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.