A Kaleidoscope Of Stars

by Maddy Hughes (United Kingdom (Great Britain))

A leap into the unknown Canada

The minibus lurched, stopping suddenly. A black furred bulky behind jumped, its short tail vanishing back into the pine forest. A bear! That was a bear. We’d just seen a bear. Or got the impression of a bear. I didn’t really see it. No. Did you? No. No stage awareness these wild bears. Not like on Attenborough. Gone before we’d realised what it was. Nature is sudden. Nature bounds back into the wild before you can say you’ve seen it. Nature doesn’t pose for humans. Back into drive, our bus carried on its jerky jolting journey into the wilds of Algonquin Park. We’d come for moose, and already we’d got a bear. Sort of. To find the moose we needed canoes. Canoes would take us into the wilderness. In order to carry a canoe safely you must have good posture: hold yourself upright, keeping your gaze always on the horizon, balancing the whole thing on your head. With some practice and some missteps, I mastered it. But as I sat heavily down on a felled tree trunk, I looked down at my sparkly toenails (nail-polish: free with Glamour mag!) and my new flipflops (free, also, with a magazine!) and I wondered if maybe I was out of my depth here. I had signed up to this. I had wanted an adventure, an antidote to the city. Toronto had been fun and I’d thrown myself into the Canadian way: eaten pancakes with maple syrup; seen Niagara; climbed the CN tower; no ice hockey because it was summer; but I’d watched the Toronto Blue Jays get some home runs instead. I’d eaten well, I’d danced a lot, I’d made some friends. I’d learnt all the different ways in which Canada was absolutely not the same as the USA. So now, it was time to get in a canoe and see some moose. You can’t know Canada unless you’ve been into the wilderness, learnt some survival skills and stared up at the moon a bit. Canoeing, itself, is easy. Though some of it isn’t. Going in a straight line isn’t. Stopping the canoe from spinning isn’t easy. I might have been doing it wrong. Something about it felt epic though. Deep lakes locked in by dense untamed forest. The quiet. The stillness. The rolling mist on the lake in the morning. Oh, this. This. This is wilderness. A distance sensed internally, a silence that is heavy. At night we sat around the camp fire toasting marshmallows, nervously asking about the storm clouds ahead; then about wolves; then, ‘what if there are more bears?’ Then later, in the liquid darkness, we pushed the canoes out onto the lake and lay back looking up at the canopy of stars, the blue black vertigo night. The Milky Way; textured, more vivid, than I’d ever seen it before; was this the first time I’d looked at the sky; seemed impossibly close and, impossible. We lay there in silence, with eyes straining, reaching up to the symphony of light above. No. This. This was wilderness. This was smallness. My stomach filled with my insignificance. My chest became tight. I wasn’t sure I liked the wilderness. But the wilderness didn’t care. Deep cold took hold. My back was wet. Was my canoe leaking? Was I sinking, or falling upwards into infinity? ‘I think my canoe’s leaking’. I broke the silence, with some relief in my voice. We all paddled the little way back to shore. No one spoke much. We zipped ourselves back up into our tents hoping for no wolves, and no bears, and no storms; and dreaming of swimming deep into a kaleidoscope of stars. In the morning quiet, with our paddles gently lapping the water the only sound, we stole upon a moose wading into the lake to eat the green algae that grew in the shallows. Could I see it? Yes. Sure. Not easily, no. The canoe was spinning. And it was wet. Was it leaking? I saw a blurry moose. In the distance. On the edge of the still water. In the wilderness. And I’ll remember him, wading in, leaning down into the water, ignoring us. I’ll remember waiting. I’ll remember holding my breath.