By Lucy

When I got to the kitchen on Friday, Wayne informed me that more kitchen knives had been purchased because of me. Verbatim, he said “you have improved the knife situation”, which is made me chuckle because I didn’t even complain about the knives! I merely noted that one of the international students had been using the bread knife to cut onions, but there was a perfectly good (if bent) steak knife that could cut onions.

… Ok, maybe it needed improving, but still, I didn’t say boo. Beggars can’t be choosers.

It also make me laugh, because my new friends haven’t quite clued in that I’m twisted. I’ve been in such a good mood I’ve been more bubbly and upbeat than I was before, and the sarcasm is less biting. My friends in Barrie would have joked “Well of course Lucy improved the knife situation, she’s always stabbing things!” (not literally)

K gets in on it too, he keeps telling me I seem ‘normal’. He has since corrected himself that by ‘normal’ he means I’m not given to sudden outbursts or overtly irrational behavior.

As I tidied up before work, one of the other tenants asked me out of nowhere if I was going “back home” for Easter, to get my summer tires. That was confusing to unpack;

• What is this “back home” nonsense? Thunder Bay is my home!
• Why on Easter?
• Why wouldn’t I already have my summer tires with me?
• What a random thing to ask!

I said none of this and just told him I had brought my tires with me, by throwing them in the backseat of my car. He immediately offered me to store them in his storage locker, which was kind but equally confusing. He barely knows me, although Rich pointed out he might trust me because the landlord trusts me, because the Vagabond trusts me. If that’s true, I’m unhappy about it because I’m trading a lot on the trust of a shithead *sshole man who won’t currently give me the time of day. I also have to trust Joe in return, because he’ll have my stuff in his locker. Notwithstanding that we’d both have keys, he could cancel it and have my stuff pitched at a moment’s notice.

I did start seeing dollar signs, sadly. It costs me 70-odd dollars a month for my storage locker. If I could offload that, it would save me almost a grand a year. He said he has a half-empty 10×5 locker, which is twice the size of mine, but when I showed him a picture of mine stuffed to the gills he said it’s probably too much. I shrugged because I still think it’s a long shot, but I can whittle down what I have. I want to reorganize once it’s warm enough to stand outside, so I can keep some of my crafting stuff in my trunk for when I’m travelling. I also have the feeling I might be able to keep my sewing machine and stand mixer at K’s, because he’s expressed an interest in owning them and he definitely has room for them, and if I’m not going to be using them for 6 months to a year, someone else might as well.

We had a full house at the build. Three electricians showed up to run all the electrical and they were very organized. They installed all the outlets and most of the pot lights upstairs (Scott ran out). Scott spent the day installing the beautiful countertop and Doug spent the day working on something in the basement while listening to heavy metal and swearing. At one point we overheard him say “I’m going to start stripping soon”, which was presumably referring to a screw, but it sounded hilarious divorced of context or line-of-sight. Me and John measured and cut most of the trim, but we were forbidden from installing it lest the electricians trip over us. Around noon the electricians had to cut the power and then we couldn’t even use the saw, so we went home early.

My new PC set-up is hilarious. The fish-eye on my webcam means you can see more than 180 degrees of my tiny room. I shall fix it before I stream. I did actually measure the room and it is 9×10 feet, not counting the closet. The desk is 18 inches by 34 inches, and 30 inches tall, 24 inches to the top of the place where my legs go. My knees have about 2 inches of clearance and I’m confused how a full grown man could sit at this desk. Presumably painfully.

At 3:30 AM I was rudely awoken by the room above me (the problem tenant) stomping around, before running up and down the interior stairs a few times, and exiting the building. I wondered if he was trying to pull a midnight move, but he was still there in the morning. Drunk, maybe? It was Friday, after all.

Saturday I had plans with K to watch all the Ghostbusters. I asked him if he wanted to see the new one and he said sure, but also he had never seen any of them, somehow. But Friday he had a big work project that turned into an all-nighter, so his sleep schedule was all messed up.

At 2PM I was still waiting, and I went to the marina to catch Primal Groudon. Yes, I play Pokemon Go. I just got back into it again, mores the pity because I really should have grabbed all kinds of gifts from England. I don’t understand the Primal thing, I just wanted to meet some people who play locally. Unfortunately, most people just sat in their cars to play. Maybe when the weather is nicer.

I also had a random individual ask me if I was the parking authority, because I was wearing my official-looking high-vis jacket and typing furiously on my phone? Pretty sure meter maids wear black jackets, and definitely not my tuque covered in pins. It’s curious, in Barrie people didn’t usually blink at my high-vis jacket, but I’ve noticed here that a lot of homeless/ poverty-stricken people wear high-vis and it seems to have made everyone suspicious of me.

K showed up when my fingers were frozen red and stiff (yes, I own gloves. But you can’t play Pokemon Go with gloves on!). The first place we stopped was the recycling depot, because he promised to show me where it is. Depot sounds too grand – it’s just a parking lot with a chain link fence around it, filled with dumpsters labelled cardboard, aluminum cans, etc.

After that, we stopped by the grocery store, singing Team Rocket’s “Double Trouble” in the car ride over. I got accosted in the store by a staff member, presumably because of said high-vis jacket problem. Fortunately for me, I’m pretty disarming once I start to speak, but it was still jarring. I complained to K, but he’s made it an inside joke that he thinks I’m on the run from the law and so replied “of course! You’re so suspicious”. He’s having too much fun telling people he doesn’t know my name and that he thinks I’m a wanted fugitive. He’s being facetious, of course, he knows Lucy will be my name, but he doesn’t know my birth name and declines when I offer to tell him.

Once back at K’s place, we had to clear the new boxes of Ikea furniture off the couch, and then he set me about chopping up everything for dinner. I joked that he brought a carpenter over, I should be working on the furniture, but I don’t mind helping with dinner. As previously established, I love stabbing things. Dinner ended up being chicken pot pie, and he made extra filling so that I could bring some home and throw it in a pie crust and have another, which was very kind of him! He also bought cupcakes, the one he gave me was “Cadbury Egg”. We watched movies until midnight, which is late for me, so I was glad he drove me home.

Around 9AM on Sunday I dragged myself out of bed. Second winter was supposed to strike today. See, Thunder Bay has had almost no snow this year, which is bad for a couple reasons. The first is that it makes the cold sharper, without the snow to block the wind. The second is that snowpack replenishes groundwater. Also, melting snow is how a lot of plants get their get-up-and-go in spring. We were setting up for a drought and an early fire season. Usually in early March there would be at least 50 centimeters on the ground.

A mass of wet air was drifting north from the Gulf of Mexico and it was going to slam right into the minus 20 bubble we had been living in for more than a week.

I had a big hike planned with Hanuman, but I was worried the snow might hit before we could get back. Call me a soft southerner, but I know what I can and can’t handle. But at 10, he texted me to say that he was super excited and ready to head out, so I hurriedly got myself together and ran out the door. It was a nice drive along the old highway, but it was already streaked with lines. They discovered that the pulpy brine that’s left over after you boil the sugar out of sugar beets is an effective anti-icer, so you can always tell if the city is prepping for a storm by the lines where it’s been sprayed onto the asphalt.

The place I had picked was the Pearson wetland trail. It’s the better part of an hour out of Thunder Bay, towards the American border. The name is misleading; instead of a wetland hike, it’s actually a climb to the top of a mesa that sits square in the middle of the wetland, like a natural boardwalk (ish). I wanted to try something a little tougher, with some climbing. You do a lot of climbing in scaffolding, after all.

The first part of the trail is some boards laid across the wetland to the mesa, and stapled with chicken wire for extra traction.

Any misgivings I had about the hike evaporated as soon as we hit the climb. Hanuman took off like a bullet from a gun, scrambling up the rocks so fast I couldn’t keep up. He had to keep stopping to wait for me, a giant grin on his face, practically bouncing in place. It was clear he needed this and I can’t say I blame him, if I were trapped in the city I’d be dying to get out as well. I stopped a few times to catch my breath and pretended to need a drink of water, but I don’t think I fooled him.

The trail was icy. Only the trail, because of course it’s the flattest part of the ground and water pools there. The first bit of the hike, the climb, was little more than a cliff that had little blue diamonds indicating you should be heading upwards. It was the first sense I had of being out in the proper wilderness, as opposed to the neatly groomed wilderness still within cell service and walking range of town. Although this arguably still isn’t wilderness, because we didn’t need to stop for snacks, or try to figure out where to relieve ourselves.

It felt great, looking out at the top of the cliffs with my lungs burning, having completed the climb. It felt real.

We decided to take the loop around to the right. Even before we reached the first lookout, we got distracted. We found a spot where a woodpecker had apparently been pecking upside-down (must have been good eating in the tree root). Not a pileated woodpecker, the kind you immediately think of with the red crown, but something smaller. There was a strange tree that had turned a kind of moldy green in places, for no reason we could discern. (It wasn’t mold, or lichen. Let me know in the comments if you can figure it out)

We found another place with a bunch of trees had been buffeted by such strong winds that they split before either falling over, or being cut down because falling was imminent. It was oddly isolated to just one spot, and only one kind of tree, but no obvious sign of disease or pests. Me and Hanuman made up a story that the air spirits decided it was their meadow and knocked the trees over.

After half an hour of moseying around, we came up to our first lookout. We hung out there for fifteen minutes, just marveling at the view. It’s slightly more varied to see in the spring, when you can easily tell which trees are evergreen, and the rocks that might be hidden behind tall grass. In the distance I noticed the snow starting to fall, but a snow storm chasing you isn’t the same as a rain storm. They started as squalls, so they were ebbing and flowing with the wind currents.

It was an hour to our next lookout. There was a fair bit of up and down to the path, despite being ostensibly flat. You have to remember, these mesas dot the landscape around Thunder Bay. The ‘ground’ is the original bedrock, and these ‘hills’ are sills, volcanic extrusions after the fact. So they haven’t been worn down at all.

There was a tree that had rooted itself to whatever soil the moss was growing on, so when the wind blew it down it basically waxed the rock it was on. A little “fairy fort” of stone, that we didn’t poke around too much in case some critter was hibernating inside. We found a birch that had been hit by lightning and was somewhat burned, and definitely dead and growing white mold. We were confused that it hadn’t burned to the ground or split, because if a tree is juicy enough to resist burning, usually the sap in it will boil and explode like a popcorn kernel when the lightning hits it.

We also found some scat. I think it’s cool, don’t click on the pictures if you don’t! The first one is deer scat, Hanuman says it looks like a giant bunny rabbit. Presumably the comparable levels of grass eating. The second one he was unsure of, he suggested it might be a dehydrated raccoon.

We overheard some grouse messing around in the bush, but it was too thick to see them. I’m no nature photographer, so I just grabbed this recording from Youtube as an example. It’s rather quiet!

The second lookout opened onto the Pearson wetland proper, the small pond in the middle and the nameless tributary that feeds it.

It started snowing off and on at this point, but it wasn’t heavy enough to be concerning. My two concerns were:

• getting back down the mesa, which was already slick with ice
• we were on backroads so far out I was surprised they were paved at all. If they got closed, we’d be stuck

At about 2:30 we got back to the way down. It took about half an hour to descend – when it’s icy, going down is harder than going up. I’d fallen 4 times already just walking on the ‘flat’ bit and given myself a couple of bruises, nothing worth taking a picture of. The first thing you learn in figure skating is how to fall on ice so you don’t hurt yourself. Hanuman took a spill on the way down and fell on a stick that gave him a gash, but nothing serious enough to patch it up. I have a first aid kit in the car, and also a Costco pack of bandaids.

We drove back home under heavy snowfall. The storm was here.

When we stopped at the hostel, Hanuman offered me 20 bucks for gas, which was very nice of him and I appreciated it. When I got home, I sent him a friend request on Steam. He sent me back “Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition”.

Holy crap!

How much does that cost? Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. I’ve been eyeing the game since it came out on PC 3 or 4 years ago, but I don’t think my Frankenmachine could have run it, and since I’ve had this one I’ve been broke or busy. And with all the DLC. It had to be 60 bucks at least. Jeez. I am so grateful, it was such a pleasant surprise!

I then spent half an hour yelling at Steam before it would let me install it, cuz the SteamGuard app was acting up. The good news is, my internet is 300 down, 100 up, perfect for streaming. Best internet I’ve ever had, actually. And that’s over wifi!

It snowed steadily through the night and I woke to the sound of Wayne and the landlord shoveling. We’d had at least 10 centimeters come down and it wasn’t supposed to stop until Wednesday.

I called in to work, because Aunt Flo came to visit. I don’t like calling in for my period, but in this case, there is only a single frozen porta potty outside, and I’m not getting paid, and the snow was absolutely coming down. I’m allowed to be lazy. Then I streamed Horizon Zero Dawn all day.

Tuesday was even more of a mess. I think part of the problem is that most of the road clearing crews had bounced for the season, but I figured most of the arteries would be cleared first even if the residential roads hadn’t, but even the major roads weren’t plowed. It took me half an hour to get to work, in part because the windshield wipers had frozen to the windshield and refused to relinquish it. I almost beached myself in a snow bank, because the street the build is on hadn’t been plowed at all since it started coming down. After all that, I ended up leaving after a couple of hours because there wasn’t much for me, with everything being messed up by the snow.

Wednesday it finally stopped: final count (as far as I could tell) 35 centimeters in two days. It was still snowing, to the north in Nipigon, and Highway 17 was closed entirely.

I had another stroke of luck; my points card came in. I’ve been collecting points on my debit card ever since I got it when I was 16 and never redeemed them, but the grocery store around the corner lets you purchase groceries entirely with points. So that’s grocery money sorted for the next couple of weeks, cuz I have a lot of points to spend. I appreciate everyone who wrote to me of their concern after my last post! I do alright – I got a roof over my head and food in my belly. Some people aren’t as lucky as me, and this is temporary. Once the construction season starts up again, I’m be rolling in it.

I was in a miserable place this time last year. I remember… when the Vagabond came to visit me in Barrie. The patio doors at the hotel opened into a garden courtyard, so we sat out there and talked. Whenever there was a lull in the conversation or he went back inside for another can of beer, I lapsed into a thousand yard stare. I did it a lot back then. I imagine most people thought I was being thoughtful or meditating or something peaceful. He came out from grabbing another beer, paused, sat down, and caught my eye in that way he has when he wants a real answer and not something glib or sarcastic. “Hey, where do you go? When you do that?”

Where do you go. That was a good question. Not “are you ok” or “what are you thinking about”. Because he was right, I wasn’t there anymore. I was in the past, reliving it in a painful loop. I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t ok. He knew it, just like that.

When was the last time I did that? I can’t remember. I asked Rich and he said last time he can think of was before Christmas. Maybe even before October.

I am happy now. Happier than I’ve been for seven years, maybe even happier than I’ve ever been in my entire life. It’s not entirely because of the Vagabond, I did the work and I have some freakin’ amazing friends, but it does make me pause. That he did all this work, and in his mind I’m still sad, morose Lucy. He hasn’t seen the new me, the ‘real’ me, practically glowing with a new lease on life.

But that’s how it is, sometimes.