My family just made a camping trip to Great Blue Heron Provincial Park, located 45 minutes north of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. It was a treat to leave the city for a while and reconnect with the outdoors.

We spent much of our time hiking, which in retrospect was too much activity — we each wished we had another day there to spend doing nothing. It was our first time up there, and there was so much to explore that it was hard to stay still. We’ve learned for next time.

While Saskatchewan still doesn’t give me a feeling of home despite having lived here for half my life now, I thoroughly appreciate it. Up here in the almost-north, the lakes and trees do give me much. Maybe home for me isn’t necessarily British Columbia as much as it is water.

I also thought about how irrelevant provincial borders are when considering the larger systems this land is a part of. For instance, at the trailhead of a hike in Prince Albert National Park, just next to Great Blue Heron, I was reminded of the ice age that shaped this landscape. A temperature shift of five degrees Celsius covered all of Canada in thousands of feet of snow.

I paused to consider the current climactic changes we’re causing and those projected for the relatively near future—some predictions of five or even eight-degree heating. On top of that, Canada’s temperatures are rising at twice the speed of global averages. While I’ve recently felt somewhat more hopeful when Regina, my own small city (pop 229K), approved their fairly ambitious Energy and Sustainability Framework, aiming to keep us in line with the Paris Agreement, I still recognize that the world is past the eleventh hour, and temperature shifts such as the one that caused the last ice age are most likely already inevitable. My non-stop daily dilemmas about how to reduce my footprint are laughable.

Still, we’re here and now, and despite reminders of this crisis all around, I tried really hard on this trip to find calm in seeing the life and death that was all around. We saw 41 bird species, white-tailed and mule deer, a fox, a young moose, and uncountable other wonders on the forest floor.

I also saw my son, Jakob, relaxed. This was a treat, as his own burgeoning anxieties about our current and future world normally weigh him down.

Even here, away from world news (which was particularly awful this past weekend, I learned upon my return), our anxieties were still in the background. I couldn’t shake the tension that I experience physically in my neck, back, and (oddly?), forearms. I tried taking deep breaths and lowering my shoulders, but it didn’t work. My mind wouldn’t stop. I was there but not there.

Jakob too was obviously still processing some heavy stuff. The epic story he told me as we walked several hours each day involved a gentlemanly protagonist, Toby (our cat), dealing with a barbarian invasion amid a plague called kittypox. Just before leaving, we’d seen the news of monkeypox, clearly on Jakob’s mind. It’s strange to be out on a beautiful hike, marveling at your your child’s creativity and skill at storytelling (he’s a budding writer, taking after his dad), also aware that planted in his narrative are fears of disease and social collapse.

Back at home while we were away, I had a fellow MFA student, Sabine Wecker, water a test piece I got started before leaving.

This is an alternate version of a cast I made of Jakob’s face with an extremely thin clay slip. It’s the same local clay body, just presented differently.

I’m still having difficulty understanding what I’m trying to get at with this work, and I’m still not sure it’s the direction I should be taking. I didn’t have the time alone I’d hoped for on this trip to think more about this either, so I’ll have to leave off once again with a promise to myself to figure something out by next week.