Life's An Adventure!

Our marriage is five years over a half-century. I’m not certain what sounds better (or worse), fifty years or a half-century. When I turned fifty, aeons ago, I joked I’d passed the half-century mark; thought it was amusing. Until I hit sixty. I remember how grateful I was to my husband when, just before my 58th birthday when I was thinking I would be turning 59, he said no, just 58. I was thrilled; it was the best possible birthday gift. I thought I might be sliding into senile dementia, believing I was a year older than I really was.

Funny thing is, I’m not really, not really-really that old. Actually I’m not old at all. If I were, I would feel old. I’d look old. I don’t. Either feel or look it, that is. Fact is, age isn’t a factor in my life at all, even though I was so glad to regain that errant year, if only to grab another year’s experiences and experience.

I still have a letter he wrote to me when we were fifteen, and I was away for a week at a summer camp. The mangled syntax recalls his voice soft with the mush of goofy puppy-love. The sentiments that of a boy reaching beyond himself into manhood. I have another letter, one I wrote to him seventeen years later, when we were 32, had three young children, and he was away at a conference-workshop for a week. My letter informed him among other things, that our youngest child had just lost another tooth and he was totally focused on finding a dinosaur egg, because one of the other children in his grade 1 class had sworn his father told him there were plenty around for the picking.

When we were young, I would call him ‘honey’ and ‘dear’, and this used to irritate my father no end. No bees buzzing around him, no antlers on that one, my father said. What?

I’ve always loved him madly. Even when he was a callow, a truly callow youth, and I had my doubts. I’ve never hesitated to tell him that I love him. Except once, that I can recall. That was well over a decade ago one September, when we were canoeing the Bowron Lakes circuit in the Cariboo Mountains of British Columbia with our youngest son, a biologist. Took us nine days to canoe the circuit; lake to lake to river to lake to river to lake. Spectacular environment, surrounded by mountains. And cold, at the three-thousand-foot level. It rained every bloody day. Rain down below, but on the mountain peaks, there appeared a spreading cone of snow. Even our son was discouraged and he’s the original Outdoorsman. I wasn’t, oddly enough. Discouraged, I mean; we were well geared for the weather and despite the rain managed to dry our tent and sleeping bags in occasional sunny, windy periods. Until the rain hit again, and it did; again and again.

True, all that paddling from one lake to another, one camping spot to another did weary me. And the incessant portaging. At that time of year there weren’t all that many others and they were mostly adventurous young Europeans, whose paths we would occasionally cross. That trip was also the first time I'd ever heard a screech owl. It had been on our first night out, raining heavily, dark as all get-out, and we were huddled in our tent, wondering what we could eat for dinner; no opportunity to do any cooking, when suddenly a heart-stopping, liver-shrivelling, lunatic, high-pitched, strung-out scream petrified me into silence. I got used to it over the days that followed. Got used to other owls that seemed to follow us at night, when we ventured past our camping spot to the boxes upon we sat and shat.

Getting the food out of harm’s way each night was a joy. Most sites had a long ladder which you would position against a tree, haul the food pack up and hoist it between two trees on the ladder-like shelf placed there, bridging the trees, for that purpose. Remembering, of course, to lay the ladder back down. Sometimes, rarely, a camping site devoid of handy trees would boast a large iron safe for the food pack. The safes looked rather the worse for wear, having suffered obvious insults from irate bears.

We often looked up the mountainsides through binoculars, hoping to see a grizzly (at a comfortably safe distance). On one sandy beach we once came across the sharp hoof prints of a moose, and mingled with the prints those of a wolf. Eeech! The imagined scenario that resulted was that of mangled and bloody carcasses, but there was nothing left other than the marks we'd seen to indicate nature red in tooth and claw had resulted.

Before we’d set out on this adventure, I had asked the outfitter if pepper spray might be a good idea. Earlier, we had watched a mandatory safety video to give us an idea of what we might encounter on our journey and warnings about grizzlies loomed large, as did my resulting worries about them. The outfitter looked at our son, looked at me, then told him not to worry. He could always outdistance his ma should we venture across a hungry grizzly. Very encouraging. At some portages we did see others clanking along, sporting bells to warn off bears.

More harm came to people from other sources, however. At one juncture we watched from shore as several people were taken out of the circuit via a parks patrol boat and we conjectured hypothermia. Another time, a couple smashed a wonderful (borrowed, as it happened) cedar-strip canoe on a snag by treacherous rapids in a bottleneck of one of the rivers, and they were brought out. On that same stretch of rapids we managed to manoeuvre successfully enough, but dusk was fast falling and we knew we’d have to take the first available campsite. We did, and what a site. From hell it was. The only place on the entire circuit where we had to clamber up a formidable bank to get to the tree-blown campsite, hauling the canoe halfway up a ledge to secure it for the night. Clambering up and down that bank for potable water was fun, as was washing; us and the dishes.

This site had welcoming hosts as well, hordes of mosquitoes and blackflies - again the only site we came across thus equipped. As we were grumblingly settling up for the night and cooking dinner, we heard the backwash of paddles rounding the bank in the dark and hailed a brace of young Austrians who happily accepted our invitation to join us and share the meal my husband was cooking.

Funnily enough, we loved all the meals he cooked and he detested them, ate only enough to keep him going while we wolfed everything down. He doesn’t care for pulses and legumes, and we’re wild for them. Two days later, that same young couple ‘rescued’ us after a particularly difficult day-long paddle, another storm in the offing, dusk falling and no camp site. When we finally reached one it was theirs and they invited us to share, offering us hot, sweet tea to revive our flagging spirits and aching, frozen limbs.

Oh, that allusion to the one time I decided I didn’t love my husband? Well, the last day of our circuit found us (me) exhausted and eager to re-establish permanently on dry land. We had paddled down the Bowron River, come too close for comfort to a moose cow and her calf (to my way of thinking; my husband and our son kept paddling determinedly toward it, curious to see how near they, we, could approach before the cow reacted), then entered the last, vast lake and, determined to reach our destination in as little time as possible, we were paddling smack through whitecaps in the middle of the lake in high winds. The wind took my words into the ether as I screeched at my husband to paddle alongside the shore and he refused, feigning deafness. We survived, somehow we survived.

Much as we did three years earlier when we alpine-camped on Long Mountain about three hours’ drive from Vancouver, near the Stein Valley. We were just two years shy of 60 then, and although we’d often mountain climbed in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, (cheerily singing ‘I Love to go a’wandering, along the mountain tracks’ when the children were younger) and I always carried a small knapsack, I’d never before been geared to climb with a full-size backpack containing sleeping bags, inflatable mattresses and clothing. Light by comparison to what the others carried, but a new experience for me. At one point, when we were climbing over a rockfall of square boulders each the size of a car (named, improbably, the Gates of Shangri-La), and the top of my pack almost bounced me onto rocks below, I truly wondered at my sanity.

When we’d gained height close to the mountain peak, a blue-green, clear glacial lake just below us, it seemed worth the effort. Kind of. The scramble down to the frigid lake to wash (wash, hah!) or retrieve water for cooking was not one of my favourite activities. A glacier slowly melted into the lake; its soft, distant thunder lulled us to sleep that night. The tent on a shallow slope, (the flattest part of the mountainside we could find) we gradually nudged the edge of the tent through the night.

Next morning we took a day climb, coming across other glacial lakes, another glacier abloom with red algae, and an altitude which afforded us a view of unending mountain peaks across the Stein Valley. The afternoon sun slowly disappeared as a thunderhead appeared in the distance. We took the hint and hurriedly retraced our ascent to seek shelter in our tent. When the storm hit it was fierce, the rain pounding our innocent little shelter, winds howling mercilessly around the mountain. We survived that one, too.

Cripes we survived lots. But life is an adventure, right? We used to wake up really early on week-ends when we lived for a while in Tokyo, so we could take the subway, take a bus, take a train all for the purpose of exiting the city. We’d see intrepid Japanese bent on the same kind of adventure as we, but they dressed like western big-game hunters, really getting into the spirit of things. At the half-way point in our transportation web we would meet up with other members of Friends of the Earth, a friendly, casual group comprised of 50% Japanese, 50% Australians, Germans, Brits, Canadians like us.

Typically we’d set out for a forested mountain. On occasion we would see tea houses set into mountain niches; we would see signs warning to beware of monkeys; we would see stone lanterns set aglow between bamboo trees; once we came across a giant Ginkgo tree reputed to be two thousand years old; once a shrine with a gigantic pair of sandals said to have been worn by a Buddhist monk who had walked from China to Korea to Japan to deliver his divine message. That’s dedication, that’s determination, that’s no mere hike.

Years ago we drove from our base in Atlanta on our way to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, where we meant to enjoy snowshoeing in the Great Smokies. Close to our destination we reached the national park whose highway would lead us to Gatlinburg. We’d been that way before without incident, but this was winter in the mountains and where below it had been raining, up above was sleet and snow. I cursed the park rangers who could have stopped us, but did not. We began to see cars ahead of us sliding on the icy road. I had never quite known fear like that before, certain that there wasn’t much to keep us from sliding right off the edge of that mountain into the abyss.

Big help, there were two park vehicles ahead, rangers trying to get people to turn back. Turn around on that narrow, icy road, good luck to us all. We tried, got stuck, our son got out on the road to push, and I became an hysterical babbling idiot, intent on being as big a help in such situations as usually I somehow managed. We finally descended successfully, snow still thickly falling, took another route and lived to experience excellent snowshoeing conditions, later in the week, once we were settled into our rental accommodations, even dipping under a frozen waterfall on a wondrous winter trail, surfeit with giant tulip poplars laden with snow.

Our latest adventure? Gatineau Park has become our adventure venue of late. Oh well, we needn’t even venture that far, relatively speaking. Aren’t we fortunate, we have a wonderfully wooded ravine accessible by walking across the street where we live. Adventures? We’ve had them. Still do, on occasion. They are decidedly less strenuous and potentially dangerous.