The Godfather of the Wilderness

When I was nineteen I lived in a dive behind the Pay & Save gas station in North Van. But the cool thing about my life at that time was I owned a big Chrysler with a 383.

A friend of mine showed up and said he had broken up with his girlfriend and needed to go up to Williams Lake to pick up his stuff. The Chrysler was the car for the trip. When we got to Willams Lake, he cleaned out his place and then said let's drive out to Bella Coola. Bella Coola's a couple hundred miles from Williams Lake, on a dirt road over the Chilcotin Plateau and through a mountain range in Tweedsmuir Provincial Park. Before starting out, we stopped by the liquor store to pick up a jug of wine and two-four of beer.

We had a blast driving across the Chilcotin, drinking and looking at the scenery which looked like Africa to us. We played with the electric windows and laughed and sang. We saw almost no one except an old guy with Fedora in a black Cadillac. He looked like "The Godfather" of the wilderness. We laughed a lot about that.

Once you leave the Chilcoltin and start heading through the Tweedsmuir, the road goes from being flat and wide down to something just wide enough for one vehicle. It takes you down about three thousand feet to the coast. Some catskinners built it on their own because the goverment said it couldn't be done. They call it "The Hill." And I was getting drunk. We had gone through some stuff in high school and we were getting emotional about that. I was driving and crying and slugging him, and he was slugging me.

After a mile or so, we figured out what would happen if I drove us off the road. By the time we reached the bottom of "The Hill" we were sober.

In Bella Coola, we dragged ourselves into the cafe for pie and coffee and when we came out I noticed all the Chrysler's tires were flat. I guess I hadn't noticed how rough the road was.

That should have been the end of my drinking behind the wheel. But I was nineteen. And it wasn't.