Stories, Excerpts, Backroads
I’m not sure what I would do without those mountains and all the trees. They remind me there is still plenty to climb. I know they are stronger than I’ll ever be. Still, they allow me to be in their world, reminding me where I stand, like the stars. It’s a good feeling to live on rock and wood.
Smokey skies but nothing like last year at this time. There s a few fires burning close by. The garden is bone dry and I’m up late trying to get some water on it with a hose and antique cast sprinkler. It is low and does a good job.
Lisa and I photographed a wedding today. It has been awhile since we have done one. We used to do a lot. We were very good at it. We both like doing them. Some photographers dislike doing them, thinking they should be shooting for National Geographic instead. I always felt we were documenting the start of the Bride and Grooms family history. Someday the pictures would be looked at by their grandkids. We wanted them to see the day as it was. The love, the awkwardness at times, the heat or cold and their friends and family. We also wanted to show their connection to the land and each other.
Like I said it’s been awhile but it was like riding a bike. Lisa didn’t miss a shot during the ceremony and moved things along during the portraits making sure the kids and elderly were done first so they could seek shade.
It all came back in a hurry. The beautiful couple with their two small kids was dearly in love. We were honoured to document and share their day. The endeared themselves to Lisa and I when they confessed their rings cost $13 each on Etsy.
Talking about being in love. Hunter and Bree are out from Calgary. I cooked a few steaks on the BBQ with fresh potatoes, carrots and squash from the garden. It was a feast. It is good to have them out.
The valley is busy. Plenty of traffic. Crazy drivers. All in a hurry to have fun. Ambulances going out all day and medic helicopters coming in to take the wounded back to Calgary.
I am getting used to it as I get older. There was a time everything about the crowds burned my ass. Now I’m glad they stay shopping in the valley bottom. There is still plenty of room on the backroads.
The moon is bright same as mars. Very fine day.
Above the lake.
It seems these last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of activity. Lisa and I still make time to get out in the bush regularly. The weather has been clear and hot. The garden is chugging right along.
Our children have been out to visit. It has been nice to have them with plenty of laughter filling the house. We helped move Lisa’s parents into a new home. Their old place was getting too large for them. Now they live just a stone’s throw from us. This is a relief for Lisa. It was so nice to see our kids taking time away from their schedules in the city to come home and make their grandparents welcome. They think the world of their Grandparents, and know how hard they have worked for everything. Lisa and I are very proud of our children.
Glacier Lillies. Maddy and Lisa telling Chad to pay attention,
while he takes a photo of the large peaks.
The photos in this post are from a place I find very special. Lisa, Maddy, Chad, Willow and I hiked in yesterday. It has been several years since we have been there, due to roads and bridges washed out. There was a time I would hike from wherever the road ended. But I was young and stubborn then. My Father and I even had some long hikes into Leman Lake.
Alpine Forget-Me-Not.
Back then the trail crossed several slides with tall skunk cabbage and elder bushes. It was closed in thick. You never knew if a bear or moose was going to be waiting for you around the next corner.
We all looked in vain for a way to cross the swift creek. While Lisa, Chad and I were looking for a deadfall across, we noticed Maddy on the other side putting her boots back on. That ended the search. We all took off our boots rolled up our pant legs and subjected our feet to freezing cold water and sharp rocks. Willow crossed enthusiastically, got caught in the current, and came out about twenty yards downstream.
Scorpion Weed.
We took time to rest, along the trail. It was still steep and in some places overgrown. Lisa reminisced about hiking here while pregnant with Kelsie. Being pregnant never slowed her down. We wondered around marvelling at the sights and smells.
The hike reminded me to try to stay in good enough shape to be able to show these places to Cooper and Scarlett when they are old enough to hike the mountains on their own. That will be sooner than a blink of an eye. Yet that same, seemingly small, time will start taking a toll on my hips and knees. No doubt, just as my father, my balance will be tested on logs over the creek and I’ll curse the rain for making the rocks slippery.
Willow takes a dip.
We looked for wild flowers and porcupine quills. Maddy and Lisa alerted Chad to pay attention, because, if I pointed out a ‘Glacier Lily’ on the way up, I may ask him what it was on the way down and he better know the answer.
Sky, rock, bush and water.
To experience these places with loved ones is a gift. The colour of the lake, the sky and large mountains, the smell of spring slides bringing down old spruce, the ice and snow and how I cheer it now, thinking if we could only get a few cold years the glaciers could build up again, how I am a fool to think such things are up to me, the fish and bears and all the wild flowers, the overgrown trail with so many ghosts and so much yet to show.
I always try to look extra hard before I leave, because I never know when I will see it all again.
At loose ends these days. Took to the creek in the evening. Thought it would be good to be under the trees. Up the road someone had cut a big live fir. It landed across the road. They had taken the bulk of it and left the rest that had fallen to the other side. Too much work to tramp through the three feet of snow, probably.
You can tell a lot about people’s tracks. These were lazy people. They didn’t need the wood or they wouldn’t have cut a live tree. It will be a year before it can be burned. With all the dead wood it seems a shame to cut a live tree.
Why should I care. The province allows clearcutting of entire forests. Places I used to wander beside the Palliser look as if they have been scorched by fire. Even the thin stuff up Windermere Creek is fair game. Slash piles and oil cans, the only thing left over. Sure it will grow over. The abuse the trees and creeks and land puts up with and still survive is a miracle in itself.
Lisa likes to call me the ‘tree police’. Suggesting I take things too seriously. She loves a grove of trees in an area we frequent. She finds peace and healing there. The trees rise above all others and reach their spiny fingers into the sky. Darkened grey or white, green and blue they are a sight that never fails to uplift.
One of the trees is leaning. It has woodpecker holes up it’s trunk. Limbs are breaking and not being replaced. It lives, but is dying. We have been watching for several years, wondering when it will fall towards the creek.
I tell Lisa some day we may come around the corner and the trees will be cut down. She doesn’t agree, the trees are of a variety that are not normally harvested. There would be no reason to cut them down, but to watch them fall. She has more confidence in humans than I.
A town politician/developer in the village at the headwaters of the Columbia River talked about, ‘a God given right, that if you pay a bunch of money’ for a second home, a person should be able to do what they will with the lake shoreline to launch their motorboats.
God given rights, sure as shit, have fucked things up in the past. It’s what allows pollution to flow downhill. Everything and anything below us is on their own. It’s why we look at mountains, trees, rivers and creeks as dead, as something only to be conquered.
It’s been grey for awhile now. Typical for March. Wind and spit. Mud and melt. The buds are appearing on the low brush, when I squint my eyes I can see them on the high branches also.
Palliser Pass 