Bowen Island Journal

2008-07-17T22:40:00.000-07:00

The Undercurrent is delivering great online stuff finally. Along with Bowen TV, we're rocking...

This weeks wrap up:

Coverage of Ross Carter's memorial, from Lois, his wife, who write the Island Chronicles column.
Controversy swirling about the installation of an artifical turf field at the school, and the subsequent loss of trees.
Nice review of Canada Day.
Our first annual writers and readers festival was a success!
Bowen TV coverage of the forest fire.
A tour of the Marina

2008-07-16T23:49:00.001-07:00

The best of the loveliest of days. The weather is perfect, and we hosted a noice little party for friends this evening, capping a day in which I spent a terrific few hours hanging out with my friend Jeremy Hiebert from Summerland. Jeremy and I are old blog friends, and we get together every few years with that natural kind of "pick it up where we left off" kind of feel. Today I picked Jeremy up in the Cove, we came back up to the house for some beers and then we went for a little drive about, poking around Artisan Square and then hitting Hood Point beach for the nicest swimming of the year so far. Finn came with us and sniped at us from behind the big old tree there with a super soaker water gun. It has been a perfect summer so far. Not even the 24 small lacerations on my leg caused by an errant weed whacker have managed to make a dent in the vibe.

Lots of folks are leaving Bowen these days, many of them heading for Gabriola Island. Corbin Keep and Cindy Marsden left last week and Mara Brenner and Stu are looking at leaving soon as well. Our good friends the Hardin's are moving back to Manitoba next month.

I suppose it has always been like this - people coming and going - but it seems unfair that we are losing all of these good people. The economics of Bowen are not easy at all - it is hard to make a good living on island and commuting into Vancouver is becoming prohibitively expensive. BC Ferries operates now as a business rather than a public service and the fares increase once and sometimes twice a year. When I moved here in 2001 the price of a book of ten walk on tickets was $27.00 making a return fare to Bowen less than the price of a bus ticket into Vancouver. That same fare is now $5.20, with the commuter discount. Rents on Bowen are expensive and there are very few spots available for a family. The irony is that the economy is so high end now that the businesses like Tuscany Restaurant can't get the help they need to take advantage of the wealth in this market. With no affordable housing, service sector employees are coming to work from the continent, and with that ferry fare, they have lost a good chunk of their first hour or two of work just getting here.

I know lots of people read my blog here as they are deciding to move to Bowen, so my advice if you are thinking of it is to be careful about whether you can actually afford to live here. At this point the housing market is going a little soft, and you can get nice houses under $600,000, but in most of the rest of Canada, that would buy you half a province. So think about it carefully.

The economics are hard if you didn't get here when we did, when the housing market was cheap and interest rates were low. That's the reality, and I count myself as lucky that we are able to stay here, even as many of our friends head to more affordable and prosperous climes. It's funny to think of Bowen as so rich, we're impovrished, but that seems to be the case. Alas, we still have the great beaches, and good friends and sockeye salmon and veggie burgers to grill on the barbeque. Summer is what it is.

2008-07-11T22:37:00.000-07:00

Summer time means things are dry. The Alska high has taken up residence in the Gulf of Alaska, funnelling beautiful weather our way. Yesterday there was a might northwesterly blowing -- all kinds of seaweed at Bowen Bay tonight -- and while we were overnigting it in Vancouver a small fire broke out on the mountainside not far from our house. James Glave, across the valley took some video of the water bombers that were called in to douse the flames, and they did a marvelous job. Everything is safe and sound, but for the love of humanity people...NO OPEN FIRES!

2008-07-06T09:11:00.000-07:00

John Dumbrille posts a modest report about his team's successful defence of their University Master's World Cup title. This is a world class seven-a-side soccer tournament that John's team won last year as well.

Yeah Canada! Yeah Bowen!

2008-07-03T22:51:00.000-07:00

Strange night last night. We had thunderstorms all night for the first time since I can remember being on the coast. It was a very Ontario kind of summer evening. The water was very still and the air got quite moist before it unloaded around 10:00 and kept going until dawn. A great soak for the garden.

The day before, Canada Day was a hit, with Morris Men and organic carrot cake from the Ruddy Potato and the firefighters soaking the crowd to end the festivities.

Summer is in full swing, and the garden is coming up beautifully, considering this is our first year. Today we ate the first two snow peas, and the tomatoes are coming along. Beans,, brussels sprouts, strawberries and blueberries are all promising. In the forest, the salal is turning from flowers to berries and the huckleberries are almost ready to harvest.

2008-06-30T23:01:00.000-07:00

Ross Carter passed away yesterday.

I first met Ross when he and his wife Lois shared a B&B with us on Gabriola Island in 1998 during the Gulf Islands Celtic Music Festival. He was there with his wife Lois, who plays fiddle. They talked of Bowen over breakfast with us and those conversations were among the many that eventually brought us to this island.

Ross lived here for more than 45 years I think. He served the island as a municipal councillor and our rep to the Greater Vancouver Regional District as well as in the capacity of a patron of the arts, an artist in his own right and a gentle but influential voice for the community. I have two stories of Ross that stay with me, both of which speak to the kind of roots he set down here, and the kind that I have since set down as well.

The first was a couple of years after we moved here. One non-descript fall day, as we were travelling on the ferry, I came across Ross gazing out the window at the view up Howe Sound. "Look at that," he said. "Isn't that something?" I was struck by the fact that he was still taken by our landscape even 40 years after moving here. He never took the beauty of this place for granted, and I often tell that story just to reinforce the incredible luck we have to live in this stunning inlet.

Another time I was working with a group of citizens looking at sustainability and change. There was a lot of handwringing at the time over the huge changes to the island brought about by a lot of new people coming to live here. I was curious about change in perspective, and I asked Ross what the reaction was on Bowen when the first painted lines on the road. He chuckled and said something about people predicting the end of the world.

This island constantly changes, and with each small change we take a step in a different direction. Like Ross and Lois, I am committed to this place, regardless of the changes that come. There is something about staying in it, witnessing it as it were that seems to be an important role to play.

Now seven years after I moved to Bowen and started this blog, we are faced with another small change: the loss of another of our community elders. I will miss his warmth, his quiet reflective voice and his way of seeing this place.

My heart goes out to Lois. We'll have a tune or two for them at the next session.

2008-06-30T16:24:00.000-07:00

Finally home for a good stretch. In the last six weeks I was here for five days. In the interim my beans have come up, the peas are climbing higher and we've eaten the first strawberries from the garden. Yesterday was our first ocean swim of the year and today we gathered a bunch of salmonberries for this year's jam (a jar of which will be entered at Bowfest, to defend my title).

All in all, summer has arrived and the sleeping on the deck days are here to stay...more photos here

2008-06-12T22:45:00.000-07:00

No blogging for quite a while here. You have to be here to blog about the place, and I have been elsewhere a lot.

Salmonberries are coming in and everyone is complaining about a cold and wet spring, but it's been good for the salal which looks great. Tomorrow we'll go pick our first patch of slamonberries and freeze them for jam.

I turn 40 tomorrow.

2008-04-23T12:25:00.000-07:00

Today the first violet-green swallows are daning in the air above my house. They have returned to feast on th eemerging insect population. It put me in mind of the flock of snow geese I saw three weeks ago as I walked off to another journey away from my island.

The snow geese are amazing. Every year they make the 4000 km trek from their breeding grounds in the Russian Arctic on Wrangel Island down this way where they overwinter at the Reifel Bird Sanctuary in t fRaser River Estuary, about 30 kilometers due south of here. They come in huge waves, by the thousands in the autumn and the leave again in early April or late March to head north. They can be heard flying high over head in honking and enthusiastic clouds. It is an impressive sight, and on many occaisions I have witnessed life in the Cove come to a standstill as people gaze skyward at the noisy pepper above.

The geese are almost archetypal to me. The represent the opening and the closing of seasons. When they appear overhead in March, it is as if they are opening the door on spring, trailing with them the promise of warmer weather and fertile ground. When the head south in the fall, they take with them the harvest and the last remnants of summer and the signal the beginning of the storm season. The gees always seem to make it back here befor ethe hurracanes come, Flying in the fall storms would be suicidal, so once they are tucked down in the fields and marshes of the estuary, it's as if the rainy season is welcomed.

So I was remiss in noticing their passing north to Russia. The season is truly shifting now and the geese have left to begin their renewal on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, leaving us to plant, harvest and steward a nother year of living on Bowen Island.

2008-04-22T08:53:00.000-07:00

It's a bright sunny morning here on Bowen Island. Still cold, but there is not a cloud in the sky.

Last evening we went harvesting nettles for an iron packed nettle lasagna. We picked probably a pound of netle tips which reduced to about 8 cups. This was layered into a casserole dish with lasagna noodles, onions and cheese for a traditional spring treat.

There is a a great nettle patch at Cape Roger Curtis, surely one of the gems of local food on the island. To pick nettle tips, just break off or cut the top of the plant below the third bract. Anything lower than this is woody and tough. Use gloves of course, and when you get home, chop it finely and steam it up. You can freeze what you don't use right away. The steaming will reduce the greens and takes the sting away as well. You'll notice a wild, almost nutty smell as the nettles are cooking too.

I am so looking forward to the wild foods harvest this year. I was out in the berry patches yesterday, looking over the Oregn grapes and the huckleberry stands I usually pick from. There are a lot of flowers and the huckleberries have already gone to fruit. As I was inspecting one bush an immature fruit came off in my hand. It was little more than a flower at this point, but loath to waste it I popped it in my mouth and got a huge surprise. The fruit tasted like honeysuckle nectar. here is a small quantity of syrup in thes fruits, which gives one an extremely sweet little drop. Surprising, given how tangy the red huckleberries are.

Salmon berry plants are look healthy with lots of flowers as well. In another six weeks or so, they will be ready for the harvest, and my prize winning salmon berry jam will be cooking up.

As for our garden, our builder has abandoned the work of constructing a gate, which has been a huge pain in the ass, as we have been all ready to plant seeds. I rigged up a temporary solution on Sunday and will finally get the salad green in and some peas and things as well. I'd finish the gate myself, but the location requires some tricky concrete work. If anyone knows of someone who would be willing to come help out with that, I'd appreciate it.

I added some fish fertilizer to the top soil to see if I could boost it any, and I'm off to see about seaweed, as we have some great low tides right now and yesterday's northwesterlies should have brought some sea vegetables to the west side of the island . This summer will definitely be an experiment with the garden, to see what grows and what doesn't and see what we need to do with the soil. But it's exciting to be on the path of local, homegrown and Bowen harvested food.

2008-04-20T12:22:00.000-07:00

For the record, Saturday night I walked home at 4am from the kitchen junket through a half inch of snow on the road.

It's sunny, but cold. A northwesterly has been blowing all weekend, and it arrived with snow squalls right donw to the shore.

Spring is coming in fits and starts again this year. Reminds me of two years ago.

2008-04-13T08:00:00.000-07:00

Our first warm spring day yesterday, with temperatures cracking 20 degrees. Our new garden is finished, but the deer fencing isn't complete, so we're a little reluctant to plant yet. Got some things growing in small pots to get started.

The dawn chorus has been beautiful and strong lately with chickadees and winter wrens making most of the noise. Not as many towhees as susual yet.

2008-04-07T18:41:00.000-07:00

Spring makes it's grey and rainy appearance. Lots of things blooming and blossoming, including salmonberries (another cold spring, anothe rgod salmonberry year) and Indian plum. Daffodils and hyacinths are up, the latter somewhat surviving the curiosity of deer.

We've had heavy showers and snow at 1000 meter elevations. Our garden is looking lush and we're up to planting food soon.

2008-03-14T09:38:00.000-07:00

Paul Stewart and I were on the front cover of The Undercurrent last week, juggling together.

We have a very cool juggling club here on Bowen Island. Paul is one of the founders of the Club. As a bus driver, he was on strike in 2000 and was looking for something to do on the picket line. He took up juggling and hasn't looked back. He is familiar to most ferry commuters, seen always juggling three balls on his way to and from work. If you ask him how to do that, he puts the balls in your hands and teaches you how to juggle. That is a practice I do as well.

I first started juggling with Paul's son Calder and our friend Toby Volkmann. We used to juggle together as a warm up for taekwondo training. One day Toby suggested that we put together a juggling club. It took a while, but last year the club was launched. We meet at the BICS gym every Saturday from 1-3 or out on the field if the weather is nice. We average about 40 people out every week ranging in age from age 2 to folks in the their late sixties. No experience is necessary, no equipment is necessary and there are no fees. Donations are always welcome. It is a true community experience, full of intergenerational creativity and is great training for the mind, the body and the heart. There is always someone to teach you what you want to learn or to introduce you to challenges that push your abilities.

We have a weblog, a video promotion done by Bowen TV and this week a dozen or more of us are heading over to Victoria for the Victoria Juggling Festival.

Playing together is the best part of being a Bowen Islander.

2008-03-13T15:56:00.000-07:00

When we moved into this house in June 2001, I had a clear vision at some point that the front of our place could be a garden. This was a bit of a pipe dream initially as we had a deck out there, the front is a rocky cliff top and steeply sloped and there is no real access to there, no flow with the rest of our living space. Still, I've been called optimistic to the point of uselessness, so my aspiration was in character.

Last year, our deck rotted off the front and in the course of tearing it down and do some work on the foundation of the house, it suddenly became a lot more possible to do something about the front. We started spending a lot of time walking around down there and visualizing how it might all work out. We courted a few exorbitant estimates for the ladscaping work and were dissuaded by the cost, especially considering that we need a new roof this year.

This past week things changed. Andy at Bowenshire had an opening and his costs were pretty low. Sensing that if we did it this week we might have food this summer, we went for it. In the past four days, there have been diggers and rocks and fill tumbling hither and yon around the front of the property. A deer fence is going in and the rock work is in place. There are two fellas down there laying a flagstone patio and some steps, and we're going to have our builder put in access steps from the front porch and the downstairs office to create a flow.

Finally, after seven years, it looks like we'll be growing at least some of our own food.

And just in time for the announcement of Bowfeast, this August 11-17. Excellent.

2008-03-08T23:11:00.000-08:00

Sad news from Vancouver Island. Longtime Bowen Islander Heather Croil passed away last week. She moved to Ladysmith a couple of years ago and took a place near the school. The last converation I had with her, she said she was looking forward to learning some skateboarding tricks.

Heather was a delightful Island neighbour. She was very active in the arts community, which is where I often ran into her, at concerts and gallery events. She was curious, supportive, positive and always interested in talking about big ideas, beauty and life on the Rock. She was one of the first people I met on Bowen and I never had a "stop-in-the-Cove" conversation with her that wasn't full of insight and joy.

Condolences to her friends and family who may stop by here.

2008-03-05T01:18:00.000-08:00

Home for a brief jot. Was able to get out for a leisurely walk this afternoon, around the Cove. The hatchery folks were releasing some coho in the Lagoon and that was fun to watch.

Weather was raining really hard yesterday, but beautiful today and likely to stay the same for tomorrow. There are buds on everything and the crocuses are up in the Memorial Garden. Winter is fading away now.

2008-02-19T17:54:00.000-08:00

Nice high pressure ridge over our coast over the past few days, bringing sunny skies and fog to the region. Makes for some great photos.

La Nina is in full swing, which means that this kind of weather will be rare over the next six months Expect a wet spring again and possibly another wet summer. Might make the early berries a bit mushy, but the huckleberries and salal should come out fine.

2008-02-07T17:06:00.000-08:00

My friend and neighbour James Glave has just published a mini-book on learning to hunt deer called "Buck the System." This is a brilliant 26 page story about his quest to bag a deer right here on Bowen. It's a moving piece of work and a phenomenally told story, and it captures beautifully the melancholic state of intention that lacks ultimate execution. James pokes at the folly of middle class environmentalism with a modern day parable that is about much more than aiming arrows at ungulates..

2008-02-06T22:44:00.000-08:00

A lot of snow around here these days. Last night we had a significant wind and rain storm
but this morning was sunny and bright and the snow line is up above 300 meters again. We seem to have had more snow this winter than any I can remember since moving here to the west coast in 1994.

2008-01-31T20:08:00.000-08:00

Rob Paterson is experincing some emergency conditions on PEI as the power has been out for a few days now. He has posted a great set of musings on 21st century emergency communications as a result. Some of these are quite adoptable to Bowen.

2008-01-29T15:21:00.000-08:00

We awoke to ten centimeters of snow on the ground this morning. I was stranded at home, having failed to get to Regina last night, and took a few photos of the winter storm on my way back to the Vancouver airport.

And finally, from the annals of "no small change goes unnoticed" BC Ferries has installed some new automatic gates at the Snug Cove terminal. I noticed that they left them open when we departed though.

2008-01-22T13:04:00.000-08:00

Mordor (eye of Sauron is only visible at night)

While I am on a bit of a rant about greed, I should give a little update about the Gash on Black Mountain.

The Sea to Sky Highway is being upgraded to improve access to Whistler for the Olympics. A major piece of this is building a by pass over the top of Eagleridge Bluffs along the skirt of Black Mountain. Black Mountain lies across the Queen Charlotte Channel from us and the construction is 5 kms away as the raven flies.

They had the option of building a tunnel through the mountain or blasting a gash across it. The provincial government choose the "blasting a gash" option and destroyed a significant coastal bluff ecosystem and a beautiful arbutus grove in the process.

The work has continued unabated for months now. To build a four lane highway across the base of a mountain that is essentially a cliff, you need to blast a lot of rock. For some reason, they choose to do this at night. Last night, just as I was talking to Caitlin about how sad rampant greed was making me, there was a blast from the mainland that shook our house FIVE KILOMETERS away. It took 20 seconds for the sounds of falling rock to become silent.

Before, with all the blasting and cutting along Miller Road near our house I was comparing life here to living atop Vimy Ridge.

Now we just refer to the other side as Mordor.

The Eagleridge Bluffs Coalition website is still up and they seem to be still doing good work.

2008-01-21T17:35:00.000-08:00

Another pristine day here on Bowen. Snow on the mountains and crisp sunlight everywhere. Took a few photos around Artisan Square this morning, waiting for Aine's singing class to end:

Off for 10 days to Whidbey Island and Regina, Saskatchewan. Will see how the island has changed when I'm back.

2008-01-20T21:42:00.000-08:00

And on a happier note, George Zawadski is doing a huge community service with his launching on Bowen TV on YouTube.