Power? Yes. Progress? Well...

On The Times By Art Stott July 5, 1955  Victoria Daily Times

NOTE:

Art Stott, former Olympic athlete, was a well-known Victoria columnist. His family still uses the property frequently mentioned in his columns.....

A FRIEND of mine whose business is fish receives regularly a copy of the B.C. Power Commission's publication which carries the slogan "power means progress."

My friend looks at the catchwords with the glazed eye of a cod long on ice.

"Power," he says, "can mean progress under specific circumstances. Power often does mean progress, given certain conditions. But power frequently involves the opposite of progress, and the words certainly aren't synonyms."

Art Stott

My friend paints me a word picture of the modern kitchen, complete with every electrical gadget known to the women's magazines. He dwells particularly on the newest ranges and grilles. Then, with a high-pitched, desperate laugh, he says, "Just fancy all this kitchen science and beauty devoted to the frying of a mess of plankton. Think of this increase in efficiency, cleanliness and what some people call art over the outlandish custom of an earlier day—even our day—when a housewife had to depend on a wood-and-coal stove to cook a big, juicy salmon steak, or bake a full salmon in an old-fashioned oven."

He falls into a brooding silence. Maybe he wonders about the kind of progress which produces power at the expense of the fish whose momma never gets to the spawning ground because hydro developments are blocking her up-river course. Or maybe he feels a little sad for the fingerling whose momma made it, but who never reaches maturity because it isn't equipped to cope with the equipment at the lower end of the penstock.

'LET'S DAM IT'

"I shoulda been an engineer," my friend says. "Then I could go around shouting, 'There's running water. Let's dam it'."

Sometimes I think he's a little backward. He ought to weigh his misgivings over the hazards to the fish run against the benefits of rural electrification—particularly in the rustic summer camp.

At our Shawnigan shack we have electricity now—put it in last year. The cost didn't really cripple me. Neither does the bill which comes every month, though we use electricity only about three months a year. Still, it's cheap. It's handy. It's convenient. And the way it has transformed our hunk of wilderness is astounding.

Why, before we had electricity, we used to beat it up to Shawnigan for a week-end after a tough period in town and find there wasn't much to do once night fell. We'd go to bed anytime after 9.30 and that early retiring used to get us up around 7 in the morning.

Now we don't have to go to bed at all if we don't want to. The light's as good as it is down here. We can sit up and read till all hours, and we can preserve the conventional Sunday morning routine by sleeping in until 11. Then, when the week-end's over, we can come back to town with no regrets. We're too tired to have any—didn't get enough sleep.

Sometimes I get the impression that something's wrong with the progress that has come from power at Shawnigan. But when my mind strays that way, all I have to do is look at the children.

UPDATING THE KIDS

Once upon a time kids up at Shawnigan were thrown pretty much on their own resources. Their activities were limited. Of course they could swim and go boating in the good weather. But, shucks, there wasn't any water skiing then and if a guy went out in a boat he usually had to row.

Or a youngster could go wandering through the woods, climbing hills, picking berries, learning all sorts of corny stuff about wild-life, about trees, about that knot-headed subject called woodcraft. If he didn't like that, he could go fishing, but who wants to go fishing? And if the weather was bad, he had to stay in the house with nothing much to do but read, play games or amuse himself with the materials at hand.

All that's changed now. A kid doesn't have to worry about swimming, about boating, fishing, the outdoors or self-generated entertainment.

All he has to do it twist the knob on the radio. He can have his hit parade, his favorite dance band, Liberace in season. Or he can savor the supreme joy of listening to a man who seems to have a larynx made from an old tomato can, trussed with perished garter elastic, saying "It's a long fly, going, back, back, back..."

Power, it's wonderful. Progress we got. And doesn't it make you feel sorry for kids who once were dragged into the wilderness with the idea that the wilderness itself had pleasures to yield?