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This is one of the best blogs I’ve seen. Nick Rowan (he even has a tree name) is the Treeographer. He’s also a traveller, woodworker, and a wonderful writer.
The Treeographer is my attempt to bring my enthusiasm for trees to others – not by evoking guilt or pity, but rather by celebrating the interlacing history of man and tree.
Farley Mowat and I go back a long way. I didn’t know him personally but his stories taught me much of what I knew about the Canadian north when I was a kid. He was the quintessential Canadian writer, not just because he wrote about Canada, but because, like the land, his stories held, and continue to hold, such power. And he was from my time. When he mentions Eric the Red and Leif the Lucky, I smile. Those were the Vikings that fascinated me in third grade, when the bottom half of our notebooks were lined and the top left blank for a pencil sketch of the explorers. Long before Ragnar Lothbrok. It was a time when authors (white males) wrote with omniscient (godlike) viewpoints and felt no need for political correctness because it didn’t yet exist.
I spent the last few days reading myself to sleep with Lost in the Barrens. This is the book that teachers recommend to boys who don’t read, for within its pages lie adventures they will never experience any other way. I don’t know for sure, but I’ll bet that Gary Paulsen of Hatchet fame found Farley Mowat’s books when he was a kid.
Written in 1956, Lost in the Barrens was the third book Farley published, and it won the Governor General’s Award. This “survival story” details the adventures of an orphaned Toronto boy named Jamie Macnair and his Cree friend Awasin, who go hunting caribou with the Chipewyans and end up lost and fighting for their lives in the land of their tribal enemies, the Eskimos.
The two sixteen-year-old boys ride out a six-month mythic hero’s journey where they are tested step by step and page by page. They encounter:
At its heart is Awasin’s wisdom and Farley’s theme: “if you fight against the spirits of the north you will always lose.” Its echo resounds as the boys arrive home: “always travel with the forces of the land and never fight against them.”
I grew up in southern Ontario not far from where Farley spent his final days and some blue moons, the land calls me. I don’t know if it’s ancestral memory, karmic echoes, or simply the allure of home, but this land draws me like lodestone. A kind of madness ensues and I find myself on realtor.ca pricing Kawartha cottages where I went to university, or sorting through faded black and whites, or just visualizing the fields and trails where I rode my horse in Pickering.
My memories are forged on the flora and fauna of what I grew up calling the Eastern Woodlands. I understand the way of the land there; know the names of all the trees and plants; can still smell the odour of wax-pressed fall leaves and crave the sugar bush; remember the purple trillium, and the enormous oaks and elms that shaded us from summer sun so we could read beneath their boughs. And though I’ve lived in British Columbia for two decades I’ve never lost the lure of the lakeside cabin in the bush.
Like Yeats and Thoreau I long to cast off the city and “live deliberately” — until I think about mosquitoes and black flies, -30 Celsius and a metre of snow, and remember just how deliberate that is.
But still it calls. And, in part, I owe that calling to Farley Mowat.
Farley died in 2014 at the age of 92. He was still writing. Maclean’s magazine wrote such a stunning salute to Farley at the time of his death that I can only point the way.
In his hand he held a tiny sea shell, so old that when Awasin took it, it crumbled into dust between his fingers.
Jamie looked out over the broad valley to the dim blue line of the hills to the east. He spoke with awe. “Thousands, maybe a million years ago, this must have been one huge ocean, ” he said. “And these hills were just islands in it.”
Awasin was not surprised as Jamie expected him to be. “There’s a Cree legend about that,” he replied. “It tells of a time when the whole northern plains were all water and the water was filled with strange monsters.”
This woman, Chris Czajkowski, is one of my heroes. For thirty years, she’s lived off the grid alone in the wilderness with dogs for company, built her own cabins, and written her books. I thought of Chris tonight as I was reading Farley Mowatt’s classic, Lost in the Barrens. I saw her present at Sechelt Writer’s Festival years ago, and I wondered how she survived the raging forest fires this summer.
Here you can read her experience living through the wildfires in northern BC.
I see she has a book tour in BC this fall. If you can make it to any of her readings or presentations, please come out and support this amazing woman.
Trees are powerful sentient beings who help mankind and ask for no reward, which is why this garden of trees is so fitting a memorial. Each tree in the Ringfinnan Garden of Remembrance grows for and bears the name of one firefighter or first responder lost during 9/11. There are 343 trees.
We visited the garden before we left Kinsale, Co Cork, Ireland in late July. Its creator, Kathleen Cait Murphy, was born in Kinsale but worked as a nurse for forty years in New York City at Lennox Hill Hospital. After 9/11, she decided to create the garden on her family land. It is dedicated to Father Mychal Judge, Chaplain in the New York Fire Department and personal friend of Kathleen. Though she lost her life to cancer on 29 March, 2011, the garden is still tended and is, in many ways, a tribute to the woman herself.
Wandering through the lines of trees, I read the names, ranks, and positions of those who perished. It is a sad and sombre place on a soft rise that reaches out over the countryside. Some trees cradle weatherworn shirts in their branches. Faded ballcaps adorn the monument. Over the past sixteen years, many families and friends have made a pilgrimage to this sacred place where memories live through the power of the trees.
You can follow a map to the garden via Trip Advisor.
Henry David Thoreau
7 Sept 1851
Ireland is rife with beautiful locations: sea vistas, mountains, pasture lands, and rolling fields of grain. One of the best places we stayed was a self-catering cottage in Avoca.
The farm is at the end of a long one-track lane with verge on either side. Finding it was an adventure. The first lane brought us to a farmhouse where the lovely woman explained to us where we needed to go. We were close. Then another woman drove in and said she’d take us there. So we followed her to the right turnoff. I was nervous going down the thousand-year-old laneway because if anyone came at me, there was no way I could back out. Fortunately, we made it in and out three times without running into anyone.
It is an incredibly peaceful scene. The hosts live next door in Holly Farm. Sanchia explained some of the history to me:
The house has been here since the early 1600’s. There was a farm and people already living here then. The same family were here for eight generations before the farm was sold in 1918. It changed hands twice since then until we bought the derelict buildings in 2000.
The Granary was a farm outbuilding used for storing the grain used to feed a small dairy herd. It also held the milk churns before they were collected by the dairy.
The farm was a small one, 80 acres. It is now joined with the neighbour’s farm. He sold the derelict buildings and a couple of acres to us.
The lane is part of what used to be called ” mass paths”, going across hills and farms from outlying areas to the church–our lane went between Ballycoog and Croghan (the big hill with the windmills you can see from the deck) and Avoca church. The lane is possibly 1000 years old.
Croghan Hill is the scene of my research. We climbed it the day before and were now on the other side of it. The scene was remote, but we also felt wonderfully secure and part of the landscape. We were able to sit out on the back deck and enjoy the countryside. The weather is fickle; changing from sun to cloud to rain to wind and back again constantly. One of the more beautiful moments was this rainbow:
We were able to watch DVDs, cook our own dinners, read, and generally make peace with ourselves and our travels. Avoca is the town where Ballykissangel was filmed. I can’t imagine how the film team managed with all their equipment. They must have parked in the large lot across from the church on the hill. There are not many stores there–a touristy Ballykissangel shop, a small grocer, the Fitzgerald pub, a Tourist Info shop with computers/wifi–but Arklow is about a twenty minute drive and has all the shops including Aidi and a Dunne’s store in the mall. We also spent a day hiking in Glendalough, which was gorgeous and is less than an hour’s drive north (remembering that I drive slow on these thin twisty roads).
We loved the animals. Three dogs met us every time we ventured out; in fact, two of them spent the whole day with us when we first arrived. There are also a pair of white geese and a flock of free-ranging ducks. Birds sing, sheep bleat, and the wind whispers through the pastures.
Sanchia and Richard have lovely gardens and she gave us fresh zucchini and cucumbers from her hothouse! She also provided duck eggs, almond milk, butter substitute, gluten-free bread, and condiments. She caters to people with food allergies. Just be sure to let her know in advance.
ducks & dogs