munday's child
October 19, 2020
o n e
On this walk, I am thinking of names and speed and scale.
Trail names are whimsical, specific. They suggest an intimacy, carry and sometimes conceal narratives, experiences, inside jokes. Consider: Space Nugget, Bucket of Blood, Lower Queso Grande.
Trails are slow,
lots of surface area.
Capillaries where interactions occur.
TWO: By contrast, the names of logging roads are utilitarian. Davis Lake Main. Trent River Main. They orient, they tell people in trucks which general direction they must go in order to cut down big trees.
t h r e e
Trails form organically, through usage. If and when they fall out of use, the landscape wastes little time erasing them.
The bigger the pathway, the more abstract the name. Interstate 95. The 101. The Trans-Canada Highway. Lots of speed. Lots of flow and volume. No impediments. No contact. No exchange.
FOUR: A simple delight: watching autumn leaves as they make their descent to earth. So much variation, so much personality and style. It is as if each leaf has waited its entire life for this moment for this brief swan song, to fully express and reveal itself.
Munday’s Child (not to be confused with Tuesday's child, Wednesday's child, Thursday's child, or Friday's Child) is a short trail skirting the marshland that separates the village of Cumberland from the foothills of the Beaufort mountains.
Most nights, I tell my three year-old daughter, Aila, stories with an ever-growing cast of recurring characters that includes snakes, badgers, deer, and ravens. The principals, however, are Beany Bean (detective) and Izzy Pickle (Assistant Detective). They live somewhere in the vicinity of Munday’s Child.
f i v e
SIX: Venn diagram with two sets.
Set A, flora and fauna of Cumberland forest.
Set B, imaginary flora and fauna of Cumberland forest in the story-realm of Beany Bean.
*both sets contain creatures such as slugs, squirrels, and raccoons. Set B also includes lions,
elephants, pterodactyls, and bearded, talking worms.
s e v e n
Munday’s child is named after the River Rat, Al Munday. He and Chad and Val comprise the essential core of Rats and have built much of Cumberland’s trail network. Al has a wiry frame and a silver handlebar mustache. A figure of local renown, a painting of Al working on a trail hangs near the bar of the Waverly Hotel.
there is rubber rat nailed to a fallen log on Munday's child. One
day, he disappeared. The next week, he was back. No explanation offered.
EIGHT:
Empty can of Lucky Lager, once (and still) emblematic of island loggers. Currently embraced by hipsters as a local answer to Pabst Blue Ribbon.
[not technically a question, and certainly not one worth answering].
nine: the waverly hotel was locally dubbed "the Hug & Slug" in cumberland's not-so-distant rough and tumble past. The first time Jan went to the Waverly twenty-five years ago, he walked in on two men sniffing lines of cocain in the restroom.
Today, the Waverly has clean toilets and serves craft beer and brunch. But you can still get (a) lucky.
At dinner one evening while pop pop and La La are visiting.
La La: "what do Izzy Pickle and Beany Bean look like?"
Aila: “Izzy Pickle is a bean, and Beany Bean is a pickle.”
*Small structure along Munday's Child, suspected by
Aila to be Izzy Pickle's house >>>
t e n
eleven: A football-sized hollow at the base of a dead cedar. sawdust strewn about as in an unkempt shop. The work of the pileated woodpecker.
Lone carpenter ant rests on the trunk of a nearby pine tree, looking lost. An ant colony is essentially a superorganism; the sum of the communication between the ants of a colony amounts to a formidable intelligence. An isolated ant is broken synapse, a severed junction, [or an easy snack for a pileated woodpecker].
So many people isolated, isolating. So many broken synapses.
t w e l v e
If the River Rats are not out building trails, they are likely as not at the Cumberland Brewing Company. Chad is about fifty: charming, garrulous, a rogue. He is from someplace very cold – Saskatchewan or Manitoba.
Chad revels in the stories behind the names. Bear Buns is so-called because of an incident in which a black bear stole the Rats' lunch.
The rats' style: Waste not, want not mixed with humor and whimsy. More than one broken axe handle has found a new reason for being in the Munday's Child boardwalk.
Thirteen:
Names, like trails, are provisional.
Where does the trail lead, and what name will it go by?