Day 21 To Dease Lake

July 12, 2014

Good morning from a gravel pit! BC is so pretty that even their gravel pits are worth taking pictures in front of.

Awoke to a brush cutter from the Ministry of Transportation getting ready to cut alongside the highway. We realized we have been lucky none of them have been operating where we have set up camp.

The man was super friendly and gave us each an iced tea from his chilibin. Still cold!

The sun, while a welcome change from the clouds and rain, is also very very hot. It's already uncomfortable during breakfast time and I must choose: take shirt off and die by bugs, or keep it on and die by sweat?

See the bugs between my rainfly and screen? They buzz and keep me up at night.

We met two people from the US on this bridge. The second American cyclists all trip! They are touring as a fundraiser, and you can check out their website. The picture is of Tom and Nick.

 There's a cute little spring coming out from the rocks. Perfect to fill a waterbottle!

We got close enough to smell this bear!

Today was an extremely special day, and we were fortunate enough to have Tom along with us. While traveling alone, Tom happened to run in to many people and make connections with what seems like half the people in British Colombia. One of these people was a First Nation woman who invited him to a birthday party in Dease Lake on July 12, if he was in town. Well, we ended up making it to town just in time for that birthday party.

While I was in the grocery store, buying a tub of ice cream to eat by myself, that woman he met two weeks prior walked into the store, which greatly simplified the process of finding her and getting the details for the event.  We hadn't been in town for more than 10 minutes before this happened. It's a small town, but still, what are the odds?

And so we ended up going to a Birthday Party for Lilian, who just turned 75. I don't have picutres of it, but it was quite the event. It was in the community center, and featured a pot luck of salmon, doll sheep stew, caribou stew, and moose rib. That is in addition to the regular cheese, crackers, and veggie platter that you normally find. 

I highly recommend moose rib, if you ever get the chance. 

They had "Indian Gift Giving" which, as they described it, is when you give a gift, and then take it away. I've done similar gift exchanges before, but the version my family plays is much tamer, and they are all too passive, reserved, and polite to each other. "Oh, don't want to take something that someone else might want, let me pretend to be excited by this light up keychain I don't want and have no use for...."

I much preferred the boisterous, no holds barred intensity that this family played with. They ran across the circle to grab someone elses gift, and yelled at each other, and yelled over each other, and made their joy and frustration very clear. And they were allowed to accumulate as many gifts as they wanted. One guy walked away with two of the coveted wool blankets. 

The whole experience was quite surreal, and I thought it was time to go. But things were about to get even crazier. For me they got crazier, but that's only because I'm weird.

As I went up to peraonlly wish Lillian a happy birthday, thank her, and say goodbye, she started talking about what she had been up to in the community recently, and that included being arrested for protesting mining operations in the sacred valley. I thought that was cool, but then she dropped the name "David Suzuki" real casually, and I really started paying attention because David Suzuki is to the environmental movement what Babe Ruth is to baseball. You can't really become much bigger of a rock star in the environmental movement than he. 

So I listened some more and learned that they had worked together in some respects on this project and she has met and talked with Dr. Suzuki several times. And she's been arrested several times. You can see her getting handcuffed and taken away at about 2:00 of this video:

 

Happy birthday, Tiger Lilly! Keep fighting.



It was the best day of the trip so far, and what better way to conclude it than setting up our tents and going for a swim?