By G.D. Maxwell
"I’ve got blisters on my fingers!"
— John Lennon
Me too. And thumbs, and palms and a few other places I’d rather not mention.
Springtime at Smilin’ Dog B&B – trying a new tack this year – is a continuing lesson in patience, logistics and futility. It’s also a lesson in the kinesthetic dynamics of sport. Whatever muscles got worked this winter skiing are definitely not the same muscles needed for the arduous manual labour needed to beat back the Cariboo wilderness or keep up with the proud Cariboo tradition of cocktail hour. My blisters are joined by a raging case of drinking elbow lest my neighbours consider me some kind of wimp. Sip through the pain, big boy.
Spring’s early, ahead of schedule. Mayflies have almost played out, their numbers reduced to several billion. They no longer blot out the sun and cast the land in perpetual twilight. Weeds banished last autumn have returned to reclaim garden beds awaiting cultivation and seeding. Raspberry canes are leafing and next year’s shoots are popping up all around them. And the rhubarb’s back with a vengeance.
As are the gophers.
The first thing I saw when we arrived wasn’t the field of grass that already needed mowing. It wasn’t the budding maple tree that survived the mild winter or the tatters of last summer’s greenhouse.
It was the hole.
"Exploratory," I muttered to myself, ever hopeful. Convinced no self-respecting gopher would want to live in a crumbly, walled bed, I’d spent days last fall dismantling the mound of dirt that was their condo and replaced it with a gopher-proof marvel of engineering: Strawberry Fields Forever.
A small fortune in strawberry plants will soon arrive and with the help of an active imagination, I can already taste the jam and shortcake and pilfered, warm treats they’ll hopefully become. As long as the gophers don’t return to destroy them.
I’ve brought with me a new, humane, catch and release trap to do battle with the gophers. It’s a fascinating device, all wire and pressed metal and ingenuity. So far all it has caught is a squirrel, lured by the twin delights of peanut butter and oats. It would have caught Zippy the Dog but he couldn’t squeeze through the opening.
The gophers seem wary of it but I’m determined. Maybe they’ve heard my plan is to release their trapped, furry little asses into the depths of Sulphuric Lake.
But I’m having second thoughts about this whole garden thing. It’s not the back-breaking work that’s got me down. It’s not the short growing season, the stubborn clay soil or the need for a greenhouse to grow any heat-loving veggie. It’s not even the gophers.
It’s the manure.
With western Canada struggling to contain mad cow disease and trying to unravel the maddening mystery of how one cow out of hundreds of thousands turned up with the malady, anything remotely bovine is troubling. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, the shits.
If the hysteria over beef and beef by-products is enough to bring the cattle business to a grinding halt, is it too far a stretch to worry about just what might be transmitted to the veggies? Am I setting myself up for a raging case of Mad Broccoli Disease? Anything’s possible.
The steak business has pretty much collapsed. At the cattle auction last Friday in Armstrong, steak on the hoof went for around 15 cents a pound – metric-free zone. The week before, it went for nearly 60 cents. Auctions across Alberta this week simply didn’t happen. Not enough beeves to make it worthwhile.
Naturally, being the helpful kind of guy I am, this got me thinking about whether there wasn’t some angle Whistler could play here. And yes, I think there is.
Whistler needs more tourist attractions. We’ve pretty much run out of adventure sports options and, witness the X-Games, are more or less scraping the bottom of the athletic barrel. Cultural is a hard sell but kitsch is always popular, be it giant muskie or the world’s largest apple pie.
Many visitors to Whistler comment on what a quaint – if contrived – faux-European Alps kind of experience it is. All in English, of course. So why not borrow shamelessly from the Swiss who pretty much invented kitsch?
This, of course, is where the cows come in. Outside Switzerland’s big cities, cows rule. In the canton of Valais, for example, cow fighting is a big tourist attraction. While it has neither the panache nor blood of Spanish bull fighting, Swiss cow fighting is nonetheless spirited and, more importantly, the tourists eat it up.
From March through early October – months Whistler would kill to have more tourists – marginal milk cows are culled from the herd, allowed to keep their horns and prodded to go at each other. The resulting clash is part Looney Tunes, part low comedy and all fun. The winner is declared when the loser wanders off to graze.
The cow fighting season is bookended by the Cantonal Championships in Aproz during May and the Combats des Reines at Martigny’s Foire du Valais in October.
Why not Whistler?
We could ape some traditional Swiss costumes, suitably infused with Canadiana, blend cow fighting with something colourful like St. Cergue’s alpine descent of the milking herds, toss in an alpenhorn or two, eat a lot of chocolate and build enough summer festivals around the cows to make North Americans think twice about exposing themselves to Swiss terrorists just to soak up some cow culture.
The best part is with cattle going for pennies a pound, the startup costs would be diddly.
And why stop with Eurocentric traditions. With growing herds of contented cows amusing tourists and tempting bears, we could choose a few to become Whistler’s Sacred Cows, thus striking a chord with the Lower Mainland’s largely ignored Indo-Canadian community. The Sacred Cows could wander the village and flesh out the stale offering of jugglers and clowns.
What, you ask are Whistler’s Sacred Cows? We could hold a contest to choose and name Whistler’s Sacred Cows. Offhand, I’d recommend Sustainability, Affordability, Resident Housing, Natural Step and Bed Unit Cap form the core of the Sacred Cow herd. But that’s just a start. Why don’t you let Pique know what you consider Whistler’s Sacred Cows to be.
This idea has legs. I’m sure anything that would put a positive spin on Canada’s cattle industry would merit sizeable startup grants from various ministries: culture, heritage, agriculture. Hell, even Ralph Klein might donate a bull or two. Lord knows he throws enough around.
