Finding a refuge, an escape from a dangerous and unwelcoming world has long been a goal for people under threat. As the global population has grown, such getaways have become harder to find.
North America has become one of the “go to” refuges. Fortunately, there’s still some space available.
Easterners might often think of BC as the far end of Canada, reasonably enough, and Stewart, situated at the head of the Portland Canal, might as easily be seen as the back end of BC.
The Portland Canal is the flooded remains of an ancient glacial fjord that stretches well over 100 kilometres through the Coast Range to the Pacific Ocean. Today it serves as the border between BC and Alaska. The Nisga’a call the fjord “K’alii Xk’alaan,” which is roughly translatable as “at the back of (someplace).” The term “canal” for fjord derives from a term used by Spanish seagoing exploration in the 18th century.
I once met an elderly German woman in Stewart who told me that she was an adolescent in Yugoslavia during World War II. Toward the war’s end, the Slav partisans were ridding the area of Germans, and her family fled by horse and wagon toward Austria and southern Germany. At one point they were strafed by a fighter plane.
She came to Stewart in about 1950. One wonders whether or not that seemed far enough away. When she arrived there, today’s highway through Bear Pass was still covered with the ice of Bear Glacier, which has since retreated back toward the ice field that is its source.
Stewart seems, in some ways, almost primitive, in some places half overgrown and abandoned, many of the buildings leftovers from the middle of the last century. To visit the place seems like stepping back in time.
In the early 1980s when one of the mines was producing, the miners there invited the teachers from schools in Thornhill and Hazelton to visit on the May long weekend to play a softball tournament. The road north from Kitwanga wasn’t yet paved, and it was a long drive. But the games were fun, the miners were good hosts, and when the play was finished we all shared a celebratory case of champagne.
In 2002, Christopher Nolan directed the psychological thriller movie 'Insomnia' in Stewart. Al Pacino and Robin Williams had starring roles. Some locals may still remember Williams going to the local pub and entertaining them with an extended standup comedy routine.
Politicians and governments the world over are coping with the seemingly sudden onslaught of human movement. We are increasingly “swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight” to use one phrase. Immigration problems may be the issue that decides the upcoming US election.
We may not always welcome the strangers who arrive, many carrying all their worldly possessions with them. Often they don’t speak our language(s). They may drag along with them resentments and conflicts from their old countries (we wish they wouldn’t). Mostly, though, they just need a place to be, unmolested, able to take on the task of becoming Canadians insofar as they are able.
Near the end of the road, at the edge of the sea, Stewart really does seem like the back of someplace, but western Canada features many such places, half empty locations where a breathing space might be found.