Walking Northwards Into Darkness

Figure 1: "Wendigo Altar" by Walter Bruneel

Walking Northward into Darkness:

Wilderness, Wendigos, and Wastelands in the Writings of W. D. Valgardsson

Samuel Levesque

Icelandic-Canadian Short Stories Háskólí Íslands Haust 2005

Foreword: Wandering out of the world

I have my mother to thank for more than a few of my eccentricities. Growing up in the rapidly emptying Northeast corner of Oregon, she was all but raised in a ghost town, a weather beaten bit of hilly land east of Pendleton, which as of three years ago now lies completely devoid of habitation. Her youth was spent playing and exploring around empty farmsteads, aging grain elevators, and overgrown schoolhouses.

I spent my childhood in a town that was well on its way to becoming a ghost town. Throughout the late 70’s and 80’s, South Prairie, Washington was slowly sinking into economic desolation. There were abandoned homes scattered throughout town, ringed in protective thickets of black-berry and vine maple, while out in the woods the remains of railroad works, saw-mills, coal mines, and farms reclaimed by the forest provided a wealth of exciting, if rather dangerous, playgrounds. Mom loved it. So did I.

There is something particularly evocative about abandoned places, where the works of man stand visible, but conquered by the slow tide of Nature. There is also something thrilling, even downright scary about such places. The world is full of stories of haunted houses, abandoned mental hospitals that house maniacs with axes, and hidden ghost towns populated by inbred clans of cannibals. Exploring a newly discovered site was always a nerve-racking event for my friends and I, often with good reason, though we never encountered a horde of inbred man-eaters.

While the reality may not be so harsh, the wastelands we create nevertheless serve as a reservoir for our fears, real or imagined. No one was afraid of ghosts when they burnt down the old South Prairie School, but they were afraid of the teenage drinking and promiscuity that sheltered in its weathered walls. That alone was enough. Later on, in my teens, I had friends who were thrown out of usual society, more often than not due to their parents’ prejudices. Many of these friends squatted in the older neighborhoods and forgotten outskirts of surrounding towns. Being outside of societal norms, they not only had to fear the bugaboos of normal society such as murderers, rapists, and thugs, but also had to fear elements that society usually looks on as good, policemen, social workers, and missionaries, who often were as bad as the criminals. There are frightening things enough in the forgotten places of our world, but the imagination takes it further. It seems that these days, it is not the wide open untouched spaces that scare us, but rather the man-made, man-forgotten wilds in our own backyards. We want to put up signs bearing the legend “Here there be Dragons” under every urban bridge and around every sub-urban greenbelt. W.D. Valgardsson understands this fear. It is at the heart of much of his writing.

Introduction: Wendigos, Wilderness, and Wasteland, Oh My!

W.D. Valgardsson’s short stories are packed with allusions, metaphors, and themes that are so well integrated into the text that they often slip under the reader’s radar at first. The myth of the Wendigo, or its non-mythical sociological ramifications, pops up throughout his writing, even if never mentioned by name. Instead, the Wendigo myth is expressed through the actions, inaction, and motivations of his characters. Wilderness, that is the land and life of the land, appears in a Janus mask, at once the essence of home and the terrifying face of the unknown. Most striking of all, wasteland, a place both physical and physiological permeates the bulk of his stories in a myriad of forms. These three elements are worth examining in detail, as they are in large part the essential elements of Valgardsson’s prose.

Figure 2: Wendigo Costume by Comtemporary Artist Ken Warren

Walking with Wendigos

In the mythology of many North American tribes, especially those around the Great Lakes and northern plains, the Wendigo is truly fearsome and malevolent being, a disheveled brute with a chunk of ice for a heart, blackened fingers and lips, and terrible strength. Often the Wendigo is depicted as hugely tall, but also emaciated, and it is said that these creatures emit a terrifying combination of groans, snarls and whistles, being devoid of human speech.

But it is not this aspect of the Wendigo that Valgardsson makes use of, rather other, less graphic aspects of the myth. According to some of the legends, one can become a Wendigo, either by consuming human flesh, or by simply looking upon one. Once one has “gone Wendigo”, all food except for human flesh and unhealthy, often poisonous matter, such as frogs, moss, and toadstools, becomes unappetizing, and one is driven to kill and eat others, often starting with one’s own family. There have been cases throughout northern and central Canada of “Wendigo Psychosis” whereby an individual, most often a native, believes they have “gone Wendigo” and begin to crave human flesh.

It has been argued that the Wendigo myth was an important mechanism in Native societies to prevent widespread cannibalism during the long northern winters, but in Valgardsson’s hands, it becomes something else. When Valgardsson subtly and skillfully evokes the Wendigo he uses it as a symbol for the cyclical nature of violence, where victim becomes victimizer in an ever-expanding downward spiral.

The most effective examples, in my opinion, are in Valgardsson’s What Can’t Be Changed Shouldn’t Be Mourned, as well as in “An Act of Mercy” in Bloodflowers.

Starting with “A Matter of Balance”, and continuing through “Wrinkles” and “Identity”, the Wendigo keeps appearing in a rather subtle form in What Can’t Be Changed… In “A Matter of Balance”, the unnamed protagonist gazes upon the face of two men-turned-predators, bikers who live by symbolically feeding on others in the “wilderness” outside normal society. The protagonist has entered that world, both through the loss of his wife to a murderer, and by his harmless, but nonetheless illegal prospecting on public land. Once out in the wild, having seen the two “Wendigos” he begins to take on some of their characteristics. They plot with cool efficiency (hearts of ice) to head him off at the trail, and he plots with equally frigid heart to lure them onto a slope that only he is prepared to descend safely. Once the Wendigo bikers have slid down the slope and are hanging by their fingertips from certain death, the protagonist again coolly and methodically decides to leave them to die, rather than giving them a chance and thereby restoring his own humanity. As in the myth, he has looked at the face of a Wendigo, and himself become one.

This cyclical violence appears again in “Wrinkles”. The two young men Duke and Albert are already Wendigo. They wait in the woods, and are already in the “wild” outside of normal society. They both seem to have a drug problem, or in Wendigo terms, they subsist on poison when not preying on humans. Duke seems to be the originator of this Wendigo cycle, as it was he who bludgeoned “Wrinkles”, an elderly woman, to death with a hammer in a botched robbery. Having seen the face of the monster, Albert becomes one himself, selling his friend out to the victim’s vengeful fiancé, who has himself gone Wendigo because of the violence brought into his life by Duke and Albert.

But not all those who witness the Wendigo become the Wendigo. Many die before they have that chance. In “Identities” the unnamed protagonist wanders unprepared into the “wild” outside of his normal middle-class existence, where he encounters a Wendigo in the form of a police officer. The officer, who through the course of his job must have looked on violence and its perpetrators, kills the protagonist due to his own lack of humanity. His doubt and trust have been trained out of him, and his experience in the “wilds” of the urban ghetto forced him to go Wendigo.

Finally, there is the tale of two brothers, Niels and Helgi, in “An Act of Mercy” from Valgardsson’s Bloodflowers. The brothers share a fishing camp with their abusive drunken father, who foolishly attempts to bring in his nets in the face of a sudden early winter storm and is caught out on the water overnight. Despite their obvious dislike for their father, the brothers head out to rescue him as soon as the storm has cleared. After a long search, they find him frozen in place in a narrow cove, horribly frostbitten. This is one of the few instances where Valgardsson’s use of the Wendigo myth includes allusions to the actual beast. The father is described as having frozen black lips and a chattering, wheezing voice. His limbs have been frostbitten so badly that he is likely to lose an arm and both legs, and he begs his sons to push him into the water end his suffering. While the brothers disagree on what to do, one wishing to end his father’s suffering and the other unwilling to have it on his conscious, they are both acting out of human decency. When Helgi falls to his death, however, Niels decides to let his father live, rather than push him in, as he originally planned, as punishment for his brother’s death. As it says in the story: “All mercy in him died”. He has become Wendigo.

The Wendigo appears in Valgardsson’s work subtly, sneaking around the undergrowth of the stories, never calling itself by name. Rather than use the myth to provide an actual creature, Valgardsson keeps to a more modern interpretation; one expressed in films such as “Wendigo” and “Ravenous” wherein the Wendigo is not a physical presence, but rather a kind of contagious psychosis. Valgardsson’s Wendigos are the products of unresolved or unresolvable violence, and their propagation continues in a vicious cycle.

While many of these tales take place in the wilderness, many of them have an element of urbanity as well. The Wendigo, a spirit of the frozen woods, seems to have crept down into the cities and suburbs of Valgardsson’s world. This begs the question, why? Why would a creature of the vast wilderness confront modern characters? To Answer that question, we have to take a look at the next related theme in Valgardsson’s work, wilderness.

Wilderness: Romance or Rapine?

These days most people recognize, or at least pay lip service to the idea that wilderness is a good and valuable thing in and of itself. Beginning with Wordsworth and the other Romantics, and crystallizing with the American Transcendentalists, nature in wild and untamed form has been seen as a source of healing, spiritual renewal, and authenticity.

This is the wilderness that Valgardsson’s fellow Icelandic-Canadian author, Kristjana Gunnars, points to in her essay “Poetry and the Idea of Home”. Wilderness in this view is the unobtainable “home” that manifests itself in memory, evoked by sensual elements of the natural world. The poet longs for a home that never was and will likely never be, which, according to Gunnars, is where much of the emotional power of poetry resides. In simple terms, one could define this viewpoint as claiming that we all want to return to a natural state, to reenter the Garden of Eden and reclaim our unspoiled innocence.

This ideal of wilderness has been the most pervasive in recent years, but it has never managed to block out or silence and older, darker vision of wilderness that pre-dates the prevailing Romantic notion.

Beginning with Beowulf, (who himself encountered a “Wendigo” in the shape of Grendel) the very first written English fiction, and continuing unchallenged until the birth of the Romantics, wilderness was not a source of healing, spiritual renewal or sanctuary, but rather the visible darkness that lurked at the edge of the everyday world, the abode of monsters, beasts, and witches. The wilderness was a devouring thing that had to be kept at bay, and was only entered by the very brave, or the very foolish. This vision has continued to this day, but not in the “legitimate” literary forms. Rather, it has found a home in the horror and macabre genres, where wilderness still serves as the breeding ground of monsters, and in the adventure tale, where the harsh land challenges the hero and destroys the unprepared.

This is the wilderness most often encountered in Valdgardsson’s work. His characters are tested by wilderness, frighten by wilderness, and often killed by wilderness, but they are rarely comforted by it.

Which is not to say that the Romantic wilderness is completely lacking in Valgardsson’s work. In “The Man from Snaefellsnes”, Valgardsson-as-character is symbolically healed of his traumatic past and obtains a measure of peace with his immigrant up-bringing by baptizing himself in a hot spring on a trip to the Icelandic countryside. In “The Cave”, Valgardsson evokes the pastoral joys of a bright Winnipeg summer, replete with rose petals and lovemaking in haystacks to add an element of poignancy to the section of the tale dealing with his love interest. But even in that pastoral bliss, there is a creeping darkness. Early in the story, he mentions that Sigga is plagued with mosquito bites, which seems to affect Icelanders worse than others. Then, as the story progresses, the reader is pulled into the tale of Sigga’s father and grandfather, both of whom go mad upon entering the wilderness, symbolized by a cave on the shores of Lake Winnipeg.

In other stories, there is even less of the pleasant wilderness. In “Seiche” and “An Act of Mercy,” we see the harsh northern landscape taking a toll on the men who enter it, often ending in their deaths. Even the darkly comic “The Couch” pits its main characters against an absurdly malevolent wilderness that seems almost conscious. “The Couch” presents us with a wilderness that is actively trying to thwart the desires of the main character. While comic, this vision of wilderness as something antagonistic and dangerous, pervades many Valgardsson’s stories, whether it is the brutal weather of "An Act of Mercy,” the unpredictable danger of “The Seiche,” or the subtle slide into madness of “The Cave.”

In this, Valgardsson keeps to a common thread in Canadian literature, as Margaret Atwood points out in her lecture on wilderness in Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature. There is a long history of Canadian story telling dealing with the madness of the northern wilderness, where men “go bush,” catch “cabin fever,” or “go Wendigo,” or are simply swallowed up by the harsh landscape. Discussing a poem based on the doomed Franklin Expedition, and its representation of the wilderness, Atwood states, “[It’s] noteworthy that the figure conjured up is giant, female, icy, connected to madness, and destructive: a sort of Nature white in tooth and claw.” (26) This is not the safe, tranquil and idyllic wilderness of the British, or even American mind, this is wilderness unbared, Nature as a bitch goddess and devourer of men.

Interestingly, this unbared wild “white in tooth and claw” is neither remote, nor untouched by the works of man. Like the wild in which his characters encounter their Wendigo fates, Valgardsson’s wilderness is at once removed from us, and lurking just beside us. The characters in “Seiche” are not a long way from help, but the just as well might be. “Waiting” gives us a man so at home with the wilderness that he is forgotten in it, even by his family. They move on to urban life, yet he cannot make that transition, even though such a move would be simple, at least in practical terms. The wilderness is a world away and right next-door. In “Snow,” the young couple is only a short walk from their home, but for all the husband is aware, he could be miles away. Lacking his wife’s keen sense of direction and instinct (she is the more successful hunter of the two), he has entered the wilderness unprepared, and the reader is left with the uncomfortable feeling that he will pay a steep price. The wife, however, is comfortable in the wilderness; she has been tested and proven herself.

This is the other main use Valgardsson makes of wilderness. It is the testing ground, the place that challenges and changes. “Saturday Climbing” is a perfect example. It is only by being tested on the cliff-face he is climbing that the father in the story can come to grips with his daughter’s newfound maturity. Loathe as he is to admit it, the wilderness forces him to accept it in very real and physical terms, when he must rely on his daughter to belay him, to literally hold him up. Faced with this hard physical fact, he can no longer entertain his illusions of paternal control and superiority.

Valgardsson’s wilderness is neither remote, nor static. It challenges his characters, and through them, the reader, in very dynamic ways. It lurks, for as dark a thing as Valgardsson creates can only lurk, just outside the everyday. It is a wilderness more mental than physical, and in that vast North of the mind, anything is possible.

Wasteland

The final element in Valgardsson’s work that frankly fascinates me is his occasional forays into what I have come to term “wasteland.” My use of this term takes a bit of explaining, and even then, I wonder if it is not simply an aspect of my own internal mythos rather than a literary concept.

Wasteland as a concept is perhaps best explained by T.S. Eliot’s poem of the same name. I have always interpreted it as a lament for the world lost in the fires of the First World War. The poem seems to say that the world has ended, and we are all living in the ruins of the world that was; the wastes of our own creation.

Wasteland can be a physiological, geological, or mythological place. It is that place outside of the illusion of normality, and it is wasteland that encompasses both the wilderness and the Wendigo in Valgardsson’s writing.

Wasteland contains wilderness. Even in the most densely packed urban areas; one finds pockets of the wild in forgotten, unnoticed places. These places are not, however, unpopulated. They are the home of the ghosts and monsters of the post-modern age: the homeless, the forgotten, the murderer, the criminal, and the poor.

It seems that Canadian authors are more aware of this world than their American and British counterparts. Charles DeLint, a best-selling Canadian fantasy writer, has made a career for himself writing about the strangeness that lurks just beneath the surface and around the corner of everyday life. Valgardsson’s fellow Icelandic-Canadian short story author, David Arnasson, sets many of his stories in places abandoned by or outside of what most people would think of as normality. It is this lurking wasteland that lends an aura of menace and uncertainty to Valgardsson’s writing. I think that Canada, with its multi-cultural ethos, tends to create more of this liminal wasteland than other nations. Instead of pockets of sub-cultures welded together by one over arching nationalism, Canada is much more an amalgamation of separate societies, making it easier for one to feel cast out.

“The Man from Snaefellsnes” gives us an especially clear example of this socio-phychological wasteland. Valgardsson-as –character in this story feels separated from Canadian society, remembering slights at the hands of “English” schoolteachers among others. His Canadian wife annoys him with her good-natured, but rather shallow attempts to connect with his, or anyone else’s for that matter, ethnicity. Yet he also feels separated from his Icelandic heritage, both due to the slights of fellow Icelandic-Canadians (he mentions being called útlendingur by his peers) and due to the historical injustices that drove his grandfather to Canada in the first place. He is in the waiting place, the wasteland between two worlds, and though this story ends with his reconciliation to both worlds, many of his characters do not reach such a happy ending. Rather, they are abandoned, or preyed upon in the wastes.

Abandonment appears time and again in Valgardsson’s stories. In “A Matter of Balance,” the action takes place along an abandoned stretch of railway converted to pedestrian trails. Duke and Albert in “Wrinkles” squat in abandoned buildings and Duke meets his end in an abandoned cistern. The young couple in “Snow” moves into an abandoned railway station on the outskirts of a country town. Another Albert, this time in “Waiting” is himself abandoned on his island by a family caught up in the rush of modernity. Jack and Dana Andrews drive into an actual wasteland, a place stuck between the developed and the wilderness in “An Afternoon’s Drive” and are nearly trapped there. Danny Thorson is trapped when he arrives on a bleak island wasteland seemingly forgotten by the rest of the world in “Bloodflowers.”

Yet it is not abandonment alone that makes a wasteland. People also drift into it of their own accord. Duke and Albert in “Wrinkles” are a good example, but the best example I can find are Norman Thomas and his family in Bloodflower’s “Brothers.” Thomas has married a Native woman and taken to the wilderness. In doing so, despite his protests to the “British” fish-camp owner Alex, he has stepped outside of the norm and into the wasteland, where nothing is certain. Alex, in comparison, holds tight to the ideals of civilization and normality. He flies the Union Jack above his camp, hangs the Queen’s portrait in the mess hall, and prides himself on keeping his operation both physically and morally “clean.” In this way he stays out of the wasteland that Thomas inhabits.

Another good example is the peddler in “A Place of One’s Own.” Separated from the narrow-minded mainstream because of his tattoos and wandering nature, the peddler exists outside of society in a myriad of ways. “Neither Fedorchuk nor his wife approved of people not brought up in the area. Of the peddler, they were particularly contemptuous because he had no place of his own and, therefore, no trustworthy identity. Like all people who live on the very edge of having nothing, a place one’s own was very important to them. Divorced from the land, constantly travelling, appearing and disappearing without explanation, the peddler was no better than a gypsy.” (53) This lack of permanence is one of the essential elements of the wasteland, but it is not just his unusual appearance or nomadic lifestyle that alienate the peddler, but even the manner in which he makes his living. Buying cast-off and fire-damaged goods and then re-selling them tie him to the wasteland. Storing these goods in an “abandoned church” which he rents out distances him even further. Even though he makes an attempt at re-entering the mainstream by buying a local store and taking a wife, he is nonetheless abandoned in the end, and goes right back to his nomadic ways. A sad ending, but it could be worse.

The wasteland, Valgardsson makes very clear, is a dangerous place where assorted creatures prey on the unwary. There are the bikers from “A Matter of Balance,” out to prey on the unwitting, and the policeman in “Identities”, trigger-happy and blinded by his prejudices. There are sweet-talking predators like Jack Spitzer and Henry Smith in “On Lake Therese,” plying with bottles what they cannot take by force. Even denizens of the “normal” world can be fearful to those living beside them in the wastes. Alex the fish-camp owner attempts to rape Thomas’s teenage daughter, precisely because she doesn’t fit into his narrow view of propriety. Orville in “Red Dust” prostitutes his niece to pay for a hunting dog, stating that “Everybody’s got to earn their keep.” One wonders if he would have done this if the niece were not already in the wasteland, separated from normality by her mental deficiency. “First Flight,” offers the reader another character wandering the wastelands of their own mind. Simple-minded Gregory Jorganson’s fateful amble through the empty streets of Middleton ends when the very men he idolizes, NATO pilots and personnel, turn on him, driving him out into the cold despairing night to end his life on the railroad tracks.

The wasteland is the unknown, the out-of-bounds, the between space where what we think we know may not be so. While it is tempting to say that it is the post-modern condition, this is not the case. Rather, it is a facet of the post-modern state that troubles and haunts us, and one that Valgardsson makes artful use of in his tales. Valgardsson returns again and again to the wasteland in order to makes us uncomfortably aware of it. By guiding his reader to look into the abyss, he makes sure that we acknowledge it, and in so doing, avoid it.

Walking back into the world

In the end, most of my squatter friends got places of their own, landed a job, moved on with their lives. But the time they spent out in the wasteland, amongst the Wendigos and wilderness left its mark. Many of them bare scars, physical and mental, and many will hurt for the rest of their lives. But the tragedy has a brighter side as well. As a group, they are less complacent, less materialistic, and consume less. They are also more willing than most others I know to reach out and offer aid and comfort to their fellows. Sadly though, some of them were lost. One of them even “went Wendigo”.

It is this danger and redemption, the state of being tested by the world that is at the core of Valgardsson’s writing. He seems to say to his readers, “This is the world you think you know, but look at all the strangeness and danger underneath it all. Look out for yourselves and others, lest you become one of the monsters.” Valgardsson presents us with tales that are dark and foreboding as a haunted forest, but he does so to warn, not simply to frighten or disgust. When one is wandering around the wilds of the wasteland, it is good to know about Wendigos, if only to avoid them.

Works Cited:

Valgardsson, W.D. Bloodflowers. Oberon Press, 1973

Red Dust. Oberon Press, 1978

What Can’t Be Changed Shouldn’t Be Mourned

Vancouver, Douglas & McIntyre, 1990

Atwood, Margaret. Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995

Gunnars, Kristjana. “Poetry and the Idea of Home”, Stranger at the Door.

Online search: Encyclopedia Mythica: “Wendigo” 20.11.05 http://www.pantheon.org/areas/mythology/americas/native_american/articles.html

Online Search: Wikipedia: “Wendigo” 18.11.05 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendigo

Online Search: Native Online: “Wendigo” http://www.nativeonline.com/wendigo.htm 18.11.05

“Ravenous” Fox Pictures Inc. Antonia Bird, Director 1999

“Wendigo” Magnolia Films. Larry Fessenden, Director 2001