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by Payton Hoegh
My trip to Canada last week wasn’t meant to be any sort of pilgrimage. It was a family vacation scheduled for the late summer before a busy fall. But circumstances changed that.
I began to realize a sacred shift slowly.
First came the Park Fire in Northern California, kindling in late July. I monitored its catastrophic spread from afar and worried about the threat of fire closer to home (in the canyons north of Los Angeles), where we still nurse anxieties from our brush with the Creek Fire several years ago. I scrolled through pictures of scorched forest and paused for a long while on a devastating image of a fox fleeing the flames. It seemed clear that there was no way to escape. Perhaps that image—the way my heart broke and the sharp reality of climate chaos rushed in at its viewing—was the first step in the journey.
The Jasper Fire followed. My parents had spent time at Jasper and Banff National Park earlier in the year and were so struck by the beauty of the landscape they were eager to return. Our trip had been planned at their invitation and we exchanged worried messages as the wildfire in the region grew. I recalled the fox as I listened to the premier of Alberta’s grief-stricken update on the widespread destruction. Much of the town of Jasper was burned. Hundreds of thousands of acres of forest were destroyed. I thought of all the creatures—human and wild—whose homes and even lives were lost. It was another step.
Then my wife got sick. Having lived with Lupus for over a decade, she’s no stranger to illness. But heightened symptoms exacerbated by a surprise Covid diagnosis meant that she couldn’t travel. I had managed to avoid the virus and, after a conversation full of disappointment, we concluded that I should go alone and spend this time with my family. When I boarded the plane, there was smoke in the skies over Los Angeles. I could smell it in the air, too, when I landed.
A couple of days into my time in Canada, at the summit of a hike my wife had planned for the two of us, it was clear that this trip had become more than a vacation.
Despite the insistent gleam of teal lakes below me, I sat cradled by granite, a book open on my lap and my eyes fixed on the blue-gray skyline, the jagged mountain peaks and the shining, shrinking speck of glacial ice they held.
I was reading about the water cycle as I watched the glaciers melt in the Canadian Rockies.
I felt something shift in me.
Over the textbook page I had been studying, the mountains seemed spotlit in the distance, struck by a somehow-bright sun, shrouded in light smoke. I thought of the fires raging back home. I thought of the blaze to the north just beyond my vision and it seemed clear that I had been brought to a holy place at a sacred time.
I had traveled 1600 miles, inhaled smoke from two different fires, held grief and regret, anxiety and loneliness, anger and disappointment as I climbed 2,300 ft to see just a bit more clearly.
No matter how far we travel, there’s no escaping the harsh realities of life’s uncertainty and the frightening consequences of a changing climate. We can’t ignore the increasing intensity and prevalence of wildfires and hurricanes, droughts and earthquakes. We can’t avoid the way these things sit heavy on our hearts, weigh on our minds.
This is the world we live in. I knew all of this when I started my journey but, somehow, seeing that delicate, vulnerable glacier made it all more real.
All of this flashed through my mind as I felt my throat clench with lament.
I watched for a little while as smoke and feathery clouds competed to obscure my view of the ice before I let my gaze drift to the lakes below, pools fed by the glaciers’ loss and leant a jaw-dropping color I’d never seen water take. They were stunning, shining as the wind stirred their striking blue-green surface. They were beautiful in a way that didn’t make sense beside anxious thoughts.
Somehow, this is the world we live in, too. One which, when we pay attention, when we’re open to it, moves our hearts in a way we can’t really explain.
I sat there for a long time caught between grief and joy.
As I turned and placed the glacier’s glint to my back, pilgrim head full of contradiction and the water of Lake Louise shining below, I put my foot to the trail I was meant to walk with my wife and started to think about when her disease had been at its worst. I recalled when she had struggled to walk because the nerves in her feet made each step a painful rush of needles and fire. I thought of how she had hiked with a cane to teach herself to walk normally again, and I smiled thinking about the practice she had developed every time a trail crossed a stream.
Later that afternoon, I followed the steps of the ritual I had observed her practice all those years ago.
I sat on a rock beside the Elbow River and quietly watched it rush by with dueling elegance and fury. I looked up at the mountains and glaciers in the distance as I unlaced my shoes and peeled off my socks. I wiggled my toes and smiled a bit before slowly plunging my feet in the water, water fed by the joy of melting snowpack and the sorrow of melting glaciers; water pure and sweet and strong yet laced with ash from the blaze still raging upstream; water that would never again sate the tongue of foxes lost in fire; water that would fill aquifers and feed crops and carry life in its flow; water that would evaporate and form clouds and fall as rain and saturate soil holding the seeds of new forests, or quell a fire's rage thousands of miles away, or freeze and drop as sleet and snow to coat mountains anew.
I held my feet in that icy water until it burned as I watched the glaciers melt in the Canadian Rockies. I thought of how time might form that same water into glaciers I will never see.
As I pulled my feet from the river, I tried to hold its gifts close to heart.
This is the world we live in and in this time of fearful uncertainty, water’s wisdom might bring some balance to the holy contradictions of joy and sorrow we carry each day: be soft but strong. Move with grace and purpose. Always be ready for change and, in whatever way you can, be for this Earth, our shared home, a source of renewal and hope.
Be like water.
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