I’m on my way to Ontario for ten days or so. Jumping on a redeye, because I had a job to do today. Tomorrow morning early I will land in Toronto and my brother and neice will pick me up and we will travel to the Beaver Valley where we will interr my father’s ashes and finally lay him to rest. And then we will celebrate Thanksgiving together and watch the Leafs game (and probably some Blue Jays games) and marvel at the beauty of the Beaver Valley in all of its autumn glory.
And then, later in the week I’ll head out to eastern Ontario and find my way to my friends Troy Maracle and Cedric Jamet and Jennifer Williams and we’ll set up our meeting spaces at the Queens University Biological Station on Lake Opinicon, where the skies are dark enough to see comets and the lake is like glass and your breath hangs on the still morning air as winter drops hints of frost all around.
Our Canadian National Men’s Team played a friendly today against Australia. I caught bits and pieces of it as I was getting myself to the airport. Seems it was a performance that feel short in many ways and despite having enough chances to win 5-1, Canada couldn’t solve the Australian block and we lost 0-1. I figure that many teams might play like this at the upcoming World Cup. With 48 teams in the mix, we will have to get used to playing teams that will try to keep their 0-0 draw intact. Australia had 1 shot on target, a goal. We had 8. Another friendly awaits on Tuesday against Colombia.
One highlight tonight was the 18th appearance of former TSS Rover Joel Waterman who played 8 games for our plucky little team in 2017, our first season in existence. Joel apparently had his best game yet in a Canada shirt, according to smarter people than me who were able to actually watch it. He won his duels, got a tackle in and helped keep a clean sheet for 71 minutes. Since he was trade to Chicago where he scored the goal that got them into the playoffs, it seems like he’s been much happier. Montreal was a dumpster fire.
Last night.
This morning.
Crossing Skidegate Inlet, yesterday
We are working in Haida Gwaii this week. At the Haida House Lodge at Tllaal on the east side of Graham Island, there is a dictionary of Haida words collected from Skidegate dialect speakers over the years. Last night I sat on the covered porch while the rain came down off the Hecate Strait and a southeasterly lashed the side of our cabin. This morning I had a look in the dictionary and there are dozens of words and expressions for rain. My blog doesn’t have the ability to write Haida orthography, so I’ll share some of the translations:
- Fine rain
- Fine rain coming down
- It is raining so hard the water gets calm
- One drop of rain less
- Misty
- It is raining small drops; crying on the way
- Sprinkling rain
- Heavy or big rain that hits the water and bounces up
- Rain that calms the sea
- Rain drops here and there
- Rains too much and everything is damp
- Starting to rain
- Starting to rain hard
- Rain that cleans
- Rain that is hard and noisy
- Rain that is easing off.
- Rain shower that goes by
- Rain squall coming that darkens the sky
- It is raining so hard the droplets are sticking together
- Snow turning to rain
- The clouds keep rubbing
- The rain that is pouring straight down
It was about 30 years ago that I first saw the World Wide Web on my friend Chris Heald’s computer. We immediately grasped the potential of self-publishing and even had a short lived website called “Stereotype” because it had two writers. We posted editorial musings sort of in the spirit of Suck.com. It was a proto-blog and I learned how to code html which I used for my first websites. Netscape quickly became my browser of choice so I’m chuffed to celebrate its 30th birthday.
Lest we forget. 10 years ago Maclean’s published an article about how the federal government was purging its archives of data on social, economic and environmental trends. I remember this. They were at war against climate science, and anything that could identify the negative consequences of wealth inequality.
Do you matter at work? I take it for granted that people do want to matter, if not at work then in their personal lives. That they want to be able to effect a positive change on the world around them (and if they would rather influent a negative influence, they are suffering with sociopathy). Is mattering and belonging different? Does it matter?
I think it does. From a link in that article comes this quote: “we work not just to pay the bills but because we want to contribute something meaningful to society. The psychological effect of spending our days on tasks we secretly believe don’t need to be performed is profoundly damaging, “a scar across our collective soul”.” I think unnecessary meetings are like that too. Or worse, poorly designed but necessary ones.
RIP to Midnight, the humpback whale that was struck and killed by a BC Ferry in Wright Sound last week. That was part of the area we were visiting earlier this month where we encountered dozens of humpbacks, and 15 fin whales too. There are so many whales on our coast now. And so much boat traffic, including ferries to Prince Rupert and Alaska, cruise ships, LNG tankers and bulk carriers. Many of these ships use these narrow fjords. Wright Sound is the intersection of the Inside Passage and the Douglas Channel at the end of which lies the port of Kitimat. The confluence of waters makes it a rich feeding ground for whales and dolphins.
Lund harbour, taken last year, when the skies were clear of smoke and rain.
The little town of Lund sits pretty much at the end of the road near the northern tip of the Sunshine Coast. It was established by two Swedish brothers who opened a store in 1889 right on top of the historical village of Tla’Amin, from which the surrounding First Nation derives its name. It is a town that now sits surrounded by Tla’Amin treaty settlement land, and which is still very much a working port. There are a few fish boats, but mostly it caters to marine services and adventure tourism for people living on and visiting the outlying islands and nearby Desolation Sound.
It was rainy and smoky yesterday so instead of a planned hike into the mountains we canned blackberry jam in the morning and walked around Lund in the afternoon. Along the way we visited Ron Robb and Jan Lovewell at Rare Earth Pottery. We met these two about four years ago, and we have mutual friends. Over the years we have bought a piece or two from them, and today left with a tea bowl and mug. Ron makes tea bowls using the Japanese method of kurinuki rather than throwing clay on the wheel or building pots from coils. Kurinuki means “hollowing out” in Japanese. The potter begins with the shaping of a solid block of clay and then scoops out the centre and takes away clay until the final item is produced. The result is a unique piece that has arisen from stillness, rather than the motion of the wheel, and is shaped from emptying out, and that very much resonates with me.
It’s worth a visit to their gallery if you are ever in Lund, and perhaps you will even find them in one of the twice-annual kiln firings. But if not, there is a wonderful video of them firing a wood kiln in Earl’s Cove with two other potters.
From Ron and Jan’s place we wandered down to Finn Bay where the Tidal Art Centre sits in an old forestry station. The gallery is currently hosting a beautiful solo exhibit of the work of Donna Huber. Huber’s work is inspired by everything from Chagall to Inuit printmaking and it shows in her use of space and perspective.
To cap off our afternoon, I had a stroke of good luck. While shopping for a lemon at The Stock Pile, I spied a copy of Phil Thomas’s Songs of the Pacific Northwest on a display carousel. Copies of this book used to be very hard to come by, but it seems it has now been reprinted by Hancock House. There is a playlist on YouTube with all of these songs, many of them sung by Jon Bartlett and Rika Ruebsaat, of whom I wrote last week.