The Wilderness Belongs to the Weird

The stones are quiet here

When I sat like this on the beach in Nice, the stones growled and cracked and rumbled like placid thunder. I sat with my back to the Promenade where the murders happened and watched the sun merge with its own watery reflection. The round pebbles sang with each departing wave.

The sun is the same. The beach isn’t. No murders here. No growling trucks and panicked screams. No beach clubs or restaurants or the garish golden glow of a misplaced McDonald’s baring ghoulish teeth on the ground floor of the casino.

This is Canada. This is practically December. Even if the sun remembers the Mediterranean just like I do. The same sun has shone on this British Columbia beach, overseeing the ancient conversation between stone and water and wind, since before the first Phoenicians landed boats on the beaches of France. Before creatures only half-human huddled in rocky caves at Grotte du Lazaret, overlooking the sea.

The conversation is the same, but the audience has changed. Until now, I wasn’t here to catch it. The thin trail of foam that gives the gentle waves a lace trim where they meet the beach. The rippling reflection of the lake on the underside of a moss-furred cliff. The bright blowfly green of trees that refuse to lose their leaves, that drink sunshine and rain together and pretend that winter doesn’t exist.

I’m no solipsist. If I wasn’t here, these things would still exist. But not in quite the same way. The world exists without us, but the world we live in is an act of the imagination. A buzzing swarm of murky memory and radiant falsehood. The sun shines brighter because we see it.

In these wild and abandoned places, we become more genuinely ourselves.

People get strange out here

In summer, the water is practically passe. Everybody heads for it like busy flies congregating around a gob of spit. The light makes us active. The heat makes us bloom.

It takes a certain kind of person to seek the same places out in winter. Families practically disappear, replaced by older couples or solitary dog walkers. At one of my favorite spots, a rocky bench above the lake that nearly no one knows about, I exchanged muted greetings with a willow-thin woman. Her hair was the color of polished concrete, and her arms were raised in a gesture — disbelief? Gratitude? — toward the lake.

People get strange. In winter, the wilderness belongs to the solitude seekers, the oddballs, the misfits. If I had a tribe, this would be it. Composed entirely of people who don’t want to be part of any tribe. A silent society based around leaving each other the fuck alone.

I brake for fairies

One of those twee stickers you find in souvenir stores. I brake for fairies, leprechauns, unicorns, and other creatures only I see. Slapped merrily on the back bumper of a Kia the color of March’s dirty snow, the whimsical proclamation bumbled along the mountain road in front of me.

If you knew a little more about leprechauns, you’d run the bastards over. If the old stories are true, we ought to be wary of fairies. But I have a soft spot for the fanciful and the strange, even if I don’t believe a word of it. Maybe there’s nothing under the dark patches of the forest than cobwebs and rain. But we don’t have to believe that.

Frontiers have always attracted the strange. The fewer people there are around, the more odd those that remain become. Loosen the laces on the social corset and watch how weird we get.

Once, in the dripping darkness of a fertile forest, I heard a strange whooping that turned out to be an embarrassed woman singing to a fallen tree. Another time, I ran into a man summoning spirits in a stone circle under the trees by means of rapid warbling whistles.

Some people leave painted rocks in networks of roots. Some leave fallen flowers at the base of the trees.

You don’t need to go far. On my way to the lake, I saw a man waist-deep in the ice-cold water. His hands raised in lotus position, he stood as motionless as the tangled roots of the fallen tree that rose out of the water in front of him.

I laugh at these eccentricities when I find them. But there’s something warming about a person being fully themselves. The quiet spaces let us be who we really are, in all our full-throated folly. That’s part of why wild places are so precious.

For all the beauty this world contains, it wasn’t beautiful until we got here. As recently as 16,000 years ago, no human had set foot in these forests. As pristine and perfect as the pebbles of the beach that showed only my footprints, destined to disappear after I leave by the action of wind and wave. It took an act of the imagination to change a lump of rock into a mountain, a forest into a god. It’s our feelings about the world that make it beautiful. The version of it that exists only inside our minds is the thing we really love.

Imagination makes the world radiant. The lie that reveals the deeper truth. Every time I launch my boat, I chuckle at the image that appears unbidden in my mind: a scaly hand reaching out of the water to grab my wrist and pull me under. If, on a trail under the trees, I walk between two tall boulders, I’ll make sure to pass through them again on the way back. I’ve read too many fairytales to take silly chances.

I’m not superstitious. None of this is real. That’s the problem. None of it is.

Not the stories we tell one another, and not the world we think we see all around us. We are aware of only the tiniest fraction of all that exists. We only just know enough to realize how little we know.

The scientific method is all we have to throw light into the red-toothed fog that surrounds us. Whenever we stray from it, bad things happen. But all the science in the world doesn’t stop me from feeling, just for a second, that clammy hand closing like a manacle around mine. Knowing the voices aren’t real doesn’t stop me from hearing them. It only stops me from reacting.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. It takes hard heads to build a world that we can live in, but soft hearts to make it worth living in. I’d rather be the kid blowing soap bubbles across the still water of the lake, entranced by their magical motion, than the balding property developer scowling at a chart and wondering how many more trees he’ll need to cut down to build another ghastly house.

There’s room in my imagination for truculent kelpies in the lake and the bristling Sasquatch rumored to roam these woods, even though my reason won’t allow their existence. There’s more than one type of knowledge.

By four in the afternoon, the gates shut

The sun drops below the mountains. The lake breathes cold air over the beaches and the whispering rocks. The car park empties out, a contraction of a cooling heart to send one last bolt of blood out into the void.

The concrete-haired woman and the bubble-blowing kid and the motionless meditating man vanish as surely as a wispy cloud torn apart by the dazzling white crown of the mountain rising through it. Fallen leaves swirl and dance in the turbulent air my car stirs into motion as I head for home.

Maybe I’ll be back tomorrow. Maybe I won’t. Maybe someone just like me will be here instead. No matter what the weather says, no matter the dull tyranny of facts that insist things are as they are and can never be otherwise.

The wilderness will always have room for the silent and the strange. There’ll always be a place for these creatures only I see.