I've known for years there would always be things I don't understand, will never understand and probably, truth be told, simply can't understand. At the magical end of that continuum is, for example, purple green beans.
For most of my life green beans were green. I assume that's how they got their name - black beans are black, pinto beans are pinto-coloured, red beans... you get the picture. Yellow beans, which I always thought were just unripe green beans, are called yellow beans. Purple beans that look like green beans are actually called purple beans but when you say purple beans nobody knows what the heck you're talking about. When you say
"purple green beans," they understand. Weird, but true.
But that's not what I don't understand about purple green beans. When you cook green beans, the beans stay green and the water you cook them in turns green. When you cook yellow beans they stay yellow and the water turns yellow. When you cook black beans, etc., and so on.
But when you cook purple beans the beans turn green. Fair enough. I can deal with a little magic in my life. Half of the reason I grow the darn things is to be amazed by this trick of pigmentation. The thing I don't understand though is where the purple goes. The water you cook the purple green beans in turns... green?
(If you understand the chemistry that makes this happen, please don't explain it to me. There isn't enough magic in my life; I'd like to hold on to what I have.)
Of course, there's always the Coca-Cola vs. gasoline conundrum if you want to ponder something almost impossible to understand. Take Coke. The ingredients of Coke are water, high fructose corn syrup, caramel colouring and a few pennies worth of secret ingredients and corporate intrigue. Coke is made everywhere, bottled everywhere and generally not shipped very far before it winds up on your grocer's shelf or in a vending machine near you.
Gasoline, on the other hand, is monumentally complex. It starts with geological surveys, wells drilled unthinkably deep into the ground, or even more unthinkably deep in the ocean, and crude oil is pumped from those unthinkable depths to the surface. From there it really gets complex. Crude oil is shipped by every conceivable means, including pipelines stretching the length of countries and across sovereign borders, tanker ships and trucks, around the world. It is "refined" by a process that makes purple green bean magic seem ridiculously simple. After all that it's trucked far and wide to gas stations near you, including the only one in Whistler. That there's even such a thing as gasoline is testament to human ingenuity.
And depending on who's having a sale, who's at war with whom and what the greedheads have conspired in smoky back rooms, the price of a litre of Coke at your local gas station isn't all that much different than the price of a litre of gasoline.
I could understand that if Coke still contained cocaine. Okay, no I couldn't. I'll never understand that.
But then, I'll never understand why there's an asphalt plant where no asphalt plant should be, down at Cheakamus Crossing. That's not entirely true. I do understand why the plant's there. It's there because someone at muni hall did a half-assed job, no one at muni hall caught the half-assed mistake, no one at muni hall ever questioned whether there should be an asphalt plant operating there and no one cared until recently.
The part of it I really don't understand is why there have never been, will never be and, with extremely rare exceptions, never are any consequences when the error is discovered or when people who should know, should care and should correct these kinds of mistakes don't.
While I'm notionally okay with the compromise deal that was reached with the plant owner - and want to make it clear that he is not the villain of this piece, having relied on the daisy chain of incompetence that first led to an asphalt plant being greenlighted for that location - I don't want to leave the impression that everything's hunky dory. It's not.
I share the sense of helplessness the asphalt plant's new neighbours feel in trying to correct this mistake. I share their outrage at the seeming indifference with which their plight has been received by muni staff. While the elected politicians have been pretzeling themselves to ameliorate this problem there has been deafening silence from staff and nothing even approaching a mea culpa .
In trying to demonstrate the "communications" and "steps" taken to deal with this oversight, the best our brightest have been able to come up with is a single, pathetic, nearly incomprehensible memo John Nelson, then Director of Public Works, wrote to Hugh O'Reilly, then mayor, on May 7, 1997!
That memo, seemingly written by Monty Python, explains how a "mistake" had been made when it was previously reported to council that the asphalt plant couldn't be moved to where it is because the zoning didn't permit such use. It went on to clarify that the plant could legally be operated there. The "mistake" was correct, the correction was a mistake and the rest is history.
According to staff this is the full extent of the public record. I don't know about you but it makes me wonder what the hell all those file cabinets at muni hall are for. Decoration?
On the other hand it does help explain why, for example, the muni was unknowingly subsidizing swimming pools at several hotels in town to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars by failing to bill for their water usage. No one noticed, no one cared and no one would have noticed except someone who does works diligently - and whose job didn't contain anything approaching a mandate to monitor water usage - caught the oversight.
No consequences, no compensation, just a shrug of the shoulders.
Contrast this to a homeowner who was caught creating an illegal suite in his home a while back. The muni put a cloud on his title that'll be a devil to deal with when he decides to sell. I'm not suggesting there shouldn't be a cloud and I'd have preferred he'd been ordered to remove the illegal suite. But it kind of makes you wonder whether there's a department hidden somewhere in the hall that kills flies with cannons while refusing to go after bigger game.
The only way this comedy of errors could be compounded further is by rezoning the new plant location to allow an asphalt plant in perpetuity. Move it? Sure. Zone it? Why bother? We never have before.
We deserve better. What I really don't understand is why we don't get it.
