Life Shaping Moments

In the summer of 1965 I turned 17 and, between highschool grades 11 and 12, I got my first summer job working away from home. I went off on the train to work as a survey assistant on a hydroelectric project in the mountains of British Columbia. The Mica Dam was to be built across the Columbia River and I would be a part of it! At that young age, feeling both physically and emotionally immature, lacking in experience and social confidence, I felt acutely nervous about whether I would be able to perform adequately as a working man.

Survey Crew

One hot day in perhaps the first week of the job, I was out with a small survey crew hacking a “cut-line” through pristine wilderness along the Columbia River valley. We were pioneering the route of a road which would allow the entry of all the heavy equipment needed to build the dam.  As the “kid” on the crew, I was asked to carry our canvas water bags down to the river, fill them with water, and bring them back so that everyone could have a drink. 

I had no idea where the river was and probably asked which way I should go. With some trepidation I set off, hoping it wouldn't be far, but it turned out to be quite a hike through the trackless forest. By the time I finally found the steep ravine and saw the river far below, my confidence was already shaken. Nevertheless, I made my way carefully down and arrived at the sun heated rocks at the river bottom. The lovely jade green water was not in flood but it flowed energetically past with a rushing sound that dominated all impressions. The warm stones gave off a smell of the ancient dried flesh of spawning salmon which had died there century after century. I took a quick look around and felt that I was the first human presence in that particular place for a very long time. This was where salmon come to reproduce, where bears come to catch fish and where deer come down to drink. Here nature was proceeding as it had forever, vigorously in its own way, without reference to human culture. 

It was a profoundly moving moment for me, but I had a job to do. Maybe I had been sent off on this errand as a joke because you can't just dip a water bag into a river and expect it to fill. I figured that out though, and using my aluminum hardhat as a dipper, I managed to fill the water bags until they bulged.

Water Bag

Water is heavy! The climb up from the river took every bit of aerobic capacity that I possessed, but, panting and heaving, I eventually pulled my way up to the top. Now, which way back to the crew? In a state of anxious doubt, I set off in the direction I felt was most likely.

Crashing through the tangled bush, stopping to listen every 40 steps or so, I was truly lost. It seemed to me I had been on my grueling excursion for well over an hour. Maybe the crew had gone on without me! Finally, I heard the sound of voices off to one side. Changing direction, sweating, covered in flies and mosquitoes, I broke through to the cut-line where the guys were waiting. They greeted me with jokes and laughter. They drank deep from the water bags and I felt a sense of appreciation and acceptance from them which was, for me, something to build on.

That summer I experienced, in my own modest way, a coming of age. 

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I was fortunate, I think, growing up in Western Canada because even from early childhood, forests were a major feature of my world. I have memories from way back, maybe when I was about three, poking around in a small clump of saplings looking for snakes and bears. Then, at age five, exploring the edges of a big forest that plunged steeply down from our neighborhood to the North Saskatchewan River far below. Forests always fascinated and attracted me.

My family moved around a lot.  When I was in third grade we lived in North Vancouver. I used to walk to school on a trail through deep forest of huge mossy cedars on the shoulders of the coast range.

Eventually we settled in a suburb near Victoria where our back yard actually adjoined a beautiful forest of maple, Douglas Fir, Hemlock and Cedar hundreds of acres in extent. It was the perfect terrain for imaginative adventures and for building hideaway huts of fragrant boughs.
  

In European folklore the forest is often portrayed as dark and forbidding; something alien and dangerous to people, but I have never felt that way.  For me a highrise luxury condo or a modern office environment would be strange and uncomfortable places to be. As to danger, high voltage transformer stations come to mind or maybe a petroleum refinery, but not a forest. In my experience, the forest offered a welcoming refuge, a place to dream, and a place to explore the limits of both my imagination and my physical capabilities.

While that first summer job in "the bush" as a surveying assistant was challenging and enjoyable, I really felt an inner conflict. I loved being out in the beautiful wilderness each day but it didn't feel good to be taking part in the destruction of all that natural beauty.

Both the culture and the economy of my home province were based on resource extraction. From early times, the magnificent first growth conifer forests that surrounded our settlements were perceived as valuable only when they were cut down, sliced up into lumber or chipped for pulp. We valued forests as a source of raw materials for houses of softwood lumber and chipboard, or to make newspaper and toilet tissue. We thought only how they might be converted into profit, i.e. money, so we completely missed their real value. We didn't understand that the trees absorbed carbon dioxide and exhaled the oxygen that we, as animals need to live. We didn't see how trees stabilized the soil and retained moisture and provided habitat for an abundant diversity of life. We can enjoy the benefits and real value of a forest only when we leave it be.

As a young man, I yearned to make my home in a beautiful wilderness setting, independent of the dominant industrial civilization which was devouring the natural world. For several years, off and on, my brother and I lived deep in the northern wilderness in a log cabin which we built by hand. It was a wonderful experience, a time of intense learning. Ironically though, to finance our wilderness homestead we took highly paid logging jobs, contributing to the destruction of the immense trees of the Vancouver Island rainforests.

Marriage, family, and  the need to produce income intervened, but I still dreamed of somehow settling beside a pristine lake somewhere deep in the wilderness.

It took me a long time to understand that by moving to wilderness setting, building some sort of shelter, clearing a garden patch, I would be disrupting the local ecosystem. And even if I lived in a way that kept my impact to a bare minimum, what is there to stop others from moving in, building roads and large houses, roaring around with motorboats and snowmobiles as people like to do?  Could I live independently, hidden away in a remote natural setting somewhere, without doing harm to the wild?

Thinking it through I began to see that, rather than going into the wild forest to live my life close to nature, it would be so much better find some little bit of abandoned industrial wasteland and get to work breaking up and removing the concrete and asphalt, rehabilitating the polluted soil, growing some plants and actually creating a bit of forest.  The point would be to increase biodiversity rather than reducing it, however slightly.

As years went by, I never saw a way that either of these two extremes could actually work.  Not in Canada, not alone.

Eventually, good fortune led me to make a friend on the internet; a Thai lady who loved plants, gardening and old traditional ways. Her dream, she said, was to have a home surrounded by a garden of trees and flowers.

Keeping it brief; we got along very well together.  I sold my place in Canada and made the big move to Thailand where we joined forces and were soon married.

Here in Thailand we seem to have stumbled upon a kind of "middle way" between the two extremes; a reasonable and practical way forward.

I'll continue to talk about that in future entries.


         
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