When the mercury drops below freezing and the skies ring clear I become uncertain of all things empirical. The outside world is incoherent; a conflict I didn’t start or welcome. Lying in bed long before the sun brightens the eastern sky I reach my hand to the window pane at the head of my bed to feel the disparity between my sheets and what is to come. The cold is welcome but the rain, that melancholic meteorological mirror, is absent. Was looking forward to my third time in the racing shell under gray skies and on top of whatever the moon has wrought on the tidal river but it was canceled so I must reconsider the day. My days of late have been parched, lacking movement. Not that I've squandered all of them, just most of them in a daze of illness, recovery, and uncertainty. Today could not be similar. I must move, learn, observe otherwise that slippery slope ending in annihilation would be a step closer to its inevitable conclusion. So I dressed in long underwear all but unusable with age, waxed trousers, wool sweater and headed north to a place not seen in nearly a year.
A trail I’ve hiked often enough my destination and my consciously stated objective was to reach a lake where I could study the visible path of beaver under the ice but the subconscious had other motives that would surface more and more as I walked steadily up hill in what should have been an easy meander through a second generation tree plantation masquerading as a proper forest. It was a day we wish for after the long winters sans sunlight and blue sky but I missed the persistent drizzle and the blue sky was a direct assault on my state of mind, a personal insult and I cursed it for its promise of spring. Give me the unfoliated devils club shrouded in fog, the salal emerald in opposition to the gray; let me bury the memories of first kisses and fires under skies that match my spirit. Needing not to be reminded that soon the dryas octopetala would bloom and it’s circum polar range would unify an otherwise disjointed world. I did not want any reminder that life is life and it’s unremitting march would continue. As I walked and looked at ice and moving water occupying the same space chastising myself for not moving with more intensity so as to create steam with my body allowing an elemental trinity to manifest itself on the edge of an unnamed creek most give little attention to. Somehow the feeling that I cheated the flowing water of a triune representation filled me and tears began to form.
Two and a half miles up I recognised the bend in the trail where we stopped and embraced for the first time and later many miles further where we laid down our tent, built a fire, she cooking over the open flame while I scavenged wood, it was the picture of shared competency and it’s loss a portrait of a failure, a loss unquantifiable. Standing there overlooking the lake where I saw nothing of the beaver, no fresh damage to the saplings, no break in the ice at the bank, no track under the frozen to indicate their presence. The notable absence of what has been present for three years was surprisingly welcome. Maybe they found more suitable habitat then again maybe trappers have removed them. It was an absence felt on a myriad of levels; the fire ring cold, the two trees where I hung our hammocks empty, where we put our tent covered in winter debris. The dryas octopetala will bloom but the beaver have fled, water and ice may occupy the same space but that precious third will remain absent, nullifying the fullness of elemental potential. It is a frigid February and T.S. Elliott got it wrong April isn’t the cruelest month perhaps it’s now; when the soil doesn’t turn but must be broken and the burial is the culmination, rebirth a fever dream of spring in an eternal winter.
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