I had occasion, in this week’s paper, to write about myself in the third person (twice, if you’re keeping score at home), which is always an odd experience. It was easy enough to find a descriptor for one of the mentions, but I had to think about the second one for a bit, before finally going with “local historian”.
You see, I’ve been asked by one of the organizers of the upcoming Plein Air paint-out in Ashcroft if I would be interested in hosting a walking tour of downtown Ashcroft. It’s ostensibly for the spouses/partners of the artists who will be here for the weekend, to give them something to do, although artists are more than welcome to tag along if they want to see some neat old buildings; heck, any residents who feel like a Saturday morning stroll can come too, because the more the merrier.
(I told my son about the tour, and he asked how long it was going to be, and I replied about an hour or so. “An hour?” he said incredulously. “You could spend an hour just standing on one corner.” He exaggerates for effect, but not by a lot.)
The invitation came because I know a lot about Ashcroft’s history, but when it came time to describe myself as a “local historian” I paused. No argument with the “local” bit — I’ve lived here for more than 27 years — but historian? I never studied history at a post-secondary level, never trained as a researcher, never published any books. The only formal history I learned was what we got in school, and in retrospect that left a lot to be desired.
I don’t know how history is taught in school today, but in my day (I graduated high school in 1981) it seems to have been taught in the most boring way possible, about the same tedious subjects over and over. There was a lot about early British and French explorers, and Upper and Lower Canada, and Confederation, and then we seemed to jump straight to European history from 1914-ish to 1945. Want to know about the Treaty of Versailles? I’m your pigeon. The Cariboo Waggon Road? It didn’t exist, at least not in my formal education.
The truth is that everything I’ve learned about local history I’ve picked up informally, on my own, mostly over the last 15 years or so. It happened so gradually and insidiously that I didn’t even know I was becoming a historian; I simply realized, one day, that I knew way more about the Cariboo Waggon Road (later the Cariboo Highway), and the history of auto courts, and Ashcroft’s various bridges, and Widow Smith of Spences Bridge, than I had ever set out to learn.
It means I’ve become the sort of person who can look at an undated photograph of the Thompson River canyon and say “Well, it was clearly taken before 1914, because the track for the Canadian Northern Pacific Railway — now Canadian National — isn’t there on the opposite bank” or casually drop into conversation the fact that China Bar tunnel on the Trans-Canada Highway is the second-longest automobile tunnel in North America (completed in 1961, it’s 2,000 feet long, and also the only one of the canyon’s seven tunnels that is ventilated). I can tell you when James Teit came to Spences Bridge, and why, and how old he was, who Cataline was, and which three local communities each have a Tingley Street and why that name was chosen.
All of which happened almost by stealth, as it were, but it’s been a heck of a fun journey, albeit one I never set out to make. And I’ve tried to make it fun for readers as well, because I’m at heart a storyteller, and we have some fantastic stories in our area. If you’re at all interested in hearing some of them, then please feel free to join me on June 8 (8:45 a.m. at St. Alban’s church hall on Brink Street). I promise that the longest we’ll stand on any one corner is 10 minutes, tops.
