Far, far from here there is a wide, fertile valley accessible only by
a narrow steep gravel road, by boat from the mouth of the Stikine river
or by bush plane. I grew up here in a log cabin on land in Tahltan first nation territory near Telegraph Creek in northern Canada. In the long northern winters we heated our home with wood, cut from the surrounding land and stored in the wood shed, we ate vegetables harvested from our garden and stored in a root cellar and fish and meat, hunted and canned or frozen.
Since then I have lived mostly in urban areas, including the cities of Victoria, Toronto, Edmonton, Vancouver, London, Munich, Berlin and now Pune, India. I miss the wilderness often. Sometimes, staring out the window of a car or a train I wonder why I'm not walking over the fields I'm passing by.
However I'm continuously drawn into the kinetic energy of the city by the speed and intensity of the human interaction I find there, the proximity to events of apparent importance with their electric currency.
Whether it is despite of or rather as a result of having grown up without a television, if one is playing I find it near to impossible not to watch it. Long ago I decided I wanted to participate in the creation of electric media, choosing the option offered by the personal computer to manipulate the screen images, sounds and text myself. Certainly that has allowed me to feel that I wield the power of a creator and am not simply in helpless servitude to the flickering screen.
Yet I would be naive not to recognize that this is an illusion.
If through my creativity I can provide moments of honest reflection, for myself and perhaps another viewer, then that is the best I can hope for. A more sustained consciousness I believe I can only find in nature.
I am thankful for my upbringing where I was saturated in the sustained consciousness of my wilderness environment. As the flickering screen before me reflects my stuttering fingers with these words, I hope to believe that you cannot take the woods out of the boy.
Ethan Reitz
