My last summer in BC was a whirlwind. Dizzying thoughts of leaving my job, selling all my belongings, and dragging my wife and cat across the country swirled in my head. They wailed so loud that I could barely breach the noise and catch a breath. Overwhelmed, I crammed my anxieties into the well-loved walls of my grandfather’s old Jansport and hopped on a ferry. It was my hope that the clamour would dissipate over the beaches of Vancouver Island’s south-western coast.
I chose to cap off a quarter-life spent in one place by beating seven days of R&R into my boots with a pair of permanently sandy socks. Weary that every puff of pacific air was numbered, I breathed the coast in deeply. I ascended and descended dilapidated ladders, propelled myself across rivers suspended in cable cars, and picked my way through tidepools and bogs. Every night, I pitched my tent on the tideline and let the Pacific crash through all the noise I’d brought with me.
Instant coffee and oatmeal in the face of two blue-grey expanses lured me from my tent each morning. As I walked, the tides lapped away at the tensions in my spirit. With every footstep, I left a dissonant key behind me until I was swaddled in the silence of the forest. Ultimately, I played myself out to the slow, unwavering, beat of my feet on the trail having shed all the noise in my bags.
Completing a hiking trip is always anticlimactic. The time spent collecting blisters for your blisters fades as you return to your real life in some grey parking lot. Your phone breaks the silence, and the cacophony you’ve shed begins to creep back in. Without acknowledging its presence, you pack it up and bring it with you.
Signing my acceptance wholly unacquainted with the East Coast, I was optimistic that its tides would welcome me with familiarity. We quit our jobs, sold our furniture, packed our clothes, and carried our poor Russian Blue onto Canada’s longest domestic flight. Meanwhile, across four time zones on the edges of a strange ocean, our new life awaited us. unacquainted with the East Coast, I was Bent on finding western familiarity on these eastern shores, I spent my first months gradually spinning up the nausea that accompanies change. The trees are shorter here, kept humble by the wind. The greens that paint the forests are more variable in complexion. The sweet scent of the Atlantic and the sharp scent of the Pacific cannot be reconciled. I now see that every similarity I had conjured up actually came with a hundred differences. The more I forced my new home to be my old home, the deeper I sunk back into my noise.
Cloaked in disharmony, I slipped back under the surface. As the depths approached me, I ditched the comparative lens I’d been looking through, and the sinking stopped.
Now, as I swim to the surface, that unwavering beat of the trail echoes in my mind and I reach for its silent accompaniment.
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