Five years ago this week I left the Okanagan after defending my Masters thesis (Course Language: How the Reader Is Encouraged to Collaborate On Our Seminar and Pass Me). It wasn't like I vowed never to return, but I knew it would be a good long time before I drove those highways again. If not the floods, then the fires. If not either, then unrepentant Albertans insisting it wasn't their bitumen that created the conditions for these weather extremes, no sir, it was Pierre Elliott Trudeau -- or his son.
Much of yesterday was spent listening to the CBC for reports on what is now called the McDougall Lake Fire, a more ferocious fire, we are told, than the devastating 2003 fire that tore through parts of Kelowna proper. Not sure if it was a caller or a guest, but a UBCO sociologist reported on "acute anxiety": a situational condition that occurs when people are asked to grab what's important and leave their house immediately -- and they grab only practical things, like can openers, not family heirlooms, or their children's favourite toys.
The picture up top grabbed my attention for various reasons, one of which entered the absurd when trauma fantasy had me considering the potential practicality of a hunter's trophy, how in our distress we might rationalize it as a hat rack. But it's more than that of course. Someone took the time to kill this stag and presumably butcher it, freeze its meat. Was it mom's kill? Her daughter's? More likely mom's by the way she is holding it. Or her (late?) husband's? Son's? Her father's? Her mother's? Every picture tells a story. But when I see pictures like this, I hear many stories.
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