Twice Forty-five. Imagine.

It is that time of year here when I chuckle over the old trucker’s CB-radio adage: “Watch out for those soft shoulders and dangerous curves.” A great double entendre which of course made it into at least one country song. I wish I knew the tune.  

Soft shoulders now, in late April, being both sides of every snow trail we use. Packed hard by six months of winter sledding, hauling, walking, skiing and skidoo-ing, but now bordered by bottomless powder. One brief slip of attention, one lurch at the wrong moment, and you and your dogsled, skis, or skidoo are careening off into unpacked fluff. Stuck, floundering, wallowing, and cursing. The trail now has now become the high precarious ridge, not the low and guiding valley.  

I vividly remember first encountering this condition 45 years ago, almost to the day as I write this, coming down Pike’s Portage on the final evening of a six-week journey, Yellowknife to the Thelon River and back to Reliance. My sled was heavy, the trail was steep and high-centered, and there were ten trail-hardened dogs who surely sensed that we were closing in on the end of our journey. I noted that night in my journal – “Soft snow on either side of the steep trail down Pike’s, like mashed potatoes. The most challenging sledding of the trip.”

April 24, 1981. Right over there, on that slope east of Reliance. How can this be? I was 23 years old, full of the marvelous brash confidence of youth and only dimly aware of the multiple layers of naivete and sheer dumb luck that had blessed my companions and I in getting as far as we did. By that evening we were in Reliance, amazed to be off the trail and back in the warmth and modern surroundings of the old Environment Canada weather station. Electricity! A shower! TV! Our trip was nearly done. There were still some adventures ahead but the crux was behind us.

Forty-five years. I was thinking about that span of time today, as I went up the hill first with a team of eight dogs and then with a skidoo, to cut and haul in a big load of bucked firewood. This has been the coldest April in our 39 Aprils of carefully kept records, and it ain’t quite over yet. Despite Herculean efforts, the firewood supply around the homestead reflects how relentless this cold has been.

(An odd side note – we had no communication on that trip back in ’81, and we had mused to each other one day in the tent, windbound in a blizzard, that “Hey, who knows, maybe some nut-case has shot Ronald Reagan.” And it turns out – some nut-case had! And now tonight I come in from the wood-haul and catch a blip at the tail end of the BBC hourly news –something about a shot, and a president, and a close call at a hotel in Washington. Very same hotel, it turns out.)  

Forty-five years. The blink of an eye, or maybe most of a life. Depends whether you are a chunk of bedrock, an old white spruce, or a steadily aging human being. 23 years young then, in 1981.  68 years old now, in 2026. What struck me today, though, was the span of forty-five years and the fact that I was still doing pretty much the same thing, all these years on, in virtually the same place, still careening down a slope on a steep trail into McLeod Bay, trying to remember the tune to the Willis brothers song.  

Some would say this is evidence of a lack of imagination, but I dispute that. I have no shortage of imagination. All those years ago I dared to imagine a life out here, and after several more forays and false starts in 1983 and 1985, I was here to stay by 1987. And happily by then I had met someone willing to imagine right along with me, complete with soft shoulders and dangerous curves. And now that life of ours here has been mostly lived. My long-suffering wife knows I have a good imagination, because she has seen me imagine some pretty wacky undertakings in our time here. A certain nine-ton wooden sailboat comes to mind, as do a few octagonal log buildings. Not to mention all the things she could name (quite quickly some days) that I have imagined I’d done but actually never did, and words I imagined I didn’t say, but actually did. Ahem.

I don’t think being in the same home place, doing a variation of the same thing, over and over again for forty-five years constitutes a de facto shortcoming, or a lack of anything. I prefer to frame it as Persistence. Vision. Loyalty. Stubbornness. Infatuation with a place. And so on. Of course I must view it this way, or else I would wonder what I have done with my time. As my dear hero the poet Gary Snyder, soon to turn 96 and still living in his chosen homeplace, wrote, “The most radical thing you can do is stay home.”

The thought of a forty-five year span also prompted me to dial backwards from that 1981 sledding down Pike’s, and dialing the years back from there landed my daydreams in the year 1936. (Happy Birthday, Mom!)

This 45-year span back from 1981 is especially striking to me since I have been at work for many years now on a piece of historical fiction set in the 1930’s, and set in this same stretch of landscape: Reliance, Pike’s Portage, and the Thelon River. Having now marked forty-five years here, I am better able to imagine those forty-five years back from 1981. A lot has changed, and a lot – like dogsleds and sled dogs, soft April trails and heavy loads of firewood – has not changed a bit. Looking back 90 years is not so hard when you can stand in the same place and see half the distance in your mind’s eye.  

But hey, if we want to talk about a need for imagination – try to imagine the next forty-five years here! Makes my head spin. 2026 + 45 = 2071. Our daughters will be 75 and 72 years old, if they make it that far.  Kristen and I, along with everyone of our same-age peers and colleagues and siblings and our “generation” of Boomers, will be long gone.

And what will be happening here, in April, 2071?

“Here,” in the local sense of the east end of McLeod Bay, the slope of Pike’s Portage, this cluster of log buildings near the mouth of the Hoarfrost River? And here in the watersheds of the Peace, the Thelon, the Mackenzie? The country called Canada? And on out from there.  

Now that is something interesting to mull over, while cutting and hauling some late-season firewood. Don’t get too lost in daydreams and conjecture, though, or you’ll be slewing right into the mashed-potato pow-pow at the side of the trail and cursing a blue streak in no time flat. Just like in 1981, and 1936, and now 2026. Those darned soft shoulders and dangerous curves. That song makes me laugh every time.