Bog Walk

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When I trudge the slow hill, I look at houses, the old and faded on their mossy lawns, soft places on the sills barely visible, cracks in the walk, dying needles on the lower boughs of planted pine - and the new, crisp at the edges like fresh-pressed shirts but shaped to match their neighbours, worthy of their million-dollar tag, second storey dormers peak above cottage facades - all I can think is that I’ll never own one, how the zeros keep joining the end of the priceline, zeros behind zeros. What normal human has so many to toss onto house-posts-come-hitching-posts?

A woman rakes leaves and doesn’t look up, sweeps one-handed and grim as if they were dust on her kitchen floor. Another leads a writhing Chow, a squirming would-be escapee, and doesn’t greet me. I suppose I look odd, my jeans and down coat, woolen hat pulled low against November afternoon, a twice-used bag swinging from my arm, hands in pockets, headed for the bog.

The boardwalk sports rolled roofing, gritty and safe. I’ve come for standing water, but the puddles are frozen over, thick hollow slabs splintered from knobby peat to woody shrub. There's a new path since last time I came, a scenic loop, well walled so that even dogs are penned from young mosses planted by the bogslogging mistresses of Spirit Park.

I bet those ladies have English accents and fine wrinkled skin; I bet they’re chipper and chatter while they dig. Cloth gloves and spades and gumboots and fleece, they transplant packets of sphagnum. A new patch here, black earth measled with green, the salal and blackberry slashed back - the natives reclaim stolen land. The English bid ta ta and return to pricey homes, read classic novels, a stew on the stove. Tweedy husbands putter home from golf.

Fresh daisies clash by a signpost, bouquet for a bog lady recently passed. A bit of water below, so I kneel on my plastic bag and scoop with a yoghurt cup, but it rolls away, my god, a plastic blight on this holy spot. I borrow Muriel’s bouquet - I’m sure she would approve - and use the stems to coax the culprit back within reach. She would have preferred, I’m sure, a mossy pot with curling mushrooms and arbutus bark. I scoop some peaty water to take home, take the circle tour around the haven, greet another dog walker who doesn’t greet me back.

The old moss field blooms now, knolls of purple roll across the clearing, and at the edge a planted rose, blooming fresh and foreign, put there in the night, no doubt, by a rebel gardener.

I wish life into my yoghurt cup. I wish paramecia and amoebae, cilia, flaggellae, so kids can gaze in microscopes and shriek and shake and giggle at the sight of small things they never knew were there.





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