Red Cedar

It’s fall and I’m traveling on union business again. Not as much as I was last year now that bargaining is ended but I expect there will be enough to do with simple shop stewarding in the next little while. Prince Rupert last night, I’m writing as I head home – one of my great productivities being writing in motion. Being in the air, being in transitory space opens up the senses. Even when it’s just Prince Rupert on a Dash-8. I’m sure I could be just that much more productive if I got on a plane once a week and let my imagination roam a little bit. Odd, because I don’t actually like flying much, my body gets cranky with it – gassy and lethargic even when there’s no time change involved and the journey is short. I’ve got a theory about how organ compression at altitude is unhealthy. I wonder if those who work in the industry record higher rates of particular types of illness – strokes and embolisms for example. It’s curious you never hear about such studies if they exist.

In any event, Prince Rupert was all rain in the less-than-24-hours I was there. A city I actually have grown to enjoy quite a bit (the people I know there are fabulous), it does rain an awful lot. And it’s never just the drizzle and mists we get so often on the lower coast but that hard rain, drilling into coat-linings and thin city-shoes. The glowering mountains romantic only for a few hours of such gloom before one starts wondering what it would be like to live there all winter long. Which I suppose is what afflicts so much of Canada, and why PR seems to me the quintessential Canadian small town.

Probably the thing I appreciate most is that outside of the stupid modernity of Vancouver and Victoria these days, outside of the touristed zones – there is a small town Canada which exists for itself despite provincial government attempts to drive everyone into cities. Signs in the airport are retro not by design but by age – the old Chinese-Canadian restaurants with red vinyl booths are still in operation even as the Tim Hortons’ move in. I am nostalgic for these places as replicas of the interior towns of my childhood, of the outskirts of Saanich where I grew up – now replaced by the shiny and new, fueled most recently by empty Olympic promises.

At the same time, the streets lined with empty shops belie the real wreckage left in the wake of mills shut-down and the neglect of successive governments. It used to be when mills closed it was a temporary situation – a few months of EI and the wood would start coming through the shutes again – everyone knew it and relied on this schedule for a type of holiday. But once stumpage was de-linked from wood milling the corporations were allowed to truly abandon the communities even as they pillaged the wood. A couple of years ago I sat in the airport on Digby Island, watching the rain slicing through the grey dusk and listening to a group of international buyers who had come up for the day to investigate purchasing the pulp mill piece by piece for shipment overseas. Shipment to places where BC wood would also travel to be processed there, instead of here in the small town it was taken from.

Hard to believe any government would do that to its people, but there it is – the NDP first de-linking stumpage and the Liberals ramming the fact home with further changes to the Forest Practices Act. And the only new businesses towns like PR and Prince George have seen as a result are casinos plunked right in the town center – offering, in particular, bingo and slots. The gambling choices of the very poor and desperate.

It’s a mixed up way to feel I realize, to embrace the ghost-town aspects of rural BC while simultaneously worrying about the government decisions which are killing them. While I don’t want these places to change too much I also don’t want them to disappear altogether. Which harkens back to my quest to “find the real Canada” – a place I’m sure doesn’t exist much in the neuromancing cities and Starbucks strip-malls. At least that’s not where I feel it.

Traveling from the Digby Island airport onto a single-platform ferry to meet the road into Prince Rupert – grey light and rain sweeping over the windows of the bus, looking up at the cedars and firs lining the road. Watery coffee in a greasy-spoon serving $3 breakfast. A road trip involving switchbacked logging roads to get from one town to another. Looking down on mile after unpopulated mile of mountains from an airplane headed west. A string of 1920s mining shacks falling down the hillside into the thickening forest coming back again from the early-century’s devastation. Peaches by the roadside of a hot interior valley connecting nothing to nothing. The crappiest of seaside motels boasting “ocean views” on the edge of Queen Charlotte City.

Those are the places where it comes to me that there is something in a national identity that has nothing to do with where the “majority” lives. And I suppose it just means I don’t belong where I am most of the time, but am ever reminded that I sure do miss where I came from. Unresolved and wondering even as I make my little home in the city with Brian and Mica, what other towns I am always partially wishing to live in.