River of Wisdom

“You didn't come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean.
You are not a stranger here.” ~ Alan Watts

“My farm is a sixty-acre strip of stony land washed to where it is by a glacial run, huddled under those kinds of midnight skies. Lately it is some beaver swamp, some pasture, a roofless cedar log barn, and a secret little stream trickling down off the mountain that makes the spring forest around it hold green light all day long. We call it a farm mainly to keep our hopes up. We do farm the place, and that is a detailed chorus of pleading, cajoling, and bargaining with everything done to the land before we got here. We have vague but promising signs that the land may have forgiven a bit the old trespasses of clear-cut, pesticides, and overplanting.

Only two families have lived on it since the place was taken from the surrounding forests and the Algonquin people in the mid-nineteenth century, but those farmers left their signs: a rusting harrow in a tumbled-down log outbuilding, an evening star cut out of the barn’s western eves that let dusty light in at day’s end when the roof was still on, crumbling split-rail cedar fences and played-out soil. This place, as anybody who works land around here knows, should never have been cleared and farmed. It can feed the remaining trees and bush and the animals who live here, but it can’t feed much else, not without help. It’s sand, mostly. Our way of helping is to dig into the ground the spirit and the body of everything that withers and dies here. So far, the deals we’ve struck with the place are holding.

Partly because of my traveling and teaching schedule, which supports our farm habit, and partly because we don’t plough with a tractor, this is still mostly a dirt farm. That is what I used to tell the customs people when they wanted to know my occupation: dirt farmer. Once I was asked if I was bringing into the U.S. any monetary instruments totaling $10,000 or more. I reminded the customs officer that she knew I was a farmer. “Oh, right,” she said. “Sorry.” Ours is a fair way of life, more than fair. But it isn’t much of a living. A dirt farm it is likely to remain, and we turn out a bumper crop year after year without the heavy, crippling labor that used to be done here in years past. For now we plant clover, bury cardboard to encourage the worms, and hope that small green patches of people food will bear the early frost or show up in time to feed the scholars at our school. Patience and a manageable mortgage are mandatory for this kind of thing.

The name of the river I live beside when translated into English comes out something like “the place of full life,” which does it some justice. We’ve come to call it the River of Abundance and Time, which is a better rendering. Across the road from our skinny farm is a granite and oak ridge a day’s walk long that neighbors call The Mountain. The Mountain is not a mountain by almost any standard but a prairie one, but it rises sudden and unannounced from the land around it, steep and still bearing the marks of the upward tectonic forces that made it, and so locally it is highly regarded as a proper mountain. My friend and I climbed The Mountain one morning. Not being much of a mountain it wasn’t much of a climb, so we had energy enough to sit for a while and take in the great arc of the River of Abundance and Time as it rolled in its true course out of the purple western hills, through two grand lakes and on to the Mattawa in the east. We could see for forty kilometers, anyway, in every direction.

It was a beautiful sight. I admired aloud the valley before us that the great melt of water had carved ten thousand years before, the old torrent of which the current River of Abundance and Time is for now a subdued memory. After a minute my friend said, “Valley? What valley is that? Where’s the other side?” He was right, of course. It isn’t a valley at all and has probably never been. I’d just assumed there was another mountain explaining the river running between them. But it isn’t so. The river is where it is without any obstacle, without another side. Or you could say, the other side of the river—what makes it a river and not a lake—seems to be gone. But a long time ago some other, subtler thing made a home for the River of Abundance and Time, and still keeps it right where it is. This book about the wisdom of dying is, partly, about that subtler presence on the other side that binds all things to their course.

The river was dammed farther up about a half century ago to control the melting runoff, so now it flows slow and steady most of the year like most old-timers do, no longer too rambunctious, hardly able to act as in days gone by on the mad flush of spring. A half-hour’s paddle downstream from our place the river pours into to a large lake which is a favored cavorting spot for people from the city. Judging by the summer traffic, they are untroubled by the price of gasoline—or the end of gasoline—and all that goes with it. Holiday weekends are raucous times on the river, and you can be tested by the mayhem. On one of them I stayed home, making me the local exception, and lived through a prolonged reminder of why being here on those weekends isn’t wise. The buzz and the roar of two-stroke power plowing the river in front of the house to a muddy froth was constant, and it sent endless waves of erosion up and down the shoreline. This is how one of the local people accounted for it all: It’s a free country. Somewhere in the helpless, molar-grinding consternation of that weekend, a couple of thoughts struggled up toward me through my anger like lake trout through dark water:

What if those people could stand on the shore watching their wake wash a bit of the shore away? And what if each of us could stay put long enough to see the rippling trail of everything we did rolling out behind us? What if we stopped long enough to see the long train of unintended consequence fan out from every innocently intended thing we did?

A taste for the consequence, for what endures: Maybe then there’d be a chance for things to be different.”

~ Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul