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And so it began, in earnest. My Walden, if you’ll forgive the comparison. It didn’t much resemble Thoreau’s, but all in all it was a unique, transforming experience, to be sure. That and the zero rent were, I suppose, fair compensation for the general inconveniences. Whenever I talked to any of the townsfolk about my current project, I was constantly surprised by their blank, appalling ignorance on the whole subject of camping, most especially of the winter variety, which I told them was my intention. They were unable to imagine anything more acutely, needlessly uncomfortable. Several of them, particularly women, visibly shuddered at the very thought. They had never done it, never seen it done, knew no one who had tried it, knew nothing about how it was done, thought it was crazy in any case. And these were people who had lived there most of their lives. It bewilders me still. Somewhere I had picked up the idea that it was a popular sport in this country. A typical example: when I was about to be evicted, in mid-winter, I called the local Welfare office in Markham and asked if they had a line on any reasonable housing in the area. The woman on the phone very courteously asked me where I was staying at the moment. “In a tent, in a woodlot,” I said, matter-of-factly. The ground being at the time covered with snow, she was of course horrified, and immediately offered to get me an emergency space in the local hostel, ASAP. I promptly demurred and informed her that a warm sleeping-bag, in a warm tent, in a quiet woodlot, was infinitely preferable to any hostel ever devised by the mind of Bureaucratic Man. Inasmuch as she sounded very intelligent, and spoke with an English accent, I doubt that I changed her way of thinking in the slightest, but she finally advised me simply to visit the local office and apply for funds to cover the rent for a room. Fortunately, it never became necessary.
A young man I’d known for some years, Damien, now a working biologist, but a fascinating character who has done a few wacko things himself (such as living in a converted schoolbus in Vancouver for many months), became increasingly agitated as winter was approaching and I was still in the tent. He was kind enough to drive up and supply me with some enormous vinyl sheets, removed from old back-lighted billboards, with which I built my bath-house. (It was much too small, but now I know how to do it right—Native-style, using the perfectly straight trunks of about 15-20 young spruce, at least twenty feet long and trimmed smooth.) Gradually it became clear that Damien was facing a crisis of vanity: winter camping was something he had never tried, and he was having trouble with the notion that I was fully prepared to go through with it.
I regret that that first night has not left a more vivid memory; it has by now blended into what we may loosely describe as the General Way of Life in the Woods. Apart from its isolation, that first site was a very pleasant place. Isolation of the emotional kind is of course never absent when I’m alone, and it has come to colour the entire episode, in such a way as to fulfill Samuel Johnson’s description of life itself: “a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed.” Although given the sort of mind he had, he might easily have added that for a man who reads, there is at least a great amount to be learned. Part of what made the location a rather nice one was its nearness to the fields, and the greater light and breeze that this admitted. This edge of the woods faced east, and though the prevailing wind in this part of the world is from the west, there were days when it blew for hours at a time from the opposite direction, without a cloud in the sky. |
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