Columbia Valley culture is small town culture. It’s Chili cookoffs, Fall fairs, and loser laps around town. It’s thinking nothing of making the hour and a half long trek into Banff when you turn 18 and are legally allowed to drink in Alberta, because it’s no good trying to sneak into the bars in BC because everyone in the valley knows you’re underage. It’s a one bar town, where if you want to go out on the weekend, even after you turn 19, your choices are, (at most) Bud’s, Copper City, or driving to Cranny or Banff. It’s hitting the beach in the summer, and it’s getting out of town on weekends to avoid the gorbies. It’s making jokes about Edgewater, or Wilmer, or Brisco, or Spillimacheen, or Radium, or Canal Flats… wait, it’s making jokes about everywhere! It’s fund raising for two years to buy a grand piano so that touring artists have something decent to play. It’s loggers and miners, teachers and entrepreneurs, with dirt bikes and quads who like to get out in the woods, sit around a fire, drink beer and just be with their friends and family. It’s where having “nothing to do” means making a potato gun in the back yard, or riding your bike into town, or going fishing, or watching movies with friends. It’s appreciating the simple things in life.
It’s a culture of leaving, returning, or just staying where you are. There are always people with stories of journeys to far off places, or life in big cities, but those that come back are happy where they are, and those that never left know why.
It’s a culture of cars. It’s a hard place to live without one. And a culture of the woods. Camping, dirt biking, hiking, skiing, cliff jumping, these are things Columbia Valley people enjoy. And they don’t have to drive hours fighting traffic on the sea to sky highway to get there, they just walk out their back door, or take the logging roads, where they are more likely to see a bear than another person. It’s having your garden eaten by deer, and of being more afraid of hitting a deer on the road than another car. It’s where ‘the Park’ (ie. The Kootenay National Park, full of beautiful natural and historic sites) is just a highway to get you to Alberta.
It’s a culture of tourism and summer homes. Everyone knows someone from Calgary who’s nice, but everyone rolls their eyes and sighs at the overwhelmingly number of red license plates on the streets in the summer. “Damn Albertan drivers!”
Columbia Valley Culture is small town culture. It’s being proud of what people from your community accomplish, whether it’s going out to hear them play music, admire their artwork, read their writing, or reading about their accomplishments in the paper. It’s supporting one another in hard times, raising money for hospital trips (because if you’re really sick, you definitely have to go stay in Calgary, or Cranbrook, or Kelowna and those trips get expensive), having welcome home parties, and just showing up to lend a hand. It’s saying hi when you run into each other in the city, even if you don’t normally hang out. It’s spending an hour getting groceries even if you only needed milk because you have to talk to everyone you run into in the store.
Many of the things that make up Columbia Valley culture are not unique to the Columbia Valley. But the combination of them is.
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3 comments:
Damn skippy.
AND it is driving across the lake in winter because it is locally recognized as a legitimate road, and then rolling your eyes at the non-locals, at least a couple of which inevitably end up in the drink because they strayed of the path. Like, HELLO.
This made me happy because I got to live it, but sad because I don't think I'll make it back for another couple months. it's really interesting that we all feel the same way about it regardless of our backgrounds, our friends, even our ages...it's home.
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