Lytton: Climate Change, Colonialism and Life Before the Fire

by Peter Edwards, Kevin Loring Narrated by Kevin Loring, Wayne Ward

Overview

From bestselling true-crime author Peter Edwards and Governor General's Award-winning playwright Kevin Loring, two sons of Lytton, BC, the town that burned to the ground in 2021, comes a meditation on hometown-when hometown is gone.

“It's dire,” Greta Thunberg retweeted Mayor JanPolderman. “The whole town is on fire. It took a whole 15 minutes from the first sign of smoke to, all of a sudden, there being fire everywhere.”

Before it made global headlines as the small town that burned down during a record-breaking heatwave in June 2021, while briefly the hottest placeon Earth, Lytton, British Columbia, had a curious past. Named for the author of the infamous line, “It was a dark and stormy night,” Lytton was also where Peter Edwards, organized-crime journalist and author of seventeen non-fiction books, spent his childhood. Although only about 500 people lived in Lytton, Peter liked to joke that he was only the second-best writer to come from his tiny hometown. His grade-school classmate's nephew Kevin Loring, Nlaka'pamux from Lytton First Nation, had grown up to be a Governor General's Award-winning playwright.

********The Nlaka'pamux called Lytton “The Centre of the World,” a view Buddhists would share in the late twentieth century, as they set up a temple just outside town. A gold rush in 1858 saw conflict with a wave of Californians come to a head with the Canyon War at the junction of the mighty Fraser and Thompson rivers. The Nlaka'pamux lost over thirty lives in that conflict, as did the American gold seekers. In modern times, many outsiders would seek shelter there, often people who just didn't fit anywhere else and were hoping for a little anonymity in the mountains.

********Told from the shared perspective of an Indigenous playwright and the journalist son of a settler doctor who pushed back against the divisions that existed between populations, Lytton portrays all the warmth, humour and sincerity of small-town life. A colourful little town that burned to the ground could be every town's warning if we don't take seriously what this unique place has to teach us.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940160582993
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	06/25/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Introductions

This book begins with a confession. I rolled the school bus down a hill by my home, crashing it into the Sam family’s fruit trees in Lytton, British Columbia, when I was ten years old.
     I was never brought to justice, but I’m sure I was suspected. I don’t say this to boast or to relieve myself of any guilt, but rather in an attempt to jazz up this book. I also assume that I’m protected by some statute of limitations and that my tender age at the time of the crime protects me legally.
     Besides, Lytton has burned down since then—twice. The evidence has been destroyed, along with my old family home.
     The book that follows is written out of love, not for any form of repentance.
     It was not written in easy times, and there was another fire in the area when the book was in the editing stages. Still, the book got written and I am confident that Lytton will rebound yet again. I continue to message with my old childhood friends like Robert Bolan, Donny Glasgow and Tommy Watkinson, as well as my mom’s great friend Kareen Zebroff. They’re all survivors. Lytton is the home of survivors. The community at the junction of the Fraser and Thompson Rivers has been around for thousands of years and has always rebounded in the past. I can’t imagine the world without it.
     The Lytton that was the centre of my universe in the 1950s and 1960s had no skyscrapers, elevators, escalators, parking lots, bookstores, public libraries, fast-food franchises, drive-throughs, malls or even traffic lights. It also didn’t have great school bus security.
     My family moved into a modest old stucco house on Fraser Street, across the street from the Lytton Hotel and its lively beer parlour, which we could smell from the street. When we occasionally camped on the front lawn and slept under the stars in sleeping bags, patrons lobbed salt shakers at us before heading home. Our house was also just a stone’s throw from the Anglican parish hall and the Catholic church, and a monument to the great nineteenth-century Chief Cexpen’nthlEm (also known as Sexpinlhemx, Cexpen’nthlEm, Cixpen’ntlam, Shigh-pentlam and David Spintlum) of the Nlaka’pamux people. Just a block from our home in another direction, overlooking the Fraser River, was the train station where a young Queen Elizabeth II once stopped long enough to shake hands with a few of the locals.
     Years later, I learned that the land where the CNR site was built was also where Chief Cexpen’nthlEm negotiated a peace back in 1858 to stave off a war with American gold miners. If not for the Chief and the Nlaka’pamux of the Lytton area, what is now British Columbia could well be part of the United States, and Canada would not stretch from coast to coast to coast.
     I didn’t know any of this history while growing up, just that the view from our yard was spectacular and that the monument to the Chief overlooking the river and the CNR station was formidable and mysterious.
     My dad, Dr. Kenneth Edwards, was the only physician in the area and he got to make the rules in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, which was a few minutes’ walk from our home. Much later I heard that he made a rule immediately after he started work at the old Anglican hospital: everyone got to come in and leave through the front door. Up to that point, Indigenous people had to come in through a side entrance, even though they were the overwhelming majority in the area and had lived there much longer. I also learned from my brother David that Dad sometimes scaled cliffs, dangling by a rope, to treat victims of car crashes. I marvel at the thought, as he was no great athlete. After a dozen years there, we moved to Windsor, Ontario. You can be a doctor in a place like Lytton for only so long. Dad’s responsibilities were 24/7 and relentless. He had delivered almost every kid at Lytton Elementary who was younger than me, and he pronounced their relatives dead when their time came, often through car accidents. In a place that size, many had been his friends as well as his patients, and I know that hurt him. This was before Canada had universal health care, and Dad loved it when Indigenous people would show up at the door of our house to pay him in freshly caught fish. Perhaps that’s why, to this day, I love the taste of salmon.
     At the end of a hectic day, Dad would bunker himself away in his den, relaxing with a beer and a book, two closed doors away from us kids and the TV, which he dismissed as “the Idiot Box.” He was surrounded by books in his den, and I sometimes felt I was competing with them for his attention. Perhaps that’s why I became a writer.
     Our mother, Winona Edwards, was the first real writer I knew, although I’m sure she was too modest to think of herself as one. She influenced me enormously. She loved reading as much as my father, and her world shone brightly whenever Agatha Christie published a new mystery. They both loved the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, but Agatha Christie was Mom’s own special favourite. A comment from Christie I’ll never forget was about the moment she felt she had turned professional. Christie said that a real writer writes “even when you don’t want to.” Without Mom’s influence, this book would never have been written.
     The older I get, the more blessed I feel to have spent my first dozen years in the shadow of Jackass Mountain, a two-kilometre-tall peak to the south. In a community that wasn’t just the centre of my universe but the centre of countless universes for generations before and after me, the name typified the local sense of humour, fitting for a place where anything that endures is bound to be loved but nothing is really precious. Mom and Dad raised me and my three siblings—Jim, David and Melanie—in a happy and defiant little cocoon. I never really saw limits. In the Lytton of my childhood, we felt we could see forever and be anything we pretended—and aspired—to be. I have since learned that not everyone had it so good.
     We were unaware as children of the horrors that existed for other children who were starting their lives nearby. We almost never saw any kids from St. George’s Residential School, set on farmland just four kilometres from my home. We never visited or were invited to visit St. George’s. Lytton was the centre of their universe too, but the view for them was often very different.
     The community now known as Lytton was at the centre of the Nlaka’pamux universe long before the settlement on their territory was named after a much-ridiculed British writer, who was also a senior official in British Columbia’s nineteenth-century colonial government. Tiny, confident Lytton once aspired to be the provincial capital, but mostly it has been a place of refuge and countless new beginnings and fresh starts. The family of an Olympic gold medallist got its Canadian start there in the nineteenth century. Another Olympic champion hid out here to get away from life’s pressures and recharge his emotional batteries.
     Lytton was home to about 550 people when I grew up there, but it had shrunk to 249 before it burned down in the summer of 2021. The Lytton Creek Fire wasn’t the first to ruin downtown Lytton, but unlike the fires before it, that one in June 2021 destroyed pretty much everything, including my old family home on Fraser Street. That was the same street that was once home to another career writer, playwright Kevin Loring of the Nlaka’pamux of Lytton First Nation. I learned that Kevin’s dad even lived for a time in our old family house. This wasn’t some great serendipity, as there were only a half-dozen or so streets and a limited number of homes in town.
     The book you’re reading is an attempt to explore and understand Lytton—and all that we lose when places like Lytton are destroyed by wildfire—brought to you by two homegrown writers from different generations and different backgrounds. I’m a few years older than Kevin. I went to school with his aunt, Shiela Adams, who was one of the top students and athletes in my grade. I was great friends with one of his cousins, Donny Glasgow, whose family gave Lytton its smile and swagger for generations. Donny was authentic before that term became trendy. Shiela and Donny are now two among many living symbols of Lytton’s resilience as it faces its greatest threat in over a century.
     The fire that levelled my former family home was mentioned by Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and teenaged Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and others around the world as an example of the danger and brutality of climate change. People once went to Lytton to heal their bodies and souls in its dry, intense heat. Now it’s a canary in the mine shaft for the future of our planet. Saving Lytton could offer lessons for saving countless other communities.
     Lytton was struggling to pull itself up from its knees when another massive wildfire swept through the area in the summer of 2022, and even more fires in the summer of 2023. As this book was being completed, other Canadian communities were suffering the ravages of climate change in the form of uncontrollable wildfires. Yet the people of Lytton are struggling to rebuild yet again—stronger than ever.
     This book is also an attempt to explore and understand Canada, as Lytton is a quintessentially Canadian place—for all the good and bad that this entails. William Blake said that you can find the meaning of life by studying a grain of sand. I think you can also find much of the soul of Canada by studying sandy Lytton.
     Despite the many earnest themes this book will touch on—the environment, the legacy of colonialism, Indigenous rights, the hope (and threat) of technology, religious imperialism and race relations—we also want you to be moved to laugh and cry and appreciate a community worthy of your attention, just as I did while growing up in it.
     We didn’t have such weighty concerns when growing up in Lytton before it all burned down.
     Our little universe seemed as though it would last forever. Hopefully, it still will.

Peter Edwards
September 2023


The story of the village now known as Lytton, BC, located at the confluence of what we now call the Fraser and Thompson Rivers, didn’t begin during the gold rush era, when it was given the name of the British Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1859. And contrary to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s remarks at the COP 26 climate summit in Glasgow, late in 2021, when he said, “There was a town called Lytton,” it didn’t end on June 30 of that year, when the village was burned to the ground during the hottest week ever recorded north of the forty-ninth parallel.
     The story of this special place at the heart of the Nlaka’pamux Nation is many thousands of years old. My own family comes from both those early settlers who emigrated there during the gold rush and the Nlaka’pamux, who have always called this place home. I am from there, in the most elemental sense. I was born and raised there. I have made my life’s work as an artist telling stories that come from this place, which my people called ltKumcheen, meaning, in essence, “where the rivers meet” or, as I was told, “the place inside the heart where the blood mixes.”
     Lytton has been my muse and my passion. I draw on it as a source for artistic creation and inspiration. My first published play is called Where the Blood Mixes, a reference to when n’Shinkayep, the Coyote, the Trickster, was destroyed by a powerful transformer. His heart was thrown into the junction of the rivers. His heart is still there now, turned to stone, and exists today as a massive heart-shaped boulder just below town. This place is the heart of the Nlaka’pamux Nation and home to the largest First Nation in the tribe. Even now as we recover from the devastation and trauma of the 2021 fire, and the terror that subsequent fires and floods have brought, I am still inspired to create and tell the story of this special place, and the people who have—and who still—call it home. Since burning down as the world watched, Lytton has become synonymous with the effects of climate change. In the months and years following the fire, everywhere I went, the story of the little town that burned to the ground was ever-present. Not only that, but the video most often used to depict the tragedy always ended with the ruins of my mother’s yard, the home I grew up in, where the only thing left standing was the beautiful treehouse my stepfather made for the grandkids. The most absurd example of this occurred when I travelled to Dubai in my role as the director of Indigenous Theatre at the National Arts Centre of Canda, to participate in an Indigenous forum at the World Expo in November that year. As I was checking into my hotel room I turned on the TV, and there on the BBC was the video of my burnt-out backyard playing on repeat, with the ruins of everything my mother and step-father, friends and family had owned as a graphic example for the world of the climate catastrophe we all must reckon with. Having just travelled halfway around the globe to talk about the importance of telling Indigenous stories in the era of climate change, I couldn’t shake the dark irony or the karmic guilt of my own carbon footprint. All while an atmospheric river of torrential rain was washing away highways and communities and reshaping the traditional territory of my people on a level not seen since the last glaciation.
     In my lifetime I have witnessed the battles over the environment from both sides of the conflict, and I’ve witnessed the changes to the ecology. There once was a small glacier on the eastern slope of Klowa Mountain on the west side of the Fraser. Even during the hot summers of Canada’s hotspot, that bright white patch of ice was ever visible throughout my childhood. However, I noticed in my early teens that every summer it was getting smaller and smaller, until one year, when I was about nineteen, it was gone. It never returned.
     The heat brought us more than fire. Pine beetle infestations caused by the warmer winters have been evident throughout the BC Interior since the late 1980s, turning millions of hectares of evergreen pine forests orange with dead trees. There has been much speculation that the devastating floods from the atmospheric river that inundated the region in the fall of 2021 were exacerbated by the extensive clearcutting of bug-killed trees.
     Sockeye salmon stocks, which my family relies on for sustenance, are threatened and continue to dwindle every year from extensive commercial fishing, habitat loss, disease from fish farms and over-heated river systems. The coho stocks are now listed as threatened, and the Fraser River steelhead are on the verge of extinction.
     Concern for the environment in relation to colonization and resource extraction has been a central issue since the gold rush. The massive influx of miners washing the riverbanks into the river in search of gold and competing for space on the river with the First Nations hampered the annual salmon harvest. This ultimately sparked a little war between the Nlaka’pamux and the miners, the outcome of which may have saved western Canada from being annexed by the United States.
     But what truly makes Lytton the special place that it is, as it once again builds back from fire, is the people—the remarkable stories of the individuals who collectively helped to shape the character and legacy of this little town. These unique characters and how they relate to one another, their journeys and where they end up, help us see how and why this little village on the side of the Trans-Canada Highway matters.
 
I was born in that humble little town on November 24, 1974, at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. Dr. Edwards and his family had moved away by then. I grew up on Fraser Street, just down from Peter’s childhood home. Only, for me, Peter’s childhood home was the Haugens’. It was my great-aunt Rita and her husband Laurence “Haugie” Haugen’s house. Our Yaya, our matriarch, my great-grandmother, also lived there. And so to me that house was also Yaya’s house.
     One of the treasures I lost in the fire was my father’s Shakespeare book. My cousin, John Haugen, the current owner of the property, gave it to me a few years ago. It had been in their basement for decades. My father had made notes in it and had left it there after a period in his life when he was studying to be an actor. He passed away in 1994, so little treasures that remind me of him, particularly of him as an artist, are special.
      Before we moved to my mom’s current property at Fourth and Fraser, my parents owned a trailer at the southernmost end of town, overlooking Hobo Hollow. We had a perfect view of the Winch Spur and the CN trestle bridge and Lytton Creek, where the fire began. We lived there until I was eleven. The trains pass through town about every half-hour—and with the CP and CN tracks running parallel above and below town, trains came through all day long. Our little trailer would shake like there was an earthquake. And when they blasted their horns, it sounded as if the trains were coming right through the front end of the trailer. I grew up hearing the sound of screeching brakes and the badooom-pa-thump rhythm of the railroad ties beating the ground like a drum, day in and day out. At night, lying in my bunk bed, tucked in and tired from playing all day outside, it was the rhythm of the passing trains that put me to sleep.
     We had so much freedom in those days. I remember walking down Main Street when I was maybe eleven, wearing a fully loaded bandolier of 40/10 shotgun shells with my shotgun in hand, to go hunt grouse along the ridgeline above Botanie Valley Road—with only so much as a “Hey, Kev, where ya headed? Good hunting!” from the adults on the street.
     The smells of the timber on a hot day. The crickets and the grasshoppers, the birds and coyotes across the river. The constant wind in the days and evenings and the weird stillness that would settle in at twilight. The familiar faces chatting on the street. The friendly waves to people as they drove along Main Street. The Christmas and May Day parades. The street dances with my uncle’s band, Little Ritchie and the Fendermen, rocking the oldies. These are the memories of Lytton that I cherish.
     The name ltKumcheen has been anglicized to Kumsheen, which is the name of a local rafting company and resort. It was also the name of the high school—a fact that was often made fun of by opposing high school sports teams. Our team mascot was a cougar; we were the Kumsheen Cougars. It was always funny until we kicked their asses. Lytton is a competitive town.
     Is. Was. My family home was the dead centre of town. Across the street from Caboose Park, the swimming pool, the town hall, the Legion, the bank, the medical clinic, and a quick stagger to the Lytton Hotel and Buds and Suds pub. Lytton is about the size of a city block. The rez at the end of town makes it feel a bit bigger, but not by much.
     Since the fire, the residents, the Lyttonites, are displaced. In hotels and at the homes of friends and family. Most residents are low-income earners or pensioners. Many have spent their entire lives in Lytton. Many are uninsured or underinsured. Some have moved on to other communities, too defeated or too heartbroken or too old to wait out the long rebuild ahead.
     When you live on the rez, it’s a different story. Even if you can afford it, it can be difficult to purchase homeowners’ insurance on a house that is collectively owned. Insurance is purchased en masse for houses on reserve because land and the majority of the housing is collectively owned by the First Nation.
     Since the fire, the Lytton First Nation has built a temporary tiny home village for those band members who lost their homes, in a field at the old St. George’s Residential School property that we call the Battlefield. I was always told by my mother that the reason it’s called the Battlefield is that we used to have epic battles with the Lil’wat there, on that field. I don’t know if that’s true, but everyone calls it the Battlefield. There are old pit houses there, remnants from a time long before there was a Lytton.
     As Lyttonites, we’ve all been wounded, disappointed and lost. It is my sincere hope that this book will help to illuminate how special our little town is. That it will help inspire those who still carry its spirit in their hearts to rebuild and continue the story of Lytton. And now it is our honour to share with you this ancient little village off the side of the highway, in the heart of the canyon, at the Centre of the Universe.

Kevin Loring
September 2023

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