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Title: Of Sicamous
Author: R. D. Cumming [
More Titles by Cumming]
The Okanagan Valley, in the Province of British Columbia, is bounded on the north by the mosquitoes at Sicamous, and on the south by the forty-ninth parallel of north latitude, which is the United States; and to one who is accustomed to the sand and the sage, the general aspect throughout gives a most pleasing rest to the eye. A trip to the Okanagan is like one sweet dream to the inhabitants of the dry belt--a dream that is broken only once by a dreadful nightmare--the mosquito conquest at Sicamous; but you forgive and forget this the moment after you awake. The mosquitoes at Sicamous are as great a menace to that town as the Germans are to Europe.
The train for the valley, when on time, leaves Sicamous, on the main line of the C.P.R., at about ten, good morning, but sometimes she waits for the delayed eastern train. This happens very frequently on Sundays--for who or what was ever on time on a Sunday? Sunday is the lazy man's day--the lazy day of the world--the day on which we creep along out of tune with things.
Now, when you get side-tracked at a C.P.R. station in the Rocky Mountains waiting for a delayed eastern train, you may as well throw all your plans into the lake, because they will be out of fashion when you have an opportunity to use them again, and you will require new ones--the train may come to-day and she may not come till to-morrow. But, if that station chances to be Sicamous, and it is Sunday--and it must be raining heavily, for when it is raining there are no mosquitoes--you will not regret the delay, and you will be very much interested if you have an eye for the unique, or if you have the slightest inclination to be eccentric you will be reminded that--
There are friends we never meet;
There is love we never know.
Here people--strangers and friends--meet and nod, smile, talk and depart ten or twelve times every day. You will wonder how people can talk so much, and what they get to talk about--people who meet accidentally here, only for a moment, and will never meet again, perhaps. Almost hourly, night and day, cosmopolitan little throngs jump from trains, chat a few moments among themselves, or with others who have been waiting, and then allow themselves to be picked up by the next train and rushed off into eternity--that is, so far as you are concerned, for you will never see them again--and some of them were becoming so familiar. They are voices and faces flitting across your past; they are always new, always strange, always interesting; they are laughing, chatting, smiling, scowling, worrying. There are fair faces and dark faces, pleasant faces and angry faces, careless faces and anxious faces, and faces that are thin, fat, long and short. The voices are as varied as the faces. There is the sharp, clear voice and the dull voice, the angry one and the pleasant one. There are young and old, beautiful and ugly, scowls and smiles, the timid and the fearless--the black, the white, and the yellow; and there are faces that look so much like ones you know at home that you are just on the point of asking them how the boys and girls have been since you left. If they had known that they were the actors on a stage, and you were the audience, conditions might have been improved--artificially; they might have acted better, with more "class," but the interest would have been injured; you would have been robbed of a genuine entertainment. Those people went north, south, east and west; they went to the four corners of the earth. The sound of their voices and laughs go up into the tree-tops, up into the hills and down into the lake, and they are echoed back to us; and that is the only record that is ever taken, of this interesting drama; and then the voices fade away east--fade away west.
But you hear the elaborate puffing and snorting of a locomotive as though laboring under its great load of humanity; there is a loud whistle from somewhere, and then another; two engines are speaking to each other; then the bell rings, the engine sweeps by, and the whole earth trembles--it is the delayed eastern train. There is a great scramble for entrance. Chance acquaintances are forgotten in the individual excitement. The steps to one car are blocked by one man who has enough baggage for ten, and one worried-looking young lady with a baby is afraid she will lose her train. The train pulls out with a "swish, swish" of escaping steam under great pressure from the engine, and the station is robbed of half its population. The familiar faces have disappeared, but a new throng has been cast into your midst--new faces, new smiles, new voices, new scowls; and the chatter is renewed with vigor when we have found ourselves, and are located in several little isolated bunches. But the Okanagan local is here waiting for our scalps. There is another scramble of men, women, children, bag and baggage, for seats, and we are off. The little station platform is deserted and silent but for the clatter of the wheels of the baggage truck. The tree tops sigh, the lake murmurs, but they cannot hold us, we must hurry to the great beyond--the whole world depends upon our individual movements.
[The end]
R. D. Cumming's short story: Of Sicamous
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