Canadian Town Puts Emphasis on Respect, Family Togetherness

It’s Saturday, a little before 3 p.m., the hour townies converge on Lakeshore Drive like trout at the mouth of a brook.

But at Askew’s Foods, four clowns close out their cash registers. Count Dracula sweeps up at Shuswap Home Hardware. And inside Mainprize Pawnbrokers, a female cowboy redraws her mustache with an eyeliner.

Shannon Thompson, 22, smudged the handlebar earlier in the day while sharing a pizza with her customers.

“The kids can’t see me like this.” She dabs her upper lip. “They’ll be here any minute now.” Thompson regards her mother, Shirley Mainprize, in a green felt outfit. She is a grapevine. “Mom. Straighten out your grapes. They’re about to fall off your head.”

Up and down Lakeshore Drive and streets nearby, moms and pops are closing shops two hours early to greet a wave of costumed kids and their parental tag-alongs with eats and treats.

It’s Halloween Eve.

In the United States, 135 miles south of this community of 16,193, this can be a day when mischief-makers soap windows, decorate trees with toilet paper and splatter eggs on houses--that is, when they’re not glued to their TV sets for a steady helping of horror movies.

The Canadian kids, no doubt, could be tubing if they wanted. Almost everyone in town receives, courtesy of cable, the Big Five: NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox and CNN, not to mention HBO, MTV and Showtime.

But Stuart Lindsey, 9, will have none of it. Dressed as an alien, he sets out in the rain with his 5-year-old sister, Isabella, sparkling in her fairy costume, to canvass as many shops as possible with Mom and Dad in tow.

The previous Sunday, all four Lindsays hiked up and down Bastion Mountain. The week before, they went biking on dirt trails in Little Mountain Park.

Anne Lockington, 48, catches her breath. Her two daughters and son are rapidly filling their soggy sacks with goodies. “And just think,” she says, wiping drizzle from her eyebrows, “tomorrow we get to do this all over again.”

*

As much as adolescent girls swoon over “Dawson’s Creek,” as much as teen boys love watching wrestling smackdowns, the coolest place to be in Salmon Arm is decidedly not TV Land.

“It’s so fake,” says Brian Davies, 17.

“Bo-ring,” adds Jen Visocchi, 17.

Justin Reimer, another 17-year-old, sits in the bleachers during a volleyball class. While most kids in town watch two to three hours of television a day, Justin watches only a movie a week, whatever his parents rent. His favorite: Harrison Ford. “I like the way he protects his family, like in ‘Patriot Games.’ ” Forget prime-time anything. “TV’s a waste--I’d rather be outdoors.”

Seeing the country, you understand why.

It begins with Mt. Ida, the Larch Hills, the Fly Hills: great, up-reaching things, their caps white with a brushing of snow, their slopes serrated, spruce blue with drops of gold--tamaracks about to shed their needles.

There is Quest Mountain and Crowfoot Mountain, a hunter’s paradise with grizzly, bighorn, cougar, moose. Cliffs break into showers of sunlight, thawing lakes clink like wind chimes, morning fog hangs sweet with the scent of maple sap. And at the southern tip of a lake shaped like elk horns lies Salmon Arm.

The town is unassuming--frame houses, trailer homes, cabins, four fenceless parks, a few aging inns, a golf course, an airport, two wineries, a sawmill, a factory that produced rubber mats for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, two malls (neither with a single security guard).

The average family income is $23,994. A janitor makes $8 to $10 an hour; a log loader operator, $150 a day. Eight percent of the work force is unemployed.

“An ordinary town in an extraordinary setting,” says Chris Cran, a resident artist.

Yet it clings to something all cities in Canada once had, what most rural villages just about anywhere now must defend: a soul.

Salmon Arm is a place where shopkeepers know the first, last and middle names of their customers’ children; where drivers leave their car doors unlocked and their keys on the floor; where people lend a hand on Clean-Up Day--the spring cleaning of a 40-acre park, done since 1914.

As for litter, there are only maple leaves skittering along the streets.

Here, street signs don’t castigate; they coax. (“Pleasant Notice,” one reads. “15-Minute Parking.”

When teens loiter outside the 7-11 on a Friday night, the manager doesn’t call the cops; he puts on Beethoven and cranks up the outside loudspeakers.

And there’s plenty to do: Salmon Arm has 21 churches, 10 elementary schools, three high schools, one college, two radio stations and five weekly newspapers.

Enthusiasts can join up to 78 “sports” clubs (the Mountaineering Club, Quilters Guild and Beekeepers Assn. among them), 73 “general interest” groups (like the Compassionate Friends Support Group) or 17 “service clubs” (like the Royal Purple of Canada).

Salmon Arm has a symphony, a film society, a theater society, a folk-music society, a historical society. It holds 43 festivals a year, including the Sled Dog Races, the “I Care” Anniversary, the Squilax Pow Wow, the Annual Rubber Duckie Race.

In May, jazz artists entertain crowds that ogle grebes, a duck that spends months flying across Canada to nest along Shuswap Lake. In September, everything stops for the Fall Fair, a 102-year-old country music fest during which ranchers show off their livestock.

Says Anne Marie Niskakoski, 28, who arrived from New Zealand 12 years ago: “You have to wonder how anything gets done around here.”

*

Statistics on Salmon Arm:

* Places to pay for access to American TV programming: 1.

* Places to purchase firearms: 1.

* Households that receive, through cable, American TV programming: 95%.

* Households that store at least one firearm: 20%.

* Increase in youth population (12- to 17-year-olds) since 1991: 25%.

* Decrease in youth crime rate since 1991: 41%.

* Number of youths charged with shooting deaths since 1991: 0.

* Number of youths charged with using firearms illegally since 1991: 0.

*

Mike Smith, 49, owns a shotgun and three rifles. He also owns a winery and Sun Country Cablevision Ltd., which has distributed American programming since 1984. Before then, people who couldn’t ante up $24,000 for a satellite dish watched Canada’s CBC-TV and CHBC-TV.

Today they get 60 channels for $29.03 a month. Any content complaints?

“None,” Smith says.

He’s aware that some politicians, authors and parents hold television responsible for teen violence. He knows all about the school shootings in Colorado, Arkansas, Washington, even the one in Alberta. He knows something else, too: “TV doesn’t make you shoot people.”

Smith is baby-sitting this weekend. He hands his 2-year-old grandson, Riley, a saltine. “You know what does? Lack of respect. In Canada, we have a politeness, a respect, that just doesn’t exist down in the United States.”

His neighbors tend to agree. The dialogue that follows, assembled in Salmon Arm, contains voices from high school counselors, principals, a pastor, parents, a high school dropout and an A student:

“To single TV out as the culprit of youth violence is ludicrous.”

“It takes an entire community to raise a child. How can just a TV destroy him?”

“TV is a lazy man’s baby-sitter.”

“If TV is the problem with kids, where are the parents in filtering out what their children are watching?

“You’d have to be pretty slow in the head to copy what you see on TV. That’s retarded--something a 4-year-old would do.”

“The TV takes your place if you let it. It takes away quality time with your kids.”

*

Stan Thiessen was hired by the Family Resource Center, a state agency for needy children. He had a desk and a computer in a tidy office on Lakeshore Drive. He was going to work with Salmon Arm’s street kids.

Thiessen found a half dozen.

They weren’t as bad off as he’d imagined. “These kids looked clothed and fed. They were being harbored by young adults.” This presented a problem: There weren’t enough kids to keep him busy.

So Thiessen widened his scope. “Now I handle teen mothers, bullies,” he says. “We do have those.”

And they also have drugs. British Columbia produces truckloads of high-quality marijuana, which give U.S. border patrols fits.

“You can get marijuana around here, but I don’t see drug use related to crime,” Thiessen says. “No, drugs aren’t yet a threat.”

What, then, constitutes a threat?

“Forest fires.”

Salmon Arm has 70 firefighters who handle, on average, 75 forest fires a year. Everyone remembers the last big burn: The Silver Creek Fire that began July 2, 1998. For 31 days, fire crept across the Fly Hills and Mt. Ida, turning 4,700 acres of spruce and pine into giant, charred toothpicks. Half of the town had to evacuate, finding shelter with relatives, friends and even complete strangers in neighboring towns.

Police? There’s one station, 14 officers. And they must enforce the law in several outlying towns.

Phil Sommerville is a corporal. He has a boyish, jaunty air and quick, ironic wit that warms him to folks in town. He’s been on the force 29 years and has fired his pistol once: “I had to put down a black bear.”

The last shooting in Salmon Arm was in 1996, he says, when a suicidal man fired a rifle through the station window to provoke the police into killing him. Did anyone return fire? “No. We coaxed the poor guy into surrendering.”

*

J.L. Jackson Jr. Secondary is the town’s “mixed” school. The word does not refer to ethnicity--Salmon Arm is 90% white. “Mixed” means that 610 teens from blue- and white-collar families share classes in a pair of 50-year-old Quonsets.

Above the desk of Reid Findlay, the vice principal, hangs a poster that shows a boy on a soccer field, his back to the camera, the number “1” on his jersey. Below, the poster reads:

Rule 1 in Raising

Your Children:

Spend Half as Much Money and Twice as Much Time.

“I guess that idea--living with less--goes against the grain. But it would prevent a lot of problems,” Findlay says. He pulls a folder from his drawer and reads a passage from an essay written by an 8th-grade boy for English class.

” ’ . . . He was dangerous. Get on the bed, bitch, and give me your money or I will blow you away!’ ” Findlay puts away the folder. “Probably something the boy saw in a movie the night before. We called in his parents. Turns out both worked two jobs, never spent any time with the boy.”

Both parents subsequently cut back on working hours. The boy’s essays, Findlay reports, have lost their intensity.

*

Jim Campbell is the sales manager at Westside Stores Ltd., an outdoors shop at the Centenoka Park Mall--the only place licensed to sell firearms. He and his 15-year-old son, Tyler, haven’t had any trouble selling tents, fishing tackle, rubber boots and the like this year.

Rifles?

“We’ve sold one new rifle this hunting season,” Campbell says. Last year, from October through December, the store sold 40 new rifles and 60 used ones.

Tough firearms legislation, enacted on New Year’s Eve last year, killed business, Campbell says. “It’s all the hoops they make you jump through to buy a firearm.”

One hoop is the Firearms Acquisition Certificate, which requires a background check and a recommendation from a former or current spouse. It takes eight to 15 months to get one.

Sue Smith, 47, a mother and grandmother, says the restrictions are excessive. “A gun, to me, translates into a juicy elk steak. It’s a tool. Like a wrench.”

Westside doesn’t stock handguns anymore. “Too unpopular.” In Canada, it’s illegal for regular citizens to carry loaded pistols anywhere outside of a firing range. The guns are confiscated, and the fines are stiff.

Seth Francis, 7, is playing in Aisle 2. He tries on a scuba mask, picks up a plastic dump truck, a fish weight. Then he traces his finger over the plastic revolver inside the “American West” box.

“Seth?”

His parents glare from the end of the aisle. The boy pulls back his hand.

“He knows pistols are bad things,” his mother says.