juan_de_fuca_travelogue ovenbird Day 1 My anxious dog, Mulder, and I (his anxious human) quadruple checked our packing_list before embarking on our trip to the southern extent of Vancouver Island (along with an assortment of four children and five other adults). Neither Mulder or I travel well. I meant to get a dog to help with anxiety but ended up with a dog WITH anxiety, so now we just go through our days being anxious together. Mulder has never traveled before and his first impressions were mixed. The ocean breeze was too chilly for his tastes so I had to lend him my sweater. He was also disappointed that I wouldn't share my salmon burger or yam fries with him but was consoled with a peanut butter treat. He was subjected to four other people, traveling without their own schnauzers, asking to pet him. He tolerated this, but grumbled to me about it later. However, we arrived safely on the island and he had a quick nap in the car and was allowed to occupy the lap of his favourite child. We made a pit stop at Goldstream where I had to bribe my children with ice cream to get their feet onto a walking trail presided over by old growth cedars with Usnea beards looking wise upon their ancient chins. We sat in hushed delight when we stumbled upon a nest of four violet-green swallows singing a dramatic aria of impending starvation which brought their mother promptly--an iridescent dart incoming from a cloud dappled sky. We hiked a dry river bed, tripping our way through loose scree and rock to a small pool fed by a whisper of waterfall and the kids scrambled over fallen logs while my anxious dog anxiously supervised and I anxiously worried he would break a leg between boulders. But the only thing broken was pride when my daughter couldn't climb a steep incline with her cousins and she cried because it's hard to be the youngest and the most cautious in a world that unfairly praises adventure and daring. She recovered during our car ride where she played a game with her cousin in the back seat that involved imagining an array of yes or no questions while I navigated the winding roads chased by fog and the photo bulb flashes of sun off the sea. I took note of all the worrisome warnings (a sign that said "tsunami hazard zone" another that pointed out the presence of bears, wolves, and cougars) and then swallowed down the rising panic. At the cabin the kids became feral, running from room to room screaming and chasing each other with a broken rod that they discovered in the basement. I could hear them chanting my son's name and referring to him as king. "All hail king H****" they cried and it struck me that it takes only seconds of wilderness for children to embrace a Lord of the Flies style hierarchy. After dinner I took my weary nervous system and my trail worn dog out to the yard where I scanned the sway of green leafed spindles for things that might eat us and found only a solitary robin, round and red and proud, looking for snacks in the lawn and drinking the passing mist. I caught his eye as he flew up to an exposed perch and we passed a silent greeting between us. "Welcome to Cascadia," he said. "I thank you," I replied and I felt the clean chill of earth bound clouds on my skin and breathed in the incense of a long dead fire and felt my feet upon the shifting basalt, and so, wreathed in salt and robin song, I arrived. 250707 ... ovenbird Day 2 The night refused the possibility of sleep (or my dog denied me the possibility of sleep). He was too anxious to sleep alone as he usually does and insisted on curling himself into my side for the entirety of the night. He wheezed and licked and murmured in his sleep and I did not sleep at all, save a few mostly unconscious moments when I sunk into nightmares. I dragged myself and my lingering trauma from my postpartum days of endless sleep deprivation through the morning, held the fragile life of a fledgling in my hand, and managed to drive the bumpy, twisting roads to Sombrio Beach in the afternoon. The beach is all rocks, which my father-in-law (a former field geologist) broke open with a specialized hammer revealing stratified innards. I could hear the kids yelling from down the beach, "look Grandad, we found a conglomerate!" My daughter came home with her camera bag full of pebbles. My dog worried after the kids and whined every time they rushed ahead. We made our way to a hidden waterfall, climbing wet rocks and roots into the dark of a cavern only barely open to the sky. The rock walls were papered in moss, and I soaked my shoes while my son shouted "take a picture!" as he posed just out of reach of the spray. I was happy to see him finding enough adventure to quench his thirst for adrenaline. On the way back he walked along a ledge of loose stones on purpose because he liked the feeling of his feet coming out from under him and his body slipping down a slope turned into a wave for surfing. Back at the cabin Mulder and I are hiding out in my bedroom, having a tea, reading a book, closing our eyes. Being extremely tired has always felt like vertigo to me and I can feel everything spinning. Maybe when they are tired our brains can no longer decipher the play of gravity upon the body and we can feel the earth turning. So here we are, my dog and I, bathed in dust and sea salt and forest, letting this impossible planet subject us to its centrifuge until we find out how much hope is lodged in each unlikely cell. 250708 ... ovenbird Day 3 After Mulder's sleep destroying antics he was exiled to another room last night, so I slept, though in a confused way (see "dusk"). When I'm over tired, falling asleep feels more like being thrown from consciousness. It's a disconcerting experience, almost like going over the drop of a rollercoaster. There is no agency, no soft embrace of dreams, just a sudden cliff that I have no choice but to plunge over into a sleep state that brings disorientation and, frequently, nightmares. At least I woke this morning a little more rested and with greater affection for my dog since he wasn't a source of exhaustion. We had a leisurely breakfast followed by a small early birthday party for my daughter. Her grandparents put together a "gold rush" party (something they did for their own kids many years ago) and so the cousins watched Charlie Chaplin in the 1925 film "The Gold Rush," and then panned for gold in the yard using tiny (real!) fragments produced by their grandad. I wasn't sure they would enjoy a 100 year old film, but there's something truly timeless about the physicality of a silent movie and they were all laughing. There was less laughing after gold panning because some children ended up with more gold than others and the injustice resulted in disproportionate rage--oh what fun to watch a social microcosm emerge right before your eyes! In the afternoon we trekked to Mystic Beach. It's a forty minute hike to get down there from the parking lot and features my favourite kind of terrain--lots of exposed roots and rolling elevation. It's a different thing entirely from walking on flat ground. I can feel my arch working and the bones in the top of my feet taking on additional stress. But it's the good kind of stress--the kind that comes with a feeling of your whole body being alive with its own hidden topography of rivers carrying oxygenated blood to hungry organs and moisture to thirsty cells, with everything culminating in the cavern where the heart presides. My cardio endurance is still significantly better than it was the day I moved to the west coast nearly twenty years ago and that feels like a point for me in my match against time. And the forest here is as alive and vigorous as I am (more so I'm sure). It's an ancient world holding space for ancient life forms: moss and lichens, ferns and fungi. There's so much moisture that it's dripping onto the top of my head from the canopy above. The forest and I both settle into a rhythm of exchanging the air around us. I could happily spend every day this way--my feet finding a path, my joints swallowing the impact of my heels hitting earth, my body finding a rhythm that could sustain this effort for hours. I think, this is what we are made for, we creatures grown upright with legs meant for walking. We are meant to cover distances in the shade of slow growing forests; we are meant feel every changing shape of the earth beneath our feet; we are meant to stir up the scent of fallen pine needles and wild sage; we are meant to arrive home smudged with dirt, tasting of salt, and smelling like cedar and sweet gale and sky. 250709 ... ovenbird Day 4 Morning is for meltdowns and this particular morning was spent looking for my daughter's camera which mysteriously went missing at some point yesterday after a hike. It was not occupying obvious places or less obvious places or even less obvious places and many tears were shed over the camera itself and the photos contained on its memory card. But there was little time for more extensive searching. We were on the road at 7 am, with my crying child in tow, heading to botanical_beach, which must be visited at low tide in order to explore some of the most amazing tide pools in the world. It was one of the things I was most looking forward to on this trip and it didn't disappoint. Only my son claimed boredom. Apparently extraordinary sea life does not provide the requisite adrenaline rush but the rest of us gave ourselves to astonishment. My brother and his wife came from Victoria for the afternoon and we walked the beaches. The path down to the ocean is choked with ferns and salal and there is a point where vegetation closes over your head and you have to duck to fit though. The whole world there is green, like being under water. "This is like Narnia!" my sister-in-law says, and it is--you have to push aside the vegetation like heavy coats until you stumble onto the sun warmed rocks of the shore. It really is like finding a different storyline. As the day warms, vapor starts rising off the sand and people in the distance disappear into the fog. It's eerie and strange, the way they seem to fade away, becoming more and more like ghosts of themselves. We linger like seals on the rocks until a chill comes off the ocean and we decide to return to the cabin. The kids make dinner--hamburgers and fruit salad--and we all eat outside. I notice, suddenly, how quiet it is. I can't even hear traffic sounds as the nearby roads are lightly used. There are moments when I can hear only wind and birdsong and that feels like a miracle worth attending to. It doesn't last long. After dinner everyone under thirteen tears around the house screaming. They find a loft accessible by ladder and cram themselves in there, then they jump to the ground, shaking the whole house. Then they crash away on the piano in the basement and bounce a ball off the wall. Everyone over thirteen sits around in an exhausted stupor. I guess this is how childhood memories work. The kids will remember magic and the adults will remember fatigue but somewhere in the middle is something I want to hold onto: a sense that I brought my children to something worth seeing even though they didn't appreciate it all. When they look back on this week spent with cousins, running wild on the beach, I think they will say, "that is such a beautiful memory." I hope they will be grateful. I hope that when summer comes later in life it's days like these that will rise up in their minds as the definition of what it was like to be young and carefree and in love with the world. 250710 ... ovenbird Day 5 I was up way too early but made up for it with a morning beach walk. The coast was deserted and fog lay low over the sand, rising in clouds of vapour where the sun was coming through the tree tops and heating the rocks. Crepuscular rays touched everything and it couldn't help but be holy. Sunbeams blessed the foreheads of everything--crabs with their dukes up looking for a fight, bull kelp abandoned when the tide went out, small rivulets carving helix paths from forest to sea, the grasping feet of trees finding purchase on the cliff faces. Silence walked with me, keeping me company, putting its hand in mine and pressing, communicating wordlessly a tale about the beginning of time and its eventual contraction, everything returning to that dense point of potential that contains every story in the universe. Places like this are vellum thin. They let through the shadows of every song that came before. I add my own--just a small melody made of air and the tentative vibrations of the strings I carry in my throat: a farewell of sorts. A robin appears on the rocks and we nod at each other. I say thank you to the one who welcomed me on the first day and is here, now, to see me off. When it comes to goodbyes these are the best kind: the ones that make an embrace of gratitude, and say nothing at all of heartbreak. 250711 what's it to you? who go blather from