Sunday, October 6, 2013 Williams Lake, Canada
With a title that goes from bike to bard,
Catching your eye should not be hard.
This tale begins on a bike, riding in search of Dog Creek Road. One can find this road by driving
from Vancouver on the TransCanada Highway 350 kilometres north northeast, then on Highway 97 200 kilometres north, then on Highway 20 two kilometres west of the Williams Lake junction.
Today I found Dog Creek road through on bush trails that spidered up the hills that divide it from South Lakeside Drive, which branches off Highway 20 one kilometre west of the aforesaid Williams Lake junction.
A previous attempt had me go to the end of South Lakeside, about seven kilometres, then climb onerous hills on shrinking trails before I emerged at Kwaleen School, the latest local public school to close; but on the same side of the hills as South Lakeside Drive. Today I branched up less-onerous hills only two kilometres along the drive.
Bushwacking away, mostly pushing my bike, I emerged at Allen Road, which joins Schmidt Road, which joins Dog Creek Road. Rather than a leisurely coast downhill back to Williams Lake, however, I rolled eastward off Dog Creek Road onto Tamarack Road, to search for a bush trail way to get back downhill to the city below.
Woody Guthrie came to mind as I walked up to a log fence with a sign that said, "No Trespassing." On the other side it said nothing. That side was made for you and me, but I walked along the fence rather than breach it. A log mansion has breached the hilly forest, its kilometre-long, winding driveway private, but a necessary path downhill, to...
Walmart, another breach of the local wilderness, and robust local economy and fair wage legacy.
That legacy is history across Highway 20, where a non-operating sawmill squats along the Williams Lake River Valley. A lake river valley, you wonder? Yep. Riding among the many buildings and piles of planed lumber and logs, I remembered when this mill was noisy with jobs and production, a few short years ago.
I rode toward the millsite bridge, to avoid going farther along the river to find a cross the river on one of many railway flatcars converted to bridges farther downstream. Every time I have seen the bridge, the gate on its east side has been locked. Today the gate was open, the padlock hanging on the gate's chain links. Open gate, open lock, like Rome, open city in the Italian film of that name, private property in retreat, at last. The mill people or the bike people breached this barrier, I rejoiced. I want to find someone to thank.
I rode a kilometre along the path on the river's east side, then began to climb a trail to the railway crossing above. This crossing had crew shacks and sheds when I came to Williams Lake in the early-1990s. An old woman lived in a little house surrounded by lilacs, on the west side of the tracks. Now all the buildings are gone.
Two snakes, brown, about a centimetre wide and 40 centimetres long, crossed my path as I climbed the trail. Coleridge's line from The Ancient Mariner came to mind as I stopped my bike to let first one snake, then 20 metres farther uphill the other snake, cross my path: I honored man and bird and beast, as Coleridge wrote; or at least I honored snakes. Perhaps a reference to Milton's Paradise Lost is more fitting. The snakes breach the land long after provincial government sold what was a provincially-owned railway to what was a federally-owned railway, and is now a subsidiary of a United States railway. The railway went. Jobs went. Snakes survived, possibly thrived.
I considered riding a few kilometres north to the dump, with its Share Shed, actually two sheds, and surrounding ground, where people may leave things or take what others leave. I imagined that many former millworkers shopped there, given the recent destruction of the local economy by governments and businesses, near and far.
But people be. People survive, some happily like me, here in this depressed and sometimes depressing city, whose population was 13 000 when I got here in the early-1990s and is below 10 000 now. The art of merely being, enjoying each day of life, is a useful art too rarely practiced. My late mother-in-law could do it. I have a photograph of her merely sitting on a lawn chair, smiling in the summer sunshine. Many times I saw that look of contentment on her face: merely glad to be alive.
The beer can, which I found in the dirt off the edge of the Walmart parking lot, in my bike bag, I rode across the train tracks, walked uphill a couple blocks, and rode a few more blocks home. Riding along the paved path that joins my apartment building to the local recreation centre, with its swimming pool, two ice rinks, and performing arts theatre, I saw several beer cans. They filled my bike bags. The beer cans were from fans of last night's hockey game between a local team and another town's team, in an adult league that feeds no professional hockey league. The economy goes nowhere, the hockey players go nowhere, but the beer cans go for dimes at the local liquor store, a government-owned corporation in a province and country selling assets built by generations of people.
These were mostly Budweiser beer cans. I once read that the Busch brewery in St. Louis, USA, or somewhere, has enough capacity to fill the whole Canadian beer market's volume; albeit with yucky beer. This could turn Canada into a nation of teetotallers, or alcoholics for lack of tasty beer.
One bike trail from earlier in the day was called Guinness, presumably the beer choice of some mountain bikers. I wouldn't ride those steep trails, drunk or sober.
While I wait for a local renaissance, I'll turn on the U.S. Public Broadcasting System television channel to watch William Shakespeare's Henry the Fourth, Part Two, from the English Renaissance:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/episodes/the-hollow-crown-shakespeares-history-plays/synopsis-henry-iv-part-2/1750/
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