[SB] Scrambling towards Zion: The Shield in Mud Season (March 16)

[Molly Wolf]

The Shield in Mud Time

A sloppy, tussocky, grey-brown field populated by mud-sodden beef cattle bellying up to a roundel of last year's hay; surrounding the field, the usual half-grown woods that you see wherever someone sensible had decided to give up on trying to cultivate this land, but time has not yet restored the forest that ought by rights to be here.  Behind, two startling monoliths of rock rearing up maybe two or three storeys, baring their ancient uncompromising iron-stained teeth to the world.

Yup.  It's March.

Around here, lessons for the apprentice driver include tackling the mess of Mud Season; roads not yet roughly scrubbed by the graders, full of potholes and washboard and simple greasy mud (pebbly enough to be not too slick and surmounting rock close enough that you're not apt to get stuck up to your axles -- I have seen Real Mud, and this is not it). The apprentice driver at the wheel in the seat next to me was doing just fine, which left my attention free for the landscape.

Which was unlovely in the extreme.  This country can be beautiful but it is almost never pretty,  especially when it's free of the cleansing innocence of snow cover and not yet tenderized by leaves.  In fall, it has a ruminative aspect, like the ancient rite of Tenebrae. The fall's leaves lie umber on the ground, thick with the memories of summer.  In spring Mud Season, not so much.  It's just grimy and untidy, like a house that's been moved out of but not yet cleaned up.  You're conscious of all the litter of winter storms, and there is a lot, some of it going back to the Great Ice Storm of '98.

You're conscious too of the reappearance of turkey vultures in graceful mating pairs, soaring contentedly above the line of the 401 as they feast on the remains of those critters, dozy and gaunt from hibernation, who get smooshed by their hundreds on the highway, this time of year. But you're also conscious of the noise of songbirds, a presence whose previous absence you had not noticed until the song came back again, a yearly surprise.

For that's the upside of mud season in the Shield.  It's no more beautiful than morning is in that grey light before sunrise, too late for stars but too early for colour, when there's only a suspicion of a fair or cloudy day.  But it holds promise.  If you know what to look for, you see the thickened leaf-buds and the way willows have turned that odd greeny-gold, the first to signal spring as the marsh rushes are the last to turn green.

Looking at that grotty field and the dirty cattle and the two grim monoliths with their covering of winter-damaged scrub, I thought of other landscapes, smooth and green under clement skies, where winter only comes in for a quick curtsey and summers are well-behaved as good children, and there are hardly any mosquitoes and no black flies. Eden, we call it. Oddly, I wouldn't want to live in a place like that, except perhaps for a week or two in late February after a hard winter.

I like -- no, I love -- the Shield in this and every season because it speaks to me of God.  If I lived in gracious country, it would be easy to think that a good and pleasant life is all that's meant to be and we're to live, love, eat and drink well, bear trials nobly, and accept our own final extinguishment with regretful good grace, like Marcus Aurelius.  To do so, however, I would have to stand apart from the suffering that surrounds us, to overlook the poverty and injustice that we have brought to our own kind in this world -- and also the roughnesses of creation.  If humankind can be a nasty piece of work, so can your average mustelid.*

Or I could go to the opposite extreme, pointing at this scene's ugliness and snarling "See? Here's reality; let me rub your nose into it.  Don't give me this bullshit about a beneficent Creator!" I could rail against a God whose callous indifference left children dying of starvation and dozens of small furry smashed corpses on the 401, nature red in tooth and claw (see mustelids, again).  Belief is a choice, but so is hope, and in our arrogance we can choose indifference or despair and blame God for forcing our choice. But it's we who choose our own limitations, and we do so out of pure spiritual arrogance. If I refuse to see it, it doesn't exist.  Right.

The Shield is the Shield is the Shield, a vast apron of rock, utterly indifferent to humankind, that dominates my country.  It's very nearly as old as Earth itself, at least in its older parts -- my part is merely a couple of billion years old.  It does not exist for my purposes nor for any other human being's, a fact made clear to those who tried to clear and settle it back in the mid-19th century.

But it is also a place where artists open to a certain spiritual wildness have found a piercing beauty.  Canadian art, as such, starts here, in this landscape, with extraordinary impressionist paintings, colours laid on thick and buttery and urgent.  And just as I thought this, late-afternoon sun suddenly spilled across the field and the cattle and the monoliths and touched everything with tender sienna tints.

The Creator is in Creation; we only have to set down our prejudices, accept the mosquitos, and be quietly open to whatever's out there.

*Mustelids: members of the weasel family, including weasels, martens, fishers, mink, wolverines, otters, and others like stoats and ermine -- all short-legged long-bodied omnivores loved more for their fur than for their dispositions.