When our boys were babies and we fled the noise and filth of the city to find pastures and forests where they could be free to leap and laugh, we came to live among the hills above a wide river-valley. It was an obscure region of Ontario and it already had a very long history.
But of course we were young and sublimely unaware of the powerful influence the past could still exert in such a place. Even in our admittedly self-centered state of mind, however, we couldn’t help but notice the tall black crosses that were standing at almost every cross-road in the district.
It was hilly country, as I have mentioned, with a deep and enduring bedrock of Canadian shield granite, and there were a great many streams and lakes and beaver-ponds among the random hills. In the seasons when the waters were warm and flowing, plant-life flourished and the sloping fields were all abloom with native grasses and wild-flowers. Everywhere, aggressively impinging on the hard-won fields and pastures, was a vigorous mixed forest of conifers and hardwood trees, quite healthy in spite of a recent infestation of Dutch elm disease which had left the tall white skeletons of once well-grown examples of the species standing up among the greenery.
We learned later on that the dead elms were known locally as “widow-makers” because of their long, heavy branches which could break off and fall on anybody who was trying to cut them down. Dead elm is terrific firewood, though, and available toward the end of winter, when some people might have run out of dry wood to burn, so some guys did take that chance.
I remember, as that first slow spring progressed, that I began to notice a truly astounding variety of birds, insects and reptiles. There were also plenty of the bigger and furrier kinds of wildlife, certainly, but most of those animals seldom allowed themselves to be seen by humans. Darkness was their domain.
Summers, although shortened by the over-arching arctic zone, were lush, with regular rainfall and sudden, violent thinder-storms. But the autumn was always my favourite season when I lived there. For one thing, the mosquitoes and black flies are done then and the earth still holds its warmth in the yellow light of the declining sun. Especially noticeable on cloudy days for some delightful reason, the hills are radiant with the reds and oranges of maples and oaks, the fresh bright yellows of the poplars and tamaracks, and here and there on the edges of the smaller clearings were the flame-coloured sumacs, all attractively punctuated with the deep green triangles of the evergreens.
Farming could be marginally profitable in the region, but never on the grand industrial scale we always used to see further south. It’s a lot more difficult to divide that rough country into squares and rectangles, so I guess the benefits of machinery don’t really justify the expense. And the ground was still very rocky, even though the lengthy stone fences that were on all sides a distinctive feature of the landscape tesified to the dedicated efforts of many generations of farmers.
The locals always complained in their lilting dialect that every winter the malicious frost got into the ground and pushed up more rocks that they had to dig out and pile on the fences before they could get onto the muddy fields with their tractors and horses and plows. Peculiarly, as I thought at the time, they spoke of these rocks as “floaters”.
Financial depression was a constant feature of life around there, and much later on I became sort of obsessed with trying to figure out why that was. I really do think that it must have been at its worst back then, though, because when we were driving around the back roads looking for property in the beginning, we saw abandoned farmsteads all over the place, some with all their furnishings intact and simply left to the weather and the spider-webs.
In one of those deserted farm-houses, I saw an old photograph in a crooked frame on the wall, of a father and seven or eight strapping sons. They were all wearing the typical belt-and-suspenders combination and standing soberly in a row, in descending order of their age and height. All of them had very large forearms and hands, which were held forward and curved in such a way that it was obvious even to a city girl like me that they had spent most of their time just picking up rocks.
Somebody told me that a lot of those places had been settled long before the automobile was invented, and back then the roads were laid out for the use of horses and wagons. Roadways had changed drastically when people started using cars more. So that was probably also a big reason why those farms had fallen into disuse.
But anyway, I have never seen so many porcupines as we had around our farm that first year. Of course we were insanely busy moving up from the city and settling in and, although the weather wasn’t too good that April, we immediately started on several totally unrealistic projects that had been prominent components of our former urban ‘dream’, some of which actually took a number of years to complete. So we were distracted and didn’t realize soon enough what effect the move would have on our two dogs. They started running off into the bush all the time, almost always coming home with their mouths full of porcupine quills. Whoever lost the argument would have to get the pliers and remove them from their frenzied and sharp-toothed mouths.
Some dogs learn and some dogs don’t. The problem is that porcupines have only one speed – very, very slow. At the bottom of the cliff in the back field there is a jumble of rocks where the porcupines like to hang out for some reason and sometimes they would be crushed beneath the constantly tumbling boulders. You could see their little skeletons, all covered with quills, among the rock-piles.
After a while those silly city dogs took off for good. Probably, they told me, the wolves had led them astray and eaten them. Apparently the wolf-bitches do it. But anyway then we got a wonderful country dog, a black-and-white collie called Toby, and he really took good care of us. He was big, happy dog and very brave and smart. He never took off at all.
We got him from Henry, the eighty-year-old bachelor who had sold us the property and lived ‘next door’, which was actually almost half a mile away. We could see the tops of his roofs among the trees on the hillside above our place and we always checked to see whether smoke was coming out of his chimney – in which case he was more likely to be at home and awake – before we paid him a visit.
It was old Henry, as a matter of fact, sitting in his spartan kitchen one chilly winter afternoon, who told us that ‘the old people’ always used to hide their money and valuables in the stone fences. In days gone by, he said, that was their bank, especially after the stock market crash in ‘29 and during the years of the Great Depression. They would have a rusty old tin put away under some particular rock among the thousands upon thousands of rocks that had been flung onto the loose, sinuous piles that wound over and around the fields and hills.
They did this, he continued, in order to be safe from both theft and house-fires, which were not infrequent when wood-stoves and kerosene lamps were in daily use. Summer lightning had also been the cause of many such disasters. Then Henry told us, grim and frowning and shaking his white-haired head, that – human nature being what it was – some people would use these secret hoards to assert control over their dependents and heirs. Gesturing at us with his gnarled forefinger, Henry pointed out that the great disadvantage of the arrangement was that very often these carefully accumulated fortunes were lost when the original owner, spiteful and secretive to the end, perished unexpectedly.
I guess most people would realize right away that this was exactly the kind of information that could really fester in somebody’s mind. But I just remember cracking a lot of jokes on our way home and laughing quietly to myself about old Henry’s ‘tall tales’. I have always been a big fan of irony. But probably I should have been takihg it more seriously.
With hindsight, I think there was also a tendency on my part to sink into the same inarticulate fatalism that I had obserevd among the locals and frequently ridiculed, in my ignorance. But anyway, Jason – that was my tall, dark and handsome husband’s name: Jason – couldn’t forget about what Henry had said, and I suspect that Henry told Jason a lot more than he ever told me about the history of the stone fences. But it was completely absurd!
There were literally hundreds of miles of them, and many sections were overgrown with a hundred years’ growth of moss and vines and tree-roots. Near the swamps, where the beavers had been busy, a lot of the fences were mostly sunken into the soggy ground. Sometimes in bed at night I would wake up for a minute and see that Jason’s gleaming eyes were open in the starlight and seemed to be looking far away. Maybe that was when he was starting to think about it. But I never had a clue. I never did see it coming.
(to be continued)
The Dragon Of Rural Route Four
The dragon is used in this story to represent symbolically the human tendency to hoard assets, thus impoverishing local economies and leading to other crimes of desperation.