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.

Michael Herman has gone home. We had a fun two months, opening space, creating community dialogues, swimming in bioluminesence, working and playing together. He left his mark on Bowen Island, having inspired the mayor to write a column in The Undercurrent and hold weekly coffee chats. He helped us to understand the connections between power, vision and heart as they relate to municipal governance and communities and he taught a bunch of kids to do Horse Lips.



Sad to see him go, but he knows he's welcome to return.

Yesterday, being the first day in about two weeks when I had time to sit and notice the world around me, I had a sudden awakening. I checked the date and found that we had eased into fall, although today's sunny and hot weather belies no hint of that. I caught myself looking out over the water in the Queen Charlotte Channel and just noticing what's going on.



The soundscape of Bowen at the moment is founded upon a steady drone of crickets, which call all day and night, chirping away looking for mates. Birds are quiet, although there have been more flocks of black-capped chickadees and young robins, who hang out silently, trying to look cool. Flickers, Stellar's Jays and nuthatches are all about. The towhees are inconspicuous at the moment, and the eagles and vultures a little more scarce too.



Today walking down along the causeway at Deep Bay, Finn and I watched the coho and the chum salmon jumping in the salt chuck, practicing for when there is enough water for them to enter the fish ladder and swim up to the gravel beds on Terminal Creek. There is no telling what they might find there this as there has been some very reckless dredging of Grafton Lake this summer, with the result that a lot of silt has made it's way into the Terminal Creek system. Along with the complete loss of a batch of coho fry earlier in the summer, this is not good news for this amazing fish. Some of the coho in the bay are two feet long, and are flying a full two feet out of the water right now. Weaving among them was a little grebe, diving for shore crabs and tossing them down.



I harvested some sweet grass yesterday from a clump that my friend April gave me in the spring. I'll braid it and use it for smudging this winter. Maybe have some on hand to give away to Elders.



The traffic is still a mess in the Cove. A bunch of new signs have been added to help people try to navigate the whole situation. They can best be summed up by a large sign that now greets drivers as they unload from the ferry: "Unique Traffic Pattern Ahead." Fair warning I suppose, although it doesn't help. This traffic experiment has become so BIG that it seems impossible to let go of now. Everyone is pulling to hard on everyone else. It's as if we are all standing on a log and leaning away from the other person all the while hanging on for dear life. Let go, and both of you fall in. The only solution is to ease up and move together, but I don't see that happening. It's frustrating, because there is a lot of work to do on the Snug Cove Plan, but at the moment, all of the energy is tied up in this ad hoc road system. With no stated deadlines, evaluation criteria or other parameters, it'll require change that allows someone to save face in order for this thing to move ahead.



In the meantime, I'm of the opinion that our village is a much more unsafe and unappealing place to be.



I can't quite feel fall in the air at the moment. It's close to 35 degrees in the sun right now, and although we have had a little rain and some cool weather, the nights seem to contain and inversion at our modest 200 foot elevation, making the evening air unseasonably warm. Hints of things to come have started appearing though, as last night we had the first Squamish for quite awhile, whooshing out in the Channel and occasionallybreaking over our ridge and swirling around to buffet the house with modest winds. Soon enough, those winds will blow at gale force with an icy edge to them. For now, we're enjoying the respite.