Step out of yourself to truly take in nature

Please forgive me — I don’t get out nearly enough.

So when I do, it can have an over-large effect on me.

Trees somehow become more than trees — new paths are immediately stories unfolding. Flowing water requires stopping, to just listen. An unfamiliar bird call means freezing in place.

It makes me wake up, suddenly alert, as though I’d been sleeping through too many of my days — too much of my life — and, at once, I’m seeing, hearing, noticing things in a way I often no longer do.

About two weeks ago, we got to head to a piece of land owned by friends a short drive outside of Saskatoon. When we arrived, a bald eagle lifted from a treetop perch next to the thread of the road, leaving a single falling feather behind to catch in eager alder fingers.

I’ll just say it’s somewhere near Rosthern. An old river lot, fenced but undeveloped, laid out in a natural pattern. Woodlands — bur oak, poplar, ash — and open grassland. A cycle of growth, death, decay and regrowth offers up its well-worn lesson on every square metre.

It’s a piece of land that hasn’t seen much farming, standing as it does on great berms of sand that sometimes slump into the river when erosion messes with their particular angle of repose.

There’s a cabin, standing straight and true and simple near a stand of huge, planted spruces. No electricity, no running water. A propane stove, an icebox that once took a block of ice. The cabin’s comfortable, once the woodstove has warmed it.

This time of year, the colour palette outside has plenty of whites and greys and blacks. The sedge-yellow of the wintering grasses dominates.

There’s a steep-sided gorge down to the South Saskatchewan River, formed by the drainage that comes out under the high bank of the beaver dam at the bottom of a series of shallow interlocked marsh ponds. You can use the gorge to carefully make your way down to the edge of the river, where you can stand and watch the river’s flow for as long as you like.

The river doesn’t care: not about you, not about anything.

Cakes of thin river ice mash together so every irregular shape of flat ice is edged all around with mounds of crushed slush. The ice heads downriver, uncaring, often turning individually in weak gyres.

The marsh ponds, meanwhile, march away uphill and to the west from the river.

The ponds are all threaded on the upper side — one that could perhaps be called their headwaters — with myriads of small, curling inlet streams weaving through wet ground. From the satellite, they look like the pattern of veins and capillaries on the back of your hand, heading towards what would be a pool at the arrival of your wrist.

It was warm then, but with some fallen snow on the ground, hardly deep enough to soak the cuffs of your jeans, old snowfall already aging to rounded refrozen blobs, the flakes all shedding their arms.

It’s a place of footprints, some easy to decipher, some much harder.

Here, a coyote has chased a big rabbit, a pell-mell sprint-and-follow across open ground, jinking and cutting through low brush, all the tracks sharing that single same determined line that ends with escape or capture, no middle ground. The final outcome? Unclear. There, the dizzying and frenetic foot-web tracks of squirrels, engaged in the involved confusion that is, well, squirrels. There are the berms of the sand burrowers, loose and brand-new looking.

Those were the simple tracks.

The older ones were left by humans. On one piece of high ground, well back from the river and far from the cabin, a straight-sided rectangle is cut into the turf. I’m a firm believer that perfect rectangles rarely just happen.

No sign of what it had been, no foundation stones or anything else, just a roughly six-by-10-foot hole that looked down and out over the curve of the wetlands below, and then also out across the flatlands, the river in the distance.

It screams that people made it, but with no way to tell when or why.

Near the cabin, other foundation-type signs — a rectangle that might have been a shed or coop, another one cut back deep into the edge of the high top of the riverbank, something, if I’d seen it in an Atlantic province, I would be certain had been a root cellar.

There was once a farmhouse on the ground, most likely set into the windbreak of spruce. There’s one lonely standing SaskTel telephone pole there, another on its side nearby, in a section of land eroded by the beavers’ enterprising waterworks.

All of it alive. All of me alive, taking it all in, every one of my senses working, and delighted to be doing just that.

There — something as simple as a lone blue jay, tilting its head at the curiosity that was me.

And that was only daylight. We couldn’t stay.

I can only imagine the riot of stars, the northern lights, the great and lonely rising moon.

I think we need the outside, the outdoors, to be well.

I know I do.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at winnipegfreepress.com/russellwangersky