MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Winter / Spring 2018

WINTER/SPRING 2018 MLCM 69 Czechoslovakia, April 1984 Tania Don’t look down… We’ve come too far, sacrificed everything to get here. Everything depends on them , these foreign border officers. If they look down, we will go to jail. One glance from the comforts of their solid stone building to the river below and they will spot two sodden, desperate refugees flailing urgently upstream. One glance and we will have nothing. They will send us back with no opportunity ever again. Our lives, and the life of this tiny baby I’m trying to keep warm and alive inside me, hinge on luck and intuition… this moment decides everything that is to come. We can do this. My husband Hak and I struggle up a river canyon, our backs pressed against the wall. Under the gushing snowmelt of waist- deep water, my foot meets a slick river rock and despite Hak’s firm hand in mine, I go down. The icy, springtime snowmelt envelops me, but other Coast Mountains, February 2017 Tania A little over three decades after my escape from communist Czechoslovakia, I watch Martina snowplow through the white of the oncoming storm, down the remote Klattasine Glacier. She is stubborn, a little naïve, and optimistic… until she is not. But slowly, she is learning the power of luck and intuition, the power behind a single moment. Just a few hours ago, I watched her meltdown, fighting to lead us out of a maze of towering cerulean seracs and crevasses. The meltdowns are a frequent occurrence these days, but she always gets through it, always finds a solution and moves us on. Skagway seems impossibly far away, but not as far away as Canada felt from behind the iron curtain of Czechoslovakia’s suffocating constrains of communism and propaganda. Over the decades, I’ve learned to enjoy the journey, that with determination, can take us anywhere, let us do anything. I am here in the mountains to experience the entire process with Martina, and I love it. I love it, even though we are often cold and hungry, and faced with danger. I love the perfect, stellar snowflakes that land on my sleeve, I love the jagged ridgeline that extends east off the ice encrusted Klattasine summit. Distance means nothing, out here there is only this moment and the next. Life is a teetertotter of conflicting opposites – darkness and light, happiness and fear. I love watching my daughter learning these sublime lessons. For now, the wind has dried and frozen her tears. than the splash, I don’t make a single sound. Hak helps me up, I can see the strain and fear in his eyes. Now the only dry thing left on me is my handmade wool tuque. I take it off and hold it over my pregnant belly, trying to keep my unborn child warm as I start to shiver through the early stages of hypothermia. We are so close to freedom. Together Hak and I inch upstream as close as possible to the stone wall directly beneath the border guard station. Upstream is Switzerland, safety, freedom, opportunity, a new life. I take another step… This child will be born free.