Bogged

Mette Bach field-trips through her Deltoid youth

Most people know Delta as the five exits off Highway 91, a suburb lacking intrigue halfway between Vancouver and the Peace Arch at the US border. It’s also known for the regional landfill, the one component that makes it a destination for garbage men from all over the Lower Mainland. The Lower Mainland’s sewage also travels through Delta before its final escape into the Fraser River. On humid summer days, this was unavoidable knowledge while I was growing up, but not exactly bragging material.

So can you blame me that, once I had escaped, I rarely admitted to being from Delta? Sure, Jodie Foster did come to town in 1988 to film the notorious and controversial gang-rape scene at a sketchy dive for The Accused—our town’s glorious turn on the big screen. But in my life, my connection to the place has been more of a dirty secret. So when disaster hit Burns Bog last fall, I found myself strangely unmoved.

I was staying in Squamish that September day, watching reporters and newscasters preaching TV doom to a backdrop of billowing smoke. My partner passed me a tissue as distraught residents and conservation scientists addressed this catastrophic emergency. Burns Bog, after all, is the largest raised peat expanse in an urban area, anywhere in the world. They called it the lung of the Lower Mainland. It was all quite disturbing on that level, but watching my old playground ensconced in flames, I stayed numb.

The next day I left the house to pick up fresh bread. A cloud of thick dark-grey smoke hung over Cleveland Street, Squamish’s main drag. Ash covered my car. I couldn’t believe it—Delta was 100 kilometres away. For the first time in my life I was from the place that everyone, including me, was talking about at the Sunflower Bakery that morning, but inside I felt hollow and phony.

*   *   *

It wasn’t until after I had moved away at age 17 that I understood how Burns Bog legitimately put Delta on the map. As I sat reading in my Burnaby basement bachelor suite—oh so cosmopolitan—the Globe and Mail kept me up on the Pacific National Exhibition’s scandalous attempts to relocate there. This was in 1999. By 2004, from the safe distance of my chic Cambie Street heritage apartment, I read that the feds had purchased four-fifths of the 10,000 natural acres of spongy, peat-covered land. Finally, this singular ecosystem, home to 200 species and richer in biodiversity than any other urban landscape, could breathe a sigh of relief, safe from development.

But this didn’t really sound like the bog I knew. It’s not that I was unfamiliar with it. Our local paper, The Leader, had certainly printed the news every time it was bought or sold. We heard about the mall developers wanting to turn it into a giant shopping sensation. We heard about the realtors wanting to create more commuter condos. We played there, snacking on salmonberries, and walked dogs there, throwing dead branches into the creek for retrieval. But to think of it as a nature preserve was a bit of a stretch; and to call it a regional “lung” seemed a bit dramatic.

After all, Mr. Burns, an ambitious tycoon (not unlike his cartoon doppelgänger on The Simpsons) for whom the bog is named, had purchased it to raise cattle. Reputedly disappointed by its uselessness—bogs are low in nutritive value—he kept it because of its low worth as real estate; it would have been more of a hassle to get rid of it. For his business to thrive, he was literally forced to move to greener pastures.

*   *   *

My parents are not cruel people. It’s not like they intended to inflict Delta on me—it just happened. Looking back, I think they suffered a Canadian mutation of the American dream. After the community’s brief stint as a cannery locale in the late 1800s, investors bought and sold the place for almost a century until the Kennedy family built North Delta’s first strip mall and community plaza in 1967. New homes nearby were marketed as an ideal suburb fit for family living. Sunny Delta, as it was dubbed, was more than just an investment—it was a lifestyle.

To my Danish parents, everything in Delta was big. The size of house they bought upon moving there in 1982 would have been unthinkable in Denmark. They had spent five years applying for immigration papers, and were ecstatic when my dad finally landed a job with a British company that had Vancouver offices. A couple of his colleagues had bought houses in Delta and, as per the Kennedy vision, it seemed like a good idea. Around the corner, at the mall, you could buy giant vats of mayonnaise at Extra Foods and queen-size pantyhose at K-Mart. These things were impossible to come by in Copenhagen, and therefore exotic.

A more mixed immigrant neighbourhood wouldn’t have suited my parents—they were firm believers in integration and cultural immersion. And so we strove to become a typical Delta family. On summer days we went to Kennedy Heights for ice cream at Big Scoop. For a dinner treat, we’d go to The Sea Shanty, a fish ‘n’ chips place in Nor-Del. In 1986, we celebrated the completion of the Alex Fraser Bridge by walking across it with the rest of the community. We put a bumper sticker on our Ford LTD that said “Take the Fraser over the Fraser.” My dad was thrilled. To him the bridge meant no more taking the bus almost four hours per day. To my mom, it meant we had to get a second car.

*   *   *

At first, I was scared of the bog. The playground kids said it could suck people in—kind of like Venus-flytrap plants, of which I was also afraid. I imagined making one false step and being doomed. My friend Surjinder said she had heard of a tractor getting stuck in its quicksand, and that the driver had escaped only by grabbing some nearby branches, lifting himself out by using the tree as a catapult. I would also have been afraid of the black bears that used to come up from the bog, but they had conveniently been ushered northwest during bridge construction.

The summer my parents divorced, my friends and I upstaged the family drama by finding a motorcycle in the bog. Egged on by adolescent bravado, we hit the jackpot when we saw its shiny handlebars hiding under some bright-green skunk-cabbage leaves. We were 14, and it was actually a moped, but we called it a motorbike and felt every bit as cool as Meatloaf while riding it. My friend’s dad fixed it up good, and we rode it along the old train tracks that glittered in the bog’s filtered sunlight. I can still taste the sweetness of the bog’s crabapples and our No Name-brand juices boxes.

But on the first day of school, the bog was no longer our place; overnight, it became unsafe for geeks and weirdos. Junior high was a new era, and the bog was the place to get drunk, have sex, do drugs and just hang out. Even for the barely to moderately cool, it was the only Friday- and Saturday-night destination. It became the place I heard about on Monday mornings as I eavesdropped. While I’d been home on Saturday nights watching The Golden Girls and curling my hair, so-and-so had made it to second base, or dropped acid, or stolen a bottle of vodka from the liquor cabinet and “got way hammered, man.”

Nevertheless, I was a Delta girl, and that was a tragic fate. White Rock girls lived in nice houses off the beach. Surrey girls had their notorious reputations—jokes were dedicated to them, a springboard from which to jump into whatever identity they might choose. But being from Delta meant living in a stratosphere of blandness, and I knew it. Counsellors, teachers and well-meaning adults insisted that I would one day look back upon those years as the best of my life. I called their propaganda, trying my best to convince them that they were delusional, living in a Beverly Hills 90210 world where cheerleaders and football were fun and inclusive activities.

By Grade 12, I was so obsessed with leaving that the daily reality of school seemed not just inconvenient, but downright offensive. I focused on saving money to leave. I sold wholesale meat over the phone, Grade A Alberta beef. My boss offered the incentive of six free steaks when we reached our quota. I hated the only guy in the office who achieved this, an ex-con trying to patch things up with his girlfriend—hated his work ethic and enthusiasm. I didn’t even meet the quota to earn minimum wage.

*   *   *

Looking back on it, my anger and frustration with the place was disproportionate. There was something to the nights my friends and I spent aimlessly wandering up and down the grid of streets and avenues. We’d walk from Scottsdale Mall to the Cheers pub down Scott Road all the way to 96th Avenue, and then we’d circle back, taking 116th instead. The loop would take all evening, but we had time. There was also the tangible satisfaction we took in peeing in all of the public parks, vacant lots and elementary schoolyards. We made it a goal to mark all public property. It took a year; we thought we were being symbolic.

I may not recall what I learned in biology, but I do remember the exact taste and feel of a chocolate-glazed donut at four a.m. at the Tim Horton’s on Scott Road. I remember the over-boiled coffee, what my stomach felt like after six cups of it, and the bitter people who worked the night shift, telling us to go to college. I remember the conversations we had about God, about living in the woods, about Zen, about agreeing with Nietzsche—everything. We had all night. It was just us depressed teenagers and tired police officers, trying to stay awake.

Now, since deliberately revisiting my old stomping grounds after the fire, it surprises me to feel sad about the disappearance of its culture. I wasn’t supposed to care about Starbucks moving in, about the Krispy Kreme and the drive-thru bank minutes away from where my mom still lives. Juxtaposed with the American conglomerates, the vacant, overgrown lots I grow up among were vaguely authentic. There was something quaint about our Delta Shoppers’ Mall, our Bosley’s Pet Centre and Sun’s corner grocery. I wasn’t supposed to care and now I do.

*   *   *

Recently, I tagged along on a tour of Burns Bog. Ida, a chic urbanite from Montreal, taught me about the plants I could have picked and survived on when I was a kid. She taught me that the weeds I used to pick for bouquets are called horsetail, that they contain silica, and that you can brush your teeth with the stems. It’s funny: I grew up so close to it. I played in it. I heard stories about it. I rode a moped through it. I walked aimlessly along its edges (technical term: the lag). But I never consciously learned about it.

Apparently this makes me no different from a new generation of Deltoid youth. The conservation society teaches thousands of students about the bog, but these are field-trippers coming by the busload from Vancouver, Richmond, New Westminster—even Langley and Chilliwack. I asked Ida about the Delta kids. What do they learn about the bog? Not much, unless they’re officially “troubled” and join the volunteer program. Mostly they just live there. They learn about the bog by living in Delta.

There is one ongoing problem—one too big for the single patrolling officer to handle.

He complains that he can’t get people to stop illegally dumping things like trucks and car parts. Once they start sinking into the deceptively mulchy brown ground, little can be done. On Ida’s tour, I saw the infamous tractor. It has been there since 1972, and even a helicopter can’t pull it out. Unlike what I grew up believing, it isn’t sinking into a pool of quicksand; it’s being enveloped in the bouncy yet solid ground. The nature of a bog is to preserve its layers. When future generations manage to excavate the tractor and other abandoned artifacts, they will find them in the same condition they were in when they went in. I wonder what will be made of our Dodge Chargers, shopping carts and condom wrappers.

As for the big fire, my gut reaction—or lack thereof—now makes sense. Of course the Vancouver media were all over the fire’s possible detrimental effects. City folks are trained to think in terms of lost acreage and fire damage. The truth is that we could all have been more apathetic. According to the bog’s conservation society, the fire merely burned off superfluous trees. The bog itself—the layers of sphagnum, peat and soil—are a ground phenomenon. Healthy bogs have unhealthy trees. If trees do well in a bog, it’s a sign of nutritive value at their roots. And nutritive value is just not what the bog is about.

Nevertheless, I was finding it offensive that the entrance to the bog is obscured near the southeast corner of a parking lot behind a big sports complex, Great Pacific Forum, a.k.a. Planet Ice. Rather than following the convoluted directions in the conservation society’s pamphlet, all you really need to look for from Highway 91 is the sport emporium’s huge electronic billboard. I thought it was pathetic: the city planners’ way of undermining the importance of this natural phenomenon. But clearly, I was wrong. I was only reacting to years spent wandering streets peckled with flickering TV light.

Now I get it. The bog is perfectly positioned. It doesn’t want local residents’ attention. It doesn’t want to be a destination point with a big welcoming sign. Like the guy coming home from a hard day’s work to his beloved living-room television, the bog just wants to be left alone. And what better location than Delta, where letting things alone is part of the culture. I spent my youth yearning for something special in either myself or my surroundings. I can’t help but think that, half a lifetime ago, this knowledge would have served me well.