By Martin Castro (The Cascade) – Email
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I live in Mission, and every time I tell anyone I invariably get a response along the lines of “Oh you live in Mission do you?” And then we exchange knowing looks.
This relatively small community exemplifies many stereotypes of small towns. The first stereotype is that of the quaint town with a seedy underbelly. When you build on a hill, you start at the bottom. So there’s a section that I guess could be referred to as “old” Mission. (Down on First, by the RBC and the cat shelter that announces its presence a good couple of feet in advance via the unmistakably acrid scent of chlorine.) Here’s where Mission gets weird, because although most of it looks quaint as can be, and our parks are nicely kept and quiet and frequented by dog walkers and families, every now and then something will scratch the surface, and then news will come out, like it did in 2014, that one of the buildings in the industrial area was actually a drug lab containing $3 million worth of MDMA.
Drugs are a prevalent force in Mission, although an oddly passive one. I’m almost 100 per cent sure that at one point there were at least three simultaneous grow ops on the residential stretch walking down from where I live. Just as the smell of fertilizer is to Abbotsford, the smell of marijuana is, in a lesser degree, to Mission.
But this isn’t to say that Mission is this hopeless black hole populated solely by old people and drug manufacturers. I mean, to a certain extent it is, but it’s also nice as hell. This is the weirdest thing about the place. Despite its kind of squalid economy compared to Abbotsford (we can’t even claim we have a new, big theatre now, HighStreet took that away from us as well), Mission is home to some of the nicest, most picturesque scenes (in a stereotypical small-town Canada kind of way) in the Fraser Valley.
The fact that we’re essentially a big hill has its perks. For example, sunsets in Mission, especially during the summer, are ridiculously nice. I’m talking about the kind of unrealistically adorable sunsets Bob Ross might spend his afternoons painting, remarking, “Now see, that’s nice isn’t it? How about we add some people? Sure, let’s add a family, maybe a couple of trees and a little bird.”
So it’s not that bad, it’s just the odd coalescence of the kind of reality we’re reminded of when we see joints or cigarette butts lying on a bench adjacent to a playground, and the picturesque fantasy of houses lined with endlessly blooming trees in early May, blanketing the ground below with bright pink petals as their flowers become too heavy to support.
