things move around

I’m in Elkford, B.C., this week and next. Just south of here is Montana, gay cowboy country. I saw a couple of gay cowboys frolicking on the hillside this morning actually. This evening I walked up some wooden steps, tugged open a flimsy wooden door and looked around. The reception room smelt like backpackers, but I knew very few come through here. A bell sat on the wooden counter, and I rang it. While I waited I looked at the boundary map on the wall: bright red blooms denoted the coalmining areas, green the provincial parks, and a large splodge of blue a designated hunting zone. I picked up a flyer for Queen Donair and Pizza: “Donair is the creation of extensive research resulting in a flavor so unique and mouth watering that you will want to have it as often as possible.”

After a while I called the extension written by the bell and summoned the bloke. A minute later an old Chinese guy arrived, wearing a wide-brimmed khaki hat. I said hello, and he said “Hello! First,” and he bounded out from behind the counter and across the room and pulled a stack of papers from next to the TV, “have you completed this? Census?” He looked a shade sad when I said I had. Then he took my name and spent five longer than average minutes filling out the lesser part of a form, which he presented to me for completion. Then he gave me my (genuine metal) key and said “Is this your first time here? Yes? But not your first time in town? It is? Lots of nice places to eat in Elkford. Over there is the restaurant, Chinese and pizza, very good, but it’s Monday, maybe it’s not open, so check first, if it’s not open you go the gas station, they serve breakfast and they’ll pack lunch for you too. My name’s Jay - if you want anything, just call”. Jay later proved true to his word by locating a corkscrew for me.

Jay’s recommendation for dinner was closed on Mondays, so I ate at a dingy (but warm, it was seven p.m. and still summery) cafe, where women came and drank coffee and nattered and went. One of the women had just had her first day on her new job on a road maintenance crew - she’d been twirling the signs. She loved it and said it was way better than the mine. She savoured newly-acquired lingo like “target-jacket”.

Then I went to the cold beer and wine store next door and bought a bottle of Cedar Creek Pinot Noir, 2001, which as I write this is revealing a mulish tartness and a body like a stubbly Clint Eastwood chin; the nose as prickly as a porcupine, the finish luxurious yet predictable, like a last minute 30-yarder from Steven Gerrard. The young woman behind the counter said she was only going to be in Elkford for a couple more weeks; she’d been lured up here with the promise of a bar job but had ended up working in this cold beer and wine store. And am I from Australia? Yeah.

Elkford is a quiet town, and the quieter for the first immodest flush of summer. Just North of Elkford you come to the end of Highway 43. You’re driving North and a sign says “Highway 43: End”, and then it ends, just like that, in a cul de sac near the top of a valley guarded paternally by two lesser ridges of the Rockies, inhabited by deer, who crop the lawns in the towns and flit in front of your car, and elk, who stand and stare at you and dare you to drive your car into their antlers, and people who are coal miners or whose husbands are coal miners or who work at one of the five vast open-cast coal mines for which Elk Valley is famous.

There is a poem on the wall of my room entitled “ABOUT THE HEATING SYSTEM”, which I reproduce verbatim:

In floor hot water radiant heat
Should be most comfortable 18°
Adjust thermostat 2-3° at a time
Takes about 20 minutes for floor to heat up.
Too warm, open door or window.