Fall Equinox 2023: Walking the River
Kisiskâciwanisîpiy | North Saskatchewan River
Last weekend I walked part of the Edmonton Camino, a five-day walk through the city’s North Saskatchewan River valley, from Devon (where the trail is still unfinished) to Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta. The Cree have a name for this river, Kisiskâciwanisîpiy or Swift Flowing River and the trails that accompany it, Amisko Wacîw Mêskanaw, meaning Beaver Hill Road. Beaver Hill Fort being the original name for Edmonton. At more than 160 kilometres of public trails, Edmonton has the longest continuous river trail system of any city in North America.
What started in 2018 as an annual event has branched out to include more than one Camino walk through the river valley (often near a change of seasons) and frequent Camino ravine walks. The Camino Edmonton is done in 15 or 20 kilometre chunks. I did the first day this year.
What I look forward to on these gatherings is the walking, the being in nature, but also the conversations. Conversations with people I’ve never met or friends I haven’t seen in a while or some people I only meet up with on the Camino. For me, it’s a celebration of the season.
As pilgrims on this river Camino, we talk about our lives and the wider world. Our relationships, our work, our families, our health. The wildfires this year that have displaced so many, the floods halfway around the world or across the country. And yes, climate change; how each of us is coping or not. The conversation flows naturally as part of the pilgrim experience. None of it is scripted. We speak of things we were grateful for too—the clear smoke-free day before us, the beauty and the sounds as we pass through boreal forest and near the river. The land is talking too, although I’m not sure I am always listening as well as I could.
Last September, just before that equinox, I had an encounter with a Cree elder in my neighbourhood. I was walking to the farmer’s market and he lay stranded on a City roadworks lot with a bad leg. He introduced himself as Henry Bosineau from Saddle Lake and he needed help. He told me he had slept on a bench in the nearby school yard that night and someone had stolen his cane. He had had to improvise. “I had to break a branch off a tree!” He held it up for me to see, shaking it. “The poor tree!” he said several times. He was truly mortified and furious. I was astonished and moved. He needed a ride to a local shelter. They would have an extra cane for him to use. I called the Crisis Diversion team for him and he was soon on his way.
I pondered Mr. Bosineau’s feelings for the tree and my own astonishment for a very long time. I know I wouldn’t have hesitated to pluck a dead branch off a tree whether I needed to make a splint or start a fire. Even though in my Western mind I “know” a tree (or a branch) is never truly “dead.” Even when returned to the soil. There are always things living, sheltering and feeding off it, birds, insects and micro organisms. But Mr. Bosineau’s wisdom went deeper than “mind,” to something at the level of spirit. An Indigenous way of knowing. What if I approached a tree as a person, as one of my “relations” as Indigenous people like to say?
As we celebrate National Truth and Reconciliation Day in Canada this weekend, I’m reminded that righting our relationship with Indigenous peoples also requires righting our relationship with the land. I think there is hope in being together walking, together talking; in being together on the journey. If we don’t isolate. Whether it is on the big Camino or the smaller forays in our neigbhourhoods, we can in some small way begin to mend our lost connections: this rupture with the river, with the forest, with each other.
Through it all–wildfires, floods, droughts–I believe if we listen, we will find our way.
19 Comments
jano thibodeau
September 22, 2023Audrey, dearest beauty –
from the book CENTERING by M.C. Richards 1916- 1999 –
Forward by Mathew Fox-
from CLAY roots the Beginning –
on this human journey to birth
to spiralling to evolve
to die
Audrey
September 23, 2023Thank you, Jano, for sharing your insights as a sculptor. Always appreciated.
Janice Pelletier
September 22, 2023As always your writing touches me deeply. Your gift with language is empowering and thought-provoking and so beautifully expressed. Thank you for sharing.
Audrey
September 23, 2023Thank you, Janice, for reading!
Linda Winski
September 23, 2023Grateful, as always, for your wisdom sharing, Audrey. Aldo Leopold wrote: ” Our ability to see quality in nature, begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.” Your gift of word smithing and sculpting as you share experiences with us is always appreciated.
Audrey
September 23, 2023Thank you, Linda, for reminding me of Leopold’s contribution and insight.
Henny Vroege
September 23, 2023A big apartment building is going up across from my house. Before construction started, the contractor felt it necessary to cut down three very big, very old, beautiful trees. I grieved.
Audrey
September 23, 2023That’s terrible and so sad. But happens so frequently in our culture. Thank you for sharing this story, Henny.
Pearl Gregor
September 23, 2023You are touching upon the theory of the Unseen world: the World of Ancestors. I am currently listening to Perdita Finn’s latest book: Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World. It is her personal journey through learning and speaking with the ancestors. A lifelong pursuit through listening and speaking with the ancestors, nature and the unseen world. For many in North America, she may well be delusional. Christians long ago spent many months and years outlawing the world of Aboriginal Peoples and their relationship to the unseen world. It is time to relearn the lessons of Aborigines around the world. We could change much of our deeply entrenched misuse of the earth by learning some respect for the trees as your hero in this story knew and lived!! Thanks for this world we really live in story!!
Audrey
September 23, 2023Well said. Thanks for sharing this author with us, Pearl.
Thanks, Audrey! A very beautiful piece!
September 23, 2023A very beautiful piece of writing! As always!
Jannie
September 23, 2023The older I get, the more alive everything feels. And the more precarious.
Audrey
September 23, 2023So true. Thanks, Jannie.
Kate
September 23, 2023Lovely connection between the Camino Trail and what we can learn from Indigenous peoples, Audrey. I look forward to following the trail next time I’m in Edmonton.
Audrey
September 23, 2023You’ll like it.
Jenine
September 24, 2023Thank you Audrey. Important connections made in a beautiful piece of writing.
Audrey
September 24, 2023Jenine, thank you, for connecting!
Carolyn
October 5, 2023My feeling is that we should be prosecuting people who clear cut forests. After the Northerners were allowed to return home, I drove with my daughter to Yellowknife. I cannot “un-see” the mother black bear and her cub who were walking along a road through a burned, smoky forest. They would have had to walk another 100 km to find undamaged woodland. They live on the edge of my consciousness now, and I wonder. Did they make it?
Mr. Bosineau’s tenderness is life affirming for me. Your compassion for a man and his for a tree offer beauty to the world. Thank you for the story.
I did not know that Edmonton had established a Camino. That is good news indeed.
Audrey
October 5, 2023Oh gosh, Carolyn, that is so true about the animals–the other migrants/refugees among us that don’t make the evening news. Good that you accompanied your daughter home, like the mother bear and her cub. Thank you for pointing out to our consciousness, not all of us (in this sphere of all our relations) will make it home from these disasters.