News is our dump’s full and we may soon have to ship our garbage south. If so, we should thank the good people of Sechelt for storing our toxic diapers for the next thousand years or so. But there’s a nostalgic piece of personal history that needs to be shared before memories of the landfill filter into the haze of time. When I was in high school here in the ‘80s, our skills in wooing the ladies weren’t exactly on par with our hormone levels. Back then, boys here were a little culturally stunted — we had only a half dozen channels and no internet. We also lacked "fashion sense." All the boys wore black T-shirts — someone had long ago proclaimed you were gay if you didn’t. We never thought to question it. For the most part, local girls provided little relief. If you weren’t already related to each other, the two of you were probably first naked in a crib in 1972 with pictures to prove it. Mating attempts were concentrated on the summer girls — those stylish divas who’d wash in for a few short months every year from exotic lands like Kamloops or Langley. They provided the accepted genetic distance from our own bloodlines but we soon learned these teenage tourists were cagier than our third cousins. We weren’t "cool" and some of them said we "dressed funny" or we "ONLY listen to AC/DC." We didn’t have a lot to work with and would literally spin our wheels trying to impress before stumbling upon one weapon that was surprisingly deadly. The local garbage dump. I don’t know how we discovered it — we were probably driving around in my parents Ford Fairmont with some girls who were camping at Lowes. It was night, we were uncomfortable, they were bored and someone just said, "Let’s go see the bears." "The BEARS!?" the girls (possibly) squealed. Sure. In 1987 there wasn’t a fence around the dump and you could drive right in and find five or six big, fat black bears gorging on remnant pork roast. We’d sometimes end up there on a Friday night, challenging each other to see who could get the closest before one of the bears looked up and sent us squealing back to the car. But even we never considered it as a romantic spot to take dates. It turns out that tourist girls love this stuff and evolutionary programming had finally worked in our favour. The spectacle of these wild, man (garbage) eating bears faced down by the brave men (boys) who would dare offer their bodies as protection seemed to release a flood of hormones. It was gold. So we went back to the well time and time again, prostituting those bears for all we could until finally, tragically, someone fenced it off for good. It didn’t matter, we soon discovered lemon gin. But I still owe those dump bears a debt of gratitude. They accomplished a pretty daunting task — they made us look cool. So, I’m tempted to throw one extra smelly bag over the wrong side of the fence to say, "Thanks, bear."
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