All posts by dongayton.ca

Williams Lake

I have taught a Fire Ecology course at Nicola Valley Institute of Technology for a few years now, and I was recently persuaded to teach a compressed, two-week version of the course to a group of Indigenous Rangers from the Chilcotin region. The course was to be held in the town of Williams Lake.  

My trip from Summerland was uneventful, other than seeing, for the first time, the vast regional disaster that is the Highland Valley Copper Mine and its tailings lake. (Not a pond, but a vast, dead lake). I will certainly think twice now about buying anything containing copper. 

My motel room, on the outskirts of Williams Lake, was quite satisfactory, but spending two weeks in it took some mental adjustment. My students were mostly in their thirties, they all knew each other, and whenever they went on break the jokes and sarcasm started up immediately. 

Knowing virtually nothing about this region, I was a steep learning curve, starting with the basic understanding that the Cariboo region is to the east of the Fraser, and the Chilcotin to the west. The terrain and vegetation of the Chilcotin plateau is quite variable. Dense Douglas-fir forests are the norm, but there are grasslands in the valleys and south slopes, and some large ranches scattered here and there. The fabled Nemiah country, off to far west (a place I hope to visit sometime) is subalpine forest.

Mid-course we took a field trip west on Highway 20, where we saw vestiges of the 2017 Alexis Creek wildfire, which caused massive evacuations. It is interesting how 2017 was designated as a “Record Fire Year,” but that label has been transferred several times since then. 

Turning south off of the Highway, we proceeded down to Farwell Canyon, on the Chilcotin River. This is sandy, dry sagebrush and bunchgrass country, similar to the ecosystems I know in the South Okanagan. Given the height of the very flammable sagebrush there, It was obvious the area had not burned for decades.  The Chilcotin was running muddy brown in June, as a result of a dam collapse somewhere upstream. Unstable river slopes were everywhere. This Canyon was a previous Indigenous settlement area, and we did get to pay homage at a small pictograph site.  

In advance of my arrival I had been warned about the homeless/drug problem in downtown Williams Lake. The mayor, Surinderpal Rathor, had even considered declaring a town state of emergency. After class in the afternoons, I drove around town carefully, getting to know it. Williams Lake is at the west end of the lake itself, named after Chief William. WL is a real milltown, with several lumber mills hard by. It is also a crossroads; highways go north to Quesnel, east to Horsefly, south to Cache Creek and west to Bella Coola, with any number of side roads heading to places like Meldrum, Springhouse and Dog Creek. The town is also a magnet for fishermen and hunters, and of course the testosterone muscle trucks abound here, as they do everywhere.

Scout, the Island of tranquility. The Stampede Grounds, the intersection of Highways 20 and 97, and downtown Williams Lake, are to the northwest.
Scout, the Island of tranquility. The Stampede Grounds, the intersection of Highways 20 and 97, and downtown Williams Lake, are to the northwest.

On one of my afternoon forays I discovered the Scout Island Nature Preserve, a fascinating wetland area at the west end of the Lake. Even though it is surrounded by highways, gas stations, big box stores, railyards and sawmills, the variety of birds and vegetation are quite delightful. Narrow trails and boardwalks wind through marshes and dense cottonwood forests. I encountered a Western Painted Turtle, one of the largest I have ever seen, dozing on one of the trails. And a pair of starch-white pelicans were camped on a floating log. There is a beach and a small grassy lawn for picnickers. I thought Wascana Park in Regina held the world’s record for the amount of Canada Goose poop, but the Scout Island lawn is definitely a contender. The little beach is mostly for suntanning, but I did lean on my Norwegian genes and swam once in the very cold, very green water.  

Painted turtle

One evening I brought a takeout supper to a park bench at Scout Island, and had quite an animated and up-close conversation with a young raven. His main topic of interest was my hamburger.

Like the town of Merritt, Williams Lake is kind of an epicenter for the offices of nearby Nations and Bands. And again, like Merritt, it has a significant East Indian population. And the maids in my hotel are all Asian. Just one more example of the quiet but profound multiculturalism we have in Canada. 

Out of boredom one evening, and against my better judgment, I left the motel and went to see the movie Mission Impossible. I was quite thrilled to find that the menacing, evil monster of the movie was: AI. Leaving the theater, I tried to unlock our new-to-us white Nissan Rogue. I clicked the fob button several times, but the door wouldn’t open. So I pulled the embedded key out of the fob and was struggling to get it in to the door lock when I heard a woman’s voice behind me say: “can I help you?” That voice triggered several sudden realizations: this was not my car, mine was parked just ahead, they were identical in color and shape, and the lady was being awfully nice to this random old man trying to break into her car. After my profuse apologies, we had a nice chat about the movie, and both of us agreed that Simon Pegg, not Tom Cruise, was the real star of the show. 

Another encounter: during a lunch break I was walking through one of WL’s downtown alleys, and I passed a gentleman who was struggling to load a spare tire into the back of his older vehicle. I offered to help, and he showed me an array of tools, none of which, he claimed, was the right one for the job. I was puzzled for a few minutes, until I realized the spare tire fit underneath the car, and there was an ingenious cable-and-winch system to get it in place and hold it there. The problem was we didn’t have the right tool to operate the manual crank by which you raised and lowered the spare. I started improvising with the tools at hand and was eventually able to lower the cable, attach the retainer to the spare tire rim, and then slowly crank the whole assembly back up into its appointed place.  The gentleman was very appreciative, and I learned about a spare tire attachment system. Looking back, I began to wonder; are WL folks particularly friendly to strangers? Are these just two random happenstances? Does my age and appearance make me particularly non-threatening? Or do I have a look that says I am desperate for company? Who knows.

In class, we spent a lot of time discussing the contemporary paradox of “not enough fire/too much fire.” I was fortunate to have some fire-scarred tree cookies from the Chilcotin, which showed the classic pattern of frequent small cultural burns prior to European contact, followed by an abrupt cessation, followed by the vast contemporary megafires. Our dry forests, including those of the Chilcotin, went from roughly 15-20 seasons of fuel accumulation between fire events, to a century or more.  I had the students wrestle with an assignment I call “Sharing the Torch:” how do we reintroduce Indigenous cultural burning, ramp up western scientific prescribed burning and, where appropriate, combine the two. I am still digesting some of the fascinating ideas that came out of that assignment.

Williams Lake doesn’t make any of the “top 100 luxury vacation site” lists, but it certainly treated me well. And it reinforced my Canadian pride.

Memorabilia

As a callow youth, I was on a quest, searching for a unique personal identity. That quest, many decades later, produced two pieces of memorabilia. The first was a meerschaum pipe, acquired while wandering through Istanbul’s crowded outdoor markets. Imagining myself as a kind of late-teenage literary artiste, I splurged on the gorgeous pipe. I was sure its unique full-bent style would mark me as a pensively philosophical wordsmith.

At the time of the pipe purchase I was absorbed in the writings of Matsuo Basho, the seventeenth century Japanese Haiku poet. Basho was an old man writing a travelogue about his final journey through central Japan; I was on a hitchhiking journey around southern Europe. So it was a natural literary fit. Basho’s writing style was to put down a few descriptive paragraphs of his journey, follow them with a poem in the classic Haiku style, and then transition back to descriptive prose. Each poem would somehow reflect the emotional or artistic meanings of the portion of the journey he just described.  

One of those poems stood out for me. It came as the aging poet was on horseback, being led by his manservant across an open meadow:

Turn the head of your horse

Sideways across the field

So I can hear the cry of a cuckoo

I was so taken by the poem that I carefully carved it onto the bowl of the elegant meerschaum pipe. Eventually I lost track of said pipe—either it was stolen or I misplaced it, probably because I had quit smoking. So now it is memorabilia in memory only. As Ringo Starr once said about memorabilia: who knew you had to keep it.

There is another memorable symbol from that youthful era, which is still in my possession. In my early twenties I worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in a jungle area of northern Colombia. Some enlightened bibliophile in the Peace Corps office had supplied us volunteers with a box of carefully selected paperback books, knowing we would experience some long evenings away from the usual First World comforts and distractions. Several of the volumes were from Vintage Press, a New York book publisher. As a result I became familiar with the works of Jane Jacobs, William Faulkner, Joan Didion, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and others. All the paperbacks bore the enigmatic fiery sun logo of Vintage Press. 

The jungle town I worked in had a history of gold mining, and a large portion of the population were black Africans, brought over originally as slaves to work the gold mines. One of their descendants had become a street jeweler, and I approached him, Vintage book in hand, and asked  if he could make a small gold replica of the logo for me. He did an excellent job, and I doubled the few pesos he charged me for it. 

That medallion hangs on a loose string around my neck as I write this. I’m not exactly sure what its meaning is for me: reverence for nature as symbolized by the sun, respect for good literature, or the power of artistic craftsmanship. Memorabilia are mere objects when you acquire them. It is the passage of time and memory that layers them with significance, reminding us of particular moments, states of mind, or adventures. I do worry occasionally about losing the medallion, like I lost my meerschaum, but that is the nature of a memorabile: it must be out there, a visible mental trigger to earlier days and passions. Otherwise it is just a possession.

Our basement storeroom is chockablock full of boxes containing random items from our children’s childhood and highschool years. Whenever they visit I offer up a box or two for them to take home, but they refuse. So we keep them, knowing at some point a grade school award, a favorite doll or one of the dozens of other items in the boxes will suddenly have meaning. 

I suppose for elders like me, there is the risk of dwelling too much on the past. On the other hand, reflecting on memorabilia helps us define how we got to who we are.

The Viking Funeral

A boat on fire in water

Description automatically generated

Ok, I must get serious about this ship model I’ve been commissioned to carve.
It will have a dragon’s head at the bow, a sail, and it must be combustible.
But how big should the ship be? I’ll have to phone a funeral home, to get a weight estimate.

But first I better review the instructions.

“Mr. Stokes, we commission you to build a replica model of a Viking ship.
Our dear recently departed father, Yorgen Johansen, demanded a traditional Viking funeral.
British Columbia regulations are quite strict about the disposal of bodies, so we are sending you Yorgen’s ashes instead.

At the funeral we will launch the ship, carrying Yorgen’s ashes, on to Okanagan Lake.
Just before launch, we will set the ship afire.
It must burn slowly as it drifts along, and then sink.
If you have any questions, please contact us.”

This is a true story, only the names and places are fictional.