It sort of feels like summer is over although we are enjoying a warm stretch here in mid-September that has brought sun and warm temperatures and calm winds to the island. This is more typical of the summers I remember from half my life ago, before we experienced extreme heat and drought. There was always a dry patch between the middle of July and the middle of October with a bit of rain usually in August and more at the beginning of September. But in the past 20 years that pattern has changed. This summer seemed like an anomaly.
But as a result of the warm spell we are having there is a second dawn chorus in full swing. Yesterday I recorded 24 birds including forest and ocean and this morning the birdsong was so overwhelming that I just from my porch I have already recorded 27 in less than a half hour. Visiting sparrows make up the interesting bits: Savannah, Fox, Lincoln and a White-throated Sparrow clear as day. All of them added to the list of this year’s birds, which is up to 315 now. It might yet hot 365, but it’s going to need some additions from the mudflats of Reifel sanctuary and October migrations in Ontario.
Here on the island, the rhythm has returned somewhat to the quieter days of the shoulder season. With a pleasant weekend coming up I have no doubt that we will be overrun by visitors. Another few weeks, when the rains return and the daylight grows shorter, our visitor levels will return to “we aren’t complaining” levels.
In the meantime, a pair of visitors to the inlet were taught the lesson we all know about how volatile and unpredictable the sea can be here. Two kayakers, after being unable to find good information online, resorted to ChatGPT for advice about paddling in Howe Sound. The ended up being caught in a strong wind – both inflow and outflow winds can come up in mere minutes – and capsizing. They were very lucky not to have been killed in the process.
Howe Sound is an extremely dangerous body of water. The only way to navigate here is paying attention to conditions that you are faced with and understanding how forecast models might imply particular changes for particular places based on wind direction and tide. It takes years of observation and local knowledge to properly navigate here, especially in a small craft. Our local kayak shop supplies paddlers with this information tailored specifically for the moment you are setting out. That’s the reason it is hard to find good knowledge. The knowledge is context specific and changes by the hour or minute. If there is a small craft warning issued and the water looks calm, it may be perfectly safe to paddle. Or you may begin your paddled and few minutes later get caught up in what seems like two meter waves that come out of nowhere.
Yesterday I travelled into the city across a beautiful calm sea, and Adam Taylor and I spotted five or six humpback whales. Adam, who has done more for ocean awareness and conservation on our island than anyone I know, said that he thinks September and October are the high seasons for humpbacks now. It’s hard to know what their rhythms are as they travel through our waters or take up summer residence, but the herring schools start maturing around now so the whales of the Salish Sea have less urgency to head south to their birthing grounds. Some whales even stay well into the winter now before making the journey.
Whales are new to the inlet. It has been five generations or so since we had regular folks noticing whale behaviour, because they were almost hunted to extinction. They are back now, and people like Adam, whose family have lived for more than a hundred years on Bowen have memories of the cetaceans that live around us. We talked about a famous pilot whale that for years was the only cetacean in the Sound who was always drawn to the hum of crew boat engines and tugs.
TH generations of people who have lived in these parts are being honoured in a couple of ways. Pauline Le Bel and I have reached our first fundraising goal for the Squamish Welcome Figure Project which will be installed at the Community Centre once it’s completed. This first $15,000 allows us to pay our career Xwalacktun to begin work on the log he has secured for the carving. The next $15,000 we raise will pay for him to complete and deliver it and to host a ceremony and event to have it installed. You can donate here.
This week’s Undercurrent contained a story about another project honouring ancestors, as the Nexwlelexwm/Kosei Peace Park will open next weekend. The Park recognizes the Japanese-Canadian families that settled here in the early part of the 20th century and who were interred during the Second World War along with many other Japanese settlers on the west coast as part of an egregious chapter in Canadian history. This history will be commemorated at Sandy Beach where apple trees have been planted taken from cuttings of the original tress planted by the Yamada family who homesteaded on King Edward Bay.
Back in 2001 I wrote a song about the end of summer here on Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island that contains the lines “The winds have turned southeast again/And the Sound is full of cloud.”
Today is that day, right on time. Blustery winds in the channel in front of my house, a steady blow in the tree tops and a sprinkling of rain. What has been a fairly normal summer is turning to a fairly typical autumn. What happens next is anyone guess, as an unusually strong El Niño is predicted to arrive in the next few months.
On the subject of turning, this morning as I was sitting in the spot pictured at the top of this post, I was reading an address by Joan Chichester from 2001 where she addressed the urgent condition of women in the Catholic Church. If you’re in mind for a dose of fierce prophetic voice this morning, this will raise your dander. And it’s twenty-five years old, and structurally speaking, nothing has changed.
It is true that theological debates are raging everywhere; but it is also true that everywhere the Holy Spirit is breaking through – as the Holy Spirit did in Rome in the 60’s. In Asia, Buddhist women are demanding ordination and the right to make the sacred mandalas. In India, women are beginning to do the sacred dances and light the sacred fires. In Judaism, women study Torah and now carry the scrolls and read the scriptures and lead the congregations. Only in the most backward, most legalistic, most primitive of cultures are women made invisible, made useless, made less than fully human, less than fully spiritual. The humanization of the human race is upon us. The only question for the church is whether the humanization of the human race will lead as well to the Christianization of the Christian church. Otherwise, discipleship will die and the integrity of the church with it.
A tip of the hat to the daily email from the Centre for Action and Contemplation.
Turning and churning. In Participatory Narrative Inquiry we talk about “churning” as a way to let stories and meaning and people work each other through different kinds of connections. Today Ron Donaldson has a beautifully rich field note in which he looks at how a single piece of knowledge entered into a field of expertise because of exactly this phenomenon.
A good story doesn’t necessarily give us the answer. It changes what questions we are capable of asking.
Different narrative ecologies (living, evolving, adaptive patterns of knowing distributed through people, practices, stories, environments and relationships) can preserve different parts of a phenomenon for very long periods, even when one community has developed sophisticated explanatory knowledge that never reaches another.
Expertise is often deep knowledge of a domain. But phenomena don’t necessarily respect our domains…
Perhaps that is one of the things we mean by expertise. Not knowing everything within a domain but knowing when the answer might live somewhere outside the domain.
“The knowledge wasn’t lost. The connection was lost.”
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.