I’d be lying if I didn’t admit the current situation is depressing.
Last week, the province said there was no chance for normalcy returning this month and probably not the next. There’s lots of free time, but less money and opportunities to use it.
People across the province keep getting sick and the number of those infected continually rising.
Borders shut, businesses barred and people told to stay home.
Sure, it’s great chatting with people virtually but it’s all about the pandemic. While the COVID-19 crisis is like none we’ve experienced, it’s not the first crisis nor will it be the last.
They will come and go, much like the winter snows and crocuses.
Eventually the news will move past COVID-19, to wildfires, the amount of dog poop on the greenbelt and the length of time it takes the city to fill a pot hole.
Stories of little old ladies making cabbage rolls for charity, businesses making burgers for the library and kids making climate change quilts for LUNA will return.
COVID-19 isn’t forever.
A couple years ago, I spent time in the woods of northern Alberta near the Caribou Mountains with a trapper. He had spent most of his life living in a log cabin, with no electricity, only wood heat and surviving off the profits from that winter’s fur.
Sometimes he would take clients into the bushes to hunt. One comment that always made him bristle was when guests would tell him they couldn’t wait to get out of the woods and return to ‘the real world.’
A world of concrete, metal and loud trucks.
The trapper said the bush was reality, whereas the city was just a Broadway show, moving from one drama to the next.
Humans are creatures of the woods after all.
My dad said on a phone call the other week that even during the horrors of World War I, as men blew each other to bits, birds still sang above the trenches.
Life goes on.
No matter how COVID-19 changes our community, it’s important to remember the Columbia River will continue to flow, snow will return to Glacier National Park and Mt. Begbie will preside over Revelstoke.
As Queen Elizabeth said during her April 5 address to the Commonwealth, including Canada, “We should take comfort that while we may have more still to endure, better days will return.”
@pointypeak701
liam.harrap@revelstokereview.com
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