The Long Road

Decorating blind, again

Now sitting in Scotiabank’s my little apartment, I have owned exactly 2 homes in my 35 years. Both of them I bought sight unseen, from several thousand kilometres away. So wandering the showrooms and marketplace at IKEA, and burning my fingertips on my phone screen from spending so much time in their app, to furnish a place I hadn’t actually seen, wasn’t new or particularly surprising. It was in a way my bliss, and I loved every second of it.

Finding space for all of that love and bliss in a little Ford Escape wasn’t the most straight forward task. I knew in a worst case scenario, I could just ship up a few boxes and that wouldn’t be the end of the world. But I didn’t need to save any space for anything, it didn’t matter how ridiculous the inside of my car looked. There aren’t any prizes for unused space, so I may as well just try to take it all. I unpacked individual IKEA items to save on space and weight. I stuffed clothes into lampshades. I padded the back window with pillows to keep a floor mirror and ceiling track light from going through it on acceleration and bumps. Plants were boxed up in bunches and stacked. It was the culmination of nearly a decade of playing tetris with suitcases at YVR.

A few highways bumps made me bite my lip hard and turn my head back at my porcelain bathroom sink, as if I could see it, wondering if I had just rendered it useless. But thankfully not. Not that I was ever driving very fast anyway. I had litres per hundred records to set.

"There aren't any prizes for unused space, so I may as well just try to take it all."

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Beauty anxiety and cosy nights

Long drives soothe me. They aren’t a chore, they’ve never felt like a thorn in my side or something I just needed to get over with. They’re one of the best parts of life, and in my dream car, going up through one of the most beautiful places in the world, it was something I was more than ready to enjoy every second of. I just wish there were more McDonald’s for their baked apple pies and black coffee.

So more than 9 weeks behind schedule, it was finally departure day for the Yukon after a multiple-time extended summer in BC. Hotels were booked, cancelled, and re-booked. It was a running joke in my mum’s house that every conversation we had about how my apartment is coming along in Whitehorse, the year of completion got exponentially more ridiculous.

"Don't you go falling in love with my ZZ plant now, because I'm taking it with me when I leave here in 2054."

But now I was staring down another 2,200 kilometres, a distance I’d been used to doing straight through. I would this time spread it out over 3 days. 8 hour drives easily became 14 hour days between coffee breaks, emergency photo stops, drone launches, and deep breaths in the sweet forest air.

The weather changed often and dramatically. Golden hour light took my breath away, touching the very tops of trees or peaks of mountains. Blue hour felt never ending and never more beautiful. It was the best of summer, every moment of it. The beauty was almost too much for my chest.

Pain from the north

The wind here is unrelenting. It’s magical on those 30° summer nights, but that seems a world away still. For now, it remains painful on my hands and ears. A reminder of the north.

Walks through a hilly neighbourhood and up into the mountains gives a little peace to my mind, and the opportunity for endless nose sniffling out loud. I stop at a backyard to give the most beautiful cat some love through it’s fence. And then cross the steps into the nature trails, passing the sign that warns of rattlesnakes. I hate snakes.

The skies here never stay the same. Sunset and twilight over the mountains feels so magical. It’s an intense feeling. The sunset kept changing to become more and more beautiful. For only minutes, low fast moving clouds would light up in pink sunlight against varying depths of blues, and then so quickly those clouds lost their pink. It was magic.

I was taking the same photo over and over again, convinced each one was the most beautiful. These are good evenings, but I can’t wait until it’s truly warm and my ears don’t hurt in the wind.

A breath of fresh air

Rains

Waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of a pouring BC rain through a cracked open window is just so beyond perfect. I wish I could go back to that moment over and over and over again.

Of course it’s easy to be so in love with the BC rain when you’re away from it for the better part of a decade. It’s the low cloud, misty, constantly drizzling sort of weather that I do deeply miss after a winter of -40 and endless ice and snow.

"Of course it's easy to be so in love with the BC rain when you're away from it for the better part of a decade."

Walks through the forests reawakened my senses. I dug my fingers into every rain-soaked moss, ran my hands through massive ferns, and stared completely mesmerized at their newest fronds still wound tightly. I must have touched hundreds of leaves, every branch within arms reach, transferred every little water droplet hanging off the edge of a leaf onto my finger.
The most delicate leaves bounced at the impact of raindrops and light gusts of wind. The sweet forest smells overwhelmed me in ways I could never describe. They stopped me dead in my tracks. I became obsessed.

It was not just a reawakening of my senses, but of my soul too. Every walk, I never wanted to leave.

What's good isn't only happy

April 14 at last, -23°

Ethiopian one last time for dinner because there could be no better ending than that. Back home, it felt like forever laying on my back. Just staring at my ceiling, but I eventually fell asleep on my old sofa. The northern lights still danced outside every window. The serenade was of course perfect too.

A restless night ended to low, orange sunlight pouring in the windows. I made a small, spacey walk around the house running my fingers along random walls. I held back tears for all of about 4 seconds inside my long idling car, and finally pulled away for the last time, looking back more times than I can remember.

Somber moments and simple joys

I never expected to see these little cedar waxwings playing around my house this morning, technically the afternoon. I still had my coffee in my hand, so it was morning to me.

After so many of them flew around my dining window and caught my eye as I sat at the dining table, I stood at the window looking a few metres down to one of the trees I planted years ago where dozens of these birds stayed for some moments. I just stood watching them, sipping my coffee and smiling like it was the first time I had ever seen anything so beautiful. It was deeply surreal.

"Cedar waxwings are a really special bird for me, one that represents a lot of love, but that's more a story not for this blog, at least not now."

There was just one other time I had seen them here in Yellowknife and it was not anywhere near the middle of winter like we are in now. This felt extra special and like I could not miss them, and like this was not just a coincidence.

The forever northern sunset

Just a few hours later, the sunset snuck beautifully up on me. The low grey overcast sky of the entire day was glowing orange as light flurries still fell. This forever sunset is one of my favourite things about the north. From the sky, the horizon faded into a misty snowfall far in the distance and all around the snow was reflecting pink. Cotton candy clouds circled the entire sky.

Tea, dinner, and tea

Back home, just the simple joys of too-hot-to-drink tea, candlesticks, and some writing carried me well to dinner. I didn’t even make it through a full episode of The Great Pottery Throw Down before I was messy pouring tea into my thermos and changing in a hurry.

Tonight as I began tipping the teapot spout down toward my mug, I stopped myself and ran back toward the living room bringing AuroraMax up on my phone. It was instantly clear there wouldn’t be time to sit down with a cup of tea, so back in the kitchen, I poured straight into my thermos for the road.

Tea waterfall down the side of a mug and all over the counter successfully averted.

As the aurora lowered back into the northern horizon, I retreated back to the car where two slices of stollen were waiting. I really did bring them out with me on a plate with a fork, and despite driving hurriedly out, not a speck of powdered sugar was spilled over the plate’s edge. The car smelled strongly of lavender cream earl grey tea. A shimmering, pink lined arc of the northern lights danced straight out the front windshield.

The aurora quieted quickly down, and before I left for home, I laid out on an area of the ice not far from the car where I cleared the snow away. It’s hard to say how long I stayed this way, staring straight up. The aurora had cleared of the sky overhead, but I would occasionally catch faint streaks of her in my peripheral vision just as I would catch the faintest sound of Look After You, left playing quietly on repeat, when the engine would switch to battery and there was no other sound.