Garbage Day

My good friend GP, one of the three crazy medics of Fort Nelson, happens to be the son of Trapper Ray, the local legend who used to run a trap line near Liard River, and once mounted a vigorous campaign to save the fur spiders, an entirely fictional local species that nonetheless garnered much concerned support from tourists to the Northern Rockies. There were once fur spider crossing signs on the highway, I have myself seen a “Save the Fur Spiders” fridge magnet, and legend has it that a proposed hydro dam was left unbuilt so as not to intrude on their habitat. Anyway, as you might have suspected, GP has a number of excellent stories from his previous life in the North, and I thought this one, flushed out by a discussion of the imminent closing of the Cache Creek landfill, was worth publishing:
“Yeah, there actually used to be a landfill near where I lived, but they closed it because it attracted too many bears. Basically, we’d just back the pickup in, throw out the garbage, and try to leave before the bears figured out we were there. And then sometimes, there would be two in the back of the truck, going through the garbage before we even got out.”