When I was in high school, I always thought that I would probably have a summer job as a tree planter or something similar. One time when I was a kid, my family and I were all at the Four Seasons pool and I was in the hot tub with a few tree planters in from camp. I remember a young woman with dreadlocked hair and a young man all sitting in the hot tub with me and my mom.
They were very tanned and very earthy looking and I thought that they were beautiful.
The young man told the young women that it was time to go and I remember her saying: "No, we can't go; I'm not clean yet."
Aside from a general distrust of the cleanliness of hot tubs thereafter, I remember this incident clearly as a "Prince George moment."
People work in the bush here and they work hard. But not everyone works in the bush.
When I first moved to Victoria, I kept referring to the young and beautiful deadlocked youth as tree planters until my cousin gently corrected me: "Megan, they are called "hippies" and haven't gotten their hands dirty with an actual tree in the forest, ever."
I have been thinking about the experience of growing up in Prince George and whether or not I'm a Prince George summer job fraud. Sure, I know many people who have had, or still have, actual industry jobs. But I am not one of them. I think that when I lived in Victoria, I adopted the rugged Prince George image as my own but I have a suspicion that I am a big, giant faker.
I don't like bugs, I like to shower every day and I like to watch TV at night. Aside from one summer job at one of the mills in town, I have never had a "real" Prince George job. Though I always thought that I'd have a summer bush job because that's what we did back then, I never really got around to applying for one of those jobs. Instead, I stayed clean, dry and dreadlock-free with my minimum wage retail job.
While in university, many of my fellow students at UNBC had some rough and dirty bush jobs that paid well, were physically demanding and gave them authentic stories about bears and cougars and other scary bush monsters.
Me, I worked in retail.
