In the Midst of a Canadian Landscape –

There is still the half round ice-trail weaving between the brown soggy clumps of wetland grasses, and the black zig-zag of run-off water gurgling and frothing in a tiny cataract to my left. I walked on the path just the other day but the warm afternoon sun has presently eroded the snow canopy down to only a trace left in the shadows of leaning old birches, the ones poet Robert Frost liked to write about…..although I confess to being somewhat bewildered what the analogy meant to real life.
I came to this hollow of the Bog a thousand times over the winter, with trusted canine companion Bosko, and watched winter sculpt down sharply upon this frozen, lonely landscape. I’ve stood here and watched the four resident deer bound over the snow drifts where today there is the busy trundling of squirrels and a couple of crows picking at something in the matted grasses. I stood here listening to the wind howling on a sub-zero, moonlit night, and watched many mornings as the sun painted this hollow from ridge to treeline, a brilliant, sparkling gold. What an amazing contrast today, when the voyeur might even bask a little, leaning back against the tall pine that catches a goodly amount of sun on days like this one, as early spring makes its stroke upon this incredible scene of life’s re-awakening..
It has been a busy winter season in the capitalist sense. We’ve all worked hard to make those necessary financial gains that allow a few moments of escape from the regimen of modern life and times. I remember one evening a few years ago now, driving to a meeting I didn’t wish to attend, and stopping on the Muskoka Beach Road in area of the Stephens Bay. I looked down at the farmhouse cradled in the January snowfield and illuminated so brilliantly in early evening moonglow. I thought about all this hustle and mean bustle to achieve one thing after another, and how great it would be to just decline going to a meeting, to sit here instead and watch the moon continue to rise, and celebrate a truly enchanting evening in the heart of Muskoka. I have always hated going to meetings and anyone who has participated in one, seated next to me, has probably been highly irritated by my unsettled, squirming, anticipatory vigor and general impatience with the clock and speaker. And I decided on that particular evening to stop going to meetings. Seriously. I’d had enough of meeting-happy citizens sucking the independence out of my life. Since then, I have only attended several and then it was only because it was in defense of a threatened public park by greedy development interests and poor political leadership. On those occasions I was too mad to think about everything else I was missing, tied to the auditorium chair.
I have a fear of being fettered by anyone, anything or any event, and I’m always cutting away commitments someone else makes for me. Don’t you hate that? Finding out you’ve been recruited by some group or an organizing committee about to change the world in their image.
My wife Suzanne used to agree to our attendance at after work functions or what I used to call the grim and grimace affairs, where small talk was coated with niceties and so were the meatballs. When I was on the job myself as a day to day editor for the local press, and party time would roll around, the only reason I could muster the stamina to go was if it was a way to scoop up a story tip, get a date, or gather up enough food and beverage to bring myself (in my appraisal of the shortfall) up to an acceptable wage. Of course the only way that was truly possible, is if I’d carried out a couple of antiques, a sofa and sideboard because I was paid horribly as a writer. Nothing new there! So standing around exchanging pleasantries wasn’t an option. I eyed the food and booze and my wife would get embarrassed by mid-evening and possibly leave me dripping of sweet and sour sauce, or heading for the open bar again and again..
I guess my actions were so loathsome that she gave up on sharing her invitations with me evermore. Suzanne attends these functions with colleagues alone and I tend to the four pets and two sons still residing here at Birch Hollow. All seems to be working in this particular case of social dysfunction. When she asked me the other day, why I don’t like going to parties or after-work socials, and whether it linked back to some terrible misadventure in youth, I did have somewhat of a breakthrough in conscience.
As a reporter for the local press, part of our job assignment was to cover every grip and grin in central and south Muskoka. The “grip and grin,” is the photo-op, when one hand of friendship (supposedly) meets another. It’s a nice image for the social pages but my publisher liked these staged shots for the front page. Every press day it was the same argument….accident or crime scene versus anniversary grip and grin. Gads, how inappropriate. I went to anniversaries, birthdays, family reunions, weddings, ribbon cuttings, service club shindigs and covered oh so many political visitations to one and all in this ballywick,… Muskoka. I would get to an anniversary at a community hall or family residence, and be cordially received then forgotten about usually until hour two, the time my feet would start to take root. Most often I’d have to watch everyone else eat and eat and eat, and when they weren’t eating they were sucking back the booze. Maybe only once in about a decade of this community minded stuff was I ever offered a piece of cake, a pop or a chair. And I’ll tell you what….that if I had so much as thought about being intrusive and asking to set up a photograph ahead of their schedule, a call would have been made to my boss demanding that I got lashes for insolence.
And truth is, many times I was hungry because there was no food in my house, as the pay didn’t afford many frills beyond covering rent and a few bottles of beer a week. Yes, the writer-kind would rather give up food than booze. So as these folks are passing around platters of turkey and roast beef, Yorkshire Puddings and great bowls of steaming spuds, beans, carrots and then there was the desert, by golly, it was the kind of emotional abuse that etches onto the soul. I was hungry. How grand and generous it would have been to offer me a plate and a place in line for the buffet. But no, I was just the photographer, the reporter who would put this event into the paper for posterity. Here’s some posterity for you…..it made me very angry over a painful decade, and yes when my wife queries why I don’t like attending functions, I could unwind a thousand tales similar, where niceties just don’t make up for years of being forced to attend fetes for the ignorant, grand balls for the arses of the social grandiose.
Toward the end of my reporting years, when I actually begged to get fired, I may have grabbed off one or more of those luscious meatballs that passed beneath my nose, and scooped up a few butter tarts when no one was looking, and although I don’t remember exactly, I may have got caught with a slab of beef in my pocket for a sandwich later on. It’s most likely these hosts “with the most” did contact my publisher and demanded satisfaction,…. which in their minds probably meant firing me and giving their anniversary coverage front page instead of being tucked into the classifieds beside “In Memoriums.” I really didn’t care if they fired me or not because I’d become a rogue-employee by those final years, and damn if I was going to attend ribbon cuttings and anniversaries without fringe benefits. If I wasn’t offered them, well, I took what food was required to get the energy to snap the photograph. I’m sure I was a spectacle. A poster boy for Reporter’s Monthly, chasing down that hot wing with a snatched glass of ale.
Suzanne doesn’t ask me to accompany her to social events in part because she fears I will resort to some insane justification ritual, to balance what I have to put up with in inane conversation, with a mitt full of shrimp and cheese for pain and suffering. I’m not quite so boorish at home but invite me into your home, and expect something edible to go missing. Heck I took a bite out of an ornamental candle once when I got bored, and at a wedding my girlfriend said I ate the bride’s bouquet. That was good news considering that later I was sick to my stomach, and got the shock of my life when I yacked up a fern and flower petals. Thought it was the autumn sunset of my life!
I sure like the freedom afforded Bosko and I here in the midst of this Canadian landscape, listening to the spring melt wash through this lowland, and the honking geese flying out over Lake Muskoka. The sky’s the limit today. No fetters for as far as the eye can see. No one planning that I should attend anything more than the dinner table and lounge chair to watch Coronation Street. Seeing as I never miss an episode of dinner or Coronation Street, Suzanne informed me that I am most definitely fettered by habit. I guess she’s right. At least they’re my bonified habits, not the habits of others I’m forced to endure.
If any one thing parallels my years as a writer, it is this feeling of shackles past, when to make a buck I had to prostitute myself as a decent reporter, going to events that were nothing more than grandstanding photo ops…..and it made me angry. I just never realized how angry until that night, staring out over this amazing Muskoka farmstead, bathed in the satin light of a winter moon, thinking about the hours yet to spend in the company of committee members and point making. I turned around after a lengthy and thoughtful vigil, and refused to spend the rest of my life restrained. As a writer of blogs, I’ve never been so liberated, and so resolved to remain this way.
Get out and celebrate the Canadian landscape this spring. That’s what Bosko and I will be doing in between these sessions where she sleeps beside and I tap musically at the keyboard in that personal harmony lost then found.

Please visit my other blog at gravenhurstmuskoka.blogspot.com