Four Guys Living On the Telkwa High Road

When I returned to the Bulkley Valley after completing journalism school, it was an act of failure.

I’d sent resumés to so many newspapers across Canada, most of the dailies, from my student room near the University of Western Ontario, in London.  (It’s a great old-style university by the way, which doesn’t get that much recognition.)

But nary a peep in response.  In the early seventies there was a downturn in the economy just as I finished school. I often gave that as my mumbled excuse.

Back I came to the Bulkley Valley in northern British Columbia, with its far-off mountains running up close to loom over the small town of Smithers.  The just-off-Main-Street Hudson Bay Mountain towered, its glacier and ski-runs gleaming in the sun.

My home, the home of my heart, a log cabin where three boys and their widowed mother all grew up, lay 20 miles or so farther east from the Town of Smithers, out past Telkwa and Quick to what we called Deep Creek in those days.

After my disappointment at the lack of clamoring for my services, I returned to the home place.  But all the available work seemed to be in Smithers, so I took a room there.

I found employment as a Child Care Worker at the Ministry of Human Resources or whatever its name was then, for the provincial government.  Child Care Workers were a definite step down from Social Workers’ positions, but that was the best I could do with just a psychology degree (prior to the journalism diploma, don’t you know).

Not quite sure what to do with me, the ministry put me in charge of the town’s teenage drop-in centre.  This was basically a two-room shack at the edge of a park a few blocks from the centre of town.

Provider of life wisdom

Of introverted and easily annoyed character, I was not really the best type to ride herd while distributing life wisdom to boisterous, even out-of-control young bucks.

There were a few girls drifting about, but most who frequented the drop-in were guys.  They were mainly there for the ratty pool table and the rock music emanating from a worn but nicely loud phonograph system.  One of those combo phonograph and AM-FM radio furniture units. The high-decibel band Nazareth was a big favorite.

At 23 years old, I was only seven, eight years older than these kids.  And, like, I’m really mature.  And I was supposed to do what with these juvenile delinquents?

I want to write more about them someday, but I’m trying to get to the Telkwa High Road!

Let me give you a brief layout.  Highway 16 runs its ribbon of asphalt two-lanes roughly east and west.  West to Prince Rupert.  East to Prince George. In our most frequented part of that road, we’d drive through the rolling terrain of trees and farms and fields, from Quick up over to Telkwa, where the Telkwa and Bulkley Rivers combine, than through that brief dip in the road to Smithers.  If you kept going for quite a few hours, you’d run into Terrace and eventually the sun setting over the port of Prince Rupert.

Heading towards Smithers, turn right in downtown Telkwa to get on what we called the Maclure Lake Road.  Maclure or Tyee Lake lies close above Telkwa.

And that’s the start of the Telkwa High Road, so-called because it parallels Highway 16 at an upland altitude, from Telkwa across various Babine Lake Roads and keeping on well past Smithers to the native village of Moricetown, famous for the precariousness of the old-time fishermen spearing salmon from the cliffs of its narrow river canyon.

At one turn along the way, you can head off to Driftwood Canyon and its 50-million year old fossils of redwood and gingko, ichneumon wasps and prehistoric trout and salmon.

Since the High Road ran in the uplands, often the views at sunset or from certain over-the-valley vistas opened onto a magnificence of sky and mountains and weather.

A farm on the High Road

In that year of my discontent as the manager of the drop-in center, I joined three other fellows roughly in my age group as we rented a farm on the Telkwa High Road above Smithers.

We only rented the farmhouse.  The outbuildings and barn were there, but not for our use.

The four of us knew each other from the ministry social circles in town, or from parties, or through my mother who was deep in the social whirl.  Two, Eric and Ron, were social workers.  Rick was a slightly younger guy with long black hair who mostly went to parties, played guitar and tried to charm the ladies.  He was an ingratiating and probably smart young man, doing what he wanted to do, and the other three of us weren’t that picky, we kind of liked him, and we needed somebody to share the rent.

One of the social workers I think had the relationship with the farmer which enabled the rental, and we found ourselves living in this ramshackle farmhouse on a knoll overlooking wide sloping fields of hay.

All four of us seemed to be between girlfriends or in dysfunctional relationships.

I had a broken down car of some kind. I commuted from the farmhouse to the drop-in centre every weekday, a 10-15 minute drive.

Memories

I remember two things the most from our time there.  One was the great parties we managed to have.  I’m not really a party guy, but the four of us worked together to put on these shindigs.  The music was loud and rocking, and that was my department.

At one of these parties, I remember in late afternoon walking towards the barn with a group of people, smoking a variety of substances.  I remember discussion of cocaine, which at that time in the early seventies was often considered innocuous, its addictive qualities thought to be exaggerations by the anti-marijuana crowd.  There was no cocaine at this party, that I knew about anyway.  But I find its mention interesting because although we lived far, far away from the centers of anything, in a rural place called a High Road, we were still connected to the impact of distant North American culture.

The other prominent memory I have, which still makes me grin at our youth and interests, were the tense team chess sessions the four of us had, while smoking whatever strong weed young Rick came across.

Ripped out of our minds, somehow we could really focus on these games.  In teams of two we debated and bickered with each other about the next move, while giving the other team the gears about the quality of their previous one.  Occasionally we would separate and whisper so our devious plans could not be overheard and then we would return to the table, confident.

We very formally recorded each move under our names and the date.  I wish I had just one of those old game scores.  That would be fun to play over….

Of course, sometimes we didn’t complete the games, distracted by animated discussions or just wanting to chill with the rock music we all liked.  Pink Floyd’s Meddle was often played.

A dream fragment

Oh, there’s one other memory, almost like a dream fragment.  It was a golden summer afternoon, late in our sojourn at the farmhouse, just before I found a job as a reporter/photographer with the town’s weekly newspaper.  I read a book while propped up on the mowed lawn. I listened through speakers brought outdoors to the Beatles’ Abbey Road album.

Eric, the cooler one of the pair of social workers, came and sat outside not far away, and listened too.

My favorite part of the album is the second half of the second half, from “Golden Slumbers” onward.  I put down my book.

Once there was a way to get back homeward
Once there was a way to get back home

Boy, you’re going to carry that weight, carry that weight a long time

And in the middle of the celebrations, I break down

On to the drumming and guitar solos of “The End” which always electrify me and then the song glides quietly onto

The love you take
is equal to the love you make

My companion rose up and against a leg dusted the wide-brimmed hat he always wore.  “That will last.”

We shared a moment, with that music, and then I agreed.

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We Did Good Work – The Decline of Flood Safety in British Columbia

Here are a couple of ponderous words. “Floodplain management.” That’s much too bureaucratic for the reality of swollen rivers and creeks and lakes and storm surge ocean, for alluvial fan avulsions and debris floods.

But that was the kind of work, looking after public safety around those bodies of water and unstable slopes, that I did for 26 years or so in a ministry for the British Columbia provincial government.

I say “I did,” but I was usually a junior person in an experienced team of technicians and engineers.  I was one of the new technicians twenty-five years ago when active flood protection was a serious function of the province.

Over the years though, the job took on more responsibilities as the work force dwindled, and the Technician became Officer became Senior.

What ministry was that again?

I’ve left the name of the ministry indefinite because there were so many names, and accompanying re-organizations, over the years.  There was the Ministry of Environment, Ministry of Environment and Lands, Ministry of Environment and Lands and Parks, back to Environment somewhere and then onward to Ministry of Water, Land and Air Protection.  We called that one WLAP (wallop).  WLAP was so named because the government of the day hated the word “environment.”

The current and the most ungainly version, in every way, is the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development.  Try saying that real fast three times.  Or even worse introduce yourself on the phone.  And what the hell is a natural resource operation?  Tree surgery?

There was an entire generation of foresters who were close to being out of a job due to markets, pine beetle infestation and silviculture neglect. The government needed to find a place for them.  They are good people, but with a different culture and priorities in the long-standing Forest Service as compared to say, the Ministry of Environment.  They were given this huge new ministry, MFLNRORD, to manage.  (Try to say that as an acronym.  MffflnrrrORD!)

Where I worked was known variously over the years as Flood Safety, Flood and Groundwater, Flood, Engineering Section, and so on. It was always an odd duck to the managers. They usually put it with something roughly accurate like Water Management, but for awhile we were in Environmental Protection with the pesticides people. Not long ago they lumped us in with the fish & wildlife people, who really hate dikes, the flood safety structures.  Not too keen on dams either, with dam safety being another thing I did.

The most meaningful thing

The most meaningful thing for me was that we responded to emergencies. This made it stand out within whatever organization included it.  When I started at the end of several years of seriously bad flooding in our region, we were provided a thick folder of forms and procedures to use while hiring equipment and working with Ministry of Highway crews to do flood fighting.

But even then, within a very few years, the section’s responsibilities were pared back.  No longer expected to run the show (usually), we now became the subject matter experts, assessors and observers, for anything to do with flooding.  From the debris flows of the Chilliwack River Valley to the extensive farmland deluges around Hatzic Lake to threatened high water and flooding from the massive Fraser River, we were supposed to know what was going on and the best way to get things done.

Over the years, our ability to respond to flood emergencies dwindled as the section’s staff were cut back and cut back.  The Emergency Management BC organization took over more, usually without enough specific technical expertise or planning.

Flooding in this part of BC, with everyone living on the delta of the mighty Fraser, or next to the Serpentine, or the Nicomekl, or the Pitt, or the Alouette, or the Chilliwack Rivers, to name only a few, risks the livelihoods and occasionally lives out of a few million people, and billions of dollars in property and infrastructure.

Flooding is not a rare occurrence. But it always fades out of topical awareness for the public in a surprisingly short period.  A couple of years maybe, or sometimes less.  Serious flooding happens somewhere in BC every year.

The foresters who have become Ministry managers inherited the responsibility for floodplain management with little understanding of dikes, other flood-related structures and policies. They lack acquaintance with the dire consequences of serious flooding.  Compared to forest tenure issues, timber sales and forest fires, it has little priority.

A certain camaraderie

But this blog post is really meant to be an appreciation of the people I worked with.  Responding to emergencies, assessing flood situations in driving rain or summer heat, built a certain camaraderie, passed down from the old hands to us more junior staff.  Sometimes we would have to step up and take on responsibilities we weren’t completely prepared for, with people going bugshit around us.

We cared about what we were doing.  We thought it was important.  It helped people.  That’s why it’s such a shame to see that function be ignored and slowly dropped with nothing to replace it.  The province has been lucky the last decade or so in the Lower Mainland Region — not so much serious flooding as there could be.

There are several of us in the Lower Mainland who, although retired, meet once in a while with who’s left.  These few struggle to do the mission, which is to keep people safe from flooding.  Safe from defective or poorly thought out diking designs, and poor planning placing more people at flood risk, safe from seismic failures and poorly engineered pipeline crossings.  Among many, many other things.

We get together and learn of the really insufficient effort the ministry makes about its flood prevention and response duties.

A case in point

A case in point, and then I’ll leave this….  Our section head was always an engineer who directed other engineers and technicians.  A dike is only as good as its weakest spot and it can be a highly technical issue.

Besides the engineering, the section head at one time had to know all the flood related bylaws of the municipalities in the region, all the personalities of engineering heads in the different municipalities, all the plans for studies on flood and river related matters up and down the main branch of the Fraser River, and elsewhere.  The section head would be expected to advise inter-provincially and internationally (down to the States).  Sea level rise and climate change had to be on his horizon. Seismic standards became important.

The management of this ministry of foresters had a hard time finding a competent engineer, for what they were willing to pay, to replace the retiring section head.  So that position is vacant and has been for months and months.  Other important engineering positions are vacant.

The solution?  Hire yet another manager to run things with little background or appropriate knowledge about flooding, dike standards or construction, and without the necessary engineering background.

We used to do good work.  I realized that the other day when I had a chance to chat with one of the other oldtimers.

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Notes on photo locations from a variety of news sources, top down:

1) Northern BC, along Highway 97
2) Flooding of Hwy 1 in BC, from Nooksack River in Washington State
3) In eastern BC.
4) Chilliwack flooding along Fraser River – always the potential.