2009-05-27 - 2:12 p.m.
Well, it's been a couple of weeks, and I'm beginning to get into a routine here in Wells/Barkerville. I'm still trying to find the right schedule for the services at the church - the latest plan is three times a day on weekdays (except my two days off) and twice a day on Sunday. Not as regular as I would like, as someone at the park pointed out to me "tourists are stupid. They don't read". I was having four services on Sunday, the three regular ones (9:30, 11:30 and 4:30) and one more at 7:00 in the evening, but a) they weren't well attended, and b) Trev, who is the priest from Quesnel who is supervising me, will be coming out once a month to celebrate communion, and he wants to come in the morning. So I've shifted to one Sunday service at 10:30 in the morning. More of a traditional time for church anyway.
I still haven't gone out much in the town while I'm working. I've been trying to gauge how much time outside of the church is appropriate- I know that they want me at least in part to be out and interacting with people, but being in the church and able to answer questions/tell the story of the church. There have been some long, long, dull afternoons, and those would I think be better spent on the street.
I also started the cemetery tours this week. This is something that I knew was coming, and was looking forward too. I like cemeteries, always have. When I was a kid, the family used to take Sunday walks sometimes, and some Sundays, we would go to the town graveyard. We'd visit the relatives, and then Dad (who grew up in the town) would entertain us with stories of how all the people he knew in there died. So now that I'm grown, I take strangers to a cemetery and tell them how the people lived and died. Some quite interesting stories. My favorite is the one about the woman who was buried four times. Now, she didn't end up in our graveyard, but her husband did, giving me the opportunity to tell the story.
See, Cariboo Cameron was one of the first miners up in the part of the country, and like Billy Barker had a town named after him (Camerontown, just down the road from Barkerville). His wife died one summer when they were up working the claim, and before she died, he promised her that he would bury her in Onterio, where she was from. Well, old Cariboo couldn't leave the claim, so he had her buried in the cemetery here. At the end of the season he dug her up, and shipped her to Victoria, where he had her buried again. The next summer he came back up north to work, and at the end of the summer went to Victoria, dug up his wife and put her on a train for Onterio. Arriving in Ontario, he buried her again, next to her family. Now, old Cariboo Cameron was very rich, and very famous, and it wasn't long before a story started going around. The story was that his wife was not in the coffin buried in Ontario, but rather, it was filled with gold. This rumor even made it to the pages of the New York newspapers! Anyway, in the end, they dug her up again, and verified that it was Mrs. Cameron in the casket. After all this, Cariboo Cameron lost all his money, and came back to try to start again. By then there was no gold left, and he died a pauper, and was bured (just the one time) in the Barkerville cemetary.
And that is just one of the stories I get to tell.
