Shrinking World

Bernadette McDonald

My World is Getting Smaller

I watched my world shrink, one mountain range at a time, until I was confined to my bed.

March 2020. The Air Canada number was occupied, as always. “Please note that our operators are busier than usual. Wait times are approximately three hours. We advise you to visit our website.” Underlying message: “Please go away and don’t bother us.” After watching the explosion of Covid worldwide, and taking advice from my travel-savvy friends, I was attempting to cancel our flights to Athens. We had planned a trip to Leonidio for a month of climbing, something that we did almost every spring—typical for northern climbers longing for some sun-kissed rock after a dark and cold winter. Our destination wasn’t always Leonidio, but some place warm and Mediterranean, where the limestone is prickly and the olive oil is silky and golden.

These spring getaways often coincided with work assignments in Europe, perhaps at the Trento film feistival, where I could dash out of the theatres for an afternoon of climbing at an Arco crag. I occasionally combined the annual spring migration with research for a writing project. Hiking and climbing in the Tatras with the Polish ice warriors or chasing the uber-fit Slovenian climbers around the Julian Alps. Nothing could match those springtime escapes to stunningly beautiful vertical landscapes to meet up with friends who loved them as much as I did. Although Covid put a screeching halt to all of that in the spring of 2020, I was so confident that it would be short-lived that I simply planned to postpone the trip till the autumn of that same year. This would be a minor blip in my globe-trotting lifestyle. Hence the attempted call to Air Canada.

I never did get through. And although it was annoying and inconvenient, it didn’t take long to realize that my frustration was a first world problem. Something shared by many people used to being able to travel long distances to tantalizing places, I had to admit that it wasn’t all that important in the grand scheme of things.

Spring is a disappointing season at my home in Banff. In fact, it’s a misnomer. Winter lingers with cold temperatures and snowstorms until one day the sun comes out with both barrels loaded. Millions of mosquitos burst into life and summer has arrived. The spring of 2020 was shaping up to be pretty typical, but something was different. It was eerily silent, for the world-famous tourist destination effectively closed its doors. Police cars monitored the only two roads into town, questioning everyone who wanted to enter, discouraging all but the residents to keep driving past. There was nothing in Banff for those travellers: ski resorts were closed; hotels were shuttered; restaurants were closed; even the t-shirt shops had shut their doors. We gazed down the main street in a town that is usually heaving with pedestrians and cars, and saw no one. Not a soul. I scuttled home and read “The Plague”.

Residents were discouraged from moving about unnecessarily. We were asked to refrain from any activity that could be even remotely dangerous, since local rescue teams had no way of protecting themselves from injured skiers or climbers; it was too early in the pandemic to fully understand how it was spread, and personal protective equipment was hard to get. So, we hung up our ski-touring equipment and instead, strapped on xc skis and slipped out to the strangely empty trails. No sounds of happy skiers calling to each other, just the ravens squawking as they do and the reassuring swish of skis sliding on snow. Day after day we skied on those trails, watching the snowpack gradually shrink as the temperatures warmed, lost in thought about the strangeness of the quiet and the solitude. We would come home to increasingly dire news from around the world. Messages from friends in Italy and Spain that chilled us with their lockdown tales and family tragedies. We silently gave thanks for our empty town and our trails and pine forests and clever ravens. We stayed off of social media. The global pandemic had become personal now.

When the air temperature warmed and the snow turned to slush, we stripped the wax off our skis, stored them away for next season, and transitioned to walking. Chickadees began changing up their repertoire from their cheerful winter tunes to their more melodious mating serenades of spring. We wandered the trails around town, binoculars in tow, marvelling at the annual avian migration just beginning to pass through the valley on its way to the far north. Darkeyed junkos and spotted towhees, the resident family of bald eagles, wailing loons, and finally, the first robin. The valley seemed overrun with birds. Or perhaps it was the same as every other year but we were now just paying more attention. I’m not sure about the birds, but when elk and deer, and eventually a grizzly sauntered down the main street of Banff, I was convinced that the natural world was moving back in to claim its rightful place. It felt somewhat reassuring.

We encountered friends and acquaintances we hadn’t seen in years, because everyone was walking the same trails, peering at the same birds, keeping two metres apart and speculating about the future. We talked about travel and everything we were missing: climbing in the Med, hiking in Utah, skiing in Norway. All of this would pass and we would soon be back in the air, winging our way to all of our favourite places.

Or would we? Would we even want to?

Weeks passed. And then months. Friends became ill. Events were cancelled. International travel was completely off limits. Within Canada, “Stay close to home” was the mantra. And home was the mountains, the forests, the birds. Summer flowers faded and the golden larches shimmered in the autumn sun’s caress. The first snows arrived and once again it was time to prepare for the longest season—winter. The trails were still empty, the town only half awake. Since the world couldn’t come to Banff, it felt like the entire valley was exhaling a sigh of relief. A chance to heal. A chance to think clearly. A chance to slow down.

June, 2021. When the second Covid summer arrived, it was cruel. A heat dome descended on Western Canada like a hammer, crushing everything in its path. Forests and grasslands ignited, people died of heat exhaustion, gardens and vineyards withered, an entire town burned to the ground. The atmosphere turned into a toxic mess of fumes and smoke. “Stay close to home” took on another meaning: do not travel; do not clog the roads; don’t make it more difficult for the fire fighters trying to do their job in this Armageddon we called home. Covid was still rampant everywhere, but the news wires had lost interest. Everything was about fires. There were so many forest fires nearby we lost track. And they were growing exponentially, exploding in front of our eyes.

Weeks passed. The air quality deteriorated even further. We hid inside, windows shuttered, trying to keep the ash from sifting in. We limbed the trees around our house, scalped the native grassland down to bare soil, and held our breath. When would the next fire start? Where? Had we done enough to save our home?

Every season eventually passes, and the 2021 fire season did as well. Climate change had taken on a new meaning. We knew it was coming. We understood that we had brought it on ourselves, but it was personal now. We began to think differently about travel. Not just of restrictions and injections and face masks but of emissions and guilt and personal responsibility. My world was changing so rapidly and in such dire ways that it felt like a complete loss of control.

March 2022 and I’m at home again, this time convalescing after knee replacement surgery. I can hear the snowplough through the partially open window. Damn. It must have dumped last night, which means everyone I know is going ski-touring today. I don’t even want to open my eyes to see what I’m missing. But I need another pain killer. So, I open them a crack, roll over slowly and carefully so as not to jostle my leg, shake loose a pill and slosh it down with a swallow of juice. Good. That should kick in soon and I can fall back to sleep. There’s no reason to wake up, no place to go. Just more excruciatingly boring physio exercises and more pain killers while my new knee heals and my quads atrophy. The aging process just got personal.

Two hours later I am kicking steps up the pristine West Face of an unnamed peak, matching—step for step—the progress of the climber I have just interviewed. The sun has risen and the air temperature is rising. My crampons are biting into the icy slope with precision, and my pace is rhythmic and sure. In a few hours I will be on the summit. Every moment of this climb is perfection. I must remember every detail so that I can recreate it in my mind when I need it most. Like now, flat out in bed.

Thank you, (unnamed climber), for remembering all those details so that I could add your story to the much bigger one that I am tackling.

I could never have imagined how therapeutic this writing project would be when I started it two years ago. How the zoom calls and WhatsApp conversations and exchanges of emails and photographs would brighten my bed-ridden days as I connected with the world that I love so much. Climbers of all sorts—reticent, arrogant, confident, humble, unknown and famous—all sharing their stories of adventure on the windswept ridges and faces of the Himalayan giants.

One thing that the pandemic gave us was a universal truth: while our worlds got smaller, we got older. My world has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk again. From the razor-thin ridges of the Julian Alps to the fragrant pine forests of the Rockies to the puffy white duvet on my bed. And with that shrinkage comes stress and grief. But thankfully, with a bit of imagination and some help from my friends, I can still feel the bite of that high-altitude wind and savour the warmth of the first rays of the sun.

Eventually I will move confidently from this room, out onto a trail where the pines will rustle in the breeze and the ravens will watch from their airy perch. Maybe I will eventually touch that Mediterranean limestone again. One thing is sure: this restless person that is me realizes that I have found a still spot in the world.

Summary

Bernadette McDonald reflects on how the world seemed to become smaller during the pandemic, and how this brought her to see and appreciate more of the seasons, landscape and wildlife around her home town of Banff.

 

⇑ Top