Greenstorm's Journal

So one of the reasons I came up to Fort particularly is to work with my friend/ex-boss Ron, who moved up here about the time I first took a summer student position in this town. In fact, we started in the same month-- he was friends with the folks who worked at my old job and so he felt maybe more integrated than me. Anyhow, I worked the summer here, went and tried another place the following summer, and in the middle of that summer texted Ron to say "can I come work for you permanently henceforth" and he made it happen. We worked really well together but I tended to keep a layer of distance, because he was my boss, though the structure felt pretty non-hierachical.

Since that company dissolved I've been going over occasionally during Saturday morning coffee, when a bunch of the folks who worked together at the old company would hang out at his place. It was generally a small-group setting, with folks I like, but it was still a group setting.

Well, Ron sold his house and is moving away at the end of the month. He asked if I wanted anything from the house and I went over and poked around and there was some stuff we put on a list and discussed prices for; I dug up some starts from the glorious old rose that lives at the house; and we just talked. We talked about his plans for the summer, moving into a truck he kits out and doing some contract work, and about my plans for the move. We talked about, I don't know, just stuff.

I'd forgotten what it was like to just hang out with someone I enjoy. A friend. I'd forgotten that I could just enjoy someone's presence; that there's a space that's not "intimate because we're involved in some sort of a co-project and it's intense" and "I'm doing this interaction because I'm supposed to and taking what I can from it." Just... it was nice. I enjoy him. It was good. And he's not busy tearing himself into pieces because of self-loathing or doing some sort of weird self-harm through overwork or whatever and that is also very, very nice.

So I've got myself a bedframe for down south out of it, and a hammock stand, and a couch the animals can go on. If I can enough pork, I will give him canned pork in trade. I've got the amazing old rose which lives at his home. I have a BBQ/smoker that needs fixing up. He may come and visit over the winter, and/or maybe if A&E are into it he could live in his truck rig there over the winter on and off for some $, it would be nice to have a friend there for a bit.

Love for me feels like pain. When I experience love, I also experience pain, they're almost inextricably linked. I'm reasonably sure it's a PDA thing, that pressure rising to meet the inevitability of my emotion and locking together into one fused experience. I cried on the drive home, music on, windows down. So much of my interpersonal has been so frought lately and it was good to just be able to just love someone and to have it be ok and not mean anything other than it does.

Meanwhile A&E have taken some time to digest the budget numbers and are starting to brainstorm scenarios down there and put them forward. As is my role I'm going to push for numbers. I suspect I need to ask them what it'll take for them to put numbers to their proposals, rather than for them to hope I'll do it for them. We'll run through a couple scenarios and see what makes sense; as before I've been acting as the reality check. I'm very tempted to tell them to take a small-business course, or at least something involving making a business plan, because I don't know that I'm the person to do all this instruction.

This process may involve me targeting fall for my move instead of midsummer. We will see. Gosh I want to spend time on a project with someone who can lay out steps and do reasonable troubleshooting right now. I miss that kind of interaction.

Anyhow I'm home with fancy roses and I'm about to put food in the oven. Things will be ok.

Warm again. We're supposed to have a stretch of warm + rain, which of course is on top of what was 3' of snow and is maybe a little closer to 2.5 now. The dogsled race happened on the weekend: I normally love it but last week's forestry conference kept me busy through the start of the long races, and I was in a pretty bad place mental-health-wise on Saturday, and then on Sunday I just wanted to stay in controlled environments and not jeopardize feeling ok. That said, Tucker's apartment was across from the lake where the event was held, so I could peek out and see the dogs in the sunshine.

Warm again and the new piglets got castrated, pushing the edge of the 10 day/2 week window when I'm comfortable doing it at home. Well, comfortable is a tremendous overstatement but it had to be done: they get castrated or they get eaten very young unless I can source that immunocastration drug. They seem to be doing alright this morning; because my anxiety is running so high it's fixating on everything, and one of them having adverse reactions to castration and bleeding out or something is one of them. That hasn't happened to me. I did castrate one with a scrotal hernia once and had to put him down immediately, which was very traumatic, but they all went cleanly here so far. I'll go out later today and watch them all pee but they're sleeping now with Mama Black Chunk, who's been let out of isolation with her babies. Actually it's pretty cute: when I went out the boar was spooning her, and she was spooning the babies.

I sold the 4runner to mom, which is basically the best news. I love that truck and didn't want to see it go to someone who wouldn't care for it. Mom lent her car to someone who had an accident and didn't know to leave insurance out of everything so they decided to scrap it because it got a dent; she was in the market for something new and I had this 4runner which I need to get rid of because I can't keep two vehicles. I'm so glad it's staying in the family. I need to get the windshield redone (they put sand/gravel on the roads up here in winter for traction, since it's too cold for salt, and it's pretty normal to replace your windshield every year or two since rocks fly up and crack them) and replace the battery and pull the farm junk out of it. First I need to shovel it out the rest of the way from under a snowdrift.

The peppers I planted back in January are up and the other peppers are ordered. I've also ordered some black plastic flats, which-- these are supposed to be extra heavy duty so they don't break every year. I keep wanting to get enough of a carpentry shop together to make myself some wooden ones but that hasn't happened yet so hopefully these last a couple years. I need to get the rest of my peppers into soil. I've also put artichoke seeds in. We'll see how they go. I'm starting to rattle what goes where around in my head.

I've also got start dates for most things on my garden spreadsheet; I do need to go through and winnow out what I'm starting this year and what I'm not. Especially, when I have multiple accessions of something from last year I probably want to grow saved seed rather than bought seed, etc.

I really do need to shovel my way out to the greenhouse and A-frame and start grouping out the geese.

I'm kind of tucking this here at the end but Saturday was pretty rough. I think my brother is going to manage to do what nothing else has, and drive me substantially off the social internet. I need to decide what to do about that: block him? Some other workaround? Gracefully let go of those parts of the internet? Hopefully my counselor can help me come up with some ideas this week. He's definitely infuriating and deep into DARVO right now. He spams the family chat with links about the "freedom convoy" and the constitution, ignores any facts he finds inconvenient, does the two-step "you can't trust media to report the science correctly/reading academic papers too closely to decipher them is some kind of trick or gotcha" and most recently "people are too specialized" (I it's think code for scientists are wrong) followed by "are you familiar with the Dunning Kruger effect" which is basically like being trapped in some sort of horror sitcom where someone who doesn't believe in science tries to use a science idea that explains how non-experts think they know a lot to explain why he, a non-expert, knows more than other people.

Horror sitcom is not my favourite genre. Maybe a laugh track would help?

Anyhow, being almost totally offline for the latter half of the weekend meant I watched Leverage with Tucker and had some time to think about a particular scene that had been picking at the back of my mind. In it a dude is flirting with a woman across a counter, and she is flirting back. At one point her hands are lying on the counter between them, he puts his hands on hers, she looks slightly uncomfortable, he lifts his hands away and says "the hands, it's too much, right?" and she nods and says yes and they keep flirting but he doesn't reach out to touch her again.

This little snippet of interaction has stayed in my mind, and I've finally dug out why. A lot of the male-assigned folks I've engaged with sexually would have had trouble getting all the way to the end of the four parts of this: 1) try something 2) collect feedback based on body language 3) ask for clarity if they detected something amiss and 4) course-correct and continue to enjoy the interaction. If they were actually willing to try doing a thing they'd be unable to assess for feedback, if they assessed for feedback and detected something slightly amiss they'd spiral into self-loathing and be unable to clarify and course-correct. Obviously this prevents meaningful feedback; anything other than positive feedback drags the whole experience to a screeching halt. I wonder if this is linked to protect women from even a hint of bad feelings/women are delicate flowers who should never have a moment's dissonance in their lives? I wonder if it's linked to a model of masculinity that's about prowess and always being right the first time? Or what's going on? Anyhow, that bit in the show made me happy.

I live somewhere cold and reasonably wet. Our occasional extreme low (not to long ago the regular low) in winter is sort of -40 (which is both Celsius and Ferenheit, it's where the streams cross). We get maybe 3m of snow falling over the course of a winter, which is maybe 1m of accumulation at the height of winter. Snow is much more variable than rain, of course, with density and thus volume fluctuating wildly. Still, what I'm trying to say is that there's white stuff on the ground for six months.

We're connected by a few ribbons of pavement. There are groceries in town, gas stations, an insurance agent and a dentist. There's a dollar store and a department store and an auto parts store, two mechanics and two hardware stores. There is a medical clinic. Prices in general are higher here but it's possible to order in what can't be bought in town and to not leave much. Most people drive into the bigger city pretty frequently though: there are bigger stores, variety in stores, bulk discounts, a movie theatre, restaurants, bank branches, optometrists and orthodontists and physiotherapists. Few people out here are strangers to driving in winter conditions. They (we?) are used to navigating roads that are marked by two dark tire strips in a flat white expanse, sorta guessing where lanes are when the plough hasn't gone by yet, taking it easy and slow when the roads are slippery.

Or we're supposed to be.

Thing is, a vehicle with snow tires in -20 handles basically normally. The snow/ice is cold enough to either blow off the road or stick to it like more concrete. Winter tire substance is sticky at low temperatures, unlike summer tires, and so it adheres to the road much like summer tires do to a summer road. It's pretty reasonable, especially if you choose to drive in the brief window of daylight.

In the shoulder seasons snow is wet and slippery, half-frozen. Not everyone has their snow tires on yet and snow tires aren't entirely built for water over melting ice anyhow. Everyone has seemingly forgotten how to drive in this, which is fair: it's only for a total of maybe two months a year. This morning it snowed here; in the city it rained-then-froze, which is black ice, and then snowed overtop. Here was sloppy driving to work and I got to play with the Tundra's 4hi since I won't have my winters on till Saturday. In the city was a ten car pile-up and closing down a major highway intersection (the city is the crossroads of the two highways up here, one of which runs north-south and the other which runs east-west).

The first couple years I drove 20km to work and 20km back and was pretty nervous around this time of year. It's the sort of weather when my rollover accident happened and I'm both a relatively new driver and relatively new up north. Then I moved workplaces and also it was covid so I had a shorter drive when I drove in at all. Today I came in for the first time in awhile because work is offering a free flu shot. Turns out the nurse administering the shots is coming in from the city.

We'll see if she shows. Meanwhile I'm here in the office, wearing my fancy opal ring with the leaf on it, looking out the window at the light skim of snow over everything and the sun rising over the lake.

Today was another day in the bush. I went to a sample site I for sure had to do, fairly close to a quite disused logging road called the Kuzkwa South. This was south of where I'd been working before by about 20km. I had my suspicions halfway up the road and then recognised it very suddenly when an unmistakable cliff loomed through the trees.

Inzana is a wide bowl with lumpy soil-and-tree crusted lumps those 20km north.

The Kuzkwa South road snakes up and down and up and down with astonishing potholes and quick corners though abrupt topography until grey-streaked peach cliffs suddenly loom up on one side and a little lake sparkles downslope through the trees on the other. The cliff is fringed with rubust, healthy-looking douglas fir and the lake is ringed wit birch. Everything looks so inviting to play on: the rock cliffs look like they're easily climbable, fractured like ladders, though the long talus slope leading up to them suggests keeping to the edges and to the anchor-points of clumps of trees. The lake is so sparkly, not distant at all but not close enough to have road dust: it it looks like just ten minutes of climbing through trees to get there.

I'd been there once before, briefly, in 2015, for work as a summer student. That moment of coming around the corner and seeing the cliffs and the little lake, the highly interactive landscape, has never left me. The spot is only just shy of two hours' drive from town and only really 20km off the pavement (the last 10km is very slow!) and I was giving serious thought to going back there camping when a pickup appeared going up as I was going down. He didn't have a radio so we did the truck-negotiation of backing up into a wide spot so we could go past each other and I figured this was not the weekend to go up. Hunting season, also likely not great timing. I wouldn't want to do that road in snow either. It took careful maneuvering to get around some of those potholes without getting stuck even with them dry and with a lot of traction.

I'll still keep that place in my heart. There are so many places in my heart.

The actual spot I was working wasn't bad either: there were clumps of huge aspen trees, 30m or so (well, huge for the area) and a spaghnum wetland that was nearly dried out so I could squelch across it if I didn't stand too still: it opened out into a pond that was still filled with water. This is probably the only month I could have walked that wetland: it had aquatic weeds on one edge.

The road in had those improbably large moose tracks and an equally large wolf track dried into some of the mud.

It was just pretty. Nice. It felt like home. I listen to podcasts on my phone when I'm out since I've given up my project of memorizing poetry: it's important to make noise constantly when you're out so the bears know you're coming and can make good decisions.

I can see the shape of my loneliness best when I enjoy things. I want to go home, tell people about them, take someone out to see those sudden cliffs and go scrambling up them together. I want that not always -- some spaces are just for me -- but sometimes. I want the option.

Either way, the landscape is doing its best to comfort me these days and I appreciate it.

Last night I slept terribly. I woke up at 3am and showered because I felt gross. I only got a few hours of sleep altogether. It reminded me of when I was a pre-teen on paxil and I'd wake up at 2 or 3 and just... not sleep. Hours of breathing exercises and deliberately relaxing everything, night after night, and no sleep. Just more hours. No one told me that was a side effect.

That means I'm probably taking my pill too early; it's done that to me before. If I take it at 10am I seem to sleep fine the next day but if I take it at 7 or 8 I I wake up at 3 and am AWAKE for several hours, while feeling awful. Not recommended. It's basically impossible for me to do things at 10am though, at least things I need to carry an object for. I can't reliably take the pill in the bush. If I can get myself biking or yoga-ing on most non-field days I'm thinking about stepping down the pills to zero.

So anyhow, on no sleep I drove an hour and a half on honestly pretty good forestry roads with the summer student and we got to the block and... climbed something halfway between a rock face and a hill. I wish I knew more about the geography of the Inzana to tell you but I can describe the scene. The whole area is an old, old, lake bed and so it sweeps out in a long, gentle landscape ringed with what I think of as small, older mountains. It's not a valley, exactly, because it contains many riverlets. Instead it's a very shallow soup bowl.

We don't have smoke here so the air is hazy-blue and relatively clear; fall is coming and the light is already golden closer up which creates a great sense of scale. I don't think anyone can quite understand how much space there is here and how few people. Huge layered rocks round up into the valley at intervals of several miles. The one we climbed was the biggest one near and I didn't have to lean far forward to use my hands as we scrambled over fallen tree-trunks. Sometimes the rock broke through the soil, and the trees that fell brought up the scant few inches of topsoil with them.

Ringing this hill, this outcrop, this 30-minute-climb to the center of the world, there were moose swamps. They were mostly dried up but the occasional glint of blue water made it through brilliant green reeds; all was just little glimpses between tree trunks. Beyond that was cutblock and trees and swamp and cutblock like a patchwork draped inside the bowl of the Inzana. By contrast the top of the knoll was crispy, still green with kinickinnick but columned with a short open forest of chasm-barked dust-orange douglas fir and a few vivid birches. As the elevation fell off down the hill the trees were taller and taller, while on top they were scarce enough to give a little shade without obscuring the view in the least. Off the crown of the hill lodgepole pines joined the douglas fir and near the toe the pines remained but the douglas fir were replaced by moisture-seeking spruce.

Fall is coming. It wasn't loud with insects. There was no traffic hum. There was just the glint of occasional water through dusty trees. The Inzana stretched out all around.

Every area in Fort has its own particular character. Sakineche is mountanous with tall, narrow trees. Tchentlo is rich and lush with a riot of growth and huge trees mixed with little ones. The Kiwalli is pines on shallow hills like a prairie full of grass. The Cunningham is winding and hot and dotted with little lakes. But I think I love the Inzana the best, love that gentle patchwork bowl with its rocky crags long since ground into arcs by glaciers, love the water that lays out expanses of bright swamp, love the relatively sedate flow of its creeks.

Or maybe not? The Driftwood also lies close to my heart, densely forested and craggier with fire-scarred flanks of shallow mountains hemming it in and such fast-rushing streams that steam in fall mornings.

Then again, Mackenzie had so many beautiful places.

Anyhow, the climb was hard and we were on and off blowdown trees in shoulder-high bush, maybe a third of the time walking narrow trunks like balance beams or hitching over them when they crossed our path. I was tired and I hadn't slept and my body knew it, and my side felt and feels weird and my shoulders hurt because they'd been holding tension and then they had to hold my pack too.

But it was beautiful, and it was a place few people have ever been or ever will get to see, and it showed up for me today. I am grateful.

My old boss somewhat insistently invited me over to his place tomorrow morning along with another friend/ex-coworker. I've been over there once since winter, it was lovely, and I sorta ghosted him after that with a "not doing great" message.

Curious whether this is:

A social call
An intervention
Or a job offer

Especially based on the other person who will be there.

Yesterday I filmed my grain variety trial. Today I recorded some tomato trial data. I posted about the tomato trial on the open-source tomato breeding forum and had a bit of back-and-forth with the person who is doing the most fun and interesting things with tomatoes of anyone. He spontaneously said that Sweet Cherriette was fun, which it totally is.

Having spent all this time in the garden and then a bit of interaction with people who think a particular vegetable cultivar can be "fun" I am having trouble imagining talking to folks over coffee tomorrow morning. What do people talk about? Feelings? Jobs? I mean, he's pretty good to talk to but I just want to garden and maybe talk to people who are looking at my garden about what they're seeing or maybe even just folks who are interested in gardens about how I'm structuring my systems.

I read this, now, as an autistic trait: the desire to immerse myself in the thing I love forever and barely come up for air. It's always been isolating for me, or maybe alienating, because so much of my soul is made of something that other people just don't understand or care about. When I do get to talk about it there's a lot of 101 and I'm also never sure what is common knowledge exactly. When I get to talk with other folks who are super interested (v rare) I have super imposter syndrome and turn quiet with big eyes. So I don't get to do these things together with other folks, and this is the important part of my life.

It does make me pretty happy though.

There was smoke high overhead in thin ribbons today. Was going to drive up to Sakeniche with work but my bush partner got called to work on the fires along with a bunch of my office; part of how government maintains fire capacity when fire seasons are so unpredictable is that it expects to draw trained firefighters at will (foresters all have some fire training and lots of them worked fires as summer jobs; currently they're only calling up folks with past experience).

Guess I didn't have to work till 7 yesterday wrapping things up for the weekend.

The first of the mass graves of children was officially excavated in Canada this week.

Everywhere people are talking about the 215 children found in that grave, from age 3 on up. Everywhere they are grieving and honouring.

I've always lived a little in the future. Working in forestry, on the landbase with the Indigenous Nations whose children these are, I've had to learn about our history with these Nations both professionally and personally. I live in a town that's very Indigenous, maybe 30-40% of the folks in town depending on how you look at it?

And so I know that 215 is the tip of a very large iceberg.

Canada's policy of removing children and sending them to these residential schools lasted a very long time. A very high percentage of these children died, the figure I've heard most recently was around 25%. 1 in 4. The abuse in these schools was horrific so it's not just that these kids died. These kids died far from home while enduring the kind of tortures Christians describe in their hell. They were buried by their surviving siblings and friends and other fellow children who then went home and, having experienced only institutional abuse sometimes for a couple generations, tried to parent their children.

Mourning these 215 children, seeing them, is a release. They are loved in death, as they were no doubt loved at a distance by powerless parents in life. But there are so many to come, so many, so many.

I was abused a little as a kid, not enough to really grasp the enormity of this but enough to know that with enough support I could come back from it and find love and connection and trust in the world again. The Nations as a whole are doing this, their people slowly knitting themselves back towards wholeness.

I had that chance so I know what it would have meant to not have it. I know what it would have meant to die knowing that no one in the world would save me, that there were people cruel enough to make that happen and no kindness was powerful enough to stop it. I know what it would have meant to die knowing that the balance of the world was against me.

None of this is new. The exact numbers aren't known because when too many kids at these schools started dying Canada stopped keeping count. The Catholics who ran the schools may have numbers but they aren't telling. The official, likely very low numbers, are in the thousands. This has been sitting on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission website since 2015, along with some calls to action to try and fix things (this is the "reconciliation" Canada talks about). I had to learn about it in a couple different places in school, and in communities with any reasonable sized First Nation population it's just known; many of these folks went to the schools and basically all their parents did, after all.

But there's something about seeing this exact number going around, 215, that's so hard for me. Maybe it's the press of the rest of them, waiting.

There's nothing about this that was ok. Genocide, knowledge loss, family separation, abuse, death, removing people from their ecosystems: none of it was ok.

This week I am carrying grief for the as-yet-uncounted dead.

It's bigger than I am.

Part of getting my professional credential involves a lot of reading about Canada's situation with regards to its indigenous peoples. Specifically I live in British Columbia, which has one of the dodgier relationships with First Nations. Where most of the Canadian provinces had some sort of treaty process, British Columbia really did not. One of the folks in charge of BC joining the confederation added some wording that basically kept the federal government from doing much about that at the time, and the provincial government has been incredibly avoidant of the issue except to step in and reduce reserve sizes from time to time. Plus there's the whole residential school/foster care situation and, well, quite a lot of things.

It's interesting that in my life I've lived close to two of the residential schools that were closed down most recently, one in Mission and the other close by up here. Both those areas had pretty high First Nations populations, which might be either a cause or a result of the schools.

I'm a third of the way through this lesson and I've read over maybe three dozen articles so far. I'm not new to this knowledge at all: we got it at school for forestry, I've kept up on it myself a fair bit. But eight or nine hours of reading in 30 or so hours is really a lot.

At the same time I'm involved in an anti-racist training at work which I did yesterday and will attend the next two Thursdays as well.

I don't know how many normal Canadians get this stuff, or how much of it they have to read. I know the older foresters didn't get it. Part of the way Canada is supposed to make up for this is to take it out of the closet and let everyone see what happened. Today I feel like all that effort is being directed at folks coming up into my forester type role: absolutely important, and absolutely not enough.

You know, at the end of a lot of these (not the association, but most other stuff around internalized -isms) they say: this is hard work, be good to yourself. Have some ice cream, have a hot bath, give yourself space to process. I've had enough trouble doing that for myself on a good day.

Right now I'm seeing everything through the lens of the next step I'll create in my life, that of community. Every interaction I think: how could this be improved by community? Is this person part of a community I want? How would I like to feel supported in this situation? Where am I missing support or connection? What would it feel like to feel like I was in something together with folks, and what things would I like to be in together with folks?

The First Nation of a place always has fit into that aspiration for community. it's of course impossible to say what that relationship would look like because the folks who belong to each place are different, but I don't want to live in somewhere that's eradicated or completely marginalized its folks. Here the Nakazdli and the Yekooche and the other communities are real entities, with real political and social force.

One of the things I love about this area is that government in a very practical, nuts-and-bolts sense is shared: busses and flu shots and social services are administered through a hybrid system, often strongly involving or spearheaded by the Nakazdli. There's a fair bit of decolonization going on around the edges, just because our own government has abdicated its role in providing services and the Nation has stepped in. The bus doesn't run on a schedule, you call and it'll come get you when it can manage. Daily levels of health care are often accessible without provincial ID.

I would miss that were I to move back to a place where my culture of origin dominates.

There's something lovely about living in a town small enough that, if you are part of rush hour and need to stop at the grocery store and post office and pharmacy during rush hour, it's not a major inconvenience.