Respite from the fall rains

Fall rains have begun in earnest but not with heavy winds yet.  Lats night it poured straight down and this morning a northwesterly cleared the air and brought a chill to things.  Snow on Mount Brunswick today and a definite chill in the air.  The salmon should be home very soon, if they survived running the gauntlet of fish farms in the Broughton Archipelago two years ago when they went to sea.  Most of the salmon runs who pass by those farms have been decimated in the past few years.  Sea lice kill the young ones.  Our chum and coho both swim through there on their way to the sea.

So we'll start to keep a vigil for the chum that return in November when the conditions are right.  In the meantime, enjoying this beautiful day before the rains come for good.

The foest returns to reclaim

In the front of our house, which has been transformed from a dusty cliff top to a beautiful food garden, we have a small Douglas-fir that broke a few years ago and started to die. We had it removed, all but a spar standing about 15 feet high. Part of the reason the spar remains is that there is a tree house attached to it.

But the forest has been working it's magic on this tree and slowly has been converting this spar into a snag. IN the temerate rainsforests of our region, snags are the islands of life in the woods. They hold a huge amount of anuimal and vegetable biomass, and are the primary locations for small organisms that eat things and break them down to create the rich forest soils that make possible the extreme growth of our trees.

Last week a pair of pilleated woodpeckers began visiting the spar to dine on the small bugs that are making it a home. One was back this morning, and it aroused me from sleep with its pecking and calling. I had a sudden realization that the tree has transformed from spar to snag. It is now crawling with enough small creatures, that woodpeckers are beginning to accelerate the deconstructions of the tree. This morning around the base, there are small piece of bark that the woodpeckers have removed and already there are woodbugs on the underside of some of that.

In the middle of the garden, with an apple tree espaliered to it, our Douglas-fir has become a soil factory, a buffet, and a home to a thriving community of industrial little forest creatures.

Summer and seals

The North Pacific high is well established bringing calm, hot and clear weather to the south coast of BC. This is turning out to be a massively dry summer, fuelling forest fires in the interior and creating drought conditions all over the place. It reminds me of 2003, when the salal in the forest margin behind our house dried up and died. The huckleberries are thin and mealy and the cedars are drying out.

Most significant of all, Bill Newport wrote yesterday that Terminal Creek has dried up for the first time in recent memory. Terminal Creek feeds the fish hatchery, and disaster could have struck the coho and the chum fingerlings, but the hatchery stewards got water pumped through in time. The note of alarm in Bill's voice is distinctive though, and I'm surprised we haven't yet heard of water restrictions on the Cove Bay system.

IN another note, the ocean has been stunningly warm and the swimming is excellent. Yesterday Finn and I went over to Bowen Bay and I swam out to the float to relax. While I was lying there with my legs dangling in the water, I felt a kid bump my foot and when I looked down I saw that it wasn't a kid at all but a seal pup bobbing in the water. I said hello, it looked at me for a few minutes, and bumped my foot with it's flipper again before slowly swimming away. It kept coming back to the float though, playing around with kids and adults who were swimming out there.

Cute and all, but remember that if you go out there, try not to initiatie contact with it. If this little seal grows to be curious about humans, it could create problems later in life if it approaches boats. So as with all seal pup events at Bowen Bay, give it it's distance.

To the Cape

Finn and I went out on our first salmonberry picking trip of the year, and came back with a couple of pounds of fruit, some of which will be baked into a salmonberry cheesecake for my birthday this weekend! The bushes are good, heavy with berries and very healthy this year.

Last night Caitlin and I put the canoe in at Tunstall Bay and paddled to Cape Roger Curtis. I have never been down to the Cape by water before. Most of the shoreline is rocky cliff along the water, much higher than it seems from the land. There are only a couple of beaches but there are several little coves. Some of the trees are amazing. There is one shore pine that looks like someone has literally thrown it against the side of the cliff and it has stuck there. Next time I go, I'll take a camera.

The Cape is really the most wild and beautiful place on this island. We picnicked by the lighthouse watching tow boats and ferries lazily move by while overhead planes made their wide turn over the Strait to make final approach at YVR. Closer to the sea, there were four eagles out and about trying their luck at fishing but only a nearby heron was having any luck. We had an escort seal for the trip back who seemed also to be having some luck chasing salmon out in the channel.

We have high spring tides right now, and the beaches and reefs were completely submerged making for a leisurely trip back poking into the coves and caves on the way.

All in all a nice end to a summery day.

Perfectly afloat

My mother in law owns a 16' Clipper canoe that has a semi-permanent home at our place. This spring I have been taking it out on the lake and, more recently, the ocean.

Last night, we took it down to Bowen Bay to spend the evening at the beach, relishing the heat wave that is hitting us with 30 degree heat and setting new records for June high temperatures. In the evening, there was nary a whisper of wind and so I took the canoe out for a solo paddle heading well out of Bowen Bay and out into the Collingwood Channel. There were no boats around and only the very gentlest of swells. My boat drifted on the ebb tide, being watched by a seal that popped up at various intervals off my stern with a little puff of rancid breath. I lolled around out there until the sun set behind the gentle low slopes of Mount Elphonstone and then headed back in, paddling towards the waxing moon, which is now skirting low on the southern horizon.

Perfectly afloat.

Returning home, living in community

Got back early this morning on the 7:30 water taxi from Granville Island.  The water was flat the whole way other than a little chop in the Sound where the night's light Squamish was finishing.  I've been away for a few days in Springfield, Illinois, and coming how was a sweet relief.  I got off the boat and there was just silence all around, a little birdsong, sun beginning its day under a high hazy sky.  

I waited at The Sniug for the family to pick me up, and got into a nice conversation about the Cape and community and the long furture of life on Bowen.  Lots passed between us, but one thought I was left with was that no one can plan a neighbourhood.  Developers plan developments, but it is up to citizens to make them neighbourhoods.  We have fear about all kinds of scenarios of the future, but at what point do we find ourselves in those stories, helping to turn "developments" to "neighbourhoods."  Regardless of whether a developer has produced a "neighbourhood plan" creating neighbourhoods is the provinces and responsibility of citizens.  So my questions for the medium term and long term for the Cape is, what are we all prepared to do to make whatever happens down there a part of our community?  How do we act as midwives tothe new neighbourhood that will evolve with the new people that will ineveitably arrive?  How do we steward the future community we all want to live in?  If we find ourselves on one side or the other of the debate, can we see ourselves caring after the desicion is made?  Or if "our side" "loses" do we turn our backs on the Cape?  I find my own emotional energy these days invested in these questions.  

In other news, we're doing more work on the front of the house these days, building access to the garden from the front of our place.  Over the past few years we have made more an more of our lives in the out of doors, putting in a hot tub and a garden and patio and using the sleeping porch.  We have a small place, but since stretching out, we are able to make it much bigger, with some many more outdoor rooms and spaces and our lives have stretched correspondingly.  

The work on the front should be finished this week and when I find my camera I'll upload some photos.  

Photos

On my way to the Cove yesterday I shot some photos of a spring-like February:

• Magic ducks and gulls standing on the ice in the lagoon.
• Mallards swimming on the ocean side of the Causeway.
• The welcome to Snug Cove from the ferry and the government dock.

A cream coloured morning

Mild today, almost spring like and the snow is melting more rapidly. The sun this morning was a pale creamy disk rising above a white ocean, dappled by the remnants of last night's outflow. We have snow on the ground for six weeks now. Usually snow disappears in a matter of days.