Mnemonic (30 page)

Populus tremuloides

Cariboo Wedding

Leaves
: Alternate, deciduous, simple, broadly egg-shaped, kidney-shaped or circular, 2.5-9 cm long, 2.5-8 cm wide, the bases rounded to slightly heart-shaped, smooth, finely toothed and fringed with long white hairs, upper side green, lower side paler; leaf stalks 2-7.5 cm long; buds smooth
¹

It was a long way to drive for a wedding, from our home on the Sechelt Peninsula to the Nazko Valley, west of Quesnel. We left on a Thursday, in late July. Up early, second ferry from Langdale to Horseshoe Bay, Sea to Sky Highway to Pemberton, then east on the Duffey Lake Road as far as Lillooet the first night.

In Lillooet, we could see flames on the mountain behind the town. Helicopters were swinging buckets of water over the flames, clouds of smoke billowing into what had been a clear sky as water hit fire. The woman at the post office said part of the town was on evacuation notice but when we said we'd been thinking of staying a night in Lillooet, she quickly said, “Oh, you'll be fine. It's only the outskirts that need to worry.” A small town in depressed times: every tourist dollar counted.

We wandered around and looked at things. The main street of Lillooet was Mile Zero of the wagon road leading miners from Port Douglas to the goldfields during the 1860s (many place names on the route evolved from the stopping houses along the way: 70 Mile House, 100 Mile House, the 108 Mile Ranch, etc.). The beautiful Miyazaki House was elegant in its shady garden, trees hung with bright apricots. Farther down Main Street, the museum featured in its basement a dusty approximation of Ma Murray's
Bridge River-Lillooet News
print shop (Margaret “Ma” Murray and her husband George launched the newspaper in 1934). We couldn't decide at first whether to stay or move on to a town without a fire at its back. Clinton, maybe — or Cache Creek. But we liked Lillooet. I felt that there was a story in the plantings around the Miyazaki House — that the fruit trees, the big cottonwood, and the lilacs might figure into this memoir I was writing about trees. So we reasoned that the fire couldn't reach the town overnight, and it was likely we could sleep peacefully in a room at the Mile 0 Motel without being roused by loudspeakers to pack our bags and leave within twenty minutes.

Our room at the Mile 0 was adequate, though spartan. A few thin towels in the bathroom and two Styrofoam cups by the coffee maker. Still, there was a view of the Fraser River if we stood on the small balcony with sliding doors to let in air. If we stood outside the front door of the unit, we could watch the drama of the helicopters, one after another, rising from the Fraser River with their buckets.

We loved the Miyazaki House. It was built in the late 1800s (a heritage report issued by the District of Lillooet indicates the construction was between 1878 and 1890) in the Second Empire style, with a mansard roof. Built for Caspar Phair, a merchant and gold commissioner, the house, with its gracious lawns and gardens, was a centre for social activity well into the next century. During the Second World War, it became the temporary home and surgery for Dr. Masajiro Miyazaki, a Japanese-born Vancouver osteopath who'd been interned at nearby Bridge River when Canadians of Japanese ancestry were evacuated from the Coast. Dr. Miyazaki's medical skills were needed in the area and he was recruited as Lillooet's coroner when the town's doctor died during the war. After the war, Dr. Miyazaki was able to buy the house from the son of Caspar Phair and lived in it, raising his family there, until 1983, when he donated the house to the town of Lillooet.

Walking the main street of town in the evening, after a good meal at the Greek restaurant, we saw people on every block or corner, all of them looking towards the mountain. It was a Thursday, not a weekend, but it felt almost festive, walking the sidewalks of Lillooet where residents had set up lawn chairs with small coolers full of beer and soft drinks for the children. Some people kept binoculars focussed on the fire. We bought ice cream cones and ate them on the patio of a little café; around us, customers sipped cold drinks and talked of the fire. I expected to smell smoke but it was just a faint whiff, a rumour. Several times in the night, I went outside to see a deep orange glow against the dark mountain. Other motel guests were watching too, an uneasy fellowship. I imagined I could hear the crackling of flame, fanned by wind off the Fraser River, but in fact it was strangely quiet.

We were heading to a wedding so we drove off before 7:00 a.m. the next morning; the helicopters resumed the water-drops at 6:00 a.m. so we didn't need a wake-up call. Our car was covered with a fine film of ash. By now we knew that the mountain was Mount McLean, and that there were no roads to where the fire was raging on its slopes which meant the blaze would be fought mostly from the sky. As we drove over the bridge across the Fraser River, we saw the smokejumpers' campsite on its banks, a village of tents that had sprung up overnight. Young men were crawling out of tents, pulling on red shirts with the fire-service badge. I thought of another MacLean — Norman —and his wondrous book about another fire fought by young men, the 1949 Mann Gulch fire in Montana, a book of Shakespearean power, which ended in tragedy. In my heart, I wished these guys courage and luck.

The Pavilion road was beautiful in the cool of morning. In the valley bottom, there were trembling aspens, their heart-shaped leaves fluttering while horses grazed above the river in distant fields. Hawks watched from telephone poles. And everywhere a soft wind, the smell of dry earth. It felt like morning at the dawn of the world, the old gods walking those shimmering fields, attended by rustling leaves.

I had my copy of
Plants of Southern Interior British Columbia
in the car and looked up trembling aspens. The delicate movement of their leaves, dark green with pale undersides, made a sibilant music. The white bark was a perfect contrast to the cinnamon trunks of the ponderosa pines. What would the book tell me about their ecology?

“Reproduces mainly from root suckers following disturbances, such as cutting or fire.”
²
Well, this was a landscape vulnerable to fire, I thought, looking behind us to see the smoke from the McLean Mountain inferno while the radio news reported that its size had doubled overnight. I remembered my childhood among the fire-shaped Garry oak meadows of southern Vancouver Island and saw some similarities to these dry expanses of grass. There is also a history of controlled burning by the Stl'átl'imx people
³
to enhance plant resources, notably berries and roots.

While we drove, we were listening to Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sing Handel and Bach arias.
⁴
Two years into my singing lessons, I was happily accompanying her while John drove; our windows were open and warm air carried the tang of sage into the car. The aspen leaves were rustling and when we passed a grove of them by the side of the road, we could hear their whisper. It was an idyllic drive, Lorraine (and me) singing,

There in myrtle shades reclined,

By streams, that through Elysium wind,

In sweetest union we shall prove

Eternity of bliss and love.

Such a potent landscape — the rock formations and pines and golden stretches of grass. We passed small creeks entering the Fraser River and shelves of rock which were fishing sites for the First Nations people of the area. These sites were owned by extended family groups and had names passed down through the generations; sometimes a place speaks its own name even now: the site known as “shady rock” or the site known as “foaming.” The sockeye were running, heading for their spawning beds near Horsefly and Stuart lakes, and I expected to see people out with nets but didn't. We did see a pair of coyotes on a small hill, taking the sun, and hawks swooped as chipmunks raced across the highway.

Our destination was Quesnel. We'd reserved a suite at the Talisman Motel, and we didn't know what to expect. The marriage of my niece Lisa and her beau Chad would take place on Saturday afternoon at Rainbow Lake in the Nazko Valley, an hour and a half from Quesnel itself; my oldest brother and his wife had their home on the lake and their children — Lisa and her three brothers — had been raised in the valley. Then everyone would return to Quesnel to the Seniors Centre for the reception that evening. It seemed prudent to stay in the town, walking distance from the reception.

Although it was hot when we left home, it was even hotter in the Cariboo, a different heat from the bracing dry warmth of the Lillooet area where we'd spent the previous night. Driving up the long highway, stopped at various intervals for road work (the smell of new asphalt sickening in the heat), we were glad to have air-conditioning in our car, along with bottles of water and bags of fresh cherries to eat at the construction stops.

My family drove this highway when I was a child, on our way to Edmonton to see our grandmother. (There was a faster route but we took this one if my father wanted to pick something up in Prince George — a gun part, maybe — or if my parents wanted to visit old friends in Clinton or Williams Lake.) They were long trips, my father wanting to make the most of daylight, so we'd break up our camps shortly after dawn. He'd pack the station wagon while our mother made sandwiches for later in the day. My brothers and I were delegated to walk the dog and make sure she peed before she was loaded into her spot in the car.

I recalled camping trips in this country with our children when they were small, our own dog panting in the back of our van as we drove the long highway to Bella Coola or Prince Rupert. I'd forgotten the spruce forests along the highway and the beautiful grasslands near Williams Lake, the aspens in small groves, often with horses grazing among them; yet they felt deeply familiar as we drove north to the wedding.

We passed the Sandman Inn on our way into Quesnel, where my younger brother Gordon had first suggested we stay. We were meeting him, and the idea of a shared suite seemed sensible; we could have a visit (we so seldom see him) and we could drive out to Rainbow Lake together the next day. My brother had stayed there for another family wedding a few years earlier and praised it for the adjacent bar and grill, but we were glad when we saw it that we weren't staying there. It was located south of town on the side of the highway. “Can we walk nearby?” we'd asked him, and he confessed it was not really that kind of place. We knew from the description on its Web site that the Talisman Inn was above the Fraser River and near a walking trail that circumnavigated Quesnel. I imagined the three of us walking early in the morning and updating one another on our lives. The Sandman Inn, next to the big parking lot for Extra Foods and Walmart, looked like it could have been anywhere in North America.

And when we located the Talisman, we felt lucky. It felt like we were somewhere in the middle of a western town. It was an older motel but very well-kept, with huge baskets of flowers, a block from the river where that trail meandered along its banks for some 5.5 kilometres. When we checked in, the woman at the desk told us that a complimentary breakfast was served in the lobby each morning. Inside, the rooms were fresh and clean, the air conditioning units were quiet, the bathroom stocked with huge fluffy towels, the kitchenette large enough to prepare meals if one wished. We didn't, but we'd brought food to have with a glass of wine once my brother arrived from Vancouver (he was doing the drive in one long day), so we stocked the fridge with olives, cheese, hummus, a bottle of excellent Pinot Grigio, some beer, and cider.

Trembling aspens can occur in huge, long-lived clones that may be thousands of years old.

— Parish, Coupé, and Lloyd,
Plants of Southern Interior British Columbia