So. Growing up in a small town in the middle of nowhere (Central Interior BC, to be more precise; the government keeps redrawing the line for the Northern Living Allowance to include or exclude Mackenzie) gives one a fairly unique perspective on life in general. Fast food chains are considered a bit of a novelty when one has to drive two hours to get there. Mackenzie is a sort of a microcosm by necessity; two hours north of Prince George, with extreme amounts of snow in the winter, makes it necessary for this tiny little town to be very autonomous. I was shocked and appalled, twelve years ago, to discover that the even tinier town I had just moved into had no drug store, medical services of any kind, high school, laundromat, or ATMs. That's right, there were NO bank machines in Bruderheim twelve years ago. There was a bank though.
Mackenzie is, by its nature, not at all anything like the real world. But the things I learned growing up there are some of the most important things I can think of for surviving in the real world, and they are things that I probably would not have learned elsewhere. So, once again, I am giving you a bulletted list! Yay! >.< Things I Learned in Mackenzie That Are Important In the Real World:
- Wild animals are dangerous. I have seen grizzly and black bears across the street from my house, bear tracks across my back yard, a fox in my carport, coyotes peeking out of the greenbelt across the street, and very rarely, deer and moose across from my house as well. While all of these critters were facts of life, I knew from a very young age to keep my distance from them. Someone recently linked an extremely disturbing video of a cat harassing a fawn in Cranbrook, and the doe's reaction (basically it tried to lead the fawn away, was surprised by a big huge dog that came bounding out to investigate, and proceeded to trample the dog, possibly to death). I could not watch to the end of the video, but my brother tells me it aimed a kick at the cat's head near the end, too. This video did not surprise me. What surprised me was the fact that someone saw their cat bothering a baby wild animal and went "aww isn't that cute, where's my video camera" instead of calling the cat AND the dog into the house before momma showed up to protect the baby. ANY mother animal is dangerous if she perceives a threat to her babies. Any wild animal is dangerous if it perceives a threat to itself, too. No matter how cute and adorable a wild animal is, unless it's small enough that you can crush it with your boot if it tries to attack you, it is dangerous to get too close to it. If you are driving through Jasper National Park and you see a cute baby bear, stay in your car. If you see some cute mountain goats... Stay. In. Your. Car.
- Everything is within walking distance (if you're willing to walk long enough). This is true just about anywhere in the world, actually. If it's on the same continent as you, you can walk to it. This concept actually is more involved than one might think, at first. You may think I am being overly clever here. But really, if you can walk somewhere within the time you have to get there, it's in walking distance. I could walk to West Edmonton Mall right now (approximately 60 blocks from here) in time to catch the movie that starts in an hour. That's about on the edge of my "reasonable walking distance" radius, especially if I have to carry something with me. My reasonable travel radius basically doubles if I ride my bike. I can get downtown in about 45 minutes to an hour. That's how long I have to allow if I am taking the bus. Growing up in a town where there was no public transit, many families had only one car, and there was only one taxi company with only a handful of cars, walking or biking from place to place was just part of life. I walked a mile to school and back every day in high school (which starts in Grade 8 in BC, in case you are not from around there). Sometimes I would walk that distance twice to get to an event or grab a slushie from 7-11. Some people rode their bikes to work out at the industrial site. In fact, enough people rode their bikes out to the mills that someone put in a paved bike path alongside the highway.
- Dress for the weather (and be prepared for the weather to change at a moment's notice). Ideally, a town with no public transit, in which many people walk everywhere, would be located in a temperate region of the world. Not so with Mackenzie. Thanks to that one-mile walk to school (yes, it really was uphill both ways, but not the whole way) I learned how to deal with unexpected windstorms and thunderstorms, fog so thick you can't see your hand in front of your face, freezing rain, ice, hail, sleet, sun, extremely hot weather (we're talking over 30 C and it didn't happen that often!), extremely cold weather (under -40 C, and that was much more common), extremely deep snow, and everything in between. Growing up in Mackenzie is the reason why, in Edmonton, I take my backpack with me everywhere I go. My backpack contains an umbrella and my jacket if it's too warm to wear the jacket. It has sunscreen in it right now, and when it's not summer out, it has a spare pair of gloves, a pair of dry socks, a lighter, and possibly some hand warmers. I have had occasion to use all of these 'just in case' items at various times while living in Edmonton. I am also not ashamed to wear long johns in cold weather, and tend to dress in many thin layers that can be stripped off if I get too warm, rather than wearing a huge parka when it's only -15. I do not freeze to death waiting for the stupid bus to arrive, although I am sometimes not very comfortable. Even if I don't expect to spend a lot of time outside, I make sure I am prepared to do so if I have to. And yes, I still check the weather forecast before leaving the house.
- You can't always get what you want. Did I mention it was a 2 hour drive to the nearest McDonald's? We would make a list of things that we needed and every two or three months, we would all pile into the car early in the morning and drive to Prince George. We would spend the day going to optometrists, shopping for clothes, buying things in bulk at Costco and Superstore, browsing Coles, getting dog food, buying Christmas and birthday gifts, demanding that the thing we ordered into that store must be there that day because we wouldn't be back for another two or three months, looking for specialised craft or camping gear, and basically running around like headless chickens trying to get everything on the list that we couldn't get in town (or couldn't get at the same price or quality). Then we would have a late supper at either a restaurant or from the sandwich cooler at Mr. G on the way out of the city, and drive back home again. This was costly in terms of time and gasoline. We learned to delay gratification because well... We didn't really have a choice.
- If you do something bad, one way or another, your parents WILL find out. People might not even intend to rat you out to your mom when they casually mention "Oh, I saw Jimmy at the mall yesterday, he sure is getting tall!" the day before your week-long grounding ends. The rumour mill is certainly not designed to carry word to your dad that you were smoking up behind the gym during shop class, but it sure does a good job of it. Heck, in a small town, if a random stranger sees you littering and shouts out the window that he or she is going to call your mother if you don't pick that up right this instant, you BELIEVE it. Outside of that microcosm where everyone knows everyone else, the same principle actually applies. Especially with things like Facebook being so willing to create a virtual small town for you. If you crash your car, your parents are going to hear about it eventually. Also, parents have superpowers that alert them when you are lying or covering something up. Don't do that. Just be honest with them, it's better for everyone involved.
- Entertainment does not require electricity. At some point every year, the power goes out in Mackenzie for at least a few hours. OH NOES! What will we ever do without our internets? Well let me tell you something, young whippersnapper. When I was your age, TV was called BOOKS. No wait. That's something else. By the time I left Mackenzie in 1998, I think there were 20, maybe 30, dial-up connections available through the local ISP. It took half an hour of setting your modem on redial to even get connected to the internet, and then it took five minutes to load a website with a lot of graphics on it, and oh yeah did I mention you had to pay by the minute to use the internet? Mackenzie was actually an awesome place to have no power. In the summer, there's a lake just down the hill. Voila, swimming pool, boating, fishing , you name it. In winter, the ice was thick enough to skate on, ski across, and do some epic ice fishing. There is a 9-hole golf course, and as a teen, I could play a round of golf for $7. There are miles and miles of hiking trails (with dangerous wild animals about, granted) that translate into cross-country ski trails in winter. There are about a zillion epic tobogganing hills. There are huge back yards to play in. Actually that's how I met the guy I mentioned at the start of this post; I was playing in my back yard, he was playing in his, and his dad had pulled down the bit of fence between our two yards to repair it. Once the power went out for about 48 hours during Christmas break. It was -40 the whole time. We had a fire in our fireplace, played cards by candlelight, read books, told stories, played board games, drew pictures... It was actually really fun.
- There is no such thing as a 'snow day'. In the winter of 1993/94, there were so many non-instructional school days due to cold temperatures (the rule was if it's colder than -35, school is optional) that the school board declared no more cold weather days. We were missing too much instructional time. I was in Grade 7 that year. In high school (when I had the one mile each way walk) the only time school was closed was when the power was out. Otherwise, rain or shine, blizzard, thunderstorm, or absolute zero, school was in session. Real life works that way. Hate to break it to you. three inches of snow is no reason to miss work or school. Neither is eighteen inches. Of course, it would help if the city would do its dang job and plow the roads in a timely fashion. For those of you who have never lived through a Mackenzie (or other northern community) winter, you probably have no idea why I laugh hysterically when someone complains that Edmonton has had a lot of snow this year (or any of the twelve years I've been here). My dad would get up and shovel the driveway and walkways at 6am before he went to work. Then my brother and I would shovel again a couple of hours later before walking to school. My mom would shovel again sometime in the middle of the day. Then we would come home from school, shovel the driveway again, do homework, have supper, do the dishes, and shovel again. And I'm not talking scrape a wee skiff of snow away here, I'm talking between one and five inches of snow each time. If one of these shovelling sessions was missed for whatever reason, we would have to deal with up to ten inches of snow at a time. The total snowfall each winter was somewhere around 15 to 16 feet, on average. FEET! That's roughly 5 meters, or three short-to-average height women standing on each other's shoulders. If we stayed home from school every day that it snowed a substantial amount or the weather was extremely bad, I would still be in grade five right now.
- Natural resources are precious. Mackenzie was a boomtown founded on the softwood lumber industry. It was built on the southern tip of the Williston Reservoir after the WAC Bennett Dam was built, creating what was, at the time, the largest man-made lake in the world. Mackenzie is now a bust town. All of the mills have closed (although I hear rumours that someone bought at least one of them and is planning to reopen it). Without the booming pulp, paper, and lumber industry of the late 20th century, the town has withered. On a very small scale, this is an example of what happens when natural resources are depleted by overproduction and unchecked consumption. Also, Mackenzie is blessed with a source of clean, delicious, fresh drinking water. The water comes from the underground springs that feed into Morfee lake, and is filtered through natural charcoal beds. Have you ever had Fiji brand bottled water? It might be the best bottled water you've ever tasted. Possibly the most expensive as well. It is almost (but not quite) as good as the water that comes out of the taps in Mackenzie. We have to be very careful to keep the lake clean in order to continue to have the best tap water in the universe. There are restrictions on using boat motors on certain parts of the lake, and steep fines for dumping into it. Every body of water on the planet needs to be treated as carefully as Morfee Lake is. I may sound like a hippie, but as our population increases, the amount of drinkable water is decreasing and becoming more and more polluted and unsafe to drink. Water is the second most basic requirement for humans to live (the first being air). Speaking of air, the air in Mackenzie tastes sweet. Well, in the summer it does. It's because of the huge amounts of clover blossoms. It doesn't smell like car exhaust or sewer gas. It almost never smells like the pulp mill unless the wind blows the wrong way (well now it never smells like pulp mill...). It just smells like... outside. You know why? Well, partly because it's a small town in the middle of the forest, far away from civilization. But mostly because everything is in walking distance. The majority of people in the town will choose to walk fifteen minutes if the weather is good and they don't have a bunch of stuff to carry, rather than drive three minutes. Fewer people means fewer cars, granted, but a smaller population actually uses their cars, too. People use people-driven modes of transportation more often. They walk, bike, rollerblade, and skateboard where they need to go far more often than the general population of a large city like Edmonton.
- Everything changes. It was heartbreaking to go back to Mackenzie after being away for so many years. My mom and I spent a night at my cousin's house after a camping trip to Crooked River Provincial Park a couple of summers ago. My elementary school has been bulldozed. There is just a huge empty field where it used to be. The scenery, the beautiful forested mountains that surround the town, are horribly scarred by the pine beetle decimation of lodgepole pines. Very few of my friends and their families are still living in town. My house is grey. The spruce sapling that I planted when I was six or seven years old and watched grow for ten years appears to have been chopped down and a storage shed erected where it once stood. Not everything is bad, though. I remember when the Petro Canada station's store became a 7-11. I remember when Subway came to town. I remember the creation of John Dahl Park. I remember when they dismantled the awesome slide at my school and moved it so they could build a new Adventure Playground. Things change, and they make me feel happy or sad or indifferent, but change is change.
- Family is more than just genetics. After moving to Alberta, I came back into contact with some childhood friends who had moved out here years earlier. One is my best friend. We met in preschool. She spent every possible moment at our house when we were little girls. We rode our bikes together and went tobogganing and swimming together. We went to Guide camp together. We fought over boys and over mutual friends and over stupid little things that no one remembers anymore. We loved each other and we hated each other. We did spiteful things and thoughtful things for each other. We traded shoes and jackets (and our mothers promptly made us trade back). In truth, we are as much sisters as if we had been born in the same family. We are probably only still friends because we didn't have to live with each other through puberty though! Seven years of fifteen minute birthday phone calls, sporadic letters, and occasional incidental visits may have killed some friendships. Not ours. There are a couple of other people in Edmonton whose parents were friends with my parents and who just happened to be close to my age, so we ended up playing together a lot as kids. When we hang out with other people, they assume we are related to each other. I suppose it makes some sense; our parents sort of raised us communally in a lot of ways. Growing up together forges sort of a bond between people, I guess. I am not very good at explaining it, but there is a connection.
- Mosquitoes are vicious (but blackflies are worse, and horseflies are the worst of all). So, I mentioned a population explosion of mosquitoes in Edmonton. It recently rained a whole bunch here, and then it got hot. TA-DAAA! Mosquitoes everywhere. They bite. Lots. The thing about the skeeters out here, though, is that they are small. And their bites are small. And while their bites itch like crazy, they only last a few hours at most. Mackenzie mosquitoes are twice the size, have been known to produce dime-sized bites, and the bites itch for DAYS. I am not going to complain too much about Edmonton mosquitoes. Blackflies don't exist in Edmonton. They are weeeee tiny bugs that can fit through the screen in the window I have right now. I would have to replace this screen with a much tighter mesh if I were back in Mackenzie. They take a bite out of your skin about the size of their own bodies. But first they inject a local anaesthetic so you don't feel the bite. And they inject an anticoagulant agent, so their bites bleed like crazy. And they itch once the numbing venom wears off. And the only thing in all of creation that has even half a chance of keeping them from biting is Muskol. Muskol is a very stinky bug spray. It's one of the ones that can dissolve certain plastics. It's very bad for you, but it's the only thing that works. Horseflies are just assholes. They're gigantic blackflies (bigger than house flies) but they don't even bother to numb your skin when they bite you. They just chomp away. and it HURTS.
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