One of the things I discovered moving to a small village was how your circle of friends expanded to include a wider range of ages. Before moving to McBride, we hung around with people our own age. Of course in McBride we still did that, but in a small community, the organizations we belonged to, also included those who were older than us. Groups like the Robson Valley Art Council and the environmental group included “senior citizens” also. One of those seniors was Natasha Boyd.
Although Natasha was older than us “counter-culture” types that moved into the Robson Valley, she held all of the same values about the environment and the arts, as us young whippersnappers. She was a talented artist, although that was a sideline to the small hobby farm she and her husband Carl owned.
When I was in the third grade, our class studied the culture of the American Indian. I became very fascinated by with them, and my interest in them grew very intense. To feed that interest, that summer my parents took us on a camping vacation to Colorado, whose high point was the Indian cliff-dwelling ruins in Mesa Verde National Park. It was a wonderful and memorable vacation for my sister and I.
We were fascinated by the ancient adobe ruins tucked under the huge overhanging sandstone cliffs, and when we weren’t exploring them, we spent a lot of time in the park museum. There we gazed in amazement at the intricate dioramas that portrayed the historical development of Mesa Verde.
We marveled and were fascinated a by the small figurines with their tiny tools and utensils, in the realistic-looking dioramas (photo below). I still vividly remember them to this day, more than sixty years later.
When Natasha died, I went to her memorial service in the Dunster Hall. Around the hall were displayed pieces of Natasha’s art work. When a speaker gave a talk outlining Natasha’s adventurous life, I was gobsmacked to learn that she had spent a couple of years working on those dioramas that had so fascinated me as a child.
I still wish I would have known that information while Natasha was still alive, I would have loved to hear what she had to say about them, and tell her just how much seeing those dioramas had impressed me when I was younger.
Like me, Natasha, though of an older generation, both grew up in the United States. Our lives took different paths, but surprisingly, we both ended up in a sparsely populated, isolated valley in British Colombia. Although I didn’t realize it when she was living, some of the work she had done long ago, effected me when I was a child.
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