Seaplane terminal, Vancouver harbour, BC Today is the beginning of a long road trip which will take me to several places in the next two weeks. Starting off this morning in Vancouver where I am fogbound, waiting for the cloud ceiling to lift so we can fly out to Victoria. The nature of the seaplane terminal in Vancouver harbour during a fog delay is reminiscent of what it must have felt like in the Chicago Bears dressing room yesterday as they felt their Superbowl chances slip away. Here it is the same. On the coast, important people …
Nanaimo, BC If you arrive in Departure Bay on the 6:30 am ferry from Horseshoe Bay, and the fog is so thick that you can hardly see from ship to shore, and you walk along the waterfront, past the marinas and chandelries and seedy nautical-themed alehouses and you take a moment to admire the gleam of a freshly burnished screw on a small tug in dry dock and you say “good morning” to everyone you pass because it’s still early enough that we’re all neighbours, and you stop to admire a surfacing eider duck and you spend a few minutes …
It’s really impossible to overstate the worry I heard in people’s voices today. In our meeting an Elder named Billy Bird spoke briefly before lunch and reminded the group just what had been lost – the salmon runs, the crab and prawns, the seaweed beds, the clam gardens. The Namgis people and their relatives on Gilford Island, Kingcombe Inlet and Oweekeno are ocean people. Their life is on the ocean and without access to the ocean the fear is that they are no longer a people at all. For thousands of years these people have lived in …
Alert Bay, BC Not a bad place to blog from eh? This is the kitchen counter I am sitting at in a wonderful house in Alert Bay overlooking the bay itself and looking up the channel towards Port McNeil. I am staying at a place called “Above the Bay,” owned by a lovely couple, Dave and Maureen who also have a spot right down on the water called “On the Beach.” This is going to turn into a shameless plug for their place, because the sun just set behind the Vancouver Island mountains and the beauty is astonishing and its …
Port McNeil, BC THis was an insane idea, but that is the nature of my travel schedule these days. It’s late – almost 2 in the morning – and I’m awake because I’m still a little buzzed from having driven this trip tonight. It’s bad enough to drive have the length of Vancouver Island, but crazier still to do it with a six hour flu and starting the whole trip at sundown. For whatever reason this afternoon I developed a pounding headache in the middle of a little Open Space meeting I was facilitating for our learning community …