There is something about seeing a place for the first time, like an elementary school crush. At first you are instantly attracted, but painfully shy. Yet at the same time all you really want to do is run up and hug them, be best friends, and hold hands.
I had the great pleasure of reliving this experience recently while on a drive from Nanaimo, B.C. to Tofino B.C. The drive in itself is a bit harrowing with its narrow, twisting roads, and especially so in a torrential down pour with flooding along the way. I was instantly intrigued with this wild landscape, giddy actually. Being from a high mountain desert climate, soggy weather and lush rain forests made up of cedar and evergreens are a foreign thing to me. Add in the Atlantic ocean, and I was dumbfounded.
My adventure buddy and I oohed and awed as we went around every turn of the road, but when we saw this sight we pulled over immediately. Luckily I am no longer the super shy child I once was because that little girl might have stayed in the car, but not this one. The pull was too strong, as soon as the car stopped moving I was out in the rain, into the fog and the river and the rocks.
Everything was vivid and intense and strangely bigger. Well maybe not strangely, it was bigger. The Maple leaves were twice the size of my face and the base of the fallen tree was a good foot taller than me! A fact not hard to believe with all that moisture, but still, it was wonderful.
If only for a moment I was a part of that river, the leaves and the tree too. That landscape and I became friends. These pictures help me tell the story, but I'm afraid they do little justice to the sheer brilliance of that moment. Words too, seem inadequate.
Lucky for me, my memory and my imagination can fill in the blanks.
~ Jordan
*Last time in Nature: Migration
