In June, 1994, I was in the middle of a two-month bicycle expedition through, Alaska, Yukon, and the length of British Columbia. On the 14th, I pulled in to an isolated restaurant/campsite. I’d just made the climb from Dease Lake, descent to the Stikine River, and climb back up onto the plateau.

The night before, I was hosted by a group of schoolteachers in Dease Lake, after a detour into Telegraph Creek. The schoolteacher there insisted I couldn’t miss the Stanley Cup game and phoned back to Dease Lake to arrange for me to see the contest. Though not a hockey fan, sitting through the game seemed a fair price to pay for another night out of my one-person tent and a shower. I arrived with a six-pack. Of course, the game was a big disappointment to the teachers. I feigned similar regret.

Sitting down at the restaurant on the plateau for a spaghetti dinner, the muted satellite TV in the corner caught my attention. It was, to my surprise, tuned to the evening news, on what is now Global. Aside from the previous evening’s game, I hadn’t seen a TV in over a month. At first, I assumed there was some new uprising afoot in the US, or Latin America. But, wait, I recognized my old Vancouver neighbourhood. What on earth was going on? I called for the proprietor to turn on the sound.

And that’s how I witnessed the Stanley Cup Riot. From my perspective — happily lost among one of the great landscapes of British Columbia — it reinforced my existing jaundiced view of “civilization” at the end of the twentieth century.