My last week in Victoria was characterized by the time I got to spend with my nephew (second-cousin, whatever he is) Mason. We went to the playground. We cuddled. I took him to the petting zoo in Beacon Hill Park and got up close and personal with some goats. The sheer range of experience on this trip is part of what made it amazing. One day I’m having epiphanies at the sight of the wide open Pacific and climbing some mountains just for kicks, the next I am trying to stop baby goats from climbing onto my lap with a baby braced against my hip and having the time of his life yanking on my hair.
But honestly, the goats were the best thing ever, he loved them.
Melia asked me if spending so much time with the Walker babes had been good birth control. And I mean, ya, I was beat by 9 o’clock every night but guys, your kids are all awesome, and I really want to have that someday. Not anytime soon though, cause sleep is REALLY, REALLY AWESOME, and the ability to travel without a circus caravan of play pens and highchairs in tow is something I want to hang on to. I really should have taken more funny pictures to show them when they’re 18 and come to visit me wherever I end up someday.
Man, can’t wait to whip out this one when I have a teenaged Mason crashing on my sofa.
What else did I do… The days all blur and pass by faster than you can imagine. I went to the new Robert Bateman Centre and saw some photo-realistic nature paintings. Bateman is actually a bit of an idol of mine as well, mostly for his work in conservation and his philosophies on the importance of the next generation having a sense of place, an ownership and commitment to the natural world. More recently, he’s done some pretty evocative pieces to bring awareness to the changes in the natural landscapes he loves.
Melia, Hailey and I (with the babies pack-sacked once again) went on a little hike to a beach just outside of Sooke with a gorgeous waterfall you could walk under.
On Saturday I took the ferry over to Salt Spring Island to go to the famous market in Ganges.
Salt Spring is this totally, utterly hilarious place, another end-of-the-road where all manner of ageing hippies and back-to-the-land types run to. Tie-dye, dreadlocks and small sustainable family farm complexes are prevalent. It is very, very small.
There is a bus that runs every two hours from the ferry dock in Fulford to the main town of Ganges. I say bus, but it was really more of an oversized van when it came down to it, and there were about three times as many people waiting as could possibly fit. We were delayed for nearly twenty minutes as everyone piled in on top of eachother, backed out, asked for change and sent the poor driver into conniptions as he tried to organize the chaos. And everyone was so achingly polite and nice.
“Oh no, you have a bag, here, you take my seat, I’ll hitchhike”
“No no, I can hitch a ride, it’s no trouble! You were there first and you’ve paid”
“Well if you insist…”
“Don’t worry, we’ll just flash some farmer and get a lift no problem.”
“Hey man, I only have five cents, can you cut me a break man?”
It was hysterical. The lady beside me said “I’m from Main Island and we’ve only just got a bus, so this is pretty funny.”
I replied “I’m from Toronto, this is HILARIOUS.”
Eventually some people caught a lift instead (after the whole bus shouted out tips ranging from where to stand, to do it fast before the ferry traffic dissipated, or, in the case of the out-spoken homeless looking guy in a floor-length trench coat, suggested either crying or showing some leg) and, after ascertaining that there were no BC transit employees aboard and making us all promise not to sue in the case of injury and/or death, the frazzled driver (a white, middle-aged guy named Tao) let some people sit cross-legged on the floor and perch on the hockey bag one guy had squeezed through the door. Best public transportation experience of my life.
Ganges is a cute little sort of town caught in transition. Salt Spring Island is being torn away from its history as a counter-culture refuge with every rich Vancouverite or foreign investment banker who decides it’s a great place for a vacation home. Crystal shops and herbalists are slowly being replaced by real-estate offices and upscale boutiques with nary a mu-mu in sight.
The Saturday market that runs through the summer to the end of October was probably the best example of things as they used to be, stocked as it was with vendors selling hand-picked mushrooms, up-cycled clothing and a variety of spiritual miscellany, all interspersed with buskers rocking it out on the fiddle or guitar.
I got my fortune told for five dollars paid to a dreadlocked, gypsy lady sitting in a tent on the end of a row. It’s a gap year, the whole point is to do the things you would never, ever do. I like to think I’m open minded and getting more-so, after all.
It wasn’t like the palm readings you gave your friends at sleep-overs where you counted the breaks in their love line and forecasted 17 divorces and 82 children. I won’t tell you everything she said, because that’s between her, my palm and I, but the main things were that I’m destined to live an adventurous life, characterized by restlessness, change, and loving deeply whether I want to or not. She told me that passion is my greatest spiritual attribute and that when I embrace it fully instead of guarding myself against it I will reach my full pre-destined potential. Don’t judge a hippy by the length of her dreads, that’s not bad actually, as advice based on lines on one’s hands goes.
I said goodbye on Sunday, not just to Cam and Melia and Mason but to the West. I hung over the railing of the ferry and said goodbye to the mountains and the beaches and the cedars and the sea and if I teared up a teensy bit then that is absolutely none of your business. I wish I could tell you that as we pulled into Tswassen harbor a whale leapt out of the waves and was silhouetted by the setting sun and I felt a deep sense of satisfaction and closure and then the screen faded to black, but no, Michael McGowan did not direct my life, even if sometimes I like to think of it that way when I’m listening to soundtrack music and staring out bus windows.
I’m back in Vancouver now, doing nothing so much as waiting to get on a plane to Arizona to meet up with Cole and my parents, forgoing my solitary freedom to be part of a whole again. Because when it comes down to it, this journey of mine wasn’t so much about what it was that I did, but the fact that I did it alone.
It is so important to spend time alone with ourselves, and I think in this extroverted world its something we forget. I don’t mean anything as specific as taking mental health days or bubble baths. I just mean making time to be quiet with yourself, until you can’t help but get a sense of who you are. If you wanted to get to know a new coworker or classmate you would spend some time with them one-on-one, its the same thing.
When I was in grade eleven I did my final English project on the journey of self discovery as a concept, as a subject in literature and as a reality that I was planning to embark on myself. I have always been intrigued by the concept of “finding oneself”, like, how does that work? Why do people feel the need to don over-sized backpacks and bandannas and sleep in hostels to achieve it? Is there a method that everyone knows abut except me? Was I sick the day of the three-step power point presentation?
For that project I looked at The Motorcycle Diaries by Che Guevara, Eat, Pray, Love and One Week, all chronicles of formative, life-changing journeys. I talked about philosopher Stuart Hampshire, who believed that a person’s “self” was a thing of substance that could be discovered and understood through reflection and an understanding of the events in one’s past that caused their present motives and reactions. I talked about Jean-Paul Sartre who described the “self” as a never-ending project, always in flux and under construction, and David Hume, who maintained that the self was a bundle of all of our experiences and thus could never be discovered, only be temporarily understood at a specific moment in time. And at the end of my half hour presentation I had to look out into the faces of my drooling and semiconscious peers and tell them that I still didn’t get what exactly it meant to discover yourself, what such an undertaking required or why travel seemed to be an important ingredient, but I really really really wanted to try it for myself.
I wish I could go back in time and send a letter to younger me, who was so bored and desperate and hungry for adventure and a life where she didn’t wake up knowing exactly what was going to happen that day. Because I think I get it now. “Discovering yourself” means different things for everyone, but to me it means getting to know who you are just like you would anyone else. And travel? I like to think that a lyric from the Dave Matthew’s Band sums that up
“Sometimes the best way to find out who you are is to get to that place where you don’t have to be anything else.”
In our daily lives we tend to define ourselves in relation to other people, as daughters, fathers, brothers, sisters, friends, employees. And we are all chameleons. I know I am. I used to wake up and put on my cheerful, wonderful daughter face (or my surly teenager face, but let’s not go there), go to school and be silly and loud with my friends, friendly to my classmates and polite to my teachers. I would go to work and put on my 1000 megawatt retail smile and act professional in ways that would boggle people from other corners of my life. Maybe I was myself for the hour I spent alone in my room before I went to bed, but the whole day long I was acting for the benefit of other people’s expectations, the only way to avoid it is to get to a place where I don’t need to be smart or funny or dependable or a single damn thing except what I am. And that place is within the walls of my own skull, in a part of the world where no one knows who I am, where there’s no one left to be.
If you want to get to know yourself, go be anonymous in a city that doesn’t know your name anyways. Don’t talk to another living soul for an entire day. Sit on a rock with your feet in the sea and wonder where we go when we die, or whats more terrifying- that we might be all alone in the universe or that we might not be. Remember things from your childhood that make you cry. Mouth the lyrics of your favourite song. Picture your life in 10 years, or 20. Close your eyes and think of nothing at all. Listen to your own opinions. Laugh at your own jokes. No one here knows you anyways, you’re thousands of miles from real life, you can be the crazy girl giggling to herself on the beach. You don’t have to BE anything, just be.
You will realize for the first time, you feel secure in your own head. You know yourself like you know your little brother or your friends. You feel safe. You’ll realize that you actually sort of like yourself. You’re brave. You are funny. There’s a lot to like. You can be your own friend. You will be able to go places where everyone is talking and feel at peace being quiet. You will still feel scared some days, but then you’ll realize that you have something safe to fall back on, just like you would depend on your parents or your friends, you realize you can depend on yourself too.
Now that you have that foundation, that realization that if everything blows up in your face you still have that solid ground to retreat back to with your own being, you can build yourself. Go do cool things. Do things your friends would never want to do, that everyday you would never want to do. Start conversations with strangers. Listen to their stories and let them shape you. Go see things so beautiful that they make you cry. Climb high things and stare back down the slope at what you can accomplish. Add layers to your rock-solid core of self. Tell your own story to strangers. Come to the realization that you are interesting, that everything and everyone is interesting if you look carefully enough. Fall in love with yourself and everything and the whole wide world. Be an fortress with unbreakable walls and floor-to-ceiling windows. Let the sun shine in.
Then, when you have found yourself and loved yourself and built yourself, you will be at home whatever mask you put on, whatever force tries to throw you down or shake you off, wherever you go. And when you finally do come home, hold that knowledge tight, folded away in your deepest corners. Keep it unshakable and safe. Tuck it away with the postcards and ticket stubs and go back to being a sister, a brother, a lover, a friend. Put your masks back on in bumper to bumper succession. But it will be different. People might say that you’ve grown up, gotten worldly, but the reality is that you now have the time-tested knowledge that you can do it.
You can put yourself or be put in a situation of the least common denominator. You can find yourself all alone in a place you’ve never been, with everything you own in the world strapped to your back, (some people’s idea of the worst case scenario) and know that you’ll be okay. Everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve found myself with the thought that I could stay there forever. Tofino, Jasper, Victoria, Vancouver. Every single place I’ve been able to visualize the life I could carve out for myself and be happy with. I’ve seen life lived a hundred different ways in my travels, and I haven’t really gone that far. I’ve spoken with suburban queens and bush-wacking surfers and Welsh economists and people who were living a life they didn’t like and who had the strength to get up and walk away to find one they did.
There’s no “right” way to do it. There’s no formula of career, kids and white picket fence that means you’re really living. Its not a matter of running far away and never, ever stopping either. Actually, forget about right, its a hard thing to get wrong. Live a life you’re proud of. Fill it with love and experiences and the things that bring you joy. If you’re not happy, change things. That’s an option. It’s something you can do. Dye your hair, throw your phone over a bridge and move to Timbuktu if you want. If there’s one thing I know to be true, its that your life is yours, and you’re a perishable good so act accordingly. Do what will make your life what you want it to be and do it as soon as possible. Don’t procrastinate on being happy, cause guys, you never know when your end date might be. Live on your terms, because when you’ve only got one chance does it really matter what other people think?
I don’t know what I want to do with my life yet, I might not until I’m actually in the midst of doing it and that’s okay. All I know is that I want to keep moving. Peter, my Australian fiance (as soon as he buys me that beach house, that is) said it well- you don’t come back from a trip like this satisfied, you come back more restless than before, with even more things on your bucket list. I want to pick coffee in Costa Rica and eat rice and beans every day. I want to plant trees in the mud and sleet and rain in Northern BC. I want to live and work in London, Oslo and rural India. I want to live my life a hundred different ways and keep doing cool shit. When I go I want to die without a penny in my bank account and a bucket list checked off.
But as much as this trip was about being alone, it was also massively about being with family, family who I unfortunately only usually see at weddings and funerals. I have always been grateful to be part of my massive, ridiculous, far-flung tribe, but never more so than when I was actually able to come across the country and be greeted with open arms by people who hadn’t seen me since I was twelve. To everyone, related and otherwise, who opened your doors, gave up your couches and let me into your lives for a little bit, thank you so so much. I learned so much about the people I come from and the clan that shaped me, and it was so great to meet you all on adult terms, as someone besides “one of the kids” or “Dale’s daughter”. Now I have a whole other coast to miss when I’m at home. My love to you all.
So that’s what I’ve learned. And it wraps up Act 1, I spose. Now for a week in the desert, a three month hiatus and then hopefully something entirely new.
Thanks for reading home-listeners, catch you all in January.
Your friendly neighbourhood vagabond,
Kelsea
In all honesty, I’m still having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that this trip is actually happening at this point, and now I’m on the last leg. Well, almost last. I’m still flying to Phoenix to see the Grand Canyon with the fam jam after this but I don’t really count it as part of my wandering. In all honesty, Victoria is lovely and I’m having a great time but it feels like a bit of an anti-climax too. It feels like the beginning of heading home.
Victoria’s a great city, somewhat of an over-sized Kingston on the ocean, with a little dash of new age eclectic and international cool. Its downtown is pretty and old-fashioned looking. Its homeless population is one of the relatively largest and most visible in Canada due to the city’s favourable climate and status as the driest place on the wet coast. Lots of mass-market hipster-esque boutiques and organic bakeries scattered throughout.
But it’s also the place my cousin Cam and Melia laid down roots with their five-month-old babe Mason, which is the main reason I’m here for two weeks. Cross-country backpacking trip and grand tour of the Walker babies, that’s the idea.
Mason is amazing. I’m completely in love. I’ve never spent extended periods of time with a baby before, been able to figure out how to make them laugh and get to know their favourite songs. I’ve cuddled him to sleep and watched him try real food for the first time and waltzed with him around the kitchen and it is going to be so hard to leave. I don’t think I could ever get over how pretty much every other thing he does is a first. He tried banana today, the only other things he’d ever eaten in his whole life up to that point being milk and rice cereal. And his face when it hit his tongue… I got to watch a brand new human being experience flavour for the first time, and that’s pretty incredible.
Mason is awesome. Babies are awesome. I’ve discovered this whole maternal aspect to my personality that I didn’t even know I had.
And I’ve done some really neat things around the city too! After I explored China Town and the downtown core on Tuesday, Melia, Mason and I drove back up Nanaimo-way to the small town of Coombs whose claim to fame centers predominantly around its hilariously offbeat marketplace known for its grassy roof and the goats that wander around cheerfully grazing it. Goats on the Roof became a sort of small-scale Mecca that all other sorts of alternative retail flocked to, and now Coombs is a weird, wonderful little grouping of grass-topped stores.
On Thursday we took Mason on a short hike along the water in Sooke while Cam was at work and when he got home he and I left to climb Mt. Finlayson in Goldtream Park, a fifteen minute drive from their house. That’s what I’m going to miss the most when I get back to T.O., not having to drive for two hours to find somewhere beautiful to walk and something tall to climb.
On Friday I went to see an exhibit at the Royal Museum of British Columbia that Neil from Wales in Tofino had whole-heartedly recommended. And it was fantastic, it centered around the British and Norwegian teams that raced to be the first to conquer the South Pole in 1915, braving 250 km/hr winds in waxed canvas jackets and reindeer fur boots. Only one team came back, and their stories are the sort of utterly insane, uplifting tales that make me wish I was born a century earlier so I could have experienced the golden age of exploration first hand.
While I was at the museum I decided to go see an IMAX movie that tied in to the exhibit about another Antarctic explorer, Earnest Shackleton. For those of you who haven’t heard the story, Shackleton set out to be the first person to traverse Antarctica from one side to the other, but his ship got stuck in the ice pack miles away from land, forcing his crew to spend the winter in one of the most isolated and forbidding places on earth. The spring break-up didn’t end up freeing the ship, as they had counted on. Instead, the shifting ice pack began to crush it. Eventually, the men were forced to abandon ship, and camp entirely lost and given up for dead on the ice.
Shackleton’s new goal became to get them out, no matter what. And he swore he would do it without losing a single life. So began an epic lifeboat journey through relentless seas and dangerous ice-floes in weather-worn lifeboats rowed by malnourished men who had just spent nearly a year aboard a doomed and grounded vessel or in tents out on the ice. After ten days, they made it to Elephant Island and stood on land for the first time in 15 months. But they were far from safe. No one would look for them there. There seemed to be nothing for it but to starve to death. Shackleton wasn’t done though. He had the ship’s carpenter reinforce one of the ship’s battered lifeboats with cannibalized wood from the others and set out with a handful of his men to attempt the impossible and sail 800 nautical miles in an open boat to the whaling stations on South Georgia. It was a journey that no one has been able to replicate since. And then, by some phenomenal stroke of luck and fate, they did not get pushed by the currents and miss the tiny island of South Georgia entirely, but made windfall on the opposite side of the uncharted, mountainous and glacier-covered land mass from the whaling stations that would be their one chance at salvation.
Now, just a few years back, three trained mountaineers attempted to replicate this crossing of South Georgia. They were healthy, rested, experienced, had the blessings of good equipment, and they knew exactly what lay ahead. It took them three days. Shackleton and his companions had not slept in a week. They were frost-bitten, wind-chapped, beaten-down skeletons with leather boots, a carpenter’s adze for an ice axe and 50 feet of rope. The only thing they knew was that they had to go north. It took them 36 hours.
They emerged from the freezing grasp of the mountain pass and made their way to the station. They were led to the station-masters house. He looked at these three frozen, beaten, filthy husks of men and said “Dear God, who are you?”
“My name sir, is Shackleton.”
The station master broke down and wept.
Four months and three attempts later, Shackleton managed to lead a successful rescue mission to Elephant Island. Twenty-two ecstatic figures greeted them on the shore. Not a single life was lost. If you have a more heroic story of the human spirit then that I want to hear it.
Later that day I walked over to the Emily Carr house, her childhood home turned museum in Oak Bay. It was charming and beautifully restored. They were in the process of working on the facade when I was there, and I walked up the side to the cozy glassed-in porch to find 3 contruction workers sitting on the painted steps playing with a little black cat. Elvis (the cat) followed me inside and bounded up on to the welcome desk like he was planning to serve me. One of the most passionate volunteers I’ve encountered pressed tea and a self-guided tour sheet into my hand before more or less taking me on a tour herself while explaining how it should be done. I love when people love what they do. The best part of the house were the plaques here and there in every room that displayed quotes from Carr’s memoirs that took place in the rooms they were found in. The whole thing was cozy and friendly and a lovely end to the afternoon.
On Saturday I went to the Art Gallery, which is half-contained in this beautiful old mansion. I saw an exhibit of contemporary Native art, toured again by a very enthusiastic volunteer.
Sunday Melia’s brother in law, his one-year-old, Cam, Mason, Kona the dog and I went for a rainy day hike up to Jocelyn Hill. I want to be a stick-the-kid-in-a-hiking-pack-and-go parent one day. The babies were neutral and only got a little bit damp, and I had a ton of fun. Modern fatherhood on the west coast, I love it. That night I crashed a bi-weekly family dinner with Melia’s mother, sisters and associated family mambers. I love families, my own especially, but other people’s too.
And today? I’m back at Wild Coffee downtown, taking a slow day and writing to you!
The Wander Year 