Travel Diaries #31 - Summer in Revy
Summer in Revelstoke: Liminal road trips, seasonal changes, and experiencing a different sense of freedom
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Spring
The snow melted, as you were expecting. Bluebird days – those days where you’re blessed with snow underfoot and clear blue skies with blinding sun overhead – cleared the horizons and the heavens so you could see as far as the edge of the earth, and far into the future, where anything might happen. Riding slush in t-shirts on sunny days under blue skies became the fashionable way to spend the day. The relentless pace of winter eased up somewhat, like a heavy rain-shower that you can sense is running on empty and destined to ease. Then, some more snow. Heavy end of season dumps prolonged the inevitable, expectation of the end building, building, until suddenly, and then all at once: spring.
Like school breaking up for the summer. Half the town was leaving, most of our orphan family disbanding. Going home. Going travelling. Going away to work for the summer. Going to the coast to surf, perhaps before returning to Revy for the winter, living the dream the winter/summer seasonal lifestyle of the ski and beach bum before remote workers ruined it all for everyone.
The road trip is the great North American rite of passage and symbol of destruction and rebirth between old lives and new, from youth to fully-grown. It felt like a fitting way to transition from the intensity of this most transformative of winters to whatever lay beyond it. Our Revy family got together and planned a rather ambitious one, our destination: the USA; our plan to drive down most of the west coast to the Coachella music festival in Palm Springs, following which we’d say goodbye to many of our extended family for good.
Several carloads left Revelstoke in early April to undertake this rather ambitious journey which would take the returning travellers over six and a half thousand kilometres in two weeks, through British Columbia and the eight westernmost states of the US, including the cities of Seattle, San Francisco, Las Vegas and Salt Lake.
We came back to find our home-away-from hometown in a quieter state than we’d left it, the last of the snow disappearing from the downtown streets, replaced by sunshine and clouds and drizzle. Booker and Pie had returned all the empty beer cans to the recycling centre, collected in plastic shopping bags after every party at the Rusty Nail over winter, piling high side by side with the firewood. In return they were handed about CAD$400 for the deposits, which at a rate of 5 cents per can, meant they disposed of a haul of about 8,000 empty beer cans, as drank by ourselves and dozens of friends, strangers and random acquaintances who graced the hallowed walls of the Rusty Nail that winter. 8,000 cans, along with the snowfall stats (12 metres) and personal county of days spent riding (60), the measure of the winter. The liquid facilitators of the disintegration of the spirit, or as it may be viewed in a more thoughtful and charitable light, the ecstatic rituals of joyful communion of it with others.
Summer
A few of us stuck around for the summer. I’d assumed coming here I’d stay for the winter and return to the city in the quieter summer, where there might be ‘more going on’. But by now Vancouver was a long-distant memory that felt like it had happened years ago, a fleeting world and brief holiday which I felt no draw to return to – for what? I had everything I wanted in this sleepy little mountain town.
Everything.
I got a job at the local branch of Denny’s, the infamous 24-hour diner and breakfast hole. A job with tips, the North American dream and the height of my recently-graduated career ambitions.
At some point on the American road-trip I misplaced my phone’s battery, and never bothered to replace it. I spent the subsequent five months phoneless, meaning I could be contacted at any hour of the day by almost nobody. There was no need, the lazy summer pace of life meant everyone I knew could be found by calling over to their house, or at work, or by calling into the patio of the local pub. If I couldn’t find them I’d head home, more than likely someone might call around to the house at some point, friends or friends of friends or strangers alike. A few friends lived a few blocks down the street, and a few more lived over by the railway line. If they weren’t home when I popped round I’d catch them next time, or maybe even crack a beer with their housemate or whoever I found over there.
Someone who’d been out of town for a few weeks or months might show up at the door or be chilling out with a beer when you got home from work. In the entire year I lived in Revelstoke the side porch door of the house was never locked once, a freedom I hadn’t been able to enjoy since I was about 12 years old. No phones, no locks, sometimes following the Kiwi example and going to the shop with no shoes. Everyone and everything contained in a square radius of a 15 minute walk, or a couple of miles’ cycle to work. Traffic continued to roll through town at the rate of about one per minute; most of the tourists took the ring road and avoided it, the town only a pitstop on the cross-country and continental Highway 1, Revelstoke was a convenient stop-off just under halfway between Calgary and Banff, most stop-offs were just for refreshments at my restaurant ($$$).
After work there’d be a few beers and a barbeque in the football pitch-sized backyard, or regular hot afternoons spending all our tips in the beer garden of the Last Drop. Hop in the pickup and head out the road to cliff jump into the still freezing and always enormous glacier-fed Columbia River; local raves in river-side forests, journeys out to the lakes of BC, or a hike in the wildflower blooms in the national park up on Mount Mackenzie. Football or cricket or bike rides or softball or swimming in the river. A slower pace but still the transient life, with new faces and old popping in or showing up, all were welcome.
My first time truly traveling, and I began to understand that it really wasn’t about where you went, or going anywhere, in fact, but in an attitude and approach to life that being away from home and in a novel environment merely facilitated. One sunny, hazy, hot August evening, myself and my dreadlocked friend Dave cycling in wavy slow motion along the empty tarmac’d suburban roads back to his house at the base of Mount Revelstoke, where we’d often sit on his roof overlooking this model rail and logging town on the western edge of the British Empire’s drive to civilise the world. White-peaked mountains in the background that Disney or Miyazaki couldn’t have caricaturised with more vibrant projections of life. The whole world was still, token vehicles whizzed by infrequently, the exceptions that proved the rule of tranquillity. Our handlebars weighed down by double-bagged plastic carriers full of beer, heading for the roof to sit and watch the world not go by.
“Aw mate…”
Dave turns to me and in his distinctive Sydney drawl and lets out a declaration that captured what we’d all been thinking all summer, and none among us could scarcely believe to be so real:
“This place is freedom”
The white suffocation of winter meant I’d been acutely conscious of the fact that I didn’t leave town for five straight months in the winter; I was less conscious of the fact that after getting back from Coachella I barely left town again either. Joyful unawareness of the outside world, but with that was a sort of blissful unawareness of what was right in front of me.
Summer was a kind of tripped out bliss I had never experienced before and most likely never will again. Wide-eyed, innocent enough to be on the right side of adventure, and with a hedonistic joie de vivre in my heart, everything was new, everything was big, everything was vibrating with colour. The sheer whiteness of winter a time of hibernation of sorts, of retreat from the outside world though a world of internal transformations occurred, and now the snow had gone and colour returned to the world, it lay wide open again. Hazy green and soft yellow and sheer blue, days and small-town blocks blurring into one another over a timeless summer, life lived in a small town where anything could happen, just slowly, very slowly, no noises creeping in from the outside world, in infinite space there’s infinite time, to just be alive, just to be free.
We never knew how good we had it.
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