A little grey this morning as the Island recovers formats busiest weekend of the year. Saturday night was the infamous Bowen Island dock dance, staged by the fire fighters every year to raise money for the volunteer fire department. It’s a huge party with bands and dancing and lots of beer. The subsequent day, the island seems hungover (and truly a fair percentage of its residents are actually that way). I had a light day, cooking breakfast for my own visiting family members who were slow to get going. I walked to the Cove in the afternoon and on the way back picked blackberries and Oregon grapes to make jelly today. Today is a holiday in British Columbia, and the clouds have rolled in, lowering the sky a little. Rain is possible, and will be welcomed. There is a chill on the air. The seasons continue to turn over.
Elsewhere…
Matt Webb marks the seasons too. Today he reflected on the very special moment of the summer in which the Test cricket season comes to an end in England. I do think you have to love cricket to appreciate it, especially the metronome of summer hours ticking away that is the fall of wickets.
And more from Matt: the dream of crowd sourced information and citizen science is still one of the best things the internet has enabled. Matt has a mammoth post documenting six crowd-based efforts which reveal patterns of life in our atmosphere, biosphere and noosphere.
And something else to think about. Space hurricanes!
Cameron Norman has been blogging about his approach to Strategic Design all summer and he’s finally tied together all the posts into one big guide to doing it. It’s so good that I’m going to add it to my facilitation resources page.
On our recent sailing trip, we noticed that the return of the ochre sea stars has been knocked back. I have seen very few of our iconic purple starfish this year. It looked as if they were recovering from a bacterial wasting disease, but now it seems they are still suffering. The Tyee reports on what’s happening.
Two of our TSS Rovers made their professional debuts on August 2. Kirstin Tynan, who played for us from 2022-2024 and was signed in February to the Vancouver Rise of the Northern Super League got her first start in goal, stopping ten shots in a 3-3 draw against Ottawa Rapid. Callum Weir, our men’s team keeper this year got a short term call up to Valour FC of the Canadian Premier League but suffered a 5-0 defeat behind a team that offered very little defence in front of him. Callum will return to university at the University of Victoria for the winter. Watching these players leaning hard into their dreams and challenging themselves at the professional level of their games is way I continue to help build this little club of ours. It’s all about building better players and ultimately better human beings.
When we published our Cultural Master Plan for Bowen Island back in 2017, I had the observation that the best way to make a living as an artist on this island was to sell Bowen Island to Bowen Islanders. It seems that every household has paintings of the scenes that lie just outside their windows. Songs I have written about life on the island have been taken up as markers of our collective experience. Poems about the place always make people nod with approval about the beauty and deep currents of the place.
And then there is The View.
Jackie Minns and David Cameron are two of our cultural treasures (link opens in Facebook). They are playwrights and actors with a particular knack for capturing the absurd and funny and the tender in their satires about island life. These last two weeks they have remounted their production of The View, originally staged in 2007 at the Legion, before we had a performing arts centre to work in. This week, finally – after 30 years or so on the island and numerous productions staged in pubs, parks and pop-up venues – they brought it home to our new performing arts centre. Under the direction of their son Andrew Cameron and featuring two other stalwart Bowen Island actors, Kat Stephens and Fraser Elliot, The View was unleashed upon us.
The play is about neighbours. A new couple from well to do West Vancouver, Deborah and Kenneth, begins building a house on the west side of the island and find themselves next door neighbours to Zorg and Angel, long time islanders who practice tantric yoga, chakra healing and chainsaw sculpture. The fifth character in the play is the never-seen Douglas-fir that grows on their property line. Zorg and Angel love the tree, Deborah say it blocks her view of the sea and wants it gone. Kenneth just goes along with whichever person is yanking his chain at the moment.
Somehow, on a single set, with merely four actors, the cast finds a way to skewer almost everyone on Bowen. The old timers, the newcomers, the artists, the community builders, the wealthy and the just-scraping-by. The developers and the eco-greenies. The stoners and the sophisticates. It is a feature of the play that every single person in the audience has at least one little squirm, all the while having a good belly laugh at who we are.
There was truly something for everyone. Little cultural anomalies like “Just take my truck. The keys are in it and you can leave it in the Cove…” The cast themselves aren’t spared either. Ironies such as the fact that the hapless Kenneth, the stunned but up-for-it newcomer to the island is played by local real estate agent Fraser Elliot. Jackie Minns is a yoga teacher. David does many of the things that Zorg does for a living. Kat is the furthest thing from her character. She grew up on Bowen, acted since she was a little kid, babysat the director Andrew when he was small, and survived as the only girl a well-loved family of fastball-playing brothers.
Every community needs its bards and storytellers. On Bowen we are lucky to have these ones. They capture a little piece of our character, tender self-deprecation, that lightens the sometimes intensely specific conflicts that can divide a small community. If you can’t laugh at yourself, you aren’t doing it right. These folks help us do it right.
The view from the ferry this week as I headed into Vancouver.
This weeks notes and noticing:
- July 14, 2025: transform: transforming conflict, dialogue and community
- July 15, 2025: people doing things they are good at: handy apps, polymaths and women’s football
- July 16, 2025: seeing the treasure: local placemaking and the Golden Ratio
- July 17, 2025: I’m in awe..: complexity, constraints, governance and amazing medical science
- July 18, 2025: the threat to beauty: AI, and the threat and promise of true creativity.
Let your curiosity carry you. And if you are a blogger sharing links and little notes like this, the part of me that chases rabbit holes would like to add you to my blogroll.
Summer nights at the football. Our little band of TSS Rovers ultras celebrates one of the 9 goals our teams scored on Wednesday night.
The summary of notes and links published on the Parking Lot blog over the past week:
- July 7: heavy lifting. A new phone, a new US political party and a new season
- July 8: annals of democratic renewal: political violence, democracy, youth engagement and the role of community foundations
- July 9, 2025: here’s what I’m reading: A review of Matthew Quick’s We Are The Light and short story season begins
- July 10, 2025: playing at home: my Rovers win big and send a couple of players off to the professional leagues.
- July 11, 2025: the Kanesatake resistance: personal reflections on the events of this day, thirty five years ago.
I met my friend Aryana on the trail this morning heading to the pier for some coffee and a walk. She said “you’ve been on Bowen for a while now, right?” I looked at my watch and saw the date. Twenty-four years ago today we were busy packing up our three bedroom co-op townhouse in the West End of Vancouver, and bundling our 4 year old daughter and nine month old son into our 1996 Honda Civic. We were getting ready to follow the moving truck to Horseshoe Bay and then over to Bowen Island.
If you have followed along at this blog and others, you will know that I began writing about my experiences of the island almost right away. There was a few months of hand coding html pages for the Bowen Island Journal before I switched over to blogger. That blog kept a good record of the first 15 years of our time here. In about 2017 I consolidated all my writing and just starting writing Bowen Island blog posts on this blog with their own tag.
I love the occasional dive into these archives. They remind me of my curiosities and what had my attention even in the swirl of change that a small community experiences. Perhaps for my 25th anniversary on Bowen I’ll draw these together into some kind of publication. My friend Pauline LeBel would love that.
Bowen Island these days is very different than it was 24 years ago. There are more marine mammals around: sea lions, orcas and humpback whales are now regular residents in our waters. The businesses in the Cove have come and gone, but at the moment there are some wonderful cafes (Like Tell Your Friends on the pier) that are my regular haunts. The Pub is in a new building, The Snug and Docs are where they always were. The library long ago moved to the old General Store. The Ruddy Potato is where it was when it opened the weekend I moved here.
There are new neighbourhoods and new trails and some places I used to go are now fenced off. Some other things never seem to change much. People still complain about the heavy toll tourism takes on our village. The ferry runs at a relatively random schedule. No one likes it when various layers of government do things, except now that we have to build long neglected infrastructure, there is a tenor of discontent that we didn’t do it sooner. Facebook has replaced the Phorum, but the same songs are sung by the chorus.
We have a new municipal hall and community centre, where I will be going tonight to watch Singing In The Rain complete with cartoon and short film trailers, just like in the old days. Tomorrow I will be singing with my choir at Tir-na-nOg, a theatre school for young people that found a home about 20 years ago after rambling across various space on the island.
We have a cougar now, as evidenced by the numerous sightings reported by Islanders and the deer carcass that was stewing in the ditch near my house (but which was thankfully relocated today). The last bear to visit here was about 14 years ago, but there are coyotes and racoons and skunks in addition to the endemic wildlife. The barred owls are breeding like rabbits.
This morning on my way to the Cove, I had my usual June trail breakfast of salmonberries and huckleberries plucked from the bush. We’ve made some amazing moves to protect lands that were long fought over, especially the Cape Roger Curtis lands that now sport a lovely waterfront trail that winds along the shoreline in front of a couple of huge houses that no one will ever live in and a few slightly more more modest houses lived in by actual Islanders. The Bowen Island Conservancy has protected a bunch of south shore waterfront in perpetuity and Metro Vancouver has bought the rest as parkland. They have also done a marvellous job on a waterfront park on Dorman Point. We have also been encompassed by a UNESCO Biosphere Region and we are developing relationships with our hosts, the Squamish Nation, who blessed the name of the island on our sign in a ceremony back in 2020. We live on Nexwlelexwm, and Sempuliyan, one of the family that held us in ceremony on that date, referred to us as Nexwlelexwm uxwimixw, the villagers of Bowen Island.
Affordability has only gotten worse here, but the Bowen Island Resilient Community Housing Society is in the processes of building an affordable rental building with 27 units behind our new amazing community health centre, which sits next to our new amazing fire hall and emergency operations centre. A seniors building, Snug Cove House, is going up across the road meaning that long time islanders like me might have an option to live a long life here as our mobility decreases and our needs increase.
We still have a local newspaper, with its own cartoonist, the inimitable Ron Woodall. Visual arts are still a huge part of life here and there is live music most weeks to listen to at the pub or in the various venues around the island.
Years ago, there was a swan that lived in the lagoon by Mannion Bay. Everyone loved this swan from a distance but also everyone hated meeting this swan up close. My daughter called it “the ornery swan” becausee it nipped and bit people and made a bunch of noise when its perfect little world was disturbed in any way. But from a distance, the swan struck a beautiful image, a still white bird floating majestically on the still dark waters of the bay or the lagoon.
When the swan died, we held a little memorial for it and I wrote a song with a call and response chorus that somehow captured why we loved that bird and how he was so much one of us.
Islanders now gather round
The swan, the swan was swimming
The swan lays dying on the ground
And the swan swims here no more.Gathered on a wintery day
The swan, the swan was swimming
On the rocky shores of Mannion Bay
And the swan swims here no more.Where salmon leapt upon the weir
The swan, the swan was swimming
Where ducks and geese all lived in fear
And the swan swims here no more.All who came to know that bird
The swan, the swan was swimming
Defied the warnings they had heard
And the swan swims here no more.Islanders have come and gone
The swan, the swan was swimming
We had the swan to reflect upon
And the swan swims here no more.A stately bird of grace and poise
The swan, the swan was swimming
Beautiful and mute of voice
And the swan swims here no more.For this wild creature was one of us
The swan, the swan was swimming
A mute and silent blunderbus
And the swan swims here no more.Who are we without the swan?
The swan, the swan was swimming
A part of us is dead and gone
And the swan swims here no more.The tide rolls in and fills the Bay
The swan, the swan was swimming
But the waters here are still today
And the swan swims here no more.Now eagles chase the gulls away
The swan, the swan was swimming
And things have changed on Mannion Bay
And the swan swims here no more.
That kind of gets at the red thread of this place. Twenty-four years.