One

Notes from the Burn

Near the Gataga River in British Columbia’s northern Rockies lies a chain of lung-shaped lakes unnamed on just about any map you look at. The most easterly lake, the one closest to the Gataga, is the one I know best because one spring I fell in love with a wilderness guide and that summer, my heart on fire, I drove up the Alaska Highway to Muncho Lake from where a float plane flew me to his cabin on the shore of what’s known as Mayfield.

The first time I met Wayne I’d just flown home to northeastern bc from New York. Every chance I got, I was flying to New York. Feature it, as my grandmother liked to say. Feature my hooking up with a mountain man when what I thought I wanted was to live in the city.

Wayne had already arrived at his cabin with his string of horses and expedition guests after having travelled for six weeks, starting from Mile 442 of the Alaska Highway. They had crossed the Toad River into the mountains, traversed Heaven’s Pass, then the Steeple and Bevin Passes, descended onto the glaciated valley of Sheep Creek, and finally crossed the Gataga to Mayfield. Accompanying me on the plane were writers, photographers, painters and filmmakers arriving for a one-week wilderness camp at Mayfield Lake. When the artist camp was over, Wayne and I would be alone for two more weeks until a final group of clients would be flown in and all of us would travel together back out to the highway. It would be Wayne’s last expedition of the season and the first of its kind, ever, for me.

As our plane landed, Wayne was a speck on the wharf growing larger, the long, lean length of him taking shape as we neared: the bright coral of his dress shirt, sleeves rolled up, exposing his tanned arms; his face also tanned, a face defined by a white moustache and a square jaw and a calm and confident air, an air I did not share. I was certain I’d lose my balance walking the plane’s float to the wharf, as if I were crossing from one life to another and falling would confirm my recklessness. As I stepped from the pontoon onto the dock, Wayne reached out his hand.

“Hi there,” I said.

“You made it,” Wayne said, and as we hugged, his rich laugh resonated from his chest to mine. Beside the wharf was a weathered-log sauna and beyond that a slumped-roof cabin, built on the north shore of the lake where the water was rich with swamp grass. I’d soon learn that moose liked to wade there, dunking their meteoric heads, their dewlaps sluicing the afternoon light, their rinsed bodies glistening beneath the soaring mountains, the lowering sun gilding the limestone peaks.

A few months before I’d arrived, the pine valley next to the lake had burned, the fire stopping just shy of Wayne’s cabin. So all that first summer, the valley was gimped by a leafless wind. It rasped the scorched bark, crisped coals flaking off while electric-green shoots broke through the charred earth. Arnica up first, its yellow petals so immaculate it startled, then poplar and pine and willow, all in a race to begin again. The horses grazed there, swishing their tails, their ash-plumed hooves cracking open more pods, slickened seeds gummed to their silver shoes.

I was split open too, the person I’d been sloughed off, my senses a Leatherman flicking open its tools of cornea, cochlea, waft, touch, tart. Syntax glassing for anything that moved—olive-sided flycatcher, soapallalie, dwarf birch, furred muzzle of the northern caribou, sun through the thin-paned window of Wayne’s cabin, its light a pale wash on the oilclothed table; a tin butter dish with enamelled roses and a blue rim; a mosquito net hung from hooks in the ceiling, draped over the bed, where our bodies, in sleep, would turn in sync. There was such relief, as if it proved some vital and necessary force had brought us together. And some kind of proof, it seemed, was what I needed.

There was a bench by the lake, its silvered planks worn smooth as the hooves of the horses grazing the burn, and we’d sit there, listening to the loons. One afternoon a family of otters swam near the shore, formed a circle and played, and I felt so far from home, sick with guilt for having left my husband, and aching for my children, though they were grown. There were days when, overcome with what I’d done, I’d leap from the wharf just to feel water’s axe-smack stripping off thought like a seed head slipped from its saw-toothed stalk—awareness deboned of thought, a gawking shimmering socket.

We rode the horses on a trail up to the alpine, where the air was thin as a marmot’s whistle; where frost boiled up through glacial till, split plates of shale into toothy sprockets; where caribou tracks pestled the scree and moss campion grew in the hollows of their steps. When I walked on the caribou lichen (Cladonia rangiferina), it crunched like cornflakes. I felt first like a giant whose ill-placed steps were crushing a coral floor, then Lilliputian, sitting on the ridge, staring at mountains racked peak after peak. So much space and so much silence. Below, I could see Mayfield Lake, where Wayne had asked, “Do you think you could live here?”

Every sound seemed directed at me, every gust of wind, every bunting darting by—muscles on a pull-string—every squirrel ratcheting in the trees, spruce needles clattering to the ground, the horse bells tolling. This was the news I received.

One day I walked into the burn and found an insect that looked like the charred forest incarnate, its body black as charcoal, witching the root of a burned-out tree with its brittle antennae, its legs the rusty orange of dead spruce needles, its wings rattling and sizzling, a new exuberance rising from the wreckage. For a moment I could delete the past. I walked back to the cabin and stood there, my hand on the small of Wayne’s back, beside a lake whose mud bottom was etched with beaver trails, its surface whisked by merganser wings. Where the water was shallow and fleshy with grass and moose plunged their heads, I gathered up my love and moved forward.