Sticking to the Path Most Followed has its Merits

By Laurie Sarkadi

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a

trail.” A friend has this aphorism on a plaque with a drawing of a hiker in a forest, and,

metaphors aside, I hate it.

Where I live, in an off-grid house perched on a slab of ancient bedrock, hemmed on

three sides by a drinkable lake in Chief Drygeese Territory of the Subarctic, there are

boundless options to blaze a trail. I can walk any direction in winter over frozen lakes

and rivers of the taiga with few man-made obstructions, unless I go about 30 kilometres

west and jag south to the capital of the Northwest Territories, Yellowknife. Near this

surprisingly metropolitan city of 20,000 there’s also the infamous and highly

contaminated former Giant Mine site, which destroyed Dene traditional lands, water and

lives, in exchange for gold.

In part because of such toxic legacies, I suffer from a type of environmental affliction,

maybe a neurosis, that wants everything in nature to have the greatest chance possible

of living out its days, its cycles, without human intervention. In other words, naturally. I

know that we are intrinsically a part of nature and therefore bound to make our marks –

Buddhists, and physicists, aptly point out the law of action and reaction is constantly at

play – but few could argue that once a natural space becomes accessible in North

America, humans overreach.

There is a well-worn trail I follow almost daily near my house. Because I have a terrible

sense of direction and often use walking to sort out problems, head down, instead of

mindfully taking in my surroundings, I’m happy to follow a footpath. It was my husband

who one day pointed out a tall majestic tree just off the trail – a jackpine, long dead, its

trunk twisted like metal cables and weathered a stately silver-grey. Tangles of dried

branches and cones extended on either side like arms. Its top looked like a straggly

mop of hair.

My husband called it a condo. About a dozen holes had been pecked or chewed up and

down the trunk, giving sustenance and sanctuary over the years to birds and animals

like woodpeckers, grouse, hawks, owls, voles, squirrels, marten, flickers, bufflehead

ducks…as well as countless insects.

Uncharacteristically – because we don’t really have meadows in this low-lying region of

boreal forest – the tree was in the middle of a large circular clearing carpeted with pale

yellow-green lichen, alone, save for a hunk of granite the size of a large headstone that

stood like a sentry at its base. I could imagine this tree coming to life Disney-like to hold

court while creatures of the forest gathered ‘round. If I were scouting an ideal movie

location to shoot a coven gathering, this would be it. The space took on a quality of the

sacred for me.

I took heed of that tree every walk thereafter, careful not to stray off the trail too often for

a closer look so I wouldn’t stomp a new path through the lichen or the snow and alert

others to its location. A lot of people here heat with wood stoves, including us, and this

dense, near-petrified standing dead would be a valuable commodity.

That summer I noticed flagging tape and some other old trees further down had been

cut to clear what I think was going to become a quad trail. If you build a quad trail,

quads will come. The slow-growing, fragile forest floor would not recover from this

scraping. The cranberries, the mating pair of osprey, everything dependent on this

ecosystem being intact, would suffer. I made some inquiries, expressed some concerns,

and the work quietly stopped.

The next time I walked that trail was after several months away from home to attend

school in Guelph, where I grew up. I was shocked to discover the tree had fallen. I

shouldn’t have been, it’s what dead trees do when left alone. Still, I grieved a little. But

then I noticed how completely at home it looked cradled in a bed of lichen on the forest

floor, offering up its hollowed carcass for a new generation of inhabitants, all of whom

would aid in its degradation towards becoming soil and nurturing new growth.

Sticking to the trails is how the Dene safely navigated annual portages to the

Barrenlands, a treeless landscape rutted with veiny lines from the once-thundering

herds of migrating caribou. It’s how the Bruce Peninsula can be enjoyed, given that

trails crisscross over 700 private and public landholdings on traditional and treaty First

Nations territories. And it’s how a centuries-old dead tree near me might have a better

chance of offering condo life to the locals, because it’s not just people who deserve a

decent place to live.

Laurie Sarkadi is an award-winning journalist, producer and singer-songwriter who lives on Chief Drygeese traditional territory near Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. She is the author of Voice in the Wild, a memoir (Caitlin Press). This article first appeared in “The Blue Print Newsletter Summer 2023”, an online publication for the Bruce Trail Conservancy in Ontario. lauriesarkadi.com