For a moment, I’m flying.
The world around me used to be still and frozen, but it has started to come alive. Most of the snow has melted away. What remains is wet, sloppy snowy remnants that will soon become the bog. The walls of dead-looking, human-high sticks that lined the side of the winter road are becoming trees again, with little green buds appearing all over them. The road itself is now a treeless stretch of mud and ditches and puddles, and for a moment I’m flying.
My feet have left the quad as I hit the peak of my parabola. Then my hands, gripping the handlebars—not so tight that they’ll get exhausted, not so loose that they’ll let go; elbows bent ready to absorb the impacts—jerk me forward. My moment’s flight is done and I’m violently hurtling through this world on top of a 300cc engine. The quad’s low pressure tyres fling a constant barrage of mud up behind me. The suspension might be absorbing some of the impacts, but mostly that’s a job for my knees. I’m in a permanent half-squat over the seat, pulling the vehicle in to me, pushing it back into the ground, thrusting my weight back for more traction, thumb locked to the accelerator, eyes constantly scanning the ground rushing towards me, ready to react.
A rare, clear dry patch—time to put on some speed.
A ditch!—take it head on, absorb the impact, accelerate hard out of it so there’s enough momentum to keep flying through that massive stretch of thick mud.
A puddle of deep, dirty, muddy water—my quad and I are splashing straight through, water flying everywhere, droplets flashing around me in the perpetual northern daylight, coating us both, my quad and I, in mud and glory.
I love it out here.
Tulita is a little 1km radius patch of town surrounded immediately by endless wilderness. It starts directly behind our house, and goes on for hundreds of wild, endless human-free kilometers in all directions. Last year, the summer made that wilderness into dangerous, threatening, stifling, intraversible bog. It was too hard going to move very far through, especially with my shitty heart, and it was full of bears and other very real dangers. It kept me a prisoner in town. A fragile, helpless being huddling in an island of civilised safety. This year, it has become an awesome, massive adventure playground. I hadn’t realised I needed a quad, but I so desperately, desperately had.
I take my gun out with me, bouncing along in a sling on my back, and I try to shoot any grouse I see. “You’re not really hunting though, are you?” My neighbour asks. “You’re out for a rip”. He couldn’t be more right.