ForesTriangulation
p. 3 of 5
23. Manatoulin: on a clifftop with friends of my parents, emerging from cover of ridgeline trees, the familiar vertigo wells up looking out toward the vast openness. I can only think of leaping the blue sky and beauty pressing in, Indigenous history troubled, trebled, tripling dark thoughts I have no tools to understand. We descend and I return to the solitude of my parents’ friends’ back seat as our wan daylit tour of the island carries on. We soon stand within the tribal council longhouse: low-slung, light diffused, there’s comfort and familiarity in an empty communal space, but there are also ghosts here, in this longhouse-cum-Christian-church-in-the-round in a wooded clearing.
54. Iris scan to enter, a visit to Wudang Mountain, ancient forests. A T’ai Chi master welcomes us both.
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14. Returning from camping in Algonquin for nearly a week, our stores depleted, all those eggs and fresh bread slices long gone.
My dad and me. Tea Lake, Radiant Lake. Portage trails with entranceways obscured by brush. We watch for the pinprick orange sign to pull up. Canoe kevlar green on the sand, leaving traces, some near mile marker 1500. “800 yards,” the map speaks like an oracle: doable. Other times it says beware. Navigating stiff oncoming white-caps, the wind from 1 o'clock bearing down and veering us off our dead-noon triangulation dashed line, toward the largest silver birch on the shore, our canoe tenuously isoscelesing our valiant father-son imaginary line on an imaginary map writ large.
My dad, tumpline foreheaded, up ahead on the trail somewhere behind the trees. A fork triangles off to a dead-end lake. He is not there. I am alone with the woods. I find an American dollar bill lying in plain view. Awkwardly, I stoop to pocket it, and resume my stride. Strange exaltation fingering greenback, my dad emerges from lakegleam through trunktree.
I peer at a new plane of lake, unhead canoe, shoulder to thigh to ground unburdened and sprint. Daddylonglegs striding the glassy mirror. Dipping paddle drips submerged. Algae-frosted tree stumps flood an alien world.
Once home, I seek out the secret stash in my bedroom and rejoice. Dad and me threading the invisible dotted line on the plastic-ensheathed map, ensheathed and plasticked against the elements.
13. First cottage return of the year. Still the spring cools trees and unspoiled air all about. After the requisite flurry to unpack days of groceries, car doors thud shut and reveal silence.
First to the treehouse my brother and dad made, magically left from the summer before, yellow-wax runged rope ladder tinged brown with over-winter, swaying and whipping beneath me, my weight digging in with every dowelrung. Climbing, crawling belly-first: am in. The mildew corners and clefts of dried pine needles arome the enshrouded space. I kneel and tug on the dangling rope-pull for the thin plastic brown venetian blinds, then the other side more confidently.
I listen to the wind above and below my perch, my haven. Twinned trees column me aloft.
14. Otty Lake, the next summer’s return. Down the hill I am hidden. I pull and dislodge one branch, then several fallen branches, and lay them across solid trunks. I canopy the sudden croft crawl space, snowfortlike. I crawl bellyfirst. I am alone more alone than in the vertiginous tree fort. There you smell the uppermost tree boughs, listen to the sigh of pines, spy a passing car through the trees, or peer at the voices below. Here it is a different colour and texture of alone. The smell of moist earth is rich in my lean-to.
Nestled and camouflaged in the forest glade’s embrace. A chipmunk pauses, time pauses as well as I hold silent still. I breathe out, alive in time again as a squirrel’s scolding chatter from above sends the chipmunk’s striping arrow for cover. I too am eluding the chatter of the world.
The next day I secret a towel as blanket and a library book, and nestle to the earth again. Fiction for an unbending pillow, sky triangulating down, defining me there forever, safe and secreted away until dinner is called. The slanting sun signaling far above and beyond.
