It is one of those perfect days — brilliant sunshine, powder blue skies and a soft breeze that carries the scent of summer on its breath. Along with a group of friends, I board The Native, a pretty paddlewheeler moored on the Fraser River alongside the New Westminster boardwalk.
As we settle down on the boat and a horn signals our departure, the paddles begin to churn. Hostesses bustle around taking orders for the bar and a buzz of animated conversation floats across the deck as we cast off on our two-and-a-half hour cruise upstream.
At first glance, the Fraser River is muscular — an industrial waterway shouldering log booms, tugs and barges to the lumber mills lining its route through the Fraser Valley. But the Fraser is much more than that.
It weaves through the lives of the 2.4 million people who live and work along its 1,375 kilometres from the rugged mountains deep in the heart of B.C. to the delta where it empties into the Gulf of Georgia. It nourishes a unique ecology of plant, fish and bird life, and has been a partner in the province’s history and development over the past two centuries.
As the scenery unfolds, so does the history of the Fraser River. The gold rush days (when there were more paddlewheelers along the Fraser than on the Mississippi) are gone, but the Fraser remains at the heart of B.C.’s economy, the lumber industry in particular. Logs braided into raft-like booms lie against the shoreline and cheeky little boom-boats dance around them, nudging errant sticks into place.
We move smoothly under Surrey’s Skybridge, the first of several bridges that span the river. Just beyond this is the venerable Pattullo Bridge, which opened in 1937. Its orange Meccano-construction-like archway is a familiar sight to commuters who drive its lanes every day as they stream into New Westminster from Surrey.
Breaking into open water, the river is a pastiche of impressions. An osprey sits on a piling, its feathers ruffled by the breeze.
A speedboat buzzes past us like an angry hornet. A goods train worms its way along the distant Surrey shoreline.
Hugging the bank, a log salvage barge, its crane outstretched like some ungainly pterodactyl’s beak, retrieves an errant deadhead. Wild grass, alder and cottonwood trees doze gently on small islands in mid-channel and up ahead, the coastal mountains smudge the sky in blue and grey silhouettes.
We help ourselves to a buffet of cold cuts and salads as the gates to what was once the B.C. Penitentiary come into view on our left. No longer a grim fortress, this has been transformed into a romantic restaurant, complete with fairy-tale like columns and ramparts.
Coquitlam’s Mary Hill lies further inland, its deforested slopes and jumble of tightly packed buildings, a scar against the hillside.
Past TimberWest’s log sort area, the new Port Mann Bridge looms against the sky. We glide under its mammoth concrete arches, and just beyond its stanchions, the old bridge is a crumbling mess of concrete and steel rods.
But the Fraser River endures, an inscrutable witness to the passage of time and change — coupled to B.C.’s past, and forever linked to its future.
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