Living the Dream

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-Deanna Kawatski

Year by year, Jay had learned more about hunting, about gathering and preserving food, and about living in equilibrium with the beautiful, but uncaring, land. He taught himself wood carving and became adept at sewing skins and weaving moose hide into snowshoes.

Five days after Jay's first visit, he was back with some homemade huckleberry jelly, rhubarb wine, and a tiny chair that he had carved. Thus began our friendship. When I saw the red canoe crossing Bob Quinn Lake, far below, I knew that I could expect Jay within a few hours. For the chance to see me, he would make a round trip of 19 miles-15 miles hiking, 4 miles paddling. The final trail up the mountain to the lookout was very rugged, a near-vertical rise of 2,500 feet.

At the end of the summer, I visited Jay's octagonal cabin on Desire Lake. Sun streamed through a bay window where tea roses grew. Wolf skins hung on homemade furniture. Books, carvings, and wooden toys lined the shelves. I enjoyed, in particular, the wooden owl whose wings rose up when a towel was hung on the hook at its base.

The following summer, I returned to the fire tower once again. To make a long and romantic story short, we were married that fall.

In November, I began my initiation into bush life. In some ways the transition was easy. Even when I lived in cities, I usually chose walking over riding buses, and was used to covering miles on foot. But now, hiking was a way of life; we are three miles by a boggy foot trail from the highway, and we also go on long rambles near home.

I think that the hardest part of the transition, apart from loneliness and not being able to flit off on a whim, was adjusting to the short winter days. In the past, it had been so easy to flick a switch, but here we had no electricity. And when the days finally stretched and warmed, and I could peel off my winter clothes, I was attacked by every size and shape of insect imaginable. When it comes to wilderness living, if anything can knock someone from an idealist to a realist in 10 minutes flat, it is the bugs.

In June 1980 our daughter Natalia was born in the cabin beside Desire Lake. The next spring we moved to the rich, alluvial land in the Ningunsaw River Valley. I had felt a real sense of peace at our home on Desire Lake, but we could never grow a decent garden in the acidic, weed-choked soil there.

Our new home sits in a clearing that we carved from the thick jungle on this beautiful 300-acre river flat. The Ningunsaw River, a tributary of the Iskut, flows east to west through the center of our valley, and the giant spruce, balsam, and cottonwoods there can make us feel as small as gnomes at times. In season, even the stinging net tles, cow parsnips, and ferns tower over our heads. On one side of the valley, a peak we simply call South Mountain rises to an altitude of 6,000 feet, and Rocky Mountain goats live on its high ridges.

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