Wednesday, I got invited to walk the trails at Chief Whitecap Park along the South Saskatchewan River with a trail-maker and bird-feeder-filler.
He’s out there in all kinds of winter weather, watching for action at the mouths of fox dens, making an all-essential first trail-breaking pass through the woods after snow, clearing branch falls, and just generally acting as a four-seasons steward of a lovely piece of ground.
I have a bad habit of accepting invitations from people I don’t even know to go places I’ve never been: “Meet me at the end of this dead-end road — I’ll be the one in the van.” Simply put, I’m a sucker for someone who says, “There’s something you really should see.”
Sometimes I just invite myself: in November, I asked a machinist in Carbonear, NL, if I could visit him in his machine shop, simply because his internet videos of metal work were so entrancing. I got to see a meticulously organized and completely professional full shop in his backyard garage, a spot where he makes a full time living building replacement metal parts, and I met a man who quite simply glowed, a walking, talking reminder of what it is to be lucky enough to have a whole and satisfying life.
But back to the trails.
It was cold Wednesday, the snow squeaking noisy underfoot against the near-silence of the woods. The trails wound up and down and around obstacles and steep inclines, a curlicue of single-file routes my guide knew well, but were so complicated that they confused my sense of direction almost immediately, especially with the sun cloaked in clouds. We stopped at a feeder, and black-capped and curious chickadees came in close, the purr of their wings abruptly stopping with each landing and perch, after which they’d look at us with black-bead eyes, tilting their heads as if wondering what we were up to.
A bevy of waxwings like Christmas ornaments in one tree, puffed up against the cold. Redpolls were also nearby, though they were shy.
We walked, talked politics, the calculation of trail routes and the geometry of acceptable slope, wound our way up river and followed the riverside bluffs upwards as they rose. I heard about the place where a cow’s skull had been discovered, the spot where five large brush hearts were woven out of thin and supple twigs — and were then hung in nearby trees as a remembrance for someone’s loss — and the best, most even, summer route to the riverside beach.
Finally, just when we turned around, we caught our breaths standing on an open bluff looking outwards across the frozen river, and while we stood there, a large red fox ran downstream along the edge of the hard-frozen river with that economy-of-energy lope that foxes and coyotes do so well.
I just stood and watched the fox run, light orange against the snow, its tail a bushy flag, and didn’t once reach for my phone, knowing that there wasn’t enough time to catch a shot, and knowing also that any picture I got would be a poor imitation of real life.
What do you get from meeting a machinist or a trailsman on their own special home ground?
Maybe not to accept an imitation when you have the opportunity to choose a route — or even machine one — to things that have much more value.
Beautiful piece. I love the ending.