Travels with Rob: Chilliwack

Chilliwack, British Columbia.

Located about 100 or so kilometres east of Vancouver on the TransCanada highway, Chilliwack sits in the Upper Fraser Valley, south of the Fraser River, north of the American border and surrounded by farmland. Once a small farming community it has started growing in recent years into a kind of sprawling, messy small city.

I have kind of a love/hate relationship with the city. I was born here and spent time growing up on the military base, CFB Chilliwack, when it still existed. I eventually ended up living on an Indian Reserve about half an hour out of town, so spent a lot of time coming to town to shop or see a movie at the, now non-existent, Paramount Theatre. A community garden now sits where the theatre once loomed. That area has suffered rough times and currently seems to be struggling through gentrification.

Down from the theatre, for those curious, is the famous Five Corners though I never learned why it was famous beyond that it had five corners as three road intersected it. It was a popular spot for placard-waving, Christian types to stand and hope to save us from our hell-bound ways. Not for nothing, I am told, Chilliwack used to hold the record for most churches per capita. There are a lot of them still. And, inexplicably, a fair number of Confederate flags but that seems to be in the decline, thankfully.

Chilliwack’s boundaries encompass several First Nations’ communities, indeed sits at the general centre of the Stó:lō territory. There is a quiet tension between non-Native and First Nations people, the two groups coexisting somewhat uneasily in my view.

I used to think it rained a lot here but since I moved to Prince Rupert, BC, I have revised that understanding and the fact that the summers are ridiculously long and hot nowadays, I have revised even further. It’s stupidly hot. Unpleasantly so.

This isn’t meant to be a downer piece as much as it appears to be at first glance. There is a lot of distractions here to entice travelers: Cultus Lake, just south of the city, is beautiful and has a lot of attractions; the arts centre downtown is quite beautiful and features some great tours and shows throughout the year. There are great trails and local tours to go on and other stuff to do (I’m not fond of sport fishing but it exists).

While the aforementioned quiet tensions exist, I did find that, one on one, the people seemed fairly polite to each other. I spent a month in town, working as a courier for Skip the Dishes, delivering meals from select restaurants to people, kind of like Uber Eats in the USA, I suspect. For the most part, people were nice to me.

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