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Up Chute Creek is a portrait of Okanagan landscape and people like no other. It is alternately passionate, joyful, heartbreaking, lyrical, quirky, and always wise, and always human, in the best sense. This is a book for the people of the Okanagan, both new and old, to treasure and to share.
"A wise, funny, heartfelt, smart, poetic memoir of a love affair with a
wild, granite farm at the end of the road in Naramata. If you didn't love the Okanagan before you read this book, you will by the time you're done."
- Harold Rhenisch, author of Out of the Interior and The Wolves at Evelyn
"For 30 years, my family has made a ritual pilgrimage to celebrate food's seasonality by picking cherries in the Okanagan Valley, the Garden "of Eatin" of this book. But in that time, the rural charm of this area has changed beyond recognition from the forces of development and growth. Up Chute Creek zip-lines readers through this region's environmental issues, from population growth and water shortage to a unique, but endangered ecology. No easy solutions, but what a ride!" - David Suzuki, author of The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature and host of CBC's The Nature of Things
The Okanagan Mountain Park fire bookends this narrative. Building a house in a 'fire zone' creates a dynamic connection between men and women, urban and rural lifestyles, and humans and the natural world. In this humorous tale of 'post-urban neo-ruralism', the author makes ties with community, family and environment in the South Okanagan. Up Chute Creek is a regional story of "landscaping" - the ways you forge connections to a place as it creeps into your bones, infiltrates your psyche, and shifts the geography of your soul.
When Melody Hessing, the author of Up Chute Creek: An Okanagan Idyll, moved to Naramata B.C. in the early 1970's, stucco motels, benchland orchards and fun-in-the-sun tourism were the main ingredients of the South Okanagan lifestyle. Today 'wine country' includes estate wineries, golf courses, casinos, cycling trails, and triathlons, attracting residents and tourists alike to a diversity of upscale venues and activities. Yet there are few published accounts of the ways in which rapid growth, diminished biodiversity, and social change have shaped the contemporary South Okanagan. This story provides a glimpse of the Okanagan region in transition, celebrating its unique character and contributing to its cultural heritage.
This story is about landscapes - the way we change the land, and the ways that the land changes us. The author moved to the Okanagan Valley with her husband in 1974. Late-comers to the back-to-the-land movement, they did it in style, building an unobtrusive house by hand on a rocky cliff near Naramata. Young and naļve like many others, they ignored the inevitable (dis)connects between romantic ideals and rural pragmatism, topography and age.
The story is a creative non-fiction account of this experience, beginning with a post-evacuation return to the 2003 Okanagan Mountain fire. The narrative flashes back to an earlier discovery of this property, encounters with neighbours, and the heroics of a do-it-yourself construction project on a remote house site. Living in a remote place, paid work and a baby force the first evacuation of the Granite Farm, followed by a quarter century of coming and going to a home-away-from-home. The author remains tethered today to the vulnerability and beauty of this arid, rocky landscape.
Up Chute Creek is a story about "landscaping" the South Okanagan, about how you forge relations with a place while it creeps into your bones, infiltrates your psyche, and shifts the geography of your soul. Building a house, the emotional and physical challenges of rural settlement, the contrast between early settlement patterns and those today, comprise the social and ecological curriculum; the learning curve is bumpy and steep, the trajectory up and down.
The narrative is about the continuing 'development' of this province - the spill of people into place, and how the place changes. It explores timely themes relevant not just to the Okanagan, but throughout Canada: gender issues, urban/rural tensions, historical settlement, community cohesion, economic transition, and declines in biodiversity. Its humorous narrative style contributes to a discussion of contemporary landscape that tries to reconcile development with preservation, past with present, neighbors with friendship, marriage with autonomy, body and soul.
Melody Hessing has taught Sociology, Women's Studies and Environmental Studies at Okanagan College and other post-secondary colleges and universities in British Columbia, and currently teaches at the University of British Columbia. She has published two books with UBC Press as well as numerous popular and academic articles on topics ranging from environmental policy to ecofeminism. More recently, she has published creative non-fiction in several anthologies, and in 2008 was a finalist in the CBC Literary Awards.
"This is an Okanagan pioneer's tale, but a modern one. Melody Hessing gang-tackles composting toilets, quirky neighbors, woodrats and childrearing with refreshing honesty and wit." - Don Gayton, author of Interwoven Wild and Landscapes of the Interior
"Up Chute Creek evokes the times, the people, and above all, the land, that make the Okanagan Valley such a special place." - Dick Cannings, author of British Columbia: A Natural History and An Enchantment of Birds: Memories from a Birder's Life
"When Melody Hessing breezed up Chute Creek she brought with her the clean biting insight of an outsider. She staked out her territory as she and her family got to know the neighbours. My father Victor Wilson was at first furious with her, outraged at her language and her direct manner but in time he came to love her. Melody's Naramata neighbours are thrilled that she's chosen to write about our wacky neighbourhood out in the Okanagan hills." - Sandy Wilson, filmmaker: My American Cousin
Published in a limited edition of 500 copies, numbered and signed by the author.
208 pages | paperback | 6 x 9 inches | Illustrated with photographs throughout.
ISBN 978-0-9810271-1-1 | Price: $20, plus $1 GST.
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An essay by Melody Hessing on The View from Naramata appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Okanagan Arts magazine. It is available online HERE.
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