Although I’m a city boy, born and bred, I entertain a picture of myself as someone equally at ease in rural settings. I tell myself I have a foot in both worlds. I’m used to sirens in the middle of the night, the continuous roar of traffic, crazy people screaming at the sky. But I’m reserved by nature, quiet, reflective. If I had lived in medieval Europe, people might have taken me for a monk. Given my personality, it’s understandable then that every so often I feel an need to escape from the city. These times of retreat are even more valuable to me during the Covid-19 pandemic when it feels like I’m in an Edgar Allen Poe story where the walls are closing in around me.
And so I find myself up before sunrise, watching fog settle over an Ontario lake, enjoying the illusion of a pristine wilderness as docks and cottages vanish in the mist. Then the Canada Geese start up. There are flocks of them (or is it gaggles?) in every tiny cove. They are obnoxious. They remind me of city neighbours who go at one another across balconies. They honk louder than city cars. They’re filthy. They carpet the shoreline in green knots of shit. To take photographs in the fog, I tread carefully as if I’m a soldier on D-Day trying to avoid land mines.
So much for nature. So much for the contemplative life. I’d find more peace in the city.
