Driving over the 90 km/h speed limit between Fort St. John and Chetwynd through Hudson's Hope would be cheating yourself. The mighty Peace River accompanied me nearly all the way back to Chetwynd through the gorgeous valley framed by mountains and studded with lakes after a weekend of phenomenal food, excess adult beverages and friends old and new.
A uni roommate housed me, her parents once again opened their house and set their kitchen table for me and former co-workers with some delightful additions organized all-you-can-eat sushi and fondue meals.
While living in Fort St. John again for any length of time appeals to be like a hole in the head, I was glad to be back there among part of my extended forestry family partly for a good time but mostly for the people I happily and quickly call friends.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Home?
It's a long and rugged road
and we don't know where it's headed
But we know it's going to get us where we're going
And when we find what we're looking for
we'll drop these bags and search no more
'cause it's going to feel like heaven when we're home
It's going to feel like heaven when we're home.
Chorus from the Wailing Jenny’s “Heaven When We’re Home”
As I nurture my wanderlust, I’m continually confronted with what and where home is. Bouncing between travel, work and play, I look forward to going home – even though home is very loosely defined in my mind.
Going home from my current summer home of Chetwynd is going back to my hometown, Red Deer, Alberta, where my possessions are stored in an attic where my mother lives with a family. I don’t have the luxury of going back to the house I grew up in or a house that is even truly my mother’s. While I am more than welcome at that house, it doesn’t truly feel like home and there’s always a residual feeling that I’m a guest there.
More than geographic location, home is about feeling for me. Feeling welcome, secure and like I belong and am accepted there. I have been fortunate to have experienced that numerous times in a handful of countries. At the Sharklab on South Bimini, I felt valued and my presence welcomed and even occasionally sought after. In Mackenzie, B.C. my Canfor coworkers quickly enveloped me into their lives even though they all knew my time there was temporary. At the Ranch, where despite its now-condemned-for-health-reasons status, we relished passing the time together over beers, crib, campfires and conversation. When I was working my first field season in forestry in northern Alberta and it pissed rain all day, I anticipated being home from the moment my boots hit the gravel road where we parked the pickups – even if home meant crawling into a soggy tent. In all, I was deeply embedded in the comfortable ease of daily life with the people and environment around me.
Home then, is not one solitary location for me even as I am increasingly being surrounded by friends committing to life partners, offspring, mortgages and therefore their version of home. Just as Alice Sebold suggests varying views of heaven in “The Lovely Bones,” home is many things to many people.
For me, the pursuit of home is destined to be moving target as settling and being content in having made a home would mark the end of my passport stamps.
and we don't know where it's headed
But we know it's going to get us where we're going
And when we find what we're looking for
we'll drop these bags and search no more
'cause it's going to feel like heaven when we're home
It's going to feel like heaven when we're home.
Chorus from the Wailing Jenny’s “Heaven When We’re Home”
As I nurture my wanderlust, I’m continually confronted with what and where home is. Bouncing between travel, work and play, I look forward to going home – even though home is very loosely defined in my mind.
Going home from my current summer home of Chetwynd is going back to my hometown, Red Deer, Alberta, where my possessions are stored in an attic where my mother lives with a family. I don’t have the luxury of going back to the house I grew up in or a house that is even truly my mother’s. While I am more than welcome at that house, it doesn’t truly feel like home and there’s always a residual feeling that I’m a guest there.
More than geographic location, home is about feeling for me. Feeling welcome, secure and like I belong and am accepted there. I have been fortunate to have experienced that numerous times in a handful of countries. At the Sharklab on South Bimini, I felt valued and my presence welcomed and even occasionally sought after. In Mackenzie, B.C. my Canfor coworkers quickly enveloped me into their lives even though they all knew my time there was temporary. At the Ranch, where despite its now-condemned-for-health-reasons status, we relished passing the time together over beers, crib, campfires and conversation. When I was working my first field season in forestry in northern Alberta and it pissed rain all day, I anticipated being home from the moment my boots hit the gravel road where we parked the pickups – even if home meant crawling into a soggy tent. In all, I was deeply embedded in the comfortable ease of daily life with the people and environment around me.
Home then, is not one solitary location for me even as I am increasingly being surrounded by friends committing to life partners, offspring, mortgages and therefore their version of home. Just as Alice Sebold suggests varying views of heaven in “The Lovely Bones,” home is many things to many people.
For me, the pursuit of home is destined to be moving target as settling and being content in having made a home would mark the end of my passport stamps.
Monday, May 3, 2010
Peace in
After 10 days of catching up with family and friends, changing my ocean kit for forest gear, finally graduating uni and celebrating a birthday, I am set up in my very own room in Chetwynd, B.C. and sharing a house with three other working "professionals."
Friday, April 23, 2010
Home and dry
Never a fan of big last nights, my last night in Bimini appropriately was an animated games night at the kitchen table while the sky cried torrentially. These meterological tears were a precursor to my own the next morning as I said goodbye to the Sharklab and the amazing team of staff and volunteers that it housed.
A function of living, working and playing together for three months, we were a tight-knit group that often sounded like a gathering of the United Nations at a comedy club.
When not sharing vulgar, side-splitting laughs about sex or poo, we discussed at length the food items we would give our left breast/nut for. Failing to find common ground there, conversation reverted back to sharks - and almost always to their claspers or cloacas. Those four topics exhausted, chatter turned to taking the piss out of someone either for their accent or where they called home.
Home and 700 meters of elevation removed from sea level and four plane rides away from Bimini, my mental state is beginning to settle down. Emotions thoroughly all over the spectrum from leaving Bimini, part of me was ready and glad to be heading back to Edmonton - even if only for a while.
A function of living, working and playing together for three months, we were a tight-knit group that often sounded like a gathering of the United Nations at a comedy club.
When not sharing vulgar, side-splitting laughs about sex or poo, we discussed at length the food items we would give our left breast/nut for. Failing to find common ground there, conversation reverted back to sharks - and almost always to their claspers or cloacas. Those four topics exhausted, chatter turned to taking the piss out of someone either for their accent or where they called home.
Home and 700 meters of elevation removed from sea level and four plane rides away from Bimini, my mental state is beginning to settle down. Emotions thoroughly all over the spectrum from leaving Bimini, part of me was ready and glad to be heading back to Edmonton - even if only for a while.
Travel outfits
Sprinting through the Memphis airport to the tune of "paging passenger Connolly" on the intercom with two rum bottles clanking up against each other in my carry-on, I spotted this couple. They were a comforting reminder that there were more matching travellers than just Robyn and I.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Departure downs
It's nearly time for me to once again roll on. After being minorly fucked over on my departure flight, I'm leaving Bimini on Monday.
I'm ready to move on, which is likely the result of 6.5 years of a dragged-out university degree. My uni terms were compartmentalized into four month segments and I seem to have developed only a four-month attention span.
The Sharklab further built on carefully controlled intervals.
We checked the gillnets every 15 minutes, changed tracking duties every hour, looked to first, second and occasionally third lunch to break up the day when on the boat for nine hours.
In my three months here, I was constantly awed by the diversity of the sea here, yet continually shocked and amazed at how filthy shark biologists are. I thought my summers working in the forest industry had exposed me to every rude comment imaginable, but it is outrageous what leaves, or occasionally enters, mouths here.
Conversations are quickly reduced to innuendos about sex and poo with remarks about sharks and food thrown in for variety. These four topics bind all of us together into a tight coagulation of what sounds like a gathering of the United Nations at a comedy club.
Amidst all the filth and occasionally trying tasks of manually clearing out the septic tank with shovels and buckets, being defecated on by pelicans and working through the night fishing for juvenile sharks over an entire tidal cycle in 20 mile per hour winds and sporadic downpours, assisting a PhD candidate collect her field research has been extremely rewarding.
Expectations more than satisfied, I have also learned and done things I would have baulked at in January such as accept a dinner party invitation from rowdy women claiming to be pirates driving a golf cart and consuming pink drinks, snake hunt and nearly daily handle sharks.
Five days left until I am back on Alberta soil and the rotating and often revolving cast of volunteers and staff along with a plethora of elasmobranches will ensure a second Bahamian stamp in my passport.
I'm ready to move on, which is likely the result of 6.5 years of a dragged-out university degree. My uni terms were compartmentalized into four month segments and I seem to have developed only a four-month attention span.
The Sharklab further built on carefully controlled intervals.
We checked the gillnets every 15 minutes, changed tracking duties every hour, looked to first, second and occasionally third lunch to break up the day when on the boat for nine hours.
In my three months here, I was constantly awed by the diversity of the sea here, yet continually shocked and amazed at how filthy shark biologists are. I thought my summers working in the forest industry had exposed me to every rude comment imaginable, but it is outrageous what leaves, or occasionally enters, mouths here.
Conversations are quickly reduced to innuendos about sex and poo with remarks about sharks and food thrown in for variety. These four topics bind all of us together into a tight coagulation of what sounds like a gathering of the United Nations at a comedy club.
Amidst all the filth and occasionally trying tasks of manually clearing out the septic tank with shovels and buckets, being defecated on by pelicans and working through the night fishing for juvenile sharks over an entire tidal cycle in 20 mile per hour winds and sporadic downpours, assisting a PhD candidate collect her field research has been extremely rewarding.
Expectations more than satisfied, I have also learned and done things I would have baulked at in January such as accept a dinner party invitation from rowdy women claiming to be pirates driving a golf cart and consuming pink drinks, snake hunt and nearly daily handle sharks.
Five days left until I am back on Alberta soil and the rotating and often revolving cast of volunteers and staff along with a plethora of elasmobranches will ensure a second Bahamian stamp in my passport.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Course's work
The Sharklab celebrated Easter Friday by tracking juvenile lemon sharks in the day and joining the invading hordes of American holiday makers on the north island for night one of Junkanoo and excessive dancing in the streets and dock-side pubs.
We needed a mildly wild night out after hosting a university elasmobranch course for five days. Kicked out of the lab for its duration, we were moved to an apartment down the road. We somewhat grudgingly took this minor inconvenience and made the absolute most of it. The volunteers often went out to help with their seatrips in whatever capacity we were needed - boat drivers, bait cutters and throwers, photographers. I helped out with baiting in 18 blacktips, and escorting the students down a mangrove-lined channel so they could hand feed juv lemons.
The second last night, I scored a dinner invitation that the others are still bitter over. Walking back to the apartment, a golf car pulled up and offered me a ride home - offering and accepting rides from complete strangers is normal and expected in Bimini. When I saw the driver and her three passengers had pink drinks in fish covered glasses, I knew it would be a crazy ride back. Stopping next door to where we were staying, the middle aged women invited me in for a dinner of steak, lobster, fresh wahoo, veggies and rum punch. The lobster or rum punch wasn't their cause of envy. It was the steak. Collectively, we haven't had steak in decades. I paid dearly for my dinner engagement the next morning.
Getting up hungover at 6:50 am to be at the lab at 7:10 am to set a vertical longline in the Gulf Stream on four foot rolling seas was the opposite of fun. The morning after a full moon has its perks though. Still stumbling and reeking of rum punch, I enjoyed these vistas.
Hauled up by hand, the 1800 feet of the vertical long line netted us three! tiger sharks.
The largest was 3.28 meters! They tied him alongside the boat so we could get in and snorkel with him.
I'm home in less than three weeks. Eeekk. It's going to be difficult to leave, but I am also eagerly anticipating my impending uni graduation and northern B.C. summer.
We needed a mildly wild night out after hosting a university elasmobranch course for five days. Kicked out of the lab for its duration, we were moved to an apartment down the road. We somewhat grudgingly took this minor inconvenience and made the absolute most of it. The volunteers often went out to help with their seatrips in whatever capacity we were needed - boat drivers, bait cutters and throwers, photographers. I helped out with baiting in 18 blacktips, and escorting the students down a mangrove-lined channel so they could hand feed juv lemons.
The second last night, I scored a dinner invitation that the others are still bitter over. Walking back to the apartment, a golf car pulled up and offered me a ride home - offering and accepting rides from complete strangers is normal and expected in Bimini. When I saw the driver and her three passengers had pink drinks in fish covered glasses, I knew it would be a crazy ride back. Stopping next door to where we were staying, the middle aged women invited me in for a dinner of steak, lobster, fresh wahoo, veggies and rum punch. The lobster or rum punch wasn't their cause of envy. It was the steak. Collectively, we haven't had steak in decades. I paid dearly for my dinner engagement the next morning.
Getting up hungover at 6:50 am to be at the lab at 7:10 am to set a vertical longline in the Gulf Stream on four foot rolling seas was the opposite of fun. The morning after a full moon has its perks though. Still stumbling and reeking of rum punch, I enjoyed these vistas.
Hauled up by hand, the 1800 feet of the vertical long line netted us three! tiger sharks.
The largest was 3.28 meters! They tied him alongside the boat so we could get in and snorkel with him.
I'm home in less than three weeks. Eeekk. It's going to be difficult to leave, but I am also eagerly anticipating my impending uni graduation and northern B.C. summer.
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