Totally Awesome

Remember the eighties? They were awesome! Or maybe we just thought they were awesome, I mean we used that word a lot back then, totally, gag me. But when was the last time you stood in awe of something? I mean seriously? My online dictionary defines awe as 1)-an overwhelming feeling of wonder or admiration 2)- a feeling of fear and reverence, a feeling of amazement. Wow, one word two incredible definitions both of which apply at once. I love the English language! It rocks! I was awestruck recently and it grounded me. It was cathartic, almost an epiphany. It doesn't happen to us jaded modern humans often, but maybe it should.

I can remember a couple of the last times I was stricken with awe. The first was Wednesday May 13th at 5:30 pm. Precise enough for ya? The source of this phenomenon was the annual break up of the MacKenzie river or Deh Cho (Big River) in the local Slavey language. When you live beside a great force of nature like the MacKenzie you do so with some trepidation. You must always be cognisant of her. She has taken many lives over the years and only infrequently does she give back the dead. The body of a man from Ft Liard washed up in Tulita this spring. He died last year and over 530km away as the crow (or raven) flies! She is a huge living thing, like some great snake she wends her way from Great Slave lake to the Arctic ocean over a 1,000 miles away. Still all winter she sleeps lying under her white winter mantle her waters, her power, hidden from view. Out of sight but not really out of mind. Not in the mind of those who have seen what she can do anyways. Maybe I am too old a dog, maybe I have seen too much, lived so much, survived so much that I cannot sleep as soundly as I did in the ignorance of my youth. I have seen and survive; earthquake, flood, fire, explosions, and a hurricane. I have seen nature in full cry. We lull ourselves into a false sense of security, into an illusion of control.

For how can you control such a force of nature? How can you tame the wind? Or the sea? But unless you stand there and watch nature doing its' thing how are you to know? Well last May the 13th I did just that. I watched the Deh Cho shake off her winter mantle and surge headlong into spring. A week or so earlier my Assistant Cesar had asked "When will the river break? I can't wait to see it. Someone said it could go today. It sure is warm." "Well I doubt it will go today." I proffered. "The river has to rise first. It is the water that comes down the river that will make it break, not the sun or the rain falling on it. Not here anyways," "Really?" He protested. "It's been very warm." "It will need to be warm upstream in order for the river to break. The small streams melt the big brooks melt, the small rivers melt and all that water flows into the mother of all rivers." I said pointing at the river laying there white amid the long thawed banks of mud. "When she's ready she will rise and let you know. People upstream will be squawking hours if not days before it breaks." And so it came to pass that the river broke at twelve mile (Which is, oddly enough twelve miles upstream) and this brought us to the banks of the MacKenzie at 5:30 that Wednesday. The river creaked and cracked and moved. In great sheets the ice came our way. Sheets as long as a football field moving along at a few knots. Now, this is a sheet of ice that is six to eight feet thick. So there is considerable weight involved. Logs the size of telephone poles were crushed into splinters when the sheets of ice plowed into the shore. Awesome... Watching this spectacle humbles you. We watched as the winter road (or Ice Road as they say on TV) broke into pieces and went by, you could still see the tire marks made a few weeks ago. The water rose and flooded the yard of my friend Walter, a local elder. It flooded the yard of another elder on the other side of the road. It did considerable damage, but I have seen much worse. The rest of us breathed a sigh of relief.We had dodged a bullet, been spared the wrath of the river. We stood, chastened, humbled and put in our place.

Rivers can do that. This summer I went to visit my Aunt Katherine in St Catherine's which is appropriate because she is a saint! While we were there my cousin Lori asked if we would like to see Niagara Falls. Neither I nor my wife Lina had ever been there before so we said yes. It had rained all weekend but the forecast showed a brief spell of sun for about three hours. We took advantage of every minute of it. We took a drive through Niagara on the Lake and approached the falls. We parked and Lina and I took a walk. It was awesome! There's that word again. The sheer power of it. The thunder at the horseshoe falls was amazing. They were selling ponchos in the gift shops, but I told Lina "Uh uh, I want to get wet! I want to feel the falls on my face." We did too. We were soon soaked. The mist rolled off the falls and fell on the road behind us. I can only imagine what Father Louis Henepin must have felt when in 1677 he became (arguably) the first European to see the falls. He used words like surprizing (his spelling) and unparalleled but not awesome, too bad. No wonder he used such superlatives at its' height more than 6,000,000 cubic feet of water pass over the falls every minute. Now that is awesome! I have been to Virginia Falls in the Yukon. It was amazing, it plunges over twice the height of Niagara but at a much lower volume. Still impressive. Especially when we went to fly out. My friend Shane, the pilot said "You want a great picture of the falls?" We replied eagerly that we did. He turned the float plane toward the falls and took off in the direction of the falls. We left the surface of the water just shortly before the crest. "It saves fuel!" He added, "The speed of the river is added to the speed of the plane." He explained. We got a spectacular view as we soared over the cascading water. Then we dropped down into the valley below and yes we got some great shots.

Continuing on our holidays we went to Nova Scotia. I had long wanted to go to Brier Island, out Digby neck on Nova Scotia's Fundy coast. It reputedly has some of the best whale watching anywhere in eastern Canada. The weather for our trip was sunny and beautiful. This is where my Celtic blood shows through and I turn a tartanny red. If getting there is half the fun then we were in for a thrill of gargantuan proportions. Apparently the whales were being elusive this year. They were being unpredictable like, well, wild animals. Damn this nature! Why can't it be natural in a moire controlled way? Maybe an invisible glass wall to hold these creatures like some giant fishbowl. My brother Larry, the computer programmer seemed to favor this solution. I shrugged. What the heck? Maybe getting there is half the fun. We motored three hours out into the mighty Bay of Fundy, home of the worlds highest tides. The sun blazed. My skin glowed like an oven element. But then there were whales. At first we saw a Minke. Now the Minke is one of the most commonly seen whales, because it is curious and approaches boats. I had seen them before on other whale watching trips (this was my fourth) The Minke measure up to 35 feet(10.7m) and weighs 20,000 lbs (9200kg). Let me repeat that 20,000 lbs! This is a big critter. The fact that it is curious says volumes about this animals intelligence. They say curiosity killed the cat, but I'm still waiting for the autopsy results. We watched the Minke surface and blow for a while, but then the young lady narrating the tour announced that Humpback whales had been spotted a few minutes sailing away. We cheered it was these brawny buggers we had come to see. at 57 ft (17m) and 90,000 lbs (40,000 kg) these whales are twice the size of the Minke. I had never seen a Humpback before and I had always wanted to. I had been fascinated by these huge mammals since I first saw a dead whale beached at Crystal Crescent beach as a child. Our neighbors had driven us there to see this behemoth. Majestic even in death. I stared enthralled. I love the sight of these leviathans, of course I would rather see one alive any day.

The book "Whale Watching on Canada's East Coast" describes the Humpback as curious as well. I would go one further. The Minke is curious and approachable. The Humpback is a shameless exhibitionist. They love to put on a show. The lady doing the commentary felt it necessary to explain some of the whales behaviour. "They often splash their flukes in the water, we are not sure why they do this. Some people speculate that it is done to dislodge sea lice." We humans need to explain everything. We need to see animal behaviour as all being entirely logical and as mirroring human behaviour. There is a big fancy word for this it is anthropomorphism. There I get to use that degree again, whew it only cost about ten grand, that was worth at least seventy five cents. If i keep this up I'll get my money's worth. Anthropomorphism. There used it again. Ch-Ching! Why can't animals do things for no reason. We do. We snap our fingers, whistle, sing, make fart noises with our arm pits. Someone tell me what practical purpose these serve? I mean unless you are one of a limited few who can earn a living making fart noises with your armpit. Why can't a Humpback thrash the water with its' flippers just because it wants to?

Because that is exactly what Quixote did. Oh yeah, they name the whales. Cool, eh? Each whale has an identifiable tail and they all have names. In fact the boat keeps a binder with photos of each whale and they photograph each encounter and keep track of it. They can even tell you how old some whales are and if not they can tell you when the whale first appeared and when it was last spotted. Very cool. Right, a word about those flippers or flukes as they are called. They are 5 metres or 17 feet long. They are the longest limbs of any animal on earth. Imagine having 17 foot arms. Wow! More than five times longer than your arms. You would never have to get up to get a beer, uh, I mean pop. Only problem is that closets would have to be three stories high or your sleeves would get dirty. But just imagine, you could scratch anywhere! Enough silliness. We watched Quixote and his partner frolic in the bay. They surfaced and dived and lay on their backs thrashing the water while we watched. Stunned! Amazed! And , Yes Awestruck! Once the whale dived near the boat and sprayed us. You could smell their fishy breath. Whale breath. A whale breathed on me. You don't soon forget that. Partly because it smelled a bit like the sewer truck. But also because you don't get that every day. Unless you've gotten really rich making fart noises and you can afford to go whale watching every day, but apart from those lucky few the rest of us mere mortals don't get to do this. Awesome. No, really awesome. Not in the gnarly eighties way, but in the Merriam Webster Collegiate sense of the word awesome! Fear, amazement, reverence. That kind of awesome.


Most of the time I enjoy the view from the top of the food chain. I think most humans do. We roll along in the club car of the ecological gravy train, seldom thinking about the rest of existence. Every once in a while we need to be knocked down a peg. We need to be shaken out of our secure little world into the world of reality. We need to know that we are but a small cog in a very big wheel. It is a vast universe and we are but cosmic dust. We need to lose the smugness to get humble, to be belittled. We are not the masters of the universe. We are no less than the trees and the stars, but no more than them either. Being humbled, being belittled by nature means knowing your place. It does not mean that we do not have a place. Seeing things like the raw power of lightening or a forest fire calms me. It lets me know that I am a part of nature, that I am of this world and not just in it. This world that is ours for just this moment of time, this world is not inherited from our parents it is borrowed from our children. We are not masters of it but guardians of it. Awe, it is a very cool thing like a natural reset switch. It restores the defaults, blows away the inflation of our collective egos that we have gained at the expense of a million other species. Species with as much right to live and thrive as us. We search the stars for a sign of life, while we destroy the miracle of life right here. Species we don't know or understand disappear every day. I would love to think of a boy, generations from now, standing on the banks of the MacKenzie or Niagara and being awed by the sheer power of nature. To feel the blow of a whale and smell the breath of so great a being. You know what that would be, well it would be....

AWESOME!