hello, northern ontario

The river is a colorless divining mirror this morning, taking on the qualities of the sky and autumn robed birch and maples along its banks- for a disconcerting moment it’s a steaming lavender reflection of the sky and the old bridge pilings look like a gateway to another dimension, looming in the pale space between day and morning, sky and water. I’ve been hearing the bald eagles down at the Mouth since before the start of the salmon run. I’m intimately familiar with their high pitched babyish chattering from winters on the west coast- a lonely stretch of time during the herring run on Denman Island, watching a family of juvenile bald eagles at Fillongley, or seeing them in droves at Rathtrevor, and while the north shore of Lake Huron is no Pacific Ocean, it is a place of deep seated power to me and deep in my bones, home.

The karmic cycles of my returns to this part of the world mystify and enrage me, even as I make a harried drive across the country to be here, my own personal Hajj. Alberta lies in flames behind me as I trek through the wild grasslands of Saskatchewan and sleep beside grain towers and train tracks in Manitoba, and the need grows relentlessly for the jumble of ragged boulders and endless lakes and the endless uninterrupted stretch of the Boreal forest just across the Ontario border. I have loved the prairies and the mountains and the ocean, the gulf islands and the rainforest and waterfalls, the high desert and painted hills, but something in me quiets on the shores of a lake near Ignace. How many times have I stopped here in my annual migrations? The same fox haunts the windows of my bus and secrets off into the bush with its gleaned trash from careless travellers. The jack pine tower over the beaver houses and fish leave ripples scudding across the lake and the sunset is the old northern classic, spectacular streaks of pink and vibrant hues across the west.

What is it like to pass a year in a place, to know a river through every season? The best I have done is to pass through the same places fleetingly in two seasons, the migrations east and west. Last time in White River the snow came down blindingly and I tailed an eighteen wheeler with the Cool Bus all the way to Marathon, finding the road by his tail lights. We spent a night at Lodge Lake, Jude still alive, and chipped the frost of a searingly cold night off the inside of the windshield with my credit card. Now it’s summer, and summer in northern Ontario is the best and saddest season. It is always a shock when it’s eternal days of gold slip into autumn and we lie in hibernation remembering the glorious dense deciduous foliage when only the jealous conifers remain. Summer is forever in memory, eternal droning days humming like a honey tree full of bees, golden rich and ripe. The island is haunted with memories that defy capture on the page- white horses in a hayfield in Gordon, the ancient alvars of an island called the home of the spirits. Is there a way to exist here, betwen extremities of exultation and madness? I don’t know.

memory bank

I have this feeling that some of the moments most worth writing about were never meant to be kept. That the hot iron breath of horses in the blackberry hedgerow is meant to only come back to life when the smell of autumn over-ripe blackberries along the Sables punches me right in the hippocampus, not to be confined word for word on a page. do you have to let it linger. Or the secret to successfully writing about the diffuse moments that elude capture is to let them percolate away into the tangibility.

It’s not the way it really was, but it’s the essence of the thing. The exact where, when and who aren’t the point, dear diary. I remember with every passing train at night one very early morning or very late night outside of Medicine Hat in a red van named Wanda, running alongside a freight train miles long and the bend and sway of the prairie grasses in the wind of its passage.

Henderson the Rain King

“Now I have already mentioned that there was a disturbance in my heart, a voice that spoke there and said, I want, I want, I want! It happened every afternoon, and when I tried to suppress it got even stronger. It said only one thing, I want, I want! And I would ask, ‘What do you want?’ But this is all it would ever tell me.” Chapter 3, p. 24 , Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow.

So I approach life full on, exploring the alleys and corners and plains, the backstage theaters behind velvet curtains, and the forests. I’ve wanted cool forest glades shaded by fir and dew damp and mercilessly primal but upon arriving found dry hollows that burned with the scent of fires and scorched earth and beetles that clicked over the carpet of dead, dry needles, unfeeling, unthinking, motivated only by the drive of ‘need’ not ‘want’. I’ve found I wanted, without knowing, the small fresh blossoms of wild strawberries that grow prolific along the roadside, and release the smell of berries underfoot. or wanted for a loon to cry out at night, passing over a neighboring lake and shrilling eerily as she touches down between reeds and turtles, but not until it had happened could I put a name to it.

I've got one more silver dollar

We dream up this trip in another lifetime and I pick you up at the airport, still somehow surprised that you are there. When I say I want to do something, I do everything in my power to make it happen. How many times have people said to me “I want to do that!” and not followed through. How many times have I done something alone, anyway?

Friend. How many times have our lives collided, unexpectedly and wonderfully? Our first lifetime together in punk houses and dirty alleys and bars, underaged, tits out on the patio, too young to know what we even desired. When we tell stories from that first era of kicked in doorways and shots mixed with period blood people look at us askance. “You’re lying,” they say. If anything, we’ve understated the stories from our teens, maybe only half believing them ourselves. I live for the excess and you do, too. I’d forgotten what it was like, the first few times I broke the ‘rules’ of life. I’d forgotten that the matching triskellion scars we bear are even odd, they’ve been parts of us for so long the pain and the courage has gone to distant seed.

Seventeen years later three of us are together again in Kelowna and my heart is so full of love it hurts. Sometimes my life is so lonely, all of us scattered and adventuring and changing and growing, but sometimes we get to come back together at a punk show and look at each other over our pints and smile knowingly. Sometimes we get to drive the Cool Bus through the night time streets of the city and then through a corridor of alleys to a new friend’s house, where the people are weird and beautiful and we fit right in. Sometimes we get to come home to each other and I know in my bones that I have made the most beautiful family and I feel divinely blessed.The punk houses have changed, now. They’re clean and the doors are all on the hinges. The roomates are fresh and don't know the stories we tell that have turned into legend. We talk about our credit scores instead of riots. We share collective sorrows and grief and absurdity and the new and healing me gets to come together with the younger me as a whole. It happened- I was there. I was a part of it. Thank you for reminding me of what I have forgotten is mine.

People comment that they love the way that the three of us talk together and we ponder over it until we figure it out- we love each other so much and are so comfortable together we can argue and correct each other and disagree without aggression or conflict. That kind of comfort is exceedingly rare. We have all known each other at our worst and lowest and we are better, now. Not perfect but better, all works of progress permanently. There is no judgment here. I am safe and happy in a way I am not often. Life seems full and has come around in a satisfying way. Much like my treeplanting friends we ebb and flow on our own paths and it is sad and hard sometimes when we are apart without knowing when we will come back together, lives lived sharp and true like poetry. The beauty comes from the absence and is necessary to make it so' and I love it and loathe it all at once.

We meet again in England, still babies, and we go out and drink whiskey on Denmark St, looking for a punk bar which we find down a steep stairwell. I am sixteen years old and have no ID. I’ve run here trying to live life to the absolute fullest, to experience every moment, to dive into it, to not die without regrets- that’s my biggest fear, dying and regretting not living. This is MY life to do with as I please, and I am keenly aware of this, seeking to suck the marrow from the very bone. This is the first time I’ve REALLY broken the unspoken conventions of life to do what I wanted, manifested an insane dream into reality. My family is disappointed I left school and are worried for my future.I left before people we knew started dying and got paid to ride horses through the English country side, explore London on my days off, live somewhere else. Here I have the space to be, away from the abuse, and be present for a moment. Is it so obscenely beautiful because of the escape, or youth, or was it really like that?

We create a moment, smoking Marlboros in the dark streets of London. We get shitshow drunk like we always used to when we were kids- seeking the beauty of the excess, we give into the Bachanalian desires of our lizard brains, although perhaps moderation is just another puritan convention we’ve decided to discard. A man is creeping on us and asks if I’m your girlfriend. You grab me and plant a possessive and protective kiss on my mouth and he turns away, disappointed. I’m not my confident self, yet, not until after Hearst, and you are my savior. I wonder why you’re here with little ol’ me and my social anxiety, not yet knowing what I will become. You depart at Paddington Station and I carry on to catch my train back to Epsom and the horse farm.

You have gone out into the world and lived and traveled and done so muchand are home again and we reconnect over a beer. I'm actually quite envious of the long term travel, the living, the new experiences and culture I fear I have missed out on. Toronto is years behind me now and I am workingthrough my baggage and trying to become who I deserve to be. You are the first person who believes me and takes my side when I finally realize the mistreatment and mental torment I suffered in our first lifetime, at the hands of somebody who was a part of that group. I was ostracized and lived in a disassociated daze. You remind me I was there and a part of things and that I lay as much claim to my memories of this time as anybody else who was there. You remind me of the beauty we had in white punk houses where friends nicknamed Dirty Face sucked drinks off the filthy floor and people got stabbed with forks at parties (allegedly) and punks with Mohawks wore their girlfriends used tampons as a necklace for months. You remember and understand and know I’m not making it up or exaggerating it. What a God damn time and a beautiful life we have had so far. You give me back those years that I forgot I owned, although it takes me until Kelowna, cracking ice cubes out of a tray in the kitchen and communicating with you without fear of reprisal, that I integrate them into my new self. What I lost comes rushing back in and rejoins me and I am united and whole.

You, my friend, are the first person I have tricked into coming on a prolonged roadtrip in the Cool Bus. I've been trying since I got it. Mom and I bop around Vancouver Island for a bit at Christmas, that miserable grey winter. I take her to my favorite place on Denman Island, a provincial park right on the ocean, empty in the winter except for us. We bring Chinese food from Oyster Bay and spend our Christmas in my world that I have manifested and created. I have a post season roadtrip from Williams Lake to the Okanagan with another planter I’ve fallen in love with that I can’t have. This is my curse. But the memory of singing along the entire way and spitting cherry pits out the window and being manically free after the grind of the season is unforgettable. Much of our Playlist, friend, comes from that roadtrip. But most of my bus life has been a monastic existence of self reflection and lonely ocean and woods and I am ready to rejoin the world.

I have woven you into my new life, drawing the threads together. Treeplanting and my bus solitude make a satisfying full circle with Guelph as you embark on this journey with me. I’ve craved the company so badly, to turn to someone and say, look at that. To experience the wonder and joy and hardship together, to see and be seen. From Edmonton I take you to one of my favorite spots at Abraham Lake where I’ve been free camping with a view of the mountains and the lake, stunning in the background but lonely and empty without a friend. You are just happy to be in beautiful places and that much, I can offer.

I didnt mean to write this much backstory that had nothing to do with out travels together, but it deserved to get written down too.

Thanks for being you and letting me exist, imperfectly but loved.

To be continued.

Refuge of the Roads (tribute to Joni)

Out by Jay Dee Lake in my first season of planting, Pipes and I sit in the mess tent on a summer day off and have a Joni Mitchell singalong. Yesterday was pieces of land that made me cry- one island of floating duff over a muskeg infested with black flies, another entirely of sticks and slash. But today we are not working and we sing. I warble along, “Carey you’re a mean old daddy but I like you, I like you, I like youuuuu.” Serendipity. Another day I hear Britt strumming A Case of You across the field, and I smile.

I could drink a case of you and I would still be on my feet

These days saved me. I fell asleep in my tent knowing I went out and did it, that I survived, that I participated as much as I possibly could and I didn’t miss out on a damn thing. And I fall asleep listening to Joni, my tent in a field of wild flowers, dreaming of what is to come and what could be. One night I leave the bus party behind to go to the shitters, situated in the same field of wildflowers as my tent. All around are van dwelling weirdos, travellers, believers, living how they desire, and I ache for the same. Anything goes, here in the Hearst forest. While I sit over the hole I helped dig a thunderstorm breaks out- the lightning and a full moon illuminate the field, fireflies are dotting in and out of existence and right there on the shitter toilet, I have a soul changing epiphany of a moment. The shattered glass sadness of Toronto is not too far behind-Joni was there too. When I go a few doors down for a coffee and Cesaro is working he has Court and Spark on vinyl. I get my nice coffee from my friend and we argue about our favorite album- mine is probably Hejira, or Ladies of the Canyon, or Travelogue, or Blue. I love them all.

I find pipes passed out in the hallway of the HoJo one night, head cradled in hands, and direct him into the room I’m sharing with other friends. I fall asleep between two of my tallest friends hogging the blankets in an overfull hotel room full of stories and unconditional love on the side of the highway in the Boreal forest.

So you sign all the papers in the family name, you’re sad and you’re sorry but you’re not ashamed

I spend a long time grieving for the Hearst Forest. I arrive shellshocked to camp on Waxatike, knowing I’ve finally found my people. The chaos and the wildness I craved is evident from the get-go. The bus arrives in Hearst around 3 am, although I have made the twelve hour drive with my mom and Britt. The pre-season preparatory email lets us know there will be two buses in the Esso parking lot, one for gear, one for people. We can sleep there, or party, or whatever (verbatim). Sure enough, two shabby paint peeling school buses are parked in a potholed dirt road excuse of a parking lot against a backdrop of train tracks and stacked pulp trees, slow moving equally shabby yellow cranes loading them into slat sided freight cars. I load my gear onto a blue bus with a cross-armed garden gnome mounted on the hood and wait. Our driver arrives, bearded and confidently cool, polarized sunglasses and worn out baseball cap adorned and we head into the boreal forest of true northern Ontario. “International waters!” a vet shouts as soon as we turn onto chemin McCowan, an hour and a half down the highway, past Kapuskasing, into Opasatika, into nothingness. And everyone who knows is cracking beers. “Piss break, Dan!” someone in front of me shouts, and the chill beardy guy pulls over and we’re all out in the sunshine pissing in the ditch and smoking cigarettes and the rowdiness is already ramping up.

When we arrive in camp a foreman is doling out our equipment, Work Wizers and hardhats and planting bags. What is it in my face that makes him say, “Oooh, we got a lifer here!” I don’t even know yet. We trail after a veteran planter with empty beer bottles in our bags. That’s how I learned to plant- leaving behind a trail of beer bottles, their necks buried in the soil of the ditch outside of camp.

Dan picks us up with the bus from our first day on the block. As we drive past Tony’s crew he says, “Give ‘em the old fruit basket, Bry,” and Brian cracks the bus window and hangs his buttcheeks, cock and balls out the window. Tony’s crew waves and shouts and we rattle and jounce off down the barely there road.

You just picked up a hitcher another prisoner of the whitelines of the freeway

Next season (life has become measured in terms of seasons, not years) Soph and I sit on top of the kitchen in the camp infamous for the foot aids epidemic. Our directions to get here were opaque. “60 kilometers west of Hearst on highway eleven, right on Pitopiko Road. Drive over the bridge where we took the naked photo, then until the camp where the foot aids happened.” Soph and I are drinking a mickey of vodka that was left in the glove compartment of the kitchen bus during a prior party night. We are bonding after several rifts that leave me writhing in anger and we are listening to Joni and having a much-needed heart to heart that will get us through the rest of the season and pervade our eventual friendship. I play Blue Hotel Room for her, and we cry and confide, and then we need to piss but the climb down and back up is so daunting, we just piss over the edge of the roof. Prince Pony/Daddy Dane is walking by at this late hour for some reason and he glares up and us and announces, “Disgusting.”

I slept on the strange pillows of my wanderlust

Now, eight years later, so many companies later, so many drives across the country and friends coming and going, so many highs and lows and forests and trucks and buses and kitchens and parties later, I’m on my way to do a small fall plant with Daddy Dane in the Chilcotin. It all comes around. I was viscerally bummed out when we all left Thunderhouse and so many people ended up together at other companies- a lot of friends ended up with him, and I wanted the camaraderie and trauma bonding of having survived Blunderhouse together, the memory of being kicked out of the HoJo and the sawdust trails and the sloshing pitchers of Purple Helmet. I was mad I was alone, and that where I was didn’t have the faintest ring of the Ontario lawlessness. Now, I don’t necessarily want it anymore- but it will be nice to be with him and remember that once we stood arm in arm in the Thunderhouse shop, drinking his homemade wine and singing The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald with our eyes closed, until our hands failed us and we smashed the bottles on the floor.

I leave a hotel room the morning after the last night of my first season, disentangling myself from the warm, complicated body of a sweet camp crush. I remove the scratch card stuck with sweat to my breast and tuck it under the bedside lamp with a quarter and leave.

No regrets, Coyote, we just come from such different sets of circumstance.

I’m driving through the Qu’Appelle valley listening to Buffy covering Joni- The Circle Game. It seems appropriate, between Buffy’s home in the valley and Joni’s hometown in Maidstone. I’m on my way to an accidental friendship, one of the best kinds, the ones that blossom organically out of nothingness. We both work at the same treeplanting company. The homestead outside of Rocky has become a place of refuge for me, pre and post season. Late night, down on the banks of the North Saskatchewan river, that accidental friend turns and says, “Hey, do you like Joni Mitchell?” Do I like Joni Mitchell? And we spend the easy, early morning hours of the day listening to Joni at the Bridgeport festival, singing the songs of her youth, still her, still wild, still beautiful.

We watch basketball comfortably in the house in the spring. Sometimes we all make food together, sometimes we play board games, sometimes we are comfortable with each other’s presence across the yard, doing our own things. We sit around a campfire at night and my mom is there and we all share our favorite planting stories. We WhatsApp each other our frustrations during the work season, in different camps. We drive aimlessly around Horburg, sometimes stopping to pick up stumps of likely firewood. The mundane has become wonderful. At a wedding, surrounded by mutual friends, I realize I have arrived again, without knowng it.

I let go of my need to control it all and know that the beauty and the love will always come to me when I am ready to accept them.

The seasons, they go round and round and the painted ponies go up and down. We’re captives on the carousel of time.


 

take a sad song

I can not be as eloquent as Farley Mowat, so I’d like to start with a quote from The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, which was one of my favorite novels as a kid, and remains one as an adult.

“There was no other wanderer on that road, yet I was not alone, for his tracks went with me, each pawprint as familiar as the print of my own hand. I followed them, and I knew each thing that he had done, each move that he had made, each thought that had been his; for so it is with two who live one life together.”
― Farley Mowat, The Dog Who Wouldn't Be

It’s late at night in Hinton and I’m heading up the hill to the bus to go to bed after party night. The dogs are always on my mind- they need to be put to bed before dark so I don’t lose them or upset them in the chaos (Jude especially) and around two a.m, I know the old guy is going to need to go out for a pee. Regretfully, I leave behind the fire and the baked potato and the buds to go and do my due diligence. Every day of my life since I got him has been changed by having to make sure he is ok, cared for, put first.

Jude hasn’t worn a leash anywhere than the big city for years. He’s not yet crippled, but he is fifteen and slowing down. The night is illuminated almost day bright with a full moon and all the stars of the bush road isolation, the sky almost white with pinpoints of brightness, and Jude takes off at a gallop down the hill. I jog after him and he gives chase, leading me on a game of tag and chase almost all the way to camp- I run after him and tap his bum, he turns around and weaves in and out of the bush and the tall grass, the tips of his gremlin like ears ‘flip flip flipping’ the way I love when he runs. After fifteen minutes of chase, he runs up behind me and leans against my legs, old tail wagging, eyes bright and mischievous. I’m out of breath- we lie down on the trail in the tall grass and the moonlight and he somersaults against my chest, lying belly up and grinning as if pleased with himself. There on a warm June night, I hold him close to me and know he has had the greatest life a dog can have.

When we finally get up and head back to the bus, he follows without complaint. He can’t jump up into bed on his own anymore- he stands at the foot and lets out a solitary “oof” that means “I want up,” and I get up and pick him up, one hand around his bum, careful of his arthritic hips, one around his chest. He slides into his familiar place behind my legs. Mostly, now, he sleeps on his bed at the foot of the bed, grumpy and displeased with my fidgeting and thrashing and early wake up call.

I fall asleep forgiving myself. I have carried a lot of guilt in my life about my dog. I was seventeen when I got Jude from an Amish sheep farm in Wallenstein, Ontario. Freshly back from a stint in England, repairing my relationship with my mom, I say “I want a dog.” And she simply says, “Ok.” I read an ad in the classifieds, make a phone call (not on Sunday), and we go to see him. A parade of Amish children from eldest to youngest come out of the barn holding pups. Jude is the last, dangling precariously by the shoulders by a girl so young she is barely walking. Mom and I both know, instantly. It is him. He is the one. He is the only one who’s basecoat is white, dappled all over with tiny black spots. His paws are brown speckled, and his head is a black cap. He has three large black spots, two on his rib cage and one small one above his tail. The large black spot on his side is the softest.

For the first three years of his life, he gave me absolute hell. I should have done more research about blue heelers- I didn’t realize to what extent they needed constant attention and exercise and mental stimulation. He chewed through doors, ate panties whole, jumped the fence out of the yard of the townhouse and barked incessantly, including directly in my face after three hour walks. When I moved to Toronto to go to school, he moved into a dank, tiny basement bachelor apartment at Bathurst and Dundas with me. He spent a lot of long days there while I went to school and worked full time to support myself, but we also had a lot of adventures at the dog bowl and in ravines and later, in the Beaches. When I was cooking in restaurants sometimes he’d stay at home alone for twelve hours. I’d get home and take him and his glow in the dark ball to the nearby park and we’d play fetch for two hours in an attempt to make it up for him. “I’m sorry, I’m not doing a good enough job,” was a thought I had on a regular basis.

Finally, treeplanting came, and we embarked on a new adventure together. Jude spent his entire summers free in camp, getting fed peanut butter sandwiches by his multiple aunties, hoovering up the spilled and forgotten lunches in the buses, making doggie friends, getting sprayed by skunks, driving with the top down held by one of his aunties, sneaking into hotels, pissing on planters tents and bags, refusing, steadfastly, to be trained not to be in the kitchen.

We drive back and forth across the country together a multitude of times. We spend much time together, just the two of us. We run across the Prairies together, embodying a moment straight out of a Farley Mowat novel. We live together in a school bus. He is a part of every relationship and every breakup I ever have. He rides shotgun with his Auntie Mic from Ontario to BC to join me at an apple orchard where he lies in the rows all day while I pick. At thirteen, he hikes up Mount Finlayson with me. Every time I leave Ontario, my uncle wonders if it will be the last time he sees him.

This year, it finally was.

This is hard, if not impossible to write.
It is the night before my 32nd birthday and around 8pm, the old guy comes into the kitchen and barks at me, eyes bright, asking for something from me. His dinner, maybe. Maybe he hears the thunderstorm that rolls in rapidly afterward. I like to think he was just coming in to say “I love you, I’m ok, goodbye.” Half an hour later when it is pouring rain outside, I wait for him to show up like he always does when he is displeased by the weather, to either lie grumpily on his blanket in the kitchen or to ask to be put to bed in front of the fire in the bus. “Has anyone seen Jude?” Nobody has. I know, already.

I and some friends and staff spend hours and hours looking for him. When full dark finally falls, I sit outside the kitchen and ugly cry, wondering, “What if he is cold, wet, scared? What if he is stuck somewhere, or hurt?” He is completely deaf, and searching for him is difficult. You can’t call his name and wait for him to show up- you have to see him. But I know that if he isn’t with me in the kitchen, he is either stuck somewhere or dead.

What follows is an interminable period of anguish. When I shower, with the rain pounding on the shower roof, I’m sure I hear him barking somewhere far off in the bush, but every time I turn off the shower to listen the sound disappears- auditory hallucination and nothing more. What if I have left him outside in the rain and the cold? What if he is hurt? For three days, I replay this thought over and over while I tramp through waist deep greenery in the bush around camp, hoping, searching, for at least closure. I can’t work. I run into my coworker outside the kitchen and she bursts into tears. “We bought you birthday presents in town yesterday,” she sobs, “and we got presents for the dogs.” And then I’m laughing hysterically because it’s my birthday and it’s so fucking sad, I don’t know what else to do.

The next two days I spend half heartedly searching are hot and sunny. The birch are tall and shady and blow in a perfect summer breeze. The creek runs cool and swift over the boulders it is named for. The fireweed is in bloom and everything is lush and green and beautiful. I make peace with the idea that he has laid down somewhere in this perfect, peaceful green and passed away. The searching has become token. I know in my heart he is gone, and feel his absence keenly. I fall asleep the first night holding his argyle jacket in my arms.

When we leave camp and drive into town, I can’t quite shake the thought of him alive, lost in the bush, cold and scared and confused. And instead, I remember one night in Hinton. We are running down a hill together under a blanket of moonlight on a perfect summer night- he runs, I chase, the invisible tether between us at play, until he comes to my feet and says, everything is ok- life has been so, so good.

i may never climb a mountain

Sometimes I feel a little melancholy watching climbing documentaries. Like, I WISH it was something I was into or could do but it’s not and I can’t. I’m big. My feet are in near constant pain from being broken. My carpal tunnel is so severe I can barely use a lighter or open a Ziploc bag. Also, I’m absolutely terrified of heights, to the point where I’m actually absurdly proud of my tentative proficiency with a ten foot orchard ladder. I guess it’s not just climbing- it’s a couple of different extreme sports. I’m a person of extremes- they’re extremely appealing to me. I tend toward impulsivity and ‘all or nothing’-ness. This can be construed as a flaw or a virtue, but I digress. When I was 16 I dropped out of highschool and moved to the UK to pursue a career with horses. I’d been riding for years at that point and wanted to get more serious about it.

I may never, and probably never will, climb a mountain. (I dragged my sorry ass up Finlayson with my fourteen year old dog, that was enough.) But I’ve ridden a galloping thoroughbred at full tilt past the grandstand at Epsom Downs (not in a race, but nonetheless, stellar). Many, many people have sat on a horse, taken a riding lesson, gone for a trail ride, even ridden for year, but few have had that experience. Many, many people go to climbing gyms, boulder, climb professionally, summit extremely technical mountains, but few have climbed Meru or K2. This is a loose lateral comparison- to be honest, I don’t think there’s any comparison between the skill and athleticism it takes to summit a fucking mountain and what it takes to breeze a thoroughbred. The comparison lies between pony rides and going to the local climbing gym for a birthday party in the eighth grade.

So I will probably never climb a mountain. But at one time, I got to ride six or seven horses a day. At one time I was a competent enough rider to school a client horse or back a green pony or ride on of the trickier horses, and then ones that bucked, reared, bit and kicked, and in time, I came to enjoy those ones. Horses that bolt or can’t be passed or walk on their hind legs or spook at the wind or at nothing or are mildly traumatized. I like those ones. I was a really timid rider when I was younger and I fell ALL the time but I kept going and got around to sticking, most of the time. I may never climb a mountain, but most people will never ride a Spanish pony down the sand gallops in Epsom with it bucking and rearing at a flatout gallop, having lost both stirrups and enjoying every second of it (especially the part where I stayed on).

I may never climb a mountain but most mountain climbers will never be out on a hack in west London, the eye discernable beyond the indistinguishable scramble of shiny buildings, when the companion horse colics. Sir Gregory (god damn ridiculous racehorse names) went downhill quickly, the big, fleabitten grey gelding going to his knees while I held frantically onto Ginny with one hand and the other groom and I chased him in circles with a falling branch. It is vital to keep a colicing horse moving forward so they don’t roll and twist their bowel- almost a guarantied fatality. Between chasing him with a branch and holding onto the high-strung paint mare it was hard to pull out my old flip-phone and call the yard in a panic for someone to bring a trailer. We were about as far from the yard as you could get without doing roadwork, an hour’s ride with the canter up the hill included. So they came with the lorry and I had to ride Ginny home alone. Horses are herd animals- they don’t like being separated. This big colored mare was a bit flighty to start with (before I’d started working there she’d dumped her owner and broken her arm) but she liked Irish folk songs and we rode the hour back to the farm while I sang The Rocky Road to Dublin, The Raggle Taggle Gypsy and Wild Rover to her over and over again.

I may never climb a mountain… but I’ve galloped a son of Sadler’s Wells four furlongs in a training saddle, tasting life and death all at the same time, faster, faster, faster than you knew a horse could go, faster than you knew you could hold onto. The uninterpretable instructions of the trainer from Tipperary, lost, gone, and all there is to do is is ride.

Douglas Coupland Protagonist

When we were younger we were promised something better than an impenetrable housing market and inflation that made a 1lb bag of coffee beans cost eighteen dollars. In an attempt at frugality (pragmatism is not a quality I come by naturally) I’ve purchased the pre-ground bag (on sale) but the grind is too fine for my French press and the coffee came out bitter and rancid. Isn’t this what we’re supposed to do, though? Cut corners, pinch pennies, save at the expense of enjoyment in the moment for the vague and distant promise of home ownership or retirement. Fuck that. I’ll buy my whole bean coffee and avocados and gluten free bread. There’s no promise that next year will happen, let alone tomorrow.

So when we were young what did we dream of. Becoming a veterinarian or an astronaut, writing a book, love, adventure. Career fulfillment and a BraveNewWorld™ of politically correct equality. Now in our 30’s and beyond we dream of becoming VanLife influencers and making a million dollars a year by posting clips of our halcyonic backdoor ocean views on TikTok, filtering out the bleak succession of Walmart parking lots, truck stop showers and the dreaded Knock. In our adventures in late stage capitalism and the widening divide this seems like the one true path to financial stability, even though we know better.

Somebody’s always waiting for the sun to explode or for the nuclear apocalypse in a Coupland novel- it’s an imminent threat, looming there probablistically. Two summers ago I drove the Coq with flame up to the asphalt on either side like a child’s dream of the rapture. I’ve never driven through the mountains when they weren’t on fire. Sometimes at work in the cherry orchard the smoke is so thick that the sun becomes a far-off point of somber red and the entire day has the weird waiting quality of Sundays. We work and eat and go into town and swim in the creek as normal, and maybe this is what really freaks me out. The End won’t be a single cataclysmic event. It’s happening now and we just have to keep living through it. Last winter the entirety of the lower mainland and by extension Vancouver Island got completely cut off from the world- the summer fires through the Fraser Canyon left the earth destabilized, held together with crumbling, burnt trees and the roots of the vegetation dead, top-soil dry and blown away, and then the freak, heavy rains washed the roads out in cataclysmic mud-slides. Entire highways were gone. Swathes of highway washed away in the same place where an entire town had burnt to the ground just a few months prior. Driving through in the spring after is sobering. Burnt out vehicles are stacked behind chain fence and we rattle past them on temporary bridges and engineering marvels of new road.

It used to be that the city would get too claustrophobic, feeling too aware of a million lives revolving around one another and bumping lazily and senselessly against one another, ungoverned and indefinable particles of quantum theory. I got unmoored from it and lost my place in it and was only aware of how close by everyone else’s existence was.

Traveling across once again in a ragged red van, four am outside of Medicine Hat, a freight train passes by in a scream of steel, sparks flying, close enough for the conductor and I to look into each other’s faces. There’s a weird sense of observation out here- a glimpse into the inner workings of the world. Freight cars loaded with pulp trees on their way to make toilet paper. You don’t see this part when you wander into Provigo late at night to buy birthday cake Oreo ice cream sandwiches and toilet paper and a bottle of wine. My planters crawl through the burnt land replanting trees and when I first started doing this, I, too, had some mistaken ideology of ecological reclamation, but it turns out, we’re mostly making toilet paper. Huge equipment in the northern swathe of Boreal forest cuts the earth into mud and slash and planters plant tiny seedlings in the lee of the wind and they grow and are cut down and loaded into freight cars, shipped to factories, processed, packaged, shipped again, eventually ending up on store shelves for us to fight over during a global pandemic. What’s not important about those trees? What isn’t glamorous about being one of the most sought after necessities in a world that feels like its crumbling?

best moments redux

one

everyone’s off at a horse show except myself and james and another stable hand and I’m scheduled to ride a hot headed little chestnut ex-racehorsed/polo pony. I usually hack out with his nervous owner hauling on his mouth and moving at best, a restrained trot, while I ride one of the full livery horses- once I encourage her to a quiet canter through a wooded loop on the downs early in the morning and I think they might have a chance. Amanda and AG follow me and Archie the piebald cob through the shade and hedgerows and rabbits run into the blackberry bushes and the sun is out and everyone is enjoying themselves.

But Amanda is absent and so are the show riders and head girl and competent T and James puts me on AG for an afternoon hack. I’ve worked my way up here from my first UK ride on Cromwell, an old sway backed liver chestnut who I was put on as a test for my first ride at Woodruff. Cromwell’s back is so crooked and wide that riding him at a canter is like sitting on a couch on the back of a swaying double decker bus- he’s old but he takes the bit in his teeth and puts his head down and bulls forward until we almost hit the white rails. From there I rode all the ponies and solid horses and worked my way up to my favorites- the kind of hard ones.

AG is largely considered one of the hard ones. Amanda is so timid and AG is so forward and so through-bred oriented that the staff have to be cautious not to let him have his head, lest he run off with Amanda on board one day. A former Polish stable girl galloped him at the exact same spot on the Downs every ride out that when his hooves hit the sand, no matter who was on board, he’d remember his racing days and prance and snort and plunge forward. and so we are forbidden from letting him get out his beans.

James is on Dicky, a big, floppy eared bay moron who can turn himself inside out bucking, A is on my dependable cob friend Archie, and I’m jogging along on slim little AG, across Headley Road and down the lane toward Langley Vale, past Chalk Farm and out onto the Downs. AG is a perfect gentleman, a phrase the seller used when he sold him to Amanda. The penny shiny gelding is a dream, but not suitable for an amateur rider. With a light hand his mouth is electric. He jiggles the bit in his mouth and steps out off the leg, forward into the contact, just like you want. Contentedly, his head drops and his ears bounce from side to side, taking in the world. When we hit the sand gallops James moves out at a brisk trot, which AG eagerly matches- it’s easy to feel the current running through him. The gallops must evoke something of the old racehorse in him. He perks up at the rails and the footing but is still polite. I’ve since ridden racehorses that spun in excited circles as soon as they hit sand or took off, ripping arms out of sockets, as soon as they hit the sand. But AG and I converse silently. “No,” I say with my seat, posting slowly, sitting deep, leaning back. “Not yet.”

There’s so many ways we could go. Sometimes we go out up Walton Downs or to Tattenham Corner and tie up the liveries while we get a pint in the garden. Sometimes we ride up the gallops parallel to the grandstand, a gamble if you’re on an OTTB remembering their racing days. But today we turn left to cut up The Hill. The Derby is passed and the grounds are clear of caravans and bare knuckle boxers and travelers who grab at the bridle of my mount and ask “How much for the colored mare?” and James takes off at an uphill gallop shouting, “Come on, then!” I start to shout back, “I’m not allowed!” and he says back, holding Dicky back, “I’m in charge today. Let him run” so I sit up in my seat and give the copper gelding his head and we’re off, uphill, in the most beautiful gallop.

There are wildflowers all around on the summer grass of the downs and The Hill is so steep it’s a green plain before me with the distant thin blue line of the sky at the top- Dicky is moving his huge bulk at a remarkable speed in front of us and behind us I catch a glimpse of Archie boogying uphill with Amy barely hanging on and I look back in front of us and hold on. “Let him out!” James says back without looking. “This is just a lovely little picnic!” so I let the reins out another notch and move my hands up AG’s neck and trust. Every motion is absolutely synchronized. My center of balance over his pitching back on the uphill slant changes every second, but my hands are moving with his neck and my thighs are up out of the saddle and it’s simultaneously so precarious and precisely perfect. Sometimes riding a Thoroughbred full tilt is not like this, a silent conversation, anticipated, instantaneous communication. Sometimes its a fight to maintain control, sometimes its the barest understanding of each others language, a light speed, death defying journey in which your bodyweight is held by two slim aluminum bars. But today, as James has promised, it’s a lovely picnic.

We pull up at the top of The Hill and as James had planned all along, the geldings are all tired from the steep gallop and give no protest at being reined in. We move down past the grand-stand at a collected trot and when we turn back to come through the woods north of The Warren, James coaches us through contact and collection. With lots of leg on heavy Archie, Amy pushes him up and he moves beautifully in frame for a few moments before both tire. AG and I prance under the overhanging branches- he wants still to run but he transfers that energy into what I’m asking from him, his mind and body engaged in the task at hand.

Later, after I left England (regretfully- turns out the horse industry in Canada is significantly more exclusionary) AG took off on the Downs with Amanda on board, quickly dumped her and impaled himself on a broken 5 bar gate in his frenzy. He took off toward the Langley Vale golf course, reins dangling and bleeding profusely from a gaping chest wound, and was ultimately euthanized by a police officer in somebody’s back garden. I can’t help but think if he’d been in a home with a more confident rider and allowed to run on a regular basis, this never would have happened.

Dyl

My first season of treeplant was by far the best one, which is a comment I hear frequently. In some way we’re all mild addicts, chasing the dragon. One morning (ish) outside the HoJo after a town night we all decide to do LSD.

One of our planters, Dylan, was leaving later that day. He was a core staple of our team IMO. On nights off the chant of “Dyl… dyl… dyl.. DYL. DYL. DLY. DYL. DYL!” complete with table slapping and nudity had become a cultural tenant. So a few of us uncrinkled tinfoil on the sidewalk behind the only hotel in town that let us stay there (flashback to dread sex santa saying “I think one picture of a clown is a tab…” and the cooks dropping off a stock pot of still steaming, unpeeled hardboiled eggs for breakfast). The day unwinds in this way that takes a thousand hours.

It hits as we pass a garage sale. There’s a surplus of chicken decor, an electric mobility scooter and some potted houseplant cuttings. EGD wants to buy the scooter. (Everything is compared to the number of trees it would cost to buy it. EGD… that’s like… 20,000 trees!) So for $3 I buy a robust pothos in a plastic pot. (Take this in, guys… I just traded… 30 trees… for this ONE plant… how bizarre.) We strut back down the street parallel to the highway to the HoJo parking lot, a McDonald’s stop inbetween- I can hear every ice cube clinking in my cup, my Big Mac falls apart in my hands, the restaurant looks like a shiny silver space ship, everything is funny.

Dyl is sitting in the parking lot scavving (verb- to steal, to scavenge) wifi with the horde when we arrive back. I hold the potted plant out to him breathless with laughter. “You got me a plant?” he says. “I promise I’ll take such good care of it!” but I have to tell him, no, no. This is your replacement. This is the new Dyl. In my memory this is roughly the first moment I meet Filthy, as well (soon to be surpassed by him boat racing so hard he threw up and had to stuff a tampon up his nose to stop the flow.) Somebody has a helium balloon on a ribbon tether and it’s bouncing around uncontrollably smacking us in the face and I have the plant and human Dyl gets on the coach bus and the rest of us get on the shabby schoolbus and head back to camp.

The plant goes everywhere with me. Dan indulges me on the bus and takes Dyl’s numbers. He sits in the drivers seat. He’s in our Dan or Die crew photo on the log deck. (I’d do anything to be that happy again. ANYTHING.) Dyl lives on for a while at the camp by Jay Dee lake until another town day off- naked bus day. When we arrive back in camp after town errands we kick everyone who won’t get naked off the bus. Diaper Deck (it’s not an inside joke if you don’t get it) starts to pull Dyl out of his pot by the roots. “PIPER!” I say. “He’s a plant! The pot is his house, not his PANTS!” so Pipes tenderly pats him back into the soil, but I think it’s too late by then, anyway. We play drinking games and Pipes pours entire beers into Dyl’s pot while I scream “You’re killing him!”

Blond curly Clara arrives in her gold Bug. We lie under the mouldy snack cupboards on the dry bus watching it zoom back and forth like a Benny Hill Sketch. I swear to god Yakkety Sax is playing in the background as the Bug comes in and out of frame like a clown car, every time with more people, until eventually it rolls to a flat tired stop in front of the bus doors. “Make it stop! Somebody has to make that car stop!” Once again, I am screaming.

This must be the night Neeko and I race the keg, limp legged along the rim of the gravel pit, ‘strollin’ toward the distant promise of a fire. It’s hard to tell these stories because they’re all tangled together. I have no recollection of carrying Dyl under an arm as we strolled, but I must have, because at some point, I hold him out to Tony with desperation. “His leaves are limp! Somebody stole his glowstick!” Tony pauses from a retelling of the story of Jose Manuel and plucks at the limp leaves. “Best to put him out of his misery,” he says, with the dread sex santa wisdom I’ve come to rely on. So we furiously rip him to shreds and throw his empty pot onto the fire while Neeko screams “You’re killing him! You murdered Dyl!”

Fuck I love camp.

Wild Horses (Charlotte Lake)

The Chilcotin is unbelievable- I’ve made a really hard decision about next season that will have me working in Alberta again and I’m going to miss the interior surprisingly badly. Farwell Canyon and the Churn and all of my favorite little places in Williams Lake and Quesnel- the greatest talent you can have when you are almost permanently on the move is knowing the best places in each town. Best bookstore, best coffee, best eggs benny, best karaoke place, always measuring it up against home. I carry around a few hundred maps in my head and I just have to dust off my Grande Prairie/Grande Cache/Hinton map. Prairie Sushi with travel mugs full of sake, the weirdly good sushi place in the mountains in Grande Cache, the swanky liquor store near St.John’s ambulance with all the good gin, Homesteader Health for refills of amber solid perfume and nag champa and kombucha, the farmer’s market downtown, smoking rooms at the Prairie Haven. Lone Teepee (iykyk). I feel adrift sometimes but it becomes more and more clear to me every time I’m stationary for more than a week or two that the constant motion and desire to be on the move is at the heart of my being. Bus life has its downfalls but getting on a ferry to a Gulf Island for the herring run on a last minute whim in March is fairly spectacular.

I’m incredibly thankful for the last eight seasons and the extensive travel and adventuring I’ve had the chance to do all around Canada. I’ve seen and experienced so many bits of Canadiana that most people never will. Treeplanting itself is a Canadian right of passage. Dear everyone who ever told me that horseback riding and horse farm work and all my injuries would eventually catch up with me- as a person suffering from chronic pain in their early 30’s, YOU WERE RIGHT. I would love to still be able to be physically planting, but again, I’m grateful for this weird, niche collision of skills where I still get to be in camp, albeit cooking. I’m grateful for the life long friendships and the sense of self and validation I’ve gained in camp. Its a place where I’ve been able to be completely myself and make these incredibly close friendships I never would have otherwise. There’s a dose of reality in camp- best and worst. But you can’t really hide who you are and there’s a lot of mutual respect and love based on capability and understanding.

Best moments of 2022 in retrospect: driving down highway 20 toward Bella Coola on a break between spring and summer trees (so strange how life has taken on the rhythm of trees) when a herd of wild horses emerges from the trees and canter down the shoulder, so I slow Althea to a crawl and maybe shout out loud- “Oh!” These moments make it all come together. When we bump down 25km of washboard gravel to the lake and park looking out over the beach and the Charlotte alplands, remote rolling green topography and snowy mountains that the low clouds cast billowing, Biblical plays of shadow and light over, its discovery. Three days on the beach with beers and my dogs and the mountains, just swimming, sitting in my chair, sitting with myself and doing nothing except existing. This is especially glorious when it’s a break from camp cooking, when all you do is work or sleep and any personal time comes at the expense of sleep and there’s no time to catch up and it all just sort of spirals out of control and into unreality. This personal time is sacred.

Reflections II

I don’t feel it until I run into friends at Goldstream and we spend a night drinking beers and listening to tunes and walking together and misbehaving. When they’ve gone there’s a void that calls out incessantly with the need to be filled. Waterfalls aren’t doing it anymore. Their discovery isn’t even a surprise. I seek them, they exist on the map, trails, distances, difficulty noted. I go to them because there’s nothing else to do. Another one- they’re pretty much all the same, every gob-smackingly beautiful god damned waterfall. God I hate them. They’re beautiful and unremarkable all at once, without anyone there to say to, “Would ya look at that.” I wonder what the others making pilgrimages up Finlayson are thinking, feeling. I can’t put a finger on it until I see the memorial at the bottom of the falls, far below the trestle I’ve just hiked laboriously down from. Ahhhh yes. I know the nighttime desperation too well. When the dark and the animals and the aloneness don’t scare you anymore because all there is room for is The Bad Feeling. My aloneness strikes me suddenly and I’m scared. The vast, cloying emptiness of it makes me feel sick.

We’re driving into camp toward the end of the season and there’s too many lives in the truck, nine total between people and dogs, and the drug hangover is awful and I’m already feeling the disconnect. Past Williams Lake, down through the Fraser Canyon and across the mighty Fraser, over the plateau, off the highway and down the logging road and descending into the canyon. The green of the unpeopled woods stretches away dizzyingly uninterrupted and the shadows of the clouds undulate alarmingly across the vast expanse of the mountain face. It’s the same feeling of being unpinned and I have to close my eyes against it and pretend to sleep so I don’t throw up. How can you feel so alone in a truck full of people. There’s a song on the radio that I don’t know but everybody else does and it intensifies the feeling and magnifies it uncomfortably, like these little tentacles of connections I’ve started to make are retracting, like its been so long since I’ve been a part of the world that I don’t know how anymore, and the desire to be in the city and surrounded by the hustle and to forget this empty space exists is so strong I want somebody to turn the truck around and deliver me to the airport where I can get on a plane and go home and exist.

Later, back in camp and centered in my world, I sit alone at a length of plastic table. Its decorated with beer bottle vases of wildflowers and tiny lights that are duking it out with the vast blackness of the woods and the intense announcement of the stars in the sky that they are present, cool & cruelly confident of their place in the order of things. I put my feet up on the table and for a moment I know exactly what the fuck is going on and who I am. Its a perfect moment, chain smoking, warm night, bright stars. I can hear the party going on in the dry tent and for a moment, I’m worried that I’m missing it, but I remember I was just in there, in the thick of it, hot and tired and sweaty and overwhelmed and needed a break to remember myself, and that’s why I’m out here. Mission accomplished. Contemplative, I look up at the sky. What the fuck are you trying to tell me, I wonder. What is the meaning of all this.

Here are the parameters I exist within at this moment: Citizen of the Planet Earth. Sometimes I’m comfortable with this. It all zooms out to absurdity, nothing I’ve ever worried about is meaningful in any way, we are tiny little specks of dust in a universe too big to comprehend. I’m comforted by this and perturbed in turns. Alone at the table, late to the dinner party, adjacent to the action within the dry tent party, half removed. I don’t want to observe anymore. An old mushroom revelation comes back. “You can either watch or you can be a part of things.” Sometimes I feel doomed to watch. What are we doing, blasting our music out into the night and cranking our lights up against it and screaming and dancing? Existing defiantly. We’re screaming back up to the stars “We were here! We are here. We are being here right now.” Remembering this, I rejoin the party. I want to scream my existence into the universe, too.

Bus Life Reflections

Ontario sucked me into it’s blackhole so completely I almost tried to move back to my hometown and into an apartment and get cemented into place there. I still largely feel the desire- to deep dive into the city like layers of it will peel back on itself and eventually reveal some shred of truth or belonging. I crave the busy activity of life all around me and the bars and shows and restaurants. I want to go on dates and get punched in the face in a mosh pit. I want to be a part of things.Or would I just create a nest and hide and dream of the mountains and the quiet lakes- its impossible to say. Either way feels like a door closing.

Two years of bus life was profoundly lonely. It seems patently unfair to skirt so close to home and still feel this way, so close to the companionship of long nights and drugs and bodies and music and just having somebody to talk to.

Profoundly- adverb

to a thorough or very great extent or degree; deeply:

The Marina in Campbell River in a windstorm. Everything is gray and damp. The grey sea beats up on the grey seawall, spills over onto the gray gravel and the grey sky obscures the looming dark grey island across the strait. The ferry horn marks its passage, invisible grey ferry in the grey mist on the grey sea between the grey masses of land. In the middle of the city many of us are living in the parking lot. Grey smoke spills out from my woodstove into the grey sky and nobody seems to notice or care.

I like to walk along the pier every day to the boatyard where they are stripping old paint off of boats and repairing hulls and coiling ropes- the names of the boats are wry little inside jokes and bad puns. One large liveaboard yacht has its windows lit up every night in the gloom and they gleam like beacons, like candles left on for those lost in the dark. On the way down the Spit bald eagles circle above the big box stores and bleak suburban plazas.

One totem pole in the Wei Wai Kum cemetery commands attention every time I pass. She hovers protectively and reaches out enticing talons. Most of those buried here are children.

One night at the fishermen’s pier it is so miserably frigid and damp there is no escaping it. I rent a Sawzall and blow the fuse on my house inverter sawing a hole in the ceiling for the flue pipe for my woodstove. Snowflakes come through the hole and melt on the hot cast iron and I sleep curled up on the couch beside a sputtering fire- it takes some time to exert mastery over the tiny stove and actually have it produce a fire worth writing home about.

Down the ass end of Menzies Mainline, a potholed excuse for a road, I spend the start of October at Brewster Camp. Old Camp 5, old logging camps where families lived. There’s an unsettling surprise of a tombstone under a feral apple tree. Here’s a sound I forgot I knew- the ripe onomatopoeia of an apple falling from the tree and hitting the ground. The days are formed around the desires born out of solitude. Wake up. Make coffee. Read a book. Journal. Jude and I tramp around in the damp ferns and lichens, through mushroom patches, following the sound of water. I can hear a waterfall distantly through the trees and the beauty of the thing is having the freedom and the time to find it. We walk toward water constantly. Sometimes we surprise a mushroom picker in their chanterelle patch, suspicious and jealous. In the evening I put the kayak out on Brewster Lake, immediately outside my back door, my bus, my life. A few kilometers down Brewster Main there’s a collection of beaten up old RVs and campers in the desiccated old apple orchard, other permanent fringe dwellers. When its time to leave I take a round about route, trying to avoid the 14kms of Menzies Mainline that take two hours to drive down, cursing at the potholes. I pray fervently to an unknown entity not to run into a logging truck on the single track of Mohun West, but at least it isn’t potholed all to hell. In the bus I skirt lakes and cliffs and clearcuts, climb and descend hills, gun it through mud and washouts, but the sun is out and there are no potholes and I’m lost and there’s no cell service and this is what I love. When we spit back out onto the highway I am triumphant.

Thanksgiving weekend out at Little Bear Bay, right on the estuary. The view outside my wall of windows is a panorama of ocean and mountains. There are more people here. They’re talkative and knock on my door to introduce themselves. Paul and his wife and their permanent wall-tent set up that leaks smoke out into the sky and smells like salmon and wet wool. They run a fishing charter and on Thanksgiving we cook Coho right out of the ocean and asparagus I had in my ice box and Paul pulls out a baggie of shrooms and Lord knows I’ve never said no, I don’t know what my own best interests are. It’s dark out and I can’t find the bus, I’m sliding down the bank into the estuary at low tide, only able to orient which way is ‘up’ by the stars, and then barely. Falling down into the ocean. I want to lie down in it and become a sea creature, feeling multitudinous. Every city night every camp night every day of my life has led me here, falling down in the ocean and not knowing what way is up.

Am I surprised when Paul creeps up to the bus in the dark, knocking, after I’ve reoriented myself and found my place, upright, drinking and smoking in the dark? No. Do I know better when I let him in? Probably. Am I still disappointed and upset when he makes a move, fumbling around in the dark, his wife asleep two hundred feet away? Yes. Get out. Get out. You should go now. I show him the door definitively, although he’s upset and desperate and still trying. My heart’s hammering away in my chest and I can’t breathe and I want, once again, to be where there are no people, because I don’t know how to avoid these scenarios. I thought you wanted this, he says. I want to believe the best. The next day after the hangover becomes manageable enough to move and he and Jenn are out in their boat, bringing back the lonely smell of the sea, I pack up and leave for a fresh start. This is not who I want to be. You are not who I want to be with.

Shitters

If you’re used to working in camps with porta potties that are regularly (or even irregularly) serviced, you’re lucky. When I started in Northern Ontario, the shitters were tents with toilet seats placed over holes dug in the ground. When the holes got full, they were filled in and the tents were moved to a new hole. Digging and filling shitter holes was unpaid planter labor, which seems almost incomprehensible to me now (along with unloading reefers, camp set up and tear down, driving, and a variety of other almost unbelievable culturally accepted sketchy business practices).

This is how we find ourselves standing in the rain at our Fushimi camp, crowded around an overflowing shitter hole, shovels in hand. It’s been raining for ten days straight and camp is in a depression below water level, so when you drive down the dirt path into camp the lake that lies beyond is at eye level. The shitter holes are thusly filed to the brim with shit, piss rain water and ground water that has seeped up from below. Every shovel full of dirt thrown into the pit just makes the foul water rise closer to the edge. There is no stemming the flow. Most planters are hiding in their vehicles, waiting to be allowed to depart, but we won’t be allowed to leave until all the camp teardown tasks are accomplished, and this one is truly monumental.

I am screaming into the rain while I throw shovelfuls of gravelly earth into the pits and they splatter back at me. Maybe six of us are going about the horrid task, possessed of a vehement hatred of everyone else that has bailed, rage growing with every blackfly bite or splatter of sewage-water to the eye. Finally it dawns on us that we need to dig a hole adjacent to each shitter hole, then dig a short dam in-between each to provide an overflow/relief hole and then fill in both holes. It’s the only way.

We dig furiously in the rain, hands blistering against the hard earth and I am screaming still, “If you’re not doing anything, come and pick up a fucking shovel, and also, FUCK YOU!” I’m still a subscriber to the community aspect of camp at this point, not yet questioning the dubious ethical aspect of the free labor. We’re like a prison chain-gang out in the rain and the mud and isn’t it true that treeplanting itself used to be prison labor?

Finally the first relief hole is dug and we break the dam in between and as the foul water rushes across, I see a single kernel of corn caught in its current, and I absolutely fucking lose it. “CORN!” I am screaming at this point. “When did we even eat corn?” And then we’re all laughing so hard in the rain that we’re trying not to fall down in the biohazard we’ve created, and we’re slapping each other on the back, and I’m crying with laughter, and eventually, more hands with more shovels arrive on deck, the holes are filled, and we depart for town.

I absolve myself from ever filling in another shitter hole again after this. End of the season on Thunder Road, Tony is close by, booming out “Help, help filling shitter holes!” as we slowly pack up camp to leave. I lay back down in my tent, illuminated blue by the sunlight, and hum a few bars of For the Longest Time to myself. My dues are paid.

Stay tuned for more shitter stories, including the time all the tents blew away in a windstorm and all that remained were the seat bases, but bitch, you’ve still gotta shit somewhere.

The ol' downward spiral

I’m largely cynical about the goodness of people, which is why it’s so confounding that I think you’re better than you are. Scratch that, I know you’re better than you are. You can’t change people, this is true, but sometimes it shines through, soft and golden and yielding and internally I triumph. “I knew it!” At the slightest sign of conflict or danger or any kind of emotional turbulence it’s quickly repealed, though. That’s how we’ve landed here. “Who else knows?” you ask me. What exactly the fuck is your angle with that particular question. It sends me reeling. This is a thing that happens, surely we both know that. What is the bare minimum of human decency here? It’s something well above the bar of “Who else knows?” and this is the terminal sentence that really makes me doubt the veracity of anything I ever felt from you that was more than nothing.

”I’m just as bad,” I tell Jacqui, when we’re talking about pill popping and cocaine and binge drinking and being a fuck up. “You’re NOT,” she says, exasperated. “You are ONLY this bad when you two are together.” This may be true. I keep a lid on it most of the time. First meeting in years, I am the one drunk, I am the one who does not give a fuck about the girlfriend, I am the one who is ruthlessly seeking what the body needs. “Let me enable your downward spiral,” I message you after you say you’ve been dumped. This isn’t really what a good friend would do, and I’m sorry.

We’ve wallowed around rock bottom together before, blackout, sad, suicidal, insane, cheating, desperate for any kind of human connection. I’m at a better place than this now and I think you are too. Now I’m doing this for fun, not to blank out everything else that’s happening. I text you from a birthday party I’m obligated to attend, post falling down an entire flight of stairs in your house. “I’m so horny I’m suicidal.” Before I leave your house, I groan. “I have to go do real people things.” From the Uber, I take a selfie and send it, my face visibly wild eyed and screwy. “I’d rate your coherency about a 6/10,” you send back. Oh, good. We’re enabling and goading each other on and it’s addictive, the back and forth rapid-fire stupidity of it all. The furtive meeting later, skulking around in the driveway shadows, curtains drawn.

In my request for a sober chat, something I actually think was relatively mature and sane of me, and not at all crazy or self indulgent, you first blow me off and then say you’re only sober-ish during the day at work. Surely that can’t be true, I respond, even as I am in the midst of day drinking g&t’s and taking percs for my back. I need to know what you remember saying, although you’ve said it many times on different nights in various stages of fuck up-ed-ness.

“You’re not crazy,” you said to me, unprompted. I knew what we were both here for, this time, although it’s the electric connection and easiness in each other’s company and the pure, stupid, illogical joy I find in your cartoon character existence that keeps us coming back to each other, rubber bands snapping back into place. And everything I always suspected, you confirm. Maybe you’re just telling me what I want to hear, which seems unlikely, because I haven’t fished or asked or prompted. This confessional comes over a cigarette in the night with blow and tall cans and there’s no love here, until you bring it in.

The timing isn’t right. It’s never right. It was always you. It always should have been you. I love you. Stay for a while. Let’s do real people things. I wanna go out for breakfast. I wanna cook you breakfast. How do you take your coffee. Write for the magazine. Meet my mom.

This of course is all bullshit.

There are no messages to mix up here, until later you say, you’d get back together with your ex if she came back, although, by your own admission, she isn’t very nice to you. I have no leg to stand on here. I never do. I’m inserting myself where I don’t fit. I’m a visitor passing through who had no intention of staying but the beauty of my life is that I can change it at my will, at the drop of a hat. My life is scattered across the world, but part of it is here. “You can’t stay only for me.” And I never would, but of course, its part of it. I know there’s the potential for a full and happy life here for me, with just the barest whisper of desolate blue-grey ocean and unpeopled rainforest and long formless days alone in the back of my mind. There’s my best friend and the market and the rivers and photography and writing and just, god damn, Guelph has a lot going on for it, but you’re all tangled up in all of it and there’s just no separating the two. It would ruin me if I stayed.

I am soft, soft, soft and my better characteristic is that I’m a lover. I want to do nice things for someone. I want to remember how you take your coffee and bring it to you at work. I want to love you but you still won’t let me. I never asked for the late night, twinkle light confessional with a funky guitar soundtrack, through a haze of cigarette smoke and your hand on the small of my back. You volunteered it, or more likely, dangled it like a carrot in front of a stupid, stupid donkey, because you know me so well, you know this is what will work.

”I don’t know where we’ve landed after this.” After a not-at-all-sober conversation, things are less clear than ever. Should I stay or should I go now. I opt to go. I will give you this- it is always me who is leaving, but I am always willing to put it all on the line to try. “Let’s fucking send it, bud.” Let’s just date. Who gives a shit. The timing will always be wrong unless you make the universe your bitch and run with it and move heaven and earth to make it work. Unless, of course, you simply don’t want to. And that’s fine too.

Maybe I’m the only one who operates this way, with a strange, uncharacteristic optimism. I just want to once again return to those confessionals and remind you that I did not fucking ask for this to happen. I thought I knew exactly what was happening and I was as in charge of the situation as I ever am of anything. So, here’s your breakup rap, I hope someday you’ll let someone love you. More or less the same old song and dance. Wife this hot mess, I’m elusive as the loch ness monster. No risk no reward, or something. Blahblahblah.

Who else in the world can I sit and have a 6 hour conversation ranging from the meter of rap and poetry to plot continuity to political correctness to old school punk and stand up comedy, passing the phone back and forth to trade off on Spotify tracks and chain smoking? Nobody. This is a space I can only exist in when you’re present. There’s one morning on MacDonell
when I wake up and I know I am in trouble. The hoodvent from Vienna’s starts cranking out pancake smells and grease and noise, and a single shaft of sunlight pierces through the blinds and lights up your face on the pillow and I’m struggling with my shoes, trying to make a runner before daylight comes and this happens- trying to get away before it turns real- and you’re sleeping with your mouth open and your hair splayed over the pillows and that single ray of sunlight turns everything into soft gold and before I know it, something in me is demanding that I yield to that gold, and I know that I love you, and I know that I’m not supposed to, so, heart beating furiously in my chest, missing underwear and socks, I leave as quickly as possible, filled up with this butter-soft gold and carrying it through my day, almost embarrassed.


I can’t sit and wait to be devastated so I leave.

Let’s talk about bad timing.
What comes next is bad timing.
I am single, homeless and seasonally unemployed.

And the most pressing thing you have to say to me is “Who else knows.” ALL you had to say was “Are you ok?” So when I worry if it's fair of me to send this, I try to remember it wasn't fair that I had to spend a week alone in absolute agony without so much as an “Are you ok?” Driving myself 300km to deal with it wasn't fair. It wasn't fair that you changed the rules of the game. What is fair.

You’re onstage at karaoke and you are the most confident person who has taken the stage. You pump a first in the air at the drop and shimmy and shake and sing and my fucking heart hurts because you’re so ridiculous and so lovely and you just absolutely have no fucks to give. Carry that energy into everything else in life. And get your fucking driver’s license.

Positive Affirmations

Without a doubt, the morning is my favorite part of the day. It's cliché- new beginnings and fresh starts.

Yesterday the day broke clear and cool over the Georgia Strait. It was a morning too beautiful to take out the camera. I would have only been frustrated and disappointed at my own inability to capture what was before my eyes. Footprints frozen in the sand, the fine layer of frost over everything glittering in minute ice white diamonds. The view across the strait was totally unimpeded by fog and the mountains wreathed the horizon, rising out of a land obscured by mist. Steam scudded across the dimpled surface of the sea- it turned from steel to gold to rose as the sun made its ascent behind Mount Washington behind me, snow capped and decidedly Bob Rossian in her pastel winter pallet.

Mornings are for Jude and I. We had our private and contemplative morning stroll around the estuary marsh, reeking at low tide with its marine stench of rotten seaweed and saltwater detritus. The ugliness of the tidal flats and the rot could be forgiven when the water reflected the pink streaking across the sky. Jude paused here and there to sample crab legs. He wakes up in the morning and moves from behind my knees to the pillow where he lays with his head on my shoulder and whines almost imperceptibly into my ear. We've done this every morning since he was a puppy, except for the days where I get up before him. He is a reliable 6 am to 7 am riser. As soon as I acknowledge him he rolls over in a ploy for a belly rub, legs bicycling in the air, lips peeled back in a foolish grin.

The cats come and sit and stare directly into my soul until I get up. Everyone just wants breakfast. Jude, too. It feels like that portrait of Salvador Dali when the cats leap back and forth between the counter and their cat tree, impatiently, while I get the fire going and the coffee on. I set up the percolator or the French press the night before, a small act of self care, so all I have to do in the morning is put it on the fire.

Yesterday on our drive up from the south island to CR I repeated positive affirmations. I don't usually buy into that hokey shit. I feel bad even typing that because it made me feel so much better and is something I intend to do every day going forward. The bus has to go into the mechanic which is a stressful time of packing the cats into their carrier, which they hate, not knowing how long repairs are going to take or how much they are going to cost or how serious they are, or if it is safe to drive in the meantime. I'm reluctant to leave my winter catatonia behind and begin Dealing With Things. The sun came out for our drive and there isn't much I like better than a good road trip and a good playlist. I actually love driving.

So, the sea on one side and the forest on the other, I put aside all things worrying me that I have been recirculating in a toxic loop and find the good.

I am healthy. Jude is healthy. The cats are healthy. They will forgive me for shoving them into their crate. The work has to be done and what it costs, it will cost. I have no control over the bad things in the world. I am employed. It is a beautiful day. I have what I need, and more. There is so much love in my life, even if it is far away sometimes. So many people love and care for me. I love my little bus home, even if she can be trouble.

There are more. I found many, many things to be positive and grateful for. The negative is just louder and more persistent.

So maybe it was the day of the drive the feeling started. Maybe it was even working away quietly in the background while I was at Goldstream, almost imperceptible. The feeling of great universal doors being thrown open, of threads drawing together and the shuttle of a cosmic loom working away busily, operated by unknown forces. I wasn't going to go to Goldstream, initially. I had designs on Chemainus and even went as far north as Duncan before thinking fuck it, let's head south. Parked in my site, green ferns, green trees, everything damp, green and ancient, my phone went off. "Are you and your bus at Goldstream right now?" A friend from treeplant who I always run into in the most random places had just arrived at the campground. He had also only narrowly come here without intending to. Those invisible threads, weaving.

In Courtenay, post positive affirmations, The Feeling grows stronger and I can begin to identify it. Its the feeling of being present and centered. It is the feeling of possibility. It is the feeling of power and the ability to make things happen. I have manifested this before but it eludes me mostly, and I don't know if it is wiser to accept that it is not within my control, or to continue to seek it out. The harder I grasp at it the quicker it evaporates. I am striking a few things off of a to-do list I have long been procrastinating on while in town. I dropped my knives off to be sharpened, dropped a load off at Value Village, and went for a walk down 5th Street with Jude. "Wouldn't it be funny if I ran into Ashlea?" the thought comes unbidden. Why would she be in Courtenay? I stopped on 5th Street at a chocolatier she had recommended to me a few months prior and treated myself to a few truffles for accomplishing all my tasks that day, and, feeling of wellbeing growing and stabilizing, strolled with Jude along the Puntledge River back to where the bus was parked.

Ashlea and I actually narrowly missed each other in Courtenay. Not just the city but the chocolate shop. The Feeling knows, no matter how much I may dismiss it.

Back in Campbell River, my winter home, I backed into my campsite first try. Looking for some music to listen to while I got work done around the bus, I did a google search for an album from a one man band from St.Jacob's, Ryan Baer/The Haret. I bought a CD from him on a sunny Saturday morning in St.Jacob's twelve years ago while he played a bass drum made out of an old suitcase, a few keys of a piano, a harmonica and a trumpet and sang simultaneously. The CD is long gone, and I have never been able to find his music online. He isn't the kind of person who has Spotify or uses YouTube. He's just a guy in a Mennonite farmer's market singing Appalachian folk songs (although freakishly talented- prodigous even). So I was shocked when I found the entire album uploaded on SoundCloud, although mislabeled, with no track titles, only the artists name.

Ten years ago I burned the CD and sent a copy of it to an ex who had really loved it. I dumped him in a pretty unforgiveable way, at an awful time in my life. I have never not felt bad about it, but I've spent a lot of time coming to terms with some horrible things I've done and why, analyzing the cycle of abuse and the ways in which I, myself, was abused and manipulated and how that seeped into every facet of my life. (So, every boyfriend I ever had after Cameron, sorry. I'm working on that. It wasn't my fault but that doesn't make it ok.) ANYWAY, sidebar. The SoundCloud version of the album had, in turn, been uploaded in 2019 by the ex I had sent it to back in 2012ish. It felt almost like a gift to myself, again, that serendipitous knitting together of the universe, happenstance, timing and coincidence.

Listening to this album puts me back to exactly where I was in 2010 and while there are parts of it I miss absolutely, The Feeling knows I am in exactly the right place in my life. I miss the horse farm so badly I don't even like thinking about it- I have missed it since the second I decided to leave. I miss parts of Guelph. The river, the trails, the arboretum. The grubby old patio at the Jimmy Jazz, but even that is gentrified now (fuck you, Royal Electric. You ruined my bar). I was so miserable in that city though, still under the oppressive grasp of a man who controlled every aspect of my life, except the farm. I was so sad and scared and miserable. That abused, gaslit and insecure person is gone, now.

I'm sitting on the banks of the Quinsam River in my bus that I built, myself. A hot fire is cracking in the stove beside me, that I installed with my own two hands. I am getting ready to go back to work, another cycle in the bush to come, a life I built myself. I drove here through the mountains with the cats and Jude, when I used to be scared to even drive a car on the highway. And I am ready for whatever comes next.

I sit here and put that out into the universe- I am ready. I am ready. I am ready.

Bad Bitches

The most common questions I get about living in the bus are about being a woman travelling and living alone. Don’t you get scared? Don’t you get lonely? Of course I do, but I was lonely and scared in the city, too. Way out down some forest service road in the bus with Jude and the cats and my axe and my woodstove I feel complete in a way. It is better to just rely on yourself. I see so many people in relationships based off of a mutual need to not be alone rather than an appreciation of each other (I’ve been there, too) and it fucking horrifies me. I don’t NEED anybody, but of course, sometimes it would be nice to have somebody. Sometimes it gets tiresome just to be doing all of the daily mundane tasks by myself. I’d love to be able to make a partner chop wood for once, or climb up to clear snow off of the roof, or drive, or pick up the diesel bill.

I’m more capable than any men I’ve ever had in my life. My ex didn’t even have his driver’s license- when we went on a vacation it was colored by the fact that I had to drive 2,000km and stay sober while he quaffed beers everywhere we went. White boy rapper wouldn’t last a day in the woods (and I don’t think had his driver’s license.) The women in my life have been the real bad asses.

Here’s a brief shoutout to the amazing women in my life. My mom, who became an amateur MMA fighter at the age of 44. I could write a book about what a bad bitch my mom is. My grandma Esther who’s demure presentation masks a core of absolute iron. She raised my dad and went to school full-time and got a degree. There are grainy 1970’s film photos of her on a motorcycle. She chops wood and drives the tractor and used to live with my dad in a tiny homestead in Tekhummah. That remote little wooded plot with the falling down cabin and the well could be mine, now. I want it incredibly badly. Her sister, my aunt Evelyn, who travelled to Europe on a freight ship as a teenager. This was even more impressive for somebody from a conservative Christian family from Tekhummah.

All of my coworkers from my seasons of treeplanting. Women who smell like diesel and woodsmoke and exert mastery over ATVs and chainsaws and trucks, women who do their own oil changes, and everybody else’s, women who lounge casually outside of mess tents with their beer and smokes. God I love them. Women who casually tap me on the shoulder to show me how to use an angle grinder or to take over the flatdeck trailer I just can’t wrangle around a tight corner. Women who can plant thousands of trees in a day, and good ones, too. Women who run camps, not with the military precision of a man, but with the kind of empathetic leadership that commands true respect, and love. I am constantly in awe of the women that I work with and they are always inspiring me to learn a new skill, to say yes, to accept help and guidance. Laura and I changing flat trailer tires and convoying the dry bus and the kitchen bus from camp to camp- those are some of my fondest memories.

I have worked with some incredible women in kitchens. The culture is slowly changing but kitchens are a sexist place. I remember one job I had in Guelph where I kept getting put in the dishpit because ‘women are more organized’ while a guy who’s only prior experience was microwaving pre-portioned meals at Swiss Chalet stumbled through a service on grill. Fuck you, dude. He got paid more than I did hourly, too. Chef Gallivan who just made the most beautiful, sophisticated food and commanded a kitchen quietly with her no-nonsense presence. A great chef does not need to scream or threaten or belittle their staff to get results. Vicki, who owns her own bakery now. Women who could out-drink, out-party and out-cook every single person on staff.

I have never thought twice about being a woman travelling alone. I do what needs to be done and learn how to do what I don’t know how to, and that’s the way I like it. And if I’m being honest, I’d rather have another woman on board to help with the wood chopping and the chores than I would a man. We would be the most powerful bitches on earth.

Dispatches from denman

Between fuel rationing, road closures and an overabundance of caution regarding snowy roads, I have largely been bumming around the same few spots in Campbell River for the last month. Immediately prior to the catastrophic flooding in mid November I had done a run south island and spent some time in Chemainus as well as done the Pacific Marine loop, checking out Fairy Creek with an old pal and poking around Port Renfrew and some spots on the west coast I had never been. I am thankful for friends who push me out of my comfort zone- although I have traversed some sketchy logging roads when pressed to for work, I am actually quite a nervous driver. I have come a long way from staying up all night catastrophizing about driving on the DVP the next day, but I probably wouldn’t have done that particular road solo and appreciate the push. I boogied back north to CR to deal with some paperwork and narrowly missed the Malahat closure as well as the Nanaimo sinkhole.

As a person who is actually kind of stoked for societal collapse I like to think I am smart in the face of natural disasters. I filled my fuel and water tanks, propane, bought extra pet food and a sack of rice and parked myself at the marina. Unfortunately some people have been abusing the 48 hour free parking and staying there in their RVs for months on end. I had just finished a laundry run when I saw bylaw pull in, and had enough time to throw everything in the sink and peel out of the parking lot while they took down the offenders license plate numbers and banished them. I have a conversation about this later with my sometimes neighbor Brian, a really nice man who boondocks fulltime in his RV. We find each other at Quinsam Campground at Elk Falls Provincial Park just outside of town.

So for a month, I do (did! I am trying to break this weird present tense habit) did the familiar circuit around CR. Oyster Bay, marina, Quinsam, fisherman’s wharf, the spit. There is a new campground at the reservoir I want to check out but a 20cm dumping of snow has made a bit of a mess of things and I do not own tire chains.

Knocks at the bus door are not often a welcome thing. At Little Bear Bay all whacked out on shrooms it was Paul, also all shroomy, trying to lure me into a threesome with him and his wife. Maybe it was just a regular ol’ hookup he was after, I honestly don’t recall, but that incident was the impetus for the current alcohol moratorium. I am tired of kicking men out of my space. Out at Quinsam, night time, no lights on, another knock. Who the hell? It is a campground neighbor introducing himself, and I can smell the booze wafting off his breath as we stand in the dark, my ax clutched surreptitiously in hand.

The next day I left the bus idling while I went into the grocery to fill up my water jugs. It has been a while since I had starter problems but they were so persistent and the stakes so high, with short camp moves and remote camps, that I feel almost superstitious about firing her up more times than necessary. That, and in the dark, short days of a west coast winter, I must augment my solar power with charging batteries off the alternator while Althea is running. If anyone knows how to even get this tricky bitch in drive, they are welcome to have her. Not really, though, this bus is actually the sum total of my worldly goods.

On return I struck up a conversation with a gentleman cyclist who moved to the island after visiting his daughter eighteen years ago and falling in love. He was super interested in the bus and the lifestyle and the freedom.

“Oh, shit,” I thought. “I AM free. That’s the point.”

I still had 3/4 of a tank of diesel, full water, propane, etc and decided on an impromptu trip. I had seen oysters near Baynes Sound and wanted to go harvest some and god damnit, why shouldn’t I. Where I had seen the oyster bed was awfully close to the Denman ferry and one thing sort of led to another and with no concious decision making I found myself the only camper in residence at the very small, quiet and beautiful Fillongley Provincial Park.

My time here has largely consisted of walking with Jude. Hornby looms nearby and across the strait the mainland mountains are an impressive range of white peaks, when the fog and clouds reveal them. The days are still those bleak, grey winter days but the rain has tapered off considerably. Sometimes, a rogue bit of sunlight will burst through the clouds and illuminate the day with absolute glory. We walk down to the estuary with the wind cold in our faces, Jude’s shoulders hunched against the cold and his ears folded back in a way that projects his displeasure. Across the water, one of those rogue sunbursts is lighting up a patch of forest like a summer day. The clouds there have turned into biblical, illuminated Michaelangelo clouds. I hope someone is walking there, and has found themselves unexpectedly in their own brief burst of gold, glory and hope.

Denman Island views December 13th 2021

Letter to (e)stranger

Thank you for teaching me how to eat oysters. I feel like I’m stepping in on some private memory when I have oysters, as if I should apologize, but its my memory, its me. Maybe twenty, eating oysters for the first time. God, twenty’s so young. We totally overdid it at some oyster joint on Queen West and went on a celebratory pub crawl for your birthday, spending entirely too much money on oysters, nice wine and high-end debauchery. I was unused to this. Not the drinking, but the ‘nice’ part of it, out somewhere that didn’t have needles in the bathroom stalls and the sour smell of vomit on the patio, somewhere that kept the lights low for ambiance, not to hide the cockroaches and sticky floor.

Today I went out to buy them fresh from the dock in town and felt like a real person for a minute. Sometimes I pick up a few from an oyster bed when I’m out walking the dog. There’s always an oyster knife in my coat pocket, or purse, or knife roll because I never know when I might need one. You told me about buying oysters from Marche Jean Talon and not having an oyster knife, and I think about this when I’m there, too.

You sat on the counter-top once, drawing maps of Montreal. We were drunk, and this is when we were still drunk and happy, instead of drunk and silent. And you’re told me all these crazy stories about parties in Montreal and nights out in the city’s vibrant underbelly, mobsters trying to buy boys and elephant costumes and all. That map is superimposed on my travels throughout the city.

Once we sat across the table from one another at a table at The Only and were completely silent for several beers. I doubt lone space station astronauts contemplating the vistas of earth have been so lonely, or deep sea divers untouched by the last, straggling rays of the sun, surrounded by strange creatures. I ran. Remember? You had just come back from running away to Montreal. You knew what it was to fall into a city, searching, running, who knows. Plumbing alleyways and parks and the dark corners of bars, the sticky, sour smell of old beer. It’s my turn to run away to the city, on trains and buses, driving my car, hitching a ride. I run to it over and over again. The first time I got off the train and went to a hostel, before I had friends in the city. I went for a job interview at a fancy restaurant on Maissoneuve, but the glow had gone out of restaurants already and I hated the thought of a strange kitchen without Jamie, Bob and the familiar playlist and beloved menu. Maybe it wasn’t working in kitchens I loved but just that one moment in Toronto where I felt cemented into place and like a part of something.

I spent the better part of a winter in Hochelaga with a friend and fell into the city. I felt like I half knew it already. I’d dreamed of it. Dieu du Ciel came out of the frigid evening like a holy shrine of golden light and warm wood and charcuterie, and I met it like an old friend. Once or twice I thought about Vanessa and her outrageous fake French accent dropping a board at a two top and saying “And here is your charcuterie” in that particularly obnoxious and haughty way. I went out to a local bar in Hochelaga with a pal and drank pitchers of Canadian. We got the fun kind of blackout drunk, taking the metro downtown and stopping at the dep for beers to drink in the park, clearing a bench of snow. The night did that thing where it took on a life of its own and blurred together in lines of light and laughter. If we were in Toronto it would have ended up the the Lake View. We wound up swing dancing at Les Katacombes with a live big band. Phil gets my jokes about Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich, God bless him. I don’t know how to swing dance and neither does he, but Sophie certainly does, and it’s more fun this way, anyway. The next days I found bookstores on Saint Henri and good coffee and vintage and wandered a little guiltily around, feeling like a snoop in a city that didn’t belong to me.

One night at a warehouse rave after a group night out at Saint-Houblon with all the treeplanters, I produced fifteen tabs of acid from my purse. How did it get there and why so much? It’s confusing. For a while there was a time where I just always had some cycling through my purse or glasses case or some other small, designated pocket. Your mom once inadvertently threw out twenty tabs of acid you were keeping in your nightstand drawer, clutching to remnants of your wild self. So was I. You would have enjoyed treeplanting. Maybe you wouldn’t remember, because you didn’t remember a great many conversations we had in that year- we were always quite drunk when we saw each other and the stress of the restaurant had pervaded everything. I begged you more than once to leave Toronto and go to Montreal- hell, go anywhere! In the end it never happened and I’m thankful because I never would have gone treeplanting and gone on the crazy adventure that the past several years had been, highs and lows and all.

Anyway, in yet another probably forgotten conversation, I accused you somewhat viciously of ‘buying in’ to the vision of high paying jobs being the only single path to success narrative that your parents had been pushing, whether you realized it or not. And you told me “You’ll buy into something, some day.” I scoffed. I bought into tree planting in a pretty bad way, though. My life moves through a seasonal rhythm every year, leading up to the start of the season. I make great money. I’m great at my job. I don’t have to deal with the politics of restaurants and the machismo and abuse. In the winter, I do whatever I want. When I visit Montreal, we climb the mountain in the snow, eat bagels on St.Viateur. I have my friends filed away in their apartments on my own map of Montreal. My favorite ways to walk somewhere, my favorite places and ways to spend a sunny Sunday in February emerge. My own city bursts into life.

Two Februaries ago, right before lockdown would fundamentally change our lives, I found myself on an impulsive bus to the safe, warm and cozy pull out couch of Tony and Julia’s, ensconcing myself in the safety of a Montreal winter. From the bus I sent my boss in Guelph a text to quit my job as kitchen manager at a job that had become hell, toward the end of an endless rotation through diner land and greasy spoons and mediocre small town restaurants. Jokes on everybody else, because COVID shut down the retreat center just a few days after I called it quits and took off and I would have been laid off indefinitely, anyway. I sat drinking Negronis at Le Darling for hours on end, by myself, anonymous, reinvented, and it was the happiest I’ve been. I went back the next day in the acid afterglow, and the whole city was glowing like that. The bells rang out from the churches and it was frosty and cold and beautiful. I have come to belong here in my own, strange way. I find friends in the bars and restaurants who exclaim “It’s you”. The diverging and converging circles of friends I have made crash into each other like waves in Montreal. I write a poem for Julia and spiral staircases and black coffee on an early spring day, little do I know, the last day of normalcy before covid. I stopped at the dep to buy the 750ml bottles of Unibroue beers and stuffed them deep into the pockets of my winter coat, feeling as if I was somehow paying homage to something and making it come full circle.

MP and I spent days lost downtown, winding around. We slept with the windows open to the river at her parents house on Ile Perrot and her white sheets were cool and salty. I kissed her on the lips in the Okanagan one summer, before we drove across the country together for the second time. All of our Montreal friends were on that trip, both ways. We watched the sun rise over the mountains in Banff and unrolled our sleeping bags on the grass verge of a soccer field for the night. She and I bicycled to a concert in the March snow and I feel like a real Montrealer, thinking of your Peugot getting lost somewhere on Bloor, of your road bike against the snow and unplowed bike lanes of Toronto, thinking of you bicycling around Montreal. Let’s leave off here, if we can. You were leaving to bike off down Bloor, turning into Danforth, then home. East, east, through the city, deeper into it. It was summer time and as you biked away the small of your back peeked out between your t-shirt and your jeans. So long.

I will keep oysters, and gin and tonics and maps of places that I love.

Geographically Large

When I say ‘the island’ I mean Manitoulin, which, throughout a tempestuous thirty years of constant motion, remains home. It has been a long time since I have lived on the island. I actively resist it, but I think I will eventually end up back there. All of my family is there, or a short drive away through the La Cloche mountains.

Mountains and water. The two islands have this much in common, anyway. I woke up this morning and took Jude out for our morning walk along a stretch of rocky beach at low tide. In true Vancouver Island style, it was overcast and promising rain. The mainland mountains were invisible across the strait, lurking somberly and immense behind the dense cloud and fog, while the black bulk of the nearer island mountains hemmed us in. As we came back to the bus to make coffee, somebody called my name from the back of a van. Two treeplanters who had just finished a fall plant up in Tahsis. We chatted for a while before going our own way, off into this island that is geographically large, but oh, so small.

My island, my mecca, my home, is small. It is the largest fresh water island in the world, but it is small. The biggest town on the island is roughly 1,000 people. The only set of stop lights is in Little Current to regulate the traffic over the one lane swing bridge. A chain coffee franchise of certain Canadian notoriety was recently built, after massive opposition and heel dragging. Change does not come easily here. Despite Manitoulin’s relatively small size (2766km squared, compared to Vancouver Island’s 32,134) it is much easier to get lost there. There are unpeopled sprawls of land and hikes and trails that aren’t permanently contaminated with other people. It is possible to camp on the shores of Lake Huron for weeks without seeing another human being, possible to hike around Misery Bay and drive out to the lighthouse at Meldrum and swim in complete solitude.

I have driven out to remote rec sites on Vancouver Island in the off season of November and never once have I been alone anywhere. People largely keep to themselves, but even at the ass end of some shitty logging mainline on a frigid day in November, there will be another camper or trailer. Every few weeks I run into somebody I know, always treeplanters, which can’t be a surprise, because everybody comes here after the season, or finishes their season here. Wallowing around in the winter doldrums, wearing dirty sweatpants and feeling completely, totally and utterly aimless, is not the time I want to be running into people I know. I want totally solitude, free of self conscious self observation.

Flying home from Alberta last year, the plane started descending through the cloud cover over Superior. Looking down on the wolf’s head shape of the lake and feeling, deep in my gut, a pull- I stared down at the Agawa Canyon and Marathon, tried to find Manitouwadge. Over the vast expanse of Lake Huron (it truly can only be appreciated from the air), I waited, expectantly, for the shape of home to reveal itself to me. By the time we flew over the island we were low enough for me to see the bays and islands. Cockburn Island, first, then eastward. Meldrum, I can feel the warmth of the honeycomb rocks under the sun, and the deep, deep blue where the lake drops off abruptly into mysterious and frigid waters. Barrie Island, I mentally place myself at the municipal beach. Has it been a bad year for watersnakes? After every thunderstorm, we would drive out to our pastures there to check the cattle. Stamping down the long grass in front of the gate to scare out snakes, shaking a bucket of barley chaff and calling out the names of ‘the girls’, all the cattle named for friends and family. Over Gore Bay we are low enough for me to see the pavilion and the docks. I index Mikey away at work, maybe installing new docks at the marina or working on the boardwalk, Nana safely ensconced within the new house on 540, Esther perched on the west bluff, watching the sailboats on the north channel. The causeway through Ice Lake. I’d love to be driving down Emery Road on a summer afternoon with my mom and my nana, stopping at all the houses we have lived in, telling, ritually, the stories. I have belonged here and continue to belong here, these stories say. They are our anchor in place and time. Somewhere within the green expanse on the south shore my dad is out in the bush, alone, his happy place. The home of my heart, Carter Bay, sweeps in a sandy, wild crescent at the edge of that green expanse, and I know in my bones every twist and turn of the creek that runs through the dunes to the great lake, and I know that there it is possible to be well and truly alone.