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Chilcotin Time: We Always Get the Job Done

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Chilcotin Time: A Day Late and a Dollar Short but We Always Get the Job Done

“A day late and a dollar short” might be phrase with a negative perception, but when you add “but we always get the job done”, we realize things will be done when the time is right. Not when we think they should be done, or when external sources dictate they should be done, but when the time is right, from nature’s perspective. And when you live in the wilderness, nature’s perspective is the only one that counts. To be conscious and aware is to know this and allow it to shape the way you live your life.

There is a book called The Road Runs West by Diana French. It is the story of building the Freedom Road, BC’s third road to the Pacific. While this story takes place in what might be called the deep Chilcotin, and our location in the Chilcotin Ark is more of a periphery, what she says about Chilcotin Time still rings true here. “Chilcotin Time is always later” Diana French says. In the Trails to Empowerment community, I know what that means because we live here. It means when nature says the time is right.

Time is different here because we don’t live by society’s conventions. For example, we don’t have Sundays, the animals still need feeding, it doesn’t matter that it’s the weekend. Daylight savings time, another of society’s inventions, isn’t relevant here. The chickens go to bed when it gets dark, not when the clock tells them to.

Even the seasons, that larger passing of time, are different here. Spring is split into two parts. Snow melt in April is the first part of spring where the melting snow turns the whole Chilcotin to mud and the landscape is covered in ugly, rotten snow. Dry spring comes in May as the moisture is quickly sucked up by the thirsty ground and grass starts to grow, wildflowers follow. Summer finally makes an appearance some time in July when days are hot and dry, an escape to the mountain tops brings the temperature down a few degrees. With our large percentage of coniferous trees, fall is a blink-and-you-miss-it kind of event as the few evergreen trees’ leaves turn golden and then fall over a couple weeks in September. We might be lulled into a false sense of security by an Indian summer in the rest of September and maybe October, giving us a last warm spell before winter hits. At first it teases us some time in October or November, with snow falling overnight and melting by lunchtime. But soon it is November and here to stay and then there will be five months of snow and ice before snow melt returns.

This means that certain events can only take place at certain times of year. Our horses must be off the range by the end of October, not really because our grazing licence says so, but because if we don’t they will have nothing to eat and will be snowbound until they can be retrieved in the spring, or perhaps even July if they are at high elevation. Our firewood needs to be brought in before it’s -20 otherwise the bulldozer won’t start and we’ll freeze. Our water intake needs to be maintained before the freeze otherwise the pipes will be frozen and burst all winter.

Chilcotin Time is for events to take place when nature says so. The concept of a day late and a dollar short is when we fall into society’s trap of thinking things need to be done on any schedule but nature’s. We get them done when nature says it’s time.

A recent example was getting the horses off the range, which involved bringing 20+ horses two hours down from the alpine and driving them an hour home in the trailer. Events meant that only two guides, Lea and Kayleigh, were available to get the horses down. Twenty horses were a lot for two people to manage and by the time they found most of the horses they saw six were still missing. Getting off the mountain in the dark wasn’t a good plan which meant there was no time to go looking for the rest. They hurried down the mountain with fifteen horses.

Kevan and I met them at the trail head with a second trailer. We could have brought a third trailer too but it had two flat tires and we hadn’t had time to change them because we were welding up the muffler on the truck we’d brought with us. We loaded up ten horses, brought them home and then in the dark Kevan and Kayleigh went back to get the other five horses we’d left at the trail head.

The next morning and Kevan and I had to go to town so it was Lea and Kayleigh who went back to get the remaining horses. They now had two riding horses, but with snow on the mountain they had to take off their horse shoes before they could ride them. On the way, their truck broke down – the Chilcotin roads are hell on vehicles. 10Km from the trail head, they got their horses out the trailer and rode to the trail head, then the 2 hours back to camp. They managed to find the other six horses but had no one at the ranch to pick them up.

We called our neighbour who was able to pick up our other trailer from the ranch and then meet them at the trail head.

The job wasn’t done yet, we now had to go get the truck and trailer that were stranded at the roadside. We took two trucks, one to pull the trailer and one to pull the broken down truck if we couldn’t get it running. After some roadside mechanicing which included hitting the fuel tank with a hammer and changing some fuses, we realized we couldn’t get the truck started. So we towed it and brought the trailer back. A day late and a dollar short, one day after the ranch closed and one truck less running, we got our truck and trailer home and got the job done of bringing the horses off the range.

By being conscious and aware of Chilcotin Time, we weren’t frustrated by the delays and breakdowns but were flexible and adaptable to get the job done.

Charlie