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All together now…

“You go to war with the army you have… not the army you wish you had.” Donny Rumsfeld said that, or something close enough to forgive what may be an inaccurate use of quotation marks.
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“You go to war with the army you have… not the army you wish you had.” Donny Rumsfeld said that, or something close enough to forgive what may be an inaccurate use of quotation marks.

“You build a town with the people you have… not the people you wish you had.” I said that. I feel much more secure in using quotation marks when I cite myself even though my memory’s so faulty I generally forget what I’m talking about let alone what I said.

And someone else, quite possibly a writer of greeting cards, said, “When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember your original plan was to drain the swamp.”

Bet you’re curious to know where this is going, aren’t you? Me too.

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a group of guys got together and decided it’d be a really cool thing to host the Olympics™. Being Canadian, they naturally focused on the winter Olympics™, not that there’s anything wrong with the ever so brief Canadian summers. I mean if you can subject athletes to the cruel summertime brew of heat, humidity and highly visible air of places like Mexico City, Beijing or St. Louis, the possibility of needing medical treatment for goosebumps in Vancouver seems fairly benign. But winter it was.

Lost in the mythology of the development of Whistler Mountain is any real detailed knowledge of the individual motivations these guys brought to the task. The allure of the Olympics™ shone a bit brighter then, not having been completely riddled by the rust of corruption, professionalism and geopolitical oneupsmanship, and I’m sure bagging a big ticket item like that was appealing. Certainly there was a desire to develop a ski area close to Vancouver. More likely than not, there were some dreams of wealth.

But regardless of the personal motivations, there was a unity of purpose behind that initial push to develop the ski area. That unity was aided by the small size of the group of people involved and the blank canvas on which they laboured.

It was moved along by strong-willed people who worked to a vision — build a ski area — that was a necessary component of that Olympic™ goal. Franz Wilhelmsen knew, instinctively, what a mountain ought to ski like and laid out Whistler Mountain to fit the picture in his mind. Hugh Smythe knew how a ski resort ought to operate and shaped the operations of Blackcomb Mountain to fit that new paradigm. Paul Mathews and Gary Raymond understood skiing was but a subset of mountain living and mountain living meant building places to live, if only one weekend at a time. Al Raine, among others, understood it took a village to add the focus necessary to cement the disparate bits into an experience.

It was never easy to build what’s become Whistler but it was easier when those doing the building were working toward a common vision.

Despite the vision, despite the strong personalities, despite the unity of purpose, Whistler wouldn’t have enjoyed the success it has if its timing hadn’t been almost perfect. I’m certain that timing seemed anything but perfect in 1981 when the whole crazy town was dancing toward bankruptcy but it was one of those instances when almost perfect was good enough.

Whistler stealthed onto the scene when travel was becoming cheap, skiing was enjoying the demographic push of the baby boomers’ might, people still took vacations, obesity wasn’t an epidemic, skiing was très cool and Colorado was so yesterday.

That was then; this is now.

Travel’s still relatively cheap but getting anywhere near an airport, let alone on an airplane, is a royal pain in the butt. Not that it matters. Most of the boomers have morphed into fat cats — literally — and greedheads. That’s bad for skiing but it continues to be good for ill-timed real estate developments, golf, and cigar jogging. North Americans are too overworked and scared about their job insecurity to take even the meagre vacations their corporate taskmasters allow and even if they do, their kids are too fat to let themselves be dragged to a ski resort; given their choice, they’d rather experience something as dangerous, difficult and uncomfortable as skiing through the world of video games.

Couple this dismal world view with the loss of Whistler’s “newness”, our recent history of leaderless civic politics, our inane fixation with matters Olympic™ and what you get is what you see: malaise. What’s happened the past few years isn’t so hard to understand. It’s certainly no reason for us to turn on each other and start devouring our young.

But it’ll be interesting to see whether or not we can pull ourselves up, dust ourselves off and get on with the task of reinventing ourselves without coming out of the process looking like someone wearing clothes of a different age and a different size.

The good news is that Mayor Kenny and council have shown us some good moves lately that suggest they’re not going to let the Olympics™ leave us with a monumental debt hangover. This is a good thing, Martha. It’s a good thing because it suggests they’re beginning to look beyond 2010 and the two-week circus. The Olympics™ is a distraction, a speed-bump on the way to building whatever community we’re going to become.

But both God and the devil are in the details, an irony I’ve always appreciated. And the details are yet to be worked out. Whistler 2020 is short on details and long on good intentions. And we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact it’s only a plan and any plan — as New Orleans found out so graphically when everyone in charge seemed totally unaware of the very well laid out emergency response plan that existed for the city — is only as good as the leadership that implements it.

More fundamentally though, this town doesn’t enjoy the unity of purpose that helped it prosper through hard times in the past. We’re not a community of builders and ski bums who want to build a better ski resort. We’re more mature — demographically speaking — and way more diverse. Your interests are, quite possibly, not my interests and vice versa.

Despite this, we’re all on this ride together and we’ll either succeed or fail together. And that, my fellow seekers, is why we should rejoice and synchronize our calendars and shelve whatever else we were planning to do on October 14 th in favour of attending the long-delayed, sorely-missed town meeting.

I don’t know what it’s going to be like but I do know this: our best chance to work successfully is to work together. Oh yeah, and leave the consultants at home, would ya?