In 1722 Daniel Dafoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, published A Journal of the Plague Year, one man's account of the Great Plague of London which killed about a hundred thousand Londoners and others in 1665-66. Wikipedia tells us that Dafoe takes pains to achieve verisimilitude in his plague book, describing specific neighborhoods, streets, and even particular houses in which events took place. I admit to having never read Journal of the Plague Year. Perhaps this would be a good year to remedy that defect.
Our own pandemic of 2020 has turned the planet into a strange, unfamiliar world. But for CV-19 I would be in Cape Breton now, enjoying the woods of Boularderie Island, cataloguing the birds and wildflowers, trying in vain to persuade twin cousins Lynn and Louise to go for a skinny dip in my own private, perfect swimming hole. But no, I am in BC rather than CB, striving to make the best of altered circumstances.
I find that in at least one way I have become a facsimile of my late, lamented mother. When I was young I never quite understood why dear old Mum put such a high premium on peace and quiet. I no longer wonder why. From the sleeping porch at Big Bras d'Or it is commonplace in the dead of night to hear barred owls and coyotes in conversation from somewhere in the upper reaches of Kelly's Mountain, five kilometres away. We get up in the morning to revel in the chorus of warblers singing from the woods just behind the cabin. At 'Bigador' there is plenty of peace and quiet. Here in our no-longer-little city it often seems to me that there is none at all, so when Mary and Mike proposed that we join them in a longish hike to Sheilds Lake in the Sooke Hills, Jan and I said yes, please and thank you.
Monday was a glorious day for hiking a less-traveled wilderness route: sunny but not too warm, a gentle breeze producing what might be my favourite sound in nature: the soughing of wind in pines. Not spruces, not firs, not hemlocks produce the same sound. Only pines. On the way to Sheilds—no, that is not a misspelling, the lake is Sheilds, not Shields—there was plenty of p & q to value. In mid-August songbirds have mostly done their procreative duty and fallen silent: the woods are no longer alive with their urgent song, but we did hear a vocalizing pygmy owl and counted ourselves lucky.
Our friends treated us to a 'lifer': a new-to-us, rough, untraveled route across a height of land to our target lake. Sheilds is sufficiently removed from any madding crowd that we had a reasonable prospect of having it to ourselves. And indeed we did. Sheilds was another 'lifer: a lovely good-sized lake festooned here and there with pink water lilies. Apart from a calling raven here, a sapsucker there, we were alone.
I am someone who tends to feel that getting dressed to go for a swim is just about as logical as doing so to take a bath or have a shower. If I have to swim with a cast of strangers, in a bathing suit, I typically conclude it is not worth the trouble. At Sheilds there were no strangers, no need for bathing suits. Like-minded friends are one of life's true treasures: all together we went for a lovely swim in the altogether. It was sublime.
After relaxing swim and restorative lunch it might have been a downer to tear ourselves away from Sheilds but there was consolation: another lake on the way back, another swim for those needing a second cooldown.
None of us were in any hurry to get the day over with so by the time we'd tramped 14 km, climbed 430 metres or thereabouts, subjected our feet to 31,107 steps, nine hours had somehow slipped past. By then I was ready to call it a day. Wrinkles and sags notwithstanding I'm grateful I can still do such a thing.
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