I picked up Emma Jane Kirby’s The Optician of Lampedusa: A Tale of Rescue and the Awakening of Conscience in Otis and Clementine’s, the used bookstore/café/cat rescue I visited in Upper Tantallon, Nova Scotia. I thought it might be a book at least tangentially related to walking–or perhaps walking-adjacent–because the refugees fleeing Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria ten years ago walked to ports in western Turkey and then got on overloaded boats to Greece, sometimes drowning when those boats capsized. Any time I think about those journeys, I realize how privileged I am to be able to choose to go on long walks, and to have the ability to wear appropriate shoes and carry my things in a backpack, instead of wearing whatever was on my feet when I fled, and keeping the few possessions I have left in a plastic shopping bag.
However, while The Optician of Lampedusa is, as I suspected, about refugees fleeing their unsafe home countries for Europe, I had the location and the country of origin wrong, because I didn’t know where Lampedusa is. It’s an Italian island off the coast of Tunisia, and the refugees in question are Eritreans. I don’t know how they got from Eritrea to the coast of northern Africa, although it’s possible that they walked part of the way. I didn’t know Eritrea was a vicious dictatorship then, and I don’t know if it still is so terrible that its citizens will risk anything to escape.
The Optician of Lampedusa is a nonfiction novel, given the level of detail in the story it tells. It focuses on the experience of, not surprisingly, an Italian optician who lives on the island–a finicky man who likes things to be just so, giving us the kind of access to his thoughts and feelings that are characteristic of fiction rather than nonfiction. The optician, his wife, and six friends are on a sailboat, enjoying a weekend pleasure cruise, when they encounter hundreds of refugees whose boat has sunk. The eight Italians are able to save 47 people, but another 368 drown. Their own boat, which was intended to carry a maximum of ten passengers, is nearly swamped under the additional weight, but they would’ve continued trying to save the refugees from the sea anyway, except that when an Italian coast guard ship arrives, the crew tells them to stop. Among other things, it’s illegal–it was at the time, and remains illegal now, too, for all I know–for private individuals to interfere when boats carrying refugees sink: the reverse of a Good Samaritan law. The rescuers aren’t charged, perhaps because the event generates so much media coverage, but still, they are traumatized by the experience–by the number of people they can’t save, and by their sudden realization of how immensely privileged they are. The optician recalls how the experience makes the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean Sea, something he had ignored previously, tangible:
But he could not ignore the fact that the waving hands had always been visible to him. They had waved in the water, yes, but they had also waved from the reception centre, from the church steps and from the roadside where he had jogged past them, blindly. They had waved from the newspaper columns and from the television screens where he had filtered them out and switched them off. They had always been in his line of vision and he had chosen not to see them.
The fact that the main character is an optician is obviously symbolic, but the acknowledgements in the back of the book indicate that actually was the man’s profession. No doubt, though, that’s the reason Kirby chose to write about his experience–or at least part of the reason for that decision.
This is a quick, vivid read, and although the use of British slang to translate what the Italian characters say is sometimes a little jarring, the prose is lucid and affecting. It made me wonder about Canada’s decision to continue pretending that the United States is still safe for refugees under the Canada-United States Safe Third Country Agreement, despite the Trump administration’s behaviour towards noncitizens. Of course we would risk further tariffs and other retaliation from the Americans if we were to centre our foreign policy on ethical or moral grounds, and enough Canadians are upset about all the newcomers arriving here that they’d vote for the Conservatives (or did in the last election) if the Liberals didn’t reduce the number of people we accept, so there are economic and political reasons for pretending that the U.S. isn’t dangerous to migrants–and to its own citizens, too: we can probably expect 2SLGBTQ+ folks to begin crossing the border, for instance, the way that high-profile academics have done. It might be easy to ignore the humanity of those seeking shelter with us, as the optician did, but perhaps, as he discovered, once we experience the truth that they’re just like us, only not as lucky, we might find that turning a blind eye to them is no longer possible.
I bought David A. Robertson’s 52 Ways to Reconcile: How to Walk With Indigenous Peoples on the Path to Healing at the airport in Winnipeg, which is a) appropriate, since he lives here, and b) good news, because it’s an important book that deserves a wide distribution (it’s published by an imprint that used to be Canadian-owned and is now part of Penguin Random House, which no doubt makes it easier to get airport shops to stock it).
52 Ways is intended for settler descendants who want to do something to advance reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples but don’t know where to start. Robertson doesn’t like the term “reconciliation”—he argues that there’s never been a good relationship we can return to—but he says that doing something is more useful than arguing about semantics, which might be surprising, coming from a writer, but which also makes a lot of sense.
You’re not supposed to read the book as I did, in one sitting, although Robertson’s friendly, even breezy tone makes that pretty easy. Instead, each short chapter makes a suggestion about things one can do, from starting an Indigenous book club, reading Indigenous comics, or wearing an orange shirt on Orange Shirt Day (all relatively easy to accomplish), to tasks that are more difficult: learning the difference between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation, reading the mammoth Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Final Report, and understanding one’s privilege. Easy or hard, simple or complicated, Robertson approaches every topic with generosity and openness. “We gave to allow ourselves to make mistakes,” he writes; “it’s the only way to improve and grow.” I’ve seen similar openness in other Indigenous writers—Louise Halfe, Willie Ermine, Dwayne Donald—and it always impresses me.
Robertson recently published an op-ed in The Globe and Mail which was in part (I think: I haven’t compared them side by side) taken from this book’s introduction. The response: racist abuse. He posted on social media about that reaction. Honestly, it makes me wonder what is wrong with people. With my people, that is. People who can’t see how they’ve benefited from this country’s ongoing colonial abuse of Indigenous Peoples, who refuse to acknowledge our history here. I suppose they can’t accept the truth.
The book’s last chapter invites readers to pass it along to others. That’s how I’ll use it. When non-Indigenous students feel shamed and overwhelmed by Indigenous texts, especially ones about residential schools, I’ll recommend 52 Ways. “Pick one thing,” I’ll suggest. “You don’t need to try to do all 52. Just pick one.” The antidote to that kind of shame, I think, is action. Robertson has set out a smorgasbord of possibilities. Which one will I take on next?
I bought David Orr’s The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong in Otis and Clementines, a used bookstore in Upper Tantallon, Nova Scotia, which also facilitates cat adoptions and has a café. The book looked interesting for three reasons. I had recently skimmed an article about Robert Frost in The New Yorker, in which I learned about the widespread perception of Frost as a “monster,” something Orr traces to the discord between Frost and his first biographer, Lawrance Thompson, whose three-volume work is, Orr writes, “scathing toward Frost , worse . . . scathing without quite seeming to want to so.” For more than 50 years, Thompson’s version of Frost dominated thinking about the poet, as if in response to way he was lionized while he was alive. Second, I was curious about how Orr might fill an entire book—a short one, but still—with a discussion of one 20-line poem. And, finally, I was at the end of a 100-kilometre walk, and I realized “The Road Not Taken” is, at the most superficial level, a poem about a walk. That’s the context of the decision that the speaker makes between the two roads—something that would’ve been obvious to its first readers, but which we might be likely to miss since few of us walk anywhere these days. The “traveler” who chooses the road that “was grassy and wanted wear / Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same” was on foot, and the “step” that hadn’t darkened the leaves covering either road would’ve been human, had it existed. Those lines in the poem’s second and third stanzas show, as Orr notes, that the speaker’s claim to have chosen “the one less traveled by” makes little sense. Those two roads, as generations high school valedictorians and advertisers have missed, appear more or less identical, according to the speaker’s description of them.
That detail is only one of the poem’s perhaps surprising complexities. Orr works through it carefully in a chapter that’s a masterpiece of close reading. He also situates the poem within Frost’s life and particularly his friendship with the English poet Edward Thomas, who apparently provided Frost with a reason for writing it. But Orr’s take on “The Road Not Taken” goes beyond the poem itself into the idea of individual choice in America culture and the interdisciplinary field of choice, which I didn’t realize existed, and philosophical perspectives on the self. Does the self exist as a “unified, continuous entity,” as most of us experience ourselves, or is philosopher Derek Parfit’s argument “that we have no self at all, but merely an overlapping succession of mental states” closer to the truth? What role does our cultural framework play in our senses of who we are? Throughout these discussions, Orr continues bringing Frost and “The Road Not Taken” into consideration, as if Frost had anticipated them in his poem.
The book’s epilogue thinks about the crossroads as an emblem of decision-making: it’s, following anthropologist Victor Turner, a liminal space characterized by paradox, duality, performance, and metaphor—the latter both suggestive of doubleness, since a performer both is and isn’t the role they play, and “a metaphor joins two terms so that they both are and aren’t each other.” Performance and metaphor, Orr contends, are “the great engines” of Frost’s poetry, and he is thus “the great poet of the liminal,” whose “natural terrain is the unsettled intersection of opposing paths.” This is all very interesting, but Orr missteps, I think, when he tries to extend the idea of liminality to the United States as a “threshold nation” where immigrants are offered new beginnings. That’s too broad a statement, and in Trump’s America, it’s factually incorrect to say about the majority of newcomers. The exceptions are white South Africans, it seems. All others are subject to arbitrary deportation. Too bad Americans decided to take that particular road. I hope they make a different decision, collectively, at the next place where their road diverges.
Matthew drops me off in the parking lot at Pomquet Beach and wishes me a good walk. I stride down the boardwalk towards the water. That boardwalk saves the dune habitat, mostly blueberries and dwarf spruce trees, from being trampled by visitors. At the beach a sign explains that rare piping plovers nest here, and asks people to avoid walking close to the dunes, where the sand is loose and dry, because that disturbs the plovers. Sometimes people accidentally step on their nests. I do as the sign asks and walk close to the water, where the damp sand holds the footsteps of other creatures, human and otherwise. White-throated sparrows are trying to sing “O Canada.” The sun is surprisingly warm, even now, at 7:00 in the morning; the forecast calls for a hot day. I’m wearing a sweater, but not for long.
Before I left for Nova Scotia, I finished Matthew Anderson‘s book Someone Else’s Saint: How a Scottish Pilgrimage Led to Nova Scotia (my reflections on that book can be found here). I knew as I read that book that when I came to visit Matthew and his wife, Sara Parks, I would repeat the pilgrimage from Pomquet Beach to St. Ninian’s Cathedral that is the subject of a good half of the story it tells. Matthew led a group of people on that pilgrimage back in September 2024; they arrived at St. Ninian’s Cathedral in time for the official celebration of the 150th anniversary of its dedication. I won’t be participating in anything so important. I’ll just be spending the day walking the 25 kilometres or so from this beach to Antigonish.
The waves are hitting the sand with a surprising muffled thump. By the water, seaweed–some bright lime green, some a dark rusty brown–has been left behind by the tide. I step around the low piles of smooth stones beside the water. A pale grey plant, like sage, is growing in the dry sand across the beach, where the dunes and the plovers’ nests begin. One of the plovers flies out over the water. Crows in tall, dead spruces watch me, silent. Fragments of lobsters and crabs, dropped by seabirds in order to break open their shells, exposing the meat inside, litter the sand.
Matthew drove me over the route the day before, so that I would know where to turn, but still I miss the path off the beach. The stick someone planted to mark it blends in with all the other sticks. I retrace my steps through the dunes, watching for plovers’ nests and wondering if ticks live here. Everyone in Nova Scotia seems to be concerned about ticks because of the chance of contracting Lyme disease, and rightly so: it’s not a joke if it’s left untreated. Wikipedia tells me that most infections are caused by deer ticks, which aren’t common back home in Saskatchewan; the only ticks I’ve seen are wood ticks. It also notes that a vaccine was developed 20 years ago, but it was discontinued due to a lack of demand. Why would people prefer to worry about ticks and disease when they could get vaccinated instead? I see the path first, then the stick at the beach end. It doesn’t stand out; I can’t blame myself for missing it.
I march down the footpath onto the gravel road behind. Even though my pack is heavy with snacks, water, and rain gear (the forecast also calls for thunderstorms this morning), I feel strong and energized. I also know that this part of the walk–the beach and the road leading inland–will be the quietest, that as I get closer to my destination there will be more traffic, and so I want to enjoy this part. When we were here yesterday, I took a photograph from the window of the car of a great blue heron standing on a rock, but I don’t notice that bird again today. I do see something that resembles a cormorant swimming in the inlet. Maybe that’s the heron? It dives before I can get another picture. A stiff breeze blowing inland keeps me cool, and a yellow warbler is singing. Ferns, dogwoods, serviceberries, and aspens grow next to the road, along with lupins, of course. Those garden escapees are everywhere in Nova Scotia. So are ox-eye daisies, which are ubiquitous everywhere. I pass the road that leads up to Chez Deslauriers, the Acadian cultural centre. Matthew and I dropped by there yesterday. It was closed, but he took a selfie, or an ussie, as Ted Lasso‘s Jamie Tart would say, of the two of us on its porch.
The sky is clouding over, and I’m glad I brought the rain gear along. My mind is racing along, partly with thoughts about writing this blog post, and I wonder to what extent walking can be meditative. I know it can be, but it takes work. I feel my feet on the firm gravel, saying left, right, left, right to help focus my attention. Then I see three pedestrians ahead of me, where I make my next turn, off the gravel road and onto the paved one, and I stop. I hope I can catch up to them; to walk with someone else, however briefly, would be a welcome change from my usual solitary plodding. My mind immediately leaps to Matthew, who seems to have an innate knack for happiness. I’m not like that. I’m someone for whom happiness, as former journalist turned mindfulness podcaster Dan Harris argues, is a skill that must be laboriously learned. Rather late in life, too, at least in my case.
The pedestrians–three women about my age–are chatting with a motorist who has stopped in the middle of the road, and I catch up to them just as the driver says farewell and moves on. I say hello. They are Audrey, Colleen, and Virginia. They talk about people they know, family and friends, and periodically ask me a question about what I’m doing. They’re all from here, although Virginia has lived in Calgary for 40 years. They make the same walk down this road every day, from their homes to the gravel road and back again. They’re surprised that I’m walking to Antigonish. They used to cycle there, years ago, but I get the sense that the roads have gotten busier than they’d like. One warns me about the traffic volume and speed on Taylors Road. They point out a cottontail–“will that be in your blog?” one asks–but I was scribbling in my notebook and miss it. They walk at a quick pace, and when I stop to take a picture or a note, I fall behind. They walk in the traffic lane, too, which has me worrying about their safety, but they walk here all the time, so they must know what they’re doing. I notice a host of blue flag iris in the ditch, dozens of plants, but I’m not close enough to the women to call their attention to those glorious flowers, and even if I were, I don’t feel like interrupting their conversation. I can keep those flowers to myself.
I take off my pack and slide out of my sweater. I hear what seem to be many different birds, but all day long Merlin tells me that the new songs I think I’ve never heard before are coming from song sparrows. They must have dozens of different songs. Maybe they just improvise. One by one, the women say goodbye and walk up their driveways, and I continue into Pomquet alone. I pass some of the landmarks I saw on my walk the other day–the church, the empty museum, the fire department–and turn on Taylors Road. Two chickens, one black and one orange, are finding something to eat on a lawn, while a robin watches them. I’ve been thinking about the situation in the United States–the way undocumented immigrants are being treated by ICE and the way other people are pushing back–and I find the lyrics to Woody Guthrie’s “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos” on my phone. I know the tune and the chorus, but not the verses, and I decide to teach it to myself as I walk by singing it:
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria You won’t have a name when you ride the big airplane And all they will call you will be “deportees.”
I think about the instability in the song’s use of pronouns. Sometimes the workers who are being deported are referred to as “they,” especially in the first verse; sometimes as “you,” as in the chorus; but most of the time the singer uses the pronoun “we,” putting himself with them and even claiming that his grandfather was an undocumented fruit picker. Is that true of Woody Guthrie? I don’t know. I used to wonder if he’s indulging in a kind of cultural appropriation in the song, but the range of pronouns suggest something more complex is going on. Maybe the speaker–it could be a persona, after all, rather than Guthrie speaking, or singing, directly to us—is using “we” to assert solidarity with the workers? That makes sense to me, but that doesn’t mean it’s the correct interpretation.
Passing motorists–and there are a lot of them: Taylors Road is busy–must wonder why my mouth is moving, who I think I’m talking to, as I sing and walk at the same time. Or maybe they’re travelling too quickly to notice; the speed limit here is higher than on the road that runs through Pomquet. I detour around a tractor mowing the side of the road, breathing in the smell of cut grass, and pass the École Acadienne de Pomquet, where children are crying out joyfully as they play outside, waiting for their days to begin. It must be the last week of classes. I remember what that felt like for me, the mix of relief and anticipation and also sadness, since I knew I would be alone much of the summer. Other children, and a few adults, are on what must be a walking path on the other side of the road that runs to the school, where there’s also a community centre, and I consider crossing over to walk there, but I would have to wade through tall grass, risking ticks again, and if the path ends or turns, I would end up wading back to the road again, so I decide to stay where I am. I step into the ditch to get a photo of a Canadian flag, and notice the thick, spongy moss and bunchberry growing beneath my feet. I’m singing Canadian songs now–Leonard Cohen, Stan Rogers–songs I learned in Spain after someone told me about a communal dinner where everyone was asked to sing a song from their home country. I realized I didn’t know any Canadian songs–not completely–and used the computer at an albergue to look up lyrics and scribble them in my notebook. I practiced them as I walked along until I had them by heart. As it turned out, nobody ever demanded that I entertain them with a Canadian song, but I still remember them, and they help pass the time on these long, solitary walks.
I arrive at a narrow overpass that crosses the four-lane highway to Halifax. There’s barely room for a pedestrian here, and I cross quickly. Road walking can be dangerous. A bumblebee is working on a roadside lupin, and a bullfrog makes its percussive call in a swamp. I make up a chant that lists some of the trees growing here–spruce, alder, dogwood, maple and birch–and then realize I’ve left out the aspens. An explosion of Pokémon cards litters the shoulder, and I wonder why some kid would’ve thrown their collection out of the car window. Maybe their siblings were responsible. Across the road, a billboard displays what I think is supposed to be an albino elk. Do those animals live in this part of the world? I have no idea. The sideroads here have Scottish names, and I remember reading in Someone Else’s Saint that there’s a transition right about here between the Acadian presence in Pomquet and the Catholic Highland Scots near Antigonish. Both of those settler communities displaced the Mi’kmaq who lived on this land, but Paqtnkek Mi’kmaw Nation is not far from here. The name “Pomquet” is a French corruption of their name, which refers to the bay that stretches inland from the Northumberland Strait. In a way, this walk passes through all three communities on its way to the cathedral in Antigonish, which has become important to them. Matthew talks about that in Someone Else’s Saint, and even though this walk won’t change anything about colonialism here or elsewhere, I can recognize that ongoing history. It seems that everyone I’ve met on this trip has read Daniel Paul’s We Were Not the Savages, which suggests that people here are aware of the brutality of English colonization here. The Mi’kmaq were the primary victims, but so too were the Acadians, who returned here after the 1755 expulsion, and the Highland Scots only ended up in this place because of political and economic imperialism in Scotland. We can’t change the past, of course, but we could make the future different. Easier said than done, I know, in our individual lives, never mind in our collective experience, but still, not impossible.
The sun breaks through the clouds and the heat on the back of my neck is shocking. I’ve been walking for about three hours, and figure I’m about halfway to my destination. Matthew asked me to text him so that he could bring me coffee, and I realize I’ve forgotten to do that. He answers right away; he’ll be with me in 20 minutes. Meanwhile I keep walking. I pass a motel and a gas station, and then I cross the Lower South River on a bridge that has a wide, sand-covered sidewalk. The ditch is filled with blue flag and what I think is marsh marigold, although I can’t tell for sure from the shoulder and am not going to climb down to get a closer look. Matthew pulls up. He has coffee and food: a small omelette, a piece of buttered toast, cookies. I haven’t had a second breakfast like this while walking since I was in Spain, and I realize how hungry I am. He draws me a map to complement the one in the invitation on his blog to people who might’ve wanted to participate in the pilgrimage. He showed me the turns I need to make the day before, but even though there aren’t that many, I’ve still jumbled them together in my mind, and the map ought to help. When I finish eating, we say goodbye and I continue walking.
Despite the map, though, I miss the turn into Antigonish, mostly because I’m replying to an email on my phone instead of paying attention to where I am. By the time I realize, with the help of Google Maps, where I’ve gone wrong, I end up having to walk back almost a kilometre to the place I should’ve gone right. I resolve to focus on what I’m doing. Now I’m on the road that leads into Antigonish. It’s a long plod on an uneven shoulder. An osprey flies overhead. Finally I see the sidewalk the map indicates on the other side of the road. I’m looking at the tall trees across the road. A goldfinch flies into traffic, and a dead blue jay, obviously hit by a vehicle, lies next to the sidewalk. A sign asks people to slow down because young foxes are in the area, but I don’t see any. I realize I’ve missed another turn. My wayfinding skills must be terrible, or else I’m looking at everything but the map and the intersections. Missing that turn means, I think, that I’m going to miss another one that takes me through a park almost all the way to St. Ninian’s Cathedral. That’s okay, I tell myself. The sidewalk running along this busy street will be noisier, but I’m in the town now, and I should be able to find my way to the cathedral without much trouble.
I cross a bridge over the North River and reach Main Street, where the signs are bilingual: English and Gaelic. I can see the hospital to the right, and I know from yesterday’s recon that it’s at the opposite end of town from the campus of St. Francis Xavier’s University, where the cathedral is located, so I turn left. I walk through the centre of town. It’s not as pretty as Lunenburg, but it also doesn’t feel like the set of a Hallmark movie, so I like it better. I’ll have to cross the river again to get to the cathedral, and I see a bridge on College Street. St. Ninian’s Street is just past it. And there’s the cathedral: a tall stone building with two spires. I thought I might’ve been able to see those spires earlier, but they’re not as tall as I’d thought.
I make a pit stop in the building named after Brian Mulroney–I’d rather use the facilities there than the ones at the cathedral; that feels more respectful–and then I walk back down the hill and enter St. Ninian’s. Inside, it’s bright and quiet, except for the lawnmower running outside. As Matthew’s book points out, there’s some controversy about whether there actually was a St. Ninian at all. He’s reputed to have brought Christianity to the Scots, but there’s some evidence it was there before he’s thought to have arrived. History can be odd that way. Stories change and get lost, names get confused, and where documentation is incomplete, we end up deciding what version we’re going to believe. It’s enough for me that the people who built this imposing structure thought St. Ninian was real. The priest isn’t around, so I can’t ask what he thinks about that question. I’m sure he must have an opinion.
I sit quietly in a pew towards the back, resting. My phone tells me I’ve walked 27 kilometres, which makes sense. Matthew said the journey was about 25 kilometres, and missing that turn made it a little longer. I feel a telltale tickling on my calf. Sure enough, a wood tick is making its way up my leg. I don’t want to leave it alive in the cathedral–someone will walk out of the next service with a tick latched onto their body–so I kill it. At least, I try to: my first attempts are not successful. I could try to drown him, but the only water around is the holy water, and I’m sure disposing of it there would be considered sacrilegious, but I don’t feel like carrying it uphill to the Mulroney building’s washroom. I leave it in the aisle. It looks dead, but it might be pretending. Slowly, I walk back to Main Street and the Syrian shawarma takeout place, Grape Leaves, where I’m going to have lunch. Matthew joins me there. We eat in a nearby park. I recommend their lemon-mint drink, which is perfect on a hot day.
The other day, Sara called Matthew and me “walking nerds,” which is a fair description. My goal with this walk, and with this blog post, is to encourage other walking nerds to consider making the pilgrimage from Pomquet Beach to St. Ninian’s Cathedral on foot–especially those who have read Someone Else’s Saint. It’s not that long, as long walks go, and there’s something pleasing about turning a written account of a journey into a physical experience. Now I know what the pilgrimage Matthew writes about was like. Or might’ve been like, since walking alone is not the same as walking with other people. Or maybe people will read Someone Else’s Saint and be satisfied with Matthew’s accounts of the two walks he relates, without feeling compelled to re-enact them. That would make sense, too. For most of us, that would make a lot more sense than trudging along the side of the road on a hot day.
I saw C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet on the shelf in the guest room at my friends Matthew and Sara’s place, and I was curious. I read the Narnia books when I was a kid, but I didn’t know Lewis wrote science fiction. It looked short enough that I could finish it before I left, and I did. Also, the story begins with the main character, Ransom, on a walking holiday that reminded me a little of Arthur Wainwright’s account of a walking tour in Yorkshire. Oh, I thought, a book about walking. But that’s not what it is.
Out of the Silent Planet sees life on other planets—Mars in particular—through Christian theology. That planet, like all the others except ours, is run by Oyarsa, a creature kind of like an archangel, who reports to a deity, Maleldil. The angels are able to move between planets, and while they can’t be seen by humans, they can be perceived. Matthew tells me that idea comes from Thomas Aquinas, which makes sense, since Lewis was a medievalist in his academic life.
Three humanoid species, or hnau, other than the angelic eldila, who can exist anywhere, live on Mars, or Malacandra, in the book: the hrossa, the séroni, and the pfifltriggi. They happily coexist, accepting, even celebrating, the differences between them, and happily accepting the rule of the Oyarsa. So other species, on other planets, accept both hierarchy (instead of democracy) and difference. That combination, for Lewis, represents a utopia.
Thulcandra, or Earth, has been influenced by a “bent” eldil, a fallen angel like Satan; the behaviour the humans, or two of them, demonstrate that influence. They are independent or non-state colonialists, partly looking for gold, partly for room for the human species to expand after making Earth uninhabitable. That’s rather prescient for a book first published in 1938. One of them, Weston, like Elon Musk, represents the expansionist position: he rejects human history, including art and culture, in favour of a kind of techno-fascism. The other, Devine, is just weak and greedy. He wants to get rich. They kidnap Ransom, a Cambridge philologist on a walking holiday, because they think Oyarsa wants a human sacrifice. He doesn’t, but they don’t know that. Oyarsa is way ahead of the humans, constantly. They don’t understand that, either. They don’t understand much. Ransom, though, because he’s curious and not exploitative, is different from the others, and the story is told from his perspective. He’s not the narrator, but the narrative stays close to what he experiences. And his language: the narrator’s vocabulary is that of an Oxford don in 1938. As Lewis was.
Out of the Silent Planet is the first in a trilogy. Will I read the other two? I doubt it. But I don’t regret reading it. Now I know what it’s like. Learning things is never a waste of time.
I wake up early from strange dreams I can’t remember and check Facebook. The Americans have attacked Iran and Trump is warning against retaliation, as he did when he instituted tariffs on this country: a bully’s behaviour. At least Canada has only been subjected to economic warfare—so far. As Tabitha Southey said on Facebook, it’s as if the American president bombed Iran so that he could post on social media about it, cosplaying strength and resolve. Such a weak buffoon, and causing so much damage everywhere.
I check The Globe and Mail on my phone to get more details, and see Mark Kingwell’s opinion piece arguing that generative AI may make all learning obsolete, leading to the end of something “transcendent and transformative” in our lives:
I don’t just mean a critical-thinking skill set, or body of facts, or even the basics of media literacy and fallacy-spotting – though these are essential tools for life. I mean, rather, the things that animate the hundreds of students who still come to our classes: the value of self-given meaning and purpose, the pleasure of being good at hard things for their sake alone, a consuming joy in the free play of imagination. A desire to flourish, and to bend the arc of history toward justice. I don’t know if those things are exclusive to humans; I do know that they are threatened and in short supply among existing humans.
Those two things—the wilful ignorance of the great empire’s decision makers, their utter stupidity and blindness even to their own citizens’ safety (since despite the threats, Iran will retaliate somehow), and the way people will be increasingly unable to sort through what is true and what is bullshit, falling prey to whatever scams our tech overlords build into their algorithms—feel connected to me, and both open the door to despair. Instead of giving in, I dress quietly and go for a walk.
I’m staying with my friends Matthew and Sara in Pomquet, Nova Scotia, for a few days. It’s paradise—although I know that not every day here will be cloudless and warm. We agreed yesterday that today would be devoted to writing, and as I’ve said in a yet-unpublished essay, I’m useless unless I walk for an hour in the morning, so even without death-from-above and cognitive-rot-from-within encouraging me to imagine the apocalypse, I would still need to stretch my legs. I smile at the old cat, Sweet Pea, who is snoring in her bed next to the window, and silently (I hope) open the front door.
The road is lined with birch and aspen trees. Roses, yarrow, and tufted vetch bloom beside the shoulder. I consider walking to the beach in the nearby provincial park, but that’ll take too long, so I decide to turn around in Pomquet. There are so many birds singing: Merlin identifies song sparrows, ovenbirds, red-eyed vireos, black-throated green warblers, American redstarts, and common yellowthroats. I add easier birds—crows, jays, robins, a white-throated sparrow—to that list. I’m walking among so much life.
The winding road is surprisingly busy for seven a.m. on a Sunday. It’s chilly; my nose runs and I’m glad I put on a jacket. As I get closer to Pomquet, I hear a rototiller: the sound of a man who doesn’t care about being unpopular with his neighbours. A pair of goldfinches flies into a tree on someone’s front lawn.
I use my watch to check my pulse: 86 beats per minute. Maybe walking, as important as it is, isn’t strenuous enough. One of my companions on last week’s walk, Nico, is 82 and incredibly fit. I want to be like him in 20 years; hell, I’d like to be that fit now. I’ll use some of the benefits from my new job to hire a personal trainer, I decide.
A row of mature trees, tall and stately with fine foliage, like the mesquite trees I remember from visiting Tucson, is covered in white blossoms. I risk the ticks I’ve been warned against and cross the lawn to get a better look. Bumblebees are everywhere, working the flowers, buzzing with what I imagine is contentment. I’ve never seen these trees before. The plant identification app on my phone tells me they are black locusts. There’s so much to learn about and see, to experience. I’m so happy to be here.
I’m sitting in a used bookstore/café with Seamus (pictured above) in Upper Tantallon, Nova Scotia. This is the end of our walk, although tomorrow we’re going on a day hike. The trail continues into Halifax, but our feet will no longer be trudging along it.
We walked together this morning to Queensland Beach, talking quietly about life’s twists and turns—not unlike the winding coast road we were following. Such metaphors might be lazy, or maybe they’re unavoidable. Perhaps my writer friends can weigh in on that question. We stopped for a group photo in the fog, then we carried on towards the trail on the rough shoulder of the road, where the fist-sized rocks reminded me of country roads in Spain. I was in a group at the head of the line of walkers, and somehow we missed the turn and had to retrace our steps, adding a kilometre to the journey.
We finally found our way. I felt a need to stretch my legs and walk at a quicker pace, and soon I was alone on the path. I thought about the contradiction between my desire for connection and community, which reflects my complicated relationship to introversion and extraversion. Also, something I’d eaten had given me terrible gas, and farting among other people is embarrassing. The path was lined with maples and aspens, with purple Dutch clover, meadow buttercups, ferns, and tufted vetch everywhere. And lupine, of course. Almost all of those species aren’t native to North America, but they’ve naturalized here, and they’re all over. I heard song sparrows, and Merlin told me that another song belonged to a northern paruta, a species I’d never heard of and still haven’t seen.
It started raining lightly. I thought it might be condensation from the fog dripping off the trees, but as the drops got heavier, I decided to put on my rain jacket. Immediately the rain stopped.
I decided that, since I was alone, I would do one of the guided meditations on the app I downloaded to my phone—one that reliably makes me cry. (Reader, once again, it did.) I sat on a bench to eat lunch, and the rest of the group caught up to me. When I had finished, I walked with others for a while, before I pulled ahead and was alone again.
I began to feel uneasy. The directions we were given this morning mentioned a cemetery and a yellow church. I didn’t see either. Was I supposed to turn off the path? Had I missed something important? Without a companion, I had nobody to confer with. Google Maps filled in the gap. The church was behind me, but the trail still led to Upper Tantallon. I wasn’t lost. I couldn’t get lost as long as I was on the trail. Then I thought about my walk in the Haldimand Tract, and how I constantly got lost on footpaths there. A rail trail is different, I told myself. It isn’t going to just disappear in the trees. Is it?
I caught up to Dawn—I wasn’t at the head of the line after all—and we compared notes on our Camino experiences, ten years apart. As we chatted, I realized I need both solitude and community. Both are important; both are valid. The question for all of us, perhaps, is to find a balance. That’s the task ahead of me.
(Thanks to Julianna at Otis and Clementine’s for letting me stay so long past closing time writing this post.)
As we left Chester, we passed St. Augustine’s Roman Catholic Church. How fitting that today’s journey began by evoking that saint, famous for saying—if in fact he he did say it—solvitur ambulando, “it is solved by walking.” Walking, apparently, fixes problems, although as Tanis MacDonald argues in Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female, everything depends on what needs to be solved and who needs to solve it. What problem am I trying to solve? So far, it’s the question of what community means, especially the community that forms when a group of strangers goes on a long walk together.
The drizzle at the beginning of today’s walk pleased the slugs on the path. After an hour or so, I decided that the rain was heavy enough to put on my rain jacket. It immediately stopped.
Much of the land we travelled through was boggy, with lots of Labrador tea in bloom in the peat bogs, along with more purple pitcher plants. Don, my walking companion, found some wild strawberries and ate a couple, leaving lots for the squirrels and chipmunks. My plant identification app told me we were passing rhodia and sweetfern, which were new to me. Oak seedlings grew beside the path, and I wondered if they would eventually tower over the birches next to them. The ground under the trees was carpeted in blueberries. When they ripen, will cyclists and pedestrians share the trail with bears?
We talked about walking, our jobs, our health. Don is a minister at a rural church in Nova Scotia, a second career after working in the corporate sector. As we chatted, I thought about how much commonality is needed to create community. Are there degrees of community? Is there a spectrum of connection? Probably. Sociologists distinguish between strong and weak ties—relationships of greater and lesser emotional depth and intimacy. The apparent binary of strong and weak is likely an oversimplification; like almost everything else, there must be a range of possibilities. Robert Waldinger, the director of the Harvard Study on Human Development, tells us that the key factor in a happy life is the quality of our relationships. It’s a bit like the movie Moneyball: that one variable tells a person’s entire story. I’m not sure whether Waldinger focuses primarily on strong ties, though, or if he sees weak ones as also important.
What kind of tie forms during a pilgrimage? Does communitas lend itself to acquaintances or deeper friendships? Perhaps both are possibilities. That’s been my experience. As Don and I trudged along, we talked about the complexity of Christian theology and the fact that many of its tenets are based in mistranslations or other confusions. My friends Matthew and Sara tell me similar things. Letters that are attributed to Paul, for instance, were actually written by someone else. The simple Bible story I was taught as a child, its certainty and sharp edges, bleached all of the nuance and difficulty out of those ancient texts. When understood in their historical context, that stark clarity evaporates. “How do you convey that idea to a congregation looking for certainty?” I asked. “Gently,” he answered.
I told Don stories about my Baptist childhood—answering an altar call when I was nine in hopes of bringing an interminable service to a close so that everyone could go home for lunch (spoiler alert: that didn’t work, at least not for me)—and he told similar stories about evangelicals driving curious people away from faith with their dogmatism. It’s good to know that I’m not the only one, but I doubt my perspective will change. The closest I can get to a belief in immortality is through Primo Levi’s essay on carbon: that element perseveres after we die, and is taken up by other creatures as part of their bodies until, when they die, it’s released into circulation again. That’s cold comfort to folks who have trouble with the idea of their nonexistence, I know, but it’s enough for me.
Different people have different ways of seeing things, of course, and when Don explained that he’s been colourblind since birth, he gave me a clear example of that. He sees reds as what I would call dark green or black, and greens as what I perceive as gold. He showed me an app on his phone that renders the world in the tones he sees. Everything is autumnal, all the trees and flowers and grasses a burnished orange-yellow. What I call red or green means nothing to him. “Can you imagine a colour you’ve never seen?” he asked. No—that’s impossible. Let’s show each other some grace, then, some compassion, I thought, since we might be unable to see the world differently than we do. Except Nazis, of course. I’m not falling into the paradox of tolerance, making space for people who aggressively refuse to extend that tolerance to others. Of course, tolerance is a pretty low bar. Acceptance, even love, are what’s required. But if tolerance is the best we can do, then okay.
I’m writing these words in the early morning darkness of the sanctuary in the Anglican church in Hubbards, where I slept on the floor between two pews last night. I didn’t sleep well last night, either. The snoring the night before was an ear splitting cacophony, but it was the cold that kept me awake. I decided to follow my friend Geoff’s example and carry only a sleeping bag liner, and even wearing all my clothes, it was too cold. My thin sleeping pad didn’t help. I had no space in my bag for anything more luxurious, and if this walk continued for two or three weeks, I’d get used to it. I did sleep a little better last night, because this church is warmer and the snoring slightly muffled. It’s six o’clock now, and coffee is probably being made in the downstairs kitchen. I think I’ll try to find a cup.
Today’s walk was somewhat longer than I expected, but every minute was remarkable. The weather—coolish, mostly overcast—was ideal for a 20-mile amble along a rail trail. It was so chilly during the first couple of hours that my hands were cold and my nose was running, but I prefer that to heat exhaustion. Like yesterday, we walked through thick second- or third-growth forest. The pines and maples met over the path, as if we were walking through a tunnel of chlorophyll. Unlike yesterday, we saw multiple deer and turtles, and unusual plants—or at least plants that are unusual for me, since most of what I know is native to southern Saskatchewan: northern starflower, purple pitcher plant, cotton grass—the latter two in a spongy peat bog next to path. I saw some tall lungwort, too, which I haven’t seen since the last time I was in Prince Albert National Park.
We saw more art, too, including what looked like an accidental collaboration between a tree and part of an old stove.
My phone told me that these white flowers are Allegheny blackberry; then it lost its confidence and would only claim they were dicots. If that’s an example of generative AI expressing humility, it’s a good thing.
I heard so many birds, including my favourite, a Swainson’s thrush. There were hermit thrushes, ovenbirds, a variety of warblers and vireos, and of course red-winged blackbirds and bold, insistent robins.
Someone asked what my forthcoming book is about, and as I stumbled through an attempt at a summary, I realized again that I need to come up with a short, clever, thoughtful description of it, and quickly. I’m sure the marketing people at the press would appreciate it.
The team put out stickers for us this morning. I took one that reminds me to stay positive, and stuck it on my notebook. Once again I enjoyed the companionship of the other pilgrims. They’re all people with a deep religious faith, it seems, and I wondered how much my inability to believe in much, a product of my Baptist childhood, in which I learned that religion was performative and narrow, its words mostly unmatched by deeds, leaves me on the periphery here. I thought about Casey Plett’s book, and the complexity of her consideration of community, and about how I accept Indigenous expressions of spirituality—smudging as a form of prayer, for instance—whereas I struggle with the faith tradition in which I was raised. That’s fine—I’m not mourning what I don’t have—but I wonder how such fundamental differences affect the community can develop, and how much similarity, or even uniformity, is required for community to form.
Of course, our commonality is the experience of this walk—not just our footsteps, but eating together, talking, being kept awake by each other’s snoring.
About halfway through the walk, I stopped at a convenience store. I knew we were going to cross the territory of Acadia First Nation—although all the land here is Indigenous, really—and I asked the fellow behind the counter if we were on Acadia First Nation. “Yes, we are,” he answered. “Thanks for asking.” I’m still wondering how to interpret that response. Was he reacting to the thread of acknowledgment in that question? I’m not sure.
I asked him how to say “hello” in Mi’kmaq. He didn’t know—not a surprise, given what colonialism has tried to do to Indigenous languages—but he did teach me how to say “thank you”: wela’lin.Wela’lin for this day, for this opportunity, then. Wela’lin.
Lunenburg is so pretty, but so is Mahone Bay: colourful frame buildings, bright sky, sunlight on the harbour. Lunenburg has the Bluenose II and other tall ships, and excellent falafel. Mahone Bay might have falafel, too, but I’ll never know, because we’re all eating together tonight at the United Church, where we’re staying.
We left the United Church in Lunenburg about 1:30 this afternoon. There are 14 of us, plus half a dozen students from the Atlantic School of Theology who are getting credit for a graduate course on leadership and pilgrimage by acting as guides for this walk. We spent the next three hours or so walking along a rail trail, passing through thick second- or third-growth forest, with blue flag iris in bloom where there’s standing water beside the path. I saw a pair of pink lady’s-slippers, too, shy blossoms among spruce seedlings.
I came here to walk with other people, to experience what the anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner, in their study of pilgrimage, called “communitas.” That’s the temporary community that forms among people engaged in a pilgrimage, outside their typical routines, in what the Turners described as a “liminal” space, between one place and another. On the road, somewhere, neither here nor there, connections form, however temporary, between participants in the ritual of pilgrimage, however attenuated that ritual is in the 20th century. The organizers of this walk are doing their best to create a sense of ritual, but as a person without any kind of religious faith, for me the ritual is the steady beat of my footsteps—especially when I’m hearing the footsteps of my companions. That’s what I came for; that’s what I’m getting.
The conversations on the trail were rich: work and its meaning; footwear and foot care; the plants we were looking at, especially the ones nobody recognized. I spend too much time alone, and walking with the others, words tumbled out of me. Am I talking too much, I wondered, engaged in a monologue instead of a dialogue, overwhelmed by the feeling of walking with others, of community? I thought of Marianne, the friend I walked with in Spain almost 12 years ago, and the way she sometimes asked that we walk in silence.
Towards the end of today’s walk, I found myself reflecting on the connections between community and conversation, between community and silence. I listened to the crunch of my steps, birds, distant traffic. The toad into Mahone Bay was paved, narrow, quiet. I walked into the town, alone, listening to the sweet music of a hermit thrush. Far ahead of me, the sight of a pair of pilgrims provided reassurance that I had taken the right path.
