So, since I left Time Out Farms, I haven’t had time to write anything at all. I’ve been to Vancouver, Victoria and Ucluelet and I’ve been busy experiencing so many cool and exciting things that I simply haven’t had time to write it all down. But I have so much to tell, and I’ve kept notes. So, now that I’ve settled down at a farm again (which seems totally awesome, by the way), I’ll hopefully have time to catch up with my writing in the evenings.

I’ll publish them in chronological order, which means that you’ll probably have to wait a little for the stories from Ucluelet and the new farm. Since it was quite a while ago that I arrived in Vancouver, I’ll begin the texts that are date specific with the date, not only the day of the week. And I’ll do it the Swedish way: 7/5 means the 7th of May and nothing else.

So, please, bear with me. These last two weeks have left me overflowing with words.

I just realised. I haven’t spoken Swedish for about five weeks. I Skyped with Kirke sometime just in the beginnng of my stay at the farm, and I’ve Skyped with my mom, but with her I always speak Finnish. So. No Swedish for five weeks. Excepting the odd conversation with a dog or a cat, maybe, and a couple of Swedish folk songs sung for the horses while cleaning the stalls. That’s the longest period I’ve ever gone without speaking Swedish. Ever. It feels strange.

Luckily, Frida will fly in to Vancouver tomorrow.

Friday: I woke up this morning and felt empty, but didn’t really know why. It was a lovely spring day outside and I was in Vancouver.

Until I realised that there was no animals around. No cats to lay on my chest, no dogs to lick my fingers even before I’ve woken up properly. No horses to neigh impatiently when I finally got out into the mist to feed them their breakfast.

Jeremy, one of my couchsurfing hosts, has a lovebird called Tuna. She’s a real personality, charming as hell and she bites everything. But she’s no Alex. Or Remy. Or Victor. It’s gonna take some time to get used to only being around humans again.

I’ve been such a good girl at the farm. Not only did I work and ride all day, I also decided to do some stomach excersices, you know, to not get problems with my back later. So every day, after work but before lunch, I did sit-ups. I even managed to work myself into a sweat. I felt so proud of myself.

Remy the dog used to come into my room and lie under my bed. But when he was laying there and I started doing my sit-ups, he always crawled out and left, after giving me a long look from the door. He probably thought I’d gone mad.

And in the evenings, inbetween brushing my teeth and rinsing with mouth wash, I flossed. Every night. Back home, I only used to do it, like, a couple of times a week. But here, I made a ceremony out of it. My dentist would be so proud of me.

But as a parting gift, the night before I left, my dental floss disappeared. I had this roll, actually a refill that I hadn’t bothered to put in a box. A few nights earlier, I hadn’t been able to find the end, so I had had to pull at different parts of the roll until I found the end. Which lead to the roll having a few loose loops and stuff. I’m pretty sure Leo the mongrel cat found it on one of his explorations in my room and thought it looked like a fun toy. He is the only creature that I know that would steal dental floss.

I guess that that was a parting gift of sorts. He welcomed me to Time Out Farms by stealing my favourite pen, and he said farewell by stealing my dental floss. Everyone has their ways.

When the Germans left, I thought that I wouldn’t have to listen to the country radio station anymore. But, turns out, the Austrian girls also liked country. So, with the argument that I was the only one with a rain coat, I volunteered to do all the paddocks, outside, in the pouring rain. But don’t think that I’m that altruistic. You see, that far away from the radio, I could listen to my own music instead, in my mp3-player. So my three last days of working didn’t turn out that bad, in spite of the rain.

I listened through Annika Norlin’s entire discography. God I love that woman. She’s such a master lyricist. And then, once the last odd Hello Saferide single was over, the player contnued on to Håkan Hellström. When the crazy Brazilian drums in “Mitt Gullbergs kaj paradis” started beating in my headphones, I couldn’t help it. I started dancing, it was impossible not to. With the rake as my partner. Junior must have thought I’d lost it, he looked at me as if I were an UFO or something else questionable.

I must have been fifteen when Håkan’s second record came and I listened to it like crazy, but now I hadn’t heard it for years. It was a wonderful morning. That energy. I was happy all day after that.

My last week at Time Out Farms felt more like I was waiting to leave than anything else. Not in the sense that I wanted to get out of there – it was more a combination of circumstances that gave me too much time to think, which in turn lead to me dive into my travel plans and guide books. So much, that I probably spent more time reading than I actually spent with the horses.

Firsty, all those wwoofers arrived. With eight people around, talking (mostly German) all the time, I was so mentally overwhelmed that I eventually couldn’t handle spending time with anyone at all. Instead, I sat in my room reading about Vancouver, Vancouver Island, Washington state and Oregon. Watching TV shows. When three of the Germans, and then finally the last two, left on Sunday and Tuesday, the house got so much more quiet and calm.

Secondly, it rained more or less the entire week. There was a slight brake in the downpour over the weekend, so on Monday I got to ride Portia one last time. Then the rain came back and from Monday evening until Thursday midday, it poured down non-stop. No riding. No grooming. Just mud and the smell of wet dogs. So I read guide books and played card games with the three remaining wwoofers.

Pancake breakfast with the nine wwoofers and a few additionql guests.

On Sunday I had my last pancake breakfast. (Did I ever tell you that? That every Sunday, Diane and Willie make pancakes for breakfast? And that I’ve learnt to eat them the real Canadian way: with sour cream, fruit, berries or jam (home made strawberry-rhubarb sauce was by far the best we had) and maple syrup.)

Fort Langley

On Monday, Benedicte and me (the only two non-German speaking wwoofers at the farm, she is French) biked in to Fort Langley for some chocolate and ended up buying floats at a diner. Fort Langley is this almost-too-cute, film set-like village of two streets with shops selling antiques and British candy and other fancy stuff. The diner looked like a too clean place from the fifties. Even the rock n’ roll playing in the speakers tried to convince us that we in fact had stepped into a time-machine. But it was cute, and the day was chokingly hot, so the floats were just what we needed. You see, floats are these really American things consisting of a glass of some kind of soda with vanilla ice cream on top. I chose a root beer, to get the real American diner experience. It was good. Extremely sweet, but when have I ever had trouble with sweet things? Had I been sixteen years younger, I would have loved it.

Me, having a float at the Fort Langley diner.

The rest was mostly rain, and on Wednesday evening Diane cooked this wonderful chicken dish. The dinner was all laughs and jokes with Diane and Jay, Benedicte and the two Austrian girls. That’s something I’ll miss, being three or four wwoofers at Time Out Farms, enjoying Dianes wonderful cooking each night. Laughing at Jay’s bad jokes and feeling that contentedness in my body that is only possible after a whole day of real physical labour.

On thursday afternoon, I left for Vancouver.

One of the horses that I’ve been helping Jay train, is one of the horses that Diane has bred herself. She’s a big, brown thoroughbred. Her name is Portia.

She isn’t that young anymore, maybe eight or so, but she has a story that explains why she is here training with Jay, when she should be somewhere else, winning horse shows. Jay got her started a couple of years ago, and he says it went well. Then Diane sent her to a training stable, where they were supposed to continue her training and make her a show jumping horse. But they couldn’t handle her. Jay thinks that, as English riders often are, they were too tough on her and didn’t understand that she’s a sensitive horse. They completely ruined her self-confidence, and then they sent her back to Diane.

In a way, training a horse that’s already been trained, but wrongly, is much harder than starting up a horse that has no training at all. The first times with me on Portia, we had to just concentrate on getting her to not want to run away from everything. Eventually she realised that I wasn’t going to pull her mouth – I didn’t even ride with a bit. Jay had me riding in a halter, just to make sure that I didn’t accidentally pull her mouth. For every training session, she got calmer and more relaxed, she stopped trying to run away and actually listened to what I tried to ask of her.

Oh, but when she was calm, she had the most wonderful trot, so fluent and energic. And her canter, once she stopped racing, was really easy to sit in. I could feel that she had the potential for quick speed changes, something that is very important in a show jumping horse. And the fluency of her stride made me believe that she would be a real master jumper too. If only she had a rider whom she trusted and who inspired self-confidence in her.

Every training session, before mounting, Jay taught me how to do the roundpenning exercises with her. Getting her to run around me, stop, look me up, how I should get her to move away from me and then follow me. It looks so easy when Jay does it, but being there in the middle of the roundpen, with an excited horse cantering around me – it’s scary. Not in the way that I was afraid, but more that I was nervous that I would do something wrong and totally scare her instead. But Jay helped me, gave me instructions and maybe told me off a couple of times. Mostly, I felt clumsy and stupid, but for every time I got a little bit more secure, my timing got a little bit better and Portia got a little bit more relaxed.

During our last training session, I got her to dance around me and then follow me like a huge, brown dog. It’s an amazing feeling, when a horse wants to be with you like that.

Jay said that she liked me, already from the start, and that I looked good on her. I felt that too. Sometimes you just connect with a horse, it’s like you understand each other. That was what happened the first time I rode my pony Ofelia. And something similar happened with Portia. Not as if everything was just perfect right away, but more like she made me become the rider she needed in order to become a better riding horse. She needed a calm and light rider, so that’s what I became. Without even trying.

And it’s the same with people, really. The ones that I like the most also tend to be the ones that bring out the sides of me that I like the most myself. For me, that is really important. Some people just make me awful, while others bring out new and exciting things in me that I didn’t even know was there.

That’s what Portia did. She was this beautiful creature who just needed someone to be slow with her, be calm and believe in her. That’s my biggest regret, now that I’ve left Time Out Farms, that I won’t be able to continue being that person for her.

Horses are like people. Some love to be photographed and will gladly show you their best side. While others can’t stand the pressure and aoways make funny faces instead. Guess what kind Portia is?

But in the end, I still want to become a geographer. Work as a geographer. So, in a way, one could ask what the point with all this horse shit is. More than just for the fun of it. I won’t need to know about the hierarchy in a horse flock when I get samples from groundwater wells, or whatever it is I’ll be doing to earn my living. My curriculum vitae won’t look more attractive if I add the ability “kinda knows how to get a horse to trust me” on it. It could seem as if I’ve walked into a dead end here.

The fun is obviously the main reason for me being here and that’s what I’ll be taking with me most when I leave. The memories of all the horses and the great connection Jay helped me to get with some of them. Especially Portia. But I also think that one could look at this training programme of Jay’s in a slightly broader sense too, which would give the practitioner an insight that is relevant even for the academic geographer.

It’s about mankinds relationship to nature. Firstly, the whole concept of a nature outside and independent of humans is neither constructive in a practical sense, nor true. Nature is in a constant state of change and at the moment humans happen to be part of that change. Nature has no opinions, and doesn’t value one state of things above any other. Nature is. It’s us humans that value, we who are in BIG trouble if the change spirals out of control. Being an environmentalist is purely out of self-interest.

But that doesn’t mean that we, as conscious beings, can do just as we like. This tradition of seeing nature as one entity, separate from humans, has lead us to use all other organisms on our planet for our own gain. Humans have a long history of taking what we want, without considering the consequences. It’s not only our present Western civilization. Look at the Mayas. They (probably) consumed themselves to death (through obliterated forests and over-used soils), with some assistance from the ever-ominous El Nino-Southern Oscillation. What we should learn from all the civilizations that have fallen before our own, is that in order not to destroy ourselves, we have to consider the other organisms in our surroundings aswell. And to act according to their needs while trying to achieve our goals. In that way, everyone wins.

And that’s exactly what Jay is doing. He has taken one tiny part of the non-human world, the horses, and taught himself how to train them on their terms. The goal with the training programme is still very human, the horses are trained for riding, but it is done in a way that the horses can understand. While training with the horse logic that Jay keeps talking about, the horses actually enjoy being ridden. Because, what they want is to trust and please a stong leader. And if the rider can convince the horse that she is a strong leader, the riding becomes a pleasure for both parties.

In my opinion, that is what we should do with most things in the world. First realise that we are a part of the whole. And then try to find ways that works for all parties involved. Mosses aswell as frogs aswell as humans. It might be much more complicated, doing things in this way. But we humans pride ourselves for being intelligent. For once, we should use that intelligence for something good.

So, in that sense, my training with Jay might also have been useful for my future career as a geographer.

The exhibit at the Royal Alberta Museum that I enjoyed the most was the temporary photo collection of the moths. So, guess if I was excited when I found a sleeping moth on the fence in Russ’ paddock. Not as pretty and colourful as the moths in the exhibit, but still. A moth. My own little moth photo.

Today, I’ve been traveling for 46 days. Even considering that the first 27 chapters on this blog were written in Sweden before I left, 73 chapters in 46 days is a considerable amount of text. I find it hard being moderate. Not only when it comes to words.

I doubt anyone has managed to get through everything, but as long as most of the chapters get read by someone, I’m happy. And even if they wouldn’t, I get such a feeling of satisfaction after having finished a text, that actually – I don’t care if anyone reads at all. I’ll probably just keep on writing until I touch ground in Stockholm on the first of August. As long as the tablet doesn’t brake, there’s no stopping me.

So here we go – excitedly continuing towards the two-hundredth chapter.