The Precipice, BC, early September to early October

Precipice Valley, North-West BC, East of Bella Coola. The remotest spot we've been in our travels so far. We feel like we've reached the edge where the tide turns, you hear it turning in the silence. We are with Dave and Rosemary Neads, who have carved out a life here over decades, in a place under ice and snow for 4-5 months of every year. When they first came it was a 4-5 hour journey to Anahim Lake and the road - rough west to Bella Coola, east to Williams Lake. It's now maybe an hour and a half, on the back of a logging track. They built their home over five years, Doug Fir (who was Douglas, I wonder) around broad windows over the valley. And left the Grizzly rub tree below the rim rock, where generation after generation of bear has trod to rear and scratch, always the same approach, the same care with which each in turn has placed its paws, in spots now so old and precise that the dents are worn deep in the earth. The bear is always there about that tree even if all you do is put your small feet in those steps and tug coarse hairs from the bark.

While they were building, they lived in a small log cabin down by the river. It's sandwiched between two of the half-dozen meadows ('long', 'round', 'river') that are scattered amongst the first-growth fir, pine, aspen, cottonwood - little human shapes in the wilderness. There were no meadows here 70 years ago. But there were the trails that we make like animals, never straight. The valley was an avenue for First Nations Chilcotin, Ulkatcho, and other bands, a meeting place for a clutch of paths that joined like rivers to flow-on down to the Atnarko Trench, a rare opening in the sheer wall of the Coast Mountains, path to Bella Coola and the sea beyond. The Hotnarko river of the Precipice flows into the Atnarko, so too trade would flow down-river, like the diamond-fine Obsidian from the volcanic peaks to the north and east, good for arrow-heads, later furs from the interior, while oolichan grease (boiled out of rotting catches of a smelt-like fish) flowed up the way, crucial preserve and dietary supplement for those far from the water. Alexander Mackenzie, first white to cross America east to west, passed north of here in 1793, rivalry between the bands shaping him a far more tricky route than that offered by the broad valley and its ancient ways.

That cabin is our home, cosy mattresses up a ladder-stair close beneath the steep pitch of the roof, big old stove, battered kettle, and a couple of teddy bears - just to keep topical - to welcome the kids. And in the mornings we brew porridge there and then hike up the hill along a steep-sided track, to be welcomed by Chilko, Dave and Rosemary's massive-breasted-hearted dog. He gets so attached to the kids that he won't eat his own breakfast until they arrive. Freya first, bursting out of the forestry at a sprint, red-faced, bright eyed, sweaty. Dave and Rosemary too, new to kids for such a good old stretch of time, build connection out of it - Dave working on his carpentry in the workshed with one on each side, deep in sawdust, hammering nails to make haphazard boats, or Rosemary, firm but loving, with Freya's head in her lap after she wolfs down a great bowl of supper and conks out. Close to the end of our time in the Precipice, Dave told us he was no longer scared of kids. And I no longer of chainsaws. Though certainly respectful. Which amounts to a pretty good exchange.

The sawing, the falling and the bucking, the stacking high into the roof-timbers of Dave's huge wood-shed, is our core task. All the heating over all those snow-bound months will come from that shed. It's getting your cave prepared, is how Dave describes it. I've never used a chainsaw before, and he's a good teacher. He gives sparse, key instruction. He watches. He gives you a clear sense of what you're getting right and wrong. Like getting the hell back and out of there as the tree begins to topple, not worrying for half a fateful moment about the saw trapped in the hinge. And then he leaves you to it. Each morning when I knew I was going to be using the saw I'd try and really focus on the power that blade had to change everything. Maybe that's just the novice in me, but Dave did lend me a book a few days in that detailed different safe techniques amongst dark boxes setting out how many fatalities there'd been in BC because of this, or that moment. And even when his bent-backed pal, another Dave, lumber man visiting from up north, three or four generations of sawdust in his blood, breaks from the fire and his songs to cut some fuel out of the black night, almost dancing with the saw he holds it so light upon his creaking joints, you sense respect. Becs and I are quite a team. Sometimes we head out with Dave as a threesome in the clanking ancient monster of a log truck to fall some real chunky old trees, Dave sizing them up and wedging them so they fall close to the track, the two of us, all day, heaving the barrels of wood across the rough and into the back.

Closer to home we're with the kids, who set up camps under the trees and use the stubs we saw to build palaces.

We meet all the locals on our first night. For many years it was just Dave and Rosemary in the valley in the winter months, alone about the fire between the snow and the wolves, who winter with them on the rocky outcrops half-way up toward the northward rim. But now Klaus might join them for Christmas turkey, after he's fed the cattle. He looks after the 50 odd head, who'll be out on the range all summer, but huddle about the hay-shed once the snow comes. A few miles further down-river there's Fred and Monika, organic farmers just getting started in the valley, all our good potatoes come from them, and Kai's kilt companion. Fred, as with the little man, likes to wear the tartan to a party. And then there's Lee, the ranch-owning-making-life-large-x-impressario, who's here throughout the summer, and hosts us all that night, with a mountain of prime pork ribs, cooked on a bonfire barbecue, dripping thick source, and digs out more whisky and his bass guitar so we can get a tune up and running. Every one of these folk is both larger and smaller in this place - we each stand out, stark, licking grease from our fingers, our togetherness and separation drawn vivid in the space that stretches out beyond. Klaus folds tight into his beard, vanishes, the kids feed the dogs bones, Dave wrestles the pain in his hip, fights alone, Lee sleeves rolled up open-chested works the fire and the talk like a rodeo. We're a small pool of language and construction and cut grass, the laughter ringing out but cut short in silence. Maybe we share vulnerability above all else.

And vulnerability certainly comes to us in the days that follow. Alongside awe. As Dave shows us to the outhouse by the cabin, right on the banks of the river, he gives us a can of bear spray, a 'banger' firing spring, and a ear-splitting horn. Use in reverse order, he tells us. If you're using the spray you're very close indeed. And he reminds us that the bears won't hear us by the water. And he tells us that the most important tool of all is awareness. Stay aware.

Staying aware, growing aware. That's me in this place in those weeks. The way I walk around a bush, or across a meadow, senses open, focussed on the fact that we are no-longer top of the food chain, digging up some remnant sense of what it might be like to be hunted. The cool stones beneath me in the river when I lie back to sink my hair, the smell of hay in the barn as I pull out the fiddle to play in the rain, the age of the wood in the walls of our cabin, our cluster of togetherness, the balance on the open back of the old truck that Dave and Rosemary suggest we should use, even for the journey up to the house, after the bears come.

Dave had seen a sow and 2 small cubs in the meadow behind the cabin that first morning, as he travelled out to pick us up from Anahim Lake. And we saw fresh shits, great piles of it, from then on. Take a poke with your finger and you can tell how fresh it is. But we only saw them and our other locals three or four days in. Klaus came down on his ATV and we piled into the truck to cover 500 meters safe and perch above the meadow where another sow and her two were grazing. I was astonished to see how big she was. Vast. Bigger than a bull, her long long neck stooped down to the grass, moving with slow, deliberate, absolute grace. Contained in her world with her cubs, without fear. But very aware, even though we were downwind, and their eyesight is not great. And then, already juggling anxiety and fear with wonder and thankfulness, the privilege of seeing these beautiful creatures in their place, knowing our own, there's suddenly another adult, ambling out of the trees that lie to the left of the space between us and the others, beneath the ATV and truck. Even Klaus, calm and knowledgeable and aware of the bears he lives besides, was surprised, wary. We backed away, bundled up somewhat reluctant kids, got the motor started (trick where you have to stamp the gas, turn the key, and wriggle it rapidly to get connection - Becs had the touch) and jolted away. The next morning we woke up to the other sow and her cubs just over the fence at the back of the cabin. All in all, seven grizzlies right close by, with another juvernile male, three-year old, wandering about at Fred's. They say there are around 70 along the Hotnarko/Atnarko, one of the highest concentrations in the world, and they're the good old chunky coastal ones, growing far larger than there interior peers on a rich diet of fish and berries and grass.

But it all got a bit stressful, over time. The concentration was unusal even by Precipice standards. Klaus knew that one of the sows was unafraid of human contact - 'not a runner', even from the big dogs together, and the motors. One of the grizzlies had taken three of the calfs. I went for a couple of hikes up towards the rim with the kids, them doing just grand at the bear-bell-yell act, spotting poos and giving them good pokes to see if they'd developed their 24-hour film. But it was pretty fraught. And we couldn't let them out of our sight for one moment, for all the freedom they've grown so used to. We helped Lee and Klaus bring the horses across, 5 including 2 towering, crusading, hoof-crushing Percheron, but although that might have kept the bears out of the meadow in front of the cabin, our route for washing-up at the river, it didn't make any difference out back. And then, as we cut timber in the woods, we returned one morning to find that a grizzly had carefully placed four great territorial shits around the kids' camp of the day before.

We felt it was time for a break! And had always known anyway that we wanted to head up into Tweedsmuir, the broadest stretch of wilderness in British Columbia, for a good while during our time with Dave and Rosemary. And the window for doing so before the cold and snow really began to bite was closing. So we sat round maps with Dave late at night, packed our sacks full of home-baked bread and home-conjured granola, got a lesson on how to get our hosts' proud old Dodge Camper (originally a delivery van) chugging (another art), and set off up the pitted track, for the painted mountains, the Rainbow Mountain Range, kids sloshing about in the back.

solo

Sunday November 6th. We're in Wallowa County, Oregon once again. Enterprise, held between the peaks of the Wallowa mountains and the depths of Hells Canyon. It feels like there's a bunch to tell about the past couple of months, but it's probably best to start here and now. We're at Rick's, and when I walk in the door these days it feels like a home. Put the kettle on, let the chat trickle, sort the kids, the instant warmth in familiar smells, knowing where the floorboards squeek. And Rick and I are with Freya and Kai, now 6 and 4 and a handful of days, while Becs is out and about in the hills. We dropped her off at Buckhorn Lookout on Wednesday, pack square above her head. Too much pasta I reckon but we'll see. She even had to leave her beloved binoculars, worried at the weight and the ways she hoped to take. We all looked down from the Lookout at rim after staggered rim of the north-south valleys that build up to Summit Ridge and the falling beyond, Hell's Canyon, 9,000' odd from the highest point to the twisting Snake. Then I took the kids off to fry bacon on a fire while she headed down. She's due back this coming Wednesday, and today the snow came, so I'm glad that she took my sleeping bag which is by far the warmest of our bunch, and hope she still managed to get a fire glowing to keep the stars company. I must pop out and sniff the air before bed.



But before then, just a few recent photos. These are of the last hike that the two not-so-little people did as 3 and 5 year olds. At Rick's you wake up each day to granite, the Wallowa Mountains right above you. They're always calling. And we seized on blue sky and late snow to climb right into them over four days. Not a soul. Fierce tight fires in the icy nights. Quick dips in alpine lakes (all four of us, it's catching). And Eagle Cap, at the heart of the wilderness. It's just over 9,500'. And here are the no-longer-so-little folk on their horses (take a stick, not any old stick) en-route ...

Six words on F 'n K right now - alive, rooted, together,

loved, loving, whole

September 27th

We were due to set out from the Precipice today, beginning the long journey south. The aspen leaves are a bright gold-yellow carpet, softly spoken beneath our feet, and it’s the right time to be leaving – the restlessness of autumn, before the snow, the tipping in every fibre. Then, last night, we gather up at Rosemary and Dave’s, Klaus chugging his way over from the ranch in the middle of the valley, Fred and Monica from their farm at the Western extreme, before it falls on down toward the Hotnarko Trench, solitary, massive tear in the Coast Range Mountains, still shrunk beneath them, home to Bella Coola. So all the current valley gang are there. Only Lee is missing, gone three or four days with a bunch of cattle fresh off the range for the Williams Lake sale.

It’s home-baked pizza on a grand scale, moose mince and all, and it’s billed as a farewell after the month we’ve spent here in this extraordinary spot (more of which we will write of later). But just as we arrive the news begins to trickle through on the satellite phone, from friends and contacts East and West - The road has gone.


Precipice Valley is a good 1½ hours from Anahim Lake, a mix of rough and very rough track. Anahim Lake is on Highway 20, only artery from William’s Lake to the East and Bella Coola to the West, last stretches only opened in the ‘50s, big chunks still unpaved. And, after three days of rain like no-one can remember, great lumps of that Highway are now downriver. And we’re cut off to both the East (where we were due to be heading) and the West.

We don’t yet have a clue about the track. The rain took breath yesterday, before we heard what was up with the Highway, and the four of us climbed toward the ‘rim rock’ that fringes the north edge of the valley, aiming for Joseph’s Lake, in fresh sunshine and relishing what we thought was our last day. We didn’t get there – the Precipice ‘creek’ bridge washed out, and the torrent too dangerous to risk fording again and again (once with Kai enough). Then the rain started up once more last night, and all night, drumming on the cabin roof. And right the way through, until mid afternoon, when at long last the thin sun elbowed a little space and the sodden valley began to steam.

So tomorrow, if the heavens hold, Dave and I will set out on ATVs to check out the track. The Granny White Dragon is an hour down it, parked as far in as we could safely get her. And she may well have to live up to her name in the day’s to come. But not for a while – any which way there is no way that we’ll be leaving this wild and wonderful neck of the woods for some time to come. There are photos on the web of hunky highwaymen in chunky lumberjackets beside fancy helicopters beside some very large holes, more like vanishings, and they haven’t got a clue as yet as to how long it will take them to conjure them back.


Today we were a bit anxious. The rain kept on and on relentless, and we had movement in our boots, and good plans made, re-unions with kind folk en-route south, some time to catch breath in Wallowa County at Rick’s before meeting up with Mum and Dad on the distant stretches of the Imnaha River, even a cinema visit, popcorn spilling, in Vancouver as Arcteryx kindly fixed-up my trusty, age-old companion of a rucksack. Then suddenly caught, held back just as we step forward, worried that things might not be as we’d hoped. But tonight our mood has shifted. You read the first few pages of Cliff Kopas’ account of his 1930s packhorse trek to Bella Coola, stuffed with tales of 19th century adventures, trappers, red-haired packers, of families trapped by snow searching for mythical trails, babies born as wolves attacked the stock, and you know that this place has nothing to do with schedules. Sure you might have dreams, and know the trees you need to fall today and tomorrow for the cabin you dream of just here next year, beside the creek. But hold them gingerly. Don’t play with expectation. Don’t for a moment assume. For the wind or rain or snow or fire hold the cards, or the grizzly you forgot to make damn sure you kept an eye on, or the pack rat that nicks your tea.

There’s an account by the Marquis of Lorne, Governor General in the 1880s, of his travels through the Canadian West, and his opening sketch is of his wagon wending a way along a narrow trail through towering firs. The forest dwarfs his wagon, it’s a humble splinter in the midst of giants. It is enough to make you cry. First growth as they call it. Like First Nations. Framing that picture I have this jagged edge - the old-time saw, antique, rusty, massive, across the broad wall of Bonnie’s barn; the photos of rough-necked lumberjacks on jerry-built scaffolds, about the towering life-force they’re about to fall, five to each end, oddly humble in their moustaches and sweat and moment.

Where does our desire to tame come from? How foolish are we when we begin to believe we do so? Here, even now, the rain just keeps on falling and the rivers move mountains.

Dave's Precipice Bread

3 cups unbleached white flour
2 cups wholemeal flour
1 tsp dried yeast
1 tsp salt

Stir the lot

Take 2.5 cups warmish water, maybe a little more, and stir in a quarter at a time. Until the whole bundle comes together, nice and doughy.

Cover with something impervious to keep the moisture in, and a towel, and leave at room temperature overnight.

At break of day, spread out dough over sprinkling of flour, and push flat. Fold it in upon itself. Turn over and tuck in at the fold. Leave fold-down for an hour at room temp, covered with a towel.

Pre-heat oven to 500 F, with dutch oven inside. Then lower to 450 and tip dough into dutch oven, fold-up.

Cook for 50 mins. Test temp at centre if you’ve got the gizmo – should be at least 195 F.

Enjoy (delicious anytime, very particularly good on long hikes; lasts well)

PS Dave Neads' bread needs no kneading

Enterprise


They called him Thunder in the Mountain
he wore a hide of ponderosa pine
and in the pinch between his fingers,
about his ankles wrapped within his
hair the rivers flowed, you could have
cupped your hands beneath him, you’re on your
knees and the water spills, ricochets
drums across your eyes ‘til the mist
rises and you cannot see.

But I smell him, he’s made of ponderosa
after all, his stench has not been laundered
or spun or sprayed, it hangs from
petals laces puddles like an oil
a slick of perfume rising
within rain. I am a snake
curled in the smoothness of rock
I feel his heartbeat,
raw drum upon the earth, I don’t forget
the throb of death, the rattle of pebbles
the ginger shifting of position
on an old street bench.

That’s where I found him, he was
rooted his limbs had sprouted yet
could stretch to catch the sun,
between his teeth he’d made a home
for twenty creatures and as I
paused to pass the time of day
a raven rose from one, black
as the river, and a damsel fly
snatching life between its wings.

Shoulders broad as the Wallowas
catch even the wind, and he
brought those limbs together
bark cracked and fell about his feet
in piles of jewels and tales and times
long gone, and he cupped those
hands. We walked away in search
of entertainment, a flat street
behind us far off
a great horned owl sings.

Meditation some months in

Been doing ‘standing meditation’ for some time now, probably a couple of years off and on. I was introduced to it by Donald, up at Anam Cara above Inverness. I was the one who said before we got going on the introduction that I pretty much doubted I’d get into a meditation rhythm, that walking and hiking were my ways of meditating, shaking myself loose of the clutter, feeling the ground. Not sitting or standing still and focusing.

And here I am, still doing it!

Lasqueti, out on the paddock late, shooting stars, odd flashes of light, no moon, silent. Focus on the raven’s eye. Black. Blue. Open. Vast. Spiral. Deep. Aged. Stone. Echo. Reflection. Sink. Fall.

Fly – as in the vastness of the ocean as I swim here, way out, cavern of space about me. It sets me free and terrifies, so small and insignificant am I. Lost in the rock and churn of the never-ending whole. So small and alone within it. Consumed. And so outwith myself. I am the sea and the sky, held between, all my atoms have spilled, they are too small, the sea too big to hold them like a wrapped-up chocolate bar.

So, in meditation, last couple of nights, within the raven’s eye, begin to feel the air about me holding me like water, no need to fight it (as I say to Freya as she reaches out to swim …. ‘it’s there to be your friend, it will hold you, help you, if you let it. Welcome it, don’t fight, open to it, spread within it, and it will hold you high’). I feel its buoyancy, feel how solid the air about me is, a substance. I won’t slip through for it’s crammed with substance. The breath within me meshes with it. Within the raven’s eye I begin to fly.

Haphazard at first, not certain enough, like the bat caught within the barn. I fling the high doors wide open, part the curtains like a welcoming, and after a few more lost flutters it feels that opening and is free.

A traveller and a princess

One of the mountain tales for one of the kids as we head up into Strathcona, from the heart, with a touch of reflection on what this year is bringing me and Becs as we learn more about ourselves and each other and what might be possible.

The traveller and the princess meet and talk of marriage and what they hope it will bring to the world. They sound each other out. A force of good. Good will. Beauty. Openness. Generosity. Strength. Growth.

For them themselves, for those closest around them, their children, beyond, beyond the palace walls.

They share this vision.

All about them are open-faced-hearted children. They’ve been playing some beautiful make-believe amongst the rocks, and they return to lie with parents, one cheek on rock beside the stove, face rid of its vigor for the world, as parents battle, niggle, crotchet, attack, counter, endlessly.

But they don’t really see that.

Much later they are old and wise and they have learned that it’s good to re-imagine our lives as seen through other’s eyes. Maybe strangers. Maybe someone young who you care about greatly, who you want to see the beauty of the world.

What do they make of their union, that giving of each other’s life?