The Wilderness that Was
Travelling by car through Ontario all these years, my gaze has wandered often (preferably as a passenger) to the passing landscapes. On the narrower, secondary roads, looking sideways, the rhythm of quickly passing crops and woodlot trees could be mesmerizing.
Woods, as we called them, were intriguing. We had one behind our house on Dell Ave., and us kids explored and mapped the extensive Cathcart woods just up the street. Travelling, Sarnia to London, along the murderous three lane highway 22 there were few trees to be seen, but on the newly laid 402 there are goodly stretches of woods on either side – welcome lulls from buffeting winds and drifting snow.
Coming along side and into the Pinery we were treated to its large expanse of Carolinian forest, and felt enveloped until we emerged again, each day, through dunes to face Lake Huron’s horizon. Years later, as we travelled north to camp with our own kids, we reveled in the transitions from country road — trees at bay, to wilderness highway — blasted out of the Canadian Shield, with forest crowding around, until we settled finally into our canopy of Algonquin pines.
Our woods have so many edges. Looking in from the open roads and beaches and rivers, unless the sun be with you, they seem inscrutable, uneager to divulge the depths of their being. Unless there is reason and access to delve deeper and explore, some scrambles of trunks and branches and brush may never be known by any larger than small mammals.
Meaningless – all is meaningless, says the preacher tongue in cheek, also about impenetrable, inaccessible North American bush. But in my mind, I glimpse single, sample saplings or secluded clearings, back in from the edge, and I know that the tree grows unperturbed, and that the clearing is home to all kinds of life, and that they don’t need us, ever, to be fulfilled.
It takes Tolkienesque imagination to fully comprehend worlds beyond our experience, whether that be acres of woodlots or vast expanses of forest. All of them have remarkable depths of natural synergy and meaning, with stories all their own.
Once upon a time, before our time and for a long time, North America’s landscape was nothing but such synergy — a sweeping story untouched by modern mega-project managers. Other than the smattering of indigenous clearings, there were no broad paths or artificial edges to distract us, and from within, only the future was inscrutable.
I like to imagine what it was like then — my neighbourhood, or ravine-riven Toronto, or the Sarnia savannah. It would be nice, just once, to hike through old woods from the lake shore to the escarpment or High Park to Forest Hill, or along the beach from Centennial to Bright’s Grove, and see nothing but trees and meadows, streams and lake.
That memory is only a few hundred years in the past where we live, reverberating within the collective memory of our indigenous hosts and early explorers. We do well to reach for and remember our wild side, even as we make ourselves at home and accept that God has placed us here with a purpose and that not every manifestation of man is a blemish on creation.