We celebrate Kimberley Women: Four Generations. Strong women. Talented and creative. Compassionate and wise. Ava Fei Clark, an eight-year old iGeneration, reinvents what it’s like to be a kid, adventuring her way throughout the Americas. Chloe Smith, a millennial, redesigns a new way of working and living. Becky Bates, a baby boomer, races her way through midlife. And Shirley Rossi, the Silent Generation, reflects on a life of generosity, when you could trust a candy apple.

Kimberley Women. Each in their own quiet, kickass way, inspiring us to do things a little differently.

Eight-year-old Ava Fei Clark sits at her kitchen table pretending she is my teacher. On a whiteboard she marks fourteen math questions, checking my answers against a multiplication table posted on the wall. Her ten-year-old brother, Koby, makes ginger snaps, and calculates how many ¾ cups of brown sugar he’ll need for a cup and a half.

In ten days, Ava Fei and her family will leave Kimberley, BC on an epic adventure.

Like many families, they’ll drive to California. Once safely parked in Anaheim, her parents, Dan and Alice, will take their kids to Disneyland. Then, like many Clark-Young family trips, things will take a monumental twist: the family of four will head south on their bikes, 2500 kilometres to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Once there, they will do what most families do: they’ll relax, eat fish tacos, make sand castles, and swim with the whales.Following this, they’ll bus across the US border, mount their bikes and head north, cycling over 4,000 km to Jasper, Alberta, part of the family’s goal to cycle the route between Tuktoyaktuk, Canada, to the southern tip of Baja, Mexico.

Adventure is nothing new for Ava Fei (see insert). In 2010, as a one-year-old, she and her brother accompanied her parents on a 700 km, 20-day canoe trip along the Yukon River.

Over the next seven years, Ava Fei and her family undertook some legendary adventures: they paddled over 4,400 kilometres during 197 days on water, and cycled 9,500 kilometres during 247 days on the road. In 2016, they hiked 250 kilometres of the Continental divide.

At their kitchen table, we watch the video of the McKenzie River trip. At one point, Ava Fei looks into the camera and giggles, then turns around and splashes into a mud puddle beside the river. While watching the film, Ava Fei is laughing. I ask her what was the favourite part of the trip. “We got to play,” she says, then continues watching the film, giggling away.

In his film, Familia Ciclista, Dan Clark reflects on what his family gains during these journeys far away from home: “Our family is unified in this simple life,” he says.  “They become little people ready to take on the world.”

I ask Ava Fei about the deeper meaning of these adventures, what she learns from  journeys very few humans have undertaken. She looks perplexed, as if to say, “This is just what we do. I’m not sure what you mean?” This is a family that enjoys spending time together. If someone’s experiencing an intense feeling, they talk about it. They study the things around them. They notice what clouds look like before rain. How black flies behave when the wind dies down. How a passing Muskox steps though an ancient era. They make popcorn in cast iron pots. Listen to rain on tent roofs. They play trumpets with pepperoni sticks. They giggle.

“We rejuvenate ourselves on these trips,” Alice says. “We find our rhythm. Things are pretty simple.”

I ask Ava Fei about her thoughts on their upcoming adventure. “I’m going to miss school,” she says.

“It’s ok,” her mom responds. “You can teach us while we’re away.”

“Are you nervous,” I ask her.

Ava Fei giggles. “No,” she says, then finishes marking my test with a red erasable pen.  “You got a perfect score!” she shouts, then bites into one of her brother’s cookies and smiles.

Ava Fei’s Adventure Stats

2010: 700 km. Yukon River. Canoeing. 20 days.

2011: 300 km. Valdez to Whittier, AK. Ocean canoeing. 42 days.

2012: 3400 km. Jasper to Tuktoyaktuk. River canoeing. 100 days.

2014: 6000 km. Patagonia to Bolivia. Cycling. 195 days.

2015: 1000 km. Great Slave Lake, Pike’s Portage, tundra circuit.  Overland canoeing and portaging. 55 days

2016: 250 km. Continental Divide hike from Field to Kananaskis. 25 days

2017: 3500 km. Inuvik to Jasper. Cycling. 52 days

Never Enough Time In The Day

Chloe Smith

The Millennial

Chloe Smith sips tea on the couch and stares out the window. She’s got the quiet comfort of someone in no rush to speak. “It’s like a puzzle,” she says, describing what it’s like juggling five jobs and a sixty-hour work week. “All these pieces that fit together. It’s tight, but the irony is, I feel free.”

Like many millennials, Chloe’s chosen a career path more flexible and less predictable than previous generations. “I have all these tiny pockets of friends and families,” she says, “but I need a pretty fancy daytimer to keep it all organized.”

The Lifeguard

“I’m the Kimberley Aquatic Centre’s longest standing employee. It’s been eleven years. I had a moment the other day looking out the window, staring at the trees. I thought, they’re blocking the sun. When I started here, they were just planted.”

The Bartender

“My dad had a beer fridge in the basement when I was a kid,” she says. “I know how to pour a beer. A friend of mine start working at Overtime, and I thought, this looks like fun. Every time someone comes in, I learn something new about the town. And, i like good beer.”

The Receptionist

“Friday mornings, I work at Revolution Acupuncture & Wellness, with Troy and Yana. One afternoon, they invited me for a beer, and a few weeks later, I was working there. I look forward to every shift with them. They’re incredible human beings.”

The Nurse

“As a kid, we’d listen to my mom’s nursing stories. My brother would turn green, but I loved it. When considering careers, I thought, I Iike taking care of people. Being a nurse would be a good fit. I worked for five years, on and off, in Cranbrook doing private nursing care. Now, I’m specializing in nursing foot care two days per week.”

The Designer
“My great-aunt was a founder of Blanche MacDonald fashion and beauty School. In 2014, I went to Vancouver to study fashion design. I wanted to create comfortable, stylish, mountain-style clothing. After I completed my program, I returned to Kimberley to begin a design company. My great-great-grandmother, Lily, was a seamstress and a nurse in the war. Everyone called her Lily of the Valley. One day, I was driving home from work, the alpenglow striking the Rockies. I had this ah-ha moment and thought I’d call my company Lily of the Mountains. Presently, I’ve got a beautiful studio with lots of natural light. I head there in the morning and lose myself for hours drafting new ideas. I’m content with being small, but I’m growing steadily and sending packages all over North America.”

The Octopus

“All my jobs I never sought,” Chloe says. “They just seemed to happen. At times, I feel a bit like an octopus. I can feel spread pretty thin, but i never get bored. There’s never enough hours in a day. I know there’s a time when I need to focus on one thing, but it’s just not right now…”

old-soul,

Beware of the Chair

Becky Bates

The Baby Boomer

Becky Bates can’t feel her hands, the hair outside her toque, frozen. She’s just returned from a two-hour run through Kimberley’s Nature Park and has put on a pot of tea. She offers me a beer. “Today was hard yards,” she says. “Minus 16.” In four days, Bates will leave for Hawaii to compete in the Hurt 100, one of the planet’s toughest 100 mile races. She’ll navigate slick-rooted jungle trails, stream crossings, mud wallows, and thirteen hours of dark. Over half its entrants won’t finish. “Beware of the chair,” she warns. “The number one rule of ultrarunning, beware of the chair.”  

Bates, who’s in her mid-fifties, describes how she emerged as one of North America’s top female ultrarunners, twenty years older than most of her professionally-sponsored competitors. “On our 50th year celebrations, my friends danced and partied. I went to Helena, Montana to see if I could run 50 miles. I had no fricken clue. I didn’t train. I did two three-hour runs before the race. I placed 5th, which I thought was pretty good, though I didn't run for a year and a half after that.” Since then, Bates has competed in fourteen ultrarunning races, ranging in distance from 45 to 160 kilometers, half of which she finished as first or second female athlete.

When Becky isn’t training, or adventuring with her husband, Ian, near their St. Marys’ River home, she’s working in the Vancouver film industry as a special effects assistant. She works with a fabrication team, constructing mechanical devices for stunts and effects: pneumatics, hydraulics, flight simulators, and weather machines that create fog, rain and wind. “We throw cars 60 feet across the road,” she says. “It’s pretty cool.”

She explains how she fell into a career in stunts and special effects: “I was living in Squamish and went to visit friends on a movie set,” she says. “The art department was looking for someone to glue moss on the bottom of a fake log spanning a gorge. I was a climber, so I volunteered and the next thing I knew, I was glueing branches to a fake log.”

The next summer she took a job as a stunt double. “I thought I was going to die every time I went to work,” she says. “I hated stunts, but if it sounded fun, and I thought I was going to survive, I’d take it.” In Jumanji, with Robin Williams, she stunt doubled for thirteen-year-old Kirsten Dunst, diving out of the way of stampeding rhinos. “It was a strange life,” she says. “One week I was working on XMen 2. The next I was climbing the Squamish Chief, eating Dunkin’ Donuts.”

Becky recalls a typically treacherous day working in stunts: “We’d been in the water all morning. I had to jump in a river, fully wet-suited and in a period-piece long dress, nine times. If we missed the eddie, we’d go over the falls. It was fricken cold. We were going under and couldn’t get back up. Rafts with the cameras were bouncing off rocks. “I put my hand up to get rescued and no one was there. One of us was going to die if we kept doing it. I said, ‘I’m done.’”

“Now, my days are emails and a cell phone,” she says. “I work 12 ½ hour days, but at least I know i’m going to make it home.”

Ian joins us at the dining room table. “What’s amazing about Becky,” he says, “is she works a sixty hour week, drives 45 minutes home to a basement suite, puts on a headlamp and heads out in the rain for a three-hour run. Then, she gets up at 5:45 the next morning and does it all over again.”  

On race day, Bates is excited. She feels ready. She recalls the daunting advice her coach gave her a week ago: Unless your femur is protruding out your rear, there will be no DNF (Do Not Finish).  Five hours in, Becky starts to warms up. She finds her stride. A smile comes across her face. “Think I'm better at longer races,” she says.” I like going long and slow.” Thirty miles into the race it pours rain. She’s hungry and freezing, yet doing well; she’s two hours ahead of her predicted time. “I wore a space blanket like a tutu,” she says. “I warmed up at an aid station that was so remote they had to haul everything in by goat. For the first fifty miles I just drink fluids. I ached in places I didn’t know I had.”

Bates finished the Hurt 100 in record time (27:33:07), tenth overall and second female in a field of professionally-sponsored athletes. Two days later, while most competitors were recovering in the warmth of the Pacific Ocean, Becky flew back to the Vancouver rain and began her 60-hour week.

I ask the obvious question: “Why?”

“It keeps me in the mountains,” Becky says. “And you get free beer. I’ve got a bunch of growlers and belt buckle prizes. Some get a leather belt,” she says. “I’ve got one of those too.”

Believe in Where You Live

Shirley Rossi

The Silent Generation

“Let’s see how many of these things I can break,” Shirley Rossi says, as she reaches into a china cabinet, searching under a stack of cups and saucers. “I don’t need ‘em anyways. They’ll all have to go sooner of later.”  She pulls out newspaper clippings, old photographs, and awards, then lays them on the kitchen table. “What’s this?” she asks, then laughs. “I didn’t know I had this one.”

She holds a medal in her hand and shakes her head. It’s her 1993 Governor General’s Canadian Commemorative Medal for volunteerism. “I should polish this one,” she says, then chuckles. She passes me yellowed newspaper articles highlighting the history of her extraordinary volunteer work (see sidebar). With each article and momento she smiles. Often, she laughs, then tells a story: “I said to them, if ya wanna make money, sell food. Food makes money, and the next thing I knew, I had an $8,000 bill at AG Foods and 600 lbs of potatoes.”

Later that week, I post a photo of Shirley on Facebook. I’ve never seen anything like it. For a generation not typically garnering a lot of social media attention, Shirley’s portrait has 363 likes and 80 shares. People are effusive about their love for Pat and Shirley Rossi: “Everyone in this community, both young and old, have been touched by the overwhelming generosity of Shirley and Pat,” Kathy Merkel writes, “Memories that so many longtime area residents will never forget. Thank you Shirley and Pat!”

Merkel’s referring to the Rossi house, where for fifty-one years, over 350 kids visited every Halloween. “I made 6 trays of caramel apples, 12 dozen gingerbread boys and girls, and 150 caramel suckers,” Shirley says. “It took me and Pat a week to decorate the inside and outside of our house. We made our decorations, cutting and painting plywood patterns. It was a lot of fun. We were always busy people.” All this, while raising a family of six children. “We had one kid every year for six years,” Shirley says. “When the babies cried upstairs, we’d both jump up. It was awesome. I never had any reservations about it.”

And if you know the Rossi story, it makes perfect sense to wonder how they found the energy and compassion to give so much to their community. “We knew our boys,” Shirley says. “They’d want us to go on. You know your kids. You know what they’d want.” She’s referring to the two separate fatal car crashes, six years apart, of their boys, Lyle and David, “It’s there every day,” Shirley says. “You never forget it, but what are you going to do? You have to go on living.”

It’s apparent how much Shirley believes “going on living” includes giving back to her community: “If you don’t have volunteers, no city the size of Kimberley would make it,” she says. “We don’t have those kinds of dollars. Your heart has to be into it. You have to believe in where you live. If it weren’t for volunteers, what would you have?”

In the last few years, Shirley’s health has forced her to quit most of her volunteering, as well as the extensive Halloween celebration. “I’m slowing down a bit,” she says. “I’ve only felt my age in the last few months. I was too involved. Didn’t think about getting older. Didn’t have time.” Yet she takes it all in stride, like all adversity thrown her way. “You take life as it comes,” she says. “Obviously, Pat and I learned that one. You have to make out of life what it offers you. It is what it is. We’re going to make this work.”

It’s just before 5 pm, and Shirley and Pat’s son is pulling up to the house, like he does every day, to have a beer with his dad and visit the dog. “It’s the only dog who eats in the front room and gets to drink beer and tea,” Shirley says, then laughs.

Pat rests his hand on Shirley’s shoulder. “She’s a marvellous person,” he says. “ A great mother and a wife. I don’t know where she gets all the ambition for how small she is.”  He pauses, then tears up. “I love the lady…”

“Before you go,” Shirley says, “I’ve gotta find some more paperwork. Somewhere I’ve got this all written down. I said to my kids, ‘You can’t expect me to remember all this stuff…”

Only So Many Hours in a Day.

A Partial History of Shirley Rossi’s Volunteer Work:

Brownies: Leader

Women of the Moose: Banquets. Catering.

United Way: Canvassing

Julyfest/Winterfest: Board of Directors. Food Booth.

Kimberley Old Time Accordion Championships: Food Services.

Kimberley Bavarian Society: Vice Chair/Board

Kimberley Summer Theatre: Board member

Kimberley Country Fair: Founding Member

Dynamiter Hockey: Booster club. Concession stands.

Mark Creek Lions: Pancake Breakfast.

Rotary Club: Paul Harris Fellow, for “Significant assistance for the furtherance of better understanding and friendly relations among the people of the world.”