Ironically,
it was moving to Australia that focused my desire to complete a set of
images and
write some impressions of
the splendid Thompson and
Fraser river canyons of British Columbia. In
recent years in
drought-dusty Australia, rivers have dwindled to creeks
and creeks are little more than interconnected sets of
puddles in the months between rainstorm-fed deluges. Is Australia a
harbinger of climate change, a premonition of future landscapes
elsewhere?
If I were to be
homesick for anything from my Canadian travels, it would be the rivers
that bind British Columbia's diverse regions to tidewater. I especially
reflect on the bright, crisp, translucent colours of
the arid Thompson River valley. A wide, constant river, a
cobalt sidewinder slithering across a sage grey stage -- sunshine --
water
water always,
even in
the middle of a desert. How can I describe the elation I always
feel when I
go there? -- like breathing pure oxygen after the gloomy greens and
heavier air
of the Fraser Canyon and Fraser Valley nearer the coast.
Perhaps it's this transition I find so stimulating, between the parched
sagebrush and the wealth of clean blue water
flowing so close by. There's often not even an edge of
sandbar willows and cottonwoods: the river races past clay slopes
dotted with a garrigue
of aromatic, blue-grey shrubs and scattered clumps of bunchgrass -- a
Mediterranean landscape beside a river
instead
of a sea.
People live where they
have to and travel where they want to. Although I have been
travelling the Fraser-Thompson corridor for a half-century, I have
never lived there, and
perhaps if I had I would have tired even of the Thompson's dramatic
landscape. Instead, over the past 15 years I've been a travelling
observer, recording
human landmarks in projects/books like British Columbia in
Watercolour and Vanishing British Columbia.
Now I find myself painting an almost unpeopled, unmarked
landscape, the empty "great lone land" -- I
suppose in the spirit of the Group of Seven, Canada's most venerable
artistic tradition.
Of course there are still people there: in "white" villages like
Ashcroft (population 1,664 in 2006, down from 1,914 in the previous
20
years), Spences
Bridge
and Lytton (from 368 to 235) and in the scattered communities of the
Nlaka'pamux people where the population is actually growing
significantly. Due
to the last, the
census district including the Thompson valley where I painted gained
3.4% population from 2001-6. But "Fraser Valley A," the census district
that includes the Fraser Canyon and the villages of Yale, North Bend
and Boston Bar, lost 19.8% of its population from 2001-2006. To a
traveller there are few human marks remaining on
the landscape, only some mobile homes, rusted cars and a few
spots where abandoned orchards and non-native trees struggle to stay
alive without
irrigation. Is this an environmentalist's ultimate dream, that
everything return to a natural state? All the human marks
appear temporary, except of
course for the railways.
Western Canada, both historic and modern, is about trains
conquering distance and triumphing over forbidding mountains. The
corridor of the Thompson and Fraser rivers was the only practical way
to reach the
Pacific Ocean, as the CPR
demonstrated a
century ago with its money-losing Coquihalla section of the Kettle
Valley Railway. The Canadian Pacific went
through first, on the south/east bank of the Thompson, in the early
1880s. Then came the Canadian
Northern Pacific, now CN, running on the other side and driving its
last spike at Basque in 1915. It was an easy run for both railways to
Spences
Bridge; then, the CN paid the price for having arrived second, needing
an
extraordinary set of tunnels and sheds to locate its line on
the
steep,
landslide-washed canyon face. Down the Fraser River the situation is
similar; the CPR crossed the Fraser at Cisco to the more open western
side, creating a divisional point at North Bend. The CN had to cross
the Fraser twice, first at Lytton where the Thompson meets the Fraser,
then back at Cisco. Only recently, just a few years ago, CP and
CN forged an agreement to share their lines, with all eastbound trains
using the CP side and westbound ones using CN's.
Is there a rain shadow anywhere else like the one on the
Thompson River side of the coastal range, inland from the west-facing
slopes of the Fraser Canyon? Only ten
inches of precipitation a year fall in Aschcroft versus untold feet of
snow
not a
hundred miles west on the upslope of the coast mountains. Yet the river
running through the desert is so prodigious -- 90,000 cubic feet of
green-brown water pass the Spences Bridge gauge each second during
springtime snowmelt! The arid part of the long Thompson River
begins near the eastern end of
the coastal rain shadow around Kamloops Lake and continues to its end
at Lytton. Further east nearer its source, where the river drains
Shuswap Lake and the mountainous watershed of the Yellowhead, the land
is
much wetter, more like the coastal slopes: cedars and thick forests, an
almost impenetrable underbrush. And, the Thompson and
Fraser
are
major salmon rivers; sockeye use the corridor to reach the South
Thompson and the famous spawning grounds at Adams Lake.
The stretch of the Fraser River from Lytton to Yale has an almost
mythic status in western history. Effectively unnavigable, the canyon
was laced with narrow trails and suspended cobweb catwalks used by
Aboriginal
traders and fishers until the gold rushes of the 1850s prompted the
colonial government to build the Cariboo Road. Twenty-five years later,
in the 1880s, the CPR pushed its rail line through, destroying much of
the road in the process. Forty years later, in the 1920s, the
provincial government rebuilt the road and the crucial bridge at
Spuzzum, opening the Interior to automobile traffic and creating an
essential section of the nascent Trans Canada Highway.
From Hope to the coast, the Fraser River created a wide, fertile plain,
BC's agricultural breadbasket and an industrial waterway for logging,
fishing and other industry. More like a mini-Mississippi than the wild
river it was upstream, it hardly seems like BC at all -- in the same
way that the Lower Mainland, recently rebranded as Metro Vancouver, is
a far cry from the landscapes and climate of the Interior.
