“we can meet there in peace/if we make it” (Gary Snyder)

Early last evening, I was sitting by the sliding doors and I looked down the bank to see a bear in the brush. Not this bear, but probably a relation. I watched it amble up to the surviving cherry from our old orchard, the one I wrote about in Euclid’s Orchard, and then I watched it climb the tree. For such a lumpy animal, it was surprisingly agile. Up, up, and into the unpruned limbs. There must have been a few cherries because it broke off a branch and scooted down the trunk, pausing to eat before strolling away through the tall grass.

There are times when I miss our orchard. I miss our early enthusiasm, our energy. The ground is rocky but we’d dig holes, planting the trees with compost. Apples, cherries, plums, pears, and hazelnuts. We draped them first with old gillnetting from the dump and then we fenced the perimeter. And the trees did produce fruit, though never in the amounts we hoped for, because animals always found a way in. We kept trying to improve the fencing, several kinds of wire, including electric. But bears, deer, and eventually the elk that were reintroduced to the Sechelt Peninsula in the late 1980s to keep the areas under big Hydro lines clear of deciduous growth, anyway, all those animals found our orchard. The bears were particularly destructive, tearing trees apart in their haste to get to the golden pears, the juicy Melba apples.

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us,
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

When I look down from the west-facing deck, I can barely make out anything resembling that old orchard. The cherry tree bloomed beautifully this year but other trees have died or become so covered with lichen and moss that they look almost sculptural, little abandoned gods. Last spring, during a difficult time, I went to sit among the trees to try to put some things into perspective. It helped, and it didn’t. It seemed to me that more than almost anything, the orchard was a monument to a life we’d put so much love and energy and attention towards, maybe always towards, and perhaps we never actually accomplished that dream. Last spring, it felt that I’d failed, spectacularly. But watching the bear, who was no doubt the offspring of one of the original bears — a child, a grandchild? — I realized that the orchard is remembered, in the way the beautiful old crabapple tree is remembered by successive generations of those same bears. It’s not what I expected but it’s something sweet.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

We can meet there in peace. If we make it.

**************************

Note: the lines of poetry are Gary Snyder’s, from “For the Children”.