C, your bamboo forest is home to many people. I call animals people now because corporations are people now. So animals, having emotional lives and history and culture and social lives, well, it just follows.
These communities in your bamboo forest grew up with the bamboo. Your neighbours disapproval doesn't matter to nature, they should be aware that the chaos in their minds is nature too, it can't be tamed.
In Dust they bulldoze the trees, snapping them off, uprooting them along with nests and burrows... then they sometimes burn the piles. All winterlong there are signs on the highway saying “smoke” and the orange flames in distance lighting up the snow.
I have two such piles in the yard, left when a guy called Shorty plowed a few acres down for my horse to graze. I left the piles of trees, and moss overgrew and made a roof on the pile, and animals immediately colonized them. The tiny wrens love the big pile, and the giant willows are sucking nourishment from it as it rots down below, a healthy birch tree has sprung out of it. Water flows under the tangle in the spring, and under- pile torrent of life for frogs and snails.
The farmer told me to burn the piles, I ignored him. I wanted to see what would happen, and it's been exciting.
It's the trees at the edge of the forest that are susceptible to disease and beetles and ants chewing on them. The ones ensconced deep in the gloom are safer.
Before Dust there was a place called Covey Hill, do you remember? You came there with me and you said it was “quiet”, yes it was terrifying, it was the first place I came to that was not a city.
Covey Hill was colonized by English people, and the valley by the French. The Valley town was called St Chrysostom. I had to look this saint up.
Covey Hill was 3 hours South of the city.
To get there or back you drive through Kanehsatake, where the Mohawk live, and across a bridge into the big city.
As we got to know our neighbours, we cadged rides from a couple of commuters once in a while.
One was a Doctor, we'll call him Roger. He had a small car, “I let Martha have the Suburban” and if we were a few seconds late to meet him on the road (we had to walk a quarter mile through the bush to get there) he was fuming.
When we got to the reserve he would scan the bushes and overgrown trees and grass and say “these people don't know how to use land”
This was Mohawk land, all of it, even his house belonged to them, but...
On our last trip with Rog my partner Barnyard spent the trip in the backseat with my dog, and he licked the window of steam the whole way back. Barnyard, not my dog.
Then we met Gilles. A 60 year old French man who commuted to an engineering or communications job. Gilles was forever cheerful, seemed genuinely interested in our lives, enjoyed my dog, he drove a beautiful roomy bmw or merc with leather seats and air conditioning (no steamy windows).
He always seemed happy to see us and at Xmas we brought him a bottle of whiskey and had snax with his family. Gilles had many pleasant stories, including UFO viewings, and he was fun to hang around with. He did the speed limit on the reserve and never complained about it.
These were the two commuters of Covey Hill. They are both dead now of old age. Almost certainly.