Weeks since I last posted here. We have had two weeks of beautiful spring weather, marred only in the last few days by the fog and rain of late winter...the herring rain that falls when the herring are running on the coast. In First Nations communities up and down the coast, the winter ceremonies are ending and the food seasons are beginning: herring, oolichan, salmon, shellfish...The berries are showing life, with the salmonberries starting to shoot. They'll be followed by the thimbleberries, huckleberries, salal and finally the fat, juicy non-native Himalayan blackberries which will end our summer with purple stains and sweetness.

All of this promise is at hand. We even have foreshadowing of what is surely to be a summer of drought. After the storms of this winter it's incredible to see the creeks already receding.

A time of palpable change.

Here's a great article on Bowen's own mountainbiking superstar, Dangerous Dan Cowan.

Reflecting on recent posts at Bowen Online and letters in The Undercurrent bemoaning our situation here on Bowen...

Call me crazy...some of you will, but you know what? I like the ferry as it is. I like the current Snug Cove configuration, with one lane of loading and one lane of parking - I thought it was the most elegant compromise of the summer of 2003, and I'm pleasantly surprised by how well the new lane works. I like the busses on both sides of the water. I'm happy with the existing shelter, and I enjoy standing in the cold air in the morning cuddling a cup of coffee and talking with friends.

When I'm old and creaky maybe I'll feel differently about these situations, if I have trouble walking on, or such. But for now, I really like living on an Island, I like our messy little Cove and I like what we have.

In the chorus of complaint I so rarely hear folks appreciating what's here. I take a lot of pride in living on this rock and I see all of these quirks as adding to the character of my home.

My greatest fear is that Bowen doesn't get "fixed" beyond recognition and that we sacrifice our real, deep satisfaction with our Island for the "narcissism of small difference."

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.