Being open to hearing the land tell its stories

By Richard Wagamese

 The land holds stories within it. The trick is to make yourself open to them and when you do they have a voice that rings loud and clear and cuts through everything else to show you that history is a living thing just like the land itself.

We hiked to a place called Battle Bluffs with good friends. The bluffs stand above Kamloops Lake and face south and west where you can look out across the wide sweep of the Interior Mountains of BC. It’s an awesome and spectacular place.

It was a bright, sunny day. There was a pretty stiff breeze blowing and the smoke from distant forest fires gave everything the look of mystery, the haze making it all seem gauzy and unreal somehow. We sprawled on the rocks to rest and I drank it all in.

In tribal times the scouts would come to sit and watch for sign of enemies coming out of the purple mountains or across the iridescent platter of the lake. From those heights the land stretches out across the territory of the Secwepemc, or the Shuswap as they came to be called.

There’s history in the sudden flare of space. The country below us reduced to a narrowing where the lake pulled our focus forward into the hard vee of its disappearing so that it became like time, really, wending, winding, curving in upon itself turning into something else completely.

Great battles were fought on the grassy plain below. I imagined that I could hear cries of them rising upward just as I felt the solemn peace that fell over young men who sat for days there to pray, fast, and seek the vision that would lead them into manhood.

It’s a sacred place because of that. A place of  becoming and leaving. Lying against the ancient rock I could feel history on my back. Real. Alive. Vivid. When you allow it, history seeps into you the same way the land does, easily, mysteriously.

I don’t know why places like this affect me so, only that I know that the search for a sense of my own history involves many histories. So that coming to that place became a pilgrimage of sorts — a deliberate marching forward and backwards at the same time to reclaim a piece of me I didn’t know existed before.