Important notes: This is installment #2 about a road trip to Wood Buffalo National Park and back. The straight up tourist info stuff will be posted here . This is the story stuff.
And some names are changed to protect the guilty.
It’s a short run to the Canadian border from my house if I head straight north. I avoid the Peace Arch crossing unless I am going bird watching in Delta. It’s too busy, with uncharacteristically unfriendly border guards. This time, I sailed through the border at Sumas.
Uncomplicated border crossings are one blessing of becoming a boring middle aged woman. I had far more trouble when I was younger and likely to be the target of drug dealers (“can you carry this bag over the border for me” is a real question I’ve heard). The younger guards make half-hearted attempts to snare you with questions about how a dinosaur dig is run or the actual location of Wood Buffalo National Park. When you blather on with happy paleontology chatter or your driving route to Northwest Territories, complete with scenic stops, they wave you through without examining your car full of gear. I won’t be abusing this privilege any time soon because I know they keep records.
Blue River was the first stop on my drive to Northwest Territories. I selected it as a potential short trip destination. This small town is short day’s beautiful drive from my home, and definitely worthy of a longer return trip. While it was a stopover on this trip, it is an outdoor recreation destination. Summer offers hiking and paddling, river ecotours for wildlife viewing. Winter offers cross-country skiing and snow-sledding.
Blue River wasn’t a town when indigenous peoples would have cherished the area for the abundance of wildlife- and likely fish- at the confluence of the North Thompson and (of course) Blue Rivers. It became a hub for fur trading and later, the railroad. In the 1940’s, interred Japanese Canadians were put to work building the Yellowhead Highway that forms part of the Trans-Canada transportation system. Blue River is supported by logging, transportation, and tourism.
I didn’t have time to do much at Blue River besides survey the area for future trips. I drove and walked to chart out what I would do on a long weekend holiday sometime next year. Evening and rain were falling.
Right before turning in, I walked out of the campground to find an eerie protest scene. I know the story- indigenous peoples among others (including my state) are protesting an expensive boondogle of a project to parallel an existing crude-and refined-oil pipeline and extend it to the coast. Once a private project by Kinder-Morgan, the controversial project was taken over by the Canadian government to the tune of billions in taxpayer funds.
The protest at Blue River focused on indigenous rights and man camps. Temporary concentrations of workers across oil country has resulted in short-lived population booms at dubious camps that attract a broad range of sins, just like early pioneer towns. Or some college fraternities. Bad things can happen, especially to indigenous women.
I photographed the red dresses hanging in the forest and the protest signs as the night fell. I heard voices but saw no one. I realized standing there in the rain that I couldn’t be too judgy about Kinder Morgan’s pipeline, having driven there in a fossil-fuel driven vehicle built of mined and manufactured materials. At what cost?
I had chosen family-friendly Blue River Campground as my stopover. It was casual and inexpensive, with a shower room for campers. I rented a small camping cabin instead of setting up my tent. Cheap and convenient.
And very necessary since I really was not well.
I bought my house 19 years ago from a couple notorious for their drinking. She was a mean drunk; he was violent. They drank every day in the short time I knew them. Morning started with coffee, then beer. Mixed drinks appeared by midday, straight hard liquor by mid-afternoon. She lathered family and neighbors with insults and profanities. He muttered and swore, occasionally whirling red-faced on anyone he imagined might be Viet Cong.
I learned this only after signing the agreement to let them rent for thirty days. They said they needed time to pack up a quarter century of belongings and memories. She showed me a closet full of frothy finery and photographs from her days riding costume class in Arabian horse shows. The house was filled with hearts and flowers, the yard littered with garden gnomes and homey plaques, perhaps to counter her poisonous malice toward all of humanity.
The barn was full of clutter except for a corner of the hay loft where armchairs and tables offered a place to watch the sun set over the river from an incongruous picture window. I cleaned out piles of cigarette butts and used hypodermic needles lining the rafters above. An addict’s man cave.
I feared Kevin the most during the week before they threw a boozy moving party for friends and left early. In that time, I was caring for one of my horses and building paddocks for the rest of the herd to move in. If Kevin wandered by in the afternoon and sensed a threat, he would whirl on me, roaring incomprehensibly…then slur an apology and stumble away, eyelids sagging and red.
It was a good thing I did not know about the hot tub incident then. My now-beloved neighbor told me how Kevin shot a man in a drunken rage. He imagined the man was flirting with his mean wife at a liquor-fueled hot tub party. The man’s back took the bullet; the hot tub was intact. The victim was airlifted to our Harborview trauma center by helicopter from the back pasture. Kevin did 3 years in jail. The victim never walked again. Kevin was out now, and they were leaving the house and the memories behind.
My immune system is Kevin. I live with a belligerent, paranoid, twitchy drunk within. My Kevin has a nemesis, too: not the Viet Cong, but Gram-positive bacteria that sneak in via skin wounds. When Kevin sees them he blows up, throwing glasses and tables and chairs. If it gets too bad, he whirls on me as the enemy and comes out swinging.
The only way to stop the chaos is to coldcock Kevin, dropping him flat until he sobers up. It’s only been once that Kevin really blew it, 13 years ago. This year, I blew it.
On a late-May trip to Alberta detoured by rain, wind, and snow, I didn’t think too much about bugs. I had only one nice weather day, during a visit to Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park. There were a few mosquitoes. Days later, when my shoulder stung on a hike in Waterton National Park, I assumed my camera and backpack straps were chafing. That raised bump I could feel? Probably a blood blister.
It was only when I arrived back home a week later that I looked closer. The blood blister seemed to be moored only on one side, so I pulled- and pulled it off. In true horror movie style, the legs of a bloated, long-embedded tick wiggled at me in protest.
The pathogen had already worked its way from the tick’s mouth parts under my skin, but the urgent care doctor mistook infection for bruising and decided to be conservative about prescribing antibiotics. The next day, angry red streaks raced toward the lymph nodes in my armpit. Kevin looked up from a long, sober slumber.
By the time the infection was under control, Kevin was out of it and coming for me. On the worst night, I drove home from work exhausted, feverish, and in crippling pain. I had left the door unlocked and ajar that morning, knowing I wouldn’t have the strength to turn the key in the lock and twist the knob. I pushed the front door open with my shoulder, shuffled to the couch, and laid down fully clothed for the night. I was too weak to fix dinner, take a shower, climb the stairs to my bedroom. I lay there breathing, listening to the air rasp back and forth across my throat, wondering if I would wake up the next morning.
I did, and decided to take control and break some rules. I broke into emergency travel meds and called my doc to demand reinforcements. Within hours, Kevin was down for the count, sullen and subdued. Two weeks later, he had retreated back to the addict’s man cave.
But the bacterium was still there. Pathogens are talented at hiding in systems built to expel them. They lurk in lungs that should cough them out, settle in pooling urine that should flush them, swim among our intestinal flora and suddenly stage a coup. They shield themselves with biofilms or spore coats, sometimes hiding under lesions we build to wall them off. This one settled somewhere south of my kidneys.
When two rounds of antibiotics failed to prevail, we cultured to identify the enemy. The day before I left on this trip, my doc called me as I sat among train commuters traveling home from work. She sounded befuddled, said it was a really odd one. Notoriously drug-resistant. I couldn’t ask for more detail with everyone looking at me. Train riders abhor medical discussions, and it would be too late to call once I got home. She would post lab results and send me with a drug and a back up.
I asked the obvious- should I really travel into the hinterlands? She thought maybe yes, and she had spent years serving remote villages in Alaska. She should know, right? She was going on vacation, too. “I’ll see you when I get back, Miss Monica,” she said.
In my simple little camping cabin at Blue River, I curled up shivering in winter weight clothing and a puffy sleeping bag. The cabin’s portable heater blew hot air full bore as the rain fell outside. I fell asleep and dreamt of red dresses flowing languidly in a chilly breeze among the dark trees in a damp forest.
I had made it. I got myself on the road and was leaving the cocoon of home. I was on my way.
Larkey Skip 