1          Yukon Waters

I died in Crag Lake, in a dream. I walked into its pure, cold sub-arctic water slowly and willfully, knowing that I was surrendering the me I had known for 25 years, along with the myth that we humans are somehow separate from nature. It was my first ego-death - an undeniably positive transformation - incurred during a time in which I was living in such a reciprocal balance with the wilderness than I ever imagined was possible. This dream unfurled itself as I lay in bed fully clothed with hat, scarf and mittens in a small unheated wood cabin on the edge of the lake, on the edge of winter. It was one of the first long, dark nights I remember after arriving to the farm in June when the Yukon midnight sun barely set, its abundant light yielding the biggest cabbages I have ever seen. I slept well on Porcupine Creek Farm, spending the long summer months bent over those enormous cabbages, kale, rutabaga, carrots, and organic potato fields. Garret – the Irish farmer who fell in love with radiant Heidi, Ontario suburban girl turned invincible-north-country-woman, was so proud of his straight rows, his diversity of potato varieties beyond the beloved “Yukon gold,” and most of all -- his healthy, organic alluvial soil. I slept well there, even in the neverending twilight, being so newly empowered and in love with my agile, hardworking body that was helping to provide hundreds of families in Whitehorse and Carcross with a year-round abundance of fresh organic vegetables from the Wild Blue Yonder CSA. I slept well, too, after the incredible meals we shared – Heidi, Garret, their two-year old daughter Fionnuala, and 3 other female migrant farmworkers. Dinner was usually some excellent local beef (traded for with potatoes), those supernatural, homegrown greens, roasted rutabaga, and a big round of sourdough bannock from the cast iron pan– always accompanied by the climatically appropriate condiment of lard. I will never forget how much I adored looking at everyone’s hands at the table -- strong, soil-kissed, honest, humble, happy and generous, sharing hands…. It was through my own working hands, and the radical simplicity they were here to serve, that this deep sleep came and offered this life-pivoting dream, this sweet and bold awakening, this invitation to belong.

I came into a special relationship with this mountain lake. To this day I dislike its colonial name. There is nothing wrong with a “crag” – defined generally as “a steep, rugged rock or cliff.” The lake and the valley of Carcross (short for Caribou Crossing after the Porcupine Caribou Herd and their ancient migration path through here) is surrounded by a number of snow-capped mountain peaks. And yet it feels inaccurate and disrespectful to have given such a crass, masculine nomer to this gentle, receptive body of water. Its entire tender shore was encircled with soft pine? and fluttering alder, the graceful flight of quiet, soaring eagles and turkey vultures… Its sandy beaches have been trod for time beyond human memory by the noble hooves of caribou, deer and moose, the paws of thirsty grizzly and black bears, wolves, coyote, little fox – a vast multitude of life supported here for millenia. This dear lake gave me life as well. Every day I walked down from my cabin to bathe my worked and wonderfully weary body in its clear cold waters. Even on the warmest day of summer, the air temperature in the mid-60’s F, every plunge took my breath away with dependable iciness. It was chilling, but so consistently generous in rejuvenating every cell of my body in the most exhilarating daily ritual of whole-self renewal. A regular old shower or bath would never again come close to rivalling what pure, cold water does best -- awaken the spirit, and rewild the heart, even if just for a few crystalline moments. In Crag Lake, I promised to open my life to always braving the deepest medicine untamed water has to offer us -- the gift of selfless, deep aliveness.

Porcupine Creek, which ran past the farm fields and into this lake – was the other life-changing body of water on the farm. Taking a break from harvest, I walked down to its shore, kneeled carefully, put my lips to the gentle current, and took in my first drink of wild water flowing across our Earth. This feeling remains indescribable and incomparable in my life.. It cut an even deeper yearning in me to reclaim the lost feeling of being at home on our Earth, to learn how to belong here in a good way, and to discover what other primal, electrifying and deeply fulfilling intimacies we seem to not even know we are missing in our oblique, invisible, neglectful, confused and often harmful relationship to nature.

I never thought it would be safe on our polluted planet to drink directly from a stream or lake, and doing so changed my life forever.  I grew up feeling fearful, cast-out, and indirectly but somehow wholly responsible as a human for the fact that every river and creek I grew up near in the Chicago suburbs was virtually unsafe to even touch. Crag Lake and Porcupine Creek gave me a new (or rather an ancient) reference point, for the meaning of water, fresh water. It rebirthed me on every level. It awakened my genes. It continues to inspire and drive my quest. As Lyla June, Dine and Cheyenne artist and water protector sings in the Ma Muse song For Her Speak: “All things thrive where water is clean.”

My reverence for Crag lake also included an appreciation for the generosity of water it yielded towards growing the food we produced for the Wild Blue Yonder CSA, which fed so many others. I never realized it was possible to live in this way in the 21st century: to produce more than to consume. Even with 7-10 people living on the farm, there was never more than a small grocery bag worth of waste produced every few months, as there was very little food or other household products purchased, all paper waste was burned for heat, and there was a vibrant local sharing economy when it came to equipment, tools and other resources. The farm was granted an award by the local government for bringing sustainable agriculture to the territory. This award was rejected by Garret, who requested instead a more equal playing field with regard to subsidies… And still this farm - the first organic, regenerative farm in the Yukon - nourished hundreds of families, while asking very little of the land, the water – thriving in the midst of the wilderness, whose diversity of life lent balance to the fields.  Wendell Berry spoke of the premise of agroecology when he wrote: “The farm can exist only within the wilderness of mystery and natural force. And if the farm is to last and remain in health, the wilderness must survive within the farm.”

The first snow of October blanketed the potato plants, as it did the bright red wild rose leaves and fireweed on the forest floor… Harvest quickly ensued, but all was well. Dozens of people from Carcoss and Whitehorse came to bend in holy posture over fields, running our cold, joyful hands through the good soil, finding every tuber. The farm grew community too – that essential warmth. New and old-world vegetables were shared alongside moose liver from an elder friend of the Tagish First Nation in an annual harvest festival that touched my core, just like the water did.  

My lake dream, and this dawn of interdependence consciousness, was preceded by my first acquaintance with true silence. There were many profoundly quiet nights in the far north, but I felt initiated into the gift of silence through sound. I had just laid down in the cabin on the shore of the lake when the soft billowing voices of a pair of loons commanded my whole being. I listened to these birds with my whole life. Nothing has ever evoked simultaneous feelings of wholeness and loneliness like their calls did, and that spoke so profoundly to those years of my life. A solo, travelling farm apprentice, I had so many illuminating and expansive moments of happiness and homecoming, however alone and however poor I was – I never felt so. Listening to the loons, it wasn’t just their deeply attuned echoing of each other, or their tremulous praise of the intricate goodness of water… it was the way the lake received and mirrored their braided voices in every profound subtlety, reflecting back all that truth and beauty into the big, wild, dark night, until their song touched every edge of its silent core. The quietness of the oncoming winter was heralded as the lake received those calls into its own speechless depths.  I lay so still as I listened. I felt like an immense gift was being delivered directly to my soul. I never appreciated silence until those birds defined the edges of it, sang its essence, offered it with such austere passion to the night. I felt invited into the peace of fearlessness, into sublime emptiness, into source, into sharing my own voice with as much profound authenticity. And I understood then, yet a little more, how these waters could be so transformational.

I didn’t know when I came to the Yukon that I would leave my old self there in that dream, in that lake. I wasn’t looking for a metamorphosis. I was searching fervently for connection -- an empowered acquaintance with our sources of sustenance that I never got growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, and living in the city through college. I wanted to know how to grow food, how to use my body and hands, how to use tools, how to build things, how to cook, how to live in good relationship to the Earth and with others, how to survive. With every joyful moment of connection I gained, each return to source was also accompanied by a growing ache in my heart for all that so many of us have lost touch with, and don’t even know we are missing. When did the deep contentment of feeling the penetrating warmth of a fire in the woodstove, emanating from a known tree that was felled, cut and split by hand, disappear from our lives? When did the fulfillment of nourishing ourselves and our loved ones with food we have lovingly tended and grown become a novelty, instead of a birthright?  Attachment theory tells us that early and consistent embrace, touch, and responsive mirroring with our parents, especially our mothers, is crucial to an individual’s ability to form healthy, long-lasting familial bonds with others as adults.  Has our collective loss of early, frequent and intimate contact with our shared Mother, our beloved Earth, rendered us incapable of having a wholesome and mutually beneficial relationship with Nature? If so, I was intent to repair this within myself.   

My farming journey began in Italy and California before I arrived to the Yukon. I had always wanted to see the North – and I have always tried to acquaint myself with my mother’s  geography from her mysterious youth that we never knew much about… So, I found myself leaving a grapefruit orchard in Southern California on a greyhound bus bound for Whitehorse, following the breadcrumb of “Goody Sparling” – the bright and shiny, intriguing name of one of the very few people from my mom’s past who sent her a Christmas card every year.

Gudrun’s father came to the Yukon from Sweden in the Klondike Gold Rush in the 1920’s and struck it rich, later opening the Regina hotel in downtown Whitehorse, where I did have a cup of tea and some chocolate with her on the tail end of my time there. “Shonagh was a beautiful young woman, a great lady,” Goody recounted.  I didn’t learn much about my mom, probably on account of the politeness of tea, which seemed to confirm the painful, abstract knowing that my mother’s youth was marked by a number of unspeakable experiences.  In my desire to know Mom better, I sought out the people as well as the places that knew her, that mothered her.

My mom was an orphan. Her blood mother, Mabel, had been a victim of date rape, and sent to the Winnipeg Church Home For Girls where she was forced to give her up for adoption. She was assigned to a wealthy but deranged family in Winnipeg. My Dad and I marvel that my mom never kept or shared a single photo of her adopted mother, nor her classically evil stepmother. Any joy of youth that Mom remembered to us - through the many traumas she finally spoke of at the end of her life - seemed to have come from her time in nature – swimming and skiing in Orillia’s Lake Couchiching, riding bareback through grapefruit orchards while in boarding school in Palm Springs…    Though Shonagh didn’t get adequate early attachment from any of her three mothers, she did get ample time in nature, and forged a lasting bond. Mom trusted nature. She didn’t trust people but she always trusted beauty, the innocence of birds, the truth of trees, the nurturance of water. Mom taught my brother and I how to seek the peace of the wild. And yet this surrogate nature-nurture, was it enough?

My last two pinpoints on the map enroute to Whitehorse -- Vancouver Island and Prince George -- were more than just vague breadcrumbs that I followed. We had gained the geography of British Columbia in our family when Shonagh’s lifelong search miraculously yielded gracious contact with her birth mother Mabel and half-brother Bill.  My stop in Victoria on my way north to the Yukon was the last of a total of four opportunities I had to look into my grandmother’s warm brown eyes, and to hold her magnificent gardening hands. Though I never knew her well, I saw her backyard garden in Victoria. Unlike my grandmother on my father’s side, an urban woman and retired fashion model who was not fond of cooking, I knew that Mabel made her family home by her hands, with bread made from grain she grew and milled, vegetables and peach trees nourished by algae lovingly carried from north Pacific beaches, and horse manure collected from mountain trails.   These blessed encounters with Mabel were significant – even if they left me with more questions than they answered… A new sense of having a real maternal lineage could never quite unseat the inherited feeling of detachment - a steady, amorphous sense of not knowing exactly where I came from. My journey north marked the beginning of a lifelong quest to recover belonging and lost mothering and nurturance – from nature, from my mother’s family line, and from the void of separation from ancestral and cultural homelands that most of us Americans harbor. The journey continues…

When my Dad picked me up at the airport in Chicago, returning home from the Yukon, he said he has never seen such a depth of despair and disappointment on my face. Travelling back from that existence, I was never more keenly aware of how wasteful, how greedily consumptive, how backwards and how normalized land abuse is in our society today. By the third time the stewardess on the plane tried to serve me water with yet another plastic cup, I nearly lost it. I fell into a serious anguish, on the heels of this exalted initiation. Looking at all the waste generated from just one commercial flight, looking at people in the airport in their ugly, synthetic, disharmonious clothes, slogging the weight of all their unnecessary things, eating junk food mindlessly with faces glued to some prescribed television channel blurting everything back but beauty.   I might have felt it had all been a dream - like those wild white horses looked crossing the Yukon highway in the middle of the twilit night, had I not returned home to see a card my mom had tried to mail to the Wild Blue Yonder… Failing to include the address of the farm, the postal worker must have gotten a good laugh out of that one!  The envelope validated how immediately out of reach this experience and these hard but harmonious lifeways felt upon my return to “civilization.” Even my grandmother’s hands by then had ceased gardening -- how would I ever claim these homecomings in this world of ours?   

When I walked into that lake, I was so happy to let my ignorance die. I had finally gained a consciousness of how my own little life and my wellness related – for better and for worse -- to the life and wellness of our planet. I think that, unconsciously, I never wanted to examine that relationship before because I knew it was self/human-centered, that it wasn’t reciprocal. Even as a child, I think I felt an innate sense of how wrong our way of inhabiting the planet felt. When I entered into this rare experience of mutual give and take with nature, I gained at last some tangible clarity, a more authentic and visceral alignment, and new mindfulness of where I/we were failing.  I discovered I had nothing to lose, and everything to gain in building a real relationship with our world, however painful it was to see it with honest eyes. As Joanna Macy says – “The cost of intimacy with the Earth includes tears and outrage.” I wanted it… at any cost, even as I knew the despair I felt on the airplane was just the tip of the iceberg.

Entering that cold water, I let a little bit of my unbelonging go, claiming a peace with my own existence here on earth. I discarded false belonging - former attachments to shallow comforts, distractions, and any remaining vulnerability to the weight of prescribed social pressures and timelines for achievement, acquisition, marriage... I let go of much of my desire to please, and accepted the invitation into authenticity. I liberated myself from the need to feel significant through the hustle of individual achievement, and began to walk towards a different view of success – expanding my desire for personal well-being to include a desire to benefit community and nature.  I left this place feeling so full in spirit, so good a person, so married to beauty, more rooted and held in the world, even as renewed connection opened the wound of unbelonging wider to be healed. Here I dedicated myself to becoming a seer and a rememberer – to lovingly observe and to listen to the wild with my whole life, to responsibly seek mystery and feed my awe, to frequently return to silence, and to wilderness, to arch my life joyfully towards the subtleties and diversity of our world, to sing its radically beautiful and ancient complexity out across the pure, rare freshwater that remains