Bleached blonde

  My favourite kinds of countryside are bare   (well, lichen-covered is okay) whale-back   rocks, dry bleached grasslands and desert   country. I don't know what that says about my   character or my soul. I believe dancing   waterfalls and verdant flower meadows are a   bit more conventional.

 Tonight I am moving beyond my small square   in Rome to a summer memory of the interior   of BC. Don't want to get into a rut. 

I spent the month of August 2024 in BC, mostly with my two dearest oldest friends on the coast. I did however, take time for me, and in this case, my memories.  

I drove the 365 miles from Vancouver to Grand Forks BC, the challenging Hope-Princeton highway, the astonishing Anarchist Summit, with time to myself to think. Mostly about the road.

I know the trip's exactly 365 miles, because in 1978/9 I rented an old house in that town, and took on my first teaching job, working with a great small group of developmentally challenged kids.

 I know it was 365 miles, as that's how many my sweetheart drove to visit me each Friday, and to return to work in Vancouver each Sunday (and how sad they were) night.

This was the first time I'd visited on my own. We left BC for Ontario in 1985, returning on several occasions to visit our old haunts, our old friends. This time, I went looking for D. And he was there. 

One of the best things I did was driving up Hardy Mountain - I had forgotten just how steep it was! Hardy Mountain is one of the areas inhabited by the fine Doukhobor people who made the Kootenay Boundary area home in 1908. Today a few of their red brick communal houses stand, remnants of their self-sufficient life. Their influence lives on in many aspects of daily life in the town. 

I stood by the road, listening to the wind in the long dry grass. And it was where I wanted to be in the world.