Above Summerland

Some sentences arrive fully formed, requiring no explanation. At six o’clock on an August morning, two hours before I intended to wake, my eighty-year-old mother stood at the bedroom door wearing an expression I had never seen on her face before. She looked as though she had already lived through the day and knew how it ended.

“They’ve closed the highway.”

Not a highway. The highway.

In the southern Okanagan, there is really only one.

Highway 97 runs where it does because there was nowhere else to put it. On one side rise the broken bluffs lining the valley, punctuated with ponderosa pine, vineyards, and orchards; on the other lies Okanagan Lake, an improbable inland sea carved by glaciers and abandoned hundreds of kilometres from the ocean. As deep as 232 metres in places, it behaves less like a lake than a fjord that somehow lost its way. Twentieth-century engineers merely accepted a decision geology had made...