I hear the muffled sniggers and see the puzzled looks. It’s hard to be certain whether it’s disdain or pity I see in their eyes when, on those rare occasions, they’re too slow in averting their slackjawed gaze and I catch them in the act of staring… in utter disbelief. There is about them a general sense — and a rare sense at that — of outright superiority my mere presence swells in their beleaguered chests. There is also a sense of cultural dislocation, a suspicion perhaps that I don’t belong here.
They’re probably right about that.
I suspect it is more or less the same thing really fat tourists feel in Whistler when the lean machines resident in town take time out from running marathons, swimming across local lakes or riding their bikes up Wedge to suck back a soy latte and munch a bean sprout on a local patio while they chow down on a BlackcombBurger, double fries and a couple of beers. What kind of weird place is this and why in the world don’t these poor, skinny people who live here have a Cinnabon outlet in this quaint, if uncomfortably pedestrian-oriented, village?
It takes a certain kind of idiot to drive a small truck in the Cariboo. I am that idiot.
The Cariboo — either a misspelling of Caribou perpetrated by an early, British factotum and perpetuated by a culturally stubborn unwillingness to admit mistakes, or a fanciful play on Halloween in the Caribbean, a locale this part of B.C. is frequently mistaken for — is a big land peopled by big characters who all drive Big trucks. Whether you frequently haul half-tonne round bales of hay in the back or rarely haul anything bigger than a plastic sack of groceries, Big trucks are a sign of belonging, of understanding and proudly proclaiming your sense of place. One-tonne dualies are de rigueur and are, often as not, whipped through parking lots by petite real estate agents with the speed and agility of an Indy car pulling into the pits.
Real men drive real trucks and real trucks in the Cariboo are Big trucks made even Bigger with the addition of spring kits, lifters, dual adjustable air shocks at all four corners and tires more frequently seen on earth-moving machines. Real men do not use ladders to climb into these trucks unless they’ve passed the age where they’d be required to collapse their RRSPs into RIFs, if any of them believed in such effete nonsense as RRSPs. Ingress to their trucks requires the same strength and agility and more or less the same moves required to mount a high horse. This is the land where men are men and chaps are just funny pants. Giddyup, cowboy.
A standard issue, half-tonne pickup truck is, literally, a child’s toy ’round these parts, the kind of local faux pas immigrants from Germany and Switzerland buy hoping, along with neatly-pressed western shirts and unscuffed, shit-free cowboy boots, they’ll blend into the local scene and be thought of as belonging to the wide-open spaces that have lured them here from their tiny, crowded, mass transit-riding countries.
Lost in this vast, open land, my tiny, old, battered, low to the ground Mazda pickup is an object of scorn and ridicule. It is the pimple on the prom queen’s nose, the gay caballero at the Bridge Lake Rodeo, the vegetarian at the Cattleman’s Association barbeque. It’s only saving grace — and yes, this is probably clutching at straws — is the noticeable dent in the front bumper, earned at the cost of Bambi’s life and still sporting a few tufts of hair and a bit of blood. “Don’t rightly know how the deer lost that one,” they chuckle as I park it outside the feed store where I sheepishly purchase a bag of dog treats while admiring the hand-tooled saddles and tack as though I understood what the hell they were for.
The Cariboo is a land of endless hope and desperate irony. It is peopled by rugged individualists… who re-elect one of the few sitting NDP legislators in Victoria. The most recent big celebration was a grand opening of a new business a few kilometres south of 100 Mile House. For as long as I’ve been coming here there was an abandoned building at the corner of highways 24 and 97 that looked vaguely like an auto dealership plunked down in a greenfield whose only other sign of commercial life was a log home operation. Hamburgers, hotdogs and sugarwater soft drinks trumpeted the rebirth of new business over the Canada Day weekend. Defying all odds — and coinciding with the violently-loathed Campbell carbon tax — a new RV dealership opened up. Timing may be everything but up here, hope springs eternal.
Admitting one is from Whistler around here is not a good idea unless one wants to defend the indefensible, the only places more generally loathed being Victoria and, of course, Ottawa. Whistler is seen as the black hole into which all the province’s highway improvement money has been sucked and into which disappears any real commitment the Campbell regime demonstrates toward increasing tourism. Arguing against those propositions in a land with severely potholed roads and no visible support for tourism other than vague road signs branding it Cariboo Country is futile. “Down the coast,” is a perfectly acceptable answer to the where you from question since down the coast is where most of the weekender and seasonal cottage owners who don’t speak with foreign accents come from. Down the coasters bring vital transfusions to the anemic economy and are, therefore, welcome. Whistlerites? May as well have said Sodomites.
But, as I like to point out when I’ve been too slow-witted to lie, people from Whistler share a lot in common with people in the Cariboo. We both have a penchant for dogs, for instance. True, we don’t tend to “walk” them behind our car, er, truck quite as often as I see folks do around here and, yes, we do run more large dog obits than people obits in Whistler but let’s not get bogged down in the details.
We both proudly sport logowear. Admittedly I try to keep the Quicksilver and Dog Lotion gear down the coast and have added a few articles of Stihl and Husqvarna wear to my wardrobe. Try as I might though, I can’t bring myself to doff the Screamin’ Reel trucker’s hat I won at last year’s fishing derby even considering it’d go a long way to mitigating the negative image engendered by the Mazda.
There’s value in having a foot in both worlds. I’m sure of it. I don’t know what exactly it is but I’m willing to give it a few more years to reveal itself. Meanwhile, I’ve got to get ready for the Garlic Festival. Maybe I’ll borrow a real truck.
