Hobbies You Might Not Want To Admit To

Morning on the deck in the South Chilcotins. While it is cloudy, I can see some extremely promising clear breaks to the south-west - even the ‘official’ weather forecast is looking optimistic. Weather aside, morning on the deck is a magical time, particularly when accompanied by a most excellent cup of coffee, as it is this morning (who am I fooling - show me a morning when I haven’t been accompanied by a good cup of coffee, and I’ll show you the inhabitants of hell learning to ice fish).

Morning is a particularly good time to observe birds. Birds, you say? Karen, you and the Pensioner better extricate yourselves from the boonies right quick - you are walking a fine line of eccentricity. (and trust me.... this concern is echoed with great resonance by our children....and not just with regard to the birds...). I’m with you, but hear me out. 

For the most part, I have assumed that birds fall into the following categories: robins, crows, seagulls, ducks, and brown/grey birds. (OK - I could probably identify an owl in a pinch). Astoundingly, I am finding that latter category - brown/grey birds - is considerably more diverse than I had originally understood. First of all, there are small, medium and large brown/grey birds. Who knew? AND.... some of these brown/grey birds have other colours on them! Like yellow, and red...! Amazing. 

Depending on your mind set, bird-watching can be either enormously satisfying or fully exasperating. Consider for a moment the size of your average field guide to birds vs. your average field guide to mammals.  Not even comparable. In this area we have, what? -  two varieties of bears, a couple of kinds of deer, moose, wolves, coyotes, a few cats, a bunch of weasils and the standard sampling of rodents?  But birds.... I couldn’t begin to list them! I mean, there are at least three different woodpeckers alone! (I say this only to impress upon you my new-found additional category of birds - woodpeckers have now been separated from the brown/grey category - some of them have red on them). And there’s no guarantee that one bird of a variety will look the same as another - apparently sex, age and whether or not it’s breeding season impact the plumage. Seriously? Hundreds upon hundreds of varieties AND a variety of permutations of colouring amongst each? Give me a break... or a bear - a bear always looks like a bear.

Nonetheless, the more time I spend observing this inexhaustible array of plumed personalities (did I just call them ‘plumed personalities’? ... I seriously need to get back to civilization....), I begin to understand the birdwatcher’s obsession. I’m not sure I am endowed with sufficient patience to make a serious hobby of birdwatching (plus I would like my children to continue to admit to being related to me) but there is a certain satisfaction to being able to say I can identify a red-breasted sapsucker. Wow. Pack up the car - I think the fine line may just have been crossed.

What Now?

The thing I unquestionably love most about our cabin in the South Chilcotins is the deck.  I have a bit of a thing for decks, actually, and this deck, though rudimentary and looking slightly the worse for its years, is blessed with all day sunshine. Combine that feature with a deck surface wrapping three sides of the house, providing shade and a cool breeze when the temperature tops 30 degrees, and you really have the ultimate wonder-deck. And of course, unlike Whistler, where spring drizzle and cold temperatures tend to predominate, the South Chilcotins, nestled in the rain shadow of the Coast Mountains, offer up generally drier, warmer weather, providing a cornucopia of deck-sitting opportunity.

So I sit here - it’s been cloudy most of the day, but for the moment the sky has cleared and I bask in late afternoon sunshine. To say it is peaceful would be an understatement, but to suggest it was quiet would be entirely inaccurate. Gun Creek thunders in the background, the wind hisses through the aspens, and the birdsong is cacophonous and continuous. These sounds, however, blend together in a sensual symphony, massaging the spirit and re-booting the soul. And the smell... snow brush flowers, newly minted evergreen shoots and wild roses... a combined fragrance paradoxically both delicate and over-powering. (Amazing how much time and money is devoted to trying to recreate the perfume of fresh air).

In short, a splendid afternoon. I’ve been on vacation for a week now. You might question the sanity of taking vacation time in June-uary - not really famous for consistent, fabulous weather, and, of course, too early for bike riding in the higher mountains. (In fact, I think you could say that June is pretty much famous for consistently cold damp weather.) However, the man known simply as Geoff, having pulled the pin on the day job and filed to collect his pension, was moving his base camp to these parts for the summer, and I just felt the need to tag along. 

Retired. Weird. How freakin’ old are we??? When did that happen? I know, I know - not specifically retired, just reassigned (I mean, retiring to become a mountain bike guide doesn’t exactly scream ‘decrepit’). It’s still a watershed moment though; a point in your life where you realize just how much life has happened, and that you are somewhat precariously balanced on the fulcrum of age. I guess I would be fine with that if... if I had any clue on where I go from here. (a friend of mine put it most succinctly - ‘I’m trying to figure out what to do with the second half of my life’). I wasn’t banking on having to resolve this quite so soon  - crap, I only just figured out what to do with the first half of my life! At this rate, I’ll be 100 before I can confirm my personal retirement plans. And I’m not sure if it is a good thing or a bad thing that I have this existential continuity crisis in common with my twenty-something kids. (I don’t think they find it all that comforting either).

So I take a breather on my deck in the South Chilcotins. I listen to the birds, smell the flowers, soak in the sun (though a rather grey cloud has obliterated it for the moment...literally, not metaphorically... I think it might rain.....). I delight in the brilliant greens of spring, the small bear foraging around the yard, the patches of grassland offering the first lupins, balsam-root sunflowers and Indian paintbrush, and the tireless avian choristers (though even in my lyrical reverie, I have to say that the crow is very like that one voice in the choir, who, try though they might, can NOT actually hit the notes...). As the saying goes, ‘you’re only as old as you feel’. Today, that makes me about 86. Maybe I don’t have to worry about the second half of my life...