Pop 89: A Good Visitor

By Madonna Hamel

I just got an offer to upgrade my internet for “faster service.” How fast does it need to be? How much faster can life get before it blows a gasket? Speed has already proven detrimental to our health and well-being. Do we really need to get onto the internet to get outraged, indignant and disgusted faster? And what are we neglecting by giving over time and energy to the screen? 

Getting lost in the Internet, THE addiction of the century, is a false connector. It’s robbing us of connection with living breathing family, friends and neighbours. I have come to the conclusion that, while I learn lots through handy tutorials and lectures on YouTube, my noisy stuffed brain never gets enough. And before I know it, the countdown on the screen is over, and I’m hooked into the next video.

Our relationships are suffering. When I lived in the big city, I witnessed busy women friends pencilling in “a roll in the hay” like it was a dental appointment. What happened to courting? To dating? To “getting to know you, getting to know all about you?” To visiting?

How did mating and mingling fall victim to our obsession with speed and efficiency? And, how is it there’s even such a thing as speed dating? And, if dating is just another chore to get out of the way, how on earth will we value the riches, struggles and joys that come from companionship and a lifelong partnership? 

Speed is not the solution, but the problem. We expect everything yesterday, as the hackneyed expression goes. Speed also encourages superficiality. There’s always something to “check out” to move on from. We “surf” the net. We skip across the surface of life, taking passing glances, like a stone on water. 

(How many of us have ever actually body-surfed, I wonder. Or even know how to skip stones. Both activities require time to learn but come with the full-bodied reward of having achieved a physical skill. What glee!) 

We are not prepared for the incremental losses and gains, changes and challenges that come with long-term healing when we are smote by sickness, injury or, as in my brother’s case, a stroke. I don’t say “if”, I say but “when”. Because if we are fortunate enough to live into old age, those things will come.

Not only is it a shock to wake up one day realizing you can’t do the things you did just the day before, but you have to go through the long process of accepting the reality that you may never do them again. As it is, if you’re lucky, you won’t be doing them for a year or two. You can’t hurry healing. Recovery teaches us patience. We have to move slowly.

Before I moved to Val Marie, I was a radio-writer broadcaster. I worked mostly in Quebec City and Toronto but also in Windsor and Kelowna. There is a saying in journalism: “You are only as good as your next piece.” Not only were we encouraged to hustle to get to the “scene of the crime,” but we were encouraged to write, clip and file our stories within mere seconds of going on air.

Then, thanks to a series of failed romances and the selling of the family home, I found myself homeless. I came to Val Marie as a guest at the Convent Inn. I would slow down and spend my days in the quiet of the former chapel, writing about just these concerns. Settling down into a territory where humans are at the mercy of weather, crops and animals and are forced to move at the pace of nature, not their own whims and disjointed agendas, my own unnatural propensity to rush was made clear to me. 

The wilderness is a paradox- spend too much time alone in it, and you begin to cry out for company. Your brain begins to turn on itself, eating itself, as the writer Annie Dillard wrote about her solitary time as a Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. We humans are herd animals; we need to congregate around each other.

But the wilderness is also where the desert monks and nuns of the great Christian mystical tradition went to commune with God, with The Great Reality, with Truth. The wilderness is where we can still go to connect with the sublime and the mystical. 

Up until recently, this was strictly a farming and ranching community. But since 2001, when over 900 kilometres of land were sold to create Grasslands National Park, we’ve become a mix of old-timer ranchers, farmers, escape artists (like myself), painters and young science grads working for the Park. And, of course, we must include thousands of tourists from all over the world in search of endless space and silence and darkness. 

This also is a family community. When I first moved here, I was asked if I had kids. Sorry, I said, as if I’d committed a misdemeanour. The disappointment was palpable. But, slowly, after 10 years of dancing two-step at the weddings, shedding tears at the funerals, serving burgers at the rodeo, cheering at the bonspiels and borrowing dozens of books a week at the little library, I’ve become part of the larger family.

When I first moved here, George Hayes called out one afternoon when I was passing the Seniors Centre in a hurry. “Come in here and look at this.” He stabbed at a picture with his calloused finger. “That’s your mom’s uncle, Honore Morin,” he said, pointing to a young man in a uniform. “After the war, he came back, got a team of horses, and he’d help people out on their farms. Then he’d stay and visit a while, wouldn’t rush off like people do now. We’d make him something to eat, and then he’d tell us about where he’d been. He might stay the night. He was a good visitor. Nobody knows how to visit anymore.”