The utter folly of leaving home

My son tells me the electricity went out around 11 am yesterday morning. Fortunately for him my friend’s work shut down for lack of electricity and when she discovered that her home had full power she collected him. Oddly enough her home is located approximately 1 city block west of mine. For the first time this summer he has spent an entire afternoon in the cool comfort of air conditioning until the early evening. He has always loved soups and stews but soup is not something I make when the days are over 24C though yesterday he was able to indulge himself with that and goldfish crackers.

The power came back online around 6:20pm for 20 minutes and was out till after 9pm when it made another brief appearance. Apparently, I am the victim of rolling back outs but I am my mother’s daughter so that I had my portable Coleman lights and the son and I were able to pass the evening with Harry Potter and James Lee Burke. I got up as is my habit around 4am to discover I had power only to lose it again just as I poured the water into the coffee pot.

There is an old Irish expression that says what is breed in the bone comes out in the flesh and found myself questioning why I live in the center of the largest urban centre in Canada and in an environment that is both alien and foreign to my character. Like all the McNamara women that came both before and then after me, I could not wait to leave and now in my maturity I repent of those choices and decisions that led me to this place and at the mercy of government bureaucracy and incompetence.

I find that I long more than ever on nights and days like these for those long familiar woods and home. A lack of electricity would not disturb the tranquility of my days. There are Coleman lamps a plenty, and if the power was out, I would still have the wood stove to cook on. And if the day was too hot to cook inside, I could just start a light a fire in the yard, and if the heat at night was too obsessive to sleep inside, there is always the cool night air on the porch. I would always have coffee or a cuppa to take to the porch as I rose and no doubt I would be watching the path Venus takes as it moves across the horizon rather than stumbling and scrambling to dress in the dark.

My mother’s father was born in the country and even he longed for adventure that he thought he could only find in the city, and hence when the opportunity to leave came he did not hesitate to lie and sign up to fight the Hun in a battle that would carry him half a world away in an alien and foreign land. In retrospect, he was luckier than the rest of us for he learned early in life that sanity and peace lie in hills, woods and valleys. He came home from the WW1 relatively physically unscathed but with a decided contempt for society and its rules, and so sought the sanctity of the woods and river valleys. He spent his life as an illegal fur trapper, logger and wood’s guide. He probably could have received a license to trap furs if he the patience to wade through the levels of government bureaucracy required and paid the fee for the right to make a living in the land he thought he fought to save. No doubt he felt that he had paid enough through tears, flesh and blood on Vimy Ridge and saw no sense or appreciable meaning in any government telling him how, when, and where he could make his way in life and demanding that he pay once again for the privilege to do so. In WW1 he was a scout and a messenger. My mind often shuts down in horror when I attempt to picture that slight 16 year old boy creeping through the wastelands to scout the enemy lines. He told me once that what he hated most was not the cold or hunger, nor the lice, or rats but the sound of the horses crying to their death. There is a degree of courage and fortitude that was present in him that I rarely see among the city breed but I often encounter it among those who live tied to the land.

There are times that I want to leave this country and put its trouble far behind me and live free from the government’s ever expanding reach but what holds me here is that I find I cannot forsake the woods of my Canada that tied me so long ago to the land. As long as I am here there is hope that the day will come when I will be free of my obligations so that once again I can walk in the woods that sheltered and nourished myself, my mother, my grandparents, my great grandparents, my great-great grandparents and so on, and so on. That is the hope that has carried and substained me as I walk on these mean streets and through many a dark day and night here – that one can indeed go home again.