August has arrived and while we seem to be still waiting for truly hot and dry weather to arrive on the south coast of British Columbia, the community calendar moves on. This is the season in which three particular community events happen.
This August long weekend is a popular one for visitors to our island and that means traffic snarls in the Cove as people try to figure out our mysterious ferry marshalling procedures and village layout. The Cove is packed and bustling during the day but grows quiet and still at night. So still that as we lay in bed drift off to sleep last night we could hear a couple of humpback whales sighing out in the bay.
Saturday however was an exception to this rule as the annual firefighters Dock Dance took place with a terrific cover band playing all kinds of classic rock. The Dock Dance is a bit of a homecoming for many islanders who return to see old friends and drink a lot of beer and raise money for the volunteer fire department. It’s not my scene exactly, but it’s an important community event, and the music drifts up from the village, which we can clearly hear as we enjoy the evening on our porch.
In a couple of week the men’s 2026 Bowen Island Fastpitch League season wraps up with a tournament over three days in which the six teams of the longstanding fast pitch league compete for this year’s bragging rights. This year the league published a fantastic program which covers the history of the league and pays tribute to the life of one of its founders, Eddie “The Yeti” Weismiller, who died earlier this year.
At the end of the month, the weekend before Labour Day, our annual Bowfest Festival returns. The day begins with a parade down Government Road from the Community Centre to the ferry dock. Island kids line the curbs with bags ready to scoop up the candy that is traditionally scattered from the floats. From there we all gather in the Bowfest field for a day of local music, slug races, a community tug o war (kids vs parents) and whatever other activities are scheduled to take up the day. When we had young children, it was a busy day. Nowadays we mostly sit in the sun listening to the music, having the odd dance, and greeting old-timers that come by. It’s harder and harder to recognize faces every year as the island changes all the time. We’ve been here 25 years now, raised kids and sent them into the world, watched our Elders cash out and move away or die and leave behind another little piece of emptiness.
These events remind our little community of who we are, and, for many of us, who we were. These are markers in our community life that have stayed the same through multiple generations. That stability offers us the chance to see what is changing.
Not all change is bad. There are some amazing new people that arrived on the island in recent years, many of whom I count amongst my best friends and with whom I spend time, make music and share a coffee or a beer. But last year I found myself in a small circle of really old friends, most of whom were already living here when we moved here in 2001 and we had little to say to each other beyond just silently dancing together and appreciating the long standing connections we have, the stories we share, the struggles we’ve witnessed in each other’s lives and the implicit celebration that we are still here. Our kids have fledged, our health is good, and we are astonished by the new faces and activity all around us, sharing perhaps a slightly melancholic sense that the community is passing us by. And yet, if someone asks us if we’d like to run for Council or be on this or that committee, we demur. Nope. We’ve done that. Done our time. It’s time for others to find their own contribution.
For us, it’s all about those moments of listening to the band echo up the valley, hearing the ping of an aluminum bat smashing a softball into the blackberry bushes over the left centrefield fence , standing aside as kids rush to the chocolate that has fallen at your feet during the parade, or just lying in bed, revelling in the darkness, the stillness, and the quiet, and perking up from the edge of sleep when a humpback whale surfaces out in the bay.
A raining morning, connecting some readings and the hard work of seeing ourselves for who we really are.
I am sitting on the pier, fuelled by an espresso, just having completed volume 2 of Solvej Balle’s story On the Calculation of Volume. Volume 3 is sitting next to me ready to be cracked open as I wait for a friend to arrive from the mainland.
Balle’s work has been lauded for its beautiful writing (beautiful in translation too, thank you Barbara Haveland) that moves at a measured speed and is very clear and incisive. This is a story about noticing, set as it is on an eternally repeating 18th of November, charting the narrator’s exploration of her world. It sits very comfortably beside Samantha Harvey’s Orbital; a short novella that is saturated with gorgeous passages of writing, a novel way of seeing time and space, and an almost imperceptible pace.
As the title suggests, this is a book that investigates depth. Towards the end of the second volume comes the clue that unlocks the plot device: “Time is not a circle and it is not a line, it is not a wheel and it is not a river. It is a space, a room, a pool, a container.” Volume 2 ends with a beautiful three page meditation on the world as containers, which I can only invite you read for yourself.
Locked in this container of time, the narrator Tara Selter has to discover depth in order to give her life some meaning. The story meanders between longer explorations, that include trying to solve her problem, seeking an experience of seasons, exploring the history of the land in which she finds herself. As she goes she records notes about what is important to her. It’s not clear that there is any reason for that other than that she is consigned to this single container of time as a human, she seeks deeper and deeper meaning in it.
One passage that stood with me is a conversation she has with a meteorologist she meets, who explains to her what season are:
“…the meteorologist then began to reflect on our strange relationship with the seasons. She talked about astronomical seasons, and meteorological seasons. About the calendar years division into spring and summer months, about people’s surprise when meteorological phenomenon did not occur with the calendar, even though everyone knew that any attempt to synchronize the weather with the predictability of planets and calendars was pointless.
She did not believe, however, that seasons could be regarded as meteorological phenomenon. Temperature and precipitation are meteorological phenomenon, she said. Cold and heat, cloud burst and drought, but seasons? She saw them more as psychological phenomenon. Memory concentrates. Accepted stereotypes. Conglomerates of experiences and feelings, perhaps. People ask if it won’t soon be summer, even though we are well into July, simply because the summer has been on the cool side. As a meteorologist one is almost expected to deliver particular weather conditions at particular times of year, she said. A proper summer. A proper winter. As if you hadn’t done your job until you had delivered a certain sort of weather. We going to have a winter this year? As if the seasons were a concept of sorts that we dragged around with us. From childhood perhaps, she said, with winter snow and summer sun. Or perhaps not even that. Perhaps the human seasons really only existed in films or in our photo albums. Especially if you have children. She did it herself: took pictures of typical seasons. She had noticed that she took more pictures from the seasons that lived up to our expectations of them: pictures of snow in winter and bright sunshine in summer, a hot day on the beach, red and yellow leaves and a child in rain boots in autumn – and always snaps with sandals in the summer, even in summers when most days were rain boot days. As if we had templates for the seasons, and when everything fits, we take a picture. As if it is an event in itself that the weather has gotten right. If it is winter in a film, there is always a little snow, she said. Or frost. Even if the film is set in southern Europe, there will always be a sprinkling of white, to let us know that it is winter.”
Containers and constraints generate the spaces inside which we make meaning. What we choose to see, what we fit with our predetermined ideas, or what emerges as we explore things that aren’t implied by the constraints themselves. Containers are emergent. Meaning arises within them and about them.
Balle’s work is a gorgeous meditation on this, with a gently travelling plot line that takes sudden turns into new landscapes contained ointment the experience of a single day.
Volume 3 sits beside me. Volume 4 has just been released in English. There are seven volumes in total. All calculated.
Flags flying on the waterfront at Shearwater BC. There are two standard Canada flags and two of Curtis Wilson’s 2005 Indigenous Canada flag
I spent yesterday, Canada Day, with my friend Pauline Le Bel inside the common room at our municipal hall. The room was filled with the “Canada Day Re-Imagined” part of the program. Michael Yahgulaanas‘ recent works were on display, there was a full collection of posters of the Calls to Action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and we were there to solicit donations for the Welcome Figure Project that we are championing.
I appreciate how Canada Day is celebrated on our island. It is a celebration and invites a thoughtful reflection on what it means to live in this country. National holidays don’t need to be excuses for blind nationalism, but they don’t need to be blindly critical of the nation either. They need to be complicated and nuanced reflections on where we live, what we love about it and a celebration of the ways we can make it better, by building community, advancing justice, and listening to the varieties of experience that surround us.
In last week’s Undercurrent (vol. 52, no. 26), our excellent local newspaper, one of our renowned local poets, Jude Neale, offered a Canada Day poem that, in a quiet way, names some of this. I’m sharing it here with appreciation:
Canada Day on Bowen Island
By Jude Neal
On Nexwlélexwm, morning arrives by ferry.
The ramp lowers with a groan of metal,
and Bowen Island opens itself to the day,
green and salt-bright, waiting.
Children spill onto the dock
with paper flags in their hands,
red and white flickering like small flames
against the blue harbour air.
Their laughter rises first,
light as gulls,
carried over the water
and caught in the cedar branches.
Strawberries come next,
stacked in cardboard trays,
ripe and shining,
little summer lanterns
held carefully between two hands.
Along the shoreline, the day gathers colour.
Coffee steam curls above paper cups.
Dogs nose the grass and shake seawater from their coats.
Voices drift between picnic blankets,
folding chairs, coolers, bicycles,
the soft shade of trees.
Families settle on the grass.
Friends wave from across the field.
Someone makes room at a table.
Someone pours lemonade.
Someone laughs and calls a neighbour over.
And Canada appears, quietly.
Not only in the anthem,
not only in speeches or flags,
but in the ordinary grace
of people making space for one another.
In a shared plate of berries.
In a hand offered onthe dock.
In stories carried here
from prairie towns, northern rivers,
Atlantic kitchens, Pacific rain,
and all the long roads between.
It is there in many voices,
many histories,
many ways of belonging.
It is there in courage.
In care.
In the work of welcome.
In the hope that a country.
can keep learning how to hold its people well.
Above this small island,
the summer sky opens wide.
Far beyond it, the north remembers its green fire,
aurora ribbons loosening across the dark.
The prairies breathe gold.
The mountains keep their snow.
The Atlantic throws light against stone.
And here, on Bowen,
the sea folds all of it into one shining afternoon.
A child pauses at the harbour's edge.
Her flag flutters softly in the breeze,
a red maple leaf against summer green.
For one still moment,
the island seems to hold its breath.
The ferry waits.
The water glimmers.
The cedars stand tall.
And through this small bright scene,
the whole country seems to shine.
Thanks Jude.
A baby barred owl seen last Wednesday by Terminal Creek, near our home. These owls breed every year in the same place and the babies sit in the trees and wheeze at passers-by until their hoot-makers come in.
Today I turn 58 and In a couple of weeks I will have lived on this island for 25 years. Being here for that length of time – a duration that has long exceeded anywhere else I’ve lived – tunes one to the finer rhythms and changes of time and place. Today, the thing I’m noticing is the change in the dawn chorus year to year. The sound of the dawn chorus which begins in April really and shifts through a few movements in May and June before abruptly stopping in the summer, is like a developing symphonic piece. There are distinct movements to it that are consistent enough year after year that one can discern the mark of the composer on them. These include the constant buzzes and questioning whines of the towhees, the two note calls of the chickadees: the black-capped clear and bell-like; the chestnut-backed buzzy and wheezy. There is always a distant goose call from the bay, about 600 meters away below us to the south. Juncos chip in the garden. Flickers hammer on roofs and power poles. Crows harass whatever predator is threatening them or call to each other from the beaches down below us. From high above it all, ravens offer their occasional grumbled commentary on the state of things. Creepers and kinglets sing the hyper-soprano parts.
As the spring progresses though, the yellow-rumped warblers (affectionately named “butter-butts” by birders in these parts) and the robins take pride of place in the chorus. These will be later joined by the orange-crowned warblers. As we get into June, the black-headed grosbeaks start singing with their clear, loud phrases. White-crowned sparrows begin calling and a visiting western tanager will offer both flashes of colour and lovely ringing song. Flycatchers round out the chorus, with the western offering a whoop-dunk, the Pacific a wolf-whistle and the willow a sneeze.
But it’s also the variations that grab my attention. In 2020 we had nuthatches meeping away everywhere and then they disappeared from the chorus the next year. Pine siskins, who will migrate hundreds of kilometres east or west in search of eruptions of insect populations will almost overwhelm the chorus some years, while in others, like this year, they will be completely absent. This year western warbling vireos are everywhere and seem to be the most common mid-range voice in the choir. And little packs of bushtits move through the understory like gangs, something we don’t get every year.
This is the body of work that the land here produces. When I travel at this time of year, I notice ways in which the niches of voice are filled by other birds, but after living in a place for a quarter century one can discern the subtle movements and compositional techniques that the island, in this place, and at this time of day employs in its expression of the season. This little patch on which I have sat for 9,000 mornings has its own body of work, and every day, every season, and every year offers variations on the theme.