Appreciating nature involves savouring the present moment. When you take a minute to feel the wind on your face, or listen to the sounds of the wind, you begin to see the world for what it really is.



But there is another faculty which perhaps equally important if not more so. It is the ability to connect the present moment to other moments both past and future. These skills are important for example if you are a hunter and you can read the present signs around you and tell both what has passed by and when and where it will emerge again.



I discovered on the weekend that the Laichwiltach people, whose territory is up the coast around Campbell River, have words to describe the present moment in terms of the thing that has just passed. For example just around the subject of thunder that have a word that means "the sound of thunder right after the initial clap" and "The sound of the sky after thunder."



As I was walking to the Cove this morning I noticed these moments. Here, this morning, there was trickling all around, the sound of the island on a morning after a night of rain as the water is draining away. Or the sound of the forest in which the rain continues to fall long after the storm has passed. Or, on a bigger time scale, the sound of the first redwinged-blackbird after the cold snap of January, when he calls in Deep Bay with a hoarse and unformed territorial song.



There are sights too. By laying eyes on the soft grey clouds filling the sound from the northwest, I can tell what the weather was like last night - windy and wet. If I arrive back on the island from being away and the sky looks like that, I can recreate the previous day or two of weather in my mind's eye. There is also the clean white of a mew gull's head, a new adult emerging in the post-winter, ready for the spring.



Certainly all of these harbingers of spring are the early signs, and we'll see more rain and winter storms over the next six weeks. But this time of year around Groundhog Day seems about noticing what the present is saying about what has finished and what is about to come.

The sun returned for most of the day today. Sunlight on the coast is the colour of blue and green, restoring those hues to the washed out landscape.



The warm weather made for an unusual sight. During the winter it is common for several days of rain to be followed by a clear spell when the clouds lift and the mountains appear gloriously coated in white. After the warm southwesterly air flow of the past couple of weeks there is hardly any snow below about 1500 meters on the mountains, meaning only the tops of Mounts Brunswick and Harvey had anything like a prominent snowcap today.



Finn and I played cricket and soccer in the back, with the smell of mud rising to our noses, in a delightful scent of spring. Daffodils are peeking through the now thawed ground and it won't be long before the salmonberry bushes and the ocean spray start to bud their new greenery.

The rain lets up for an hour or two and then starts again. It switches between torrential downpour and fine mist, sometimes lingering in slight drizzle. Everywhere there is saturation. The roads are so soft now that school buses and garbage trucks can't travel on them. Roads that are seal coated have opened up great wounds where the water pools in potholes as deep as six or eight inches.



But Bowen Island is a rock and most of the water - something like 1 billion gallons of it this week alone - has flowed quickly off the island in the creeks and streams that lie in hardened channels. They flow off into the ocean which is now the colour of pea soup, with many huge trees still floating around like stricken bodies, roots clutching at the sky in some kind of arbour version of rigor mortis.



There is fog everywhere too, swirling past the house, making it impossible to see on the roads at night, or lying in still patches out in the Sound, seemingly fixed, but gone when you turn to look at them again. There is no colour in the landscape that does not include to tone of the fog. The greens and blues of the mountains now look like gunmetal grey and the sky and the sea are one timbre.



This is not so much a weather system as a way of life now. We can hardly remember a time when everything was dry, when the wood on the house was not coated with a layer of slime, when the roads did not glisten and hiss. When the season changes here, it is more like the coming of another world, and we change our lives accordingly, throwing open windows, basking in the sun, setting out our blankets and bedsheets to fill with the fresh air of spring.



But now, we huddle inside, stoaking the fire to stay dry rather than warm, watching the ravens sip their fill from the puddles in the grass.

Yesterday's tally was anothe 37.4mm of rain, measured at Squamish. It felt like more, although I was sick in bed most of the day. That brings our grand total this week to 274mm.



We kicked off the inaugural contradance of the Bowen Island Folk Dance Society last night at Cates Hill chapel...American and English country dances in the church.



Good fun for those who were there, and for those who weren't, we'll be at it again in March.

No rain yesterday, at least none to speak of. I think we only added 2mm to the running total. It was very much a lull in the storm. Late last night though a new front moved in and the downpour has recommenced. I am certain that by tomorrow night (if not tonight) we will have our foot of rain.



To give you a sense of how much that is, even here, on the edge of the temperate rainforest we get something between 1900mm and 2400mm of precipitation a year. This week already we have had more than 10% of that fall.



One other marker of how devastating this rain can be is floating out in the channel in front of our house. There are hundreds of trees out there floating in the murky water with their rootballs still intact. These trees have slid of slopes in the watersheds around Howe Sound and plummeted down the fast moving creeks and rivers in what is known as a debris torrent. They litter the water and make it really hazardous for small boats.



The rain is due to continue tonight, and we're expecting upwards of 60mm in total for today and there is no sign that the rain will let up even into next week. Another couple of low pressure systems are keeping the southwesterly flow of air coming, and there is a huge deep low lying off the end of the Aleutians that is, for all intents and purposes, a hurricane. It has a low pressure centre of 952mb which is just incredibly low. It's acting like a big hole out in the ocean, sucking in air from all around it, bringing wet warm air up from the tropics to feed it and loading up on more moisture which it will deposit on us later next week.



I'll keep the tally going until a high pressure system clears us out.

Another day, another 46.2mm of rain making about 235mm this week. It's calm and not raining at the moment, but we expect another 30mm or so tonight, getting close to our "week of a foot of rain" forcast from Monday.



Progress on the ark is coming along nicely.

The tally continues with another 66.4 mm of rain falling yesterday. It's just after midnight and pouring buckets still. The heavy rainfall warning has been renewed for tonight with up to 80mm expected before the rain eases off.



We're up to 188.4 mm of rain in three days. That's seven and a half inches. Of rain.