Wolf Willow Williwaw

Phil Burpee

Phil Burpee, Columnist

Oooh, that smell. It’s hard to keep your head screwed on this time of year. There was trouble enough trying to keep a sober outlook while the choke-cherries and pin-cherries were in bloom, but now there’s no hope of avoiding one of Nature’s most beguiling intoxicants – the waves of nectar emanating from all those wolf willow bushes splashed all over the country. This is a scent so intense, so enveloping, so sweet, so alluring that it seems to almost have a physical force when it sweeps over you. All living things are in the business of attention-getting at one time or another in the course of their lives. We seek to attract for purposes of sex, of kinship, of authority, of information sharing, of fellowship, of assurance. We do it with scents, with colours, with sounds, with postures, with dances, with feathers, with roars, with squeals, with hums, with coos. We bring attention to ourselves most pointedly though for some particular biological purpose, usually to do with either procreation or dominance. Young human males have traditionally done it with TransAms and sub-woofer speakers. Young human females have very successfully employed skin-tight blue-jeans and cascades of back-combed hair. The wolf willow does it with sensuous floods of aerated syrup, pouring over the contours of the prairie like some invisible liquid, flowing towards some ancient sea at the base of our brains. There is no defence.


What is a drug? What is a scent? What are these pheromones and signatures that bypass intellect altogether and flip switches on the fundamental breaker panels of our very being? These chemical markers came with us when we lurched up out of the water onto the dry and continue their work yet on the wafts of air rather than amongst the watery currents of the great oceans of our infancy. Turpentine hydrocarbons venting off a stand of limber pine in the hot summer sun. Sagebrush reaching up like so many caressing fingers from the serpentine of a deep coulee at dusk. That fuggy smell from the nape of your lover’s neck in the dreamy world of half-sleep. The sweetness of horse. The bitter tang of fear at the back of your tongue as some phantom brushes past your ear. The ozone you taste/smell just after the lightning bolt has ripped the air. Your mother’s skin. A curl of single-malt vapour lifting up out of the glass, touching the soft palette at the back of your nose like a passing thought. These things predate words – they even predate thoughts. They elicit experiential responses, needless of language, for the thing itself is the language unto itself.

When the williwaw comes, the little whirlwind, on a warm Spring day, it moves across the land with a certain furious purpose. It behaves like a living creature, self-contained, mobile, born from somewhere and going to somewhere else, much like ourselves. It has a voice and it has a body whose presence we can see as it spirals across the grass and bends the bushes low, lifting up into itself all manner of stuff and ground litter so that we can behold its shape materialize out of the air – the Invisible Man briefly cloaked in the garb of nature’s clutter. As it passes, the wolf willow reaches out and offers the gift of scent so that this dancing thing might carry with it a certain message to any who might choose to stop and consider. For such is the power of evanescence, of fleeting, passing energies, that impressions of permanence are a sign of foolishness, and the very nature of coming into being only to pass out of being again when the dance is done is the very heart of living. So teaches the little wind.

It is no surprise that we seek to drug ourselves with booze and pot and pills and junk TV and toys and religion. It is because we have lost access to the primordial forms of enchantment and the luxuriant drunkenness of being awash in the blood currents of this world. It is not for nothing that mystical revelation historically results from a lengthy sojourn into the wilderness, far from the madding crowd, and deeply immersed in a great solitude. Because it is the words that cling and drip all over our original senses, leaving us to believe that if it cannot be spoken (or now, rendered on a touch-screen), then it is not real. We have fallen into the dreadful trap of vicariousness, whereby experience can only be quantified inasmuch as it can be reflected back to us through some intervening medium. We have become mere watchers. How sad. And how troublesome. For our increasing inability to behold the actual world that surrounds, underlies and supports us is causing a toxic disconnect between us and the living planet that is our source and our sustenance. In our stupour we look out into the world but do not see the old friend standing before us – the old friend who spins across our landscapes, replete with the swirling scents of home.

I suppose I could sit down and have a good look at the underlying biochemistry of just what happens when a big, generous waft of wolf willow nectar gets up my nose and makes its way back into my skull. It would be a grand and merry ride, studying the conversion of airborne molecules into electrical impulses and synaptic flashes by the gajillion. But I flunked Grade 11 chemistry, and though I greatly admire the estimable capacities of science to provide an itemized roadmap for such an astonishing exchange as the one mentioned here, it is by no means necessary to get to the root of the matter. The wolf willow williwaw transports me – it gathers me up in its little tornado and lifts me out of my delusions and right into actuality. It puts just the right bend in the straightness of my so-called beliefs, and thereby saves me from a creeping and debilitating certainty. For certainty must fall before the restless swirlings of mystery. And Mystery is the veil through which seemingly inconsequential experiences beckon us to awake from our dreams and behold the day.

I have a civic concern. It may well be that anyone who is driving along the road with the windows down and passes into a stream of wolf willow nectar drifting up out of the hollows should pull over immediately and relinquish control of the vehicle – maybe call the Queen’s Cowboys to report a D.U.I. situation. When the cruiser shows up, all the hapless driver can do is plead guilty to operating a motor vehicle under the influence of the pheromone of the very world itself, calling out to the traveller to come hither – abandon such narrow sobriety – and give over to the splendid intoxication of the passing williwaw that is this life.


Phil Burpee
June 16, 2012