The cone of silence, make mine a double scoop

I was in another place entirely. The book I was reading had me so engrossed I was on another plain. By the magic of the printed page I had been transported from the tiny cramped living room of the run down single wide trailer I shared with my roommate and fellow trainee Dan. It was a Sunday the one day that the Hudson’s Bat trading post in the isolated northern Alberta town was closed. We had only CBC North and Sunday afternoons meant opera music. I was sitting on a black leatherette love seat which was excruciatingly uncomfortable. The matching sofa had been destroyed by a previous trainee who had gone round the bend and burrowed himself into the stuffing with a soup spoon. He had been “sent out” as the saying went. I wish they had let him finish the job first, I hated that love seat. Dan was on the ugly but much more comfortable sofa. The rest of the furniture in the tiny living room consisted of a pressboard coffee table which was a slab of wood with four screw in legs. The matching end tables consisted of two plastic milk crates each shrouded in green cloth pinned with safety pins. Two old lamps topped these, they did not match. The TV sat on four milk crates which no one had bothered to cover.
“How do you do it?” Dan asked. The words exploded into my world like a hand grenade. I fought desperately to keep my concentration, trying not to be sucked back to the present by this verbal vortex, like some sort of wormhole back to the reality of that drab trailer and that drab Sunday. I wanted to stay in my warm dimension like a sleeping child pulling the covers around him as his mother tried to drag him off to school. I left a pregnant pause after the statement. It was a very pregnant pause. It was a pregnancy of elephantine proportions. Eventually Dan delivered the follow up by caesarian section. “How do you go off into the bush by yourself and stay there? All weekend, sometimes three or four days without seeing or talking to another person?” Under the weight of this verbal onslaught, I conceded the field and closed my book, marking my page and tossed it on the coffee table. I wish it was a huge leather bound tome that would have struck the table with a thunderous clap to let Dan know of my displeasure. Alas it was a paperback and made virtually no noise at all.
“I am not alone.” I said sliding my hand down to the head of my golden retriever ruffling his fur. “Seiko goes with me.” “Oh, I suppose he is a stimulating conversationalist?” Dan replied mockingly. “Compared to present company…?” I asked. “Har har!” he replied. Seriously, how do you stand to be alone like that? Don’t you get restless?” he persisted. “We are very different people.” I pointed out. It was true, we were very different. I remember when I picked Dan up at the town’s desolate, wind swept dirt airstrip. No one looks graceful getting out of those tiny single engine planes. You have to put you foot on a tiny step no bigger than a drink coaster and take hold of the wing strut and lower yourself down. Dan was not aided by the way he was dressed. He wore no toque or gloves. He had on a brown sheepskin lined jacket, which was warm enough but he had dress slacks and leather-bottomed dress shoes on. When his feet hit the frozen, packed, icy surface of the busy runway he was slipping like a pig on skates. The oversized blond afro on his head did not add to his image. Hey, it was the eighties. When he regained his balance he extended a bare hand. I took it; he shook hard, for two reasons. First to keep his balance and second for a bit of heat as his hands were red and cold as ice. “I’m Greg!” I yelled over the screaming wind. “Dan!” he yelled back. The pilot shook his head as I took Dan’s bags to the truck. He tucked his head in close and said quietly “He won’t last a week.” He thumbed towards the odd looking young man. “Greenhorns.” I said knowingly. I was a veteran with two full years under my belt.
In spite of first impressions Dan managed to settle into the town without burrowing into sofas. He was different; to be sure, but the locals accepted him because of his inherent good nature. He would never be described as a typical northerner. He was a city kid through and through. He preferred indoor activities to spending time on the land. I spent as much time on the land as a hectic schedule would allow. With my golden retriever at my side I drove and hiked every road, trail and goat path for a hundred miles. Local people would come to me and ask how the roads were for traveling.
“No seriously.” Dan persisted “What’s so great about going off into the bush all by yourself?” “Well; if I had to sum it up I would say peace and quiet!” I said loudly. “Peace and quiet? How can you get more peaceful than around here?” Dan said totally missing the hint. “You have to like your own company. You also have to know how to build a fire, pitch a tent, and do a hundred other things that you don’t know.” I replied my voice dripping with sarcasm. “I could do it!” Dan replied. I looked at him hard; he had surprised me once. But could he do it again? “Maybe.” I said skeptically. I liked Dan a lot. He had grown in my estimation since that first day on the frozen runway. He still had a long way to go; but an agreeable personality makes up for a host of sins.
Fate changes things with haste and I very shortly found myself moving on. Temporary jobs called relief assignments had opened up and I had to go. Dan and I stayed in touch. He was looking after my dog until I found a more permanent home so we needed to. I could; of course, understand his mystification with my love of solitude. It is not for everyone. But there are those who share my enjoyment, even if they may be ascetics, hermits and monks. We share something. Something most of us have lost. I frequently misplace it myself. It is not silence in the true sense of the word. For those who know the land know there is no silence there. The noises and sounds are natural ones. The wind in the leaves, the water over the rocks, the drumming of a partridge, the chatter of a squirrel. There are even much more subtle noises. The thing is that when you storm the bush on a snowmobile or four wheeler; commando style, weekend warrior style, with rowdy friends and boisterous talk there is no way you can hear it. It is the heartbeat of the earth. All this sound. Unless you are still, probably alone; certainly in a state of mind to hear it you cannot appreciate the miracle of it. You must be still enough to hear the beating of your own heart. Not the frantic beating that happens when you are stressed or exerting yourself; but the quiet calm beating of your heart when you are at rest, at peace. When you are propelled into the wilderness by a two stroke motor it would take an hour for your ears to recover enough to even hear it.
But carried into the wilderness by the effort of your own feet; carried on feet that make an effort not to disturb every creature for miles around; thusly immersed into the wild, you may hear the beat of nature’s heart. We are after all creatures; a part of nature not apart from nature. Go there. Settle. Settle on some rock or stump. Become part of the forest. Sit. Be still. In a time; perhaps an hour, perhaps longer nature will resume around you. You will hear pine needles fall to the forest floor. You will hear the wing beats of the birds flitting from tree to tree. You will see the rabbit stare at you in awe as he makes his way along his beaten path. He will stand on hind legs and sniff the air. If you are still he will perceive no threat and move on with no more fuss than if you had been a squirrel or a deer. The longer you stay in the bush the more likely this is to happen. The more naturally you fit in, the more practiced your ear becomes and the less the stink of civilization clings to you. It is a perfect time to relax; to lie in your tent and read; for contemplation and prayer; to cleanse your soul. Nothing eases tension like the sound of running water and I invariably make camp beside a source of it. I had favorite campsites in that country. Not surprisingly they had been used many times before I came there. I had shown Dan some of them on his rare trips with me.
So when my phone rang one Monday morning I was not surprised that it was Dan. “I took a page out of your book and went camping this weekend! “ He said jovially. “A whole weekend!” I replied “I am proud of you!” There was a brief pause “Well not a whole weekend. I went to that campsite overlooking the Little Red River.” Dan said his voice a little less confident now. “Ah, I know it well; I can picture it in my mind’s eye.” I replied a sense of calm rising in me at the thought of it. “That’s a long hike; it must be the better part of fifteen klicks.” I said incredulously. “Yeah; I biked it.” Dan replied. The mind boggles. “Biked it? Man you can hardly walk it, with all those potholes and deadfalls.” I was amazed. “Yeah it was an ordeal, with the pack and the tent and the gear.” Dan added. “I was exhausted.” I didn’t doubt it. “Well I am impressed. How was the weather, did you get bored?” I asked. I had a million questions. “Well, I didn’t really have time to get bored. I lay down for a while then I headed back to town. I guess I am just not cut out for solitude.” He sounded so down I felt I had to do something to lift his spirit; to recapture the mood he had been in when the conversation started. “Tell me; when you were there; when you were resting in the bush; did you hear it? Did you hear the heartbeat of the earth? “I so wanted him to at least experience the feeling of peace that I had known. “Um, well. I had my headphones on the whole time. AC/DC blaring. I couldn’t hear a bomb go off!” As I hung up I shook my head. A bomb going off indeed; I thought. The final shot in the war on solitude; civilization one silence no score.