Little did I know ...Actually to tell it like it is I knew absolutely nothing. I'd moved from four provinces over, twice and entirely of my own volition not because of a job transfer or something of that forced nature. Moved a town in the Canadian Rockies where I'd found the perfect little playground for my hours of opening my senses to the air where I could fill my lungs ad infinitum in one heave of the chest, where my eyes could bring to my ever so enquiring mind hundreds and hundreds of square feet of the forest at a glance without having to cover so much as ten steps. And my ears...

Seven years of weaving through three million people in cars as I dropped off subpoenas, court transcripts, film rolls, urine samples, airplane tickets and on more than hundreds of occasions, contraband. This had taken me about seven bicycles, untold numbers of parts, tires, brake cables, front forks. The toll however was in wear 'n tear on the inner workings of my body and my polluted psyche.

I blew that popstand. I performed a change of scenery. I parted the seas of what was to be the old and the new in the rest of my life. No matter what, no matter who, blindly I vaulted to my new digs Out West.

Within a week of my arrival to the town I deemed roots where going to be set, a feeling never equaled in my past, I was plunging my car into the town's drinking water. The ice-water scuba diver measured eighteen feet to the car's front bumper from the canal surface.

I'd freed myself from the seat buckle, forced the driver-side door open, didn't bother fighting the incoming rush of water and threw myself torso first away from the still sinking heap of metal. Having doggy-paddled back to shore, I queried my memory for directions out of this hitherto unknown neck of the woods.

"Uhmm do I go this way," pointing in the direction I came from ,or "Over here." where I knew from looking at a topo map the previous day that a Ranger cabin was on the road further ahead. But how far ahead ? Two km? Thirty km? My skin inundated me with information that my pants and sweater were sopping wet, my hiking boots contained feet, toes and water, and my saving grace, this oh! so French felt beret stretched over my ears. It was -10 Celsius, midnight, and way too far from being anywhere close to comfort. "All right let's think about this!" In my mind I looked up this topo map which now made it about the third occasion I'd viewed it. I saw the road, the bridge that my car averted, all along the waterway. I counted squares on the map, my eyes squinting and index finger assisting in the tallying, "Five in all." to a trail head where I'd driven by two or three parked cars. "Uhm Five km. All right let's go." I walked, I jogged. I walked, I jogged. I listened for cougars in the night. I listened for wolves who hadn't packed a lunch. I shook the icecycles on my sleeves.

I got my ride back to town, fifteen km away. I couldn't help but roll out that topo map to count the squares. "Five of them indeed."

The undoing of eons of reincarnations and lessons had just begun.

Meticulous was I in assuring the escape from my own eons-old hands. "Gotta keep myself from acting hastily, don't let any fear seep in, think everything to keep going, stave off counterproductive thoughts and hypothermia, and keep the pace that'll afford me the energy to get there."

Patterns. Thank you for patterns. Within these first two years Out West, I lived another epic, involving multiple "no-false-moves-allowed" river fordings. "Every move has to be the right move, no 'or else'". Nobody would find my floating corpse.

Eventually I moved away and returned later to be near my playground Out West. Again within two years, two months apart this time, the hitherto unknown pattern reared it's head. I survived a psyche-provoking scramble up a mountain face then a grizzly encounter that had me crash through the bush blinded by complete darkness bespectacled with foggy, wet glasses in a winter's first snowstorm, soaking wet again, getting out halfway through the night having aborted an overnight stay with a useless lighter and no means of keeping warm and cozy in the way all of us expect to spend our nights in civilization.

Friends offered their take on these peripeteias as you the reader may come up with your own. But they were all of the Hippocratic kind treating the symptoms of these outings, in other words "Don't drive so fast on unknown back roads", "Carry a flashlight and better fire-lighting gear", "Exit the bush earlier". Nothing seemed to stick for closing words on this pattern. Every time my misadventures were summoned I wondered whether this person would provide the concluding elusive explanation. To no avail...until an evening borne of serendipity. "Marc, you were doing all the right things throughout these epics as you maintain. And that's why you've gotten yourself out absolutely unscathed each and every time. Well the way the universe operates, the right thing already happens all the time anyway. Lesson: The Universe will provide. Transfer this away from these epics of your's Marc and apply it to the rest of real life."

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