My Country: Essays and Stories From the Edge of Wilderness

By Nowick Gray

Nowick Gray harks to the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau in portraying his "life in the woods": "I spent the last two decades of the twentieth century nestled in a mountain valley in southeast British Columbia, sequestered in a home of my own making. I had wished to enjoy the privilege of proximate wilderness, and I was willing to take on the challenge of creating a sustainable livelihood in such a place." The setting of wild nature served as backdrop to the writer's internal landscape—personal explorations of body and spirit, creative nonfiction mingled with like-spirited tales of magical realism. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nowick Gray
• Release date: May 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780981143156

Book preview

My Country

Essays and Stories From the Edge of Wilderness

Nowick Gray

Copyright 2014 by Nowick Gray

––––––––

Get a free ebook (see below) and join my Wild Writings mailing list for updates, discounts, and more free books!)

> Click Here to Sign Up <

Rendezvous at Jumbo Pass

Will and Faron plan a romantic rendezvous at a remote mountain cabin. When a night storm crashes his last dream door shut, Will faces a final chance to save his family from disaster.

Send me my free ebook!

Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction: Nature and Me

Forest Walks and Other Exercises

The Homeland

The Curtain of Trees

Entering the Tunnel

No Mas

Cat Tracks

Fickle Sun

Forest Storm

White Rabbit

Beyond Politics

Interior Rainforest

Before the World Burns

Climbing Mount Cooper

The Meaning of Life

Remembering Winter

Transitions

Breathing Together

Marriage in a Cave

Woman and Deer

Deep Summer

Mountain Dreams

The Deserted Playground

Creation

Trinity

Just Coyotes

New Moon

Guerilla Bears

The Boy, the Witch and the Princess

A Neighborly Visit

Running Wolf Canyon

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Preview of Rendezvous

Free Book Offer

Foreword

Outside my window, young hemlock trees drip with fresh March rain beading the ends of their branches. Beyond the vacant pasture stands the forest wall mute and uninviting, as the mist, mingled with smoke from my studio stovepipe, drifts between us. The insistent rain escorts the last of the winter snow on its way into the brown earth. A slight wind stirs the branches. I let go of words and remember to breathe.

I spent the last two decades of the twentieth century nestled in a mountain valley in southeast British Columbia, sequestered in a home of my own making. I had wished to enjoy the privilege of proximate wilderness, and I was willing to take on the challenge of creating a sustainable livelihood in such a place. With my own efforts and help from my partner, friends and neighbors, I cleared land and carved a homestead out of the bush. So easily said, and a decade of hard work done.

Garden, orchard, house, fences, woodshed, waterline... task by task the primary needs for food and shelter came to be satisfied. Along the way a daughter was born. Parenting duties and the need for wage-earning, by construction jobs and planting trees, took center stage. On the wings of that stage the surrounding mountains offered up their pleasures: hiking and camping, swimming in summer lakes, backcountry skiing in winter.

Ten, fifteen years into the project, my original devotion to nature remained, but it took different, often less literal forms. Writing and playing music occupied more space in my days and nights. By my last year in Argenta, this fifty-year-old would be content with a daily long walk along the unpaved road leading to a wilderness trail near my home. Now only puttering in the garden—my partner more dedicated than I to weeding carrots and hoeing beans—I still gave my sweat to the autumn chores of firewood, thinning the surrounding forest of spruce and fir: falling and bucking, hauling by truck, finally splitting and stacking the six required cords.

More often, the outdoors served as backdrop to my internal landscape. Drawn outside in warm sunny weather, I would bring along an intermediating distraction, a different sort of tool—book, notepad, flute—with a headful of questions and new impressions to ponder en route to a random destination.

Going back two centuries before Emerson’s famous essay Nature (1836), we arrive nearly at Shakespeare’s time and the birth of the modern English language. Two centuries ahead to our own near future, and we find less nature to write about, more reason than ever to examine its meaning and celebrate its miracles.

As Emerson realized and expressed with such eloquence, there is more to nature than meets the eye. His collection of Nature and other essays comprised discourses on the following aspects of human nature: Commodity, Beauty, Language, Discipline, Idealism, Spirit, Prospects. And even in the title essay he waxes poetic, not so much about the power of the natural scene in itself, but in man, or in a harmony of both. Nature, he admits finally, always wears the colors of the spirit.

Emerson was a prophet and a philosopher; and Thoreau, with his more practical and hands-on approach to nature, his disciple. These writers described nature and probed its depths precisely for the value that such observations give to our own existence. Human consciousness, in their context of nature, is not the dominating force of the Old Testament, but the interpenetrating force of the Vedas. It is our window on divine consciousness, which we see manifest everywhere in the natural world. Nature is the substance that connects the inner and outer worlds in one organic unity.

In an age when the frontiers are all breached, and ecosystems are suffering irreversible devastation, contamination, extinctions, it becomes more important than ever to expand our awareness of the nature intact within us. Nature is not confined to forest and field, nor even to an infinite field of stars. Its power and immensity drive every detail of our own biological machinery. And while its spirit offers us a mirror of our most transparent selves, its inexhaustible body of forms inspires us to create our lives and works with just such exuberance and beauty.

This, then, is My Country—personal explorations of body and spirit, in the time and setting of my BC homestead, community, and surrounding mountain wilderness.

Introduction

Nature and Me: A Short Autobiography

I grew up in cities until I was six. Nature to me then was a postage-stamp back yard, a thimble plastic pool. In my later youth, in a small Allegheny mountain town, I delighted in roaming the woods and fields, playing army, hunting crayfish, damming creeks. Then, on to the suburbs for my teen years. Nature there meant sports: swimming in Long Island Sound, baseball in red sandlots outside Atlanta, training for track on wintry Illinois roads.

By the time I was twenty, poetry, drugs, and the New England woods had opened the doors of my perception (with a nudge from Huxley) and I was able to see past the recreational uses of nature to its nurturing, superordinate beauty. The silent, downy nightscapes of snow; the flowering liquid essence of spring; the dry basking animal heat of a summer day; the crackling colors of rainbow fall leaves. Music streamed through it all like nature’s ingenious soundtrack. The literature and arts of the Romantic period stoked the fires of my newfound passion. My appreciation had become at the same time more direct, and more comprehensive of the organic spirit at the heart of creation, whether natural or human. Yet, when I reached the threshold of leaving this fertile womb, the question of basic survival loomed largest.

I jumped cold-turkey from the academic hothouse into the granitic soil of New Hampshire, one of North America’s most economically depressed areas. Land was cheap because the former generations of farmers had given up and moved on. A fellow ex-student, lured by the grail of rural self-sufficiency, had sunk his borrowed fortune into a large chunk of wooded hillside for a cooperative homesteading venture and was seeking willing bodies to help flesh out his vision. I came full of theories about gypsy economics, constructive anarchism and apocalyptic survival. I had no money, and no useful trade.

I took a job on the district highway crew, manning the street sweeper unit which the old boys dragged over the undulating roads of the county. This device of blue-collar initiation spewed me with muddy grime, head to toe, for $2.17 per hour. I drove to work in a yellow lemon of a Karman-Ghia that I bought from a fourteen-year-old boy for $140. My first car, it worked fine until I decided to treat it to a quart of high-quality detergent oil. The detergent action dissolved whatever carbonaceous glop was holding the pistons together and the car promptly died. It was a sign. As were the eleven days and nights of rain that dismal spring, which I counted off like Noah watching the end of the world.

Lacking the fortitude for the full forty-day deluge, on day twelve I left my drenched dreams behind and took a ride in a friend’s Beetle for California with thirty dollars in my pocket and another gleam in my eye: the promised riches of the sunny, booming West. I figured that with a big bank account, I could better cushion the rocky landing of my next journey back to the earth.

The California cities, I found, were not made of gold. After two years of odd jobs as an unskilled urban laborer—housepainter, clerk, gas jockey, parking valet—I dreamed up a new way to get back to nature. I would go back to my books and find nature in literature. The bonus? A paying job, a career as a teacher. And I might even find a nice pastoral place to settle down. According to this latest conception, nature was mostly a state of mind, an aesthetic quality of life; self-sufficiency was confined to the status of financial equilibrium.

Drawn by the remote and rugged beauty of the Northwest, I arrived in British Columbia for graduate study. The setting proved apt for delving into the rich natural resources of Canadian literature—an entity which, until registration at the University of Victoria, I didn’t know existed. Upon completion of my thesis two years later, I discovered that a master’s degree in English is worth about as much as the paper spelling it out. Nevertheless, I finally landed a job in the midst of a nature more vast and remote, yet also more human, than I had imagined.

Along with my girlfriend from UVic, I was hired by the school board of Northern Quebec. I ended up learning more in that Inuit village than I could ever teach to my junior high students. Jeanne and I shared the intention of one day investing our newfound wealth in a back-to-the-land dream, complete with solar house design, microhydro system, 4WD truck. The people in that wild, white world had made choices not altogether different, in embracing prefab housing, shotguns and camp stoves, and powerful snowmobiles within their traditional lifestyle. More compellingly, they survived by virtue of an attitude, a history, a culture based on living with nature, in nature, of nature. This is not to say that they were in any way primitive. Their own human nature was warm, friendly, infinitely patient and optimistic—above all, adaptable. Their history is all about change, of making practical use of what is at hand—from whalebone, to steel knives, flour and tea, aircraft and development corporations. With every innovation has come a compromise with a former, more natural way of life.

The Inuit are no longer self-sufficient, in material terms. Yet in bearing, in outlook, in grounding in the matter of survival in an always challenging environment, they are supremely self-reliant. I learned that when I saw the hunters using knives to operate on skidoos in open-air surgery at forty below in the middle of nowhere.

Not exactly in our element in a culture and geography so foreign to us, Jeanne and I left the North after three years with a new appreciation of what it means to live on the land, and the capital required to fund the venture. We bought a share on a land co-op in the interior mountains of BC and set to work.

Giving urgency to our private vision was the growing specter of global catastrophe. Reagan’s election in 1980 promised to escalate the nuclear arms race, and my partner and I both wanted to increase our chances of survival with a functioning homestead, far from the vulnerable urban centers. At the start our skills in the basics of rural living were negligible. Tapping neighbors for help and advice, we cleared a driveway and laid a waterline; cleared space for a garden, orchard and house; built a woodshed and temporary chicken coop number one. Then came housebuilding, a project which would take seven years.

Jeanne grew disenchanted early on, leaving for the city even before the foundation was poured. I spent the first three years of the building phase living in a tipi. During this time another partner came my way, who matched my commitment to building a life on the land. By our first summer together, when we adzed the logs for the floor joists, Sarah was pregnant.

For those first three years of homesteading, I paid little attention to making money—the endless schemes which preoccupied many of my low-income neighbors. When my savings account finally ran dry, and Sarah and I brought home a baby daughter to a half-finished house, I had to start hustling. There were a few useful trades I’d learned by experience, and some others I had to learn from scratch. I began hiring myself out as a carpenter, stonemason, firefighter, treeplanter.

Now money earned meant time spent away from family as well as from the lagging house construction. Sarah and I both began to look closer at ways to work at home: both to generate income and to produce what we would otherwise have to buy.

Short of pure self-sufficiency, we found instead a place in a fabric of interdependence. It seemed neither possible nor desirable to produce every food, every tool locally—whether on the homestead, or in the nearby community. Barter, home business, homestead production, and paying jobs all played a part. It is relatively efficient, for example, to grow all one’s vegetables, plus extra garlic, and then to sell the garlic and buy grain, which is not so easy to grow in a mountain valley. Another example: Sarah designed box labels in exchange for the products they advertised—apples and a kitchen stool. And after gaining experience building rock walls for our own house, we were both hired to build a rock-walled flower