Went out the door Sunday with potatoes in mind.
Not onions. Not yet. But soon.
The potatoes? They’ve cracking their way up out of the long mounds, each day a few more dark green clusters unfolding, like verdant hands opening from small angry fists.
But I didn’t make it to the garden. On the step, from in back by the brook, I heard heavy equipment working, the screech of excavator jaws on stone, the grunt and heavy shift of big hydraulics at play. (Sunday work is sometimes the kind of work you do when you think you can get it done before anyone can stop you or ask to see a permit.)
Saturday, I’d been down a dirt road where heavy equipment had stormed through for a few kilometres, seemingly only for the sport of pushing raw clay into the trees; there was no apparent gain to widening a road to nowhere.
So I went down the driveway and around the old rail bed to see who was digging, where and maybe why.
The bowl of the bay had filled up with the fog, the grey-white softness filling in each finger of water and stretching up the lowlands along the brooks and streams. High ground was converted to peaked islands, the tendrils running inland fast along the watercourses. The woods behind the house were full of mist, and sound was strange. The sharp clank of metal hand tools from places hidden in the grey, but where I knew there was only close-packed alder, bog and pink-burning rhodora, the rasp of gravel being shovelled into plastic buckets that I knew was coming from my neighbour’s (because I’d seen him, shovels and buckets in hand) but that sounded like it was coming from the hills.
Once out of the fog, I found the excavator, at least two kilometres away, expanding the sod farm. Laughed at myself a little, for forgetting so completely that you can’t always believe your ears.
I love that about fog — when you learn, again, it’s not only your vision that’s obscured. That things are not what they seem.
Just the way it’s easy to get the wrong impression when you are blocked from seeing someone’s intent.
Intent’s important right now. This is a hard and changing time, an overdue time — there are many wrongs to be righted in our culture, and much heavy lifting. That heavy lifting gets lighter with every set of hands that can be drawn in to help the cause.
And harder with every set of hands that is dismissed.
I love that about fog — when you learn, again, it’s not only your vision that’s obscured. That things are not what they seem.
Belittling, bullying and attacking the people who are trying to understand the current great surge of voices — especially if you are doing it just to build up your own credibility — does nothing to help the cause. It damages it. It damages it from within, because it means allies eventually recognize that they have to spend time fearing each step, looking over their shoulder at their compatriots. And from without, because it takes those who would be allies and pushes them firmly away.
Callout culture may well have a place — but it’s like sounds from the fog.
It’s often not coming from where you think it is — from an open-hearted desire for change — but instead miles away from there, from ground where someone is resolutely using the heavy machinery for their own decidedly personal ends.
One last thought on potatoes.
Salting the earth indiscriminately is not a great plan for growing future crops, or, for that matter, for making fists open up into hands.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire newspapers and websites across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky.
