Our annual community festival, Bowfest is happening today. AS I write from home, a kilometre and a half from the festival field I can hear the band Queer as Funk getting everyone dancing. It turned out to be a beatiful day – blustery and cool but bright sunshine and clear skies. It looked like rain was in the forecast but we dodged it.
My friend Pauline Le Bel and I spent the day at our little table chatting with people about our initiative to fund the carving and installation of a Squamish welcome figure at our community centre. We raised $760 just from donations today. We need another $2300 by the end of September to pay our carver, Xwalacktun, to begin work on the sculpture.
The festival was the best in years. Since the pandemic, I have feared that Bowfest might fade away, but there is new energy, new people, a million new kids, and it feels like the community has come through a big transition. Even though we don’t recognize a lot of new faces, many of the Elders I spoke with today were really happy to see the energy and the new things going on in a way that seems to have secured a continuity for the deeply Bowen traditions that matter: Dog of the Year, the slug races, the preteen rock bands killing it on the MainStage, the Legion selling beer, and the parade.
It was the fiftieth anniversary of Bowfest this year and that was the theme, and it felt like a good, solid community event.
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.
The view from my house across the Terminal Creek valley to Apodaca Ridge, which is shrouded with cloud blowing in off the Strait of Georgia.
From time to time we get strange weather days here on the west coast. Yesterday three dense tracks on thunderstorms flowed north from California bringing rain, thunder and lightning to our region. Summer thunderstorms are quite rare here; it is more common to get one or two in the winter when there is much more convection in the atmosphere. Nevertheless I returned home from an emotional day in the city and sat here on the covered porch looking out over Apodaca Mountain and Kwilakm/Mannion Bay below and watched as electricity flashed through the clouds. There was hardly any wind and the rain was light and persistent, getting heavier as a cell or two passed gently overhead.
This morning is grey, windy and wet. The forest and garden are drinking deeply and the wind is drying the roads. I awoke to the sounds of fog horns from the ships at anchor in far off English Bay, and the call of a Merlin getting some early morning hunting in.
Two years ago a young male cougar swam to our island. Its not clear where it can from, but most likely it crossed the Collingwood Channel from Keats Island, as distance of nearly 2 kilometres at its shortest point. The cougar took up residence on Mount Collins and the west side of Mount Gardner, and has made Bowen Island its home. Until recently it has been surviving on deer, of which there are plenty on Bowen. It has kept to itself and very few people have seen it, although hit has been captured a lot on camera. Those that encountered it have often been deeply moved by the animal.
In the last month or so it has turned its attention to livestock and has killed three sheep. Its shift to domesticated animals means that it is now targeted for removal by conservation officers. It won't be relocated. It will trapped and killed. Eating sheep has sealed its fate and soon we will be cougar-less again on Bowen.
There is also at least one black bear on Bowen at the moment. Possibly two. They will not be long for this world either, as this is not a very bear-safe community, meaning that we don't generally have good practices around securing garbage and other common practices to make it safe for bears to cohabitate with humans without become fatally attracted to our stuff.
We are a wild-feeling place, but not a wilderness. It's not possible for wild predators to live safely here. Nevertheless, I feel blessed in a strange way that the cougar and these bears have chosen to be with us, even though it was always a death sentence for them. They put the question about who we are, what we have done to this place, and what we can really say about how we live in respect of the island, the sea, and the flora and fauna which we live amongst.