BIG CREEK — The little
road was old when I first
encountered it in 1950, but
it had aged gracefully and
both wild creatures and men
tred lightly upon it.

It had almost certainly been
built about 1900 by Vic and
Charlie Erickson who home-
steaded river bottomland where
Mons Creek meets Big Creek.
They needed it to move wagons
detween the homestead and their
horse pasture beside Mons Lake.

They would have built with no
machines, only handsaws, picks,
shovels and crowbars. So men
then worked.

When Vic, the surviving
brother, sold the place in 1950 he
remarked that he hadn't had a
Sunday off work in 40 years. It
was the age of the seven-day
week.

The road was wide enough to
accommodate a wagon and no
more. It ran over rolling hill
country spotted with tall, lonely
Douglas fir which were too large
to be cut, so the wagon road
looped around thera,

Where it crossed Mons Creck
on the way to Mons Lake, they
buils a sturdy wooden culvert, The

last of the culvert’s whipsawed
planks now lies under a metre of
water, raised by a beaver dam.
There are hand-forged spikes in
those planks, hammered out on an
anvil.

In time, in the custom of the
country, that private road became
a public road, although the British
Columbia Highways Department
never graced it with so much as
one bucket of gravel. But it did
become a line on the face of this
province and can yet be found on
the government maps. Indeed, the
line on the map won't disappear
until a decade or so hence when
maps are revised. Meanwhile it
remains, a ghost on an atlas.

The first part of the road was a
sidehill gouge fron, the ranch up a
steep bluff. Then it ran across
open meadows beside Mons
Creek, where the beavers were
later to make a necklac? of small
ponds. Then it rambled through
the light and shadow of a forest
of jackpine, poplar and Douglas
Fir.

In the 1950s, you drove it slow-
ly and respectfully and sometimes
not at all.

One time, when rains had turn-
ed the road to porridge, | found a
pickup truck abandoned in a
mudhole. The driver had been one

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PAULITICS & PERSPECTIVES

of those who can’t stop spinning
wheels and he had done so until
water and mud came up into the
box on the back.

I am immodest enough to
remember skipping past in an
Austin A-40, ieaving the hulk to
be dragged out by tractor a day or
so fater.

That was one of the few vehi-
cles I ever saw on that road.

Friday, October 25, 1991 - North Shore News — 9

road remains a ghost on the map

There was another and better road
to Mons that had been created by
Walter Bambrick building his own
bridge across the main river in
1926.

His bridge lasted until the 1948
floods washed it away and the
government bridge replacing it
lasted until the floods of this spr-
ing washed it away.

The original road thus spent
much of this century almost un-
noticed, travelled more by the
deer and moose than by men and
machines.

It accumulated legends. All
good roads do, even short ones.

The Watt family, who bought
the Erickson place, were thrown
into wild dismay one bitter winter
day by the loss of the baby on
that road.

The older kids were rocketing
down the cutbank in a homemade
bobsled when it capsized and they
lost Kirby who was then about the
size of a ball of yarn.

The father found her. When the
sled went over she had apparently
made a perfect parabola in ihe air
and dropped deep in a snowbank
leaving only a blue-tinged hole to
mark her passage. She had con-

tinued sleeping. Kirby was a
placid child.

The late Duane Witte toppled a
new tractor into the gully. Asked
if he wasn’t worried about dam-
age, he said man's only worry in
this world is whether he goes to
heaven or hell.

“If Ego to heaven, I stili got
nothing to worry about and if I
go to hell I will be so busy snat-
ching sparks out of my ass and
shaking hands with all my old
friends I won’t have time to
worry.”’

In recent years, beaver dams
closed the road's centre to all ex-
cept the occasional tractor, but
cars could still drive up to the
dams from either side.

Last fall, a savage wind went
through the area and toppled trees
across most of it, including a few
of the giant firs. Nobody has
bothered (o saw them out again.

There are flowers in the ruts
now where wheels will never roll
again. Squirrels, grouse, deer,
coyote and wolf have reclaimed
the trail. The old road has died as
it lived, quietly, peacefully and
with dignity.

Tanna,
LYS? MAO E DE VE
WV! 926-F63E

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