I laid a cushion out on the patio and fell asleep. I was tucked under a sleeping bag that was in turn tucked into a second sleeping bag, both under a wool blanket, all against the night’s chill. I intended only to give myself a straight-up view for a while of the aurora, without neck strain. But I soon dozed off after closing my eyes, opening them again to see what had changed in the northern lights, closing them again, a few more views, then deeply asleep. By good fortune, this aurora corresponds to clear skies and only a thin crescent moon that doesn’t drown out the show with its own light. Along with the stars and planets (and annoying satellites), the slender moon just adds to the dancing colours and shapes filling the sky. The solar storm was the most intense in 19 years; looking up into the sky, straight up into the brilliant shower of intense radiation, I wondered at the absolute, aloof silence of such intense power.

I woke at dawn, rose to pee in the harassing dewy chill, thought of the aurora, thinking as I always do the morning after that it couldn’t have been as it appears in my memory. I considered going inside for a few more hours of sleep in the warmth of the house, away from the din of birdsong. But I so enjoyed my outside sleep, I wanted to sink back into it. Despite the noise, the feeling of peace brought a few more hours of sleep and dreams. I woke again with a smile when I realized I was hearing the swallows, who must have arrived from their southern quarters during my morning sleep.

I laid there for at least an hour, letting my senses wake fully, waiting for the sunbeams to round the corner of the house so I could rise in their warmth. The morning bird chorus hadn’t ended. Lincoln’s sparrows, northern water thrush, ruby-crowned kinglets. Not all the songbirds have returned yet, but already the chorus is rich, many species singing over each other all at once. On the pond, a duck softly pipes to her brood, all of them making funny wet noises as the ducklings learn to dabble for bits of food. Hornet and yellow jacket queens buzz along the walls of the house slowly and menacingly, surveying for nesting spots. So many of them this spring! This will be a bad year for stings. The first, soft unfurled aspen leaves tremble in the breeze, almost silent, just becoming audible; they’ll firm up and becoming louder, clapping in the wind all summer, sounding like a very large applauding crowd heard distantly.

Rising from my bedding again, back into the house where everything now seems mundane after such a rich night and morning. It’s a let-down feeling just like when a prolonged power outage ends and all the lights and motors turn back on. News, emails, the to-do list, cleaning last night’s dishes, making coffee (black, I’m out of cream), back to the computer, more news, analyses of and predictions for the world in its sad, sad state, then breakfast. Five eggs and a heap of buttery hashbrowns from home-grown potatoes brought in from the root cellar. A strong cup of cardamom tea.

Trevor and Buki head out to help clear trails for a couple hours. I have watering to do. The garden is so dry, and it’ll be a hot day. Trevor and Buki return, our trail-clearer and his partner leave. Buki goes in to sleep; she was up late last night with all us aurora-watchers, and up and active early for trail work, so she’s zonked, and I can get some work done rather than taking her out for her morning walk. Now the rest of the day is private. It’s sunny and warm. My shoulders were already sunburned from yesterday, but only on the top. I’m tanned nearly all over already, just not the tops of my shoulders because my sun exposure has been mostly at a low angle as I lie out on the dock, head-end away from the low, northern spring sun. Now the sun is high and I’m upright, with garden work to do, no time to lie down for a sun bather’s nap.

All through the gardening day, so much to see: A springtail perched on the stigma of a gentian. The undecided sinuous speed of a centipede suddenly exposed from under a pot. The bundle of fresh moss spore capsules not yet opened. The garter snake basking on a rock. So few snakes this year, and only the largest ones seen so far. I guess the winter’s thin snowpack let the cold penetrate deeper into their hibernacula than it should have, killing most of them, especially the smallest ones. The still-early garden bringing out more and more flowers in every colour but orange (why so little orange in the spring flora?). A calypso orchid in the nearby forest, the first of its kind we’ve seen close to the house, just outside the property line. The opening of fold-on-fold buds on the latest trees to leaf out; further inside the bud, flowers forming, and within them the gametes. Meiosis everywhere around us as the greening world prepares to create the next generation, creating the future. The opening leaves look so extravagant after those six months of winter’s miserly twigs.

The nearby creeks call from their cascading tumbles over the mountain slopes and through their nearer cobbly channels. It’s a sound carried louder by the night’s denser air, but a sound that should be louder than it is during this prolonged drought. The thaw continues, but only up high, and there’s little snow pack up there this year to feed the creeks. There’s only one patch of snow remaining in our view of the mountain slopes. The final melting of that patch is our indication of when it’s safe to plant out the tender vegetables in the garden, when there will be no more frost until September or October.

The bats swoop and flutter silently at dusk, more of them as it becomes harder to see. Also at night, the heavy, low whirr of passing June bugs (Melolonthinae, a kind of scarab beetle). Why “June bugs”? We find them in May, not June. And “foolbugs” would have been a better name. They’re inelegant, they fly aimlessly, they crash into things with a tumble and struggle to get up again. Their bodies are as plump and as aero-non-dynamic as the fattest grubs. But somehow they manage to find each other and mate. While typing this, next to the corner windows of my office, I wonder what happened to the giant silk moths, who used to flap noisily at the windows at night, but who now are absent most years. There was one last year, the first in a long time. None this year so far. And fewer moths of every species. Even here on the edge of the wilderness, it’s the insect apocalypse. Why?

Spring. The clouds are starting to remember that they can do more than in their winter repertoire. We’re waiting for our annual early summer monsoon, when the clouds grow tall, shade us in the afternoon, and call out thunder to each other and give us rain. Or so we hope. Most recent years have brought a weakened or failed monsoon. It isn’t just climate change doing this to us. It’s industrial logging. In the past 25 years the timber companies, with government and public approval, worked fast to reduce the canopy cover by half across the upwind plateau. They’ve badly diminished forest transpiration, drying our air. Now there’s less for the clouds and their supporting thermals to work with, so we rely on the Jetstream to bring us summer rain. But in summer, especially in July through September, that atmospheric stream doesn’t want to remain at these latitudes. And the Jetstream has gone loopy, with exaggerated undulations that get stuck in place, bringing flood years to one region, and drought years to another. We keep finding ourselves stuck on the hot and dry side of those loops. The reduced summer rain has dried our forests out badly. Half the trees on the stony plateau west of the house have died and fallen in the last 15 years. And half the trees have died in the subalpine forests to the east. The whole region is drying out. Giant wildfires are the result. And those fires are the further cause, driving a vicious cycle, as so much mass tree death and incineration has further reduced transpiration, drying the region’s summer air.

But the nearby forests remain alive, though weakened. The understory surprises us everywhere. I’ve seen twenty spring seasons in this landscape, but every spring still amazes me with its greening forest: reemerging queen’s cups, lilies and false Solomon’s seal, impossibly delicate oak ferns, the spikes of rice grass, the opening parasols of wild sarsaparilla. Winter and the subsequent brown season are so austere, and now, suddenly, everything is Baroque.

This is the ornate living world that most of the world’s humans no longer experience in their cities, suburbs, and slums. And few people, even if they find themselves in the wilds, would notice much of it, no matter what is happening around them. I notice, at least some of it, though there’s always more to discover. Trevor notices. I’m sure Buki notices even more. Our awareness of the sensory is part of what draws us three together here at the threshold of the wilderness.

I dread the time that is coming, when this wild landscape also burns. And then everywhere we look around us, we will have to look at the austerity of blackened snags. The post-burn green-up will be wonderful, but it will green up into a further drying, heating world that will have less and less in its repertoire, less for the senses. At least humanity can’t reach the aurora and ruin it. No matter how hard we try, we will never touch any of the universe but our immediate surroundings. At least the sky will remain ornate, though our view of it is now foreverly compromised by those damned satellites and other space junk.

I should stop typing and go outside to see what is happening. Even indoors with the windows closed, I can smell the sweet perfume of the cottonwoods.

Early to bed, early to rise! Most Canadians I know start yawning by 8:30 in the evening, and by 9:00, they are in bed and are not to be disturbed. Quite different where I come from in the US, where at 9:00, everyone’s still wide-awake playing board games or cards, knitting, baking, trying to get the kids to settle down, or watching sitcoms. I find it funny that in the northern summer of Canada, most people are already asleep before sunset. Are Canadians afraid of the dark?

When we were children, my sister and I could hardly be dragged indoors from the wondrous dark of late summer nights. “Kids! Bedtime!” “Aww, mom! Just five more minutes? Please!!!” We had nighttime games to play with the neighbour kids. Like Gray Wolf, that in-the-dark variation of hide and go seek, with it’s hiders’ refrain: “Gray wolf, gray wolf, are you out tonight?!” followed by the seeker’s reply “Ooowooooooo!” Do kids still play that game? Do kids still go outside at night?

We often walk Buki along the road at night. There’s less traffic then, or none at all, so we usually have the road all to ourselves. Neighbours who on occasion drive home after dark, bleary eyed, will already be familiar with my headlight beam or Trevor’s, and Buki’s bright reflective eyes. Other drivers who don’t know us might find our presence on the road unnerving. Do the say: “why don’t those night owls go to bed at a reasonable hour?” “What are they doing walking around in the dark?” “They’re weird!”?

In 20 years of living in this valley, I’ve never seen anyone else walking along the road at night. Trevor and I must seem very strange, but it’s normal for us. And there’s so much going on at night, we don’t want to miss it all. On our nocturnal walks, we get to see the northern lights, the shooting stars, the seasonal changes in the constellations, Orion trekking across the winter sky. On summer night walks along the road, we sometimes enjoy the wonderful sensation of lying down flat on our backs on the still-warm asphalt to gaze up at the stars. We get to hear the wolves howling in chorus. And we sometimes sing to them, and they sing back. We can monitor the rise and fall of the owl populations and know by their singing when they’re in the mood for love. Plus we’re the community’s self-styled night watchmen, keeping an eye out for any suspicious activity.

On night walks at this time of year, I often catch a reflective glint in my headlamp beam several meters ahead on the road bed. A brighter sparkle than the reflections from bits of mica or quartz grit. Marking the spot in my eye’s memory and walking toward it, the sparkle is gone unless I move the headlamp lower down and crouch for a lower-angle view. If I’m careful, I find its source: a wolf spider. Their night-vision eyes are reflective, like Buki’s, but the reflected light is a different colour. Not amber, but instead pure white, just like the sparkles of a diamond.

This reminds me of James Thurber’s story The Mystery of the Topaz Cufflinks, in which a cop prowling at night finds a man in a roadside ditch, on hands & knees, barking like a dog, and a woman slowly approaching him in a car. The policeman, full of suspicion as any cop will be, demanded an explanation. The man and woman were embarrassed about what they were actually doing, so the man said he was looking for his lost topaz cufflinks. But the cop noticed that the man was in front of the car, not behind it. And so, eyes squinting with certain doubt, he explained that people lose things behind them, not in a place they haven’t yet got to. Unable to rescue their story (probably too tired so late at night to fabricate a story about driving backwards that wouldn’t implicate them in some sort of traffic violation), they had to admit what they were actually doing: they were curious to know if human eyes don’t reflect in a bright light beam at night only because a person’s eyes are higher than a car’s headlights, thereby losing the reflection upward to the sky (the woman’s hypothesis), or because they don’t reflect at all (the man’s hypothesis). Hence the man was crouched low in the light of the car’s headlights. They were too embarrassed to admit they were doing natural history. Most people (and cops) don’t understand the naturalist’s curious mind. Curiosity is a dangerous thing.

I wonder how often my own natural history activities have startled people or made cops suspicious. Once I was crouched under a nearby road bridge at 2 am: staring into the pool of a drying creek bed, watching a giant water bug who was in turn staring menacingly at small stranded fishes. I wanted to see the bug use its powerful front legs to catch one of the fish, and use its dagger-like mouth parts to stab the fish and suck its juices out. Poor fishes. I could hear a vehicle coming, and it was too late to scramble out from under the bridge to look like I was just out for a late-night dog walk. Whoever it was, I figured they would just pass over the bridge and be on their way, unaware of me. But while I crouched out of sight under the bridge, waiting, they stopped just a few feet directly above me and I heard them get out of the vehicle. I was ready to explain “Um, hi, I’m looking at fish”. I figured it was best not to say “Um, I’m looking at a giant water bug”, which would really cross a line, especially if they don’t know what a “giant water bug” is. But they got back in their vehicle and drove on, still unaware of me. If I were really smart, before they could say anything I would demand: “What are you doing on my bridge at 2 in the morning?!”

While working on the taxonomy of introduced Taraxacum along the sidewalks of urban Vancouver, I got tired of the suspicious looks and of unsolicitedly explaining what I was doing wielding a knife to cut dandelions at the root crown and stuffing the plants into plastic bags. From the lichenologist/mycologist Vivian Miao (who spends a lot of time putting her face close up to the trunks of urban street trees in Vancouver to study the lichens), I learned that no one suspects anything if you wear a hi-vis vest and carry a clipboard. Looking official like that, people are reassured that you are doing societal good and shouldn’t be bothered. That made my dandelion job a lot pleasanter. Thank you, Vivian!

Back to the roadbed spiders, it seems it’s always just one species whose eyes twinkle back at me. I can often find more than ten within a kilometer’s walk. They’re small for wolf spiders, but surely part of the Lycosidae, with the characteristic muscular legs of that taxonomic family. I think they belong to a species of the genus Pardosa. But I’m not at all sure. I know very little about spiders. It’s not a group of organisms I would chose to study. They give me the shivers. I have goosebumps just writing this paragraph.

I could only guess what attracts the spiders to the road. Maybe it’s that they enjoy the warmth the road releases after being exposed to the sun all day. Or maybe it’s good hunting grounds, with insects scurrying around who are also attracted to the warmth of the asphalt. Or maybe it’s the lack of obstacles (thatch and such)–good running grounds for the spiders to chase down prey. Or maybe they’re out on the road just for the pleasure of a nighttime stroll, like Buki and me.

Much else crosses the road at night: toads, salamanders, shrews, mice, and the predators searching for the mice. There’s a lot of death on the road. But it isn’t all predation. Tire-squashed toads, salamanders and more. And the few vehicles racing along the road at night must be running over some of the wolf spiders, too. Death by predation is useful–life rising from death. But death by passing vehicle is useless. Just meaningless death. Some of the run-over corpses attract scavengers, and they get run over too. Whether at night or in the day, every drive on a country road is a killing spree, countless personal tragedies of death by massive blunt force or crushing. Or laming with a mangled leg followed by gradual death in prolonged agony from bleeding, infection, and dehydration as they try to drag themselves to the relief of cover and a water source. Or they get run over a second time, unable to get out of the way. Dragonflies, deer, moose, worms, bear, grouse, butterflies, squirrels, moths, bees. If there are young at home in the den or nest, they, too, suffer, dying from starvation, dehydration, and exposure while mom or dad lies dead or dying on the road. Poor organisms.

People of the ancient Jain religion know all about this. To the Jains, killing is soul-polluting, no matter how small the victim, even if it’s an accident. They walk slowly and carry a swishy broom to sweep the ground before them, clearing the way of spiders, ants, centipedes, or any other creature that might find itself under the soles of their feet. Good Jains mustn’t even think violent thoughts. Instead they seek salvation by yielding to the world’s forces willingly, without any fear, hate, or resentment. I’m guessing Jains don’t drive. Or ride in taxis. If they did, they would cause immense death and suffering among the animals crossing the roads. A Jain’s soul would be in terrible condition after going for a drive on a country lane. Orthodox Jains are so abhorrent of killing that the only food they will eat are the fruits and seeds that fall from plants of their own accord. And because possessions are frowned upon, and because clothing is made of dead materials, Digambara-sect (Sky-Clad) Jains go about their lives completely naked. My kind of people. Bless the Jains.

Goodnight. Sweet dreams.

Buki and I spent a day in the “big town” for errands. But with a wayside now and then, to stretch our legs, and to play with sticks. I was sent to Kamloops for an echocardiogram, a routine I’ll have to get used to as I age, to look for any worrisome signs related to a genetic disorder that can cause progressive thinning of the heart and aortal tissues. With signs worrisome enough, surgery might be needed. Without surgical intervention, people with my disorder tend not to live very long. But with surgery, we can live a normal lifespan.

I had to lie still for a half hour while my heart was diagrammed visually and audially. It was fascinating to hear the machine sample the sounds made by the various regions of my heart. The double beats, the rapid swishing of the blood flowing with each contraction, the curiously gritty sound, as if my blood were effervescent, filled with champagne bubbles. As the sonogram device pressed into one part of my ribcage and then moved to another, the sounds changed. At one point, it wasn’t a double beat. There’s some portion of my heart that works to a triple beat, a thumpthumpthump thumpthumpthump thumpthumpthump. My heart dancing a waltz. Better that than the heart’s characteristic double-beat quick-step funeral dirge.

I’ve shied away from doctors for most of my life. Others need medical care more than me. I’ve been so vigorous and energetic through most of my life, I haven’t needed checkups. And I’m too busy to slow down for the doctors.

Because I could not stop for Death –/He kindly stopped for me –

A spring trip to Kamloops brings me to some of the more southerly flora of my childhood. The balsamroots are having a banner year. Great grassland hillslopes extravagantly brilliant yellow. But the errands list was so long, I had no time to stop to see and photograph the great displays. Only just a pee stop at a wooded wayside by the highway, and a few quick photos where there were only a few paltry edge-of-their-range balsamroots, plus Buki’s requisite stick play. So many errands, and the trip to the hospital, where I arrived breathlessly late. They let me into my appointment anyway.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste/And I had put away/My labor and my leisure too/For His Civility –

(Lines from Emily Dickinson’s poem Because I could not stop for death)

A story over 2000 years old:

“Let us repay the gratitude to the ravens the gratitude that is their due, evidenced also by the indignation and not only by familiarity to the Roman nation. When Tiberius was emperor, a young raven from a brood hatched on the top of the temple of Castor and Pollux flew down to a cobbler’s shop in the vicinity, being also commended to the master of the establishment by religion. It soon picked up the habit of talking, and every morning used to fly off to the platform that faces the Forum and salute Tiberius and then Germanicus and Drusus Caesar by name, and next the Roman public passing by, afterwards returning to the shop. It became remarkable by several years’ constant performance of this function. This bird was killed by the tenant of the next cobbler’s shop, whether because of his neighbour’s competition or in a sudden outburst of anger, because some mess had fallen on his stock of shoes from its droppings. This caused such indignation among the public that the man was first driven out of the district and later actually killed, and the bird’s funeral was celebrated with a vast crowd of followers, the draped bier being carried on the shoulders of two Ethiopians and in front of it going in procession a trumpet-player and all kinds of wreaths, right to the pyre.“

Related by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, Book X

Let that be a lesson to you.

When I was very young, nap time was the remedy for excessive childhood energy, to give mom a quiet break. It was just something to whine about and endure, condemned to an hour of grumpy boredom trapped in my bedroom, dimly lit by curtain-filtered sun.

As an adult, I continued to hate to nap and I would resist the urge to sleep in the daytime, choosing instead to fight through the leaden afternoon doldrums, struggling, coffee-fueled, to keep productive. If I absolutely could not resist, when the urge was too strong, I would wake from naptime feeling worse, feeling sick. It was a penance. I didn’t know how to nap.

What changed? Maybe my stamina is diminishing as I enter my 50s. Or I just learned to stop fighting hard always to be productive. Have I learned to let go? Why be hyper-productive while the world slips into climatic and political chaos? Let it go. Lie down. Sleep.

As this spring of 2024 evolves out of winter, we’ve enjoyed unusually warm temperatures under glorious blue skies. Even if the air temperature is chilly, so long as the sun shines bright and the wind is no more than a whisper, it is comfortable to sleep outside. As early as late January, when we had two weeks of improbable 10 degree temperatures, I set a cushion on the snowless gravel under the breezeway of the cabin, stripped, laid down first with a book, then covered my eyes against the sun, and then snoozed, comfortably. Many sunny days in March, once the snow on the dock melted away, and now April, when time and privacy allow, I sprawl out by the pond. Freikörperkultur-style. No apologies to unscheduled visitors who arrive silently. It’s just a human body, you’ll get over the shock.

Late in my five decades of life, I’ve learned to say “yes” to life, increasingly unconditionally. I’ve learned to say “yes” unconditionally to the sun. Not “yes, except this part of me”. I have sufficient melatonin production. I tan well. I’m less in danger of skin cancer than many. And so I say enthusiastically “yes” to the sun. With my nudist naps, I’m saying yes not only to the sun, but to everything that is: the breeze, the air temperature as it may be, even yes to the harmless but ticklish little flies who love sweat. And even a reluctant but yielding “yes” to the occasional mosquito, whose bite is not so terrible after all. In winter weather, or cold rain, or when it’s windy, I can lie inside sprawled on a window bench or on the floor in front of the woodstove. But when the chance arises, I’ll nap outside in the sun.

And so with a conceding “yes”, I can lie down on the dock, and love what is. Humans are made to desire what is not. Our maladapted bodies are actually a cause of our evolutionary success. Because we are soft-soled, dull in senses, defenseless, and nearly hairless, we must invent and cloak and arm ourselves in what is artificial and not truly of this living world. And we have the opposable thumbs required to make our inventive creations work. Or because we developed inventiveness, we could become so ridiculously maladapted. Either way, we are poorly suited for this world when au naturel, and we live with this inherited adaptation of striving/inventing/struggling to overcome our nakedness so we can be comfortable and safe, even wealthy. Out of our struggle came a spectacular victory. Because it is our superpower, we just can’t stop inventing technologies. We are neurotically addicted to the ‘New & Improved!’. The human condition. We can’t stop accumulating comforts and wealth and offspring and ornament and power.

Yes, Homo sapiens has its occasional crashes of famine, genocide, and epidemics. But we recover and carry on. We’ve carried on all the way to every habitat on this planet and beyond to space, and even further onward into virtual reality.

To some of us, it’s become obvious that our technological super-adaptations are the source of our coming downfall. From sufficiently mal-adapted, to super-adapted, to technological Armageddon. It would have been better to remain just sufficiently adapted, maybe?

So I am trying to learn how to be merely sufficiently adapted. To strip away the technology as much as I can without becoming maladapted (that is, dead). To be unclothed, unornamented, undesiring, primordial. To let go of what is not and instead to accept what is, nakedly, mosquitoes and all.

Pre-human ways lie latent in our modern human minds. That pre-technological nature is still alive, still knows how to respond to the bear met on the trail in the forest, or to the snake nearly stepped on, or to the approaching ferocious lightning storm. That nature also knows how to be simply a body devoid of purpose, basking in the sun, comfortable and trusting, at least when the conditions are sufficiently non-fatal.

My naptime sleep style is not that of a REM-cycle nighttime sleep. At times I wish it could be, that way I could wipe away all the work-accumulated fatigue or account for an insufficient previous night’s sleep, and then return super-energized for work until the end of the day and nighttime’s sleep. Then I could meet all those deadlines, grow a perfect garden, and reply to all those emails.

These pondside naps might instead be something like practiced meditation. I don’t know anything about meditation. I’ve never delved into it as a learned intentional practice. But I can say it is meditative, to lie sprawled out naked, just a body in the sun, the senses sending only few, clear, simple signals to the mind: sun on skin, a breeze that has just stopped, a warbler singing, another breeze, the taptaptapping of a spotted frog, the fading throb of minor muscle pain that flared up earlier in the day, cranes calling to each other, the sweat-licking fly crawling on my arm, the sudden uncomfortable coolness as a cloud covers the sun, the return of the sun’s power as the cloud moves on.

When I first lie down, my mind is scarcely aware of that which is. Instead it grumbles neurotically with thoughts of that which is not: a deadline, hurt feelings over something someone said years ago, the urgency of overdue garden work, guilt for not replying to a friend who wrote months back, the annoying song playing on loop in my head all day. There’s a lot of crud in my brain when I first lie down.

But with my afternoon sleeps, with closed eyes, with only the sensory stimulus available in this semi-wild location, at least on days when we are free from the horrible whining noise of the neighbourhood chainsaws, I’ve learned how to give my brain only that which is: weather, birds, insects, and the sun’s warmth. My human mind shuts down, and my pre-human mind takes over. At first the worded and pictured thoughts disentangle. Then the remnants of thought blend as truncated, illogical, spliced clauses. Then the thoughts cease like a fire going out. My breath slows. My heart rate declines. I lose some of the feeling in my limbs. The muscle aches fade. And then I am aware only of what I can hear, and I feel only comfort. And then I become almost unaware. I become a body in the sun. I leave behind the ‘human condition’. In this pre-human condition, I could contentedly die. I could happily slip back into the primordial soup.

Bliss.