Cathedrals of the North
I grew up in the Skeena valley. When my family moved from central Alberta to northern BC, the Canadian nation had yet to celebrate its hundredth birthday.
Most friends and classmates had parents or grandparents who’d been raised in the cities of old Europe, within view of ancient stone castles and cathedrals. Those who grow up among such man-made monuments daily absorb the familiar shapes into their mental landscape. New arrivals in our town thought Canada was young and raw, the antithesis of what they referred to as “the old country,” whether it was England or Holland, Italy or Portugal or Wales. The aboriginal people in the town and in the Nass Valley to the north were the neighbours of those European descendants.
But as those native to northern BC know well, the absence of castles and cathedrals does not mean our nation suffers from a scarcity of inspiring monuments. As I grew up in the Skeena valley, the surrounding mountains penetrated my psyche and fostered my soul’s flourishing as much as any palace or cathedral could, and perhaps even more. After all, human monuments represent specific cultures; natural ones are shared by all.
Until I was eight, I was accustomed to the prairies, with their boundless horizons. In our new home, the individual mountains of the Skeena Valley became my companions. In the long light summer nights before falling asleep, I would gaze from my top bunk at the shape of Thornhill, clearly visible through the uncurtained pane. Beside its solid mound stood Copper Mountain, where each night, the radio tower blinked its tireless red eye. Except in the darkest and shortest winter days, each morning, the sun burst from behind the solid mass to shine on my eyelids and invite me to another day.
As a teen, I climbed both these mountains, using the well-trodden switchback trails. The day Robert Kennedy was shot, a group of us were on the way up Thornhill when someone passed on the story. Thus in my memory, the shocking news of that assassination is entwined with the fragrance of pine needles and images of the sun—mottled trail, flanked by mossy tree trunks.
Strangely, my mind does not connect the memories of ascending and descending the trails with those of the mountain views afforded from all around the town, in particular, The Bench and Graveyard Hill. For me, hiking was a separate experience from gazing at the mountains from the valley floor. The sensation of climbing involved all the senses, while the perpetual shapes of the forested slopes that ringed the horizon represented a distant presence only unconsciously taken in.
Each morning, at the end of the driveway, I turned north to walk to school. Ahead, the steep forbidding pile of Lean-to Mountain stood as sharply angled as a hastily constructed shelter to keep firewood dry. In warmer seasons, the snow receded, lending an alluring mystery to the symmetrical indigo pleats of its steep slopes. The brilliant snowy peaks resembled a brick of vanilla ice cream.
Over the years, I crossed Lean-to Creek many times on the Nass Road. Though I never went near Lean-to Mountain. I did venture up the wide bulk of Venarsdahl, which is in every way less forbidding than its angular neighbour. I recall a long-ago hike with a friend up Venarsdahl, when I staggered under the weight of an ancient Trapper Nelson Number 3 given to me by my father’s war buddy. The primitive canvas backpack on its wooden frame was much too large for me. It was hard work getting to the campsite weighed down with my share of the camping gear we’d need to spend the night on the lumpy flank of the mountain.
Strawberry Mountain stood near the highway between Williams Creek and Lakelse Lake. Named for its resemblance to the inverted berry, it is altogether smaller and less imposing, a hill rather than a mountain. Yet its symmetrical dome had its place in my Pantheon. One sunny afternoon on a recent visit to Terrace, my brother drove me along the deserted Beam Station Road. As I absorbed the half-remembered shapes we were passing, I looked up in sudden recognition and surprised myself by speaking a greeting aloud: “Hello, Strawberry Mountain!”
Back when TV was new, computers still in their infancy, and cell phones unheard of, we enjoyed a slow-paced rural childhood. With our dog, we kids routinely clocked miles and miles just to get to where we were going. In summer, we spent most of the long northern days and evenings out of doors. One of my favourite walks was the stretch of railway track between Franks’ Dairy and the place where the Kalum River joins the Skeena. Flanked by the mighty Skeena on my left, I’d walk westward on the railroad ties, sometimes balancing on the rails for a few paces, just to prove I could. On these treks, I faced an imposing shape of inky blue called Remo Mountain. Its peak was snowy for much of the year.
Off to the right of Remo was the most remarkable mountain of all, Sleeping Beauty. The irregularities of this peak form the profile of a woman’s face. She seems to be lying on her back with her eyes closed, and the thick snow on the steep slopes below her profile suggests platinum hair falling away from her pale rather hollow cheeks and brow. The lofty slopes of Sleeping Beauty are never without snow. Too remote to visit easily, this mountain holds another kind of remembrance. Within a short time, a friend lost both his mother and father. The bereaved family loved the outdoors, and they found comfort in the idea of leaving the earthly remains of their parents at a place they had both loved. Thus the remaining family hired a helicopter and flew together over Sleeping Beauty Mountain to return the ashes of their Danish Dad and their German-Jewish-South African mother. This was a mountain the whole family had loved, one they’d seen daily from their kitchen window, and one their artistic mother had often painted.
Though the mountains around us sometimes seemed forbidding, their presence was more often soothing. Once while Dad was fishing for salmon with his friend at the confluence of the Kalum River and the Skeena, my brother and I dared each other to walk across the railway bridge. I trod the ties with care and trepidation. When curiosity made it impossible not to glance down, my heart thumped into overdrive. The roiling green waters below mesmerized me into stillness. Suddenly, the smell of the fresh creosote from the railway ties made me feel sick. What if a train came? There was nowhere to go. One would have to cling to the angled metal struts of the trestle.
Seeking a source of courage to go on, I lifted my eyes to the eternal mountain peaks, and moved forward feeling calmer. Fortunately, no train came, and we galloped over the last few ties making a racket like the three Billy Goats Gruff. With the challenge of the crossing completed, neither of us had the appetite to return by the same route, and that proved a good decision. As we strolled back across the highway bridge, we heard the distant rumble and exchanged shocked glances. Then we stopped and leaned on the wooden rail to watch the long trainload of flatcars loaded with logs roll by. When it was gone, I looked at the distant blue peaks and said a prayer of profound gratitude for our timing.
On another visit to the home town, I enjoyed driving up Graveyard Hill to look out over the broad Skeena Valley. From the brow of the hill, I gazed at the familiar row of indigo peaks that ranged along the far bank of the river. Long unrecalled, they felt as familiar as my bones. In my teens I had sketched these very peaks, and later made the drawing into a water colour painting. For once, I was pleased with my art; it captured something about the river, the snow-tipped peaks, and the spring trees just bursting into bud. When I returned home, I found that old picture in a folder of art that I’d long ago stored and forgotten in a scarred and dented trunk that once belonged to my mother. The spring view of mountains, which used to hang on my bedroom wall, was discolored from the dust and smoke of the wood stoves that kept us warm through the cold Terrace winters.
The mountains that formed the familiar horizon of the Skeena Valley were my monuments, and they watched over me in silence as I grew up. All these decades later, I carry their indelible images somewhere deep inside.