The Big Swim: Coming Ashore in a World Adrift by Carrie Saxifrage

Author:Carrie Saxifrage [Saxifrage, Carrie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Environmentalists & Naturalists, Personal Memoirs, nature, essays
ISBN: 9781550925920
Google: bHRaBgAAQBAJ
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Published: 2015-04-01T23:44:45.367927+00:00

They dropped me off at the only hotel in Kitimat. It had one room left. The innkeeper wore a lacy nylon shirt, lots of makeup and hair spray. I looked like a purple marshmallow in my down jacket. In the bathroom, the toilet paper wrapper boasted virgin fiber, no recycled content. It was thick and tightly wound, the luxuriant toilet paper of my childhood, not like the droopy eco-paper I now buy.

The next morning, snow still swirled from the sky. I asked the innkeeper if she would keep my bag while I went to the restaurant on the other side of the parking lot. I felt her eyes at my back as I struggled across the snowy humps until I safely opened the restaurant door. She reminded me of my friends in other rural industries, their pride in looking out for people’s safety. I felt grateful. My husband has so much confidence in me that it would take a few days of no emails or texts before he got worried. If I fell into a snow bank, I’d be dead by then.

I struggled to open the huge timber-framed door into the restaurant. The restaurant itself seemed built at one-and-a-quarter scale, so the twenty or so tables looked small. Women managed their young children and men in reflective vests sipped black coffee and stared at the TV screen. I felt them not looking at me. Pictures of bears, canoes and sunsets hung on the log walls. The TV was muted, but the radio played a pop station with songs like “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” and “I Shot the Sheriff.”

I found a booth away from the speakers and stared out the window. Gusts sent the snow in the parking lot spiraling into the snow coming down. An ad broke through the innocuous radio music:

Stop foreign billionaires from sabotaging Canada’s national interest! Foreign billionaires are hiring front groups to swamp the hearings to block the Northern Gateway pipeline project…. The pipeline promises thousands of jobs and billions of dollars for all Canadians. Whether we decide to go ahead with it or not, we get to make this important decision about our future—not outsiders. They don’t answer to Canadians. They answer to their foreign paymasters.

Rousing music, then, “It’s our pipeline. Our country. Our jobs. Our decision.”

I looked around. Did anyone else find the ad disturbing? Could they tell I was an environmentalist writing about the pipeline for a progressive Vancouver news site?

The men just sipped their coffee, and the women kept trying to chat over their kids. No one looked up. Maybe they heard this stuff all the time. But had they heard any of the First Nations testimony on the pipeline? The Wet’suwet’en must find the talk of “foreign billionaires” insulting.

My mind drifted back to the restaurant carpet, the way it looked like green-and-cream salmon eggs from one perspective, and rows of splotches from another. I checked my watch. Just then, the door opened and Gerald Amos entered. I could see him more clearly than the night before, about sixty, with rectangular glasses.

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