Old bones: Why I can’t stop writing about the Canadian Shield

“Mount Everest ain’t got shit on me”—The Canadian Shield, probably.

Almost everything I write happens on the backbone of the Canadian Shield.

I mean that literally—I live on the southern border of the Shield, the massive expanse of ancient precambrian rock that underlies a significant chunk of the country and forms the oh-so-stereotypically Canadian landscape of rocky hills and deep blue lakes and towering pines. So when I’m sitting here in my office, the rock not that far below my feet is the rock of the Shield, the foundation to my everyday.

I also mean it metaphorically, or even metaphysically, as so much of what I write is set in the landscapes that I consider home. Both in my non-fiction writing here when I talk about the outdoors, and in my fiction writing.

My fiction writing is something I haven’t talked about much—one reason is because there’s nothing quite so navel-gazing as a writer writing about writing. The other reason is that though I’ve been writing fiction in some form since I was a very young child—like, four years old—I’ve never tried to get published. Something about that feels kind of embarrassing to me, like I’ve put so much effort into something that no one has ever read. Starting this blog is one of the ways I’m trying to combat that stage fright, and get myself back in the writerly mindset so I can see a draft through to pitchability. But that’s a topic for another day.

Typical Canadian Shield landscapes, taken by me in Sault Ste Marie and just outside Algonquin Park.

Of the stories that I’ve written—and there are a not-insignificant number of them—the vast majority are set somewhere right around here, in my little corner of Ontario. Are there more beautiful, dramatic, storied places to set a novel? Of course, but they aren’t my place. And I think there is magic here.

What it means, to set so many of my stories in the woods of Eastern Ontario, is that they all take place nestled in the nature that the foundation of the Shield creates.

If you’ve spent a lot of time in this part of the world, you’ve probably come to take the features of the Shield very much for granted: the hundreds upon hundreds of lakes filling the deep gouges left by retreating glaciers in the last ice age; the marshes and bogs filled with dead spindly trees, branches long fallen; the boreal forests full of maple and elm and pine and oak (sadly, on that note, you’re probably also used to only seeing those trees in their relative infancy, since logging has made any remnants of the old-growth forests extremely rare in Ontario).

I love those things deeply (the nature, not the logging), but that’s not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is the other characteristic feature of the Shield landscape: the rocks.

These are the boulders that peek out from under their mossy blankets when you’re out in the woods. They’re the sheer cliffs that have been drilled through and dynamited to build our highways. They’re the lichen-covered mounds lining our lakes and rivers. 

And here is the thing about these rocks that so obsesses me, the thing lodged in my brain that I cannot possibly get my mind around, the thing that underlies all my thoughts and feelings about this landscape and how I relate to it: some of those rocks are four billion years old. 

Dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. Mammals appeared 205 million years ago. Microbes, maybe 3.7 billion years ago. So when the first whispers of life emerged on Earth from the primordial gloom, the rock we’re walking on was already here.

These rocks, which I have touched with my bare hands, could have existed on earth before life itself.

And there is something more. Those rocks are actually, almost inconceivably, what is left of the mountains that once stood here instead, and which stretched almost 40,000 ft high. Everest, for comparison, is 29,000 ft. We are standing on the roots of a mountain range we aren’t even capable of comprehending.

The idea of this mountain range—this enormous, unfathomable mountain range—has intrigued me since childhood. Even now, I still try to picture it when I drive up to my in-law’s cottage on the eastern edge of Algonquin Park. How far above the clouds did those peaks soar? If we could see a snapshot of this land back then, would we even recognise it as Earth? I know that this is impossible—again, microbes didn’t even exist yet, and the makeup of what we think of as “Earth” was so completely different that it may as well have been a different planet.

But maybe that’s why I’m so intrigued by it. It happened so long ago that it can’t even really be understood by our puny, short-lived human minds. And yet, the rock is still here.

The sense of shivery awe I feel when I think too hard about the Canadian Shield is something that seeps into the stories I set here. I can’t capture the vastness of geologic timescales, but I can write about the deep unknowable parts of the lakes we swim in; the bright loud resin scent of the pines in the summer heat; the contrast of those moss-laden boulders under a fresh snowfall. I can maybe try, just a little, to capture just a sliver of the sublime. Because I do think that there’s an echo of those incomprehensible timescales here, a sort of grittiness between the teeth—this place is old in a way that you can feel, and I can’t escape the memory of it when I write. 

Before I even set out to write the body of this blog post, I called it Old bones, because that’s what I think of when I think of these impossibly ancient rocks: I think of them as the bones of those old mountains, eroded to comparative nothingness, but still here, still breathing. In digging deeper into the geology of this area I discovered that Lanark County, my home, is on a southerly extension of the Shield called the Frontenac Arch. Then I discovered that in Mohawk (Kanyen’kehà:ka) tradition, the Frontenac Arch is called the Bones of the Mother.

Just one of those synchronicities, a bit of logic to the unfathomable. 

Until next time.