After a record-breaking rainfall, I learned that foundations will only hold for so long.Kevin Speidell
In honour of Facts & Arguments' 25th anniversary, we present this week the five winning essays from close to 400 submitted for our silver-jubilee contest, Moment of Truth. This is the fourth.
Read Monday's essay here, Tuesday's essay here and Wednesday's essay here.
When I was 26, a friend told me a theory about life, and it was this: There is something that happens in your late 20s; your world is thrown into chaos; you make choices you have never had to make before; you are directly in the path of a storm. And somehow, you are spat out when you turn 30 – stronger, calmer and sure of yourself for having gone through it.
Everyone's storm is different, she said: Some burn out at work, some leave their early marriages, others fly halfway across the world and risk it all. But no matter what, lives change and start again. "Believe me, it's inevitable," she assured me.
But the more I asked people about it, the more I began to believe the storm wasn't an event that sought anyone out – it was mental, I decided, an internal battle between past, present and future, simply the moment in everyone's life when we slow down and ask ourselves two critical questions: "How the hell did I get here?" and "What am I going to do now?"
Panic set in. I bought a journal, took a week off work and hunkered down. Self-reflection, here I come.
And then a landslide left me homeless.
It began with record-breaking rainfall, as some storms do. That phrase, "record-breaking rainfall," was one I knew all too well. Big rains, tiny rains, misty rains, rain with fog, fog with rain: I am a child of rain. Growing up on Vancouver Island means owning umbrellas that match your shoes, wrinkled toes when you step out of boots and giving up in the hair wars against humidity.
So, when the weather reporter declared yet another day of rain, I changed the channel and asked my partner Mark if he'd noticed anything different from the last time we'd broken a record. He laughed down the hallway on his way to bed.
It had been five days of record-breaking rainfall, but I wasn't fazed by the water slapping the muddied grass that circled my little cedar home on a Qualicum Beach bluff. As I sat in my overstuffed chair looking out onto the dark Pacific Ocean spread in front of me, I took a deep breath: I was home.
For a moment, I considered the tiny, one-bedroom university apartment that had seen bitter, too-cramped battles between Mark and me, then the two-bedroom apartment to which we'd upgraded – the black mould circling the windowsills, the sounds of us sneezing ourselves to sleep.
The cedar house on the bluff had taken us in on a moment's notice as we escaped city life. With its floor-to-ceiling views, our landscape each day was a study in greens – grass, trees, mountains, brush – and, at night, a period piece of inky blues. The rent was perfect. We were embarrassed to say it out loud, afraid to jinx our luck. "Affordable," we muttered to those who asked. "Too good to be true," we said to each other as we pulled the covers over our heads at night.
It was just past midnight when I was shaken by the sound of thunder in the ground, the slope-side cedars being torn, root by root, from the earth –
Crack, craack, craaaack –
I got out of my chair and ran.
Crrrack, crrrrrack, crrrrrrack –
Directly to the door –
Crackkk, crackkkk –
And braced myself for the impact –
CR –
Of living or dying.
– ASH.
If you had to leave your home this moment, what would you take? Five minutes, get what you can.
Me: three Banana Republic dresses I had never worn; a pair of boots; every cosmetic within reach; my passport and laptop. (If I had nothing, I must appear as though I had everything.)
Mark: the clothes on his back, his wallet, an orange.
We fled to the car and streamed down the flooded highway toward my parents' home in Port Alberni, my birthplace.
A low-income mill town in the middle of Vancouver Island, Port Alberni is located in a valley enclosed by the leering, snow-capped Mount Arrowsmith and the old-growth forest of the Beaufort mountains. An astounding sight in summer, it's the heart of darkness and fog in winter.
The confines of the valley seeped into my mind as I grew up, constantly chiding me for wanting to rise above: Don't bother, they whispered, you won't get very far.
For people like me, who had found their way out, there was nothing more terrifying than the potential of return. I wondered if we'd have been better off staying home, riding the waves of the sliding bluff.
But if not Port Alberni, where? I did not cry. I did not pray. I had only one thought: Even Eve had to leave her Eden. As it turns out, foundations will only hold for so long.
Jaclynn Gereluk lives in Parksville, B.C.