Thursday, March 22, 2007

Orange Juice

I am having some orange juice in the darkness of the warm spring evening. Well, actually, it is room temperature in the darkened apartment, but I am pretending that I am sitting on a log beside a campfire, next to a quiet lake somewhere in Northern Ontario. That's where I'd like to be. I came across a web page telling stories of various canoe expeditions around Canada. Reading them made me want to be canoeing, and fishing, and setting up camp somewhere in the boreal forest, somewhere in the bush away from computers and telecommunications, e-mails and documentation.



Growing up, I drank prodigious amounts of orange juice - my preference was for the pulp-free form of the nectar. My friend Robin's father told me quite soberly one evening back in high school days that the pulp in orange juice was added by the manufacturer after squeezing the oranges, and that it is derived from felled trees - purified, food-grade powdered cellulose. I believed him. I think I still believe him now.

Q: How do you tell the difference between a walrus and an orange?
A: Put your arms around it and squeeze. If you don't get orange juice, it's a walrus.


I tried to fell a cedar tree last time I went on a solo canoeing trip - it had blown halfway-down in a great storm in mid 2006 and was threatening to careen dangerously down in the middle of the camp site, across my head. I had a little hatchet and no saw and it took me ages to finally hack it down - twisted by the wind, it was hung up in another cedar and so made it most inconvenient for me to end its shattered life. I had to scramble half-way up a granite rock-face to even get close enough to the tortured bend in the trunk and so I was posed rather precariously and sweatily and thus all the wood chips and dust took turns playing "Fall In Mungo's Eye Balls" and "Clog Up Mungo's Nostrils".



Now that I have a nice Gransfors Bruks small forest axe and a nice buck saw, I am prepared to lay waste to any offending trees that might lean my way. The saw will also provide me with ample opportunity to gather saw dust with which I can thicken my evening orange juice (although I found that the cedar was particularly fragrant and somewhat resinous and perhaps not suited to my needs), as I sit on a log beside a campfire, next to a quiet lake somewhere in Northern Ontario, as a nice fat lake trout sizzles in the smoke, waves lap at the beach stones, and I enjoy my orange juice.