Taking a Walk in the Woods

Text by Rebecca
Photos by Rebecca

... tree shadows ...

On Sunday Arta and I decided to take a walk on the property to get our Fitbit steps in.

What started as a walk ended up as a stroll to the far end of the property and eventually, a walk up the path that has been maintained by Glen and Greg to join up at the end of the Sicamous Trail.

At each moment along the walk, I thought we were just going a few steps further until we finally decided to commit to going right to the highway or turning around and going back home.

It was the first sunny day in a week.

The ground was incredibly wet.

The moss was soft under our feet and the forest around us had rich green colours.

... a standing mother log ...

We stopped along the way to note the place where a large tree had fallen and torn apart the trail.

We lay in bed this morning for the first hour talking about yesterday’s walk and thinking how fun it would have been to take the little kids on the walk.

Our conversation turned to the pedagogy.

How does one create a walk for kids that is entertaining for them and that also attaches them to the land?

What stories could be told along the way, stories that would teach them about plants, animals, the land, history, their relations, seasons and more?

I was thinking about reading Andree Boisselle’s beautiful dissertation, "Law's Hidden Canvass: Teasing out the Threads of Coast Salish Legal Sensibility".

In the first chapter ,she talks about the Stó:lō field school and going out on the land with elders.  On reading that chapter, I was struck by the realization that one of the reasons to tell stories out on the land is to enable the elders themselves to more easily and fully access the knowledge they already have.

"I am wondering if I can make it across this water
without some help with my balance."

Landmarks are attached to stories, experiences, seasons, and stuff in ways that enable one to recall and bring to mind other pieces of information.  I saw this in action on our walk.  At all sorts of places along our walk, Arta would stop to point out where her mother Wyora had wanted to build a house, where her brother Glen had built his tree house, the different names that we have given to the streams we crossed, the place where a huge tree had fallen in the woods leaving a rupture behind and how Glen had been able to tip the trunk back upright, with the roots settling back into the hold and restoring the pathway.  The pathway through the woods was also a pathway for sharing other stories.

The walk also gave us a chance to talk about LaRue (the corporate structure that actually that 'owns the land') and the different ways people did or didn’t feel connected to the land or to the LaRue.

To know something is not always to love it. But to know something in greater detail changes your relationship to it.

So how might we create ways for the young people on the land to build an intimate relationship to it?  To know it in a different way?  And could we do this in a way that acknowledged the stories that were on the land before we arrived here?

... a drop of water held by a leafy cup ...

Some Cedar Thoughts

At one point, as we were climbing up the hill, grasping for branches to help pull us up, I grabbed onto a cedar branch and scrambled up the hill. The branch was springy and the needles were soft against my hand.

I found myself remembering that on the west coast the cedar are referred to as the generous ones.  That pulled to my mind the story of The Cedar People that had been told to me by Tsartlip elder Earl Claxton Junior on a walk up Mount Pkols in Victoria last summer (part of a UVic class being taught by Nick Claxton).

I knew that we brought the nieces and nephews along on the walk, this would be a place where I could tell that story.  Indeed, since much of the trail had been well maintained, and we had both talked about how generous uncle Greg had been in doing the work to make this trail accessible for anyone who wanted to use it, we started referring to Uncle Greg as the generous one.

All last summer we spent time reading Secwépemc stories to the young children, seeking to make those stories part of their own lives. But it did occur to us that there is something quite powerful in telling those stories out on the land because it is one thing to tell a story about cedar and it is another thing to hear the story while standing beside a cedar where you can see it, touch it, smell it, listen to the birds in the trees around it, to the sounds of the forest around it. And also a different experience to see cedar branches nourishing the forest floor, feel the bark, the branches, the light dappling the forest floor through the branches. We could also see branches on the forest floor that had broken off because of the heavy snowfall in the winter. So, looking around us, it was possible to make time visible in the moment. To think about what had fallen and why, and to see new life growing out of branches that had fallen in years past, the fallen branches continuing their form of generous giving to the environment around them.

... the minutia of the forest floor ...

Our discussion turned to the possibility of making a book or a resource or a photo journal gathering together some pathways through this walk in the woods.

If I am taking the kids out in the woods, it is helpful to be prepared. Stories about the cedar could be told just about anywhere in British Columbia, for you will see one on any part of your path.

So the goal here, for the LaRue folks, is a blog post of this walk with some tales and stories gathered around it. Share some stories that can be attached to the land if you want to walk this path with your children or your grandchildren, this summer or this winter.

At one point in my own life, I spent a long time worrying about whose stories belonged to whom.  That is, is there a worry about me, as a non-Secwepemc person, sharing Secwepemc stories with my family?

I still think those are important questions.

... just checking to see if the deck has come back ...

But I also think there is some urgency to the question of how we attach ourselves to the land and stories, wherever those places might be.

And there are some good reasons for thinking about how to do that in a way that attaches to the world that we live in, no matter where that is.

I keep bouncing back and forth between what is a blog post, what is for a pedagogy piece and what is for my work.

It feels scary to say land based learning, like there is something in it that i could be brave enough (or foolhardy enough) to try on my own. 

Like, I wouldn’t go camping or take a bunch of people out into the woods, if I didn’t know where I was going.

So I know that people worry about the dangers of doing things that you don’t know enough about. But there are also dangers in the failure to engage.

... high on Pilling's Road ...

In some ways, it seems more important than ever to build relations with the world around us and part of this means being more attentive to our environment and attaching stories to those places.

Some Thoughts on Water and Time

As an example of this, on our walk we spent a lot of time thinking about water. We stopped by a small bed of moss. We noticed a sparkle on the ground. There was a small patch of tiny flowers, each of which was holding a large drop of water. They seemed jewel-like.

It was tricky to find a way to capture that in a photo. I stood in one direction and my body blocked the sun, casting a shadow across the flowers. From another direction the beads of water produced a glare on my screen. In my first photo the drops of water were too far away to be visible. Magnified close up, there was a loss of the sense of scale.

And in any event, I am not a great photographer, so the photo was blurred.

... looking down at the railroad track ...

That was just all in the nature of trying to capture the photo in one degree. It made me think of how much time I spent standing at that spot, trying to capture that image, one that is burned more significantly into my memory than my camera shot. I certainly spent more time with the photo than anyone will spend in reading the blog.

A mini-flash back to my most recent trip to London and my gallery walk in the National Gallery.  The guide asked us to guess how much time the average visitor spends looking at an individual painting. He told us, five and a half seconds:  just long enough to cast their eyes across it, or just long enough to point their camera and take a photo look at later. He told us that he thinks it is just fine for people to take photos, though he reminded us that each photo in the National Gallery’s collection is posted on line in high definition and in good quality.

... looking up out of the dark forest to the sky ...

On that day we saw only five paintings.

One 1/3 hours, five paintings and we stayed 15 minutes with each painting.

His goal, he said, was to have us build relationships to those 5 paintings.

I am smart enough now to bring one of those walking stools on gallery walks, so I don’t have fatigue disrupt my opportunity to build a relationship.  And so, I happily plunked myself down on a chair in front of the painting.  That way, I could relax as the guide took 15 minutes to tell us stories about the artist, the time period, the images, the economy, the dog in the painting, the clothing worn by the sitters.   And by the time we left each of those paintings, I felt as though I had a new friend. 

Of course, I could have learned these things in a history of art class, sitting in a classroom.  Indeed, that is how I have done most of my learning.  But there was something quite different about being up close to the painting itself. I could see the brush strokes, the hand of the author was visible in a way that it isn’t in the reproduction.  I can also bring to mind the voice of the gallery guide, where I was sitting in relation to other people in the room, which side of the room the painting was hung on, the room around the painting.

All of this, just a way of getting back to my story of that bead of water nested in the petals of that plant.

I don’t know how long Betty or Alice’s attention would have been held before that plant was poked by as little finger.

But I can imagine having ready to hand, a story to share about those beads of water -- because if you are watching the forest floor after the rain, you will surely find one.  The land offers pathways to the stories you are carrying

... only bent bark is left ...

And this is probably true in the back yard of some’s lawn as well.

There was water in the moss.

Last summer, walking on the moss, I could feel a crunch.  It was so dry.  But on this walk today, the moss was a cushion, a sponge.

Not enough water to get my shoe wet, but enough to feel the moisture when I pushed my hand into the moss and lichen on the trees. 

We climbed over a large old log that laid across the plant.

To get over it, you simply had to sit on the log and then swing your leg over the top.

... green and white on a bed of red ...

The log was covered with moss.

When I stood up, my jeans were full of water from that one.

The moss gave up its water.

There was a mushy area where someone had laid logs across the water to keep one’s feet from slipping into the mud. This is where the water was running through a cloud full of silt.

 Some of the water ran through culverts.

 We watched a beautiful waterfall above us.

... just a small rest on the upward climb ...

 I guess there was an occasion to think about water that runs, water that sits, water that is captured. There was no place to get a good drink from any of the clear streams. We couldn’t kneel by any of the streams. Too wet. But those little flowers had gathered water as a drinking bowl for someone.

Along the way it felt as though the birds were in conversation with us.

We also talked on the walk about stories that are laid on the land from our family. We walked down old Pilling’s Road knowing that in a month or two there will be wild strawberries there.

We looked for the tell tale leaves.

We saw the burdock which is a completely storied plant for me, walking along, picking the seeds and throwing them at others.

Burdock is part of the game. And as a child I knew this was part of the reproductive cycle. Was it waiting for young children to transport it from one spot to another.

... the Spring forest in its whites and greens ...

We had been talking about this because people talk about oral culture as though it is somehow inferior to written culture.

But when we look at the stories with the children, the stories come alive with the children, more than in the reading. And when stories are told orally in a context where there is something to look at, or something to attach the story to, it is all the more powerful.

It is easier to talk about burdock tea while holding a burdock ion your hand.

This does bring up the question of time.

What does the burdock look like when it is green?  when it is dried? when it is in blossom? 

Fireweed makes most sense in some stories when you can see the wisps of white seeds floating on the wind.

There are reasons for stories to take account of time.

... a photo  never shows how steep
the trail really is ...

Part of what made the walk interesting was seeing how much water was coming down in the streams. So much water. Streams that I see as only trickles in the summer, now overflowing their banks. Good metaphors for time. The lake was frozen at one point. There the water becomes a surface. It looks like nothing is happening. And then, there is a flood of action. You can turn anything into a lesson. Is the water only 'water', and when is it a metaphor? 

We were having all of these conversations about the optimal time for story telling, and the need for time to wait for a story, or to acknowledge that a season has not quite arrived, or that the water level at one time won’t be the water level always. I can show kids where the strawberries will grow, but I can’t show them the strawberries if I take them on a walk right now. So this isn’t the moment for that story.  Not that you CAN'T tell the story now, but rather than the conditions later will enable a different kind of storytelling experience.

But it is also knowing that there are other stories to tell. There is what the land has available and then there is the need of the person interacting with it. You can draw many stories out of the land at different times. There is so much there. But it is helpful to know what the need is before drawing out the story.

... at the end of the walk the clouds are lifting ...

Something is almost always in season. A person doesn’t’ have to theorize that all culture is oral culture before theorizing what orality can provide.

Being able to access text and image is useful.

Helpful.

I can think about taking kids on walks.

Can I take kids on virtual walks?  Can thinking about this walk provide a framework for me to do something similar in my back yard in Victoria?

How do I get my children to develop skills to attach themselves to the world they are in? If I go on the walk and say to them, 'here is a bird, or here is a budock', who cares?  It will be more meaningful if I can share stories at the same time: 

To drop people off at the Sicamous Trail end
go down the Trans-Canada until the
road narrows to one line each way.

There is where the deer lay down for the night.

Here is where a moose peed in a stream.

Here is where the road got washed out.

Here is where Cohl nearly got strangled on a motorcycle. 

Here is the path that will lead back to the cabins.

We tell those stories one way or another.

When we left this morning, I thought we were just going to walk back and forth on Pilling’s road.   

But no, Arta, just wanted to look first here... and then there.... and then a bit further.  We started at the two pottery kiln’s, then headed for the stream between Wyona’s and Moiya’s, and this led to  Greg’s enthusiasm for clearing a path.  One story lead to another, drawing us further into the woods, until when we got to the top of the path where the question was, should be walk all of the way to Sicamous?!

I said, No way!

Ironic, since when I was young, I was constantly begging Arta to let me voyage there:  Can I walk to Sicamous?   Can I run to Sicamous? Can I skip to Sicamous? Can I paddle to Sicamous? Can I bike ride to Sicamous?

Rebecca