Once upon a time, when I was just 9 years old, an immigrant kid from Holland, who'd just spent his first year in Canada, in Vancouver, when his father found work as an engineer in a remote corner of British Columbia, named Oliver.
A Company called Trump Limited was developing the concept of a mechanical giraffe for picking and pruning and electrical work, and so we moved to paradise...here I could swim in a lake a few blocks from home, walk through a cactus patch on my way home from school, fruit was abundant, as were lakes and hikes, but best of all, my family made friends that lasted.
Today, the town of Oliver still means something special to me...a town with some pride, where many of the buildings of my childhood are still standing, access to the river is abundant, bike trails along the river, and the pleasure of finding some of the best wine I've ever tasted, which isn't saying much, because I usually avoid the snobbery of wine tasting, but have to admit, Silver Sage in Oliver made even me sip every variety...my only event ever. (-:
Being out of the USA for a few days, without a computer, the news, fleeing from a country devolving into its own terrorism as the rift of economic classes and fundamentalism untie the "United We Stood".
For a few days I could day dream back to another era before modern technology, when food was grown locally, and families still owned the farm...fruit stands everywhere...because here in the Canadian Okanogan, that's still the way it is...and they're actual Canadian youth who migrate to the valley from the big cities, both French and English speaking, to make some money, and explore. When I first moved to the Wenatchee Valley in 1978, we, too, had a sort of hippie youth movement in the valley during fruit picking times, and many of us stuck around to build new lives.
We stayed at a small resort on a small spring fed lake, called the Lakeside Resort, where a simple cabana was affordable, and the beach was only a few hundred feet away.
People smiled and even the youth wasn't constantly staring at their phones...
Memories of my childhood like seeing a rattlesnake for the first time, sitting around a campfire singing folk songs with friends, being able to hang out with some friends after several years of school after school...
Most of my childhood home towns have changed drastically since my stay there, such as Amsterdam, Vancouver, Seattle, and even the Wenatchee Valley...they hardly remind me anymore of my time there,
but Oliver still exudes a spirit for me that comforts me, almost makes me, too, want to escape Trumpland.
If you'd like to see the view from this region, you can check out the video below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is27Dyb6Qis
