Shelter Within
May 21: I abandoned my dismal camp and my bicycle to the storm. Inside the modest cottage, there was a little heater, above which I hung my clothes and bedding to steam. In the corner stood a steel bedstead. The mattress sagged, caressing my tired limbs. Beside the bed, a bookcase held a set of encyclopaedias and enough Reader’s Digest magazines to entrance an expedition of attention-span-deprived adventurers. I read one of those survival-against-all-odds tales by candle-light, until my eyes refused to focus.
Early next morning, I grabbed a quick breakfast, leaving a $10 tip on the café counter, and set off into the bitter cold. A short climb beside foggy bogs and beaver ponds warmed my blood, then the landscape fell away and I was happy to follow, down a long, bone-jarring stretch of gravel, dodging wandering deer, rattling through rutted turns to the Needles ferry terminal (452m).
As I swung through a corner, I caught my first glimpse of my beloved Purcell Mountains: jagged white summits, etched here and there along a cloud-capped horizon. I cooled my brakes until the cable ferry arrived to transport me and a couple of cars and trucks across Lower Arrow Lake, to Fauquier.
Like Needles on the west bank, Fauquier (472m) lost its original site to water raised behind the Hugh Keenleyside Dam (completed in 1969), spanning the Columbia River near Castlegar. It was one of three large dams constructed in Canada under the terms of the Columbia River Treaty, ratified by the W.A.C. Bennett government in 1964. The agreement was supposed to apportion downstream benefits of development equitably between B.C. and the U.S. What it failed to account for was the loss of arable land, submerged forest, native villages, artefacts, cultural sites, and fisheries.
When I lived in the East Kootenays in the early ’70s, pioneers reminisced about the great salmon runs that used to enter the cold, glacial rivers coursing down the arid, lower flanks of the snow-capped Purcells. Their memories stretched back to the days before the spate of dam-building on the mighty, 1,950 kilometre Columbia River.
But for the ferry landing, there’s not much to distinguish Needles from the surrounding forest. Across the lake, where residents re-assembled their community on higher ground to escape the rising waters, Fauquier (pop. 585) clusters around its historic white-steepled church. It was also moved by parishioners, not only off its old stone foundation, but also from its original United denomination to Catholic.
Though an admirer of architecture, I’m confirmedly irreligious. My communion was a baptism by sun, piercing the clouds to warm the air and my chilled flesh. A sunny picnic beside the roadside was a blessing after a chilly morning.
“I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.” ~ Lillian Smith
9:30PM: If I were inclined to imbue natural phenomena with some kind of preternatural intent, I’d contend that the wind gods, cavorting over the open waters of the lake, conspired this day to drive me inward … the better to contemplate universal truths.
The bicycle, with its rhythmic cadence, its circular dance of revolving pedals and whirring wheels, is a reverie machine. Our animal sinews drive the mechanical meditation device through the world of wind-whipped waves and whispering trees. Field and mountain are a passing curtain of wonders opening onto the adventure within. Sometimes I fall through this landscape and my projected interpretations. The “here and now” arrives in some hypnotic trance, neither timed, recorded or graphed by kilometre and average speed. I’m no longer struggling against the headwind, grinding up a pass, or swooping toward some destination. I am the destination.
Fatigue and boredom, those occasional companions of the solo traveller, take us places an armchair can’t. A glacial torrent cools the air. A pungent bouquet of pine, nature’s smelling salts, wafts on the breeze.
I ask “Where was I?” and I’m the observing rationalist once more. I’ve returned from a sojourn with the instinctual, to pragmatic calculations and logistics of the expeditionary planner. Indeed, I demand to know: Where am I? How much further to Nakusp?
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