Interlude - Williams Lake

Williams Lake couldn't look nicer on a sunny summer evening, with a large crowd whooping and hollering in the stampede grounds. Everyone sports red neckerchiefs, the hanging baskets are lush and colourful and there's narry a piece of litter to be found. Small town main streets are a favourite of mine and we drove down the four blocks of this one to see an open book store (went in and bought "the Road Runs West", about Highway 20, our roadtrip raison d'etre) a couple of Chinese-Canadian restaurants and the usual collection of realtors, insurance agents, banks and pharmacies. the old train station is sadly decrepid. They are usually such nicely proportioned buildings and in the centre of town, but the death of passenger traffic defeats the need for such buildings.

We of course followed the CP and the CN lines on our way up the TransCanada, and occasionally saw a long line of cars looping up the canyon, screeching on the rails at every turn. As the terrain got drier, with no underbrush, pine replacing cedar, and rocks the colour of sand and iron and cement, the lifestyle of rural BC revealed itself. Indian reserves, the odd hay farm looking lush along the benchland, a clutch of horses held in a small, hand built pen. The brown Fraser became the green Thompson, and log cabins that would have long ago rotted away on the coast sit sagging in a field, looking dignified and lonely.

We decided we could never live in this locale but saw the beauty of its ruggedness. As we reached the Cariboo, poplar trees with their white bark and shimmering green trees left off only when there was a pond or small lake, its colour indicating how shallow or deep it was. You feel as if you are a cloud being so high, the tops of distant hills at eye level, fields and meadows all green after the hard rocky canyons travelled through earlier. It was still early enough that a soft green carpet lay on the hills, like a thin velvet, which will no doubt become brown with summer's intensity before long. Calves and colts and the odd llama baby indicate the season too. the sky is big and today was full of blue and yellow light, with just a few perfect clouds hanging there.

And always the road in front, a grey track with a new yellow line down the middle which says to me "roadtrip season has begun" There were few vehicles about for this first day after school has finished for the year, but plenty of speeding tickets being handed out, more as we entered the stampede city of Williams Lake.

We'll miss Saturday night's barn dance and swaying to the tunes of "Whiskey Jane", and we'll miss Karaoke at the Let R Buck saloon on the Stampede grounds.

But not much.