Vancouver: A nice break, and reason to clean out the closets

 

 

Photo of Stanley Park Sea Wall, Vancouver, B.C., by SqueakyMarmot, on Flickr Creative Commons.
**

My recent trip to Vancouver: A change in pace, and a reason to come back and clean out the closets. Good to be rousted out of the slowing habits, the routine that sometimes includes procrastination.

On a trip, we do everything we plan to do (if our expectations are reasonable) putting off nothing. What we’re doing is simple: there are no extras, no requirements, no taxes (other than for sales).

Back in life-land, it’s nice to keep an edge to things if possible.(This is said while acknowledging the benefits of electricity, Internet, warm clothes for cold weather, running water, modern hiking shoes, and other frills of the industrialized world.)

Still, there’s an excitement to living without those.

For a few days, I lived deep in woods in northwest Montana, 60 miles from a paved road. We were without electricity and the Internet (at a time of dot-com explosion), and we bathed in a river fed by snow melt.

We filled lamps with kerosene, received groceries hauled by mules (a luxury, even though we couldn’t have bananas (easily bruised) or as many green vegetables as packaged pastas), and delicately fried trout caught in the river.

We were in a national wilderness area, and this was a U.S. Forest Service station. 

Coming from New York City, I knew how rare this was -- but I didn’t want to stay.

The work involved using non-mechanized tools -- cross-cut saws and hatchets -- to clear trails of downed trees on steep hillsides, and often involved hiking nearly 12 miles a day on hills. Each "week we labored 10 days, then received four days off. Many of the other workers used weekends to hike up mountains in search of fire-observatory views.

But I was soft. I missed the Internet and my cell phone. I missed baths that were not in the river. I liked thinking, and writing, more than I liked producing change with my hands.

So, I departed. I returned to civilized outer-world Montana. Eventually I went back to another city, Chicago.

In the end, though, Chicago was a bit too far from the deep forests for me. The city was well-planned -- a bit too much, for me. Its only wildness lay in Lake Michigan and in winter winds. I could stand at the lake's edge, but not sail across its surface. There were no ferries, no boats for those who don't spend or have boat-owning friends.

These days, I am trying to keep myself less often in the overheated, overly comfortable rooms of life.

Testing ourselves, I think, is the best way to experience more of the world. If I only wanted the basic necessities, I wouldn't experience the back country of anywhere, from the U.S. and Canada to Bolivia or Russia. It’s the best way to know what others experience.

With that in mind, I’m sharing a list of things I find thrilling:

Going without a jacket until it’s truly cold

Cross-country skiing deep into quiet woods

Standing among northern spruce and other evergreens

Spending time in northern places: Alaska, upper British Columbia, the tops of all the Canadian provinces. Montana. North Dakota.

The snowiest places, and among people who move to these places. The Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Duluth.

When a city’s power is out from a storm and people walk and talk peacefully

The lull after a snowstorm

Bayou country and the Everglades

Diaries and books about pioneers, homesteaders, and explorers

Edward Hoagland’s books about the renegades who lived in far northern British Columbia when he was there in the early 1960s

Spending time at the edge of a continent

Swimming in cold water

What are the things that thrill you?

Foreign country, foreign beach, in massively cold water

Photo of English Bay, Vancouver, off Stanley Park, by SqueakyMarmot on Flickr Creative Commons license.
**

 

Nearly brought to tears, I was, by the Strait of Georgia.

Shed my socks and sneakers on the gray-sand beach. It was the texture of flour with a bit of water and milk added, there at Stanley Park on Vancouver’s watery edge.

I plunged in a foot and felt the grip -- the absolute seizure -- of skin, bones, and all, by the cold depths.

The truth is, the Strait was no colder than the Puget Sound. I simply didn’t have a friend to egg me on, as I do at home in Seattle, and I knew that I'd left my Vancouver hostel already: If I dove, I'd need to make the 4-hour train ride home to Seattle in damp duds.

I was tired from sleeping poorly at a couch-surf, and sad because a very dear friend had just returned to the airport and onward to New York. I was alone in a foreign country, on a foreign beach, standing in massively cold water.

I watched my ankles in the clear depths, and moved forward a bit in the sand. Unlike Seattle beaches, this one had no pebbles to cut into my feet, which should have helped -- but the water was cold and seemingly bent on murder. I felt mortality.

All of a sudden, I lost the drive. I had been walking in sunshine along Stanley Park’s seawall, looking at the funny folded-umbrella shape of black cormorants on cliffs and down on rocky points in the sea, nodding at passing walkers and cyclists, gazing across the silvery waters towards the mountains of the separate district of North Vancouver.

On this particular day, I wasn’t ready for the mortality. I wanted the sunshine.

Usually, I would have driven myself to dip fully, to feel that excitement of being entirely wet, and the warmth that comes from no longer being half in one state and half in another. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to submerge – knowing, as I did, that I’d end up chilly and remaining soggy.

Strangely, though, the feeling of dread passed quickly. If there’s one thing cold water does, it lends a feeling of resilience: “If I can withstand that, I can do anything!” At least, it does for me.

I liked being in Vancouver, looking at the cousin to my regular views in Seattle. It was as if I’d started out looking at water from Seattle, and suddenly the picture slid over a bit further – and I was looking from further north.

It was a bit eerie, but wonderful. I’ve never vacationed anywhere that was in some ways a continuation of my own region, like a chance to learn more about it. It was like meeting the cousin of a dear friend, and finding that they have the same laugh and give their hair the same part. I kept looking at pewter water extending to distant hills, and boats in the marinas, thinking to myself: “Hey, hey! More of that! More of that thing I like!”

So, no swimming this time in Vancouver. But next time, when I have shower access, and possibly a wet-suit like the resident I saw at the city's Jericho Beach -- I'm up for it.