Evening Stroll

Walking in the depths of darkness in the early night through a town of forty-three has an almost spiritual quality to it. For an hour I walk and meet no one; just dog and me, the residents of this town tucked safely into the warmth of their homes, chimneys streaming smoke all day, all night, each home contributing to the evening fog. It is so quiet and peaceful it is almost as if the universe itself is listening to my breathing, the moon hidden behind the hazy cloud its glowing ear. I guess I have been here a little while now, because I notice that a few of the usually vacant cabins have lights on. Probably a slow influx of highway workers on their winter rotation. Extra hands to gravel and shovel the roads, to clear the avalanches, to keep us connected by highway 40 to Lillooet.

I make it to the edge of town, past the row of streetlamps that sparsely light the town, ten in total I believe. I’ll have to count next time I’m out. A few houses here are abandoned, although their hulls are still intact, windows and doors left unbroken, probably due to the proximity to civilization. These are unlike the vacated houses further from the town that are full of cans and packrat droppings and wilting and peeling wallpaper. Gutted except for old rusted washing machines, an old sink here and there, decayed and disjointed pipes. The houses I pass here seem still cared for. Abandoned but not forgotten. Maybe one day I will notice lights in these windows too, smoke from chimneys. Maybe someone comes here to rest, sometimes.

Before I picked up Sanford for a stroll I had another session splitting wood with my cutting maul and sledgehammer. A friend taught me to look for a hairline splits in the rounds. Hitting those with the maul and driving the head in with the sledge makes them split quite easily. The small cracks have a special name, which I forget now. It’s amazing how fast one can improve. It’s amazing how much practice I will get with these tools by the time wood-burning season is over. One can be splitting wood to burn well into May, safety goggles on, the occasional spark flying, the echo of the metal-on-metal off the side of the shed, down the street. You can always tell who is out splitting wood on any given day. Sounds around here tend to stand out like a single red flower in a bouquet of white. Shocking to the senses.

I am getting to know cars. Who drives what truck. The same ones drive by, again and again, slowly making their rounds. Post Office, home. General Store, home. Bralorne, home. Lillooet, home. Most of the folks in Gold Bridge itself were born here or grew up here, and almost all the locals are now retired. There is probably more than the average amount of driving to-and-fro, considering this. 

Today I took the kids out on our first photography assignment. I bought cameras for each kid in the school, or rather the district agreed to pay for the cameras after I suggested the idea. Very exciting stuff! We went out to collect shots of texture, and we will share what we have captured up on the SmartBoard tomorrow. Passing the General Store there was a big black truck with the whole front end smeared with thick red blood. Or was it blood? Some of it was so bright and thick that it almost looked fake. Bright cloudy red.

“It is fake,” said one of the kids.

“We should ask them what kind of animal they hit,” was my response. They had to have hit something for there to be blood like that.

Two guys in hunting jackets, the kind that is supposed to blend in with the fall grasses and leaves, to make one’s presence less obvious, come out, get in the truck, drive our way, window rolled down. I lift my hand in a wave to slow their already small-town pace even more. They stop, of course. People are not hard to stop around here.

“We didn’t hit anything,” they tell me. “We put our kill up on the hood.”

“They say there are no white tails around here. Well, there was one white tail,” says hunter number two, ham sandwich in hand. The mustard catches my eye. It’s so vibrantly yellow.

“So you caught a deer?” I ask.

“We didn’t catch it. We killed it. We certainly didn’t catch it. Wanna see a picture?”

“Sure.” I look at the iPhone that makes its way out of the window without really looking. I have nothing against hunting. It’s probably better than the way most of our store-available meat lives out its life and meets its death, but I guess I just wasn’t that interested in squinting enough to make out the tiny image in front of me. I would still be interested in preparing a kill. I would be fascinated, really, although I have never seen blood like that, so violently red, so syrupy-thick looking.

One of the students takes a picture of the truck’s grill before we continue walking.

“Cool,” he says.