The road less cycled

I feel extremely compelled to post tonight, so I will. I’ve had a low key couple of days; today I spent a few hours in the Ravine Park Salmon  Hatchery, picking dead coho salmon eggs out of trays, some 2000 all told. We never do manage to pick them quite quickly enough, but do successfully release thousands of coho fry and smolts into Downes, McLennan, Stoney, Willband, and Horn Creeks each year. It’s very rewarding and in an ideal world I’d be more involved. In an ideal world, days would also be around 150 hours long, followed by 5 hours of sleep and some nighttime wandering.

I’ll be doing a detox program starting tomorrow morning; the “Master Cleanse” which I learned about through my friend Jeff. I ought to read the book that it’s based on, but essentially it involves no solid foods for eight days, followed by four days on a severely restricted diet. During those eight days, one ingests only a great deal of water, and a solution of water, lemon/lime juice, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper whenever one feels hungry. This allows the body to take a break from the continual digestion process, and focus on removing toxins. This is the primary function of the lemon juice and cayenne pepper; the maple syrup ensures a sufficient caloric intake to have enough energy to carry on with life as usual. I last did such a cleanse last July, with initially disastrously embarrassing and moderately effective results; dig back to July’s posts if you want the details.

Why am I doing this? While my holidays have not been excessively excessive, they have been excessive and not quite as ascetic as I’d hoped. Asceticism is easier when the pantries are not stuffed with temptations, which is not likely to happen at my house anytime soon.

Today, I also read Thoreau, the book that HH gave me last Christmas and which I’m only getting around to now. I read in the bathtub, and chose Thoreau because I realized I was wasting my time with Barth. Thoreau speaks to me much more strongly than Barth ever has, and though he writes with complexity and adroit use of the English language, he’s not near as long-windedly verbose as Barth, and addresses much less abstract concepts.\

Some Thoreau gems to close off this post. The thing with Thoreau, is you often can’t quote a single soundbite. You need the whole damn paragraph for it to flow and make sense. Oh well.

“What I have heard of Brahmins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heaves over their shoulders, until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach, or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars – even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredulous and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labours of Hercules were trifling with those which my neighbours have undertaken, for they were only twelve and  had an end; but I could never see  that these men slew or captured any monster, or finished any labour.”

“Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superflously coarse labours of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.”

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

“A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed under even what are called the games and amusements of mankind.”

“What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilising rain on their fields.”

“Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the  young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were.”

“I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.”

“One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with’; and so he religously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the day whiles he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle.”

“The greater part of what my neighbours call good, I call bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behaviour. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?”

Off all these quotes, it is the last that my current inner being identifies most strongly with.

My computer is bound to freeze any moment now, as it has done 3 times in the last 45 minutes or so. That might be fine, if the rest of the world’s computers did the same, simultaneously. Such thoughts course through my mind as I read Sharon Butala’s “The Perfection of the Morning.”

So much to write. And such baffling evaporation of ideas as I sit down to actually write it. Butala’s book is full of insights, and I’ll share just a few of them here, after briefly introducing her and the situation she writes from.

Butala, a woman whose worldly experience was largely urban and academic with the exception of the formative years of her childhood, abandoned much – a position as a university professor, nearly completed Master’s degree, her house, and her circle of friends and family to marry Peter Butala, a lifetime rancher and 41 year old bachelor content to reside in the same place where he had grown up, earning an honest, if challenging, living from the ranch.

She writes: “In the years since the summer I turned thirteen and we moved into the city, I had become so urbanized that I knew nothing about farming, or about the daily life led by people who made their living in agriculture. I thought of myself proudly as a sophisticated city woman, but even that first weekend with Peter, strangely, I kept having flashes of deja vu. They were incomplete, vague and unformed, and yet carried with them a puzzling tug of recognition, of memories that were more visceral even than images or fragments of conversations. Bewilderingly, I felt comfortable when I should have felt ill at ease; I felt at home when I should have felt lost…..I felt transported to a familiar way of being and to a familiar place. Yes, I thought, and then, but how do I know this?”

“By the time I was twenty I had developed contempt for those who wanted to return to Nature, believing they were all romantic dreamers, nitwits from the city, people raised in the lap of luxury who did not know about Nature’s nasty side, who had never done a real day’s work in their lives and thus had no idea of the grinding labor a life in Nature demanded for mere survival. “

Of her struggle to adapt to her new life: “Through that struggle to fit – to become congruent – I became not the painter I once was but a writer, and I discovered that the writer I’ve become is the Self I’ve been in search of for so many years..it has been the act of writing that created and continues to create that Self I’ve at last found, and that acts as the instrument of integration between myself and my environment….”

On men and leaving behind her old life: “I saw nobody in my city life doing anything more physically dangerous than walking to work, and in Saskatoon that wasn’t much of a risk. I’d had enough of my windowless office at the university and the endless maneuvering for advantage, not to mention the incredibly hard work people of my lowly rank had to do for distressingly low pay; I’d had enough of the men I was meeting, each one of whom seemed to be more insecure, convoluted and uncertain than the last one; I couldn’t wait to put it all behind me.”

And her Coyote Dream; which perhaps I’ll write about another time.

Such writing inspires self-reflection, of course. Could I be a Peter Butala? A capable rancher, content to live a simple, yet physically demanding lifestyle? To accept and revel in it? How long (yes Papa, he’s a Chinaman ) will I be content to float in much the same vein as Sharon Butala, in the ’soft’ yet grueling world of academics? Could I leave this abstract world of ideas and theory where I seem to spend so much time, replacing it with a life where the primary focus is the day’s physical work – a life stripped bare of all the frivolousness and frenzied efforts to accomplish…..what? What exactly am I trying to accomplish?

On the surface, it seems a horrendously unsatisfying life – it seems there must be more to life than living on the land, living with the land, working on it and relying on it for survival, romantic as the idea is. Although from where Peter Butala is, it’s only a step up to be a Percy Schmeiser – internationally renowned canola (among other crops) farmer from the Saskatchewan prairies, renowned for his struggle against biotech giant Monsanto Corp., former town mayor, and acclaimed public speaker. Perhaps it’s the participatory element, the element of democracy which I would most miss. One might expect to miss the social experience that, as I gather from Butala’s writing, is unique to the urban lifestyle. I’m not sure if I would however – I’ve never been one to go overboard in that regard, preferring to remain on the sidelines, waiting in the wings, greatly favoring a long ramble in the woods over a night at a club. Although as I’m learning, both have their place.

A Peter Butala seems so…well, grounded. So rooted to the spot, so impossibly content. I wouldn’t be content if I was content – I’d need something more. There’s an incessant need for a deeper understanding, which perhaps drives my inclination to need to write everything down, to digest it, which, by all appearances, Peter doesn’t feel. Perhaps because that deeper understanding isn’t lacking, having been gained from a lifetime spent in Nature, in touch with it’s (her?) rhythms, patterns, and mysterious yet comforting ways. I suppose what I’m saying is that the academic in me, the writer in me, would want out, no matter what I did.

Because I really have to go do my finances and get up early tomorrow I’ll close here, with a final quote from S. Butala:

“I was learning to be a different kind of woman from the one who’d danced all night in clubs to rock ‘n’ roll, competed with men at a job, borrowed money at the bank, bought a house, had a manicure, and set her cap for men and fended off others, who faced an urban, modern world on her own. As I lived this new way part of me was beginning to to feel all that – the life of the modern, urban woman – had been a mistake, and maybe not the great improvement on my mother’s life I thought it had been.”