McBride: A Community of Salvagers

 

    Here is one of my blogs from 2013:

    I have sometimes read about isolated communities located along dangerous rocky ocean shorelines, that benefited from the ships that occasionally crashed into those rocks.  Word quickly scattered through the community, and the residents rushed to the shore to salvage the items from the ship, that were washed ashore by the waves.  I have often thought that McBride is similar to those sea coast communities.

    The Robson Valley is not located beside a dangerous seacoast, but McBride does sometimes benefit from the dangerous highway that winds through our mountainous terrain.  During the time I have lived here, I have often heard of wrecked transport trucks or freight trains that have lost their loads, and those loads were often salvaged by local people.

    Living, as we do, away from town and the quick communication network of local gossip, we rarely benefit from the accidents.  Around here those salvage events happen fast.  I do still have a couple pieces of thick watercolor-like paper that had been salvaged from some overturned truck, but it was so long ago, I have forgotten the details.  I have had it for decades now, and still haven’t figured out what I could do with it.

    When I was building my house, I was very sorry in failing to hear sooner about an overturned truck carrying building lumber.  I don’t remember if that was a legitimate “salvage” or not; quite often the spills end up scattered, down mountain slopes at the edge of the highway, and are not really worth the effort of insurance companies to collect, so they are just left for local people to pick up.

    Last night, as I was trying to get to the end of a pretty bad movie that I had recorded, my wife returned from her knitting group.  She was carrying a plastic bag, and was all excited to tell its story to me.

    Apparently, a truck carrying frozen bun dough for a Subway restaurant had an accident and overturned on Hwy. 16, and as a result of the accident, the frozen unbaked bread dough, could not be safely used by the restaurant, so it was open to salvage.  

    I don’t know, how much of this frozen bread dough ended up in McBride, but there must have been a lot.  Some friends had opened their freezer to to my wife, eager to give her some of the Subway dough. They wanted her to take more than she did.  We now have about 40 sticks of the frozen whole wheat bun dough in our freezer.

    Like everybody else, I like to receive free stuff, and I am very anxious to bake and try out some of our newly acquired subway buns.

    

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca