When Olive Fredrickson published her autobiography in 1972, after a long and hard life in Canada’s wilderness, her chosen title, The Silence of the North, was instantly meaningful to anyone familiar with the hard and empty country north of the temperate deciduous forests. Most of the forests of the world are noisy. At night, the relentless sound of cicadas, the scampering of animals, the swaying limbs of trees and rustles of leaves, and the sounds of humanity, even if only in the form of distant trains or highways, are evident. But the vast boreal regions of Canada, roadless, trainless and townless, dominated by motionless black spruce and tamarack, are silent at night. You have to be near a waterfall or a stretch of rapids to hear noise. The cold lakes are like black sheets of obsidian. Ironically, if there is a noise, it will carry across a lake for miles, so that you can make out a quiet conversation by a campfire from the opposite shore, and when a loon makes its occasional solemn cry, you don’t know if it’s nearby or three kliks away. I have vivid memories of that silence, and the phrase never had to be explained to me.
I live in a small apartment in downtown Toronto. In fact, it is known to statisticians as the most densely populated place in Canada. Within a short walk from my door, there are more people than in all of the Yukon, Northwest and Nunavut territories combined. Normally, this is a very noisy neighbourhood. The streets are usually crowded with traffic, people pour in and out of the subway stations, the stores are full of shoppers. There is always music. A few blocks from my home, the gay village has been a continuously lively party for the last half century, and it’s normal to see flocks of people on the streets at 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning. Forests of condominium towers fill the air with domestic noises, and construction crews are always hammering, hoisting, and mixing concrete to build new ones. Motorcycles, helicopters, cop cars, fire engines and ambulances add to the din.
Now, under lockdown, my neighbourhood has the Silence of the North. For most of the day, you hardly hear a sound. For me, it’s a bit of nostalgia. For the hardcore denizens, those “bred and buttered in Toronto” as the saying goes, it must be very disconcerting. It’s “damned eerie,” one elderly gentleman told me. But, every day, at 7:30 on the dot, a raucous din erupts, and lasts for about five minutes. You hear the national anthem loudly playing. People are out on their balconies blowing whistles, banging pots, and singing. The custom, which began in Italy and spread around the world, is a needed emotional outlet as well as a tribute to the doctors, first responders, care-givers and store clerks who must risk infection so that life can go on.
For myself, I’m as satisfied as a well-fed cat sleeping near a fireplace. Well-stocked with supplies, blessed with good neighbours who are self-disciplined and mutually helpful, and surrounded by a vast collection of books, films and music, I am in no position to complain about anything. While the public authorities made some errors in the beginning, on the whole they are acting responsibly ― even the ones I voted against. None of them are wasting time with self-promoting propaganda videos and all of them are publicly committed to following the science to determine policy. Alberta, which began planning for the pandemic last December, and is consequently less seriously affected, is sharing its surplus medical supplies with the other provinces, and Air Canada has volunteered three large jets to move them. Politics in Canada is not as a rule much concerned with race or religion, as it is in our neighbour to the south, but it has always been characterized by extreme rivalries and constant bickering between the provinces, each of which sees itself more or less as a mini-nation. But in this crisis, all such rivalries seem to have disappeared. I’ve never seen the provinces get on so well, or co-operate so efficiently. The one sour note is that the crisis has revealed the shocking level of ill-preparedness and incompetence in privately-run homes for the aged, where half of our deaths have occurred. In one case, criminal charges are being considered. On the brighter side, a company in Ottawa has developed an efficient portable testing kit, giving results in less than half an hour, that meets the government’s standards, and mass production of this kit is already underway. Mass testing, when combined with social distancing and contact tracing, is the solidly proven way out of this mess. Let’s hope that the kit is really as good as it seems, and that it is properly deployed. I follow all the available covid statistics daily. New Zealand and Iceland, both of which are places whose statistics are unquestionable, demonstrate that the virus can be beaten if the citizenry, medical profession, and elected officials co-operate and are pro-active. Canada is, of course, a much larger and more complex country than those two, with some inbuilt disadvantages that neither the Kiwis nor the Jáarar have, but the evidence so far is that the methods should be basically the same. We will not come out as squeaky-clean ― the scandalous failure in our care for the elderly will be a stain on our record ― but we may at least get a “good effort” report card. As I write, testing levels have been consistently better than average, with immediate prospects of drastic improvement, no regional medical system has been overwhelmed, though some are working at a frenzied pace, procurement of essential supplies seems to be assured, public response has been as good as anyone could reasonably expect, social solidarity and public morale have remained high, the co-operation between private industry and government has been exemplary, and there are no food shortages or significant failures in the supply chain. I went to a supermarket to stock up on fresh vegetables on Tuesday morning, after more than a week spent entirely at home. I arrived just at store opening, and there was as yet no line-up to get in, though it had started to form when I left, with all the protocols adhered to. I scanned the shelves, and everything appeared to be well-stocked, and even toilet paper, cleansers, eggs, and canned goods were plentiful. The selection of produce was excellent. There was no evidence of price-gouging, but some items had limits-per-customer, and there were none of the usual “loss-leader” sale prices. If this normalcy can be sustained, I know not, but in any case my personal stockpile is sufficient for months, and I am only shopping for fresh items.
I’m able to keep my finances on an even keel, since my income is not dependent on leaving the apartment, and I have a small cushion in the bank to deal with any temporary shortfall. I’ve never eaten so well! Since the best way to relieve the inevitable cramps from sitting at the computer is to get up and prepare a meal, and I no longer have the temptation to run out and get three slices of pizza or indulge in other unhealthy whims, I am steadily improving my cooking skills. My neighbours tell me they are also doing this (except for the one who is a professional chef). I have fresh herbs growing on the windowsill. I’m going to be using a lot of basil. If you plant basil it will just leap out of the soil and overwhelm everything, like the Blob in the 1958 Steve McQueen movie, while every other herb has a tough Darwinian struggle. My only regret is that I didn’t stock enough caraway seed, so my goulash and my borscht will no longer have the taste I prefer. But with all that basil, my Italian dishes will shine.
At the moment, I’m listening to Otmar Mácha’s Double Concerto for Violin, Piano and Orchestra ― a somewhat melodramatic piece. The cats are snoozing. After writing the next few sentences, and posting them, I’ll curl up with the cats and read The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 1774–1777. Am I troubled or inconvenienced by the lockdown or social distancing? It’s a laughable idea. When Olive Fredrickson’s husband drowned in a lake, and her three children were nearing starvation, she walked forty miles in a blizzard to reach the closest neighbour in order to get food for them, and remarked that the experience left her with little love for wolves. There were as yet no phones or radios in her part of the world. There was no internet.
I have an apartment full of technology that, in my childhood, I would have considered a fantastic science fiction dream. The speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second. My average download speed is 28 Mbps. My friends are not far away in time, though some are pretty far in space. And I have very, very good friends.