And reading it for fun, because that’s what this historical novel has been to pen: a great deal of fun. And all the while, thinking about the second book in the series, The Third Riel Conspiracy.

In September Jenn and I took a road trip to Saskatchewan. While Jenn wanted to go somewhere sunny and warm where we could surf and lie in a hammock and drink fruity drinks, I wanted to go to Saskatchewan, where I could immerse myself in the settings of the North West Rebellion. Jenn, being supportive and enthusiastic about my writing career relented, and we drove 2000 kilometers across mountain ranges and aspen parkland and out onto the great Canadian prairie in pursuit of our nation’s magnificent history.

Salmon at Baily's Cutte, Well's Grey Provincial Park

Along the way we stopped in some of the West’s most amazing places: Well’s Grey Provincial Park, where we watched the vanguard of this year’s tremendous salmon run jumping Bailey’s Chute on the Clearwater River; Mount Robson Provincial and Jasper National Park, shrouded in fog and cloud; Elk Island National Park, its bison passing like ephemeral ghosts in the night; and the highlight: Prince Albert National Park, with its wild lakes, spectacular forests and magical wolves.

Prince Albert National Park

But the unexpected centerpiece of the trip was the discovery that this chapter of Canada’s history took place in some of the most amazing landscapes and verdant locations I’ve visited. It stands to reason: though there were many origins of the Riel Rebellion – or Resistance, as many in central Saskatchewan call it – the spender of the land, and the Métis and woodland Cree’s relationship with it, was certainly central to their complaint with the Dominion Government. The distant bureaucracy in Ottawa wanted to impose a square lot survey on a landscape and a way of life dependent on the serpentine Saskatchewan Rivers. Here, as they had in Upper Canada, the french speaking Métis organized their farms and their lives along elongated rectangular river lots. This way, each farm got access to the necessary river corridor for transportation and irrigation.

Standing on the hilltop overlooking the historic town of Batoche, the location of the decisive four day battle between General Middleton’s Dominion forces and Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont’s Metis and Cree, its plain to see why these men were willing to fight and die for what they believed in.

For three or four days Jenn and I drove the back-roads of Saskatchewan, touring various historic sites.

Fort Pitt, on the shores of the North Saskatchewan River, was our first stop. As we raced along the never-ending dirt roads of this beautiful area near the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, we were concerned that we might arrive after the Interpretive Centre closed. It being cold and windy on the plains in late September, we fanaticized about a hot chocolate in the cafeteria after our tour of the site.

Arriving to find that Fort Pitt sported little more than a cluster of (well written) interpretive signs and some four-by-four timbers laid out where the buildings of the Hudson’s Bay post once stood was a wake-up call.

We’d left the sometimes over-presented world of the mountain National Park’s behind and were on our own. That made more room for our imagination.

Later that afternoon, with the sun setting low, we visited first the old town of Frenchman Butte, and then the swell of land after which the town is named. There on that bluff a band of woodland Cree, retreating from the Alberta Field Force and the dauntless Sam Steele, made a brief stand. Riffle pits can still be seen amid the undergrowth.

The South Saskatchewan River from Fort Pitt

Fort Carlton

Next we made for Fort Carlton, where there is more than just the outline of the Fort, but where we were too late in the season for an actual tour inside the ramparts. Better still, however, was the walk through the woods to the North Saskatchewan River, where an unidentified owl swooped low across our path, or  through the grasses and brush on the bluffs above, where we jumped a red fox from his resting place.

What ensued was about what I expected: I fell in love with the landscape, which is what happens almost every time I visit a new part of this country. And as I did, the landscape itself started to tell its story to me, and those tales became entangled with the history of the place, and wove their way into my fictional recreations.

Constructing a historical murder mystery, set in what today is known as Lake Louise, but was in 1884 called Holt City, or the Summit, and doing it again on the banks of the South Saskatchewan River, in Batoche, posses numerous challenges, but conveying the glory of the place is not one of them. Canada’s history is set amid fabulously beautiful landscapes that have, these hundreds of years, preserved the essence of our stories in their stone ramparts, as in Lake Louise, and their dips and swells and mottled forests, such as at Frenchman’s Butte.

What I do find to be a challenge is this: how do I preserve the essence of Canadian history while weaving a wholly fictional narrative around it? How do I present Canadian history in a way that is thrilling and inviting – which is my purpose with the Durrant Wallace series – while remaining true to the key events of the past?

Finding an answer to this question was my purpose in our final stop on our pilgrimage in Batoche.

The Cemetary at Batoche National Historic Site

This would become the centerpiece for the mystery behind the second book in the Durrant Wallace series, set during the North West Rebellion. Durrant Wallace, Sergeant in the North West Mounted Police, is requested by Superintendant Sam Steele to travel with haste into the fray of the battle in order to assist with an investigation. Arriving at Batoche Durrant is perplexed by the strange circumstances surrounding the demise of Reuben Wake, far behind the line of battle in the defensive structure called the Zereba. When the Mountie begins his own inquiry into what motive there might have been for the assignation, he learns that there are many who wanted Wake dead, and had the opportunity to commit the crime during the chaos of Batoche. Those motivations, and the men Durrant suspects of committing the crime, mirror the various causes of the Resistance itself. In this way I can allow Durrant to trace the history of the battle, and the Rebellion itself, back through time in order to present the actually history of the period, while telling the fictional story.

It’s still a fine line. Without revealing too much of the plot of either book (The End of the Line will be published by Touchwood in the fall of 2011, with The Third Riel Conspiracy following a year later), things happen in well known places such as the famous Kicking Horse Pass, on the Continental Divide between present day Alberta and BC, and on the banks of the South Saskatchewan River at Batoche, that may stretch fact and blur the lines between history and fiction.  My purpose is to tell a good story, and if in doing so a few more people can see that Canadian history – even without the brash and ill-tempered North West Mounted Police Sergeant barging through it – is fascinating and important reading, then it’s worth the literary risk.

Follow these stories and more on Twitter @stephenlegault.

In Nanaimo I met with Father Alen and his wife Daphne who own Nanaimo Maps and Charts on Church Street. This downtown retailer is now expanding to make room for an impressive collection of general interest and west coast books. As is my habit these days, I went into the store to say hello and introduce myself and my books and the good Father and Daphne bought ten copies of the Darkening Archipelago and had them up in the window before I could say goodbye!

Next I met Richard at Back Page Books, a new shop on Wesley Street, just across the highway from downtown Nanaimo. He and his wife Ashley opened the shop in November and recently hosted my acquaintance and fellow Canmore, Alberta resident Jerry Auld whose book Hooker and Brown has been generating a lot of buzz and some amazing reviews. Richard and Ashley have a lovely shop, perfect for sitting and enjoying a cup of coffee and browsing their great assortment of local, national and international titles.

I even stopped at Chapters on the way out of town where I signed five copies of the DA and had a great chat with a sales manager. There’s enough love to go around.

Then it was onto Tofino and to spend some time with Michael Mullin who certainly ranks among my favorite booksellers across Canada (Frances Thorsen of Victoria’s Chronicles of Crime is hands-down my biggest supporter). As well as being an oyster grower, whale watching guide, former seine fisherman and environmental activist, Michael owns Mermaid Tales Bookshop. It’s a warm, inviting store with an amazing variety of books and toys and kites right on Tofino’s main drag. Michael hosted an evening reading for the Darkening Archipelago at Darwin’s Café in the Botanical Gardens’ on Saturday night which was a highlight so far in my efforts to promote this book, and the critical issues that create the backbone of the book’s environmental theme. In addition to Michael, George and Josie from the Garden’s, and Jenn and I, there were fourteen people at the reading, and Michael sold fourteen books. He tells me that’s a great ratio. Michael has taken a shine to Carry Tiger to Mountain: The Tao of Activism and Leadership, which makes me think that I should spend more time promoting that book as I have my more recent publishing efforts.

I left Tofino feeling pretty good about the weekend’s undertaking. It was the kind of weekend that makes me proud to be a writer: a receptive and interested audience, asking good questions and engaging in the conservation (and laughing at my corny jokes). And book sellers, who despite the reports of ruinous conditions in the trade are not only soldiering on, but are starting from scratch, promoting books about which they are passionate.

In short, it was the kind of weekend that makes me excited to be an author. It makes me want to work harder, both by writing better books and by doing more to promote them and the people who sell them. It makes me want to support those who make my efforts possible by taking the enormous economic risk to open and stock a book store full of wonderful titles. It makes me want to succeed, not just for my own sake and my families, but for them.

Jason Meyers is walking the length of the Bruce Trail, a total of 885 kilometers, through some of the most lovely country remaining in Southern Ontario. He is joined by his partner, singer and songwriters Bri-anne Swan, who will be performing concerts along the way. Jason and Bri-anne’s odyssey is being under taken to raise awareness of and money for research into a cure for Multiple Sclerosis.

Alexandra Morton is walking down the length of Vancouver Island, having started by boat on Malcolm Island at the mouth of The Broughton Archipelago, and will arrive in Victoria on May 8^th, after walking more than 450 kilometers and visiting dozens of communities along the way.

Alex is walking for wild salmon. Dubbed “the get out migration” she and dozens – and likely hundreds before she reaches her destination — of others are walking to send a clear message to Canada’s federal government: that open net fish farms are killing wild salmon. These wild creatures are the electric current that charge the Pacific coast. Hundreds of communities depend on them. The only acceptable solution is to get the salmon farms out of wild salmon habitat and onto land where they can be better controlled.

Both of these extraordinary people are pilgrims and I am enormously proud to know them.

Jason is a pretty close friend. We met in 2001 or 02 in Canmore, Alberta where Jason was working for a marketing company and I was working for a small conservation group called Wildcanada.net. Jason came on board as a volunteer to help us get our act together, giving us valuable insight into how to reach new markets with our conservation message. Shortly thereafter we hired him and I think his life went downhill after that. Now he has a thriving web strategy company called Five Stones and lives in Toronto. He has supported me through some pretty tough decisions and rocky times, and I am grateful for his devoted friendship.

He is one of the most earnest, loyal and hard working people I have ever met. He describes himself as “part technocrat, part gypsy, part mountain goat” and is happiest and most at peace while walking. Recently he walked the 900 kilometer Camino de Santiago trail in Spain and I’m pretty sure that journey changed his life. Both he and Bri-anne have people close to them who are affected by MS, and so the He Walks, She Rocks journey is dedicated to them.

I’ve only met Alex Morton once, at her home in Sointula, on Malcolm Island, where she was kind enough to take me in and feed me wild salmon while I was researching The Darkening Archipelago. Alex is the most passionate and reasonable voice I’ve ever met for salmon and the ecosystem that they bind together. She measures her ardor with a scientist’s eye for levelheaded insight into what is destroying our oceans and practical solutions for restoring it to health. She read and latter “blurbed” for the DA, and her insight made it a better book without a doubt.

That these two amazing people are walking, each for a cause that is close to their hearts and critically important, at the same time is no coincidence.

Pilgrimage is a part of most every major religion in the world. Muslims have Mecca, Jews have Jerusalem, Buddhists have the Bodi tree at Mahabodhi Temple Complex in Bodh Gaya, Bihar, India. When we journey to these places, we do so for intensely personal reasons. While the outward journey may be one of self sacrifice, of faith, of community, the inward journey may be about compassion, devotion, and love.

It is this love that is needed so desperately now, at this perilous and profoundly opportunistic intersection in human evolution. When people are capable of such love for life, for friends, for family, for the wild earth that we are inextricably a part of, there is cause for hope, for joy, for our future.

Two people surrounded by many, each on a journey for something that they love. Join them.

The He Walks She Rocks journey: www.hewalkssherocks.ca.

The Get Out Migration: www.salmonaresacred.org.

What each of these events lacked in volume (Victoria had about 20 people, but Calgary and Canmore had just a handful each) they made up for in spirit. It was great to celegrate the release of my third book with friends and family.

In Calgary I got to see good friends Blaine and Sarah, and talk with them about Mito Canada, a non-profit organization that they have started to address mitocondrial disease, which struck their son Evan two years ago, leaving him severly disabled. I never, ever talk with these two amazing parents without feeling deeply inspired.

In Canmore I was able to read to some close friends who I worked with while serving on the Board of Directors of Yellowstone to Yukon from 1996-2004, and while working with Wildcanada.net from 1999-2005. I love Joy McLean’s amazing store Cafe Books, which is the last book store standing in the Bow Valley after shops in Banff and Lake Louise went under in the last year.

But the highlight of the week of promotion had to be homebase in Victoria, where my wife Jenn presented me with a cake decorated to look like the cover of the Darkening Archipelago, and where Rio stood up after my reading to announce to the intimate crowd that he thought I was a “very good writer” and that he had recently given his grade 2 teacher a copy of the book because they were studying wild salmon in class.

Finally, on the ferry returning across the Straight of Georgia last night, Jenn and I found a facing of the DA in the ship’s gift shop! Its good exposure for a book about troubled waters just to the north of this passage. Though I asked her not to, I was secretly delighted when Jenn let out a little sequel when we spotted the books. She can get away with it: I can’t.

I could care less if the Globe and Mail ever reviews my books so long as I have family who support what I do, and who think I’m a good writer.

OK, the Globe could pen a review too, if they want….

Rio and Steph and the Cake at Chronicles of Crime in Victoria

Sign outside Canmore's Cafe Books

Reading to new friends and old in Canmore, Alberta

Finding the DA in the gift shop on the Spirit of Vancouver Island

In writing The Darkening Archipelago, I choose a real landscape and real issues to set the story among. The Broughton Archipelago, and the salmon farming controversy that rages within its troubled waters is very real. But I was also aware that I would need to take creative liberties with the location and with the monumental challenges facing wild salmon and the communities that rely on them for survival to create a plausible story.

Looking east towards the Broughton from Malcolm Island

Canoe behind the band office, Alert Bay, BC

Early in the creation of the storyline for The Darkening Archipelago I decided that rather than set the crux of the story on an existing island — which would entail knowing that place very well, which wasn’t really feasible for me — that I would image a new one, and create it as pure fiction. I did so, christening it Parish Island and there created the community of Port Lostcoast, where Archie Ravenwing and his daughter Grace live. Like many communities throughout the knot of islands that pepper the BC coast, this one is a resource based community, eking a merge existence from the forests and the oceans that define this part of British Columbia.

Fishing Boat, Malcolm Island

Also like many of the communities that line the bays and inlets of the coast, Port Lostcoast is racially diverse; First Nations people are the majority, but a small white community also lives there. That First Nation, in fact, is also imagined. The Port Lostcoast Band and the “North Salish” people are fiction, and while I drew from the broad history of the region and the cultures it has spawned, don’t mistake my fictional representation in the book for the real, complex and animated culture that has lived among the Broughton for more than ten thousand years.

It was on my road trip with Josh that I decided to write the community of Alert Bay into the book. Until that point, several chapters of The Darkening Archipelago were to be set on the “big island” in Port McNeil. But I was charmed by Alert Bay, and the fact that it is a living example of an island that is half First Nations and half white made it all the more interesting to me from the perspective of plot development.

The all too real presence of the the ancient residential school – built in 1829 – which now houses the local Band Office, helped set some of the context for The Darkening Archipelago. Like so many First Nations people in Canada, Archie Ravenwing, and his father and mother before him, were taken from their families, robbed of their language, culture and identify, and raised by strangers in these institutions. Many suffered physical and sexual abuse, and all were subject to the emotional and mental cruelty that is tantamount to cultural genocide. The scars of that terrible period in Canadian history haunt First Nations people, and are a black mark on our progress as a country.

That the residential school in Alert Bay now houses the Band Office, and forms the backdrop to traditional totem carving efforts, dug-out canoe projects, and the U’mista Cultural Museum is a testimony to the real First Nations of the Broughton Archipelago’s resilience, spirit, and sense of place.

The "re-purposed" Band Office from the First Nations Dock in Albert Bay, British Columbia

In addition to being charmed by Alert Bay, I was likewise charmed by my short time with renowned wild salmon activist Alexandra Morton. It is to her that the spirit of The Darkening Archipelago belongs. During my visit to Malcolm Island Josh and I had dinner with Alex – wild salmon of course – and we spent the evening talking about her experiences taking on the salmon farming industry, exposing the plague of sea ice that infest these waters, and continuing to root herself in her own sense of place.

Totems in Alert Bay, BC

My own sense of place for The Darkening Archipelago is as much a feeling as it is fact. It is a landscape of myth and magic, or powerful totems and ancient cultures. It is home of Ulmeth, grandfather raven, and of the Salmon people, who for Milena have co-existed with the wild salmon of the Broughton Archipelago in a way that allowed both to thrive. It is the islands fridged with tattered clouds and mountains that rise up from the green waters of Knight Inlet to rip the sky. It is a place real, it is a place imaged, it is a place for things precious and wild and one on the very brink of their existence.

Totem, First Nations Dock, Alert Bay, BC

The former Residential School in Alert Bay, which is now the band office.

U'mista Cultural Centre (left) and the former residential school (far right) in Albert Bay, BC

The Cole Blackwater mysteries were conceived during a rain-soaked trip to Costa Rica in the fall of 2003. Before the metaphori­cal ink for the plot of the first book had dried, I began to think about what other kinds of trouble Cole might find himself in.

Cole Blackwater is, in the words of his drinking buddy, Dusty Stevens, an environmental crusader — a champion of lost causes. But the greatest compliment anybody gave me after The Cardi­nal Divide was released was that the environmental message was “subtle.” Because, first and foremost for me when writing the Cole Blackwater series is the plot. If the book is to be just a thinly disguised polemic on environmental and social jus­tice issues, then I may as well just write essays. That said, the Cole Blackwater mysteries are an avenue for bringing important issues facing the future of our society, and our planet, to a new audience. As I continue to develop this series, I find no shortage of subjects to choose from.

In 2003, when I first pieced together The Cardinal Divide, I was working for a small national conservation organization called Wildcanada.net. One of the campaigns we championed was called “Farmed and Dangerous.” On behalf of the Living Oceans Society we helped people take action to ensure a future for wild salmon and stop massive new salmon farming opera­tions from being developed along the bc coast. I began to wonderwhat the illustrious/altruistic Cole Blackwater might have to say about salmon farming, and how he could get involved in the effort to rid the province’s coastal waters of these death traps for wild salmon.

Before I even had a plot, I knew the title: The Darkening Archipelago. The archipelago in question is the Broughton — ground zero for the explosive growth of salmon farming in bc. From the very beginning, I knew that this book would relate an ominous story indeed. The Darkening Archipelago maps out a race against time and overwhelming odds to keep both human souls and wild ecosystems from falling into unending darkness. But it is also a story about redemption. The three protagonists in the story — Cole, Nancy, and Archie Ravenwing — all contemplate their belief at some point in the power of redemption. None of them reach any conclusions.

Jenn's photo of The Garden at Hollyhock

That is the “what” of the story process. Here is the “how”: during the summer of 2006 I received the gift of time from my friend Joel Solomon. He helped me spend a week at the Holly­hock Retreat Centre on Cortes Island, away from ringing phones and petty distractions, like the need to feed myself. There I sequestered myself in the tiny upstairs library. On massive sheets of butcher paper I drew out a twenty foot long storyboard for The Darkening Archipelago. In the afternoons I would sit on the beach and review what I had written, and work on char­acter development and narrative. The whole story took shape before my eyes. The three converging plot lines featuring Cole, Archie and Nancy formed separate chapter “bubbles” which, two thirds of the way through the book, coalesced into one nar-rative arc.

Because of this preparation, I was able to sit down and pen the first draft of The Darkening Archipelago in January and Feb­ruary of 2007. During a paroxysmal period of scribbling I wrote 310 pages and 90,000 words in 28 days. As winter slowly ebbed on the “wet coast,” I took advantage of the pivot towards spring and the burst of energy it brought, and sometimes rose as early as 4 am to write.

There are many factors that contribute to such voluminous outbursts. It would be another six months before I heard from NeWest Press that the first book in the series, The Cardinal Divide, would be published. The creation of a second book in a series that was yet to have its first volume accepted for publica­tion was an act of pure faith.

The author on the beach at Hollyhock where much of the Darkening Archipelago's plot took shape in the summer of 2006

But having just received some excellent feedback on The Car­dinal Divide from Victoria bookseller Frances Thorsen, I spent the first couple of weeks of the new year editing for the eight or ninth time the entire manuscript. That got me pretty excited about the characters — Cole and Nancy in particular — and I wanted to see what might happen to them in the second book of the series.

While the first draft of The Darkening Archipelago took shape very quickly, it took two more years to finish it. The version I finally submitted to NeWest for publication was draft number nine or ten — I lost track. But every single time I sat down to work on the manuscript was a pure joy.

I owe a lot to Joel Solomon and Hollyhock for the time and space they have given me to work on what I think is important and helpful in this troubled world. You can support other artists, writers, activists and business leaders by donating to the Hollyhock Scholarship Fund held by The Tides Canada Foundation. This fund makes it possible for many individuals to visit Cortes Island and Hollyhock every year.

One of the original story boards for the Darkening Archipelago constructed in 2006. Click on the image to enlarge. I don't know what, in Chapter Twelve, cost $42.09....

To be nominated for this award, at the Banff Mountain Book Festival means a lot to me.

The real Cardinal Divide

I went to the very first Mountain Book Festival, when it was still the poor cousin of the Banff Mountain Film Festival. That was 16 years ago: I was living in Lake Louise at the time, penning columns on mountain life and the mountain environment for the local newspapers, and dreaming that someday I might have a book to display at the nominations table.

I met Chic Scott at that Book Festival that first year, and we began what was a short-lived tradition of a cup of tea or coffee together to talk about climbing, skiing and writing. It’s been ten years since I sat down with Chic to talk shop; he’s nominated for the same award this year – as are friends John Marriott and Graeme Pole – so I hope maybe we can all meet to share stories about writing, photography and the mountains we love.

The landscape is the protagonist in The Cardinal Divide. The craggy ridge of the Divide itself is always there, as the soon to be deceased mine manager notes in the prologue of the book: “He craned his neck and looked south into the darkness, beyond the existing mine, toward the Cardinal Divide’s jagged back. In his minds’ eye he saw the reef of stone rising abruptly from the rolling foothills that broke against the implacable wall of the Rocky Mountains. Though the Divide was beyond his life of sight, Mike Barnes knew it was there. Could not forget it was there. So much angst over a hill.”

While the book is a murder mystery, it’s about very real issues and a very real place; issues that for more than a decade as an activist in Alberta I struggled with, and that for 30 years have been vexing many people across North America: How do we protect a place that we love from the overwhelming forces of single-minded progress? How do we bridge such a cardinal divide within our communities, when one group of people look back to short term exploitation to prosper while others look forward to sustainable solutions, back lack the means to implement them?

The Cardinal Divide doesn’t answer these questions, but set among the murder mystery is the story of a community’s connection to a powerful place. In asking the question we’re one step closer to an answer.

It’s a great honor to be nominated for this award.

Sun set at Green River Overlook, Canyonlands National Park

It wasn’t my first trip to the Four Corners region. During the winter of 1993-94 I spent five months in the Southwest, first volunteering at Grand Canyon National Park as a Ranger Naturalist, and then down through southern Arizona and New Mexico, and back up through the high country around Santa Fe. But I was stupid, and was traveling light, so didn’t bring my real camera with me, just a tiny Olympus point-and-shoot.

Since my first trip down the Green River I’ve been back to Utah five times, including three other trips on that wonderful river, and a five-week-long exploration of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Zion National Park in western Utah. At the end of September Jenn and I spent two weeks in southern Utah and Northern Arizona; it was a powerfully creative time.

Photography is the art of bending light. The eye beholds the scene, and the heart longs to capture the beauty before you. The mind calculates how. The camera is the tool through which light passes and is recorded, for the longest time with silver on the film plane, and now through ones and zeros on the memory card. The light must bend through eye and heart, through head and lens, through bits and bytes to emerge transformed by the creative process on the screen, on the wall, on the print before our eyes once again.

The American southwest is one of my hearts true homes. It’s a joy to share it with you. Click here (new Window)  to visit a Picasa Web Album of some images from our September 2009 trip to the American Southwest.

Sunset, Cape Royal, North Rim of the Grand Canyon

My hope was that a meeting with a prominent Canadian literary agent in Toronto in August would round out the trio, land me a fat writing contract, and set me on a course for literary stardom, or at least literary self-sufficiency.

It was not to be. All the positive visualization, wishful thinking, creative manifestation, meditation and voodoo doll arranging in the world is no competition for a supportive, yet skeptical, battle hardened agent.

God answers all prayers, say some: sometimes he just says no. Or, as the Buddha and Lao Tzu said: all anticipation leads to disappointment. Instead I had to remain open to other signs. Of course, one presented itself.

One of the first things Jenn and I decided to do when I lost my job was to take a vacation. Liberated from the tyranny of three weeks of holidays each year, we were free to travel, so we headed for the American Southwest. We have both ventured there on numerous occasions, through never together. We planned to spend time riding our bikes and hiking near Moab, venture down the Colorado River and day trip into the Maze in Canyonlands National Park, camp on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and take a quick tour through the Escalante.

The protagonist in my books The Cardinal Divide, and the forthcoming Darkening Archipelago was inspired by the canyon’s of Utah. In the mid and late nineteen nineties I spent a lot of time kicking around Canyonlands National Park, doing two and three week long trips down the Green River, through the San Rafael Desert, and into Labyrinth and Stillwater Canyons. I employed a local outfitter from Moab called Tex’s Riverways, and became friends with the three brothers who ran the show, Tex having long since retired. Dirk, Devon and Darren were the kind of iconoclastic, offbeat characters that make a bone chilling jet boat trip up the Colorado River a great experience, and I’ve stayed in touch with them all these years.

I think it was on my second Green River adventure that one of the boys started referring to me as Glint Longshadow. As I noted in the back-of-the-book material for The Cardinal Divide, I think they had this image of me striding across the agoraphobic Utah desert, fighting evil developers with a iridescent glint in my eye. It’s hard not to become attached to such an image of oneself, and so when I was hunting around for a name for my first environmental murder mysteries’ leading man, Glint Longshadow came to mind. But that’s a ridiculous name (maybe they were making fun of me…) so I let my mind wander, and Cole Blackwater (some cadence, same number of syllables) emerged.

About a week before Jenn and I left for Utah I was stirring from my morning meditation when an idea surfaced from my cerebral morass: why aren’t I writing an environmental murder mystery series set in the Southwest?

Shortly the second book in the Cole Blackwater series will go to press. This series is set mostly in Canada. Canada is a very small country. It doesn’t publish many books. And it doesn’t really celebrate genre fiction. In fact, it most often looks down its nose at the field. Canadian Literature recently referred to my first novel as pulp fiction, through (bless their souls) they did recommend it.

But the United States, on the other hand…big country, lots of books and book publishers, lots of readers of crime and other genres. I love the Southwest, and have always wanted to write about it. Tony Hillerman, whose Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn Navaho Tribal Police series first inspired my interest in the genre, passed away in 2008 at the age of 83, leaving a tremendous, if not unfillable, gap in the Southwest’s literary landscape.

So I set my intent to have a fully formulated idea for a mystery series set in Utah and Arizona by the time Jenn and I returned from our trip.

Intent is an incredible thing. I recall once staying at a century old hotel built over a hot springs near Helena, Montana and being fascinated with the place. It was in some disrepair; part of the hotel served as a retreat centre for Alcoholics Anonymous (I learned this when I cracked open a beer in the lounge). I went to bed that night with the intent of waking with a fictional story in my head about this hotel and its guests, and woke with a complete story-outline in my mind.

That was more than a decade ago. I’ve had a lot of practice over the last ten or more years at creating something from nothing. I have come to believe that like everything else, stories are merely a product of the energy and information swirling around the universe, born of an exploding star some ten billion years ago. We human’s, with our thick craniums and hyper-developed gift of imagination, are wired to be walking, talking receptors for these stories, and we quickly fashion them into tales about our own miraculous journey through life.

I love the creative process. I love taking an idea from inspiration through to cultivation. At first there is next to nothing. A single idea: in this case, a terrible, marvelous, beautiful landscape. What do I want to say about such a place? My own niche in the mystery genre is to tell stories that focus on environmental issues. It’s what I know the best. There’s no shortage of environmental calamities in the Southwest. How to choose? And how do I create characters and a plot that allows the reader to enjoy a good (maybe great) story without pummeling them over the head with an environmental message (that niche is already filled to overflowing). Who’s the protagonist? What makes him or her interesting? Why would a reader want to follow this person through a series of books?

All of these questions sloshed around in my head as I was preparing for and departing towards our Utah adventure. Jenn and I talked a lot about the ideas as they began to emerge – like startled, blinking voles from dark fissures in the earth – over the first week of the trip. At first, I didn’t want to talk about the ideas too much; I feared that if I let them out on their own, they would just slip away. But soon we were yakking for hours — on our hikes in The Maze, over cold beer on the beach at Spanish Bottom, over grilled cheese sandwiches at a riverside café in Mexican Hat — about the narrative arc of the trilogy.

Two and a half weeks into the creative process, I was ready to write it all down. We camped on the North Rim of Grand Canyon for three nights, and choose to forgo long hikes or mountain bike rides for more sedate explorations so I could have the afternoons to sit and scribble. At Point Imperial, with the wind howling and leaves blowing and sun setting, and again on the trail to Widforss Point, in a grove of golden trembling aspens, I sat and wrote and thought and wrote some more, all the while bouncing ideas off Jenn for perspective.

When we returned home a week ago I had two dozen pages of notes, including a stretch of how the three novels will work together, and biographical outlines of all the major characters. I’ve spent a few hours each day over the last week writing as succinct an outline as I am able for the trilogy, and hope to be able to start pitching it to publishers by the end of October.

I have no way of knowing now if the ideas I blurted out in the searing heat of the Maze, or jotted onto paper in the crisp autumn afternoons on the North Rim will emerge into the literary canon of the American Southwest. If they do, I have no way to say if anybody will read the books and enjoy them, discuss them with friends, seek out the awe inspiring landscapes I hope to populate with my characters, and maybe one day stand in a place where the protagonist stood in my imagination and have fiction and fact blur, if only for a moment. I have no way of knowing.

What I can say with absolute certainty is this: in just a few short weeks I was able to recognize and harness the power of events emerging and converging to produce ideas I find exciting and inspiring. If this isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing as part of a right-livelihood on this amazing planet, I don’t know what is.

Sunburst, Aspens, North Rim of the Grand Canyon

Sitting on a rock at sunrise, looking over the tapestry of tea plantations of Munar in southern India, reminded me that I’ve never been seeking enlightenment through all my running and my stillness.

If pressed I would say that what I am seeking is peace.

The view from my sunrise rock: tea plantations, Munnar, India

Just peace; a quiet heart; a moment of freedom from tiresome striving. Freedom from striving for wealth, striving for recognition, striving for health, striving to be loved, striving for well being, for security. From illusion. Freedom from the promise of enlightenment.

And even freedom from striving for peace.

At times throughout my life I’ve worked very hard to find peace. The obstacles have been almost entirely of my creation, but they have proven to be formidable barriers. At times the passage has been arduous, leaving me disenchanted. If only I knew that I could simply end the search and return to the start. If only I could remember that at those times of disquiet I was as close to peace as I had ever been, then I might have simply sat down on the path and realized I was already home.

When we stop seeking enlightenment, when we cease the wearisome quest for peace, we see that it has been ours from the very start. From the moment of creation peace has been the gift from the creator: Tao, God, the quantum field.

We are already home.

I watch Rio and Silas asleep in their beds, arms splayed above their heads, their faces a perfect reflection of quiet serenity. There is no searching here; there is nothing to strive for.

“Seek nothing and find everything you need,” says the Tao te Ching. But we forget. We strive. We hope to wash ourselves clean of life’s anguish through meditation, prayer, stretching before exercise, Brussels sprouts and herbal tea. And it helps. But all striving is a form of suffering, including striving for an end to suffering.

So we return to a clear moment of peace and remember that we have always been enlightened. We have always been pure peace. We are born Buddha and remain Buddha throughout every moment of our life. We’ve just forgotten.

Maybe enlightenment isn’t so crazy a notion, if only I can keep myself from seeking it, and simply experience it, and then let it go.

Father Thomas Keating, of the Christian contemplative movement, says in the movie One: “In the beginning the spiritual journey is the realization, not just the information, but the real interior conviction that there is a higher power, or God. Or, to make it as easy as possible for everybody, that there is an Other. Second step, to try and become the Other. And finally, the realization that there is no Other. That you and Other are one. Always have been. Always will be. You just think that you aren’t.”

This doesn’t mean that the journey is over. Far from it. Its just starting.

But we start knowing that we are already home.