KC is the hike you do if you want to see everyone—even the town itself. It’s a tempered winding uptrack from the Centennial parking lot to the lookout. There are a couple of benches to look down and find your house, or you can walk past them, sit on the rocks, and look out at the river. When a friend was here to do the Broken Goat race, we joined her on a sunrise hike and this was the direction we looked.
I never know, when I’m walking past someone, at what point to lock eyes and say hello. It was a problem in hallways at high school and it’s one now on the streets and in the grocery store and on KC. My mentor during my MFA, Sheila, agreed that you have to decide when you leave the house whether you’re going to look or be looked at. It was in the context of her buying a red dress from Horses, one I’d seen the day before and almost tried on myself. I instead tried on a long witchy black skirt and she advised me to buy it. Horses just announced they’re closing. Whenever I see a woman—in Nelson or at the Vancouver Writers Fest—wearing a piece of Horses clothing, I think “The Alchemical” or whatever the name of that design is she’s wearing. Horses are to be looked at.
KC is a flirty hike. You’re skirting the town the whole time along the watertower trail but it’s not until the labyrinth that you get a peekaboo view, and by that point you’re almost at the top. A celebrated local writer, Almeda, once left a bunch of poems on signs and hanging from trees. This is what the KC hike was like when I moved here: a poetry walk. There’s a meeting point where Techno Grind and a trail that heads to the Mining School stem off. People stand here on their bikes and talk or wait for each other, but they used to read poetry. Maybe the copper spinner is still there and I just don’t notice it anymore.
We’re making baseball caps for Mom Camp. They’re book merch, but they also feel like an invitation to a club. The club is a camp I invented in the first and second-longest story. I can imagine my protagonist wearing this hat with her scrubs, which she wore to camp because they’re comfortable and helped explain her identity in a vague enough way that she didn’t have to think about herself, which is what she ends up doing. Surrounded by moms without their children, campers go a little wild and inside. That’s what I want the hats to do. Muted purple with orange script, they’re my book as a hat. Imagine if I saw someone wearing one.
When you turn back down the trail from the lookout it’s all downhill—my favourite kind of run. You can go fast over roots and rocks if you’re focused, but you might still have to stop and talk. I like cutting left and doing the switchbacks into the Iron Colt subdivision, where there was once a river in spring. Then I run along McLeod to the Centre Star Gulch trail and home. I’ve been learning to run with my pelvis tucked and my head back, so I’m all aligned and not reaching. I think I might I look funny, rearranging my body in this way, but it’s important I have something to do with myself. Running is a chance to move through the world at a different pace, noticing in a different way. I do this all from my body. I’m nervous to do KC and keep putting it off. There’s a photo of me and Tristan and Gylfi, looking out at the town and pointing. If I walk KC alone, no one will take the photo; if I take it myself, I won’t be in it.
