laura manuel

pandemic Peak

April 2020 unfurled like never and always. 

Exponential graphs, arias from Italian balconies, marathoners circling rooftops. A means B means C. We cried and closed our doors. We cried again and learned Zoom.

Mother nature did not know. The earth awoke like it always did. Suicidal snowbanks bled into rivers. Buds formed. V’s of geese celebrated loudly. Daylight stretched across the sky, oblivious to what she illuminated.

Like reverse origami, we folded ourselves inside out until skin creased with question marks. Me looking at you, hoping one of us had the answer.

Solvitur ambulando: “It is solved by walking.”

Quietly and cautiously, I stepped outside. Was this allowed, I wondered. Did sickness lurk among the birch and fungi?

The day was brown, spring hues another breath away. A trail beckoned and soon I was overlooking Joachim Valley from a fire tower north of Hinton. A warm breeze caught my hair, a whisper in my ear. Swoosh. I looked over my shoulder to see a decade-old poster for a missing woman from the lookout. When I descended into the valley, I fell upon more ghosts: an old plane crash, an Indigenous graveyard, and an abandoned village. 

I sensed the temporality of this juncture. Soon it will all change again.

Alpinist René Daumal wrote how the last step depends on the first, just as the first step will determine the last. Within this liminal space, could mountains be a guide?

Shake out the legs, clarify the goal posts. 

Peak-a-week had a nice ring to it. However, peaks have many interpretations, summits can be debated with semantics. Consider a ridgeline after substantial switchbacks. Or numerous points on a single mountain. Or burning quads, cuts from a scree field, an increased heart rate. Perhaps a peak is defined by how many times someone spouts annoying catchphrases:

“You didn’t come this far to stop here.”

“Nobody is going to do this for you.”

“The hardest part is almost done.”

My pandemic project could not be about absolutes. I would devote myself to a mountain each week, exploring upwards. 

As a runner and paddler, I know rhythm. Weekends began to have a cadence. Camping and hiking gear spread through my house in a constant state of organizing, packing, and unpacking: bear spray in the kitchen; hiking poles next to the front door; sleeping bag hanging inside out on the back deck; a computer browser set to a series of tabs of topography maps, GPX files, and weather forecasts.

At first, I rode the enthusiasm of beginnings. In short sequence, I climbed one summit after another. Each mountain pulled me from the weekday malaise. I revelled in having a goal when all else was cancelled. By June, however, I could no longer ignore my feelings of discomfort.

One night, I lay in the back of my van near Ghost River overwhelmed with loneliness. Under a full moon illuminating rising mist, I had driven the dark highway past Cochrane. No other vehicles were on the road, no signs of life. The nylon of my purple MEC sleeping bag rustled in the dark, keeping me awake. I could not stop the tears as I stared down the stars. 

Still the same stars. 

Always the same stars. 

I realized it was grief. For loved ones I could not be with, strangers dying in strange places from a strange virus, for a murky future, for all the unknowns. 

Then morning. Bright light, coffee bubbling on the camp stove, buoyant energy from hiking companions arriving from Calgary. Mornings remind us we can begin again. I felt rock in my hands, pulled myself upwards and exhaled.

I found myself fixated on a line by Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, “Like the little tree that springs up in some inexplicable fashion on the side of a cliff: where are its roots, what does it feed on, what miracle produces those green leaves?”

Just like the little tree, life could not possibly go on, but of course it did. The wind still gusted at the ridge as it did last year and 1,000 years before. The snow still crawled into cracks along ancient granite formations in routine fashion. A tiny scrubby alder or mountain aven clung to a rock in the frigid thin air. 

And we still stepped forward.

We could not hug, but we could hike and climb. As we scrambled upwards, friends shared fears about unemployment, sick family members, relationships gone awry, confessions of depression. On the descent, the tone was always different. I heard colourful bursts of hope and re-framing. 

Pandemic peaks quickly became intricately linked to a collective search for understanding. And I realized: we do not need to know the answers, only where they might live.

By July, I was venturing further. Mountains with no trails, isolated summits with crimp holds, bogs that sucked at boots. The rock in the north is not the same as the south. I learned the difference with my fingers and toes. Mount Stearn demanded a gruelling climb with wet, cold feet. Tripoli mocked our efforts with bolder fields for miles, deep gullies, and carnivorous flies. 

Mount Phillips and Tecumseh in the Crowsnest Pass were the first mountains to make me fearful. My daughter and I ascended on the slick edge of a canyon, attempting to find hand and foot holds as we pulled ourselves up the mountain bowl. We had no rope; we had been told we could hike to the summit. Higher and higher. My heart pounded with every slip of a foot or hand. Would we catch ourselves if we started to fall? I thought. I don’t want to be a headline. 

I told my daughter to lean in, “When you feel nervous, hug the mountain.”

After a long, hot day, we sat down in the rubble. Exhausted, we looked west to a dropping sun. With a sigh, we turned back even though we could see the summit. Instead of navigating the side of the canyon on our return, we dropped directly into the dry riverbed as though we were spring runoff. 

Cascading over and around rocks the size of houses, we soon found ourselves in dry whirlpool beds – deep, smooth, circular caves. We lowered ourselves down and climbed out the other side. Then another and another. Deeper and deeper. Until we dropped into one that trapped us. The cave was cool, but I was not comforted. We were sitting in the mountain’s mouth waiting to be swallowed. Like the world around us, escape required creativity. By stacking debris from the bottom of the whirlpool, we got ourselves back into the light with relief. 

We abandoned the riverbed for the previous upper canyon route. 

Dismantling, retreating, reinventing. 

As the summer rolled on, mountains started to claim lives. A woman fell from Fable Mountain. A man tumbled down the scree on Yamnuska, dislodging a boulder that crushed him. Search and rescue teams had more work than usual. People were pushing further and higher than their ability or experience. 

Suddenly, the mountains had a volume problem. Parking lots were full at 6 AM, garbage bins overflowing, toilet paper in the bush. Previously pristine lakes became backdrops for beer bongs and fireworks. A bear made the fatal mistake of pursuing human food in his home territory.

At the same time, pandemic headlines turned to race politics. Entitlement was bubbling up everywhere. 

Late one evening I approached a group of young men on the edge of Abraham Lake. Their suitcase-sized speaker blasted nondescript lyrics to thuds over the lake’s otherwise still night.

“Could you turn it down?” I asked.

“If we wanted to be told what to do, we would have gone to Banff,” a man replied. Implying that, unless we were in a national park, the mountains were fair game. We stared each other down, standing on a seemingly lawless stretch of land. Rights of one, competing with rights of another, competing with rights of the earth.

I was overwhelmed. Privilege permeated everywhere, encroaching on a wilderness I hoped to remain untouched by such madness. 

In my tent that night, I thought about those fighting to be heard, to be represented, to live. About those dropping to one knee, about a naked woman standing in front of rubber police bullets. For circumstances that brought all of us to a place where we seem to have lost the ability to pause and listen.

In August, a friend and I summited three mountains in one day: the Canmore Triple Crown. Starting with Mount Lady MacDonald at 6:34 AM, we fed ourselves with adrenaline. The second peak was the East End of Rundle in unforgiving heat. At the bottom, I stripped to a sports bra and plunged into the frigid, aquamarine waters of Whiteman’s Pond. One final push to the top of Ha Ling and we discovered a storm rolling in with fury. Amidst hail and lightning, we sailed down the mountain, thrilled with our accomplishment. 

The Triple Crown awards finishers with a free glass and beer from the Georgetown Inn. But we were too tired for celebrations. Once again, I sunk into my reliable purple sleeping bag, realizing that the swoosh of nylon was now lulling me to sleep.

The Triple Crown felt like a conclusion, but there was still no end in sight. Choosing how to finish was going to be as challenging as choosing to start. 

Mountains were now shaping my thoughts. Resolution was not at the peak; understanding was discovered in cracks along the way.

Fall settled into weekend grooves – much earlier in the mountains than in a claustrophobic city. An early morning and late evening chill hinted at the impending golden season. Flowers changed in the alpine meadows. Pinks and purples gave way to Dr. Seuss stalks of seed. As part of my ensemble of gear, I packed gloves, a toque and down jacket. 

My body was conditioned from weekly elevation, but I was mentally fatigued. I craved a Saturday measured in naps and books. Is an endurance challenge meant to span this long? Maybe peaks have nothing to do with mountains. And maybe there is truth to the maxim that all battles are internal.

It was time to go back home.

At 3 AM we slid out of our sleeping bags at Castle River. Moonlight, stars, and headlamps lit our way to the top of Table Mountain. The journey upwards was bewitching – silhouettes of cliffs and ridgelines, skeleton trees and nightmare shadows. As we crested, the sun peeked out from the horizon’s curtain before her main appearance. With one more infinitesimal turn of the earth, we were flooded in crimsons, pinks, and oranges in a sighing morning breeze. 

That evening we climbed Turtle Mountain, the infamous rock that crushed the town of Frank in 1903. By the time we reached the top, we were soaked by fog and there was no rewarding view. It proved to be an anticlimactic finale as I photographed feet dangling over a hidden Frank Slide. 

I had come full circle, dancing with ghosts in the wilderness. 

Four months, nineteen mountains, and an army of spirits. 

Pablo Neruda’s memoirs arrived in the mail just before these final summits. I sunk into them with my headlamp as I slid into my purple sleeping bag for the final camping night of 2020. “I have come out of that landscape, that mud, that silence, to roam, to go singing through the world,” he wrote. 

And we will continue traveling. We will persevere like the twisted bush insisting on presence in a crack, flex and move like scree slides, echo like the wind charging through valleys, and sing like droplets of moisture converging into rivulets, trickles, streams, rivers. For answers are not found in what we endure, but in how we step forward together.

The hardest part is almost done.

LAURA MANUEL WRITES CREATIVE NON-FICTION AND SHORT FICTION. AS AN AVID TRAIL RUNNER AND PADDLER, SHE LOOKS TO THE WILDERNESS FOR INSPIRATION. LAURA’S ESSAYS HAVE BEEN FINALISTS IN COMPETITIONS BY THE WRITERS UNION OF CANADA AND CBC’S NON-FICTION PRIZE. LAURA IS CURRENTLY WORKING ON A BOOK ABOUT ULTRARUNNING. SHE LIVES IN EDMONTON, ALBERTA, CANADA.