oh, those rednecks

I'm definitely feeling some culture shock. Two nights ago, I was wining and dining at L'Academie and watching Sarah Harmer in concert at the Lion D'or downtown and today I was learning how to stay safe from H2S gas and rescue fallen workers in the oil fields with a class-room full of diesel-drivin', tobacco-chewin', gun-shootin' rednecks.

Try as I may not to be judgemental, it's hard to ignore the twenty-something guy in a plaid shirt and cowboy boots with a big wad of chew in his mouth when he ends up with the only black Annie doll to practice CPR on say "Oh, no. I've got African Annie. This one's got AIDS. I better use two face shields."

WTF!?!?! Did that guy really just say that? If we were in Montreal, he'd get beaten!

But they weren't all bad. I had lunch with a 65 year-old man that had spent his whole life doing labour work (and was still hard at it), who looked as rough as they come in an old, oil-stained mack jacket and torn jeans. He had spent 3 years in Kazakhstan working in the oil industry and told me all about how he had learned russian (though many foreigners didn't) so that he could shop at the local markets and travelled all over the country on his time off. He said that now he has a "little lady" in Nakusp and thinks he'll save enough this winter to go down there and "play hippy for a little while."

I'm always fascinated by the different view people have of the world up here, but I've never seen such extremes in the same day! Someone should really do an anthropological study on the redneck worldview. I'd read it! But for now I'll just sit back and gawk and think about how crazy my life is that I can go back and forth between both worlds.

My brother really summed up the way it feels to come back to FSJ after spending so much time somewhere else. He said, "I'm the biggest redneck in Whistler and then when I come home, I'm the biggest tree-hugger in Fort St. John".