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I didn’t take notes. Wasn’t planning on writing about the week. We took it day by day and weren’t hyper focussed on being productive. It was a relaxing week with not much to do after a few months that had more than could be done. The timeline of this section may be a bit jumbled. We read between activities. Texting mostly worked. The time passed.
The lights came on a little before five. I ordered breakfast on my McDonald’s app. When I got to the restaurant the line for the drive thru snaked through the parking lot. I found one of the last parking spots and selected “pick up from front counter” as the delivery option and walked to the restaurant door. Locked. They weren’t letting anybody in. I stood in the rain with all the other people hoping for food. Occasionally somebody would open the backdoor, the employees’ entrance, and yell a name. Brandon is a popular name to be yelled in public these days, but whoever Brandon was that morning he never picked up his order. We fellow stranded strangers discussed maybe assuming the name just long enough to get his food, but nobody did. Finally, they brought my order to the door, yelled my name and I grabbed it. The power had failed again, and it was one of the last orders they handed out.
I returned to the room with my bounty. The hunter home from the fast-food joint. With over a thousand extra people in a small crossroads town the cellular data bogged down to dial up speeds. It wasn’t bad around 4 or 5 in the morning but plummeted once everybody was awake and checking the DriveBC website for highway information or just killing the time.
The power stayed off most of the day. It was stormy out but not that cold. We stayed warm and dry in our room. We had a large window for light and a view of the trees whipping around in the park across the street. There was a public washroom there so there was steady stream of cars pulling up staying for a while and then leaving.
A plumber came to look at the motel water heater and went away. The Chinese owner seemed to think it could be brought back to life. I looked at it. I know a bit about controls 😉. Controls can’t help a leaking 80 gallon gas-fired hot water tank. Although the controls were quite accessible with the covers off and wires sticking out everywhere. Nobody in town would stock a replacement. A new one had been ordered from Vancouver many mudslides away. We remained all week without hot water. Anybody who says they enjoy a cold shower in the morning will lie about other things.
We managed to stay clean through it all with little perceived hardship. Living off the grid for several years lowers expectations considerably. Expectations drive our attitudes so much. We expect things will be a certain way and can react poorly when they fail to meet our expectations. Take a step back and consider that the average middle-class person today has better physical conditions than a millionaire of a hundred and fifty years ago. Not to mention better than most of historic and modern humanity. Things haven’t been as comfy as they have been in recent decades. It isn’t a given they will stay comfy.
Somebody came back to the hotel with a box of pizza from Panago Pizza across the road from the other side of the park. Close enough for a walk if there wasn’t horizontal rain happening. I drove. They had a generator running on the sidewalk. The owner handed me a box of pizza and wouldn’t take any money. If you are ever in Hope, buy a Panago pizza. I plan to.
Pizza for lunch, leftover pizza for supper. The room had a fridge.
You have to feel for the local business owners who pitched in to help people when a greedy person like me would try to profiteer. I fear for their financial well-being after the locusts are gone and with the traffic through town diminished for months to come.
When the power came back on, I checked the TV in the room and the motel internet again. Nope. Shaw was down for the count. It stayed down for the rest of the week. Our room had a coffee maker. If you skipped placing the coffee packet it made hot water. No need for a cold-water shampoo. Luxury!
Tuesday the rain let up a bit. Businesses were open with the power on. Our daughter mentioned a good bookstore in town. It was in the next block next to a health food store that sold keto bars. Yay! Skinny man does not live by pizza alone. We checked out both stores. The health food store owner was on the phone and getting the good news that the flood waters in Merritt had stopped short of her store there. She seemed happy. The bookstore was jam packed with used books for $2 each. They also had a few new books for sale for list price. Mostly current local authors or local history etc. The town was busy with people milling around. Mostly cheerful after two nights sleeping in their cars.
I topped up the gas tank at a station with an attached 7-11 and used the Scotiabank ATM to get some cash. Lunch at the Blue Moose Café was cash only. I guess numerous local businesses rely on Shaw. The soup was good. We had stopped here for breakfast a few years ago. It had okay food and good ambience. It’s still okay. The plexiglass shields everywhere take the edge off the ambience. Could have been plywood like my summer workplace. That would downgrade the ambience.
I bought breakfasts at the McDonald’s drive thru and brought it back to the room. This came to be our daily routine. Eventually they ran out of cheese and only had small coffee cups, but they never totally ran out of food by our last day, Friday.
Mostly read. Finished a book from the $2 book store. Started on book by Mao’s physician. Thick book. Slow going. Might never finish it. Read a bit of Atomic Habits on Kindle.
We went to the bigger of the two grocery stores. The line was across the parking lot. They were only letting so many people in at a time. We balked. The local Dollarama was packed and had reasonably good supplies. We had lunch one day at the A&W. The next day it was closed. Probably ran out of food.
Our daughter mentioned they were looking for volunteers to help at the local high school. It hadn’t occurred to me before that nudge from her. Warm. Dry. Books. I was in my happy bubble. Juanita not so much. We went there on Wednesday. The volunteers were hustling around humping cases of water. Somewhere in the building they were preparing meals. Meanwhile, able bodied people were laying on mattresses in the hallway staring at their cell phones. Why weren’t they helping themselves? Their only problem was they were stuck somewhere until the roads opened. Why weren’t they the ones bustling about? They currently needed volunteers at night but were good for the day. We left our names as future daytime helpers.
The perceived need for volunteers waned when most of the stranded people left that evening. Highway 7 opened for convoys of one-way, Vancouver bound traffic. They had partially cleared the mudslides and towed the stranded cars of the helicopter evacuated people to a community center. If not picked up by some designated date they would be towed to a long-term storage and the owners' charged a storage fee. Can’t imagine getting your car back won’t be without hassle.
Hundreds of others left by passenger train to Vancouver. A more comfortable ride at the time, but post dating a cheque to have to come back and get their cars.
We drove around town intermittently during the week. There were cars parked under an overpass. There was a stack of wood and a bonfire going under the overpass. Camping in a gravel pit. Newfie style. Wonder if they had Screech!
Thursday, the town seemed comparatively empty. No cars or bonfire under the overpass. The only people left were ones headed to the BC interior and the locals, of course. I can’t help but think they are in for some hard days ahead. A friend who had worked at the local supermarket on his path up the chain’s management ladder said the local motto was “Live in Hope, die in despair.” Until the Pemberton highway opened, Hope was on the only routes into the interior. In all my trips through it with my parents and on my own as a young adult I can not remember when it wasn’t raining. Steve Lord told me once that the managed forest on nearby Herrling Island has the highest unit of fibre growth per year of any forest in Canada. Mild winters, lots of rain.
Perfect!
If you’re a conifer.
We went through both grocery stores. No produce or dairy. Not much meat. Few baked goods. Lots of junk food. Signs, saying “Only two of any items”. We bought a couple of items, including a loaf of Carbonaut low carb bread. I guess things were not bad enough for people other than the odd keto freak to pay $8 for a loaf of bread.
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