The trail called Louie Joe can be found in the bowl of Lower Rossland, where the steep streets drop and if you keep walking they go up again, toward something we call Asshole Mountain, or around it, to the farms. If you turn left off a shaded street you can follow a creek that has been daylighted after passing under (or through) several people’s houses. It’s common, in Rossland, to have a basement that floods in the spring. People say their basements used to be laundromats.
This walk is lush and my dog loves it. He can run to the shallow water and do his weird way of drinking, where his whole body slurps with him. When my parents first visited, they were confused when standing on the main street looking out over Lower Rossland. “I expected to see water!” said my mother, who’s lived fifty years in Vancouver. Yet at the railing by the grocery store, they were looking directly here. The trail is thin and gentle, branching off into a lower and upper section next to the stream, and bridging over it toward a clearing. There’s a bench and a sign about Louie Joe, a Chinese gardener who lived in the area and whose name was misunderstood. His character makes token appearances in local historical plays but we’ve never heard his side of the story.
I’m starting to think about packing. I’m making a list of all our possessions and what might happen to them. I seem to be less concerned about what might happen to me. I didn’t get an interview for a job I thought I had a chance of doing for the next five years. I keep looking at rentals and not biting. It’s too soon. A future me will get a Uhaul and learn how to drive it. She’ll book the flights to Toronto and know what she’s doing.
I’ve come to this trail with grade seven students a few times. Once was with a volunteer streamkeeper, who showed us how to log data in the open-source notebook kept with necessary materials in a little cupboard next to the bridge. Another time was with some of my students when the others were at the district track meet. They self-organised a game of manhunt and I thought about the concept of risky play as they ran up and down a fallen tree tilted like a slide across the creek. I read Bridge to Terabithia repeatedly as a child and while I don’t remember details I know the tone.
The protagonist in the story “Mr. Molina Has Arrived!” is waiting for something and doesn’t know it. She keeps returning to this summer job and blaming other people for it. Like the salmon whose life cycle she cuts open to illustrate, she’s telling tourists the story of a place and leaving herself out of it. I got stung by a wasp yesterday. I’m always forgetting then remembering then panicking about ticks. It’s spring and things are changing and I just have to walk down the stream long enough until I reach the golf course and then I’ll turn back, uphill, a different me who can climb, then convince Gylfi to get back into the Jeep.
