This is an old path. Twisted old apple trees stand guard: trunks clotted with fungus, caterpillar nests woven into the crotchety branches. We don't eat the apples.
My feet leave the cracked concrete patio and I push through the trees. The ground veers downwards and is damp and deep, pulling the remnants of steps into itself piece by rotting piece. I am fighting against bush looming up over my head -- morning glory twisted around cords of blackberry twisted around anchoring salmonberry -- the spaces filled with glossy salal and fern spikes; the air is close and I know I am supposed to be here, although the vines spell passwords I do not know.
The air is filtered green drinkable light, heavy with whirring and held together by the spider silk I tear, and the fracturing air spills down beneath my repellent soaked shirt. Its hold on me is firmer than that of the thorns reaching into my blood.
When you tread the ground in a coniferous forest you can hear the hollowness at its centre.
I am sinking down into that place. And I am not afraid.
Then I am through and into dim, buoyant, vertical space.
The underbrush shudders and two dogs spill out. One a yellow football-player of a Labrador, and the other my own dog, a slimmer, tanner version of her with tracings of his Shepherd mother. Their concentrated energy hurls them over banks and crashes them through the bush.
I am walking further down. The trail switchbacks, working its way down the incline. I can hear the river faintly.
This is my backyard. This is forest from here across the UBC Research Forest to Pitt Lake on one side and Golden Ears Provincial Park on the other, then over the mountains, across a rift passable only by helicopter, then across to the other side of Garibaldi Park. This is too much space for me to comprehend.
I turn a corner. Something black is crouched in the bushes; my first, unbidden, thought is "wolf," but then I recognize the German Shepherd from next door. The dogs spin about each other, growling, and then they are off. I call mine back. He comes, but he doesn't take his eyes away from the direction the other dogs have gone. I kneel down and talk to him, feeling a bit deserted. He turns his head cursorily in my direction, but won't meet my eyes. His fur is hoary with dog saliva and spitbug slime from the bushes, his skin muddy and raw. I let him go and he's gone.
I can see the river now, as bits of white between the trees. Grasping tree roots and branches, I climb down the remaining bank, my feet landing on solid, uneven rock.
Up above to my left the river hurtles down a narrow channel then explodes over a cliff, filling a deep, rounded cavern with wet wind. The water in there is deep and black. I gaze at the waterfall for awhile, at constantly changing water constantly making the same shape.
I am standing downstream from the cavern. Here, the water has more space, and it is both quieter and greener. It widens to a thirty or forty foot across pool; the water over my head at its deepest point. Across from me the only sunlight to get down this deep strikes a gravel bar and glows through the moss draped trees on the bank, extending a long, green finger into the water.
Two brown and white ducks rise from the pool and flap downstream. Their wings are very loud, and the birds seem too big for this place. The dogs watch them with puzzled expressions on their faces.
Then the Labrador plunges into the water, as she did the first time, as she does every time, with a look of completion on her face. She paddles about, blissful and coughing. My dog follows more carefully. He learned to swim by watching her. Before, he used to walk into the gradually deepening water and get confused when his head went under and he couldn't breathe. I tried carrying him into deep water and holding him until he got the idea, but that didn't work. The black Shepherd is the last in. She always is. The neighbours taught her how to swim by tossing her into a lake. She never stays in very long.
The water down here is cold. Cold like the sting of every bone in your body sliced open, the bloody centres suddenly exposed. I step in cautiously. Baby fish dart away from my feet. In deeper water, I can make out the shapes of adult trout, curving away from the churning dogs. The crash of the waterfall fills the silence. Downstream, the river goes out into mist. The forest conceals the shadows of coyote wolf cougar bear. A friend of mine saw a cougar a five minute walk from here; he climbed a tree in fear. The cougar ignored him. It was after deer. I feel suddenly isolated, like people are something that is very far away from where I am. I take another step. Breathe. Plunge in.
The first thing I notice is that the dogs seem larger. Then I notice the cold.
My friend Samantha told me a story once, of how she used to live in a house built on stilts over water at the edge of a forest. At night, the dogs in the neighbourhood used to form into a pack and hunt. One night, they chased a deer into the water beside Sam's house. Her parents fought off the dogs and brought the deer into their house. It died. From exhaustion and from fear. What do you do when an adult buck deer dies on your living room floor? I thought they must have eaten it, but they didn't. They buried it.
I can see it now, the broken brown body plunged deep in the earth. I can see the dogs' eyes in the darkness.
"I knew you when you were seven weeks old," I tell my dogs. "I taught you to 'sit.'" I feel ridiculous; these words are nothing. The sun retracts from the water and brittle black bodies unfurl themselves down to the water's surface to drink. Bats. The trees are standing in shadow, I know I will be walking back up in the dark. A friend of my highschool art teacher stepped on a sleeping grizzly once.
I am afraid of my dogs. Their eyes are glazed. My looks glance off the hard surfaces. They are too close and their breathing is much too loud. Their faces are straining with the effort of swimming, the wet fur slicked down and shiny. I can feel the motion of the water from their pumping legs.
There is nothing malicious in them, to cause my fear. But there is never anything malicious in this place. The water beneath me is absolute. I know there is a bottom down there, but I don't know this. I know there is a slimy dark crevice going down to the centre of the earth, and I can feel it reaching up and pulling me down. I call to my dogs for help, but they churn in place, their eyes empty holes. Something is down there. The whole world is down there.
"In this province people see monsters." Terry Glavin, the founder of the newspaper I work at, told me that in a Japanese restaurant, in one of those closet rooms they put you in, while we ate foreign food and I curled up on the bench half-asleep. I was waiting for him to say that there are monsters in B.C., so I could dismiss what he was saying and feel safe, but he's too good a journalist to do that. "The natives say there are places, where one river joins another river, where one world also joins another world. There, they say, you can sometimes see people in boats--they're people in those other worlds. One of those places is where the Alouette flows into the Fraser." I woke up then.
I am swimming in the Alouette.
I have been in the water a minute that is folding out into forever. "God," a friend of mine told me, "is not safe, but he is good." This place is so good I can taste it. But this is good that makes no sense because there is no evil to make it good. This is just blank eyes in a river of monsters and those people who think that nature is cute aren't alive and those people who don't understand why God makes carnivores need to see the peace in this lifebreeding death and those people who think that nature is inspirational but aren't on their knees in terror need to be this cold. I can't stay any longer.
I splash out onto the shore where the last of the sunlight warms the smooth gravel. The air is cool on my wet body.
The water is far away.