greenstorm (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
greenstorm) wrote2022-04-02 12:02 pm
greenstorm) wrote2022-04-02 12:02 pm
We drove down the canyon
to bring him and his car to his new home. I wasn't going to go and then I did, loading the animals up with feed to give myself an extra 36 hours away. I was so focused on his leaving that I'd forgotten the canyon isn't immutable.
April is the cruellest month.
I don't know when I was down it last, we'd gone as far as a vacation in Quesnel one summer during the fires and early in plague times. Past that we'd driven it together but not for years.
The highway has become familiar. The first time I took it was a midnight greyhound to Prince George, back when there were greyhounds. I dozed in the dark comforting rumble of seats and woke as tree planters piled in with each stop, all laden with tents and shovels. That was the birth canal for my new life and I stumbled out of it blinking in the light into a cracked parking lot.
This was the world of people who could say "I hate driving in the city" and mean somewhere with two stoplights or three four-way stops in a row. Pickup trucks, people who smile at strangers in public, the boundless and welcoming landscape that loves people more than any landscape I've known.
Marie, Marie, hold on tight and down we went
Now I'm leaving the world, maybe for a little while, maybe forever. I'll drive the canyon one more time, the last time, with my pickup and my trailer and my smiling at strangers and my heart in tatters. That will almost certainly be in months, June or July or even August. I read that it takes on average 11 weeks for the intense part of grief to pass; I'll wait for grief for Tucker to pass before I modern the north.
That's not what I came here to say though. I came here to have my words broken by the magnitude of the canyon.
Last fall it rained. There were 22 slides that shut down the canyon; every highway to the interior and the north was shut down. The roads were washed into the mighty Fraser along with the railroads. They reopened months ago. The canyon has always been dramatic, winding you up through switchbacks and desert only to stand you on your nose around tight corners all the way down. Now it's even more dramatic, with the Fraser's smaller inconstant tributories scoured out of the highway and recapped by fresh asphalt and temporary forestry bridges.
The whole canyon is too big to awe a traveler within it but the efforts to repair the roads are on a human scale and are a suitable target for such awe.
But before the floods, heading down and in the months that measured out lay summer, there was the fire. Lytton hit the Canadian record for heat, 50C. Three days later a spark caught and within much less than an hour the town had burned down; miles of gravel hillside studded with scorched ponderosa pine stand in tribute now, and the nothing that was a town is screened by privacy fencing.
Everything is changed.
I write this on my phone in the airport on the way home. There's more to write but I needed it down here. The canyon; Tucker; my life. Everything changes. Everything has changed. Those paths I've walked can never be walked again.
Still, halfway down, there's a plum tree I planted in what used to be Josh's yard. In a few weeks it will flower.
I can never understand the world. I'm just part of it.
April is the cruellest month.
I don't know when I was down it last, we'd gone as far as a vacation in Quesnel one summer during the fires and early in plague times. Past that we'd driven it together but not for years.
The highway has become familiar. The first time I took it was a midnight greyhound to Prince George, back when there were greyhounds. I dozed in the dark comforting rumble of seats and woke as tree planters piled in with each stop, all laden with tents and shovels. That was the birth canal for my new life and I stumbled out of it blinking in the light into a cracked parking lot.
This was the world of people who could say "I hate driving in the city" and mean somewhere with two stoplights or three four-way stops in a row. Pickup trucks, people who smile at strangers in public, the boundless and welcoming landscape that loves people more than any landscape I've known.
Marie, Marie, hold on tight and down we went
Now I'm leaving the world, maybe for a little while, maybe forever. I'll drive the canyon one more time, the last time, with my pickup and my trailer and my smiling at strangers and my heart in tatters. That will almost certainly be in months, June or July or even August. I read that it takes on average 11 weeks for the intense part of grief to pass; I'll wait for grief for Tucker to pass before I modern the north.
That's not what I came here to say though. I came here to have my words broken by the magnitude of the canyon.
Last fall it rained. There were 22 slides that shut down the canyon; every highway to the interior and the north was shut down. The roads were washed into the mighty Fraser along with the railroads. They reopened months ago. The canyon has always been dramatic, winding you up through switchbacks and desert only to stand you on your nose around tight corners all the way down. Now it's even more dramatic, with the Fraser's smaller inconstant tributories scoured out of the highway and recapped by fresh asphalt and temporary forestry bridges.
The whole canyon is too big to awe a traveler within it but the efforts to repair the roads are on a human scale and are a suitable target for such awe.
But before the floods, heading down and in the months that measured out lay summer, there was the fire. Lytton hit the Canadian record for heat, 50C. Three days later a spark caught and within much less than an hour the town had burned down; miles of gravel hillside studded with scorched ponderosa pine stand in tribute now, and the nothing that was a town is screened by privacy fencing.
Everything is changed.
I write this on my phone in the airport on the way home. There's more to write but I needed it down here. The canyon; Tucker; my life. Everything changes. Everything has changed. Those paths I've walked can never be walked again.
Still, halfway down, there's a plum tree I planted in what used to be Josh's yard. In a few weeks it will flower.
I can never understand the world. I'm just part of it.
no subject
it will flower.
<3 <3 <3
this whole thing reads like a poem. i can see the canyon, the roads, the fire, the plum tree. the change piled upon change.
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chamisa (rabbitbrush) is the biggest local allergen in pollen season, ha. besides junipers. very important to local ecology in that it is a great bird-food and animal-hiding/food plant, and it stablizes the soil in washed out heavy clay areas that get intermittent heavy rainfall and periods of drought/flood.
no subject
Definitely that soil needs stabilization. Come to think of it, the slides mostly occurred deeper in the canyon, where the douglas fir was starting to think about shifting to the coastal type or right before, and after the brushy dry areas.
One of the forestry projects in BC right now is to prevent the dry open treeless areas from expanding, and to keep some ponderosa/doug fir on the landscape as climate change occurs-- without a dense enough pattern that it leads to more fires.
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I'm super into prickly pears, they're edible and sculptural and neat. I have some seeds from hardy east coast ones I'm trying to grow right now. I may actually have enough indoor space to keep some fun ones in there after this summer, too.
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they are beautiful! i particularly like the kind in this icon, with really round consistently green (vs red) pads, and big fruit.
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Red pads! Goodness. Do you have a patch on SR for use?
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we don't have any at SR! becuase we flood irrigate the entire back acreage and have a lot of tall elm shade, most of our land isn't actually great for cactus. i'm putting in a teensy cactus garden, 3x8', in front by the wall where it'll get enough heat. probably claret-cup and queen victoria agave to start - both are small, slow-growing, and manageable, and claret cup is stunning in bloom, such a vivid red it looks unreal. i would love an ocotillo if we could figure out a good spot for one. opuntia gets huge and sprawls, so we haven't figured out where would be good for it.
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it's everywhere here - it's native, and i wouldn't describe it as invasive, but it is very common, and tends to occupy big open spaces with limited creosote (which is invasive AF and takes over), but it is often found in community with cholla, prickly pear, many local artemisias including tridentata and NM sand sage and wormwood and whatnot, junipers, snakeweed, & other small grassy things.
no subject
Juniper we have up here, though only I believe two kinds. One is more tree-like and one is flat on gravelly highway cuts and high rock outcroppings.
I've never been through when chamisa is flowering.
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