The Nature Pages

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ at Outrider

	A Place to Stand A Tale of the Peace River Country by J. W. Secrist Authorhouse, 2006.
	While this book is a work of fiction, it is largely about a real place -- the Peace River Country of British Columbia -- and real people, the 20th century homesteaders drawn to its wild and pristine mountain valleys. Though fictionalized, their stories are drawn from the author J.W. Secrist's own immigration to the area in the 1970s and his involvement with and experience in farming and ranching in a wilderness environment.		That river attracted those boys like a magnet. Caroline had to keep them in sight every minute or they were down the banks throwing rocks and playing by the water. It was the same way with my own babies when they were llittle. I love that river, but it has always scared me a bit, with its power and immensity, the potential to sweep a small child away in an instant. I never look at that river in flood but what I think of Jack. When he was small, he was as intrigued by the water as Paul's little guys are. And then...
	"Northwest of the sprawl of Edmonton lay a country as yet little developed, in fact little known," Secrist writes in a chapter titled "1914."		,
	"Most of it lay as it had since time immemorial, a vastness of rolling poplar-covered hills, festooned with sluggish muskeg streams and pattered with shallow lakes. Cutting through the land, flowing always northeast ran great rivers which drained the mountain passes to the south and west... the Peace River country was one of the last great frontiers, begun centuries earlier when the first whites had thrust inland from the Atlantic Coast. For more than 100 years, white men had come and gone up and down the calm waters of the lower Peace, but only a mere handful had come to stay. Though the occupation by the Beaver, Sikanni, Woodland Cree, and other indigenous peoples extended back into the mists of time, in the year 1914 the country was little changed from the way it was in the beginning."
	Against this primeval backdrop, Secrist tells the story of Irish immigrant Liam Brennan and his post-WWII Belgian bride, Marta, as they try to carve a life for themselves out of the frigid cold, the stark isolation, and the elemental beauty of their chosen homeland.