Where The World Began

It was a beautiful place, the place where my world began. It was a world of adventure that formed the person that I am now becoming. I guess you could say it is a microcosm of even the little town in which Margaret Laurence so aptly described in her essay "Where the World Began". The place was, like hers, full of excitement that others might view as dull. It was a place of extraordinary escapades and splendrous surprises. It had majestic beauty and an ability to capture my imagination. It was my family cottage.
When the city became unbearable with the blistering hot sun looming down on us like a kid with a magnifying glass we would escape the chaos and enter the quiet retreat that the countryside offered. It was a place where I left the real world and entered a world where my imagination ran loose among the trees and the Black-capped Chickadees. When we reached the mile long dirt road that led us to our cottage, I would sit in the back of our Ford pickup and look back at the green and brown blurs of the world that left behind me. My imagination would make the adventure come alive, the dinosaurs were chasing us down, but we were going as fast as we could. The loud thumps echoed through the trees as my heart raced. But all was not lost, once we arrived at the main cottage we were in safety, and another adventure started.
The hot sun would roll over into a milky white moon that sat up in the sky like a Goddess with deep sparking water surrounding her. Sitting on the dock at the waterfront on a cool night you could see every single constellation in the sky, a big spider web with drops of shimmering water caught in it. If you were lucky, you’d be able to peer up into the sky and see a shooting star bolt across it, like a sparkling rocket on a mission. In that one magical moment everything in life seemed simple, and it was a sign that everything was going to be good. After a refreshing sleep, the white hot sun would be back high up in the sky, waiting for me outside, another day of amazing adventure through dense jungles and dangerous insects, crawling from every dark corner. Only small beams of light would come through the overhang of the trees. Small dust particles were visible, like the rushing traffic of the busy world that lay just beyond the realms of my own. Walking through the majestic wilderness, the air was fresh, the water was clear. The tall trees stretched up, seemingly, to the sky. I was on an adventure looking for lost treasures of the Aztecs, the gold that lay deep in the pyramids, avoiding all the hidden traps. All of this happened in a matter of an hour, before I was thrust back into reality when my mom would call out that lunch was ready. My childhood was centered around this place. My Grandmother lived there, every weekend would be spent there, holidays and family gatherings were all spent there. It was the only place in my life where I would have to make my imagination do its job to entertain me. There was always a new adventure.
Perhaps as I got older, I lost something about the great adventure behind going to the cottage. Before, I saw it as stultifying to the mind, like Margaret saw he town, but more recently I have begun to learn what a valuable place that was, and still is, especially in today’s society. Some people can’t live without the technology of this world, and don’t seem to want or care to sit back and enjoy nature for what it’s worth. There’s an extraordinary sense of serendipity in our forests and wildlife that we have yet to see as a collective. Sometimes there was the incredulity when I would be on one of my amazing quests through the thick, overgrown ferns and flowers and I would discover a beautiful little area that I would want to live in.
We all live behind concrete, glass and cold, rigid steel. That is what we see every day of our lives. The bricks of the school that keep us contained, the metal fencing that keeps us out and the glass in front of our television screens that keeps us in our seats. I have travelled across this country and the only place I’ve been that seems to have embraced both the wilderness and the benefits of the city is Vancouver. It unites the two as so to give its residence best of both worlds, a place I thought Canada used to be, something that I used to have, one that I visited regularly. But perchance there is still hope that we are not totally alienated from physical earth.
I guess you can compare some of my views about Canada to those of Margaret. The place where I spent a large amount of my childhood is now starting to form the person who I will soon become. The place of adventure and the place of imagination. I grew up knowing about the city but also knowing about the wilderness, those are where my roots lie, and that is where I am learning the sight of my own particular eyes.