A Long Way Home

As the plane descended into Fort St. John airport the only thing passing through my mind was "what the fuck have I done?" Fort St. John's landscape at this time of year, for those who've never been, is a dead wasteland. Dead nature waiting for its naked ugliness to be hidden by snow. Oil leases and gas plants and fallow fields and a river. The idea was to relax in a neutral place and come up with a strategy for attacking the next step in my life. Lock myself up in a cabin on the lake, read by the fire, eat my mom's food, dream a little dream under the Northern Lights.

Coming back to my birthplace always brings to mind the morals parents tell their children about money not buying happiness. It seems the crowd here is more divided on the matter. Fort St. John is an easy money town, where there seems never to be a shortage of jobs, where an F-350 is considered an appropriate daily driver, where you go to the bar and meet people from places like Newfoundland, Saskatchewan, and Quebec, places where the money isn't so easy. I can't imagine that all of the people here left their homes to work and be unhappy with their stacks of money. I know that money can buy me happiness, the thing is that my happiness lies outside of Fort St. John. One thing I learned very early is that it doesn't matter how rich you are when you've got wet feet and it's -30, you aren't going to be happy.

In the taxi from the airport it seemed like nothing has changed in the 5 months since I was last here, no new buildings, no people walking the streets, barren. My 'rents weren't home so I had a mandarin orange and sat by the fireplace. The only comfort winter has for me is relaxing by a fireplace, I may even prefer it to sitting on a beach, you get to wrap yourself in blankets and you don't get sand in your crotchital regions. I had a feeling that I was going to be spending a lot of time in front of the fire. Time spent doing nothing. Time spent thinking about girls. Have you seen the girls in Fort St. John? Fuck.