Near Midway, B.C. June 1, 1978

'Twas bitter cold last night.  And I with no ground sheet, no fly sheet. I think it was the damp that really got to me.  So, not the best of sleeps.  Still, I woke up – several times in fact – smiling. My chipmunk friend came round for breakfast, little beggar.  Sure he’d eat the lot if I gave it to him – or store them away in his secret cache.

 

Manning Park was too high and therefore too cold for a long stay, so I packed up after breakfast and hit the road.  By coffee time, as I entered the Okanagan valley, it was clear that it was going to be another warm day.  In fact, it was already hot.  The colours of the landscape – packed red-clay earth coated in a grey-green fuzz, and dotted with tufts of dry-looking sagebrush – intensified the sensation of heat.  

I rolled the windows down (no AC, and no power windows, so ‘rolling the windows down’ requires a stop…).  And breathed in the dry, sagey air.  It felt good, medicinal.

 

Every now and then there’d be an ‘oasis’ of lively, cool green punctuated the dry landscape – grasses and trees by a little pond or trickling stream, neatly fenced off parcel of land where irrigation systems transformed the sere landscape into a lush and fertile garden.   

 

And then, all of a sudden, I turned a corner and found myself in Keremeos. Fruit stands lined both sides of the road, mostly closed.  Cattle roamed lazily in fields behind old barb-wire fences, strung on weathered wooden posts, some looking so elderly and frail one wondered whether the posts were holding the wire or the wire holding the posts.  Evidently a co-dependent relationship.  Rocks were scattered about willy-nilly, some almost in rows.  I wondered whose hand had placed them there?  A glacier, an old flood?  Human hands?  

 

And wildflowers, gorgeous wildflowers everywhere – bright yellow, purple, rosey pink, white, blue-purple, and brilliant orange – so very orange. Perhaps it’s a trick of light, or maybe the fact that the sky is so clear, that the colours seem more intense, more rich.  

 

And oh, the smells!  Herby sage, sweet fruit tree blossoms, piney conifers, and the earthy odour of freshly ploughed ground. A bouquet of aromas of the land. It’s almost overwhelming, like eating too much chocolate.  I feel blissful, and very grateful for my good fortune: fantastic weather, incredible scenery, and now terrific entertainment – Paganini and Ravel.  What could be better than this?

 

This evening around seven I spied a campsite by a river.  Almost no one there – one of my #1 considerations.  Drove in and had just started to set up when some folks in a site down the way invited me to join them for dinner.  Mary and Gerry from Victoria.  On their way to Cranbrook for the yearly reunion of the Canadian Scots brigade.  Gerry is a real gem – a gaunt, bleary-eyed, desperate looking fellow with a mugful of stubble and a gummy grin that belies his quick and nimble mind.  He speaks little, and softly, and chooses his words carefully.  There’s often a twinkle in his eyes as he talks, a dead giveaway that he’s having you on.  Well, just a little.  Mary’s a mother hen, clucking at my can of beans, and disapproving of my travelling alone.  ‘What about bad people?’ she asks, ‘there are lots of bad people out there.’  (I almost felt like responding with one of my own mother’s frequent epithets: ‘I wasn’t born yesterday’.  But I just smiled.  She meant well.)  Perhaps sensing she was having little impact on this willful girl, she summed up her views with a tired-sounding 'young people these days', and busied herself with filling up my plate with vegetables, and a big slice of cheese.  This last to compensate for the glaring absence of meat.  But she chose not to comment on my vegetarian diet.  

 

We talked long into the night.  Mary and Gerry have camped just about everywhere in B.C., mostly in Forest Recreation sites, eschewing the more developed Provincial Parks and the crowds of urban dwellers who frequent them, building fires too big (wasting wood), playing music too loud (can’t hear the birds), and letting their children run amok (clearly not M&G’s style).  Eleven years ago, in 1967, they took their entire family on a cross-Canada centennial camping trip.  Mostly back roads, visiting historic sites, and staying in lesser serviced campsites.  They had plenty of stories and lots of tips to share with this neophyte city-slicker cum cross-Canada camper sojourner. 

 

I was inspired by their trip, and particularly intrigued by the idea of visiting historical sites.  I kept mental notes on their many practical tips that I hoped I’d remember if and when needed.  When at last I felt the call of sleep, and excused myself with many thanks, I was glad that I could to look forward to a better night’s sleep, having bought and laid down a new ground sheet under the tent, and having stretched a fly out over it.