Travels to Ogopogo land
A Season in the Okanagan
by Bill Arnott
Victoria: Rocky Mountain Books, 2025
$20 / 9781771607247
Reviewed by Ron Verzuh
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Imagine you are the sidekick of author Bill Arnott as he embarks on his latest adventure to a part of BC’s fabulous hinterland. In this case it’s the wine-growing, fruit-producing Okanagan Valley. This is Arnott country and you are about to explore not only the beauty of the land and lakes but also some intimate nooks and crannies.
As you begin your travels, Arnott relishes driving the lakeshore in a rented SUV, an upgrade, as he maps out your itinerary from Vernon, his birthplace, down through the lakes to Osoyoos. He knows the territory but along the route he renews memories and rediscovers childhood pleasures.
On one of your early stops, you learn about the Syilx tribe of the Okanagan First Nation. Their four Food Chiefs, dictate the seasons and the weather. From summery Chief Saskatoon Berry we shift to Chief Salmon, for example, and the main food gathering time of autumn. You will meet them again and again as the journey continues.
Arnott also instructs you on geographical formations. “Okanagan mountains,” he explains, “are in fact ancient volcanoes.” He soon takes you on an imaginary voyage to ancient Greece where “each seasonal gust had a god.” Here we meet Boreas (winter) and Zephyrus (spring and summer).
In a moment of reflection, he recalls having a tape recorder in his youth. “We were suddenly DJs and chroniclers,” he says. “We could also keep record of farts.” In another reflection, “[a]n endless freight train moans” as Arnott stops at a DQ for a milkshake. Soon he will reminisce about a writer’s residency where he slept in the former mansion of the Italian Countess Sveva Caetani. A brief biography follows. There is the promise fulfilled of meeting her or at least her ghost.
He dreams of seeing his grandparents again, his Dido and Baba. Dido is writing a message to say they are alright. Baba offers “The feel of a hug, same as the food she’d prepare. A penetrating, comforting love.” It’s all part of a pilgrimage to his youth guided partly by memory and partly by the Food Chiefs.
Arnott pulls the SUV to the edge of a lake and you help him hoist his red canoe, named Kuyeil, and dip it into the water. “A slurp and a glut as the lake grasped the boat and took over.” Guided by the author, you feel “the pulse of the lake.” He says “The boat rode like a trained mare” while “[f]lits of indigo appear as tree swallows skim the water.”
Entering Kelowna, the valley’s largest town, you meet Ogopogo, the valley’s very own Loch Ness Monster. Well, not really a monster at all. Instead, it is a Syilx spirit in First Nations mythology. Arnott further informs you that a settler myth contends that it is “a dinosaur cavorting in the lake” or “an ancient leviathan.”
Again, there is history to tell in the form of two seacraft, the S.S. Sicamous, a sternwheeler, and the S.S. Naramata, an old CPR tug. Arnott calls them “grand dames admiring the view.” He tags them “elderly Muppets who heckle performers from the comfort of their balcony seats.”
As you walk the lakes with him, he finds an igloo-like stone oven, He imagines railway workers getting fresh bread on the CPR line as he appreciates this “remnant of history.” He pauses to recall the “miserable history” of “forced immigrant labour, atrocious conditions. Death in the workplace. An uglier version of mining.”
Nearby sits a kekuli or First Nations pit house. You cross the old Kettle Valley Railway bed, a short walk along the TransCanada Trail, the world’s longest, and soon find yourselves in Naramata, “dense with wineries.”
The mesh protecting the vast stretches of vines are fashioned as “a bedroom in malaria country.” A brief history tells of the small town’s beginnings in 1907. Its name may have come from a séance conducted by a spiritualist named Mrs. J.M. Gillespie.
Moving south – a map is provided – we pass through Okanagan Falls, Oliver, and Osoyoos on the final leg of our adventure. A Steller’s Jay makes an appearance as BC’s official bird along with other local animals, including memories of bears, gophers, and the odd rattler.
We meet his nonagenarian mother at another stop and she hands him his father’s ashes, which we spread in the land he loved. We also share his concerns for the homeless and the always vulnerable forests as well as the future of indigenous people we meet.
Arnott’s style may seem overwritten at first, although some readers might see poetry here in the plethora of verbs and adjectives. Everything bursts, zooms, whirrs, zips, shimmers, and glimmers. A mourning dove emanates a “sorrowful timbre and pulse.” A house “nestles” next to a lake. The remnant of a glacier makes its “arduous way.”
One “eavesdrops on the squawk of ravens.” An airport can be “a place for giants to skateboard.” It’s all a delightful conjuring of images and thoughts you encounter as you meander with him through Okanagan towns with their fruit stands, historic landmarks, and tourist attractions.
Arnott’s storytelling has some of the qualities of Mark Twain floating down the Mississippi or Walt Whitman strolling the Great White Way. Lord Byron, too, comes to mind with his peripatetic Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. But perhaps this travel memoir is more akin to John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. More like Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods.
Arnott readers are treated to evocative photographs throughout the book. These resemble paintings plucked from the local environment with their rich palette of colours. Overlaid are images of the sculptures that Arnott has stopped to admire. Chief Dan George might be among them and there is one of Father Charles Pandosy, the father of Kelowna.
Your journey at an end, you may have found what Arnott philosophically calls, “commonality, melding narrative and culture in communal space, recognizing the fact that all space is shared.” You could not hope for a better travelling companion and chronicler of the journey.
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Ron Verzuh is a writer and historian. [Editor’s note: Ron has recently reviewed books by R.D. Rowberry, Christy K. Lee, Colin Campbell, and Megan McDougall for The British Columbia Review.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster