OUR TIME IN 'THE WACK' - AS ERIC SAW IT

While backpacking, we phoned our parents on a weekly basis, to make sure they wouldn’t worry about us and send the police after us.

During one of these calls to my (Eric’s) parents, my dad casually mentioned that Rachel and I might be able to do a little painting once we arrived in Chilliwack. Dad said he was about to begin painting the cedar siding of their two-storey split-level house in Chilliwack and might not be finished by the time we got home. We agreed we could do some work for my parents to cover our room and board.

Therefore, I was confused when I pulled into the driveway of my former home and saw it looking the same as the last time I was there – three months ago. It didn’t look like he had started, let alone almost finished. But, we were prepared to roll up our sleeves and get to work. Seriously, how hard could it be to change the entire house from dark red to cream with chocolate brown trim?


Back to work

Sometimes, it seems as though life has an itinerary of lessons for one to learn. We had already learned how to camp in the cold, flee crazy tultures and even how to find water while hiking in the wilderness. Well, the month of June seemed to be the time for learning about paint. Paint in itself is not all that exciting of a thing. It comes in a can that can’t really be opened without special training and then upon opening it all one sees is a thick liquid of one colour.

The garage was filled with paintbrushes, rollers, trays, shop towels, paint thinner and, as well as the usual four-litre cans, four or five buckets of paint. Yup, I mean those big ones that are almost impossible to carry and are equipped with those terrible wire handles that cut into your hand as the bucket pulls earthward from its weight. This was the first hint to the size of the job. We started painting the day of our arrival.

We both worked fairly steady for the several days; Rachel painted while I helped and built some wood trim to go around the exterior windows. It was after the first week that the subject of the deck came up. Mom and Dad’s house is, to say the least, beautiful. They had recently finished an entire remodel on the inside that included new doors, trim, flooring, furniture, a kitchen update with new appliances, and pretty much everything else. The original deck was small and somewhat cramped, as it connected to the house through the oft-used kitchen. It was used extensively as a morning-coffee-drinking escape or as a visiting place when company came over. The problem, at least in my view, was that passing from the newly renovated house to the old deck felt as though you were a newborn experiencing a Caesarian section – you were ripped from a beautiful, cozy environment to a Chernobyl-like wasteland trimmed with Astroturf.

I immediately began the task of convincing Mom and Dad to let me build them a new deck.


A bigger building project than originally anticipated

They finally saw the light and we came up with some preliminary drawings and went to work. A deck obviously does not need the same foundation as a house. But, Dad wanted to be sure the new deck would have a solid base and a tidy curb to hold the gravel that would be spread under the deck. We formed an eight-inch wide curb and dug six piles two feet into the ground. This was a foundation fit for a brick addition to the house. When we finally finished pouring the foundation one Saturday morning, the concrete truck driver said to Mom, “Well I guess we’ll be seeing you again.” “OH?” Mom replied, puzzled. “Yeah, for the floor,” the driver said casually as he rolled up his hose. After seeing the substantial foundation, the concrete expert had assumed that we were building an addition, like a shop or an office or a hobby room, to the house, not just a little deck. I think it’s safe to say that when Vancouver’s Big One comes and Richmond and Delta fall into the ocean, all the survivors will be seeking refuge under Mom and Dad’s deck. We worked for about three weeks before we got to the point where Dad said they would be when we arrived.

Once the deck was finally finished, Dad took me on a weekend camping trip in Gold Bridge over the July long weekend for a little R&R after all our hard work.


A story with a moral

On our way out of town, Dad insisted we stop at Tim Hortons. (Dad has an addiction problem with Tim Hortons coffee.) We pulled up to the drive-thru in his ‘80s-styled brown camper van only to discover the lineup was massive. I’m not exactly a supporter of drive-thrus as I think they solidify an attitude of disrespect for the environment and encourage people to be lazier. In fact, I think a tariff should be added to your order if you decide to place it in a drive-thru. But there we sat in the lineup like lemmings. After some thought I turned to Dad and said, “I bet I can go inside, order, get served, and be back in the van before you are even at the little speaker thing.” Dad accepted my challenge. I walked into the store, waited in line, ordered a coffee and a donut, paid, walked back to the van and consumed my donut before Dad had even ordered. Where is the logic in a drive-thru anyway?


More exploration, but this time of mountains, not islands

Dad has been going to Gold Bridge for decades and decades. Nestled in a hard-to-get-to corner of B.C., it is a place of the past. As the name suggests, Gold Bridge is full of shutdown gold mines that linger on, not as historic sites or tourist attractions but as places of raw history. No warning signs or markers bar you from entering dangerous buildings in different stages of collapse. Huge structures remain and massive amounts of machinery and supplies sit half-overgrown. Gold Bridge holds thousands of secrets along its hundreds of kilometers of unpaved roads.

We entered the area through a deep valley and rumbled along a rough gravel road for a long time before entering what dad calls the Gateway. The road winds between two mountains at the bottom of a valley. The road has even undercut the mountain in some places leaving huge boulders suspended over the road, as though they were hanging in mid-air. We then followed Carpenter Lake (actually the last of three B.C. Hydro reservoirs that are connected by rivers). The lake was extremely low, leaving the banks rocky and lifeless, giving the place an even stranger feeling.

We finally made our way to a campsite beside an old gold mine. Dad set up his van while I erected my tent. It felt good to crawl into the tent after being away from what felt like home for so long. The next morning we spent some time exploring and crawling through dilapidated structures. We found landmarks from when I had last visited the area at least a dozen years earlier. I felt a sort of peculiar nostalgia as we walked along an old road that used to be lined with the houses of mining executives. When I had visited as a child the homes, although rundown, still stood there, but now all I could see were stone fireplaces bluntly rising from the forest floor.


An interesting discovery

We eventually came across something rather puzzling. Lying in the middle of the bush was a dirt bike. This in itself maybe wasn’t so odd, but our curiosity was piqued. The closer we got to the bike the more careful we were to look around and see if we were being watched. Finally, our curiosity won over our nervousness and we started to poke around the bike. It didn’t make sense. Here in the middle of nowhere was an early ‘80s dirt bike, pretty beat up, with gas in it, in plain view. What were we to think, or a better question might be, what were we to do? Dad threw one leg over the bike as he mounted it and said hesitantly, “You think we could get this thing into the van?” At first, I didn’t think he was serious. After some speculation, we decided that it must belong to someone who had come this far before deciding to proceed on foot. We figured that we had better leave it alone . . . at least for now. We agreed to return when night fell just to see if the foolish hiker had returned for the beat-up bike.

After doing some other exploring in the van and having a burger at the local bar, we made our way back to the bike a few hours before dark and sure enough, there it sat. What proceeded to transpire was something that happens rarely in life. It’s one of those situations when you do something that you’re sure isn’t wrong, but is most definitely not right either. Out came the ideas, measuring tapes, saws, and scrounged lumber to build a rack to accommodate the bike in the back of the van. We finally got everything ready and decided to wait until nightfall. The longer we sat there in silence, the worse I felt about it. How could we sit here like a couple of petty thieves waiting for dark? I realized that what I was doing was basically pre-meditated thievery. If I couldn’t take the bike in the day then it was for sure not right to take it at night. So I suddenly broke the silence and said, “Let’s just take it now, there’s no one around anyway!” And just like that, I had eased my conscience.

My heart raced as I stood at the back of the van on lookout duty. I didn’t feel so bad now. We were just picking up a piece of scrap metal in the forest . . . we were doing the environment a favour . . . we were good people doing a good service… As I reasoned with myself, I witnessed my dad emerging from the forest, running as quickly as he could across a little bridge while pushing the bike ahead of him with great urgency. This sight conflicted with my ideas of environmentalists cleaning up the forest, but it was to late to reconsider. When he got to the van, I took the bike from him and he ran inside to haul the bike into the vehicle from the rear; a few hours before, we had outlined the exact movements we needed to take to load the thing. But, as Dad tried finding room for the bike amongst all the wood we had cut, we started to see that we might have to forgo the plan for a rack. Soon, we were heaving the lumber out of the van and throwing it into the bushes. In a matter of minutes, we were on the road again, headed, well, as far as we could get before we had to sleep. We drove for about an hour and a half convincing each other of the innocence of our actions.

The next day we picked up some supplies to “fix up” the bike. When we were finished, the white battered bike from the bush no longer existed. Nope, we were the proud owners of a new-looking shiny red two-stroke polluting dirt bike. We spent the next few days exploring the wilderness on our toy.


A delicate situation

Finally, it was time to head back home. I drove the bike down the mountain while Dad followed behind in the van. Along the way, I passed a middle-aged woman carrying a backpack. I didn’t think much of this, but I have to admit I was a little startled to find her in the van with my dad when he picked me up at the junction. We loaded the bike and headed for the main highway that would take us home, about 2.5 hours away.

The hitchhiker was headed to Vancouver to find work and she talked to us about Jesus and mushrooms and other things that aren’t usually connected. The lady was very kind, but I was beginning to feel a bit awkward, despite the fact that I had been a hitchhiker in the recent past. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to ending this father-son weekend by spending another two hours driving in a tipsy camper van with a person I didn’t really know.

I realized my dad was feeling the same way about our companion when he let her out at the highway. We proceeded to point our vehicle in the direction of Vancouver, waved at her, and headed home.

The only thing left to do was to explain things to Mom. In the end things turned out fine and the more time passes the more I laugh at how we managed to do so much in three days.


Enough of work, what about the rest of our lives?

Rachel and I spent the next two weeks fixing up our truck and we also made a quick trip to visit our friends Matt and Alison who were working at Keats Camp (on Keats Island). This meant three more Greyhound rides, four more ferry rides and a visit to another island.

It was finally time to get our brains thinking about the next chapter in our lives. Living with parents isn’t a permanent solution – usually. We knew we wanted to travel some more, but we also knew we didn’t have the money to do so. We had heard that Saskatoon was booming and considered moving there to flip houses. Could we live there for a couple years and be part of the rat race to make money? The idea of living and travelling the country in an RV was also on our minds, and we looked longingly at for sale signs posted on various mobile homes throughout Chilliwack. And immediately we were back to the money problem. The smaller ones cost around $10,000 and we certainly didn’t have cash like that lying around. Decisions, decisions.

In the end, we left Chilliwack on July 15, with semi-solid plans for only the next two weeks. Take our time driving through B.C. to visit Nelson and other towns along the way, see all our friends in southern Alberta, and arrive at Rachel’s parents’ place