Today I joined a Nature PEI walk through Pleasant View Cedars Natural Area near Miminegash. I understood we would see some large, old eastern white cedars, but wasn’t prepared for how breathtakingly enormous the stand was! At one point in the middle, all I could see around me was cedar, something I’ve never experienced before. It is a rare landscape on our tiny Island.
I always find it difficult to photograph forests, but trust me, that’s a lot of cedar!
There is a cedar stand on the property we occupy, an area that was too wet to be farmed, and some of the trees there are very old. The walls of our log cabin are unpeeled cedar logs, a few of which probably came from that cedar stand. Some of my earliest memories are waking early from sleep and staring at the patterns on the bark. I could see faces in the knots, would pull at the stray threads of bark that were peeling off. I was partly raised in the comfort and solidity of cedar trees.
The drought we’ve been experiencing meant we were walking over dry land that should really have been quite boggy, which was good for us but possibly uncomfortable for the trees. There was very little undergrowth due to the tall canopy. It was a cloudy morning, so it was very dark and quiet as we walked through. I sort of felt like I was in a fairytale woods – Hansel and Gretel came to mind, as it was a little spooky, with odd-shaped trees all around.
There were many trees that looked like they had legs and could walk! This perfectly-healthy cedar would have started life growing on top of a dead fallen tree, which eventually rotted away leaving this space at the bottom.
Our guides, Mark Arsenault from the provincial government forestry division, and Rosemary Curley, former provincial biologist and Nature PEI president, were genial hosts and excellent teachers. I’ve been on many walks with Rosemary, mostly scouting for mushrooms, and am constantly impressed and inspired by her vast knowledge of our province’s natural areas and her life-long passion for sharing her love of the natural world with others. I highly recommend spending time with her whenever you get a chance.
Northern red belt fungus
Nature PEI hold many field events each year, and they all seem to be free, but a membership to support their important work is only $20 a year, which includes a quarterly newsletter. This morning’s hike was easily worth 10 times this year’s fee. I’ll never forget being surrounded by those trees.
Me next to the biggest cedar I’ve ever seen on PEI. This is a rare photo of me, so enjoy.
I am still slowly dealing with debris from long-ago storms Fiona and Dorian. Most of the downed trees, hundreds of them on the 23 acres we occupy, will never be “cleaned up”. It’s too big of a job for me, the tangle of toppled 60-year-old spruce trees impenetrable in many places. I did a walk a couple of hundred feet from our house the other day and had to haul myself over trees piled four or five feet high, a brief panic of wondering if I was suddenly too old for such exertions followed by the relief that I am still quite physically strong.
Visitors comment on the destruction, on the fire hazard I’m allowing to remain. Yes, it’s true, it is all a fire hazard, but living in a forest full of conifers is a fire hazard anyway, dead or alive, so I’m used to it, and as a full-time caregiver I can’t do much more about it than I have. There are endless opportunities to worry about risks real and imagined, as I was reminded of at an emergency measures training I took many years ago.
We were to list what possible disasters could befall our municipalities, and we ticked off all types of natural disasters and possible human-caused chaos. The instructor, knowing exactly where my house is, said, “What about you, Thelma, what’s overhead all the time where you live?” Fuel-filled jets heading from North America to Europe, that’s what, and they could crash in Portage, he said, causing the western end of PEI to be cut off and straining the resources of our local emergency crews to deal with a disaster of such magnitude. Wide-eyed, we nervously laughed at this, thinking it so unlikely, but internally my younger self, who listened to the planes flying overhead on summer nights in our uninsulated cottage, wondering if some of them might be Russian missiles headed to the US, didn’t think it so far-fetched.
So I pick away at the fire hazard in the forest, my only real goal to reestablish walking paths that were there before Dorian in 2019 or, more likely, make new paths where an easier way through is evident. There is a lot to be said for taking the easy way, especially in nature. Nature just wants us to leave it alone to do its thing, to recognize that constantly trying to bend and shape it to our needs is futile and counterproductive. When you get comfortable with the mess of nature, less anxious to constantly clean everything up, the mess of life becomes more bearable. My Mary Oliver poem this morning certainly agrees:
BACKYARD I had not time to haul out all the dead stuff so it hung, limp or dry, wherever the wind swung it
over or down or across. All summer it stayed that way, untrimmed, and thickened. The paths grew damp and uncomfortable and mossy until nobody could get through but a mouse or a
shadow. Blackberries, ferns, leaves, litter totally without direction management supervision. The birds loved it.
After an absence of over 40 years, I have been attending church regularly for nearly a year. The same church I had been raised in, with some of the same people who were there when I last attended regularly in my mid-teens.
My mother stopped driving in 2016, so her cousin and his wife kindly took her to and from church. When my mother’s mobility declined after three hospitalizations in the winter of 2023/24, I felt it unfair for these thoughtful older relatives to have the responsibility of looking after my mother, so I told her I would take her.
This past Sunday, the minister’s sermon was focused on the baptism of Jesus, which is part of Epiphany, the season that follows Advent. One of the scripture readings was from the third chapter of the Gospel of Luke:
When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. And as he was praying, heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”
Luke 3: 21-22
The minister, a thoughtful and interesting speaker, asked the congregation if we had ever seen a dove descend from heaven, if we had ever heard God speak. There was silence, indicating that no one had, or nobody was prepared to talk about it if they had, and he went on to talk about what that might have been like to hear God (and he talked about Eric Clapton, too, which isn’t usual in the Presbyterian Church of Canada, but most welcome, at least by me).
I’ve never heard the booming bossy voice of the Christian God as described throughout the Bible. I’m pretty sure he’s not that well pleased with me, despite me taking my mother to church every week, so I’m just as happy to not hear what he has to say.
What I do hear is the voice of the eternal spirit, the beating heart of the cosmos, the kind and merciful universe. Where? In the rustle of the leaves in trees, easily one of my most favourite sounds in the entire world.
Today I was walking through a field near our house, a field surrounded by tall trees that have watched me move around this land for nearly 60 years. The sun had just come out briefly, a rare occurrence so far this year, and I heard a flock of finches in the forest, always calling to one another as they move through the trees.
Suddenly, I looked up and saw a solitary finch flying high over the field, and it had something big in its mouth. Just as I thought I’ve never seen a finch carrying something so big, it dropped its load, and as it fell I could see it was a spruce cone. The cone bounced on the snow and the bird continued on its way as if that had been the plan all along.
I hurried over to see it and it was indeed a spruce cone, complete with a couple of spruce needles stuck its base. I could smell the distinct odour of spruce sap, and realised the bird must have plucked this directly from a tree, a gift from high up in a tree, a place I could never visit.
I put the cone in my pocket and brought it home and put it in a little dish. The seeds are already dropping out of it. It still smells of sap.
On one of my first jaunts as I was learning to ride and getting ready to go for my motorcycle licence in 2006, I met a couple of motorcycles. As they passed, they put their left hands out and down, index and middle finger pointing outwards in a sort of casual peace sign. I hadn’t heard of the motorcycle wave, so wasn’t ready to respond, and they whizzed by without any acknowledgement from me. They were on chonky Honda Gold Wings and I was on my teeny, slow 49cc Yamaha scooter, so I just barely counted as a biker, but I had suddenly joined a club I hadn’t known existed.
The next time I met a motorcycle, I was ready and stuck my gloved hand out, receiving the low-rider’s salute in return. I was tickled to be considered a biker, even by someone with scary looking patches on their jacket!
I drove my scooter every fine day there wasn’t snow on the ground for four years while I worked at my neighbour’s dairy farm. After milking cows on a hot, humid summer evening, there was nothing nicer than peeling off my smelly overalls and rubber boots and scooting home, the wind cooling me off immediately, my sweaty t-shirt billowing from my back.
My scooter is gone, one of the many things I have put aside, for now, as a full-time caregiver (and it had a filthy 2-stroke engine, so it really wasn’t an environmentally responsible mode of transportation no matter how little gas it used). I can’t afford to dump a scooter and end up with an injury, because my mother needs me to be well and fully functioning. I’ve never been a reckless kind of person, so my risk aversion is not a new thing, but I’m now incredibly careful on stairs and ladders, on ice, on wet surfaces.
Early this morning I had the occasion to take another slow drive, 20 minutes down the road, on my little Kubota tractor, to help a friend with a landscaping project. There’s no speedometer on my tractor, so I’m not sure how fast I was going, but it’s certainly not a zippy rig. I enjoyed the slow ride, even with the diesel fumes (I will be glad to someday trade in for an electric tractor).
Neighbours waved from their yards as I passed, as did people in cars and other tractors. The smell of the briny Foxley River gave way to the pong of freshly-spread manure, then further along came the odour of sweet silage that had just been cut. White phlox that had long ago escaped from a flower garden nodded at me from a ditch, their strong lilac scent overwhelming the diesel, and that’s quite a feat.
I crossed from Foxley River to the next community, Freeland, where my mother was born and raised, where my parents had a store with our house next to it, the community where seven generations (and counting) of our family have lived. As I reached our old store, our former neighbour was out for her morning walk, and she laughed when I told her where I was headed and what my plans were. I passed the yard where my great-grandparent’s house had stood for over 125 years until it was torn down last fall. My cousin is going to have a big barn built there to hold his fishing gear. The grass is growing well over the old house site, and they have planted fruit trees in memory of our ancestors.
A couple of hours of digging and levelling and the uprooting of a couple of rotten stumps (one with a wasp nest – yikes!) and I was tootling home again. Next to the Anglican cemetery where my namesake grandmother Thelma (Hutchinson) Hardy has rested since 1927, nestled next to many other relatives, I admired the bumper crop of choke cherries growing on the side of the road in this extraordinarily good growing year.
Choke cherries
I stopped to take a photo of one of my favourite trees, a round white birch on the edge of a field, with a couple of ancient linden trees far in the background that were said to have been grown from cuttings brought from Ireland in the 1830s.
The solitary white
I’ve made so many trips along this road in my 57 years, in every kind of conveyance: car, truck, tractor, horse and sleigh, bicycle, scooter, snowmobile, school bus. I still see something new on each trip, especially a slow one. I was content and calm and exactly where I was supposed to be, moving slowly and part of everything I saw.
Our house is hidden far in the woods on the far side of Foxley River.
My attempts to find a reasonably-priced wooden scrub brush with a handle to use outside to clean garden buckets, tools and feed and water dishes for the hens have never been successful. There are tons of plastic ones, but the bristles start falling out after just a few uses and the plastic breaks down over time.
A couple of years ago I found a small wooden brush, much like the scrub brushes my mother used to use to clean floors, but this one had a hole for a handle. The bristles seem to be non-plastic, probably from hogs, probably from China. Not ideal, no doubt a by-product of industrial farming, but better than plastic, I guess?
The brush worked okay, but was a bit too big and unwieldy for smaller items and, as I’m often cleaning things in sub-zero temperatures, not having a handle meant wet, cold hands.
Yesterday I looked at the brush and thought I might be able cut it in two and add a handle to each half, thereby creating a more nimble tool and getting two brushes out of one: one for garden things and one for hen things. So that’s what I did.
Cut the end of the handle at a bit of an angle for easier scrubbing.
I pulled a wooden rake handle from my bucket of “pointy things used in the garden” (rebar, many old broom and rake handles, a couple of pieces from an old TV antenna) and cut one end so it would sit flat against the top of the brush. I screwed the handle on, cut it to the length I needed, and that was it, quick and easy. I added a hole at the end to attach some twine to hang it up and I’m all ready for more comfortable scrubbing.
The handle turned out to be made from a beautiful and extremely hard red wood. I’ve no idea what kind it is, and possibly it, too, is from China. It was a surprising pleasure to drill into it, pushing hard against the firm tight grain, and watch red curls come out in the drill bit. It is satisfying to know I am reusing this piece of wood after the rake head it once held fell apart, ensuring the tree that stretched and grew towards the light, sheltered birds, animals, insects and bacteria, brushed against its neighbour, felt the rain and watched the moon and sun dance across the sky, did not fall in vain.
Updated my page documenting the healing journey of the maskwi (birch) trees that were first harvested in July 2021 by my friend Kay, an amazing Mi’kmaq porcupine quill artist who uses the bark as the backing for her pieces.
The trees seem to be doing very well, the dark bark starting to peel off on some of the trees revealing a lighter layer underneath.
Dark bark coming off, lighter layer underneath
Storm Fiona was not kind to parts of our woodland, but the trees I have been documenting all survived in the midst of severe damage all around them. Birch are bendy, and they seemed to whip in the wind better than the white spruce that toppled all around them. Before Fiona, the “group photo” had been easily accessible along a trail we have had for decades; this time I had to climb over and under piles of trees to get there, the trail completely buried. The devestation remains breathtaking.
It’s difficult to capture, but this was a stand of towering 60-year-old white spruce, all felled by Fiona.
If you live in Mi’kmaki and are settled on land that has white birch, I hope you will consider allowing a harvest to take place. It is a different aesthetic, to be sure, and some people who see the trees near our house think they have been damaged or vandalized. I have, unfortunately, had some uncomfortable conversations with people about why I would allow the trees to be stripped, how ugly they look now.
I think the trees look beautiful, and the ceremony used to harvest the bark is a lesson to all who take from nature. Offering tobacco and a prayer to the tree is part of the bark harvest, and a relationship is formed between the harvester and the trees. I can’t imagine someone getting ready to mow down a bunch of trees in a huge machine making an offering to the trees they are about to destroy.
Where some see vandalism, I see justice, respect, and 12 millennia of history.
I am writing to you from a house without electricity. This is the third time since post tropical storm Fiona blew through here at the end of September that our power has gone out from wind knocking trees over onto the line running along our lane. The electricity was out for nine days after Fiona, and this time it’s only been 22 hours, a dawdle.
We (have to) have a generator to keep the furnace, water pump, refrigerators, and a few lights going, but we usually only run it a few hours during the day, not constantly. It’s a Honda 6,500 watt that we bought in 2003 and it has given great service, even with shamefully little maintenance. It lives in our outbuilding and feeds underground to a sub-panel in our basement. I’m hoping very soon to replace or augment it with a battery backup system that would ideally be able to connect to our solar panels, which are grid tied and essentially dead during power outages.
Thankfully our internet provider stopped trying to restring our fibre line above ground and decided last month to bury it most of the 1,000 feet from the road to our house. When the generator is running, or the backup battery on the modem is in use, we can be online and make landline calls; this is a big improvement from pre-Fiona.
I’m not sure how we are going to deal with the remaining trees in our lane. There are dozens of white spruce to be cut, each about 60 years old and 60 feet tall, and it will be a big job, more than I can handle, and potentially dangerous near the power lines. We will also look at paying to have our line buried, though I have no idea what that would cost.
Since Fiona changed the structure of our forest, so many trees are exposed and keep snapping off or falling over in strong winds, and a few onto our power line. I’ve not been able to find the words to describe how Fiona destroyed parts of our forest. I still can’t believe how quickly the woods I knew so well were flattened.
I am aware that these minor hiccups and inconveniences are insignificant bumps on a privileged, gilded road. Many will never have the luxuries we have right now, even without electricity. It could be worse, no doubt about it, but it has been tiring and disorienting.
I developed a bit of a mantra to get through the days and weeks after Fiona, the endless lugging of brush and cutting of massive trees: At least a tree can only fall once. If they could only leave the power lines alone.
To keep sawdust out of your work boots, take an old pair of socks, cut off the foot, and use them as gaiters. A hack learned from my forester pal Bruce Craig, put to much use the past three months.
Canton Becker has released a 1,000,000 hour long song today for Earth Day, on cassette tape, of course! You can randomly skip to a section that no one else has heard before and name a 15 minute section. Here’s Squeaky Ducks on a Summer Evening at around hour 695,203 for your listening pleasure.
I spent part of Earth Day cleaning out a pond in the decommissioned gravel pit on the land we inhabit, gently replacing frogs I stirred up and waving at the one butterfly I saw, seagulls, crows and blue jays wheeling and calling above it all. It was warmish in the late afternoon sun, and I was content in a way I never am in any other place. Water, trees, sky…that’s really all I need.
I’ve added a page to my site to track the regeneration of birch bark trees that were first harvested in July 2021. I’m told it will take about five years for the white bark to remerge, so I intend to photograph the trees every six months to document that process.
It’s been interesting to watch the bark change from a light soft leathery feel to dark and hard. The trees did not bleed and I didn’t notice any difference in the leaf drop in autumn. While the trees probably wonder where the bark went, they seem to be just getting to work and growing more bark!
I believe some of the harvested bark is included in quillwork pieces that are part of the exhibit called Matues Revisitedthat is on until March 13, 2022 at the Mary E. Black Gallery in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia. I told the trees this news, and they nodded and swayed in appreciation.
In late spring, we watch the different deciduous trees around our house slowly come into leaf, each type emerging when it is best for them. The first is always the willow, and the last is the red oak, which often still retains some leathery leaves from last year. It must have been explained to me in some biology class how leaves form inside a bud, but it still looks like a trick to me, like flowers coming out of a magician’s wand.
I noticed yesterday that the leaves on the birch and trembling aspen were quite large, but it was today that I was certain they were in perfect full leaf as it was a windy afternoon and I could hear the rustling of the leaves. This is by far my favourite day of the year, when I can once again hear the trees talking to me and to each other, to the birds and the sky, after a long winter of silent meditation.
The Christian God I was taught to both fear and worship has long ago slunk away to sit grumpily on a cloud after I ignored him for so long, while the Spirit of my choosing joyfully speaks to me through trees and birds and rocks and flowers. I am far happier in a forest than I ever was in a church, and the song of the leaves and the trees is the most beautiful sound in the world. How lucky I am to live surrounded by this choir.
