Crossing Canada

O Canada!


Beautiful Canada.























Sunny Canada.






Lush Canada.












Green Canada.








































Wet Canada.














Majestic Canada.







Lovely Canada.





















Living in the Van:


Can be difficult, but also creates a different type of travel. Instead of suspending your life and living a temporary, stripped down life with only what fits in your backpack, you can continue living your normal life even though you are on the road. You still shop in grocery stores, cook your own meals, draw pictures, write letters and play your bass. This isn't the miniature tube of toothpaste life. It isn't the "leave it behind, it's too heavy," life. I pick up rocks. When we get stopped for an hour at an accident site I pull out a box of beads and make earrings. Sean plays the bass. We swat mosquitoes.



Still, I can't stand up out of bed. I have to crawl over Sean and push my way through the door before I can stretch out. We learn to use the outdoor space... for eating, for writing, for playing, for yoga and planning and drawing and peeing. I remind myself that this is our home for the next few months, and it will be easier when we are stationary, but I should get used to the cramped quarters anyway.












Totem Poles

The boy appears on a bike, screeching to a halt on the dirt road. “What are you doing?” he asks. I stand, camera in hand, in front of a row of totem poles in the village of Katwancool, or Gitanyaw, Canada. I tell him that I am reading the sign. He looks at it. “What does it say?” he asks. I look at the sign, then at him.

“Can you read it?” I ask. When he shakes his head, I try helping him through it. In the end I read it to him.

When I’m finished he says, “My dad’s a killer whale, and my mom and my brother are frogs.”

“What does that make you then, a frog?” I ask.

He nods. The clans are matrilineal, and the children belong always to their mother’s clan. He watches me as I tilt my head back to watch a crow land on one of the poles. He doesn’t even look at the towering monoliths, finding me much more interesting than these things that have been here longer than him. But his fascination is short lived, and he soon speeds off again on his too-big bike to play with friends.

He is the only resident of the village that we see. No one drives by, except another Volkswagen with another couple and another camera.

Sean and I wade through a field of dandelions already gone to seed. Their little parachutes catch the wind and fly ahead towards another row of totem poles behind the closed museum. We discover a treasure trove of old poles here, stacked up like trees in a lumber yard under a roof behind the building.

The logs are cracked are gray with age. A face is divided in two. A warrior turns into an old weathered man. Sean read that once a pole has fallen it is never raised again. So this is their graveyard, their resting place. There is something telling about the way they lay here. Where the standing poles are monuments of power, rank and success, these are signs of a disappearing society. There is something akin to the jungle covered temples of the Maya, the empty streets of an Incan city, or the buried tombs of Egypt.

We visited other historical sites as well, but none of them really seemed as awe inspiring as that village and its forest of carved poles.








































Wildlife

Subtitle: from the safety of your car

I wouldn’t want to run into a grizzly on foot, but from my van it would be pretty cool. Unfortunately, the only brown bear we have seen is a brown black bear.

There has been plenty of wildlife though. The highlight for me was a lynx that sat crouched on the side of the road as we passed. I was so excited I could barely explain to Sean that we needed to turn around. I think I said something like, “A cat! A cat, a Bob Cat, Lynx?” Confused, he turned the car around. We didn’t see anything at first, so we turned back, disappointed. The cat popped up about 30 feet in front of us as we swung around on the highway. We stopped and grabbed for the camera as she turned and loped away along the side of the road. She had long fuzzy legs, a small torso and a stubby black tail. She crossed in front of the van a ways down the road and glared at us in a very angry-cat way. We asked some girls the next day if it was a bob cat or a lynx, and they said there were no bob cats in the area.

The only really close encounters we had with wildlife in the car were with foxes. The first was siting on the side of the road about 50 meters away when we first spotted it. As we slowed down it trotted up to us, sitting outside my window and looking at me expectantly. It was obviously aware that we had food in the van. We called him the pirate fox because of his haggard appearance and injured right eye.

The next fox we stopped for was also injured. It was a black fox with a serious limp, and we began to wonder if they were faking so we would pity them and throw them scraps. The locals confirmed that the foxes in the area had learned to beg from the RVs that drove through. Crafty little critters aren’t they?

There was some not-too-wild life too. This chicken was in Stewart BC (home of the toaster museum). She was not at all camera shy, in fact I had to rescue my camera from a possible pecking after taking this photo with it balanced on the railing in front of her.