CLOVERDALE — Standing six-foot-two and nearly half that wide, 51-year-old Stan Jones is just about as far from a Banana Republic-wearing, soy latte-sipping cosmopolitan as one man can be.
Living in Langley, where the only highrises are trucks, he spends his weekdays as an auto mechanic and his weekends, when he gets the chance, hunting. When he talks, he does so without pretension. When he laughs, he laughs honestly. In many ways, he's the prototypical man's man.
Sam (short for Samantha) Reynolds is an 11-year-old girl who lives in Cloverdale. Shy until you gain her trust, when she suddenly opens up like she's known you for years, Sam plays tenor sax in her elementary school band and enjoys curling up with an old school hard-cover book every now and then.
Paul Van Tassel raced sports cars for years at spots like Mission and the now defunct course at the Boundary Bay airport. Now 34, the Surrey resident seems younger than that and somehow seems to have dodged the cynicism of adulthood. Well spoken and gregarious, he now has a family of his own and runs a machine shop in Newton where he makes bar code equipment for the lumber industry.
Karleigh Meier is upbeat and enthusiastic and prone to fits of spontaneous laughter. The 15-year-old Vernon girl is an unabashed rural tomboy, preferring hunting to movies and typical teenage fare and dreaming of the day she's able to travel "up north" to the oil fields and the big bucks. That she'll take down home country music over Bieber-pop or hip-hop is no surprise whatsoever.
Four very different people at very different stages in their lives. Chances are none of them would ever be in the same place at the same time.
But this was no chance encounter.
On March 22 at Cloverdale Agriplex, the quartet came together, along with 120 other folks, in the finale of a three-day event that none of them would have dared missed.
Stan, Sam, Paul, and Karleigh, you see, are archers. Passionate archers. And this was their nirvana - the 2015 3D Canadian Indoor Archery Championships.
Staged by local archery haunt Semiahmoo Fish and Game Club, the event was the first of its kind to be held in these parts. It featured some of the best bow-and-arrow practitioners in the country shooting at "three dimensional" (essentially life-size foam and/or rubber animals) targets. And it kept Jones, who also happens to be the archery director at Semiahmoo, busy for a heck of a long time just to pull it off.
"I'd been to indoor 3D national championships in Alberta and really enjoyed them. I looked at what goes on at events like this and figured we have the facilities here, so why can't we do it here?
"I pretty much spent the last year on it. We had to get more targets and of course there's all the organization too. And we had to reach people. We sent flyers all over the country."
Ultimately, Jones was pleased with the way it all went down, though he's pretty sure the current economic climate in archery hotbed Alberta forced more than a few would-be attendees to stay home. Still, it went off without a hitch and a small profit was made, which will go directly to the Semiahmoo club's fish hatchery and volunteer groups such as the Surrey Sea Cadets, which meet at the club.
So what's it like to stand out there as dozens of archers simultaneously let fly?
Braveheart-esque, to say the least.
Granted, there's a good chunk of downtime between each flurry, wherein competitors and judges alike walk to the targets and check their accuracy. And certainly the level of safety is impressive. No one even thinks of raising a bow until every last person has crossed back into the safety zone.
Nevertheless, it's a wee bit frightening at first, watching all those high-tech bows being stressed to the absolute max, knuckles pressed hard into faces for stability, then all those extremely pointy arrows streaking through the air. Over and over again.
It's that visceral thrill that first attracted exracer Van Tassel.
"In Grade 7, my parents said 'pick a sport.' The Kevin Costner Robin Hood movie had just come out and I thought it was pretty cool."
A sabbatical for university aside, he's been at it ever since. These days, he tries to shoot four or five times a week and instructs at North Shore Archery.
"It's something you can completely boil down to you. You have a singular focus on what you're doing. It's my biggest joy in life."
Van Tassel, who put in a half-dozen volunteer hours each day at the Agriplex, especially digs the outdoor 3D get-togethers at Semiahmoo, where they shut down the trails, place fake animals all over the countryside, and commence to "hunt." He likens it to a day at the golf course.
Grade 6 student Reynolds watched her dad Robert discover the sport and fall in love with it. A year later, she asked if she could come along, too.
Today, she shoots twice a week and is a hardened veteran of a dozen competitions. It's really quite miraculous to see this unassuming little girl - did we mention she's in Grade 6? - transform into a steely-eyed warrior princess once she raises bow to face. She grabbed first place in her category at the nationals.
Country girl Meier, who looks so incredibly at home in this environment - she began at the age of seven and has been a gun and bow hunter almost as long - says archery "is calming. When I'm there, I focus just on that. Nothing else matters."
Now in Grade 10, she says she shoots five times a week, usually at a range her family built adjacent to her dad's warehouse. She finished second in her category at nationals.
As for Jones, well, he wasn't quite as pleased with his own performance as he was with the event as a whole.
"Putting it together, I haven't been practicing the way I should be. Now that it's over, I can get back to having fun," he adds with a chuckle.
If you're interested in exploring your inner Robin Hood, check out the Semiahmoo Fish and Game Club website, at Sfgc.ca.