The ungraspable phantom of life 

by LW Oakley 

We sat above the treetops that morning in April. Three of us looked down from the high granite ridge to the long cedar swamp below.  

Near the shoreline beneath us running out towards the middle of the swamp there was something in the water that looked like a long thin white ribbon.

 The man on my left pointed and said, “Look there must be a beaver swimming across the swamp under water. You can see a line of bubbles on the surface above him.” 

“Those aren’t bubbles you see.” I replied. ‘That’s the white bark of a fallen birch tree lying just beneath the water.” 

Then the man on my right pointed to the sky and asked. “Are you both crazy? That’s a reflection from the wake of the vapour trail left by that jet passing over us.”

 We looked up and down again at the swamp. Then we looked at each other and laughed. 

We had all been looking at the same thing in the water but each of us saw something  different. 

And so it is with life. When we look at life we all don’t see it the same way.  

On that day one man saw the quiet peaceful life of a solitary beaver swimming beneath the still waters of his big pond deep in the woods. It is a world he created. He built a dam to keep water in his pond and he made a lodge to keep predators from his home. 

I saw a dead tree that 1ived its life on the shoreline of the same swamp as the industrious beaver. It put down roots and grew and changed with time. The tree did not fall. It was cut down in the prime of life. Now it was rotting and returning to the earth where its dreams lay buried in a tiny seed that later became the great tree it once was. 

The beaver whittled away at the life and dreams of the tree just as time whittles away at our lives and dreams. But the beaver’s own life will kill him too. 

As he cuts down more trees he will need to travel further from the safety of his pond for the next one. And the wilderness is always watching and listening. One day a pair of sharp ears will hear him gnawing on a tree a long way from the pond. When the yellow eyes beneath those ears look over a distant ridge a coyote will see his chance.  

Then a race will be run which few people see. Fear and hunger compete. The coyote will have a head start and will be running all out before the beaver realizes the race has begun. The beaver must reach the pond before the coyote reaches him.

Nature eliminates the weak but also limits those who become too successful at what they do like the beaver. 

The last man saw a disappearing way of life. Nowadays there are few wild places that the civilized world does not touch in some way. Our lookout is no exception. In time the technology that made the wake will leave a mark on the wilderness that won’t drift off in the sky or fade away from the swamp.  

Civilization is slowly whittling away at the edges of the disappearing wilderness just as the beaver whittles his way around the outside of a tree. But there are no predators to limit the destruction caused by civilization.

  Eventually the pond and the tree and the beaver and the coyote and the natural order that connects and controls will be gone like many of the wild places where they once existed. 

In their place you will see sub divisions and strip malls and parking lots and paved streets that look like other sub divisions and strip malls and parking lots and paved streets. No matter where you go or what you look at everything will seem the same.  

Not like that morning in April on the ridge in the woods over the swamp.     

 LW Oakley lives in Kingston and is the author of Inside The Wild available at the publisher’s website www.gsph,com