The Way Home, Days 6 and 7

We left on Monday. I organized the trip so that we would have 3 travel free days in Smithers. Driving out of Telkwa toward Quick where my mother lived is emotional. I miss my mother in this world, more than anything. It's such a huge weight to carry, longing for the person you loved most in the world. We carry on. The sky opens up and rains on us as we pass her turn-off and we wind gently toward Hungry Hill. I stare out the window trying to remember everything as it whips past me. Our lives in the sacred Bulkley Valley. The road is my whole life stretching out ahead of me. In the video Mark refers to it as the highway that has become our home.

Scattered along the highway there are the little houses, homesteads, left by the first white settlers to the area. Hopeful. In clearings. The hay grows up around them and eventually the ground will reclaim them in much the same way it has claimed their owners. I can't imagine what it was like for the first non-native people to this region.

 

Simple barns and rail fences dot the landscape and are weak attempts to to tame the wild landscape. Civilization on the inside, the natural world on the outside. A line separating this, from that.
 

The train follows the highway we have been living on. My eldest brother has worked for the CN Railway since he was 18. I naturally admired him so it made sense to admire trains as well. We rode them east to Jasper and then west to Vancouver. We climbed the Rockies slowly and waited in sidings without complaint. We rode them west to a place call Pacific. The train took me places and felt familiar doing so. The first time I went away for Christmas after my parents split up, I rode the train home from Saskatchewan on New Year's Eve, where my dad was living. We rolled past frozen Canadian landscapes, filled with remote crossings in sleeping towns. It was 4am when we came through Telkwa as the only Hotel in that small town burned silently down as we passed, speechless, headed west to Smithers.

Vanderhoof. The center of British Columbia. Not much else going on there besides Glen's Drive-In, the local Sino-Canadian restaurant. Some smart person moved all these heritage type buildings into one highway-close-locale. We stopped and snooped but ultimately ate our lunch of sandwiches at a picnic table under a green umbrella. We did little to support the local economy beyond a few words of encouragement to the local shop owners,

The Loon. I heard them calling in the night at the lake. It's a sorrowful sound. The end of day floats over the lake at dusk, the loon calls us to bed, and the lake air flows through the cabin pulling away the fog of the past creating whole new memories, good adult memories in place of the fantasy of childhood.

Nearing Quesnel, there are so many logging trucks on the road we feel puny in size and purpose. Our mission to return to my childhood home seems superfluous in comparison to the whole lumber industry. The local towns are driven by mills. Train tracks loop into sawmill yards and back out. Trucks, massive trucks, low slung, super long, populate the highway and we are submissive, hanging back to let them proceed. Swaying trailers, threatening to crush us, their logs poised to  impale us should the load shift, the trailer tip. They are like missiles traveling the roads, let loose on gravel, proceeding to pavement, headed to the next mill-town. We hang back, we brake, we count our blessings. The harvest is enormous, an unintended consequence of the Mountain Pine Beetle plague. I am witnessing the forests with their dead trees, and it doesn't look good. The future of these forests hangs in the balance. We are inconsequential and get out of the way to let these monsters of progress and sustainability pass.

The Caribou. Rolling hills and pasture land.The omnipresent river flows south to the Fraser Canyon, the landscape gets drier the farther south we go.

Williams Lake, B.C.

South of Williams Lake headed to 100 Mile House for the night. I had wanted to make the drive in one day but ultimately it just wasn't possible or advisable. The Fraser Canyon lies at the end of the drive and as treacherous as it seems in daylight it's potentially deadly at night for a tired driver in a car with malfunctioning headlights. We stayed in the Red Coach Inn as we had as kids when we drove to Vancouver for summer vacation. It was pleasant and slightly surreal to be there with my dad and older sister as well as my own family.

Day 7. We slept poorly in the hotel despite being tired. I turned the AC off to keep it from blowing on my kid who had developed a terrible dry cough, the cause of which would not become clear for another week. It was hot and still and Mark and I were anxious about getting home, getting back to life post travel. We had a light breakfast and hit the road, the sun at our left as we drove south to the face the canyon. I'm glad I made this trip with my family. I feel a little more whole than I did when we set out. I feel a little more Canadian and a little more connected to the people and places I grew up around. I feel more deeply connected to the landscape of the province and to that road that connects me to where my cognizant life began.

Up the Mountain, Day 5

 Our ski-cabin is the light spec at the middle of this photo to the left of the lift-line.

Legend has it that my dad moved us to Smithers in 1965 because of the mountains. He had other reasons but they were lost on me. We skied on Sundays, as a family. Other families went to church, we skied. We ate pancakes in the morning and then we all piled into the VW Bus and after he had yelled his head off at us to get our boots, poles, and skis together, we were off. It was exciting and terrifying. My father at the wheel, hunched over, willing the underpowered vehicle up up up, around switchbacks lined by snowbanks just waiting to suck you in. He was a mountain climber but had given it up by the time I was born. Skiing was his next passion. So we skied.

He built us a ski cabin. It was a PanAbode number and the pieces got dropped by helicopter onto the mountain like bundles of Lincoln-Logs. The area that was the mountain was on Crown land, owned ostensibly by the government and we were all squatters. People built little basic cabins to huddle in after a long day of skiing, there was no power and we melted snow for water. There was a Ski-Club cabin as well where you could eat your bag lunch. I spent a lot of time there drinking cocoa and amusing the other skiers. Our cabin materials got dropped in the wrong spot so the cabin got built closer to the main run than it should have. Our outhouse ended up in the meadow where the cabin should have been. In winter I remember the deep path dug into the snow behind the cabin to the outhouse. As a child it felt like walking a long blue white corridor to the little wood hut. Scary and magical and slightly stinky.

 

Crater Lake beyond the trees. The alpine flowers were sparse due to the dry summer. Elevation is about 5000ft.

The Green-T hut. This was near the site of the original rope tow. As you rode up you could see our cabin and an optical illusion was created, the cabin appeared to sit tilted back into the hill, I imagined cups and saucers sliding off the crude table inside. In years of heavy snow my eldest brother and his friends made a snow-bridge onto the roof of the cabin and skied down the hill and over the roof, launching themselves into the ether. Spread eagles all of them, landing mostly softly below. We sold the cabin when my mother was dying, I am not sure who owns it now.

Many of the original ramshackle cabins still exist as well as many newer better ones. Everywhere progress and change even on the mountain.

 

The original ski-club cabin.

The Fraser Canyon Day 1

Driving north of Hope. The trees are replaced with sage.

The Thompson River meets the Fraser River, I think. The signage is poor along the road. The road conditions are sub-par considering the volume of traffic on the road.

 Dry, dry hills. 99 degrees out. Too hot to ride a horse. We have no stamina in the heat.

The reappearance of trees, small and scraggly clinging to the hillside, grass comes later, further up the road.

Road Trip to the Past

 Big sky and supplies at Lac La Hache

I wanted to go to Smithers. I didn't want to go to Smithers. All summer long we were allegedly going to Smithers. The drive is scary to me, it's long and the highway is undivided most of the way. It's lonely and empty and dusty and it can be hot or very cold and sometimes icy and always bumpy and under construction. The logging trucks and transport trucks are plentiful, huge and vicious. The first several hours of the drive seems to be straight uphill with the river below you on one side and a crumbling rock face above you on the other side. My head hurt, we couldn't listen to music, I was worried about the car making the trip, I was worried about being stranded in a hostile landscape in a country that has become foreign to me. I worried about my dog back at home in the kennel. In the video clips of our first night at Lac La Hache I can see how I have my hand over my mouth surveying the scene, trying to sort out what to do first. The next scene is of the tent set-up and I know by then I had had a beer and was feeling better. The clips of the following morning I look more relaxed, by the time we reached Smithers, 9 hours later, the video shows me warmly embracing my family members who had also come for the Centennial of our little town. We had made it, alive.

One of many roadside shrines to those who have died along the Yellowhead 16