Four Quarters of Light by Brian Keenan

ground.’
    â€˜Okay, Pat,’ Mary interjected, ‘you keep talking and we’ll miss our set-down point. Look, there it is. Pull in.’
    â€˜Your lecture was delivered with perfect timing, professor,’ I said to Pat.
    He smiled as he hoisted the canoe from the roof. ‘That’s the core problem, time. How much time have we got?’
    Again Mary interjected. ‘Enough to paddle our way back to Fairbanks. Now hurry up, Pat.’
    Within minutes we were on the river, with Pat steering from the rear, Mary in the middle and me paddling downstream like an enthralled Chingachgook, last of the Mohicans. After our discussion in the car, floating down the Chena was like looking through the long viewfinder lens of a millennium camera. Pat had spoken in terms of evolutionary ages, centuries of change and glacial speeds. Now it was as if the lens had been jerked back into tight focus. From a global contemplation we were thrust into this up-close image of three insignificant individuals in a tiny canoe floating easily down the Chena in its first glacial swells. I mumbled to my friends some inconsequential remark about the silence. Mary’svoice answered from behind me. ‘You don’t really hear the silence until you are up in the northern reaches of the Yukon. Out of nowhere you hear the sudden cracking and thundering and then this terrifying hiss as the glacier breaks up. You could be hundred of miles from it, but you hear it, like it was only around the next bend. For a split second you half expect a wall of water to come down on you. But there is nothing, just pristine silence. Like you never heard before.’
    Mary’s words seemed entirely appropriate and did not require an answer. I let the echo of them float into my senses as we drifted on to the soft splashes of the paddle, like hands clapping in the distance. The overriding impression was one of watchfulness, as if I was being watched and even weighed up by the land I was moving through. The forest I was looking at was in fact a forest of eyes looking back at me. I don’t know if it was the silence of the place or if it was some kind of an inverted echo of my night on the frozen lake, but here everything was aware, sensate. Nothing was inanimate.
    I could rationally understand the indigenous peoples’ insistence that nature had a persona as had every living thing in it. It must not be offended and must be treated with respect. Even at this short distance from Fairbanks, nature, the natural environment and the endless unforsaken outback was in control. In Europe the countryside is controlled by civilization; wild places, such as they are, are protected by communities of men and the laws of government. Man is in control. We pass through countryside en route to another part of human civilization, another time or another city. Here in Alaska you realize very, very quickly that it is the reverse. Man is the alien species here. The outback has neither been conquered nor been controlled. People survive in the outback only to the extent that they live in some kind of harmony with it.
    I remembered standing in a wooden cathedral in Chiloe, an island off Chile. The entire structure was made of meticulously carved tree trunks. All the adornments, the altar and the Stations of the Cross were constructed of hand-carved wood. The wholeplace was a homage to the god in the wood. In that place I had felt the same sensation of being watched by every artefact in the cathedral, just as now, in this blown-away wilderness, I was being observed. But more than that, it was as if I was being measured for my suitability to enter into this living place. I remembered thinking as I stood in the church and absorbed this watchfulness that perhaps Christ didn’t die on the cross; perhaps his spirit was received into a tree and something of that powerful spirituality was radiating back at me from the tree-framed walls. Though I was thousands of miles