Tag Archives: Cascade Mountains

Missing the world of his father’s paintings

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“There was a movie, in Bengali, with that name – Storm Warning” Neil mused.
“Really ? What did it say about the climate? Was it in English?”
They were sitting on a large boulder by the side of a small river fighting its way through an iced up landscape, early in the afternoon on the Easter Friday, in among the Cascade mountains. They had a few hundred kilometers still to go to reach their destination for the night – in the town of Golden.
They had been discussing climate change, and what might be in store for the planet, for the continent, for Canada and for British Columbia, a very loaded subject. They did not have depth of comprehension – but both knew things were reaching a crisis point, and information was not easy to get because the authorities seem to be either in denial, or unwilling to alarm the public. They were not calling a spade a spade.

Neil picked up a pebble and tossed it down the slope to the edge of the water. He wondered about the high concentration of sharp stone fragments below them. These were not pebbles that were pushed a long distance by a fast flowing river, helping to grind and polish them into smooth spheroids. He briefly wondered if these were crushed from the nearby peaks through past seismic tremors, or broken from the rocks by an ancient glacier and left at the current location. They were not exactly at the foothill of a sliding slope, so they did not get here from a recent rock fall or an avalanche.
He sometimes wished he was a geologist, or at least knew a bit more about geology.
His thoughts returned to Mabel’s question.
He had been talking about tell tale signs of impending trouble, and used the term Storm warning to drive a point. It was then that he remembered the Bengali movie. It wasn’t about Climate change. It was a different time, and the warning was of something else equally menacing for the people of Bengal – an impending famine that would kill millions, in the middle of the second world war. It was now acknowledged that the famine was man made, and not by natural calamity. The world war had something to do with it. The British Empire’s handling of the situation which perhaps indicated less regard for life of Indians than lives of the British, also were likely factors.

Anyhow, the name of the movie – by Satyajit Ray, came to him.
“It was not about climate change, but about an impending famine. It was in Bengali, and the name of the film in Bengali was Asani Sanket, which means storm warning. Somehow, the situation now reminded me of that movie. Villagers at the front line of the worsening situation did not have a good grasp of what was happening and why, since there was no draught and drastic drop of food grain production. Things appeared to go on as it always had. But there were tell tale signs, some folks were beginning to starve for no good reason. News was difficult to come by. Folks did not know things were slowly reaching a crisis point, till the crisis actually hit them in the face.”
Mabel was listening, tilting her head as if cocking an ear in a typical way that only she could do. She was also poking at a bit of snow tucked at the corner of a boulder near her feet.
“I’d like to see that movie, if you will explain the scenes to me. And also explain why and how the famine came by.”
“Hmmm… I have to see if its available on line, or if I can get a DVD” Neil nodded.
“Situation with the coming Climate Uncertainty is not too different. We are living in the information age – with the world wired up and news traveling around at the speed of light. And yet, the silence about the impending storm is mind boggling.”
“And you like Mukherjee and Dyer.” Mabel observed.
Neil chuckled. He had told her about another book, by Madhusree Mukherjee, on Churchill’s actions, or lack of it, with regard to the ill-famed Bengal famine of 1943. And Gwynne Dyer had written a book that he had in the eBook format, and often referred to, called Climate Wars. Dyer’s book was written more like a science fiction, written based on a future date. It did not predict what might happen in the future. Rather, the book pretends that it is already in the future, and is talking about historical things that has happened in the past. But the past involves the future for the current Calendar.
“You gotta read Dyer. He predicts what happens to Canada, but more importantly, what happens to the US-Mexico border and what happens to Mexico, when the world runs short of food and more or less stops selling excess grain in the world market. Mexico descends into anarchy and its population shrinks by thirty or forty million people.”
“My God !”
“Well, you should read it. It is not designed as a science fiction, but a very likely scenario with a lot of supporting comments and explanations. Things do not end up well for a whole lot of countries – and not just Mexico.”
Mabel signed. “What is one to do?”
Neil stretched his legs. “Singularly, there may be nothing one can do. Collectively, surely there are things one can do. But I have a feeling even the strongest of the Climate Change believers and sustainable living proponents are not coming clean and not calling a spade a spade. And that, for me, is a bit frustrating. However, I can understand some of the reasoning. One can compare the public with lemmings on one side, or the flightless cormorants of the Galapagos, on the other.”
It occurred to Mabel that Neil probably had a vivid imagination.
“Lemmings ?”

Neil was watching the reflection of the white patches of cloud on calm waters of the river below them.
“You know what they say. True or not, they explode in population till they are so many that they have eaten through the food source and there is nothing left to eat, and the land cannot sustain such large numbers. A big chunk of them must die in one shot. Story goes that they go shoulder to shoulder and jump in the ocean to drown and die. Some folks say this is not correct, and that lemmings are not stupid. They do not commit mass suicide, but are forced to die in large numbers when their super fast reproduction system goes out of control and the populations shoots well past the sustainability level for a lean year. Anyhow, I have never seen a lemming in the wild, suicidal or otherwise.”
Mabel tossed another pebble towards the water, but it landed short, in the snow. Her folks were not too religious. She had a girlfriend whose mom was a liberal activist and passionate about individual rights and human rights, anti-war, feminism, open borders and so on. But Mabel could not remember her talking about any impending doom with relation to climate or human population, or about the constant degradation of the environment, a move from a sustainable plane to an unsustainable one.
“I do not have relatives or friends that talk or think the way you do, about the declining quality of our environment to the extent that it is an existential threat to all higher order animals.”
———-
At this point, Tonu stopped and looked up at the cream painted ceiling of his study. It was quarter to six in the morning of Saturday, a week after his trip to the mountains. It was going to be a sunny day, and he was planning to check out the Squamish estuary area in the morning. It would be a hundred kilometer northward drive along the sea-to-sky highway. The ocean, a tiny finger of the pacific, pokes into the land with towering mountains on both sides. The Squamish river meets the ocean at that point, creating a narrow strip of sea level estuary, rich with its own eco-system and wild life.
Meanwhile, he had woken up at his usual early hour and contemplated writing a few more pages. There was no important emails waiting for him, and the earth had spun a few more degrees without further incidence other than the general degradation of things.
He wondered if Neil, his creation, should be influenced by the paintings of his, Tonu’s, father. Tonu remembered the sketches and paintings his father worked on, mostly following the general theme of simple rural life and landscape that were captured on board. He was a student of Nandalal Bose, the esteemed Indian artist of the first half of last century, who himself was a student of Abanindranath Tagore and was influenced by Rabindranath Tagore during his days in Santiniketan. Depiction of rural landscape and rural lifestyle had priority in their view. He, Tonu, thought of this movement as a theme that had two objectives. One was a recognition that rural background was where India was culturally, aesthetically, artistically, economically and spiritually anchored and rooted. Therefore this back to the village artistic movement was not a backward motion against modernism, but a realization that modernism in India had missed the sustainability bus.
The second part of the movement was to create an appreciation in the collective psyche of the Bengali and Indian middle class, of the timelessness and beauty of things simple and rural. India was fast creating an additional layer of a caste system, between the city dwellers and the villagers. This psychological as well as economic and cultural division, over and above all the other divisions that man had created for himself in the Indian subcontinent, was a further humanitarian blow to the evolving social order in India. Rabindranath Tagore, the poet with a vision, realized that this needed to be eradicated. That vision showed up everywhere, including in the art created in his time and in the immediate aftermath of his demise.
Modernism, however, was going to come to India, and it would ultimately muddy the water about rural and urban divide as well as take the focus away from the village so much, that future artists would be, Tonu felt, hanging in suspended animation, attempting to give their art a somewhat “ethnic” Indian flavor, while same time pandering to the western world for recognition, and take advantage of the recent western accommodation for appreciation of non-western art forms.
The whole thing, Tonu felt, was bizarre. Art was supposed to imitate life. But life itself had gotten so artificial, that this falseness was bound to be reflected in art, especially of the second and third generation of artists that come out of the same school as founded by Tagore and now spread across the globe. And those that still remained anchored to the original theme of rural India, faded in the backwaters in the world of Indian art. Artists that cannot draw a tail on a donkey, but can make false copies of western cubism or impressionism, where the hot topics in the drawing rooms of the new rich. Industrialists that have come into money, and feel the urge to promote art – define art in their own myopic view of India and the world, and the rest, Tonu felt sadly, is history.
However, this sad story too needed to be told, in his own tiny way, as the world, including India, were busy recklessly following a false modernism and sliding down the ever steepening slope of an existential crisis with regard to squeezing the planetary lemon dry.
He was hesitant about jotting down his feelings openly, as he personally knew a lot of people that came out of the art school. Besides, he was no expert in art. In fact, he was no expert on anything. And yet, he was tired of pseudo artists and pseudo writers and false intellectuals, unscrupulous industrialists and phony political ideologues who unnecessarily muddy up any issue till there is no clear perspective left on any topic. He was also tired, in a way, at the hapless public dancing at the end of the trivia string.
But his comments were not directed towards people he knew. It was at the general direction where mankind of taking itself and the rest of existence as humans could perceive it. To him, these are connected. He could relate to the changing scene in Canada, to that in India, or USA or Africa. And most of it was man made. Most of it was unsustainable. Most of it was a direct result of man’s increasing level of interference with the planet’s health.
One of the earliest visionaries to have realized the imbalance, at least partially, was perhaps Rabindranath himself. He saw it as a grotesque takeover of india’s cultural, spiritual and aesthetic steering wheel by a newly emerging urban class that lacked a depth of perception, or willingness to investigate long term effects of their presumed lifestyle goals, and a blind intoxication with a western definition of development that was itself bankrupt as a perpetual formula.
Tagore instinctively understood that the urban class may turn out to be the agent of destruction for India, unless it could be made to appreciate the need for a healthy balance between the rural and the urban. The western societies understood it. But a modernizing India did not. Tagore spoke about it and wrote about it. But it is doubtful if his countless admirers and hangers on actually understood the cause of the poet’s anxiety.
Tonu’s father used pastel and earth colors on boards more than water or oil color on canvas. Tonu had spend hours with his father, grinding hollow rocks on a grinding stone, extracting earth colors, which would be solved in water and kept in glass jars, to be used on future paintings on boards as well as in murals on walls. Collecting earth colors from the earth was a big adventure for him in his youth, and likely played a big role in his love for undisturbed nature and how it trumped man-made alterations of the landscape.
The thought of his father’s sketches and paintings were not a random intrusion into the flow of the story where Neil and Mabel were traveling into the Cascade mountains of British Columbia. There was a connection here.
His father drew and sketched scenes that, in Tonu’s own life, had slowly vanished from those very spots where his dad had observed them. Those open lands had now been concretized,  asphalted, civilized, crammed with people, turned into a filthy near slum urban sprawl.
This, to him, indicated two things that were inter-related and going on, generation to generation, perhaps all over the world. One of them was the destructiveness of an over-producing, over-consuming, over-altering, over-mechanizing civilization. The other was an ever greater expansion of the human population.
So, on one side, each human in progressive generations was demanding a greater and greater footprint for himself on this planet. Then, on top of it, people have brought more people and even more people, on the planet, each striving his best to increase his own size of footprint. This was another kind of an out of control snowball – a positive feedback loop gone wild. This was, in Tonu’s mind, not too different from what is happening in Europe, in the Americas, or even in the Antarctica. The difference should not be measured between regions. Rather, the change is within. Greenland might appear remote and cold compared to Singapore. But Greenland is less remote, less cold and less pristine, than Greenland was a century ago.
And so, Tonu decided to include his own fathers painting into the story, but pretending that to be Neil’s recollection of his own father. Tonu had, in that way, converted his own dad from a real to a fictional personality. One that was, just like the scenes he painted of, slowing fading from the planet.
————
Neil nodded. “Its not that I have a lot of relatives that scream about the changing world in any realistic way. My grandmother used to talk about times when things were very cheap and how everything costs so much more these days. My cousins might talk about how it was easier and more relaxing to be in school and college in our times and how things have gotten so stressful in India for a student. The pressure to perform is so great, the stakes are so high, that sometimes a student is pushed into committing suicide because she or she scored 95 out of a hundred instead of 99.”
He thought for a while, constructing the views and images swirling around in his head.
Mabel took a sip of coffee from the cover of the flask, which also served as a cup. Neil took the cup and took a sip himself. They had gotten to the point of sharing their coffee. He liked it with milk and sugar. She liked it without. They had met halfway – with a dash of milk that barely turned the color lighter, and a spoon of sugar for the entire flask of coffee. Life was a compromise. Neil was getting used to it. So was Mabel.
“But no one”, Neil continued, “actually spoke about the inexorable push of human civilization that engulfs the planet as we know it. But, generation by generation, the change is happening, I feel somewhat certain. Take life ten generation ago. I cannot name folks ten generations back in my line, but I can guess how things were, a couple of centuries ago, just as the British, for example, and the French and the Dutch, were increasing their trading with eastern India, and how the repressive society of religious orthodoxy, social taboo and enlightenment were slowly permeating through the village life. I can imagine how a high caste Hindu or a Muslim would have multiple wives and how poverty drove people to do things he would not otherwise do. How a woman had to adjust to the lifestyle dominated by men at all levels. How surviving from day to day involved not only eating enough and not getting sick with cholera or typhoid, but also not getting bitten by a cobra or taken by a crocodile in the water or attacked by a tiger in the field.”
He paused for a moment, looking at Mabel. She watched him, wide eyed. “And then, I can guess how, even in their times, things would change, generation upon generation. How jungles will be cleared, wood would be sold, tigers would retreat further away. Extra housing and population would bring safety on one side and more sickness and infection on another. Life would be changing, generation by generation, even in their times. And if one was to look at it from afar, it would have been possible for them to use those changes they saw in a small scale, to project on the planet and on mankind, on a larger scale for future. Those that did contemplate these issues, and made predictions, right or wrong, where considered either mystics, or God men, or pundits, or mad men. But, change was happening then, and it is happening now. MY own dad made paintings and sketches of rural Bengal not five miles from his home. Today, that scene is no more there. It has retreated, just like the tigers of a few centuries back. Things are constantly retreating into the background, and getting smaller in the distance, till they become a point on the horizon. Finally a day comes when it is no more there. It has retreated into extinction. And this change is not for the better.”

Mabel had seen a handful of Neil’s dad’s paintings that Neil had mounted on his wall.
She thought of telling him how she loved those paintings. But somehow, that seemed not an appropriate thing to say. The scenes he drew were gone now, according to Neil.
“Some day, you have to take me to Bengal and show me where you grew up, and where your dad made those paintings.”

A vanishing world

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They were the only travelers on the mountain road, as far as he could see ahead or behind. The road climbed, turned, and snaked in between towering hills, and then sloped down and would at times upon up to valleys and lakes. The sky remained partially clear and bright. Temperature continued to drop. Snow piled up on the side of roads as well as on the hills. The mountain peaks were white.

He thought about writing, about his travels, about the mountains, the lakes, the birds. He could write about Mabel. He didn’t know if his writing was any good. He thought about what and how, he might write.
Someone had made an interesting comment, on a social network that he visited at times, about writers. It stated that the writer needs to feel disappointed. He needs to experience a deeply unsatisfactory situation where he found no recourse at hand.
Only then, may he create good literature.
He had read similar comments elsewhere too. It was a somewhat known idea – that human suffering is the main source of creative zeal.
He did not feel that certain. Perhaps frustration can create a mental state that helps write certain kind of literature. He had also heard the same thing about painters. IT was perhaps a convenient way to explain why and how so many painters and writers were poor and hungry in their own lifetime, but end us getting famous posthumously.
He doubted, however, that this kind of depression was mandatory for all creative artists of all kinds.
He did not know enough about his brain. He doubted anybody else knew either. But the human brain was behind most things a human does, including creating something silly, or beautiful. In fact, even the definition of what should be silly and what beautiful can be argued. In fact, they are often argued. There are many that consider the cubism of Picasso, as silly rather than outstanding. Out of politeness, they would not say so to others.
Sometimes, a handful of folks would try to create a heightened appreciation of certain kind of creative art, not necessarily driven by altruistic motives, but to create a ‘fad’ or a fashion. The motive is to see high demand for that kind of products, so that the promoter can make money by selling those stuff at a high cost.
He did not consider himself to be a famous art critic, or one that claimed to know too much. But he would not pay his own good money, to acquire a Picasso – even a reprint, to be hanged on his walls.
On the other hand, he was biased towards liking the kind of painting his father did in his formative years, often using subdued earth tones, recording simple rural scenes of the arid country of Birbhum district of Bengal. Those scenes spoke to him not just of art – but of a vanishing world that might not return again. Physically, those scenes were fading away, as progress and modernization turned the landscape. That landscape was etched in his mind, as a dirt road lead them towards distant quiet small agricultural plots lined by date and palm trees, and mud-walled thatched roof village dwelling surrounded by heavier leafy trees like Mango, Bombax ceiba, Breadfruit, Rose apple and the like.

He remembered walking through the low land on the dirt road packed with hard soil and lined with the gravels stones, where he could see the distant villages, while on both sides there were first the landscape of soil eroded by running water, exposing semi arid fallow lands that the locals called “Khoai”, with its signature red earth and small irregular shaped red gravel stones covering a hard undulating soil surface. There would be palm trees here and there, and an occasional man made pond with high earth embankments on all four sides, the embankments themselves augmented by a line of palm trees.
Palm trees lining the high banks of a pond was a common feature of the land.
But today, the road was of asphalt, and the sides had a continuous stream of brick and mortar shops and houses. The area had turned into a small crowded suburb full of noise, filth and trash. The air stank of fumes from the exhaust of countless two wheelers and small trucks and cars that continuously moved about, each trying to out-honk the other in an effort to terrorize foot walkers off the road.
He did not wish to go that rout any more. He did not care about that kind of development.
However, he still doubted that one needs to see such degradation of pristine beauty before one can be coaxed to create good art or writing. His father saw the original beauty in his early years and did create what he considered one of the best arts that he liked. He was fortunate enough to have many of them hang off his walls.
A generation down the line, he himself had witnessed the degrading transformation of that landscape. But he was not creating any art out of it. That was not wholly because he could not create art. He refused to believe conventional wisdom, that art is to be evaluated by third party experts before it can influence him. He was not part of the positive feedback generation and did not intend to tread on the positive feedback loop. He had already mentioned in earlier in his musings.
Looking around, he found a similarity, however much different they might seem to a casual observer, between the khoai that his father had painted in his youth, and the high slops of the Cascade mountains around him in the middle of British Columbia. Both were, to him pristine. He knew this was relative. Man had altered the land of his fathers youth a long time ago, but particularly after the place began to grow with an eradication of dacoits and a rise of settlements.
He knew that the landscape around him once had the last generation of virgin forests, with conifers so large that their trunk were as thick as two tall men lying head to toe could not cover. Trees that could have been a thousand year old, even two thousand. All that, and the kind of biodiversity that kind of a forest supported, was gone forever. In its place, were trees that were tiny, and barely fifty to eighty year old. Slow growing, these new trees where called the second, and third generation forests, continuously felled to feed human need for lumber.
He was aware of it and conscious of it. And yet, it was still better than the landscape converted into a manicured golf course fenced off to prevent wild animals, or not so wild humans, from encroaching.
He did not like man made clearings where townships are planned to come up. Even if they are planned and designed better than the way they came up back in Birbhum district in Bengal, they would still be an eyesore to him. A manicured and pedicured one, sure, but none the less an eyesore. Nothing man could conceivably create, could equal what nature did, naturally. That is how he saw it.
He came to realize that he himself belonged to the tribe that was the principal agent of destruction of nature.
That could be a source of major depression.
He thought about it, but did not feel depressed per se. Sad, yes, but perhaps resigned to the fact that evolution could work that way, enhancing a winning trait in a species to an extreme when the trait represented too much of a good thing, and began to have a snowballing effect of a destructive positive feedback loop. Things go out of control and out of hand in a big way, resulting in a crash.
In the past, such events might have caused mega – extinctions. The reason might or might not have been the works of a single species of animal, or even multiple groups of living creatures. It could have been triggered by external unanticipated events.
But one way or another, change in circumstances have happened that the highly specialized creatures were no longer able to deal with. Thus, whole swaths of creatures die out in sudden mass extinctions, leaving the field open for the survivors to occupy and expand, carrying a different set of traits.

He thought he might write about these feelings, along with the views he was enjoying, of the drive through the Cascade mountains and its third generation conifer forests.
“where are we ?” Mabel opened her eyes and asked, as he swerved the car to avoid a dark patch on the asphalt.

“Thats the Coldwater river on our right. We are going down to the Nicola Valley and the town of Merritt.” He said and reached out to caress her cheek.

Through the Cascade Mountains

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“I love the Cascades.” Neil observed.
They were by now a hundred kilometers from home, with another six hundred to cross before they would stop for the day. They were leaving the flood plains and slowly moving into the foothills of the Rockies. The great Fraser rive was turning from a meandering river of the plains of British Columbia, to a narrower, faster and fiercer stream of the slopes. The valley that was once cut by glaciers and now landscaped further by a hundred thousand years of work by the river, had extensive farmlands to the west. But as they moved further east and north, habitation stated thinning, and agricultural farm lands of the lower valleys started giving way to farmlands raising livestock and grass. Once they passed through the initial cascade mountains.
The Fraser rive essentially separated the Cascade Mountains from the Coast mountains of British Columbia. But they were moving east. Soon they would leave Trans Canada highway and turn north into the hills towards the Coquihalla mountain.
Mabel had been driving for the past half hour. Neil sat in the passenger seat and munched some snacks, and enjoyed a mug of coffee, while tinkering with his cameras and clicking off shots of the surrounding scenery, generally enjoying himself.

“Tell me about the Cascades, Mr. Dusty” She said, half in jest, while extending her right arm to him, palm upward, for a few potato chips.
Neil passed her some chips and considered her request.
“I am no geologist, but, from what I know, this range of mountains starts from California and moves north all the way to british Columbia, and always just inland of the pacific shore – the Cascade mountain range. The origin of this mountain range is more or less the same tectonic forces that caused the great earth quake of San Francisco a century ago and which causes similar events in British Columbia too, every few centuries.”
“Explain, please”

Neil scratched his head, and took another sip of coffee. The highway was no more arrow straight, and would constantly swerve this way or that, and slope upward or downward. The nature of the hills too were changing. The vegetation were going to get more intense on the western slopes than the eastern. Being so close to the Pacific ocean, and because of the natural westerly winds, these mountains got as much precipitation, perhaps, as the Himalayas got from the Indian ocean. And the high latitude of the place, combined with the altitude, resulted in a lot of the rain actually falling as snow. Some of the snowiest parts of the world belonged to the western slopes and peaks of the Canadian Cascade mountains.
He tried to think of talking about some of it to Mabel, without sounding stupid. Mabel had grown up here, and Neil himself was only a resident for a few years, and he was no geologist.
Mabel slowed down, following the road sign, and negotiated a downhill sloping sharp turn. She was a stickler of proper driving and following speed limits. She was, therefore, perhaps a better driver than Neil, though less adventurous than him. She glanced sideways at him.
“Well” She asked, arching an eyebrow.
“There is a thin and long ocean plate just to the west of the shore line, going from California and up along the western shore of Vancouver island of British Columbia. That plate is moving east relative to North America, and is essentially colliding with the American and Canadian shore line. That tectonic movement is the cause of a lot of seismic activity all along the west coast of USA and Canada.”
Neil said it, and sipped some coffee. The statement appeared disjointed and did not explain what was its link with the Cascade mountains.

Mabel listened, but did not say anything. She concentrated on the next turn on the hills. The sun was bright and the puffs of cloud only created relief to the otherwise a gorgeous blue sky. The conifer trees lining the road side slopes created the dark contrast to the lighter warm hues of the soil. There were very few cars on the road. Most of the people were heading south into USA for the vacations, according to the radio.
Neil was observing the scenery through his viewfinder, and clicking shots time to time. He continued to do so, one eye shut and the other lined up with the view finder of his camera, holding it up with one hand and supporting the heavy lens with the other. He continued to talk, while snapping off a few shots of the road ahead, with the hills and the sky and the clouds, and the beginning of the snow along the western slopes.

“This collision – click – is the result of not only earth quakes, but also a lot of volcanic activity, – click click – and the rise of a series of volcanic mounts. In Canada, these mountain range is called the Cascade mountains.” Click.
He lowered the camera on his lap, and started fidgetign with it again. They were moving at around a hundred kilometers and hour. The road was not super smooth, and the vehicle suspension was firm and not soft. A certain amount of vibration worked its way through the vehicle and through the cushions of the seat only his body and the camera. He was conscious of holding the camera away from his body and let his arms soften the effect of the swaying and the vibration, to get clear shots using high telephoto focal lengths. But, just to be safe, he set the ISO rather hight and subsequent shutter speed to two thousandth of a second, while also keeping the aperture smaller than f11, ensuring an acceptable depth of field. He lifted the camera again, and tried to look through the viewfinder at the surrounding mountain scape.
“So why are the volcanoes not on the beaches or in the shallow seas? Why have them hundreds of kilometers inland from the shore , if the collision is at the edge of the continent with an ocean plate?”
Neil lowered his camera and looked at Mabel. That question was quite sharp. He felt impressed, and also suspicious that she might actually know more of the Cascades than he did, and might be playing with him.
“What ?” Mabel sensed him looking keenly at her.
“Well, that was a rather clever question, and I wondered if you did not already know all the answers, and were merely egging me on for fun.”
“No no… I cannot remember anyone actually speaking about it the way you do. I love to hear it. I don’t know why the mountains are so inland.”
Neil nodded, satisfied. “You are quite clever and a thinking person. Pretty smart.” He observed. “There is a subduction, at the coast line” he said, lifting the camera to his eye again.
“Subduction ?” Mabel asked.
“Subduction” Neil confirmed. Click.
“What is subduction?”
“ONe of the plates is subducting, or sinking under the second plate as they collide. And it is the oceanic plate that is going under the continental plate. As a result, the submerged plate, going at an angle into the earth towards the hot mantle. Hence, by the time it gets too hot and begins to create volcanoes, the tip of the downward slanting plate has already travelled some distance inland, albeit under the Continental crust. And thus, the volcanoes happen inland. That is what I think. Actually, I read up on it and saw a diagram somewhere.”
They emerged from between two hills and the road turned sharply to the right, with a view opening up on the left. The surface of the road was dusted with powdery snow and black ice. A sudden spate of snowfall greeted them as they emerged in the open. Before them to the right, was the Coquihalla Lakes, and its surface was still frozen, but beginning to thaw out.

There was a designated view point at the side ahead of them and a place to park the car off road. Mabel stopped over at the view point and opened the door to step out and stretch her legs. They had agreed that he would do the bulk of the driving from this point, as the road gets more icy.
Neil stepped out too, and carried his long lens camera on to the edge of the viewpoint, looking down at the frozen waters of the lake below. There were animal tracks on the snow, along with tracks of people on skates. The edge of the snow were melting, exposing clear water that reflected the evergreen conifers of the slopes.
The air was chilly. Neil went back to the car and pulled on his wind breaker, returning back to the edge.
Mabel used her video camera to take a clip of the scene and concentrated on the snow covered hillside before them.
“So, can you name some of the famous volcanoes of the Cascade range? Or are they all dead.” She asked.
She had not taken her eye off the view finder of her video camera as she asked the question. Neil suspected that she was perhaps wanting to catch his voice and his comment on the movie. He considered the question and decided on a safe answer.
“There is a famous volcano in California, but its name eludes me right now. There are a few more volcanic mounts in California. Then, on to Oregon, there are three or four volcanic mounts of the same range – Three Sisters and the Hood being two of them. Then, moving further north to Washington state, you have the famous St. Helens, Rainier and Baker. Many of them are active in the US. Many have spewed within the last two hundred years. Some have done so multiple times in that period. St. Helens is a good example. However, the Cascade mountains in Canada are not live Volcano any more” He completed.
“Wow. And any names from Canada ?”
“All of them are from Canada.” Neil took a few shots of the scene and got back in the car. They still had a long way to go today. He started adjusting the seat, the side mirrors and the rearview.
Mabel followed him back into the car, this time taking the passengers seat. “What do you mean, all from Canada? Those mountains are all in the US.”
Neil eased the car back on the highway.
“Yes, but they are all named by a Canadian, and named after mostly British Explorers that worked on Canada. For one thing, these names were, I think, given by none other than George Vancouver, the British Navigator, who charted the Puget Sound area. The city of Vancouver as well as the island next to it is named after him. He also used other british luminaries to name Baker, Reinier, St. Helens, Hood and perhaps more.”
“Wow”.
“Yes. And then there were the Lewis and Clark expedition of the early 1800s through the Columbia river, to be followed by David Thompson and then Simon Fraser. All of them except Lewis and Clark are connected to Canada and British Columbia, methinks. Lewis and Clark, I think, were sponsored by the then president of the US, Thomas Jefferson.”
They drove on for a while, soaking in the country. They were heading almost direct north through mountain passes, the semi frozen Clearwater river running alongside but flowing in the opposite direction of their travel. Merritt and Kamloops lay ahead of them. The interior of the car began to get colder as the temperature of the outside air dropped.
Mabel switched on the climate control and waited till warmer air started filtering into the vehicle.
Neil settled down in his seat and changed the display on his GPS so it would indicate their elevation instead of direction of travel. They were eleven hundred meters above sea, and climbing. Temperature outside was minus three according to the display on his dashboard.
“The area really opened up during the Klondike gold rush years. Canadian Pacific Railway managed to connect the west coast with the rest of Canada through the Coquihalla river pass after facing a lot of difficulty in making a workable rail line through high mountain country. Logging became a very big industry, with huge virgin forest trees being felled and carted to serve the industrializing world. The rest is history. But the Cascade mountains were part of it all the way.”
Mabel put her hand on his leg and reclined back, pulling the peak of her baseball cap down on her eyes, and reclined in her seat.
Neil settled down for a stretch of driving when Mabel might take a shut eye. He kept his lighter camera on his lap, picking it up time to time single handed to squeeze off a shot. There was powder snow dust on the road and patches of black ice. He kept the vehicle on four wheel drive mode and was careful not to take sudden turns.
“Where do you want to stop for lunch?” Mabel asked.

Neil glanced across at her. She was not sleeping, but watching the scene quietly. The steep hills were typical of the cascades. The shaded slopes that were dusted with snow appeared faintly bluish. Small strands of trees gave the hills a hairy look. In the crevasses there would be heavy accumulation of snow, that would be coming down to the base, gradually gaining girth in the lower ranges. The nearby trees broke the image with their dark outline.
“We could stop over at Merritt for a bite, since we shall be going through it.”
Mabel nodded and squeezed his thigh in agreement.
They still had several hundred kilometers to go. But Neil felt happy to be here, moving along the mountain passes, with Mabel at his side on a long Easter weekend holiday.
A body could do a lot worse.