Erin (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
apocalypseinsurance) wrote2023-07-07 08:35 am
apocalypseinsurance) wrote2023-07-07 08:35 am
North
I'm still thinking about the landscape here.
Part of love, for me, is knowing something deeply. I love things that reveal themselves to me. I love being aware of patterning, of uniqueness, of what differentiates the beloved particularly from others of its kind.
When I left the coast I had a sense, not just of the ecology of the landscape, but of the ecological history and much of the geology. When I walked there I had a sense of the depth of sediment in the Fraser Valley underfoot, of the thick layers of sand out by point grey and laid down by an explosive reversal of the Fraser River, of the old edges of the ocean that etched flat places into the north shore mountains as the weight of glaciers lightened and the crust rebounded in fits and starts. I could feel the tall ghost cedars from the past marching around me in the city streets and the echoes of millions of wings and bird cries in the now-drained migratory stop in the wide sweep of wetlands now cut into suburbia and fields. Knowledge of the landscape lived within me, I was a part of it, and I loved it.
The north was so overtly a shock in not being able to recognise the plants around me that I didn't think of the landscape at first. There are so many plants here that I've learned through visuals and physical interaction first, and many of them I don't know their names yet even. The names get hitched on to my knowledge of the plants easily when I see them now, and regardless of names they're becoming old friends.
But plants are not the only thing here. The landscape is so present. One of the reasons I love it here is that the sky and the vegetation are in balance: unlike the prairies there's a definite topographic and vegetative presence, and unlike the coast the sky is actually visible through trees and hills.
That's not what I was trying to say.
What I was trying to say is that I can read the landscape here reasonably well now. A glance at the vegetation, at the soil texture in a road cut, and I can see into the past to the old edges of glaciers receding and dropping gravel, to under-ice rivers of sediment carrying and sorting gravel into sinuous wrinkles. The silhouette of the top of a black spruce, that little bulbous knob, speaks of rock ground to the finest dust and then left to settle in ponds left by chunks of lingering ice. My own land, Threshold, has deep rich clay from the huge lake that stretched for a huge swathe of the interior before it poured out towards the coast and made what we know now as the Fraser River.
I'm learning to know the land. I'm learning to know it in the back of my mind, without thinking about it, cataloguing knowledge that I can pull out later if asked.
As I know the landscape it becomes part of me. It becomes as much an extension of me as anything, maybe not as layered with connection and interaction as Threshold but certainly the cradle of time and space in which I am rocked, held, loved. The north welcomes people in a way that the coast never did in my experience, maybe because it was so disfigured and damaged by development down there. Those forests shudder at the continuous lines of hikers snaking through every green space, trailing urine and trash and compaction and status-seeking fitness experiences through every bit of every type of ecosystem that's left intact. Here? The land draws you in, revealing little pockets of this plant or that soil or a scar on a tree to indicate an old oolichan grease trail. We remade the lower mainland in our image; the north remakes us slowly but surely in its own image.
It's not to say I'm done learning here: there's more to learn than one or even a thousand lifetimes can encompass. It's to say I'm a person of this land now, our traditional frame of ownership reversed if you will, it will always live in me and it feels so familiar now, like perfectly worn-in clothing. Like home.
Part of love, for me, is knowing something deeply. I love things that reveal themselves to me. I love being aware of patterning, of uniqueness, of what differentiates the beloved particularly from others of its kind.
When I left the coast I had a sense, not just of the ecology of the landscape, but of the ecological history and much of the geology. When I walked there I had a sense of the depth of sediment in the Fraser Valley underfoot, of the thick layers of sand out by point grey and laid down by an explosive reversal of the Fraser River, of the old edges of the ocean that etched flat places into the north shore mountains as the weight of glaciers lightened and the crust rebounded in fits and starts. I could feel the tall ghost cedars from the past marching around me in the city streets and the echoes of millions of wings and bird cries in the now-drained migratory stop in the wide sweep of wetlands now cut into suburbia and fields. Knowledge of the landscape lived within me, I was a part of it, and I loved it.
The north was so overtly a shock in not being able to recognise the plants around me that I didn't think of the landscape at first. There are so many plants here that I've learned through visuals and physical interaction first, and many of them I don't know their names yet even. The names get hitched on to my knowledge of the plants easily when I see them now, and regardless of names they're becoming old friends.
But plants are not the only thing here. The landscape is so present. One of the reasons I love it here is that the sky and the vegetation are in balance: unlike the prairies there's a definite topographic and vegetative presence, and unlike the coast the sky is actually visible through trees and hills.
That's not what I was trying to say.
What I was trying to say is that I can read the landscape here reasonably well now. A glance at the vegetation, at the soil texture in a road cut, and I can see into the past to the old edges of glaciers receding and dropping gravel, to under-ice rivers of sediment carrying and sorting gravel into sinuous wrinkles. The silhouette of the top of a black spruce, that little bulbous knob, speaks of rock ground to the finest dust and then left to settle in ponds left by chunks of lingering ice. My own land, Threshold, has deep rich clay from the huge lake that stretched for a huge swathe of the interior before it poured out towards the coast and made what we know now as the Fraser River.
I'm learning to know the land. I'm learning to know it in the back of my mind, without thinking about it, cataloguing knowledge that I can pull out later if asked.
As I know the landscape it becomes part of me. It becomes as much an extension of me as anything, maybe not as layered with connection and interaction as Threshold but certainly the cradle of time and space in which I am rocked, held, loved. The north welcomes people in a way that the coast never did in my experience, maybe because it was so disfigured and damaged by development down there. Those forests shudder at the continuous lines of hikers snaking through every green space, trailing urine and trash and compaction and status-seeking fitness experiences through every bit of every type of ecosystem that's left intact. Here? The land draws you in, revealing little pockets of this plant or that soil or a scar on a tree to indicate an old oolichan grease trail. We remade the lower mainland in our image; the north remakes us slowly but surely in its own image.
It's not to say I'm done learning here: there's more to learn than one or even a thousand lifetimes can encompass. It's to say I'm a person of this land now, our traditional frame of ownership reversed if you will, it will always live in me and it feels so familiar now, like perfectly worn-in clothing. Like home.