April Snow on this old Gravenhurst hideaway

Yesterday afternoon I stood on the thick grass-laden mounds, dotting the basin of this Muskoka District topography, I fondly refer to as The Bog. I was listening to the geese calling from a hiatus of flight, down along the shore of Muskoka Bay. There were only trace amounts of ice and snow down in the heavily sun-blocked areas. This morning the spring scene has been wintered over once again, and it’s as if a month of advances on the weather front have been lost. Yet it has given this lowland sanctuary a magnificent aura, a brightness that invigorates the senses.
There are people in this ballywick of mine, who will complain today that this white misery has intruded upon their expectations of an immediate spring; what was supposed to be a warm, flower-filled Easter holiday. They won’t treat this as a special event. They won’t think beyond the motor trip to school or work about the striking beauty that prevails, only steps from their front door. It is all to be endured as one of life’s many challenges. They pass this on to their children who come to see this white mantle as an obstruction to spring games and outdoor recreation…..the Easter egg hunt. How intrusive and insensitive to our plans that nature should perform…. well, “naturally.” I wish for a moment of their time, to show them this painted landscape. I’d like to show them the animal tracks that have already been imprinted across the lowland, made by deer and raccoons, a few rabbits and I believe the neighborhood fox. It’s all intriguing to me and my dismay is that anyone who lives in this beautiful, life restorative Muskoka, can find annoyance with what is so tranquil and picturesque.
Sometimes I have to snap myself abruptly, almost stingingly back to the reality that I’m rather unique in my relationship with nature, and in this place where I so passionately wish to dwell. I can stand out on this same hump of dried grass and watch a summer storm come raging over the western pine ridge, and be thoroughly intrigued by how all the life here, even the leaves on the hardwoods, react in this preamble to a potentially violent weather pattern. I can get great enjoyment watching the northern lights out here, on some bitterly cold autumn night when everyone else is tucked into bedlam. I’ve stood here and watched dozens of winter storms pound ice and snow against the gnarled old landscape of leaning birches, time etched stumps, rotting logs and tormented, windswept evergreens. I’ve heard the gunshot cracks of frigid February air resounding throughout the frozen basin. I’ve watched gusts of wind snap off trees at their base further out on this bog, when a spring gale cuts a swath across the lakeside; flooding this basin and eroding the creek banks, turning shallow pools into expansive overflowing quagmires infilling every habitat hollow visible from here to there. And I will have nothing but awe and satisfaction that I have been a witness to these critical, necessary transitions of a nature in season.
There are times when my boys or my wife will have to venture out in such inclement weather to haul me home for dinner, or to check up to see if I’ve been blown away by the autumn winds, or entombed in ice during a mid-January blizzard. As a writer specializing in these landscape essays, I must have this exposure to the elements. I don’t think any one can appreciate nature solely from the window of a passing car, or a head stuck out a patio door. I don’t think you can get the true measure of global warming from the television or the movie theatre alone. I can guarantee one thing for sure. You can find all you need to know by immersion. When you spend as much time outdoors as I do, during all four seasons in Muskoka, you can appreciate the changes that are occurring in our world. Changes, some quite subtle, we all need to be concerned about. We have too many armchair, “life of relative ease” addicts today including the youngsters, who may read or watch programming about global warming as entertainment but never offer one footstep toward these woodlands. Unless of course there is some exceptional circumstance; and in my neighborhood it means to dump off a retired Christmas tree they don’t want to ship to the landfill site, or various other household articles and garden debris they wish to cast-off without incurring any expense. The residents on my street only care about their own lawns, and how immaculate they appear beneath the flower baskets and sundry other veneer ornamentation. In the fall, like the tumble of hardwood leaves, the homeowners here, as tradition, will commence the cross road amble toting a wide variety of refuse from plastic pails to boards with nails, broken lawn ornaments to unwanted patio slabs. Just ask them at the time of this woodland desecration, whether or not they give a hoot about pollution and global warming. All they want to know about is that their property is crap-free and pretty to the eye.
I’m pretty hard on my neighbors and most of them have already read my barbs of assessment in the local press, when I once again beg them as a concerned citizen, to stop dumping their garbage indiscriminately into the hinterland. I haven’t had a lot of success stopping-up what I call, “the dumping for convenience” enterprise. It’s only the opening days of spring and already I’ve harvested a full basket of recycling bits and pieces, my mates here decided to discard into the “forgiving woods”.
It reminds me about an experience I had while supervising a group of public school students visiting an outdoor education centre here in Muskoka. The students were involved in a wildlife identification game in a planted pinery, when a small group of four or so students discovered a garter snake slithering over the brown pine needles. For whatever reason, one of the boys decided it would be the treat of the day to beat the creature to death. He picked up a stick and with great visual pleasure, and vocal encouragement from every student watching, began hitting the snake with lethal intent. It was in his eyes. There was no mistake that the objective was to render this creature lifeless. Why? Who really knows? His viewpoint was, “how convenient, a snake for the killing”.
I was in position to stop the assault, the first snake killing session I’d ever witnessed frankly, and it took several aggressive outbursts, to thwart the young man from his mission to rid the planet of this particular snake. I will never in my life forget the look in his eyes. He might well have turned his rage on me, instead of the snake. It took me physically grabbing the stick from his hand to put an end to the incident. No child in that group understood why I had intervened to save the life of a serpent. Not one of them. They thought of me as a bully and themselves as “perfectly within their rights,” to transform nature to their own likeness. For me personally, there has never been a more profound moment of understanding, about the true dangers of outright ignorance and indifference. The “don’t care less” attitude our world faces from the untutored and insensitive amongst us, is about to kill us all. These youngsters were doing what they believed was natural to humanity; to kill off what isn’t human….or what isn’t on their “want list,” of species. It was their uneducated, ill conceived measure and understanding of what should survive, and thusly, in their concept of nature’s balance, what should justifiably perish to make more room for the rights and privileges of mortal kind. I thought about developers and politicians, capitalists and urban promoters who would similarly find this poor snake an intruder.
This particular outdoor education opportunity failed because of its brief period of influence on students. Two days at the camp site was not enough to erase false impression and improve sensitivity to nature and natural assets. There will be no tangible progress in the effort to curb global warming unless outdoor education is offered to more students for longer periods, with the funding to make it a widespread school program….and not just a brief visit to a sugar bush, or a casual outdoor walkabout. From the first day of school a strong relationship with the outdoors needs to be encouraged and developed in progressive steps until graduation. Hopefully then we would have the future movers and shakers in our economic world who would recognize the importance to us all, of having a balanced, healthy, non-polluted environment in which to dwell.
When I visit this amazing little lowland amidst the urban sprawl of neighborhoods, I wish to thank personally the brave planner, the developer, who gave our burg this open space option, so folks who appreciate the peace and well being of nature, can sojourn here to watch the seasons in transition. I could remain here for hours on end being thoroughly entertained by what isn’t intruding upon the scene. There is no hustle, no bustle, no impatience anywhere to be found. It is a calm place amidst the profound changes occurring from horizon to horizon; from the tree tops to the snake and fish habitat. Other changes inspired by this final stage of transformation, from late winter to finally emerging spring.
And while in the natural world changes are occurring violently at times, as with its own balance and regimen, I can’t help feeling sadness that it has taken a tragedy of global proportion, to make us take notice of what actually sustains us through this mortal coil…..this purity of air we depend, the clean water that bubbles up from all the springs to be found in this modest, taken for granted acreage. Every resource here considered expendable by otherwise intelligent people. The same people who dump all types of cleaners and fertilizers, and assorted chemicals they wish to dispose of, right here in this fragile and vulnerable landscape; simply because it meets their requirements for cost efficiency and convenience. Then listen to them boast about their environmental awareness….the news they read or heard about but have never once actually practiced, except for their own personal, selfish reasons.
We’ve got a lot to learn about what sustains us.
It’s not just my neighborhood. My God, it’s the neighborhoods of the entire world desecrating these wild, important places. If we can’t stop it in our own area, how can we fix it globally? I like to think it will come about by persistence and education to begin with, education and then persistence evermore….. and it will only be consistent when outdoor education is required learning at every school in every town, over every year and in every city covering this grand old global enterprise of conservation.
Please take that all-important step into the hinterland. Before you endorse the next earth-moving, landscape altering project in your town, visit the site to be destroyed, and think for a moment how wonderful it would be if there was another solution…..a better way of being progressive than sprawling out across every available open space. Is it just possible that being a progressive community can parallel being a successful environmental steward. When a lowland thriving with life-forms is obliterated for the cause of convenient, multi-store shopping, on top of the venues already in place, it makes me wonder if one day we’ll all have to live in one of these malls permanently, due to the contamination everywhere else.
Thanks for reading this blog submission for April 2007.


PLEASE VISIT MY OTHER BLOG AT THENATUREOFMUSKOKA.BLOGSPOT.COM