It’s been a busy sprin
g. Sometimes I wonder where my time goes to before being shelved in the back of my mind, but I know full well of life’s appetites for the stuff. Time is delicious. Time is vitamins for Life. Life eats that shit up like it’s going out of style.
Simeon is growing into a proper, wonderful, opinionated little person. He’s just hit the 17 month mark, and I find myself laughing, frustrated, and scared to bits more and more as he learns new ways to attack and consume life right back. It’s no wonder Life needs to keep eating time. His latest little quirk is his ability to frown…usually when he means it, but it’s hilarious when he does so as he flips back and forth between an Awesome-Face smile and this serious “I don’t think so, Tim” grimace. He’s also getting more frustrated that we can’t understand his baby-talk. I think he’s eventually going to give up on us and learn English. I can’t wait.
Senie is enjoying work, having great time while driving, and is as wonderful as ever, though I do get concerned that www.thatguywiththeglasses.com will start setting up a server mirror in our house to alleviate the bandwidth she uses from their site.
As for me, I just got back from my first multi-country motorcycle ride.
Cramming your arse and fifty pounds of camping gar onto a Supersport bike for Four Thousand KM on what ended up being a fading rear tire is definitely not something I would recommend to everyone. Surely there are more comfortable bikes for a long journey and easier ways to enjoy the sights besides hearing the noise of road, air and engine screaming for hours on end. I think they call them Cruisers or Sport Touring bikes…
Yep. Definitely not something I would recommend to everyone. After all, I know people who simply cannot drive. I know a bunch of babies who wouldn’t be able to reach the controls. I also know of a few people who are blind, or legless.
Everyone else, though, I’d recommend it in a quarter-heartbeat.
Oh, I’ll be looking into getting a softer seat, and maybe some adjustable rear sets to help my knees not explode after a long day’s ride, but for my first honest to goodness, seat of my pants, everything in a few duffel bags adventure…it was absolutely incredible.
Weaving up and down through the Rocky Mountains, riding through clouds, passing RV after RV…even the regular bouts of road construction were more of an excuse to look around and enjoy the view instead of complain about delays. The best part, however, happened sometime after Lake Louise, when the mountains engulfed my senses and I was driving through a different kind of forest than I normally know. I was back in BC. Northern BC. I haven’t been this close to my birthplace for close to a decade…or more? I honestly can’t remember when it was.
It’s such a simple, subtle change. The greens look more like the greens you remember. The trees look more like the trees you remember. Those DNA-engraved qualities of the world, the sky, the stars…they all suddenly become vivid and important and nostalgic again and you suddenly shout out with glee…yes! I remember! I REMEMBER! And the smells! Oh Lord! The smells! Just the way the forest smells when you ride through a brewing summer shower, or the heat of the road lights upon your nostrils every little twig, bug and piece of stone. You can get the vision from the seat of a car, but the smell…the feel…the visceral and magnetic attachment to your environment…you need to be exposed for that to happen. You need to be in the environment to receive it all. You need to be on a bike.
I can’t really explain the differences between BC and the Rest Of The World completely. I don’t know if it has echoes all over the land, or if it is truly unique, but it certainly feels biased to the latter. There is simply no other way to describe the way the forest coming right up to the edge of the road and towering over you like a battlement. There’s no way to describe the slow, calming rivers of city traffic and the reckless abandon of the highway speeds. Everywhere you go, a place to stop that overlooks an incredible scene, and everywhere you go, hours and miles to travel before you get to your destination, no matter how close you thought you were. It’s like being lost in a dream with a road map that may or may not lead to buried treasure at the end, but you suspect that it was printed just as an excuse to get you out there to experience the road.
I love Alberta, and only the most jaded BC migrates ever say there are no trees here, or its not nearly as beautiful…it is. It really is. But there was something…soul-healing…to be back in the lands I used to call the entire world when I was less than ten years old. It’s no wonder that 1 in 3 people still live in their birth town.
Though, I suspect that it isn’t nearly as much fun coming back home if you never went away in the first place.
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