Dear Fellow Wanderers,

September has arrived at the Outpost wearing woodsmoke, frost around the cuffs, and the unmistakable look of a month that knows something we don’t. The forest smells different now – sharper, darker, almost peppered with change – and around here September is never merely another page on the calendar. It is a harvest, a hunting season, an anniversary, a deadline before winter… and this year, it is carrying a rather large secret.

There is something about September that wakes me up. Not literally. I’m quite capable of being awake at ridiculous hours all on my own. I mean the other kind of awake.

The air changes first. Long before the calendar has any authority on the matter, the forest knows. The warm green smell of summer disappears almost overnight and is replaced by spruce, damp earth, mushrooms, drying leaves and that faint cold mineral smell that says frost has started prowling around after dark.

Even the silence changes. September silence has weight to it. The birds have begun discussing travel arrangements, the squirrels are behaving like tiny woodland accountants with a fiscal year ending tomorrow, and every living thing seems to have remembered at once that winter is not theoretical.

Neither have we.

This is one of the busiest and best months of the year at Furthermost Outpost.

The garden is surrendering what it has grown. The forest is doing the same. Berries are coming home by the pail, herbs are being gathered and dried, preserves are appearing on shelves, and anything remotely edible is suddenly viewed through the very practical September question: Can I put that in a jar, a freezer, or a frying pan?

Highbush and lowbush cranberries have already had us wandering through the timber with River, filling buckets and planning jelly, preserves and waffle syrup. Juniper berries have been collected for the herbal pantry. There are still roots, berries, mushrooms and medicines tucked throughout the bush if you know where to look, and September turns gathering them into something resembling a treasure hunt with nutritional benefits.

Then there is the other half of filling a wilderness pantry.

Grouse season.

Around here, the forest provides flora and fauna, and we are not particularly interested in pretending otherwise. Hunting season means putting clean wild protein in the freezer, knowing exactly where our food came from and taking part in a cycle people lived by long before grocery stores placed chicken breasts neatly on Styrofoam trays.

September is the month when self-reliance stops being a philosophy and starts requiring freezer space.

And apparently, romance is involved.

Arön and I celebrate 30 years of marriage on September 28, and for the occasion I have decided he is taking me duck hunting.

Really, the man has done exceptionally well for himself.

He gets a wife who writes romantic songs about him, wanders the forest gathering berries, herbs and assorted useful things for his supper, stocks the pantry, helps fill the freezer, and then suggests spending her anniversary sitting beside him in a duck blind.

Flowers wilt.

Chocolate disappears.

A duck dinner has considerably more staying power.

I believe Hallmark may be missing an entire demographic.

I’ll mark the day in my own way too. On September 28, I’ll release a song I wrote about us – about thirty years of love, hard work, stubbornness, survival, laughter, and somehow continuing to choose one another through all of it.

Thirty years is a strange number to look at when you still feel as though you are somewhere in the middle of the story. We have packed an awful lot into those decades – some of it beautiful, some difficult, quite a bit ridiculous, and enough adventures to make sensible people reconsider our judgment.

But we are still here. Still building things, still making plans, and still reaching for one another in the dark.

There has been a lot happening with the music lately too. Songs that began here at the lake have found their way far beyond it, onto Spotify, YouTube and places we have never been ourselves. It remains wonderfully peculiar to sit in the middle of the Chilcotin wilderness and realize something created here has quietly travelled out into the world without needing a float plane.

September will add another page to that story.

And then there is the other thing September has tucked into its coat pocket.

A considerably bigger announcement.

I have been sitting on this particular piece of news for some time, which, for anyone familiar with my tendency to tell a good story, has required an unnatural amount of restraint.

I cannot unwrap it quite yet, but the ribbon is already tied.

Those following Furthermost Outpost will want to keep an eye on us this month, because there are some things you work toward for years without knowing whether the road will ever actually lead anywhere.

And then one day, it does.

More on that very soon.

Meanwhile, life at the Outpost has shown absolutely no respect for suspense.

Work on the lodge continues because buildings, unlike announcements and song releases, are unimpressed by publicity. They require lumber, measurements, machinery, problem-solving, sore muscles and usually at least one moment when Arön looks at something most people would require a contractor, engineer and small committee to solve and decides he can probably have it finished before supper.

For the day-to-day lodge progress, mishaps, machinery, fishing, dogs, boats, building and whatever else goes sideways, our Furthermost Outpost Facebook page is where we are sharing the reels and regular updates.

The website is becoming the quieter side of Furthermost Outpost – a place for the longer stories and the things that deserve more than fifteen seconds and a swipe. That is what these letters are going to be, one month at a time, a record of what is changing here while everyone else is getting on with life somewhere beyond our little patch of wilderness.

September deserves its own letter because it is not simply summer becoming autumn here. It is preparation becoming urgency, green becoming gold, fresh berries becoming jars, birdsong becoming wings overhead, and projects that could wait suddenly becoming projects that absolutely cannot.

The first cold morning makes the chimney relevant again. Hoodies return to active duty, flannel pajamas regain their rightful place in civilized society, and the woodshed begins looking less like a stack of firewood and more like a bank account. You start counting things without even realizing it – wood, fuel, food, daylight and how many warm afternoons might still be left.

Every September day feels valuable because we know exactly what is standing behind it – winter. I have never found that depressing. Quite the opposite. Summer may be the season most people wait for, but September is when I come alive.

There is something deeply satisfying about a month that asks you to pay attention. You notice the temperature, the berries, which birds have gone, the colour creeping down the mountains and the different smell of the forest when you step outside in the morning. September has a way of making you notice your own life too.

Perhaps that is its little trick. Everything around us is beginning to fade, dry, migrate, ripen or fall away, and somehow that makes what remains feel richer.

So this month we will gather what the land is offering, keep building, hunt, preserve, make music and celebrate thirty years together in a fashion that is apparently very Toland. Somewhere amongst all of that, we will finally get to tell you the secret we have been keeping.

September has a full itinerary.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Until the next letter from the wilderness,

Jennifer
Furthermost Outpost