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Shattering some Whistler illusions

We locked our front door for the first time last week.

As soon as the key turned in the lock, that small town Whistler feeling disappeared instantly.

About five minutes earlier we had struggled to the car, barely awake, coffee in hand, only to discover that somebody had been there before us.

In the middle on the night while we were sound asleep, somebody was rifling through our belongings in the car, as it stood parked in our driveway. That’s a creepy thing to think about.

Rather than simply steal our CDs, the only things of value in the car, these thieves were of the more uncivilized type.

Papers were scattered across the front seats. They jabbed a pen into the armrest, leaving a hole in the plastic. They put another hole in the dashboard above the stereo, which looked as though it was in the process of being removed. They stole the cell phone charger.

Worst of all though, they broke CDs and left the pieces lying around the car.

I admit my taste in music can be a little questionable at times. But is that any reason to break a Neil Diamond CD?

It reminded me of a time when I was about 10-years-old and living in Scotland.

While out shopping in Glasgow, my parents’ car was broken into.

The thieves went through every single cassette (I think we had upgraded from the eight track by then) and left them in the car in complete disgust.

Believe it or not, Englebert Humperdinck, and Johnny Mathis didn’t appeal to your typical Glaswegian hoodlum in the mid-80s. I don’t think those artists had much street value at the time.

I remember being absolutely mortified that my parents’ musical taste was so bad that their tapes weren’t even worth stealing.

Now almost 20 years later nothing much has changed. It’s another worrying reminder that I’m slowly morphing into my parents, Johnny Mathis aside. But as disappointed as I’m sure those thieves in Scotland must have been, they never destroyed anything and that’s saying something for a Glaswegian hoodlum at that time.

Our thieves weren’t as thoughtful.

It was only two months ago when I scoffed and mocked our city fiends coming up to Whistler for the night and securing the Club into place in our driveway.

"This is Whistler, for crying out loud. You’re not in the Big City anymore, you’re in Emerald. There’s no need for the Club up here. You have a better chance of being eaten by a bear than having your car broken into."

At that time I thought about how lucky I was to live in Whistler, not having to worry about using the Club or lock the doors or hide the stereo every time I got out of the car.

I was proud that we didn’t lock our car doors. I was proud that we didn’t lock the front door of our house. That was one of the little beauties about living in Whistler. You just felt safe.

So it was totally depressing to realize that Whistler is not this utopia that I had made it out to be.

You never think much about the bad things that happen here when you’re thinking about all the fun things there are to do. When you watch the nightly news here documenting the horrors around the world and in the urban centres, you can’t help but feel a little safer, a little more secure. We just seem so far removed from realities elsewhere.

But some pretty bad things happen here just as they do everywhere else.

Less than two months ago there was a sexual assault near the Skateboard Park at 3 a.m. The girl was walking alone. It could happen to anyone. I walk alone at night too.

Then there are all the stories about countless women being drugged in the local bars. They leave their drinks unattended and something gets slipped in them. It could happen to anyone. I leave my drinks on the table unattended to go dancing too.

And as I tell more and more people about the break in, the more people tell me about how they leave their cars unlocked in Whistler. I did it too. And looked what happened.

The thing is, until it actually happens to you, you just don’t think about it.

While in the grand scheme of things a few broken CDs are no big deal, it’s the thought that someone was actually in the car and was pissed off enough to destroy things.

The vandalism was a rude awakening on a number of levels.

First off we realized that there are idiots out there who are angry and vulgar enough to destroy the property of random strangers.

But it also made me realize a few things about Whistler too. Though we may try to market this place as the perfect getaway, the place to forget all your troubles, the Shangri-La in the mountains, sometimes that’s just not always the case.

There are idiots here too, and I don’t just mean those morons tailgating you all the way up Highway 99 in their expensive cars, flashing their lights at you, only to be two cars ahead of you at the lights in Creekside.

Luckily these idiots just wanted to break a few CDs.

So after cleaning the car, putting all the broken CDs into a garbage bag, removing the pen stabbed into the armrest, I marched right to the front door and locked it – an unprecedented event since we moved to Whistler.

Of course, 10 hours later when we arrived home to the locked door, neither of us had a key to open it.

I had to crawl through the kitchen window, which was inevitably left unlocked, to get us in.

It’s pretty obvious that we wouldn’t last five minutes in the big city anymore.