“Spending time in the wilderness defined my life. Then I found out I had skin cancer”

When I was 10 years old, in 1983, my father died of cancer. He had skin cancer, melanoma, which is the deadliest kind. If you’re in Grade 5 and your dad dies, you don’t have to go to school that day. Or the day after. At first, it felt like a strange holiday. I was allowed to watch a lot of TV. No one monitored my plate to see if I’d finished my peas. I stayed home for about a week.

When I went back to my elementary school in north Toronto, it felt like a sombre birthday party. The kids crowded around me in silence when I entered the classroom. Some of them gave me sympathy cards. One girl, Julie, was the only one to say something out loud. She stood in front of me with folded hands and made a slight bow. “I’m very sorry about your dad,” she said.

Everywhere I went, friends and neighbours touched my hair, gave me an extra cookie, or told me I was strong and brave. A friend’s mom traced the dark circle under my eye. Maybe she wondered why I wasn’t crying, but she didn’t ask. It was a silent gesture, a kindness. I didn’t have the words to describe the weather inside me. Life went on. I seemed fine, except I wasn’t. I had gone numb.

My breakthrough came when I was 14. I had always loved the outdoors, so my mom signed me up for a summer wilderness course with Outward Bound. I went on a month-long canoe trip with eight other teenagers. We spent half of the time travelling along the White River, which feeds into Lake Superior. On the day we reached the lake, which is so large it’s technically an inland sea, we had to wait for calm. Finally, we paddled out on rolling waves that were long and broad. The boat beside mine dipped and disappeared in a trough. When the water rose again, the boat appeared overhead.

Lake Superior changed something inside me: the clouds loosened. They broke. Out on the water, the waves flattened and smoothed as we made our way along the shoreline. I understood the power in a body of water, how much influence it had over everything around us. When I returned home, I resolved to get back into a canoe whenever I could. Like many people in Canada who live along the southern border, going north set a direction for my imagination. In high school, I worked at a summer camp in Algonquin Park. Then, after university, I headed west and became an outdoor instructor, leading rock climbing, mountaineering and white water rafting trips.

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I spent as much time as I could outside. I scaled mountains, climbed granite faces, descended into glacial crevasses, skied volcanoes and paddled into rivers full of frothy white water. I dodged rocks, hitchhiked and delved into the wilderness alone for weeks at a time. When I was 22, I met my husband, Dave, on a glacier on Mount Hood, in Oregon. We fell in love and had kids, a boy in 2005 and another in 2008. Finding time to get back out into the wilderness defined our lives.

By the time I turned 45, in 2018, I was in a more domestic phase of life. But my husband and I still regularly took our boys skiing and hiking, and that summer we went on a week-long canoe trip in Algonquin Park. A few weeks before we left, I’d had a black spot removed from my shoulder. I had my skin checked regularly, and the few spots I’d had biopsied were benign. Melanoma is uncommon in someone my age, and its genetic link wasn’t fully understood until the 2000s. I wore sunscreen as a precaution, but cancer was not something I worried about.

When I arrived at my doctor’s office at Toronto Western Hospital to get the results of my biopsy after the trip, none of my previous adventures had prepared me for what happened next. I heard my name called and sat in a chair in the small office. The fluorescent lights let out a soft buzz. My doctor tapped at her computer to call up my test results. She looked concerned as the screen flickered to life. “It’s cancer,” she said.

My doctors had diagnosed four separate instances of melanoma, the same cancer my dad had. I also learned that I had a genetic mutation that meant the cancer had a high chance of recurring.

My first instinct was to climb into a canoe and paddle far out into the wilderness. Going on a long trip had helped me recover from hard things before. But, first, an operation was scheduled for a few weeks later. The surgeon made four long slashes across my back, wide incisions that cut borders around the cancer. As I healed, one thing became clear—I couldn’t go into the wilderness like I had before.

Cancer is characterized by abnormal cells that divide uncontrollably. My mutation means that my CDKN2A gene, which helps to protect against cancer, is faulty. My doctors advised that while the course of my disease may be out of my control, there were things I could do to minimize the risk. The big one was staying out of the sun.

All I wanted to do was escape to the outdoors, but being outside the way I was used to meant weathering the elements, including the sun. Before my diagnosis, I had been planning to climb Denali, the highest mountain in North America. Now, traversing a glacier—an icy reflective surface—seemed unwise. I wanted to be around for my kids. My plans for my adventure were shelved.

The next summer, instead of canoeing across the mirror-like lakes of Algonquin Park, I diverted my attention by starting work on a book, How to Survive a Bear Attack. In 1991, two people had been killed by an older male black bear on Lake Opeongo. This was a lake I knew well; I had led canoe trips on it the summer before the attack. The incident had haunted me for years—it was unlike any black bear behaviour that I knew of. I wanted to understand how such a rare event had taken place. I see now that I was wrestling with a more profound question: Why does tragedy strike? I was lost and flailing, and this was a first step in coming to terms with my own rare condition.

If I couldn’t spend time in the park the way I wanted to, I could at least spend time with wildlife biologists, wardens and park staff—people who loved the place as much as I did. Instead of camping, I stayed in a hotel. It was high summer, and the UV rays were strong. While I was glad to be near the place I loved, I longed to go deep into the backcountry.

Two years later, during the pandemic, I found a black spot on my eye. It also turned out to be melanoma, and I needed surgery to remove it. If you’ve seen A Clockwork Orange, I don’t need to describe the clamp that the doctor used to keep my eye open during the procedure. I remained awake because of where the melanoma was located, which meant I had to watch as the scalpel moved in close and cut. After the operation, I wore an eye patch and looked like a pirate, but more precisely—as my husband pointed out when he picked me up—a drunken pirate: my depth perception was off. I staggered to the elevator and missed the button when I tried to punch it. Still, I insisted on walking home to help my good eye adjust.

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From the hospital, my husband and I headed west along College Street. I had done this walk countless times, but it was now unrecognizable. Sights came in flashes—red lights blinking, a dandelion growing from a crack in the sidewalk. I felt a puff of warm air from a vent, heard the sound of the streetcar breaking. This time, I didn’t need something the size of Lake Superior to experience a change in perspective. An ordinary street in Toronto had suddenly become the most extraordinary place.

My eye healed, the patch came off after a few days and my eyesight returned to normal. But I didn’t forget what I’d found on College Street. If the definition of wilderness is a tract of uncultivated land, then my ability to find it was a matter of scale. All I had to do was zoom in. In the alley behind my house, there are at least 20 species of plants that grow from the cracks in the pavement. Around them live populations of ants, beetles and bees. The birds come next— and not just pigeons and seagulls. I even spotted a red-tailed hawk sitting atop a telephone poll, looking proud in its element.

When meeting friends, I started mapping routes and trying to travel by foot. In the city, I had more ways to shield myself from the sun: I could seek shelter indoors, take the subway or go out only late in the day, when the UV index was lower. Was it possible to run from the west end to a friends’ place on the Danforth via the ravines? In the spirit of exploration, I gave it a try. I took the subway to Finch Station and hiked south to the foot of Yonge to see how the street changes. Ontario Place became one of my favourite places to spend time. I could talk to the trees and watch the sunset over a lake that stretches to the horizon. It reminded me of Lake Superior.

I came to see that the thrill of an adventure is directly related to the perspective of the person going on it. The more I explored the city through my new eyes, the more the idea of the wilderness started to move inward. There’s a wildness about my disease. Cancer makes my cells divide uncontrollably, but it’s not an invader. I have my dad’s blue eyes, and one of my sons bears a striking resemblance to him, because I have my dad’s DNA. With that DNA came a genetic mutation. Cancer is a part of who I am.

I used to think that the wilderness existed only outside of the city. I went north to the lakes or west to the mountains to find it. Now I see the wild all over the streets of Toronto. I don’t have to go very far to find adventure; there’s a wilderness inside me.