Time passing

I’ve come to love predictability. There’s comfort in days that roll easy on their own energy and an accompanying satisfaction in knowing that all the hard work getting to here has been worth it. Sure, there could always be more money, a tad less anxiety over details, maybe other folks being more predictable, but for the most part I have no complaint. At 55, you kind of get to want that.
It hasn’t always been that way. No, for years there were waves of titanic change; some good, some not so good. But I emerged intact from all of them. Now, it can get to feel as though I’m settled, feet firmly planted on the ground of my living. Around me is a house that’s a home, a half acre of land in the mountains overlooking a lake, a wife, a passable dog, good friends, community and work that engages and delights me. Lucky? Maybe. Grateful? Definitely.
I remember 25 years ago, talking with an Elder who’d seen his fair share of change. He lived in a small, shabby apartment in Winnipeg. It was far from where he’d been born and the noise and scurry of the city was a far different rhythm than he’d grown up with in the far north.
He talked of home. He missed it. He told me how 50 years ago there was not anything in his territory like there is now. Truth was, he probably wouldn’t even recognize it if he could make it back there. There wasn’t much chance of that. They said he was retired and he didn’t much care for the word. His life had always been spent working on the land and he said an Ojibway could never retire from the land. Retirement meant just being put away somewhere.
Arthritis had got him, finally. His hands didn’t work so well anymore and it was hard for him to walk because of his hip. But his mind was clear and he could remember everything about the life he’d lived in the bush.
He recalled the times that his friend old Stan Jack and he would stand on the dock of the marina they guided fishermen for. They’d watch the sun go down every night. They’d stand together and watch that sight, both of them nodding and not speaking, because as he said, “We see things like that us Ojibway and there’s no words big enough to say.”
They were just happy watching the land and feeling all easy with each other like you do when you come to know a man a long time. He was gone old Stan but he talked about how they used to walk together out of the town site on the reserve, into the bush and out onto the land.
Places never had names back then. They never needed names. As boys they had learned to hold a place in their memory for what it gave to them, just like his people had done forever. When you call it something, you change it, he said, and they never wanted to change anything out there. That’s what he said.
They were so familiar with things it was though they knew their way around by feel. Like how the wind feels coming through a gap, how rapids sound, how the voice of each of them is different depending on the direction you’re approaching them from, and the sudden cool you feel on your face stepping into the shadow a ridge throws all on you.
“Yes, that land - it’s a feeling, my boy.” That’s what he told me. Or least it was at one time. But eventually they came and put in roads, houses, big cut lines for hydro through the trees, marinas, lodges, clusters of cabins on even remote lakes and rivers and there were different kind of memories for the people then.
He spoke of driving into town back in 1959 and seeing a girl looking for a ride into town. Her climbing up into the cab and grinning at him with a face like sunshine. He stayed in town four days that time. It was the first time he ever forgot the bush. The first time he ever knew he could. Funny, he said, how fast something like a truck and a girl can change you.
Change everything.
He married her, and they settled down. But five kids bring a heap or responsibility and it wasn’t long before he was doing more work at the mill in town than he was out on the land.
The kids grew, his wife died and he came to dwindle away, alone in a city far removed from everything.
Changes. They take all of us away. But sharing the story of them brings us together. He taught me that.