The Way Home, Days 6 and 7

We left on Monday. I organized the trip so that we would have 3 travel free days in Smithers. Driving out of Telkwa toward Quick where my mother lived is emotional. I miss my mother in this world, more than anything. It's such a huge weight to carry, longing for the person you loved most in the world. We carry on. The sky opens up and rains on us as we pass her turn-off and we wind gently toward Hungry Hill. I stare out the window trying to remember everything as it whips past me. Our lives in the sacred Bulkley Valley. The road is my whole life stretching out ahead of me. In the video Mark refers to it as the highway that has become our home.

Scattered along the highway there are the little houses, homesteads, left by the first white settlers to the area. Hopeful. In clearings. The hay grows up around them and eventually the ground will reclaim them in much the same way it has claimed their owners. I can't imagine what it was like for the first non-native people to this region.

 

Simple barns and rail fences dot the landscape and are weak attempts to to tame the wild landscape. Civilization on the inside, the natural world on the outside. A line separating this, from that.
 

The train follows the highway we have been living on. My eldest brother has worked for the CN Railway since he was 18. I naturally admired him so it made sense to admire trains as well. We rode them east to Jasper and then west to Vancouver. We climbed the Rockies slowly and waited in sidings without complaint. We rode them west to a place call Pacific. The train took me places and felt familiar doing so. The first time I went away for Christmas after my parents split up, I rode the train home from Saskatchewan on New Year's Eve, where my dad was living. We rolled past frozen Canadian landscapes, filled with remote crossings in sleeping towns. It was 4am when we came through Telkwa as the only Hotel in that small town burned silently down as we passed, speechless, headed west to Smithers.

Vanderhoof. The center of British Columbia. Not much else going on there besides Glen's Drive-In, the local Sino-Canadian restaurant. Some smart person moved all these heritage type buildings into one highway-close-locale. We stopped and snooped but ultimately ate our lunch of sandwiches at a picnic table under a green umbrella. We did little to support the local economy beyond a few words of encouragement to the local shop owners,

The Loon. I heard them calling in the night at the lake. It's a sorrowful sound. The end of day floats over the lake at dusk, the loon calls us to bed, and the lake air flows through the cabin pulling away the fog of the past creating whole new memories, good adult memories in place of the fantasy of childhood.

Nearing Quesnel, there are so many logging trucks on the road we feel puny in size and purpose. Our mission to return to my childhood home seems superfluous in comparison to the whole lumber industry. The local towns are driven by mills. Train tracks loop into sawmill yards and back out. Trucks, massive trucks, low slung, super long, populate the highway and we are submissive, hanging back to let them proceed. Swaying trailers, threatening to crush us, their logs poised to  impale us should the load shift, the trailer tip. They are like missiles traveling the roads, let loose on gravel, proceeding to pavement, headed to the next mill-town. We hang back, we brake, we count our blessings. The harvest is enormous, an unintended consequence of the Mountain Pine Beetle plague. I am witnessing the forests with their dead trees, and it doesn't look good. The future of these forests hangs in the balance. We are inconsequential and get out of the way to let these monsters of progress and sustainability pass.

The Caribou. Rolling hills and pasture land.The omnipresent river flows south to the Fraser Canyon, the landscape gets drier the farther south we go.

Williams Lake, B.C.

South of Williams Lake headed to 100 Mile House for the night. I had wanted to make the drive in one day but ultimately it just wasn't possible or advisable. The Fraser Canyon lies at the end of the drive and as treacherous as it seems in daylight it's potentially deadly at night for a tired driver in a car with malfunctioning headlights. We stayed in the Red Coach Inn as we had as kids when we drove to Vancouver for summer vacation. It was pleasant and slightly surreal to be there with my dad and older sister as well as my own family.

Day 7. We slept poorly in the hotel despite being tired. I turned the AC off to keep it from blowing on my kid who had developed a terrible dry cough, the cause of which would not become clear for another week. It was hot and still and Mark and I were anxious about getting home, getting back to life post travel. We had a light breakfast and hit the road, the sun at our left as we drove south to the face the canyon. I'm glad I made this trip with my family. I feel a little more whole than I did when we set out. I feel a little more Canadian and a little more connected to the people and places I grew up around. I feel more deeply connected to the landscape of the province and to that road that connects me to where my cognizant life began.

The Food Thing

We are what we eat. Crap in crap out. My kid has been sick this year, nothing devastating but concerning in its persistence. We sought medical attention and she ended up taking 3 rounds of antibiotics and most recently she has been fighting something that was a direct result of the cure. Don't get me wrong. I like antibiotics but not too often. I take full responsibility for my kids health and last year with her entrance to high school I eased up on my death grip of what she was eating. I let her choose what she ate at school and at home somewhat, and I began to notice that she was slowly eating more and more simple carbs in the form of noodles, bread, pasta, crackers. The final straw was a few weeks ago, I have made a stir-fry and rice and I watched as she heaped on the rice and took a few carrots from the mix and that was it. A huge light bulb went on and I suddenly realized what had probably caused all the health issues we'd had in the winter that had crept into the summer and were now present in the fall. Her immune system had become compromised due to her diet. Too much sugar in her system was creating a perfect environment for bacterial infection and then the antibiotics killed off what she had left leaving her with a condition called Thrush. This is a really boring post but I need to outline this more for myself than anything. We are what we eat. Crap in crap out. This is my mantra. Right now I am working on rebuilding my daughters bacterial system. One of the main ways of doing this is to eat loads of fresh and cooked vegetables, some fermented foods and lots of yogurt. Juice is forbidden, for now. Donuts and cakes and cookies and noodles and pasta are all off the table. Whole grains are in. Sodas are out. Herbal tea with honey is in. It's a tough road but I feel strongly that one of the values I must pass on to my kid is how to eat properly for now and for life.

Her lunch today:
Roasted Turkey Sandwich on whole grain bread
Mixed veggies: tomatoes, cuke, carrots
Nut mix: almonds, raisins, a few chocolate chips
Peanut butter cookies: made with maple syrup and almond meal
Yogurt cup
Cheese and rice crackers

Housekeeping

We spent the weekend at my dad's. Summer is almost over and we have to finish up the work we started, painting some trim on his house. While he's capable of doing the work himself he is not naturally inclined in that direction. I am pretty sure my stepmother took care of all these things, doing some of the fix-it stuff herself, directing him on some jobs and hiring the rest out. She was conscious of how the house should look, he seemed oblivious but willing to do what she implored him to do. She has been away physically for over year but she stopped being able to care about these domestic details a few years before that. In some ways those last years before her stroke and fall were pleasant. She was more relaxed, less critical. Alzheimers took her need to have things just so. We were not always close. There were difficult years but I understood her and she knew it. We had a bond, ultimately she was a good mother and she and dad had a good relationship. She's everywhere in the house and I feel by helping him we are helping her too, carrying out her wishes, considering her preferences, keeping her present in a home in which she is absent. When we arrived Saturday dad was home eating his light lunch. He was wearing a huge pair of cargo pants, filthy and cinched around his waist, his now narrow hips no longer a match for a widening waist-band. I asked him if he maybe needed me to go with him to get some new pants for fall. I made a joke about back to school shopping but he's wary of me and my helpful hints about appearance and grooming practices. I have to tread lightly. I think of my stepmother and how she would have handled him and his over-sized pants. They would have simply disappeared in the laundry one day, gone to the poor, or the compost if they had no trace of wear left in them. She felt strongly that even the poor had standards. He wore shorts the next day and assured me that he has clothes to wear and we discussed wearing a greater percentage of them. This seemed to please him. Mark did some painting and I washed dishes and wiped up crumbs. I could go crazy cleaning the house but the cleaning woman had just been there so it felt pretty okay, considering. On Sunday we took a long walk punctuated with pie and coffee. We walked to Pt Grey Road and watched a race of Lasers in the bay. The single sails were so pretty moving together as a group gently changing shape as their sailors adjusted their trim and direction as they passed the race markers. It was hot and the dogs panted as we sat on a little knoll and watched the boats finish their heats and then begin again.