IV. June 2020: Quarantined on a Canadian Island
I’d forgotten about spring. The seasons are gentle in California, their delicate passing almost an afterthought, marked by citrus, rains, mustard, and fog. Like an inexperienced lover, Canada’s seasons are short, hard, and brutish; their unmistakable presence time-stamped the very second they arrive. And just when I’m beginning to understand the unique proclivities of a season, bathing in all of its deliciousness and grasping how best to battle its inconveniences, I’m jolted into the next. One needs a lifetime of winters and springs to understand our seasonal negotiations and alliances with Nature.
As if overnight, snows melted and seemingly dead, omnipresent hedgerows lining county roads, fields, and yards sprout thick, oval leaves, which glow a luminous green on gray days. Bright red seedpods pregnant with the possibility of new life force themselves to the tips of the branches before exploding into the world, the island covered in wild lilac. Like a fully present, psychedelic drug trip, my world is saturated with whites, lavenders, violets, blues, pinks, magentas, purples, and creams, the air indescribably dense with fragrance. Millions of florets, as numerous and uncountable as the hairs on my head, give themselves over to their duties like miniature queens: steadfastly waving regardless of the weather, feeding the pollinators, amazing the uninitiated. A symbol of confidence, lilacs exhibit a flagrant, fragrant, flashy show of hope for the future that cannot be missed by even the most pessimistic among us. With each warm breath of air off the lake, the perfume astounds. I want to roll around in it, eat it, drink it, fuck it. How is it possible to capture the mystical so that it remains a part of you always?
A flowering plant from the olive family, there are twenty-five lilac species, all of which are native to Asia and southern Europe. Able to withstand a long boat journey and harsh winters, lilacs were brought to North America by the pioneers in the early 1600’s. And while there are no lilacs native to North America, much like the Quebecois, French lilacs have naturalized. The genus or Latin name for lilacs is Syringa vulgaris, derived from the Greek word ‘syrinx,’ meaning ‘hollow stem.’ Historical writings note Ancient Greek doctors using these stems to inject medications, the lilac used throughout time as a shot of good medicine.
Obliviousness is obliterated by the horror of our predicament. Injustice, inequality, disregard for the health of our fellow beings, our foods, and our home bleeds out to the edges of our collective lives, soaking the covenant of a functioning society; trust ceded to the untrustworthy, the greedy, the banal. Gauzy days float by where I don’t recognize myself in the mirror, nor in the unmasked faces of my mouth-breathing brethren. How is it that god and Nature and science cannot cohabitate?
It’s already August-humid here, and I fear the mosquitoes will have made a meal of my bride’s susceptible, Type O hide by summers’ end. After a long, gray, budless spring, the island is awash in color. Carpets of dandelion laid out a yellow picnic blanket on the gentle hills before going to seeds. Millions of their ethereal heads protrude like cotton golf balls perched atop spindly green tees, sowing themselves through the countryside on late afternoon winds off the lake. Chamomile fills the fields and the apple orchards, powering the island’s artisanal cider industry, blossom en mass; a riot of virginal white flowers offering themselves up to the bees with the brazenness of Jane Fonda on her third-wedding night.
Fruit or vegetable? The red batons of rhubarb call to mind British women of a certain age, or maybe hippies bagging it at the health store to lay atop a buckwheat flour dough made with far too little butter. But by god, it’s early June in a cold clime, and that red stalk catches my eye like a flashing police light in my rearview. Aside from the vibrant greens of nettles and kales, the locally produced foods’ colors remain as exciting as a weekend spent indoors with my parents during senior year.
A farm stand has stalks of rhubarb protruding from buckets, four dollars a bunch, the red stalks resembling cheery celery. The plant’s anthocyanins dictate rhubarb’s hues: red, light pink with freckles, or a pale green, the color of early spring. Botanically a vegetable, rhubarb has been re-classified as a fruit in the United States (rhubarb and the imperial system setting the US apart!). Except for tres haute cuisine, rhubarb is mainly treated as a sweet, its tartness needing to be tamed with sugar, thus earning its name ‘pie plant.’ Often combined with strawberry, it’s made into tarts and crumbles and jams. I’ve read children in northern Europe and Canada often eat the stalks raw; the ends dipped in sugar. Native to Siberia, the plant thrives in cold, rainy climes.
Grown in both North American and Northern Europe from squat rhizomes, the resulting stalks produce large, striking leaves removed when sold. As I do with celery, I inquired after the leaves, thinking they could be wilted or used in soups, but the farmer explained only the stalk is edible. The greenery is toxic, containing high levels of oxalic acid. Further, she said, a hefty portion of the small farm’s crop needed to be composted following an unexpected frost, as bitter cold drives the oxalic acid from the leaves to the stalks. After World War I, adding insult to injury, the leaves were erroneously touted as a food source to the starving Brits.
En route to Northumberland in northern England several years ago, I heard about the Rhubarb Triangle, a nine square mile area near Leeds famed for forcing rhubarb in winter. The region even boasts a Protected Designation of Origin status (PDO). A laborious process, cuttings are taken from mature plants and then spend two years untouched in the field, buried under a blanket of manure, storing the sun’s energy and turning it into carbohydrates. The rhizomes remain in the fields late into the second year to get hit with one final frost. This cold blast spurs growth before being brought inside to the warmth of the low-slung, forcing sheds. In pitch-black conditions, the roots transform the stored carbs into glucose, reportedly producing more tender, sweeter, crimson stalks. The plant is traditionally harvested by candlelight, as exposure to light turns the delicate stems from a fuchsia blush into a hard green stalk. The harvest is a rugged process, each stem removed from the root by hand. A specialty item from Christmas to Easter, the two-foot stalks are sent to markets in London and Paris. Post-harvest, the spent tuber is returned to the earth as compost.
Ginger cookies too hard for my teeth were ground into flour and used in a galette dough, the recipe for the pâte brisée inspired by Wasp patron saint Martha Stewart. Rhubarb stalks are chopped, tossed with lemon juice, and sprinkled with ginger, cinnamon, and a hit of brandy. A layer of dark, creamy apple butter, the jar found on a shelf in an on-your-honor stand, was spread atop the dough before piling on the rhubarb. The edges of the galette were folded over each other, brushed with egg wash, and sent into the oven with a plea to St. Honoré the dough doesn’t leak its jus. Prayer unheard, it did, but we ate it anyway, the warm slices buried under a big dollop of crème fraîche. Our two neighbors, farmers both, found less leaky versions on their front stoops, making me feel somehow less disconnected, less isolated, less quarantined.
Rhubarb will be as ubiquitous in our garden in Italy as the tomato.
This island is Mother Nature’s summer cottage, her Palais des Papes. The dense ecosystem houses a National Wildlife Area. With its concentration and abundance of migratory birds, it is a designated Important Bird Area and an International Monarch Sanctuary. And while my introvert tendencies wish they could spend all of their hours gazing into the face of Nature, Prince Edward County also houses a tightly woven community of year-round artisans producing thoughtful work, whether it be bread, mushrooms, produce, or pottery. There is a trove of talented people here from whom to learn and be mentored by, and of equal importance, with whom to drink and cook and birdwatch. But we can only see them from a distance, talking loudly from corners of a field, trading messages, and pictures. We’ve been searching for many years for a tribe of like-minded folk, only to find them fenced off, the electric wires charged from a virus.
I would call out mosquitoes the size of horses and lousy wifi as bummers, but we’ve agreed to buy the small farmhouse in which we’re now holed up. The Irish architect-owner renovated the space, converting it into a passive, energy-efficient house. A cement pad, thick insulation, large triple-paned windows, and a tight, unbroken seal create a home that’s warm in winter and cool in summer. Entirely electric, it doesn’t even have a fireplace, as a chimney would break the seal. After it was reconstructed, a woodworker lived in the house for a year and laid floors, walls, and ceilings with old wood and beams. It’s womb-like, funky, minimalist, and entirely functional. Adhering to my adage of a tiny house on lots of land, it sits on ten 10-acres above a finger of Lake Ontario. There’s a sheep farm across the street, and we watch the sunset filtered through the conifer on the lake each evening. We would have preferred to rent it indefinitely, but the owners want to sell it. It has a grandfathered vacation rental license, which seems to be coveted, so it appears to be a good investment. And by selling our vacation rental in California, the purchase makes for an even swap. But truthfully, I want to have a place to ride this out. We have no home at the moment, nor any idea what things will look like in 6–12 months. As the house was recently rebuilt by a professional, they were fairly insistent we waive most of the contingencies. The only two remaining contingencies for the sale were the adequacy of the well and the vacation rental license transfer.
Bunches of garlic scapes are now found at the farm stands, their curlicue tendrils signaling the garlic harvest’s closeness. Toasted pine nuts, an arm’s ache of grated Parmesan, and almost too much olive oil are blended into verdant divinity. Hoarded for late suppers, this concoction rescues evenings when thunderstorms only encourage the humidity rather than sweep it away. Thickly spread onto fat pieces of rye bread toasted to just this side of char, and served with pickled rainbow carrots and a frigid Belgian ale, you can almost taste summertime.
The hardest thing to leave behind was the freezer. A mid-stomach-high chest, it was nicked and cut and banged up with gouges of rust. Bought off Craig’s List for fifty bucks post-divorce many years ago, I drove to a coastal town in another county to pick it up, white and clean and empty and waiting to be filled. The freezer slid easily into my beloved, almost new SUV, kept in the split to haul antiques for my new business.
The freezer slowly swelled with my identity, a thoughtfully cultivated persona. I bought a shotgun, read about the forest and its tasty game, and found kind mentors who took me bird hunting, showed me how to dress a deer, and the proper way to swing a trout priest. I untangled surf cast line on windy, desolate beaches at sunset and smiled innocently as I reeled up King salmon from boats in front of drunken leering grown-up boys, sullen and resentful of my fish. Pride and ego extend to the unfortunate beasts’ butchering and preparation, nose to tail, along with the carcasses of local pigs and goats and sheep. I collected fine tools for each task, leaving them cleaned, oiled, and hung near the freezer. Traipsing behind me from house to house, the deep chest was brimming with dove, pheasant, and salmon rillette; pork loins, deer chops, stocks, and sausages; pancetta and smoked lake trout with just a whiff of wild fennel.
Aging is something that happens to other people. Wasn’t it just a couple of nights ago I was drinking single-malt scotches and eating black and blue steaks topped with seared knobs of Hudson Valley foie gras and washing it all down with inexpensive wines from southern France? I remember quite clearly gooey, molten chocolate cake, Marlborough reds, and espresso at midnight fueling my walk home. The following mornings, I even managed to be pressed and dressed, mostly on-time, and at my desk before my boss rolled in.
But in reckoning with a wilted-veggies-with-garlic-for-dinner reality, scotch and beef and bacon are seldom now imbibed. If they are, quantities are extremely limited, get me while I last, and rarely past 9 pm. It’s not that I don’t long for those six-hour, wine-soaked, fat-laden dinners; it’s just that my body can no longer tolerate them. Months before we departed, dinner parties and a deflating of the ego helped empty the tightly packed freezer — the unbearable lightness of being without.
My fear is etched onto my face like crow’s feet on a smoker. Sometimes, the panic is registered quietly, in a burgeoning pantry, freezer, or fridge, bulging with hoarded provisions to stockpile against … what? To make me feel secure…. how??
Ego
a vine wrapped around
identity
twisted, creeping
clinging to once porous walls
now overwhelmed in overgrowth
blocking out light, vision, breath
hubris sheltered under comfortable
hedgerow.
-
Pruning
deeply entrenched markers
of a carefully cultivated life,
cutting along blurred lines
between circumstances
and self.
Hacking back shearing away
to the essential,
to the inevitable almost welcome
humility
of redefining this self.
Do we say fuck it and get on a plane to Italy now? Or do we wait until spring, not knowing how the world will look then? The only reason I hesitate is the expiration of our Italian visas in July 2021. We spent gobs of time securing those precious pieces of paper. Due to the pandemic, we will have spent more than six months outside of bella Italia, which is an issue. I would hate to lose the visas, but I am also loathe to jeopardize ourselves or others. When we went looking for a home in Italy, we saw many unfinished places, dreams, half-baked, uncompleted fantasies. I vowed that sadness would never happen to us, but nothing is evident at the moment.
Hopefully, things will look better come spring, and the house will be ready to be made into a home. We get pictures from Giuseppe and Sons, the builders in Italy, and work continues. We now have a roof — and were promised the doors and windows would be installed before the snows. In keeping with the spirit of the country, candles are lit to St. Vincent Ferrer, the patron saint of building and construction, that the team always has the tools and materials needed to do their job well, and they get it fucking done already. Everything seems so tenuous now. Exhaustingly so.
The suffering of others caused by this misery renders me without words, but oddly I haven’t yet had a good, long, deep cry. After panic subsides, I feel rage at the lack of leadership, the misinformation, the needless loss of life. Federal mismanagement on a global fucking scale. But mostly, after four long years of divisiveness and corruption, I feel numb. Indeed, we know the air and water are cleaner, and animals have taken back some territory long absconded. But is this global reset enough to shift our priorities? After the vaccine is created and distributed, can we harness the same energy internationally to address the pressing matters of inequity and climate change?
Optimism should be as contagious as the virus.
Sturgeon smoked and sealed by a fishing buddy was opened today. The aroma of charred wood and ocean tang instantly permeates the kitchen. Cut chunky and laid atop darkly toasted rye bread and smothered with a thick layer of crème fraîche made in a Mason jar by my talented wife. The supporting cast includes fried, fat Sicilian salt-dried capers and the last of winter’s red onions rescued from the shed, pickled to sweet perfection with a digital-dog-eared recipe from San Francisco’s Zuni Cafe (all hail Judy Rodgers). With the first bite, I’m crusted in salt and sand on a sheltered beach on Cape Cod in August, playing in the shell-strewn pools revealed by low tide. My mother lures me off the white sand flats with a tuna fish salad sandwich on Pumpernickel, my father’s favorite bread. It’s made thick with mayonnaise, red onion, celery chopped so thin it’s translucent, and sweet jarred piccalilli, an exotic find for my Midwestern mother. Once again, I am a blissed-out 8-year old in a scrappy, one-piece navy bathing suit with red piping on the straps.
We locked eyes. It was the first time in ages a male made me feel so happy, so encouraged, so… excited. The birds have returned, the once songless mornings belonging to a different season. This island’s situation on eastern Lake Ontario makes it one of the most prolific birding areas globally, with more than 350 species of birds recognized during spring and fall migrations. But it was the osprey’s return I’d most eagerly anticipated.
Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) are the second most widely distributed raptor species (after the peregrine falcon). Their diet mainly fish, they breed within 12 miles of freshwater lakes, rivers, swamps, and coastal brackish waters. Growing up in New England, I saw high-reaching poles in the center of marshes, platforms perched on top. Spilling over the sides were osprey nesting materials; sticks, driftwood, seaweed, grasses, and even humanity’s garbage, newly upcycled. On this island, these poles are everywhere: parks, backyards, in the middle of fields, alongside county roads.
Migratory birds, osprey fly from this continent’s northern parts to winter in Florida or Mexico, and even Central or South America. Many log more than 160,000 migration miles in a lifetime. Their massive wingspan of up to five feet, the muscular legs, the brown stripe on a white cheek, and the tufted head feathers make them appear powerful and prehistoric, a working man’s eagle.
Osprey mate for life, returning to the same nest each spring. The males sprint ahead to refresh the digs, repairing winter’s damage. Like a suburban couple with means, the female soon joins him, re-arranging his efforts. Some of these homes have been used repeatedly for 50–70 years, becoming as large as 10' wide and deep enough for me to slumber. Their house in order, mating begins in earnest. The male performs an aerial dance with a fish or nesting materials in his talons, hovering and swooping above the nest, sometimes as high as 600 feet. He continues this courting ritual for upwards of ten minutes, screeching his desire before floating into the nest in a leisurely manner, a slow striptease for an afternoon lover.
You had me at ‘hello’.
The female lays anywhere from one to four eggs each April or May. In the proper order of things, the couple shares the responsibility of incubating the eggs for nearly 35 days. Once the eggs hatch, the males hunt for food, while the females tend to their brood, encouraging flight within the first eight weeks of the chicks’ lives. As osprey age, their eye color changes from brown to yellow. Full-grown at six weeks and fully mature at two years, the birds can live a long life; the oldest known banded osprey was found at 25 years of age. The young remain at their wintering grounds for two or three years and then make the long voyage north to find a nest and begin to breed.
I found myself repeatedly driving to a vast field spiked with several poles. Sitting quietly, gazing up at the action, I’m eyed warily by the enormous birds, occasionally screeched at as is appropriate for an interloper, even one that admires from a distance. Their massive wing-span of up to five feet, the muscular legs, the brown stripe on a white cheek, and the tufted head feathers make them appear powerful, prehistoric, a working man’s eagle. Along with their birds of prey brethren, including the owl, hawk, and falcon, they are a force of Nature by whom I am awed. Found on every continent except Antarctica, ospreys are mostly solitary birds, often roosting alone or in small winter flocks of six to ten. Since the ban of DDT in 1972, which thinned the eggshells and reduced the number of live births, ospreys have made a dramatic comeback, falling off the list of Endangered Species.
Occasionally, I’d drive to Wapoos Marina and watch as the osprey hunt the pandemic-quiet harbor, shaking the water from their feathers as they rise into the air. The bald eagles watch, too, in the hopes of stealing the fish hunted by osprey, harassing the smaller raptor until it drops the fish, or even snatching it from their claws.
Similar to the owl, ospreys boast an opposable toe that can face forward or backward. They have pointy barbs on the pads of their feet, allowing them to grasp the fish, their catch measuring anywhere from 6–13 inches. Ospreys’ wing construction creates an easy lift-off from the water. Ingeniously, these birds haul the fish upright and head forward, making it less laborious to fly into the wind. Studies from The Cornell Lab of Ornithology show the osprey caught fish at least one out of every four dives, with an average hunting time of twelve minutes. It took me longer to park the car in Berkeley at Monterey Fish Market.
Perhaps I thought I was getting a new pet. I became obsessed with putting a nesting pole on the property. I wrote to the very few people I knew on the island, and one of our favorite farmer’s mother had two of them, lying unused. She agreed to part with one, and her nephew hauled the 40' pole in his truck and trailer and plopped it into our yard to await installation, which is no small task. He even made a platform to attach to the top, able to support the recommended 300-pounds. A sign will be carved onto the pole with the word ossifragus, an old Latin name for osprey, meaning “bone-breaker.”
We planted a little garden; think more hope, less victory. Two generously sized boxes were soon brimming with poorly spaced starter plants of superior genetic stock. True to form, I went overboard on the tomato and pepper starts. The beds were now surrounded by ugly black buckets unearthed in the shed and commandeered for herbs, tomatoes, and strawberries. My wife is miffed with me there’s no room for cucumbers, but the soil is hard and thin and full of rocks, and renting a rototiller was not high on my list of priorities this year, so we planted the beds and anything else that could hold soil, cutting drainage holes into the bottoms. While some of my favorite journeys are to farmers markets and nurseries, neither are on the ballot this year, Covid pulling a coup on all of our lives. Luckily, Farmer Vicki is famous on-island and off for her vegetable start sale, with all kinds of organic vegetables on offer and upwards of one hundred heirloom tomato varieties her specialty. She sells her goods at an on-your-honor stand, a little house painted purple with wide-open doors on Morrison Point, a fertile stretch of land along the Black River.
The lake shimmers, even when it’s gray. The vivid greens of the forest rattle with the afternoon winds, desperately trying to blow away the wretched humidity. After a winter of cracked, dry skin from travel, hand-washing, and hard well water, my skin now glistens.
Rabbits come out in the morning and again at dusk. A small family nest under the back porch, sizing me up warily, ears radioing apprehension, noses sniffing for danger. A murder of crows perched on the branches of a dead maple tree becomes animated, their glossy black bodies soon descending onto the county road. Curious, I walked over and saw a rabbit lying in the road, hit by a car, barely alive and horribly frightened. I shooed the crows away and fetched a shovel from the shed. Returning to the road, I realized I was crying in deep, racking sobs. As I brought the shovel down onto his fragile neck, I began to scream aloud at the horror of more needless, painful deaths. Kneeling in the road over a bloodied animal, awash in snot and tears, I wished him well on his next journey. His mangled body was laid in the ditch to be recycled back into Nature, the crows watching my every move from the branches above. A breeze suddenly came up off the lake, the clanging chimes on the porch echoing through the forest.
