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?