It was on our recent visit to Barkerville that my ‘no regrets’ mantra failed me.

I try very hard to subscribe to this notion. 

After all, I am the sum total of all that has happened to me and my failings have only served to instruct or to teach me empathy or whatever other lesson I require. Ultimately then, these moments have only helped to make me who I am. In my personal world view, regrets are simply a reminder that I have something to learn. After learning the lesson, one must let it go and have no regrets (please insert uplifting New Age music here, perhaps accompanied by a Pinterest-worthy optimistic quote written in bold cursive on a whitewashed board).

 

 

Barkerville, for those who don’t know, is a designated national historic site of Canada. From the 1865 gold rush until gold production peaked in 1942, it was a thriving city with over 30,000 inhabitants, all determined to strike it rich. But, as the gold diminished, so did the town’s population. In 1952 the nearby city of Wells formed the Wells Historical Society to try to save what was left, and by 1957 there were less than 60 people living in Barkerville.

 

 

The results of those initial historical efforts are the reasons we can now visit homes and businesses left intact or reconstructed from photos; an incredible opportunity to experience time travel. In short, Barkerville is a treasure.

As soon as we’d arrived and parked the Pod, I started looking for the church. I knew it wouldn’t be a part of the buildings facing the street, but at the end.

 

 

Long ago, I’d visited Barkerville with my parents and sisters. I remember Mom hating that summer’s dust. I’m sure she probably washed the inside of the car’s dash before we left. About thirty years ago, I’d visited again, along with my young stepsons and Kevin.

But it’s the memory after that trip with my parents that stands out. I was probably about nine or ten-years old. I am kneeling on the beige linoleum in the kitchen of our Cherry Street house. I can’t believe Mom is allowing Dad and me to do this inside the house. It must be too cold out in the garage, but somehow we have permission to tap little nails into the tiny cedar shakes that are covering my replica Barkerville church. We sit right beside the door to the porch and I make sure to sit close to the warmth blasting out of the register.

It is for a school project. Maybe that’s why Mom’s usual rules about cleanliness were allowed to be relaxed that day. I no longer recall specifically what the project was about, perhaps my reproduction church was part of a general street scene as our class learned about the gold rush that led to Barkerville.

 

 

I just know that I helped my Dad build a church that was about 16” high, with genuine arched windows on the side, split long cedar pieces for the vertical siding, a proper bell tower and a little nailed cross above the door. It was magnificent. The only difference between our version and the original was that our walls went straight up without the little annex.

Dad had used the jig saw earlier (in the garage!) to cut out the little arched windows on the front and sides of the church. I loved watching his strong hands split vertical mini-planks for the side walls and showing me how to carefully nail the little miniature shakes onto that church roof.

Somehow, through all life’s many moves , with all my editing and decluttering, I held onto that church. It sat on ledges in apartments, wooden box platforms in houses and on coffee tables and dressers and in storage lockers. Eventually the shingles on the roof of the bell tower worked their way off and then the tower itself split. My repair was noticeable. Some of the vertical planks on the side fell off and the horizontal piece of the cross broke away.

Finally, when we moved to Sechelt, I put it on a wooden stool and sat it under the apple tree in our garden.

I decided to think of it like an ancient totem pole. It too, was made of cedar and would, eventually, rot. I think I probably felt quite smug with such a smart Buddha-like-loving-detachment way of thinking.

Ah yes, grasshopper, everything returns to the earth. Behold the cycle of life. We cannot hold on to the material world. (I can be truly quite nauseatingly self-righteous).

I remember the first time Dad walked into our back garden on one of his many stays at our coastal home. He spotted the little church right away. He would have been in his 80s. He stopped, pointing his cane under the tree, “You still have that?” He made it sound like he didn’t care one way or another but I could tell he was pleased to see it there.

Which is when I told him that building that church was one of my favourite childhood memories. I told him too, that I loved how we’d built that flat-bottomed boat for me to pole around our swamp and how banging up boards to build tree forts, learning how to straighten nails, use a handsaw, the circular saw, all of it, all those times, meant so much to me.  I remember feeling so good that I’d told him that, but wishing too, that I’d told him so much more.  But those kinds of conversations between us were rare.

So when I saw that same Anglican church in Barkerville, in a town built from nostalgia and broken dreams, I wished, more than anything that I still had that little cedar church.

I regret that I left it to return to earth in that long-ago Stalashen Drive garden. Instead, I wish I’d built something like a Chinese altar. Maybe the broken church would be encased in its own shadow box, flanked by burning sticks of sandalwood. Maybe those plumes of smoke, like prayers made visible, would wind their way through those little roughly cut windows. I could have tucked in old family photos. It would have been an ancestral ark of a different kind of covenant.

Thinking about my wooden church while peering into those long ago homes, saloons and businesses held a rich, dark melancholy. All those lives, the music, the tears, the joy, all that certainty that life would go on.

But then again, doesn’t life always hold a certain rich darkness? Isn’t it precisely because a rose’s life is so fleeting, decay so close, that we treasure its glorious beauty?

Perhaps then, this is not so much a regret as a certain melancholia, a wistfulness for not appreciating the depth of what I had until it was gone.

Then again, it was probably never about that little wooden church at all.