Beautiful British Columbia: Our September 2024 Holiday, Part Five

It's the Pentecost weekend, which means that Monday is a statutory day off in Berlin, so I want to spend time diving back (in my imagination) into last year's holiday!

***

We entered New Denver just before the shops (specifically, the shops that were still open after the main tourist season) began to close for Friday evening. It is, as a man told us later in our journey, a town that looks like it did during the 1960s.

In fact the 1960s were why Uncle Pu had decided to take us there. My paternal grandfather had been a schoolteacher in that decade, and he was assigned to New Denver and lodged in a house just at the entrance to town, at the corner of 6th Avenue. Uncle Pu pointed it out to us immediately: a beige, weatherboarded two-storey house with a peaked roof, kept in a tidy state that preserved its historic appearance.

We parked on 6th Avenue and wandered down the slope to Slocan Lake. I imagined that tourists would throng through the village in summer months, skiers with drawling leisurely voices who would be heading into the 'back country,' mountain bikers, and the kayakers and canoeists. In one yard, someone was advertising vinyl records for sale; in another, men around middle age or older were sitting in a garden arbour at what looked like a café. Further down the street, there was a pharmacy and an art gallery and further up the street and far beyond it, a forested mountain looked blue in the mist.

I popped into a souvenir shop, which sold (amongst other things) postcards, clothing, balls of yarn, books including a copy of the 2022 bestseller Remarkably Bright Creatures that was also circulating in Berlin — as well as books by Indigenous authors like Richard Wagamese and Eden Robinson, and decorated chopsticks. I ended up getting a card that showed a dark wooden shack with a mountain ash tree in front: it raises funds to preserve the remaining houses from a Second World War-era internment camp. When I paid for the card, the man at the counter was pleased that I'd chosen it; he spoke about the cause with the same respectful gravity that I'd hear from other New Denverites later.

A fabric shop was closed; and the Valley Voice newspaper office had a sign on it saying that the owners had decided to pass the legacy to someone else and were looking for someone interested.

Next I wandered into a back yard from a local museum. The first exhibit, impossible to miss, was a lovingly restored wooden boat, "Lancet," from the early 20th century: it was now sheltered beneath a roof a little way from the sidewalk.

When I turned into the back yard, it was to find a range of forestry and agricultural implements arranged in a semi-circle. Hanging from the rear wall of the house, there were the 'Forest Finds,' everything from oven doors and shovel heads and axe heads through metal ladles to enamel dishes and colanders, some dating back into the Victorian era, that had been found amongst the trees around New Denver.

Nearer the boat, a "Wood shaft bucket" ("used to clear rock from a vertical shaft") whose slats had drawn apart near the bottom and whose iron frames were orange with corrosion, hung from a roof. A black "forge bellows" was hanging above an iron crank. A metal file, and several pincers and shovels displayed beside the bellows could have belonged to a forge, too.

"Forest Finds" around Silvery Slocan Museum, New Denver. September 2024.

It was not hard to picture miners and loggers sitting around campfires or in a woodland cottage, or working, and using these tools, a hundred years ago. I also liked picturing locals or visitors finding these tools embedded in dark, cedar-needle-strewn forest soil decades later, being delighted and confused, and bringing them to an expert who'd tell them what it was and when it had been made.

From there, we walked to another weatherboarded, street corner building that used to house the Bank of Montreal. 'This is,' our uncle told us, 'where I opened a savings account in the Sixties.'

We found out from a signs that it stopped being a bank by the 1970s, when it became the Silvery Slocan Museum.

Now the late 19th-century bank building's windows have been recast as vitrines: mini-collections of everything from an engraved musical brass instrument, through a Lydia E. Pinkham bottle, to a spittoon or two, all of which looked like purest Laura Ingalls Wilder — as well as an electric iron from the 1920s, oil lamp from Hong Kong in the 1940s, and a flower-painted, glass-walled butter churn. The selection paid implicit tribute to the variety of nationalities and backgrounds of immigrants in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

On the museum's second floor balcony, we spotted antique chairs rocking chairs arranged in the open air, as if ghosts were holding a conversation. I seem to remember that one of the chairs looked as if it had been burned in a fire.

Below the house, I also seem to remember mining carts rested on a pair of train rails, as a sign commemorated the galena ore extraction industry. (One of New Denver's streets is named Galena Avenue.) It looked like a nice museum to visit in the summer season, when the interior is also open.

— What was disconcerting in several places in British Columbia, admittedly, was that while there was a lot of visible history, little to none of it was Indigenous. Of course that speaks for itself: it shows how long ago Indigenous people were already forced from their land. But it would still be more satisfying to know which cultures did exist there and how they lived in the landscape. —

Slocan Lake, September 2024.
The mist between two of the mountains is
the smoke of a forest fire.
The cedar in the foreground is showing signs of drought.

Then we reached the lakeside.

An Edwardian pump house in white weatherboard with green trim stood beside it, underneath trees. Nearby – and this excited me most of all – there was a rectangular brown garbage can with a bear-proof sticker.

It was sad to see, while standing in the gaps between the trees on the New Denver bank, on the other side of the lake how much Valhalla Provincial Park has been injured by forest fires. Swathes of the evergreen forest were black or red, smouldering steaming smoke was seeping from several parts, and the snow fields above were contaminated and grey, long after the fire was first fought back. That said, the weather held the promise of more rain to help relieve the forest.

On the way back up 6th Avenue, I looked at the signs that described the historic origins of the buildings: one was built in 1894 as a mining office, then used by a doctor, before it was used as a mining office again. Another was a newspaper office that was partly rented out to a carpet and furnishing store, until 1904. A former hotel, milliner's, butcher's shop turned general store, ...

Like a bear near a garbage can, but in a much more appetizing way, we also began to think of food. We saw a restaurant, underneath a huge leafy tree that (in my mind at least) had its own unearthly aura and seemed to have a gin fragrance. A few droplets of rain clung onto the outdoor tables, and autumnal wasps were visiting.

We ordered ice cream and brownies from the dessert menu, and began to chat with the family of owners. It's often said that it's a small world: so it's not entirely surprising that despite the fact that we were in a village of around 500 inhabitants in western Canada, two of the family had lived in Berlin, and could chat about Prenzlauer Berg and the Avus highway with us in German.

In the meantime, the mother of the family (a hard worker who turned her hand to a lot of things, so that I was in awe of her throughout) was tending to the plants around the parking lot, while her grandchild toddled behind her wielding a large shovel. And after our meal, they kindly offered us plums that they had picked themselves. It seemed part and parcel of a neighbourly ethos I likely haven't travelled often enough to see anywhere else, and I hoped I showed that I appreciated it.

The owner family also told us about the summer's forest fires. New Denver had been on evacuation alert (or watch?) after three days of 40°C weather. A thunderstorm arrived, and lightning strikes found the forest dry as kindling — 'jeder Blitz ein Treffer' ('each strike was a bull's eye') our host commented dryly. Then a fire had broken out around Silverton, 5 kilometres to the south.

We decided to stay overnight in their inn: a pastel-blue-painted building with stone elements that looks like it might be from the 1970s or earlier, and flowered wallpaper and what I seem to remember as dark wood wainscoting along the inner hallways.

Uncle Pu absolutely wanted a chance to kayak around Slocan Lake, and this was part of his negotiation with the owners. But I was too timid to enjoy the idea of me or anyone I cared for navigating an unfamiliar waterway, and so was secretly relieved when elaborate plans to take to the water didn't work out after all.

Before we thought of turning in for the night, though, there was the remaining afternoon and evening before us. We walked to the Nikkei Memorial Internment Centre on the other side of town, across the rocky Carpenter Creek.