“There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.” Nelson Mandela

When I read this quotation, my mind immediately went to Sundre. Sundre is the only place that I have ever been able to call home that wasn't in Edmonton. I lived there for the summers of 1998, 1999 and 2000 in a rickety old 18 foot trailer from the late 1970s with a leaky roof and a bathroom that didn't work.

Living in that trailer was like baking inside a giant tin can during the day and freezing your butt off at night. The screens were torn, so we would spend the last ten minutes before bed every night killing the mosquitoes that had gotten in during the day. We rode out infestations of both mice and ants, and endured a fitful furnace in late November when the snows flew. That trailer had the world's most comfortable foam beds and the added convenience that you could reach almost anything in the room without getting up from your seat at the tiny convertible table. It had a beige with gold striped exterior and brown, orange and gold interior. Very 70s. Also very ugly.

Working in Sundre was my first real job in my field. I was a range and forest technician, and I absolutely loved my job. Sure it had hard parts; days when it snowed in July or we got stuck in the mud or our bridge washed out and I had to back down 8 kilometres of winding muddy rutted forest road with a trailer. There were days when the mosquitoes swarmed so thickly that we wore full raingear and shirts on our heads instead of the bugthug so strong that it melted our pencils and equipment. There were encounters with bears, benign and otherwise. Sometimes the job was dangerous, like when I was loading a quad and the ramp was icy and I flipped the quad off the back of the truck and by all rights should have been seriously injured but got away with a bruise on my back and a charley horse in my leg. There were injuries, like when Melissa got hit in the face with the arm of the jack-all under the load of the truck. There were scary parts – an encounter with a hunter – and funny parts – the time I fell out of a tree and into a fallen tree and not only got stuck but my head was glued to the trunk with sap. Sometimes our equipment broke, like the time we had flames and smoke coming out of the axle on our trailer.

Despite all this, there were moments of indescribable joy in my work. My personal happy place is in a certain cutblock, on one of the higher peaks in the area. I’m sitting on my little clipper canoe chair with my veg frame in front of me. To my right are brilliant orange Indian paintbrush, cobalt bluebells and the tiny white florets of yarrow; to my left, a single tiger lily bloomed. The weather is just right: warm enough to not need a jacket but overcast, so my brains aren’t boiling under my ball cap. I can see for miles, the mountains crest the misty horizon and the distance to the peaks is carpeted with the green of spruce, pine, and the occasional poplar. The air is crisp and fresh with morning and my boots glisten with a fine sprinkling of dew. I sit. I breathe. I worship.

That was the path I thought I would follow, possibly working my way up for a while with that company, then going back and doing my Master’s degree, maybe even a PhD. I loved field work, and that’s what I wanted to do. I loved the science of it and the questions that it caused to spring up in my brain demanding experiments, to find the answers. I found out later that there were serious money problems in the company, and that branch basically went under within a year.

By that point I had just graduated with my BSc, and then moved out of my parents place and in with Roscoe. I was single, jobless and directionless.

If I were to go back to Sundre, the contrast between me-then and me-now would be quite striking. Then I was gearing up for a career in the forestry field, with frequent unemployment, now I work a steady desk job at the University. Then I was moving toward a Master’s, now I’m thinking about taking a writing class or a photoshop course. Then I was single and miserable, now I’m married and much happier (this is not a “marriage makes you happy” section. I was miserable for reasons independent of my singledom). Back then I was commuting twice a week for choir (a three hour bus ride), now I don’t have a place to sing but I have my choir friends, who are the best.

Sometimes it’s just nice to saunter down memory lane and stop to smell the mountain-top flora.
Sometimes it’s the contrast that makes you realize what you have and take for granted. Sometimes this introspection helps you to find what you are missing in your life that you used to have and to see more clearly where you need alterations.