North of unreal
Floating home
One hot summer, we dropped our inner tubes into the river near Miworth and tried to float home down that thin stretch of sweet water. We wore life-jackets and thick sun-screen and I carried a baby, who floated inside my big round belly, as I frog-kicked downstream. The Nechako cradled us in her cool arms and we floated for hours toward the city, never knowing what was around the next bend. After the sun blew away, we kicked under the shadows of bridges. We were afraid of sturgeon and of the rush to the Fraser. And so, after we passed the brewery that swills Dude Beer, we pulled ourselves up on shore and hurried home, dripping wet, over the train tracks.
Now, the mountains are melting and spring is pouring in again: this strange winter starts to thaw. On the far coast, eager wolves were stalking cat food and inbred deer, and tasting dogs on their leashes. Up north, hot lime burned and billowed into black clouds and a fuel truck warmed the back of a stone-cold avalanche. Here at home, the river hurled icebergs at men in rescue suits, and my daughter and I skated in the rain, hand in hand, shy little shuffles through the puddles outside the civic centre. The art gallery director tossed gentle snowballs. Bottle collectors slipped along the sidewalk. Dogs sweated and moaned outside the Money Mart.
This strange winter, the river ice frazzled and sang and boomed and surged. In the blowing snow, mill workers in orange hard-hats shoveled sand into sandbags behind the hot oil plant. I was afraid and drove through the dark to the river at dawn, listening for a whisper of open water. A flag-woman with a tight white bun threw up her hand and hollered at me to turn around. The police finally let me through, past the Porta-Potty and the barricades, letting me drive towards the drink. But they warned me they couldn’t help if I got stuck up to my axles in the frosty wash.
Remember the night a small tsunami rolled beneath the feet of the fireman on watch on the Foothills Bridge? He barely had time to shout. The water rushed up sure and fast. Middle-aged men in pajamas were pulled from their homes, clinging to the bucket of an excavator. The river swallowed front yards and licked at the cutbanks.
Overnight, a flood zone hummed to life. Roads were raised, and a Berlin Wall of high wire dikes divided us from the river’s rage. There were excavators and gabion dikes, pumps and generators, and the slap of wetsuit flippers.
Divers in wetsuits and little black booties floated people back home in inflatable boats. The divers pulled them through the ice water in their yards to survey the damage. Dirty surges had blown through patio doors and knocked over appliances, like the stainless steel Frigidaire that still had a salmon inside. Friends wiped at tears and hacked away at thin sheets of ice in the living room. They brought in small hatchets and carried out books and computers on their backs. They crawled up driveways sheer with ice, on their hands and knees, gripping with their mittens and their boots. The flood monitor flew overhead in a helicopter. He took pictures of an ice jam that stretched past Miworth to the Mud River, and he chomped on coloured gumballs with his tired jaws. Below him, an official standing on the shore spotted ducks swimming in a thin channel of open water and shouted, “Hot Dog!” in his joy.
TV crews flew in. They tried to film an epic struggle of man against nature, David vs Goliath. They cheered the launch of an icebreaker on pontoons. They filmed a charismatic thin black pipe that pumped tepid water at the ice. They told Canadians our downtown was a flood plain. They told the nation our river was once forced to flow backwards. They described how the floodwaters once spirited away coffins as if they were canoes. Strangers turned the word Nechako over and over on their tongues, like the winter I licked the schoolyard’s frosty fence post to see how cold it tasted.
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