Fourteen

Directions

Wayne and I both grew up in northeastern bc. Our childhood homes as well as our adult ones were never much more than an hour’s drive apart.

When Wayne was twenty-one, a skidder rolled on top of him, and he spent a few months in the Dawson Creek hospital; it was around the same time that I was a candystriper at the same facility. In 1994, we both attended the Ben Heppner concert at Unchagah Hall. At least once, we both donated pieces to the local art auction. But if we met at any of those times, neither of us can remember.

In 1984, when Wayne embarked on a three-month horse trip into bc’s northern Rockies with his girlfriend Carol-Anne, crossing rivers, travelling through meadows, up and over mountains, beginning to see more clearly the difference between the landscape he was travelling through and the clear-cuts he’d helped to create, I had been married for four years and was pregnant with my second child.

When the Mount Le Moray area near Hasler Flats, the place where Wayne had grown up, was under threat of logging, Wayne, along with his partner and other concerned citizens, formed the Chetwynd Environmental Society. Together they began a campaign to protect the last unroaded watershed of any size in the Dawson Creek timber supply area.

“Wayne, it can never be done,” some said. “They’ve already laid out where the roads and cut blocks will be. That valley is a goner.”

That was circa 1990. My younger child would soon be starting school.

With an eye on some spare time ahead, I decided to get serious with my lifelong interest in art. In the fall of 1991, I enrolled in the visual arts program at Northern Lights College.

“Back to school?” my mom said. “How will that work?”

The Chetwynd Environmental Society held public meetings, gave slide shows, attended trade shows, signed up hundreds of people as park supporters. My young family must have attended some of those trade shows, but at that time, the focus would have been on my children as they roamed the booths for giveaway stickers and balloons.

It was through the campaign to create a provincial park that the land and resource management planning began, a process that, according to Wayne, took strong negotiation skills. “You had to have a goal in mind,” he says, “and you couldn’t take no for an answer.”

Wayne’s bargaining skills were honed from logging for his father. “It required a high level of firmness to get my paycheque signed,” Wayne says. “If you could get the old man to take a buck from his pocket, it was squeaking all the way.”

In 1992, once the campaign to protect the Mount Le Moray area (which would become the Pine Le Moray Provincial Park) had moved into the planning process, Wayne turned his attention to the northern Rockies, the Muskwa–Kechika.

It was the same year I completed my associate of arts degree. It was also the year I was selected to attend the bc Festival of the Arts as both a visual artist and a writer. It had taken years for me to believe that my passions were worth pursuing. I started a spreadsheet plotting out how I might complete a graduate degree.

In 1998, through a land and resource management plan (lrmp), the Muskwa–Kechika Management Area was established. In his address announcing the creation and protection of the Muskwa–Kechika, New Democratic Party Premier Glen Clark announced: “Perhaps no single land-use decision anywhere has moved sustainability forward so dramatically through conservation, resource development and cooperative management … In turn, we challenge the rest of the world to follow our example.”

By 1998, my children had become teenagers. They were getting their driver’s licences, they were falling in and out of love, they were thinking about what they would like to do with their lives. I could see they had already moved beyond the home they’d grown up in. By then I had turned my creative attention away from visual art, toward writing.

In 2001, the Muskwa–Kechika Management Area was expanded by way of the Mackenzie Land and Resource Management Plan, bringing the total area to 6.4 million hectares—one of the largest, most diverse wilderness areas in North America.

For Wayne, those early days at the lrmp tables were charged and uncertain. There was no guarantee that after all of their work the government would approve their recommendations.

“We used to tape the meetings so the secretary could transcribe them,” Wayne says. “I’d listen to those tapes on my way to the next meeting. You gotta love that stuff to do that.”

What he loved most was the Muskwa–Kechika. When I first met him, he said it was only when he was in the m–k that he felt at home. “When I’m not there,” he said, “I’m just treading water.”

As my son left for school in Vancouver, and my daughter soon followed, I cherished with a fierce attention the times when everyone was home and sleeping under the same roof. As those times grew rarer, it was my writing that kept me afloat.