It started on a gray morning, the kind that feels like the world is still asleep. The kind of morning where even the idea of movement feels like a betrayal to the stillness.
At 11:00 a.m., I found myself behind the wheel, driving north on the Sea to Sky. No real plan. Just a quiet, persistent pull to leave, everything.
Lately, motivation has been slipping through my fingers like meltwater. The city, the constant noise, the need to do something all the time, it was becoming too much. I didn’t want to ski. I didn’t want to run. I didn’t want to be productive.
I wanted out.
So I turned off the highway, took a logging road deep into nowhere, and decided I’d hunt for a cabin I had only vaguely heard about, no GPS coordinates, no route description, just a whisper of its existence somewhere in the trees.
The rain was steady, sometimes sideways. The logging road was a long, soggy trudge. My boots squelched in protest, water sloshed in my cuffs, and my thoughts repeated on loop like a stuck cassette: Why are you doing this?
At one point, I paused. The raindrops slid across my face, threading down the hood of my jacket like liquid pearls. I watched one trail across my chest, fascinated by its movement. Then, I just closed my eyes.
It wasn’t rest. It wasn’t escape. It was something simpler, stillness. In that second, I wasn’t soaked, or lost, or chasing anything. I was just… there.
It didn’t last long.
The ridge was worse, xposed to wind, sleet, and gusts that seemed to reach inside my coat and slap me awake. The cabin could’ve been anywhere, and I was nowhere. My boots were flooded. Both pairs of gloves: drenched. My pants were clinging like wet sandbags.
Cold turned to shivering. Shivering became a shake.
The wind howled, and I felt it, not just around me, but inside me. The kind of loneliness that doesn’t ask questions. It just settles into your bones.
Light was fading. My GPS failed. I dropped it. Then had to backtrack to find it. I slipped on wet rock, scraped my shin, cursed at nothing.
I stood in the woods with the weight of failure hanging on my shoulders like a third pack.
But turning around? That wasn’t in me. I could hear that voice, my own voice, Don’t stop now. Keep moving.
So I did.
And finally, miraculously, at 7:15 p.m., I swung open a wooden door that shouldn’t have been real. The cabin.
Inside: dry wood. A Coleman lantern. A woodstove waiting for purpose.
I fed the fire like it was a starving friend. Steam rose from my gloves. My socks curled with warmth. I made a simple dinner, then slid into my sleeping bag, cocooned by cedar-scented air and the cracking of kindling catching flame.
Rain tapped a rhythm on the tin roof like fingers on a drum. Birds chattered somewhere out of sight. I laid in my bag longer than usual, not out of fatigue, but reverence.
I made breakfast. Read a book. Watched the rain.
It never stopped.
By 3:00 p.m., I packed up and started the long slog back through knee-deep snow and tangled brush. But something had changed. I wasn’t frustrated anymore.
I had found something in that storm, something not made of cedar or wool or matches.
Resolve.
And when I made it back to my car, just as the last bit of light bowed below the horizon, I looked back at the direction I came from.
Still raining. Still miserable.
And somehow, I smiled.
Because I had moved through the doubt, the discomfort, and the dark.
And on the other side, I found a little warmth.
A reminder:
When everything falls apart, don’t stop. Keep moving.
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