Pause for Thought
BBC 2
Saturday, August 8th, 2009

I was away at School in the Yukon Territory in northwestern Canada. Not exactly a reform school. Not exactly a hippie commune. A bit of both. One of the work projects we did was to cut cabin logs – Lodge Pole Pine and whatever straight Black Spruce we could find. We’d canoe ten miles down the lake with our chainsaws to where we had timber rights and cut in the late summer and early Autumn. Later, we’d plough a winter road over the lake ice – ice which would grow to nearly five feet thick in the Yukon winter and drive a flat bed truck down the lake to load up logs and haul them back to town where they’d be well stacked to season for the requisite time before being sold to builders the following year.

You could drive your truck on the ice from November to sometime in late April. It was always a little touch and go for the last few weeks. The sun would have warmed the surface of the snow and ice enough that pools of slush would form. Some of the slush puddles were deep – deep enough, in fact, to compromise the strength of the ice itself and so, as a precaution, the doors of the truck were removed in the Spring and those who couldn’t fit in up front rode on top of the load itself and were warned to be sharp about jumping off if the truck began to founder.

There was one occasion when the front driver’s side wheel suddenly sank down and we could see the driver’s leg sticking out of the cab as if he were debating making a dive for it himself. We didn’t wait to see what he’d decided. The four of us who were on top of the load all did swan dives in different directions.

We are underpinned by a variety of things – our health, our money, the stability of our minds, the steadiness of our trajectory. I’m at a stage in life where I can’t take these for granted.

We are all bearing heavy loads and need to give some thought to our foundation – to our fundamentals. And it may be that there can be no guarantees and that we need to be quick on our feet as well.