Is Everything Boring Now?

Is Everything Boring Now?

   Is everything boring now? I ask this because of the reaction I had at being front and center witnessing the final few footsteps of a great trek that had begun five years before. The Trans Canada Trail begins and ends at oceans depending on which side of the country you take your first footsteps, Pacific or in this case Atlantic. Most people if they have the opportunity will hike a section of two of this wilderness path but one person decided to go the whole way with an amazing detour to the Arctic Ocean. Melanie Vogel of Germany wetted her toes in all three of those oceans and gathered blisters for the rest of the journey west.

   It was a spectacularly sunny blue skied Saturday in November when I took my own urban hike under the canopy of brightly coloured tree leaves from my girlfriend’s house to a local coffee shop. I grabbed a cup to sustain me on my journey to the sea walking at right angles to the route Vogel was taking to the ‘point zero’ marker of the TCT at Clover Point Victoria BC.

A small crowd was gathering there, some expressing confusion as to where she would be arriving. There is another zero point on the same shoreline road named Mile Zero which is the terminus of the Trans Canada Highway. I was early and so was the reporter from the city news who had come to cover the event.  I did not want to lose my early bird spot with my camera so struck up conversation with the reporter who had been on the Vogel story for some time. She spoke of how the past couple of days had been hard on Melanie Vogel as she reappeared in society after so long hiking alone, well that is alone with her husky/lab cross,  Malo. Being overwhelmed by well wishers, media interests and blistered and bandaged feet was the back story I was told as the reporter, looking through her video camera could make out the crowd that had joined Vogel for the last leg.

   The group closed in on the final steps of a five year journey and I wondered as I crouched down to take video from a low angle to make her appear bigger, I wondered what she must be thinking. I could see it in her eyes as she walked past me. There I could see a mix of fatigued bewilderment, gratitude, relief, regret and release that fell from her being with each footprint. Malo just enjoyed the treats and attention. She touched the signpost, hugged Malo and dipped her feet in the cold water as Malo stole the show rolling in a pile of seaweed when his own pack was removed. Moments later the media jumped her. She sat on a log, hugging Malo as people asked for pictures with her. She agreed to them but was in the images in body only. I could tell she had retreated into a bubble. Shoeing away the reporters for a moment by telling then that she had little to say than she had already said in so many previous interviews, and they were surprisingly respectful letting her savour the moment and somehow process the end of the journey. That was when I packed up and headed back the way I came. The long way home seemed fitting that afternoon all things considered. The question I started asking myself as the event unfolded remained and enforced by my observations of those around me. Is everything boring now?

 Is everything boring now because everything is immediately at our fingertips? Is everything boring now because with a device in hand we cannot get lost because it will tell us exactly where we are just by opening an app? Is everything boring now because every life experience, both real and imagined is available through a content producing public all over social media? I ask this because for a brief moment on that sunny Saturday everyone looked up. They took part in a flash community. They engaged with each other and actually talking to strangers about the anticipation of this woman walking across the country to end up sitting on a log hugging a wet dog. The moment of community was short lived and I watched them all retreat back to the default settings our society has fostered in the last decade or so. The excitement over, the ant hill returning to regular business and off we went into our regular lives. I noticed one young woman who as she walked past me held an expression of boredom. It didn’t take. The random and to me very exciting emotionally provocative arrival of Vogel sent my throat to stiffen and eyes, I admit filling at the corners as she walked up to the sign post. This woman might have felt a short blast of excitement but it washed over her leaving her feeling, meh. Was I imagining this? In my caffeinated state I was jumping in and talking to reporters like a pro, and to total strangers, I love doing that! So, I quickly asked the young woman what she thought of it all.

“It was cool, I guess.”

Me: “Could you see yourself doing something crazy like that?”

“Oh nooooo way!”

Me, laughing knowing me. : “I can!”

She chuckled and left. Okay, so not a good example of going on a multi-year hikes as something seen as boring, but she was bored, almost instantly. All mystery and imagination has gone into the existential junk drawer. Everything has become all too available. The things that other people do and we get to watch on You Tube and Instagram have become a kind of entertainment and not seen as exceptional. We even go as far as to critique the video quality of someone’s life dream adventure that they go to the trouble of sharing with us online.

   I have written trip reports that I hope give information about a place to hike or to kayak, and that some of my words may actually spark the imagination of the reader. I do hope that, and not that I have become entertaining.

Something special has gotten lost along the way. The way we acted out during the pandemic, the so-called break down of social norms all feel like a live version of the nasty comments threads I read on the interweb. I believe that it is due to the lack of running room. There is no escape for the in coming information, data and video. Over-sharing is killing us and we are acting out of boredom.

   I own a flip-phone. I know that some of you reading that will scoff. Why would you use something so useless you might ask? I don’t owe an answer but I will say one thing. I very nearly burst into tears at that sea side marker when a woman and her dog arrived from an mighty journey, a solo journey of many kilometres and delays due to Covid restrictions giving her the chance to spend a year and a half in the Yukon, which is one of my favourite places on Earth. Maybe owning a phone that just makes phone calls saves at least a portion of my soul. I was not bored before, during or after on my walk home that day. In fact, I was stifling the emotions the entire way home and at watching my video of the event at home felt that rush yet again.

   It is a complicated world we now live in. Do we throw away our devices to save our collective spirits? Are we all in need of an intervention and some form of a 12-step addiction program to at the very least find some moderation in the use of the digital drugs? Inundated from the moment we wake up by the noise of other people over-sharing. It has dulled the senses. It has made everything boring. Before you say it, yes I do partake in the sharing of things on the internet. I admit to getting lost in video clip vortexes when I get home from work that is tough to jump out from. I am as susceptible as any to the dangers of over-sharing of others. To say, that was cool, shrug my shoulders and then walk on to the next thing is something I can’t do. I have been thinking about Melanie Vogel all week. I wonder how she is making out in the strangest days she will experience after the hike, and I wonder what the next morning was like. Did she enjoy a good cup of coffee on some balcony and gaze out over the cityscape or did she pull the covers up over her head and let it be? The event of her last sore footsteps that afternoon struck a nerve, a pin was placed on the memory map and I cannot be bored by that.   

Stay in your Lane, but Howl if you want to!

Stay in your Lane, But Howl if you Want To!

   The separation between God and man is equal the space we have driven between ourselves and the natural world that we sprung from millions of years ago. In the recent decade I can see the changes and distancing from one another that have occurred and the unfortunate divisions driving us to become more insulted from each other. We are a society of ones. I blame the combo platter serving up the internet, a once useful creature that slowly was made corruptible and its cousin, the constant distraction machine of the cell phone. I dare you humble reader to find one single coffee shop anywhere on the planet, not just the western so called advanced nations, but anywhere that does not contain caffeine drinking inhabitants sharing tables who are glued to their phones. Not sharing life’s little stories of family and friends. Not arguing over the state of the world at large, not communicating with one another at all. Simply captivated, and so completely adhering to this captivity of scrolling through nothingness that they, we have successfully removed each other from each other while praying to the good God social media. We suck!

   It is our own fault that we are so focused on nasty little trolls and info-tainment that we are missing out on the experience of being living creatures. It is why we are experiencing something other than engaging in zombie-like meat puppetry in the glow of our personal screen time. We suck!

   It is our nature I suppose to wander away from what keeps us sane and whole. It is easier to blame the other, to seek ways of deferring responsibility for our own actions. The combo platter does the trick and the buffet of it all fills us up while somehow at the same time leaving each of us empty in the existential stomach. I would argue that the years of wandering from our natural beginnings only exacerbated the speed in which we have run to a place of avoiding each other as real people not abstracts on a phone screen.

   The human critter does not want to think of itself as small. We beat our chests and tell the old faithful myth of how we are the top of the food chain. We think and I dare say believe that we are the leader of the pack and not part of the natural world. Tell that to the jogger being chased by a cougar and ask him or her if they feel superior or just dinner. We are big, stupid bumbling animals who really have not advanced much from our days fashioning rudimentary tools from wood, bone and stone. We are now big dumb bumbling creatures with bigger tools that are smarter than we could ever be, yet we pat ourselves on the back for how brilliant we are. We suck!

   There are a few of us who are trying to reconnect, maybe not so much with each other but that we did the nature thing on the weekend, place selfie here. An industry rose up supplying social malcontents who want to engage with their true selves and touch a bit of human history by sleeping rough in a thin nylon enclosure while the wind whistles, and a twig snapping sends them reeling into a primal fear of that awareness of not being on top of the food chain. They, like me are the thrill seekers who want to sense that anxiety at the sound of a twig snap. It is a rush man! When we lose that grip on the personal human kind myth and embrace our true place in the scheme of things, to humble our egos and understand finally that it is not something to be embarrassed about, to be small. If we see the natural world as small, in how could we be on same the level of grass, or a tree in a field, a bird, a worm or an amoeba? We are! It is exciting to be small, to be part of something finally and against all social motivators to the contrary. That is why people buy tents, sleeping bags, cook stoves and hiking boots. It is why we invented horrible terms such as nature bathing. It is why I did all that and then expanded my purchase history when launching knee deep into kayaking. It is why people go outside. There is something primal speaking in the depths of who we are reminding us of why we are. Do we have to suck?

   On an island in a small chain of what looks like from thirty thousand feet to be chips broken away from the whole of Vancouver Island is a long crescent-shaped sandy beach at the base of a the abrupt and deep green hillside. One end of that beach is wild. The surf breaks violently after the smooth rolling swells of the breathing ocean meet the rocky shallows and rise up against themselves to fall in a rough line of shore for hundreds of feet. The other end of the curved shoreline is calmer. Protected by a rocky outcrop of land creating a safe warm soft armpit of land to slide a kayak into without getting wet in the attempt and naturally at that place is a perfect camp location. It offers a white sand platform for your tent if you enjoy your tent filling with sand, and a level wooded area that is sand free. It is a human place with park trails and a green cone toilet out in the open and oddly facing the hiking trail. It feels safe from all that uncomfortable proximity to our natural past.

   On morning I and my companions woke to find that the trail was not just being used by humans. My tent was in the sand. I like the sand. It gives way under me when I sleep and camping on the coast without getting sand in your tent, or coffee cup for that matter is a ridiculous notion. My tent had tracks leading to it and around it on both sides. There were no signs of any of the night dwellers investigating my abode, only seeing it as the only obstacle on the way to the fresh water stream falling from the deep woods into the sand around the rocks from where I slept. Wolf, bird, cougar and raccoons had come to visit over night. Not one twig snap was heard.

   Later that afternoon we saw a wolf appear from the head of the hiking trail. It was followed by a backpacker named Steve who was out for a hike of that side of the island with his German Shepard. I still have a grainy photo of that dog from when it arrived at our beachy home alarming us as we made hasty plans on how to get rid of what we thought at the time was a human habituated wolf.

   The next day found us still on the beach. The fog of morning just would not let go of the shoreline and the next safe place to land our boats was hours north. We stayed put and spent the day lounging on our own self-satisfaction of having this blissful location all to ourselves. A rare and beautiful thing! If not for the lack of palm trees we could see the area as Hawaiian. White sands, the roar of waves getting louder as the tide rose, and the hush later as the tide receded. The mists clinging to the green steep hill and the colour of the water had us in paradise mode. It was time to take the deep dive into the past and away from the myth. We grabbed some snacks, cameras and tucked away the rest into the relative security of kayak hatches and set out to hike to the wild side.

   The shore is longer than it appears and taking our time, taking pictures of each other in self-congratulatory images to show off back home. We marvelled in the forms, sounds and patterns of the sandy environment. Eventually, stopping in our own tracks to admire and question the single file set of footprints coming from the trees out on the sand and at their terminus, a pile of feathers and disturbed red sand. That gull had a bad morning as the tide was still going out, the kill was fairly recent and we all now felt watched. Time, what is that? The year, the minute the second erased all connection to the now when standing over a single line of wolf tracks. We sauntered onwards with prickles rising on the backs of our necks.

   Under a log held up by a pair of exposed seaweed covered rocks and down into a gully formed by the constant dredging of the sea’s daily incursions we all admitted later to sensing that crouching under that log signified the entrance of the older world. The nature that we came to do was a real, in-your-face-Jack moment. Primal is the only word worthy of describing the feeling of not belonging. We were not in our place. Nature had separated us from it. All our attempts to touch it, to climb back into the womb were dashed. We cannot go back and the limbo move required getting under the log rubbed it in intensely. Had we so totally lost our way in the world that the wolfy end of that rugged place drew a line in the sand? You do not belong here! You suck! GO HOME!

   We do not do ourselves any favours by hiding behind our phones. We are not just distancing from each other but creating an environment of apathy towards each other that can only contribute to the growing climate crisis. We need to interact once again with each other, not by memes, or one line texts, and find a course back to community which has been so sorrily lost. That wolf nest at the nature end of the beach set the stage. I felt lost on the walk back to camp. I, and all my fellow humans have waited to long to come home again and home moved on. We had our end of the beach, they had theirs. Climate change has been a bulldozer leveling the playing field for the human race. The planet is changing and we are not. We just are not changing. Nature has drawn that line in the sand and is moving on without us. The planet will not die, however you and I have questionable futures.The question remains how do we find the path back away from the trolls, and the endless energy put into scrolling the nothingness to where we can stand at our end of the beach and point to what was, and what is. knowing that even though all in nature has had enough of waiting and put the log up that we are still part of them, as they are part of us. Howl if you want to against the silence of a coffee shop filled with zombie scrollers. The creatures strolling by my tent knew that the beach can be shared, it is time we learned how to as well.