cyan's Journal: Grande Cache

This town is completely spooky in its own way. On one hand, virtually nothing has changed. Everything is exactly where I remember it, and it is rare to see any major changes outside of a new paint job on the outside of a house. Vegas Pizza, the crappy mall, Super A Foods, everything is exactly as it was. But while the town's outward appearance is the same, the inside of it has changed dramatically.

Grande Cache used to be a small tightly-knit community of families. Now, it is overrun with oil contractors. They (and their trucks) are simply *everywhere*. Everywhere you look, it's oil, oil, oil. The industrial section of town appears to be expanding faster than the residential. Housing prices are going up, and finding a place to rent is becoming an exercise in frustration.

My mother and I went to Vegas Pizza to grab a bite to eat last night. Vegas Pizza was always the sort of melting pot of gossip in the town: one of the only restaurants to stay open late, possibly with the best food in town. Well, they converted Vegas Pizza into a bar! It's now "Vegas Bar and Grill" and is filled to the rim with oil workers drinking beer and watching hockey. This is how Grande Cache has changed. It's no longer a little town in the traditional sense; it's a frontier town.

The air here is nice and crisp, the humidity practically non-existent. The weather changes every five minutes thanks to our sub-alpine location atop a plateau. This morning brought snow, and now it's clear. The astronomy conditions here are wonderful, and I can only imagine what it looks like outside of town when the moon is gone. Likewise, the amateur radio conditions here are pristine, perhaps too pristine. The sole repeater in town doesn't even seem to be functioning, so I'll have to contact the Yellowhead Amateur Radio Club 150km away and see what the deal is.

I programmed in a handful of local frequencies into my scanner. Police, fire, the airport, and some others. Other than a call from a 13-year-old girl receiving harassing phone calls from her father (!), the air waves are dead. I settled in for a long nap (five hours), and the scanner didn't go off even once. Grande Cache has no FM radio stations, the only station here is "YR Radio", an AM station based out of Hinton.

The white pages for this town are only five pages long. The "S" entries span only two or three columns, compared to the last name "Chan" in the Vancouver book which easily spans several dozen pages. There are no traffic lights here, and traffic on the highway is rare. Electricity is expensive, but gas is cheap. The electricity here comes from coal, which results in some interesting power spikes and brownouts. My UPS goes off every dozen minutes or so.

Being here is still sort of surreal. I'm still digesting the huge amount of culture shock that I'm going through right now. I didn't kid myself when I left Vancouver, I knew it would be a very drastic change in lifestyle. To come from a condo in the heart of a thriving metropolis to the middle of nowhere is about as drastic as you can get.

I start my new job tomorrow, and it looks like it's going to be a challenge. My job description is to do everything I was doing at my store in Burnaby. I'm effectively the General Manager here, so all the accounting, receivables, payables, customer service, advertising, budget.. all of that stuff will be my responsibility. Except the resonsibility here is actually *greater* than what it was at my store, since we have contracts with some very big outfits. Contracts with the Town, with the mill, various oil and trucking outfits.

It was hard to see my mom go. She left in the morning and drove back to Vancouver the entire way in one day, all twelve hours of it. In a way, it was hard because that represented my last "out." Up until she left, had I really wished it, I could've just changed my mind. I could've packed everything up and gone back to Vancouver to work some shitty 'barely scrape by' job. She represented the last of everything I've left behind in Vancouver, and like the final notes in a great symphony, it came to an end.

But that's not how I do it. I don't quit, I don't give up, and I don't run. Some people think my move to Grande Cache was a run, a way to bolt from life's problems. But I disagree. This is how I will progress. This is how I will grow, how I become stronger, and eventually live a fulfilling life.

I could have taken the lazy route. I could have had a crappy job in Vancouver. I could've stayed right where I was. But I'm not lazy. I feel the drive, the burn, the desire to progress and do something meaningful. I crave challenges and complex problems. I enjoy any opportunity to analyze a situation. And you can't very well analyze a situation behind the counter at Starbucks, now can you?