My friend Louise Loik had a piece published in the Globe and Mail today about rescuing salmon which jump out of the fish ladder at Killarney Creek, a hald mile down the road. Here story is hilarious and touching:

Salmon that can leap tall waterfalls, can also throw themselves over the side walls of the fish ladder. The evidence is before us. A salmon that, incredibly, has made it along the ladder to just below the last waterfall, has landed on dry earth. It flaps with futility. There's no way to get back into the water. My children plead for my help.



I consider my options. I look at my daughters. I look at the large fighting fish, and then at the nearly vertical slippery trail leading to the top of the waterfall where the salmon must go to complete its life's mission. The girls watch me in a big-eyed slow-blinking way. I can't just toss the fish back inside the ladder to have it just jump back out again.



I attempt to grab the salmon. This fish is the size of a cat and, like a wildcat, it is now fighting for its life. Salmon, unlike fluffy cats, are torpedo-shaped, and happen to be covered in slime.



Undeterred, I keep trying. The creature responds by slapping me in the face, leaving a fishy mucous on my cheek. My kids have now lost their look of grief and desperation. Overcome by laughter, the girls are flapping about on the ground like goldfish out of their tank. What am I to do?



Somehow, I wind up with a huge fish waging a battle for its life inside my jacket while I attempt to rush it to the water. I jam my elbows into the sides of the embankment to try to get up past the waterfall. We get to the height of the waterfall and must dash across the street to get to the headwater. Drivers stare in disbelief as I run across the road to release the writhing mass to its home. There's a splash and the beautiful Chinook immediately swims behind a rock and releases her eggs.

The whole story is well worth the read.

Last night's aurora from Alaska. This is pretty much what I saw too



There was a strong northwest wind yesterday, sustaining blows over 80km/h for the other side of the island. I haven't heard reports of tress down, although I was nearly hit by an inch thick alder branch as I was walking through the forest to my Taekwondo class. The northwesterlies bring clear and cold weather to Bowen, and for the first time yesterday, I could smell winter on the wind; not the wet blustery winter of the south coast, but the real Canadian winter, frosty and cold. I could smell snow.



These winds turned out to be a blessing because they cleared the skies for a spectacular display of the northern lights last night. North Americans have to be living in a cave not to know that there is unprecedented solar activity happening now, which means auroras far south of their usual latitudes. Last night around midnight I drove up to Hood Point, which faces north into Howe Sound to see what I could see.



As soon as I stepped outside and looked up I could see the green glow in the sky. I knew that it could be a special night. During the 15 drive up to Hood Point, I sneaked glances at the glow which seemed to be intensifying although remaining quite diffuse. Once I arrived at the point, and turned off the car lights, I could see that the whole northern sky from the horizon to about 70 degrees over my head was filled with green light, bright enough to cast a shadow on the ground below me.



For about 15 minutes, nothing much happened. Some spikes developed, and the glow shifted in intensity a little, but otherwise stayed steady. Gradually however, a reddish tinge developed near the top of the glow, which was almost overhead. Simultaneous to that, the light coalesced into spikes rising the length of the sky to meet in a point that was overhead and a little south of me. Blood red patches developed in the east and west and the light started to flicker and pulsate above me. Huge, rapid waves of energy surged through the upper atmosphere, sending chills up and down my spine. The red colour grew and faded in intensity as did the definition. When I left an hour later, the light was diffuse again, but there was already a sharp definition along the bottom of the glow, up above Mount Garibaldi to the north. I had no doubt that curtains would develop later in the night, but by 1:00am I was tired and cold, and afraid that if I didn't start home I would fall asleep and have to drive back along the deer infested roads too groggy to be careful.



We don't often get the auroras this far south, but when we do, I usually see them, and they rarely fail to disappoint. Last night's outburst was the second or third best display I have ever seen, behind a spectacular 1993 display in Ottawa featuring a red whirlpool directly above us, and the multicoloured 90 degree high curtains I saw on a canoe trip near James Bay in 1986. Last night ranks one above a beautiful and subtle display of the auroras I saw at Hecla National park in Manitoba in October 1997 which was of the dancing curtain variety and also topped a display seen from the roof of my apartment building in Vancouver in August 1998, when spikes flashed across the sky like lightning.



The auroras were a global phenomenon in temperate latitudes last night. Did you see them where you are?

For those of us that are newcomers to Bowen, it's worth remembering that there were people here long before we arrived who made this place very much what it is now. One of those people, Buster Roueche is leaving Bowen after living here for ages. He was a force behind the Legion on the island, and contributed much to the community. It's great hearing "old time" islanders talk about him. It's important to remember that all the growth of the island in the last 15 years has sort of eclipsed the community of people who lived here when it wasn't a convienent place to get to.



When people like Buster move on, or pass away, we get inklings of this community and culture in the obituaries in the Undercurrent or the odd posting at Bowen Online. These "old timers" are the history of this place, and as they die, our collective sense of place changes. I worry a little that too much of this loss will mean that Bowen becomes a suburb in that it seems grounded more in development and newness than in the stories of the people like the Davies, the Buchanans, the Carters, Millers, Collins', Taylors and others who settled here and created the community we now call home. Their silent hand runs deeply through everything we are here. Forget them and we become another new place, devoid of personality, history and collective care.

My mom sends a photo of the fall leaves from the top of the Blue Moutains, on the Niagara Escarpment near Collingwood, Ontario.



This is what I miss at this time of year. It's a little call home to my ancestral place.

It has started raining again and we are under another heavy rainfall warning. The flooding is serious up in Pemberton and Squamish. Eight hundred people have been evacuated from their homes and two people have died. I used to work a lot up in Pemberton when I was involved in Treaty negotiations there in the late 1990s. I know the mayor and several leaders in the surrounding First Nations. Flooding is nothing new to these folks, living in a flat valley that often backs up with ice or just bursts its banks when it runs too high. Many of the houses and farms in the Pemberton Meadows are built on raised berms to keep them out of the historic flood plain so hopefully the damage will be minimized by the good precautions they have taken. The biggest concern for many will be the seed potato stock that is stored in root cellars. Pemberton is one of the few blight-free places in Canada, which means that seed potatoes grown there are highly valued. Even though nearby Whistler drives a fair chunk of the local economy, agriculture and logging still make up a lot of the enterprise in the Valley. And seed potatoes are the cream of that crop.



At this point the communities of Pemberton, Mount Curry, Birken, D'arcy and N'Quatqua as well as the In-SHUCK-ch Nation communities of Skatin, Samahquam and Port Douglas are cut off from the rest of the world by washed out bridges, so the bigger concern for all involved is getting food and essentialls in to the Valley. Government says a temporary bridge should be in place over the washed out Rutherford Creek in a couple of days. I know they can all hang on, being flood veterans and pretty self-sufficient up that way.



So I'm sending out best wishes to my old friends and colleagues, Allan McEwan, Phil Perkins, Hugh Naylor and mayor Elanor Warner as well as the folks down the Lillooet River Valley in the In-SHUCK-ch Nation communities and up in D'Arcy and N'Quatqua.

Wait a minute...the sun's out.



For the first time in five days I can stick my head outside and not hear something trickling. The sea is flat out in the channel and there are large trees floating in it, still with branches on. Howe Sound will be full of douglas-firs that have fallen into the water from the eroding mountainsides, or travelled down the Squamish River and its tributaries in what are ominously called "debris torrent flows." And it's warm out: 15 degrees at the moment..



The low around which the jetsream has been bending, has moved north and landed in Alaska, depriving it of any more energy and robbing its ability to suck water out of the central Pacific Ocean and drop it on my house. There is still rain in the forecast, but it looks like it will be normal rain: showers, steady drizzle maybe. Nothing you can catch in 15 minutes in a coffee mug and drink.



There is another system approaching the coast but this one looks like it will actually keep moving. Temperatures are forecast to stay warm until the jet stream dips south and the Arctic air starts to flow in later in the fall. Right now, it's nice just to feel the sun, and remember what "dry" means.

This is a graph of the total rainfall we receive on this part of the island. You can see that our average preciptiation for October is 200mm, which we did in the first 30 hours of this storm. Our average annual preciptiation is about 1880 mm, of which we have done about 16% since Thursday. I've run out of ways to describe this rainstorm. Now I'm talking like an accountant.



It's now being called a century storm, reflecting the fact that these kinds of events only happen once in a hundred years in these parts. There is serious flooding at the north end of Howe Sound, in Squamish, Whislter and Pemberton, and that's a worry for folks up there. We're fine here, perched on a hillside with our house on piles embedded in the bedrock. We have Niagara Falls running in the rock cut below the house, and under the woodpile. So we're okay, but spare a thought for the folks up the highway a little.



Thankfully the storm seems to have an end in sight although it's still a couple of days away. The rain is more sporadic and there have been more extended periods without rain yesterday and today. I'll leave you with this graphic for now, which shows the system as it has been streaming over us since Wednseday night. It's as if Hawaii is a tap and someone left it running. You can see the band of precipitation literally streaming towards us.

I just have to record these weather warnings for posterity:

HOWE SOUND

11:26 PM PDT FRIDAY 17 OCTOBER 2003



HEAVY RAINFALL WARNING FOR HOWE SOUND CONTINUED. FURTHER RAINFALL AMOUNTS OF 100 TO 150 MM FOR HOWE SOUND AND 50 TO 80 MILLIMETRES FOR THE REST OF THE REGIONS TONIGHT AND SATURDAY.



THIS IS A WARNING THAT HEAVY RAIN IS IMMINENT OR OCCURRING IN THESE REGIONS. MONITOR WEATHER CONDITIONS..LISTEN FOR UPDATED STATEMENTS.



A NEARLY STATIONARY FRONT OVER THE SOUTH COAST WILL CONTINUE TO BRING HEAVY RAIN TO MOST OF THE SOUTH COAST. PRECIPITATION AMOUNTS OF 60 TO 140 MM HAVE BEEN RECORDED IN THE LAST 24 HOURS AT SOME STATIONS ON THE INNER COAST. FURTHER AMOUNTS OF 50 TO 80 MM FOR THE INNER SOUTH COAST AND AS MUCH AS 100 TO 150 MM FOR HOWE SOUND CAN BE EXPECTED TONIGHT AND SATURDAY. MEANWHILE RAIN HAVE EASED OFF TONIGHT OVER THE EXTREME SOUTH COAST...BUT MORE RAIN IS EXPECTED WITH AMOUNTS NEAR 30 TO 40 MM FOR VANCOUVER AND VICTORIA AND THE LOWER FRASER VALLEY ON SATURDAY. RAIN WILL TAPER OFF IN ALL AREAS LATE SATURDAY AS THE FRONT MOVES SOUTH AND WEAKENS.

At the moment it is actually NOT raining. We had 147 mm of rain recorded in Squamish yesterday in total. There is dangerous flooding conditions now there at the top of Howe Sound. You would not believe the water pouring off the land at the moment. These are record rainfalls. Yesterday Vancouver recorded it's highest ever single day rainfall at 62 mm, but it has been substantially more here in Howe Sound as the clouds pile into the fijord and dump their rain closer to the mountains. The air is really warm, probably 20 degrees C right now. Sattelite phots show a stream of warm wet air coming straight from Hawaii, a classic Pineapple Express. The difference this time is that it has stalled over the coast, and it has just rained and rained and rained. By the time the system is through, we will have had upwards of 300 mm of rain fall on us in a three day period. That's one foot. If it was snow it would translate into three meters which is more than nine feet. That's what we are talking about here. It's just unreal how much water is falling from the sky.



On another note, as we remember this day for its moisture content, we bid farewell tonight to Miriam and Remy who are the owners of La Mangerie, an eatery that was an important live music venue here on Bowen. They are leaving for Holland and the restaurant is closing, and with it goes a great Bowen musical incubator. Everyone who plays anything has at some point been on stage at La Mangerie. I played there a number of times. The closing of La Mangerie represents a real loss to the Bowen music community. We shut it up tonight in a really appropriate fashion with a band featuring Moritz Behm on fiddle, Teun Scheut on guitar, Gino Rutigliano on bass and Buff Allen on drums, joined by Bazil Graham and Julie Vik on vocals. This is a band that came together around the Bowen Island Music Exchange CD we put out in the summer, an effort that was largely born out of the mix and match nature of gigging at La Mangerie.



Hopefully new owners will keep the music, but one never knows. Good luck to Miriam and Remy.

Turns out that the rain, which is still falling heavily, has set new records. All the resevoirs are full again, and memories of the water shortages of just four weeks ago seem like another time.



I loaded the last of the small mammals into the ark. By consensus of gardners everywhere, we're leaving the deer behind!



New expressions are being coined by the hour: it's so wet, the fish are coming up for air.

We had 120 mm of rain yesterday and it's still raining. Prior to yesterday, we had 820mm of rain ALL YEAR. We had received 12.7% of our annual precipitation to date in the last 24 hours.



There are waterfalls in my backyard, flooding on the roads and ditches are all running over. It's just unbelievable how much water is falling out of the sky.



Enough blogging about the rain...I'm off to build an ark.

I love this...this crazy weather!



We have had about 5-8mm of rain fall every hour since midnight. That's something like 100mm of rain so far today and look what's in store:

HOWE SOUND

2:24 PM PDT THURSDAY 16 OCTOBER 2003



HEAVY RAINFALL WARNING FOR

HOWE SOUND CONTINUED

RAINFALL AMOUNTS OF 40 TO 100 MILLIMETRES ARE FORECAST FOR THE SOUTH

COAST.



THIS IS A WARNING THAT HEAVY RAIN IS IMMINENT OR OCCURRING IN THESE

REGIONS. MONITOR WEATHER CONDITIONS..LISTEN FOR UPDATED STATEMENTS.





AN INTENSE FRONTAL SYSTEM REMAINS DRAPED OVER THE SOUTH COAST BRINGING HEAVY RAIN TO MANY AREAS. RAINFALL AMOUNTS OF 40 TO 80 MM HAVE BEEN REPORTED SO FAR AND A FURTHER 20 TO 50 MM CAN BE EXPECTED THROUGH THIS AFTERNOON. THE RAIN WILL EASE SOMEWHAT THIS EVENING BUT INTENSIFY AGAIN FRIDAY AS THE FRONT STALLS OVER THE SOUTH COAST.

Don't you love that language? The front is "draped over the south coast." That pretty much describes the scene outside my window at the moment. Not windy right now, but cloaked in moisture. The gales are expected tonight.



The rainiest day so far this year was 33mm back in April. We did that before the sun came up. Do you have any idea how much 100mm of rain is? That's four inches. Somthing like a CD case standing up. More than the average annual rainfall for Saudi Arabia.



And we have three or four more days of this, meaning that between now and Sunday night, we should have had close to a foot of rain if it all falls according to schedule. If it sounds like I'm writing too much about rain it's because, well, it's raining A LOT.



Have a peek at the weather links on the left for the various photos and obersvations of this system that is currently soaking us and blasting us with gales.

Here on Canada's "wet coast" we have as mnay kinds of rain as there are kinds of snow in the north. On the west coast of Vancouver Island the Nuu-Chah-Nulth folks have lots of different names for rain. I'll have to collect some of them some time.



Since I have lived out here I have collected lots of different names for rain too, especially at this time of year, when discerning the differences between types of rain passes for a semi-serious avocation. One day I'll publish the list.



Today though, I invented a new name. Last night's rainfall was heavy and steady, like a summer cloudburst that lasted seven hours. When I looked out at the rain in the cold steely grey morning light it occurred to me that this was "rain-that-is-being-thrown-from-the-sky."

When I first moved to Bowen Island, I wrote a piece on the place names of Howe Sound which stands up pretty well today as my contribution to the Ecotone Wiki's collective blogging about place names for today. From that original post, I wanted to reiterate something Robert Bringhurst wrote about the Squamish name for Bowen Island, "Xwlil Xhwm." Bringhurst referred to that name as "a stony protuberance of meaning cloaked in a forest of evergreen consonants" which of course perfectly captures the sense of the place here. "Bowen" was a British Navy captain who never saw this part of the world. "Xwlil Xhwm" is all about the creation of the earth, the transformation of humans and the origin of the black-tailed deer.



Lately, there has been a wonderful effort underway to write history back on the land. Julian and Kathy Dunster have been busy naming all of the creeks on Bowen. Julian is a forester and Kathy is a biologist who hand drew a four by six foot map of Bowen for the Islands of the Salish Sea mapping project. Together they have been covering every square inch of the island searching for watercourses, and naming the ones that haven't been named yet. All of this naming reflects the post-European settlement and character of the island. Among the names of the creeks, streams and rivers are a bunch that reflect the names of Bowen Islanders past and present, and then there are these whimsical ones:

• Bong Creek



• Bang Creek



• Drum Beat



• Purple Haze



• Kill Creek



• Whine Creek



• Stream of Consciousness



• Drinking Cougar



• Hanging Deer



• Om Creek



• Donny Brook



• Dharma Creek



• Dogma Creek

Wonderful, eh?

Aine and Finn and I went for a bit of a drive today, up to Hood Point West, to see if we could see any seals in the Collingwood Channel. No seals, but a couple of Kingfishers, and eagle and some young gulls fishing were all we saw. The clouds in the Sound were hanging around the mountains, but the weather has cleared a little. Once in a while the peaks of the Brittania Range poked through and lo and behold, at about the 1700 meter level, there was a fresh coat of snow. The weather that delivered the rain and wind at sea level on Saturday dusted the mountains with the first snowfall of the season.



As if to take the cue, we received a load of a couple of cords of alder today to burn with our mill ends. It's all about wood, fire and keeping warm and dry now.

Fred's interested in the weather around here now. So here is what it looks like when a wind warning is issued for the Sunshine Coast, which forms the north edge of Howe Sound. I pay special attention to these, because southeasterly wind warnings affect us, given that we are about 100 meters above sea level looking out over the water directly southeast.:

Weather Warnings - Environment Canada: "SUNSHINE COAST 9:07 AM PDT FRIDAY 10 OCTOBER 2003



WIND WARNING FOR SUNSHINE COAST ISSUED

SOUTHEAST WINDS OF 70 TO 100 KM/H ARE EXPECTED TO DEVELOP OVER THE QUEEN CHARLOTTE ISLANDS CENTRAL COAST AND NORTH VANCOUVER ISLAND TONIGHT. THE STRONG WINDS WILL REACH THE SOUTH COAST EARLY SATURDAY MORNING. WARNINGS HAVE BEEN EXPANDED TO INCLUDE THE QUEEN CHARLOTTE ISLANDS COASTAL SECTIONS OF WEST VANCOUVER ISLAND AS WELL AS THE EAST SIDE OF VANCOUVER ISLAND AND THE SUNSHINE COAST.



MONITOR WEATHER CONDITIONS..LISTEN FOR UPDATED STATEMENTS.



A STRONG PACIFIC FRONTAL SYSTEM APPROACHING THE BRITISH COLUMBIA COAST WILL BRING SOUTHEAST WINDS 70 TO 100 KM/H TO MUCH OF THE OUTER COAST OVERNIGHT AND TO PARTS OF THE INNER SOUTH COAST SATURDAY MORNING. STRONG SOUTHWEST WINDS ARE EXPECTED TO DEVELOP IN THE WAKE OF THE FRONT AND WARNINGS MAY BE EXPANDED TO THE REMAINDER OF THE SOUTH COAST AS NEEDED. "

There ya go. Looks like a wet weekend coming up.

We're in the lee of the first Pineapple Express of the season. Yesterday morning, the rain, which had been falling all night suddenly starting falling horizontally in sheets and the wind picked up. The waves in the channel were pretty big, coming right at us, indicating strong southeasterlies. Trees bending and shedding needles and branches. We've had the fireplace up and running for a couple of days now, taking the dampness out of the air. (So has Fred by the way).



Autumn has taken hold on Bowen. The rain storm has drowned the last crickets, and I've heard Barred Owls the last couple of nights, scooping up rats and mice in the long grass in front of the house. A change has come, a tilt of some kind, that has brought new weather and washed the colour out of the landscape.

Just out for a walk with fellow Bowen blogger John Dumbrille, downing coffee at La Mangerie and walking his dog through the meadow. John and his partner Michelle were recently the subjects of a television program on Zen Buddhism.



I don't know what it is about Bowen, but we seem to have our fair share of Buddhist practice communities, including regular sittings in the Vipassna and Dzogchen traditions. There are also a number of martial arts offered here, including Wu Shu, Taoist Tai Chi, Tae Kwon Do and Karate. My whole family is taking Tae Kwon Do right now, and I'm due to sign up soon. The teacher, Master Kook says "the family that kicks together sticks together."



Why an island community of 3500 should be home to so many Asian disciplines is a mystery to me, but I like it.

Fog horns are blaring out in the Sound this morning. A bank of fog moved in last night and I can hardly stand to glimpse out to the water, as the sun is glaring off the fog making it seem as if the sun itself has descended into the Sound. It is clear where we are, but very thick just below us. Always eerie, these autumn fogs give one a glimpse of peering over the edge of the earth into nothingness.

This week's Ecotone topic is Ancestral Place



I have a friend who was raised in the farmland of the St. Lawrence River valley on a farm near Cardinal, Ontario. He moved out to British Columbia for a couple of years in the early nineties, but he came back saying that he could make it out here. He said that from the time he was born he ate food that was grown in the soil of Ontario. It was as if his body had been constructed from the raw materials of that land, and when he moved out here, he resonated on a different frequency.



Homesickness for the ancestral lands is what that is all about.



This place, Bowen Island, is not my ancestral homeland. This is not the land I grew up on, and as we move into fall, I feel most acutely that sense of displacement. In fall in my ancestral land of Southern Ontario, the climate changes in particular ways, the snow starts to think about flying and the days are crisp and clear with a sky so blue that it seems as if nature has conjured up sheer light from the natural pigment of air. Here, we get to clear days, but we start in fog and soon enough, we'll be drenched in rain as the Pacific Ocean soaks us for the winter.



I think we resonate with parts of the land that live in our genes. I felt at home the moment I arrived in Saskatchewan for the first time, having never been there before. My great grandparents farmed that part of the world and as a result gave me a piece of that place for my own. Other relatives lived in Toronto, Port Perry, Grey-Bruce and a myriad of other Ontario towns and villages, some for thousands of years, some as recent immigrants.



My ancestral place is not here. As much as I love it here, the ancestral place draws me home at this time of year.

Urge For Going:

by Joni Mitchell



I awoke today and found the frost perched on the town

It hovered in a frozen sky, then it gobbled summer down

When the sun turns traitor cold and all the trees are shivering in a naked row



I get the urge for going

But I never seem to go

I get the urge for going

When the meadow grass is turning brown

Summertime is falling down and winter is closing in



I had me a man in summertime

He had summer-colored skin

And not another girl in town

My darling's heart could win

But when the leaves fell on the ground

Bully winds came around, pushed them face down in the snow



He got the urge for going

And I had to let him go

He got the urge for going

When the meadow grass was turning brown

Summertime was falling down and winter was closing in



Now the warriors of winter they gave a cold triumphant shout

And all that stays is dying and all that lives is camping out

See the geese in chevron flight flapping and racing on before the snow



They got the urge for going

And they got the wings so they can go

They get the urge for going

When the meadow grass is turning brown

Summertime is falling down and winter is closing in.