A warning on the Kettle Valley Railway

Wisdom on bears

About 7.30 in the morning I spot a bear fifty metres ahead of me. I must be downwind; it appears not to notice me as it emerges from the dense forest flanking the railway bed, saunters across my path, and slips back into the dark green shadows thick with deadfall. I halt immediately. Here's the thing with following a railway bed: there are two directions. You either go forward or you go back.

I've been waiting for this. I'm constantly seeing signs of animals, and indeed the animals themselves. There are deer prints all over the place, and a few days ago one strolled right through my camp, looking at me unperturbed from just metres away as I made my breakfast. On the trail I saw coyote scats, judging by all the undigested rabbit fur in it. There was a beautifully clear print of a mountain lion in the mud as I filled my water bladder at the river, and my uncertainty about other prints being cougar or bear was removed upon discovery of a big splat of bear poo fresh enough to still attract flies.

There is received wisdom on avoiding bears. One piece of advice is to wear a bear bell. This is simply a bell. You wear it like a cow. It goes "tinkle tinkle" and protects you from bears. You see, spooking a bear is something you don't want to do, because when they're spooked they can charge. It's usually a bluff because you've frightened them, but rather than putting your hands on your hips and saying, "oh, come on, now!" it's rather better to avoid the interaction to begin with. It's particularly easy to startle a bear in dense forest of thick green shadows. And sows with cubs aren't bluffing.

I do not have a bear bell.

Other advice, if you are on the receiving end of a charge, is to raise your arms above your head and bellow with all your bloody might to frighten it away. The frightened bear. You are trying to appear bigger than it. Than the bear. Bears stand on their hind legs at about eight feet.

This is why you have to hang your food so high in a tree when you make camp. (NEVER keep your food in your tent beside you, because when a bear comes inside in the middle of the night it will not make the distinction.) The dimensions for hanging your food are: ten feet in the air (so the bear doesn't simply pull it down) and six feet out from the trunk along the first branch, suspended by three feet of rope (so it doesn't simply climb the tree and pluck it like a sack of apples; black bears are exceptional climbers). So, the perfect tree has, as it's lowest branch, a stout projection at ninety degrees.

This perfect tree does not exist, by the way.

Grizzly bears can't climb trees but they are bigger (yes, bigger) so you have to hang it higher. And disregard that other stuff about bluffing, because grizzlies are territorial. The best thing to do is climb a tree.

This morning it's a black bear. With no choice but to press on, I pick up two stones to clack together and make a sharp sound that carries well ahead of me and walk cautiously forward. The bear is either disinterested in me or unaware and already gone.

I'm not in grizzly country. I don't think I would do this trek in grizzly country. This is what I tell the hunter I meet that evening who says to me, as I walk into a public campsite with a long branch I am using as a walking staff, "Is that all you carry with you? A stick?"

"You know, you're wrong," he says. "Last year my friends and I saw a grizzly with three cubs just on the other side of this lake. About two hundred metres from us. It stood up and looked at us, then behind it at her cubs, then at us again."

I wish he hadn't told me this story.

The perils of trespassing

In Rhone, a tiny hamlet where once stood a train station, I come across a cyclists' rest stop next to a restored caboose that has "Kettle Valley Railway" emblazoned on the side. There are picnic tables in the grounds, pit toilets, and a hammock suspended under a roof. This will be tonight's campsite.

I remember cabooses from my childhood. I grew up near a railway and was intrigued by the turreted and chimneyed living quarters that sailed by, tailing the train. Lamentably, they were decommissioned on all trains years ago, so it's a nostalgic treat to find one. Through its windows I can see it is clean and well-kept, and judging by the pamphlets and guest book on the benchtop it's being used as a tourist office of sorts. There is also a stove of cast iron and three bunks. I try the door handle but it's locked, so I can't fulfil my childhood dream of sleeping in a caboose, even one that isn't going anywhere. Instead I set up a makeshift tent over the hammock with my tent fly to keep the warmth in overnight. I go to look for water.

The railway bed follows the Kettle River. Through Rhone today, however, it runs through farming country with long stretches on private land. I find myself separated from the river by barbed wire fencing surrounding a no-man's-land studded with "No Trespassing" signs. I need water to cook, or it will be dry oatmeal and hard pasta. Walking half a mile up and down the road looking for some way of access, I finally spot a rickety cedar fencepost hidden by bushes below the level of the road. I attempt to scale the metre-high wire.

When I step on the lower wire of the fence, it squeals in the old wood like a pig having its teeth pulled. With one leg over, straddling the wire with a barb in my groin, I hear: "woof!" Through the obscuring roadside vegetation, at equal dog's eye level I see what appears to be a black and tan rottweiler, set on the road, fixed on my location in the bushes. Then another big black dog joins it, staring straight at me. "WOOF!" The trespass guards have arrived.

Dogs would be through the fence in a second, so I quickly opt to return to the side from which I came—"see? I am un-trespassing!"—even though this is the side the dogs are on. At least I would have an open avenue of escape for a few seconds before they run me down. I try to slow my panicked scrambling, while still moving like a greased bobcat being given a bath, and unfasten the accumulating barbs in the crotch of my pants lest the dogs set upon my legs before I unmount this fence. All this haste demonstrates the simple genius of barbed wire: it entangles the hasty.

Mercifully, the dogs remain on the road. As I disentangle my tackle packet and emerge from the sunken hedge onto the road myself, I see first that the black-and-tan is nothing but a scruffy mongrel and his mate a fat, grizzled old labrador. Following twenty metres behind is an elderly couple on bicycles. I thank the gods that today is not the day I die being mauled astride barbed wire by dogs.

"We thought you might have been a bear," they call out. "We were just out for our evening ride." I explain sheepishly that I'm camped at the rest stop and was looking for water. They kindly offer me the use of the garden hose at their house, right across the road from my campsite. As much as I need, they say. I feel foolish for not simply knocking on the door and asking in the first place.

That night, fed and snug in my sleeping bag, in the hammock strung up at the end of the caboose, I have everything for a comfortable sleep. And I survived my is-this-a-mauling? encounter with dogs. Those people were nice.

They thought I was... the owners were worried about... 

Oh!

"Bears."

Searching

I've long been fascinated with railways. Not trains, but railways. They're things that can spirit you away from where you are to places where you could be. 

Abandoned railways take you to times where you can't be. They are corridors back into history, connecting the present to places once relevant but since forgotten. To disappear down one of these isolated rights of way is to vanish into obscurity.

In my youth, when I backpacked around southern British Columbia and trekked the abandoned Kettle Valley Railway, hitch-hiking was my default mode of transport. On one trip I was picked up by a lady of about forty in a rented car. She was leaving her life behind, resiling from an interminable and rancorous custody battle for her 9-year-old daughter. Her character had been irremediably maligned in court, and she had lost her last appeal. I was shocked to think of what it must take to make a mother leave her child behind. She was philosophical but clearly broken by it.

I was just 23 and coming off the collapse of my own marriage. We were young and it was my first real relationship. We were together four years.

"So what are you looking for?" the mother asked. She was calm and kind. "Why are you out here on the road?"

I liked her. She was sincere and kind. I considered her question seriously but all I could come up with was a flimsy, "I really don't know." I was a bit unsettled, by both the impotence of my answer and at not having contemplated an answer at all. What unseen motive is moving me?

"I've come across a number of young men your age doing the same thing," she said. "Journeying, searching. And they're never really sure what they're searching for. It makes me wonder what it is." She paused reflectively. "I think maybe it becomes clear only later, after it's done." 

Now beyond her age then, I wonder if she was looking for her own answers. Looking back, had I been able to at the time I'd have answered her this: We have no idea what our lives mean. We just tell our stories and the meaning emerges, ethereally like consciousness emerging from our cerebral sweetbreads. That's why we tell our stories: we are compelled to find the meaning in our lives. 

I'm reminded of this conversation as I return to the abandoned Kettle Valley Railway, twenty years later, after the end of another significant relationship in my life. What am I doing? Am I looking for something? As young adults we are still weaving our tales; as old adults do we review them? Is this a manifestation of mid-life crisis? In our forties do we regress to our twenties to see where we went wrong?

Abandoned

East of Vancouver is a city called Hope, beyond which there isn't much. A hundred years ago, in 1915, a new railway followed the valley of the Kettle River and ventured into the craggy granite mountains and deep ravines of Similkameen Country to serve the burgeoning silver mining communities.

Twenty years ago I backpacked seventy kilometres along the bed of the now extinct Kettle Valley Railway, from Brodie junction, where it breaks away from today's Coquihalla Highway, to Princeton. It was a formative moment in my life as a young man in his early twenties learning about his independence, and I have ever since wanted to return to hike the rest.

The terrain was treacherous for the railway, especially crossing the Coquihalla summit. The steep mountain challenged rail's two per cent grade limit to reach the 1200-metre summit, and the line was regularly blockaded in winter by avalanches and mud slides. By the 1960s, the number of incidents that closed the Kettle Valley Railway for weeks at a time was breaking the back of the line's finances and it was shut down.

The highway I'm now on obliterated the Coquihalla section when it was built over the top of the abandoned KVR in the 1980s. My ears are popping as the bus hauls itself up the mountain. Dense forests of white spruce concede the altitude to stands of black hemlock which disappear into an early June mist engulfing the rocky mountain tops.

I remember driving this road in winter in my youth when I had held a drivers licence for only a year or two. It was white-out conditions. I crawled up a hill of black ice at 10 k's an hour at night with a visibility of maybe ten metres, the headlights reflecting bright on a wall of falling snow, everything black beyond. Standard stuff for the Coquihalla.

I was once picked up hitch-hiking by an old bloke who used to jump the rails of the KVR in the 1920s, looking for work in towns along the line. That was common then. Young men would sneak aboard the box cars when the train was at a slow roll, evading the rail guards and their truncheons.

The railway seems to have a history of forming young men. But as a not-so-young man anymore, I am preparing to hike the line from the other direction—a one-hundred kilometre distance from Rock Creek to McCulloch—and then mountain-bike the spectacular mountainside section of tunnels and trestles through Myra Canyon, a thousand metres above Lake Okanagan.

I bet it still has the power to form, and perhaps reform, men.