How to be One with Nature, or 0.8 at the Very Least

It’s been a while.

I have been, how does one say it?  Communing with nature.  I returned more than a week ago, and it has taken me this long to get the nature out of my hair and tweeds.

Nature:  It gets everywhere.

I shall start at the beginning.

First, the Earth cooled.

Then, in December last year, during Hurricane Emily, The Other One gave birth.

Mazel Tov!

Whap!  Out it popped, with a blue cone-shaped head.  It had been a while since I was backstop for my school’s rounders team, but I think I did an admirable job.  And, as the father was absent, I was the one picked on to cut the umbilical cord.  I was too taken aback by the fact that they seemed like a perfectly ordinary pair of shears from the John Lewis haberdashery department to really notice the cutting bit.  Only afterwards did I wonder if I did it right so as to prevent the occurrence of an ‘outie’.  Ghastly things.

Thankfully, Henry’s offer of his sock-darning skills was gracefully ignored by the midwife.

Things you don’t want to see your father waving
about in the delivery room after you
pushed a small person out of your vagina.

And after what seemed like mere hours, The Other One left for her sunnier pastures across the pond, avec sprog dressed in a babygro advertising Black Sabbath.  It all happened so quickly I can’t remember my grandchild’s name.  Something suitably fashionable, I am sure.  An American state, or country of origin, and/or something spelled with an ‘ri’ instead of a ‘ry’.  And as such, I can’t remember if it was a boy or a girl.

Once The Other One had left Airnefitchie, we closed up her rooms again in preparation for real winter.  The castle was fortified, the Landie’s tyres spiked, and the cellar stocked up.  Henry and I were ready to hibernate.

Then I made the mistake of surfing the Internet.

Perhaps I was at a loose end after having had the ducklings back at the nest, howbeit briefly. I could already have been suffering from cabin fever after Henry, once again, tried to use the washing machine to make hooch whilst the clothes were still in it.  Maybe I was fed up with looking at snow.  I needed an adventure and using a new flavour of pipe tobacco was just not doing it for me anymore.

In any case, my mouse-hand found itself drawn inexorably to a ‘One with Nature’ website, offering touchy-feely holidays: swimming with dolphins in the wild, gorilla-ing in the mist, or watching meerkats in their natural habitat where they don’t wear smoking jackets or squawk at you about car insurance in cod-Bela-Lugosi accents.  It was all just too laughable.

Aye vant to sell you car insewerance.

Until suddenly I thought, Why not?

Which holiday to choose was easy enough.  I don’t swim in the sea, I don’t ‘do’ humidity, and I don’t own a summer wardrobe.  But I do hold certain strong views. 

Yes, that’s right: a bunch of beardie, down-jacketed, undoubtedly fried-chicken-eating conservationists straight out of Never Cry Vole needed someone to help them count pack numbers up in Wood Buffalo National Park.  The park covers an area slightly larger than Switzerland on the border of northern Alberta and the Northwest Territories, making it the largest national park in the world.  Perfect.  As my dear mother used to say: tweed will get you through times of bad weather better than weather will get you through times of bad tweed.  Or something like that.  In any case, I felt fully equipped to survive heavy snowfall and leaky wellies.  I signed up immediately and started packing.

I reached Calgary International Airport in the middle of the night, my jet lag, so far, having been held off by myriad ‘in-flight miniatures’ of gin, coupled with my ability to raise an eyebrow so alarmingly high that no-one dared disturb my long-haul meditation.  I found an appropriately beardie sort of fellow in a long yellow duffel coat (complete with wooden toggles) waiting for me in Arrivals, holding up a brownish cardboard sign marked simply ‘S. Airdale’.  I marched up to him and shook him firmly by the hand, ignoring the faint smell of wet dog and cheap aftershave.  We said our hellos and what-have-yous and went off to find out where the fellow had parked his ghastly Willys Jeep.  His duffel coat was soon explained by the fact that the damned car didn’t have any sides to speak of whatsoever and we were quite open to the elements.

Yes, it’s all good and rustic, but where’s the car?

We Airedales are nothing if not bred from hardy stock.  I sank my hands into my rabbit-fur-lined gloves, popped a tweed holdall half full of silk long johns over my head, buckled in and bore down.  Fortunately we were only going as far as one of the smaller runways.  After a rather exciting and longer-than-expected flight in something called a Beechcraft Bonanza – which Beardie, who was also the pilot, reassured me was older than I was – we somehow arrived at a wooden hut in the middle of nowhere.  Mind you, it did have all the mod cons.  Satellite tracking, wood-burning stove, crates of baked beans, Spam, and trusty bottles of single malt (for the those very cold evenings listening to wolfsong, I dare say).

And straight away I become bosom pals with a very bosomy lady called Agatha.  She reminded me of Matron back at school, but she had a lot more fringe on her clothing, grey dreadlocks and a bigger nose.  Instead of a teaspoon of bitter treacle at the ready for all your ailments, Agatha had dreamcatchers hanging from her ears and spoke of watching out for the spirits of the animals of the park, not just about counting wolf packs.  It seemed like twaddle, but we nevertheless bonded over the 12-year-old Bowmore.

About a week into my sabbatical, Agatha suggested that we girls hike out into the woods for the night and ‘be one with nature’, listen to the wolfsong and (naturally) toast marshmallows.  Well, I suggested the last one, but it was seized upon with great enthusiasm.

Armed with a one-man canvas tent, two bottles of whisky, a bag of marshmallows and a tin of baked beans for breakfast, Agatha and I marched off in the snow and found a nice clear patch under the trees where we could light a fire, dance naked around it and pretend we had turned into wolves.  It reminded me of my university days.

Traffic cones on statues is amateur hour.

[Image: Finlay McWalter]

It was whilst we were dancing naked, or rather, semi-naked (Agatha didn’t really have the guts to take off everything after all), that an actual Chipewyan medicine man passed our way, saw what we were doing and laughed himself silly, before disappearing into the night again.

You don’t have to tell me twice and I reached for my jacket and the bag of marshmallows. Just as Agatha plonked down beside me, we both started feeling a bit peculiar.  It may have been the whisky, it may have been the burnt sugar; it may, indeed, have been the spirit-animals of the National Park.  Who can say for sure?  But all I can remember is snow, bison, fur, howling, running, alpha males, chasing squirrels, and the fact that Canadian spruce-partridges look perfectly normal but in spite of their name taste distinctly, and rather revoltingly, of pine needles.

How dare you!

We were found by the beardie chap, lying in the wood’s undergrowth.  Apparently I was in the foetal position, with only a pine cone to protect my dignity (it didn’t work), and Agatha curled up in a similar fashion behind me.

Rumours abound, I can tell you.  We had been missing for the entirety of winter and spring.  It was now summer.  The conservationists had been tracking two new female wolves when they came across us snoozing it off.  They had found odd animal prints and had some interesting camera footage of two larger, they assumed, wolves running with one of the wolf packs whilst hunting bison.  It was helicopter footage, so it was a bit grainy, but I’m pretty sure one of them was wearing my tweed cap.  The mystery kept them occupied as they assumed Agatha and I had frozen to death and/or had been eaten by bears.  Awfully nice for them to have had that comfort, eh?

We were taken back to the hut and hosed down.  They had kept our clothing for the communal winter wardrobe bin, so I was at least able to put back on my sturdy clothes and start feeling a bit more upright again.  Agatha wasn’t saying much at all, but kept giving me odd looks.

I then took the first flight out of there and got home to find Henry sleeping with Patches and Fang on the kitchen floor, having grown a full beard to his chest and lost his left shoe.  We both seemed to have gone savage without each other: a lovely thought that warmed my sense of homecoming.

Until I found yet more hooch in the washing machine.

Along with Henry’s shoe.