Tent odyssey

By Conrad Beaubien

I believe the expression in use these days is stay-cation. Not a vacation as we generally know it, but an easily accessible respite for the mind. Sometimes these can be the best of pauses; mental health days we also call them.

We’re talking about a break from day-today patterns where we can derive replenishment. For sure, choosing to travel offers vital change; the potential to explore and learn about the endless parts of the world can be life-changing. Relatable to this topic, I am happy to share how in a roundabout way I realized recently that I have been simultaneously allowing for both of what it is I am writing about, that is travelling while staying put.

The word vacation comes from the Old French vacate meaning to be unoccupied. The later Latin—vacatio—meant exemption from service, from work, to be empty, to be free. This all leads up to reporting in my daily journal that I have been in the tent camps of early workers that built the transcontinental rail line across Canada to the Pacific; how I’ve stayed in the remote sites of the Northwest Mounted Police that guarded our border during the Klondike gold rush; or even how I’ve been camping out along Lake Superior with Lawren Harris and A.Y Jackson of the Group of Seven Canadian painters of early past century. The connection comes in the form of a large canvas tent referred to as a Prospector’s tent. With regards to prospecting, I panned for gold until I got tired of the routine of the physicality of it; you know the dumping of gravel from a cold creek into a sieve-like box and shaking it to and fro until your arms fall off. I decided that the true gold was in the beauty of the mountains, the giant cliffs that seem to have their feet planted in the centre of the earth; the glide of the tall pines and the rustle of the Whiskey Jacks as they descended into my hand to feed on crumbs of sourdough bread toasted over the breakfast campfire. Then again, staying out on the open range during the fall cattle drive along the Chisholm Trail was one heck of an experience, I’ll tell ya. Best of all, I avoided saddle blisters, but that’s another story.

You see, all of the above images seem to come to us when we sleep under a large canvas tent that even has a portable wood stove for heat and cookin’ up grub and is lit by the warm magic of light from a kerosene lamp. Canvas tents reek of history and anecdotes for their placement in the ancient charters of adventure. In the era of lockdown I acquired such a tent and installed it permanently on a raised wooden floor in an out-of-the way place at my home. Gradually I am planting the surrounds with Tamarack trees and birch and gooseberry bushes, recreating a small slice of the eco-system of the Canadian Shield, a soul-grounding that seems to always have had a seductive hold of my inner being.

The canvas veil allows for the glow of the moon, the wobble of the fabric walls carries a song of the wind; the scent of oiled canvas, of a beeswax candle, all of it becomes an encapsulated magic carpet as I drift off to sleep and surrender to the endlessness of night ethers. Sometime there is heavy rain with thunder as lightning illuminates the place and at that moment I am aboard a firefly signalling in the dark of darkness. At times it is the voice of the Barred Owl that marks my journey. Then again, come morning the shadow-play of the maple and walnut trees towering over the scene offers soothing meditation.

I highly recommend the experience as a way to untether from the mundane, to time travel and drift from place to place unconsciously guided by the gods of venture, an odyssey of the sublime, of being empty and free aboard a canvassed time capsule situated right near in one’s very own back yard.