Arrival in the Chilcotin

I wrote this last night...


It’s too late to blog right now, i.e. it is 9:39 p.m. and I got up at 5:30 this morning and will again tomorrow morning… But I do want to just say that I’m here in the Chilcotin, slowly adapting to life in the middle of nowhere, and teaching some of the sweetest kids ever. I fell in love with them right away!

So ya, AmyLou and I drove up here on Sunday: 7 ½ hours straight with a quick stop in Cache Creek for gas and a Subway dinner. Other than that, we spent a good part of our trip talking about finding your ideal spouse, differences in culture between the North and the City (she’s from the North and I’m from the City but she says that I don’t act or appear like a city person which I took as a compliment!), friendship, the role of women, the life of a tree planter (AmyLou tree planted for several summers), and our understandings of the Aboriginal people in BC. As we drove north, we left the fresh green leaves and blossoms of the Lower Mainland, headed through red cliffs in the canyon, passed the dessert region of the Kamloops Forest District, and ended up in ranch country on a plateau covered in ridges of evergreen trees, small strips of weak, rocky grass, and birch trees still stripped of their leaves. Although we’ve headed backwards in season, we do have longer days up here. We drove into a lovely color-streaked sunset as we headed west out of Williams Lake and made our way into the Chilcotin region.

And now we are here, in a real ranch house with bear skins and antlers hanging off the walls, dishes decorated with moose, and chickens and horses in the backyard. Steve and Jill are both great people and I feel at home already. Steve is a real fun, cowboy type of guy – he told us stories of crazy pranks he did when he was a student at Trinity over 30 years ago (like picking the lock to the presidents office and smelling up the place by smoking a pipe. Apparently, he was never caught…). He cooked us bacon and omelet (with fresh eggs, mushrooms, and peppers) early this morning. Jill is doing her very best to ensure that we get the most out of our stay here and we’ve had some really insightful conversations with her today as we drove to the school and back.

So much for going to bed early. But I really am going now. I’ll try to post about the school soon…