If you start in the Great Western Desert and head northward, eventually the wide, flat expanse begins to narrow, and then squeeze between the two biggest mountain ranges of North America – the Coast Mountains (called the Cascades in the U.S.), and the Rocky Mountains (aka the Rockies).
Finally you come to a long, deep, fairly narrow lake bordered on either side by rounded mountains (but really just big hills compared to what lies beyond). And then, at the end of the lake the basin peters out, with a series of little plateaus, before giving up entirely and heading into more hills.
The highest plateau is the appropriately named Grandview Flats (or to those in the know, just “The Flats”). This is the place in British Columbia where I finally settled many years ago after having spent goodly amounts of the previous 18 months on my battered Raleigh Record, a 10-speed bicycle I had bought in Chicago for $30 and then used to transport myself around the mythical “Way Out West”.
The geography I have just tried to describe is called “Basin and Range”, and refers to all the mountains, volcanic up-lifts, and interspersed flats that make up the western-most part of North America. Basin tends to suggest something that holds water, and of course there are always rivers that run into these basins, coming down from snow melt high on the faces of rocky peaks (the Range).
But I experienced another meaning of the word “basin” while living on The Flats in the spring of 1980. It was a Sunday, just after eight in the morning, and I was sleeping in, having spent a rather enjoyable time the previous evening in nearby Armstrong listening to live country rock music at the local tavern. I’m sure I also managed that night to drink more than a little of what you usually find on offer at a pub!
My bed, I have to confess, was just a 4-inch foamy on the floor (we did that sort of thing in those days), and I distinctly recall both hearing what sounded like a dynamite blast, and feeling the ground beneath me shake violently (since there was quite a bit of rock, both around my cabin, and presumably underneath it as well).
I didn’t think anything of it, really. You see, there was this eccentric we called “The Mole”, who lived a bit further along the cliff face that marked the end of both that Great Western Basin and Grandview Flats, and he was forever moving rock, digging more level space around the house he had built for himself at the top of the cliff. I just assumed the explosion was The Mole trying out a new, rather more quick and dirty way to expand his domain.
Several hours later, however, I noticed a low sort of cloud or mist that seemed to be making its way up the northern-most reaches of the lake (Okanagan Lake, which runs for some 80 miles, and up to 1000 ft deep, from about 40 miles north of the border to about 5 miles from The Flats).
Eventually the cloud was down below my cabin, and I spent some time watching it as it crept further and further up. I thought it was smoke from a forest fire, but really that was highly unlikely.
It was only the middle of May, and it was moist enough that the sunflowers (not the common garden variety, but a glorious wild perennial called Balsamorhiza sagitta) were still in full bloom. You know when it dries out enough for wild fires in the Okanagan, because the leaves and flowers of the sunflowers begin to droop and finally disappear.
No, this was something else, and I thought to myself as I watched the mist get closer and closer that it was actually filling up the valley, like water in a sink. Finally the “mist” engulfed my little cabin, and it became obvious what had happened, although being alone in the country-side, on a sleepy spring Sunday, I still hadn’t heard the news.
There was a very fine ash in the air, an ash that had been created by the first volcanic eruption in the western United States since 1915. And it had indeed filled up the basin; so much so, in fact, that it got right to this northern-most edge of it, some 650km away, in a little less than six hours.
What I also learned that spring, as well as much of the summer, is that while it can take a very short period to fill up a giant geological basin (at least when you have a cataclysm like Mount Saint Helen’s that blows 4 billion tonnes of rock off its top, and spews an ash plume 24km into the sky), it takes a much longer time for the basin to drain out.
Because one of the things about the Okanagan Valley is that it usually doesn’t get all that much rain, and even less of the kind of wind that we think is just normal in a place like New Zealand. The reason, of course, is that the ocean and its blows are several mountain ranges, and 400 kilometres away.
And so the ash blocked out the sun for weeks, and changed what had been up to that point a gloriously warm and settled spring. Without the warmth of the sun getting in, it became really quite cold, and the honey bee colonies, those great barometers of warmth and good conditions, really started to go backwards.
As I recall it was a very poor crop that year, even though the main honey flow doesn’t come until the middle of July, some two months after the eruption had occurred.
ooOOoo
The human brain is an almost unbelievable repository of memories. It seems capable of storing away and then retrieving at a moment’s notice the most trivial of sights and sounds, often from many years ago.
But unless I’m very much mistaken, the brain doesn’t seem to function quite as well when it comes to smells. My memory only seems to conjure up a very few smells from the past, and then they often only recur when I actually visit the source of the smell once again.
That’s not the case with the North Okanagan, however. I have been many places, and seen (and smelled) many things, but there is very little to compare with spring in this valley. All the pent-up energy of plants, snugly hidden away in winter snow, seems to burst forth sometime in the middle of April.
And this explosion is all the more dramatic since it follows about six weeks of bare trees and mud, the time after the snow has all melted but the ground has not quite thawed out.
But when it does come it’s nothing short of glorious. The grass begins to green up, and with it the first of the native perennials, the shootings stars (Dodecatheon dentatum) and the spring beauties (Claytonia lanceolata). Next comes pussy willows (Salix discolor), but with catkins so much bigger and more profuse than what we know in a place like New Zealand, where the various willow species are of course interlopers.
After that it’s all a jumble, really. You have no idea how many dandelions (Taraxacum spp.) can grow in a paddock until you see a pasture (always very under-grazed compared to New Zealand) in the Okanagan. There can at times be almost as much yellow showing as there is green.
And then, of course, there’s that really big, yellow flower I mentioned previously, the sunflower. This perennial pushes out of steep hillsides all around the valley, and once it has sent out its spear-shaped leaves, it creates spikes that bloom into yellow-flowered heads.
When the sunflowers take over, from long distance everything steep along the valley sides that isn’t completely rock-strewn takes on a yellow tinge, like a water colour wash. Up close, the hills are a sea of perfectly round, brownish centres surrounded by an equally perfect halo of thin, bright yellow petals.
All these spring plants fill my memory of the Okanagan, but I can also recall in almost equal detail the smell of the valley as the temperature warms up and the still days become longer. It’s a perfume of soft sweetness, but not overpoweringly so, the kind of smell you get when you make a bed with sun-dried sheets that you have just taken from a clothes line.
The smell comes from a mixture, really, of mock orange (Philadelphus lewisii), choke cherry (Prunus virginiana) and the native food bush of the prairies, the saskatoon (Amelanchier alnifolia). Later on, the saskatoon will produce dark blue fruit the size of low bush blueberries.
The taste isn’t quite up to their delicious look-a-likes, but that didn’t stop the nomadic tribes of the Canadian Prairies from picking them in their profusion, and mixing them with wild animal fat to make pemmican, a nutritious and well-preserved staple that would last right through the long winter months.
As you can imagine, springtime in the north Okanagan is also a marvellous time and place for honey bees. While the beginning of the season is far colder than in most of New Zealand, once things warm up the weather is far more stable, and there is such a profusion of native wild-flowers that nectar and pollen foragers have an almost bewildering (at least to humans) array of choices.
And the honey, when the bees collect it in mid-summer, is different to anything I’ve tasted anywhere else in the world. It’s a combination of both yellow and white sweet clover (Melilotus officinalis and M. albus), which loves nothing better than to grow on roadsides seemingly devoid of any soil whatsoever; the native snowberry (Symphoricarpos albus); and alfalfa/lucerne, although this last source very much depends on how quickly farmers are able to cut it for hay.
I first learned to keep bees on The Flats, and I more or less took these springs, the way hives built up, and the ample quantities of honey that followed, for granted. That is, of course, until I spent my first beekeeping season in the far south of the South Island of New Zealand, where I discovered just how resilient these creatures can be, especially in the face of gale after wet gale, seemingly straight off the ice of the Antarctic continent, far to the south.
ooOOoo
Newcomers entering Canada from pretty much anywhere in the western United States often remark on the startling difference between what the Americans consider “way up north”, and what the Canadians call “way down south”.
Take for instance this valley (spelled “Okanogan” in Washington State). As you drive northward toward the Canadian border the land is either undeveloped sagebrush, big hay farms, or even bigger fruit “plantations”. You can’t really call them orchards since there are hardly any farm buildings or houses, and you’re left wondering where in fact the owners (and more importantly the workers) live.
When you get to the town just before the international crossing, you can literally drive down either side of the street (a nice option for visitors from countries that are more used to driving on the left). You’re not likely to run into anyone, because there’s virtually no one there.
Once you cross over to Canada, however, it’s like someone has waved a magic wand. There are tidy little orchards (yes, with tidy little houses), and a town with a busy commercial centre. But that’s not all.
There are vineyards and wineries, and all along the shore of the lake made by the damming of the Okanagan River there are resorts and spas and fancy patio restaurants. Apart from all the over-sized pick-up trucks and the stucco architecture, you could be on some lake in a mountain valley in Europe.
What this shows, I guess, is that human settlements are all about perception. If you live in the States, and have both better land and warmer temperatures elsewhere in the country, you create a mental picture of the northern border as being remote and only partially habitable. And that is what it becomes.
If you live in Canada, on the other hand, and maybe spend most of the year (and especially the winters) in places like Saskatoon, then a lake right along the border, where it can get to 34°C in the summertime, is nothing short of sublime.
~originally composed in June, 2012~