For Part I of this series, click here!

I’ve known that I’m an introvert for most of my life. Introversion is impartial to shyness, but it does dictate how a person’s energy is replenished. Personally, some time alone or with the comfort and camaraderie of my loved ones is enough to renew my vitality and capacity for sociableness.

But it isn’t always feasible to charge my batteries that way – and while I was away on the Columbia River Field School, I had to learn how to manage my introversion while almost constantly being in a group of twenty people. I couldn’t just go home or always find time to myself. It proved to be a challenge that I wasn’t sure I could deal with at first.

After leaving our first backcountry campsite in the late morning of day five, we paddled for a few hours down the slough to our next destination – a quiet, idyllic spot of land only accessible by water with an old cabin and charming outhouse settled back from shore. The site is appreciatively named “Larry’s Place” as tribute to the owner who allows groups to camp there.

That day I practiced paddling from the stern, or the back, of the canoe. Our first day of canoeing had me feeling sorely frustrated (emphasis on sore) in this position. The J- and sweep-strokes seemed impossible and my canoe had wiggled a twisty trail through the water from my irritated steering. However, on this fifth day I found myself doing “quite well for a beginner . . . although there is still room for improvement”.

While the sore throat I’d noticed that morning didn’t get worse over the day, I found myself wilting by the time we got to our camp. Inadequate hydration and warmer weather provided a wonderful spell of heat exhaustion. When we arrived at Larry’s Place, I dragged my feet over the swampy ground, heaved my backpack off my shoulders, and sank into the grass. I didn’t get up again for a while. My other sick comrades passed out beside me. For a while I journaled about the day and wrote down canoeing acronyms I wanted to remember, then relinquished my writing and rested.

After that day, I made sure to remain properly hydrated throughout our stretches of canoeing, supplement electrolytes when needed, and be watchful of my body temperature when in the sun. It was yet another important lesson I had learned from the Columbia River.

Below, our tent sites at Larry’s Place plus the admirable view.

I slept very well that night. It’d taken me thus far to figure out that, no, my sleeping bag on its own did not provide enough warmth for the star-soaked chill through the evening. So I layered up with “a toque, longsleeve, t-shirt, and fleece zip-up [for my upper body], shorts, leggings, long johns, and baggy pants [for my legs], and two pairs of socks”, no less. Indeed I was a bit sweaty when I awoke. But it was decidedly much more comfortable than shivering in my sleep.

Our sixth day was taken to rest for the sick people to recover from the previous day (I wasn’t the only one who had wilted in the heat) and for the rest of the group to relax. Us sickies were asked to stay out of the kitchen area, so after being graciously served a bowl of granola from a group member, I drank tea to soothe my throat and enjoyed the morning chill in the air.

I noted in my journal that the other sick people seemed to be improving as well as myself. My hopeful mood was balanced by a vehemence for the mosquitoes quite abundant in the area.

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“I have been enduring extremely aggressive attacks from mosquitoes lately. I’m getting a bit tired of them. I feel like I’ve killed at least two hundred – today.”
– day six

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I don’t mean to frighten away anyone with my account of the insect activity. However annoying and painful mosquitoes can be, I realized their importance in the ecosystem the moment they weren’t there anymore. This will be explored in more detail later. For the time being, I tried my best to tolerate them (which most of the time meant annihilating them). I’m sure I’ll remember for years to come the frantic, panicked members in my tent group hurriedly slapping the bugs against our tent walls as darkness fell, and the smears of blood and bug bodies proudly displayed on the polyester thereafter. Having mosquitoes singing us to sleep while buzzing around our heads was the worst.

Going back to the struggles with my introversion, at this point during the trip I began to feel it more prominently. I was irritable and hard on myself without much space to recharge alone. I oscillated between feeling intensely lonely and wanting to connect to my peers, to wishing I could be on my own and/or home. My homesickness had peaked on day two but it certainly was still present during the middle days of the field school. I couldn’t help feeling like a failure for my anxiety, loneliness, and low energy.

However, the rest that day six provided was much-needed and helped me replenish some of my liveliness. I napped in the cozy, warm cocoon of my group’s tent that afternoon and had some space to journal and enjoy quiet time on my own. Others chose to swim, canoe around the area, squish around in the mud, or rest as well.

Now, one of the main attractions of Larry’s Place is the outhouse – a well-maintained, winsome little wooden shack tucked away into the woods. In this outhouse you’ll find all the essentials. Good books to read, classy art (of outhouses, of course), hand sanitizer, a lantern and plastic tea candles, a mirror, toilet paper, and a guest book. The guest book is renowned for its humorous poems written by visitors during their bathroom breaks. We were encouraged to add our own soul-stirring poetry to its pages; I worked on mine during the evening of our rest day.

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“Sunburns are red,
rivers are blue;
the view out this biffy
makes for a beautiful poo.”
– signed “hazelraine”

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Quite the ode, isn’t it? My peers wrote some very moving stuff as well.

Had I shown this to my former self a few weeks previous to the field school, the younger me would’ve been horrified at my blatant honesty in a public record, especially with something that might be read by people my age. (“Oh my god . . . you wrote about pooping?!” that self would have wailed.) However, I found myself caring less and less about things I would normally label as terribly embarrassing – beneath that illusion, they are just terribly human.

Besides, there was also the fact that most of us would probably never see each other again due to the spread of communities we were from within the Columbia Basin. So why not traumatize each other with our deepest, darkest secrets? Why not just let loose and live a little?

My journal entry on day seven begins with a sentence I never thought I’d inscribe while on this adventure: “I’m currently writing this from the Golden Hospital.” Then, “How did I get here, you may be wondering. Well, here’s how today went.”

We left Larry’s Place that morning by 10 am and settled in for a brisk four-kilometre canoe. (In comparison, the canoeing we’d done the previous days had been between ten and fifteen kilometres, which would take at least a few hours.) I was relieved to note that my sore throat was gone, despite not sleeping the best the night before.

Our destination was a bridge near Brisco (“wherever that is,” I snarked in my journal. Brisco is a very nice scenic little settlement on the east side of the Columbia River, about 45 minutes away from Golden). At the bridge we met with an ecologist, Catriona Leven, who monitors the wetlands in the area who showed us some beaver dams and lodges. We ate our lunch there while the leaders discussed plans for the day.

It was decided that the four sick people should be taken to the hospital because of their worsening condition, as well as one of my peers who wasn’t sick but might’ve been earlier in the trip, and myself. Though I was feeling better that day, I had had a sore throat just as the others did.

We waited on the side of the road for our ride to arrive, jittery and unsure of what would happen next. I felt at least a sense of companionship with the other sickies as we joked and sat together. (The healthy members of our group kindly refrained from calling us “sickos” too much, and “sickies” became the term of endearment instead.) I also ate an orange for good luck, and an immunity boost.

Six hours later, we were all exhausted. After rounds of testing, waiting, and bonding, we left the hospital with no more certainty than before. The results from our tests would take at least a day or two to be received. The two leaders who had driven us to the hospital rewarded us with sushi and other Japanese dishes that we devoured at picnic tables in a park. After the draining afternoon, it was a most satisfying meal.

We each called our parents with one of the leaders’ phones and let them know the situation. Mine promptly extended the offer to pick me up if I wanted; I swallowed past the lump in my throat, tempted. I was sitting at a picnic table on my own and watching people walking their dogs or children through the park, completely oblivious to the crazy journey I was currently on. But then my eyes lit upon my newfound friends as they joked and laughed and teased each other a ways away, and I realized I wasn’t ready to come home just yet. I wanted to see this through. And it seemed like I would, in fact, be okay.

So I stayed.

It might not seem momentous to others, but it was to me. I was fully committed now to this adventure and all of its uncertainty and unknowns. I was in the midst of proving my anxieties wrong.

Though our trip to the hospital was stressful and scary (personally, at least; hospitals have never felt particularly comforting to me), it was also arguably one of the most rewarding days of the field school for me with regards to connecting to other members of the group. All six of us were proud to be sickies and stay together in our quarantined areas of camp. We comforted each other and made fun of each other all in one breath. When we made a stop at a gas station that evening before heading back to Brisco, us six eagerly slipped into the store and ogled at the processed foods and civilization we hadn’t had access to for over a week.

“Look at the drinks!” one of us shouted, rainbow-coloured Gatorades towering above in the fridges, while a couple others stared with shiny eyes at the glossy candies coated in plastic wrapping on the shelves. Everything was undoubtedly chemical, unnatural, and artificial – and also deliciously tempting. As we drooled and stared at the alien technology around us, a teenage girl was watching us by the counter.

“Are you guys, like . . . Amish, or something?” she asked with a smirk. (Did we look Amish? we asked ourselves later. No, no we certainly did not. Not sure where she got that from.)

“No,” one of us laughed. “We’ve just been on this crazy field school for over a week where we are camping every night and canoeing and we got sick so we had to go to the hospital and we haven’t been in civilization for so long and have been digging our own toilets or using outhouses and oh yeah we haven’t had access to our phones at all either.”

The teenager looked disturbed. “Oh,” she said. “I would, like, die without my phone.”

Surprisingly, it wasn’t all that difficult to leave the gas station behind. I was becoming used to – and content with – the rhythms of camping, canoeing, and always being outdoors.

That night was the beginning of my solo-tent era, in which I had my own small tent lent to me by one of the leaders so that I could make sure I recovered from my sickness without getting worse or making others ill. (Or, as I explained in my journal, because I was “kind of sick but not really sick”.) I loved the solitude it gave.

On day nine, we drove through Rogers Pass and arrived in Revelstoke to partake in a tour of their massive dam. I’ve been at dams before, but none as huge and intimidating as this one. And the Revelstoke dam isn’t even the largest within the Basin. That title goes to Mica, the so-called “workhorse” of the area, which is able to generate 2,805 megawatts of power. It is one of the largest earthfill dams in the world.

Those of us who were feeling unwell still or had been sick weren’t able to join the tour inside the dam, but we still got to walk through the visitor centre and marvel at the information there. It’s impossible to relay the immenseness of the dam’s size and strength without being able to stand below it; although in the second-last photo above, the bottom-right corner gives some scale with the vehicles shown.

Visiting the Revelstoke dam was both fascinating and unsettling. On one hand, I was amazed at the sheer temerity of humans and what a group of people had managed to accomplish over forty years ago. The earth had been carved away and sculpted into something new, the powerful Columbia River diverted and stopped in its tracks. The dam sits today as a huge concrete stopper, holding back the force of 1.5 million acre-feet of water. (A million acre-feet [MAF] is the amount of water needed to flood one million acres with one foot of water. It’s hard to grasp, I know. Just understand that it’s a lot of liquid.) Water that is lured by the unstoppable tug of gravity, constantly seeking a path downhill. I wouldn’t be one to call architecture like this beautiful, but it was certainly breathtaking in its severity.

On the other hand, the dam felt largely out of place in the river valley. Against dark coniferous forests and undulating mountains, the structure is blocky and unyielding. It does not softly erode to let streams flow down its flat face nor collect soil in pockets for moss to find. It is professional and separate from the natural world around it. The low pellucid waters at its base, having been through the titanic churning turbines inside, are tamed as they flow downstream to Revelstoke.

Inside the visitor centre, the juxtaposition of hailing the ingenuity of humanity and machinery against that legend-like mystery of the way things were was jarring. The dam and its accomplishments were celebrated while recognition was also given to the Indigenous peoples who knew this land as it was incipiently. I appreciated the equipoise of progress and history, but the way it was narrated led one to think that this kind of progress was the only solution to the future, the only way forward.

Towards the back of the visitor centre, there is a First Nations Gallery with a collection of artifacts, literature, and displays for viewers to observe. On one wall there is an exhibit of creation stories and legends from Ktunaxa, Secwepemc, Syilx, and Sinixt peoples. When us sickies were done looking through the centre, we gathered outside and discussed how we each felt about the dam and the information inside. One of my peers brought up the Indigenous stories from the gallery. She noted how those types of culturally important narratives are often seen as interesting but fanciful, when, just like science, they are just another way of looking at the world. Should one view hold more weight over the other?

Her words deeply resonated with me and voiced something I couldn’t have said better. As I looked across the concrete courtyard where I sat to the massive concrete wall towering above me, I wondered: is science not just another myth we pass down from generation to generation? Is this kind of consequence-heavy progress the only path?

And what would become of the world if those original stories of creation, interconnectedness, and nature were seen to be more than just fables? What if they were given just as much respect and reverence as our logic and rationality?

To talk about these dams means to talk about the Columbia River Treaty, which as of yet I haven’t gotten into. This subject was a huge part of the field school and I can’t write about my adventures during the trip without dedicating a sufficient portion to the history and controversy around the treaty and the river it relates to. However, this post has gotten long enough; in the next part of this series, I’ll begin to delve more into the Columbia River and the complexity immersed in its vivacious waters.

to be continued