 |
| Carpenter Creek, New Denver September 13, 2024 All rights reserved. |
AFTER we visited the Japanese-Canadian internment centre in New Denver, we walked back toward the inn. First we passed through the thinly sprinkled trees at a campground beside the lakeshore. As we wandered along the beach and over the large smoothed pebbles, as crickets chirped and woodsmoke floated on the air.
For dinner we went to the restaurant that adjoins the inn. The dining room in the back of the restaurant reminded me of Social Studies (i.e. history) classes in Canadian school. Its decor was a mixture of time periods: a fan-shaped lamp hung from the ceiling, oil paintings of landscapes as well as of people dressed in 18th?-century attire apparently somewhere in Eastern Canada or the US hung on the walls above the wainscoting. Swing music played from unobtrusive loudspeakers. The tablecloths were mulberry-red and I worried about dropping any food on them. Flowers from the garden beds were sprinkled in vases on the tables: yellow dusty miller or white yarrow? I don't remember. A grandfather in a plaid shirt and baseball cap was dining with his grandson in one corner of the room, and at the end of the meal they played on the floor. The inn owner family's grandchild was roaming around all the tables and intermittently vanishing into the kitchen with a quietly cheeky air.
A man and woman were the other guests, sitting in the opposite corner. As they chatted with the current owners, we found out that they were the inn's previous owners. The pair had run the place for (I seem to recall) thirteen years. When we were woven into the discussion, they told us about the inn's past life. In the 1970s, I think, the inn had been named in honour of Lucerne in Switzerland, before being renamed after the park on the other side of Slocan Lake. The pair bought it and ran it for many years. They reminisced about the boom and bust cycles of working at an inn: long periods of inactivity, even with the year-round influx of mountain cyclists in summer and snowmobilers in winter. They evidently had few, or no, regrets about passing the torch.
Besides, the former inn owner mused about the social changes in New Denver, likely applicable to British Columbian towns in general: new people moving in, people speaking to each other on their smartphones instead of meeting each other in person, young people travelling off for jobs in remote areas, for weeks at a time, returning too tired to leave their houses and go out in the village. I guess that in a city like Berlin the social change is not dissimilar, although it might be easier to notice the change if one lives in a village.
As for the food, one of the brothers ordered a wild sockeye salmon burger with fries. But above all we shared sweet & sour chicken, spring rolls with dipping sauce, dumplings with soy sauce and green onion, beef ginger chicken, and sweet & sour pork. It was Hong Kong food as we'd never had it before, because it had elements of home cooking rather than the familiar conventions of restaurant fare made for a large crowd. Green onions from the garden and lemon slipped into the sweet-and-sour sauce, and I liked it. It felt like being invited over to a friend's house.
To drink I had chrysanthemum tea, which came in greenish-yellow buds. The inn owner daughter also recommended that we try a new ginger ale brand, brewed in Victoria, so we did; in Berlin I also like to compare the taste of German ginger ale (generally more pungent and dry) to the Canadian ginger ale brands we grew up with, and this Victoria brand was the first time that I had ginger ale that tastes like cooked ginger root rather than raw ginger root.
For the dessert, the grandmother — who was doing the cooking — brought us apple fritters as an extra: fried with fruit which her grandson had picked from a tree across the street, dusted with powdered sugar.
After that, pleased with everything, we went to our rooms.
***
September 14, 2024
Next morning, as I recorded in my notebook, I woke up before 6 a.m.
Walking downslope through the town, it was a relief to see rain and mist clinging to the mountains across the lake. Hopefully they were quenching more of the forest fires — although it was always hard to tell what was mist and what was smoke. The reddish mountain ash berries glowed in New Denver's streets, and (intentional) woodsmoke rose from a house's chimney. We saw one or two For Sale signs on the buildings. No bears in sight, but we did spot what I thought was a hawk.
 |
| Sign near the waterfront, New Denver September 14, 2024 All rights reserved. |
In the restaurant, the radio was playing 1980s hits like "Down Under" and "Eye of the Tiger," as we ordered coffee, Earl Grey tea, and chrysanthemum tea. The brothers had one of the omelettes with toast, as far as I recall, as well as Belgian waffles with blueberry jam and whipping cream, and French toast with maple syrup. Uncle Pu and/or I ordered porridge, too.
Uncle Pu was asked how he would like the porridge prepared. He was ready with an answer, since he has a patented way in which he prepares it for breakfast. He explained that he likes it served with brown sugar and milk on the side, and — when asked — specified that the milk should be 3.8%... Unfortunately for the restaurant, Canadian milk that is not skimmed seems to come in 3.25% or some other fat percentage, unlike German milk. But, when it was reported to him, Uncle Pu accepted this divergence willingly. I did feel bad that there was any doubt that we'd accept it... Either way, the porridge was tasty.
Then Uncle Pu roamed around the town with us again. We stopped at the Catholic church of St. Anthony's (1929): there, he said, he had met the priest and rung the bell a few times when he was a child. Afterwards we passed the Knox Presbyterian Hall, built 1897, now a non-denominational community hall.
 |
| Old fire station, New Denver. No longer in use; as of 2024 I think it was partly or wholly owned by a tree maintenance company. September 13, 2024 License: CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Returning to the inn, Uncle Pu engaged one of the owner's family in talk about geothermal energy, and I cryptically noted that there was mention of "exploitative rentals of gold mining equipment by stock listed companies (TSX)." Which I guess refers to the veins of various precious and semi-precious metals that still lurk in the British Columbia hills, luring modern-day heirs to the gold fevers that once populated the Yukon, Cariboo and Sacramento. Meanwhile, the housekeeper (wearing an apron) was on her rounds and knocking on doors.
As we headed outdoors again, we had (in my case, for the first time) a quintessential North American experience, namely a visit to an outdoor outfitter's shop. I was so awed that I kept a long mental list of items:
canoe paddle covers, pots, pans, water bottles, water purification kits, water purification tabs, forks, spoons, bear spray, bear klaxon, whistles, lifevest for dogs?, swimwear, tops, hiking trousers, puffer jackets, paddles, knives, axes, maps, books about bear attacks and mushrooms, fuel canisters, sunscreen, flares
Sale signs were prolific, given the end of the holiday season, and I guess we probably felt doubly welcome. Uncle Pu chatted with the shop's owner, who stood behind her son at the cash register. (The store is a franchise, which has outlets with other owners in, for example, Victoria.)
I think he was at the time embarked on his months-long quest to find Gore-Tex hiking trousers with a certain number of layers of fabric, so that was one topic. (In Berlin's sports stores, he had failed to find his Holy Grail: one salesperson explained that they only carry the cheaper apparel in-store, and that online shopping is the likelier option.) But he also winkled out the information that the outfitter would be running kayak rentals the following year. In the end he bought, for example, two waterproof bags that can be used in kayaks to prevent one's valuables from becoming soaked or sunken.
Then, at the owner's recommendation, we drove to a boat rental in the nearby town of Slocan, thirty kilometres away. I continued to worry that we were on a lemming mission and that I'd see my uncle and all of my brothers be lost to Davy Jones's locker if they did go kayaking. (Whether this fear was rational, or irrational — and if the latter, if it was inspired by my father's sudden death — I guess I'll leave to any future therapist to decide.)
In consequence, I felt little sense of grievance when Uncle Pu surmised that the area's kayak store owners were engaged in a conspiracy to keep tourists off the water and away from the far shores of the National Park, to avoid risking people's lives through the wildfires there. I also still had no intention whatsoever of climbing into a boat myself, although I feared that this would seem like girlish timidity and let down the feminist cause.
Instead I was sunken in foreboding gloom. That said, the foreboding gloom was needless. Slocan's kayak rental was closed — the owner clearly cheerfully convinced that the season was over anyway and that a spontaneous vacation was in order.
 |
| Red and black trees after forest fires; mist and possibly smoke, in Slocan. September 14, 2024. All rights reserved. |
By way of compensation, we went on a road trip to the ghost town of Sandon and the former steamship vacation destination of Kaslo.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment