Summer of the Horse

by Donna Kane

  Sometimes I think I walk to escape myself. I can imagine walking so fast I break free of my body. I think that I write for the same reason.

  Wayne leads the pack string safely across Upper Tuchodi River.

  Twenty-Two

  Wilderness

  One year I rode with Wayne’s pack string for the first two legs of the expedition, starting at the abandoned Summit Lake Lodge at Mile 392 of the Alaska Highway. Into the hills we went, nine riders and twenty horses full of piss and vinegar after nine months of rest. We followed a game trail along the North Tetsa River, where bears pawed up the roots of hedysarum and a harlequin duck swam in the rocky pool as we crossed the swift-moving river.

  It was spring, the landscape awash in anemone and bluebells, in the songs of ruby-crowned kinglets, warblers and sparrows. We crossed the North Tetsa, riding up a pass and then down, then up again, along a muddy and root-snarled trail to the plateau of Twin Lakes, then down to where the weather was active, going from cloud to rain to sun to wind, as if in love with its possibilities and restless for each, to Henry Creek—where our dog paced an ice ledge on the bank before plunging in for the swim and I thought she would drown, her body fighting the current, her eyes never once leaving the sight of Wayne, my eyes never leaving the sight of her, until she reached the opposite shore, and Wayne never looking back, the whole time confident she’d make it—up into a wide plateau in the subalpine where a herd of mountain caribou came bounding toward us, and we stopped the pack string and watched them come. They may never have seen such large strange objects before. They ran toward us to see what we were about and the pack horses ran toward them, their panniers filled with rice and turnips and coffee jostling on their backs, the riders pulling out their cameras, the dog told to sit, all of us held in a moment of interspecies curiosity, checking each other out, before the pack string moved on to the Chisca River area where the treeline stopped and the sheer limestone mountains rose so high I thought of Everest—a broad band of impenetrable brown and grey—with the sun getting low so that, behind one of the cliffs it threw a mountain shadow against the sky, the shape of the rock reflecting in the dust in the air. It is said that on nights when it is very dark, and the sky is clear, the shadow of the Earth can be seen just like this, its curve blocking the light of the sun whose rays reflect off the interstellar dust around our planet’s cut-out. I watched the mountain’s reflection as I rode along, the ground a wet seep from a small underground spring where the lupines flourished and smelled like honey.

  When we reached the alpine on the Northern Caribou Range, it was cloudless and warm, and we stopped to sit on the slope with the forget-me-nots and moss campion, and camped for the night. Margison Creek and the thin veins of snow in the mountain crevasses were visible from the door of our tent. The next morning we descended into the broad Tuchodi River Valley, travelling upriver, crossing side channels to East Tuchodi Lake. From there, we crossed the Tuchodi River—glacial flour colouring the water pewter, giving it an opacity, a body, the current a broad rippling muscle riding the river’s spine, its shape thick enough for its waves to cast shadows on the water—I carried the dog on the horse, then led the horse up a steep incline before descending to Gathto Creek, where we camped, and from where I walked to the top of a ridge, found the bleached skull of a fox, held it in my hands while the sound of horse bells rose from the valley.

  Before Kluachesi Lake, the river crossing was rough and Brian was tossed into the chuck, had to scramble up the bank. We travelled back down to Tuchodi Lake, and the next day a jet boat took me and the rest of the outgoing crew down the Muskwa River to Kledo Creek just north of Fort Nelson, where I got in my truck to drive back to Rolla.

  Not once in the twenty-five days and roughly two hundred miles we’d travelled had I seen another human being other than the people I was with. The cumulus clouds formed, cast shadows then disappeared and the sun came out and glanced off the mountain cliffs and more clouds moved in and it rained and the slopes turned a sheen of iridescent green and night fell and day came and then dusk. Sometimes I would feel an intense rush of freedom, a sense that I was in a world that existed without me—mountain peaks that cloned themselves plate after plate, the coulees of snow that melted then spilled over broad smooth rocks forming gelatinous waves falling into the inception of creeks that threaded through meadows of hellebore and anemones, the world’s beauty going on without any human intervention. A world for which I was not responsible.

  “You can find wilderness anywhere,” the poet Tim Lilburn once told me while sitting in a café in Victoria, giving a small shrug toward the window. “You can go to Mount Doug and find wilderness.” It was raining and the café windowpane was steamed up. I looked across the street at the Belfry Theatre. A few miles beyond that, lost in the mist, was Mount Douglas. I could have walked to it from where we sat dunking our tea bags made out of a silken material of such quality I probably didn’t own a shirt that nice, and inside that chi-chi fabric were crushed flowers, bits of stems and petals.

  A few summers ago, poet Simon Armitage walked the Pennine Way from Kirk Yetholm, on the other side of the Scottish border, to Edale in Derbyshire, a span of roughly two hundred and sixty miles. In his wonderful account of that journey, Walking Home, he refers to the Pennine Way as wilderness. But wait a minute, I thought when I read it, there were signs along the trail, and fences to keep in sheep and cows, and every night he reached a village where he could buy toothpaste and where pubs pulled their taps of brew while he read poetry to the locals and where he slept on a mattress in houses equipped with plumbing and heat and where every day, at some point on the trail, he would meet or be accompanied by someone he didn’t know, a trail that could be nearly always traversed by an atv, a trail he was often delivered to each morning by car. Maybe I was being unfair, but I felt proprietary about the idea of wilderness, as if I had exclusive rights to it. Which was silly, and more than a little ironic.

  American activist Robert Marshall said wilderness is “sufficiently spacious that a person in crossing it must have the experience of sleeping out.” The 1964 us Wilderness Act states that wilderness is “where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

  Does it matter if we use the word wilderness to describe both the Pennine Way and the Muskwa–Kechika?

  “Well, for sure there is a danger,” Wayne will say. “You don’t want to get those things confused. If you can say that a developed agricultural landscape or a formally industrial landscape that’s now abandoned is wilderness, then you have thrown the doors wide open for exploitation. If the word wilderness can be used for areas where there has been development, we lose the standard for what should be protected.”

  Don McKay, in Vis à Vis: Field Notes on Poetry and Wilderness, wrote that “by ‘wilderness’ I want to mean, not just a set of endangered spaces, but the capacity of all things to elude the mind’s appropriations.” Which is what Tim Lilburn was likely getting at too—“You can find wilderness in a teakettle” was something else he said.

  Would the word wildness be more appropriate when describing metaphysical states of unknowability? Perhaps, but wilderness has more heft, somehow feels as though it has more to sink our imagination into. Is it because the word wildness has remained an abstract, like beauty or greed, and because, like those concepts, wildness has no mass?

  Wilderness, on the other hand, is used by some to describe both the metaphysical quality of an object (its unknowability) and the physical thing itself—the Muskwa–Kechika, the Pennine Way. In its definition of the word, the Canadian Oxford Dictionary uses adjectives like “uncultivated” and “uninhabited.” Most often, wilderness is described as a physical place; unlike wildness, it has weight and mass. While concepts like wildness and beauty retain their abstraction, continue to reign in the heavens of our mind, wilderness seems to have fallen with a thump to Earth.

  If this is true, then it makes our preference for the word wilderness
when describing the capacity of things to “elude the mind’s appropriations” a bit ironic. But it is also how metaphor works. The word wilderness is easier for us to get a handle on because it is easier for us to sense. We can hold bits of it in our hands, feel its weight and shape. Wilderness, unlike wildness, is, quite literally, easier for us to grasp, and so we use the label to describe that which is beyond our grasp.

  The Muskwa–Kechika Advisory Board spent many years trying to reach a consensus on how to define wilderness.

  If the physical places we name as wilderness are themselves mutable, sometimes going from a large landscape with an undisturbed-by-humans ecosystem to a few wooded acres behind someone’s house, does it matter? For those who are in the business of protecting wilderness areas, the answer seems to be yes. In the battle to keep the objects or places that wilderness names intact, their qualities must also remain the same.

  But is the Muskwa–Kechika really wild? After all, by its very protection it is a product of human intervention. And if people like Wayne take their pack strings through it, churning their way over the trails, is the ecosystem still intact? Wayne will say the changes made to wilderness by his travelling through it are ephemeral. A few years ago, a couple from Argentina followed Wayne’s route and later asked if he ever lit campfires because they often couldn’t find the places he’d camped.

  For now, the concept of the Muskwa–Kechika seems to remain unchanged. It still possesses the qualities of unroaded valleys and undammed rivers and many unnamed mountains, a place with few mapped routes, where bears and caribou are not habituated to humans, a place where you can ride along a cliff at dusk and hear nothing except the squeak of your saddle—no roar of a gas plant, no vehicles driving by, no hum of a fridge or furnace kicking in. A place where my thoughts seem to echo that silence, reminding me that I need quiet in order to think.

  “Did you feel that?” I say to Wayne when we arrive at camp.

  “Feel what?”

  “The silence.”

  I want to tell him that the silence I felt along the cliff was filled with reverberations, a palpable awareness, as if the rocks, the trees, the stream were tremoring with a sense of consciousness. I want to say that maybe, just as photons need an object to reflect on in order to turn into light, or gravity requires objects of mass in order to be measured, maybe consciousness is its own kind of force, something that requires an object to reflect on in order to turn into thought. I know what Wayne would say: “That’s a bit too woo-wooey for me.” And maybe it is. But how extraordinary that we still don’t know for certain what consciousness is, how, like gravity, we are deeply aware of its presence, but not of its source. Its wildness remains. The very thing that makes us aware eludes “the mind’s appropriations.”

  There is beauty in wilderness—beauty in its physical manifestations and beauty in its capacity to elude us. James Joyce wrote, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.” I love this sentence because it serves as both a question and an answer. When I first read the sentence, I take it as a question—what is the beautiful? But when I read it again, it answers the question—the beautiful is another question—there is beauty in the things we can’t know, in things that escape the mind’s appropriations. Sitting in the alpine on the Caribou Range, or travelling through a silence echoing off the cliff as we near the Prophet River restores me, as though the world were going on without me, bringing me to a place still alive with its own possibilities. Ecologist Aldo Leopold said wilderness “should be big enough to absorb a two-week pack trip.” I think wilderness is a place that has not been appropriated by us, either physically or ontologically, a place that retains its beauty because it escapes us.

  Mayfield Lake: just another day in paradise.

  Twenty-Three

  Sally

  Once upon a time there was a gal named Tessa who sold her horse, Sally, to a fellow named Trevor, to pay for a trip.

  Trevor, a generous soul, told Tessa that, even though he now owned Sally she should still think of the horse as hers and ride her anytime. Trevor kept Sally, a sorrel mare with a white blaze and a brown mane and tail flecked with strands that glittered in the sun like spun gold, at Emilie’s. A few times, on trips home, Tessa would go to Emilie’s to ride her horse. But life got busy, things changed, and she stopped coming. Trevor rode Sally once. Like Tessa’s father, Trevor sometimes drank too much beer, but unlike Tessa’s father, who used to lead Sally to Tessa’s trampoline, get on the trampoline and, on an up-bounce, land on Sally’s back and gallop her as fast as she’d go across the field, Trevor lacked the experience or maybe the coordination, or both, and fell off. His career as a rider ended. Trevor quit paying board fees and Emilie quit thinking of Sally as Trevor’s horse.

  Once or twice each summer, Emilie and I will go riding and I’ll ride Sally. She’s fine-boned, quiet but easily spooked; perhaps the trampoline trick is partly to blame. After our rides, Emilie will always say that I should buy her, that Sally needs someone who understands her, but by the end of the day, Emilie will decide she’s not ready to part with Sally, and I’ll laugh and say that’s okay, I’ve got my eye on an Italian bicycle and the Vancouver seawall.

  This morning I wake up to go riding with Emilie, and no one else is in the house. I can count the number of days on one hand when I’ve been alone this summer. Many of the guests who come and go have become friends—not just with Wayne and me, but with the entire Rolla community. They stay for the social atmosphere, the impromptu parties and the conversations that go late into the night. In the morning, I’ll lie in bed and listen to the voices downstairs, count the number of times the coffee grinder turns on, the number of times the front door opens and shuts. I’ll hear the car doors slam and look out the window at the vehicles as they drive in and out, at the lawn I keep mowed and the flowers, which have been spectacular this year. Some might note the weeds but I’ve given up on the notion of weeding, in part because I’m so short of time and also because the flowers mostly drown out the weeds and what are weeds but wild plants we can’t control, or “misplaced plants,” as the adage goes.

  I don’t go out to hose Comet until it’s nearly noon. It’s a perfect summer day, not a cloud in the sky, the temperature already nearing 30 degrees Celsius. I know there’s lots I should be doing, not the least of which is writing, and so I feel a twinge of guilt as I haul out my riding boots from the basement. I make smoked Gouda and spinach sandwiches, and take a few bottles of cider from the fridge. When Emilie pulls into the yard with her horse trailer, any doubts I’ve had about frittering away my day on a horse ride have vanished. One thing I know for sure is that there has never been a moment wasted in Emilie’s company.

  With our lunch, my hat and my gloves, I hop into Emilie’s truck. We drive a few miles north on the Rolla Road to the Peace View Cemetery. Like most of the cemeteries in this country, this one, set on the bank of the Kiskatinaw River, has an excellent view. Northeast past the rolling hills and the bleached clay cliffs, you can see where the river flows into the Peace. The Kiskatinaw is the river I love; it’s the one I grew up by. On the one hand I love seeing the river, but on the other hand I dread the nostalgia and feeling of loss that brings. I know by heart the dirt trails to the river, the swimming holes and, as summer wears on and the water becomes shallow and clear, where to wade for ammonites, their fluted shapes catching my eye. I know the bend in the river where the geology changes and the fossils become more clam-like and where a hill glitters with gypsum. My father had shown me all those places as a child, and then, when their turn came, he showed my children.

  There is an old metal archway you have to pass beneath to reach the Peace View Cemetery, the archway painted white, the name in raised metal letters, and on the back of the arch, the words god bless you, rusted and faded but still blinding in the glare of the afternoon sun. We park on a grassy
knoll and unload the horses, cracking open a cider as we put on our horses’ saddles and bridles. We ride down the road until we come to a small opening in the trees and go through it, finding ourselves on an atv trail that winds through poplars lush with leaves—a trail that gently descends to the river.

  I remain a self-conscious rider. I ride as though I am being watched. And most of the time I am. Emilie analyzes whether I’m sitting the horse, or sitting on the horse, whether or not my feet are properly set in the stirrups. Do I look at ease? Like me, the horses know Emilie is their leader.

  The riders who go into the mountains with Wayne include plenty of skilled horse people, but there are also those who have never ridden before. The horses are accustomed to that and the riders learn that they need only to be balanced and alert and the horses will take them where they need to go. Emilie likes to say that the horses on Wayne’s pack string carry people like baggage. When I ride with Emilie I try not to be baggage, so every now and then I get Sally to trot up beside Emilie, and a few times we pass her and take the lead. I can do it, but it’s work. When we reach the river we stop to eat our lunch along the bank. Watching the brown water rush by, I realize again how much I miss its silty current, the sheer clay banks, the swallows nesting beneath the cliff’s overhang. But the rocks along the shore on this part of the river are different from those where I grew up. Here the rocks are not fossil-like. They are just regular stones.