I love letters to the editor. I’m not entirely certain the editor loves letters to him as much as I do but, hey, it’s all part of the job.
One of my great disappointments when I first began to grace the back of Pique with my graceless prose was the utter lack of letters to the editor. Not about what I was writing but about anything at all. I assumed it had something to do with the fact people in Whistler are both busy and, well, perhaps not apathetic but let’s call it attention challenged.
This disappointment was heightened when I picked up a local paper in Kimberley and found it buoyant with letters to the editor. Kimberley! On the one hand we have Whistler, with all its world-classiness, media hype and four-season splendour. On the other hand, we have Kimberley with its annual accordion festival and… well, with an accordion festival what else does a town need? Especially when you feature a 40-accordian, European orchestra playing Ride of the Valkyries. Okay, it was in fact the very week of the Great Kimberley Accordion Festival when I was there. And the town was at the peak of its annual buzz, jampacked with locals and tourists wandering the Platz, delirious from too many soft pretzels, sausages and sweet bock beer. Still, I was gobsmacked… and not a little bit jealous.
As a result, for a long time I considered it part of my loosely-defined columnist job to spark letters to the editor. I tried everything I could think of. I ran contests that resulted in not a single letter and even fewer entries. I tried controversy, once going so far as to suggest a not-too-tortured reading of the Christian bible could leave people wondering whether the Jesus character might not be gay, not that he ever stumbled into a men’s room at an airport in a U.S. city where the cops have nothing better to do than troll for closeted, homo-bashing Republicans tapping their foot in an adjacent stall. Nothing! Okay, one letter from someone suggesting my understanding of the bible lacked depth. Duh.
Over the years, and owing nothing at all to my efforts, letters to the Pique editor ebbed and flowed but mostly flowed. Today, the letters section is mostly alive and well with people writing about the challenges and triumphs of the moment, people thanking others for making their fundraising a success, people igniting bridges before they leave town, people making disparaging remarks about local politicians.
But last week’s cautionary letter about the dangers posed by marauding bears might have crossed the line, assuming there is a line to cross.
The writer was appalled when a brazen bear came a-panhandling at the door of his Horstman Lane hideaway. He was appalled later when another bear walked past his house. The nerve of some bears. Walking past houses in broad daylight, showing off their ear tags like common tramp bears. What next? Defecating in the woods?
Without elaborating on what he might have in mind, the writer suggested such bold bear attacks were a “real problem” requiring positive actions, not “feel good”, new-age, lets-all-live-together-in-peaceful-harmony rhetoric. I don’t know what kind of positive actions he’s thinking of but I suspect at least one was foreshadowed when he suggested he’d be happy to go outside and see if the bear was still there if he had a gun. Fortunately, it’s getting harder and harder these days to cross into Canada from the U.S. packin’ heat.
Then he went on to warn that everything we’ve worked so hard for so long to create, the tourist Mecca called Whistler, could go up in a puff of smoke should it come to pass that one of the local, thuggish bears actually maul or kill a human. It would, in fact, be our own version of the Fountain Valley Massacre.
Could he be right? I’d never heard of the Fountain Valley Massacre and was, at first, confused about the exact location of St. Croix. Believing it might be somewhere in Quebec where a gang of bad bears feasted on tourists, I took the writer’s advice and Googled it. As a public service for those of you who didn’t, here’s what I learned.
During the afternoon of September 6, 1972, — coincidentally a day after the Munich Olympic massacre — five masked bears carrying shotguns, handguns and automatic weapons invaded the clubhouse of the Fountain Valley Golf Course in St. Croix, Virgin Islands. Four tourists, two resort workers and two other people were murdered; eight others, mostly golf course workers, were wounded. Tourism in St. Croix went into the crapper.
Oh, wait a minute. I read that part too fast. It wasn’t five masked bears. It was five masked men who did all the killing.
Now prior to reading last week’s letter I would have been prepared to argue that no sentient human being could possibly believe a bear mauling a person and a gang of desperadoes shooting up a bunch of people were roughly equivalent. I’m no longer so sure.
Come to think of it, I’m not even certain at this point that our local bears, fed up with the relentless encroachment on their habitat, might not purloin a cache of weapons and massacre the Israeli ski team during the 2010 Olympics. What? Israel doesn’t have a ski team? Never mind.
As an aside, and having nothing whatsoever to do with anything, the letter also laid waste to my belief that everyone knew at least two words of Latin — non sequitur . I’m no longer sure of that either.
What I am sure of is this. There have been almost as many bears killed in and around Whistler this summer as there have been people killed by bears during this decade. I’m also pretty sure people haven’t stopped going to Panorama since a bear killed a mountain biker there last July, haven’t stopped going to Uninta National Forest in Utah since a kid was killed in his tent there last June and I know for an absolute fact that people haven’t stopped visiting and moving to Canmore, Alberta since a jogger was killed there in June 2005 by a bear.
Still, hope springs eternal. Keep those cards and letters coming, folks.
