Squatter's Rites | chapter 3

3

The woods stood all along the western boundary of the fields, and formed a deep, luxurious windbreak, in which the land sloped gradually down to the shore of the river. That slope, an overall drop of about forty feet, explains one of the most remarkable qualities of that gloriously solemn patch of forest: it had never been cleared since the last glacier melted back. It wasn’t exactly virgin (has that word any meaning left?), but it came much closer to it than anything the average city-dweller is ever going to see.

I should have mentioned that all this time I was operating with slightly impaired vision. The previous summer, having gotten an unusually fat cheque from one client, I had gone with some canoeists on a “whitewater” weekend, during which I tried somebody else’s banana-boat briefly, a totally unfamiliar, round-bottomed, whitewater toy, with the inevitable result: I flipped it and lost one of my two pairs of distance glasses in the swirling currents of the Madawaska River.

Then in January, after doing a shot of a blizzard from a low roof downtown, I was climbing back downstairs through a very small hatch, when I crushed the other pair of glasses, which I had carelessly put in my jacket pocket after they froze over in the icy wind.

Ever since then, being chronically short of cash, I had been using my reading glasses, which are fine for items in the 1-to-3 foot range, but disturbingly tentative for everything beyond. When I finally went to get a new prescription, I told the optometrist about having driven back to the city over a hundred miles with the reading glasses tipped up at a rakish angle, as far as they would go. “The horizontals were fairly sharp,” I said, “but the verticals were a little fuzzy.” Noting that I had apparently survived, he merely smiled. It’s not easy to make a professional smile.

This small aside relates to the most remarkable natural event of my entire experience in that woodlot. On my very first visit, in mid-May, when the ground was reasonably dry, I was barely fifty yards in among the trees, when I came within less than three feet of stepping on a curled-up fawn, as it lay in hiding along the path. Being half-blind at the time, I never caught a glimpse of it until it naturally bounded to its feet and ran away.

The moment, to say the least, startled the hell out of me. Having been born and raised in New York, I knew nothing of such things as baby animals the size of Great Danes hiding in the foliage, motionless, (and odourless, I’m told), trusting that they’re safe from passing predators.

Added to my seriously impaired vision was the usual darkness of the woods, to which I was naturally unaccustomed. And not just in a visual sense, at that moment, but emotionally, from childhood. I call this sylvanophobia (fear of forests), a condition which I strongly suspect is an ineradicable part of the human heritage. It has, after all, been a very long time (five million years is the usual figure) since our ancestors began to leave the forests and slowly adapt to life on the open plains of Africa. I could feel that old anxiety rise within me, but I knew I would have to suppress it—outgrow it, I felt—if I ever wanted to live in there.

It was not as if I were new to the whole thing. Cumulatively, since 1976, I’d spent several months canoeing and camping in the north, both alone and with others—yet I had always found the forest uncomfortably eerie at night. Sporadic personal experience is simply not enough. The next nine months taught me that only sustained exposure to the forest can overcome that ancient fear.

Two memories of the time: A bird-watcher friend, Terry, reassured me about being pestered by kids, or worse, after dark, saying that “Nobody goes walking in the woods at night.” And Wife, in one of our many idle conversations on her back porch, this one on the subject of night in the country, responded with an instantaneous and fearful shudder of agreement when I observed: “It sure gets dark in those woods at night.” Only later did I realize that, though she had lived in the country for most of her life, she had never allowed herself to be in a woodlot after dark.

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