Narrative and photographs by Meredith Stephens
Grief was something I thought I could run away from. If I created as much physical distance as I could from my place of loss, surely I could find healing. I had just lost my beautiful sister Stephanie after more than five decades of sisterhood and hoped that I could find healing in travelling to distant climes. There couldn’t be anywhere more distant than the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. The time zone is sixteen hours behind Adelaide, and the season is contrasting. Surely by distancing myself in time and space I could recover from my grief.
My partner Alex’s chief pleasures are planting trees, sailing, and hiking. In the Sierra Nevada, he could indulge his passion for hiking. We arrived in the Sierra in early June and stayed in a cedar house surrounded by ponderosa pines, Douglas firs and junipers, yawning into the sky. Every day we planned a hike along the numerous trails winding through the mountains. Even in June, it was pleasantly cool. Alex lit a fire in the fireplace every evening, and I donned a thick jumper. On our third day, our chosen hike followed a trail alongside the northern shoreline of Shaver Lake.
“If a bear approaches, the worst thing you can do is run away. Hold your ground and shout at them. Otherwise, they will think you are prey,” warned Alex.
Till then, I had been enjoying my stroll through the mountains at an elevation of almost 1800 metres, and it never occurred to me that we could cross paths with a bear. In Australia we often crossed paths with kangaroos, who would hold our gaze for a few seconds before gracefully hopping away. I had never considered that wild animals could be predators. Then, on second thoughts, I thought it would be nice to see a bear, and with Alex alongside me, felt less vulnerable.
“You have encountered wild bears before in California, haven’t you?” I quizzed Alex.
“Oh yes, several times,” he confirmed.
“Wasn’t there one time when you were alarmed?”
“Yes. That was when I was hiking alone in Montana. They couldn’t hear me. If a bear can hear you, they are more likely to stay out of your way. Some people use whistles.”
I started scanning the hillside for signs of large moving creatures, but instead my attention was drawn to the abundant wildflowers that I had never seen in Australia. I noticed bright red flowers protruding beneath the huge pine trees, known as Snow plants.
I kept longing to spot a bear, but instead continued to notice wildflowers. The most common wildflowers were sensed by smell before I sighted them, small creamy flowers with a heady fragrance of rich honey. I wished I could photograph the smell.
The nearby town of Shaver Lake had been saved by the firefighters in the 2020 wildfire known as the Creek Fire, the largest fire in California’s history. You could see the line where the fire had been stopped. On one side were scarred mountains which had lost their vegetation, and on the other remained majestic pine and fir trees.
On the side that had been spared, some pink flowers, known as mountain pride, asserted themselves through a crack in a boulder.
I had been looking for bears, but instead found myself in the midst of a North American spring. Splashes of colour of ever more exotic wildflowers emerged along the roadsides and the trails.
My hope to overcome grief through travel to a distant land had been in vain. Moving from a southern hemispheric autumn to a northern spring, and moving back sixteen hours in time to yesterday, was not enough to relieve me of my mourning. I missed phone calls and text messages from my sister Stephanie, and especially the opportunity to recount the tales of my travels when I returned home. Stephanie was my most avid listener, and never expressed any envy when I regaled my travel tales. Her concentration propelled me to provide ever more details of my travels. Now, I honour her memory by continuing to pursue the kinds of activities that she took delight in and writing the kinds of stories that she enjoyed.
Meredith Stephens is an applied linguist from South Australia. Her work has appeared in Transnational Literature, The Muse, The Font – A Literary Journal for Language Teachers, The Journal of Literature in Language Teaching, The Writers’ and Readers’ Magazine, Reading in a Foreign Language, and in chapters in anthologies published by Demeter Press, Canada.
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