One Moment of Wildness

There was a time in my life when I spent every spare moment in wildness.

I was raised with wildness at my back. Beyond the mown expanse of weeds and the thousand square-foot vegetable garden that was our back yard in Porcupine, Ontario, was a field of tangled shrubs and small trees bordered by an old double track road; beyond that a small creek sheltered by willows; beyond that a single paper birch that stood on the edge of Mr. Mackey’s field; and finally, the rough second grown pine forest that defined my childhood and gave birth to my taste for nature.

These woods, and those that rambled away beyond the squared log home that my grandparents lived in for more than forty years on the Palmour Mine property, were the geography of my childhood.

(above, walking with my sister along the double track behind our home in Porcupine;
below, the paper birch and Mr. Mackey's field, with woods beyond)

Singular moments: cross country skiing on the trails that Lucien cut through the woods behind his home, and coming to the place where like a miracle, cookies would materialize form the worn pack he always carried; cookies no doubt hastily packed by my whirlwind of a Grand-mare, Evelyn. I remember one particular day as if it were yesterday; it was just he and I -- Grandfather and grandson – and a gift of precious time that will never occur again.

Singular moments: hunting for grouse with my father behind our Porcupine home. My father was a good marksman who won trophies for trap-shooting. To watch him stop, swing the Winchester shotgun to his shoulder and fire in one fluid motion was a heart stopping sight for a boy of seven or eight. There would be an explosion of leaves and small branches in the woods and then he would walk into the foliage and return with a partridge, its body perfectly intact but its head astonishingly absent. My father would then field dress the bird and put it in his back while the acrid scent of gunpowder dispersed in the crisp autumn air.

(Above, my grandparents square log house on the Palmour mine site property;
below, after a day's hunting)

Singular moments: during the summer of 1979, when we lived in Elliot Lake for a short time, building a fort in the well of a tree that had been toppled in a storm in a woodlot behind our house. We hollowed out the well and using scrap lumber and garbage bags built an igloo like structure which we convinced our parents to let us sleep in one night. I was eight; just a little older than my eldest son Rio is today.

I lasted until sometime after midnight. Of all the phantasmal sounds that haunted those woods, it was an ant that finally sent me indoors. We had an old 8-volt battery powered light in our hut with us, and it’s beam was angled upwards toward the ceiling. In the circle of light it cast we watched, horrified, as a giant creature circled our hut again and again, its shadow pressed against the flimsy plastic fabric of our makeshift walls. As the creature roved around the circumference of our abode, we would each in turn cower as it drew close to our backs. It finally dawned on one of us that if we were seeing the shadow inside the hut, then the beast had to be inside too: which is when we noted the ant running in manic circles around the rim of the upturned flashlight.

Skiing with my grandfather, hunting and fishing with my dad, camping with my buddies in a plot of forest spared the saw and the subdivision, fishing, hiking, the annual Christmas-tree hunt in the back-forty, walking with my sister to inspect robin’s eggs in the trees beyond the big garden: these and a hundred other moments of wildness are what shaped me and created who I am today.

Which is why I find it so perplexing that I have moved so far from my connection to wildness. And why, when recently Jenn and I spent a long weekend in the Rockies that a single day in a wild, out-of-the-way place made my heart ache for more singular moments of wildness.

There is a creek that snakes its way between Mount Andromache and an unnamed peak to join with the Bow River just south of Mosquito Creek in Banff National Park, Alberta. The creek’s name is Noseeum: it’s named for an animal the size of a dust mote with teeth like a saber tooth cat’s. This was our destination one hot afternoon over the August long weekend: It’s a place I’ve been twice before, and have wanted to share with Jenn since we became a couple two years ago.

I moved to the Rockies in 1992. After a single season working for the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources as a student Park Naturalist at Murphy’s Point Provincial Park, I got a dream job as a natural history interpreter in Lake Louise, in Banff. I knew nothing about the mountains, but over time learned just enough to stay alive and employed, in part thanks to the fact that my lot was thrown in with veteran park staffers Jim Wood and Jack Loustinau. For three or four summers I lived with Jim, Jack and a motley collection of other seasonal park staff in a dark, dank, dismal locale called Charleston Residence. But we were rarely there. We spent our time outside and it was that time that defines my experience in the Mountain Parks. We hiked. We hiked a lot. And in 1993 when Jim and Jack and I met Josh – who is now a Doctor of Physiology but was then a sheet snapper at the Lake Louise Inn – we became a team.

But it was Jim Wood who provided my inaugural experience with the true wildness of Banff National Park. It was Jim who taught me how to pack for a trip, what to wear, how to read a topographic map and use a compass, and how to travel “off-trail.” In short, it was Jim who taught me to take my adventuring in the parks beyond the carefully scripted descriptions in the guide-books (most of which were written by friends, and which are invaluable) and into the vast regions of the Parks seldom seen and rarely visited by people.

It was Jim took me up Noseeum Creek for the first time. It was early June of 1992; I’d been in the Rockies for five or six weeks, and Noseeum Creek and the high mountain passes beyond were to be my first off-trail adventure.

Like the singular moments with my father and grandfather, this one is engrained in my recollection.

Jenn and I shoulder day packs and head up the south side of the creek. The afternoon is warm, and within minutes we’ve feeling the sun boring into us. We find the familiar cadence of walking and talking and inside of an hour we’re at the base of a steep cliff where waterfalls thunder through a deep gorge and trip across ancient stone cast aside in the last ice age. From here we can see where Jim Wood and I made our accent of the limestone steps that lead to Noseeum Creek’s headwaters: a narrow gulf strewn with boulders that provides a steep egress to a table-like plateau nearly two thousand feet above us.

Jenn and I take a more circuitous route, but one with fewer objective hazards (fancy mountaineer talk that rocks that might fall on your head). After plugging up the mouth of the creek with where it surges from its canyon with stepping stones we jump across and scramble up the headwall. Another ten minutes and we’re reaching the top of the first of many deceptive benches that will eventually lead to a sparkling, melt-water lake. But we won’t reach the glistening waters before succumbing to the erroneous relief of numerous false summits.

(Near the headwaters of Noseeum Creek)

The day that Jim and I ventured up Noseeum Creek was overcast, the clouds pressed tightly down on the headwaters of the creek, so that when we finally exited the narrow chimney, we were cloaked dank, grey cloud-cover. We didn’t have the spectacular view that Jenn and I enjoy of Mount Andromache and the Molar Glacier to buoy our spirits. It’s probably for the best, because I was already tired, and a little scared, and if I’d seen where we were heading I probably would have protested even more than I already was.

On the hot afternoon in August, my wife and I look back at the long, sensuous ridge of Mount Andromache and I can’t help but retell the story of Josh and my accent of that peak. It was during the feverish summer of 1995 when he and I climbed peaks before work and after work and on the weekends. In one frantic week Josh and I ascended five mountains and got turned back by a sixth. Mount Andromache was one of the five, and it was a lovely scramble on a perfect morning. I later wrote an unfortunately worded account of that climb for the Alpine Club newsletter in which I stated that Josh and I lost our innocence on that peak. That of course could be misconstrued: all I meant to say was that because we thought the peak’s name was Andrew Mackey, and not Andromache, we hadn’t found any climbing bata on the peak, and so our route was of our own making.

That’s all. No harm intended.

I shake my head at the memory of the awkward mistake, and at a time when all I did was wake up at four a.m. and bag peaks with my best friend.

It wasn’t so long ago, really.

Jenn and I weave our way through a steep, forested glade, crossing another creek below a tantalizing waterfall, its spray filling the air with a cool mist scented with the essence of a mountain wilderness: sun warmed pines tinged with seared limestone. I’ve written this so often over the last twenty years that I fear that I’m plagiarizing my own words: it is moving water is what stirs me and awakens me the most in nature. Our bodies are almost entirely composed of water so that when next to a cascading creek or river I find it nearly impossible to ignore my kinship with the blood of the earth.

Of course, Wallace Stegner said it best when he wrote, in The Sound of Mountain Water that “[b]y such a river it is impossible to believe that one will ever be tired or old. Every sense applauds it. Taste it, feel its chill on the teeth: it is purity absolute. Watch is racing current, its steady renewal of force: it is transient and eternal.”

Stegner may not have known it (or he very well may have) but at a quantum level water is of course both transient and eternal, as are we. Transient because like all matter, the tiniest components of our water-born bodies are flickering in and out of existence at the speed of light; eternal because these particles that make up this cascade and my own sweat and blood are nothing more than energy and information, born of a star eleven billion years ago, recycled over and over, assembled and reassembled as man and forest and canyon and yes, as mountain water.

Just as the boundaries between ourselves and the world around us are fanciful demarcations, nowhere more so than when seated next to, or standing in, an icy creek high in the mountain wild.

Upwards again, urging our protesting legs to plod along a small rise, we surmount yet another bench of tilted limestone. Jenn lies down in the sun while I scout our route, wondering just where the hell this lake has gotten too since I was last here more than a decade ago. I scramble up another fifty foot high step and spot the reclusive thing and then see Jenn striding along below. Reunited, we make the final approach to the shimmering lake and find a place in the shade to cool off.

All around the landscape is bare and devoid of vegetation. This is raw earth, not so long ago beneath the rapidly receding Molar Glacier or its kin. Unnamed peaks rise up all around, dip and fold and are cut through by rivets of melt water. A few snow patches cling to the mountain sides below the merciless sun. Above, another few kilometers walking, is the saddle that Jim and I crossed into the next watershed on our journey.

I’m not normally one to take the plunge, but being a coastal boy these days, the opportunity to cool my heels (etc…) in a mountain lake is rare, so I strip down and dive in. Jenn complains that she might have missed the event while taking pictures so insists I do a repeat performance. I oblige, shouting and stammering as I cut the frigid waters.

When Jim and I reached the lake we kept on walking right by, crossing that high col above the watery shores to reach the headwaters of the Molar Creek and South Molar Pass. From our extraordinary vantage point we could look down on a herd of elk – and no tame town elk these but a wild lot never having munched someone’s front lawn or manicured hedge or roadside verge.

From there Jim and I carried on, dropping down to the Molar meadows, traversing miles of hummocky terrain that taught me my first real lessons in off-trail travel – don’t get frustrated -- and finally connecting with the Mosquito Creek Trail. The last dozen kilometers of our walk were on that well worn path. It was my first really big hike in the Rockies; counting couldn’t number all those to follow.

In 1992 I was just discovering what it means to be alive, on this glorious earth, in a wild place untrammeled by people. Today, eighteen years after I first visited the headwaters of Noseeum Creek, I am remembering again all those vital lessons.

Though sore feet and aching legs might have obscured it at the time, my long day in the mountains with Jim Woods was one catalyzing moment of a profound relationship with the earth. What began with my forays into the spruce and pine forests and on the crystal lakes of Northern Ontario became a vocation for me during the summers of 1991 through 1996 when I hiked a thousand kilometers a year, many of them in an Ontario MNR, Parks Canada or US Park Service Volunteer uniform.

But more than that, being amid the wildness of Banff and the other Mountain National Parks became a portal through which my perception of the world changed, and my place in it right along with it.

I didn’t have the language for it at the time, but even then I was aware that through my exploration of the natural world I was delving into my spiritual connection to the universe beyond. Then I spoke of nature and the mountains, and later the canyons of Arizona and Utah, as my temples, my houses of the holy. And of course they still are.

Now, I can add to this. Simply put, when immersed in wild country I know that I am closer to the basic elements of creation than nearly anywhere else. In the canyons of Utah, the folded peaks of the Rocky Mountains, my childhood forests of the North, or on a wild beach at lands end I might touch the raw fabric of existence. That of human making only adds to the barriers which obscure our relationship with the fundamental truth of existence: we are all incontrovertibly one.

(Jenn along the table land near Noseeum Lake, with Mount Andromache beyond. Josh and I walked up the ridge that forms the right hand sky line and then traversed above the Molar Glacier to the summit.)

Since childhood I have experienced moments of blissful connection with the earth and the sky and those I love while in wild places. Here the illusionary boundaries between me and the living earth, its myriad creatures the universe beyond are less palpable. Here I can, for brief moments, experience the rock solid earth as part of the quantum soup that we wade through, unseeing, most every day.

These are singular moments: not unlike the feeling of connection that comes from a moment shared between father and son or grandfather and grandson, we are connected to this sacred earth in ways more holy and more profound than we have the senses to perceive.

Jenn and I return to the car. We drive into Lake Louise, and for nostalgia’s sake, drink a cold beer and eat dinner at Bill Peyto’s Café at the Hostel. If we were to slip a Blue Rodeo CD into the stereo it would complete the reminiscence. We’re both dirty and sun burnt and a little tired, but exuberant for having been in the mountains for a day. I love my wife in all ways, but in no way more than when we are together in wild country.

I remember now what propelled me up so many trails, over so many unmarked passes between wild valleys, to the summit of so many craggy peaks: immersion in the world around me. Immersion: It’s what I’ve been missing living apart from wild places. It’s what my decisions over the last five years have cost me. And though I don’t regret the outcome of those decisions, I’m ready to invite more wild moments into my life again.

The moving away from is of course as natural as the desire to reunite. And now, of course, I have so much more to bring back into the wild that might help me see it as I really is. And so much less to get in the way of that view. One moment of wildness can reveal all that there is to know about the real nature of this universe of mysteries. One moment of wildness is a window unto the vast, sparkling nature of the soul.

(Bliss: the rope swing and the man who built it - my grandfather Lucien Legault - and me, around 1976 or so. The swing dates to when my father was a boy. I really wish I had a coat like that now....)

Note: My thanks to my father, Bob Legault, for taking such good care of our childhood images, and for scanning them recently for a fabulous slide show at my wedding to Jenn. We are very grateful.