If you’ve been reading the pages of Pique the last few weeks, you may have noticed my byline popping up more than usual. After nearly a year away from Whistler, I am officially back in the saddle at Pique, joining a long list of locals who have bid farewell to the community, only to return, a little worse for wear, but satisfied in the knowledge the grass isn’t always greener on the other side.
It wasn’t exactly how I envisioned the past year, but life has a way of tossing you curveballs, especially when you don’t feel all that equipped to knock them out of the park. I left the resort last December convinced I would never call it home again, but, as I keep joking to friends, this town is a little bit like the mafia: You can never truly leave.
One of the stranger qualities of Whistler is that, in some ways, it lives outside of normal time. There is arguably no community in the country that changes as much or as quickly as ours does. We refresh our population every winter with a new injection of young adults seeking a bit of the fun and adventure we are so known for, and being the global tourism destination we are, change is the bedrock of our town. There is always pressure to grow, to offer new amenities, new experiences, new everything.
And yet, if you ignore the physical signs of Whistler’s impermanence—the newly opened and shuttered shops, the upgraded facilities and parks, etc.—you might get the sense nothing ever really changes here. We are, both literally and figuratively, a community of seasons, our collective rhythms finely attuned to the whims of the mountains and Mother Nature. That cyclical nature can have a sort of prolonged Groundhog Day effect, every ski season a shadow of ski seasons past.
The issues affecting Whistler, at least from a bird’s eye perspective, don’t change all that much either. It’s interesting to flip through 30 years of Pique’s archives and see how so many of the same challenges facing us today, whether housing or labour or overtourism, persisted decades ago.
The simple reality of living in a resort community set up to serve the needs of the millions of tourists who visit here each year is that the systemic barriers that also exist elsewhere are so deeply entrenched they are that much harder to break down.
If Whistler doesn’t change on some elemental level, we as individuals certainly do, a process that, at least for me, was accelerated by my having skipped town. I spent long overdue time with family, lived for several months in the heart of Downtown Toronto, with all its screaming chaos and over-stimulus, and eventually landed on the Island, in Victoria, a charming and rapidly changing city in its own right.
In that time away, I got kicked around a bit, as life has a way of doing. I got laid off from my PR job two months after starting, and worked at a grocery store for a while to help cover the bills. My housing situation remained precarious for a good chunk of the year. Friendships ended, some abruptly, some through natural drift.
Through all the trials and tribulations, what struck home more than anything else was this notion that nobody was coming to rescue me. If I wanted to create the life I wanted to live, I was the only one with the building blocks to do it. It’s something I already understood on a certain level but hadn’t experienced in practice until I was separated from my usual social network, my job, and my community.
It’s both the blessing and the curse of the Whistler bubble. There is a pervading sense of escapism here that insulates you from the reality of the outside world. It’s so easy to get caught up in the rhythms of this town that we forget we still have the freedom to march to the beat of a different drum. Sometimes you need to leave the bubble to understand your place inside of it, and I am so grateful I did. I return to a Whistler and a job that may not have changed much while I was gone, but I most certainly did. The next time a curveball comes my way, you can be damn sure I’ll be swinging for the fences.
