18 June, 2008 - Day Eight

When Irving got up at 5:00 a.m. for the bathroom, there was Angie, seated in the living room on that awful futon, reading. She was unable to fall back to sleep, she said. We certainly did, and found later that she had, too, finally gone back to bed to sleep again until 7:00 a.m. Then it was a rapid-fire series of showers, dog feeding, last-minute packing and getting everything stuffed in and atop the car.

And off we went. We'd had our week away. Angelyne had experienced her first big adventure away from home for a full week. Her uncle in Vancouver had expressed his interest in flying her down to visit with him, but she felt apprehensive about being so far away from home, about flying. She has inherited her mother's surprising reluctance to become a fearless adventurer.

Her familiarity and comfort with her grandparents, and travelling with them away for a week to a destination hitherto unknown to her, and only imagined by our reports on our weeks-away yearly had intrigued her and piqued her interest in sharing those experiences with us. We'd put her off for several years before deciding she was mature enough to accompany us.

Now she had a week away with us under her belt, and knew intimately what it was like to hike about in the New Hampshire woods, to clamber up a mountainside, to traverse a coll, and mount another summit, then make her way carefully and time-consumingly back down the alternate side of the second mountain.

She knew what it felt like to attain a height that dazzled her when observing it from the highway or the mountain base. She could now recognize the sense of accomplishment and awe, standing on the sheer rocky top of a summit and viewing the endless march of other mountain tops as far as the eye could see, all around her.

Now, for the next six hours as we travelled back home the weather alternated between wet and overcast and occasional sun. The car's heater and the air conditioner used in equal measure until late morning when the skies hosted a series of incomparably, fearsomely beautiful cloud formations billowing and lowering across their imperial stage in whites and bruised hues of grey-to-black.

The lush green landscape rushed past, interrupted by nature's rock sculptures; mountains and highway-blasted rockfaces. Yarrow, daisies, chicory, lupin and cowvetch; hawkweed and clover flowering brightly in the foreground. Passing tiny cabins and cottages, Irving tells Angie the story of Hoppy's Cabins, warns the walls might fall in should anyone be foolish enough to pass wind. They'd fall like a stack of dominoes.

He tells her that when we were young and newly married, we had visited with one of his uncles at his cottage up near Barrie; a family get-together. Needless to say, although the cottage was a respectable size, it wasn't capable of sleeping that many people, so we were encouraged to find our own arrangements, and try the cabins a few miles away. Which turned out to be so small and dilapidated there was room for the bed and little else.

Angie is delighted, repeating her own version of the endless farting possibilities. Collapsing with helpless laughter at her own witty offerings as her grandmother tut-tuts her granddaughter's loud and obnoxious pleasure. What is this bond between grandfathers and their grandchildren, the offerings of scatological humour tickling both their fancies...?

The car labours up one mountain after another, from New Hampshire to Vermont. Mist rising heavily from wooded mountainsides and valleys. Vultures, Great Blue Herons, crows, flap their unhurried way through the landscape. Flocks of starlings flutter and turn on the wind in their choreographed ballet. Small towns strung out along the highway; farms, subsistence and prosperous.

Churches, town halls, post offices. House-proud gardens where huge old rhododendrons and hydrangeas are the order of respectability, interspersed with the ubiquitous geraniums throwing their bright faces up toward that elusive sun. We pass over extended and high bridges beside railway trestles and finally leave the mountains behind, the valleys taking their place.

We're intrigued to note a roadside sign reading "We Want Wind", and wonder what that's all about. Irving had pointed the message out to Angelyne as it fed right into their previous hilarity over the passing of wind; suggesting it to be an invitation for her to apply herself. And then the meaning of the message is revealed, and we're astonished at what it is we see before us.

Long before our near approach we see in the distance a few mysterious-appearing forms, and wonder what on earth they might possibly be. As we approach ever closer, it becomes obvious that we're going to be exposed to the presence of a wind farm. Giant revolving arms of windmills turn lazily on the landscape, like the unforeseen presence of some unknowable feature whose purpose is to puzzle and awe.

Oh, we very well knew what they were, and what they represent. Windmill farms, the wave of the future, as one of the many derivations of new forms of energy. We drive on, ogling them, mesmerized by the image of these huge, graceful and in some strange way, luminous contraptions that seemed to us so futuristic, yet ephemeral. They completely transform the landscape.

They have inherited a rich valley landscape now devoid of growing things. They straddle the landscape for mile upon mile, marching off into the distance from east to west, and still they come. The length and breadth of their peculiar presence is breath-taking, and breath-takingly beautiful. Rolling down the car windows we can hear their swish, but it is their visual presence that strikes us.

We're entranced by them, they're so compellingly present, so obviously a symbol of the future.