Hi Adele,
I am hiking the bruce trail and thinking of you.
I'm offering up some stories and photos here for your amusement.
Big hug and much love to you,
Nicole
Day 1
7km
The Bruce Trail is the luxury cruise of backcountry trails. Compared to what I walked in Chile and Argentina this trail is a clear and breezy. Friendly white rectangular trail markers meet you every few feet. I can hear them saying, “Oh hello daring! Why don’t you come this way?” I smile and meet their welcoming gaze.
I come to the base of a scramble up the escarpment, but I have a map that tells me although the hill is steep this will only last for a quarter of a kilometre or so. The effort is finite and then the path returns to being nice and flat with lovely views over Georgian Bay.
In Argentina the only information that my map told were things like that it would be a seven-hour hike to the next camp. I could assume that the hike would all be straight up; I was summiting a mountain after all. When I hiked in Patagonia in Chile I had no map, only GPS tracks and the path I followed only had trail markers every few kilometres. More than once I flopped to the ground in front of one of them and had a good cry from the stress of having had to navigate my way there.
But I am Canada now with polite Canadian paths, so kind and accommodating that I hike many more kilometres than I expected to today. I started down the path late in the day, at 5 PM, and I walked all the way until the orange sherbet sun had melted into the bay.
Day 2
18km
In every trip I’ve taken, the first long hiking day is the one where I talk to myself in my head all day, about anything and everything until all my thoughts have been talked out. Sometimes I pretend that I am talking to someone, a friend or a loved one, sometimes I am just telling my own stories back to myself, creating narrative and meaning from memory. The residue of emotion from my experiences frees itself through my storytelling and then pounds its way out through my feet and into the earth. My heart is as tired now, as my body but my mind is much more still.
Cruise Ship Bruce Trail was somewhat less accommodating for me today though no less formal. I found trail blazes dressed in black tie. When the white trail mark is outlined in black it is called a tuxedo blaze. I learned that on a sign nailed to a tree by the Bruce Trail association.
I found other informative signs today like the one directing me to glacial potholes. I discovered a lovely round circle, like a fairy ring, in the middle of the path. It posed nicely for a picture but I was just thinking that it hardly was fancy enough to merit a whole information sign in its honour, I nearly stepped to its very large older brother, a sinkhole of about 4 metres depth, perfectly round, equally photogenic.
A less useful information sign warning me to “lookout for poison ivy.” As I started down that stretch of trail I noticed that it crossed through a field of three-leaved plants, abundantly clustered so close to the path that there was nowhere to go but right through them.
“They can’t all be poison ivy, can they?” I asked the imaginary Bruce Trail Association representative in my head.
I remembered my girl guide training. I had received some badge for plant identification. These all certainly had the telltale three leaves.
“But surely,” I complained to my inner Bruce Trail rep, “if you wrote ‘watch out’ on the sign then that seems to mean that I should be able to, you know, see the poison ivy and then avoid it. If this whole overgrowth is in fact poison ivy, why would you not shut down the trail in this section? This is unacceptable!”
My BT rep registered the complaint, offered me a benign reply, and promptly filed it away four cabinets to the left in the archives of my mind. With no other alternative I hiked down the path.
“Will I start to itch immediately? Will it take twenty-four hours to flare up? Will I get it on my hands if I touch my pants? Will these pants be safe to wear tomorrow?”
I studied the white berries boiling under those sly looking three-leafed plants. My inner girl guide pointed to them in alarm.
“Brown owl says no! You should not be here!” but where else was I to go?
The abundance of poison ivy decorated the path for more than one kilometre.
My favorite sign today read, “HAZARD EXIST,” without being any more explicit about what those hazards might be. It warning me that whatever hootenanny I found myself in on this path it was most certainly my fault and the sign was in no way to blame
I fell today. Falling is part of hiking. It’s important to know how to hit the ground well. I tripped on a root launching myself forward. The weight of my fifty-pound pack tipped right over my head pushing me down face first. I didn’t hurt myself. Not a scratch, though maybe later I’ll find a bruise. I stayed on the ground for a while. I freed myself from my straps and sat with my head down on my folded arms, using my knapsack as a desk, like a child in afterschool detention.
I fell when I was hiking in Chile too. Fatigue and a tree root were again the instigators. When I fell then I rolled to try to protect my left ankle which had been a bit stiff. Instead I landed hard on my right ankle. I heard it crack. I lay like a bug on the shell of my knapsack, with both feet in the air. I was afraid to move my ankle for what I would find. I was four days away from the nearest human. No cell reception. If my ankle was broken I would have a long way to crawl.
“Why I do all these crazy things all by myself? Why to do I need to go alone?”
I told myself that this aloneness invites a closeness with nature. There are elements of beauty only visible with the deep reintegration with the landscape. There is an intimacy there, a love story between sky and sea and forest and me.
“How could I invite someone else into that love?” I asked myself and myself thought about for a while then answered, “But whom are you excluded by going off on your own? Which human loves are you forcing away? Which family members are you hurting?”
On my back, legs extended I did not have a rebuttal.
Gingerly I wagged my right ankle back and forth, it was sore, sprained and swollen, but not broken. I stood, testing the weight of the fifty-pound pack on my shaky legs, then willed myself down the path again.
Today ego was more tender than my body. I was still alone. Had I learned nothing?
I hauled myself up ad over to a lookout point. I took in the view of Georgian Bay and stretched myself out on the rock ledge for a rest. A hawk swirled in the air currents above me, then two, then three. I sat up. Four, five hawks danced in the air above me. How could anyone feel alone with such beauty? I was the dance in their wings as much as I was the music of the air. I was the cradle of the limestone rock as much as I was the innocence of the water in the bay. I was everywhere and nowhere and only here. I was love.
Now I am sitting with my laptop on white round stones only a steps away from the shoreline. Pink sunset, pink water but no pink itchy flesh. No signs of poison ivy just yet. Many signs of love.
Day 3
10km
Rain.
I remember once on the Appalachian trail it was raining one morning and because I hate carrying a wet tent, I thought I’d wait until it let up. I waited till lunch, no change, mid-afternoon, still strikingly wet. By the evening I had naturally decided to stay a second night. Fortunately, I had a lover with me in my tent so I was not bored. The next day it was still raining but we packed up the tent and carried it, heavy and dripping, over the slippery path. My next stop was a hostel where, for every night you spent there, they gave you a free tub of ben and jerry’s ice cream. I stayed two nights.
Today the rain started just as I’d finished stuffing my knapsack and was about to take down the tent.
“Maybe it will stop,” I thought, forgetting my lessons from the Appalachian trail.
Today I had no lover, but I did have a laptop and so I wrote several more scenes for my book.
Late afternoon a hearty group of hikers past my tent.
“Are you all right?” I called out to them.
“Yep, you?”
“Yes, I’m staying out of the weather.”
“Well it’s nice out now,” one of them said.
It wasn’t quite nice, just not raining. The wind was still kicking the bay into white caps. But they had just walked 16km in that rain, so it was nicer than it had been in the morning. They were almost done, having parked one car only about a kilometre away.
They walked off down the beach.
“Hey!” I scurried out of my tent. When you get to your car, might you be heading north?
The next patch of path ran over about 9km of highway. Road walking is no fun.
They told me that they were in fact heading north. My soggy tent was up on my back in no time. I got a lift to a hostel in the next town just in time for the sun to come out.
Hostel = Shower. Laundry. No ben and jerrys.
Sunshine in the Evening = 10km loop hike minus big pack to see the sunset send red rays through the cedar forest. Quick march home at dusk.
Day 4
10 km
The weather report said that we'd only get about 1mm of rain. As I watched the path fill with puddles, and the puddles over flow into little rivers, and the rivers fill my shoes and make friends with my socks I thought to myself, "Very good, you've met your quota now, well done, that's quite enough already." But the rain continued until I decided I would not.
And thank goodness I did stop because the evening brought a clarity of beauty that deserved stillness.
Last month on the full moon I wore a piece of yellow cloth around my neck with a small bundle of tobacco tied to one end. Smoke from the fire rose up to the round hole in the top of the white teepee. In the circle sat wise women, young women, women who could drum, woman who sang, women who had been hurt, women who had loved, women who had much to say, women who were silent. We sat together, praying and honouring our sister moon. One by one we placed our tobacco in the fire and relinquished our worries to the alchemy of that heat and light. We left transformed.
Tonight the moon worked its magic on me again. It's gravity lifted from me the weight of any worries. I abandon myself to it like the tides.
Day 5
20 km
Turquoise, Lapis, Sapphire
Blue, the squeeze of a baby's hand
Blue, a brush of cat whiskers
Oyster shell, butterfly wing
Blue, a wish unspoken
Blue, the taste of a kiss
Inky twilight, Lichen swirl
Cell by cell my body becomes crystalline
I have less words now, after this many days on the path. Quiet had finally come.
The moon rises so fast I can feel the earth spinning. So much movement in the stillness.
I want to walk along that moon path,
to see where that silver light would take me,
to be part of all that shine...
Day 6
Said prayers to the morning sun.
Walked to the road.
Hitch hiked to town.
Gratitude
Gratitude Gratitude
Gratitude Gratitude Gratitude
Gratitude Gratitude
Gratitude
