Sky Pond is Edgewood’s primordial soup. Here’s who lives in, on, around, and over the pond: protists and other mysterious single-celled beings, algal muck, spatterdocks, lake limpets, leeches, whirlygig beetles, bladderworts, mergansers, damselflies, water stick insects, hornworts, mares eggs, cattails, freshwater sponges, islands, scuds, fishing spiders, beavers, canoes, fireflies, wild rice, sandpipers, spotted frogs, calla lilies, ostracods, water voles, fringed heartworts, olive snails, muskrats, Barrow’s goldeneyes, spike rushes, fingernail clams, giant water bugs, little brown bats, mayflies, tadpoles, the nesting catbirds who sing through the night, and lovely reflections of the sky.

Sky Pond really sings. In winter, when sudden waves of arctic air shock their way in to the valley, cracks in the ice proliferate suddenly with a resonant SNAP! In spring, bubbles melt from the ice with hushed gurgles and sighs. That’s when the spotted and wood frogs croak, quietly, getting their business done as quickly and inconspicuously as they can. On warmer days later, aroused toads locate themselves and each other with louder vocalizations that sound, not inappropriately, like giggling. And then the mating chorus frogs spend a month in crescendo–hundreds of voices, powerful from such small bodies. Pondside mornings in June are a tangle of bird song while the drier uplands elsewhere in the valley are quieter, with fewer species to hear. In the darkest hours through the short northern summer night, Lincoln sparrows pierce the quiet with sudden outbursts as if singing in their sleep. Late in summer, the cranes become conspicuous again, once their young are less defenseless. The cranes’ calls are so loud and clear that all the other sounds vying for attention become null for a while. As autumn sets in, migrating wanderers fill in for the songbirds who have already left. That’s when marsh wrens and great blue herons, or an occasional Baird’s sandpiper arrive, or the rare greater white-fronted goose just come down from the arctic tundra. And all through spring through fall, the beavers slap their tails. Something worries them, or maybe they slap just for the pond-owning joy of it.

Sky Pond is a series of springs where the water floods up stagnantly, lingering a long time before seeping away into the swampy forests to the west. The largest of the springs can be viewed by leaning over and looking down from the rim of the canoe (but be stationary a while to stop the reflections from jostling so you can see clearly). The big spring is just a running-leap dive from shore near our parsnip bed. This spring fountains out so much fresh, cold groundwater as to form a large gap in the usual submerged vegetation, a sort of chasm with swags of some sort of pea-soup coloured goo. You’d think a couple of biologists would have a scientific name for the goo organism, but we don’t. This and some of the other springs weaken the winter ice from below, so be careful where you walk on the frozen pond!

It was the beavers who blocked off the spring flow to make a pond, starting who-knows how many beaver generations ago. The main beaver dams form the northern border of the Sky Pond wetlands. Beavers are are offended by even just a weepy bit of outflow, so they’ve chinked up the low-shore spots elsewhere around the pond margins. Trevor and his hired machines augmented the dams with a more southerly, artificial one that forms our main crossing. From this causeway, you can see the main dam to the north. Dam dimensions: total length over 270 meters long and variably 5–8 feet high. Quite a major construction, better than the hired machines could do.

Until 2019, the beavers had been absent from Sky Pond for a few decades. Their dam was in disrepair, leaking badly, and the pond levels were dropping to a level we didn’t like. Hence the machine-made causeway dam to try to keep Sky Pond from becoming a marsh, as abandoned beaver ponds tend to do. While the dams were leaking, many aquatic organisms were stranded and dead, and others took advantage to grow up from the dried peat and exposed mud.

So it goes in the radically fluctuating world of beaver pond cycles. I tried once to fix the main leak in the dam, with Purple’s help (Purple the dog, who had beaver-coloured fur and a castorian eagerness to move logs). We stuffed logs, mud, and sedge leaves into the underwater drain. It was muddy work with thoughts of unseen leeches. Purple was proud to show me how large a log she could move by the strength of her jaws and leg muscles. It’s amazing how strong a small dog is. Beaver work is hard work, and after a couple hours, we gave up. No leeches found their way to us (not a big deal, really; I know from experience that an attached leech is far less awful than the thought of an unseen leech trying to get me).

The leak continued. But two years later, the beavers returned, repaired the dam, raised the pond levels too high (from our perspective), and caused us to place wire mesh around the trunks of the trees we didn’t want cut down. Using the various shrubs and young tree stems, the beavers have constructed two new lodges, one of which is a sort of lean-to on the flanks of the causeway. In the coldest times of winter, we know they’re inside the lean-to lodge because we can see their crystalized breath as hoar frost lining their air vents.

And so it goes with introductions: a light and (I hope) inviting preview. Sky Pond is an assembly that includes the most diverse habitations and residents of Edgewood. We (the humans and dogs, that is) look at, listen to, canoe on, and occasionally submerge in this primordial soup of stories and thoughts. Without Sky Pond, we would be very different in mind and body. Body, literally, since so much of the food we eat grows from the pond muck-enriched gardens. Mind, because we would be poorer in stories if we didn’t live with a pond. As lichenologists, we (Trevor more than me) theorize much about systems, synergies, and symbioses. But Sky Pond gives us maybe even more evidence of the complexly layered nature of life: systems-of-systems-of-systems.

Many future blog entries will relate the events and beings from Sky Pond, from our bowl of primordial soup. Stay tuned…

Stepping stones

Let’s catch minnows in a jar,
Abandon our shoes on the bank
Like an old sorrow, a heaviness.
Let’s cross the creek
only for the sake of crossing
the slippery stones
which may or may not
hold our weight.

Though there’s no time
to hesitate (all is in the movement,
the lack of pause) everything
at this moment
depends
on the firm and precise
placing of the
foot.

 – Lorna Crozier
   From The Garden Going on Without Us

hen I was a small child, I was afraid of ants. Seeing one wander toward me, I would scream in exaggerated terror. My mother worried I was so fearful that I would be poorly suited to life in this world.

In the 1979 Russian film Siberiade, a multigenerational epic of isolation in the vast taiga, there is a character who works himself to death trying to build a corduroy road across the vast, impossible swamps to lead aimlessly anywhere but the place of his birth. Scenes pause on the wide-angle-lens view beyond the last logs he’d laid down, into the wilderness to the unpromising horizon. At the point of ultimate exhaustion, he fell over dead at the side of his pointless road, landing cheek-down in an ant mound. The actor who portrayed this character had to lie dead-still, eyes unresponsively open, camera rolling, as the ants crawled over and bit his face. Though grim, it is a beautiful scene.

I’m told that in the native Okanagan culture, children are dared to place a hand down on an ant mound. A challenge to see who can stay palm-down longest, enduring the biting, before pulling away to brush off the swarming ants. Now that I’m an adult who can take an ant bite without panicking, I wonder, if I were present at this test whether I’d be drawn into the challenge. Would I do any better than the kids?

One of the three full-time mammal residents of Edgewood is Kabuki (Buki for short). Based on her puppyhood behavior, we thought we were in for a difficult time with a problem dog. She was a bold and headstrong imp, and was too quick to play-bite and dominance-nip. I became her self-designated bitable friend to give her an outlet for the roughhousing she loves. The bite-Curtis-but-nobody-else strategy worked, and later we developed designated biting game situations while biting me was no longer allowed in any other situation. The bloody (painful) results of this training were shown to Buki with played-up “ouch” emotions, and that brought out the needed empathy to train her to be gentler and more cooperative. My scars faded, and now Buki is three years old. Our biting games are elaborate, harmless (no bleeding, but it still hurts), and hilarious. A game perfect for bonding and for building trust. As a child, I was afraid of dog bites. Now dog bites are a silly game.

As an adult dog, Buki is gentle (aside from our careful biting games), never aggressive or skittish around people, except for one friendly and perfectly trustworthy local who freaks Buki right out of her mind. Is it because he has big crazy curly hair and wears a low-brimmed straw hat? On trail outings, Buki meets other hikers with obvious joy. On the approach to strangers on trails, she stays with me until I call out “don’t worry, she’s gentle”. And then she bounds toward them, all her body language saying “I love you, let’s play!” She’s met with “Oh! What a cutie!” and “Hi pretty dog!”

On a recent trail, a couple approached Buki and me. As usual, I called out reassurances, and Buki (ears up, eyes wide, tailless butt wiggling fast) bounced like a puppy off to greet them. The woman screamed. I thought at first it was the usual scream of delight, but the pitch and volume rose higher and higher, and I saw her bury her face in her husband’s shoulder. She was in a state of grossly exaggerated terror while Buki went and picked out a stick from the forest to play with. As a confused apology, I said “Oh, you really are scared aren’t you?” I tried to explain that Australian shepherds like Buki are not the sort of dogs who attack people (their overly friendly and playful tendencies make them very poorly qualified as guard dogs, let alone attack dogs). Despite reassurances, I saw a look on the woman’s face that I would expect of someone who just witnessed terrible violence. The husband explained that his wife is scared of animals, and they walked on without pausing. My dear, for the sake of your own and others’ happiness, try to learn the difference between danger and safety. Urban people, obviously, but at least they were out in the forest tails (albeit an easy, short one).

My first drivers license gave me freedom from the city and out to the wildland trailheads. My curiosity about plants started in childhood. By the time I was a teenager, the need to know plant taxonomy had become a strong force. At first I was a nervous solo hiker, but curiosity kept me going. I wanted to see and understand all those species I was reading about on my page-turning reviews of the regional flora. Blind curves on the forested slope-contouring trail seemed at first to conceal a wild animal ready to pounce. I’d heard it was wise to make noise to avoid bad surprise encounters with cougars and bears, so I jangled my car keys loudly as I walked. My childhood fears faded slowly. I wasn’t terrified of ants by then, but I had to learn the difference between danger and safety. And now I know that in those dark forested places that raised my fear and alertness are not the sort of places where a hiker is likely to meet any animal larger than a squirrel.

Earning a place in the wilds requires the taming of fears. Especially now that Canadian kids are so sheltered from any cause for courage, it’s common for young people to react badly when first taken out to see a wild place. Maybe not as badly as the dog-fearing woman, but will they ever learn to keep their hand in the ant mound, gritting their teeth, maybe giggling about the silliness of the contest? Even Buki, who fearlessly and gleefully runs toward potential danger (she’s been called an adrenaline junkie), had to learn through her puppy years to let go of some useless fears (though she never has got over her terror of the crazy-haired man in his straw hat).

In this blog series, which begins here, I hope to help foster fearless connections between people and the living world. Let’s venture out and see what we can find.

Oh the rewards of the wilds!