I’m on the porch of a cabin on a rocky shore of a bay on the Canadian Shield. The porch is a screened plywood box, eight feet by six. I’m propped by cushions in a captain’s chair at a trestle-style board table. The boards are gummy and dark with linseed oil. They reflect light from the water in patches polished by use. This is my desk. When I close up in October, I’ll drag it inside. Once I left it out here, and in the spring it was gone, I assumed for firewood, but I found it at a campsite on the main lake, intact except porcupine-gnawed at one end. I hauled it back. A friend said, “You need a new table,” but I couldn’t do it. Since the floor of the porch slopes toward the water, my desk is level only because I have pushed it into a corner with the edge opposite resting on a nail I have driven into the vertical two-by-four that divides the screen in half. I am looking out at the bay through the left side of this divide.
It’s a warm morning in a warm, wet spring. To my left is a mosquito chorus. Soloists approach and bump against the screen. They can sense my CO2, my heat, my smell; they’re assessing this nylon membrane; they want in. They’ve been wanting in for ten million years.
Wilderness is from the Middle English wilderne, wild place, from the Old English wilddeor, wild animal. Deor, deer, is from the Proto-Indo-European base *dhewes, to stir up, blow, or breathe. Wilderness is where the animals move and breathe. That’s still the idea, but this animal is everywhere.
I wanted privacy and silence on water, but water meant Jet Skis and a twenty-year mortgage. I was down to looking at rock farms, but open an upstairs window and you heard a highway. The Bancroft realtor was an Irish cowboy named Vincent Moran. Moran said he had no farms, just some shacks on an uninhabited lake a man needed sold. On the drive up, we stopped twice at creeks to refill the radiator of Moran’s Vauxhall. The third time, we parked on a height of land on a power-line cut. Moran switched a can of spray paint to his left hand and pointed west, down the hill and beyond, to where the road passed close to what he said was the landing on the lake. “You can’t see it,” he said. “That’s where you go in. You’ll need a boat.” We made our way downhill through the woods, Moran leaving a trail of pink fluorescent circles. When we came to a tree with a pink fluorescent circle on it, I thought, He’s shown this property before. But it was fresh, it was ours. At last, a low silver band of light through cedars. From the water we walked east along a shore path to some small buildings in a clearing of poppies.
In the cabin behind me is an oversized wooden chest lined with sheet aluminum to protect against deer mice. When I first opened it, under layers of bedding were men’s shirts and jackets. The clothes smelled like naphthalene. The jackets on me were short in the sleeve. At the time I would have said I wore them because I was impatient to arrive. My innocence here was only ever an assumption.
Nothing had been cleared out. On the kitchen walls were iron pots and skillets, band saws and axes; on the sideboard, a hand meat grinder and stovetop toaster; on the oilskin counter, a miniature rubber Firestone tire, its hub a glass ashtray from the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Crossed on the wall of the open porch off the kitchen were two great rusted saws, one a two-man crosscut, the other, with one handle, for cutting ice. In the main room, in wooden crates in a compartment under what had once been an ice chest, were miscellaneous nuts and bolts and other more mysterious links and brackets of iron and copper in cans and jars. In tins in a metal cabinet in the main cabin were a half dozen Pal hollow-ground two-edged razor blades (“Suggest PALs to your Pals. Thank you.”), graphite lubricant from the Panef Co. of Milwaukee, Barber’s Singeing Tapers (Eaton’s, 39¢). Leaning in a corner of the kitchen, a Canadian Buttons Limited yardstick (“Celluloid Buttons for Women’s Wear, Lacaloid Buttons for Men’s Wear”). In the shed out back, a rusted propane generator, steel bait pails, barrels of stove oil, a tumpline hanging on a nail. In middens under a mat of hemlock needles at the east and west margins of the property, corroded cans and mossy antique bottles: a Hires Root Beer with an embossed orange label (“Made with Roots, Barks, Herbs”), a sparkling water (“A Special Formula Developed by the Canada Dry Laboratories”).
I wanted it all.
Moran was selling the place for a Toronto doctor, who had bought it for a dollar from the widow of the previous owner. The doctor had no use for it. His nephew sometimes came up to smoke weed and relax. Now his wife was divorcing him, and he needed money, but with no road access, electricity, plumbing, or insulation, and only wood, propane, and stove oil for heat, refrigeration, and light, it wasn’t worth much. The owner before him was an Ottawa man in the cardboard box business named Wilkie Stimson. Stimson had built a bathhouse and three extra cabins, a sleeping cabin for himself, a bunkhouse, and a smaller cabin to house an Indigenous couple who cooked, cleaned, and guided in October, when he hosted a hunt-and-fish camp for his buddies and associates. Stimson’s guests were the yahoos who threw liquor bottles into the lake, sank empty fifty-gallon kerosene drums a short distance out, and drove golf balls off the dock.
I had no interest in Wilkie Stimson. But all Moran could tell me about the original residents, whose possessions were here intact, was that the husband and wife were Americans and he was known in the village as the Judge. Either the Judge had presided over the Lindbergh kidnapping case and was doing penance in the bush for sending the wrong man to the chair, or he had sent too many men to the chair not to retire in Canada beyond reach of the mob.
“He told them in the village he was a judge?” I asked Moran.
Moran didn’t know, but he guessed he did.
When I was a boy, I kept a diary before I realized I had communicable thoughts. What I had was the world, but my parents fought when they drank, and it could disappear at any time. Into my diary went the number of the bus my friends and I took to the municipal swimming pool, my friends’ names (with nicknames in brackets), the hour we left, how long the trip took, what we bought to eat, the best jokes told and tricks played, and when we got back. All in the sunny, bumptious, social voice of my mother.
I keep a daily record here too, without the bumptious voice. Arrival and departure times, animal sightings and encounters, weather, water temperature, visitors, dreams, chores completed, anything unusual. The Judge did the same. In a bottom drawer is a packet of perpetual desk calendars in which he tracks the weather; ice cut; fences mended; vegetables planted; fish caught; animals killed; treks out; visitors through, some looking for work; bird and wildlife sightings. Three entries from 1941, with morning, noon, and night temperatures in Fahrenheit:
FRIDAY Apr. 18. 25. 45. 45.
Clear forenoon, cloudy afternoon. Showers from 5 p.m. on. Ma’s first trip to town this year. She did fine. Snow gone. 3½ hrs. in, 3¾ hrs. back. Ma had about 12 lbs. to carry. Me 35 to 40. Got my Easter outfit a little late, pants + rain jacket. Got 2 fine chickens.
MONDAY May 5. 45. 60. 43.
Cloudy forenoon; clear afternoon. Planted onion & Fava Bean. Started to build fence additions. Stated from C.B.C. on radio that April was warmest Apr. in 100 yrs. Mean Temp. 50°. Things are very advanced here for the time of year.
SATURDAY May 31. 35. 65. 52.
Fair morning—cloudy afternoon. Town trip. Ice still on path. Flies not too bad. Tomato plants didn’t come. No rat traps in town. No Ipana tooth paste. No crow repellant. No seed corn. No Paris Green. What a hell of a place!
Once I would have said a record here is to track how things go. Now I would say there’s more to it than that.
In my dream, I arrive in the spring, and just out of sight, around the point or behind a scrim of trees, is a condo building, a gravel pit, a Best Western. Cottages at the end of a lane I never noticed before, or learned to not see, have metastasized into a subdivision. Or the bay has been drained for a six-lane highway. Tractor-trailers roar through in convoy. Like all recurring dreams, this one requires recurring waking reinforcement of an emotional crux, which in this case is territorial. It’s from the sound of half-tons rattling down the power-line road, from campers or fishers on the main lake, from a kayak or a canoe coming this way.
For someone sitting at a desk, I am remarkably proprietorial concerning all I survey. My brain is like a flock of gulls insanely jealous of their nest. Across the bay, the great blue heron gives a disgruntled crank and with slow wingbeats changes his roost. A romp of otters comes swimming along the shore, rolling and feinting across the dock as they go. A jungle cry from a Tarzan movie, and a pileated woodpecker swoops out of the Cretaceous to grip the trunk of the birch as she studies the berries on the holly bush. This is wilderness. I don’t want human disturbance.
I want it neither of the animals nor of me. Or animal disturbance of me. This porch is screened. Deer mice drown in my traps. The dock spiders don’t survive to reproduce. I consider myself an observer only, an appreciator, a recorder, a brain with eyes and ears in a skull in a plywood box, but I am very much here.
One August morning, two canoes came into the bay, headed for our dock. In each were two white-haired women. My wife, Rosa, was here, and like me she makes herself scarce when boats come in too close and people want to talk. But when they put in at the dock, there’s nothing to do but go down and see what they want. The women in the first canoe were two granddaughters of the Judge and his wife. The others were cousins. They had come from Maine, New Hampshire, and New York State. The night before, they had camped on the beach by the cliff on the main lake. After fifty years, they had no idea what they would find here: the place unchanged, a bungalow, a McMansion, a ruin, a campsite, wilderness.
Rosa and I were as welcoming as we knew how to be. We wanted to hear everything they had to tell us. We offered tea. This porch can just fit six, but Betsy, the elder granddaughter, decided it would be too crowded. Her grandparents only had a deck. Nothing screened in. We served the tea inside the cabin. Betsy spoke with emotion about their summers here. She said that Camp—they all called the place Camp—had been part of her dreams her whole life. Her first memory was from age two, when she fell out of a sled while being pulled through the woods by Pop-Pop and cut her face on the crust of frozen snow. Pop-Pop didn’t stop.
“Pop-Pop,” I said.
“Our grandfather, Pop-Pop,” Betsy said. “To us they were Pop-Pop and Granny.”
“Each other they called Pete and Mike,” her sister, Kathy, put in.
“Nonsense,” Betsy said.
“Pete and Mike,” Kathy said again. “He was Pete, she was Mike. Remember? She’d say, ‘Pass the salt, Pete,’ and he would.”
Betsy wondered at our wood stove. Nothing airtight for her grandparents. Pointing with her tea mug to the corner where Stimson’s ice chest (now our food bin) stood, she said they used to sleep there, on ticking filled with balsam branches. “The balsam would start out soft,” she said, “but they never changed it. Once I surprised them with fresh balsam. Mistake! Pop-Pop didn’t like surprises. And you better not touch his stuff!”
Betsy said that when she and her parents and four siblings, and sometimes cousins, visited, the family would be ferried down the next lake to the east in a boat with a driver hired from the lumber mill manoeuvring around the log booms. They would walk the portage to the south end of this lake, where Pop-Pop would have left a canoe on a platform by the shore. It was a big canoe, but loaded with kids and gear, it had a clearance of about two inches, and only the parents could swim. “Tricky!” Betsy said.
In the forties, Betsy said, the Toronto Star and the Star Weekly published articles about her grandparents’ life here. One was called “They Took to the Woods.”
“Get it?” she said, bitterly. She had reread the articles before coming on this trip, and she was irritated anew that the reporter had called what her grandparents were doing an “experiment in primitive living.” Their grandfather had been camping all his life. So had his father before him. Her great-grandparents had started out in the Adirondacks.
“Remains of same mountain range,” I said. “The Grenville.”
Betsy just looked at me.
But by 1910, she said, the Adirondacks had become too crowded. So they moved their vacations up to Ontario. They knew exactly what they were doing. If they needed help, they had friends here, Indigenous and Polish guides. They always knew where they were going and how to get there.
The six of us took a walk around the property. Indicating one of her grandparents’ Adirondack shelters that was now a storage shed, Betsy asked, “Who would turn a perfectly good Adirondack open camp into a shed?”
“Wilkie Stimson,” I said, but she didn’t hear me.
Kathy said they used to sleep in that shelter under mosquito netting. Pop-Pop or Granny would build a fire in a circle of rocks in front of the open side and tell the kids that if they came out, the wolves would get them.
“Kathy, don’t be ridiculous,” Betsy said. “There were no wolves.”
“Of course there were wolves!” Kathy cried. “We heard them in the night. Sometimes really close! Remember that time Pop-Pop saw their tracks in the snow the next day? They’d followed him coming back from the village?”
“Kathy, you’re dreaming,” Betsy said. She was looking at Stimson’s bathhouse. “None of this was here,” she said.
The next day we visited their campsite on the beach, but the cousins had gone off in one of the canoes, and Betsy and Kathy must have just had a fight. They weren’t talking to each other, and they were in no mood to talk to us. We didn’t stay.
Back at our dock, I asked Rosa what that was about.
“Who has the more legitimate emotional connection to this place,” she said.
“I could resolve that for them. We do.”
Six and a half thousand years ago, the climate here was warmer than it is now. The boreal forest moved farther north with the ice, and Indigenous people came from the south, or east, or both, to hunt caribou, beaver, and coyotes in forest that by then was mostly white pine, birch, hemlock, and oak. In his account of his 1613 trip up the Ottawa River, the French explorer Samuel de Champlain mentions an Indigenous band on the Madawaska River, the Madaoueskarini Algonquins (called by him Matou-oüescarini), but they were probably not represented by the Algonquins he met on the Ottawa. Within forty years, all the Algonquins would be scattered and reduced by smallpox and the Haudenosaunee. No one told them when, in 1783, a Mississauga chief at Lake of Two Mountains sold the British a vast tract of Algonquin land between the upper St. Lawrence River and the Ottawa River.
In 1863 the Madaoueskarini Algonquins petitioned the governor general for a tract of land for four hundred families. But the tract Indian Affairs was prepared to grant was too small to sustain that many. These were hunters and fishers, not farmers, and anyway, this is not farmland. They would have no roaming or timber rights and no recourse if the British chose to log it, which they would. Her Majesty’s Navy would need the white pine for ship masts. Indian Affairs suggested the size of the tract be doubled. But that was the year before Confederation, and the land was never handed over. In 1893, the Madaoueskarini Algonquins again asked for the land, which by that time would be adjacent to a new provincial park. In 1911, the park was expanded to include the land they had been promised but not given. In their honour, the park was named Algonquin and their few dozen descendants evicted.
Twenty-six years after the eviction of the last of the Indigenous people here, Irving Vann Earle and his wife, Mary, arrived from New York State on their way deeper into the bush. They had camped at this site before. The morning after they arrived, they decided they had come far enough. They built this cabin and lived in it year-round. He fished and hunted and chopped wood and cut ice and followed the Second World War on a shortwave radio in a corner by the door behind me. She kept two gardens, flower and vegetable, and put up preserves. They had a sugar bush. With no navigable route in, only logging roads on their way back to bush, every two weeks he walked the seven miles to the village for supplies. Almost every other trip, summer and winter, she went with him.
One February I was here in celestial weather. In the mornings I chopped wood; in the afternoons I sat in a lawn chair in the snow on the ice out front of here, facing south, the sun low to the horizon but warm. A hundred metres to the southeast, a wolf kill frozen in the ice of the bay was the active hub of a red pinwheel of animal tracks from points around the shore. The ravens that nest on the cliff on the main lake descended on it again and again. On the third day, clouds moved in, and when snowflakes floated down, I could hear them smash as they landed. Toward dusk, a corvid commotion drew me up the hill behind here to a clearing where two of the ravens were taking turns rolling down a snowbank, egging each other on.
For months after the women’s visit, they sent letters, photographs, even a CD copy of home movies of their parents and grandparents camping in the Adirondacks. It was generous of them, and it was all interesting. But there seemed something purposely unclear about the language they used for what the Judge had been or done before he came here.
In one packet, Kathy sent the Toronto Star and Star Weekly articles about her grandparents that had so annoyed her sister. Both were by Hugh M. Halliday, who specialized in stories with a nature angle. I remembered reading his stuff in the Star when I was a boy. In neither article does he say Earle was a judge. In the first, from the October 24, 1945, daily paper, titled “Saw 11 Men Walk Last Mile Algonquin His Heaven Now,” Halliday describes him as a Syracuse lawyer who “spent most of his working life in New York state and for 35 years was on the staff of the criminal courts.” Upon retirement, Earle “sold everything he owned in Syracuse and hit for the tall timbers. He built the cabin himself.”
The second article—not an in-house rehash, and much longer; Halliday had paid the Earles at least one more visit—appeared three years later, in the Star Weekly for November 6, 1948. This time Halliday calls Earle a “retired lawyer, who was a New York state court official for 33 years. (He saw 11 men go to the electric chair in the course of his duties.)” So still eleven men but not thirty-five years, as he had reported earlier. It would have been the Judge who rounded up the first time, not Halliday, who had a naturalist’s scrupulosity. In the Star Weekly, he describes Earle retiring at noon one June day in 1937 and, two hours later, he and Mary, their “trailer packed,” leaving Syracuse, turning “their backs—and permanently—on . . . the pressure of official existence.” Halliday then states, “In 12 days, their log cabin 18 by 20, was ready.” Was ready. Halliday was not a writer to avoid agency. But he now knew Earle had not built the cabin himself. Not in twelve days he hadn’t.
And I thought, If Earle could say he built the cabin himself, couldn’t he just say he was a lawyer, the way he could just say in the village he had been a judge? On the staff. In the course of his duties. Not a district attorney, or he would have said (unless, I suppose, he was hiding from the mob). Not practised law but his working life. A court official. Why this language? Who was Irving Vann Earle?
Betsy had said this was no experiment in primitive living; her grandparents knew exactly what they were doing. But according to Earle’s log, in the spring of his and Mary’s third year here, he tried raising turkey poults on the small island in the bay. On May 6, 1942, he clips the wings of seven poults and leaves them to roam the island. The next day, they’re “getting along all right.” Two days later, he checks them again. They’re swarmed by blackflies but okay. On the twelfth, “Found a couple of broken eggs on Turkey Island. Don’t know how or what. Not in a nest.” On July 1, he reports, “2 poults have disappeared. Don’t know what.” The next day, “All 5 poults gone—goddammitt!”
If Earle was the experienced woodsman the family believed he was, how could he not have known that every animal in this forest can swim? The distance from that island to shore at the nearest point is ten metres. The poults could not escape predators: He’d clipped their wings. What was he thinking?
Among the photographs the women sent, there’s one of Irving at the end of the dock, feeding an apple to a beaver. The Star articles also include pictures. There’s one of Mary climbing a hemlock, like a hydro lineman. The caption reads, “Tree climbing is recreation for her.” And there’s one of the two of them by the steps to the main cabin, at a spot I can see if I turn in my seat. Kathy sent me an original print. Irving is a stout man in jodhpurs and heavy boots. He stands with his feet firmly planted. His right hand is in his trousers pocket. In his left hand, which he holds close to his belly, is a cigarette. Mary is also stout. She is shorter by half a head. She wears a long-sleeved cotton jersey and trousers tucked into work socks. On her feet are heavy-duty black running shoes. She is looking in the same direction as Irving, away from the camera. Her pose is the mirror image of his. She holds her right hand just as he holds his left, close to her body, but there is no cigarette in it.
The other thing that came from the material the women sent was a mention in one of Kathy’s letters of a possible family secret. Mary may have been part Cayuga.
Last summer I was buying a length of that white, non-floating rope in a hardware store in Haliburton. As the guy measured it out, he asked me what it was for. I told him for a line out to the winter anchor for our dock. He asked me where our place was. When I named the lake, he said, “On the bay?” and told me that some of the lads had an ice-fishing hut on the main lake last winter, illegally, because they weren’t Indigenous. He said he knew they weren’t Indigenous because he is. His grandparents worked summers as cook and guide at our place, when Stimson owned it, and he used to stay with them, in the cabin by the kitchen. “Man,” he said, “those were fun summers for a kid.”
“What were the men like?”
“What men?”
“Stimson’s guests. How were they with you and your grandparents?”
“They were okay. Look, my grandparents appreciated the work.”
As he handed me my rope, he said, “This spring, by the lane into your landing, you saw a little pile of boards, tin, and melted foam? Some smashed up fishing rods? Kind of like the charred remains of a fish hut?”
“I wondered what happened there.”
“Wonder no more, my man.”
One day it occurred to me to ask why some entries in Earle’s log were in shorthand. Did New York State lawyers once need shorthand? I photocopied some pages and took them to a transcription service in a downtown Toronto office tower, where I was treated like a lost old man who had found the elevators. The young women in the office seemed amused that I would think they could read shorthand. One said the owner might be able to, but she was out of the country. Everything is done by machine now, another explained to me, speaking slowly.
The next day I scanned the pages to a woman in the U.K. who advertised online as a shorthand decipherer. She wrote back to say she couldn’t make out most of the entries, but if it was any help, one seemed to be about somebody named Joe dropping off forty pounds of moose meat. So Earle just sometimes ran out of space. That night, I was rereading one of Kathy’s letters and finally took in the fact that he had been named Irving Vann after a judge his father admired, having worked under him as a court stenographer—which is what Earle himself must have been: a court stenographer! Why else the shorthand? So not the judge his father had dreamed he would become, but what his father was. Sufficiently a disappointment to his father and to himself to retire early—from a profession that he was good at but that itself was not good enough—to expat exile.
Of course, I didn’t really know any of that.
The June 1944 issue of The Canadian Field-Naturalist reports Mary Earle’s discovery of the first evening grosbeak nest in Ontario. She followed the grosbeaks at her feeder a short distance west along the shore path, and there it was, fifty feet up a cedar. Over the years, Mary counted nearly a hundred varieties of birds around the bay: purple finches, scarlet tanagers, winter wrens, hermit thrushes, whippoorwills, great crested flycatchers. There are now fewer than forty. Mostly it’s gulls, crows, ravens, loons. Barn swallows, hummingbirds, the kingfisher. Robins and blackbirds, masters of broken environments. By the end of May, Mary would count the arrivals of twenty kinds of warblers. The end of May is now almost as quiet in the day as in the night. In the night it’s just the barred owls and the loons.
One day, unasked, Kathy sent me her grandfather’s retirement announcement from a Syracuse newspaper. Titled “Man Plans Vacation for Rest of Life,” it reports how, after working as a confidential clerk to an appeals court judge and subsequently to a state supreme court justice, Irving Vann Earle was retiring as the confidential clerk to a county judge.
So. Not a judge or stenographer but a confidential clerk to three judges in succession. Maybe the third position was a comedown after the second, or maybe it was a choice. Therefore, in any case, the shorthand, the diffidence, the seeing eleven men go to the chair, the relief to be away from all that, the decision to live the rest of his life where he’d been happiest when he was young, in the woods on a Shield lake. Still conjecture, but more generous. Irving Vann Earle may have stretched the truth and made a settler’s mistakes, but he was a man of discretion, not secrets. Secrets are story stuff, the currency of a person at a desk in a screened plywood box with a need to be the authority around here.
In 1949, Mary suffered a stroke. For a few years she and Irving came in summers only, with difficulty. In 1954 they sold and moved to a cottage behind the home of their son, Junior, and his family. Their graves are next to the woods at the edge of a cemetery in Lac-Beauport, Quebec.
It will soon be winter. This forest is “boreal-temperate transition,” which means half deciduous. The leaves will go, the bare-bones rocky terrain will reveal itself, the November cloud blanket will descend, the bay will reflect the dark sky. The view from this porch will be monochrome, but no one will be here. Like a train of thought a few seconds later; like the Madaoueskarini Algonquins; like Irving Vann and Mary Earle; like Betsy and Kathy and their parents and siblings and cousins; like Wilkie Stimson and his buddies; like the Indigenous kid with his grandparents; like the Toronto doctor; like his nephew; like us all, with our casual and nostalgic and cheated and contested and predatory claims, I’ll be gone. Driving rain will turn to sleet. The bay will freeze. Snow will fall and stay. It will soften everything, until there are years when it melts as it lands and those years become all years, and for a long time it will only rain, rain and flood, and who knows what stories will be told, what claims made by whom, on what wilderness.