Well! That was certainly a few days of excitement, wasn't it? The drama! The anxiety! The palpable tension! The nervous watching of the clock! The breathless media coverage, the social media chatter, the personal stories of triumph over adversity!
The Olympics? Oh, yes, the games were still going on in Paris, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm referring to the huge landslide that blocked the Chilcotin River west of Williams Lake sometime overnight on July 30/31, and which seemed to be all that anyone was talking about for the next week. I don't know about you, but my Facebook feed was chock-a-block with images of the slide, which completely choked the Chilcotin.
The images were undeniably dramatic. On one side there was the dry bed of the Chilcotin River, bereft of water, while on the other side a massive lake began to form, filled with lazily floating logs piled up against the slide like cattle sheltering together beside a fence. The undeniable beauty of the surrounding landscape certainly didn't hurt; I suspect that quite a few people who couldn't have picked out the Chilcotin River on a map a few days earlier are now planning a holiday to the region.
The story, already dramatic enough to start with, even had the type of human interest angle that a scriptwriter might reject as too far-fetched. This was embodied by the rafter who was camping in the area with his dog, and was awakened by the sound of the slide close to him in the dark. He ran, and managed to escape, although at the expense of a broken leg, and was airlifted to safety. His dog, Seko, got separated from him in the confusion, and for the next three days the search was on, with the story getting the happy ending it deserved when Seko was found safe and sound at a nearby ranch.
While that drama swirled in the background, every picture, every snippet of video that was posted online was being pored over with an intensity usually reserved for the Zapruder film showing JFK's assassination in 1963, or the Patterson/Gimlin film from 1967 purporting to show a Sasquatch. People talked about cubic metres per second, about best- and worst-case scenarios, what a one-hour breach would look like as opposed to a 24-hour breach. A new word to many — overtopping — was suddenly a part of every conversation. Potential downstream impacts were assessed. The two questions on everybody's lips were "When will it break through?" and "When that happens, how long will it take to reach X location?"
Around 10 a.m. on Monday, Aug. 5 was the answer to the first question; "Not nearly as long as you'd think" turned out to be the answer to the second. By 2 p.m. it had hit the Fraser River, turning the heretofore trickling tributary from pristine blue to angry brown and bringing a swirling surge of logs and trees with it.
Now, I'd like to think that the fascination with this event shows our awe and wonder in the face of the implacability and mutability of Nature, but I suspect that much of the interest stemmed from its appeal to the three-year old child who still lives deep within each of us. After all, who among us did not, when we were young, create a lake in the mud after it rained, or in the clay-like sand on a beach beside a lake, and then trace a path out of it with a stick or finger to watch the water drain out? The Chilcotin slide was this innocent pastime of our youth on a grand scale. How many people, looking at those pictures, wished they could somehow carve a channel over the top of the slide and then sit back and observe the result?
Oh, and Nature? Nature is awesome, in the adjectival sense of that word (inspiring great admiration or fear). It has been humbling to watch her do what she has always done, since long before we were here, and what she will go on doing, long after we are gone.
