What the Stones Remember by Patrick Lane

Author:Patrick Lane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala

I have lived alone much of my life, even when with other people, my wives, friends, and family. I’ve often disappeared into the backcountry just to be far from people. In the early 1970s after my first divorce I set up camp in the mountains northwest of Adams Lake having followed game trails to a meadow beside a nameless creek. For weeks I saw no one. I lived mostly off the land, shot squirrels, and willow and blue grouse, and cooked them on a spit over my fire. I left when I ran out of dry vegetables, salt, rice, and coffee. It took two days to walk out. When I saw the first house I stopped in the trees, afraid to pass by for fear someone would see me. A logging truck sat in front of the house, its twin stacks pouring out black diesel smoke. When it pulled away, I skirted the house and followed the truck back to the world.

I think most people think of solitude as loss, as loneliness, but my journeys into isolation were journeys into myself, always painful as if I were running away from someone or something. Yet I always chose to return, chastened by my need for companionship and love. The human world always called me back.

There was an old hermit who lived in a shack down Pottery Road near Vernon when I was a boy. I wandered by his place one afternoon. I wasn’t trespassing. I was just a kid following the tracks of a bobcat down a dry coulee. I gave no thought to the old man who lived in the shadow of the coulee. I was aware of nothing but a perfect paw-print beside a bit of desiccated sage or balsam root.

I was so intent upon the tracks of the bobcat I didn’t notice I had intruded upon the old man’s cluttered yard. He had nothing to fear from a stripling boy, yet when he saw me he raged from his clapboard shack and assailed me with threats and warnings to be off. I left as quickly as I could. I think now he lived alone in willful malice. It was as if he were punishing someone who he imagined had wronged him in the past and had chosen to live away from people out of spite. But it was not solitude he had found in that dry coulee, it was suffering.

When I was a young man working in the mountain valleys of central British Columbia I met a number of old men, solitaries who had chosen by will or by chance to live alone. I came across one on Poplar Flats up the North Thompson when I worked in the mills there. He was a man left over from before the First World War, a remittance man sent out by his family in the nineteenth century. He had gone back once to fight in the trenches and then returned with poor lungs to prospect for gold in mountains that held little or none.

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