the muddy sturgeon river, a.k.a red willow creek. st. albert. may 30/08
This weekend a friend of mine took me to a pond in my hometown that I did not know existed! A sprawling swamp, green haze & still water. We attempted to catch frogs, but they eluded us -- though I did catch them on my audio recorder, singing their nighttime sonatas accompanied by what I think is a grebe:
We also saw a muskrat, and a fox waltzing down the bikepath with some sort of rodent-like dinner in its jaws, and red-winged blackbirds with their urgent echoes: we found an old nest perfectly woven onto the side of a cat-tail, yellow grasses & dried berries & eggshell-remnants inside.
I climbed an old willow, all sunset branches, & there was a yellow warbler, calling, flashing about in the uppermost leaves. It reminded me so much of climbing in my grandma's crab-apple tree, & hearing the robins singing: it reminded me of a book I read a long long time ago, that I loved when I was about eight: The Singing Tree, by Kate Seredy. The singing tree in the story refers to the world tree in Hungarian folklore -- the unseen bird in the tree is 'singing up the world', keeping all the levels in balance, coaxing the branches to hold up the sky, telephone to heaven.
The book is set in Hungary during WWI, and at one point, I think I recall one character tells the story of a long, harsh crawl made by a battalion -- they travelled days without seeing any signs of life, neither human nor animal, and then one morning, there's a tree standing in the middle of a wide plain & it's full of a flock of birds, all singing...
I actually read something really good in the newspaper, as well. The Hay-Zama Lakes Wildland Park in Northern Alberta, which has been designated as a Ramsar Wetland site, and has been a protected area since 1999, is going oil/gas free! The oil companies are now forbidden to drill any more wells as of right now, and will have to have pulled out of the area completely by 2017. Stewardship of the park is being turned over to the Dene Tha' First Nation based out of Chateh, who will now be responsible for its continued protection. They have amazing plans for ecotourism there now, leading horseback and dogsled expeditions on the old trails, & birdwatching at the lakes (it's on 4 major migratory routes). This is incredibly promising. It makes me hopeful.
Also -- this reminds me of a really good book on Dene Tha' epistemology -- philosophies of meaning & experience: Ways of Knowing by Jean-Guy Goulet. I read it originally for a paper in linguistics class in which I was writing on language and meaning, hermeneutics & why truth-conditional theories of meaning are not universal (rather, Western industrialized-culture specific), using Northern Athapaskan languages as a base. & it was one of the many resources that pushed me into Anthropology, because I realized I was more interested in the usage of language by people, for purposes, than just the wonders of syntax.
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