I can dimly recall the excitement of young children at the appearance of horse-drawn wagons dripping water in neighbourhood streets, carrying the house-to-house blocks of ice required to keep food fresh in kitchen ice-boxes. My mother, with her tiny kitchen on the second-floor flat of a modest downtown house in Toronto, had her own ice-box. Food shopping back then was an almost-daily requirement. The shards of ice we could pick up off the back of the wagon before the ice-vendor could shoo us away were sought-after treasures in the summer months.

Now, young Canadian women trek to the Himalayas to mount the summits of impossibly high mountain peaks, and get their fill of the sight of ice and snow, the adventure of achievement, surmounting heights, geology and inclement weather conditions to test their stamina and physical prowess in challenging such mountains as Annapurna drawing them to the irresistibility of raw nature.

From the time I can recall as a very young child my own fascination and comfort with nature was acutely part of my own nature. One of my earliest memories is discovering the beauty and placid awareness of being in a public greenspace. And my anxiety after that to have the exposure to green parks and trees repeated. Until such time as I was able on my own to seek out these hallowed places within a large city teeming with people. And so it has been in all the years since, where I have found myself comfortable within places venturing much further than urban areas, to climb North American modest peaks, to hike in forested areas, to canoe and camp in semi-wilderness areas where humans once saw as their natural homes, before civilization left as much of nature behind as it could possibly shake off.

Despite my fascination and deep awe with mountains, exploration, and the inimitable sights to be had I don't believe I would ever have had the drive to launch myself onto the Himalayan range. Though that others do deeply fixates me on their experience, manipulative skills and athletic capabilities in completing their journeys -- and the tragedies of those that don't manage to.

Contrast that time in the not-so-distant past when electricity-driven refrigerators were yet to become a common household commodity and the present time, complete with the capacity of humans able to use satellite telephones to communicate with their families awaiting information back home, that they have arrived at their destination, safe and sound.