Lambsquarters (29 page)

The season of the fence clinched the corduroy road. Fencing through the extensive ground tangle and excessive wood waste was arduous: post holes had to be hand-dug between grills of trees, braces had to be built and
wire had to be stretched in cramped, muggy mornings drifting from spring to summer. The leaves unfolded with attending shade, but mosquitoes hatched hourly. That fence forced Thomas to look at the ground, be eye to eye with the elements. Develop an affinity.

ORIGINAL SETTLERS,
cutting, chopping, slicing with their crosscut saws, laid down the very first roads with felled trees. They followed native paths, portages and trapping lines, made way for horses, wagons, more immigrants. But soon the townships broke into patchwork quilts run through with Roman roads. Straight lines gave way only for deep lakes, stone-faced ridges, festering swamps. With stumps and rocks studding the land, only logs laid like matches in a box could form a base for concessions and sideroads.

Excess trees from land clearing laid edge to edge make a road only visually similar to its cotton namesake:
Corde du roi
. The king’s cord is a fabric soft to the touch with a light-reflecting nap. Corduroy roads, although they do play with light through the lace of leaves, have no soft drape. One hard log lies against another and another, forming a continuous curdle of hills and valleys. Early immigrants were legally required to slog together to build these roads, whose ghosts can be seen each spring as the township graders unearth the splintered remains of former forest trees, forced up through the gravel by frost.

I think of the first families when I see those torn logs. Families sitting on open wagons, fiercely holding their children, riding over waves of a road as choppy as the seas they sailed to get here. The pulse as constant as a racing heartbeat. A nursing mother cradling her newborn against full breasts assaulted by each jolt, and children bruising in their pretence of riding ponies, shooting rapids, rolling down terraced hillsides. Some pioneers carried only the clothes on their backs; others had the dubious burden of trunks full of silver and books to protect. In their bumpity journey they were levelled on a classless plane.

The logs that appear during the spring breakup are all that are left of those roads now. Just memento mori to remind us of our connection with the past. And our impending outcome in the future. Occasionally, farmers still build a bit of corduroy in the bush—they fill in low spots for vehicles during logging. Their form is for function and is ragged and imprecise. Not trimmed, not measured, not calculated to please in itself.

Thomas’s road is different. It is function and beauty both. Some say function is beauty, but it doesn’t always follow. Or lead. Perhaps beauty depends on the nature of the function. And in the case of Thomas’s road, the function is nature.

I gather the road just began with the laying of four-foot lengths of log. All the deadfall from a bush idle for
many years. Cedars dying or blown over, not knowing yet they were dead. Permanently on tilt or crashed to the forest floor. Dangerous widow-makers, threatening to fall suddenly on the unsuspecting. Balsams, which just seem to grow up to die (like us all), stand at attention until a great wind levels them or they are lovingly laid out. Their final rest as road.

The bush itself has a high part, where maples and hemlock, beech and black cherry grow, even a nanny-berry tree, its trunk a straight link to the clouds. The high forest needs no corduroy, is rarely wet, is always accessible. But it leads off to lower ground directly. To the swamp cedar and the aspen, the poplar and the thick underbrush and bulrush. There are beauties in a bog, but access is the problem. How do you tramp through the terrain when you sink with each step? You don’t. Unless, of course, you have corduroy to step on.

Thomas has taken years to thread his road through the acreage. It winds and meanders and connects with the two ends on high ground. It has absorbed every dead tree that has fallen. It’s a conservationist’s road. A road that makes life from death. A coroner’s road.

Like some magic lens turned around corners, like fibre optics, the road opens up the inaccessible. The secrets of the marsh are revealed. Suddenly we can walk on water. We can walk the bog. Each season spreads itself across the landscape on either side of the narrow winding path.

Winter landscape passes quickly on skis. The mushrooms of snow on stumps; the cattails of snow on bulrushes already bursting with their own internal cotton wool. The black eye of a snowshoe hare perfectly camouflaged against his white world. In winter the views are quick and crisp. Sleeping nature.

Spring awakens with the thaw. Before bugs or leaves, the forest yawns awake. Sap runs. Small shoots of horsetail—prehistoric plant, brown, speckled black, alien—push ancient genes through spaces in the road. Bullfrogs croak, peepers peep. Warblers in bare trees sing, flash yellows and blues, reds and blacks on the starkscape. Ruffed grouse drum. Water burbles the edges, mud oozes, but the road holds, carries us into this heart of marshness.

Slowly, green arrives. And the road leads to details. The minutiae of life on the edge. Iris poke through the marsh with the promise of blue and yellow flags. Rigid horsetails morph to fine feathers, yellow-green and soft. Trilliums, red and white, and bloodroot grow on higher ground. The showy but shy flower of the ground ginger hides under leaf mould. The canopy begins overhead, budding, then unfurling into dappled skies, filtering sun and rain both. This stage is quick in Grey County, where spring can last just days before a heat wave arouses everything through to an orgasm of greens and abundance. There’s so much to see, but blackflies and mosquitoes, fighting for territory and ownership, rush the body
through the bush. Orchids, tiny pink salacious snake-mouths. And mushrooms. And morels.

Then full summer days begin with marsh marigolds massing, drifting into iris and angelica, soaring their arrowhead buds into the ether and opening as cumulus clouds of bloom. Lobelias begin—first the red
cardinalis
, then later the blue
siphilitica
—and spotted jewelweed spreads tender stems under the cedars. Nettles encroach a spot: if you have bare legs stay to the middle. Time passes. Fireflies strobe. Cicadas hum like errant wires.

August is a time of thick dews. Spiderwebs of gold and silver cross the road and are rebuilt each night by Penelope and Arachne working their own secret fates. Goldenrod, Joe-pye weed and fleabane, fall aster and touch-me-not. Things are going to seed. Iris pod like little peppers. Ragweed at large in the air.

Then a sudden frost. The first red leaf. A next and a next. Gold and brown and orange. The forest begins to die. It does not go gentle.

As the road circles through the bush, so the season follows—or leads. The man I live with has opened up the way, has revealed the secrets of the swamp. But only to those who will look, who will slow to the speed of the snail to see, who will suffer the slings of blackflies and the arrows of nettles to experience outrageous fortune. He lets me walk on water.

TROWEL

THE FOREST TOOLS ARE LARGE,
sharp, wicked: bucksaws and swede saws, axes and hatchets, and chainsaws, which pollute with noise, the odour of fuel, and require the armour of Kevlar and steel. The tools travel in the wheelbarrow or trailer, which is hitched to the Ford or the baby John Deere. Or they dangle from Thomas’s long arm in an old white pail, quixotically labelled “leaks fluids” as if dreams could be held there intact, or solid plans or ideas. He can swing the saw over one shoulder and hold the axe by its neck, but usually he has more to carry than that. So he dons his overalls or his chaps or both and is panoplied for his fray with woods that are ever encroaching on the waterward road, ever falling and felling, responding to the vagaries of the elements.

He heads down the thinning fall meadow, through the late grazing flock, around the centre stone-pile and shade
cedars and disappears through the gate, over the swamp edge and into the forest, past the stumped area we call Knock-down Corner and beyond into the Bush and away. And while he trudges and trims, piles and stacks, orders the deadfall into posts and lumber, kindling and road fill, I garden unarmed near home. I harvest or deadhead, divide or weed. My tools are manageable in my hands, tiny, efficient and light. I almost always use a trowel.

A trowel is a double-edged sword. A hand tool with a thin, flat double blade for mortaring rock or plastering walls, or a small, scooped shovel for opening the earth to receive or relinquish young plants. The word derives from the Latin
trua
, meaning “ladle,” or
trulla
, meaning “spoon.” In its way the trowel does provide nourishment to those who pick it up. It feeds an aesthetic need and reinforces the power of production. It feeds the simple pleasure inherent in the skill to build or grow.

Trowels are strong symbols for Lambsquarters. With them we throw mortar, plant seedlings, smooth plaster, weed and thin. Trowels were among the first tools here, and they remain crucial to the farm.

The house saw few changes in its first hundred years. Rudimentary electricity at mid-century led to pumped water and primitive indoor plumbing. A telephone. A Romanesque archway that must have grown from a simple doorway between the front and back parlours, small rooms both, joined now by a vaulted
entrance, the only curve in a structure of strict straight lines. Paired sconces graced this graceless passage, a token of frivolity surrounded by austerity. This aberrant arc, which neither separated nor joined the cramped little rooms, had to go. We attacked the plaster with the wrecking bar, pried out the lath, dismantled the studs and found ourselves (when the dust settled) with a large bright room, punctuated with a branch line of void in the wall. I bought a trowel.

I’d never plastered before, but Lionel, the buildingstore man, who had taken on the cause of the renovation, assured me it was simple. He sold me a huge bag of plaster and the trowel and gave mixing instructions. So there I was, hod in hand, my first batch of mud ready to throw, my shiny pointed trowel securely nestled in my fist, its wooden handle warm in a room still awaiting central heat. It was January.

Before buying the plaster trowel, I had invested in the cheapest of garden trowels the previous fall. We bought the farm in October, and having no way of knowing what might appear in the derelict gardens the following spring, I planted as many daffodils as I could around the apple trees in the front orchard. The trowel was an inferior one. It immediately became acquainted with the rock population just under the surface of the ground and succumbed. It was the first of many.

By the time I got to plastering, I’d already mastered
the arts of demolition, wood splitting and stove starting, fuse replacing, wallpaper stripping, lino lifting and dump going. I thought I could do anything. I liked the feel of the trowel. I loved the feel of the throw. Plaster mixed perfectly careens off the blade and sticks exactly where it’s sent. Catch for one player, and never a miss. The throw comes off the topside, after scooping with one blade, but the bottom is the spreader, its pointed end directing morsels of muck into corners, angling one side to eke out the fill to the other edge, smoothing along the original wall to make a perfect join. Artistry and play and serious work in one action, like Ceramus’s pottery.