Days 21-24: Humbled by Nature and Home Again

Shouldn’t it be easy to find a coffee shop on a Saturday morning that isn’t a Tim Horton’s or a Starbucks in the downtown of a major city? This was my quest in Calgary, and I was failing. I found two independent shops, which were both closed. Perhaps it was because I was wandering in the very bourgeois oil corridor of Calgary, surrounded by the most phallic expressions of the fossil fuel economy in Canada–Suncor Energy Centre, Transcanada Tower, Shell Centre, and smaller headquarters for Conoco Phillips, Husky, and more–where the demand for coffee is quick, predictable and corporate. I’d heard from many people that I’d like Calgary, but I wasn’t comfortable there. During my coffee search, which was more about free wifi than caffeine (the only way I can use my phone in Canada), a haggard old man approached on the sidewalk, looking out of place in the silver gleam of skyscrapers. He was mumbling and looking down to his shuffling feet until he was about four feet away from me when he abruptly looked up, pointed at me, and very clearly said, “Better go now. Nothing for you here.”, before continuing on his way.

“That was weird”, I thought, but not outstandingly so and actually less strange than many meth-fueled sidewalk encounters I’ve had in Spokane. I was seeking wifi hoping to find better directions to the Unist’ot’en Camp where I planned to drive that day, referred from the Rosebud Spirit Camp where I’d just been in South Dakota. The two camps are somewhat similar in nature, but the Unist’ot’en Camp is much closer to the point of extraction and has already been involved in direct confrontation with Chevron and other authorities as they block fossil fuel development in their land. I had a comfortable conception of where I needed to go and decided to just get driving and figure out the details as I went, knowing I had some hours both north and west and no one to meet in Calgary on a Saturday.

I drove north first, enjoying the breeze through open windows and clouds that appeared then as entirely benign. The highway is two lanes, and surrounded by flat farmland. When the wind picked up, it picked all the way up. The rain started all at once and I had not known until then that rain could, indeed, fall in sheets instead of drops. Within minutes, significant standing water had overwhelmed the road. Visibility reduced to almost nothing between the heavy rain and the spray from other cars and semi trucks driving through the collected water. The first wind gust thankfully pushed everyone in tandem without triggering any collisions, but the following gusts pushed first one semi off the highway to the shoulder and then another. With no exit in sight, the rest of the drivers, myself included, had to maintain speed and wait it out. The storm only got worse. With the radio on scan, I heard a severe thunderstorm warning, followed by a tornado warning to the west. I looked left, and the sky was turning green. Maybe the old man on the street was right, maybe there was nothing for me here.

When an exit finally appeared through the street mist, I took it and paused to consider my options. As much as I wanted to see the camp (and still do), I didn’t want to drive through a potential tornado and risk my life on a terrifying road to do so. My original plan was to head to my grandma’s house, in eastern Washington just on the U.S. side of the border with B.C. the following night, but I realized that if I headed back south, I could probably make it there sooner and catch up on writing and see my family before heading home. The storm was traveling north, too, so when I turned around I was out of the worst of it before long.

Looking at the map, I realized I could go either north slightly through Banff and then drop due south to Osoyoos, or I could go south through the Crowsnest Pass and follow a different highway along the border. Not sure where the mountains were least passable, I asked a gas station attendant for her advice. She said, “Take Crowsnest, you’ll be in the mountains a while but then it should all be valleys and farms. Much faster.” A while, it turned out, is a measurement which leaves a great deal of room for interpretation. I knew that I’d be pushing the timing to get to the border by dark or close after, but decided to start anyway. Crowsnest Pass is beautiful and takes you across a stretch of the Canadian Rockies in winding sweeps with mercifully frequent passing lanes for the logging trucks that share the road.

Before long, a storm nearly as bad as the one I had just escaped hit the mountains. The same sheets of rain, but less dense traffic and better drainage made it easier to navigate. As the hours unwound, dripping rain intermittently, I kept thinking each mountain ahead had to be the last and that I would descend into the valleys that the woman at the gas station had promised. Darkness came as each new curve revealed imposing layers of more mountains. And more. And more. By the time the rain had transformed into thick mist and conquered the road with its clouds, my faculties were beginning to dim. In my brights, the mist reached tendrils around my hood, burst suddenly against the windshield, withdrew, glowed bright and shifted in speed and stillness in tricks of relativity made to make me feel unconvinced of my own motion.

By crunching the numbers on the frequent signs to see assure myself of progress and listening to the one CD of music I had with me (thanks Gavin and Katie!), I retained some sanity. Signs warned of falling rocks, tipping trucks, and surprisingly, caribou on road. Were there caribou this far south? I thought that the mist’s aggressive whiteness might be tempered if I turned off my brights. It worked, but after a few miles kilometers, something whispered “Turn your brights back on”. I don’t know what to credit for that strong impulse, but when I turned them on, there were eyes glowing back through the mist. In the road, a massive caribou– in my lane and of equal bulk to my car.

He didn’t budge when I passed just in time, just watched me go past, probably well aware of his size advantage. I pressed on, thoroughly freaked out, but determined to make it through the mountains. They had to end soon. Now on the lookout for wildlife, I continued to navigate the mist and listen to this wonderful album on repeat. I saw on my left a smaller animal in the road and slowed down. A dog, who rushed my car as I approached. I slammed on the brakes and time slowed down enough for us to make eye contact through my driver side window. He looked like the dog I had growing up and had a Lassie face on that said “Help, bring help” like he was flagging me down at the driveway. By this point my imagination was in high gear and I couldn’t help but think that something awful was happening down that dog’s driveway. I hadn’t seen another car in forty minutes on this remote stretch and was too afraid to stop. I hope that nothing horrible was happening, but I didn’t stop to find out what that dog needed or if he was just feeling like it was time to die in the road.

I kept driving and the road opened up next to a river, the Moyie, and I realized that I was just across from a place in northern Idaho where my family has been camping for the last few summers. I thought about swimming with my sisters and hoped that a second caribou wouldn’t cut short my possibility to do that again this summer. Somehow, perhaps due to the tiny size of road signs north of the border, I ended up turning towards the U.S. border by accident. On that wrong road, a sign confirmed that I was as close to that place as I thought and at the bottom of the list of upcoming towns, “Spokane: 240 km”.  Just seeing it in print underscored all of the stress of this drive and the accumulated overwhelming topics I’d been grappling with on this trip and throughout my life. I thought about how easy it would be to just drive home and sleep in my own bed. It’s cliche, but there really is no place like home, even when your home is a little dirty and small and disappointing sometimes, and I was Dorothy right down to the tornado that set off this whole side adventure.

At least three times that day, I had thought that I would die from either a drifting semi or car, or from animals in the road, or from the sheer force of nature. When I saw the mileage sign, I was overwhelmed by a desire to not die yet. I realized I’d been driving for the better part of 12 hours and that I wouldn’t make it through the storm to the border in an intact mental state, so I stopped in Castlegar at a cheap motel. The room looked just like the set of a particular episode of The X Files that I remembered seeing as a kid, but it was no time to be choosy, nor paranoid about further darkness. I cried, and slept, and set out in the morning. I made it to my grandma’s house, which in some ways is the most intact childhood home that I have, and visited with my mom and my grandma and my aunts and uncles. I got to work a bit and eat delicious food and then drive back to Spokane following my mom, who was also returning that day.

We met up at our traditional road food spot, Billy Burgers in Wilbur, WA, on the way back and talked and devoured french fries and Cokes, a mutual guilty pleasure that must be the result of a genetic predisposition. It isn’t far to Spokane from there and I have never been as excited to see my beloved, dirty, brick-and-grey little city.

Obviously, I was fairly disappointed in those days in Alberta and B.C. which were both more expensive than anticipated and, thanks to weather and last-minute planning, a relative bust from a logistical or results point of view. All I can really gather from that time is the feeling that I had multiple times during those days, that really started in talking with Rachel about Yellowstone before, that humans are basically powerless against the incredible scale and power of the natural world. Especially against the backdrop of talking to people about plans for adapting to the violent and dramatic changes which we’re already beginning to see in our climate, to lovely and passionate people who want so much for us to succeed in living here a little longer, it’s sobering, but also oddly comforting, to see how easily our plans, our roads, our imposition of our will, can fail and be crushed without notice given. Humans have been talking loudly and stomping about and taking what we want without regard for balance for some time now. At this point, we can still try to regain some of that balance and respect and humility before the awe-inspiring power of the planet, but it seems clear that nature will get the last word. So we’ll drive into the unfamiliarity of the storm, hoping that we’re told when to turn our brights back on.