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Hiking the Great Silence of Canada’s Rocky Mountains
We always bring fire down from the mountain.
I’m not much of a hiker.
I should say that from the start. A sedentary lifestyle and a distaste for physical exercise have left me with a writer’s doughy physique and an aversion to breaking a sweat.
At the same time, I have a madman’s addiction to silence. Not the silence that’s an absence of sound, the kind you can get in a room with the windows closed. Something deeper, more profound than that.
The great silence of the world that is a sound of its own, a silence that seeps like a thief through the pores of your skin, that wraps itself around your bones and allows itself to be taken with you, back from the wilderness, back to the city where we sell the freedom of the great wild for a leased pickup truck and a handful of subscription services.
I had conceived a plan.
I was living in the flatlands of Alberta, Canada. A great place to make money; a terrible place to make a life. At least for me. Hockey and fishing and hunting and child-raising leave me cold; I’d as soon dig my own grave as shovel snow.
But Alberta has its mountains. A three-hour drive from my home, it was a journey I made as often as I could.
