Writing from northern places


Art
	Writing from northern places Prince George
by Clea Ainsworth People living in northwest BC have a unique relationship with the natural world. We live within or near wilderness at all times. While some northerners make their living in the woods, others pursue wilderness recreation. Wildlife is everywhere, quite often as close as our own backyards. It is not surprising then, that nature plays such a significant role in the writings of many northern authors. In the work of Betsy Trumpener, a writer living in the outskirts of Prince George, the wilderness isn’t just a physical environment occupied by wild animals - it’s a state of mind, a patchwork of myth and an unavoidable presence with which to contend. Trumpener explores this complexity in her short story "Drag Marks", which appears in the anthology Outskirts: Women Writing from Small Places (Sumach Press 2002). "Drag Marks" is the story of a woman’s acclimatisation to the wilderness. The central tension in the piece (titled after the marks made by predators dragging their prey into the bush) is brought about by three elements of the human-wilderness relationship: preparation against the wilderness, the disorientation often created by the wilderness, and the violence within the wilderness environment. The interplay of these elements reveals a conflict between the wilderness as a real environment, and the wilderness that is only imagined. Trumpener’s narrator in the story is constantly preparing to confront danger she can’t see: "There are so many new positions you have to learn when you live out here. Cradling your neck and playing dead if it’s a grizzly. Walking backwards, eyes downcast, whispering softly for a black bear. Acting brash and larger than life against a cougar. I sometimes practice these precautions in my head as if they were the steps in a fire drill, or the first-aid routine to stem fatal bleeding." Despite the constant preparation, however, the narrator of the story doubts her ability to stem any disaster from happening: "I’m afraid I’ll choose the wrong pose, or fumble with the bear spray, or forget how dead I’m supposed to play". In "Drag Marks" the wilderness is full of imagined consequences and situations, for which preparation seems appropriate. However, the preparation against the wilderness itself creates fear. Trumpener writes about a wilderness full of disorientation, a wilderness with which her narrator is not fully comfortable. This disorientation adds to the panic in the story: "The dogs disappear under the wire and it’s hard to see your footfalls in the dark. The only path is the colour of snow." There is a real risk of getting lost in the vastness of the wild. To the human explorer the wilderness is full of densely packed (but often unreadable) signs of direction and orientation. Along with the desire to prepare and the feelings of disorientation, Trumpener’s narrator is also concerned with the violence in her environment. In addition to the warning signs of drag marks, the narrator catalogues a number of different signs representative of the violent predator’s work: "a half-smiling jaw bone" and "black winged birds singing on a red rib". A casual walk in the woods reveals the violent nature of the cycles of life. The fact that the narrator now perceives herself as part of this cycle brings her within range of the violence. Ultimately, because Trumpener maintains in "Drag Marks" that the wilderness can’t be controlled, there is no solution but to accept its presence and move on as best as possible. The wilderness is unavoidable and the narrator, for her own sense of peace, needs to come to terms with it: "On the way home, we find a collared dog, still half-buried in snow. It’s winter-stiff, a purple flower growing from its head. I turn away and grab Lilly and kiss her flat on her liver mouth. I squat on the road with my nose in Lilly’s fur. She smells like wet hay. I don’t even think to look for drag marks." In real life, Trumpener has actively sought out the wilderness about which she writes. She packed up her truck and moved from Toronto to Williams Lake in 1999. The move was "a conscious choice to treat our souls. To rest our eyes on scenery, to stop rushing. In Toronto, I always searched out a vista - there were so few." She describes the transition from urban to rural as both "a shock and a blessing". On one hand, the cabin in which they first lived provided only "a thin skin between us and the wilderness. There were bugs outside and inside, and the grass grew past your waist." Ultimately, this turned into a positive thing as Trumpener notes: "you start paying very close attention to things: the quality of light, the height of trees… you walk and study the ground for signs of what’s up ahead." Before long, Trumpener landed a job with the CBC and today she is the news reporter for northern BC. As far as her writing is concerned, the job couldn’t be more perfect. Trumpener’s work takes her travelling to small communities and down roads where, "you never know what’s around the next corner… and those images stay with you- the quality of light around the Hazeltons, the dry hills around Williams Lake." It wasn’t very long after Trumpener had settled in BC that she met Patricia Van Tighem, author of The Bear’s Embrace, a book which details Van Tighem’s near-death encounter with a grizzly. The two writers met when they roomed together during a week-long writing course. At that time, The Bear’s Embrace was an unpublished manuscript. This meeting was a point of departure for Trumpener, in that it made her reconsider her previously urban views on the wilderness. "Patricia told me about the grizzly and the feeling of her head inside the bear’s mouth - the sound of her bones being chewed… It didn’t make me fear the wilderness, exactly, but it moved it into a different realm. It was no longer bucolic," said Trumpener. For her, a pastoral view of nature as simply bucolic doesn’t credit its complexities: "Having been here a while now, I know wilderness isn’t just about pretty sunsets. It’s also about sloppy hunters dumping moose guts in your backyard. Patricia’s story was both terrifying and exhilarating - archetypal and almost like a fairy tale. And after all she went through, Patricia escaped from the grizzly by twisting its wet nose!" Many writers like Trumpener are challenged by the complexities of the human-wilderness relationship. In northern writing, this complex relationship often refers to the wilderness as an antagonistic force. However, the truth is that statistically there are far more "predators" in cities - getting behind the wheel of a car is more dangerous that a hike in the woods. According to the provincial government, approximately six people in BC are injured by bears and cougars every year, and over an average five-year period, these animals kill four people. The amount of literature concerned with the wilderness as dangerous and predatory reveals the use of wilderness as a metaphor to speak about general issues that concern and frighten us. Wilderness, used as a metaphor in Trumpener’s story, speaks to the human desire for a safe place, to find our way in the world, and our fear of the violence that touches everyone’s lives whether they live in the northern wilderness or in a concrete jungle. Certainly, Trumpener uses her understanding of wilderness to tell her story, "Drag Marks", and to speak to the larger issues in our lives. There is much beauty, fear and complexity in Trumpener’s writing and this is a true sign of her keen perception of her environment. Her stories cast a big shadow, and Trumpener’s dialogue is crafted as sharp as a knife. Truthfully, you never see a story by Betsy Trumpener coming, it just hits you profoundly and it hits you hard. (Clea Ainsworth is a writer in Prince George.)
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