One of my favourite trails to run or walk is Cemetery, which might be one specific trail, but is how I refer to the network of trails that loop around Happy Valley. Parking by the old Happy Hills Farm, you follow a creek down to the oldest graveyard in Rossland, where stones from the turn of the last century are buried in lush grass in the spring. It’s the year of the firehorse, and while I have no idea what that means, it’s in me. I’m coming out of a long rest—twelve years in a relationship—and I’m reawakening into a life where I alone make the choices, in which I feel like a horse on fire.
At dinner the other night, a good friend told me about how they reset their year April 1st. They make their resolutions then, ignoring the pranks. We both vaguely recalled how the term April Fools emerged: royalty laughing at the fools who didn’t know the calendar had shifted to a January start. Listening to KEXP yesterday, my favourite occult DJ, Greta, played songs for Aries season, mentioning the sign is the first in the zodiac. Cemetery is the first trail network to free itself of snow in the spring. Leaving the clearing of flattened tombstones, you enter a bit of a dark forest, or the potential of one going downhill, but you gently climb to an intersection where you can walk straight up to the site of the old mining school or loop along the side of KC mountain, where there is a bench overlooking the river and the smelter. “Teck! In all its glory” said an old friend Carly anytime we turned a corner into view of the giant industrial plant, its bright lights like something bedazzled.
It’s Easter weekend and kids are painting hardboiled eggs or eating chocolate ones. Last week at school there was an abundance of students carrying around eggs in protective designs of their own making. Grade eight students in career class imagined their eggs as babies. One asked me where he could keep his egg during English class and I said I thought this decision might be the training we was undertaking. Second grade students tried not to step on their eggs all morning. Returning from lunch, they found their eggs had been replaced with bright yellow peeps—marshmallow chicks—which they could eat when they got home.
After a few switchbacks and climbs along this bright portion of the trail, you’ve met the other one, and can follow a dirt road along the edge of the valley to get back to your car. The day we looked at houses to buy in Rossland, we were enamoured by a small cottage overlooking a sloped apple orchard. The apples at our house now roll down the same street as the bobsleds; these would have rolled down to the cemetery. The story “Lift the Coop” is about a woman who wants to live the fantasy of rural life but is living at a golf course subdivision, working as its principal landscaper. We meet her on the day she’s finally repealed the bylaw against chickens and is fantasizing bringing her new chicks on to the green. She’s fighting the order she tries to maintain every day by turning toward life.
