An Autobiography
The scattered story of a life lived in books. Books shape us, teach us to feel, comfort us, and ruin us irrevocably if read correctly. They change us.
Books are the affliction and the cure. And if you find one that is special enoug...
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I remember the moment I realized for the first time, I mean really truly understood, that one day I was going to die.
Warning: parts of this story are inaccurate. Parts of this story may be total fabrications. They are as true as I can make them, more or less. Forgive me. I've grown old, and it's become difficult to recall the difference between truth and memory.
In southern British Columbia, where Banff National Park gives way to Yoho National Park, where the Trans-Canada Highway follows the Columbia River along this meandering path through the mountains, at some point if you're driving that way from Calgary to Kamloops and beyond, you may pass by a little community called Blaeberry, which I think, as I recall, is mostly campground. I don't remember there being much of a town of any kind. My humblest apologies to anyone who lives today in Blaeberry and knows differently.
I was travelling with my family, my mom and dad, my brother, my Grannie, and the family dog - a black lab named Scoter. I think I was probably about 10 years old. The dog would've been about six, which I suppose is about 42 or so in dog years. It would've been right around the time the 80s were giving way to the 90s, just as I was on the verge of growing up, an ominous sort of venture that I suppose I was going to get around to eventually. It's not like I wasn't busy doing other stuff, but growing up does seem to be contagious and generally unavoidable.
The Columbia River that runs past Blaeberry is anywhere from 6 to 17 million years old according to Wikipedia. I've done my research, you see. It cut its way through the Columbia Plateau which was formed by basalt lava. That's pretty exciting to me. Basalt lava is the kind that leaves those geometric shapes like the Giant's Causeway in Ireland which takes thousands and thousands of years of erosion to be exposed in these tall hexagonal spires. It takes millions of years for a river to cut its way through rock, and to deposit soil for forests to grow. Forests like those you see around Blaeberry in Yoho national park in the Rocky Mountains.
Time is a wonderful thing, and terrifying. You experience it acutely and perhaps chronically at different times in your life. Road trips with the family focus your attention on it. And if you're lucky, you may lose all sense of it.
I have no idea where we were going on that family trip although I'm sure we got there. We obviously got back. But I think I remember more about the journey itself than I do the destination. I suppose that's some kind of metaphor for life itself.
I remember later in the trip, sitting in our Bronco in line at Tsawassen Ferry Terminal on a blazing hot day on blazing hot asphalt waiting for the ferry and missing one boat because it was so busy and waiting a few more hours with an aged Grannie and a poor overheating black dog all crammed into a vehicle with all of our camping gear and provisions.
Perhaps not ideal, but memorable. Definitely that.
But that's getting ahead of things, or perhaps taking a bit too much of a detour.
