Disaster in Paradise. Amanda Bath

it would be a bountiful crop. We cruised the rows of vegetables and discussed the serious business of growing food: beans, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, onions and corn. Jillian’s devotion and hard work had created a garden filled with hope and promise. The rain had been a boon, and now the hot sunshine was working its magic. I remarked on the box of purple petunias that cascaded down from the upstairs balcony, and the enormous pots of begonias and pansies beside the front door.

      We sat as usual in the cozy dining nook off the kitchen, having tea and bikkies and swapping news. “How are all your house projects progressing?” Jillian asked.

      “We hope to finish off the new roof as soon as Christopher gets back. It’s taken three years but we’re almost done, and Christopher’s excited about laying the steel down. But then of course there’s the bedroom and the deck to finish!” We laughed and shook our heads at the time it took some of us to bring projects to completion in this mellow place. It was a Kootenay thing.

      The subject of elderly mothers was a bond between us. Jillian’s mother was in far better health than my mother, leading an active, independent life in Kaslo. I related my agonies of guilt at abandoning my mother in the nursing home; Jillian assured me I’d done the right thing, the only thing I could have done in the circumstances. We watched a deer and her two fawns grazing in the shady meadow below the house, a scene of perfect pastoral bliss.

      Back home, I emailed all the residents of Johnson’s Landing, asking for a ride to town next day. I wanted to go to Kaslo to attend a meeting of our newly formed hospice society. This was an exciting development and I hoped to join the board. The care of the dying and bereaved was dear to my heart and I wanted to offer our new society whatever knowledge and experience I had.

      In the past, a neighbour always offered to take me along when I didn’t have a vehicle for some reason, but on this occasion there was complete silence. Apparently, nobody was driving to Kaslo that Tuesday morning—it was the first time in almost twenty years that I hadn’t found a ride when I needed it! But I did receive a call from Jillian, offering to take me in on Thursday instead. Jillian liked to make Thursday her shopping day because Kaslo’s health food grocery store received its fresh produce that day. She slightly disapproved of Christopher going off and leaving me for so long without a car, and wanted to help me out. I thanked her and we agreed to go to Kaslo together on Thursday morning.

      I wrote to the hospice group and explained my predicament, but also admitted that it was hard for me to do much of anything just then, other than sleep, cry and try to make sense of what had happened to my mother, and my part in it. I found myself writing: “Perhaps there is a reason for the fates keeping me at home on Tuesday.” Chelsea Van Koughnett, the leader of our hospice group, reassured me that all would be well; I should stay home and rest.

      Tuesday, July 10

      In the morning I visited Kurt Boyer, our nearest neighbour, who was about to leave for Toronto to have a hernia operation. Kurt had lived in Johnson’s Landing since 1971, and in 1974 bought his piece of land from Ruth Burt. He was self-contained, self-sufficient, almost never left the land and filled his time with mechanical projects, inventions, reading and his vegetable garden. He ventured to Kaslo or to Nelson, the nearest town, only when absolutely necessary, so this trip to Toronto was a major event.

      He’d manufactured a new pair of shoes especially for the occasion. Raised in the tropics, Kurt had walked barefoot for his first twenty years and no commercial shoe or boot could accommodate his broad, splay-toed feet. He created his own personal lasts, formed rubber into sole moulds and affixed leather uppers with rivets. The results fit, and were pleasing to the eye, if a little unusual.

      I took note of Kurt’s instructions for watering the tomato plants in the greenhouse, then hugged him and wished him safe travels. I turned away and strolled down his untamed driveway, fringed with thimbleberry bushes, then crossed the road and took the shortcut path back to our house, about two hundred metres distant. It was extremely rare to have both Christopher and Kurt away at the same time and I felt just a little vulnerable. I was still so weary and found even simple tasks almost overwhelming.

      The afternoon found me in my place on the lounger by the corner post when I noticed something odd. A coffee-coloured slick, a brown ribbon about half a metre wide, had suddenly appeared along the lakeshore, emanating from the mouth of Gar Creek. I slipped on my shoes, climbed gingerly down the precarious steps from the deck and hurried across the yard to the driveway bridge to inspect the creek. The water was the colour of a well-brewed tea. I looked upstream towards the mountain. What was happening up there? It wasn’t unusual to see the creek run dirty at this time of the year, though I couldn’t recall a change so abrupt and dramatic. But who knew? I probably wasn’t thinking clearly.

      Then the smell hit me—earthy, dank, with a tinge of something like pine disinfectant, wafting down the creek draw. Obviously the odour indicated broken and mashed pine trees up above us, but what else was going on? I recalled a similar smell back in February after an avalanche of snow brought tons of tree debris down the creek as far as Gerry Rogers’s driveway, a kilometre or so upstream. But this stench was pungent, to the point of nauseating—odd and worrying. I squatted on the tiny bridge and watched the strange opaque water thundering underneath me. An osprey wheeled overhead, shrieking to its mate, but I barely heard it over the roar of the creek.

      While I was in England Christopher had told me over the phone that it was raining non-stop. Obviously, I hadn’t taken in the information, or considered what that much rain could mean, because I was so preoccupied with my own worries. When I arrived home on July 3, the weather turned sunny and temperatures soared to over thirty degrees Celsius. The heavier-than-usual snowpack was melting fast, which would explain, I thought, why the creek had been running so full. Now the water was this tea-brown colour and the smell made me shiver.

      Gar Creek, where it crossed the property, was normally a tranquil stream that gurgled under the bridge, meandered between cedar trees and gushed over rocks slick with algae down the last few metres to the lake. The big old cedars along the bank suggested it was a well-established, mature creek that had been running undisturbed in its gravel channel for centuries.

      The little wooden bridge in our driveway provided me an excellent vantage point. Various large boulders and old tree trunks in the creek served as measuring devices against which I could estimate the height of the water. One of my measurement boulders was now submerged and lost to view. An old cedar stump was only half visible. The wild blackcurrant bushes on the bank were being whipped and leaf-stripped by the torrent.

      Wednesday, July 11

      In the early light, after a night kept awake by the roaring water and the terrible dank-earth and pine smell, I stood on the bridge in my nightshirt and was shocked to see that the water was no longer tea-coloured, and no longer water. Thick chocolate mousse slurry was painting a mudpack on every leaf and twig, high up the bank.

      I ran to the road above our house. Parallel to our driveway, the unpaved main road crossed Gar Creek for the third and last time and terminated a hundred metres farther on at the beach parking area and turnaround. Two culverts channelled the creek under the road. To my horror, the southerly culvert was about 70 percent blocked, while the northerly one ran at full capacity, disgorging a powerful jet that pounded against the bank.

      The bank was beginning to erode. If it gave way, the contents of the creek would have a direct downhill route to our basement. Oh no, it didn’t bear thinking about—our basement was jam-packed, filled to bursting with tools, books, two freezers, machinery, boxes of tiles, trim wood, our record collection, slides and photos, filing cabinets and all of Christopher’s clothes in cedar chests and dresser drawers. I wouldn’t know where to begin if everything was flooded with thick stinking liquid mud. My exhausted brain didn’t want even to entertain this nightmare scenario.

      At 6:30 a.m. everyone in the community received an email from Loran Godbe, who lived with his mother, Linda, and Gerry Rogers in the house highest up the mountain; he was our lookout perched on the hill. I remember thinking, “He’s up early!” knowing that Loran was a night owl. But he hadn’t gone to bed yet that morning. His words were troubling.

      Hi All—

      At