Babes and Bears

The day after my nineteenth birthday, I hike the Juan de Fuca trail on the coast of Vancouver Island, a 47 kilometer trek that curves its way through giant cedars, thick mud, and smooth beaches. I decide, because I am naïve and optimistic, that I will hike it alone. I am an outdoorsy person, sort of. I’ve hiked before – yes, I was nine the last time and my parents carried most of my gear, but I like trail mix and sometimes jogging. I slip pepper spray on my belt loop every morning of the trip.
The path, if not too generous a term, evolves from smooth stoned beaches to eerie old logging roads to mystical trees of Lord of the Rings caliber. The trees whisper intimately to each other and I stumble around them and eavesdrop. They creak, gulls chatter above, and waves crash and chuck stones like my father at the dinner table with a particularly inconvenient salt shaker.
To the east, Heaven pours out between the silhouettes of trees – or if that’s too poetic, bright light, the colour of white noise. I tromp my hiking boots in fresh mud, sip from a flask of water from the stream a kilometer back. To the west, the ocean crashes itself on the beach, twenty feet below the cliff the trail shrugs on.
A rustle in the salal bushes around the bend has me white-knuckling my pepper spray, but a handsome fellow hiker trollops through and I ease my grip. He greets me, big-eyed and smiley with a North Face cap and dark stubble. “You camping at Sombrio tonight?”
I remember the last time I showered (five days, and my mum said deodorant attracts bears so I left it at home). I hug my waist. “Probably Chin.”
“Tight,” he says. “Careful of the bear skat.”
I try not to skat myself, and think how jolly a story this could have been to tell our grandchildren as he winks and wanders the other way.
I look out at sea and across to the blue peaks of Washington’s Olympic Mountains. I love the ocean for the way it makes people like me dream, with our matching bravery (or stupidity) and unwashed hair, our uncanny love for the wilderness and candies in trail mix. For a moment, I am at once petrified and grateful to be alone. It will be scary to face a bear (and I later do, but I needn’t pepper spray him), but it is also wonderfully liberating, this solitude. This love for reckless abandon and the coolness in the air.
I pull my pack tight, skip over some mud, and trek on.