PHOTO GALLERY - Pacific Rim Biome
THREE STORIES OF THE BOG
Quicksand in the Qu’Appelle Valley
The very word bog takes me into my grandmother’s story of the gelding of Kâ-têpwêt, one late spring morning in 1920. My grandmother was homesteading near Nokomis and would visit friends in the Qu’Appelle Valley, the strange humps of land looking like a miniature range on the prairie that would forever confuse the eyes with flatness. The winters were like no others she had endured in her native home of Winsford, Cheshshire, but she was a woman of quiet comforts and did not speak of hardships or droughts. The silence of her eyes told all.
The gelding was fresh with spring air and broke loose from the owner’s corral. He found his way over the hummocks on to Evan’s section and was grazing on a welcome patch of alfalfa. Then he spooked by Brett Evans’ tractor, galloping into the next field. The family kept ties around the perimeter of quicksand, a liquefied portal that was no good for any farmer or his family. But the gelding flew past the ties and the lines and soon was up to his gaskins in the boggy embrace of fluid sand.
What next? I asked my grandmother, who told the story slowly, not wanting to imagine the plight of the horse, or the tears of Emely Evans, who knew the gelding from the neighbouring farm and favoured him with carrot tops and over-ripened apples. Horses will not die a slow death, she uttered. The gelding didn’t wait until the quicksand took his whithers or even his flanks. The gelding could see his own end before it arrived. Deliberately, bravely and with a finality that didn’t beg a second chance, the gelding dove his head into the opaque chute of murk and did not draw back for air. His body toppled, hindquarter buckling as the bog swallowed him whole like a field snake swallows a vole. Only his tail, a beautiful roan, remained on the surface, still glistening with early morning sunlight. Only a trace, like an elegant fan, dancing on a russet lake.
Museo de las Momias – Guanajuato
“Throughout history, throughout the cultures of the world, death has held an important significance: to transcend, that is to say, it is merely the body that dies, whilst the spirit lives on and so transcends… For these reasons, every kind of ideology, regardless of its social and historic context, has always utilized that longing for immortality, that fear of oblivion, or simply fear itself, in order to distort… or play upon the ephemeralness of being, or of ceasing to be.” Arturo Oliveros, Las Momias de Tlayacapan
We took the second class Flecha Amarilla bus from San Miguel de Allende to Guanajuato, boarding mid-morning and crossing the arid landscape north. The sun was at its height when we arrived, pressing a sharp claw into my forehead as I disembarked into the dusty street. Guanajuato is nestled into the steep slopes of a rivine, with underground tunnels providing a labyrinth of streets. Orientation was impossible as we moved through the confusion of colonial buildings, zocalos and callejones – the maze of narrow, crooked alleys winding up the hills from the town’s centre. Positos 46 marked the birthplace and museum honouring Diego Rivera, but what really brought me to Guanajuato was the famous Museo de las Momias, at the cemetery on the lower southern slope of Trozado Hill. The high mineral content of the soil, rich in lime and clay, and the dry atmospheric conditions of the region allowed for the preservation of bodies. Mummification takes only five years in these perfect conditions. When relatives of the deceased failed to pay an annual grave tax, the body was exhumed and if it was “museum quality”, it was displayed.
We entered the crypt-like building, paying 5 pesos at the gate. Cameras were allowed for an additional 2 pesos. The mummies are some of the strangest ones ever seen on display. “La momia mas poquena del mundo”, the smallest mummy in the world, was separated from her mother, who resides in an adjacent hall. Both died during the cesarean section birth. The babes were considered “little angels”, free from all sin. They were dressed as the saints that they worshiped – Saint Martin de Pobres or the Virgin Mary, with remnants of rag dolls or favorite toys still by their side. With shoes or no shoes, with torn clothes or formal attire, mummies of the aged or the young were grouped in glass cases, sometimes stacked in twos, and sometimes standing. There was the mummy of Ignacia Aguilar, a woman said to be buried alive, her arms above her head with scratch marks on her forehead. There was the laughing mummy of Don Justo Hernandes, the Landowner. There was the oldest mummy, Remigio Leroy, the French Doctor, buried in 1865. As we moved deeper into the museum halls, more and more bodies lay crowded and grimacing under poor lighting. The air was getting closer, causing my travel companion to finally bolt for the door to find air and light.
I stayed back, pondering the words of Arturo Oliveros. My own obsession with death, the Day of the Dead, and the speculations on the soul intensified while I was working on a poetic narrative involving the monarch butterfly migrations to Michoacan, Mexico. I had stumbled on Jill Leslie McKeever Furst’s book “The Natural History of the Soul in Ancient Mexico” in the stacks of the U.B.C. library and it was like finding gold teeth in a peat bog. She introduced me to the “Bird of the Heart” – “a small bird that lived near the ocean in a southern province of Teotlixco, and the people of that region believed the hearts of the dead transformed into these winged creatures. Some yolias (souls) transformed specifically into “birds of the heart” but others took the physical form of other winged creatures. In the Florentine Codex, Sahagun says that, four years after death, the dead became hummingbirds, other birds with precious feathers, or a wide variety of butterflies that drank the nectar of flowers.”
The other half of my journey that year involved the arduous bus ride to Angangueo, whose name in the Tarascan language means “entrance to the cave”. The quaint village provided a comforting base camp leading to the Santuario de Mariposas El Rosario. At an elevation of 10,000 feet, and well past the season of tourists, my companion and I rode in a cattle truck up to the Oyamel forest of the sanctuary. We were the only visitors, apart from the acres of monarch corpses carpeting our path; those creatures that mated, then died after a long winter’s hibernation, assured that their future descendants would find their way back to the 49th parallel and beyond. The Aztec believed Monarch butterflies to be the incarnation of their fallen warriors wearing the colours of battle.
After we left the mummies of Guanajuato, and while traveling back to our artist’s studio in San Miguel, I felt the beginnings of a fever. I stuck my head out of the bus window to cool my forehead but nothing took the heat away. The illness progressed over the next few days to a pitch of delirium and I was taken to the chemist for medicine. The oddest symptom was a faint, almost tattoo-like rash on my thighs which would bleed when I was in water. Months later, I was diagnosed with yersinia, a relative of yersinia pestis, commonly knows as The Plague.
There have been times when swarms of passing monarchs have frightened people. A report was filed in Pennsylvania in 1892 describing a phenomenal event when “a two hour flow of millions of butterflies became a living, breathing, palpitating picture”. The red excreta during first flight looked like a shower of bloody rains. Witnesses mistook it for cholera germs. It was 1850 when a cholera morbus outbreak inspired the creation of Guanajuato’s municipal cemetery.
And finally, what brought the imagery full circle for me was Furst’s depiction of lividity: “Appearing as a butterfly-shaped spot on the back of the corpse, the metaphor of the bird in the heart describes how a human being dies. The modern pathology textbook says that lividity is evident when the heart ceases and the blood settles into the lower sections of the body. The Nahuatl speaker says that the bird of the heart has flown. In their own ways, both are quite accurate.”
When I travel with my mind’s eye back to the catacombs of Guanajuato, I meet both the dancing eyes of the mummies and the effortless wings of the mariposa monarcha. I believe the animating force we called the soul, the Tonalli of Ancient Mexico, takes flight and brings us to our true nature, the centre we call oneness in the east, completion in the west, and love in the universe.
The Pacific Shorepine Bog
The Shorepine Bog of Pacific Rim National Park was one of the first places I explored after walking the mesmerizing miles of crashing surf at Long Beach. Only a few hundred meters up from the waves at Wikininnish Beach, the bog presents an eerie cemetery of the natural world, where hidden species of flora have adapted to the sterile conditions of this 400 year old sphagnum moss bed. Here, the Lilliputian pines, looking more like giant broccoli stands, have grown up from the carpets of moss. On the open bog, dwarf plants, which would prosper in the neighbouring rain forests, appear like west coast bonsai – Sun Dew, Bog Cranberry, and Sweet Gale. Not far away in the muskeg forest, the ground is slightly higher than the bog, allowing for better drainage and nutrients to thrive, and here the land is dominated by western red cedar and hemlock. Hummocks form at the base of trees, looking like tiny islands in a sea of bog. Salal and dwarf dogwood have a chance of survival under these slightly dryer conditions.
One footstep off the boardwalk trail and years of struggle and growth can be crushed. When freezing weather occurs, bog plants are veiled in a layer of icy lace. Spring flowers and fall berries splash the bog canvas with colour amidst the never-ending spectrum of green. The true harbinger of spring, Lysichiton americanum, or skunk cabbage as it is commonly known, displays its fast growing yellow torch and hood. The protective hood conserves the plant’s heat, dissipating the familiar odour which attracts pollinating insects. Only the American Robin and Stellar’s Jay have adapted in the bog lands with little food or cover. Deer, cougar, wolves and bear use the bog as a shortcut to better eating grounds.
It was on one of my solitary visits that I encountered the unhappy black bear. Signs had been posted, warning visitors of his presence. The bog trail was cordoned off by park officials for fear of a bear attack. I arrived at the entrance and heard strange and unfamiliar sounds in the bush. Then I saw him, moving like a black furry tank towards the road, visibly foaming at the mouth with his head swaying back and forth in the rhythm of a pendulum. I remained in my car but was moved to take his photograph as he snarled my way, not stopping but lumbering forward on the road to Wickininnish Beach.
That night, I dreamed myself deep in the bog trail, waking unknowingly toward the jaws of this black creature, stepping off the boardwalk just in time to transmute my body into the shape of a giant broccoli shorepine, living forever after in the cemetery of this natural world.
