By Laurie Sarkadi
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” A friend has this aphorism on a plaque with a drawing of a hiker in a forest, and metaphors aside, I hate it.
Where I live, in an off-grid house perched on a slab of ancient bedrock, hemmed on three sides by a drinkable lake in Chief Drygeese Territory of the Subarctic, there are boundless options to blaze a trail. I can walk in any direction in winter over frozen lakes and rivers of the taiga with few man-made obstructions unless I go about 30 kilometres west and jag south to the capital of the Northwest Territories, Yellowknife. Near this surprisingly metropolitan city of 20,000, there’s also the infamous and highly contaminated former Giant Mine site, which destroyed Dene’s traditional lands, water, and lives in exchange for gold.
In part because of such toxic legacies, I suffer from a type of environmental affliction, maybe a neurosis, that wants everything in nature to have the greatest chance of living out its days and cycles without human intervention. In other words, naturally. I know that we are intrinsically a part of nature and therefore bound to make our marks – Buddhists and physicists aptly point out that the law of action and reaction is constantly at play – but few could argue that once a natural space becomes accessible in North America, humans overreach.
There is a well-worn trail I follow almost daily near my house. Because I have a terrible sense of direction and often use walking to sort out problems, head down instead of mindfully taking in my surroundings, I’m happy to follow a footpath. One day, my husband pointed out a tall majestic tree just off the trail – a jackpine, long dead, its trunk twisted like metal cables and weathered a stately silver-grey. Tangles of dried branches and cones extended on either side like arms. Its crown looked like a straggly mop of hair.
My husband called it a condo. About a dozen holes had been pecked or chewed up and down the trunk, giving sustenance and sanctuary over the years to birds and animals like woodpeckers, grouse, hawks, owls, voles, squirrels, martens, flickers, bufflehead ducks…as well as countless insects.
Uncharacteristically – because we don’t really have meadows in this low-lying region of boreal forest – the tree was in the middle of a large circular clearing carpeted with pale yellow-green lichen, alone, save for a hunk of granite the size of a large headstone that stood like a sentry at its base. I could imagine this tree coming to life Disney-like to hold court while creatures of the forest gathered ‘round. If I were scouting an ideal movie location to shoot a coven gathering, this would be it. The space took on a quality of the sacred for me.
I took heed of that tree every walk after that, careful not to stray off the trail too often for a closer look so I wouldn’t stomp a new path through the lichen or the snow and alert others to its location. Many here heat with wood stoves, including us, and this dense, near-petrified standing dead would be a valuable commodity.
That summer, I noticed flagging tape and some other old trees further down had been cut to clear for what I thought would become a quad trail. If you build a quad trail, quads will come. The slow-growing, fragile forest floor would not recover from this scraping. The cranberries, the mating pair of osprey, and everything dependent on this ecosystem being intact would suffer. I made some inquiries and expressed concerns, and the work quietly stopped.
The next time I walked, that trail was after several months away from home to attend school in Guelph, where I grew up. I was shocked to discover the tree had fallen. I shouldn’t have been; it’s what dead trees do when left alone. Still, I grieved a little. But then I noticed how completely at home it looked, cradled in a bed of lichen on the forest floor, offering up its hollowed carcass for a new generation of inhabitants, all of whom would aid in its degradation towards becoming soil and nurturing new growth.
Sticking to the trails is how the Dene safely navigated annual portages to the Barrenlands, a treeless landscape rutted with veiny lines from the once-thundering herds of migrating caribou. It’s how the Bruce Peninsula can be enjoyed, given that trails crisscross over 700 private and public landholdings on traditional and treaty First Nations territories. And it’s how a centuries-old dead tree near me might have a better chance of offering condo life to the locals because it’s not just people who deserve a decent place to live.
Laurie Sarkadi is an award-winning journalist, producer, and singer-songwriter who lives near Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. She has many happy memories of time spent around Collingwood and Georgian Bay, within the Territory of Saugeen Ojibway Nation, with her family. She’s written two books: Voice in the Wild, a memoir, and My Free Trip to Santa Fe. Her non-fiction appears in Canadian Geographic, The Globe and Mail, walrus.ca, Up Here, and several anthologies. Visit lauriesarkadi.com