We booked two nights at Greenwood in the Boundary region
along the US border. Nowadays Greenwood bills itself Canada’s smallest incorporated
city. Fewer than 700 live there today but once upon a time—in the first years
of the 20th Century—it was a copper mining and smelting boomtown of
a few thousand. Apart from its saloons and brothels, wild and woolly
Greenwood boasted 14 hotels, two newspapers and—pay attention now—a
thousand-seat opera house.
A copper smelter flourished from 1901 ‘til the end of the
Great War when the clamor for the war-useful metal collapsed, delivering a
near-mortal blow to Greenwood. We took a walkabout among the slag heaps and
remaining ruins of the smelter and contemplated ephemeral life. We ate and
swilled beer at the Greenwood Saloon; its beautiful old bar was delivered
overland by horse and wagon in the 1890s. Attractive old buildings adorn
Greenwood, so many of them that the producers of a Hollywood film chose it as a
key location for their 1999 pride-and-joy: Snow
Falling on Cedars.
In 1942 Greenwood received a life-saving transfusion:
having decided that its ethnic Japanese people could not be trusted, the
Canadian government uprooted more than 20,000 of our fellow citizens from their
coastal homes and communities, stole their property and packed them off for the war’s duration
to internment camps in eight different BC Interior ghost towns. The internment
order applied to everyone—even the good soldiers, some of them decorated for
gallantry—who’d served Canada in the Great War. Only Japanese citizens were
thus abused, not German or Austrian or Italian. It is a disgraceful, racist
chapter in our history.
From Greenwood we drove uphill to another early-1900s
boomtown, Phoenix. Apart from the saloons and brothels, hotels and newspapers,
Phoenix could brag about something else: Canada’s first professional hockey
team. In the 1910-11 the Phoenix skaters won every trophy that was available
for the winning in the region. Another was in their sights too—the Stanley
Cup—but as a result of mischief perpetrated by others their opportunity was
denied. Too bad, had they won the revered Cup the Phoenix Seven would have a
novel claim among Stanley Cup-winning cities: the only one that no longer
exists. All that remains of Phoenix are the scars of its mine operations, its
youth-filled cemetery and the city cenotaph. Nothing else.
We loaded on the backpacks and went for a walk along a
rail trail just over the hill from Phoenix. Then a black bear, the ‘cinnamon’ sort,
lumbered into our flight path. We stopped. I clapped my hands and hollered.
Nothing happened. Ordinarily a black bear would skedaddle. Bruno just looked at
us. Unblinkingly. A minute passed. Discretion trumped valour: we reversed
course and went back the way we’d come. I looked over my shoulder once or
twice.
My principal bird target this trip was a
woodpecker—Lewis’s woodpecker to be precise—whose numbers are much diminished
from days of yore. At Grand Forks we took a wrong turn and wound up passing a
handsome cemetery. Jan once more warranted the moniker I awarded her years
ago—Hawkeye. She spotted a woodpecker. Yep, a Lewis’s—the only one we would see
in the entire trip. I exulted.
We stopped to take walkabouts at natural
attractions—always superior in my mind to the manmade kind—Gilpin Grasslands,
the riverside Kettle Valley Trail, Cascade Falls—before heading off to Nelson
to commune with kin. Niece Sarah lives there with Pier and the lads, Theo and
Luca. Accorded a royal welcome, we naturally felt like royals. I was
particularly impressed with the parenting prowess of Sarah and Pier. They
abjure practices that ought to be
abjured: no hollering, no idle threats, no running off the rails. Would that
all the young parents I know possessed a measure of the same calm, cool, loving
command-and-control I saw under their roof.
At ultra-charming Kaslo we admired another array of old
buildings, studied the Internment display at The Langham and had our socks blown
off by SS Moyie, an 1890s-era
sternwheeler that hauled people and freight to ports of call all along the shore of
Kootenay Lake for nearly six decades. The Moyie,
nowadays a National Historic Site, has been beautifully and lovingly restored.
I rhapsodized, transported to a long-ago era.
Then it was off to New Denver, another ghost town rescued
from annihilation in the 1940s by anti-Japanese racism. Some 275 28’ x 14’
shacks were constructed at New Denver by the internees who were relocated
there. We lingered over the exhibits at the fine Nikkei Internment Memorial
Centre and walked the Kohan Reflection Garden, a verdant tribute to those who were
interned.
Then our mood was lightened by a trip to Nakusp
Hotsprings. One pool at 106 degrees F, another at 98. Soaking our brains out
with a small number of other aficionados, it was Jan’s turn to rhapsodize. A
lover of hotsprings, she decided that Nakusp’s operation is the best of the
resort-style facilities we have seen.
After five days on the road we decided it was time to
head for home. We took the road less traveled back to Victoria, via the
Fauquier cable ferry across Lower Arrow Lake, through the devoid-of-people Monashee
Mountains to Lumby where I added yet another cenotaph and a fine outdoor mural
to my photographic collection of Canada’s war memorials.
Remember when high-school accounts of field trips ended
with that finely-crafted, always reliable ultimate line? A good time was had by all. I can do no better. Jan and I
frequently agree that we are spoiled rotten. Good fortune, good health,
frequent travel being key elements in the spoilage. In less than a week we are
off for more—to Cape Breton for the summer hiatus, with a four-day stopover in
Montreal for more historical and cultural adventure. Spoiled rotten indeed.
