I recently read Erin Innes’ column [“Seasonal visitors increase activity” June 15] and felt something strange. It was loss. Her loss, not mine.
Innes has lost a piece of glitter; she’s lost one of the many sharp pieces of naive innocence we all eventually lose as life marches on. She’s closing her protective arms on a life she knew and, for a while at least, refusing to acknowledge the life she knows is coming; as she should, sometimes it’s best to dig in.
But I also felt a twinge of annoyance; this confused me. When viewed as a snapshot, I’m one of the “city folk” Innes refers to. I’m one of those who tries to come to Lund every year, and when we do, we too absolutely engage “the locals.”
But what triggered the twinge is this wide coarse brush I seem to have been tarred with. Perhaps it’s not only me that has been painted unfairly. After all, we all have roots, we all have stories, we all have our own foundation and we’re all unique.
What is “city folk?” Yes, I live, work and raise my family in “the big smoke.” By that measure, I’m “city folk.”
But I grew up in Powell River, though south of town, not north. I raised chickens and pigs and hauled their water in buckets every morning, gumboots slipping in the muck that was the creek bank. I bused into school. I weeded by hand and ate kale before it was popular.
I can run a rototiller like no one can and I can point out hidden red snapper holes I doubt have been fished since I left.
I may be “city folk,” but I earned the right to be local and that membership card can’t be rescinded.
I’ve chosen a lifestyle in which to raise my kids that did not allow for my rooted geography to be called their own. By choice, I’ve put my gumboots away.
But we return every year, by car or by boat, or sometimes by both. We stop in Lund because, in its own way, it’s home, too. When we stop we make sure we buy fuel, food, moorage, laundry, beer, cinnamon buns, fish and chips and a gorgeous pottery dish we really did not need.
But Innes, we do that because of you; because if we do that your friends and family have reason and ability to stay in Lund and keep on keeping on.
You are Lund, you make Lund, but Lund is not to lament, it’s to shepherd. If passion like yours is directed away from pending bitter and toward assuring the core of the community remains, Lund will be in good hands, even if some of us city folk can’t find it when we’re standing in the middle of it and need to ask directions.
Rob Stokes still wears gumboots and no matter where he lives, will always be from Powell River.
