Behind the Scenes: Filming Lost Lake
While researching a travel series for Bricklight Films, Blake (my partner in crime) and I thought we should start closer to home since Covid travel restrictions were still in effect. I looked online for local ecological stories we could tell that might interest people.
That’s when I came across an article about a lake that vanished in 1924. I had never heard of Sumas Lake, and I’m sure I’ve been to most lakes in the Lower Mainland. I did know where Sumas Prairie was, though. It’s an area located at the edge of Abbotsford and spans to the border of Chilliwack. The site is flanked by two mountain ranges and bisected by TransCanada Highway 1.
I was curious. Maybe this was just an unfamiliar lake that wasn’t on my radar. I started down the internet rabbit hole, discovering that this was a massive lake and the home and hunting ground for Sema:th peoples. They opened their home to neighbouring Nooksack, Chilliwack, and Kwikwetlem and shared the abundance.
Blake started to ask questions. When I told him what had happened, he also started going down the rabbit hole. The deeper I dug, the angrier I was visually and physically becoming. We stayed up late researching, and I spent the next week reading everything available. I read every article and book I could find. The stories reflected the same message; there was rich biodiversity to Sumas lake that existed before the region’s colonization. The lake ecology changed significantly when gold miners began settling in the area and used Euro-centric ideas to develop an economy of cattle ranches and homesteads.
This newfound knowledge and anger into motivation to tell the story. Blake grabbed his camera gear while I held my notes, and we drove the 30 minutes to Sumas Lake’s old shoreline. There are farms and a nursery there now. The area happened to be flooding when we showed up. The first shot of the day ended up being the last shot of the PSA we edited. As Blake calibrated the camera, I walked ahead and looked over the flooding field toward the Vedder mountain range and damned if I didn’t tear up. I was standing in a lake bed that should have been 4–6 feet above my head. I get a lump in my throat every time I see it. All of the stories flood to mind like a lake reclaiming its bed.
We grabbed shots of endless farms and country roads as we travelled through the area. There is a new ecosystem that has adapted to this unnatural prairie. This area now grows most of the food for the Lower Mainland and employs or houses 3400 people. It would be an absolute disaster to those who rely on it if this area were to flood back.
We went to Barrowtown Pump station. It is next to the quarry you can see from the highway just past the Yellow Barn Country Market and №3 exit. The pumps were running at their lowest capacity while we were there. It seemed deserted, although I’m sure somebody was in the building behind the towering chain-link fence monitoring water levels. During high water season, Barrowtown station ramps from two to four pumps at peak flood season to keep the area from flooding. Sumas Lake was the floodplain for the Fraser River. It would expand from its regular size that fits comfortably between the mountain ranges to almost three times the size, extending down to Sumas, USA and Chilliwack, BC. The city pays half a million dollars each year to make sure this flood doesn’t occur and thus pushes the farmers out. After all, the settlers drained the lake to create arable land for farming.
I learned from reading Before We Lost the Lake that during the gold rush in BC, miners used Sumas as a passageway, and farmers ended up settling in the area. It started with grazing animals, which meant clearcutting the natural grasslands and replanting them with grasses European animals could eat without getting sick. As it became more habitable to the grazing animals, people started farming plant-based food. But the silly, dirty lake kept flooding and ruining crops. As they would today, the farmers got upset about this and decided that, instead of moving, they would put pressure on the local government to do something about the lake. In the early 1920s, this strategy finally succeeded when they started rerouting entire riverways, dredging new paths. They cut off all waterways feeding the lake, drastically reducing its water levels. They continued actively draining the lake and succeeded by 1924. The original dam was put in place to keep it dry while dykes were carved into the landscape to help curb the flooding.
No regard was given to the Sema:th peoples or any animals that relied on the lake. In the 1910s, the self-proclaimed colonial government declared that the damming and draining of Sumas Lake would continue and paid no further regard to the consequential loss of animal populations, critical wetlands, and the Sema:th way of life.
If an earthquake devastated the pump station, the lake would reflood in approximately forty-eight hours. I would feel terrible for the people who have called this place work or home as they are not specifically responsible for the draining of the lake. I would feel for them like I feel for the Sema:th. Nobody deserves to lose their homes and livelihoods forcibly. However, Mother Nature has a way of doing what she wants, and no matter how hard we fight it, one day, the lake will exist again.
This project moved me so that it has completely changed the direction of the stories I want to tell and how I want to spend my spare time. I also learned that over the past 100 years, we hadn’t changed much as a species. We are still behaving in this way towards all ecosystems, still oppressing Indigenous peoples. How do we move forward?
