Weird Things in the Hills

Every so often when I’m at work, I stumble upon something interesting. Usually its an animal or a nice view, but sometimes it’s stranger. It’s absolutely amazing how far people travel to dump their trash, or grow their pot.On Wednesday, I stumbled upon what I consider to be my most unusual discovery in a clear cut to date…the grave of a three year old child.

Now, this was no body dump…which actually would have been less perplexing (although more disturbing), but a very well kept, and highly visible from certain roadside points (once you knew what you were looking for) grave (or more probably a memorial).

At the time, I had no context to put this in so I was highly perplexed. My partner did not believe me, so I took him up to show him…he became perplexed as well (he has a three year old himself). We considered the possibilities, and poked around the area trying to figure out just what the hell was going on…I mean people don’t typically burry their loved ones in the middle of clear cuts. There was no particular view, and although the south western exposure was a warm sunny one, We couldn’t figure out why here of all spots. Given the young age of the child, it seemed unlikely that it was his favourite spot, or that he even had a close connection to it (although that assumption would later be proved wrong). Upon initially seeing the cross at a distance, I thought it was a loggers joke. I have seen crude crosses constructed from planks cut from trees before. But as I got closer the quality of the materials indicated something more profound. I was working on the assumption that perhaps a logger had died in a falling accident or something…but when I saw the dates I was forced to reject that theory.

A later examination of the find (by Googling the child’s name) revealed that this was in fact, the precise location of an airplane crash. In January, a flight from Tofino to Vancouver went down, killing the pilot and two of the passengers. This explains both the memorial and the odd piece of yellow aluminium paneling I found nearby. It didn’t, on reflection, strike me as looking like a place where a plane had crashed. There wasn’t much disturbance (although I later discovered that they removed the plane off the hill with a helicopter). It looked like a rather typical clear cut with a grave.

Now, looking back, I probably should have pieced this together…I do vaguely remember something about a plane crashing in the hills somewhere, but the January 21 date puts that less than a week after I got back from Asia, so my mind was probably not processing the local news quite as deeply as normal. Other people at the office where as mystified as I first was when I showed them the pictures, everyone except my friend Mike, who said (without blinking or any apparent surprise that I had found and taken photos of a grave at work) “oh, is that from the plane crash?”. Some people are just too rational to be mystified these days….probably why fortune telling and rain making are on the decline.

Anyhow, so I have walked on a piece of local history…the very site of the Sonicblue crash. The case is before the courts at this time…apparently the airline had a very sketchy safety record. Check out this link for the full story (actually the only story I could find about it).
PLANE CRASH

So mystery solved. I, however, still have some questions. Is that actually a grave? Or is it simply a memorial? I may never know.