Storyline: Westward Ho!
Tue, Jul 11 and Jul 14
We didn’t stay in Kelowna and in hindsight it was a good thing that I could not book a campground there. But we drove through it on the way into and out of the Peachland RV Park, where we had booked 3 nights.
Hills. Bare. Dry. Hot. That is exactly how I remember the area around Kelowna. I knew the name of this then small town before I knew the capitals of the Canadian provinces. Kelowna has a special place in my heart. This is where I consider my life in Canada to have begun. Eh, not necessarily the first touch with Canada, but here in Okanagan College at the beginning of June 1995. Or was it end of May? (The date- stamped old photos tell me it was end of May). There was an environmental conference I attended. It actually was the 29th annual congress of the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS) at the end of May. I had a presentation on Global Climate Change. My last obligation to my colleagues from Brussels University and my first engagement with perhaps new colleagues from Canada. It was a quiet place with not much happening beyond the conference. Calm lake to which we walked. Somehow. I even keep a photo of me steering a motorboat.
Some people on the shore curious about my background took me in their boat for a ride. And no, I didn’t have that motion sickness then. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t have an answer. And yes, it was the time when I did perm, so this is not my natural hair look.
Now, some 28 years later, memories have paled, fading with the time and extremity of other events, and places changed, I was trying to find this quiet place named Okanagan College, with nothing around but burnt hills. Now once again we drove by Okanagan College. We drove by the airport on a busy highway. Nothing reminded me the quiet place I had experienced so long ago. Heavy traffic, an extremely busy city, hills built up to their tops…
One thing though had not changed. That oppressive heat. Strong sun burning over one’s head with nowhere to escape. Hot and dry!
Long story for a short blog post. But I’ll try a few points that have stayed with me for all these years.
I remember leaving Toronto in 19° C and landing at Kelowna airport late afternoon in 39° C! I had expected the opposite. After all we were in the mountains. I had taken my fluffy winter jacket with me. My perception was different. The entire concept of “a small town in the middle of the mountains” as advertised on the conference invite, was completely strange to me. A small town in the mountains in Europe meant a walking distance to everything. To conference halls, to accommodations, to restaurants etc. Not here! I had given my experience here in Kelowna many times as an example of different expectations based on different experiences. And perhaps written about it here and there on papers lost or buried in our basement. But I remember getting off the plane at the Kelowna airport on a Sunday and asking for the bus to the college. No bus? It is Sunday and there was no public transport connecting the airport with the town. Of well, they said it is small, didn’t they. Perhaps we can walk. No, we can’t? So how do we get to there? Take a cab? This is not in my point of reference either. I ask the cab driver how far and he says 10min. 10min? We could walk. No, 10min driving. A new concept again. In Europe we measure walking time. Here they use driving time. And how far are the mountains? I meant the one advertised in the conference invite, since I wasn’t seeing any. Two hours away? According to the cab driver, who probably meant The Rocky Mountains.
Later on, I’d visit Vancouver and even do some hiking in the mountains. There I’d have a new experience of people with cowboy boots and hats walking up to the snow and turning back.
No one but me and a German tourist who’d later help me getting back were hiking in the snow.
Arriving at the college we had to register and then drop our bags off in the assigned rooms. It is well past noon and we haven’t eaten anything. “Where can we have something to eat?” I ask the girl at the registration desk. “Oh, there are restaurants some 10 – 15km down the road.” They didn’t have anything for the guests arriving on Sunday. The conference started Monday morning. They’ll have coffee and refreshments then.
10km? How am I supposed to get to there? “Is there a bus?” No?! “Don’t you have a car?” A car!? I arrived from Brussels, Belgium. Can’t drive from there. Perhaps she meant I should have rented a car. A colleague and his wife from Ottawa had flown to Calgary, rented a car there and drove. But at that time car rental was a foreign concept too. That same Ottawa couple adopted us for the duration of the conference. His sister-in-law from Saskatoon was with them too. (Funny what one can remember.) They drove us to restaurants, to pubs, to local the pharmacy… to everywhere they were going. They’d simply invite us. We’d discuss climate change and my work in the Southern Ocean. They were curious.
But they also warned me. If you want a job in Canada, don’t look into the environmental field. Don’t talk much about global warming. Those jobs don’t exist here… look into programming. There is a lot of demand. Valuable advice from complete strangers at a time when I needed a job here. And it was there and then, at the conference, that I started to part from my research work related to climate change. It’ll take me years of longing. And even now when I hear young people talk about it, I’m sad that I had to give up my research work I loved so much. Moving to Canada, this wasn’t my expectation. But I had two kids to feed and a stable job was a necessity.
Another disillusionment was the “small and quiet town”. Often in busy and hectic Toronto I’d think – perhaps I should have taken the kids and moved to this small, quiet and hot city named Kelowna I loved so much then.
The small and quiet is gone! It is a roaring busy city, spanning over the hills as far as one could see. But it’s still a shock that this city had grown to 142 000 by 2022. And that does not include surrounding communities. Global News reported in 2022 that Kelowna was the fastest growing Census Metropolitan Area in the country. We waited a long time in traffic comparable to Toronto’s to cross over the William R. Bennett bridge. West Kelowna was busy too, and even Peachland and the drive to the wineries. This is for the next post.
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