Talking to Grandmother Oak (1998)

TALKING TO GRANDMOTHER OAK
August, 1998

David B. Schwartz

She camped all the way to Florida, living on fresh roadkill. That’s the first thing I heard about Brenda when she showed up in Sarasota back in 1967. She and her companion Tom, an Arctic explorer, drove down from Canada, camping along the side of the road. They’d stopped when it got close to dinnertime at each roadkill, poking and examining the carcass until they found something fresh and appetizing. Then they’d make camp, dress out the raccoon or possum or squirrel with their razor-sharp buck knives, make a fire, and turn the meat on a spit. Crawling into their pup tent, they’d rise early in the morning, make coffee, and drive another day. Brenda sure looked like somebody out of the North woods compared to all of us in our shorts, T shirts and sandals. Tall, blond and angular, she dressed in a long-sleeved shirt, well-worn blue jeans and hiking boots. A buck knife was strapped permanently to her belt, a small sketchpad always in her hand.

Brenda, even at that young age, was an experienced Arctic naturalist. Traveling with her partner Tom on his frequent trips above Hudson’s Bay and Baffin Island, Brenda sketched and painted wildlife, getting as close as she could to see birds, seals, walruses, and polar bears. The finished watercolors in her folio were charged with the sharp, illuminating light of the Northern latitudes. Against a pale-blue sky and dark sea a Great Blue Heron would stand on a rocky shore. Each pebble, each blade of grass, each feather was drawn with the detail worthy of an Audubon. I had never seen anyone my age who could paint like that. The nature that she painted was alive. Later, when she linked up with my friend Roger and they moved in with him on an overgrown estate on the tip of Longboat Key, where I made my own home in a shack near the bay, I got to know her a lot better. We talked as she stood at her easel, which was set up in front of an orange tree in the overgrowth. Under her brush, three oranges on a branch rose off the page like glowing suns setting over the Gulf nearby.

After college, I saw Brenda only rarely for 30 years. But like most friends from that extraordinary time, we did not lose touch entirely. We would always hear news of each other, and we’d see each other upon occasion. I knew that she had become a noted Canadian wildlife artist, with her own gallery in Merrickville along the Rideau Canal, whose portraits of birds in the wild had become especially sought after. She painted for the National Geographic, and even achieved the greatest honor for a painter of birds: to have her work appear on a Canadian duck stamp. Then I learned that her companion Tom had taken seriously ill. In his farmhouse far from the Arctic wilds where they had spent so much time together, Brenda nursed him through his final illness.

I called Brenda up about a year after Tom had died to tell her that Roger had terminal
melanoma. So Rodger’s own dying served to bring us together again to care for him in his own final illness. The years had changed Brenda little. She still wore blue jeans and a buck knife. She still carried the ubiquitous sketchpad. But since Tom’s death, she had lost the ability to paint. When she picked up her brushes, she told me, old critical parental voices called so loudly to her in her head that she could only stop it by laying the brushes down. She struggled, for the first time in her vigorous life, with a chronic illness herself precipitated by Tom’s loss.

More than 30 years after I had stayed at Brenda and Tom’s farmhouse with she and Roger, I wheeled in the driveway with my young son Nate and his best friend. We were on a boys’ road trip, the summer after my own separation from my wife. I wanted to take Nate and Biniam on a "Blue Highways" trip to Maine, traveling only on secondary roads, taking ferries instead of bridges, and stopping to see old friends along the way. I wanted them to see the America that I had known as a child, before the advent of the interstates and their accompanying identical fast-food restaurants, Holiday Inns, and strip-malls. I also wanted to show Nate grownups who were pursuing in their adult lives precisely that interest in the natural world that so compelled him. I wanted to show him more friends of mine who did what they loved, rather than being trapped in offices and careers.

I had taken him to see friends who had returned to living the way that they really wanted to after some years of conventional employment. But Brenda was a person who had never wavered, even for a moment. We walked the trails on her 550 acres of Ontario woods. A bird flew overhead, squawking. Brenda looked up. "Those terns have made a nest in that tree. Now, they are talking in their teenage voices." It was clear that Brenda knew all of the birds around her house individually and could identify them at a distance and by voice. She knew the trees, too, even deep in the woods. She pointed out an immense white oak in a boggy hollow to the left of the trail. "Grandmother Oak has given me a hard time over the years. Not so much anymore, though. I would try to paint her and she would play tricks on me." With my questioning, Brenda allowed that she could feel the spirit of trees.

"What is the spirit of a tree like?" I asked.

"Very slow, very deep," she replied. "They don’t notice or change much. Wetness, dryness, fire, insects; that sort of thing." We walked on, Nate and Biniam running ahead, as boys do, towards the swamp.

Brenda and I sat on a rough bridge that she had made which crossed a muddy, water-lily choked, shallow stream. Nate and Biniam immediately stripped and jumped into the water, paddling through the mud and vegetation like some little African children. We watched them playing, happily and fearlessly, in the swamp. I asked Brenda to tell me more about her deep connection with the natural world. How did she come to it? How had she overcome pressures to get a "real job" for all of her life?

"I have always known that the world is alive," Brenda said, dropping a stick into the slow current and watching it lazily flow through the water lilies. "I’ve always known that there is no real dividing line between humans and the rest of nature. But it was the gift of a book from my mom when I was seven that convinced me that it was possible to live a life of adventure. The book was Man Eaters of Kumaon, by a guy named Jim Corbett. After that, I never considered living any other way. My dad used to give me a lot of trouble about it. He didn’t like this about me. ‘You’re going to end up a street cleaner,’ he yelled at me. I didn’t reply – he could get pretty mad – but privately I would think to myself that it might be a rather nice job." She pursued what she wanted to anyway. Contrary to my impression, Brenda pointed out that in the art world, she wasn’t considered a "real" artist. No wildlife artist was. "Animal painting isn’t considered ‘real’ art unless the animals are dead," she explained. It didn’t bother her. We were sitting on the bridge on a beatingly hot August day. It was extraordinary – it just doesn’t get that hot in Ontario. We had driven hundreds of miles north, north of the Great Lakes, anticipating that it would cool down as we came north. But the heat never lessened at all. It was the hottest summer on record, and the longest drought. I asked Brenda about the global warming that was so evident around us. She looked off philosophically. "People are turning forms of nature that are beneficial to them into forms that are toxic to them. Eventually, it will be too toxic for us pink, squiggly worms to survive. But the earth, Giaa, will go on – that’s all the world is: cycles of creation and destruction. I’ve been sketching a portrait of my cleaning lady – you know, like these natural cycles, she is the one who cleans up. I call the drawing my ‘Black Madonna.’ Nature is going to clean the earth of all these humans." I looked out at my son and his friend paddling back toward me, pulling up things to examine from the muddy bottom with their feet, and I felt a pang.

When we left Brenda for the mountains of New Hampshire, she was about ready to leave on another birding trip. "A year after Tom died, I still felt pretty discouraged," Brenda had explained to me, "and I was sick. So I decided that I needed to do something new – some big undertaking – to pull myself out of it. I decided that I would identify and sketch in the wild 200 birds in the coming year." This was an extraordinary undertaking, it seemed to me: many birder’s life lists – the number of birds they had simply observed in the wild over a lifetime -- was only 200. By November of that year, Brenda had already sketched her 200. Then she kept on going. Someone had told her where a rare bird could be sighted in the swamps of Louisiana, and she was about to get on a plane to see if she could find it.

Before we left, she helped me pick some peaches from her tree for our journey. "You should pick them when they are as firm as a young girl’s breasts," she said, plucking a ripe peach deliciously from its stem and handing it to me. She sounded like Julia Child giving instructions for marketing. Then she unsheathed her buck knife and cut me a stem of ripe tomatoes from her garden. The boys and I got into my car and headed off towards the Eastern Mountains.