The View You Can't Get From the Road

Someone once said to me, "I guess that's the price you pay to live an interesting life." That phrase stuck with me.

It was offered right after I finished telling the story of a week I spent coordinating a community gathering deep in the northern BC wilderness - along a string of lakes in a place that had a name to the people who'd always lived there, and no name at all to anyone else. I had a plan. I had a schedule. It lasted about four hours on the ground.

The elders had something else entirely. They wandered in every direction with complete indifference to the agenda - not defiantly, just naturally, the way you move through a place that belongs to you. And then they found a canoe.

They wanted to paddle across the lake. My first reaction - the one I'm not proud of - was liability. I ran the calculation in my head and nearly said no. What I did instead was decide to be the one paddling.

So there I was, in the middle of a lake that no map I owned had anything useful to say about, doing my best impression of someone in control. And at some point out there, I looked around. Everyone in that canoe was fine. The elders weren't managing the moment - they were inside it. Paddling in their ancestors' footsteps, on water their families had crossed for generations. The only person not copacetic was me.

In the outdoors scene, we call that type II fun. The sort of thing you don't enjoy in the moment but look back on with glee. In the community relations world, we simply call it work. But that trip taught me something I couldn't have learned in a consultation training, a briefing note, or a carefully scheduled engagement session. You have to bring people back to the land to allow them to speak about it. The land is where the real conversation starts.

I was proud to call this my office for the summer.

Now I'm not here to say that working with Indigenous communities is fraught. A position like that would dissuade interest in the occupation altogether, and I want the opposite. I want to make the case that a career - much like your own life - needs to be something you look back on proudly, and that getting there requires a bit of sweat equity. I think about the foolhardy adventurers who have stood at the base of Mount Robson and decided to climb it. Not to conquer it - that was never really the point. But because somewhere up that mountain, past the loose rock and the aching legs and the weather that wasn't in the forecast, there's a view you simply cannot get from the road. The summit isn't the reward. The altitude is. Community relations is the same. The scrapes are real. The boulders are real. But you don't go for the story you tell afterward - you go for what you can finally see from up there.

At many remote lakes in Canada, you'll find "the canoe". It belongs to no human - but instead the place where it was found.

The word I keep coming back to is place. Not as a coordinate on a project map. Place as in the kind of knowing that comes from sitting with someone at their kitchen table, or walking a trail you didn't know existed, or being trusted enough to hear the version of a story that doesn't make it into meeting minutes. To have place in a community is to be known before you speak. It is to arrive and be recognized - not introduced.

Getting there isn't complicated, but it takes time you can't bill for. It means showing up before there's anything to show up for - a community dinner, a cultural event, a fundraiser where your presence carries no agenda. It means listening more than you talk in the early years, and sitting with answers that don't have an obvious application yet. It means learning the difference between a conversation and a transaction dressed as one. This is the climb. Not dramatic, but cumulative. Every visit is another hundred feet of elevation. Some days you're picking your way through loose shale. Some days you take a wrong turn and have to backtrack. The mountain doesn't care about your timeline.

And then something shifts. You can't schedule it or plan for it. The real question starts replacing the diplomatic version. You begin to understand which concerns are on the record and which ones carry more weight. An elder mentions something in passing that rewrites your understanding of the place. A community member who was quiet in every meeting says something to you in the parking lot afterward that is more useful than the preceding two hours. This is what the elevation gives you. Not answers - just a different angle. A view of things that were invisible from the road.

The trust that makes this possible isn't a credential you earn once. It requires maintenance. It is easy to lose and slow to rebuild. The practitioners I've seen do this work well aren't the ones with the sharpest deck or the most polished engagement framework. They're the ones who have been on the mountain long enough to know where the loose rock is, and who move accordingly - carefully, honestly, without any illusion that they've mastered the terrain.

That's what it looks like when it works. Not a consultant who lands Tuesday and leaves Thursday. Not a process that was followed but a relationship that was never built. It looks like someone who has done the unglamorous, uncelebrated work of being present - long enough, and humbly enough, to understand what a community actually needs from a development project. The view from there is worth every bruise.

And the view is the whole point.