A life on gravel roads
I make a pot of tea after dinner, pretending that tonight is the night I will stay cosy at home, only to, by the time I’ve taken my first sip, already have decided that I need to be off on a highway driving into a blindingly low sun for another retreat to nature and sure rendezvous with wildlife.
Shadings of dust and sand would settle neatly in place on the back of my car while clouds of it chased me down more and more kilometres of gravel roads. The little ‘SOS’ and satellite icon in the upper corner of my iPhone has become an almost familiar comfort. This has been my nearly daily life for weeks now.
The mosquitos weren’t quite out yet, just the odd one that seemed dazed, confused, and way, way bigger than I remember. Snow is, of course, still very abundant in the mountains, and streams have begun to fill crevices through the flora, bringing magnificent colours back. It’s like the world comes back to life again, and I just think I have never been more in love with that.
But the last days I have finally spent more time inside than out, chasing any darkish corner in an all white, east and west facing apartment in the northern summer, with hopes of being able to curl up and edit any of the millions of photos and videos I’ve been taking.
Right now it is after midnight, and the sun is finally below the horizon. My salt lamp glows warmly on the windowsill, and behind it, the outline of the mountains against a bright twilight sky will remain for another few hours until the sun rises again. I want to take in every moment this, of the twilight glow and cool breeze in through the window. For these months, it’s difficult to keep a normal schedule. I want to be up all night and asleep through the middle of the day.
A time between
Blue hour hung over endlessly, ultimately until morning this time of the year. The sky was slow falling into enough darkness to allow the aurora to shine. Naturally, this is one of my favourite times of the year for that very reason. The magic just never ends. I cosied up in the car, eating fig bars and drinking tea, of course careful to grab the tea and not the bear spray, watching out the moonroof, waiting and waiting for the darkest hour or two to fall.
While it all sounds beautifully romantic and perfect, which it was, being at the edge of a river in the middle of the countryside at dusk as bears emerge from a long winter isn’t the most relaxing thing I have ever experienced, but the specialness in it is far from lost on me. These are some of my favourite weeks of my life.
