Bruce Tillen Interview – Clearing the Land

Bruce Tillen, former Arrowhead resident, discusses the process of BC Hydro clearing the land for the Hugh Keenleyside Dam.

Title Screen: Circular logo on a black backdrop. Logo is an image of four waves turning into wheat on the left end. The title “Stories Beneath the Surface” is circled around the image in capital letters.

Interview with Bruce Tillen – a bald white man, wearing a white shirt and blue and black jacket. He is standing outside.

Revelstoke Museum and Archives logo in the bottom right hand corner.

Transcript of Narration:

[He starts with his arms crossed]

My dad and my mom they uh made their-their uh living [lowers his arms and clasps them in front of himself], he had off highway logging trucks, and at one time they thought of making our old house into a-into a, like a bed and breakfast type thing.

Which would have been great because we could have had about 10 bedrooms in that house, it was a big house. Um, and it wasn’t even a question of can they stay, because our house was never-there was never any indication it was going to be underwater.

Probably more than half of Arrowhead was above the water line. So they-it could have been saved and they could have put a road in or whatever was decided. But uh, it was easier just to buy everybody up and uh shut everything down.

And so when the land clearing came in, that was the first shot of reality where you know, you’d see nice fields and all of a sudden and trees around in forest and pretty soon it was all pushed flat, burnt, and uh stumped.

So by the time that it was time to move out, the land had been mostly cleared, the-the building’s gone, it was a dust bowl, and by then we were just glad to be out of there, because there was nothing left; no buildings and nothing but memories.

And uh, I took my-my parents and some family friends back to where I had on the tugboat, uh a couple years after.

And after they had been there uh Harding Rudd said: I really wish I had not gone back because I-I wish I could have remembered Arrowhead the way it was. And uh, I think that’s underlying factors.

A lot of people, you don’t really want to go back, because memories are usually better than, sometimes, when you go back and see it’s all rough landscape and rocks and logs.