“Well, I’m a reporter just new in town. Looking for work.”
So begins Roy Breen’s introduction to life in a small village in the West Kootenays, to the love of his life, to witnessing inspired community resistance to centralized decision-making and, fortuitously for them all, his new employer. While covering stories of all descriptions for the Mountain Echo, Roy Breen recovers from a hectic fifteen years as a Vancouver reporter. He’d paid his journalistic dues there only to be shunted away from a City Hall beat promotion by a lesser-paid cub reporter, no thanks to a change in ownership in the leaner, meaner millennium. Fed-up with this corporate treatment, Breen quits and heads to the British Columbia Interior where he was born and raised.
He and his cat spend some quality camping time roaming through four of B.C.’s six mountain chains before ending up in an old silver-mining village beside a glacier-fed lake, remarkably resembling New Denver merged with Silverton. The lyrical valley and village descriptions will make many readers want to quit their own stuffy, city-trapped jobs and move there themselves.
The Mountain Echo, moreover, still pays its writers and actually employs a proofreader and fact checker, which along with reference librarians, have been dismissed by metro dailies in Vancouver and elsewhere. But then the odds of running into the main antagonists at the previous evening’s meeting en route to the village Post Office is much higher in El Dorado as well and the new reporter in town has to tread carefully and tactfully.
The first major issue is the shocking announcement that the El Dorado Hospital will be shut down within weeks. Vans arrive, in a startling display of efficiency from the centralized health authority, to remove vital X-ray equipment. But the villagers are resourceful veterans of blockade lines and have organized a telephone tree which loops around the communities dependent on the emergency ward, the doctors, the extended care wing for bedridden elders and volunteers arrive by the dozens and stay there round the clock.
We are introduced to the many and varied forms of peaceful resistance from individual hunger strikes to protest “crawls”, yes, not walks but crawls which are more commonplace in religious approaches by supplicants near cathedrals in South America, on their knees as they cross stony plazas. We go behind the scenes to understand how difficult it is for a level-headed co-ordinator to deal with highly individualistic types who threaten violence and sabotage and would thereby threaten the credibility of the entire protest. We also understand more about the conflict and ethical considerations of our reporter-narrator who has always tilted to the side of the underdogs and been reprimanded for it in the big city daily. But here he puts a writerly foot wrong once and is hollered at most profanely by the normally level-headed organizer herself, a statuesque beauty who is a natural leader in the community. We also get to meet the public relations bureaucrat from the regional health authority who must deliver the bad news about the hospital closure and he, as you might suspect, gets his comeuppance soon enough.
Throughout it all, Sean Arthur Joyce uses a light, deft touch for topics that could be heavily righteous slogging. His characters are completely 3-D and his dialogue is a delight to ‘hear’ as it is so realistic in its rhythms, which sets each distinct character apart from the next, no easy feat. The humour is gentle and tolerant and reminds us that when we live in a small community, the most sound advice would be: Let your words be gentle in case they come back to bite you. For a journalist, this means striving for fairness, depth and objectivity and not ‘piling on’ the blame in this era of rushing to often-violent judgement, propelled by self-serving, vindictive and ultimately irresponsible tweets.
The love story which unfolds is also a delight and we readers cheer on the middle-aged lonely hearts who are instantly attracted and find each other to be excellent company in the midst of the strife afflicting the villagers. The cafes in El Dorado serve great coffee, even if the wait-staff tend to editorialize the hapless new reporter’s latest efforts, and the mountain water is sublimely pure, the basis for all great coffee, lest we forget. Pack your bags and head for the West Kootenay mountains, especially the Valhalla Range, a copy of the big-hearted Mountain Blues nearby, best read aloud by kindred spirits en route, especially those in need of that special blend of glorious wilderness and resolutely alive, no-nonsense, ‘stand up to protect it or lose it forever’, community that beckons within its pages.
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