Come Hell or High Water 2

         ‘Good judgment comes from experience, and a lotta that comes
          from bad judgment.’
                                                                                              Cowboy proverb


For Robyn and I to find the Wild West, we had to head east, across the Georgia Strait. A turkey vulture turned a lazy sky circle above the Jesus Loves You sign, as our own turned into the ferry terminal. We camped out in the back of the boat, hot sun shining on our faces, making us sleepy. I awoke to a lost generation, holding out their dominant hands, in supplication to the signal, missing on the open water. The way they looked past me, spoke to my age, and irrelevance. But it felt good to be invisible to the socially obsessed, reclining in my chaise lounge on the side of the gene pool, watching the blood in the water. Connections are more important than connectivity. Always drink upstream from the herd.
We landed on dusk, and a big harvest moon over Mount Baker. Robyn drove through vast expanses of big cookie-cutter tract houses. The Asian immigrants that had created the monster home had more use for floors than fields; yard space was just another relative that wouldn’t have a room to sleep in. We drove through the yellow light of downtown Langley, to the place had once secured the south bank of the Fraser River against the Americans.
In 1827, the Governor of the Hudson Bay Company was a worried man. The boundary between the British and the American possessions of the transmontane West had yet to be decided, and George Simpson feared that Fort Vancouver, his fur trading outpost further south than John Jacob Astor’s Fort Astoria in Oregon Country, might be lost, if the final border jumped north from the course of the Columbia River, to the 49th parallel. He ordered the creation of Fort Langley on the south bank of the Fraser, in an attempt to consolidate British claims to both sides of the river. Of the twenty-four men that James McMillan arrived on site with to begin construction, five were incapacitated with gonorrhea, and another had some other, apparently more exotic form, of ‘venereal disease.’ All the horses were crippled, exhausted, or dead. The brambles were seemingly impenetrable.
Despite the setbacks, the remaining nineteen men had, by early September, built two bastions and a palisade worthy enough to command respect in the eyes of the Indians, who begin, shrewedly, to conjecture for what purpose the Ports and loopholes are intended. By 1830, Fort Langley had become a major anchorage for the export of cedar lumber and shingles, and salted salmon in barrels of the same wood, to the Hawaiian Islands.
But the ‘Birthplace of British Columbia’ would not be destined for anything greater. Traders from Boston controlled most of the maritime fur transactions, travelling along the coast by boat, and the strong competition kept the price of pelts much higher than Hudson's Bay was paying elsewhere. Also, the indigenous Stó:lō people living along the Fraser were not particularly interested in hunting or trapping, since they were quite self-sufficient on salmon, and not in serious need of European goods, except for some guns in the first year to fend off a short-lived, largely symbolic, threat from another tribe. Finally, the Fraser was not as navigable as Simpson had imagined. After the river forked with the Thompson River, the powerful rapids and sheer cliffs convinced him that the passage would be certain Death, in nine attempts out of Ten. Parts of the journey from the north would have to be made overland, to bypass the Fraser Canyon and Hell's Gate.
Fort Langley barely survived the threat of Russian invasion in the early 1850s, the threat of American invasion in 1857, the boom and bust of the 1858 Gold Rush and Fraser Canyon War with American miners, the removal of its military and capital administrative functions to New Westminster in 1859, the loss of Hudson Bay Company monopoly, and Canadian Confederation in 1871. Shipping was lost to paddle wheelers, and the first train.
In 1921, a sawmill brought some measure of blue collar prosperity to the struggling town, until redundancy and aging machinery shut it down for good, just over seventy years later.
Which is why Richard and Carolyn were able to find affordable housing, in what had become a vestigial Vancouver bedroom community, and why Robyn and I, would have a place to stay the night, before beginning our long drive to Christina Lake the next morning. Our wagon sailed under Dr Benjamin Marr’s ancient columns of horse chestnut trees along Glover Road, until we reached the correct four-digit house number, on the pink and green trim we recognized as Carolyn’s favourite colours. There were two eights in the address. Some day the overseas Chinese will swoop on it. Carolyn and Richard’s eldest son, Kyle, was still at the house, working as a lifeguard at a local pool. He had waited up for us, and wondered why we were late.
“Your mother wrote the turnoff as Highway 1, rather than Highway 1a.” I said. “We were halfway into Vancouver when I figured it out.”
It didn’t matter. Kyle offered us a glass of wine, and then some fruit juice, when I told him of my infirmities. We spoke of the intervening years since we had seen his parents, his university aspirations in kinesiology, and the impact of technology of every aspect of life. He brought out his mobile phone, and introduced us to Siri, an artificial intelligence program which Kyle claimed could ‘answer all your questions.’
“Go ahead.” He said. I started big.
“What are Maxwell’s Equations?” I asked. Siri didn’t seem to know.
“Try again.” Kyle said.
“What is the meaning of life?” I said. Siri choked.
“He doesn’t know everything.” Said Kyle, to my obvious relief.
It was late, and we had a long drive ahead of us next day. Kyle showed us downstairs, to grandmother Grace’s bedroom, and bid us goodnight. Robyn fell asleep almost instantly, but I was distracted by the light outside our window, and my abdominal cramps, which ebbed and flowed in synchrony, with the irregular far off doppler haunted herald horns from passing trains in the night. The first signal of the last of the Old West, would be the last thing I remembered, on the first of our Wagon Days.