The River Awaits

Life in the Bridge River Valley is full of the one thing that fills up my soul and balances out my hectic energies: a direct on-your-doorstep ability to participate in sport in nature. In the few days I have been here I have been fitting it all in, and I even made sure that I left some time to mow the lawn.  On Sunday I had one of those three sport days that the BRV is so famous for; I swam across Tyaughton Lake, went for a kayak, and then went horseback riding, wrapping it all up with a lovely dinner at Ken and Shirley’s, which has become my base for a home-cooked meal away from my parent’s place. They remind me a lot of my parents: welcoming and easy-going. Real work hard, play hard types, an approach to living that I immediately understand.

Yesterday I went for a mountain bike with a friend and then went solo skinny-dipping in Kingdom Lake. I had brought a bathing suit, but when I arrived at an empty forestry campsite there were no social norms impelling me to wear it, so I didn’t. The water was cold, the view of the mountain spectacular. Life is great here. Quiet and calm. It’s like I have a direct line to the mountains, to the natural world, and this bond is what keeps me connected to the core of my being and keeps the fire inside from burning out of control. The city makes me feel frazzled and jittery, the overload of choice, social stimulation and noise pollution just too much for my attention system to pack in.

The view during my swim.

I spent a couple of hours at the school thumbing through Kindergarten teaching resources, as I’ll have two K students in the fall and this will be the youngest age group that I have taught. Thankfully I started to get excited about coming back in the fall, a feeling that has been fleeting up until this weekend. It really does take a month of time off to decompress, and I suppose I am now on to phase two of the summer holidays as a teacher: the ramp up. Slowly things will come to mind about how to structure my days in the coming school year, especially considering the range of ages I will have in the room. I’m going to have to stagger independent activities so that I can be available to do guided activities with the students at each of their developmental levels. Thank goodness I am excited again, and am I ever!

On Thursday I leave on the 6:30 am Greyhound bus from Vancouver, which will take me to the start of the Sustainable Living Leadership Program (SLLP), the headwaters of the Fraser River at Mount Robson in the Rockies. It is a place that I know, as years ago Mike and I spent four nights backpacking along the Berg Lake Trail on our way back from Edmonton, on our second attempt. (Our first attempt was abandoned as I picked up the stomach flu and spewed my guts dry out of the tent we were sleeping in at the very start of the trail. Thankfully this happened before we had set out and not while we were out in the mountains.)

Myself and a group of other keen outdoors folk will travel for twenty-five days down the entire Fraser River by raft, canoe, and a small portion of the way by shuttle van while hiking some of the last remaining old growth forests in the province. We will be sleeping in tents every night, and will also be developing our vision of the sustainable project we hope to implement in our home communities upon our return. The SLLP is a program supported by the Rivershed Society of BC, a non-profit organization that was started by Fin Donnelly after he swam the entire Fraser River not just once, but twice. He will be one of the facilitators on the trip and serves as MP for Coquitlam, Port Moody and New Westminster.

Upon my return I am going to pass along the knowledge I have gained about the Fraser River to the students and to the community. I plan on putting on some slide shows here in Gold Bridge and in North Van, writing first-person accounts on here and in the local newspaper, and passing along my learning to the students at the community school. We are raising fish in our classroom this coming year, which will be another way to connect students with first-hand experience in learning about river ecosystems. There are a number of rivers in town that we can visit as well, giving students an experiential portal to deepen their understandings of the natural environment.

While much of the cost of the program is supported by the Rivershed Society, I am on the hook for $1,350, and as a new teacher still holding some debt I was hoping to do some fundraising. Then Oregon took hold of my heart and a free place to stay and free waves held me hostage longer than I had anticipated. So, this is my last-ditch fundraising effort. If you would like to support me on my quest down the Fraser, please send me a cheque (address below). Any amount helps, and of course you are under absolutely no pressure or obligation. In a sense you are also donating to the school, because the knowledge I gain will be passed along to the students, and to be honest, as it is I tend to spend a lot of my own money on teaching resources that I would like to take with me on the path of my career.

More information on the Rivershed Society and the SLLP can be found by clicking here.

The sustainability project I am hoping to implement upon my return is to start a community garden at the school. During the trip I will come up with a more solid plan for this, but it is a great way to get community involved with students, and growing food is something that is intensely rewarding and is a solid step towards living a more sustainable lifestyle. I’ll post the plan on here when I return.

I won’t have access to a phone or to the internet while I am away, so please accept my advance thanks for the support and I promise to send a personal note upon my return. Be sure to send your return address as well. This also means that I won't be able to post on the blog while I am away, but I will be sure to transcribe some entries from my journal when I'm back in "civilization", if you consider a town of this size to be such a thing. 

My address:

Jacquie Lanthier

General Delivery

Gold Bridge, BC

V0K 1P0

Well, I must get back to packing. The river waits. 

Back in Gold Bridge

Back in my own bed in Gold Bridge, the sound of a neighbour’s morning weed whacking rouses me from a sweaty half-sleep. I’m home now, although it feels different in the heat of high summer—I move slower, open more windows to let in the quiet with the afternoon breeze, and spend time looking at the reflection of my garden in the pond. I think I will head to one of the nearby lakes at some point today, as it’s finally hot enough to swim in the frigid waters since I can bask in the heat of the sun afterwards for a few moments to chase away the gooseflesh.

The tomato plants and pepper plants that I committed to soil before I left have flushed out like open umbrellas in celebration of the heat and humidity. It has also been raining in the evenings, setting off the decorative weeds at the side of the highway and adorning the mountainsides with flashes of colour. It’s certainly beautiful and relaxing here, but my stay will be short. On Thursday I embark on the three week rafting trip that will take me and a group of nine others from the headwaters of the Fraser River at Mount Robson in the Rockies all the way to where the river meets the ocean in Vancouver. We will be camping all the way, and I am totally looking forward to the lengthy stay on the land.

I ended up staying in Pacific City, Oregon, until this Wednesday. The surf was too tempting, my stay at Darin’s too comfortable, and the soft sand of the beach too welcoming to be rushing back home to live alone in a house in Gold Bridge, population fourty-three folks of retirement age. It’s true that I would have loved staying here for July as well, since I tend to love wherever I am, but I’m sure I would have started to feel lonely and perhaps bored with no steady job to keep me busy, nor people to gallivant around the mountains with during the work week. That said, with the mine shifts the way they are and with a few renegade young people living in Bralorne during their multi-week stints between work shifts up north, I’m sure I would have come up with some sort of workable social routine.

One of the dory boats in the Dory Days parade, as watched from the neighbour's balcony. Dory Days is a yearly festival in Pacific City, and is part of the reason I decided to stay for some extra time.

In my last few days in PC (the local acronym for Pacific City) I befriended Darin’s wonderful neighboour who lives in the apartment upstairs. Such an awesome woman! It was really great to spend some time with a woman who is in a similar situation to me in many respects: artistically-inclined and choosing to live in a small town on her own because of her affinity to the natural landscape. My home is in the mountains, hers borders upon the ocean, and our windowsills attest to our different locales; hers is lined with treasures from the seascape: agate, a clearish rock formed when mineral deposits drip into a crevice of harder rock, sand dollars, various shells and pebbles worn smooth in the pounding surf. My shelves hold rough chunks of rock jaggedly shorn from the hillsides, feathers of owls and other large predatory birds, half a jawbone of a moose, moose teeth, deer antlers, and pieces of wood bleached by the sun and sanded down by the waters of the nearby Lajoie hydro reservoir.

 View of haystack rock, beach and the cape from Darin's backyard.

While Darin was at work she and I went for long walks on the beach with her awesome dog and spoke of the importance a connection with nature has in both of our lives. I always love meeting other down-to-earth women, and it seems that as I get older there are more earthy ladies who come into my life, if only for a few days to share in the marvels of living at the beach. I’m sure she and I will reconnect elsewhere, and the internet, in spite of its flaws, does make reconnecting with like-minded individuals all the more possible.

On this trip I also spent time with a wonderful Alaskan woman who has just moved to Oregon with her boyfriend. Darin connected with the boyfriend through a mutual love of surfing, and then she and I hung out and surfed while the guys were at work. Go chick surfers! There are not too many around, so it was quite an empowering experience to be two women out there on our own with the sea. She is another beautiful person that I am sure I will connect with again in the future.

Darin did have Monday and Tuesday off before I left on Wednesday, and we spent the days getting in surf sessions in the small summer waves. Small waves can be trickier on a long board, because you have to turn the board as soon as you catch the wave to ride down the wall of the wave, otherwise the board is likely to do a nosedive into the ocean. I’m getting better at this, as with all of my wave-riding skills. I had a great teacher, Darin, and daily practice out on the water for three whole weeks!!! Life is great, and I am now completely addicted to surfing and am already surmising how to spend next summer married to the waves.

View from the sand dune in the backyard where I spent a ton of my time.

We also slept out on the cape under the stars one night, which was magical. The sun set in front of our eyes, turning the sandstone rock of the cape orange and pink in the fading light, a sliver of moon glowing brighter above the haystack rock of PC, itself eventually setting like a red flame melting into the horizon. The view of the stars was completely unobstructed by cloud, leaving them bright and sparkling in the moonless black sky. I had a sleep filled with vivid dreams, and then awoke to the pale sunrise smudging the sky in soft pastel, lighting the ocean under the dory boats of early-rising fishermen motoring out into the bay.

 On the short walk from parking lot to cape.

The moon at dusk.

Oregon is just beautiful, and if I ever was going to move to the US, (maybe to do a master’s one day?) I would pick this state to call home. It’s got it all: old forests nestling right up to the surf, mountains and even a high desert. If you have not been here you should go. You will not be disappointed.

Sunrise on the cape.

When we hiked down from the cape the tide way way out, so we spent time looking into tidal pools and trying out the underwater function of my waterproof camera.

Tiny hermit crab that Darin found.

As for Darin and I, we are crazy about each other, and have a ton of fun in each other’s company. He matches my spontaneity and creative, inquisitive mind, and we have a mutual love of the great outdoors. Unfortunately he does have a couple of years of university left to complete down at Oregon State University, and I am settled with my job here in Gold Bridge, about fifteen hours of driving north. So, we will just see where things in our future take us. Perhaps we will meet again, and perhaps not. We are just leaving things open, knowing that any time that we get to spend together will be a gift, although who really knows what will unfurl in the wings of the future. That uncertainty is always present, even though we humans like to trick ourselves into thinking we have things all figured out. You just never really know with life. Even the most anticipated plan could all be turned on its head by the afternoon.

A misty evening at the beach on my last night.

Last Day in Oregon

The wind is back after a few days of respite. It’s amazing how much of a chill it brings to the air. I’m sitting at the little internet café sipping a chai latte made with soy milk—one of the amazing comforts of living in an urbanized setting that is easy to give up but equally easy to take back as a habit of daily routine.

I’m becoming quite the surfer, able to read the waves better than ever and I have been able to drop into some pretty big sets. I’m getting better at watching and waiting for the right shape of wave to come to me, whereas before I would just paddle for anything and hope to catch it. When you surf this often, conserving energy becomes essential, so waiting for the good ones before paddling your butt off is important if you want to stay out in the surf for a while.

I’ve had a wonderful time here on the Oregon coast, surfing almost every day of the past few weeks and exploring all the little nooks with good surf within a hundred miles north and south of Pacific City. Darin has been an amazing partner in crime as well. We both love the great outdoors, the mountains, the ocean, so get us spending time together for any stretch and we fill up our waking hours with time in the hills and in the surf. During his days off last week we did a little overnight backpack to a gorgeous lookout, camping in the trees and watching birds circle as the sunset rolled in, and then dropping our backpacks off at the car and heading out for a morning surf.

Leaving for our hike. We surfed before we left and then again the next morning in the waves behind us.

It was actually the most amazing sunset I have ever seen in my life. Honestly. And I was thinking about how many sunsets I have seen. Probably not that many when I consider the number of days I have been alive and inside during twilight hours. Not to mention growing up in North Van to top it off, where a shelf of grey cloud often obscures the horizon for weeks on end.

Experiencing this sunset was like being at an orchestra. Darin and I walked from our campsite to the lookout with a view of a lighthouse sitting on a tiny island in the sea a couple of kilometers off shore, and I climbed over the sagging rope rail, which, judging by the wear and tear on the ground beyond, was a very common occurrence. Darin soon followed after some quiet comments about safety, and we had ourselves a front row seat on the root of one of the tall trees closer to the edge of the cliff. Far below us a crumbling rock wall gave way to a rocky beach with pounding whitewater rolling itself along the pebbles and throwing itself against the cliffs of the coast, which themselves quickly sprung into a thick forest of evergreens.

The sea stretched itself into rows of crumpled dark blue corduroy, and a golden eagle took flight circling low and steady, twitching its tail rudder and the tips of its wings to keep it in smooth flowing arcs. The crumbling rock must be the perfect place to hunt for rodents. Soon a bald eagle joined in the dance, and our view of the forest and the sea was bordered by the silken movements of these two birds. They would climb higher, circling just above us, before careening down close to the surf below to start their scan all over again.

At one point Darin went back to get some things organized at the campsite and I was left to witness the rest of the show alone, gasping and clutching my fists. As the sun dipped lower in the sky a strip of cloud came across the horizon, just beyond the reach of land, between my eyes and the lighthouse. It streaked across the sky, slowly blanketing out the sun enough so that it was a pale yellow orb set into a grey belt, and I could stare directly at it without hurting my eyes. Then more cloud, still in an ever-thickening stripe across the sky, and the hazed smudge of the release of rain dancing with the ocean breeze.

Then the pink of the sun melting into the pastel edge of cloud, into the buttery rain, and still the eagles circling higher and closer. And the lighthouse perched out on its own rock, and the endless miles of steady sea, rippled and fraying at the edge of the coastline.

The remnants of the sunset once Darin returned. Little lighthouse on the rock at the centre of the frame.

At one point I heard sniffling, and in looking behind me I saw no one because of my stealthy seat, but it was a sight that could easily make one cry.

Darin arrived back with my camera in hand just as the last piece of yellow from the sun had melted into the ocean, and we watched, still in amazement, as the wispy clouds above us lit into sunset colours of red, pink and purple, and the eagles started to drift away and out of view.

It was the most dramatic sunset I have ever seen.

A few nights ago there was another amazing sunset as we sat on a log at the beach. A strip of red pierced the sky for a solid half hour, a thick sheet of grey clouds above and below it, like the slit of an eye barely open, and then the haystack rock of the Pacific City skyline standing like a black statue, the arrow of red piercing through it like a spear thrown straight through a watermelon. It was one of those things that shocks the senses and slaps the words right out of the mind, for there are none to convey how beautiful it all is. And the view of sky to the soundtrack of crashing ocean waves, with fine silken sand underfoot, and the taste of salt from an evening surf still clinging gently to one’s lips.

 Our tent was right beside a WWII monument, so we took a couple of artsy photos.

I’m heading out on the long drive back to North Van tomorrow, although I’m sure I will be back, because Oregon certainly has a gentle hold on me.

Chasing Surf

The surf has been elusive and small, but Darin and I have been chasing it up and down the coast during his three days off. Evenings have been the best, when the tide is high, and watching the sun set while it reflects off the water, bobbing a stream of light right in front of you is an amazing way to spend an evening.

I'm getting better, more able to read the waves for signs of a good break, better able to fight my way back outside the whitewater surf to wait for the next set to roll in. The waves are supposed to get better over the weekend and into next week, the perfect reason to extend my trip into the end of next week.

It's also nice to be amongst strangers, leaving my anonymous footprints for the surging waves to wipe clean with each strike up the beach. I could get used to this lifestyle. Reading, writing, riding my bike to check on the sultry waves, reading and writing some more, eating dinner on a little sand dune knoll overlooking the miles of coastline. Paddling into the sunset. Even when the surf is not good, it's still good to be out on the water. It's calming to sit there atop a floating board, undulating with the rise and fall of the ocean, waiting patiently with the sound of waves slapping the shore behind you.

Here are a couple of pictures of my adventures so far. I have not taken a ton, as I find myself so transfixed in the now that I forget to take out the camera, and that's okay with me.

 Posing on a rock at "Shorty's", an amazingly-beautiful surf spot that is a fifteen minute walk through an old growth forest to a hidden cove of beach. My favourite spot so far.

 We totally look like beach bums.

Darin's usual morning routine: jar of coffee and a cigarette. I had to take this picture because he looks like some kind of rock star or something.

Pacific City, Oregon

Outside the local small-town library I am poaching the free wifi service. I'm sitting on a wooden bench in the sun as the wind tousles my hair and the potted plants hanging from wooden rafters. The library closed at 3 pm, just as I rolled up on my bike. Small town library hours. I should be used to this.

I'm staying with a friend here, who happens to live a sand dune's climb away from the rushing surf; a pretty nice way to spend the first part of a summer break.

I'm here to surf, as is he, and although the waves have not been great we did manage to trade my short Australian-aquired board in for a summer-worthy long board, and after a single afternoon session on it at Otter Rock I don't think I'll ever go back to a shorty. It's a big one, 9'4", but it's a wave-catching machine, and everything I paddle for takes me sliding into shore with effortless momentum. Now if only there were waves to catch I'd be set!

We wake up at 6 am every morning, hungry like addicts for the sight of sugary waves, and so far, each morning, there is nothing. Flat, closing out, breaking too close to shore, nothing. A few souls are out, dressed in full wetsuits, boots and gloves, paddling through the still surf because they are jonesing harder than we are and probably had to drive much longer than our measly five minute commute to the local surf spot. The couch and bed beckon us back home with a stronger gravitational pull than the flat surf does, and such a short drive makes it easy to turn on heel after watching for the possibility of a ridable set of waves to suddenly crash in.

It has still been wonderful, relaxing, soul-stilling. Long walks on the beach, staring into the surf, reading, writing music late into the evenings with the salt air wind lingering at the lip of his doorstep. I've been here four days and am only starting to relax and unwind, and my god does it ever feel good.

The last week of school was nuts, as it always is, and then my best friend Peter and his wonderful girlfriend came for a visit--my first "city" friend visitors since I have lived in the little mountain nook of Gold Bridge. We went walking with Sanford, I took Peter horseback riding for his first time (he had a great time) and we spent some time up Marshall Lake road with Stacy's Dad and their family friends. I have driven by the turnoff for Marshall Lake a ton of times, always wanting to explore it, and now I finally had reason to.

Up in Bralorne there was a local ball tournament over the July long weekend, and teams from the lower mainland and sea-to-sky corridor came and camped and played ball. And BRALORNE WON!!!! The tourney has been going on for something like thirty years, and for the first time in the history of the thing our little town won! I wasn't there to see it, as I was riding with Peter, but I imagine it was quite an exciting afternoon for our little crew of mountain residents. Go Bralorne GO!

The wind is picking up now, and if there is not any good surf I think I'll read some more and then take out my kite for a little fly. Once my friend gets off work we have decided that we are going out into the surf no matter WHAT, even just to paddle around and get a bit of exercise. The forecast is not looking great, but at least it has been sunny each day since I arrived, which was apparently not the case last week.

It's busy here in Pacific City, much more so than I recall last year when I made my first trip to this state with a girlfriend. The notorious fourth of July holiday saw that sky ablaze with amateur fireworks, residual batches of which alight for a few minutes at dusk each day since, and the fine sand of the beach is littered with spent firework debris, as well as the odd plastic bottle that has waded over from Japan (seriously!). Or perhaps it just seems busy to me now, since I live in a place of such constant peace and tranquillity, where I consider it to be busy when there is a car that I don't know passing on the main street up to Bralorne more than once an hour. I suppose it's all about perspective, and on that note, I'm off to look at the waves once again.

Happy Summer!!!