When I read, in this week’s Clinton news article by Susan Swan, her comment about how this summer seems to have missed us completely, I nodded my head sadly. Around the Roden household, summer 2017 is referred to as “the summer that time forgot”. Just a week after school recessed, the Elephant Hill wildfire roared into life; and only now, just before a new school year, is there a sense that the fire is finally being wrestled under control.
Between then and now, summer 2017 was seemingly almost non-existent. Evacuation alerts and orders; extensive and prolonged highway closures; the days upon days of thick, choking smoke; fear and concern for our friends and neighbours: all of these combined to make summer 2017 seem like an abstract concept, not a real thing.
The toll on businesses and organizations has, I fear, only just started, and will go deep. The Journal has reported on the closure of the Semlin Valley Golf Course and the cancellation of the Ashcroft and District Fall Fair; but dig deeper, and the wider impact becomes clear. Without the golf course, there is no MS Charity Golf Tournament and no Lions Charity Golf Tournament, so deserving causes have lost out. The fall fair was a major fundraiser for the Lions Club and for the Ashcroft-Cache Creek Rotary Club, both of whom traditionally operate profitable concessions at the event.
The Thompson-Nicola Regional District was to have held its August out of town board meeting event in Cache Creek and Ashcroft this year on August 17, with an appreciation dinner for local volunteers on August 16. The dinner was cancelled and the board meeting moved to Kamloops, meaning our region lost a valuable opportunity to showcase itself. Registration for the annual Kids’ Fine and Dramatic Arts Camp was down by a third over previous years, leaving the Winding Rivers Arts and Performance society with a shortfall. Registration in the Kids’ TRYathlon was half what it usually is.
This is, sadly, probably just the tip of the iceberg. The fallout from “the summer that time forgot” may not truly be known for years. And of course, for some people that fallout may never truly be reckoned. I speak of those who lost not only their homes, but everything they own, and for whom the world can probably never really be the same again.
It was an amazing experience to be at the barbecue for many of the Boston Flats residents last weekend, and hear laughter and see smiles, listen as people who had lost everything joked and bantered and traded stories. I know that not everyone who lost so much is at that stage; but to be in the presence of so many people who were was humbling.
Speaking with Boston Flats managers Marianne and Don Rumball last week was also humbling. They were both so willing to speak about an event that is unimaginably horrific, to share their memories of a day that brought so much destruction to a place that they—and so many others—loved. Were I ever in their position, I would hope to have half as much dignity, calm, and grace.
Well, “the summer that time forgot” is in the books. Let us all turn a new page and begin writing a different, better story. If the past few weeks have shown us nothing else, it is that we can certainly do it, if we try.