birch, pine, maple

It’s loud in the passenger seat of Charlene’s UTV, as we peel off the highway east of Garden Village and take the muddy ditch. The tires throw up great thick splashes of chocolate milk mud on the other side of Highway 17. For the first half hour or so, we encounter lots of other folks on their machines, clad in bright orange, off to enjoy a perfect crisp October Saturday and get some hunting in.

The further north we head, the less folks we see. Charlene knows this part of the woods like the back of her hand and we go back and forth between the official snowmobile trails and off-trail shortcuts. She navigates loose ridges of gravel as easily and confidently as she does deep bush ditch-pocked trails, club music pumping as we wave our arms in time and giggle at the same stupid jokes, enjoying the ease of a friendship that goes back nearly forty years.

Crystal Falls. Field. Desaulniers. We cross bridges that used to carry train tracks, the Sturgeon River sparkling below, the great Canadian Shield rising in sheer cliff above, all around us autumn’s glorious colours glowing as though lit from within. Yellow tamarack, red oak, blue spruce. A bald eagle circles overhead. Charlene points out the sharp scent of nearby wildlife, shouts ‘partridge’ a couple of times and I’m impressed by her ability to see anything at the speed we’re going. She regales me with a story of how she shocked her city friend by plucking and cooking a bird she ran over on a similar outing to the one we’re on. I would love to see that, I think to myself.

We stop in River Valley, Charlene buys me a red plaid hat and tells me this is the end of the cell service. We take a shortcut towards the 805, past the camps of her husband’s cousins, her own relatives, friends of theirs. Up here they call them camps, the word cottages reserved for new builds by folks from down south. We see three lynx, a mother and two babies, crossing the road ahead. I spy the head of some furry water mammal, I think otter, she suspects beaver, cruising down a creek on my side of the trail. We cackle and gossip and drink hot apple cider from travel mugs.

We’ve been on the machine for two hours as we enter the last part of our journey, and Charlene explains that the land beneath us is a magnetic anomaly, which I later learn is called the Wanapitei Anomaly. An egg shaped deposit deep in the earth with a profoundly different magnetic charge than the land surrounding it. She invites me to notice how my body is changed by the shift in fundamental forces, and I do. The further we go into the supercharged space, the quieter we become, my breath deepens, I attune to the sheer vastness of the land around me. I feel the presence of my brother’s spirit drawing nearer to me.

This is one of the reasons Charlene is bringing me to Lake Manitou, into the heart of Dimii’aagamaa Anishinaabe land. This was a holy place to my brother, a place he invited me to many times, a place I failed to visit while he was alive. This afternoon jaunt is also a pilgrimage, a paying of respects. This was where she spent summers in her own childhood, and we peel past the lake a bit so she can show me the exact spot, but when we take a corner on the gravel road and see a black bear of considerable size just ahead, we decide to turn back towards the rest area and have our lunch.

When we’re done eating, she turns to me and says ‘Sing me the one you wrote for Kelly’. I feel suddenly shy, but I sing it anyway, I sing my regret and my love and my grief and we both cry. I am so grateful to her for bringing me here, she who also knew and loved Kelly, she who also knows and loves this land as he did. The trees seem to reach out their branches to gather in the song.

So many different moments superimpose themselves on this one. The beautiful face of Charlene’s mother, taken too young by cancer, a face full of kindness that I see emerge from Charlene’s own features. Teenaged Charlene and I walking the tracks with our friends before a school dance in autumn, the crimson of the leaves the same shade as her wild and glorious mane of curls, and me so pulled in and energized by her power and magnetism. The three light boxes fixed to the ceiling of the radiation suite, that I stared at every day for 6 weeks less than a year ago, as I lay prone, arm over head, receiving treatment that was all at once life saving and life endangering.

The images on those light boxes were a triptych of fall trees - birch, pine, and maple - seen from the vantage point of someone lying on the ground beneath, looking up into the canopy and beyond into a bright blue cloudless sky. Every day I looked at them and hoped myself back into the world, imagined that in a year’s time I would enjoy the same view in three glorious dimensions, returning from my pilgrimage to the kingdom of the ill. And here, thanks to the generosity and grace of Charlene, am I.

I lay back and stare upwards, I marvel at the fractal nature of time and of the events of my life. I am acutely aware that the number of autumns I have remaining to me is not only a smaller number than ever before, but also an unknowable number, each instance one of increased poignancy and value. I breathe in, capture this ephemeral and eternal moment in my lungs, send it into my cells, encode it in the deepest place within where dreams are kept. I breathe out, all my love and sorrow and remembrances, my breath a gift to the trees that witness the comings and goings of our human lives and pass no judgment.