FOXES AND WHAT THEY MIGHT MEAN

At some point most days I walk north along Rideau St and then down towards the old Woollen Mill, which is all shut up. My gym is in there, along with the local newspaper, a lawyer or two, a spa and a climbing gym. I loop that grand old building to get to where the willows swoon over the Cataraqui River. I can see though the windows that the River Mill restaurant still has white cloths on all the tables. The prospect of a sit-down meal is so remote now that it seems more like a film scene in which a roomful of ghosts has died. 

Next door, there are spots where the steel fence into the brownfield site that was the Davis Tannery has been cut open. There are muddy rabbit tracks that offer glimpses through the trees of tents, and pallets dragged into the woods like bodies, perhaps to keep bedding and clothes, food even, off the wet ground. At the north-west corner I turn onto the K & P Trail and head for Belle Park. In the late 1970s the city built a sad-sack 9-hole golf course atop a decommissioned city dump here. The course was put out of its misery a couple of years back and its thick yellow meadows are a fantastic place to get away now, and they shelter not just the occasional ticked-off pheasant but frequent rising clouds of blackbirds.

When they say that the wildlife is coming back I don’t know if it’s true or if we are just finding time to better explore our cities, to see the things we rushed past in blinkered fashion just a few months ago. But there really are foxes under the old sheds down at the downtown yacht club this week, even if there aren’t dolphins in the Venice canals, and I know I find a weird sort of solace in that fact. Most nights there is a car parked at the end of that dead-end street, its occupants focused on the den’s entrance as intently as if Bill Murray is about to appear from the dark hole in some fantastic reboot of Groundhog Day.

There are bedraggled osprey atop their poles at Belle Park, and one of them this week was up there tearing apart a sparrow, snapping its see-through ligaments as if they were the little elastics inside some wind-up toy from a Kinder egg. Swans have laid down a nest of woven reed-stems behind the beaver lodge. One of the pair roosts while the other is a gliding sentry at the mouth of the open water. There are deer on Belle Island proper. Any other year I’d have missed all of these things. I’d have been too busy running with clients from house to house, and sweating after-hours on contracts both fruitful and fruitless. Would I rather be doing that again now? Leading my old life, frustrating and fulfilling in equal parts? Yes, please.

A month ago I thought I might be able to write my way through this. Get a decent draft of the next novel finished. But that was before the fog of days settled over me, and the weird, idle sort of busy-ness that comes when four people must learn to live with each other in a whole new way.

Wherever you look there are people melting down. They wring their hands in online chatrooms and proclaim that they would rather die than suffer in isolation this way. Their suffering - often nothing more than no beer, no barbecues, some mild personal hardship - seems to me a tantrum it might have been possible to suppress in the face of the many thousands dead. But people rush to the scene anyway, weighed down with armfuls of encouragement and even gentle remonstrations, anything to light a fire, to buy this poor soul another week or two. I suppose it’s what friends do.

I try not to read this sort of thing. I find it disheartening. The symptom of another problem I’d rather not face. But I return to it at night when everyone has gone to bed. I measure their panic and their politics against my own (of course I do). And in this terrifically trying moment, it sometimes seems to me that the earth is populated by only three sorts as far as this crisis is concerned: a couple dozen real monsters, a few million frontline workers doing the real heroic work, and some seven billion lightly medicated moralists.

There is everything on these walks to Belle Park and back. An empty pink milk bag had snagged the other morning at the swamp’s edge and looked for all the world like a fresh scab peeling from some swimmer’s wet limb. I stood staring at it for what felt like hours. (This odd compression and elongation of time, as if it is a sort of taffy, is one of the more remarkable changes I’ve noticed). There is generous behaviour (the little curbside libraries stuffed with food now as well as books) and selfish (the stream of cyclists rattling along the footpaths with no respect for personal space).  There is the train of shopping carts lined up at the foot of River St, as if the entire population might be on the move. There is the flight of the osprey as it approaches its nest, wings out and hanging nearly still in the air, as if re-enacting some avian crucifixion. There is sunlight slivered between a grid of poplars. And off in the middle distance there is heavy machinery still tamping down the footings for a third crossing over the Cataraqui River. A bridge is what they’re building; a way, they tell us, to get from here to there.

Belle Park