Would you walk 500 metres down a slippery, 45-degree slope in the dark?
I wouldn't. I didn't, although I walked up the slope before sundown.
Curiosity didn't kill this cat, but it put him in danger twice; but the risks
were instructive, as the Ancient Mariner might tell the Wedding Guest.
Riding my bicycle down the Williams River Valley trail ten kilometres to the Fraser
River last week, I noticed a cement retaining wall. It was about 10 metres long and a metre
high. It was about 200 metres above the trail, about two kilometres from the Fraser. I wondered
why the wall was there, and planned to find out next trip, with new, grippier shoes.
Only climb what's climbable in runners, I have long thought. I don't fear heights. I
only fear falling from them. Actually, I only fear hitting the bottom:
https://www.google.ca/search?q=williams+lake+river+valley+trail&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=Faw4VPOcOobfoAS4pIKoDQ&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAg&biw=1280&bih=565
A week later, wearing the grippier shoes, I biked down the trail to below the cement wall.
Various interruptions that day delayed my start until after 1600h, but there were still
three hours of daylight.
Various interruptions arose while I composed this tale. Perhaps an uninterrupted life,
like an unexamined life, is not worth living. An unexamined, steep, rocky, ravine-slivered
slope is certainly worth examining, if one wants to climb it and live.
Bicycle stashed behind the shrubbery partway up the hill, I began to climb.
Work gloves helped my grip when on all fours, but prickles pierced the gloves, and
a couple remain under my skin two days later. Rocks tumbled now and then, as I
slipped downward, but a couple sticks I found en route helped me stick to the slope.
They also eased my prickled hands. I missed climbing hills and mountains in Alberta,
prickle-free.
Dirt cascaded down my shoes sought traction. There were few trees to hold.
The sun sank in the sky over the nearby Fraser River.
Near the top, I met a steeper place, detoured around it, and reached the level of
the mysterious cement wall. It was about 50 metres south of where I rose. I
suspected the wall was for the railway track. It was, for there was the track.
It wound northward around a bend behind me, a few metres below the top of the
valley. Ahead of me, Williams Lake lights twinkled about five kilometres to the south.
I looked down the hill, noticed the sun lower in the sky, and began to descend.
I followed a rock-strewn spillway below a culvert, below the train track. About
halfway down, the rocks met a drop too steep for me. I went town-ward, along the
slope, but that way looked too steep, too, especially as the sun skimmed the horizon.
Well, thought I, it took an hour to ascend, a half-hour to descend to this precipice,
and it would be dark within an hour. A slip in the dark, a fall of even a couple
metres, could hurt me too much keep going. Don't die here, I thought.
Wanting neither to die nor to climb back up to the tracks and walk out that long
way, I was in a hillside dilemma. My bike was below. Walking out
on the train tracks, back to the start of the trail along the river, and back to my
bike, would be more than 10 kilometres, in the dark.
I chose to incur less risk, walk up, out along the tracks, back to the start of the
trail, then back to my bike.
This first danger I had gotten into was over, now that I trod level ground; but
another danger was coming.
I walked a few kilometres along the tracks. As I walked into the city's north
end, past two sawmills, I thought I might be wise merely to walk home, and return
the next day for my bike. A deer crossed the tracks a few feet in front of me.
Then the Moon came out. I recalled skiing in the moonlight near Chetwynd
in 1998. I figured a moonlight walk along the trail in 2014 would be another
glowing memory. I therefore went to the trail and started walking the three
downhill and three flat kilometres to my cached bike.
Then the moon went behind growing clouds. It got mighty dark along that trail.
Here came my second danger: bears. In the past month, four bears have prowled
in the city. Conservation officers, inaptly named, shot them, rather than tranquilizing
and relocating them. Location is everything, realtors say. Bears might agree. My
outrage over shot bears diminished as I walked the trail, expecting fewer bears;
but one bear would be too many for me.
Bears around here are not afraid of people, unlike bears where I grew up, in
west-central Alberta. There, I would bicycle to the dump, watch bears eat the
garbage, clap my hands, and the bears would run away. Clapping my hands here
might invite a bear to dinner, which might be me.
I had kept one of the two sticks I had found while I climbed the hill to the tracks.
The dark woods crackled with noises, not heavy enough to be a bear, I hoped.
The Williams River burbled beside the trail. A couple times I raised my stick in
both hands, ninja-style, planning to whack or stab any attacking bear. I hoped the
bear wouldn't notice that I was a mere fake ninja. A whack or a poke might
make a bear mad enough to claw and chew me more. Bears have pride.
Ten or so years ago, a woman in the Kootenays survived a grizzly bear attack.
She lay on her stomach, as still as she could. The bear sniffed and left. She later
said that she noticed what bad breath the bear had. She smelled grizzly breath and
lived to tell about it.
Eight years ago, I was untangling a boat from shore shrubs near Kluskus, about
200 kilometres northwest of Williams Lake. A grizzly had been keeping children from
the school I then ran there. I heard crunching ten metres away, and saw a grizzly,
downwind of me, foraging. Not wanting to be foraged, I got that boat out
on the water pretty quick. The bear could have swum to the boat, I suppose; but I felt
safer on the water than on the shore.
School children could have given unique excuses for not doing their homework:
"A bear ate it." "A bear ate my little brother." "The bear didn't know this math."
That was my second grizzly. My first had been safely on the ground, no blasting
conservation officers prowling. I was in a helicopter flying over Virginia Falls,
twice the height of Niagara Falls. The falls are on the Nahanni River, west of
Yellowknife. Six of us working at the Fort Simpson Hudson's Bay Northern Store
had chartered the helicopter, for $100 each, in July, 1986, for a day trip. We landed
near the falls, with no bear in sight.
We also landed by Little Doctor Lake. There, their food cached in a wooden box
up a tree, lived a man and his daughter, about 11. She was preparing to go to school
for the first time in her life. We visitors wrote our names in their autograph book.
An older book boasted the autograph of former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
His 1970 travels in the area would convince him to declare the area a national park.
Back in the spooky woods, less than a kilometre from my bicycle, I heard a loud
splash in the river. It sounded like a big rock thrown in. I hoped it was a deer, not a bear.
When I got to where I thought my bike was, I picked my way through the dark and
shrubbery. I found nothing. Then I walked back along the trail, through more shrubbery,
and found my bike. Mary Shelley's
The Last Man, from the Kamloops library, was still in
the saddlebag. I was glad not to be the last man, as I rode out, slowly, on the trail in
the dark.
An hour later, I was home, a bit scratched, my socks heavy with prickles. As I soaked
in the tub, teapot nearby, I cleaned my socks and listened to the podcast of "Union Made,"
the weekly labor news show on Vancouver Co-Op Radio: http://www.coopradio.org/
I was glad for the adventure; testing myself, reasonably, was satisfying. It increased my
respect for nature, for its superiority over us, and it made me want to reduce the tragic distance
between us and nature, of which we are a part.
The Dr. Seuss-style "Would You, Could You, in the Dark" title for this little tale
comes from the same book that someone working at the local, publicly-owned liquor
store knows. There, by the bottle return, is a handwritten couplet to beer. It asks,
"Would you, could you, with a goat? Would you, could you, in a boat" drink beer?
I was in the liquor store yesterday to buy a wee box of four 250-ml beers for $4.60.
They were brewed in Prince George, about 240 km north of where I type. I am sure
there are many cliffs and bears between here and there.
We share Earth. In vain we try to dominate it, ultimately impossible, luckily.
Would you fall off here or there, would you fall of anywhere?
Would you, could you, way out there, be eaten, eaten by a bear?
( I don't know why some paragraphs are screwy. I don't blame bears, or beers.)
