Recovery

Thick snowflakes fall lazily from white sky, letting me know that this morning is a windless one, and before making my way downstairs my gaze traces the low ridge crested with trees just beyond the edge of town. The formation looks inconspicuously regular, nothing out of place to draw the eye’s attention, but I know that on the other side of this small mountain’s edge stands a barren, hollow, empty space, a scar that today is being blanketed in snow. To an eagle in flight looking down at the ridge it would look as if some giant with a hunger for rocks and an ice cream scoop the size of a moving truck scraped away a year’s worth of rocky dessert from the land, although the culprit was we hungry humans, and we used the tons and tons of mountain to build ourselves some dams. This is where our power, and possibly yours, if you live in the lower mainland, comes from. It comes from the dams that make lakes out of the rivers here, in the basin of the Bridge River Valley.

I’ve been thinking about power lately, among other things, as I’m reading a new book: In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, by Nathaniel Philbrick. You may be wondering how thoughts of power, and by power I mean the energy supply to heat our homes and light our evening activities, translates into a book on whaling, but the connection is this: whale oil was used to light the lamps of folks in the 19^th century, which in my mind is similar to the damming of rivers that likely powers most of our homes in BC. Kind of a stretch, perhaps, but that’s what isolation does to a mind; the octopus arms of thought can reach a very long way when you have night after night to entertain yourself.

So this is how I start today, in thoughts about dams and rivers, and that initial spark spirals into thinking about how the fish that used to travel all the way here and further to spawn are now halted at the foot of a dam that’s an hour’s drive away and was built with the backside of this mountain that stands in view of my new bedroom window. Funny how things connect when we have the time to let them.

I moved my bedroom upstairs last night. Moved the whole thing, the mattress and box spring, the drawers and tables. Moved all my art supplies and the desk downstairs to the room that was previously my bedroom. Heat rises, and at the suggestion of a wise friend who has been here for a visit I decided it was a swell idea and why not? What better way to spend a Thursday evening?

I’m quite an intense woman—I think you’d have to be to voluntarily choose to move to a place like this knowing you will live alone, sometimes utterly so, in the mountains—and sometimes that intensity flares up inside and fuels on itself, consuming my thoughts and my days. The dark horse of winter was here to visit me this month, and with another bad cold keeping me inside and some intense days at the school the isolation of the January days hit hard this year. Too much time sitting alone with my thoughts, especially living in such contrast to my sunny Christmas vacation. Too many days stuck inside questioning my purpose, life’s purpose, questions to which there is no answer. I get like this sometimes, and when I have sufficiently spent long hours examining multiple angles of non-answer in the solitude of my house staring out the windows, at the pond, at the Chickadees flitting along the sterile branches, eventually it moves on like a wharf fog that comes and goes. The thickest fog comes in with the seasons, when the strong winter air makes the ocean, warm in comparison, mist up into the sky.

I’m usually full of positivity and energy, and to balance that out I suppose it’s necessary that the pendulum swings the other way once-in-a-while. It’s good being here though, because I am learning of the impermanence of life, of those moments when you feel down, and subsequently of the moments when you feel up. Constant change, always, and I think this is a valuable lesson to carry with me throughout my days, to carry as close as I can hold it. This life here is teaching me of this, and how to ride it out, looking forward at where I am going, although sometimes it’s hard not to look back to try and size up the next wave. Sometimes it looks like there is no next wave, and perhaps there isn’t, and you must bob there in the frigid west coast water, the wind pelting your face, the salt stinging your eyes, and then maybe you pee in your wetsuit and it’s warm again for a moment before that too makes its way beyond your body and is gone. And you must wait, and try to practice patience, because the next wave will make its way to you on its own time, and there is not a single thing you can do to make it hurry up and get there.

But it’s hard to wait, and in the anticipation we can sometimes feel stuck, so stuck, until eventually we start to notice the small things, like the taste of ocean on our lips, the barely perceptible rise and fall of the ocean’s heartbeat beneath us, the fact that we are floating exactly here, in this moment, alive, with this particular, often underappreciated view spread out before us like a suppertime tablecloth. A view that is ours to see or to bypass, and sometimes I, like everyone else in this world, need a reminder to look towards the horizon instead of scanning my eyes back and forth along the dark water in search of something more amidst the sea.

I am an intense woman, yes, but on top of that it seems that the experience of life here, living alone in this wilderness environment, is also more intense. The recovery from a low, from this low, feels more immediate, more concentrated, very clear and pure. Or perhaps I am just getting better at letting it wash over me, letting the next wave come and being ready to paddle my way into its belly. That said, out here the human din that’s usually tied up with living in civilization is non-existent. No traffic, no noise pollution (unless water is being let out from behind the nearby Lajoie dam) obscuring the birdsong and distant river, no light pollution competing with the first evening starlight. The sun is still a trace in the sky when the stars first appear here, bright pinpricks of light twitching to life above the ragged mountain horizon.

For now I am on the other side of my dark days. It’s as if a full moon has finally risen in a cloudless sky, and the path I am on is lit once again.

I’ve got a new room to see me through the next year up here, and if I need to I can change it again; after all, I’ve got four more to choose from.

The mouse is back, and to be honest I find the tiny ovals of mouse feces strewn across the counter surprisingly endearing. If anything, this tells me that I need out for a couple of days, and as cute as it may be to be visited in the night by a little critter, “mousetrap” becomes the next item on my shopping list. I’m heading into Lillooet today for the weekend once I finally get my act together and pack. I'm staying with friends--real adults to converse with and share meals with, and we’re planning on heading out on a day of ski touring in the backcountry off the Duffey Lake Road.

For now the snow has ceased, but it will be back. It cycles just like everything else, and as the fan on my wood stove rumbles to life I watch the band of chickadees leave my yard for another and prepare myself for the slow snowy drive into town.