The Great Divide
Reality returns
Time has restarted again. Or rather, I have woken up to it once more - for it never stopped running, no matter how deaf I was to its ceaseless cosmic tick. Quarantine life is a never-ending loop, a sort of timeless dream-state that flattens all events to the same dread dimensions - the kitchen, the news, the bedroom, and back again to the kitchen all over. But now I have woken up to time, and there is a great hurry.
The Great Divide Trail is possible! And the Divide is bearing down upon me at speed, precisely one second per second as the days tick by. It was Constantine of course who awakened me to the trail. I had all but written it off. Without quite realizing, I had gone about the process of adjusting my expectations, and had projected myself forward as if the timelessness would continue indefinite. Fleeting notions lit upon my mind and vanished again, procrastination and delay meaningless in the vast wash of empty days before me - a sewing project, an instrument to learn, a musical idea that evaporated as soon as I set to write it down. It was pointless to rush, and I saved my diversions on the chance that I would need some sense of momentum and differentiation later. They were good ideas, but trifling in the shade of the overarching joy I feel, now that my life has a recognizable shape.
It was Constantine who found the itinerary. Buried in the pages of the GDTA’s trip planning resources was a spreadsheet of sample timelines, slow, average, and fast. And it was he who noticed that with slight modifications and a carefully calibrated pace, we could avoid all but the most necessary permits in Jasper and Banff. So we began the formidable task of pandemic logistics. With the traffic diminished and hitch-hiking a daunting reach (not to mention we would be finishing near Highway 16, the notorious Highway of Tears), how would we get the van to the northern terminus, and how would we get south to begin? With rental cars shuffled and taxi companies called. Resupply was worked out and long heavy food carries accepted as necessity, given that half the tourist towns are shut and the timeliness of mail is uncertain. It was, yes, just possible, given the camping permits opened as scheduled on June 21st. We’d be well on trail by then, so my parents were deputized, and our sattelite communicators set to receive their news.
Even more, the relentless optimism that is Constantine’s most delightful and irritating feature proved contagious - if we began NOW, and SOON, who’s to say that our southbound PCT permits would go to waste? Two months is an age in pandemic time. The border could open by July 25th, sure, and then where would we be? We set about ensuring that the answer was Hart’s Pass, with plenty of time between trails for rest and resupply. Our scant window took on dimension and became definite. We would begin the GDT the morning of June 12th, hiking south from Waterton Townsite to tag the border and then north, north! Northbound, NOBO once again, twenty-five miles that first day past the border of the park and on into unregulated crown lands, where we’d be free to wander as we liked until the middle of June.
The twelfth is one week from today, and weeks have meaning again. To make it from Pemberton to Prince George to Kakwa Trailhead and back down, through Peter Lougheed to stash food and on to Lethbridge to catch a taxi to Waterton Town, to walk down to tag the border on the twelfth and hike north and onward before sundown, we have to leave the morning of the ninth. That’s Tuesday, and days have meaning again, and Tuesday is soon.
The GDT is soon! My kitchen walls will be left unpainted, and the van’s newly refurbished engine will roar again, more quietly now that her clickety exhaust leak is fixed and her pistons flush smoothly with a purring hum. I will not need to order some presentable summer clothes - my seasonal adventures are done all in one outfit, and my wardrobe is unsuited for hot weather. My hiking pants are all I need, fashion be damned. The clearance rack at MEC was unusually ugly this year, but my clothes will be gloriously destroyed by bushwhack and snow as they always are, and it matters not at all. My new pack will clash with the grey-green-pink pebbled pattern, and with my garish blue thermal most of all. I will be warm and safe and dry and happy in my clown outfit, tromping merrily though snags of juniper and cursing up to my knees in snow, puffing labouriously up and over the high passes under a six-day load, and everything will make a marvelous kind of sense. It is the kind of suffering I am most accustomed to, and I welcome those privations as the expression of my soul.
I have had plenty of time to think, during this odd timeless dream of mine. As the loop repeats, so do the patterns of my thoughts, elaborating their repetitions as a Bach fugue. Rigid to the measures, and yet between the bars they change, exploring within their limits every degree of freedom. It will be obvious to those who have followed this newsletter that I have been concerned for several months with the question of a life. What shall I make of my life? And exactly how is a life decided upon? For all my surety of this one thing, the rightness of my itinerant existence, it had eluded me until now that this is, in fact, my life. I had been grasping about for some settled-ness, some narrative of living that is legible and acceptable to the wider culture, for some task or occupation that would fit me into the greater stillness that defines for most people place and purpose and drive. Despite myself, I had bought into the notion that my wanderings were in some sense an extended adolescence, that my gift of perpetual motion was in fact the prolonging of a search of some kind, and my reluctance to be rooted down was revealing of a flaw, or a fear. In my roundabout circular fugue-thinking, I have cycled and circled and come around to see that this is not so. This life is. It is not a prelude or an overture to a real and settled adulthood - I have been properly an adult for many years now, and these are the real and settled adult choices I have made. I have chosen! I do not need to choose next, and I am not stalled in my progess or fidgeting unsure. No matter that my career is not a job that pays, or a sport that is affirmed with medals at the Olympics. I’ve said all these things before, yes, and then gone back on myself, become insecure in the context of society and acceptable lives. It is not an easy thing to be an eccentric, to press on differently against the pressure of conformity. It is Constantine again who makes the difference, this man that I love with his link to our community. My beloved co-eccentric and our company of scattered nomads bring me back to myself, solid as he is in his commitment to wander. We have a business now, one which he started but is very much ours, which opens us up to time and trail forever. We have ideas of places to go, in just a week’s time and for years in the future, trails upon trails upon trails to follow, and mountains to climb, and reasons to grow.
“This is our life now, isn’t it?” I said to him on the porch one morning, discussing our profits and marketing and returns. “We have enough to keep going, I could even work part-time and hike most of next year.”
He looked at me with puzzlement, as if I had said something so obvious he had never thought of it before. “Of course,” he replied. “This is what we do.”
Next time you hear from me, I’ll be on trail!
Talk soon, and take care, and don’t worry if you don’t hear back for a while. Cell service is limited, and town is too.
- Magpie