|
The curling rink in the
abandoned mining town of Kitsault,
uninhabited for almost a quarter-century now,
offers a very particular variety of isolation,
of aloneness. An hour north of Prince Rupert by
air, up the tendril end of Alice Arm, there is
manifestly nobody around. Here inside, the Maple
Leaf Pub is dark. In through the lobby, pas the
“Sunny Kitsault 2nd Annual Mixed
Bonspiel” sign, I push open a creaking door and
find myself on iceless rinks, the stone stacked
uselessly in the ends. Even the structure itself
announces emptiness with those thousand clicks
and wheezes that empty buildings emit; high
beams move microscopically in the light wind; a
pipe shifts in joists underfoot.
And yet, I’m imagining this
place full of occupants, against my will. I hear
footfalls, purely illusory. I see flashes in the
corner of my eye as if a door has just been
opened. Outside in the parking lot- the handle
of the front door stalagmitic with petrified
gull guano- I find myself peering anxiously into
the swaying saplings that are trying to take
back the parking lot, to reclaim it as
wilderness. For a moment, I can’t see where I’ve
parked my truck and my breathing quickens. I
turn again, a motion right there at the eye’s
periphery.
Nothing, nothing and
nothing. I’m not being observed. I can’t be
seen. Here, in the very middle of the most
nowhere nowhere I’ve ever been- in a
place that used to vibrate with the life of a
thousand residents but where, one day, a mine
closed and everything stopped- I am, for
all intents and purposes, invisible.
It’s a hard status to
achieve: geographic invisibility. Last May,
I introduced the place branders, a priesthood
risen up to serve a new hierarchy of location
that is building itself in the world today, a
hierarchy that links geography in one
competitive grid of tradable locations. It’s a
new reality that stems from our greater freedom
of movement over the surface of the world, from
the globalization of our business and culture.
But’s its also a reality where Point Grey is
Fulham is Pacific Palisades- not as mere
comparables on the map, but as locations that
could actually substitute for one another. These
are places that are nearly interchangeable,
parallel universes where virtually identical
lives might be led. Queen East, Hackney or
Williamsburg. Alberni Street, Lakeview or
Butlers Wharf. Who doesn’t read the real
estate listings when they visit other cities and
imagine plausible lives?
Picture a place that
doesn’t link to the grid. Not because it is
remote; after all, remote places often
acquire special value precisely because they’re
hard to reach. The summit of Everest is so
remote, you need to book five years in advance
to have the experience of standing there- and
even then, it’ll cost you. I mean off the grid
in the microeconomic sense, unreachable by the
market. A location that’s off the grid is, by my
definition, one that’s invisible for its refusal
to compete with other locations for attention.
Kitsault used to be one
such rare location. Ever heard of molybdenum?
It’s used to make industrial lubricant and the
hills around Kitsault are loaded with the stuff.
In 1980, an entire operation was completed to
extract it: a mine facility, 100 houses, and a
few hundred more apartment suites, a shopping
mall, a recreation centre, a school, and yes, a
curling rink. Just 18 short months later, the
market for “molly” crashed and burned.
Everything was locked up and mothballed; people
were shipped back to their originating
locations. Kitsault before was a hot
locale. Kitsault after was a blown-out
candle. The best you can do is lean in close and
get a whiff of a flame that used to be visible
for miles.
A whiff not easily
obtained, either. I read about Kitsault,
ironically, because 25 years later, the mining
company finally decided to sell its 322 acres,
including more than a mile of Alice Arm
waterfront. It’s a three-and-a-half hour drive
from Terrace, BC, which mind you is more that
three-and-a-half hours from almost everywhere
else on earth. And I didn’t have the $7 million
being asked for either. But still, I was on the
phone immediately to selling agent Rudy Nielsen
of Niho Land & Cattle Company Ltd., a man who
specializes, appropriately enough, in the
marketing of unique parcels.
Rudy is a straight-talking,
no-bull kind of guy, but even he proved hard to
pin down on my proposed visit to that bit of
invisible geography he controlled. We played
voice mail tag for all of three months. And when
I finally got him, a note of hurry was
introduced when he told me that Kitsault had
been sold. It would not be invisible for much
longer. There was development talk in the air. A
resort was being built. I was imagining cruise
ships turning up Alice Arm, throwing down
anchors in waters deep turquoise from glacier
runoff.
The Kitsault caretaker
is Hank. He’s fine with me exploring on my
own as long as I take a truck on account of a
town resident named Beefer. I ask, “Beefer?”
Hank says, “That’s his name. B for bear.”
I visit the hospital first.
I climb the front steps and enter the lobby. The
door bangs shut behind me and I’m introduced to
an utter sense of abandonment that haunts the
town: the vibrating sense of former lives.
Surrounded by empty examining rooms and
hallways, I venture into the operating theatre.
I open labeled drawers still full of syringes,
finger cots, lemon and glycerine swabs, and, in
one, a saw and a set of pliers with long handles
and biting teeth. Outside, the entire time, the
forest is completely shifting, sighing. Distant
waves slap on a stone shoreline.
In the shopping centre, I
find myself fighting a sense of nearby
malevolence. I’m reminded of how strictly our
urban cultural training enforces the idea that
emptiness is unsafe. Who might be hiding in the
Payjack Sports store or the Town and Country
restaurant. The rules seem suspended with the
dust particles I’m stirring up in the
Hospitality Foods outlet. Empty aisles, empty
shelves, an abandoned pricing gun: I peel off
and apply a neon green Previously Frozen sticker
to my lapel, then turn and catch my reflection
in the produce section mirrors. Scare the hell
out of myself.
In the residential sector
of town, I consider which of the houses to
enter. From the hilltop, bands of green
wilderness roll away from me and into the
impenetrable hills, growing darker with each
ridge line, cooling out into grey and blue as
the forests climbing toward the brilliant white
of three vaunting snow capped peaks. I choose
number 48 because it winks at me. The glass
storm door shivers in the wind and catches the
light. Of course, I whip my head around-
hypersensitive to the presence of all those who
now are missing from the place. I swivel in the
street , kicking gravel, and find nothing but a
faded two-level split with a once bright red
door now bled cool by the sun to terra cotta.
Inside, I spy chocolate brown wall to wall
carpet, a back deck collapsing under rampant
moss, a half-finished basement in which a bar
had already been installed- completed with glass
shelves and an alcove where the bottles should
have gone.
Outside, the air smells
different. I admire my own acclimatization to
this place and then take one step off the porch
to find something very soft, very fresh
underfoot.
Beefer.
It’s hard to stay
invisible. The market abhors isolated zones
that refuse to link into the great, tradable
whole. What then will Kitsault become? New owner
Krishnan Suthanthiran has a lot of ideas, but we
discuss such a range of them that I leave our
meeting with no certainty of what kind of
visibility it will enjoy in two or even 10
years. He mentions tourism, a resort, kayaking,
skiing, sport fishing and a wellness centre. “It
simply boggled my mind that it wasn’t being
used,” he tells me of this place with its
“absolutely gorgeous, breathtaking scenery.” He
knows he wants Kitsault to be full of life
again, occupied and used. “A lively, vibrant
community,” he envisions.
Seduced by the invisibility
itself, perhaps? The wildness of the area is a
complicated part of its appeal. With each
passing day, the wilderness advances on the
town. The saplings have not only taken the
curling rink parking lot, but entirely
obliterated what used to be the school’s
playground. When I fly out in the charter Beaver
float plane, we bank a last corkscrew turn over
Kitsault, and I see it again, threatening to
overwhelm the structures entirely. “Things left
alone out here get grown over,” the pilot, Karl,
observes. “Trees up here are basically big
weeds.”
And so, a tension surrounds
Kitsault’s status at the moment. What is wild
presses in each day to claim it, to keep the
place invisible, while Suthanthiran has ushered
in a countering force. It is one fully exerted
by the grid of trading places, which, for the
first time since it was shut down, Kitsault has
again been plugged into. In this grid, Kitsault
is like any number of remote places used for
recreational experiences. And in the
competitiveness of this grid, Kitsault must
fight for survival, through pricing and profits,
through the attraction of visitors and
branding.
Who can say which side will
ultimately win? Check back in five years. In the
meantime, the final image I take away is from
the Kitsault library, where the books are all
still stacked and sorted. Where a book open on
the librarian’s desk, painfully, turns out to be
The Canadian Mines Register of Dormant and
Defunct Companies (2nd edition).
Where the card catalogue may still be browsed,
which allows me to report that the only Margaret
Atwood in the Kitsault Library at the time of
its closing was her 1979 novel, Life before
Man.
Downstairs, the pool- which
Hank tops up regularly to keep water pressure on
the tiles- is floating with a thousand dead
spiders. The whirlpool is empty. Thinking of
that card from the catalogue, I sense no others,
finally. I am in the belly of a building that
once teemed with people and I feel entirely
alone.
And already beavering away
in my mind, across the bands of untouched forest
from here to Prince Rupert and on towards home,
I wonder if I might someday find myself in a
very busy place- Michigan Avenue, Madison
Avenue, Oxford Street- spinning through a
revolving door out to a sidewalk crammed with
people, fully embedded in the grid, the
hierarchy of tradable locations. And if, with a
freak flash of sun and angled blue sky, I might
suddenly get a ghosted image of this: nothing,
nobody- the genuine rarity, the empty space.
Would I crack my neck around looking for an
invisibility that is no longer there? |
