It's Not In My Head

 I've told my medical history so many times this year I could recite it in my sleep. ENT. Dermatologist. Gynecologist. Oncologist. Ophthalmologist. Genetics. Each one listens and takes a few notes, looks at the one piece of me that belongs to their specialty... and sends me on to the next one.

And somewhere between waiting rooms, that little voice whispers: Maybe it's you. Maybe you're a hypochondriac.

I know that voice. I've known it since I was 5 years old.

Growing pains

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know this part of the story. When I was a little girl, my mom took me to the doctor almost every week. I couldn't eat, my stomach hurt all the time, and I was wetting the bed. The doctor said it was growing pains. Then she said I had a school phobia and needed more attention at home. I loved school.

She never once felt my stomach.

By the time a different doctor took one look at my swollen belly and sent us to emergency, it had a name. Ovarian cancer, at ten. (I wrote the whole story in My Story back in 2013, if you want to go back.)

I learned two things that year. That I was tougher than anyone expected. And that when something is wrong with my body, I might have to be the one who insists on it.

"Probably appendicitis"

Fast forward to 2022. I was living with friends in New Zealand, helping out as a live-in nanny when the second COVID wave hit. I was starting over after a pretty traumatic breakup. One night I got up from the couch, nearly passed out, and came back with pain right over my appendix. My friend, who's a pharmacist, and I sat there analyzing my symptoms like the two health nerds we are. It was after 10pm and I didn't want to waste anyone's time and I certainly did not want to sit in the ER all night so I went to bed.

The next day I called the symptoms hotline and after a 45 min conversation, the nurse talked me into going to the after-hours clinic "just to be safe." They sent me to emergency. Eight hours in triage, scan after scan. I remember thinking how thorough they were being.

Then a young doctor asked if I had any family in New Zealand. I said no. He asked if there was anyone I might want to call. I said no, not really. I had no idea what he was getting at.

He took me into a private room (honestly, it was a broom closet) and told me yes, I had appendicitis. But they'd also found a large mass on my right kidney, and they were sure it was cancer.

I was in shock. I didn't know what to do or who to call. So I called my ex-boyfriend. We'd broken up not long before, after two years together. I thought he was my forever person, but there just wasn't room in his life for me as he'd just gone through a horrible divorce and was dealing with a narcissistic ex-wife and three pretty entitled teenaged daughters. He asked what I expected him to do. I dunno... jump in your truck and come give me a hug? I hung up feeling really stupid for calling.

"Nothing to worry about"

The next year was one of the worst of my life. They took my kidney and suddenly I had all of the symptoms of kidney failure.  Ironically, all the years that I had a tumor in my kidney, my kidney function was perfect. That's why it was undiagnosed for about 10 years (based on the size of it). 

I was living with friends and felt like a HUGE burden. I was still helping out with their kids but I felt useless. I was in bed recovering most of the time. I hadn't worked since COVID started in 2020, when I'd moved cities for that relationship and given up my massage clientele. Now I couldn't work at all. The anxiety came, then the panic attacks, the insomnia, the depression. I cried every day. It was the dark night of my soul.

The specialist told me the tumor was encapsulated, he got it all, and I was "cured." No reason to worry. Then my second routine scan showed small nodules in my lungs that hadn't been there before. He said they were completely nothing to worry about. He never referred me to an oncologist. He said it was unnecessary.

With my history, I couldn't let it go. I reached out to doctors in Canada who knew me, and they told me to come home for a second opinion. After more scans and tests, I had my answer: Stage 4 renal cell carcinoma.

I flew back to New Zealand with the results. My specialist still didn't believe it.  I felt gaslit and I started getting really angry at the health system in New Zealand.  Who could I trust?

I learned that the only treatment option for kidney cancer was immunotherapy and targeted therapy.  It was a fairly new form of treatment, only available to me in New Zealand if I had private health insurance, which I did not.

My anxiety got worse. I made the hardest decision of my life. Everything I owned had been sitting in a 20-foot shipping container since COVID, and I sold all of it. Everything I loved, my life was in New Zealand. My friends, my support network, twenty years. I had nothing in Canada to come back to, but I had access to treatment here so Blue and I got on a plane. My family didn't offer the support or love I desperately needed. I have 5 siblings but none of them had room for me or Blue.

Looking well

I don't know what I expected but the first year back I was on "active surveillance," which means they watch how fast the cancer is spreading before they treat it. That was THE WORST. I was in limbo. I wasn't on active treatment, so I didn't qualify for most cancer support. I couldn't work because I was too sick, fighting a fatigue that flattened me. But I didn't look sick. People had a hard time believing I had Stage 4 cancer. I felt like I had to convince everyone I was sick, and I'm pretty sure my family thought I was faking.  I was confused.  The Oncologist said I needed to get back to Canada to start treatment, so why on earth did they rush me?  I still had a life in New Zealand.  Did they not understand how hard it would be to come back to NOTHING?

I spent that year moving between friends' places, feeling like a burden at every one. Then suddenly and out of the blue (oh the irony), Blue needed TPLO surgery on his knees. He couldn't walk up or down stairs so I moved in with my elderly mom, into her apartment. I slept on a pull-out cot in her cramped and cluttered living room while she watched TV, banged around the kitchen and smoked until 3am. I stayed there for 18 months.

My depression got worse. I was suicidal. I remember lying on that cot asking myself how my life went from idyllic to this.  This is what falling from grace feels like.

What got me through was giving myself something to DO. I couldn't work, so I enrolled in school. I decided to publish my children's book, Fluffy the Extraordinary Butterfly, and I paid for all of it on credit, because with no income, credit is what I now live on. I didn't want to die without finishing something. I got my Graphic Design diploma from Toronto Film School (with distinction, I might add) and now I'm halfway through my Creative Arts degree at Yorkville University.

Here we go again

I started treatment last year, immunotherapy every six weeks plus a daily targeted drug. Then the brain fog got bad, my memory started slipping, and I was seeing double. It took a lot of asking before I got a brain MRI. It showed two old "lacunar" strokes, small strokes in the tiny blood vessels deep in the brain. One is in my brainstem, in a part that helps control eye movement. (Double vision, anyone?) It also showed some tiny bleeds and the kind of wear on the small blood vessels that usually shows up in people much older than me. I was told it was all normal. I'm still waiting for someone to explain why two strokes before sixty is normal.

My oncologist suggested I stop the Lenvatinib (the daily pill) and put me on a month of Prednisone to "cool down my system." I stayed off it for over five months and started feeling pretty good. But other symptoms kept showing up, and every time I mentioned one, I was told it was normal and had nothing to do with my treatment. So I stopped mentioning them. Until recently.

And now there's the new stuff. Nosebleeds that wouldn't stop and a crusty nose, which earned me two ENTs, a biopsy, a cauterization, and two prescriptions for Vaseline (I learned that Castor Oil is much better). A few months later I had a hole in my septum the size of a dime. Purplish blisters on my skin that started small and spread to my elbow and knee. A lump growing under the skin on the bridge of my nose. Another one in the corner of my eye that grew back almost as soon as it was removed.

Nobody can tell me what any of it is yet.

I've done what I always do: I've read and researched everything. One thing I know for sure: you have to be your own advocate. Sometimes you just have to take matters into your own hands. At the risk of sounding like a true hypochondriac (I am definitely NOT), my "self diagnosis" list has narrowed down to a few possibilities. Granulomatosis with polyangiitis (an autoimmune condition that inflames small blood vessels and can eat away at the nose). Sarcoidosis (clusters of inflammation called granulomas that can show up in the skin, lungs and nose). Squamous cell carcinoma. Or atrophic rhinitis, which could explain the nose but not the rest. I'm not a doctor and I could be wrong about all of them. But I need someone to look at all the possible things it could be and HELP me.

Why I'm writing this

Because I know I'm not the only one. If you've been passed from specialist to specialist, if you've been told it's normal or it's stress or it's nothing, if you've started to wonder whether you're imagining it... you're not crazy for asking.

Hypochondriacs imagine illness. It wasn't all in my head before... Ovarian Cancer, Strokes, Kidney Cancer, and what the heck else have they missed? 

So I'll keep climbing this one. One mountain at a time.

If you're in a dark place right now, please reach out. In Canada you can call or text 9-8-8, any time. I'm so glad I'm still here.

~ Tracy

Let me re-introduce myself...

Hello Again (and Hello for the First Time)

I started this blog in 2006, not long after I moved to New Zealand. Somewhere along the way it grew. More than 214,000 views later, I owe a lot of you a hello. And if you're new here, welcome. Pull up a chair.

So why did I go quiet? Ironically, because of a writers' group. I met a fellow writer who convinced me to stop giving my writing away for free online and save it for a book. They even suggested I delete this blog. (I wrote about it in Why I Stopped Writing back in 2017.) Instead of writing the book, I stopped writing altogether. Lesson learned: for me, writing for you IS how I write.

So, who am I now?

I'm a Métis storyteller with two homelands, Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand. I grew up in Northern Ontario, lived in New Zealand for twenty years, and ran a massage therapy and wellness business for thirty. I've been a yoga teacher, a fundraiser, a mountain climber (Kilimanjaro, 2013!) and the founder of Pendo Project, which helps get kids in Uganda into school with lunch in their bellies.

I'm also a cancer survivor, three times over. Ovarian cancer at ten, again at thirty-two, and in 2022, Stage 4 kidney cancer. That last one brought me home to Canada for treatment, with my New Zealand Huntaway service dog, Blue, by my side.

Since then I've been busy reinventing myself again. I published my first children's book, Fluffy the Extraordinary Butterfly. I earned my Graphic Design diploma from the Toronto Film School, and I'm halfway through a Creative Arts degree at Yorkville University. And I'm finally writing my novel: my memoir, One Mountain At A Time. Yes, same name as this blog. That's not a coincidence.

What you'll find here

Honest stories. About living with cancer and fighting to be heard by the medical system. About creativity, healing, and starting over in your fifties. About New Zealand, Northern Ontario and everywhere in between. And the occasional story about Blue, because he is the love of my life.  Dogs can be your soulmate you know.

I've never been good at filtering, and I'm not going to start now.

If you've been here since the beginning, thank you for still being here. If you're new, I'd love to know who you are. Leave me a comment, and you can find more about me and my books and projects at tracypepper.com.

Not everyone starts a mountaineer. Some become one.

~ Tracy

Nature Journal - Beauty, Presence, and the Healing Power of the Natural World

 Three Walks. Three Continents. 

One Body Learning to Listen.

~ ~ ~

I grew up in Northern Ontario in the mid 1970's to the early 1990's, a child of the outdoors pre-technology. I'd leave the house in the morning and didn't come home until night.  Sometimes, I'd sleep over at friends and I didn't tell my mom where I was.  She knew I'd be home eventually.  Every summer I'd set up my tent in the farthest corner of my huge backyard, so I couldn't see the house. I'd live in that tent for 4 months every year, only going inside to sneak food or to have the occasional bath... I swam so much in the fresh lakes I was clean enough. Times were different then and parenting was not like it is now. My earliest memories are of being outside riding my bike through every street and trail I could find, calling on friends, going swimming alone or finding new friends to spend the day with. Then later on in my teens, when the bike became uncool, I walked everywhere, from my house to my friends, the lakes or the little strip mall in town, taking short cuts through the bush trails, moving in my small world as a matter of necessity rather than intention. I'd walk for miles every day. I did not yet know that walking could be its own destination and I did not yet understand that being in nature, truly being in it and not just passing through, was something one could choose deliberately, as an act of self-renewal.

That understanding came later, in my forties, through an invitation that changed the direction of my life. I was asked to climb Mount Kilimanjaro to raise awareness of ovarian cancer, a disease I have survived since the age of ten. I said yes before I fully understood what I had agreed to. What followed was months of training, a transformation of my body, and the discovery of a relationship with challenging, multiday wilderness hiking up steep New Zealand hills and mountains that I did not know I was capable of. Standing at the summit of Africa's highest peak, I was reminded that I really could do anything I put my mind to.

That conviction carried me to the famous Milford Track, one of New Zealand's Great Walks, undertaken with my friend Chad in the stunning Fjordland of the South Island. It was a hike of quiet awe with brilliant blue skies, glacier-carved peaks, waterfalls cascading into pools of crystalline water, and the extraordinary birds of Fiordland calling through the ancient forest. I did not know at the time that I was carrying kidney cancer inside me. My energy was not what it had been. But the beauty of that place held me up.

Then came diagnosis, and a reluctant but necessary move back to Canada for cancer treatment that wasn't available for me in New Zealand. My service dog, Blue and I moved in with my elderly mother, saying good-bye to a life we absolutely loved and thrived in. Then came a slower, quieter life, walking the Klaus Wehrenberg Trail in Sheppard's Bush Conservation Area just five minutes from my mom's apartment in Aurora, Ontario. With Blue, a now ten-year-old New Zealand Huntaway with brand new knees (he had deteriorating ligament disease in both knees diagnosed shortly after we arrived in Canada), moving just ahead of me through the undergrowth, his nose to the ground and his tail sweeping the air we just walk and breathe, in this moment.

These three walks: Kilimanjaro, the Milford Track, and the Klaus Wehrenberg Trail which are the subject of the journal entries that follow. They span years, continents, and radically different moments in my life. But they share something essential; each one asked me to be present, to use my senses, to surrender to what was there rather than what I feared or wished for. In this, they align with what Garcia and Miralles (2020) describe as shinrin-yoku, the Japanese practice of forest bathing which is an immersive, sensory engagement with the natural environment that research has shown to reduce stress hormones, lower blood pressure, and restore psychological equilibrium. Shinrin-yoku does not require a summit or a trail rating. It requires only attention.

Denis Dutton (2009), in his chapter "Landscape and Longing," argues that the human response to natural beauty is not culturally learned but evolutionarily embedded, that we carry an ancient, aesthetic preference for landscapes that promised our ancestors safety and sustenance: open ground with scattered trees, proximity to water, elevated vantage points. Reading his argument, I recognized every trail I have ever loved. And Gaard (2018) pushes this further, arguing for an ecofeminist aesthetic of reconnection and the idea that beauty in nature is not something we observe from a distance but something we belong to, and that healing comes in part from remembering that belonging.

These journals are written from inside that belonging. They are records of what I heard, smelled, felt, and saw. They are records of a body in motion and a body at rest. Perhaps most preciously, they are records of what nature has given me, again and again, even when I had very little left to offer back.

~ ~ ~

Journal Entry One

The Rongai Route, Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania — Six Days

I am standing at the base of the highest freestanding mountain on Earth, and I am terrified. Not the clean, clarifying fear that sharpens you but the low-frequency dread of someone who has just realized the full scale of what she has agreed to. I trained for months. I ran, I hiked, I carried weight in a backpack up a small mountain (in comparison). My body is fit but the feeling of altitude is an unknown I cannot prepare for in a New Zealand suburb, and that unknowing sits in my chest like a stone.

I remind myself why I am here, I had Ovarian cancer at age ten and nearly four decades of survivorship. I got an invitation to climb in solidarity with other women who have faced the same disease and others who knew women who didn't survive it.  I came to Africa alone to meet this group who all traveled together from Canada. There is meaning in this and I feel it, even as the mountain disappears into cloud above me and the air already feels slightly thin. I do not put pressure on myself to reach the summit. I tell myself this firmly. I am here to walk as far as I can walk, because not everyone makes it and this is a reality I understand.

We begin in the African rainforest, and the beauty of it catches me off guard. The canopy is dense, layered in shades of green so saturated they seem artificial. The smell is extraordinary, rich, loamy, alive with decomposition and growth in equal measure. Garcia and Miralles (2020) describe the forest atmosphere as literally medicinal, charged with phytoncides which are the organic compounds released by trees that strengthen the human immune system when inhaled. Moving through that low forest on the Rongai Route's first day, I breathe as deeply as I can knowing that soon I may not be able to.

Slowly, over 6 days, the world changes. The rainforest gives way to moorland, heather and giant groundsels which are strange evolutionary forms that look like something from another planet. Then the alpine desert which is a spare, lunar landscape of volcanic rock and thin air where almost nothing grows. The beauty here is starker. It is the beauty Luccarelli (2018) identifies in the picturesque tradition, rugged, asymmetrical and overwhelming in scale. The kind of landscape that reminds you that nature was never designed for human comfort.

We walk slowly, pole, pole which means "slowly, slowly" in Swahili.  This becomes both the instruction and the philosophy of our high-altitude trekking. I fall naturally to the back of the group, keeping pace with another cancer survivor, a woman in her sixties whose calm, quiet steadiness I find deeply reassuring. There is no reason to hurry. We will all arrive at camp at the same time as everyone else. I use the slowness to look: at the rock formations, at the sky, at the way the light changes across the mountain's vast flanks. I take photographs. Probably most importantly, I breathe.

As we reach Kibo Camp, a blizzard descends out of nowhere. It's pandemonium and the guides are yelling at each other in Swahili as they frantically set up camp, pounding tent pegs with rocks using their frozen bare hands. So many of them don't have adequate clothing or footwear.  Very few have gloves.  I want to help but I am disoriented and useless from the altitude and cold.  Our tents are wet, everything is muddy. We need to sleep after lunch because the summit begins at 11:30 pm. I lie in a damp sleeping bag and feel the wind shake the tent and think: I don't have to do this. But I sleep, and at 9:00 pm I pull on every layer I have brought with great difficulty because my hands don't work, and step out into the minus twenty-two degree dark night to find the food tent where everyone is gathered for a hearty meal of soup and freshly made bread.  How they fed us so well, I still can't figure out. It's snowing, fat, fluffy snowflakes falling through the beam of my headtorch, landing on my eyelashes.  I can only see what the headtorch illuminates just a few feet in front of me and what I see is magical.

I struggle to find adequate words to describe the summit climb. I am grateful, in a way I could never have anticipated, that it is pitch black. You cannot see how far you have to go. You cannot see how far you might fall. You can see only the boots of the person directly ahead of you, shuffling upward through the dark.

This narrow field of vision becomes a kind of mercy. Dutton (2009) writes that our aesthetic responses to landscape are partly about what we can survey and control - the elevated viewpoint, the long sightline that signals safety. In the dark of Kilimanjaro's summit night, all of that is taken away. What remains is something more primal: the simple imperative of the next step. When people stop, you are met with both frustration and gratitude in one, because it breaks the rhythm, but it's also nice to catch your breath and stop, albeit briefly.

The altitude does something strange to the mind. There are moments when I simply stop caring whether I continue or not. Apathy settles over me like fog, a physiological flattening of the will that altitude induces. It is, in retrospect, one of the most frightening things I have ever experienced: to feel indifferent to one's own (and other's) survival. My porter, a jovial Tanzanian man whose warmth and energy seem impervious to altitude, cold, and darkness, keeps me moving. He talks to me. He encourages me. He makes me laugh when laughing seems impossible.

As the sun begins to rise, I know we must be close to the top.  The guide points to some enormous boulders that we have to climb over.  Once again I want to stop to argue with myself over why I've signed up for this, but there is no place to sit. Every movement is deliberate and slow because the altitude makes the body clumsy and my fingers are numb from cold. Altitude also makes you short tempered.  This is how the guides check to see if you are ok.  If your personality changes, they escort you down the mountain for acclimatization as walking down is the fastest and safest cure.  They will give you oxygen or if necessary, a visit to the hyperbaric chamber. When I am certain I cannot go further or climb one more damn rock, I see open blue sky and think that we reached the summit, only to realize that there is still another two hours across the ridge to the summit. I start crying. I am convinced I can't do it so I sit down. My porter sits with me until I get too cold and have no choice but to keep moving.  Clearly my personality hasn't changed enough to warrant concern.

The snow stopped a while ago and we have the most stunning clear sky for the summit. I can hardly speak. My words are slurred with cold, exhaustion and altitude. But I am standing at 5,895 metres above sea level, and say to myself, I DID IT!  I found an energy reserve I had no idea I had.  I am in a daze.  I want to sit down to rest but the air is so thin, I need to move down the mountain to breathe.  

As I walk away from my token photo at the summit sign, I see two cheerful familiar faces walking over.  They are a couple I met on the bus in Kenya traveling around Africa a few days earlier, who happened to also be from the same small town in New Zealand as I was.  You realize how small this world is when you travel.  I told them that I was in Africa to climb Mount Kilimanjaro and they looked at each other and said, "let's do that."  I was thinking, "YEAH RIGHT.  I trained for months."  Yet here they were.  I was gobsmacked.  Maybe they were a mirage?  Maybe my mind was playing tricks on me.  Actually, nope.  I have a photo with them somewhere... I'll try to find it.  And you know what?  I never saw them again, even though we all lived in that same small town for years afterwards. I never got their names either.  So if they ever read my blog, please please get in touch.  I mean, what are the odds of bumping into them up there on the same day and at the same time?  I booked this climb months ago and they didn't know what day or even which route I was climbing.  It felt very serendipitous but I was too overcome by altitude to fully appreciate it.

Now for the descent... nobody talks about the descent... and I understand why. The scree is treacherous, shifting underfoot like loose gravel on a steep roof. I am so afraid of slipping and breaking my neck that fear temporarily replaces exhaustion. It's a slow, painful (and scary) climb down to Kibo Camp where I can rest my weary legs and feet before continuing the descent down to the last camp and the final night on Kilimanjaro. And in the hours and days that follow, something settles in me that has never quite left: the knowledge that I can endure more than I believe I can. That my body, pushed past every limit it thought it had, sometimes finds something on the other side of that limit. Not triumph, exactly. Something quieter. Gratitude. Astonishment. A deep, cellular sense of being alive, once again reminding myself that I am capable of so much more than I give myself credit for.  Why do I continually doubt myself?  It's an annoying but endearing quality I must live with.  

What was most beautiful?  The snow during the summit climb, falling through my headtorch. The laughter of my porter at four in the morning on a freezing mountain. The moment the sky began to lighten and Africa spread out below us, vast and silent and gold.  And that couple from Mount Maunganui approaching me with big smiles, reminding me that I am never far from home.

 

~ ~ ~

Journal Entry Two

The Milford Track, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand — Five Days

I am nervous, and the nervousness feels unfamiliar after everything I faced on Kilimanjaro. But this is a different kind of fear, it's quieter and more personal. I have had very little time to train so I feel out of shape even though I practice yoga daily. My energy has been low in ways I cannot fully explain, I have this fatigue that doesn't lift the way it used to. My friend Chad has asked if I'd like to take his wife's place as she was not up to doing it; these Great Walks are booked more than a year in advance. I am grateful beyond measure, and also quietly afraid that I will slow him down, that I will not have what this trail asks of me.

He is easy-going about it. He always has been. I tell myself: just walk and enjoy the scenery... and pray for good weather.  The Milford Track is notorious for rain, often non-stop. And I mustn't forget to just breathe.

I prefer, when I hike, to walk in silence. Something in me settles when I am alone with the sound of a trail, the crunch of my footfall, the rustle of wind through canopy and the distant percussion of water. On the Milford Track, I often fall a little behind Chad, not because I am struggling, though sometimes I am, but because I want to stop, look and mostly listen. I notice the different varieties of mushrooms clustered at the base of a silver beech tree and the intricate geometry of a silver fern. I take in the heavenly way the light breaks through the canopy in long, slanted shafts that make the forest floor look cathedral-lit. I listen to the silence, between bird song.

The birds are extraordinary. The Tui fills the forest with a sound that is part bell, part breath, part something entirely its own, kind of like a liquid, complex call that seems almost too musical to be real. The Kea, the alpine parrot, wheels overhead with a raucous intelligence that is almost comic; Chad stops to watch them, and I hear him laugh from somewhere up the trail. The Kaka moves through the canopy in flashes of rust and olive. And then there is the the small, bold Fantail or Piwakawaka in Maori, who appears and dances around you as you walk, hovering and darting within arm's reach, as if the hike is a game it invented for your joint amusement. The Weka, flightless and determined, appears whenever food comes out of a pack, the rustling of plastic calls to them like Pavlov's dog; it regards you with the frank, calculating gaze of something that has never needed to develop a fear of humans.

Garcia and Miralles (2020) write that shinrin-yoku is not a passive experience but an active engagement of all the senses; sight, sound, smell, touch, even taste of the air. The Milford Track offers all of these simultaneously. The air itself is remarkable: cool and clean and carrying the faint mineral scent of glacier and stone. It is not hot. It is not cold. It is exactly what air should be. Gaard (2018) argues that this kind of sensory immersion in nature restores something in us that modern life systematically depletes — a felt sense of belonging to the world, not merely moving through it.

The sand flies are a particular challenge. They are relentless and vicious, a reminder that Fiordland's beauty comes without modification for human comfort. We cannot stop for long in any one place without being swarmed. But we find ways: we pull off our boots at the edge of glacial streams and submerge our feet in water so cold it makes you gasp, and the cold clears everything. The clarity of that water is unlike anything I have seen. It is not transparent, it is invisible. The streambed is visible from a metre of depth as if through glass, every pebble precise.  The fish appear to be gliding along the river bed as though they are a species from another planet.

What stands out most is colour. Colour that seems calibrated beyond what I thought possible in nature. The sky is a blue so saturated it seems to press down on the mountains. The beeches are a green so deep and particular it almost has weight. And the water, stream and lake and waterfall alike, is a luminous, crystalline blue that seems to generate its own light. Luccarelli (2018) traces the long history of the picturesque, the aesthetic tradition that taught Western eyes to read wild, dramatic landscapes as beautiful rather than threatening. Standing at the top of Mackinnon Pass, looking down into the valley below, I understand that tradition completely. This is the landscape that painting taught us to love, and then revealed was real.

The descent, always the descent, is where the trail gives its greatest gifts and extracts its greatest cost. The knees and feet take everything. Why doesn't anybody talk about this part? Between the brutality of the downhill kilometres are the waterfalls, hundreds of them including Sutherland Falls, one of the highest in the world, visible from the valley as a thin white line dropped from an impossible height. Closer up, the falls are a roar and a mist and a cold spray that reaches twenty metres into the surrounding air. I stand as near as I dare and feel the sound in my sternum.

In the evenings at the huts, Chad and I eat our freeze-dried meals and talk. I am too tired to do more than sit and be grateful for his company and his quiet competence as he handles the cooking and the kit without fuss and asks nothing of me except to show up the next morning. This is a particular kind of friendship, the kind that holds space without filling it.  Everyone needs to experience this kind of kindness, at least once in their life.  I feel pretty lucky to have a friend like him on speed dial.

I did not know, on the Milford Track, that I was already sick, carrying a 7cm tumor inside my right kidney. I'd been dealing with uncontrollable blood pressure for many years and faint blood in my urine that the doctors dismissed. My body was telling me something I had not yet learned to hear. But what I remember is not the fatigue. What I remember is the colour of the water, and the Fantail dancing at my shoulder, and the air, clean and cold and still, pouring into me like something I had been missing for years.

 

~ ~ ~

Journal Entry Three

The Klaus Wehrenberg Trail, Sheppard's Bush Conservation Area, Aurora, Ontario — Late May

It is late May in Aurora, and the world has gone green almost overnight. It was the longest winter I can remember but surprisingly, Blue and I really loved it. I have been on cancer treatment for almost a year, a combination of Immunotherapy and Targeted Therapy that they call chemo but it's nothing like the chemo I had when I was ten. My energy is rationed now, a finite daily reserve that I spend carefully, choosing what matters. I've been experiencing side effects from the treatment, brain and nerve swelling, brain fog and issues with memory, rashes, body numbness, swelling, migraines and fatigue that makes me want to just sleep until this is over. What matters most days is this: Blue's leash coming off its hook, the click of the clasp, the way he turns to look at me at the door as if checking that I am really coming. I am always really coming. The search for my keys and one last quick trip to the loo.

Before I was diagnosed with kidney cancer, I walked to get somewhere. Then I walked because I loved the grand, demanding trails that tested me. Now I walk because walking is what I can do, and because Blue needs it, and because the Klaus Wehrenberg Trail is five minutes from my front door and somehow, impossibly, given everything, it is enough.

Blue is a New Zealand Huntaway, ten years old, black and tan and built for moving through country. He walks without his leash wherever I can, walking ahead by a few metres before stopping to wait. He always stops to wait. He does not run ahead and disappear; he moves to a good vantage point, turns back to check my position, and holds there until I catch up. I have never trained him to do this. It is simply how he is.  The leash laws were not as strict in New Zealand as they are here in Canada.  In fact, lately, he trails behind and I wait for him!  His new knees make a big difference in the way he walks.  He's more sure footed but he gets achy.

I let him set the pace, which means we stop frequently. He sniffs with an intensity that suggests each scent is a complete narrative, telling him the story of who passed here last night, what they ate, how long ago they stood in this particular spot. While he reads the trail this way, I look up. Garcia and Miralles (2020) describe this as one of the simplest and most powerful practices of shinrin-yoku: to slow down until the senses can actually receive what is there, rather than filtering it into background. Blue has been teaching me this for years without knowing it.

The trail in late May is in full surge. The canopy has closed over the path in the last two weeks, you can almost see it happening day by day. The undergrowth is thick with trillium going to seed and new fern unfurling, and the path is soft underfoot with leaf litter still damp from spring rain. The smell is layered: earth and wet bark and something faintly sweet from the hawthorn flowering in the gaps where light breaks through. DeFrantz (2005), writing about the aesthetics of African American dance, argues that beauty need not be universal to be potent and that it is most powerfully experienced within a specific, culturally and sensorially particular frame. My frame this morning is this trail, this dog, this body that is working harder than it looks to simply be here. The beauty I find in it is entirely mine.

We find a bench,  always the same bench, at the start of the trail, where you can call a loved one who is no longer on this earth, and I sit down to talk to my dad. Blue circles once and folds himself into the leaves beside me, his chin on his paws, his amber eyes scanning the treeline with the relaxed alertness of a dog who has nowhere else to be. We sit like this for ten or fifteen minutes, sometimes longer if we aren't disturbed by other walkers and their dogs.

The birds in late May are extraordinary: a red-winged blackbird making its territorial claim from a branch overhead, the see-sawing two-note call of a black-capped chickadee, the conversational chatter of a house wren somewhere in the undergrowth. A squirrel launches itself from one branch to another with an acrobatic confidence that briefly startles us both. Blue lifts his head, then puts it down again.

Dutton (2009) argues that human beings have an evolved, deep aesthetic preference for landscapes that offer what our ancestors needed: open ground with scattered trees, proximity to water, an elevated viewpoint. The Klaus Wehrenberg Trail offers a version of all of this — the stream below the path, the clearings where the light comes through and the gentle rise that gives you a long view through the beech and maple. 

I do not need Kilimanjaro to experience the aesthetic pull of landscape. It is here just minutes from my house, available every day.

We pass other dogs and their people on the way back. This is one of the quiet pleasures of the trail, the easy community of dog walkers, who are, as a group, more open and friendlier than almost anyone else you encounter in public space. The dogs greet each other with the frank enthusiasm of creatures who have not learned to be guarded (unless their owners are or they have met dogs who have not been trained). Blue wags. I wave. Sometimes we stop and talk about nothing in particular like the weather, the trail conditions or whose dog has discovered the stream this morning, and the smallness of it is exactly right.

Back at the car, I open the hatch and Blue puts his paws up on the bumper waiting for me to give him a boost. He immediately curls up in his bed as I get into the driver's seat. I sit for a moment before starting the engine. Gaard (2018) writes of the ecofeminist aesthetic as one of reconnection, the recognition that the boundary between self and nature is not fixed, that health and beauty are partly a matter of remembering our place within a larger living system. 

After Kilimanjaro I felt that as triumph, after the Milford Track, I felt it as awe. This morning, on this beautiful trail just five minutes from home, with my old dog snoring in the back seat, I feel it as something more ordinary and more sustaining: gratitude. Simple, daily, renewable gratitude.

What was most beautiful?  The way the light came through the canopy onto the wet path. The sound of the stream over stones. Blue folding himself into the leaves beside my bench and looking up at me, as if to confirm we are both still here and doing this together.

~ ~ ~

Three walks. Three continents. Three entirely different relationships between my body and the natural world.

On Kilimanjaro the beauty was elemental and extreme and found in snowfall at 5,895 metres, in the voice of a porter cutting through altitude-induced apathy, in the astonishing fact of survival. On the Milford Track, it was sensory and saturated with colour beyond what colour usually is, water of impossible clarity, birds that seemed to exist purely to make a tramper stop and listen. On the Klaus Wehrenberg Trail, it is quiet, local, and daily beauty of a familiar path made new each day by the light and the season and the company of a good dog who waits.

What connects them is presence. Each trail demanded, in its own register that I stop filtering the world through anxiety or ambition and simply receive what was there. This is the core practice of shinrin-yoku as Garcia and Miralles (2020) describe it as an immersive, sensory attention to the natural environment that restores us physiologically and psychologically. It is also what Gaard (2018) means by an ecofeminist aesthetic of reconnection: the healing recognition that we are not separate from the natural world, observing it from a safe remove, but embedded within it, subject to its beauty and its weather alike.

Dutton's (2009) evolutionary aesthetics helps explain why these landscapes move us so reliably and so deeply, why the long view from a mountain ridge, or the sound of water over stone, or the filtered light of a forest canopy produces an almost involuntary response of pleasure and meaning. These preferences are ancient. They are in the body before they are in the mind. And DeFrantz (2005) reminds us that beauty need not be universal to be powerful because it is most alive within a specific, embodied, particular frame of experience.

My frame has changed. The epic walks that once defined my relationship with the natural world are, for now, not available to me. Cancer treatment has redrawn the boundaries of what my body can do but the Klaus Wehrenberg Trail is only five minutes away, Blue is always waiting at the door and the red-winged blackbird is staking out his branch in the Canadian canopy. Beauty, it turns out, does not require a summit. It requires only attention, and a willingness to sit on a bench or a log or in the leaves and let the world be exactly what it is.

~ ~ ~

References

DeFrantz, T. F. (2005). African American dance: Philosophy, aesthetics, and "beauty." Topoi, 24, 93–102. http://web.mit.edu/bpt/readings/DeFrantzBeauty.pdf

Dutton, D. (2009). The art instinct: Beauty, pleasure, and human evolution. Bloomsbury Press.

Gaard, G. (2018). Toward an ecofeminist aesthetic of reconnection. In P. Quigley & S. Slovic (Eds.), Ecocritical aesthetics: Language, beauty and the environment (pp. 97–). Indiana University Press. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,sso&db=nlebk&AN=1739048&site=eds-live&custid=s7439054&ebv=EB&ppid=pp_97

Garcia, H., & Miralles, F. (2020). Forest bathing: The rejuvenating practice of shinrin yoku. Tuttle Publishing. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,sso&db=nlebk&AN=2371601&site=eds-live&custid=s7439054&ebv=EK&ppid=Page-__-1

Luccarelli, M. (2018). Renaissance aesthetics, picturesque beauty, the natural landscape: An essay examining the rise and fall of the impulse toward beauty. In P. Quigley & S. Slovic (Eds.), Ecocritical aesthetics: Language, beauty and the environment (pp. 77–). Indiana University Press. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,sso&db=nlebk&AN=1739048&site=eds-live&custid=s7439054&ebv=EB&ppid=pp_77