The Spell of the Stikine

There is a nursing station in the northern wilderness of British Columbia. I worked there one winter, in an isolated settlement called Telegraph Creek, which is on the bank of the Stikine River. The Stikine is a beautiful and grand river that hardly anyone has heard about. Originating deep in the Cassiar Mountains of far northwestern British Columbia, it fills with glacial melt water, swells and grows for 400 miles, and has carved out canyons for over 10 million years. It is known for its dangerous rapids, and in some places the river is so life-threatening that perhaps only one or two teams of rafters have shot the waters and lived.

After the rapids, the river flows pristinely, innocently, and majestically past Telegraph Creek. A village that, in the late 1800s, was a jumping off point for riverboat men, trail guides, and fevered gold rush explorers. After Telegraph Creek, the Stikine sweeps on into Wrangell, Alaska, where it creates a huge saltwater delta, then pours itself into the Pacific.

The week I arrived, the gently sloping mountain ranges along the Stikine were crisp and white with spring snowfall. Black fringes of spruce and fir hemmed up the hillsides in undulating borders. So postcard sharp was the countryside, so fresh the air, so sparkling clear and bright the sunlight on snow and water breaking through blocks of ice in the river that my senses swam and hummed. I found myself breathing deep, eyes tearing, and fingers reaching out as if I might capture this incredible unspoiled air, sunshine, and purity – to hold it, if only for a short while.

Telegraph Creek still has a Hudson's Bay store, where I wandered one afternoon. Since the locals' curiosity about me had worn off after a few days, there were no patients at the clinic to whittle away the hours. I bought a gray fleece jacket there with the name of the eatery because it caught my eye – The RiverSong Café.

One night, I left the nurses' trailer, overly preoccupied with problems I had been dealing with that day: assessments, medications, charts, records, new patients, insulin orders. I simply needed a break. So I drove the short half mile or so to the airport strip on the edge of the village. I don't know what called me there.

Killing the engine, I jumped out of the truck and walked over the gravel and snow to look up at a million, million stars puncturing the velvet black sky. The only sound was the crunch of my boots on the tarmac. For several minutes I stood under a shower of aurora borealis, smelling snow, my eyes making out lines of drifts against the trees, my ears aching in the void. I did not hear a thing.

Such incredible, profound, soul-stirring silence. Not a rumble of far-off traffic, not a plane, not another person, not a creature anywhere. Not a whisper of movement. Such complete and utter silence.

This is the place where the wilds are stilled, I thought, where the night is simply night. Time stopped, and my heart was touched.

As philosophers have written, "When meditation is mastered, the mind is unwavering like the flame of a lamp in a windless place." I had entered a temple of Nature and, if only briefly, found just such a "windless place." This experience created a hunger in my soul for years to come.

Such was the night I became mesmerised by the spell of the Stikine.

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