And so, the seasons turn. Like daylight savings time, spring slips in under the radar early this year. As if noting the disappearance of the last layer of ice on my driveway, the metallic warble of varied thrushes announces the ever-earlier dawning of morning skies. The sharp-edged scrape of skis and boards on freeze-and-thaw snow grants permission to turn over, go back to sleep and get a later start on the mountains.
Though there’s still a quarter-year of ski season to go — at least for those who grind it out until early June — thoughts turn to other pursuits this time of year. Those who still play the game begin to get itchy to swing golf clubs and swear at golf balls following a trajectory other than the one they planned. Bikes have already been spotted throwing up roostertails of corn snow on the valley trail.
Like a late-winter virus, creeping thoughts of exhausting renovation, wholesale landscaping and the endless effort to keep the wilderness from reclaiming each of our little parcels of ersatz civilization begin to gnaw at our brains, chewing away at the rational thought centres that would otherwise save us from ever undertaking those ill-advised projects for which we have more enthusiasm to start than skill to finish.
And, of course, if you’re a red-blooded Canadian — particularly of the XY persuasion — you begin to get downright giddy at the approaching chainsaw season. “I love the smell of two-stroke exhaust in the morning,” says Chainsaw Al, my neighbour who believes Joyce Kilmer got it all wrong when he waxed poetic about trees.
Al would feel right at home in Whistler next month when the blue smoke and screaming engines start to lay waste to the urban forest on Lot 1/9. For that matter, so would any politician or corporate captain with a penchant for wasteful, unnecessary, inflated and ill-advised opportunities to squander other people’s money. When the smoke clears, when the trees are hauled off, when the squatters are evicted, when the millions of dollars are set in paving stones, sweeps of concrete, flagposts and a three-tiered podium, when the Games are finished and the last medals hung around necks of soon-to-be-forgotten heroes, what’ll we have left?
A legacy?
I know it’s pointless to flog a dead horse, tilt at windmills and piss into the wind. But I can’t help wishing someone would come to their senses about building, or more accurately, not building the Olympic Medals Plaza on Lot 1/9 until they come up with a really good explanation of what they’ll do with the leftover white elephant after the Games are finished and how much all that paved-over paradise will cost to maintain each and every year between now and, oh, forever.
The project is a microcosm, a metaphor if you will, for opposing visions of what Whistler ought to become. Humility, common sense and an ironic appreciation of history argues for a temporary medals plaza to be constructed on the driving range, an idea dismissed in an earlier incarnation, back when we were hoping this would be a smaller, greener — saner? — Games. Glitz, glamour and an overwrought sense of the vaulted Whistler Standard are foursquare behind mowing down the forest and creating a vacuous, antiseptic… what? Meeting space? Public square? Iconic plague?
It would be a funky tribute to our roots to hold the medals ceremonies on the old town dumpsite. A kind of you’ve-come-a-long-way-baby symbolism would attach itself to such a bold stand. The world media would eat it up. There’s a much better story in, “From garbage to gold,” than there is in creating yet another soulless expanse of gum-stuck paving stone.
There’s positive symbolism and a personality of comfort-in-our-skin in recognizing the Olympics are a temporary aberration and setting up temporary facilities to deal with their extravagant demands. There’s a stench of desperation attached to squandering the last undeveloped parcel in town on a flashy show of nouveau riche excess, of clearcutting the final vestige of nature in our very unnatural pedestrian village for a couple of minutes of television coverage. It’s pathetic.
But it does pave the way for Whistler of the Future. Whistler of the Future is where we’re headed and it’s not going to be a happy place for anyone with faded Gore-Tex, duct-taped ski boots and a concept of place that embraces anything other than a highly-polished, plastic-on-the-furniture, keep your feet off the coffee table sense of propriety. The driving range is who we were; Lot 1/9 plaza is who we’re becoming. We’re losing our inner kid and gaining an awkward, tight-suited adulthood. Maturity sucks.
More importantly, this project underscores our headlong rush toward building a Whistler we can’t afford. In the arcane world of municipal finance, we have — or will have — the capital to build but we won’t have the income to operate or maintain. And, of course, we can’t use the capital money for operation and maintenance. So we put another tick in the column of reasons we need to increase property taxes, a subject about which we’ve yet to hear any detailed explanation of what we’d actually lose — the devastating consequences — without the proposed increases this year and every year in the foreseeable future.
Yet, two weeks ago, while most of council and the mayor symbolically took their shoes off and pounded them on the council table and sang in unison, “Not a single taxpayer dollar,” when Tom McHorler presented H.O.M.E.’s partially-baked plan for temporary housing to get us through to a post-Olympic athletes’ village reality, their very next act embraced their ill-advised intention to take on the operation and maintenance of the long-promised tennis facility, something that’ll surely become a sinkhole for municipal — taxpayer — dollars. No dollars for housing; unknown dollars for tennis?
It must be time for me to retire and write fiction because, frankly, I just don’t get it. I don’t understand why we want to hamstring our future for the Olympics. I don’t understand why we want to place our hope in an unknown operator who might be able to run a municipal tennis facility efficiently enough to break even. I don’t understand why we want to take on a capital project the magnitude and cost of which we can’t possibly know — the Fitz slump project — in exchange for a finite, knowable income stream from paid parking in the dayskier lots. And I don’t know why we need to think about hard-surfacing and landscaping them when every pay-parking lot I used in various Colorado resorts were — quelle surprise — unpaved, unlandscaped dirt lots.
They say with age comes wisdom. I feel so cheated.
