NOT picking up hitchhikers is illegal!

Hitchhiking is a way of life on Bowen Island. Before we had busses, and even back before Wes's taxi ran hither and yon, folks stuck out a thumb to hitch a ride to where they were going. Early on in my residency on our rock I learned that you never wave to a driver who is going the same way as you, because they will almost always stop and ask if you need a ride.

When a friend of mine moved to Bowen a few years ago, he was without a car and he hitched to the Building Centre to buy an axe. When he emerged, he was nervous about hitching a ride with a new axe and so he walked all the way back home. When he started telling this story several long time islanders laughed and said that he should have thumbed a ride. They said he would have had a better chance of getting a ride because people would have been curious to see his new axe.

That's how it is. Or at least how it HAS been.

These days people are more reticent to pick up hitchhikers for whatever reason. I think it's about new folks coming to the island and not knowing everyone and not used to the culture of letting people ride with you. But hitch hiking remains a way of life for many without cars - young people, older people who can't drive, and others, and its an important part of our rural and informal transportation system. The bus doesn't go everywhere on the island and Wes doesn't drive so the thumb is the way to go.

Now a new group on Bowen has emerged to make hitch hiking and ride sharing a more organized affair. Bowen LIFT is out to enhance our traditional cultural practices for getting around. Give them a visit, download a sign and get with the program!

Food regulations put small vendors in a pickle - The Globe and Mail

While I was away, BowFeast happened, one of my favourite Bowen Island celebrations.

And then a food inspector showed up. Here's what happened.

Before Bowen Island beekeeper Stuart Cole could sell 25 bars of honey-infused hazelnut nougat at a local festival, he had to tell the health authority exactly how and where it was made and list the ingredients down to the nut.

Then he had to cart his baking supplies to the local school’s FoodSafe-certified kitchen to make his supply for the festival.

All that just to sell enough nougat to break even at BowFeast, an annual three-hour community festival celebrating food produced on Bowen Island.

But at least he wasn’t selling jam. That would require a lab test to make sure bacteria wasn’t festering in it.

“I have respect for what the health inspectors do. To me it’s a question of the scale and application of regulations,” Mr. Cole said. Other vendors were not so understanding.

Five farmers pulled out of the Aug. 14 event after a health inspector wanted to test jams. All other vendors had to fill out a detailed form on their products.

“Why do we have to fill out a form to sell what we pull out of the ground?” said Suzan Philippe, who had to wrap her lettuce in plastic bags. “I think it was a deterrent for a lot of people. I don’t think I’ll do it again next year.”

The rules have festival organizer Michelle Pentz Glave fearing it may become impossible to separate the state from church bake sales and community festivals.

“It’s getting into the realm of the absurd,” she said. “This is kids selling chocolate cookies and a few grandmas selling their jam.”

The law sees it differently, however. Temporary food markets, from farmers’ markets to bake sales, are governed by provincial food safety regulations enforced by local health authorities.

“You are selling [food] in a public place and you have a responsibility of minimum due diligence,” said Sion Shyng, a food safety specialist with the BC Centre for Disease Control. “The guidelines are there to add that consistency while a minimum level of protection is offered for public health.”

Anyone selling low-risk, home-prepared items, including baked goods, dried fruit, fresh produce, fudge or honey in a public place has to fill out a form listing the ingredients, the preparation process, how and where it was packaged, and a sample of the product label.

Health inspectors can then test the recipes to ensure the pH levels and water content are low enough to prevent food-borne diseases such as salmonella and E. coli. After the recipe is tested once, it can be used in perpetuity as long as it isn’t changed.

Some high-risk home-prepared items are banned from markets, including baked beans, cabbage rolls, guacamole, garlic spread, fish, juice and humus.

Mr. Shyng and Vancouver Coastal Health said very few samples fail the lab test, but they could not produce numbers.

For Ms. Pentz Glave, the stringency of the regulations stands in ironic contrast with one of the eat-local movement’s goals: establishing non-commercial food sources.

“We are starting to see the first friction between these two systems – the need for keeping us safe and the need for neighbour-to-neighbour, small-scale, kind of nimble approaches that are going to allow this local-eating revolution to happen.”

The conflict could be solved with more scale-appropriate safety measures, she said.

“They have a one-size-fits-all regulation and it just doesn’t work for us,” Ms. Pentz Glave said, adding that it would be more appropriate to invest in education for small-time vendors. After that, it should be up to buyers to decide.

“Let’s make the people make their own choice,” she said. “Let’s just make sure that we have good public education so the knowledge is there to have food-safe practices.”

The provincial disease control authority disputes that logic.

“Why would one accept a higher or lower risk just because it’s a different location?” Mr. Shyng said.

via Food regulations put small vendors in a pickle - The Globe and Mail.

How the hell do we do this? Perhaps we need a Bowen Agriculture Alliance Open Space to figure out how to work with the regulators so they don't kill our local economy before it has even had a chance to get going.

Going away, coming back

While looking for some information for a song I'm writing on the Sid Sirocca, the boat that is beached on Pebbly Beach, I discovered a new Bowen blog: Going Away, Coming Back.  Who is this mystery writer who drops such  beautiful gems into the web sphere?

Bowen Island National Park?

The federal government has formally begun its one year feasibility study for a national park for Bowen Island.

I had heard that this was under consideration, and now the planning process has begun.

I'm not sure which lands are under consideration. Obviously Crown lands, which means one of the three mountain tops. Cape Roger Curtis is not one of these parcels obviously, as it is private land, and it is being logged, smoothed out and prepared for houses now. It's gone.

Which is too bad, because there was a time when we could have bought that land for $16 million and made it into a park. But the current owners beat the community to the punch and came up with the money before we could raise it all.

At any rate, what do you make of the idea of a national park on Bowen? It represents a shift in what we think of as a national park for sure. Not too many small rural stands of second growth forest are represented in the national parks catalogue. Do you worry that too many people will come and overrun the place? Or is it just a good way to protect existing Crown land.

One thing for sure, the possibility might exist to put more Skwxwu7mesh identity on the land here. Obviously any conversion of Crown land to park requires consultation with the Squamish Nation. It would be good if we, as a community were to approach them to enter into a relationship with the Nation in whose territory we reside. That would be a welcome change, rather than letting the federal government be the ones to blunder through the relationship.

I'm up for helping on that.

Bowen in Transition

Dave Pollard is one of a small group of us who are working on thinking through the Transition Town scenario for Bowen Island. He's got a number of useful links and think pieces at his blog.

Blustery

A blustery night here last night on Bowen as a weak front moved through.  Winds backing southwest have stirred everything up.

Yesterday was a fun day...50 people crammed into Artisan Eats to watch the World Cup Final (won of course by Spain!) following which we commiserated with many of our Dutch friends here on the island both in person and virtually.  Feeling bad for Teun, Betty and Thuys, Tanya and Jim, Clement, Edwin and others.  Remembering too Miriam and Remy who owned the bakery where Artisan Eats is now, and imagining what it would have been like there if they had still been running the place.  Probably painted orange.

The water in the sea is very murky now, but full of plankton and very bioluminescent at night.  While the moon is young, now is a good time to go swimming at night if you want to see a sea of light.

Katabatic Winds and True Summer

True summer, the deep summer that comes with the stabilization of the Pacific high, arrives here on he coast all of a sudden. The clouds and unstable weather of June gives way to a crystal clear sky and hot sunny weather. Overnight the true summer comes in and with luck it will stay until the sun starts to fade away in August and the ocean cools, weakening the high and letting the fall storms through. 

The summer this year arrived three days ago and we migrated with the season to the outside. Doors and windows were thrown open to the air, our bedroom moves to the porch and we spend so little time inside that we can't even get to the phone when it rings. Work has ended for the year and we enter a deep period of calm and quiet, becoming as stationary as the weather and as relaxed as the wind. 

The days are calm and hot now and the ocean is perfect for swimming. This afternoon at Bowen Bay I swam out past the moored boats and floated among seals and oystercatchers gazing across the Strait through air so clear I could make out the shape of the clear cuts on the mountains 20 miles away on Vancouver Island. 

Last night as we slept the air cooled on the top of Mount Collins behind us and flowed down the mountainside through our house, washing over us on the porch and finally out to riffle the waters of the bay below. Just before dawn the sky began to brighten pink and yellow and Jupiter blazed in the clear sky. 

It is impossible not to feel reverence on days like this, not to be moved to tears by the beauty of this place on the finest of summer days