Above is the map I made before my book tour around BC this past summer. Doesn’t it look like fun?
Well it was fun, but it nearly wasn’t. Climate change did its best to ruin it.
You can see the original route I planned. Take the ferry from Port Hardy up to Prince Rupert, then follow the Yellowhead through Terrace, on to Smithers– gorgeous country, the Bulkley Valley. I haven’t been up there since I worked on the CN railroad extra gangs in like, 1981 or so. It was going to be great to see it again, four decades later. I was especially excited about the reading at Books and Company in Prince George, where they planned to experiment with letting an author read over the PA to unsuspecting browsers, and I was the guinea pig.
But climate change came along and turned most of that vast, formerly glorious evergreen forest of northern BC into a legion of parched trees rising from withered underbrush in soil dry as dust. Lighting and human stupidity kept igniting fires all over the place, including the biggest one ever in BC, the Donnie Creek fire near Prince George, that eventually devoured nearly 6000 square kilometres. That is huge! Hard to imagine a fire eating up 60 km one way, 100 km on the perpendicular. I was watching the news from the safety of the south coast, and thinking, How’s it going to go over when I hit some northern burg where you can’t even see across the street for thick nasty smoke, and announce to the local folk, “Hey people, forget about that insatiable wall of flame ten miles from town– I’m here to read you my goofy, cartoonish novel!”
So I cut out the northern part of the tour. I decided to scale back my trip to two rock-solid confirmed locations, Golden and Fernie, with tentative stops in Cranbrook and Kimberly to do that Crad Kilodney Street Clash thingee I mentioned in the previous post.
The fires didn’t seem too bad in the southern part of BC at that time, plus I had other reasons for wanting to go: the bookstore in Golden, Bacchus Books and Cafe, has a cool website that makes it look fantastic (and it is fantastic, as I discovered); and Fernie BC is the home of the late great Troy “Bubba” Cook, who did the art work for the cover of Stag.
I just felt like I had to get to Fernie, raise a glass to Troy, and say my goodbyes…
