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Goin’ somewhere?

I’m as fond as the next guy of wandering around and doing nothing. Pressed, I even imagine people drawn to aimless wandering are probably the same people who are drawn to skiing.
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I’m as fond as the next guy of wandering around and doing nothing. Pressed, I even imagine people drawn to aimless wandering are probably the same people who are drawn to skiing. I’m not sure you could even be a skier if you didn’t have an inclination toward wandering around with no real goal in mind. After all, what is skiing if not aimless wandering on a massive vertical scale.

This town is about as close as you can come to heaven if you’re an aimless wanderer. If the wandering muse beckons you toward solitude and nature, you can heed her call by walking no further than the end of most residential streets. Ever wonder where all those trails through the woods and trails meandering up mountains on both sides of this valley came from? Some, though by no means all or even a majority, were carved by pirate mountain bikers, WORCA work crews, even municipal park staff. Most were tramped down by nearly five decades of aimless wanderers seeking a moment’s seclusion near their home turf or favourite weekend getaway. The variety and sheer mileage — kilometreage? — of trails they pioneered all over this town are an amazing legacy, something you simply won’t find in most places.

If your mindlessness is less inclined toward wild places, you can wander to your heart’s content on the paved pathway of the Valley Trail. From my soon to be ex-home in Alpine, that path moves gently away from the noise of the highway, past the snowfields or baseball diamonds of Meadow Park, through skunk cabbage swamps, along the River of Golden Dreams, into a forest of ancient cedars and skirts the manicured fairways of a golf course before leading me into the village.

An alternative, at least in summer months, is the more aerobic, graveled labyrinth of boulevards that climb up to Lost Lake, from whence narrow paths spiral into the surrounding forest every which direction. It’s all a distracted wanderer can do to remember whether he even had a destination in mind when he started putting one foot in front of the other.

Mindless wandering is quite possibly the explanation for why, as one person put it last Monday evening, Whistler is ruled by dogs. Dogs are a mindless wanderer’s best excuse for doing what comes naturally. I have a dog, therefore I wander. I have a dog, therefore I must wander. Dogs need walks; wanderers need walks. Dogs walk aimlessly, led along by their comic noses, instinct, memory and, well, aimlessness. Wanderers, excusing their aimlessness with the facile excuse of having to walk the dog, are free to just walk and daydream, knowing the dog will, sooner or later, lead them home. It could only be better if wanderers had a better sense of smell to distract them even further from their distracted reality. Then again, maybe not.

But, as a guidance counselor once told me, if you ain’t goin’ nowhere in particular — he was a role model of how not to speak English — anywhere you wind up is good enough. I think he was trying to do his job which, at the moment, was to browbeat me into choosing a major in college instead of just floating from faculty to faculty, waiting for the Vietnam war to end.

I never agreed with the notion that anywhere I ended up was good enough. I still don’t. When I wander into the village and just want to sit and watch the parade of humanity, not just anywhere will do. I do not, for example, sit at Starbucks and watch people. Being firmly in the “Friends don’t let friends drink at Starbucks” camp, I am visibly uncomfortable on those rare occasions when friends who don’t share that philosophy drag me into one. I don’t know if it’s the idea of being in a place that serves a coffee drink with roughly the same calorie count as a Big Mac, not being able to get my mind around sizing that vacuously eschews the easy-to-understand trinity of small, medium and large or, how shall I say, the whole je ne sais quoi of Starbuck Culture that turns me off, but I’d rather put up with the mayhem of pickup time at Whistler Kids and loll on Chris’s patio at Behind the Grind than have a lifetime free pass to that Seattle chain.

There comes a time though — and if I’m not mistaken, at least for this column this is that time — when wandering aimlessly just doesn’t cut it.

Much to the intense displeasure of a significant portion of Whistler’s full-time population, our municipal council decided last Monday was the time to stop wandering aimlessly on the proposal to amend the zoning on Larco’s underground space. A proposal that had come to be confused, unfortunately, with a referendum on whether one was for, or against, London Drugs.

It was a unanimous decision. It was a reasoned decision. And unless you believe the best way to run a resort municipality is to wander aimlessly down the path toward irrelevance, it was the right decision.

That it was also a fine civics lesson will be lost on the many people who didn’t come out and who won’t take the time to watch council’s performance on cable. Whatever your position was on this issue, you should take half an hour to listen to what Mayor Ken and the councillors had to say. The muni should post the video on whistler.ca for those of us who don’t have cable.

The reason you should hear for yourself what was said Monday evening is because it is a very clear statement of who we are, where we’re going and what our town is all about. If you don’t like what you hear, you should perhaps ask yourself whether this is the place for you or whether you might not be happier somewhere else.

What it comes down to is this: Whistler is about tourism. Period.

It’s not about you. At least not unless you buy into that organizing premise. It’s not about your need to follow the North American dream of cheaper is better. It’s not about having all of life’s amenities available in the town you live in. It’s not about small town or large town or urban lifestyle.

It’s about feeding the engine of tourism because if we don’t do that — and do it well — we run the risk of becoming a footnote in the annals of ski towns that made it big but couldn’t keep it up.

Buy in or cash out, boys and girls. The game’s afoot.