it's 9:52 pm, on December 22, 2002 - the Great Divide.
~
this is all from the plane ride back from toronto. an important lesson to learn goes "one cannot cure a sadness of the mind by moving the body from place to place." that's a butchered quote, but it's close enough.
also, there is no sadness in me, don't think that. this is just the travel book eventually I'm going to end up writing. by accident.
~
We are all products of our environments, it's true. But that isn't just our home environment -- it's geographical as well. The flight was from Calgary to Abbotsford, an hour and a half, and the trip stands for a huge gulf of spirit, not to mention landscape. In the Westjet inflight magazine, there was a quote that went, "I live in a province that is barricaded physically, and some would say psychologically, from the rest of the country by wall after wall of peaks and glaciers."
This barricade that we flew over is visible, it's tangible. I could look down and see in the moonlight that very physical barrier between my environment and the rest of the country. The ranges out the plane window were covered in snow, sharp. Not weathered. Al says that the Smoky mountains are the oldest in the world -- or at least, I think it was the smoky mountains. She drove through the oldest mountain range in the world, whichever they were. Anyway, the point is, it wouldn't surprise me to find the mountains of BC to be some of the youngest.
Everything on the west coast has a kind of new feeling, a lack of history Al calls it. It means that those of us who live here feel like foreigners on this soil, rather than having a place. In another Carolyn entry, I wrote "Next to the Pacific Ocean, everything natural seems startling even as it is all around her. Everything unnatural is startling too. Life is startling." it still feels that way. We are foreigners, and even our landscape confirms it.
It should have been pitch black out there and yet I could see snow thanks to what could only have been light reflected from the moon. It pointed out in sharp, silver relief the barrier to my home -- those rock crags and mountains that extend all the way to the Pacific Ocean, throughout the whole province. People in British Columbia basically live in pockets, little displaced hollows between mountains and water. Beautiful, but psychologically isolated.
Physical, geographical environment, then, shapes self. Al's probably said that before, maybe lots of people have. It's just very striking, looking down on the process itself from forty one thousand feet.
The more I travel the more I'm convinced that Vancouver really is a city isolated like few others in North America. We have the city itself, and then several large towns within a day's drive -- the roads being hard to traverse and entirely demonstrative of this isolation as well. The view on say, the Sea to Sky highway from Vancouver to Whistler is all rock crags and inlets, the road itself is carved out of the mountain -- and so many other highways in the province are the same.
The area to the north is even more remote, and south is an invisible barrier, that of the border separating a culture perceived to have enough subtle differences that Seattle is the only American city which we might ever call neighbor. Mountains, sea, wilderness, and the US border compose our east, west, north and south -- with British Columbia tucked in a small pocket in the middle.
Vancouver imprints itself on the people that live there, and you can feel it acutely looking down at the landscape rushing by, the Great Divide that spreads out below you when travelling from Alberta to BC. I've grown up on the west coast, spent my entire life here, and it's becoming fairly plain that whether I move east, or south, I'll never really leave.
~
-
what would sith be nostalgic about anyway - November 24, 2015
moving truck dilemma - October 28, 2015
- - July 19, 2015
- - July 01, 2015
bruise - June 29, 2015
-