Dark.

Heaven and hell are two extremes, and hell full of fear and terror, but what of earth, caught in the in-between? By summer's day in the city it is a sweltering heat bath, but filled with people and removed from nature. 

I am removed now from the summer's heat. I am removed from the open air and the bustling suburban metropoles that are the Fraser Valley. Hours and ours, kilometers upon kilometers removed.

On each side of my tiny tent towers a sky-scraping mountain. I am insignificant in the river-scraped-out valley beneath. It is a lonely place, this campground half an hour's drive from a town in the middle of nowhere. Loneliness is not an emotion I often indulge in, but this is a lonely place, and I, alone in my tent.

Through the valley now screeches a train, steel upon steel screaming and wailing off the proximate peaks like fate calling, the song a constant flipping between two notes, like a siren. The sound amplified by the valley and by the darkness. The wind whooshes alongside the crying train, through the pine and poplars, through the snaking valley.

The train has passed for now, and all that remains is the distant roar of the highway and the rushing of the river. It is a quiet place. Above my tent, the milky way scorches its way across the sky, light years away but brought closer in the absence of civilization. It is dizzying, mesmerizing, like a flickering fire in the sky.

I fully comprehend the aboriginals' tales and legends and early explorers' fears and inventions, for, though made beautiful and enticing by the sun, this wilderness is lonesome and terrifying, not a place to be entered by the weak-minded.