Mount Tzouhalem

I want to write about trees, Douglas fir and arbutus and hemlock and the majesty of them rising from the water to the peaks, and the sweeping valley beneath, but all I can think about is how everything in life is moving very fast right now. Vaccinations, book proposals, short story contests, and every day I am suddenly making decisions that shift whole portions of my life around and it’s good but it’s hard but it’s such a relief things are moving but it’s so terrifying that such huge things are moving, like a logjam or an ice-dammed river or that video from the helicopter where an entire chunk of Antarctic ice sheet broke off and you could see the crack shoot across the blank white snow that hadn’t been shook or shattered in millennia and it almost hurts to think of

I want to write about the steep slopes and eating a tangerine on a sun-warmed spruce-needle-strewn slope while the spring sky piled cumulus upon cumulus but couldn’t quite defeat the sunlight, and the Cowichan River braided itself to the sea in a snarl of dust coloured mud but all I can think about are things like the Astra Zeneca vaccine and how I don’t think it’s unsafe but I want two doses of the same thing, and how if I could go back and rewrite everything I would focus only on beauty and story, story and beauty, and how every day these days I either get an unprecedented encouragement or an unprecedented rejection and I can feel my life change minute by minute and wanting things is so dangerous

I want to write about how you know you have found good people to hike with when you still have a bunch of stuff to talk about at the end, as much as in the beginning, and how that’s because good people are often just people who don’t just find certain things interesting but they find the world interesting and want everyone to be able to say something and always remember to ask the other person what they think because really it’s about connections, not things, but all I can think about right now is whether I’ve answered all my emails and whether I’m right or wrong and whether I’m reading ambiguous situations correctly and how I probably looked like an idiot that time yesterday and on that call yesterday and definitely on that call last month and how dare I think I have anything to say but then really how dare anyone and how for better or worse I’ve tossed it up in the air, the whole pan, burning fragments, smoking oil, licking flames, sublime morsels, because doing otherwise was simply not an option anymore

Time: 5 h
Distance: 14.1 km
Elevation: 735 m
Difficulty: moderate