I'm getting ready to hit the road again for a week, so yesterday I took advantage of an offer from my friend Roch to hike down to Cape Roger Curtis.



Yesterday was a beautiful day, a solid reminder that spring is on the way, and the soundscape in the forest is changing as red-winged blackbirds return and the chickadees launch into their two note territorial calls. The day was calm to begin with as the night's light Squamish wind dissipated and the wind swung north west. Over the course of the morning we watched as it came into Tunstall Bay out of the Strait of Georgia, developing into whitecaps by noon. And by then we were on the trail, having abided the morning at the Tunstall Bay Community Association clubhouse, overlooking the beach and a couple of river otters at play among the goldeneyes.



The Cape is the windswept south western point of Bowen and it sticks out into the Strait making it a great place to see wildlife and to taste the salt spray at the prevailing waves break on the rocky beaches. We built a fire on a secluded beach and roasted bison sausages, talking all the time, and watching guillemonts, geese and a young bald eagle. At one point I pointed to a seal that had come into our little cove and then stood in astonishment as it turned to face us and showed us its paws. It was clearly not a seal, but an otter, and an otter of that size could only be a sea otter, an extremely rare endangered speicies on this coast, who are making a comeback from the fur trade that decimated them. But they are a rare sight nonetheless and if I can get someone else to assure me that this is indeed a sea otter, this would be my first wild sighting of one.



I still smell of woodsmoke and salt. It was a good day, a day that reminds me about what is really important.

I've been off the island a lot lately, travelling in darkness mostly, out of bed at 5:45am and back home at 6:00pm. The life of a commuter.



Yesterday I had a very startling thought. I realized that I have become very disconnected from the island. Commuting does that, especially in the winter. I am out of touch with the tides, the birdsong, the sun and wind and rain. I couldn't tell you without looking what phase the moon is in, and I was taken by surprise at the sight of Jupiter high in the early morning sky the other day. I am just not as aware of this place, of nature, of me in my surroundings.



Today I got to stay at home and do some writing and Finn and I tracked a deer for a while in the woods behind my house. This old doe kept darting in and out of salal bushes, but she was leaving good prints and there was lots of scat on the regular deer runs so she was pretty easy to catch up to. Finn was thrilled, and so was I...finally reconnecting with this place.



THis whole experiences has given me a pretty profound insight into what it's like to be a citizen of Bowen if you are a commuter as opposed to someone who lives here full time. As we get deep into the community dialogue on the Snug Cove planning process, some this sharp delineation, between people who need convienence and are disconnected from the flow here and those who live here all the time and are sensitive to large scale change without context, well, this shapr delineation actually begins to mean something.



It's nice to walk in both pairs of shoes for a while.

Our family, and a large number of the kids and parents in our Learning Centre have been training in taekwondo. Our school,Bowen Island Taekwondo now has a website with some beautiful pictures. Have a peek.

I've been travelling: away to Saskatchewan, in and out of Vancouver, travelling with the commuting masses in the darkness of early morning and late afernoon. It has seemed that the island is really a dream, more a rock upon which my house stands than a real place. It is shrouded in darkness and covered in rain.



But today something is different. Today the day began with a sunrise that, from the Lion's gate bridge going into Vancouver, threw the silhouette of Mount Baker towering over the fog that enveloped all but the highest buildings downtown. And the day bloomed like a flower, becoming clearer and bluer as it went on until this afternoon, returning on the 3:35 ferry I was absolutely struck by the character and the spirit of this place. Sunlight glinting off a calm sea, air as clear as crystal, mountains green-grey and topped with pure white crowns. I remembered the island and the landscape as a continuing character in my life here, and started singing my summer song:

All the diamonds in the world

That mean anything to me

Are conjured up by wind and sunlight

Sparkling on the sea

It feels like winter is leaving.

The ever shifting world of Bowen Island eateries is in for another change. La Mangerie, a nice spot at Artisan Square, folded up their tent in the fall and the building, which has the nicest view of any restaurant on the island has been sitting dark since then.



Losing La Mangerie was big for me becasue they were both a bakery and a live music venue. Their bread was phenomenal: huge loaves of multigrain, one slice of which was enough for dinner. And for a couple of years the restaurant played a valuable role in promoting the vibrant and eclectic live music scene on Bowen, with Friday night performances.



So last week, the loaves appeard at the Ruddy Potato, Bowen's natural food store. Upon investigating further, it seems that the room on the hill is getting a facelift and a new name, and although they are baking bread, the new restaurant under the name of "Bowen Bistro" is yet to open. SHould be exciting when it does, and hopefully live music will follow.



Down in the Cove itself, Lily Hooper's Teahouse has also changed hands, sold by Liz Fincham to daughter Sam. Liz and Sam have been running it together since it opened, and Sam is an amazing talent with the soup pot. The most amazing soups have come out of the tiny kitchen in the back, the smells wafting out to mingle with the scent of dozens of jars of loose tea. Sam made a Laotian coconut noodle soup a while back that blew me away. I can't wait to see what else she has up her sleeve.

Robert Brady at Pure Land Mountain is chopping wood again:

Doing the firewood-splitting extended meditation today I was feeling how good it feels to actually be physically involved, flame-for-flame as it were, in the heating of your own home, as opposed to working 40~50 hour weeks at a desk in an office to pay an oil truck to now and then come and dump a few thousand gallons of anciently gathered nonrenewable solar energy into a very expensive oil tank to run through a very expensive central heating system at prices that will soon be skyrocketing, as we slurp up the last of what the sun laid far down in the earth hundreds of millions of years ago.



I know in my body, with my muscles, the actual cost of the heat I get, the ergonomic cost of every kilocalorie. I know how much breakfast it takes and how much energy it takes (my own and the firewood's) to heat my house for an hour or a day, and what my own muscles have done and must do to make it so. That knowledge (physical, spiritual and mental) keeps me warm on several levels.



And by respecting and fostering the source, and doing my own best to minimize general waste (which this intimacy makes patent), I am fully and directly involved in maintaining a broader aspect of my life. Who drilled your oil/gas? Where? Off the coast of California? The Alaskan wilderness? Have you ever seen an abandoned oilfield? An oil drum dump? Soon your oil/gas may be coming from Yosemite, or Yellowstone, or following more unexplained wars in the Middle East.



In any case, oil/gas is energy borrowed from the past, and one day it will all run out. If we are still around despite our depredations, what will a bit of heat cost then? Best to keep our bodies in good shape, with natural exercise, so that our children can see the worth of it. For total fluidity of movement and use of every muscle while being pleasantly productive, nothing in a gym can touch gardening or firewooding, a couple of good natural routines.

I love this too, being connected to the sources of heat that keep us warm. This winter we are heating with alder from the south part of the Island and primarily hemlock mill ends from a mill in Langley, on the continent. A lot of them bear the stamp of the now defunct CLMA, The Cariboo Lumber Manufacturer's Association. That means the wood came from the central plateau, was trucked to the Lower Mainland, sawed, kiln dried and trimmed. The trimmings were piled up on a wood lot, scooped into a large dump truck and driven to my house in October of 2002.



In carefully burning mill ends, we are using a waste product that would otherwise be allowed to decompose, get chipped or be disposed of in landfill.

The Community Review of the Snug Cove Village Plan is rooted in some citizen driven processes that some of us put together in the summertime. It's intended to be a citizen-based collaborative response to the Snug Cove Plan. If you are a Bowen resident, you should have a look around the site and add your two cents.