So there's this thing, I don't want to call it a game, but maybe that's what it is, a drinking game, let's call it, where we shame ourselves by admitting the truly awful things we've done, or the tackiest, or perhaps the meanest, the dumbest, or the most plain humiliating. So, here's mine.
Think I was truly having a breakdown, or a midlife catastrophe, right at the turn of the millennium, that cusp of memory and forgetfulness, a fulcrum upon which, in Kathleen Edwards' words, "you spend half your life trying to turn the other half around." And sure, I've already told the later chapters of this tawdry little tale, in which I embarked on my ten-thousand kilometre transcontinental vision quest, even published a short book about it, but never this. Not until now.
Before that idea even occured, it was a particularly bleak winter. Not gonna get too emo here, but you know, aside from all the overt angst and the hot, roiling subcurrents of shudderingly wrong memories still only suspected at this point, my overriding feeling was fear. Fear of myself, of the future, of others, for others, of GETTING THIS WHOLE THING DESPERATELY, IRREVOCABLY WRONG. Whatever. Just fear. You feel me?
So in January of 2001, I went and spent some time alone in a cabin. In the region of British Columbia laughably (in this context, anyway) called The Sunshine Coast. 'Cause there ain't no sunshine there back then, not for me, not that winter. And I mean that entirely subjectively. Wait, no. Objectively. Whatever, I always get those mixed up. It felt especially cold as I stayed in a cute but paperthin cabin where cedar branches sagged under their frigid burdens beside the icy turbulent waters of Skookumchuck Narrows, where the tide waters are forced through the narrows forming the Sechelt Rapids. It's wild in every sense, but especially in January.
And yeah, I might still have thought I was going back to working with the street kids who had broken my heart (not their fault), and I was playing with writing again, having had an article published on the website of one of my remote, austere heroes, but what was I thinking... and what would I do? The thing is, I know exactly what I was thinking, at least: that not only could I heal some odd, male part of me through the solitary simplicity of living a handful of days in a remote cabin held in winter's grip, but I could begin to live the life, adopt the trappings, wear the elbow-patched jacket of a... Real Writer™.
Yes, I know. But it gets worse.
I'll just blurt it out, pass it off as if I'm gagging: Dostoyevsky. Uh-huh. A copy of Crime and Punishment, an acoustic guitar, a pre-iPod era boombox with a limited selection of CDs, one of which was OK Computer, I kid you not, and a large notepad (with rollerpoint pens) since I didn't even have a laptop back then, for shame. You need to say this next bit in Nigel Tufnel's humble voice: So what will you be paying for, sir? Oh yes, the wannabe writer's budget package. Cold, isolated cabin? Check. Raging waters nearby? Check. Heavy Russian reading material? Check. Dystopian UK music about alienation? Check. Acoustic guitar? Check. Forty-pounder of rum? Check. Hiking boots? Check. Hatchet? Check.
You get the picture. Some Kerouac bullshit, right?
But here's the funny part, the unexpected twist. It kind of worked. I wrote. I wrote scads. It's still there, in that notebook. Mostly crap, of course, many spidery lines of abandoned poetry and philosophical musings that would embarrass a fourteen-year-old. But still, however much I cringe at the posturing of it all, I found I'd grown into a slightly different skin after all was said and done.
There was a moment. A song played, but low volume, an insectile murmur. I was whittling cedar with gloved hands into kindling for a tiny wood stove that burned up quality birch and alder stovelengths way too fast. I had a beer beside me, and more than one inside. The air was clean, like the cool hush of an ancient Triassic rainforest, so clean it made me want to cry for all the worlds we won't ever get back or even see. And maybe I did cry for a moment. Yet wrapped up inside of all that was thankfulness. That I was alive. That although my fingers ached with the cold and I couldn't even play my damn guitar, I had all the things that make us happy, and that the final pieces in the jigsaw are the friends and family we choose, and that I'd see them soon, however content I felt in that moment, in that splendid isolation.
Yeah. Maybe that's all that needs to be said here, and I'll surely get gone now.