MPW | blog

Conn, Ontario. Toronto Soaring Club
I was a member 11 years ago. Phoned the president and asked to camp here. No one around but hay balers.
Coffee next morning.

My pals Ken and Steve have ridden up to the tip of the Bruce to meet me. Eating, drinking and having laughs. I ease back into home life.
Looking forward to seeing my family. I may have to visit my mom in the hospital. Hopefully she will have been released by Saturday morning but they are not sure.

Back in the late 80′s I went skydiving with four other friends of mine. 3 guys and 2 gals all jumped that day. The lead up to the jump itself was filled with a day of training and then an adrenaline filled leap into the great unknown. The wind and the noise around the open airplane door was thunderous. The exit was violent and disorienting (apparently my pack hit the back of the door and I was upside down for a second). Then the chute deploy was equally as violent. It was so intense that by comparison the slow drifting feeling of the open parachute was strangely soothing. I was just hanging there in the quiet and the calm. Sinking slowly, the only sense of motion was my ears popping every once in a while to inform me that I was loosing altitude. A strange and wonderful stillness. It was only as the last three hundred feet or so did a sense of downward motion begin. Even though I had jumped by myself from an altitude of 3000 feet it was only just above the tree tops that I started to feel high above the ground. The ground rushing up to meet me.

It is only here on Manitoulin Island heading south to the ferry do I feel far from home.

I have been wondering why I have felt no anxiety at all during this whole trip. Even when I was being pelted with heavy rain and wind while straining to keep my motorcycle upright in the mud and ruts of the Taylor highway in Alaska, the remotest place I have ever been. A simple calm focus would descend on me and I would just get on with it.
Now this is in stark contrast to many years of anxiety attacks I suffered from in the late 90′s. Back then I set out to rid myself of the malady (without drugs btw) and I have a sneaking suspicion that I may have succeeded.

I think that my recent uprooting from the many things I thought of as grounded has brought the edges of ‘home’ right up to my skin. I never felt far from anything. ‘Home’ followed me like a (non theistic) halo. Like a glow. I always felt home.

Yet, now with life returning to the city, I feel a tug of another home… family and friends. A gentle conflict. A feeling of being far away… a gentle anxiety… very gentle.

North shore Lake Superior.
I am following a pocket of sunshine heading east. Storms far ahead and behind.
Many gorgeous moments up here… Wow.
Gonna try to get past the Sault today.

Even though I am mostly thinking of my mom I will keep writing about thoughts and observations.
What the hell, eh?

I have often described rock climbing to non climbers as what is 18 inches in front of your nose and what is just above your knees. It is only when you pause and rest (on a ledge perhaps) do you then see the height you’ve gained and the mess you have gotten yourself into.
(I miss climbing… back injury has kept me away for close to a year.)

Driving the plains and prairies one can see great distances, tending to focus ones eyes far away.
In the mountains the earth curves upward in great massifs to allow one to see distant details closer.
The highways of northern Ontario between Baudette and Fort Frances remind me of rock climbing. There is much less sense of the vastness around you. The trees and cliffs of the Canadian shield are so close to the roads that it sometimes feels like driving in a tunnel.
Lakes, lakes, lakes break through the foliage to the left and right. Heavy rain and gray don’t diminish the beauty of it all.

My rain gear seems to work well but my boots now leak and my feet are properly soaked. Cest la vie.

An e-mail from home has me concerned for my mothers health.
I am at least two days away from home if not three.

Just spoke with my brother Brian and feel a little more at ease. Cell coverage has been spotty but wi-fi seems to me everywhere so I asked for my sister to keep me posted.
(Thanks guys xo)

All highways have merged into one for a while. “Civilization”, as Ted Simon calls it.

The last time I was here in Thunder Bay I was a Rheostatic.

Getting properly rained on in the province I call home.
Still many kilometers from home yet.