July 17, 18, 19, 20 at 8:00 p.m. July 20 at 3:30 p.m.

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY DANETTE BOUCHER

WITH JAMES DOUGLAS AS FRED WELLS

***
When I reach BC she’s just about done shaking the dust off her from her great gold rush, the one that created her.  I’m still a young man, young enough that I can feel how much this place isn’t done with being the centre of attention.  I pass hours, staring at the landscape and wondering, just wondering…what’s inside of all that?  What do the guts of this place hold?  What’s in her belly? 

Prospecting thrills me.  I learn as I go.  I examine the earth and learn to read it.  I pay attention to the rock and the mud and after a while I find myself trying to decipher and interpret the ground.  I am drawn by the magnetism of the ore.  I am learning a language that is primal.  I’m learning to speak dirt.

***
There is something in the air these days – a whiff of fear, a question mark.  Something is coming….

And sure enough, as the 1920s heads towards the 1930s the bottom seems to fall out of the world.  All the optimism so rampant, so infectious, that had seduced us all in the 1920s ends in a heart stopping thud.  The whole universe sobers up and the Great Depression sends a gloom of anxiety over most everyone and everything. 

From my quiet vantage point high in the Cariboo Mountains I can hear it.  It is the sound of lives falling apart. 

We cannot believe our luck.  As the world sinks into a chasm of despair we at the Cariboo Gold Quartz find ourselves sitting right in God’s pocket.

It is with breathless disbelief that we begin to comprehend:  we are going to dodge this bullet. 

Well, I’ll be darned….

***
I hope Wells will take on my tenacity, my addiction to adventure, my honour.  I hope she will attract the sort of folk who understand the lure of a mountain, the responsibility of settling into a place with a formidable natural force.  I hope she will adopt my solitary nature, but then will surprise everyone on occasion with her sudden bursts of liveliness.  I hope she will have the guts to stand up and fight when she feels she’s been treated unfairly, and I hope all who reside in her, pass through her, enjoy her, will remember that even in the darkest of hours, somewhere in the world, there is a place where anything is possible.