You can’t go home again….

71

The expression comes from the title of a novel by Thomas Wolfe and implies that if you try to return to a place you remember from the past it won’t be the same as you remember it.

There’s truth to that. Home isn’t really a physical “place”.

It’s about people.

It’s about memories.

It’s a feeling.

I left “home” in 1987 and then “home” became Vancouver. Now “home” is North Vancouver.

But despite that, home still always seems to mean “where you originate from”.

So for me….home is Prince George. Home of the dorkiest city mascot ever. Mr. PG. Yes, that weird pile of tin below. The original Mr. PG came into existence in 1960, on May 8th (Hey, we share the same birthday, and he’s less than a decade older than me me! I didn’t actually know that until just now). That Mr. PG stood outside the Hotel Simon Fraser. He started showing up in parades the next year, as a 40 foot giant on a float, and in 1963 he found a home in front of the Chamber of Commerce at 1st and George. In 1970, he was moved to the intersection of Highways 16 and 97. Eventually he was moved to the other side of the intersection, and he had to be reimagined in metal as the wood was rotting away. When he was reinvented, a time capsule was placed in his chest. There was another, littler, Mr. PG too. In 1970, BC Tel gifted the Chamber of Commerce with a small, Mr. PG Junior to replace the larger one that had been moved. Junior stood 12 feet tall and housed a pay phone in his chest. Apparently he is now housed at the Exploration Centre, sans telephone.

I have a complicated relationship with Prince George. Yes, it’s my hometown. No, I don’t love the place. It really was a great place to grow up, at a time when kids were allowed freedoms that no kid today seems to be granted. We were basically feral outside of school and family events. All the kids in the neighbourhood played tag, and hide and seek (front and backyards were all fair game, between the electrical boxes at each end of Garvin Street) and Red Rover, usually starting on a random front lawn. We had water fights and snowball fights. We played baseball at the school and sledded in the parks. In the summer we were to be home for dinner and then were usually told to get out of the house and be home by dark. “Dark” was a somewhat flexible term…. The cabin was used summer and winter….for boating, and swimming, for cross country skiing and snowshoeing and snowmobiling…and flying through the air on the Devil’s swing….that happened regardless of season. So yes, it was a good place to be a kid.

But it was also a very intolerant place, a typical mill town. If you were different, in any way, from the perceived “norm”, it could be unfriendly. It also stunk. The pulp mill used to be far more polluting than I believe it is today. I hated that smell, still do.

I moved away in 1987, to the coast, and I’ve been here ever since. I love the ocean, I love my coastal mountains, I love my temperate climate….though I could certainly take snow over the persistent fall/winter/spring grey skies and rain. We’d come back for Christmas, though not every year, as well as weddings, funerals, and the occasional other random reason. 

I have no family left in PG, and only a few friends that I still keep in touch with remain. So it’s not a place I go often now. Now it seems that a trip there almost always means something sad, a loss.

But the drive up is also riddled with other memories.

A place we camped when I was a kid. A place we camped for a work thing for dad when we were young…where we rode horses and my horse kicked my brother. The spot where Kirk’s truck died in a puff of blue smoke while I was behind him in a little car … on the last trip up from moving our things to our new apartment in the West End. A place where we stopped for food on the way home from the grandparent’s places in the Shuswap….lots of random little memories filter up from the depths of my brain.

Sitting at the rest stop outside of Clinton, at the top of the hill and looking out over the plateau, I can remember how I fell in love with the coastal mountains when I got to the coast. Prince George is in the middle of the province, and the middle of the province is a big plateau…there are no mountains to be seen. It’s always a strange feeling to lose sight of the mountains. The sky is big and open, and the landscape seems to go forever, with rolls and dips and valleys….but basically a flat landscape with some hollows.

It’s been ten years since Mom died, but the loss is still sharp and my emotions run high whenever I get near this place; it brings sadness. So I tend to avoid it.

And I have this somewhat irrational dislike for a sign just outside of town, where the highway curves 90 degrees to the left and heads in to the final hill down off the plateau.

As one drives from the coast into the interior, Prince George is always the last place listed, the farthest away. And when you reach that last sign, it says “Prince George 14”.

And there is nothing else.

It’s like it’s telling you that it’s the end of the road. And it’s not. Prince George, geographically, lies basically at the centre of the province. There is lots beyond. But PG is the place where you choose to continue north, or head any of the other cardinal directions.

PG is an intersection and you either are arriving here, or passing through to another place, but from here, each direction brings a new sign with a new list of places to head.

But I am not headed anywhere else on this trip. I am headed here, to PG. An almost 900km drive up, in a truck that is behaving badly, to pay my respects to the woman who could have been my step mother if circumstances had been different. She was with my father longer than my mother was, and they were a happy couple. For whatever reason, they decided to not tie the knot and stayed companions until my Dad was succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease and my brother convinced him to move to Cranbrook to be closer to direct family and his grandchildren.

But she was a lovely lady, kind, full of laughter and compassion, and she had been kind to me when I was a moody and pissed off teenager who hated the world. She had the courage to offer to drive me, an angry 14 year old, to St. Albert, Alberta to visit a friend when I was buying a bus ticket. It was a great trip in this massive old Lincoln Continental that she loved. It truly was a land yacht. She featured prominently in our lives for decades, though not so much in the past ten to 15 years.

But I couldn’t not drive up to be there to pay my respects to her kids, my almost-siblings. Dad would have expected me to, I felt it was important, so I did. I was paying my respects to them both by doing so, and to her family. She really was a wonderful woman and I did care for her.

And so here I am for a day. A day to drive ~900km up. A day to spend here. And a day to drive the almost 900km back to the coast.

Tiring, but right.

And I intend to stop more on the way back down south, and try to capture some images of the fewer and fewer remaining old wood and log structures left along the Cariboo highway, most of which date back to the days of the gold rush. Maybe I’ll even take Highway 99 home, it’s been a few decades since I’ve done that highway in its entirety.

Until Sunday then…..