The Ravine Keepers

"Back off Asshole!" he screamed at the younger of the three men. He swooped, raised an old piece of tree-limb, swung it at the smug face, missed by a mile, stumbled closer on the uneven trail, determined to do real harm. Veins bulged in his forehead, his eyes were squeezed with rage, his grey goatee dribbled with spittle.

“Whoa fella“, said the other, backing off, arms extended, hands forward, as though to fend off the frantic attack. The two other men, older, burlier, one clearly in authority, ordered him to drop his cudgel, get back to his hovel, wherever it was he crept out of. “Make yourself scarce, bud”, he said. “We have legitimate business here. Beat it!”

His head reeling, white-hot anger consuming him, he did, nonetheless drop the piece of wood, but stood there, glowering, a strip of the bright yellow tape that had encircled the collapse in his hand. It had been put there to shut off what was left of the path. He defied their authority. Who did they think they were, with their grey uniforms, their smirking faces, as though he was the day’s entertainment? They resembled Nazi shock troops, he said, and he called them Nazis, SS troopers. They shrugged their shoulders, turned away from him, continued their work. He made an awkward attempt to kick a boot-full of wet gravel at them.

His hair was grey, his eyes a steelier colour. His complexion a waxy grey. Their turned backs infuriated him. He screamed profanities. His voice shrilled, cracked, creaked. His body shaking with impotence.

Down the long hill entering the ravine another man, a regular who hadn’t missed a day in two decades, wondered what all the noise was about. He entered a higher, parallel cut in the side of the hill, newly bulldozed by this same crew earlier in the week, equipped earth-moving equipment sized to fit the tight area. They had bitten into the side of the hill above the creek, taken down a few trees to clear the passage, then flattened and gravelled the new trail. Taking the place of the collapsed one that had fallen with the shoulder of earth rampart into the creek bed.

As he paused, he recognized the man. He walked on, lifting his shoulders at the workers facing him in the near distance. He had only yesterday used the alternate trail for the first time. Thanked them for their efforts, said what a relief it was, to have access again, what a good job they’d done of relocating the trail. They appreciated that. Said wryly that not everyone appeared happy, but hadn’t elaborated.

They were in the process of re-inserting the metal posts closing off the old trail, at either end, where it had collapsed. And tried also to re-wind the yellow warning tape, to alert people to the danger of proceeding straight ahead. The slope had disintegrated, had been doing it in intervals through the years. The trail at that point had always made his wife nervous; she had seen it over the years becoming more narrow, precipitous. He had worried about the potential for some kid on a bicycle, not noticing the collapse, barrelling along, coming to grief. They’d been glad at the arrival of the public works crew.

They’d wondered, they said to him yesterday, who it was that removed the posts. He had too. Now they knew. The aggrieved man still stood there, back to him, screaming invectives. The elderly man said nothing, turned around, left.

This was a fellow he’d seen often the past few years on his regular jaunts in the ravine. A genial man with a wide smile of friendly recognition who liked to stop, make small talk, before moving on. A reflection of the civility most people extended to one another, passing on the trails. People who considered one another ravine-acquaintances, familiar through years of convivial small-talk as they walked together, then exited at different places along its trajectory.

This fellow he’d seen occasionally, axe in hand. He’d surmised that he’d taken it upon himself to ameliorate little awkward conditions that arose from time to time. Chopping off errant tree branches overgrown into the path. The occasional fallen tree whose trunk rolled across the trail. Those that kids tugged at, attempting to uproot, partially successfully, with immature trees. He’d thought that to be extremely public-spirited and had told him so. Eliciting a broad smile of bashful appreciation, and surprisingly, an emphatic handshake. He had an accent, which he placed as Eastern Europe, though he’d never asked him. None of his business. We all came from somewhere, at some time, in this country, he said to his wife.

It’s a bit of a geographic anomaly, a long ravined area directly in the centre of a built-up urban area. Because it’s an urban area and because the land there is so naturally given over to a series of ravines and interlocking forested areas, with narrow ledges dropping off on either side, then meeting up with more briefly open, meadow-like areas bordered by forest, the land, unfit for development because of its boggy nature, its large creeks and the clay and sand upon which it all sits, has long been a recreation site. In the sense that it provides for nearby residents an untamed landscape of nature at its finest. The creek and its tributaries, non-productive because of the lack of nurturing qualities, but picturesque, with the municipality having erected bridges here and there on the network of trails, crossing the creek as it meanders off the landscape.

Those residents who prefer to stir themselves physically, get out into an atmosphere of calm and natural beauty, regard their access to the ravine highly. It has immensely improved their quality of life. Those far greater numbers of nearby residents who have never ventured into the ravine, nor with any intention of so doing, have no interest in its welfare. A welfare that has entitled them to cleaner air living nearby, as the trees in the forested area act as a carbon-dioxide sink.

People who do venture into its rugged interior have long been familiar with the small wildlife abounding there, although the foxes, porcupines and quail that were regularly seen even a decade earlier are no longer there. Even deer were seen on occasion, picking their way across and onto the broader landscape closer to the Ottawa River or in the opposite direction where the greenbelt encircling the city centre, simply absorbed them. Though this past winter talk was rife of the presence of coyotes in the canyons where people didn't venture.

But squirrels, raccoons, chipmunks are often encountered; the more secretive moles and mice rarely. Birds of all descriptions, owls and blue jays, various types of woodpeckers, and hawks, chickadees, nuthatches, robins and cardinals. Insects, and occasionally snakes and toads seen in their season. In the winter months snow accumulates and the woods take on the sparkling aspect of a white wonderland, exquisite in the smooth luxury of a calming blanket of warmth to those small creatures seeking refuge from the dense, icy misery of winter in the snowiest, second-frostiest capital in the world.

Springtime is a gradual melting process, with the trails upheaved from being trodden upon frost slowly being absorbed back into the earth, while the sodden landscape eventually dries, the muck caused by the clay reasserting itself, drying back to a passable trail. Wildflowers begin their blooming season, from spring well beyond late fall. Mosses, lichens and all manner of odd alpine-appearing fungal growths, inclusive of mushrooms and shelf-fungi, enliven the trunks of trees, the forest understory, soon to be overtaken by shrubbery, ferns, saplings, and members of the ‘bane’ family.

From time to time the provincial Ministry of Natural Resources recalls the presence of the ravine and others like it, to dispatch surveyors to measure changes over the years, and find little to be perturbed about. Yet those whose quotidian habit brings them there and which habit has instilled in them a broader recognition of the anomalies and disintegrations of the area, do see alterations. Some of them take decades to finally occur. Some, helped along by neighbourhood children delighting in muck and digging where they should not, lighting fires where it can be dangerous, hacking immature tree trunks to the disadvantage of long-term growth, take the vandalizing measure of changes.

In some areas over the decades, the protected area has seen alterations such as the collapse of earth ramparts rising high above the creek, where trails lead in opposite directions. When those collapses accumulate, gradually narrowing access to the trails, the perambulators express real concern that they may be cut off from access to those areas so dear to them. Most people, and they are the middle-aged and the elderly, do nothing, and hope that others will take steps toward remediation. Calls are made to the public works sector of the municipal authority and eventually crews will be dispatched to assess the troubled areas and to determine what, if anything can be accomplished.

When unusually brutal storms have suddenly brought down elderly, mature firs, whose shattered corpses clutter the trails, the works crews bring their saws and make short work of clearing the trails, piling the heavy, green-needled limbs to the side, the trunks remaining where they fell, pitiable fallen giants, with the snags of the stumps raw-white, fingering the uncaring sky, silent witness to the waxing and waning of the forest.

And there are a few - thank heavens, only a few - who take it upon themselves to actively grapple with what nature has in her lapses of blind fury, left behind. Those who consider the appearance of a work crew sent out to ameliorate situations by the city, a personal affront. This large, green area is seen as their personal property, the workers unwanted intruders. Whose solutions to problems are a nuisance. Arborists employed by the city, and landscape professionals who may be called in to recommend courses of action could take lessons from these enterprising locals whose scorn for the disinterested inertia of their fellow ravine enthusiasts knows no bounds.

And if they merely scorn the inactivity of ravine users, their scorching disdain for the municipality’s works crews is far more often in evidence. The two of whom we speak are in fact, a married couple, a man and a woman, he of obvious European descent, she a local, much younger than he, both utterly dedicated to nature, raw and determined. Expressly seeing themselves as environmental help meets to nature’s plans for this valuable piece of property. She can be seen occasionally in the spring, digging into the yet-frozen earth to install a short piece of piping, to allow the melting snow and ice passage beneath the trails, forestalling the inevitable pools of water where people are wont to trod.

More latterly both have been engaged in a two-year effort to re-build an original portion of trail, utterly destroyed by the final collapse of one of the highest portions of the creek’s banks, leaving a much-used portion of a major trail suddenly off limits, a great gaping hole where the trail and the adjoining ground used to hang over the creek. As people bypassed the area reluctantly throughout the remainder of the winter, wondering what kind of remediation could conceivably take place, the mystery was solved in the early spring when the ground had thawed sufficiently to allow a miniature bulldozer entry.

When the municipal crew had finally finished and departed after some days of work, the trail-minder, for that was the name he was given by the elderly couple, returned with his wife. They worked tirelessly, almost every day this fall, regardless of the cold and the rain, on their self-imposed project; the remediation of the old trail. Actually they’d done that the fall before. A passable job, too. But once again the bank eroded and took along with it what remained of their trail. What they were working on this time was the labour required to dig further down on the bank, closer to the creek bed itself, to produce a new, wider trail, one they felt would be more reliable than the older one. He worked at digging into the wall of dirt, the rampart above the creek. And she, wearing knee-length rubber boots, worked in the creek itself, fashioning a new channel for the creek, taking it further away from the bank. An immensely ambitious project. Altering what nature had designed.

The elderly couple had their doubts. First few big storms to come along would return the creek to its natural form. After the freeze-and-thaw of winter and the ultimate spring thaw, the friable clay and sand deposit that made up the creek bank would give way as it always did. They said nothing of this to those dedicated trail workers, volunteering their time to their obsession. They did stop occasionally to speak with them, complimenting them on their dedication to hard, physical labour. The younger pair beamed.

They really were left to their own devices; no one from the municipality ever had reason to return once their work in establishing an alternate route had been completed. And it was this alternate, secure route, higher up on the bank of the ravine, within a forested area, that the elderly couple confined themselves to. As time went on and the enterprising couple working below continued to put in daily hours of work, the elderly couple began to ascribe their abnormal behaviour to the idiosyncrasies of the mentally unbalanced. And began to avoid them.

They actually were successful over time in leaching away the hillside beside the creek, sacrificing a few saplings in the process, but widening the trail below the collapsed portion, proud of their efforts. They’d even hauled a pair of tall folding lawn chairs in there, so they could rest and treat themselves to a packed lunch. The lawn chairs were left there, no one disturbed them. Their shovels and rakes were also left on site, so they could pick up their work whenever they presented themselves without having to haul things back and forth - to and from wherever it was they lived, on some nearby street.

They worked hard, you had to give them that. They really were obsessed, intent on restoring not the original trail now, since that was impossible, given the ongoing collapses, but another replacement, below the original. They felt utter contempt for the one that the work crew had put in place, much higher up the hill.

Nothing daunted them, not inclement weather, nor hard work, nor being covered with clay day after day. This was their very special project. Their diligence would pay off, their hard work appreciated by people who hiked and bicycled through the ravine. They’d had recognition from a teacher at a nearby high school who led a group of enthusiastic bikers through the ravine on a regular basis, on school days, for Phys. Ed.

Finally, the new, improved trail was almost completed. But the exposed, wet clay on top made it awkward for people to pass over it. Thick muck clung to their soles, to the bicycle tires, and people began diverting themselves back up to the upper trail. The couple patiently laid down a thick layer of dried leaves and pine needles, but they simply stuck along with the clay to those same passing soles and tires.

Soon, people began noticing that gravel was disappearing from other areas, from the official trails. Day by day, deeper and wider ruts appeared as long areas of the upper trail were looted to be trundled down to the lower trail. And that made a significant difference. Their trail was eventually completed, and just about ready for use, when it had been overlaid with an excellent layer of gravel from the higher trail. Depriving the trail above of half of its width; where the gravel had been taken away, that trail began to dip down into the hillside.

This truly disturbed the elderly couple. That these people, so dedicated to their task of ameliorating what nature had wrought, found it necessary to destroy part of the official trail so they could finally give their own a gravel coating to increase its use. At the first opportunity they remonstrated as diplomatically as they could their concern over the diminished structure of the official trail. Those formerly friendly faces turned dark. No, they denied ever tampering with that other trail. How dare they, who did they think they were, to suggest they’d done something wrong?

“I know my rights. This is a free country. I pay taxes too!” the goateed man said sharply.

A few days later, it was noted that the main trail parallel to the improvised one was missing another wide swathe of dirt and gravel, so that half of the trail leaned precariously into the hillside, no longer flat. At the entrance to the ‘new’ trail there was a small wood sign that read: “Chickadee trail, completed and dedicated December 6, 2009”.

When they came abreast of where the pair was standing, at the other side of their completed trail, the old man cautioned his wife, “hush”, and laid a gently restraining hand on her arm. She shook it off angrily, and confronted the young, pretty woman with the blonde hair, telling her in no uncertain terms that her activity was “uncivil”, destroying public property that others depended on. “Sheer vandalism!”, she said, her eyes flashing, her frail figure quivering with indignation. “I have a mind to … inform the authorities.”

She did not see, though her horrified husband did, the gnarled bough in the hand of the man whose aim was sufficiently accurate to crack the dome of her skull. She pitched slowly forward, her limp body rolling downhill, through the muck of the others’ labours, and into the creek, her head and shoulders submerged in the shallow waters. While her stricken husband’s anguished cry elicited a grimly satisfied exchange from the others as they strode off, shovel and rake tucked neatly under their arms.