View from the Hill

My partner Will, who was born and raised in Ontario, is quite enthusiastic about the off-beat culture of this new ‘country’ we’ve come to inhabit. He’s taken to the traditions, the music and the way of life like a duck in a drought takes to water. But sometimes the language gets the better of him, and sometimes the resulting confusion gets the better of us both.

Yesterday, for example, Will rang up to introduce himself to a neighbour from whom we hoped to purchase some hay bales to skirt our cabin for the winter. Judging by his side of the conversation, the negotiations seemed to be going well.

“Oh, that’s perfect then…What’s a good time for you?…Er, okay, that’s fine, we’ll drop by tomorrow around then.”

He rang off to announce triumphantly that he had secured the hay at the most reasonable price of $1.00 per bale and that we were off to pick it up the next evening.

Now, it seemed a bit odd that the job was scheduled for the evening. Unlike the city, there are no street lights, and around here work is done during the daylight hours. But we just supposed that the fellow had other business during the day, and if we had to work in darkness, we would somehow deal with it.

But it nagged at me. It just didn’t seem right somehow. This was simply not the way of things here. Nonetheless, the next evening we set off in the pitch darkness to pick up our hay. On the way there I was struck by a sudden thought.

“So tell me,” I said, “what exactly did this guy say to you on the phone? Did he actually use the word ‘evening’?

“Yes,” says Will, “He said to come tonight.”

“But did he say ‘evening’?

“Well, he said to come by after dinner.”

I started to laugh. Here in Newfoundland they do not eat lunch and dinner, they eat dinner and supper. We were on our way to pick up hay from a fellow who had been expecting us to show up in the afternoon.

Since we were already on the road, we continued on to the farm, but with some trepidation at meeting this stranger who had wasted precious daylight hours waiting around for us to show.

We needn’t have worried. Newfoundlanders are a laid-back lot who mightily appreciate a good laugh. In fact, when we explained how the misunderstanding had come about, our newfound neighbour was so greatly amused that he dropped the price of the hay to fifty cents a bale.

We’ll be picking them up tomorrow…after dinner.

After being so long in the city, living in the woods is the experience of a lifetime for us. Each and every day we are surrounded by the pure essence of life, that “force that through the green fuse drives the flower”. The fundamental rules of survival are played out all around us in their most basic form, and we are reminded of what it truly means to have life…and of its transitory nature.

One particular instance several nights ago really brought this concept home to us. In the deep stillness of a moonless night, in the wee hours of darkness that precede the dawn, we were awakened from our dreams by a sound we at first couldn’t identify.

The first screams had us dragging ourselves up from the deep, and by the time we were fully awake, the night was filled with screams, barks, howls, shrieks and wails. It was an unholy racket, like nothing we’d ever heard before—enough to make a person believe in banshees—and it was coming from right behind the house.

And then it dawned on us. The coyotes were hunting, and they had cornered their quarry in the woods not fifty feet away from us.

Sitting there in the dark with the predator/prey drama unfolding so close by, the eerie sounds of life and death loud in the night, was one of the most extraordinary experiences. I thought about the power of these night hunters and of the terror of the hunted. I thought about the cycle of life and death all around us and of our own place in the order of things. And I thought about how I wished my children could hear this and be as amazed as I at all that was contained in this moment.

The howls and shrieks and screams stopped as abruptly as they had started, and in the silence there was a loss. Once identified, the horrible sounds had become a thing of beauty and wonder. How true is this for so many things in life?