THE VALLEY OF A THOUSAND PEAKS

I am sliding CD cases down the side of book boxes in a rush to finish packing, cramming small things into the last available spaces. We load the trailer high with furniture, crank the ratchet straps, and cajole the Land Rover into dragging it all across town and along the road to the storage unit. All the things we have, stacked in one big featureless metal rectangle in a row of big featureless metal rectangles, on a big featureless industrial estate. So much life in such a small piece of the world, locked up and left behind. 

The sound of our lives changing is the echoing of our footsteps on the floorboards. Deadened for two years by the comforting moss-of-things that grows on a quiet life at home, now scraped clean of everything but the pang of our last glances at the place.

And then we are flying. Flying away, over the ocean, through new skies, over a new continent, from the Old World to the New.

We glide down over the vast western prairies as night falls, faces pushed against the plane window, looking out at the faint green banner of the northern lights floating above the distant horizon, and lightning flashing over the Rocky Mountains.

__________

One month.

Our first days in Canada are an exasperating succession of friendly people trying to help, in a very clunky system of their own collective making. We spend forty-eight hours rushing around an unfamiliar city, battling obscure bureaucratic hurdles, stewing in a cocktail of pressure and uncertainty, trying to find, buy and register a vehicle to take us quickly away from it all. When the final administrator drops a set of cold, thin licence plates across the desk at us in the cool Calgary morning, it feels as though he is handing us a championship trophy. We grab them in disbelief, and scurry to where we’d stashed the car, before something else can snatch them away from us.

And we drive to the mountains.

We’ve come to this country for two years, with nothing settled beyond the first month, during which I will be training as a log builder, and then trying to find work. We have no heading except a vague invitation to stay on a farm some miles outside a small mountain town, some hours away, where bed and board will be provided in exchange for some light work.

After an afternoon driving the winding yellow-dash highway through the Rockies, we turn onto a rough track, and a while later arrive at a set of wires strung across it, the entrance to a large forest property. The homestead squats on the bottommost slopes of a steep mountainside, wild dogs and wilder kids scampering across its gardens, old equipment and structures scattered here and there, and a campervan and a composting outhouse set off to one side, which will be our temporary home.

My weeks in the log building yard pass with the blinking of eyes to keep out flecks of flying sawdust, the screaming of chainsaws and loud shouts of ‘Give ’er, eh!?’. This is a place of flannel shirts and big trucks, the smell of wood and gasoline and the dust of the dirt road swirling up past bright red ranch barns on the drive back to the farm, to be replaced with muddy boots from feeding the pigs, the creaking of the caravan door, and the squeaking of its mice.

We move on to stay at a log house some way up the valley, where an elderly born-again Christian couple need help in the garden in return for the opportunity to try and convert us with good food, wide smiles, and prayers before supper. We spend the days digging up potatoes through the early season snow, driving the little tractor around beneath the shadow of towering mountain peaks, and watching a mama bear and her cubs grazing in the field above the house.

After my training is finished, we leave town, and head out across the province on a long, winding road trip, no end point in mind, no prospects in sight. I am stressed and unsettled. I should be enjoying the freedom of the road, but instead I am thinking about months ahead of no work, and no home.

__________

Three months.

I chew on a cold cheese sandwich in the lunch hut as the snow piles up outside, rueing my hard summer tires, the rubber on which is no doubt cracking even as I sit here. The door clatters open and two men bundle in; one round and bald, with a soft face and a bright yellow high-vis jacket, the other young and stubbled, with hair cropped into an 80’s look that might have been fashionable in a retro kind of way, or fashionable in the kind of way that fashions linger in small towns at the end of the road.

‘Well fuck, it’s as cold as a mother-fucking cock-sucker out there boys’ says the first, shaking his head and slumping into a chair.

‘Fuck ya man, it’s so cold’ says the second.

The guys in the yard call the second man Youngblood, because of the haircut. Young enough to be born this century, and young enough to limit his weekends to having sex with his ‘sort-of girlfriend’, smoking weed and watching videos of fast cars on his phone. They call the first man Lucky, because that’s what his parents named him. Lucky enough to have a job that earns him 23 guns, a snowmobile and a steady two packs a day, but not lucky enough to avoid a couple of short stints in prison. They will all call me Long Story. Maybe because I’m tall, maybe because I do a lot of talking. Mostly because everyone needs to be called something.

I nod in acknowledgement of the two men, and they nod back, more preoccupied with their surprise that the Canadian winter should be as cold this year as it is every year, than with any newcomers to the yard.

One week earlier, I had been sat in a supermarket parking lot, trying to not sound desperate for this job in a five-minute phone interview with the foreman.

‘So you know what ya’ doing?’ the voice had asked distractedly.

‘Yeah’, I exaggerated, ‘I’ve got the basics, but I’m just looking for an entry level job really.’

‘Oh ya, right on… well how much do you want?’

‘Twenty?’ I proffered, optimistically.

‘Huh, well… I can’t offer you twenty to start, but I tell ya what… we need guys. So I can start you on eighteen, and if it all goes good then maybe after a bit we can go to twenty?’

‘Sounds good’ I agreed.

‘Ok, show up on Monday sometime.’

__________

Four months.

It is -25 degrees, so cold that it hurts my teeth to breathe in, and my beard crisps to a frosted lichen as soon as I step outside. The smell of the cedar sawdust permeates my clothes. The snowplough thunders by periodically as I stamp my feet in steel-toed boots, palms callousing with the grip of the drawknife. In the purple shadows of the log yard, the fire pit draws me closer to twist and wring my hands above its leaping flames before scurrying away so as not to slack too much first thing.

I’m working with my hands again, but differently. That time, the medium was the material; I moved stones into place which were themselves the only thing necessary to complete the structure. This time, the media are tools, by which I shape the material. The wood is malleable, but not without a blade between my palm and its face.

It begins with peeling logs. The lowest rung on the log builders’ career ladder; skinning the meat for the real chefs to cook with. The first step is to remove the thick outer bark, with quick twisting thrusts of an axe. Some of them release their sheathes like a snake shedding its skin, glad to be rid of it. Others cling on with ice and bitterness, leaving you chipping away for hours.

Then comes the drawknife. I slide the blade down the trunk of the tree towards me, imploring the steel back to my side with arms outstretched, pulled back, outstretched, pulled back. Often, I have to yield to the flow to knots, because in the log-peelers game of knot-paper-drawknife, the knot wins every time. I’ll be back for them later with the brutal scream of a power tool. But for now, I quietly peel, hour after hour. It is T-shirt work in a snow-frozen land. For every ridge I slice away from the trunk, the drawknife keeps tally on my hands, over weeks and months forming a ridge of its own there in a peeler’s callous, sly reminder that there is a levy to be paid for this work, like all human work.

__________

Six months. 

I am driving the eighty-mile highway between my town and Rose’s town.

That first week of work, two months ago, we had no home, squished into a single tiny room with one bed and no kitchen, paid by the night, eating crisps and biscuits for dinner, me waking at 5am, pitch black and bitterly cold, to drive a car along an ice-ridden highway that twisted and turned through valleys and across rivers, heading to an unknown job in an unknown town.

Now I speed along that same road, glorious afternoon sunshine inspiring the snow-clad peaks of the Rockies to brilliant gold. I am almost crying with the joy of vindication. I made it here, and I have begun to build the very life I wanted to have here. In the wide spectrum of possible lives, it is almost the same as the one I have come from, and yet it seems heart-stoppingly significant, to have manifested a distant dream into a stunning, real, tangible present, half a world away from what was safe and known.

It always goes that way. When I arrive at the new, I am terrified, and vulnerable. I am alive with everything around me, unfamiliar and shockingly real, and I am desperate to settle, to exchange the mess for certainty. And then the novelty becomes known, and the terror becomes everyday comfort. And then I am nostalgic for it. I feel the loss of that first fearful moment, that courageous path through unfamiliar terrain, that urgent, alive me, forever gone, forever past. The process of dying, already underway from our first memories to our last. And with a touch of bitterness, I notice that this present moment too is fading away, and this one, and this one. And there ahead lies only the future which will one day too be the past, slipping out of my grasp, inevitably and unstoppably. They say to live in the moment, but the moment cannot give you that gentle tug of warm sadness; that wistful satisfaction we feel, knowing that our lives are not just real for us now, but were real for us then, too, because it really felt some way to us.

Three years ago I moved from a place in London with 10,000 people for every square kilometre, to a place in Cumbria, with 60 people for the same, and it was beautiful. Now I am here in the Kootenays, where it is 4, and it is beautiful.

__________

Twelve months. 

The ground beneath my feet marks the changing of the seasons as I tread through the log yard; snow melts and freezes to ice, melts to mud, dries to dust, settles with brown leaves, and is draped in snow again, a year on. My body maps my experience of this time: tired muscles, hardened palms, eyelashes singed by fire pits and hair full of sawdust.

This little town is rooted. A mountain town, a bush town, hidden in the trees, a little bit redneck, a little bit hippy, and little bit regenerated as a family tourist destination. Folded and squished between the foothills and the forests, its streets don’t conform to a tedious grid like most of the towns here in the west. I like that. The lead and zinc mines stretching for miles beneath us, as we down our pints at the pub and step out into the floating snow, keep it anchored here, hugging the creek.

At work, my evident lack of experience with log and timber was quickly overcast by my willingness to persevere, my capacity to improve, and my ability to consistently show up for work (something apparently lacking in most of their former employees). I do a bit of everything now, like all the other lads do. One day I asked to be shown how to run the sawmill, and then spent three months flipping logs and slicing timbers instead of notching them with a chainsaw. ‘Ya shouldn’t have asked, Long Story!’ was the foreman’s grinning response, but he put me back on the next log house anyway, a reward for time served. Again and again, I am reminded that all skills are learnt skills, that there is no magic dust or trickery, only process. Half a brain, confidence to try, and a humbling quantity of patience are all that’s required to travel the whole long road from novice to master, if your body can keep up.

Most of my ‘training’ is thrown at me like a bone to a dog, or else wrested from my mentors by forceful observation, like Japanese apprentice carpenters, who are expected to ‘steal’ knowledge by casting a sideways eye over what the master is doing, even while they sweep the workshop floor.

‘Can you drive a trailer?’ I’m asked, and I squirm, not wanting to back away, but knowing I am about to be plunged in over my head.

‘Well, I haven’t really…’ I begin, and looks are shared with a laugh.

My tutorial begins and ends in a sentence: ‘Take the corners wide, don’t hit anything’.

And with that, I am driving a one-ton truck down the highway, dragging a thirty foot trailer behind me piled high with 8x8 timbers, then reversing it down a steep bank to the construction site. I take the corners wide, and I don’t hit anything.

The crew has a reputation for being hard on equipment, and for drinking lots of beer. Small time drug dealers, borderline alcoholics, and a thirteen year long roster of every oddball and questionable hire in the East Kootenays come to work here. Safety is each-to-their-own, the equipment is worn out, and smoking dope and operating heavy machinery is met with a chuckle and an encouraging ‘fuck ya, boys!’ at break time. They’re the kind of boys everyone’s mother wants them to avoid, but who are good lads regardless. I am entertained, and endeared, and I can’t help but have my view reinforced that the sheer variance of people is of incalculable value, mean bastards included. 

‘So this one time boys, I was at the gas station, and I sees this fuckin’ vending machine, right? I thought to myself ‘I want some candy’, and then while I’m getting the candy, I figure that this thing is just chained to the wall, and there’s gotta be some cash in there. Gotta be! I mean, I was also pretty high, so I maybe I not making the best decisions… Anyway, that evening I got my truck and wheeled it over there, and fucking backed up to that machine and tried to shove it onto the bed, and got it stuck, so I had to reverse up more. So of course I fucked up my tailgate, but I got the bitch on there alright, and I drove that fucker straight out of there. So then I’m driving down the highway, and I got to that second hill- you know the one? Right, ya, ya, that’s the one. Well I’m going up the hill and I hear this almighty fuckin crash from behind, and that sonofabitch has fallen right off, I mean right off! There was no fuckin way I was gonna get it back on, so I just left it and fuckin went home. Of course the cops came round in a couple hours. Whole thing was on the cameras… ya, I got in some shit for that. But you do dumb shit when you’re young, right!?’

We build beautiful homes for people out of trees. Funny to think that such things could grow out of this pit of empty beer cans, grumbling employees, broken power tools and dented logs, but they do. For all their protestations, these men take pride in being the kind of men who make things.

__________

Thirteen months.

I am north, a long way north. The foreman and I drove the ten hours here to a dead-end frontier town deep in the boreal forest, so we could put up log trusses on a rich man’s lake-front house. It’s been a decent couple of days. We’re a good team he and I, and unlikely friends too.

Not long after I began working at the yard, he offered me cash to help him with a side job one evening. We put up a post and beam carport on his friend’s property down the end of a muddy track, finished in the dark, and sat on the tailgate of his truck drinking beers and talking about work and life. He’s gruff for a man barely out of his 30’s, but his uncaring dismissals - fuck it, I’m over it! – bely a real concern for doing good work. I ask him a thousand questions, and he always answers, intrigued perhaps to have a worker who is there for knowledge more than money.

Now we’re rolling back into town, looking forward to a meal and a mattress. We stop by the grocery store and the liquor store, and park up in the hotel carpark.

‘Hey Long Story, check it out’ he says, gesturing with his beer can towards the night sky. The northern lights are dancing above our heads.

Long curtains of green light are absent-mindedly weaving their way among the blackness, oblivious to our gaze, oblivious to their own numinosity. We step out of the truck to watch. And watch. 

‘Fuck Long Story, I’m getting cold here, I’ll see ya back in the hotel.’

‘Ok’, I say, and stand there long after, shopping bags hanging in my hands, neck craned, staring upwards.

__________

Fifteen months.

Days pass, as days do, with the absentminded and merry enmeshment of the self with the people and place surrounding it. I work at the yard, I run in the forest, I go to the pub. 

We move to the other side of town to live with friends. I met them entirely by chance many months ago at the bar, a happy accident born of our mutual desire to drink beer. Since then we have spent vast amounts of time together, the restrictions of a pandemic only making us more reliant on each other’s company than our easy connection would have. They were all new in town when we were too, and Tom and his identical twin Mark served as the fulcrum for our group, infecting us all with their effervescent proactivity in anything related to having fun.

We act like old friends do, thanks to the condensed intimacy of sharing lives at an age without children, more future ahead of us than past behind. Through the summer months we explored the mountains and valleys around town together, hiking out to alpine lakes to camp and talk around flickering bonfires, driving out along dead-end logging roads to camp and get high. A winter of youth now beckons, dictated by the twins in the spirit of 80’s ski bums: hanging out with maximum energy from good times to good times, plans only a hindrance, the future of negligible importance, immediate joy an essential priority.

We will gather all our friends in town for a haphazard game of pickup hockey on the battered outdoor ice rink two streets over. We will build a snow fort in the back yard – adhering to good walling principles – and invite everyone over to sit around the fire inside it and watch the walls begin to melt. We will drive up the valley to the lake, to skate for hours under blue skies on a perfect plane of snow-dusted ice. We will catch the last lift up the ski hill, hike in our ski boots over to the back side, and slide through the trees to a clearing where some diligent soul has built a sun pit, to sit in the afternoon rays, drink beers, and wait for twilight, when we will rip back down the hill under semi-darkness with woops of unconcealed joy.

We will live well.

Tom bangs on the door of the basement flat.

‘Hey Baaab! Let’s go skiing!’

__________

Seventeen months.

I see the many lives I could have had, could still have, captured for a moment and then passed up. Each glitters, and attracts, but none seems to out-warm the well-worn surface of that place I came from, and so I let them pass.

I believe that there is no purpose to my life, and that the best way to open my eyes to this reality is by spending time away from people, alone, in the wilderness. People say ought. Mountains and trees say… nothing. And while the fells of my Lakeland home are a little rough, a little raw, and offer solitude and seclusion in places, and at times, they are little more than a windswept garden compared to the wildernesses of this Great White North. And yet, those soft contours call me home, and the greater part of me wants to go, revealing that what kept me there, and may keep me there again, is not the wildness, but the people, and the communities that the people have made there, and my belonging to them. 

But what is that belonging? I cannot sigh in relief for unsullied Cumbrian purity. I was not born there, nor where my parents. I have not lived there my entire life. I do not sound quite right. I am just a mongrel, who has chosen to lean on the larger chunk of his life’s experience to form his identity, who has bound himself again and again to that identity, wrapping the cord around and around so nobody can see that the start was untethered. Still, Cumbria was the place that I was given and did not choose. London was the place that I chose but did not want to be. This, the Canadian west, is the place that I chose myself, and want to be. I came here because I wanted to, and I have stayed because I like it. And if I could move all my kith and kin here with me, the people who tie me back to my homeland… what would then be left there to pull me back?

London was hectic. I was hopelessly out of step, and I longed for the slow and calm of the hills, because that seemed far more real to me. As though the slower you could live, the more in time with the world you would be, and the more things would make sense. So, I returned home, and it felt right, because beneath its touristic hustle and bustle, the heartbeat of the lakes is slow. It has been there for age after age, round and round, people and land together. It is draped in reminders of the transience and decay of humanity, reminders that the layers of history come and go, and that those people who were here are now gone, and though we are now here, we too will soon be gone.

Here in the Canadian West, it is not so slow. There is a New World energy afoot in almost all things, because the human places that European settlers carved into this landscape are new, and their culture is new, and excitable. Activities are radical, freedom is forefront, the future is short, because this is the wild west. Less than it was 200 years ago perhaps, but far more than my Old World islands are after 800,000 years of humanity.

Placing stones in succession to make a wall without mortar is a thrilling concept here, because people identify in it an ancient set of skills, an approach to building that predates their country by millennia. It is a piece of the old, and the slow, and they betray their youth by their response to it. In the Lakes, offcomers from the city would likewise gawk and gaze, seeing the same contrast between their lives and that wall. Only those people who lived amongst the places where dry stone walls lived knew that what I was doing was not exciting. It was ordinary. It was merely a part of the culture, part of the human place, part of the long roots of ancient history. And because those people were my people, they kept my frame of mind in the ordinary, in the merely. Fulfilling – yes – but humble, and slow. Because we were just passing the time, living the lives we had always lived, and that, after all, is ok.

Here, even the fast-paced building of log houses with chainsaws and grinders is an ancient craft in the North American view, because rotting cabins in the woods are the most distant remnants of most people’s understanding of their history. Of course, there is another - truly ancient - history here. The slow indigenous understanding of tens of thousands of years. But so few fragments of it remain, smothered, drenched, drowned in the new way, that the entirety of the Canadian experience is dominated by the settlers world.

The newness is a fun space for young men to make their mark, but it is not a belonging for me. So perhaps my belonging among the fells rests on the slowness that I can share there.

__________

Eighteen months.

Tom and I are sitting on the ski hill chairlift, legs dangling above the slope as we are dragged upwards.

‘Hey man, you gonna help me build my sauna this summer?’ he asks.

‘Huh, maybe… how are you gonna do it?’

‘I dunno, I figured I’d just get a load of cedar and panel the walls of one of the garden sheds or something, right?’

‘Yeah, I suppose so…’ I say, ‘but it’d be cool to have a little log cabin one’

He turns to me, eyes alight with excitement.

‘Just a small one though’ I add, beginning to backtrack, but it is too late.

__________ 

Nineteen months.

We are building the sauna.

Tom’s relentless excitement wheedled me into drawing up plans, selecting logs, and turning his personal dream into our shared reality for an intense three-week build.

As much as I begrudge the stress, I enjoy the challenge. This is a test piece, after a year and a half of log building, to prove to myself that I do know what I think I know. I show Tom each step, and he learns well. I have been the grunt, the apprentice, and now I have to be the master. But my own learning is so recent that I still see it all through his beginner’s eyes, and I wonder if my own mentors saw my first efforts the same way. All of us just a conduit for knowledge, a direct line from him, back to me, back to my foreman, back to his teachers, and theirs, and theirs, all the way back to the first humans to wield tools, building shelters from the dirt and detritus of the world. 

We work for twelve hours on the first day, engrossed in the task at hand. We work for twelve hours on the second day too. And the third, the fourth, the fifth…

After sixteen straight twelve-hour days, we stand back, and look at what we have built.

It’s a little rough around the edges, but it’s a cabin nevertheless, and a noble little one at that. Attentively peeled cedar logs criss-cross each other up through end gables to a proud ridge, with a green metal roof to cap it off. Fitted with a stove and a door, a sauna it will be. I am satisfied, and Tom is ecstatic.

An old waller told me years ago that ‘you’re either a stone person, or a wood person’. As though DNA coded for it. Bollocks. The further I deviate from what went before, and explore new fields, the more I become a committed generalist, a harmonizer between disparate things that are merely incongruous aspects of the same fascinating whole. Interest is the driver, and willingness the engine. I am not a ‘stone person’, nor a ‘wood person’, just a person who pays attention to the world.

__________

Twenty-one months.

It is late spring, and I am rattling my way back along forest roads in the broad heat of the afternoon. My beat-up truck, wheel arches rusting and paintwork peeling, rolled off the production line years before I was born, and it ragdolls me around as though the chassis is trying to shiver free thirty years of backroads abuse and spare parts repairs. I spent all morning driving the long winding miles out of town, up the valley and into the mountains to seek out silent forest glades, where I can build a cabin for myself.

Not to live in, or at least, not forever. Just to stay in, for a while.

I feel as though I crossed the world to live a different life, and yet for all that distance, my life is far closer to the one back home than it is to the one just out there, in the wilderness. In the realms of human experience, I left my front door, and stepped straight into the house of my neighbour. What is down the road, and over the hill, and far away, is a mystery still. And this is my chance to uncover it. 

This is why I came here.

We are told by those who peddle insufferable tropes, to take life as it comes, and to go with the flow. But sometimes wilful uncertainty is just a cover for complacency. Some things do not come to you, you must go and get them.

I don’t discuss most of my biggest dreams with others, because I know that they are other people’s dreams too, and that most of those other people just sit and hope that they come true, and they don’t come true, and it is tedious for the rest of us to hear about another ineffective wish, unpursued. But I tell myself that I am different, because I do not just dream of things, I do things. I will not just sit and wait for life’s riches, I will take my pickaxe and travel out to find the gold, and bring it back to the village, and show everyone my wealth, and they will be astounded, because nobody knew that I owned a pickaxe, or knew where the gold was. Under-promise and over-deliver, as they say.

Perhaps I am just another millennial cliché, the man who yearns to escape to the woods. And I hate all that. Pretentious hipsters who opine wistfully about how they wish they could escape the dreadful malaise of modernity, while they buy in to it as hard as the rest, desperately sharing their outdoor adventures, peppering their coffee tables with books full of pictures of cabins, and starting micro-business side hustles to sell people shit they don’t need on the promise of a closer affinity to ‘nature’. People who fetishize travel, and new experiences, and the rampant ‘gnarlier than thou’ individuality of our age, while they entirely fail to do anything new, because nobody ever can, because it has all already been done before in any way that is meaningful. People who say that they ‘wish they could do that’ while they prove the very opposite, by refusing to make any of the necessary sacrifice and intensity that is integral to doing that. If it meant more to them than everything else does, then that is what they would be doing, but it doesn’t, which is why they are not. People who are all talk and no substance. People who are full of shit. I do not want to be one of those people.

__________

Society creates so much that we are crushed under its weight. Some of us try and escape, for moments, through friluftsliv. And in doing so we dance with that glorious perspective that we are free – free from duty, from direction, from right and wrong. But that perspective fades again with our return to society’s relentless purposefulness, and we are crushed again. I am looking for something more lasting, a sharpening of vision that might fade more slowly, and calm the voices and soothe the pains of life that I make for you, and you make for me, and we both wish the other did not.

If I am right about what I think I am right about, then if I go away from people, and spend time alone in the wilderness, then, slowly, I will re-align with the pace of the planet, and will go slowly about my days, and not worry the febrile worries of a social life, but cast my mind open, and see where it wonders. And if I am right, that will feel good. And if I am wrong, I will have time to think about why I am wrong. Either way, I intend to find interest in the minutia of my being for a while.

I am not going out there to survive. To cling to life and limb, drenched in stress, eking out an existence on insects and puddle water, abandoning western plenty for palaeolithic deprivation as some kind of ultimate exercise in stoicism. No, I do not want to survive, I want to thrive.

And I am no extremist. The extremist would reject society entirely, and all within in. No family, no friends, no partner. Cut all ties and disappear into the woods, to live there, to die there, committed to an existence of solitude, for the peace of purposelessness, or for any other reason. Those people exist. I am not them. I will come back, and quickly enough no doubt. And yet, the extreme is the beckoning vision, and I must get close enough to it. Not all the way there, but closer than here. How close? How long is long enough? How alone is alone enough? How enlightened is enlightened is enough? I do not know.

So I am going to go because I want to be there, because nobody else will be there, and because that will be unlike any other place I have been. Moderation in possession, and humility in scope will be my friends, but solitude and seclusion will be my closest companion of all, because society is people, and people are society.

And I am scared. I am scared of the out there; the dark, the unknown, the monsters in the trees, the death in every step. And I am scared of the in here; of failing, and crawling back to society, of betraying the ideals of others, and most of all, betraying the ideals of myself.

__________

It is June. I step out of the house, I drive into the mountains, and I walk into the woods.

Bobby Gard-Storry
Kootenay, 2021