“The Ditch” that carries the lifeblood of the valley, water, is the reason the Town of Oliver exists. Yet most people today    do not realize it is right under their feet as they do business around town.

Not so for Oliver born orchardist Greg Norton, guest speaker at the Oliver and District Heritage Society’s Annual General Meeting which takes place on Wednesday, April 16th at 7 p.m. at the Quail Nest on Airport Road.

Greg will share stories of “The Ditch”, a daring do place of adventurous entertainment for generations of Oliver kids.  The gravity flow, concrete canal that begins its life under the shadow of McIntyre Bluff was the personal playground for Greg and his friends growing up in the 1950’s and 60’s.  In later years it was his place of work. However, well before that, this amazing and seemingly simply designed structure was what his grandfather Charles Norton and others wrestled to build in the early 1920’s. Then and now, “The Ditch” has always been a central part of Norton family life.

For Greg and his buddies, “The Ditch” was their private trick bike park, their skating rink, and even their unauthorized swimming pool. He’ll share stories about careening down the spillway near the current hospital – an activity that wasn’t kind to bathing trunks – and getting up the courage to sneak into the siphon that runs under the town, convinced it was haunted. But most of all, Greg will focus on the earliest years, when his grandfather’s family and their neighbours lived in un-insulated, dusty  tar paper shacks on the east side of Tuc El Nuit Lake as the life giving irrigation system was being constructed.

It’s a very real and personal story, one enhanced in young adulthood when Greg spent several summers on the sweeper-cleaner-tar buggy work crew filling every crack in the system between the Vaseaux Lake dam and Road 18. Every day the stories told by the older generations of those harsh and yet often satisfying times became real and each time he filled a crack, he touched a piece of his grandfather’s handiwork.

For more information about the Society and the AGM presentation visit www.oliverheritage.ca, call 250-498-4027, or visit our Facebook Page.