Guilty Pleasure

One time back in the days when I was a travelling door to door encyclopedia salesman, we went to Kamloops, British Columbia.  In fact, many times.

Kamloops is about a 4 hour drive from Vancouver on the way to most of the places we would go in Alberta and Saskatchewan, so it was often a convenient place to stop to eat, and more often than not do an evening's worth of door knocking while we were at it.  I remember it as a kind of unexciting working class town, which made it a perfect place for travelling door to door encyclopedia salesmen to ply their trade.  Its population of not much less than 100 thousand would generally work against it (cities hate door to door salesmen), but its isolation in fact meant that au contraire, it could simply be worked over and over without killing territory.

One of the things I remember best about Kamloops is how many really old cars one would see on the road.  Neither collectible antiques suggesting a wealthy area nor nasty old junkers suggesting a slum, but simply old cars in decent shape that in most of the places I'd been would have rusted to dust years earlier.  Lots of AMC Eagles and such.  I was told it was because Kamloops gets very little rain or snow because it's in the Coastal Mountains' rain shadow, and they don't salt the roads in the winter.  Certainly when I was there in April, it was hot and dry and seemed like a desert.  It was fun to see all those classic middle class cars on the road.

One time, we were driving through a residential neighbourhood when I saw a hand painted sign in someone's front yard that made me laugh until I cried, while at the same time feeling like a lowlife for finding it so funny.  I just saw it out of the corner of my eye for a moment, but that was all it took to burn itself into my memory forever.  I guess it was the pathos, the innocence, or maybe the passive-aggressiveness (a term I had never heard yet back in those days) of the sign that struck me as so funny.  Probably the pathos.  Whenever anyone mentions "guilty pleasures," I think of my laughter at that sad little hand painted sign somebody took the effort to create and put on their front lawn in Kamloops, BC.

Please return our boat.