This past year, I walked out of my brick house onto the downtown street I lived on in Ottawa, surrounded by tall concrete buildings. I looked down the street to the left and then to the right - more buildings.
Even as I thought about how much I missed an open prairie field and the freedom to explore the wilderness, I was swept into a crowd of passing students and young professionals.
I knew none of those people.
Before I knew it, claustrophobia began to set in. The concrete walls of the buildings around me began closing in and I couldn't escape the busy, crowded street.
It was nearing the end of my eight-month school year and I was ready to head home and escape the cramped and overcrowded city.
When I had decided to move from the Lakeland, it was because I was seeking more. I had grown tired of the same old routine that made up my life in a small northern town, doing the same things day in and day out, seeing the same people. I felt like I was missing out on so much.
But after eight months spent riding the bus, hanging out in classrooms and coffee shops and not making it past the three or four block radius that surrounded my small, two bedroom brick house, I began to miss everything that I had grown tired of.
So when I came back this summer, I decided I was going to soak up all the great things about living here in the Lakeland. I couldn't wait to walk out my door and wave to someone who knows my name, to hang out with my friends who I've known my whole life, to take advantage of the surrounding lakes and forests and to participate in all the activities that keep people coming back to the Bonnyville - Cold Lake area.
This summer, for the first time ever, I watched the chuckwagon races in Bonnyville. I watched men grab the reins of their horses, controlling them with confidence and patience. Despite the raw power of the horses, the drivers handled them with finesse that is unparalleled at such explosive speeds.
I couldn't help but get caught up in the adrenaline-fuelled sport where thinking only gets you in trouble and participants rely only on their instinct and their training.
I left the comforts of my parent's basement for the chaotic recklessness of the forest. I chopped wood and built my own fire. I escaped out onto the lake to defy the grocery stores in favour of a fishing line and some bait to catch my own food. I enjoyed the sounds of the birds and the crickets and the stories told around the fire.
What I began to realize throughout the summer is many of the things that make living in the Lakeland so enjoyable are the things that hold the essence of real life in them.
When living in the city, I spend my time reading books, listening to professors in a classroom, discussing different theories and different ideas. But rarely do I get my hands on something more than just knowledge. Rarely do I get the chance to be situated in the bare essentials of life.
But when I'm here, it's different. Fishing, camping, chuckwagon racing or all things rodeo are things where success relies solely on the individual's instincts and capabilities. Unlike writing a paper or reading a book, you don't get the chance to step back and think about it. You can't rely just on your ability to think, you've got to summon all aspects of your being, your mind, your body.
Essentially what it boils down to is this: Before we were able to have art and literature and knowledge and ideas, we were forced to live on our basic instincts, those aspects of our being that are cause for our survival back when we still had to gather our own food with our own hands. When I'm home here in the Lakeland, I'm able to get in touch with that part of my being because those things that make living here so enjoyable contain within them that essence of real life, that opportunity to face reality head on and rely on what you as a person can do without anybody's help.
This is why, even though I've left, it is so important for me to return. I could not imagine a life stuck inside a city 12 months of the year. I would feel like I was drifting away from what makes living worth living. So though a city offers me plenty of opportunities that living here doesn't, it doesn't so readily offer me the bare essence of life that I find in the Lakeland, and for that I will always be proud to call this area my home.
