Introductions This book begins with a confession. I rolled the school bus down a hill by my home, crashing it into the Sam family''s fruit trees in Lytton, British Columbia, when I was ten years old. I was never brought to justice, but I''m sure I was suspected. I don''t say this to boast or to relieve myself of any guilt, but rather in an attempt to jazz up this book. I also assume that I''m protected by some statute of limitations and that my tender age at the time of the crime protects me legally. Besides, Lytton has burned down since then--twice. The evidence has been destroyed, along with my old family home. The book that follows is written out of love, not for any form of repentance.

It was not written in easy times, and there was another fire in the area when the book was in the editing stages. Still, the book got written and I am confident that Lytton will rebound yet again. I continue to message with my old childhood friends like Robert Bolan, Donny Glasgow and Tommy Watkinson, as well as my mom''s great friend Kareen Zebroff. They''re all survivors. Lytton is the home of survivors. The community at the junction of the Fraser and Thompson Rivers has been around for thousands of years and has always rebounded in the past. I can''t imagine the world without it. The Lytton that was the centre of my universe in the 1950s and 1960s had no skyscrapers, elevators, escalators, parking lots, bookstores, public libraries, fast-food franchises, drive-throughs, malls or even traffic lights.

It also didn''t have great school bus security. My family moved into a modest old stucco house on Fraser Street, across the street from the Lytton Hotel and its lively beer parlour, which we could smell from the street. When we occasionally camped on the front lawn and slept under the stars in sleeping bags, patrons lobbed salt shakers at us before heading home. Our house was also just a stone''s throw from the Anglican parish hall and the Catholic church, and a monument to the great nineteenth-century Chief Cexpen''nthlEm (also known as Sexpinlhemx, Cexpen''nthlEm, Cixpen''ntlam, Shigh-pentlam and David Spintlum) of the Nlaka''pamux people. Just a block from our home in another direction, overlooking the Fraser River, was the train station where a young Queen Elizabeth II once stopped long enough to shake hands with a few of the locals. Years later, I learned that the land where the CNR site was built was also where Chief Cexpen''nthlEm negotiated a peace back in 1858 to stave off a war with American gold miners. If not for the Chief and the Nlaka''pamux of the Lytton area, what is now British Columbia could well be part of the United States, and Canada would not stretch from coast to coast to coast. I didn''t know any of this history while growing up, just that the view from our yard was spectacular and that the monument to the Chief overlooking the river and the CNR station was formidable and mysterious.

My dad, Dr. Kenneth Edwards, was the only physician in the area and he got to make the rules in St. Bartholomew''s Hospital, which was a few minutes'' walk from our home. Much later I heard that he made a rule immediately after he started work at the old Anglican hospital: everyone got to come in and leave through the front door. Up to that point, Indigenous people had to come in through a side entrance, even though they were the overwhelming majority in the area and had lived there much longer. I also learned from my brother David that Dad sometimes scaled cliffs, dangling by a rope, to treat victims of car crashes. I marvel at the thought, as he was no great athlete. After a dozen years there, we moved to Windsor, Ontario.

You can be a doctor in a place like Lytton for only so long. Dad''s responsibilities were 24/7 and relentless. He had delivered almost every kid at Lytton Elementary who was younger than me, and he pronounced their relatives dead when their time came, often through car accidents. In a place that size, many had been his friends as well as his patients, and I know that hurt him. This was before Canada had universal health care, and Dad loved it when Indigenous people would show up at the door of our house to pay him in freshly caught fish. Perhaps that''s why, to this day, I love the taste of salmon. At the end of a hectic day, Dad would bunker himself away in his den, relaxing with a beer and a book, two closed doors away from us kids and the TV, which he dismissed as "the Idiot Box." He was surrounded by books in his den, and I sometimes felt I was competing with them for his attention.

Perhaps that''s why I became a writer. Our mother, Winona Edwards, was the first real writer I knew, although I''m sure she was too modest to think of herself as one. She influenced me enormously. She loved reading as much as my father, and her world shone brightly whenever Agatha Christie published a new mystery. They both loved the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, but Agatha Christie was Mom''s own special favourite. A comment from Christie I''ll never forget was about the moment she felt she had turned professional. Christie said that a real writer writes "even when you don''t want to." Without Mom''s influence, this book would never have been written.

The older I get, the more blessed I feel to have spent my first dozen years in the shadow of Jackass Mountain, a two-kilometre-tall peak to the south. In a community that wasn''t just the centre of my universe but the centre of countless universes for generations before and after me, the name typified the local sense of humour, fitting for a place where anything that endures is bound to be loved but nothing is really precious. Mom and Dad raised me and my three siblings--Jim, David and Melanie--in a happy and defiant little cocoon. I never really saw limits. In the Lytton of my childhood, we felt we could see forever and be anything we pretended--and aspired--to be. I have since learned that not everyone had it so good. We were unaware as children of the horrors that existed for other children who were starting their lives nearby. We almost never saw any kids from St.

George''s Residential School, set on farmland just four kilometres from my home. We never visited or were invited to visit St. George''s. Lytton was the centre of their universe too, but the view for them was often very different. The community now known as Lytton was at the centre of the Nlaka''pamux universe long before the settlement on their territory was named after a much-ridiculed British writer, who was also a senior official in British Columbia''s nineteenth-century colonial government. Tiny, confident Lytton once aspired to be the provincial capital, but mostly it has been a place of refuge and countless new beginnings and fresh starts. The family of an Olympic gold medallist got its Canadian start there in the nineteenth century. Another Olympic champion hid out here to get away from life''s pressures and recharge his emotional batteries.

Lytton was home to about 550 people when I grew up there, but it had shrunk to 249 before it burned down in the summer of 2021. The Lytton Creek Fire wasn''t the first to ruin downtown Lytton, but unlike the fires before it, that one in June 2021 destroyed pretty much everything, including my old family home on Fraser Street. That was the same street that was once home to another career writer, playwright Kevin Loring of the Nlaka''pamux of Lytton First Nation. I learned that Kevin''s dad even lived for a time in our old family house. This wasn''t some great serendipity, as there were only a half-dozen or so streets and a limited number of homes in town. The book you''re reading is an attempt to explore and understand Lytton--and all that we lose when places like Lytton are destroyed by wildfire--brought to you by two homegrown writers from different generations and different backgrounds. I''m a few years older than Kevin. I went to school with his aunt, Shiela Adams, who was one of the top students and athletes in my grade.

I was great friends with one of his cousins, Donny Glasgow, whose family gave Lytton its smile and swagger for generations. Donny was authentic before that term became trendy. Shiela and Donny are now two among many living symbols of Lytton''s resilience as it faces its greatest threat in over a century. The fire that levelled my former family home was mentioned by Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and teenaged Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and others around the world as an example of the danger and brutality of climate change. People once went to Lytton to heal their bodies and souls in its dry, intense heat. Now it''s a canary in the mine shaft for the future of our planet. Saving Lytton could offer lessons for saving countless other communities. Lytton was struggling to pull itself up from its knees when another massive wildfire swept through the area in the summer of 2022, and even more fires in the summer of 2023.

As this book was being completed, other Canadian communities were suffering the ravages of climate change in the form of uncontrollable wildfires. Yet the people of Lytton are struggling to rebuild yet again--stronger than ever. This book is also an attempt to explore and understand Canada, as Lytton is a quintessentially Canadian place--for all the good and bad that this entails. William Blake said that you can find the meaning of life by studying a grain of sand. I think you.