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Still Life: Cache Creek, B.C. by Margaret Thompson Only when I came to Canada did I realize how European I am. Click to read Essay Profile of Author Bio of Author from ETG Essay, Late-breaking Developments Author's Comment on the ETG Experience Updated Bio Click to Purchase Send email to the author (The copyright on this essay is held by the author.  For permission to duplicate: copyright@cunepress.com)

Still Life: Cache Creek, B.C.
Only when I came to Canada did I realize how European I am. I left an old world, where history is measured in millennia, where humans burrow comfortably in the sedimentary layers of the past, nonchalant about continuity. I came to British Columbia, where people gasp in amazement at any building more than a hundred years old. I found myself craving longevity—the mark of an alien. As a result I fell in love with the ancient natural landscape, and my foreign eyes could not help seeing the little towns of this province as puny, ephemeral things, unlikely to endure in this iron country, like smears of dirt on the skin.

Take Cache Creek, for instance. I stay here often, one of its many impermanent residents. It is halfway between my home in Fort St. James, another small town to the north, and the Lower Mainland—a convenient place to break a journey. It is typical small-town B.C., a place that people go through, not to. It clutters a junction of highways that dip and swoop by without a second thought, hurrying off again into the bare brown hills.

Cache Creek always feels temporary, as insubstantial as a movie set. The buildings give me the impression that there is nothing behind their facades, that they are all, somehow, pretending to be real. Gas stations and motels jostle for position on the main street. Wander Inns and Slumberlodges all promise Good Eats and oblivion. One motel would have us believe it is a castle, the usual clapboard crowned by a fringe of plywood battlements.

By day, the town seems to be populated entirely by greasy men tending gas pumps and fast food outlets. They minister to tired travelers like me who browse apathetically among the tawdry souvenirs or slump against cracked vinyl, uncritically consuming plates of fries and giant hamburgers oozing ketchup. The smell of hot oil taints the air. In the evening, people vanish to their motel rooms—to listen to their air conditioners if they are lucky, to sweat listlessly in front of the cable TV if they are not.

The streets empty at night. The side roads off the highway soon bump into naked hills or swallow their own tails. In the older part of town, small, dispirited houses sag and crack side by side, held up by dried vine-tendrils. Recently, houses have begun a creeping advance up the hillsides; some stand alone, high up, raw on their dusty lots.

There is a creek. It threads its way through the town, keeping its head down, intent on its own business. It ignores the tires and broken slabs of concrete, the rusty iron, beer bottles snapped off at the neck, sodden cardboard, plastic, wire, and scum that clots its banks. It veers away from the wood chip plant that is steadily chewing unprofitable trees, and the landfill opposite that is holding a non-stop funeral for big-city garbage behind tasteful screens of earth.

Whenever I arrive in Cache Creek, I take a room, lay claim to it by dropping off my suitcase, then leave the motel and walk uphill. I soon outstrip the paths and dirt-bike tracks and climb the runnels scoured by ancient rains, dust puffing around my feet like talcum, until it is too steep to go any further and I sink onto the coarse, brown grass. Up here the wind always blows, the smell of sage is strong, and the hawks wheel silently overhead. The hills heave into the distance, soft and placid, loose folds of dusty hide draped over bone and sinew.

The antiquity I crave is here, in the land itself. The hills endure. From this vantage point Cache Creek is muted, no more than a blemish. The town is an irrelevance, a temporary excrescence which could easily be scraped away. Cache Creek and all the little towns of B.C. mutely repeat the basic truth of this country: they and their inhabitants are here on sufferance. Only human will keeps the wilderness at bay; patiently, the land waits for that will to falter, to reclaim what belongs to it by ancient right. It has always been ready. Just let people turn their backs for an instant, and the gimcrack houses will fall as the ancient hills stealthily creep back, and at their feet, the creek will dash unheeding down its winding, rocky bed.

Profile
Margaret Thompson has lived in Canada for thirty years, but no one will ever mistake her for a Canuck—her British reserve is legendary in our small northern town. Still, I know the Margaret who gladly shares a bottle of wine and turns into a dancing fool whenever we listen to Paul Simon’s music.

Her love of language has affected many people—the kids at the Speech Arts festival who wait nervously for her adjudication, the teenagers in her high school English classes, and the adults in her evening courses. Yet most of our time together is spent walking in the woods, watching for eagles, or picking fiddleheads—we both love the hunting-and-gathering thing.

Her years in the North have honed her ability to see ordinary things in extraordinary ways. We spend hours in her backyard, surrounded by her flower gardens and her bird feeders, feeling a bit like ladies of the manor. Our conversations drift toward the mundane, and we commiserate about raising children—we each have three. Sometimes Margaret hands me a poem or a short story, and I have no words to describe the rightness of her language. I simply read, and am moved.

—Carolyne Kennedy

Bio
Margaret Thompson
Place of residence: Fort St. James, British Columbia, Canada.
Birthplace: Surbiton, Surrey England.
Education: B.A., University of London. Diploma of Education, University of Exeter. M.A., San Diego State.
Books: Squaring the Round—prose and poetry about the early days of Fort St. James that I have self-published. Hide and Seek (Caitlin Press)—short stories.
Serial Publication: Amethyst Review—poetry.
Awards: Central Interior Writing Competition—three-time winner. Stephen Leacock Poetry Competition—four runner-up prizes.
Favorite book: A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul.

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