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A time for warm thoughts

By G.D. Maxwell First fire, now flood. What next? Pestilence? Plague? Famine? Maybe locusts? I don’t know whether it’s time to get right with Jesus or just move to higher ground. But this clearly seems to be the season of reckoning.

By G.D. Maxwell

First fire, now flood. What next? Pestilence? Plague? Famine? Maybe locusts? I don’t know whether it’s time to get right with Jesus or just move to higher ground. But this clearly seems to be the season of reckoning. Can I get an Amen?

Death is a regular, if unwelcome, visitor to our tiny mountain home. Skipping the old and infirm – since we still seem unable to find a comfortable spot for them to await its icy touch within the social fabric of our community – death goes right for the young, the vigorous, the undeserving. The vibrant party animal, the young father or mother, the long-time local, the newly arrived, death’s not picky about who gets chosen when he swings his scythe.

More so than many towns in a country committed to casting a wide social safety net – Mike Harris’ soon to be united right excluded – Whistler deals with death maybe a bit better, certainly with difference if not deference. That may have something do to with having friends die while engaged in pastimes about which they are passionate, as opposed to finding them slumped over a messy desk clutching their chests. Avalanche, backcountry misfortune, a 30 pound mountain bike taking on a three-tonne SUV, skiing too fast into an immovable object, these things we understand, expect even.

But having a highway you drive day after day disappear out from under you? Having a ribbon of water so insignificant by provincial standards it doesn’t even deserve the title river, only creek, carry enough runoff, trees and pinballing boulders to wash away two lanes of blacktop spanning its width? That’s a little hard to digest.

I guess we should be grateful so few were swallowed up by the torrent; maybe we should even renew our faith in miracles that one survived the plunge. But as rationalizations go, that one doesn’t ease the pain... or even deserve a cigarette.

It’s unthinkable. Yet, it’s impossible to stop thinking about it. The missing bridge is destined to join the trio of nightmarish, apocalyptic possibilities that never leave my mind when I get behind the wheel of an automobile.

In addition to all the other life-threatening hazards – Washington drivers, swerving into an abutment to miss a cat darting across the road, driving into oblivion while lunging for the radio controls whenever Anne Murray comes on – there are several that never make the migration to subconscious.

The first drove into my driveway years ago. It looked a bit like a Corvette and a lot like a half-completed fibreglas project. It turned out to be what was left of my brother-in-law’s car after a deer tried to mate with it. The fact it managed to complete its journey was more a testament to just how insignificant the body of a Corvette is than to the ruggedness of the rest of the car.

The deer came out of nowhere, bounding across the road as deer are wont to do. The only thing that saved my sister and her husband from having the deer come through the windshield and join them in the cockpit was speed. Whatever was left of the deer flew high over the top of the car because it was hit at a speed that would’ve given a radar cop an instant pudgy. Had the deer been seen or the brakes applied, things would have gotten nasty.

I think about deer a lot when driving. I think about them more after having hit one this summer. More fawn than deer, Bambi was hiding in the tall grass alongside the rural road I travel to get to Smilin’ Dog Manor. Gloaming hadn’t yet given way to darkness when it decided to occupy the same space on the road I was about to occupy.

Ironically, I’d just been talking about the swerve to miss the cat and run off the road scenario with the person riding with me when Bambi made her move. I didn’t swerve.

Before the current B.C. government, I might have seen the deer. But Gordo thought he could help pay for his tax cut by not cutting the grass alongside rural roads anymore. Of course, that has nothing to do with the higher insurance rates paid by the folks in the Cariboo and elsewhere in the province, rates driven up by escalating car-deer collisions along roads that, driven at night, resemble dirtstrip runways with all the eyes shining along their shoulders.

Unmarked railroad crossings are the second persistent nightmare. They’re rare nowadays, though not as rare as you might think. It is, in fact, their rarity that makes them even more vexing. I probably wouldn’t give them much thought were it not for a legal case with which I had more than passing familiarity.

Most rail crossings have some control device, a gate, a bell, a flashing light. But many, mostly in rural areas, have only a sign, the familiar crossed tracks. Stop, look, listen. Well, stop, look and listen if the sign even registers. Chances are it won’t until you’re right on top of it and crossing tracks you haven’t checked and wondering whether or not you packed clean pants to change into.

It can happen in the blink of an eye.

The final, and most bizarre nightmare arose from another legal case. It still haunts me because it was so weird, so improbable but so every day, matter of fact; it could happen to any of us.

On a clear summer day on a residential street a man was driving home after work. How’s that for ubiquitous? He was only blocks away from home.

Near where he lived, a landscape firm had spent the better part of the day sprucing up one of his neighbour’s yards. They mowed, trimmed, raked, fertilized and removed a few branches from a cottonwood growing too near the house. When they finished, they loaded the rakes and shovels, lawn mowers and spreaders onto their truck. They also loaded the brush and branches and headed to the landfill.

Minutes later, with the landscape truck heading one direction and the man returning home headed the other, fate intervened. With neither vehicle traveling more than 30 mph, the truck hit a pothole with the driver’s side front tire, compressed its suspension and recoiled. A branch 15 feet long and three inches across became dislodged, airborne.

Without ever seeing it, the branch came through the man’s windshield, speared him in the forehead, impaled him through the skull and killed him before his car ever coasted to a stop.

At times like that – at times like these – all any of us can do is think warm thoughts about those we love, gather the ones in gatherin’ range and hold the ones far away close to our hearts.

And be careful out there.