The river is a colorless divining mirror this morning, taking on the qualities of the sky and autumn robed birch and maples along its banks- for a disconcerting moment it’s a steaming lavender reflection of the sky and the old bridge pilings look like a gateway to another dimension, looming in the pale space between day and morning, sky and water. I’ve been hearing the bald eagles down at the Mouth since before the start of the salmon run. I’m intimately familiar with their high pitched babyish chattering from winters on the west coast- a lonely stretch of time during the herring run on Denman Island, watching a family of juvenile bald eagles at Fillongley, or seeing them in droves at Rathtrevor, and while the north shore of Lake Huron is no Pacific Ocean, it is a place of deep seated power to me and deep in my bones, home.
The karmic cycles of my returns to this part of the world mystify and enrage me, even as I make a harried drive across the country to be here, my own personal Hajj. Alberta lies in flames behind me as I trek through the wild grasslands of Saskatchewan and sleep beside grain towers and train tracks in Manitoba, and the need grows relentlessly for the jumble of ragged boulders and endless lakes and the endless uninterrupted stretch of the Boreal forest just across the Ontario border. I have loved the prairies and the mountains and the ocean, the gulf islands and the rainforest and waterfalls, the high desert and painted hills, but something in me quiets on the shores of a lake near Ignace. How many times have I stopped here in my annual migrations? The same fox haunts the windows of my bus and secrets off into the bush with its gleaned trash from careless travellers. The jack pine tower over the beaver houses and fish leave ripples scudding across the lake and the sunset is the old northern classic, spectacular streaks of pink and vibrant hues across the west.
What is it like to pass a year in a place, to know a river through every season? The best I have done is to pass through the same places fleetingly in two seasons, the migrations east and west. Last time in White River the snow came down blindingly and I tailed an eighteen wheeler with the Cool Bus all the way to Marathon, finding the road by his tail lights. We spent a night at Lodge Lake, Jude still alive, and chipped the frost of a searingly cold night off the inside of the windshield with my credit card. Now it’s summer, and summer in northern Ontario is the best and saddest season. It is always a shock when it’s eternal days of gold slip into autumn and we lie in hibernation remembering the glorious dense deciduous foliage when only the jealous conifers remain. Summer is forever in memory, eternal droning days humming like a honey tree full of bees, golden rich and ripe. The island is haunted with memories that defy capture on the page- white horses in a hayfield in Gordon, the ancient alvars of an island called the home of the spirits. Is there a way to exist here, betwen extremities of exultation and madness? I don’t know.