#hoam

Looking back in anger (better not)...

But when I moved from the place I’d grown up--right where the Canadian Prairies start turning into the Great Boreal Forest, 500km east of the Rockies--to Vancouver, and mountainous coastal rainforest--I felt increasingly unnerved by my inability to name or understand any of the plants around me. 

In grade school, I learned maybe the 10 or 20 most common trees around me, and from my family’s time farming, I learned the 10 or 20 most common field crops (I can even tell barley from wheat from rye when I’m passing them in a car) and I took for granted that I could go, “Oh, that picnic will be during poplar fluff season” or “Huh, that looks like the second cutting of hay. I guess it’s so small because of all the hail we got,” or “From the looks of the weather this year, let’s only buy costumes that we can fit ski jackets under.”

And then when I moved to BC, suddenly an overcast sky meant the day woud be warmer, not colder. The trees were all “Conifer?” “Other different conifer??” “Oh my god, children’s picture books didn’t lie,” and “Is that a motherfucking sugar maple?” (Spoiler: It tragically wasn’t.) The crops in the field were “Berry... bush?” “Maybe grape vines?” and “Surely that can’t be marijuana?” (Spoiler: It was hemp.)

A significant element in my feeling at home was just owning up to it and taking a book on local trees out of the library, so I could name copper beech, magnolia, sequoia, and chestnut. My chest felt less tight after I did it. It was absolutely beautiful and I absolutely loved when I could escape the city for the trees, but I know now that a lot of the claustrophobia I felt when living in the Fraser Valley came from being in an apartment tower where my balcony plants always died, from not being able to tell ferns apart, from feeling so rootless and disconnected from the land.

Walking through a garden I’ve tended gives me a similar psychological experience to walking into a room full of friends. I’m part of something; I’m connected; I’m always being surprised by the ways they learn and grow. 

There is a bit of vindication, now that there’s a push to make sure kids know more about nature literacy, now that I hear more Indigenous knowledge about how for them, spiritual connection with the land is intrinsically tied into an ethical framework for how to live and use resources and relate to each other. It helps me feel less like a desperately weird kid, and more like the descendant of an empire that did its best to snuff out folk wisdom and local knowledges and sever its people from their land; my ancestors and family were uprooted and moved so many times, it’s not surprising that I didn’t grow up feeling as though I completely belonged here. (I mean, I’m from a settler family; we don’t completely belong here, and our reckoning with that is going to mean changing our relationship with it.)

That’s really interesting…..are you going to take a tour of them and show us?!

The tunnels in downtown Edmonton? To my knowledge, they’re all closed off to public access. I only know they exist because my dad and brother really like going through local historical maps and reading local history. (Apparently this one time, a horse fell into the tunnels and wandered through them until it found an entry into someone’s basement. And then went, “Hi! I’m a horse in your basement!” It happened... whenever it was horses still wandered downtown Edmonton.)