It feels like a day of transitions. The weather is clear today, and a strong westerly pummeled Vancouver overnight. It is sunny now, but the cold air and sea level snow that is a hallmark of an El Niña winter is upon us for later in the week. So time to chop some more wood and harvest the last of my salad greens from the garden.
Canada’s men’s national soccer team lost to Croatia this morning our Alphonso Davies scored the first goal for Canada’s men’s team in world cup history and it was a beauty. The above photo is from his last game as a Vancouver Whitecap in 2018 before he headed to Bayern Munich where he has since set the world on fire. We have one game remaining and then this team will transition into the next cycle as we get ready to host the 2026 men’s World Cup without the likes of Atiba Hutchinson and Milan Borjan and some of those veterans that carried us for so long as we languished in obscurity. Today’s loss was tough, but we need this learning and tempering in the cauldron of global competition if we are to stay at this level. So one more game against Morocco and then after this tournament is over, attention transitions away to follow the women’s team who will be playing in the 2023 World Cup. I am keen to see how we do as the only major women’s soccer power in the world without a domestic professional league.
And it is the beginning of Advent today, a season I very much appreciate. The waiting for something to materialize, for the light to return…in all its physical and spiritual manifestations, this is a powerful season of transition into deep darkness and then out again. As if to embody it, Friday I went for a cliff top hike along the south shore of our Island, in a place known as Nicháych Nexwlélexwm, which is the very edge of the world in so many ways. I was looking for the humpback whales that have been hanging out there and after an hour of watching and waiting finally there were three, breaching and splashing and diving and feeding. The Sound is full of anchovies and herring at the moment and there is lots to eat. Even this morning, watching from the ferry as sea lions and gulls filled their bellies.
George Zawadzki, photo from Bowen Island Undercurrent
Every community has larger than life characters and it seems like the smaller the community the larger these characters loom. I live on a small island of just under 5000 people and last week, on November 16, we lost a lion-hearted beauty.
George Zawadzki was probably the biggest man on Bowen Island. He stood at least 6’5″ and was a BIG man. He used to drive a small car around that had a permanent lean to the left. The first time my kids met him, he was coming up the driveway with a friend to do some window cleaning for us, and they came running into the house at the appearance of this veritable bear of a man.
But if George had the biggest body on Bowen Island, he may well have also had the biggest heart. He cared so deeply for this place and he fell in love with all the characters here and he poured himself into creating relationships. He drove a taxi, and was an enduring member of a poker game (and he took a crack at a professional career at the game too), twice ran for Council, and made a famous local film of Jacob Two-Two and the Hooded Fang which included a huge cast of local characters, almost all the children on the Island, everyone with a long beard and with George himself playing the Hooded Fang.
In 2014 when he ran for office, he set up a unique, rolling, all-Candidates meeting on Facebook, and asked me to moderate it. My job was to elicit complex open ended questions from the community and posed them to candidates on Facebook so we could see folks working together in real time. I like to think that initiative helped change the character of Council after a couple of really divisive and toxic terms. We learned a lot and I documented it here.
His insatiable curiosity about the people and place here caused him to start a local TV channel on YouTube in 2008, back in the day when you could only upload 10 minute segments. As a Toronto boy of a similar vintage to me, it was instantly recognizable that he was inspired by the 1980s and early 1990s videographers of CityTV – a crew of journalists who carried cameras around the city interviewing regular folks and covering interesting neighbourhood happenings from BEHIND the camera rather than in front of it.
So while the island was going through a very interesting set of changes, George started uploading video to the Bowen TV channel on YouTube where it lives to this day.
Bowen TV captures a moment in time when things were changing in all kinds of ways. Artisan Square and Village Square were well established, giving a new shape to our village. Bowen traditions like the polar bear swim, Light up the Cove and Hallowe’en were still solid community fixtures, political debates raged around development, environmental preservation and planning, and affordable housing. There had been a period from the 1960-1990s which was post-Union Steamship company-town era and the island was still a small and quiet place. Starting about the early 2000s that changed, and lots of new folks (me included) arrived bringing all kinds of changes with us. Some good, some bad, as usual.
Bowen TV captured that era when that general shift was in full swing and his videos span that time, introducing newcomers and featuring old timers. It is a rich historical legacy of a moment in our history lovingly curated by a man that adored this place and was curious about where it was going. He considered it the most important work of his life.
We are going to miss George around here. A larger than life hole has been left in our collective community heart.
My shoes are covered in dust. The entire island is dry and crackly underfoot. We have had no significant rainfall since July 8 here ibn Atl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound which is highly unusual for us. After a very wet fall and spring last year, we had a lovely summer but it is as if someone left hom without unplugging it and a persistent ridge of high pressure offshore has ensured that any low pressure systems trundling across the North Pacific have been diverted north.
This is our rainy season here on the west coast. By now we typically would have a fairly consistent set of front and lows that would have passed over us dropping rain and more importantly filling the creeks and capping the mountains with the first brushes of snow. A steady flow of rain in the creeks and rivers gives the returning slamin something to hone in on as they find their way back to their creeks to spawn and die. We have had nothing. The land is dry. The lakes are shrinking. The rivers are a mere trickle.
in the last few days our inlet has been filled with smoke from wildfires burning to the south and east of us. The GOOD news with that is that the wind is changing and a shift in the weather patterns is in the offing; by Friday we should have our first 100mm rainstorm of the year. The fires will not survive that rainfall, but I’m curious to see how the land does. The soil is loose and dusty. Trees are drought weakened and the wash of the soil into the rivers will make it hard for the fish. Silty stream beds are not good for salmon spawn.
In the seas around us the waters are full of humpbacks and orcas. We have seen a gradual resurgence of marine mammal life in our inlet over the past 40 years, a phenomenon that has been enabled by good marine stewardship and documented by my friend Pauline Le Bel in her book Whale In The Door.
On Sunday, taking a deep day of rest, Caitlin and I chased some humpback whale sightings along the shoreline. A friend was out in his boat sending me texts about a pair if humbacks that were moving fast along N’chay’ch Nexwlelexwm, the south shore of our island that represents the boundary between the Squamish Nation territory and the rest of the world. The whales were travelling around that edge and rounded the corner of Cowan Point heading into Seymour Bay where they stopped and rested and fed for a while. We watched them for about an hour. The bay had a few boats who were being respectful and compliant with the marine mammal regulations. there was a sea lion spyhopping along, a pair of marbled murrelets, migrating geese and mergansers and both short bill and glaucous winged gulls. It was divine. Quiet, calm, full of life.
At one point the whale came up next to my friend’s boat and he snapped this photo above. That’s me on the shoreline in front of the leftmost garage door, watching through my binoculars with awe and reverence and respect. My buddy was in tears as this whale blessed him with its presence.
These times we are living in.
A couple of years ago i posted this on our local facebook page. There was something happening that caused me to reflect on how one’s approach to conflict changes the longer you live in a place. As we have turned over our population by more than 50% in the past five or six years, I was trying to give folks a helpful road map. I daresay this is pretty much consistent in every small community anywhere.
For folks experiencing their first Bowen Island conflict, here’s generally what happens next.
- Years 1-3. You move to Bowen and fall in love with the place. You’ve found heaven. You can’t believe how beautiful this is, how amazing the community is, how precious it is.
- Years 3-5. Some controversy happens and you discover that there are people that think very, very differently from you. In fact, it seems like if they get their way, some core thing you love about the place will be damaged forever. You step up to defend it, on social media, in real life. You get involved, get organized and try to stop it.
- Years 5-8 You lick your wounds or revel in the victory depending on how that all went. Regardless, it redoubles your commitment to fight again another day.
- Years 8-12 ANOTHER FIGHT! Man the barricades! Take on the social media hordes! Side-eye folks at the General Store. You’re ready this time. You might even connect up with people in a meeting and form a group of concerned citizens. And when you do you see a bunch of people on YOUR side that you were fighting against last time. Your head explodes, but you dive in anyway.
- Years 12-15. Well, that went well. Or not.
- Years 15-18. ANOTHER fight? What?? Okay, this time, you sit back and watch everyone go through the first five steps. You find yourself in a small group at the pub one night with former friends and enemies, nursing a pint together and shaking your head as you tried to remember why you hated each other so much that one time.
- Years 18-20. You get quiet, you don’t get so involved anymore, or if you do it’s on a committee of some kind doing completely unappreciated work making design guidelines or running a community water system or deciding what flowers to plant in the bed by the ferry terminal.
- Year 20. You realize you are here for the long haul. You fall in love with the place. You’ve found heaven. You can’t believe how beautiful this is, how amazing the community is, how precious it is.
Enjoy the ride folks.
Image: a word cloud capturing Bowen Island culture from the 2017 Cultural Master Plan
About 15 years ago I met Lyman Orton, who is a small town entrepreneur who created a very successful mail order business from his family’s General Store in a small town in Vermont. He tells the story of how he got involved in town planning and ended up creating a community plan that was top-down, based on a template and not engaged with the community. When a developer with an idea for a carnival park and zoo came along, the community got quickly divided and Lyman realized that if the community had been more involved in the plan, perhaps the conflicts that lasted for years could have been averted.
That was the beginning of the Community Heart and Soul Initiative that Lyman started through his Orton Family Foundation, and that is how I met him, at a gathering of Community Heart and Soul planners in Denver in 2005. I ran an Open Space session for a ful day of that conference in which planners could share stories and tools and ask questions of each other as they wrestled with how you plan from the heart and soul of a community.
The process of heart and soul planning begins and ends with stories. It’s about the collection of stories about what matters in a place and the engagement of people to make sense of those stories. In my years on the Community Economic Development Committee on Bowen Island, Edward Wachtman and I ran a series of anecdote and sense-making circles in our community working with a storytelling research method that Edward and his life and business partner Sheree Johnson created. The data we gathered and the processes we ran resulted in an incredible set of studies that Ed and Sheree created on visitor, business and resident experiences of our island, and we used this information to produce reports and to hold an annual business summit at which businesses discussed how they could tap into a support the story of Bowen. This work also fed into our branding process. Over the years it became clear to me that the businesses that understood our story and embraced it became sustainable on Bowen and those that didn’t often failed. When the pandemic struck, the community rallied around the businesses that really meant the most to the Island and I think most of the storefronts on Bowen survived with government support and community devotion.
Over the years through the story gathering and engagement work we did, Sheree was able to bring her immense talents to discerning a core story about the heart and soul of Bowen Island. And here it is:
Just off the coast of Vancouver is a place where everything’s…well…a little different. When you take the 20min ferry ride over, it feels as though you’ve crossed over to another world, a special place where life is a little simpler, a little less stressful.
The sights, the smells, the sounds, the people – all fill you with a calmness and an
awareness; making you feel a little different. There’s no hustle, no bustle, and certainly no
rat race. The sense of community is so strong you can almost feel the hugs. In a modern
world where everything’s always moving faster and faster, it feels really, really good to hit
pause. To reflect. To exhale. To take stock. To stop and smell the ocean. To connect with
what really matters.Bowen Islanders are fiercely proud of their island, and more than a little protective.
Sometimes they’re tempted to keep it to themselves. But if you’re looking for a way to
redefine play, work or life, this might be your place, too. You’ll leave your ordinary self at the dock along with all your mainland baggage. Bowen will change you… for the better
We found that there were five pillars that I guess pointed to the soul of our community, and these seemed to have stood the tests of time, certainly over the 20 years that I have lived here, and in my experience many who have lived here much longer than me confirm these:
- Community. We know each other, we help each other out, we can easily connect and create things we need here.Even strangers on Bowen are closer than neighbours on the mainland. We have a shared experience of the place.
- Nature. We live in a forest, in an fjord, in the sea, We are contained in some pretty impressive natural landscapes and we treasure them. We value quiet, the silence, the fresh air and the access we have to the natural enviroment. Almost every Bowen Island owns a piece of Bowen Island art of some kind that points to this aspect of our heart and soul and the community mural by the ferry dock is all about this story.
- Crossing over. You can only get here by crossing over the waters of Átl’ka7tsem,usually by boat. The journey from there to here is archetypal and we use it to decompress, to slow down, to change our identity from mainlander to islander. And visitors feel this as well. There are few journey’s more meaningful to the human soul than crossing over a wild body of water and arriving safe in a snug harbour.
- You’ll be better for being here. Many of us moved here to raise our children, or came to find community. So many people I know became artists once they moved here, having never created anything before in their lives. This is a place to heal and rest, and we have retreat and recovery centres that are devoted to just this aspect of who we are. People talk about Bowen Island as having a healing character. And truthfully, even though we are often in conflict with one another, you HAVE to learn to live with each other because that person you are arguing with online today may be the one who helps you out of a ditch tomorrow. We have the chance to learn how to live with difference here.
- Connected with what matters most. That is to say those things you advise others not to take for granted while you are resting on your death bed: friends, kindness, fun, adventure, spirit, generosity, community. Bowen is a platform for the practice of what matters most.
Around the same time, Dave Pollard led us through the creation of a cultural master plan for Bowen Island which is a brilliant piece of work that used stories and sense-making to more deeply understand our community culture and find ways to use arts and allied organizations to support that culture. I think the Cultural Master Plan is one of most important documents outlining the heart and soul of our place, and one that was massively underappreciated outside of the arts community. Here is an example, an introduction paragraph to the section on trying to define what Bowen’s culture is:
This section of the Culture Plan was written in one of Bowen Island’s renowned cafés—a meeting place where Bowen’s culture is almost flagrantly on display. Bleary-eyed commuters stagger in well before dawn for enough caffeine to get them onto the ferry. Telecommuters work at their laptops, interrupted constantly by friends who pull up chairs and share the latest local news. Several breakfast business meetings are taking place. The walls are covered with local art. Tradespeople get the day’s instructions by
cellphone. A young couple studies a map of Bowen’s hiking trails. A small crowd of dogs waits anxiously by the door for their people, checking out the other dogs much as the people check each other out.Most of the people filing in wave and chat with others they know, while the few people visiting for the first time look somewhat bewildered, as if this place has a language they don’t know. Suddenly, a flash mob choir bursts into song, and then hurries off to brief applause. Then someone announces “The ferry is here…” and a mass exodus ensues. The café empties, but then as the ferry deposits its load of visitors and returning residents, it quickly fills up again.
Now these documents and values were what we said back in 2014-17 and it has been only six years or so since then but a LIFETIME has passed. We have had a turnover of well over half of our residents since then and many of those who left or died are our Elders and long time community builders who made the businesses and places and organizations that have sustained community life here. The pandemic sent us into our homes and created a double whammy of isolation from one another and a large influx of new people who arrived without having access to any of the institutions, rhythms and practices of community life that I had when I moved here. Things have changed, that’s for sure. But it’s hard to say exactly what’s different.
This has always been a place that welcomes newcomers, and the best stay on and help create new things. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but the important things we do and have are created by people that started things like the fastpitch league, our festivals and community events like Bowfest, Dog Days, The Dock Dance, the Craft Fair, Hallowe’en, Remembrance Day and Light up the Cove. We have a vibrant performing arts community of actors and musicians who worked for decades to build a community performance space. We have dozens of published writers, painters and sculptors, some of whom are internationally known. We have gardening clubs and a little farmers’ market and the shared frustrations of the ferry and fall storms and the overwhelm of tourist season. We have business owners and their teams that care for us like Pat Buchanan at the Building Centre and Glen Cormier at the Pub and the Dike family at the Union Steamship Company. We have teams that have built our arts centre, the library, a state of the art soccer field, a new Health Centre, and a community performance space, We have developers that are actually from here like Wolfgang Duntz and John Reid and although not everyone is always happy with what they do, they are us, and they have made parks and buildings and spaces that we cherish, All these things together make a soul. A turbulent, churning, generative soul.
The five pillars that we defined back in 2016 and the work Dave led in 2017 are so right feeling to me that when I see things that run counter to them, it gets my dander up. Sometimes people have great ideas that will build community but they are opposed on the grounds of property values decreasing. We’ve had lawsuits over docks and temporary use permits and although I understand why people want these things or want to oppose them, I can’t always find pillar number five reflected in those discussions.
The pandemic has restricted our ability to both create and maintain the heart and soul of Bowen Island (and crucially introduce it to newcomers) AND it has robbed us of the chance to have conversations about what is REALLY meaningful to Bowen Islanders. We’re not quite a zombie Island, but we are a bit like a new cake recipe slid into the oven for the first time and about half way through cooking. Tasty looking on the outside, a bit raw in the middle.
in the next few years we are simply going to have to re-do our Community Plan. It no longer serves us. It doesn’t capture the heart and soul of Bowen Island. When we find ourselves saying “no” to almost every new and interesting idea here, it says to me that our plan has not adequately captured a sense of who we are and what we want. And at the moment, I don’t actually think we collectively know who we are and what we want. I think as individuals we know that, but we have not been actively creating that collective sense for a few years now and so the conversations about what matters are rooted in both individual concerns and projections onto the whole. “This is what I think Bowen is, therefore this idea is in line with (or opposed) to that.” History and new perspectives are swirling together and we haven’t had a chance to see them all play out in the social spaces of community creation.
You might think it’s easy to know what Bowen Island is or wants. After all we are only 4200 people on a small-ish island. But back in 2014-16 it took us years of research to really look and see what we could find. And even then of course, we can’t capture it all. Folks who live in Hood Point have a different experience than those who live on Cates Hill or out in Bluewater or down by the golf course. The environment, neighbourhood and histories of our little areas give a flavour and spin to our collective story. But I do believe that before we take a serious and comprehensive look at our community plan we need to do three things:
- Participate in community much more than we are now. We need to REMAKE the soul of the place again. Being at some Fastpitch League games this summer reminded me of some of the best of what we continue to be. Singing in choirs, volunteering at the recycling depot, playing soccer, hanging out at the Pier and just watching people come and go all helps me to add a little and be fed a little by the soul of Bowen. What I don’t think is helping me much is having my attention distorted by the conversations on social media. What I am missing is meeting the new folks to the Island. Mostly I get to do that by playing soccer, because our Football Club is a great place for new folks to get started.
- Change the conversations we are having. Or at the very least start talking about the stuff that matters deeply. Yes we are worried about the impact of a park on traffic and water or how the community centre and muni hall isn’t the performance space we really wanted. But we aren’t talking about what matters and we aren’t exploring that with curiosity and interest like we did when we were gathering stories from businesses and residents and visitors. Without diminishing the anxiety and pain people feel at the changes that are happening here, we need to get underneath these discussion and find out what what the soul of the place really looks like these days. And we need to hear from the people we never hear from online too, in a way that works for them. Entering the public square right now is not for everyone, because the online space can be withering and the face-to-face space needs to be reinvented to be invitational and deliberative rather than reactionary and exclusive. All of that prevents us from learning from the diversity of opinion and viewpoints here.
- Make a very different plan. I don’t have an answer this one. But I know that we need a simpler plan that captures what we want to work together to build and let’s people come with creative ideas to help make that happen. Our community plan needs to be about 180 pages shorter than it currently is.
We have a local election coming up. I’m interested in who is running and what they think about this. As always I’m happy to help (I’m not running) and I CAN do stuff to help these three need-to-dos above. If you are a Bowen Islander perhaps you have ideas too. Share them here.