In Praise of Walking
BY JILLIAN STIRK
Early one morning, any morning, we can set out, with the least
possible baggage, and discover the world.
—Thomas A. Clark, In Praise of Walking
Photo by Jillian Stirk.
One foot in front of the other. The path is narrow and steep. The dun-coloured earth slides under my boots as I scramble over exposed roots. Dust catches in the back of my throat and collects, along with beads of sweat, in the soft creases behind my knees and in the crooks of my elbows. I plant my poles to get some grip before I pull myself up over the rocks.
We are four women climbing Vancouver’s iconic mountains. Some might call this peak-bagging, but the term is too predatory, our quests too modest. Before COVID, a new way of delineating time, we walked together once a week, usually just local trails. Then minutes became hours and hours became days. Either that or weeks disappeared altogether with no indication of where they’d gone. Our weekly excursions provided the structure we craved. Someone suggested we tackle five peaks in five years.
“What if I don’t have five years of serious hiking left in me?” I asked.
“How about the next five months then?” Alice answered.
I was sceptical. I thought I might not have the stamina, but in the spirit of sisterhood, my companions assured me I could do this.
Walking has always been an anchor in my life. My mother used to say there was no point standing around waiting for a bus—you might as well walk—you could always pick it up along the way if need be. Together, we walked the country lanes where I learned the names of trees and flowers. Later, I walked the cities of the world where I learned other things.
Whenever I find myself in a new place, I explore the boulevards and alleyways, seeking out the bright lights and dark corners. I fall into step on a crowded pavement or navigate cobblestones worn smooth by time. It’s how I knit together people and place to find my niche. Small victories when my feet carry me in the right direction and the sense of belonging that comes with a familiar route. But it’s when I’m truly lost with no idea where I’m headed that I stumble on things I’d never imagined. Now we all have GPS that doesn’t happen very often, our tolerance for risk so diminished we seem unable to cope with the unexpected. Climbing a mountain offers that sense of freedom, of uncharted ways. It is only when I think I can go no further, I discover what is possible.
The approach through the forest is gentle. Shafts of light play on striated layers of green. Limbs stretched, arms loose, we breathe in the cool morning air and feel strong, leonine. Alice’s terrier, Toto, trots along beside us, herding any stragglers. The arborist amongst us names the flora. Copperbush, Salal, a snowy carpet of Pacific trillium. A skeleton tree, arms extended and blanketed in thick verdant moss stands alone. We call her the dancing widow—the tree not the arborist. We talk about what we packed for lunch and who has the map. Diana used to date a guy who works for Search and Rescue, and she wants to be sure we don’t have to call for help.
“He’d probably ghost us,” she says. She laughs but checks her backpack all the same.
The trail begins to climb and we leave behind the lush coastal rain forest. As the trees thin, we find banks of velvet leaf blueberry. Bear country. My lungs expand to accommodate the incline. Walking offers time to dream, to organize my thoughts and to wrestle anxieties to the ground. Problems that seem insurmountable, that set my stomach rolling in the middle of the night, become manageable. I’ve walked through grief when the daily trek between the needs at home and the demands of work was the only time to process what felt like unbearable loss, until gradually, imperceptibly I found my equilibrium restored. When I’m walking, it’s as if the surroundings fill up the empty space.
To walk in good company, however, is something else altogether. Conversation flows—smooth and rhythmic, or clipped and purposeful—depending on the cadence of the footsteps. Secrets shared, emotions bared. But we have two unspoken rules: no complaining and no gossip. Well, almost no gossip. Instead, we tell stories of how we ventured across the world for months at a time our only link to home an occasional postcard. An unimaginable freedom denied our children.
Alice tells us about a motorcycle trip across America with a man and no money.
“I told my parents we’d bought a Honda. They thought I meant a car, and I thought it better not to elaborate.”
The artist moved to Japan at eighteen to study with a painter. “I learned about art and sex,” she says, “but not necessarily in that order.”
I took a job half-way across the world for which I was utterly unqualified assuming I would figure it out as I went along. “Such hubris,” I say, and shake my head.
“We believed anything was possible,” says Diana.
Of course, life was more complicated than we’d imagined. The new-found freedoms of the 70s were not quite as expansive as we thought. Looking back, we find the detours and the unintended consequences. Jobs that eluded us, relationships that didn’t last, still born projects of one kind or another. Some might say we were naïve.
“Shit happens,” says Diana, ever the pragmatist.
We follow the hairpin trail as it narrows and becomes rougher. We clamber over rocks and roots interspersed with patches of mud from last week’s rainfall.
“It’s just round the corner,” says Alice, and we all laugh because this is what we used to say to our children, just as our mothers said to us.
We scramble up the bald rock face to reach the peak, look out across the water and back to the coastal mountains, their albescent peaks piercing the sky and, in front, as if we could reach out and touch them, the unmistakeable humps of the Lions. Whiskey Jacks, their pearl grey feathers fluttering in the breeze, vie for our lunch.
It’s July when we climb Mt Gardner. We circle Bowen Island and approach the mountain from the west. An owl, serene and otherworldly, keeps watch from a branch high up in the canopy. Dense bush, an arbutus dotted bluff, then a hard scrabble to the top in the wave of dense fog that has rolled in from nowhere. We wolf down our lunch before damp turns to cold.
It had been a rough patch. Ellen’s father had died, not from COVID but after a long illness. The virus kept her from his bedside and now there’s no way to mark his passage. Adult children lost their jobs and moved home where we navigated new boundaries. We and they knew they were lucky to have this safety net, but this is not how it was meant to be. My daughter was rushed to hospital haemorrhaging from a miscarriage. Even though I felt helpless to ease to her pain, I broke the rules and brought her home.
Births and deaths, successes and failures. Each of us has fallen in and out of love, found passion or companionship, or if she is very lucky both at the same time. When we were young, we would have mocked such an idea, but it’s those moments of joy and sorrow that matter more and more and keep us grounded.
At the end of the day, after nearly nine hours of walking, we slump on the dock and look out over the cove with relief. We’re on the ferry ride home, leaning on the railing, taking selfies, eating ice cream, when suddenly we’re rewarded with a pod of orcas that takes command of the Sound—cruising coasting, breaching for air—before plunging back into the deep. Behind us, the silhouette of the island appears like a woman reclining at her ease.
It’s the dog days of summer, airless and parched, when we tackle the eponymous Unnecessary Mountain. The city has ground to a halt in an unprecedented heat wave that presages the climate disaster that is upon us. Diana and Ellen, like mountain goats, lean and fit and indefatigable, lead the way. The trail is not great. It’s rough, dry and poorly marked. We miss a turnoff and double back. Alice points out the area must have been logged. The new growth is weak and spindly. A strike of lightening could set the hillside alight. We scramble over rocks and press through the thicket of low shrubs. Alice and I lag behind. I feel lightheaded when we stop to catch our breath. A wave of nausea rolls through me. I drain my first bottle of water and start another.
“Are you sure this is the trail?” I ask and wipe the sweat from my forehead with my hand.
My mother too, was a wanderer and was seized with restlessness. Like many of her generation she lived with disappointments, a life smaller than she had imagined.
Alice shrugs, but since the others are out of sight we keep going. We struggle through the underbrush until we reach the next plateau where we regroup and consult the map. A debate ensues. I’m adamant we’re on the wrong track. Diana is convinced we need to keep going. After a few minutes, the trail runs out. Rationing our water, we stagger home. Tired, surly, defeated. A dull ache settles in my knees. But we rest up and regroup, and by the following week, we’re ready to try something else.
We are in that in-between state. No longer young, but not yet old. If turning fifty is liberating, turning sixty is a nudge, a signal that it’s now or never. Even though we like to imagine it’s still 1968 when our protests shook the world to its core, our lives, now so entrenched, tell us otherwise. Did we trade big ideas for sinecures or has the bar moved, as it should have, but leaving us struggling to catch up? I look in the mirror and find my mother looking back at me. The same strawberry hair, her serious expression. I sense my body folding in on me, and fear that one day my mind might follow.
My mother too, was a wanderer and was seized with restlessness. Like many of her generation she lived with disappointments, a life smaller than she had imagined. Was it the gap between what was and what might have been that propelled me out into the world? As she aged, she exchanged the physical world for a world of ideas. The week before she died, we walked for the last time beside the sea. Leaning on a frame, struggling for breath, she lamented the trip not taken, the book unread, missed opportunities large and small.
I’ve spent most of my life on the move. After six years, this is the longest I’ve lived in one place since I left home, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. I am grateful for my new friends and my life here, but I’ve felt constrained in some way, especially in this pandemic, as if time were running out. The mountains offer an antidote. A chance to improvise, the thrill of the unknown, the prospect of an adventure.
In the gossamer days of early autumn when spiders’ webs float on the air, we hike along the Howe Sound Crest Trail. Flanked by soaring Douglas Fir and Red Cedar, we catch glimpses of the water through the boughs. Lift and plant. Rise and fall. We leave the few other hikers behind and follow the birdsong back into the woods. Treble notes and baroque trills float on the breeze. We catch a glimpse of a bear with her cubs gorging on berries on a hillside and give them a wide berth. But they have better things to do than worry about us.
There is a sense of optimism that the end of the virus is within reach. Some of us long to be back in the fray. I am less sure. The absence of social obligations feels comfortable, too comfortable. If overthinking everything is a sign of aging, it has only been exacerbated by the isolation where every interaction feels momentous, exhausting. And yet, somewhere beneath all that I feel a flicker of desire for something new, to throw inhibition to the wind in a world where life itself is more fleeting and fragile than we had imagined.
When the trail descends suddenly over a patch of loose scree, the ground beneath me shifts and I slide with it. I land hard, even though my poles break the fall. Alice extends a hand and heaves me up. I nod to let her know I’m fine.
“Just imagine the bruise you’ll have,” says Diana. Pain and laughter hand in hand.
Short of breath, we walk in silence now. Another scramble, a frayed rope to steady us, and then the Summit with its heart stopping view over the fjord. Cerulean sea, islands like drops of malachite and mountains stacked up one upon the other under a bluebird sky.
On the way home, we stop at a tiny postcard lake and strip to our underwear – thin bands of colour—and throw our rainbow curves into the silent water. We shriek from the cold like schoolgirls, then strike out with long even strokes, the ripples spreading gently across the glassy surface to where the forest meets the shore, its image reversed in the void.
JILLIAN STIRK spent 30 years in Canada’s foreign service with assignments around the world. She is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers and is currently working on a novel. Her writing has been published by Queen’s Quarterly, the Globe and Mail, Trek magazine, and Open Canada, among others.