Place Becoming Otherwise

Abstract

IT IS THE EARLY 1970s. With my parents and two brothers, we wind along the narrow road that hugs the hills above Nicola Lake. Our destination Monck Park lies among the Ponderosa pines, sagebrush, and bunch grass that grow along the lake's northwest shores. It has become a summer ritual the large family car, a small canvas trailer, three rambunctious boys in the back seat. Our journey traces a line of flight across the BC Interior, a week-long trip that takes us from Calgary, through various federal and provincial parks, and finally to the Fraser Valley, where our grandparents live in communities that are beginning to feel the first effects of exurban development. As we drive west from Calgary I imagine myself turning down the unmarked gravel roads that branch off periodically at odd angles, my mind conjuring up images of remote headwaters, patches of snow still lingering in unnamed alpine passes. If we are further west, driving along the Thompson River perhaps, the imagined passes are replaced by pools of cold water, hidden at the remote ends of hot canyons. The BC Interior was a landscape of a thousand fantasies. Monck Park was the site for some of these, associated in my mind with rattlesnakes and black widow spiders, the result of stories told by a park naturalist,