III. May 2020: Quarantined on a Canadian Island
Second False Spring
They travel solo, their enormous black bodies hauled about on long, protruding legs, wispy, inquiring antennae wagging like a Labrador’s tail. One by one they come, casing a burgeoning collection of local honeys and maple syrups stacked on a shelf in the kitchen window above the sink. Cleaning up from yet another fucking meal cooked en quarantine, they provide as much spectacle as the birds of prey outside. The constant Canadian spring rains drive the ants inside to skirt jars and bottles furtively, their work like strides confident, curious. Often they’re left alone, or perhaps even tossed back outside, their paths squirted with pungent peppermint oil to deter future visits.
There are the occasional accidental deaths, the kitchen attrition, the Formicidae collateral damage, squished under socked foot or flicked into soap bubbles after being found underneath the lid of a honey jar. I’ll admit to washing a few down the bathroom drain, their attraction to my Listerine as evident as my crush on Angela Merkel. And, in an embarrassing and futile effort to take control of my environment in this time of complete and utter powerlessness, there was a stoned, angry afternoon session with a vacuum cleaner.
But through the numbing fog of fear and the oft-paralyzing anxiety of projection for the future, the ants 🐜 are teaching me to be amazed at their delicacy and grace and tenacity, to be present and accepting, sharing my world.
“And what of compassion?” screamed one of the fellas as he was being washed down the drain because, as he reminded me, karma’s a bitch, Bitch.
The trilliums are just beginning to emerge in the forests, our chilly afternoon walks in the still, gray woods punctuated by their delicate green shoots, illuminating the path to spring. Nicknamed the ‘trinity flower,’ a trillium has three sepals (enclosures for the petals), three leaves, and three petals on its single, solitary flower. Native across North America and Asia, trillium (trillium grandiflorum) expend enormous energy to push through the cold, crusty earth, their tiny white flowers blossoming just after the snows melt. The plant proliferates in the thawing soils, greedily drinking in all of the early spring sunshine before the deciduous trees leaf out, blocking access to light. Since the opportunity to bathe in sunlight is brief, trilliums pack the flowers into a little bundle at the tip of the root each year prior, giving the plant an ingenious leg up.
A lily family member, trillium, grows underground from a rhizomatous root, which is slow to develop and spread but is exceptionally long-lived, composting itself as old as 25 years. The provincial flower of Ontario, trillium is planted on the graves of Canadian servicemen killed overseas.
Carpets of trillium bloom for almost three weeks, turning a pale-to-dark pink color as they age. Since they grow underneath the canopies of trees shielded from the wind, it is the insects who are responsible for their pollination. The plant makes it easy for them, providing broad petals for their landing pads near the showy flower. When the petals have passed, trillium produces a seed pack. These kernels of life are attractive to the industrious ants, who haul them back to their digs, eat the outer part, and leave the seed to sprout in its new home. The highly nutritious seed pods are also eaten by deer, rabbits, and mice, who spread the seeds even further.
There are four species of trilliums. The white trillium shows their open, smiling faces everywhere. The red trillium (or wake-robin or stinking Benjamin) bloom in May with deep red-purple flowers with no nectar but emit an aroma of rotting flesh, which the carrion flies find irresistible, and thus tricked into their role as pollinators. It’s unusual to stumble across the painted trillium, with their white and red throats, or the nodding trillium, their heads bent in humility at their beauty. It can take up to seven years for a seed to produce its first flower, and it’s been determined that picking any trillium is injurious to the plant, requiring years of recovery.
But they do look striking in bud vases.
It’s snowing here again. I kid you not. May whatever-the-fuck-day it is, and it’s snowing and bitter, a gale as cold and uncaring as fascism blowing in off the lake. My wife is sick in bed with gawd-only-knows-what since we’ve seen precisely zero people. What would once have garnered only mild annoyance at her illness now prompts panic and anxiety, further etching my newly-lined face, which historically has been unable to hide fear, sadness, or wins a hand of poker. Nurse Nancy, I am not. I remain in mouth-agape awe of this world’s true caregivers, always in service, now on the front lines of a viral ambush. Selflessness was on back-order the afternoon my DNA was assembled.
A duck claimed from just up the road made a fool of me in the kitchen, the breasts dried to meaty gray. Her redemption once again found in water, the carcass now bobs alongside a chunky mirepoix with ginger and lemon and turmeric, Vietnamese black peppercorns, and a dried New Mexico red pepper; the bubbling broth laced with brandy from a nearby distillery.
One suitcase each, a yoga mat, and a few road staples don’t make a home. But a box arrived with wind chimes and Japanese incense, and the house has a functional kitchen, Wi-Fi for work, a big bed with a decent mattress, and good light for reading. Touchstones in various time zones and a steady delivery of local whisky help blur the ghosts come the rural blackness of evening, the only illumination the waxing and waning moon.
Two Red-shouldered hawks in a field beyond the kitchen window mate in late mornings, he a fluttering mess of performance anxiety as she squawks and screeches directives. At sunset, perching atop a post, her Lamborghini-yellow talons hold firm to a robin or finch, her beak plucking feathers that float gently on the wind before mercilessly tearing into flesh. Shredding the unfortunate catch, its deceased head jerks to and fro like an avian Raggedy Ann, the remaining tiny beak the only indication of genus.
Even though businesses are ‘opening up,’ we remain monks. Nothing has changed, and the suggestion that it has is incorrect. I’m afraid to think of the people we’ve offended here by declining invitations B or by severely limiting our interactions.
Once weekly, we venture out to surrounding farms for vegetables, left at the end of driveways or on shelves at on-your-honor stands, payment transferred from bank account to bank account. A family-owned health food store on the other side of the island, a good morning’s drive round trip, leaves a box for us in the alleyway. Blocks of Stirling butter, sprouted tortillas, and non-homogenized milk and cream in glass bottles redeem the horrendous lemons and bananas, both tiny and battered with liver spots, rivaling my Nonna Turbina’s marked and wrinkled hands. Casandra is one of the sisters who run the place; the phone our only connection. Her lilting Canadian accent is heard over a crying newborn, my mind conjuring a picture of her with freckles, flowing strawberry-blond locks, and a sturdy Nordic frame, baby latched onto nipple while she operates the register and checks in deliveries. Married to a Mohawk gentleman, they live with their infant in the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, a First Nation Reserve. Driving off-island through the reservation, its main drag lined with unadorned shops hawking cheap gasoline, cigarettes, and marijuana, leaves me with a malaise that sticks like heavy perfume.
A week’s worth of milk and cream, the necks of each bottle stopped up with a thick head of crema, is transformed into morning yogurt by my wife. She acquiesces to my request for extra-dense yogurt, straining every bit of whey through the filter in a Chemex carafe, the thin liquid kept for making ricotta. Madagascar Bourbon vanilla beans from an Ontario bakeshop are sliced open, the precious seeds mixed into the custardy yogurt before refrigerating overnight, the flavors mingling until our highly anticipated breakfast. One scoop of yogurt is christened in a pool of dark maple syrup, which is so prolific on this island the smoky sweetness wafting from sugar shacks can be smelled on the air in March, reminding me of Napa Valley’s hot, boozy breath come September.
A murder of crows converge
on the edge of a forest
peck peck pecking
near a rock wall
where winter snows pool.
A snake curled like a beaten prizefighter
the source of their fascination,
their bloody black beaks
the size of tire irons
tucking into lunch
like fat-rich tourists
in the south of France
digging periwinkles and snails
out of their shells.
A hand-painted sign with an arrow directs us to Vicki's Veggies, a tiny, unmanned house trimmed in neon green. Her reputation proceeded her long before the directional. With her tangle of curly hair and enormous heart, Vicki is a proud eighth-generation islander. She's also hugely responsible for making two strangers feel welcome, well-fed, and connected to this extraordinary community. Saving rare heirloom tomato seeds for twenty-plus years, she grows more than 250 plants in her greenhouses and hosts a plant start sale every spring, drawing aficionados from as far away as Montreal. We scooped up a rainbow flag of tomatoes: Foxy Brown, bronze Aladdin's Lamp, Oxheart White, Gold Dust, and black-as-night Indigo Apple. It was a rookie move to plant a garden so soon after arriving, without a clear understanding of the seasons and the abundant production of the area's farms. But sinking my hands into the earth is calming, and ensuring we have nuts for winter overshadowed any logic; the world now illogical to me.
Raised garden beds were built by the house caretaker, one of which promptly fell apart, heaving soil and compost everywhere. A portly, balding man closing in on old age, he measures the ever depleting well with questionable accuracy, marking the shrinking inches on a peg on the side of the shed. Having been part of the farmhouse’s restoration a few years prior, he knows the house’s inner workings, specifically its shallow grave of a well, and where to find its filters and pumps in a creepy crawlspace reached on a rickety ladder. His family has been on the island for generations. There’s even a street named after them. His mood is paternal, gifting preserved foods from his garden, closing holes where squirrels bury their cache and attaching rain barrels to the gutters on the sheds to catch precious water to feed our garden. Standing against a pick-up truck, he tosses cigarette butts onto the driveway as he relates island lore, his hacking cough a cautionary tale.
We’ve been warned the winters are long and gray and punishing, with deep snows, frigid wind chills, and unplowed roads. As our quarantine dictates skipping stores and farmer’s markets, we planted a little garden and signed up for a couple of CSA’s. Like an ambivalent homesteader more accustomed to hobby projects, we’ll ferment and cure and freeze to sustain us for Canada’s dark months. My foraging skills, combined with a bit of luck, helped me to locate what appeared to be the last upright freezer in all of Ontario, the other preppers beating me to the punch. Gratefully, I’ve never gone hungry a day in my life, and I don’t know why I would now. But the compulsion to ensure a full larder is overwhelming, a sickness that I’m confronted with every day when I pull open drawers. Feeding my demons of fear, panic, and uncertainty is exhausting.
Fear retards forward momentum, blunting generosity of spirit, kindness of spoken word, openness of heart and mind, and wholeness with ourselves, with others, and with the natural world. Fear is a nine-hundred pound gorilla with unresolved angst aped on by previous generations. Undoubtedly, the mad king just south of this border is just a scared, damaged little boy seeking the unattainable from his father. Sadly, we’re all made to suffer. To cow in fear. To fill the cupboards.
Thunderstorms are a thing here. Days of unyielding, heavy air and blue skies hung with wispy linen clouds yield to threatening, billowing behemoths in every shade of white and elephant gray. Winds whip off a suddenly frothy lake, now an eerie green color and studded with whitecaps. Thunderclaps shake the house, and enormous raindrops pour down in a warm torrential assault on salty, sticky skin, arms, and legs sheathed in deference to mosquitoes. The clouds part as quickly as they appeared, and the birds sing louder than ever, thrilled at their good fortune to drink and bathe. As the storm passes, it continues to rain in the nearby forest, a symphony of droplets played as if by Mendelssohn, from leaf to leaf, petal to petal, sheath to sheath, reverberating long after skies have cleared.
Ricocheting between horror and panic, some days I can’t catch my breath, having convinced myself I picked up the virus while pumping gas and need a ventilator because I’ve smoked all my life. And then my rattled, addled brain really starts to spin, dictating the need to come in off the ledge. The emollients of booze and dope and yoga sand and smooth the jagged edges of our collective new reality. The bottles of wine tucked into the car as we departed California remain untouched, their celebratory cheer a poor pairing with my pandemic melancholy. On the other hand, Canadian whiskey has become a quarantine friend, a bubble buddy, a quick, warm shot to a deep breath, and a freeing resignation. Spelled whisky when produced in Scotland, Canada, or Japan, and whiskey when produced in the US or Ireland, the warming aromas and flavors are unique to each region. Distilled from a fermented grain mash of corn, barley, rye, or wheat, this brown is my new gold. Traditionally, whisky is aged in charred, white oak casks often made from local woods. Through a chemical process called adsorption, the charcoal layers on the barrel walls attract the nasty bits of the raw spirit, filtering them from the whiskey, while the oak lends its distinctive, smoky notes. Kinsip, a local distillery in The County, produces a rye whisky in a hexagon-shaped bottle that they deliver to my rural door. Their small-production whisky is occasionally sold out, as sales have skyrocketed during the pandemic, other scared and tired souls needing the same spirits salve. Armageddon is not to be met clear-eyed.
My education in fine wine was mainly limited to fermented grapes. I couldn’t have foreseen the need for any other alcoholic intoxicant. Indeed, much of my identity and ego in adulthood was trained and trellised around wine. Getting my bearings in my early 20s in New York, I worked for an Ambassador to the United Nations. He was the seventh wealthiest man in the world with all of the requisite perks. He wore cashmere everything, had a smooth and glowing olive complexion, and smelled of sandalwood. One of his many homes was an entire building near Fifth Avenue, hung with art and decorated with antiques that would make even Thomas Crown envious. He had planes, fancy cars, and mansions on various continents. He also had an incredible wine cellar, which I found vastly more interesting than keeping his calendar, making thick Turkish coffees, or rewriting press releases from pazzo dictators. I thought I’d work in the Foreign Services based in the Middle East, shaking hands with swarthy men in headdresses, negotiating and eventually signing important peace initiatives on oversized parchment paper, and then dining on pheasant and wild goat in brightly chandeliered dining rooms, the chalice of peace passed round the table. However, my use of language was often anything but diplomatic, my drug use flagrant, my sexual history already checkered, and my grasp of our brief American history sketchy, at best, as outlined in my failed Foreign Service evaluation. Plus, my Arabic sucked. I left the UN and lobbied for a position with a storied wine retailer, learning about wine literally from the basement up.
Eight hour days, five days a week for eleven bucks an hour, I pored over wine labels and read the books lining the shelves, learning about estates, varietals, soils, and regions. And I tasted, tasted, tasted; tuning, and training my palate. My wine crush, 1979 Haut Brion, was a perk. Premium bottles of all ages I could never afford on my ‘salary’ were poured liberally and discussed at length by the men and women who produced them. Winemakers from Tuscany to Budapest and every highly regarded vineyard in between frequently host dinners and tastings to hawk their wares, often seducing over a very fine meal in one of Manhattan’s best dining rooms. Wine married beautifully with my worship of food and the table.
But Christ, retail sucked.
I sat for my Sommelier exams and left my sales apron for the silk blouse world of fine dining. I mostly enjoyed the banter with guests. Pairing their highly considered dinner with wines, or describing and selecting a wine from a list of a thousand or more bottles, all of which I chose, is heady. And running the numbers at month’s end, I was proud of my program’s considerable contribution to a restaurant’s bottom line. But Sommelier is an exalted position in an otherwise exhausting business. Many a Sunday evening (my Friday), I would drive home in tears, so wholly spent from the constant barrage from a slice of needy, pampered humanity. But wine has been good to me. I became conversant in an additional idiom spoken by artisans and connoisseurs I’ve visited throughout the world.
After ten years, I was tiring of the city. The third time some idiot stuck a screwdriver into the ignition of my convertible to try and start it was the day I decided to leave for Napa Valley.
A flatbed truck picked up our wagon, less than one year into a three-year lease, and delivered it to a dealer across the border in upstate New York. It took weeks of negotiation and organization to get the car from Ontario, Canada to Rochester, New York liberating us from our lease. I was saddened to see her mud and salt-stained chassis tied down for the trip. She’d navigated us without incident more than 3,000 miles from sunny California into the icy, way-below-zero-degrees darkness of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba before finally delivering us into southern Ontario, the moniker ‘southern’ deceptively warm.
As the car is owned by a US company, we could not switch our California license plates for an Ontario set. By the time the car was safely on the American side of the border, and all of the fees were paid, I felt like I got financially fucked in the backseat of that dreamy wagon. Indeed, my crystal ball was cloudy when we agreed to the lease, as it never once predicted a year spent in Canada.
Pledging to never be that type of lesbian, we nevertheless located a used Subaru Outback (the official car of country lesbians) in decent condition from a hot and highly recommended mechanic in The County. Islanders galore told us, unsolicited that particular wagon was the perfect sleigh for snow. We arrived to inspect the car in his garage, and several men were milling about, all mask-less. Dreamy Mechanic Steve motions to my wife to look under the hood so he can explain the car’s inner workings. Shoulder to shoulder they speak, he pointing to a particular belt or tube. I nearly lost my shit. But how do you scream, ‘get the fuck away from him!’ without being pegged a cunty-dyke lunatic? Did she honestly think she was going to maintain our car? The Canadians are pandemic-lax, and my wife apparently thinks she’d make a fine mechanic.
After several calls to the Prince Edward County DMV, we learned non-Canadians cannot insure a car without a driver’s license from the providence of residence. To get an Ontario license, I would need to surrender my California license and pass a driving test, which means being locked away in a car with a person outside of my bubble. And, whether it be sentimentality or practicality, I’m not yet ready to relinquish my US driver’s license. While I have a duplicate license tucked deeply into my wallet that could be offered up, the deception didn’t seem to be worth the risk. With its all-wheel drive and heated seats, our ugly rental car would see us through the winter.
For service in English, press 2.
The days are strained through a sieve, the smaller pieces of quiet joy getting washed away while the larger pieces remain to be sorted, demanding to be attended to before their expiration dates pass. And everything has an expiration date: bills and rents to be paid, leases to be negotiated, households to be moved, accounts to be closed and others opened, addresses to be changed, and dozens and dozens of pages of Canadian immigration documents to be digested and returned.
Heads down for months unwinding our California life while getting ourselves situated in another country, we hadn’t explored anything beyond our island. We longed to take a swim in the Atlantic to cleanse us of the months of anxiety, of sadness, of horror, but the border to the province of New Brunswick and further east to Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, and Labrador was closed to non-residents. Instead, we rented a small cottage near Lake Memphremagog, a freshwater glacial lake between Vermont and Quebec in The Eastern Townships, straddling the US border for 186 miles.
Approaching this historical administrative region in southeastern Quebec, we passed the exit signs for the US border, once an entry spot for people’s easy flow between the two countries. The border towns’ closeness is illustrated best by the Opera House in Stanstead, which was designed to straddle the border, its stage in Quebec, and the audience seated in Derby Line, Vermont. The same situation for The Haskell Free Library allows readers to choose a book from the Canadian stacks and check it out at the circulation desk planted firmly on US soil. Now, except for trade and essential workers, Canada has halted entry by US nationals. We could leave Canada, but we would not be allowed to return.
Never having visited Quebec, I was taken aback by how very French the province actually is. I assumed there would be quaint French touches, accents on names, fleur-de-lis this and chez that, maybe a good bakery or two. Instead, we found patisseries and cheesemakers of great authenticity and one of the largest concentration of organic farms in Canada. A Wine Route meanders past vineyards producing collectible ice wines and rosés, and apple orchards are planted to unusual heirloom varieties. We drove over covered bridges and past stately Victorian homes and rounded barns, which were designed to protect their owners from the devil because, as many thought, many moons ago, he lurks in the corners. We encountered several Quebecois who spoke little English, a delightful oddity nestled inside a vast country that resides culturally somewhere between Maine and England.
According to the Canada Encyclopedia, the first inhabitants of the Eastern Townships were the Abenaki, who traveled the region hunting and fishing. Following the American Revolution, many loyalists left the US for Canada, settling in this area. In 1791, the British government gave the loyalists land in the form of townships. The early settlers were mostly American, English, and Irish but in 1840, a wave of French colonization swept into the region. Between 1871 and 1881, Francophones became the majority, with Anglophones now accounting for less than 10% of the region’s population. However, the region does boast two universities, Université de Sherbrooke (francophone) and Bishop’s University (anglophone), which manage to co-exist peacefully.
The superior road and rail systems, in place since the mid-1800s, meant Quebec’s natural resources were easily attainable. Timber, granite, copper, asbestos, and Christmas trees have been harvested from the densely green, mostly unpopulated rural areas of Quebec for more than one hundred years. In 1937, the first snowmobile was launched over these hills, when Joseph-Armand Bombardier received the first patent for “a tracked vehicle for travelling over snow.”
