Walking and Connection

A few years ago, writer and naturalist Trevor Herriot fell off of a ladder. Well, maybe it’s not the fall so much as what he was doing up on the roof of his house: killing pigeons. The pigeons were nesting in a hard-to-reach spot next to one of the dormers, and their presence had led to an infestation of bird mites in the second floor of the house. So the pigeons had to go. That’s what Herriot was doing on the roof of the house when his ladder slipped out from underneath him and he landed on the front lawn.

This accident led to a kind of mid-life crisis. What was a man who had written a book about prairie songbirds, who had a regular guest spot on the local CBC station answering questions callers asked about birds, doing killing pigeons? Was his loss of balance on that ladder a metaphor for a larger loss of balance in his life? Despite his attempts to live in harmony with nature and in communion with other people, was he really that different from those who don’t question our culture’s lack of connection and community?

Herriot went on a vision quest–three days sitting on a prairie hill top without food or water–and then walked for three days on a 40-mile pilgrimage to his family’s weekend home, east of the city, in an attempt to answer these questions. (The Biblical echoes are accidental, I think, but important.) His recent book, The Road is How: A Prairie Pilgrimage through Nature, Desire, and Soul, is a chronicle of his search for answers. The focus is primarily on his walk: not just the walk, but what he thought about as he trudged down grid roads and waded through sloughs. It’s a very personal book in which Herriot lays bare his various failures to live up to his ideals or his ethical standards. We learn about his relationship with his wife, Karen; about his friendships; about his past. I know Trevor slightly, and I was surprised to discover that he is so hard on himself and so skeptical about what he has accomplished. Perhaps this is simply a book about a good man who wants to be better.

Herriot’s walk is relatively short, but it runs across country that is inhospitable to travel by foot–or is nowadays, anyway. It’s not that the prairies hereabouts are flat, that the mosquitoes are ferocious, that farm dogs are dangerous, that there’s nowhere to get water–although all those things are true. It’s that nobody walks in this part of the world. Nobody would consider doing what Herriot did. If you want to walk, to hike, you go somewhere else–to the mountains, or some sacred path in some other part of the world. But Herriot wanted to walk on the land he knows well, on the land he’s worked to understand over the last 30 years or so. And in many ways, his walk is a response to something the late Bob Boyer (a Métis-Cree artist famous for his blanket paintings) said during a panel discussion about the Qu’Appelle Valley, the subject of Herriot’s first book. “I don’t know what all this crap is about the valley,” Boyer had said. “What’s the big deal? It’s no holier than any other place. It’s all sacred ground. All of it.” Herriot’s walk is an attempt to take Boyer seriously, to treat this tamed and humbled landscape, this damaged ecosystem, as if it were sacred ground.

As he walks, Herriot thinks about the connection between men and women (his main example, of course, being the connection or lack thereof between himself and Karen), about the connection (or lack of it) between our culture and the environment, about the way most of us are disconnected from the food we eat and the places where it was grown or raised. But primarily he thinks about himself, his own behaviour, and the ways he is or isn’t connected to the world around him. “Any aspirations I may have to safeguard wild places, grow gardens, and build community stand little chance of success if I cannot do a better job of tending to the holiest of connections, my sexual bond with the feminine (a bond with one woman in fidelity is a bond with all women in forbearance), and then, falling out of that primary bond, all of the others: with family, community, land,” he writes. “If I can set aside transcendence and union on some other plane, I might find ways to receive the gift of peace hidden within forbearance and continence on this plan, the gift of freedom hidden within the paradox of self-sacrifice.”

I’ve read this book twice, and while I enjoyed it, there are times that I want to argue with its author, too. For instance, Herriot recalls taking two acquaintances out of the city to see the birds in a nearby slough. His companions were amazed at the number of birds. “I saw all that was missing and they saw all that was there,” he writes. “And instead of complaining, they were utterly grateful, part of them bowing inwardly to each creature, each field of cut hay, or barn, or row of fence. I don’t know if I have ever felt that deep receiving thankfulness, but in that moment it seemed like a faculty I had lost and wanted dearly to have back again.” Of course, he knows what is missing because he has been studying this place for ages and has seen the number of birds decline as their habitat disappears under the pressure of industrial agriculture. His companions could experience that deep gratitude because they only know what is there, not what used to be there. Their approach to the land is innocent; his is experienced. Perhaps the only way for Herriot to experience that level of gratitude would be to go somewhere he doesn’t know very well, to walk somewhere new and strange, like one of the sacred paths he describes as “spiritual tourism.” I know a little about this from experience. Here, if I’m walking and I see, say, yellow sweet clover, I turn away from its yellow blossoms, its scent, because it’s an introduced weed. But in Spain, if I saw yellow sweet clover, it didn’t matter. For all I know, it’s always been there. It belongs in a way it doesn’t on the North American prairies. And even if it doesn’t, I don’t know any better, and so I was able to enjoy it, to be grateful for it.

But I like this book. In fact, in late May, after I finished it for the first time, I walked part of Herriot’s route, down a grid road known as Old Highway 16, past sloughs and pastures full of waterfowl and songbirds (undoubtedly not as many as there once were, of course). I encountered an angry dog and saw some roadkill and noted what Wascana Creek looks like when it’s outside the city. I walked as far as the gas bar owned by a local First Nation, where I bought some bannock and ate my lunch on the same bench where Herriot ate his. “You’re not that guy who walks out to Cherry Lake, are you?” the gas attendant asked me. “No,” I answered, “but I read his book.”