Life is strange. And so are our perceptions. Is it a sixth sense, or just a series of circumstances that make sense? Yesterday I felt a premonition. Actually there was an event yesterday that positively terrified me. Envisioning our ascending or descending the main trail to the ravine's forest. A pathway that we've taken each and every day for the past three decades and more. We couldn't be more familiar with it. I found myself thinking; 'if I hear a warning sound I'll dive directly for Irving and push him off the trail; surely Jackie and Jillie would follow'...

I was envisioning the massive old pine that we've seen for all those years falling, collapsing onto the trail; breaking off, its roots snapped, leaving a raw trunk still embedded in the forest floor, the trunk itself sprawling with all its green pine needles on its limbs smashed, over the trail. Yesterday was a peculiar day following a week after an ice storm that wrought its own damage in the forest.

There was a becalming breeze carrying an impossibly warm current of air, interrupted now and again by icy currents. The temperature had soared to an unbelievable 26C, the sun rode its chariot across the blue highway of the sky, a more perfect spring/summer day cannot be imagined. Snow still remained in the forest, and ice. The trails, hardened by months of hikers' boots tramped down the layers of snow and ice and it was reluctant to melt.

The snow and ice on the slope of the hill had softened and the cleats on our boots bit deeply. But at the bottom of the hill leading into the ravine and the forest, the ice was hard and glassy and there were thick cracks in evidence. We heard a report like a gunshot and surmised it might be a branch breaking nearby. We turned left as we always do to access a side trail and the first of the bridges we cross. Our circuit went as usual, and when we crossed the last bridge bringing us back up to the old pine that stood as a bulwark against all that nature could throw at it in different seasons, we had to ascend a short rise again.

It was there that the ice was cracking in thick, wide sheets. I looked at the pine as I always do, and it seemed to me it was leaning even more than two days previously when I had written an email to the Parks Division of the municipality alerting to them to what I felt was a potentially dangerous situation. I hadn't heard back from them. It was difficult to negotiate those icy patches, even with the cleats they posed a problem. At one point when I found myself stuck in between two ice sheets and a deep crack, Irving hauled me out.

Back up the hill we went, and home. Today, another bright sunny day, the temperature a still-balmy 20C. Yesterday I had imagined that the old pine would collapse onto the trail and we'd see it that way the following day. It gave me shivers; I felt downright fearful. What if someone was on the hill at the time? What if we were ourselves caught? Today as we crested the hill to enter the ravine, there was the tree, prostrate, blocking the descent. 

I'm relieved. I will no longer imagine our innocent trips through the forest ending in a dreadful accident. We mourn the loss of that fine old tree, but it had over the years slowly and gradually begun its lean that would carry it to the present. On such an otherwise-fine-weather day there was no thought of turning back; we did some bushwhacking down the slope on snow-melted terrain and managed to reach the last bridge which would become the first one today, since we were going in reverse; with no other option, since the tree's collapse had also affected the bank of the creek and it too had collapsed into the creek below, taking with it a good part of the trail.

 So we embarked on an entirely different circuit. Warning people headed for the area we had just vacated that they would be unable to continue in that direction. Reversing our usual circuit, and embarking on a number of different trails we still enjoyed our hike, and Jackie and Jillie took very well to unfamiliar areas, forging ahead right after us, and sometimes, intuitively, before us. We discovered a utilitarian bridge that someone had formed with logs that took us over a bit of a chasm and that led to another trail that would complete our circuit, bypassing the fallen old giant.