"QUIET PLACES BEAVERS SHARE"
[17/9/2024]After a long week of studying, listening, and wandering, I emerge with new thoughts as I always do. This has been a fun week!
I hold a very strange position in life, and I think I've always known that to some degree. I mean my physical position mostly, but also the mental position I stand on in comparison to what I feel is most peoples' perception of place in this day and age. I've lived in salty coastal towns a third of my life, boreal forest cities for about another third, and then deathly dry plains for the rest.
People love the coast, and not just when they grow up on it. There's a whole "P.N.W. lifestyle" that people covet deeply - when I tell people about the places that I grew up in, it's usually "oh, my family visited there on a cruise once!," with a thick layer of envy hidden under the suface of their words. Either that, or they'll just outright say "I'm jealous of you." Strange.
I loved where I grew up. Maybe not in the way a tourist loves it - honest to God, I wouldn't live on the coast now as an adult now for many more reasons than environment (though that is a big one I go back and forth on; I suffer in anything above room temperature). I miss the coast too most days, but I do also love where I live now because I learned to listen and love it for what it is, not what it isn't.
As far as living goes, I assume most people stay in one biome for a lot of their life. Hell, out in the midwest, people are born in one house and die in the hospital down that same street they live on (trust me, I've KNOWN people who have). This is not me passing judgement either; I don't think I "appreciate it better" than anyone else can. I find it fascinating! This weird little continent of Turtle Island has so much to offer, and so close together too. I didn't even need to travel very far to see such a diverese palette.
My partner, in contrast, has lived in the American plains for all his life. Most people commonly refer to it as the "Midwest," but that's up for scrutiny; there's a lot of specific connotations and precognative biases people have in their mind when that term gets brought up. A lot of them are either hopelessly romantic or deeply resentful of that kind of environment and the people who now reside within it. For most, it's cowboys and farmers now; not much else to be seen.
I was one of those people when I moved to the desert praries of the US. I'll be honest: I hated it. I hated it for some other reasons going on in my personal life, but seperately from that, it was difficult to live there at first. If I had a choice on where to move, that wouldn't have been my first choice, or my second, or third, fourth...
I ain't here to be a hater. I'll get to the good part: my partner and I visited Elk Island National Park this weekend, and it was gorgeous. I loved every second of it.
Elk Island is one of many old lakes left behind when the northern icesheet melted. A lot of them disappeared naturally over time, but this one stayed. Not exactly a "glacial" lake, but its stayed around for a few reasons I can't quite remember (I'm not sure if there's a spring here too). Many of the hills on these plains are left behind by glacial sediment buildup; suddenly steep hills that dip back down as soon as they rise up.
Wetlands are fun, and a bit new to me. Marshy puddles surrounded by big cattails. These ponds are turned into moats for the small forts of beavers. The damn beavers! We unfortunately didn't get to SEE a beaver, but we sure knew they were there. The geese knew the beavers were there. They sat on top of their house, honking at them through the roof. And yet, even through binoculars, the beavers hid; damn you, beavers! I'll get you one day.
We did manage to see some muskrats! But only their shadow; the boardwalk that cut through the marsh was turned into a hidden sitting place for them in the mid-day sun. They splashed in and out of the water, dipping back underneath the surface or under the boardwalk before the sun hit their rat-like faces. Funny guys! I love a funny guy. I liked imagining them plotting, scheming in the underground nightclub of the boardwalk support beams.
And Lord, the textures... algal blooms, whispy grasses, groves of aspens standing sharply against the shoreline. Not just visual textures either - the soundscapes were otherworldly in the morning. Quiet, but delicate on the eardrums. My fiance likes bringing his field recorder out, and the quiet orchestra of those rustling leaves in the wind is now on his SD card for whenever we want to travel back there.
The animals are bold too, and even the grasshoppers. Gulls yelled almost with anger, and a squirrel nearly rummaged through our bag as we sat for a snack. And yet, NO BEAVERS. I couldn't believe it! I could see patches of dead tree groves, and freshly cut logs left behind by these industrious fellows (that's just what they do). But they hid their tracks well. I'm sure they were watching us from underwater.
We weren't there for long, only about five hours. I think that was plenty for the day and we got a good fill of walking. I love my fiance too; he knows my limits when it comes to being physically exerted due to my spine, and no one else in this world asks if I need help like he does. Even just the gesture of him carrying my pack for a bit means so much to me.
We ended up having to take a free tour bus to the park since we don't have a car, and that was a whole ordeal. Our bus got cancelled the first time we had booked for it in August, then all the open bus days afterwards were already booked full! We nearly missed the last bus of the season, but we got in. Unfortunately, we were also supposed to have a "free park tour" that morning with the trip, but no one was at the entrance building. We didn't even get to go to the gift shop!
The drive to the park itself (and back) was markedly a common story. Yellowhead Trail is a freeway across Canada, and it (as well as downtown Edmonton during Summer construction) was pretty difficult to look at in a car. It has the same aesthetic impact that freeways have in most North American cities: callously uninteresting. But unlike most, Elk Island isn't even all that far from Edmonton itself - once you pass the last factory, RV park, and the river, it's only about another 20-30 minutes to the front gate. It appears out of nowhere.
I was tired of the freeways. That's why I've moved back to the home that I know in Canada. Elk Island was no different, it felt like the Canada I'd always known, despite Alberta being new to me. And what's more, it was like the plains of the Midwest... but in Canada! Almost silly to say, but I felt like the Venn Diagram of my experience of place came together there. When we passed the first bison on the road, I felt that feeling codify.
I've been reading two books lately: the third Earthsea book, "The Farthest Shore," and a historical compilation "Alberta Formed, Alberta Transformed." It gave me a little important context before going. The carving of the land itself at the will of glacial icesheets, the nature of when the first people inhabited the area now known as Alberta and their traditions, and how the Blackfoot First Nations people lived in tandem with herds of bison.
Seeing a bison was not my "I suddenly understand nature!" moment. I think more about how having these spaces is important, not just as a tourist attraction, but as conservation. Canada does better than most when it comes to conservation, but I feel usually that when people talk about the concept of "conservation," they're talking about places like the BC boreal forest or the California redwoods, not plains biomes for bison. Bison are historically overhunted by colonists in many ways, and forested areas are more important to plains bison than we think. The winter winds are harsh, unrelenting. Bison need somewhere to hide.
Azul wants to write a paper on this, eventually. We ended up talking about the topic at-length the day after we visited the park. About rangeland plains, about the historic grazing patterns of bison, and how often people really consider these spaces. The answer is they kind of don't. It's an aesthetic problem.
One of our favourite national parks is Idaho's "Craters of the Moon National Monument," a historic eruption site where famously the astronauts trained. It's an oven out there in the Summer. The Snake River Basin is dry, and deathly hot because of the black volcanic rock that absorbs all the sun's UV. "Wasteland" is a banned word in our household, but if there was ever a place that looked empty and not fit for life, it's there. And it's beautiful.
"Devil's Orchard" is a sub-section of that park, and it displays an array of plants that have climatized to the deathly environment. They look twisted and violent; neon lichen sits on boulders, and trees like witches' brooms grow in between the same rocks. Salamanders hide in the roots and stones, and bats swarms caves made from cooled lava tubes.
Another hill, "Inferno Cone," sits high above everything else in the park. It's a hike up to the top, but next to a single tree and a patch of grass, you can see the curvature of the earth up there. Dark thunderclouds roil inbetween patches of bright sunshine, and the rain is seen boiling off before it even hits the black ground. It's otherworldly.
Craters of the Moon is having some conservation issues. Tourists are breaking apart the stones and brittle lava rock in the caves, and too much damage has closed some of these caves to the public for good. Even then, they check if you've worn any clothes in a cave within the past DECADE, as to make sure the bats don't contract a fungal disease spreading across the country, carried by the hoodies of travellers. Even though it has existed far longer than America has, the footsteps we take must be careful in these spaces.
Elk Island was conserved starting in the early 20th century as a way to save the remaining elk population. So far, it's been helping. Helps the bison and beavers too. It's actually a bit of a pit-stop for birds traveling north during migration as well. Overall, it's a good thing, even if the way it exists is a bit abnormal in the way of "proper conservation."
Historically, First Nations peoples have known much more about proper fire management for a long time, such as when to burn off dead grasses and trees to reduce fuel buildup (and herd bison at the same time). It's hard to go back to that, but people are finally learning why they have done this for so, so long. Long before modern fire management figures it out (and long before the government knows that allocating money to fire resources is important, actually... goodbye Jasper). In that sense, Elk Island shouldn't exist because its "no fires whatsoever" policy let it grow to this size. But it does. It is important to know that it lives, and who it is for.
Even if it's not "proper," these spaces need to exist. The freeways are much worse (and much more ugly to boot). Even the process of making the harsh Canadian soil arable for crops has done damage to these plains spaces. People think all this open space can only be "used" for this: people, and industry. If it's not a home, it's a factory. The rootin' tootin' cowboy homesteadin' cowboy fantasy is gone too. In my lifetime, living on open land that grows by itself is gone. I take from that many feelings.
Even the forests are occupied. Their "natural beauty" is taken and flattened down into an aesthetic of cedar cabin living. People seem to love hiking a lot more in the woods than the ancient and quiet patience of the plains, where you can see forever. To each their own, but the Salish people have known and lived in the BC forests without the need to carve out of them spaces for cities like Vancouver. And just because the plains are "open and empty" doesn't mean it only has value to cattle and crops. Life everywhere has equal value in the spaces we all share.
The boreal forest needs fires to burn off their fuel load too actually, even as wet as it is. People hate to see a cedar burn, but don't seem to look at it the same way when it comes to rangelands. The grasses are less known than the trees, maybe just because they are prone to living a shorter life, or easier to be stepped on and overlooked (quite literally). That doesn't make them less valuable to have lived.
This meanandering thought, as long as its gone on, doesn't quite yet have an endpoint in my mind. I think generally, you need to know what the beavers are doing. Even as they are little rascals, they don't cut down all the trees and eat all the fish. They know what goes on better than I do. I believe most people in the city forget how big Turtle Island is and who lives here. People need to know. It's not beavers' responsibility to tell us, but it is our responsibility to know the beavers. They live open and free on the range.
I'm tutoring my fiance through his "Wildland Plants of North America" class since he asked for help. We really both hate learning latin scientific names, but of course I'll help him. The university has a place called "The Batcave" that's filled with dried plant samples and old rangeland magazines from the 60's. This room is only seen by about 5-10 people every semester.
These samples go untouched by most. They're delicate. They're beautiful. "Tanglehead" has long, coppery awns that look like sparkling hair. "Timothy" has flowers that look like a beetle's head, and lives in Elk Island. I wouldn't know them if I didn't get to see them, to hold them, to learn to love them.
(P.S. The Blackfoot word, "Miistakis," refers to the Rocky Mountains - the backbone of Turtle Island.)