Rite of Passage

by Thomas Wells (Australia)

A leap into the unknown Canada

We weren’t alone. Paw prints packed the snow thin, claw incisions daring us onward like compass needles. The grizzly tracks conformed remarkably to our intended route, and became reliable, if disconcerting markers. We pressed on, choosing not to mention the obvious folly of tracking a supreme predator. A grunt. It wasn’t in my head, because Jean-Sebastian had frozen just ahead of me. It wasn’t in Sebastian's head, because I was snatching the bear spray from his pack. I thumbed off the safety, and aimed into the trees while J-S produced a metallic pen used for launching little fireworks. He held it out like a shotgun, and we offered our feeble call to the woods. More grunting, and a crashing that made our defences feel toy-like in our hands. The sun had catapulted high overhead, and we had yet to begin the ascent proper. Mt Roach rose impossibly to our right, its foothills bristling with an impenetrable moat of alder trees. We continued along the valley floor, hoping for an upward route to present itself before the sun sailed past its apex. We made a couple of false starts up the mountain, blindfolded by the undergrowth. My hopes for the summit were beginning to fade when we arrived at an alpine lake. It reflected a ring of dark green pines, dwarfed by mountains that fell toward the sky. Rising above the lake, on the shoulder of Mt Roach, was a staircase of unhewn boulders stacked higher than we could see. Palms to granite, we began to climb. I’m not a mountaineer. This was already the highest earthbound altitude at which I’d drawn breath. On all fours we climbed, shedding down to shirts and soothing our hot red hands in pockets of snow. Why should such a giant let us scramble onto its back, I wondered. It could thwart us with an incline of a few degrees more, loose scree instead of stable boulders. It could call in a storm, blind us with fog, trap an ankle. We were of modest experience, with no equipment more sophisticated than our boots. It seemed impossible that such a mountain could yield to will and youth alone. Perhaps it was asleep. Perhaps the mountain’s presence was a figment of my imagination, and my sense of gratitude irrational. All I knew was that uncounted hours of ascent sunk away beneath us, without injury or impasse. The endless scramble led us into a lunar alpine, where swathes of snow baked under the sun and trickled between shards of shattered granite. The summit came into view, guarded by a small, jagged tower of rock. Midst the sky whipping across our shoulders, the slide of sweaty palms, the grind of loose rock blades, we climbed until the opposing face of the mountain yawned beneath us. There was no higher ground. In any direction, it seemed. It was a gripping of the chest, a concussion to the organs, a thinning of oxygen to the brain. We stood on the border of two hemispheres, visible only to us. The Fraser Valley from where we had come, hazy green hilltops and parched canyons rolling into the horizon. And the Coastal Mountain Range, alpine peaks rippling into infinity. Sharing the summit with us was a small pyramid of rocks left by those who’d come before. I wondered who they belonged to. Someone had told me that the ascent of Mt Roach was once a rite of passage for young male Salish, marking their transition into manhood. I don’t know if that’s true. But it was a boy who shivered at a bus station outside Vancouver International Airport, and not-a-boy who placed his stone on the summit of that mountain. The transition was not a display of brawn or endurance, the acquisition of skill or ability. Not the accumulation of experience, knowledge, or even wisdom. The evolution from boy to man was a shift in attitude from expectation to gratitude, from egotism to humility. From rebellion against the forces that created me, to confrontation with the flaws in that creation. The rest just kept me alive long enough to make the leap.