Climbing

I walked down to the groyne on lake Ontario yesterday--a mile mostly uphill back to civilization (but no decent coffee shop) and the trail head, down the Doris McCarthy trail, to end up just below my house.

I was minding my own business down there, working on some writing.

Like every other time I've been down there, I thought about climbing straight up to the yard (rather than looping up the trail and all the way around back down the road to the house), which begins just past the left-hand stand of trees in this photo .

I decided to do it, just this once. But don't tell anyone. I chose a route up the ravine wall. Something like this, as seen from the top:

It was hard! The ravine wall was potentially, make that actually, unstable--I promise never to mess with it again--and my own body acted unstable itself, requiring several significant rest stops on the way up. 

Big deal, said Angel.

Dogologue: Hazard

Serious, dog’s not for everyone.

The under-threes for instance

should roll away from dog like

cup from saucer. No one wants to ingest

small magnets meant to fix Alloy Man

to his/her ship. Yeah, children’s products.

Last time I met severe trauma Dad bought me

a tilted frame about three by three

securing a mesh into which I could pitch

my best fastball or kick any football.

The mesh would catch and return. Dad thought

I’d turn sad-armed like him and pitch

for some town in the 30s, Shamrock Eagles,

Rock Glen Fiddicks, Ernfold Laundry-Kings,

Morse Codes—for all of them

pitcher what the leaders want to play.

Swallow happens. Murakami

in Norwegian Wood writes that gulp

we hear when the movie

sears. I’m talking about

jewelry. Dog let’s face it

will eat it. You know

how he plays.

Back To the Lighthouse

Dedicated readers of this blog--a leafy afternoon to you, Uncle Curly and Aunt Moe--will already know that To the Lighthouse did nothing for me, nor I for it, when first encountered at a listless moment in my life. I'd done two years in Business. I'd switched to Arts with little sense of who I was or what I wanted to do. I found myself in an English class at U of R reading Woolf and Joyce and Hardy. None of it took. In the middle of the semester I just left, heading to Calgary, without even withdrawing from my classes. I was nineteen years old. It would be five years before I finished my undergrad degree, and then in Education, not English.
Thirteen years after that, I found myself in a Woolf class in grad school at U of A. Reading all of Woolf's novels turned out to be the most spectacular reading experience of my life. I couldn't believe the power and beauty of her writing. I felt as if the patch of ground beneath me was being picked up and shaken.
Finding To the Lighthouse in the library at the McCarthy house, I'm digging this great novel again. 
Here's Lily Briscoe, Woolf's artist, beginning:
"The brush descended. It flickered brown over the white canvas; it left a running mark. A second time she did it--a third time. And so pausing and so flickering, she attained a dancing rhythmical movement, as if the pauses were one part of the rhythm and the strokes another, and all were related; and so, lightly and swiftly pausing, striking, she scored her canvas with brown running nervous lines which had no sooner settled there than they enclosed (she felt it looming out of her) a space. Down in the hollow of one wave she saw the next wave towering higher and higher above her. For what could be more formidable than that space?"
Many of us writers will recognize our own process there. Read the rest of this scene, about a dozen pages into the third section of the book, to enjoy how Woolf both describes and performs what an artist does.
Of course, reading Doris McCarthy's copy of this novel, with her underlining, and knowing a little of her practice as a painter and writer, and with the waves--placid today but mighty the days before--of lake Ontario just over there, well it's all a handy boost into my own work here.

More About Angel

The other day I was on about Angel.

He knows better than I how much space is required between us. I would never accuse Angel of doing things out of spite, but the way he gets up and takes a few steps, he's dismissive of my role in his front lawn. Maybe that's just me over-stating the tilt of his head or how he gave me the tailfeather on my way by.

And they're all like that.

I, too, pretend not to give in to Angel. I play Scrooge, implying that maybe, yes maybe, I carry a cane.

It's a civil arrangement, in other words--both sides reserving the right to go nuts on the other one of these weeks, if we're not careful.

Enjoy the apples, Angel.

Postscript: Angel has two kinds of memory, short (forget who chased you ten seconds ago) and long (flightpath and return).

Digging Wind

I heard the wind all night and can see it now, bluff dust blowing in through the screened porch.

I rather like the wind's random effects--the kind of thing someone will come along and clean up.

A glance down at the waves is enough of a reminder that this place is a moment in time--a wind garden, not a static museum.

And look, somebody threw a bouquet.

Angel and friends happy, as usual.

It's a good time up in the wind today. That's what I love about this place: having time.

Here we are, here we go. When we're gone, who will know.

What I Know About the Canada Goose

I'll try to restrict my remarks to what I have observed about one goose, Angel (pronounced like the Spanish, an-hell), who for convenience I will assume is male.
1
Angel, who loves apples, will pull one from a tree if he can. Given a bill not designed to eat an apple, Angel will apply his neck to approaching the fruit from every angle, often resulting in a comical sequence of nudging pursuit of the apple around the lawn.
2
Rain or shine doesn't make much difference to Angel, who practices the same range of behaviours in either case.
3
Angel remains wary of me. Good.
4
Angel is a strong walker and runner if need be.
5
Angel's webbed feet provide poor traction on the concrete lip of a pond. Often he has to fly out of the water.
6
Angel standing with neck extended straight up signals he's about to take off. Eight or so flapping steps, neck extended straight ahead he's airborne, feet dangling for a few beats before he tucks them in. If necessary, Angel can leap into flight in an instant.
7
A hawk or owl passing overhead will make Angel and his mates scatter in a hurry. If they can, they'll head for water.
8
Angel likes to chase and be chased in brief episodes of territorial or mood imperative accompanied by fearsome open-billed hissing. Lasting only a few steps, the chase sometimes results in the chasee taking flight. This behaviour will spook a deer if one's around.
9
Angel on one leg--the other extended straight back, web up--can still preen, look around, tear at grass, air out his wings.
10
Angel is a powerful preener who can reach even the anterior base of his own neck with his bill. Sometimes he'll look up mid-preen with a feather caught on the serrated edge of his bill. He might walk around that way.
11
The horizontal range of motion of Angel's tailfeathers is about thirty degrees from centre. Landing from flight or emerging from water both call for a burst of tailfeather shake.
12
Angel goes somewhere else at night. By sundown, he's gone.
13
Angel's a powerful shitter, turds the size of my fingers. Pity the grey squirrel (Pepe, pronounced peep), who must find a patch of ground to dig a hole and bury food.
14
Even when Angel is just airing out his wings at the edge of the pond, or while swimming, they generate a mighty whump-whump-whump.
15
A goose can limp. Not Angel but some other goose. The limp costs him his ability to chase. He's smaller.
16
Angel landing needs a few quick steps to come to a stop. In water, he'll just flex his feet and splashdown. Capable of last-second adjustments in descent, Angel can swing under a low branch, and straighten up, almost hover, before the splash.
17
Head-pumping is Angel's way of saying I might have to get aggressive. 
18
Angel will mutter when approached.
19
Angel's a creature of great power, from the eyes on down.

On Lawn

The Doris McCarthy Artist-in Residence (DMAiR) program--in which I'm happy to be the current a-i-r, (let's just say current air)--will be holding a reception out here on Wednesday to celebrate RBC sponsorship of the program starting next year. They asked me nicely if I'd mind giving up a day of what the DMAiR website calls "quiet, isolated and picturesque" living. Not all, I said, meaning it.
So today some site preparation went on--a cut and trim of the grass, which had just been done on Friday. Just as noisy this time, they went further--gathering the leaf and apple falls.
I understand the need to intervene in natural forces. As I've already noted earlier in this blog, the erosion of the spectacular bluffs, which created the attraction to live here, going back two hundred years but escalating in the last fifty, can be measured now in grains of sandstone rather than metres of prime real estate. This is thanks to an expensive and creative breakwater installation along the lakeshore 60 metres below.
However, what we do not need is to cover up the fact that leaves and apples fall here in autumn. We do not need to prettify the lawn or pretend that geese don't shit here. Imagine, me standing up for the geese--which have not yet returned, by the way, in the forty-five minutes since the truck pulled away. Nor have the grey squirrels or the butterflies or the deer pulling red apples off the tree early this morning, to name just a few of the obvious residents punished, as it seems, by such wasteful intervention.
We humans love the place for the way it is; we hide the way it is so visitors on Wednesday will love it more. This seems to me a shockingly unimaginative and insensitive approach to the ongoing stewardship of this resource. Very much NOT in keeping with the spirit of Doris McCarthy herself, in my opinion. She would embrace, not dandify, what nature gave her.
I feel like shaking down the apples and greasing the geese.