“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?