MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Winter Spring 2019

WINTER/SPRING 2019 MLCM 49 words :: Arno Kopecky W e’re time travelers, all of us, born into these frail and fabulous time machines we call our bodies. What paradoxical vessels: they slow as they age, even as they accelerate from past to future, without ever leaving the present. Of all the distractions, two of my favourites have always been reading and writing. Some of the best time travel literature, I’ve learned, is printed not in books or magazines but in the earth itself. A prolonged affair I once had with winter mountains taught me to read the stories that bygone storms jotted down in the snowpack; after deciphering the promises and warnings encoded in layers of hoar frost or wind slab or rain crust, I’d hike on up and write my own little love note on a mountain face. There was vanity galore in that pleasure, the conceit of poetry in motion, but humility too—the fact that my snowboard’s signature would be erased by the next weather system heightened the joy of seeing it there for a moment. These days, my rust-buckety time machine doesn’t fare so well in the hills. It flies better in water, so I take it to the ocean’s edge whenever I’m able, to read the verses distant winds blow in. You can tell a lot about a weeks-old storm from the shape and spacing of a wave set; when the prose is inviting enough, I’ll add my own brief in the least permanent marker imaginable: the thin cut of a surfboard, so lightly scribbled it’s gone before I can look back. I appreciate these tracks’ vanishing nature more with every loop around the sun. It lends meaning to what might otherwise be a frivolous pursuit and marks an escape from the inescapable: the environmental footprint our time machines leave behind as they march through this wondrous, horrifying modern age. It may be true that no single one of our time machines leaves much of a mark, but collectively, there’s no debate. We seven billion humans are a hurtling meteor, and those of us lucky enough to spend regular time in nature have a direct view to this grand and terrifying tale. It’s a horror story our species is carving indelibly into the sky—I’m talking, of course, about climate change. REUBEN KRABBE