Special Edition: Finding My Way Back Home 🍁
Excerpt from Lights to Guide Me Home 📖
Today’s Field Notes is a special edition for this growing community.
Many people have joined this newsletter since I last sent out an excerpt from Lights to Guide Me Home: A Journey Off the Beaten Track in Life, Love, Adventure and Parenting. Today I wanted to send you a portion of from Chapter 1 about my initial journey from the nation’s capital to the Rocky Mountains. It’s actually a chapter I wrote during a trip to Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and there is little that changed between its first draft and publication. It’s one that explains where my relationship with the outdoors began — in the forest behind my childhood home. 🌳
Lights to Guide Me Home is a memoir that takes the reader on a trip around the world while I chronicle my personal journey through some of life’s major milestones. I hope you enjoy this reading. If so, please consider ordering a copy using the buttons below. 🫶
Excerpt from Chapter 1 of Lights to Guide Me Home
THE JOURNEY WEST
By Meghan J. Ward (Rocky Mountain Books, 2022)
MY FAMILY didn’t hike and camp while I was growing up, but the serendipitous location of my childhood home exposed me to the wonders of nature early on. I also grew up in a time when unstructured, unsupervised outdoor play wasn’t a planned event. We were simply outside, all the time. Our home in Kanata, which we moved into when I was 3 years old, backed onto a protected green space, and I made weekly trips into the trees, away from the rows of houses that made up our neighbourhood.
I’d frequently stop at a place in those woods, along the Old Quarry Trail, where the boardwalk provides a path through what becomes waist-high water and mud in springtime. There, the trees lining the trail gave way to marshland and open skies. But even in winter, when the trees were barren, the forest largely blocked the presence of the not-too-distant homes. Standing on that boardwalk one might never know the treed oasis sat just half a kilometre from a major road. As a child, the forest seemed enormous – a Narnia-like land where a matrix of trails beckoned me to explore.
This was not the typical suburban experience. Access to this network of paths – a part of Canada’s Capital Greenbelt – sits just metres away from the front stoop where I’d tie my shoelaces before catching the bus to school. The Greenbelt comprises 20,000 hectares of protected green space, but our clan of siblings and neighbourhood kids mostly used the same single square kilometre. And that was all we needed.
In winter, we would strap our cross-country skis on just outside the garage, grab a hold of old bamboo poles and ski across the cul-de-sac to reach the Trans Canada Trail. Once there, we’d set our skis in the tracks, if there were any, and swish our way through the woods, gliding under evergreen boughs weighted with snow and whacking them with ski poles as we went by. Whichever unsuspecting soul was skiing behind would be hit with a cascade of snow and pine needles. Other times we set off in our winter boots, skates slung around our necks, in search of the perfect rink. What we’d discover was nothing short of a miracle: smooth ice captured in pools deep in the woods, the marsh frozen solid. Weaving in and out of trees, we’d skate until our toes told us it was time to go home. The sun was often setting by the time we emerged from the woods, soaked through with snowmelt, guided home by the streetlights as they flickered on. My parents didn’t need to ask where we’d been.
The transition to spring was never all that immediate. The temperature gradually rose and the snowbanks, once transformed into our elaborate cave system, thawed into slush. Then suddenly you’d hear it: birds chirping gleefully in the trees, the two-tone song of the blue jay heralding a new dawn. From our home we could see one bud in the woods turn to dozens, then hundreds.
Simultaneously, Stony Swamp filled with water, the trees mirrored in the small lake forming around their trunks. We watched in anticipation for the water to subside. Its presence meant Old Quarry Trail was a muddy mess, sometimes covered in fallen trees the city had not yet cleared from wintertime. Still, we were often too eager to wait. If the smiles on our faces didn’t reveal we’d snuck in an early trip to the woods, the mud caked to our rain boots certainly gave us away.
Summers spent on Old Quarry Trail made us feel like country-living kids. It didn’t matter that the city – a planned community and high-tech boomtown – was one of the fastest growing in Canada, or that we were always just minutes away from a road or manmade structure. In the protection of those woods, we could play forever, interrupted only by lunch awaiting us back home or the sun saying farewell for the day. We rode our bikes through the trails, memorizing where the big hills met sharp turns and where rocks and roots jutted out along the path. We often stopped along the way, sidetracked by trails that led to imaginary worlds. Minutes turned to hours spent running, hiding, exploring. And when we weren’t building forts, we were stopping halfway along our main trail of choice where there stood a magnificent climbing tree we couldn’t say no to. Many years later, its lower branches would be sawed off. Perhaps a few of us had climbed too high.
Fall was unforgettable as the vibrant greens and fullness of summer gradually morphed into a canvas of colour. Maroon, red, orange, yellow – we could see the forest’s transformation from our kitchen window. The maple trees kept track of time for us. The changing colours meant a new school year had started. It meant it was time to go for walks in the woods with my family, crunching leaves underfoot as we gazed up at the painted canopy.
In the low sun of autumn, I’d sneak in a few more bike rides through the woods. In the brisk air, I could see my breath and rays of light flickered through the trees, sunbeams suspended on air. I loved the feeling of flying as I rode the downhills, using the momentum to cruise through the flat sections, trying not to use my pedals.
It was a game I played even when I was by myself, riding the trails for the sheer fun of it. No matter if dinner would soon be on the table, in the stretch of trail just after a boardwalk I could never resist hopping off my bike to run my fingers along ripples embedded in the sandstone. The undulations told a story, though my young mind couldn’t comprehend why or how they were there. I loved the feeling of the ridges gliding under my fingertips, wrinkled relics of the sea from when it washed over the place 450 million years ago. No matter how different the trail looked from one season to another, no matter if they lay under a metre of snow, the ripples were always there.
Each feature of Old Quarry Trail was etched in my mind, like waypoints of familiarity that kept me comfortable even as the forest darkened. The climbing tree, the curve to the right, the boardwalk, the ripples.
Even today I can close my eyes, picture them and find my way back home.
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Loved your book! I ordered it and read it when you first published it; I am much older than yourself and my kids are grown and I have very young Grandchildren - it is a great read no matter how young or old we are :).