Where They Left it Wild

Listening to Hawksley Workman’s brand new Great Canadian Songquest contribution on the way to work this morning, I forgot I was in Japan for a minute.

The Songquest was a CBC Radio 2 initiative to have 13 Canadian artists from the 13 different provinces and territories write songs to immortalize 13 salient places in Canada. The full list can be found HERE, you can find the podcast of the show HERE (and if it's not up now, it should be soon), and you can download the tracks from iTunes HERE. There was some great stuff in there, but, being a rabid Hawksley fan, I was most excited to hear his contribution, doubly so as the place he’d been paired with was Algonquin Park.

So I was listening to the live stream this morning (your yesterday afternoon), through the wonders of the internet, and I liked Hawksley’s tune so much that I went ahead and downloaded it from iTunes. It starts out as a haunting number, with a vaguely aboriginal beat, and it climaxes in an odd cheery bit with the vivid image of

the moose and the deer come to the side of the road
to eat the salt from the winter
get away from the blackflies
that will kill you come June

before receding to a single, unrepeated statement:

and you realize quickly that its easy just to die
when you don’t got much inside of you that’s wild…

And at that moment, I was no longer in Japan.

I was in Algonquin or Huntville or Mary Lake, or any and all of the cottages I’ve ever been to. I was thinking about the lakes and trees and granite of Ontario, and I had to will myself to remember Japan—and I was almost disoriented when I did. Now, sitting in the Board of Education office with Japanese being spoken around me, I still feel detached. One thing is echoing through my mind: the ghostly refrain from Hawksley’s tune:

It’s where they left it wild.

The experience has left me in a fugue state, my mind wandering and evaluating its identities: me the half-assed pagan environmental crusader, as I expressed in my Sacrifice of Nines bit about the Golden Spruce. Me the City Boy realizing that the City also needs the Wild, as Sarfaraz expressed well in his bit last week about the Bruce Peninsula and Canadian conservation. Me as a boy positively dreading trips up to my father’s cottage off Georgian Bay, where there was no TV and no toilet and no sandy beach and if the mosquitoes didn’t carry you away then the rattlers surely would. Me with my lingering guilt about never loving that cottage as much as Dad and Craig and Alton and Curt and Jill and Eric and Evan and Stephanie did.

It would seem that I’m finally coming around, though. Over the last little while, something in me changed, and I went from loving the city and wanting to spend my holidays in it to loving the city but needing to escape it whenever the opportunity presented itself. Maybe it was Amy and all her outdoor hickery, or maybe it was Lindsay and her house in the woods. Maybe it was a realization come of cottaging with my friends: that you didn’t need comforts as long as you had company and beer and a nice long-drop. Or maybe it was a part of my genes, a legacy from my father the woodsman that had lain latent all these years as I lived in the City, slowly waking and driving me further and further into the woods until my strongest escape fantasies while working a 9-to-5 job took the form of jumping in my car and blazing up the 400 and the 11 and 60—not stopping until I hit the West Gate of Algonquin.

And here, in Japan—with all of its other-worldly wonder of natural hotspings and mountainous volcanoes and aquamarine-blue seas—some of my keenest bits of homesickness come from memories of the lakes of Ontario. Me, the city boy, on some big Japanese adventure, pinning for the very woods that I couldn’t get far enough away from as a child. In my spare time, I find myself idly daydreaming about tours to Haida Gwaii or cross-Canada roadtrips with my brother, wherein Lake of the Woods is as much a destination as Vancouver is.

I’ve still got a long way to go before I wind up a woodsy hermit, squatting in one of the few remaining cottages in Algonquin. But the possibility seems to be more appealing with each passing day, and it’s little ditties like Hawksley’s that remind me of the fact that—like Saff touched on—I need the wild (and maybe the greater We of Canadians need it too).

And I “realize quickly that its easy just to die when you don’t got much inside of you that’s wild…”

Here are the lyrics to the Hawksley tune, if you’re interested. The Ragged reference made me, of course, think of Amy Thede as I wouldn’t know what Ragged Falls was were it not for her. If Simon Ze German is reading this, he should note that Ragged was the frozen waterfall we stood on in our snowshoes, in the dead of February, in snowy Algonquin.

Where They Left it Wild by Hawksley Workman

And on the highway 60 in the middle of the night
on the sides of the roads are the following eyes
and you listen for the calls of the owl and the wolves
and you hang back silent as they fall against the moon

(and you tell yourself)
It’s where they left it wild
It’s where they left it wild
It’s where they left it wild

and then I called to the moose and I called to the deer
and we married in a swamp as the night became clear
and Centennial Ridges tell a story by the lake
and the loon cries hard to the lover that escaped

(and you tell yourself)
It’s where they left it wild
It’s where they left it wild
It’s where they left it wild

and Ragged Falls pour as we tumble in our sleep
and we dream of the beavers who are clogging up the creek
and Tea Lake ripples to the softness from the shore
and you kneel at its beauty and you worship it alone

(and you tell yourself)
It’s where they left it wild
It’s where they left it wild
It’s where they left it wild

And the moose and the deer come to the side of the road
to eat the salt from the winter
get away from the blackflies
that will kill you come June
that will kill you come June
they will change you to a skeleton in the bold wind of June

And the moose and the deer come to the side of the road
to eat the salt from the winter
get away from the blackflies
that will kill you come June
that will kill you come June
they will change you to a skeleton in the bold wind of June

they will kill you come June
they will kill you come June
they will change you to a skeleton in the bold wind of June

and there’s no service here for your mobile phone
and we feel so close here, so far away from home…home…
and you realize quickly that its easy just to die
when you don’t got much inside of you that’s wild…wild…