The Mountain

The best thing about going back to the place where I grew up is that nobody can find me unless they really try.  There is no Internet, no cell phone service, and it's a hundred kilometres from any town that anyone has heard of.  You can fly over the property in an airplane, soaring across the Selkirk mountain range in southeastern British Columbia, and not see any sign of human existence for more than half an hour.  I love this place.  Six acres of wilderness that's almost as wild today as it was when my family moved there in the early 1970s.   

We did manage to tame it a little bit. Dad created our own electricity with a Pelton wheel and 1000 feet of pipe, harnessing one of the streams that tumbles down the mountainside. Mom tilled the clay soil, mixed in a lot of goat dung and created several gardens that have thrived for decades during the short growing season.   Today, there's a verdant front yard full of clematis and rose bushes where there used to be thistles and rock.

But many other things remain untamed.   Grizzly bears and black bears still wander across the property from spring until hibernation time.   On winter nights, coyotes still perform their eerie vocalizations outside the bedroom window.   Five meters of snow continue to fall between November and March, turning the wood-frame house into an igloo-like tunnel.  Like clockwork, the sun disappears behind the mountains in the second week of December every year, and emerges again in the first week of February.   And the only communication is still an old-fashioned landline.

As a journalist and television producer I have travelled to some of the remotest corners of the planet and have encountered very few places that feel as technologically remote as my childhood home.  Many of my friends are in media, and based in big cities around the world.   For those who visit, it takes time to adjust to life on the mountain.  Some of them don't adjust.   "So there's really no way to get a signal here?" a colleague asks with no small amount of irritation.  Sure there is, if you want to spend thousands of dollars hooking up a big satellite dish near the top of the tallest cedar tree at the top of the property.   And we've considered it, if only to make it easier to work from the mountain.   But so far, we've decided against it because we know it will change everything irrevocably, and we aren't ready to give up the delights of disconnectedness-- a rare place where the outside world, and its expectations of instant responses, can be put on 'pause'.

The BC government has promised that every resident of the province, no matter where they live, will soon have access to the Internet.  It seems to be a reasonable promise in one of the world's wealthiest countries.   And I'll admit that life on the mountain will be easier once I'm able to connect more readily to my city-based work.  (I'll even be able to post blogs!)  But I also know that letting the world in with a single click will irrevocably change what I love most about life on the mountain.

Finding Home: My Odyssey

I love this city. It’s where I launched my career, where I met my husband, where I bought my first house.  I have lived here more than half my life.  But does that mean Toronto is home?

Or is home the place I grew up, deep in the mountains in the southeastern interior of British Columbia? Where I went to high school. Where I returned every summer during university. Where my mother still lives. Where I spend time as often as is logistically and financially feasible.

My official home address is in one of the most densely populated and diverse neighbourhoods in Canada’s largest city. The home of my youth is two plane-rides away, in a part of BC that defines the word “remote." The closest airport is Castlegar, known to the flying public as Cancel-gar, because it’s surrounded by mountains and frequently socked in by thick clouds.   

Slocan Lake, British Columbia

When the weather’s right, the plane descends though a narrow valley, through scenery that takes your breath away. From there, there's still a two-hour drive up the Slocan valley to the family homestead.  In good weather, it takes twelve hours to get from one home to the other.  In bad weather it can take up to four days. My husband has often reminded me that it takes him much less time to get to England to see his family than it does for me to get from point A to point B within Canada.  I’ve taken perverse pride in the fact that getting home is such hard work.  Somehow, it makes it feel more special.

But that is not how I feel today. I’m sitting on a Greyhound bus, after two days of impenetrable fog cancelled all flights out of Castlegar airport. Five hours on the bus, then a plane ride from Kelowna to Vancouver, followed by a cross-country red-eye flight to Toronto.  Right now, I’m envying friends whose home is all in one place—or at least, have their family within a one-day drive.  At times like this, my life feels fractured and complicated-- my disparate and far-apart worlds seem hard to juggle and reconcile.   

On the Bus

All these hours on the bus give me time to think. It’s making me ponder what “home” really means.  Is it where we live as adults? Is where we grew up?  Is it the place with the most poignant memories?   If the definition of home can be so conflicted for me, a first-generation Canadian, what must it be like for recent refugees and immigrants?  Is this conflict more common in a country like Canada, where so many of us are newcomers in one way or another?

These days, I'm wondering whether my split-home issues may, in fact, be full-blown multiple-home disorder.  A Danish cousin emailed me recently, saying, "Denmark is your home, even though you have never actually lived here."

A bit of context:  My dad’s eldest sister recently died in Denmark. Like most of my extended family, my Auntie Gerda lived near the North Sea on the windswept coast of Jutland.  I only saw her ten times in my life.  But when Gerda died, I wrote her eulogy in Toronto, even though she had 11 other Danish nieces and nephews living nearby.

My cousin’s email referred to the fact that my Canadian family had tighter bonds with Auntie Gerda than those who remained in Denmark. That's because my parents never lost touch, and always made the effort to bridge the distance with letters, Christmas parcels, phone calls, and a few precious pilgrimages back to the "old country."

My cousin is right. Denmark is home too.  My ancestral home.   Her observation underscores the fact that home is about so much more than residing in a physical place. 

Multiple homes expand our horizons-- make us more versatile and adaptable.  I believe it has made me a better journalist and story-teller.  And it has helped me begin to understand what it means for so many Canadians, who have uprooted their lives in other parts of the world to make this country home. 

I know it’s a privilege to have so many homes in my life.   But it’s also the manifestation of a restless soul, and a need to explore the true meaning of this deceptively simple word. The odyssey begins.