Canada

My sisters and I up in the Baldy Hills of Riding Mountain National Park, Manitoba, Canada.

I grew up in a handful of Canada’s National Parks across British Columbia, Alberta and Manitoba before my family moved to the city of Saskatoon in the beautiful province of Saskatchewan. My fondest memories belong to Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba where my father was stationed for 5 years of service with Parks Canada. Our nearest town was Grandview, we lived on the end of a seemingly eternal gravel road. Unfortunately, my sisters and I were the first on and the last off the school bus to town, but on the other hand, we had horses, a huge garden and pasture, a barn with a glorious hay loft, an equally glorious horse trough we used as a swimming pool, tree forts, beaver ponds, wolf song pouring in my bedroom window at night, rabbit hutches and chicken coops. I had adventures, of the general sort and the exceptional sort, nearly every single day.

It was my delight to accompany my father on back country patrols by horseback or skidoo in these years. Sometimes when my mum was at work in the early morning (she was a nurse), I’d feign sickness or tell my father I was too tired to take the hour long school bus ride to town just so I could stay home with him and help him out around the station. You couldn’t blame me for fibbing; riding that school bus was torture. I usually immersed myself in reading for the hour long trip but was teased mercilessly by older kids who had fathers or uncles who poached animals illegally in the park. I was even threatened by a 16 year old boy one day; I was a skinny little runt of a girl in the first grade and when he told me he would set me on fire with his pocket lighter, I believed him and was terrified of him until he graduated and didn’t ride the bus anymore. When I pretended to be sick so that I wouldn’t have to go to school, it was almost truthful, in some ways.

On one such day, when I pretended to be sick so I could skip school, my father declared that he and I were riding into a remote campground past Birdtail Bridge to check on a group of hikers. I was very small, only six or seven, but I could saddle my horse with the help of the added height of a grain bucket flipped upside down on a stall floor in the barn. We saddled up, loaded our horses in the horse trailer and drove deeper into Riding Mountain National Park.

It was a beautiful indian summer day. The forest in that part of Manitoba is boreal; a pleasant mix of spruce, birch and aspen with a pleasing and isolated smattering of oak in some of the high places like the Baldy Hills. The road that lead into the park from Sugarloaf Warden Station was fringed by beaver ponds, thick woods and that long autumn sigh of Manitoba turning gold and settling in for a long snowy winter. I took it all in with young, fresh eyes as we drove. I didn’t ever get bored of Riding Mountain National Park. Not ever. Not even once. I think that’s one of the gifts of childhood. In our youth, we’re oblivious to politics in all its forms. We’re without the burdens that come with adulthood and without those dark cloaks thrown over our eyes and mind. Everything that our senses take in, at any given moment, manages to ring majestically, purely and freshly in our hearts and souls. There’s no dark, pessimistic mist clouding the way we perceive the world around us, there’s only the light, the texture of the light falling and the texture of the world beneath our feet and under our hands. We’re filled with faith. We punctuate all we say and do with that same burning glory the sun holds high up in the sky.

While I was lost in the texture of the world around me, burning bright with the possibility of the forest, rivers and animals we passed, we suddenly arrived at Birdtail Bridge. We unloaded our horses from the trailer and rode out into the bush, through trees, over tall grasses; in the distance something black was building in the sky, a tower of storm, still far enough away that the sun stayed golden, the breeze was gentle and the bird song consistent.

We rode for an hour or more. Our horses picked their way around fallen trees, over spring creeks and eventually we found ourselves in a clearing with a pair of tents and a few twenty-somethings in brightly hued polypropylene lingering by a quiet fire. My father talked with the hikers, asked to see permits, chit chatted about weather forecasts and reminded them to be careful with their fires. I had dismounted and was snooping around the clearing when a fellow strolled up to me and asked me if I was a good rider. I, of course, didn’t spare him a display of cheeky confidence and informed him that I was a wonderful rider. It was a fairly true statement to make. I was fearless and would try anything on a horse, I was usually successful with whatever I was attempting in the way that I rarely fell off. He looked at me, slapped his leg, laughed out loud and told me he didn’t think I could even get into the saddle by myself never mind gallop on a horse.

Around that time, my dad noted the incoming storm and told me it was time to go. I had on my mind to prove that fellow wrong and so I walked over to my palomino and climbed up and into the saddle like a wild monkey; I must have had a fantastic look of satisfaction on my face once I had both feet in my stirrups because that rotten fellow who had doubted me just smiled and waved goodbye. We turned our horses towards home and rode off. At about this time, I turned to my father and asked him if we could gallop. He must have known I had something to prove because he kicked his sorrel into a run and we took off like hell was coming hot on our heels, and in a way it was. The black storm that had been building was upon us and the wind tried to claw me off the back of my horse as we ran over hills, through thick timber, over fallen trees and across grassy flats. I had one hand on the saddle horn and the other on the reins. My horse sucked wind. I clung to his back like a burr. The rain came down hot and the hail stung my face as we flew. Looking back, it was a completely insane ride, especially for a 6 or 7 year old. My father must have had some confidence in me because he led our stampede back to Birdtail Bridge and never once looked back to check on me until we were seconds away from the truck and trailer. When he asked how I was doing, I grinned, wiped the water and ice out of my eyes and responded with something ridiculous but generationally appropriate like: cowabunga dad.

With the horses loaded, we hopped in the truck, put on the heater and took the road slowly back to Sugarloaf Station. Sometimes I look back at those five years in that national park and I wonder how on earth I survived. I certainly should have been run through by an elk, eaten by a bear, stalked and clawed to death by a cougar or bucked off a horse straight into a tree trunk. Nothing particularly tragic ever happened to me, by the good grace of God.

I will opine that my thirst for adventure and my predestined wild and mildly reckless attitude towards life was probably cultivated by the monosyllabic chant of tree sway, the black scars left behind by black bears on the white skin of aspens, the musty green odor of beaver ponds and the discoveries I made while living in that park.

In those five years I discovered death and life, the capabilities and cohesion of snow, fullness and hunger, numerous pails of unhatched frog eggs, the small and the large and everything in between. Looking back, I don’t think I ever really forgave my parents for moving us to the city of Saskatoon, for the sudden and swift elimination of space and immediate adventures. I understood why we moved and I am glad, in the end, that I was given opportunities to study music, art and to play competitive sports but I never really fit in anywhere after that. Even during my high school years, I was transient in social realms, moving in and out of cliques like a little storm cloud, preferring the company of trees, animals and the challenge of sports instead of weekend parties and the student representative council. I couldn’t get enough space. It wasn’t as easy to wander off into the silence of the forest; the city kept getting in the way.

In the six year history of my marriage I’ve lived in Alaska, Northern California (briefly), the wilds of Arizona in the middle of nowhere on an Indian reservation and now here, in a small city in Idaho. When we moved here, I was ready to spend a portion of my life in civilization but now I’m ready to move on.

Perhaps the only reason I’ve been able to abide here, at The Gables, on the very edge of town, is because of the expanding view of foothills to the West. I can live on the edge of this town with the quietly hovering promise of a ranch in the future; the promises of space and the howling of wolves just outside my bedroom windows again.

My desire isn’t entirely selfish. Someday, if I should have a kid of my own, a feisty and sassy little girl or boy, I want my man to put that kid on a horse, take that kid out into those sacred middles of nowhere so that his or her senses can be imprinted by the textures of wildness, color and light; those fields of mercy, those mountains of God, those tall grasses that whisper alleluias to The Creator. I want to show them the small things, the huge things, the things that are extinct in the city places so that in the years to come, that kid will have an anchor, a compass, the steady swing of the arms of truth bringing him or her back to the basics as well as the honesty and the glory of space, time and time again.

In the end, you can pour yourself out on the concrete of the city floor, but the black dirt that makes the foundation of wild spaces everywhere is better suited for receiving those pieces of your self and soul and giving something holy and tangible in return. The voice of God is in the song of the wild. May we all find what we’re seeking. In the end, may we all return.

*This post is dedicated to my dear friend Suzy Q who just this afternoon asked me to write a story about my childhood and then share it with her. I hope you like it, Q. xx

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Returning

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