Howe Soundings

Back home

2010-09-10T11:54:00.000-07:00

Hello, Howe Soundings readers. Welcome back. I hope you had a good summer. I hope you swam in the ocean at least twice. I’d be happy to know that you ate at least one big handful of blackberries (even though the crop wasn’t that good, or so I’m told). It would please me immensely if, on at least one night, you sat outside and watched for meteors. And maybe you sat on Chaster Beach until late some hot August evening and sipped homebrew as the sun turned the sky peachy-gold and sank into the ocean somewhere past Parksville. That would’ve been pretty memorable.

I’m back from our summer adventure, and, having worked through most of the pressing tasks of settling back into home life, I can turn my attention to things like this blog (that, and baking bread and planting a cover crop in the garden and playing music and a few more things besides). As exhausting as it is, I cherish the experience of coming home from time away. Travelling gives you the chance to see home as a new place; it makes home fresh. Day-to-day things like walking to the grocery store and stopping at Truffles for coffee seem a little bit special after not doing them for so long – even if it was just six weeks. Glad to be home. Hello, Howe Sound. Hello Gibsons.

Maybe you had a look at the blog that Sheena and I updated during our bike trip. Whether you did or not, the blog hardly did the trip justice – we rarely had much time to write about our experiences, since internet access is, not surprisingly, fairly sporadic along the Trans Canada Trail! Whether I can do it justice now, in just a few words, is doubtful. I’ll just say that it was an excellent trip. Was it what I expected? Nothing ever turns out like you expect it to, but it was as good as or better than I expected. It was an amazing trip.

In short, we followed a combination of logging roads, mountain bike trails, and abandoned railways from Banff to Victoria via Elk Pass, Sparwood, Fernie, Baynes Lake, Cranbrook, Kimberley, Grey Creek, Nelson, Castlegar, Christina Lake, Grand Forks, Midway, Beaverdell, Naramata, Penticton, Summerland, Princeton, Tulameen, Hope, Mission, and Salt Spring Island. (In short, indeed.) Most of our route belonged to the Trans Canada Trail. The scenery ranged from spectacular to pretty nice, but the riding conditions, I’d say, ran the range from perfect to utterly terrible. From Castlegar to Hope, as we followed the Columbia & Western and then the Kettle Valley rail trails, we grumbled daily about trails turned into sand traps by ATVs and dirt bikes. That, I think, is my only complaint about the trip.

And now that it’s out of the way, the highlights: riding between snowy mountains and beside glassy lakes on the Spray Lakes Trail south of Canmore; hurtling down the far side of the impossibly steep Grey Creek Pass road on the way to visit friends in Nelson; stumbling through the pitch-blackness of a kilometre-long railway tunnel east of Christina Lake; eating ripe peaches with our feet in Lake Okanagan; swimming in the Slocan, Kettle, and Tulameen Rivers; camping by the water at perfect Ruckle Park. And more, many more.

But it’s nice to be home. See you around.

Summer vacation, or, blog silence explained

2010-07-05T11:32:00.000-07:00

Oh, sweet July sunshine. So nice to feel warmth coming from the sky. I can hardly tell you how much I missed it. I'm looking forward to going swimming every day this week. Here's why. (Click now! It might not look so nice after the 4:00 forecast - you never know!)

After it dawned on me last Friday that I'd fully missed my Thursday blog deadline, I decided that it was time to put Howe Soundings away for the summer. Don't say I didn't warn you about this, because I did. In just a week and a half (!) we set off for the Rockies, and in exactly two weeks we start riding home on our bikes, following the Trans Canada Trail for most of the way. I'm getting excited about the trip, and I'm also a little panicky about all of the prep that has to be done before we leave town. There might not actually be very much prep, of course, but I haven't had much time to think about it, what with work and writing and writing and work. So I'm letting Howe Soundings go for a while to free up some brain space.

If you want to follow along as we ride the logging roads and railway beds of southern BC, you can read our trip blog, Across BC by TCT! There's nothing up there yet, but we'll try to post every now and then along the way.

And if you feel like it, come on back here in September, because I'll definitely continue to blog about life in and around Gibsons. I'll probably scale the output back to one post a week - I'm starting a Ph.D., after all, and I don't think I'll have too much spare time.

Last words - we'll have a wonderful summer pedalling the back roads, but I'll sure miss summertime on the Sunshine Coast. In my opinion, nothing in the world comes close to smokies over the campfire and early evening swims at, well, basically any beach (but I'm partial to Whitaker Beach). I recommend that to everyone.

Matt vs. Gospel Rock

2010-06-28T09:20:00.000-07:00

So, yesterday morning, I decided to go and have a look at Gospel Rock. I'd been up there on a few occasions, but it had been a while since the last time. So I decided to go and take a scramble up the side. I rode my bike towards the Gospel Rock lookout on Gower Point Rd., but stopped when I noticed what looked like a trail. I locked my bike to a tree and headed uphill.

It's quite pleasant forest through there. Ecologically, it's not too different from the sort of forest you might find around Victoria or the southern Gulf Islands - lots of Douglas-fir, salal, oceanspray, saskatoon, swordfern, and thick, pillowy moss. When I bike around the point on sunny days, I notice that the forest there has the same sweet aroma as Gulf Island forests do. I'd rank it among my favourite smells (along with fresh-ground coffee, hops, and cedar). I took deep breaths of the fresh forest air and scrambled upward to where I thought I'd found the viewpoint before. I moved slow and tried to take pictures of oceanspray flowers.

Trouble is, I was nowhere near where I thought I was. I ended up in a large, recent cut. Though attractively carpeted in foxglove, there was nothing that could be considered a view. And a trailer, possibly home to guard dogs (and yes, I was trespassing), sat at the far end of the cut. I could make out, though, that the viewpoint was a hundred metres or so to my left. I tried working sideways.

I made a few metres' progress before being stopped by a thick patch of Himalayan blackberry barbed wire. I enjoyed a few salmonberries and huckleberries from the outside of the barbed wire patch and weighed my options.

Ultimately I decided to head downhill and find my bike. That turned out to be easier thought than done. I lost my way a few times, and took a fair few salal branches to the face, before finding the trail I came in on in the first place. But I got there, and pedalled home, jeans soaked and covered in forest.

You'll have to believe me here - that lookout is pretty sweet. A more panoramic view than Soames Hill, though it lacks in ambience, thanks to recent logging.

So there's a meeting tonight at the community centre (6:00 to 9:00) on the future of Gospel Rock. I'd go to it if I weren't already committed to being in Vancouver tonight. It should be an interesting one. Here's a Gospel Rock primer, for those who aren't up on the issue: the name Gospel Rock refers to a large, partly forested area south of Lower Gibsons. (The rock itself is a seaside bluff on which a local preacher once painted Bible messages for the benefit of passing mariners.) The land is privately owned, and landowners have been hoping to build on it for many years now. Over the course of those years, there's been a profusion of plans, public consultations, committees, and so on, which to this date have failed to produce a coherent vision for the future of the area. One thing is certain - it will be developed. It's all private land, and there's a lot of it. Some of it might end up as parkland (I hope!), but, inevitably, some will be used to build housing.

Head to that meeting and find out what's up. Hopefully there's a solution for that land that works for all of us - or works equally badly for everyone involved. May cool heads prevail.

Solstice (three days ago)

2010-06-24T18:24:00.000-07:00

So I'm a bit ashamed to admit this, given my preoccupation with knowing what season it is and blogging about it obsessively - I kind of missed the fact that it officially became summer on Monday. Happy solstice, everyone!

I think I've mentioned this before - er - yes, I have. I don't think that the four seasons (if there really are just four) necessarily start and end on the dates we're told they do. Spring comes at least a month before the equinox out here, winter's here when the last maples have lost their leaves, which is late November. But I don't have any trouble with the idea that summer starts at the summer solstice. It really does seem to work out that way.

We belatedly celebrated the beginning of summer by swimming at Armour's. Note the colour of my back - it hasn't seen sun in a long time. The swim was pleasant after a day spent inside, even if it shocked a little at first. A couple weeks of warm weather like this will raise the water temperature, no doubt. But no complaints right now. At least the ocean's cold enough to chill one's apres-swim iced tea.

Right on schedule, the garden has delivered up the beginning of our summer produce. These broad beans are destined for salad, which will also feature a profusion of greens from Dawn's farm. Salad season is a pretty fine thing.

Bring on the Whitaker Beach bonfires, gelato on the Gibsons waterfront, huckleberries and thimbleberries and salmonberries, warm nights on the porch, and the sweet smell of warm forest. Sunshine Coast summertime is here! Hurrah!

Taking Monday off, kind of

2010-06-21T10:00:00.000-07:00

Here I am, making excuses again. But I think I have a decent one this time.

I'm taking Monday to head into Vancouver. One of my bandmates and I are going in to get Sweet Cascadia's debut album mastered, which is exciting, because, well, that means the album is almost done.

All of us in Sweet Cascadia have put in long hours on this record, whether it be in arranging songs, recording tracks (again and again and again and again), mixing songs, or any one of the other technical or logistic things that go into making a CD. I've learned a lot about recording through the process, and I think my drumming has improved. Recording was pretty fun - although it's hard to say whether any drum part can really be called fun after thirty (or forty) takes. In any case, it'll feel amazing to have the thing pressed and ready to share with the community.

And for that to happen, I'll have to miss my Monday post. See you Thursday!

Transition

2010-06-17T07:59:00.000-07:00

So, once again, a story assignment from the Dependent has me thinking about things relevant to life in Gibsons. This time, it's an idea called Transition. You might've heard of it. I hadn't.

I'm looking at a group called Village Vancouver, which is one of 300-some Transition Initiatives worldwide. The Transition movement is an attempt to cope with the double challenge of peak oil and climate change by building resilience in local communities. Transition Initiatives originate locally and act as community hubs - through them, the idea goes, local people locate each other and begin building the local networks that we'll inevitably have to fall back on once oil prices fly off into the stratosphere. Transition founder Rob Hopkins delivers a pretty good TED talk on the subject here. I think it's worth watching.

The Transition idea is a really simple one, and it's pretty open-ended. At the same time, its simplicity might just make it accessible enough for people to want to participate in it. That it's spread so far and wide suggests that it might have something going for it. Our neighbours in Powell River, by the way, have gone for it.

Anyway, some of you might know an awful lot more about Transition than I do. One of the Village Vancouver people told me that she'd heard that people in Gibsons were interested in forming a Transition Initiative. I'd like to know more about it, so if you're in the know, and you feel like speaking to it, click on the "comment" link under this post. Transition or not, though, this has got me thinking about local community and how I'd like to get in touch with local doers and producers. Which may just come down, as I've suggested before, to time management.

Speaking of which, blogging hours are over for the day! Off to work, now, and into that local community.

Gibsons Landing at its best

2010-06-14T09:46:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me that I've been hitting the urbanism/built environment/planning theme pretty hard on Howe Soundings in the last couple of weeks. Maybe I'll give it a break - but only after today. With summer approaching, I've been spending lots of time down in Lower Gibsons, and that's got me thinking about the town and the way that it is.

And on Sunday, it was great. (Saturday, too, I'd imagine. I was at work.)

The Gibsons Landing Jazz Festival hosted a free outdoor concert in Winegarden Park, and the crowd was about as big as I've ever seen there. The sun shone. The audience - two hundred people, maybe? - lolled on the grass. People ate ice cream. A few surreptitiously enjoyed a beer or two. Lower Gibsons was at its best.

Outdoor events work really well here, and I'd wager that the physical setting of Lower Gibsons has a lot to do with that. The village, you'll acknowledge, is set in a depression formed between the Bluff and the steep slope up toward Mt. Elphinstone. It sits right above an enclosed, C-shaped harbour. Winegarden Park is right in the middle of that curve, which might just be the best possible place for a public space in the whole village.

My friend Courtney, who comments on here, knows a thing or two about urban planning. She recently made some remarks here about prospect and refuge - namely, that the success of public space (among other kinds of space) hinges on a combination of exposed spaces and enclosed ones. In other words, neither deep caves nor exposed, windy plains make good city parks. Winegarden Park, though, seems to have both prospect and refuge in abundance. Prospect, in that you can see the North Shore mountains, and refuge, in that the shape of the land around provides a feeling of enclosure.

For another thing, it's accessible by the seawall path, which puts it just steps from take-out fish and chips, incredible burritos (have I mentioned the burrito place on the wharf?), kayak rentals, Gramma's, a good swimming beach, etc.

It's a great space. But the thing is, when there isn't anything happening there, it's often nearly empty. Which is a shame. I'd love to see more musical events down there. And what about outdoor theatre? What about holding the farmer's market - or the existing Sunday market - down there? Or parking a taco truck at the bottom of the park, thus converting the whole space into an outdoor restaurant?

Something to think about. Anyway, bravo, Gibsons Landing Jazz Festival - you make the town come alive.

On having to buy bread

2010-06-10T07:53:00.000-07:00

For me, the last couple of years have been pretty laid-back. I've worked a part-time job since - wow - three Septembers ago. That first year, I wrote a thesis on my days off. After that, I took on a number of different projects, some of them worthwhile, some not really. I always had enough time on the side, though, to bake all of our own bread (sourdough, too), brew all our beer, tend the garden once in a while, knit the occasional item, and cook a lot of food. I think I told you all this before when I posted about maker culture and how awesome it is.

Thing is, since early this spring, I've been getting steadily busier. I've churned out a steady stream of short news and culture pieces like this one for a few months now, and I still have to put at least one away before heading out the door for our summer bike trip. And next year I'll be at least as busy, possibly more, when I head back into grad school for another rip at thesis-writing. I've long expected the time when I'd get busy again, and, lo, here it is. No complaint.

Will I still have time to mess around with one self-sufficiency project or another? Sometimes I feel pessimistic about it - I had to buy bread the other day. I haven't really had to do that more than a couple of times since 2006. I felt as if I'd violated my principles - I've been trying to produce a good portion of the food we eat here for a while now, and bread is about the most basic food item there is. When I make bread, I'm a producer, not a consumer. It feels important, even if I have a hard time expressing exactly why. It just does.

I'll give it a go, anyway. I'd hate to regress to the point where I bought bread every week. Perhaps it'll find a fixed place in my weekly routine. It might kill the spontaneity of it, but at least we'd have bread.

As for this year, at least there's still the garden, where the broad beans are growing enormous, the garlic are growing scapes, the potatoes are getting bushy, the beets are sprouting, and the pumpkins are soon to sprout. Not all the idealistic projects have been pushed aside.

Four things that Lower Gibsons can't lose

2010-06-07T14:39:00.000-07:00

Thank you, Howe Soundings readers, for your patience. I felt like hell last week. After a few restful, work-free days, I'm back to normal, more or less.

And now that I can think in a straight line again, I want to come right back to where I left off - in Lower Gibsons, thinking about the future of our village. Last Monday's entry came from the perspective of a hypothetical tourist. Now I'm back to being me - a Gibsons resident, very fond of this town, and well aware that time will change it. No doubt we all agree on that after Thursday's fire.

(An aside: I was having a feverish nap in an armchair when the sirens started screaming. I was still half-dreaming when the power went off, which gave the situation a kind of apocalyptic feel. I staggered out to the window, where the rising pillar of smoke and ash seemed to confirm my worst suspicions, and at the same moment, I got a text message from Sheena that read "you ok?" I later found out that she was just asking whether my flu symptoms were abating, and that she didn't know about the fire, but in the moment, it all seemed to point to some disastrous event that had happened while I was napping. And I guess that's exactly what the fire was. My best wishes to all who were affected by it.)

Gibsons is going to change. Many times I've found myself talking about what I don't want to see here - now I'm going to do the opposite. What are the best things about the village - the things without which Lower Gibsons wouldn't be Lower Gibsons? I came up with a shortlist of four essential elements.

1. Colour.

We have a maritime west coast climate. Cloudy skies are part of living here. Bright colours in the built environment - the yellow paint on Molly's Reach and this wharf, the brilliant landscaping that the Town of Gibsons' parks people do - keep the village from looking dreary, and they keep us (well, at least they keep me) from feeling gloomy. So do the deep colours of the forest surrounding Lower Gibsons. It's the drab mid-tones that look most depressing, like fleshy stucco and miscellaneous shades of grey. Those colours are why I don't like spending time in Vancouver on rainy days.

If you want to paint your business bright yellow or royal blue, go for it. I'm with you all the way.

2. Heterogeneity.

This is a big one. Lower Gibsons is refreshingly free of big, monolithic commercial or residential developments. Maybe it won't be free of simply big developments for long, but I sure hope they don't get monolithic. Or otherwise homogeneous.

Lower Gibsons draws people in with its variety. The buildings are small, and they're all obviously distinct from each other. They reward curiosity - you go around corners, look down alleys, climb stairs. And, as I suggested in my last post, sensible infill development would only add to this pleasant variety. It would reward pedestrians, and keep people in Lower Gibsons longer.

3. Access.

This is the biggest difference between Upper and Lower Gibsons: Upper is cut in half by a road, and Lower isn't. There's a road that runs through it, but neither traffic volume or speed keep people from crossing it easily. The on-street parking along Marine Drive and Gower Point Road effectively calms the traffic, and nobody in their right mind exceeds 30 km/h between the Black Bean and the tanning salon. This makes the main drag very pedestrian-friendly.

Plus, there's plenty of access to the seawall path, which connects the village's warmest swimming beach (Armour's) to the village's most scenic watering hole (Gramma's). Result: car-free summertime brilliance.

4. Meeting space.

Yes, this picture isn't from today. Which is unfortunate, because I want to use it as an example of good public meeting space. Imagine this scene without the excess water.

OK. So this is obviously isn't technically public space - it's the patio at Smitty's. But this patio, and the other ones in town - the fish 'n' chips window in front of Gramma's, the fantastic burrito place on the wharf, the patio at Molly's Reach - insert energy into places where there would otherwise just be a place to walk. They encourage passersby to slow down and gawk a little, whether or not they actually want to stop for a bite to eat.

Green space such as the very nicely landscaped Winegarden Park is also very important. Have you ever noticed, though, that Winegarden Park only ever seems to attract large numbers of people when there's an event there? I think parks and other urban green spaces work best when there's some kind of draw, be it outdoor music or a taco truck.

Your turn! What works in Lower Gibsons? What wouldn't you want to see changed? What would you like to see more of?

Sick

2010-06-03T22:34:00.001-07:00

Howe Soundings readers:

Wow! It's been a rocky couple of weeks. Lots of missed deadlines. I'm going to have to miss another one. Thursday's almost over, and I didn't get to it today. I've got a cold and my brain has felt muddy all day. Hopefully by next week all will be back to normal.

Begging your pardon,

Matt.

Habitat, part 3: Infill

2010-05-31T12:57:00.001-07:00

I'm going to switch identities for this post. See, this blog is usually about looking at Gibsons from a resident's perspective. But tourist season has been going on for a few weeks now, and it's got me wondering what visitors think of this town. So today I walked through Lower Gibsons and tried to see it as a day-tripper might.

And I thought: what's with all of the vacant lots?

I've actually been thinking about this for a while. Gibsons attracts a lot of visitors, especially in summertime. It's the kind of place that people like visiting, because even on a rainy day, Gibsons is about as picturesque as Pacific Northwest seaside villages get. We have a sheltered harbour framed by hills, and, in Lonely Planet's words, "a rainbow of painted wooden buildings perched over the marina." You can rent a kayak and eat oysters. You can get your picture taken in front of Molly's Reach.

The trouble is, in my view - and you're free to differ, as you know - that the charm starts to wear thin once you've returned your kayak or finished your plate of oysters. Why, you wonder, is there a gaping hole right next to Molly's Reach, at the very centre of the village? What's with the blackberry jungle lining the waterfront? Why has the largest street-level space in the Gibsons Quay building been vacant for so long? Why is there so much parking for so few stores and shops?

And why - I hate to say this, because I love this town - does Lower Gibsons look so run-down in spots? Shouldn't a scenic seaside village come off as more vibrant and less like a ghost town?

That said, here and there Lower Gibsons gets it absolutely right. Here's two places in particular. On the wharf you can eat incredible burritos (for cheap), peruse Sa Boothroyd's gallery, and enjoy the view from the gazebo at the end of the breakwater. Very pleasing. Along the waterfront path you can get take-out fish and chips, eat on the patio at Smitty's, or, soon, eat steaks (if you like that kind of thing) at the chophouse that's in the process of being renovated. Could this be the beginning of a longer strip of restaurants? Or will the blackberry jungle win?

I think the answer lies in high-quality infill development. The blackberry jungle, the gravel parking lots (often empty) above it, and the gaping hole beside Molly's Reach are all sites crying out to be used for things that are interesting and useful. Bring on more galleries, studios, unique shops, cafes. Make it aesthetically pleasing. Make it interesting. People will come. And not just tourists - if it's done well, locals will come too.

The Town of Gibsons began a master plan process for the harbour area last fall. The first phase wrapped up with a consulting firm presenting a "vision" for the harbour - a set of visuals for how the master plan could look. In my view, they made the harbour look pretty fantastic. Lots of others seemed to agree. Will that vision influence the final plan? Only if we get involved in the process when it resumes.

Stay tuned!

Three things of note, totally unrelated to one another

2010-05-28T07:53:00.000-07:00

It's the Friday of a busy week, and now that things are finally calming down, I've found that instead of having one nicely-formed reflection for Howe Soundings, I have three smaller ones. But that's the kind of thing that blogs were meant for, right? So, things noticed this week:

1. The float is in at Armour's Beach.

This means that summer is around the corner. In just a few weeks, the float will become a truly brilliant gathering place, where the very young and the very old hang out, chat, and jump in the water. Armour's seems to attract a little of every crowd. It's one of the places that can make me feel hopeful for Gibsons - not just as a backdrop, but as a community of people.

Sure, there are people who murmur about high coliform counts at Armour's Beach, but I've never seen anything in print that made me suspect that swimming there wasn't healthy. And, anyway, I'd prefer not to think about it.

2. Did you see this story in last week's newspaper?

Teachers (good ones, that is) are role models, leaders, etc. They build community in their classrooms and schools. And they're not interchangeable with each other. That's why the teacher placement process on the Sunshine Coast is so damaging - except for the most senior, teachers are being made to compensate for declining enrolment by switching schools, taking each other's jobs, and losing connection to the students they know. It's deeply frustrating - and I'm neither student nor teacher.

Sunshine Coast teacher Nick Smith wrote an excellent piece in the Tyee on this issue. I recommend reading it.

3. Our CSA program has started for the year.

In a previous post I mentioned the Backyard Bounty CSA program. Farmer Dawn gave us our first instalment of veggies yesterday, and they look delicious. We got salad mix, arugula, radishes, mustard greens, chives, green onions, baby carrots, and pepper seedlings. This is our third year with Dawn, and the produce is up to her usual high standard - though the carrots are sweeter and more delectable than I remember them. Earlier, too. Over the summer, the instalments get bigger and bigger and more diverse. Some might say they lean too heavily towards summer squash. Maybe pattypans are overrepresented, fine, but have you ever grown the things? There's always too many of them for one dinner table.

One of the enjoyable things about the CSA program is the weekly pick-up, where Dawn lays her produce out at the United Church hall and we shareholders drop by to claim our bags. Over the afternoon, all of the customers (most of whom are familiar to each other, Gibsons being a small place) trickle in, chat with each other, catch up with Dawn, and head home, perfectly contented, to eat fresh salad. Those afternoons show that local farming does more than feed people - it strengthens the networks that hold us together.

Mustard greens! Chives! Green onions!

Another schedule change

2010-05-27T08:01:00.000-07:00

Well, Howe Soundings readers -

Since my Monday post appeared on Tuesday this week, I'm going to do my Thursday post on Friday. Just to be consistent, you know. And because I won't have time for it otherwise. Back to my regular posting schedule next week.

Thanks for your understanding. See you tomorrow.

M.

Summer plans

2010-05-25T08:52:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me, as I made my excuses yesterday for missing Monday's post, that I'm going to be missing at least six weeks of posts this summer, and that summer isn't really all that far off now. I think I'll start making my excuses now. Since it's already an unusual week, stat holiday and all, I won't fret over the fact that this has very little to do with Howe Sound. I'll get back to the local thing on Thursday.

Last summer, five adventurous young lads (two of them with a Gibsons connection) rode their bikes from Banff to the USA-Mexico border along the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route. They made a video of their trip, which I've cleverly embedded above (new skill!) for your viewing pleasure. We saw this video on some cold, damp evening last fall, and before it was over, we'd decided to go on a long-distance bike trip ourselves.

Our first instinct was to, like the Great Dividers, go south. But we'd go on pavement, following the 101 from Gibsons to San Francisco, or possibly even further. It seemed like a good idea. Everyone who does that ride likes it, or at least everyone we know who's done it has liked it. So we fixed our daydreams for a while on a ride to San Francisco.

But who likes riding on the shoulder of a highway? Last summer's bike tour from Victoria to Nanaimo (via Salt Spring Island) only included about thirty kilometres of main highway, but that stretch was so unpleasant - flat tires, loud trucks, exhaust - that it left us good and rattled. The 101 is a slower road, but there would still be motorhomes rumbling by, and who knows just how wide the shoulders are?

So we settled on a plan B, which might turn out to be more ambitious than plan A was. We're going to ride across BC this summer on the Trans Canada Trail. We leave the week of July 12th, and we have six weeks for the trip.

The Trail is a combination of secondary highways, logging roads, abandoned rail beds, and dedicated trails, and it winds its way across the province from Victoria to Elk Pass. Except we'll be going the other way. We'll start in Banff, head to Canmore by trail, and from there we'll pick up the Smith-Dorrien Spray Lakes Trail (actually a gravel road), heading south. We'll cross out of Alberta over Elk Pass, and from there, follow Bruce Obee's trail directions in reverse - logging roads and rail beds to Cranbrook, over the Grey Creek Pass to Kootenay Lake, down rail beds to Salmo, up side roads to Castlegar, and then along rail beds almost all the way to Hope. From there we aren't certain of our route. The official Trans Canada Trail route winds up and over a steep pass into Chilliwack Lake - we might instead ride to Mission and hop a train to Vancouver, and from there take a ferry to the Island. We've got to be in Victoria by the end of August, after all.

That's about eight weeks off now, and yes, I'm getting excited. I haven't decided if I'll be blogging the trip as we go - it does sound like great blog material, but I'm not certain that there'll be Internet terminals where we'll be going. Stay tuned.

Holiday excuses

2010-05-24T17:01:00.000-07:00

Dear regular Howe Soundings readers:

I've just arrived back home from a weekend on Vancouver Island, and although I could meet my Monday blog deadline, I'm not going to. It's a holiday, after all. I'll post tomorrow morning after I get a good sleep.

Until then,

Matt.

The top three reasons why more people don't ride bikes in Gibsons

2010-05-20T07:33:00.000-07:00

In a previous post I said a few words about Gibsons' very small but growing bicycle culture. It's a nice place to ride a bike, I said. Sure, there are people who think it's dangerous or uncomfortable, but they're mistaken. Soon every second person in town will commute by bike.

Well, today's been the kind of blustery, wet day that invites you to rethink the things you say on sunny ones. And I've been thinking a lot about bikes over the last few days while working on a story for the Dependent on the City of Vancouver's recent investment in its cycling infrastructure. I was over there on Tuesday afternoon, and I got a chance to ride a good many of the city's 415 kilometres of bike routes. The Gibsons booster in me hates to admit a thing like this, but cycling over there is a piece of cake compared to here. The bike lanes are abundant, wide, and well-planned. There's almost always a route that will take you to where you need to go. Even so, Vancouver is using this investment to encourage more people on to the bike routes, and they hope to do this by addressing the things that keep them in their cars right now - the perception of danger being a major one.

And I thought - what are the things that keep people away from riding their bikes as a means of transportation in Gibsons? So I thought back to all the conversations I've had with people here on the subject of bikes, and I came up with the three that I've heard mentioned most often. This time I won't pretend that they don't exist. But I don't think they're insurmountable, either.

#1: Hills.

There's basically no way that you can ride anywhere in Gibsons without encountering a hill of some size. Unless you're in ridiculously good shape, you'll breathe a bit harder than you usually do, you might break a sweat, and you're certain to think bitter thoughts about those smug Amsterdam cyclists who glide effortlessly to work beside canals. You will experience some discomfort.

Is there any consolation? Well, maybe not. There's really no way around them. But remember - there's no shame in crawling up a hill at a snail's pace. Challenge yourself to go as slowly as you possibly can. Remember - you'd be moving at the same speed if you were walking. Once you get to the top, you'll speed up. And you'll get faster over time.

Or you could get an electric bike. Dona, my stepmother-in-law, has one and really digs it.

#2: Rain.

Summer's fine for riding bikes. But what about those short November days where you get soaked to the skin before you reach the end of your street? Or those times when it looked fine before you left, but then poured when you were too far away from home to turn around? No fun. Way more people would ride bikes around here if it weren't for the rain. I'm sure of it (though they'd still have to confront reasons 1 and 3).

At least rain is an easier problem to solve. Here's the solution: invest in a rack and panniers. Get rain covers for the panniers. Then, before you leave, throw a clean, dry change of clothes in one of the panniers. Wear your least attractive but most waterproof clothing for the ride, and then, when you get to wherever it is you're going, change. Easy.

#3: Narrow shoulders.

This might be the most commonly-cited reason why people don't ride their bikes here. Not all, but a few Gibsons roads are built in a way that makes cycling awkward, and have enough traffic to make one uncomfortable while riding. Pratt might be the worst of these, with its narrow lanes and speeding cars (it's a fifty zone, motorists). The lower stretch of Gibsons Way, between North Road and the Five Corners, is also bad. You can see why from the picture above.

But is it so dangerous to ride a bike here? Sure, there aren't many roads wide enough to be designated as bike routes. But traffic is light on most of these roads, so, unless you're in one of the trouble spots like Pratt Rd. or Gibsons Way, you can take up your fair share of the lane without unnecessary fear. In general, I've found Sunshine Coast motorists to be very courteous to cyclists. Also, there are alternate routes to most places. You might not have to ride on Pratt - the Mahan Trail is right there, after all.

True, there have been bike accidents. But there have also been car accidents, pedestrian accidents, boating accidents, sports accidents, and earthquakes.

What are your thoughts about riding in Gibsons? Or about riding in general? Leave a comment!

Phosphorescence

2010-05-17T09:58:00.000-07:00

For someone whose blog references a body of water in its title, I spend an awful lot of time on dry land. (Trips on the Queen of Surrey don't really count.) Being a landlubber is fine in a lot of places, but here it seems inappropriate. I live in a town built around the water, one that began from its wharf and spread out from there. There's nowhere in Gibsons - or on the whole Sunshine Coast - that's more than an hour's walk from either Howe Sound or the Strait of Georgia. The place is built for people who spend time in boats, but I'm more likely to be in my vegetable garden than bouncing over waves at any given time. So it felt good to spend a bit of time afloat last Saturday night, thanks to the fine people at Sunshine Kayaking.

Around dinnertime (for all creatures - we watched from a few feet away as an otter devoured a fish on the Sunshine Kayaking float) six of us got in boats and paddled across the channel to the beach on Keats Island near Salmon Rock. We lit a fire, cooked smokies, and let the warm evening pass by. It passed by quickly, as good times do. By the time we set off homeward, it was completely dark, with only a sliver of moon in the sky.

You'll have to take my word for the next part, because I don't have a shred of photographic evidence. We paddled home that night atop the most dramatic phosphorescence I've ever seen. The instant you put your paddle blade in the water, it stirred up a glowing, swirling blue cloud of sparks. It was indescribable (but, obviously, I'm giving it a go).

We set off from Keats at a meandering pace, scooping up handfuls of stars with our hands and throwing waves of blue electricity with our paddles. Gradually we rounded the point into the next bay over, and somebody called out in surprise. Underneath us a school of fish was darting around, leaving meteor trails behind them. It was beautiful, and also dizzying. Normally in a boat you have the impression of being on the surface of something. Water is like the ground, but wet and wavy - but here was something totally different. Instead of floating on the surface of the water, we were flying far above the rocks and fish underneath us. As we paddled past the fish, our boats rode on bow waves that seemed to be made of blue light.

So strange to paddle back into the marina that night, with its sodium lamps humming and the town right above it. Walking home up Gibsons Way, we had that feeling you have when you return from a place so foreign that you can't explain it to people who haven't been there. All you can do is look forward to going back.

For those who don't have the chance to paddle Shoal Channel, my friend Jon Hird's gorgeous videos can take you there while you kill time at your office job.

Howe Soundings' fourth monthiversary

2010-05-13T19:15:00.000-07:00

Which doesn't sound like a long time, until you think that on January 13th, when I created the blog, it was less than ten degrees outside, kind of damp, and the trees didn't have leaves. Tonight the air smells like flowers, there are hummingbirds everywhere, and you could even call it warm outside. Four months doesn't sound like much, but how about this: Howe Soundings is one season old. I like that better.

I've had fun with this blog so far, and I'm especially glad to have so many regular readers. One of the reasons I started doing this was so that I could communicate with people. Being a writerly sort, I'd got into the dangerous habit of scrawling reflections on my favourite topics - community, place, salmonberries, homebrewing, etc. - in a wire-bound Hilroy notebook that nobody save myself was likely ever to see. Having this blog gives me the chance to offer those thoughts up as conversation-starters (and yes! It's started conversations here and there, which I find gratifying), and by airing them publicly, I can keep them from going stale and turning into rock-hard, irrational convictions. I can try, at least. The blog also encourages me to get those reflections across as clearly and persuasively as I can. It's awfully good practice. Thank you all for reading.

But the main reason I started this blog is one that I find harder to explain. I like Gibsons, Howe Sound, all of that. So do you, probably. So does everyone. Why? There are dozens of obvious things that any of us could name in a flash that can stand for how nice our place on earth is. (Best water! Nice beaches! Laid-back lifestyle! Clean! Green! Cheaper than Vancouver!) And I don't disagree that those things are nice. But I get tired of easy answers. What's to like about Gibsons besides the clean water and the lemon meringue pie gelato at Mike's? And what's not to like about it? There's got to be something else to say about this town beyond the things we always hear said. I want to be in that conversation when it happens, because it'll help us know this place beyond Molly's Reach (which, come to think of it, would be a decent name for a Gibsons blog - apologies to Beyond Robson).

That's why I've been doing this, and I plan to continue offering conversation-starters every Monday and Thursday. Here's another reason, too - being a writerly sort, it's easy to get sucked into that big city over there more often than I'd like to, because that's where the obvious opportunities seem to be. Like grad school, where I'll be headed in the fall. I like Vancouver a lot; it's a fascinating city, and again, it has much more going for it than the obvious things. But I can see how easy it'd be to end up doing all of my writing and thinking and talking over there and coming back here just to drink pure tap water and pay affordable rent. This blog keeps me anchored on the west side of Howe Sound.

So - stay tuned. Thanks for following along.

A post about two significant firsts

2010-05-10T08:33:00.000-07:00

#1: First unassisted salt-water swim of the year.

Sunday was a gorgeous day, so, seeking some sweet relaxation, Sheena and I rode down to Whitaker Beach. After picnicking and staring thoughtfully at the waves for half an hour or so, I decided that I'd better go in, if only to stave off feelings of regret and inadequacy later on. After that I mulled it over aloud for a few more minutes, causing Sheena to remark pointedly that she'd regret it if I didn't go in. The writing was on the wall. I went in - not the first swim of the year, but the first one unassisted by a sauna. Here's proof.

I can't figure out how to rotate a video, so I recommend rotating your head while watching this.

By the time I finished mulling and started swimming the sky had clouded over. The air was still decently warm, but you wouldn't know that from watching this video. To my eye the image of me, shirtless, plunging into leaden waves resembles something you might see at some boreal Russian beach resort. Chilly and drab. It wasn't nearly that bad in real life, though the water was icy.

Some people I know doubt whether the Strait of Georgia ever gets warm enough for swimming. I say it does. In 2006 I lived steps from the beach in Roberts Creek, and I swam there almost daily from May until August. Those were beautiful months, ones that caused no end of daydreaming over the following winter in icy, grey (though charming) Kingston. These days Armour's Beach is my swimming hole, and though there've been some pretty nice days down there, I've never since encountered such a steady run of warm water as I did that summer. 2006 was a warm one, of course, so I'm not making an entirely fair comparison. And, to be fair, some of the best salt-water swims I've ever had were at Armour's during the heat wave last July. But until a year of good weather changes my mind, my favourite place to swim on the Sunshine Coast is at any sandy shore between Gower Point and Mission Point.

#2: First ripe salmonberries of the year.

Last year the first ripe salmonberries weren't out before June. I'm sure of this. (If you disagree, go ahead and tell me.) I wasn't even looking for salmonberries yesterday, but these ones looked so ripe and orange that they caught my eye from a distance. Up close, as you'll see, they were gnarled and hard-looking. But technically, they were ripe.

Salmonberries are underappreciated, which is fine, because it means that there aren't many competitors for my favourite wild fruit. I love them for their brilliant colours, their abundance, and their unique flavour, which, if I were being poetical, I'd describe as resembling bitter oranges, apricots, and spring rain.

These ones, found at the edge of Whitaker Beach, tasted like salmonberry seeds and sawdust. But I'm not worried. They'll get better.

First there was the personal computer, and now...

2010-05-06T19:10:00.000-07:00

Confession: I've given in and bought a cell phone.

I take some pride in holding out against things like this. For example, I signed up on Facebook about three years after everyone else I knew did. I resisted blogging (besides some sporadic attempts at it in the early 2000s) until early this year. I've never owned a laptop computer. I've been accused of being stubborn, but it isn't stubbornness that makes me reluctant to get on board with these things. It's that once you get them, you don't easily get rid of them. And each new thing takes up a bit more of your time, and uses up a bit more of the world's resources.

Nevertheless, I got a cell phone yesterday, and I think I was more or less justified in doing so. I spend a lot of time in Vancouver right now, and will be spending more time there next year, and man, it's hard to function in that city without a phone at your side. That is, it's hard if you're trying to make plans with people, coordinate meetings, etc. Pay phones just don't exist anymore, at least when you need them. My new device will make it easier to connect with people over there, and for that reason, I'm glad I have it. But I'm not pleased about having one more thing that must be plugged in, kept dry, attended to, remembered when leaving the house, and eventually, disposed of.

If there's a bright side to this, it's that I have another reason to appreciate living on the far side of Howe Sound. See - being in Vancouver makes it pretty much necessary for me to carry a cell phone. Over here, I don't think I'll use it very much at all. I can't imagine needing to. Gibsons is small enough that nobody's more than a few minutes' ride away, and besides that, we all run into each other on the street. Community here is (in my world at least) refreshingly unwired. Immediate. Physical. That's another reason I treasure this place.

If getting a cell phone causes me to better appreciate the times when when I turn the phone (and computer) off, then I'm mostly glad to have made this technological leap. On that note, I have a lawn to mow and compost to add to the garden; this wired office and I are done for the day. Hope to see you out there on the street.

Salmon

2010-05-03T10:12:00.000-07:00

Where would we be without salmon? It's hard to imagine the Pacific coast without them. They sustained the First Nations for generations beyond number before we arrived, and so far, they've sustained the settlers too. Their bodies have fed bears and eagles and raccoons and trees. They're essential to our place on earth.

I don't know if anyone a hundred years ago would've guessed that things would grow so dire for Pacific salmon. But we've seen the collapse of one run after another in the last few years. If there's a message in these bad-news stories, it's that we desperately need to do something to keep the salmon here, lest they go the way of the Atlantic cod. Well, we've heard clearly from scientists and other people who ought to know that open-net salmon farms are harming wild salmon stocks. There's a really good case for abandoning this practice and moving salmon farms inland, where sea lice and escapees won't pose a threat to wild fish - but nobody in government seems too concerned about all this.

Will they notice biologist/activist Alexandra Morton's latest project? Right now she's walking from Port McNeill to Victoria to raise awareness about the disastrous way in which BC's salmon farming industry has been allowed to endanger the marine environment in the pursuit of profit. Gibsons isn't on the way to Victoria, so a local group organized a separate walk in support of Morton's mission. Sheena and I duly took part. It was a nice day, and the walk was well-attended. A nice way to spend a Sunday morning. We walked from the Five Corners to the marina, where Charman Creek, in which salmon once spawned, flows into the bay. Then we dispersed.

Presumably, we were all hoping that somebody noticed.

A salmon anecdote: when I first moved here five and a half years ago, I worked at the kayak shop in Roberts Creek. Thanks to an awkward bus schedule I often had time to kill before work, so I'd wander down to the creek mouth - one of my favourite places on the Sunshine Coast - to look around. One day I looked down from the bridge and stopped, amazed. The creek was filled with salmon.

I'd been to the salmon run at Goldstream when I lived in Victoria, but aside from that, my only encounters with salmon had involved barbeques. It seems funny to say that, given that I grew up in Steveston, a town founded on fish. But no - I'd never just happened upon a salmon, much less scores of them, swimming upstream to make love and die. And there they were, without a sign, without a salmon-themed event to celebrate. There was nobody else down at the creek mouth that day, so all I could do was just wander back up to work and mull it over. That's when all of that abstract talk about diminishing salmon stocks really sunk in and became a local issue for me. I've been back every year since to see the salmon run up Roberts Creek, and I don't want to imagine a fall when they don't come back.

Gardens, ours and others'

2010-04-28T17:34:00.000-07:00

May's almost here. Trees everywhere are in leaf. Gower Point Rd. is busy with summer tourists on Saturdays. Whitaker Beach picnics with potato salad and wieners are starting to seem like a viable dinner option again. Some days I contemplate going swimming at Armour's. (I haven't yet.) But where it really hits home to me that we're closer to summer than we are to winter is in the garden.

Those are our two rows of broad beans, which just one month ago were mere sprouts. Now they're robust, leafy little plants, nearly a foot tall. In another month, probably, they'll be flowering. Perhaps they'll be fruiting already. I hope that they'll do better this year than last year, when we neglected to water the plants during one unexpected May dry spell. They never quite recovered from that stress, and produced a pretty indifferent little harvest of pods. I hope beyond hope that this year is different, because broad beans are up there with winter squash as my absolute favourite kind of garden produce.

As for the garlic, it seems to be a much more forgiving crop. Our plants are tall and sturdy now, and soon enough will begin to produce the elegant, curling flower stalks (scapes) that taste so good when sauteed with butter and broad beans (and washed down with homebrewed apple cider!).

Speaking of backyard gardening, there may be a space or two left in Dawn Myers' CSA, Backyard Bounty. What's a CSA, you ask? The initials stand for Community-Supported Agriculture, a model of farming in which customers pay a farmer a subscription fee at the beginning of the growing season. That farmer then supplies the customers with a share of her farm's produce over the season. The great advantage of the model is that the inherent risk of farming is shared between farmer and customers. If the crops fail, it's a bummer, but the farmer doesn't go out of business.

Dawn does a spectacular job of CSA farming. She grows wonderful veggies, and distributes generous quantities of them weekly for twenty weeks, all for the quite reasonable fee of $460 per share. Her CSA has a bit of a twist to it - she tends not one large farm but several small plots, most of them located in Gibsons backyards. I'm no great fan of big lawns, and I love that by buying a share in Backyard Bounty I'm helping to turn underused turf into vegetable patches. It's not just a way of buying vegetables - it's a way of beautifying your neighbourhood! If you don't get Dawn's vegetables already, I'd recommend looking into it. Click on the link above for more information.

This is Dawn's one non-backyard garden. It's a corner of Brookbank Farm, which lies just north of Chaster Creek at the corner of Russell and Henry Rds. I like to ride by there to watch things grow - lots of garlic there right now - and also just because the garden is in one of my favourite parts of Gibsons. Henry Rd. is lined with farms and orchards, and so is Russell. It feels kind of timeless out there. Out there you remember that, not so long ago, everyone kept at least a small garden patch. It's a nice place to be, especially an hour before sunset on a warm, late April evening.

Weeds?

2010-04-26T09:58:00.000-07:00

Quick. Look at these plants and tell me what you think of them.

Those were Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica), Scotch broom (Cytisus scoparius), and English holly (Ilex aquifolium), none of them native to this area (hence their common names). If you're like me, you dislike these plants to the point of open hostility, because they're aggressive colonizers and they're bad news for native vegetation. They're all over Gibsons, and they're spreading.

Now look at this plant.

You recognize it, I'm sure - it's Himalayan blackberry (Rubus discolor). How do you feel about it? It's every bit as opportunistic as those other invasives. It turns open spaces into impassible wastes of vegetative barbed wire. What galls me most about it is how it out-competes its close relative, salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis), a much prettier plant by far, whose bittersweet berries I prize above all others.

But come August, I pick Himalayan blackberries by the bucketful. And so, probably, do you.

I appreciate two things about Himalayan blackberry. The fruit, certainly - they're sweet and abundant. But its food value aside, I appreciate that Himalayan blackberry forces us to think carefully about our relationship with foreign vegetation. It's ironic that a people who themselves settled North America without asking permission can build up such a towering rage about exotic plants who dare only to do the same thing. Think about this: over on Vancouver Island they regularly throw "broom bashes," work parties of upstanding citizens who go out on nice days to do violence to Scotch broom plants. But in Powell River they hold an annual blackberry festival. Why, this is nothing but simple prejudice! It's a botanic equivalent of the Asiatic Exclusion League!

No, no, I'm kidding. I'm not going to argue that we ought to give all exotic species a chance. I think we all know decently well that some of them are worth cutting back but keeping in limited quantities (Himalayan blackberry) and that some are ghastly to look at and would be better eradicated (Japanese knotweed or the frightening giant hogweed, lately the terror of Mahan Trail walkers, not pictured). But I'll still insist on making that human parallel. Most of us are descended from settlers, right? Well, I assume that most of us settler folk are, generation by generation, coming to be at home out here on the Pacific coast. In fits and starts, we're even trying to make amends for the dubious ways through which we acquired our land. In short, though colonialism isn't dead and gone, at least we're facing up to it.

But though we might be getting past colonialism in our own lives, we're being forced to watch it happen all over again, this time in our forests, fields, and ditches. Those Scotch broom seeds that W. Colquhoun Grant brought to Victoria a century and a half ago started a botanical conquest that continues today. The consequences are terrible, but we barely have the means to stop it. Accuse me if you will of having white guilt, but I think this is our comeuppance.

Habitat, part 2: local architecture?

2010-04-21T16:07:00.000-07:00

Back to Habitat, my ongoing look at the built environment in Gibsons.

Those of us who live in the New World as settlers have a funny relationship to the local. Our ancestors lived in places they knew intimately (perhaps too intimately), but we, in the space of a few generations, have spread over vast continents without pausing to grow roots. Local culture is difficult to find here because we're foreign to our local environments. It's not that there aren't settler people here who know their home landscapes well, but our communities are still in the process of settling in to their surroundings.

But, at the same time, the word local is in demand right now. Attach it to a noun like food or place or culture and you'll attract all kinds of notice. It's clear that quite a few of us yearn for a greater connection to our places, and we show this by eagerly consuming things that were grown or brewed or written nearby. It's as if by consuming them we take on some of the essence of our locale. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's wondered what my local culture would look like, were ours a more local world - what our economy would be based upon, how we'd entertain ourselves, how we'd build our houses.

Here's one possible answer to that last question. It isn't for everyone - who can afford property on the Bluff, anyway! - but, as I see it, it's an example of what a local architecture could look like.

This house is located on the north side of the Bluff, facing the harbour. It's built right above the road on a fairly steep incline, just like all of its neighbours. The difference is that while its neighbours tower ominously above your head as you walk by, this house fades gracefully into the hillside. It's marvellous. From some angles it disappears altogether. You can't see it from Armour's Beach, for instance.

This house certainly isn't small, though it's smaller than several on the Bluff. It's how it's built that makes it vanish so neatly into the surroundings. Its shape reflects the shape of the rock underneath it. The house recedes from view when seen from the street, culminating at a single lookout window on the top floor. The lower floors are irregularly formed - the porch curves smoothly and the basement wall is a flat face. The effect is that the house looks like it was formed organically, not transposed from some flat suburban cul-de-sac. The natural colours of the cedar shingles and red trim continue this effect. Then there's the fact that the lot is covered in natural vegetation - arbutus, Douglas-fir, salal, saskatoon. Though there's a screen of trees to the north of the house, it's thin, and the house is clearly visible through it (click on the second photo to see what I mean). But your eye is drawn to the trees first, and when you notice the house, it doesn't jar your senses like some houses do. It fits.

I'm fond of this house, but, well, not all of us can afford to live there. It's just one possible answer to that question about what a local architecture could look like. I'm keeping my eyes open for others, especially smaller and more attainable ones. Your turn: do you think Gibsons - or the coastal Northwest, for that matter - has an architectural style? Are there any buildings that, in your eyes, embody this region's character?

Tamiasciurus douglasii and other neighbours

2010-04-19T14:37:00.003-07:00

I'd just sat down at my computer desk and started to search my brain for something to post about when there was a sound of scurrying claws on my front porch. Knowing that sound very well, I jumped to my feet. I didn't even have to pick up the broom before the squirrel made a mad dash for the other side of the porch and disappeared, leaving the bird feeder unmolested (for now).

Tamiasciurus douglasii. That's the culprit. I've never photographed a Douglas squirrel, as they're small and way too nimble to be apprehended by a slow-moving ape like me. But here's someone else's picture, thanks to the Wikimedia Commons.

The squirrel that visits our front porch comes to feast on the sunflower seeds that the chickadees insist on throwing on the ground. (Why, chickadees?) She keeps us on our toes. Without her, we'd forget to sweep the deck. But since the only way we can discourage her visits is to limit the amount of free food under the bird feeder, we keep it quite tidy. So far she hasn't figured out how to climb onto it from above. I hope she doesn't figure it out - that way we can keep our relationship reasonably cordial.

We don't see many raccoons here, but we know they're around. Just this morning I found garbage strewn over the steps at the bottom of Bal's Lane. They, and the bears, also keep us on our toes. It's been tricky to balance our desire to compost large amounts of kitchen scraps with the inconvenient fact that bears and raccoons have good senses of smell and are always hungry. With their unintended encouragement, we've made a worm composter for inside our house, which we empty into the outside composter when it's well-digested. It's a pretty workable solution.

Like most gardeners, we see a lot of mule deer. We get along pretty well with them. All the plants that we care about, and that the deer might find tasty, are behind an eight-foot plastic fence. I suppose that doesn't include the pot of chives outside our front door, which gets reduced to chive stubble by deer teeth as soon as it starts to sprout each year. But the important ones - broad beans and garlic, so far this year - are off-limits. The deer are more than welcome to mow the lawn for us. Thanks, deer. The fawn pictured above was mowing a lawn on Clark Rd., along with its two siblings and mother.

I've lived in a few places where the town population was a lot less diverse than it is here. Kingston was one of the strangest. The city swarmed with pigeons, starlings, and house sparrows. There were native species around, but they were mainly the obvious, adaptable ones such as eastern grey squirrels and crows. Then there was Victoria, famously overrun with rabbits. Those experiences make me grateful to live in Gibsons, where the animal kingdom is pretty well represented within the town limits. But it also makes me appreciate just how difficult it is for large groups of people to coexist with wildlife. Cities and towns are pretty good at throwing local ecologies pretty far off balance. How can we find that balance? Is it possible?

(By the way, Howe Soundings has been going for three months now. Thanks very much for reading. I've had a good time, and I'm looking forward to the next few months of the project! Keep checking back on Mondays and Thursdays for short reflections on community and place at the western edge of Howe Sound.)

Bike season in Gibsons

2010-04-15T11:30:00.000-07:00

Bicycles are playing a greater and greater role in my life these days.

For one thing, I've been working on a story for the Dependent about hardcourt bike polo in Vancouver. I interviewed East Van Bike Polo stalwart Rory Crowley last night, and spent the day prior to that watching YouTube videos of the game. I'm a bit hesitant to play a sport that involves falling off my bike so much, but it looks really fun. Maybe I'll try it sometime. And for another, I've been souping up my bike so that it'll be ready for a cross-BC tour this summer. Rather, I've been having it souped up for me, thanks to Paul and Matt at Spin Cycles. Today I rode away with new wheels and tires.

Being especially tuned into the two-wheeled world at the moment, it was easy for me to notice what's happening around Gibsons right now: the bikes are coming out of their sheds and getting onto the streets. Bike season has begun (though it didn't end for some of us). It's encouraging to see more people take to their bicycles and ride through town. But I wish there were more still.

Our area is well known as a mountain biking destination, and it's a popular place for summer road touring. But a lot of people here are somewhere between indifferent and hostile towards the more everyday kind of riding, where you use your bike just to get around town. I've been told many times that I'm taking my life into my hands when I ride my bike here, and I've had many people tell me that they wouldn't dare to ride on the Sunshine Coast at all.

Cycling is risky. I can't, and wouldn't, deny that. But I'd argue that it's not nearly as perilous to get on a bike around here as some claim it is. Most local roads are either nice and wide or have very little traffic. Pratt is a notable exception in that it's both busy and narrow, but it's easy to bypass Pratt by taking the Mahan Trail. And the road you might expect to be the most dangerous - Gibsons Way, the main drag - is actually one of the safest, thanks to the bike lanes that went in last year.

Maybe I shouldn't be so impatient. Here and there I see signs that Gibsons is growing a bicycle culture. There are a few local families that ride together as a primary mode of transportation. I've seen some great bike trailer setups, and even some specially designed cargo bikes, that riders are using to take home groceries. It's a start. I have a feeling that biking will catch on here if only enough people get out there, ride, and look like they're having fun.

As far as the last point goes, I can't help it. I love to ride around here. The air is clean, there's mountains in the distance, and nearly every road leads to the beach. And there are hills, sure, but you get to go down them too. It can't possibly be uphill both ways!

Community vs. retirement community

2010-04-12T12:06:00.000-07:00

In the April 2 edition of the Coast Reporter, Jenny Wagler wrote a superb op-ed on the need for economic development aimed at attracting young people to the Sunshine Coast. I loved the piece, and said as much in a letter to the editor, printed in the April 9 edition. I was glad to see that it was one of five letters in response to the same piece, each to the same effect. It's safe to say that many of us agree: community on the Sunshine Coast would be healthier if we could only attract and keep more young people here.

It's not just my imagination that the Sunshine Coast is a particularly elderly place. Statistics Canada agrees. Here's a quick but revealing bit of data: according to the 2006 census, people between the ages of twenty and thirty-nine account for 26% of the total population (4,113,485 people) of British Columbia, but only 16% of the total population (27,755 people) of the Sunshine Coast Regional District. At the other end of the demographic spectrum, people sixty-five and older make up 21% of the Coast's population, but only 15% of BC's.

These numbers show that there's a demographic gap. I claimed in that letter that the gap was self-perpetuating, and it's true - you grow up here knowing that you'll know plenty of people your own age until you finish high school. After that, most of your friends will leave for town, and there won't be many new twentysomethings moving in. So you leave too. Some people come back, but I suspect that most don't.

The obvious trouble with a town lacking in young people is that community initiatives are left to retired folk who often volunteer widely and do a really good job of it, but who, in general, are looking for a pastime less tiring than their full-time job. Young people are more energetic (in theory). Some of them have pretty good ideas, too. They add life to a community, which is why university towns are busy and fun places.

But there's more at stake than nightlife. There's a big difference between a place that's primarily a destination for moneyed people in mid-career or later and one that's a home to families across the generations. The difference lies in the threads of story and local culture that make a place come to life. Children grow up here, learning the landscape cul-de-sac by cul-de-sac, trail by trail, learning its people and its ways, listening to stories from their elders. Then they leave, taking all of that place-knowledge with them. Those of us who've moved here as adults will never have that advantage. I believe that we feel responsibility towards places that we know deeply, and that if more young people stuck around here, there would be more stewards of the Sunshine Coast. We could use them.

So - are you looking for a town in which to open a business and start a family? Come on over!

Where everyone knows your name

2010-04-10T08:42:00.000-07:00

Another bonus Saturday post.

We went out to see Raghu Lokanathan (accompanied by Corwin Fox on banjo and Christina Zaenker on cello) play at the Wild last night. Fantastic show. Every seat was full. Raghu was great as usual.

And the venue - fantastic. It's been pretty exciting to see the Wild transform from a bakery and coffee shop into a place where you can have a beer (and maybe some dulce de leche cake), see live music, and run into everyone you know. Gibsons needed a place like this. Hats off to Ian and Kera for making this happen!

Shortcuts, part 5: low tide route to Grantham's Landing

2010-04-08T12:00:00.000-07:00

For those of you who've just started reading this blog, Shortcuts is a regular feature that celebrates pedestrian culture in and around Gibsons by exploring the car-free shortcuts we take around town. You can find a complete run-down of the idea in the original Shortcuts post, and you can read all of them by clicking on the "shortcuts" label underneath this post.

Grantham's Landing and Gibsons are only a few hundred metres apart, but getting between them can be a trial for the car-free. They're separated by the Gibson Creek ravine, and there's no public trail that crosses that strip of forest. Your only options besides bushwhacking are to come in from the northwest along Reed Rd., or from the south along Marine. Unless it happens to be low tide, in which case you're in luck.

Walking along Marine Drive into Grantham's isn't very much fun, after all. The shoulder is narrow and the traffic can be heavy. You're much better off taking the beach. Keep in mind, though, that the tide has to be fairly low for this shortcut to be viable, as there's a short stretch of shoreline mid-way that isn't exposed at even moderate tides. If I could give you a number to look for on your tide table, I would - but I haven't ever paid that much attention. You also might want to wear gumboots if it's been raining heavily, as you'll have to cross Gibson Creek. It's a short distance away from Armour's Beach, which is where you start walking.

Gibson Creek also marks the point when you walk out of Gibsons and into the strange world of the Squamish Nation's small waterfront reserve, designated "Chekwelp 26" on most maps. Once the site of a village inhabited seasonally by the Sḵwxwú7mesh, this section of shoreline was leased out to cottagers for many decades. Recently, the Squamish Nation terminated the leases, and the cottagers left. Now the beach is quiet and the cottages themselves are crumbling into the water.

These houses had a ramshackle appearance even when people were living in them. Now they're more desolate than ever. Nearly every one of them has had its windows broken, which makes me pretty sad. Sure, nobody's living there anymore, and the houses are bound to come down before too long. But why deface something that, until so recently, was somebody's home?

It's astonishing to see how quickly nature undoes our hard work. In front of this house the retaining wall had apparently collapsed, possibly due to shoreline erosion. Many of the houses looked as if they'd taken a beating in last Friday's windstorm; some, like the green house shown above, are built so close to the water that they've been taking beatings for years now.

We all wonder, of course, what will happen on Chekwelp 26. All kinds of fearful rumours have flown around since the cottagers were turned out, but there's no reason to repeat them them here - why repeat misinformation? The way I see it is that the Squamish Nation has the right to decide what happens on its reserve land. I only hope that it's something they and the broader community can feel good about.

It's a strange walk, this shortcut, and it can feel a little desolate to see all this decay. At the same time, it gives you a chance to see a side of Gibsons that few people see, and the beach itself is beautiful, with views up Howe Sound and across to the Coast Mountains. I'll take that over Marine Drive any day.

Community cider!

2010-04-05T16:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Sheena and I bottled our first-ever batch of apple cider. The first real batch, that is - I'd made rough and ready cider from the gallon jugs of organic apple juice that you can buy from Super Valu, but I'd never made cider from whole apples before. Not only was this batch made entirely from whole apples (and a few pears), all the fruit came from trees on the Sunshine Coast and Vancouver, and all of it would've gone to waste otherwise. Something from nothing!

I started daydreaming about cider making last summer when I found out that The Local Vintner (the homebrew supply store in Sechelt) owns a cider press that you can rent. As August faded into September, I started looking around for apples to press. It turns out that you don't have to look far to find huge quantities of free apples around here.

It began with my friend Joan offering me a milk crate's worth of cider apples, grown in her Upper Gibsons backyard - her dwarf trees are only just becoming established, and she didn't have enough apples in last year's crop to make her own cider. So she generously donated her surplus to me. I also got a free tour of her backyard orchard, which inspired me to start grafting and growing heritage apples as soon as I can. Then Joan's friend Laurie offered us several boxes of bright red, deliciously tart crabapples from her tree in Egmont. We gratefully accepted the donation - she even drove them down to Gibsons for us! Thanks, Laurie.

Then, not long after Laurie's crabapples arrived, I took a walk through Lower Gibsons and noticed a tree covered in beautiful, deep red dwarf apples. I hesitated a few times, then knocked on the door. I introduced myself to the gentleman who answered, and had begun to ask in a roundabout way if I might be able to take a few apples from the tree. Before I could finish, he told me to "take them all!" and offered me a box that he'd already collected. Sheena and I returned a few days later with a ladder and took as many of Henry and Trish's apples as we could possibly handle. Trish even gave us a ride home. Wonderful people. And wonderful apples - tart and tannic, with a deep pink flesh.

Finally, our landlord Pat, an enthusiastic supporter of do-it-yourself projects, threw in a generous quantity of Bosc pears from his tree in Lower Gibsons, and we also happened to have a load of McIntoshes from my parents' tree in Richmond. The basement was threatening to overflow with apples, so we rented the press and got to work.

It was a long evening of cider-making, especially for novices such as us. We were lucky to have our friend Natalie there to help us out, as it turned out to be pretty hard work. First the apples had to be crushed into pulp, using a hand-cranked crusher (the large metal thing propped up on milk crates in the photo above).

Then we loaded them into the press and, with no small amount of grunting and sweating, squeezed the apple pulp until it was hard and dry. After a few hours (or so it seemed) of hard pressing, we'd extracted about eighteen litres of delicious, tart apple juice. I added a pound of honey to it so that it would be more of an apple wine than a light cider, pitched a wine yeast culture into it, fitted an airlock on the carboy, and let it sit. Six months later, we have cider! I think it's awfully good. Very tart, but with a little residual sweetness. Plenty of body. It's around 9.5% alcohol, which makes it an obvious candidate for late-afternoon sipping in the garden. I'm looking forward to 2010's community cider - I hope this will become a yearly ritual!

Joan and Bill, Laurie, Pat and Marion, Henry and Trish, and Mum and Dad - there are bottles set aside for you. Hope you enjoy it.

Otter

2010-04-03T08:33:00.000-07:00

No long, wordy posts for this blog today - after all, I've fulfilled my blogging commitments by posting twice this week. But here's something to tide visitors over until Monday or whenever I can write something more substantial:

Thanks to Sheena for the photo. She met this river otter on a dock out near Langdale. It had been napping until she disturbed it - which might explain the grumpy facial expression.

Habitat, part 1: twin peaks

2010-03-30T16:40:00.000-07:00

Gibsons' built environment is a hot topic. If you don't believe me, go to any Town of Gibsons open house where future development is being discussed. Everyone's got an opinion.

I like that people care about this. Good building, and that means houses, workplaces, parks, and everything else, makes for a good town. The most liveable - familiar word, Gibsons residents? - places I've been to are ones where the architecture is in harmony with the landscape. Places, in other words, where the built and natural environments cooperate with each other.

Our town's changed a lot in the last few years, and it'll change more. We need to start thinking hard about what's to like and what's to dislike in Gibsons' architecture so that we can start building in a way we feel good about, and will feel good about in twenty years. To this end, I'm starting a regular photo feature on this blog called Habitat, in which I'll share a picture taken in or around Gibsons that shows an aspect of the town's built environment - our habitat. I'll include some brief commentary on each image, and you're welcome to join in too, using the "comment" link underneath the post.

The first one I call "Twin Peaks."

You know where this is, I'm sure - I took this from just east of the Petro-Canada on Gibsons Way, facing north. I usually have trouble seeing this mall as part of the landscape around it. That is, looking north from Gibsons Way, you see Mt. Elphinstone in the background, but right up in front of you is a drab collection of buildings that could have been plunked down anywhere. I usually see two distinct landscapes here - one a natural creation, the other a cultural artifact. But when I was passing by today, the peaked facade of The Bargain Shop grabbed my attention, and I wondered - did the architect do that on purpose? For a fleeting moment, I saw the mall and the mountains as one place. I didn't think I'd ever say that.

Crossing the sound

2010-03-29T15:54:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a busy weekend in town. It was fun. But it's nice to be back.

My relationship with Vancouver tends to go in waves. Sometimes I go months without getting on the Queen of Surrey, and then there are times when I cross Howe Sound every couple of weeks. Lately I've been seeing a lot of that place - one of my privileges, I suppose, as a resident of the closest small town to the biggest city in BC (assuming that Gibsons is the closest small town - it sounds good, so I'm not going to check my facts this time. Feel free to contradict me).

When I first moved out to the Sunshine Coast I was intent on staying put. I grew up in Vancouver, then lived in Victoria, and based on that experience, I'd decided that rural life was better - for all kinds of reasons - than city life. Naive, maybe, but lots of people make the same decision in those same circumstances. So I ended up out here, and I dove headlong into the experience; I explored all the trails, I read up on local history, and I slagged Vancouver whenever it came up in conversation. I still went over there for one reason or another, but I told myself that I didn't like it. I was committed to living right here, just like Wendell Berry would.

Pretty soon all of that fervour wore off. It was hard to sustain it for two reasons - for one thing, I've spent more of my life living in cities than I've spent living out of them. I enjoy the buzz and all of the possibilities that live in big places. And for another, it was hard to convince myself that Gibsons was the ideal small town of my imagination. Maybe it would've been easier if everyone here made their own cheese, worked with pre-industrial technology, and nobody had ever been across Howe Sound. No dice. So much for being a romantic.

I still live here, despite that, and I've come to realize that dropping by Vancouver occasionally doesn't amount to betraying my commitment to the Coast. How could it? The city is right there, and so many of us are tangled up in it one way or another. It doesn't make sense to think of the Sunshine Coast except as a place that's right next to a big city. The nice thing is that, thanks to Howe Sound, it's still possible to shut Vancouver out when one doesn't want anything to do with it. And, as it happens, I will shut it out, at least for the next few weeks. I'm looking forward to it.

Spring, officially

2010-03-25T07:53:00.000-07:00

A month or so ago I wrote on here that springtime really begins in February on the coast. And so it does - just look at the flowers (and the weather we had during the Olympics). But now that the equinox has passed us, it's officially spring, and there's evidence aplenty that the season is really here. Evidence such as

mornings warm enough to sit a while at the beach,

huckleberry flowers,

salmonberry flowers (I already pointed these out. But now there are more),

broad bean sprouts,

increasingly huge garlic sprouts,

and our favourite neighbourhood cat coming out of his winter hibernation.

Spring is really two seasons out here on the coast. The first one is the blustery part where things slowly wake up, buds appear, and the first tentative flowers emerge. We're in the second one now, where things start growing faster and faster and all those dim grey months of winter wash away under a flood of green things. The first berries could just be a couple of months away. I'm pretty pumped about it all.

Shortcuts, part 4: Charman Creek trail to Shaw Rd.

2010-03-21T17:02:00.000-07:00

Enjoy this shortcut while you can, because it might soon be out of bounds for a while.

According to last week's paper, the Town of Gibsons would like to have plans for the proposed Gospel Rock development "buttoned up by the end of May." It shouldn't surprise anyone that the rocky hilltop area southwest of the Lower Gibsons village will be developed; it's been in the works for years. But it might be coming down the pipe sooner than later, turning one of Gibsons' favourite viewpoint trespasses into a tangle of whimsically named streets and immodest houses.

I'd like this blog to be as nonpartisan as possible - I like to get along with people, especially my neighbours in a small town such as this. But it's hard to talk about development without appearing to take sides. So let me get this out of the way: I'm not categorically opposed to development. There have been several building projects around here lately that have struck me as perfectly appropriate. The upper town is the commercial heart of Gibsons, so, as much as it would be nice to nostalgically roll back the years and let the condos revert into gaily-painted single-family cottages, I'm willing to see Upper Gibsons get denser. Better to have more people living up where they can walk or bike to do their errands.

But they won't be walking from Gospel Rock - that's my guess, anyway. Depending on where they decide to cut the road access through, Gospel Rock is a long enough walk from the grocery stores that building a neighbourhood there will entail making the streets a good deal busier than they are now. That isolation will have another major effect, too, that you can already see in back-eddy neighbourhoods like the new developments around the Bonniebrook area. Residential neighbourhoods that are out of the way develop an eerie, ghost-town feel. So much of what makes a neighbourhood come to life is the result of people who live elsewhere wandering through - whether they're on their way to the grocery store or they're just out for a stroll. Well, Gospel Rock just isn't on the way to anywhere, and though the architects might make it attractive (and I hope they do), I fear that the neighbourhood they build up there will become another strange, quiet backwater, with lots of nice cars on the street and not enough chance pedestrian encounters. That would be a waste of a pretty special piece of land.

Want to see Gospel Rock and think through some of this for yourself? Then here's a shortcut to a good place to reflect on quickly-changing small towns and the privilege that comes with property ownership. It also works as a shortcut if you're trying to get to Quality Farms from Lower Gibsons. Otherwise, it's just (just!) a nice walk.

The trail begins at a difficult-to-describe corner in Lower Gibsons. If you walk up Prowse Rd. from the marina, continue past Dougall Park without turning, you're now on Gower Point Rd. Then, when you cross South Fletcher (where Gower Point Rd. resumes to your left as a continuation of same road), what road are you on? I suppose it doesn't matter what it's called, because it's less than a hundred metres long. I just wonder how people who live there give their addresses. Anyhow, where whatever road that is intersects with Stewart Rd., there's a trail to the southwest. It's inconspicuous, as you can see in the picture above. But it's there.

If you follow this trail, you end up climbing steadily up the right bank of the Charman Creek ravine. If you've been on the Inglis Trail, you've been in this patch of forest before - just the other side of it. It's a pleasant place to be - some of Gibsons' best parkland. Long may it remain a park.

It's a fairly short walk - ten minutes at an ambling pace - to the top of the trail, where you find yourself in a rough clearing, facing a dirt track. If you turn right and follow the track, you come out pretty soon on Shaw Rd. But turn left first, unless you really need to get to the garden store in a hurry. It's worth appreciating where you are. Gospel Rock is a pretty nice place to hang out - its southern exposure gives it the sort of vegetation you might associate with sites further south in the Salish Sea. No Garry oaks yet, though I encourage guerilla plantings. They might just thrive, depending on where they were planted, and whether these Gospel Rock inhabitants could be kept away from the seedlings.

Just to your left, when you emerge from the ravine trail, is a really good view of Howe Sound.

It gets better than this, though - if you feel so inclined, you might wander down one of the nearby trails through the bush and find a way through the chain-link fence that a Gospel Rock property owner has erected around his portion. Through the fence, you'd find a rocky outcrop with arbutus trees, lodgepole pines, and panoramic views. It's there that you see Howe Sound at its finest. If I had a friend visiting Gibsons, say, and I wanted to impress her, I'd go there half an hour before sunset on a winter day, and watch the snow-covered mountains turn pink in the late afternoon light. But be discreet, because although the shortcut discussed here only crosses land with trespass-at-your-own-risk signs, the fenced-in portion of Gospel Rock is - well - less welcoming.

Back to that shortcut. Following the dirt track to the right of where you first emerged from the ravine, it's a short walk to Shaw Rd. - but not the part that leads you to Super-Valu. Don't try to get to the grocery store using this trail unless you're prepared to bushwhack through a ravine and trespass a lot. This section of Shaw connects to Chaster Rd., from which point it's a short stroll to Pratt. You might want to turn on the Mahan Trail to make it a multi-shortcut adventure. Your call. Enjoy your walk.

Strong wind vs. afternoon doldrums

2010-03-16T21:05:00.000-07:00

At five in the afternoon today, I was in front of the computer. A couple of hours earlier I'd started getting my thoughts in order for a piece I need to have written by next week. The work began fruitfully enough. But the soporific hum of the computer's fan and the busy morning I'd had began to take their toll and, before long, I was multislacking. By four-thirty, my body sagged in its seat as I checked my email for the eighth time in an hour. I felt drowsy, and my work began to seem hopeless.

The wind began sometime around then. There'd been a breeze throughout the afternoon, but sometime around five there came a gust that shuddered all the windows and knocked over loose things on the front porch. It came so suddenly that I instantly feared for our roof (a huge cottonwood fell on it two summers ago, and it's left me a bit jumpy on blowy days). The gusts were the kind where you think "OK - it can't blow any harder than this," and then it does blow harder, and harder still. A raven flew past the house and turned corkscrews in the air. Shoal Channel churned with whitecaps.

Then the air filled with that hazy, polished-pewter light that comes with a good squall. Everything was a yellow glow, down our street and across to the Bluff, beyond which the light faded to smudgy grey. The Pasley group, visible just moments before, had disappeared. You know the light I'm talking about? You must - I think this is one of those things we can all recognize, but for which we don't have a word. Anyway, the light grew brighter and more brilliant, and stranger and more precarious at the same time, until it seemed like it couldn't possibly build any more in intensity without something terrible happening.

And it did happen, of course, as always. With the same suddenness as the wind, the rain squall hit with breathtaking force, lashing everything with warm drops. It spent all its power in just a minute or so, and it's been showery and grey ever since.

I'm very sorry to say that I didn't have the camera handy; you'll have to believe me.

Like I say, I was at the computer at the time. When the wind first hit, I tried to ignore it - but I couldn't hold out long. Soon I stood up and walked to the window and watched the light change to that sideways pewter glow. A couple of times I thought I'd better get back to what I was doing, but each time I found myself drawn back to the window. And when the rain hit, I opened the door and stood there, getting spattered by raindrops and breathing the strange warm stormy air, and I felt then like there was something in that sudden effusion of wind and light that I would've heard, if only I could listen more closely. But the raindrops were getting the floor wet, and I closed the door, not sure of what it was.

Finally, a post about homebrewing

2010-03-15T15:15:00.000-07:00

So I make beer at home. If you've heard me talk about this before, you'll know that it's a favourite hobby of mine. In fact, I've been holding off posting about my homebrewing life because, well, it just seemed too obvious. Better to address more relevant things on here, community and place and nature etc., etc., for our mutual edification. I can talk about homebrewing on my own time (and I do). But it struck me, as I turned the handle on the grain mill yesterday, that homebrewing has a lot to do with the things this blog is about.

One of the things that impressed me most about the UK, when I visited last fall, was the beer. I hope I can say that without sounding tacky; beer over there is a much more sophisticated thing than it is in most of Canada. For one thing, the places where you drink it are justly famous for their charm and community. But the beer itself is incredible. The big brands aside, beer comes in stunning variety. Small breweries abound, and beer is often served close to where it was brewed. The result is that when you order a pint of ale in a decent pub, it's fresh, and it's often very local.

Yes, we have a craft brewing scene, and there are some breweries around coastal BC that are doing a good, and in some cases great, job (though there are none on our own Coast). But the trend is toward mass production, and those small breweries that start out great often end up producing second-rate beer in the hopes of distributing their wares ever more widely. It's kind of sad. I wish the best for those small brewers - may you stay small! - but, thankfully, I have the ability to take matters into my own hands.

Think about this. In the picture above are grains of pale ale malt, roasted barley, and rolled oats, which I crushed and steeped in hot Gibson's Landing water to make the sweet, dark brown wort shown below. After separating the wort from the grist, I boiled it with Zeus hops to impart an assertive bitterness. Then I cooled it, inoculated it with a British-style ale yeast, and it's now fermenting slowly in a cold part of our house. In a few weeks, it'll be - hopefully - a robust, yet smooth, oatmeal stout.

The ingredients won't necessarily impress hardline locavores. Though the pale ale malt (about eighty percent of the grist) was malted in Armstrong, none of the ingredients are from that close by - except the water, of course, the same stuff on which our little town prides itself. Even so, I think it's as local a product as you could hope for. It's made from basic ingredients - whole grains, whole hops, yeast, and water - and all of the labour, from mash to bottle, is my own. When I share a bottle of homebrew with friends, I feel that subversive thrill that do-it-yourselfers feel when they dodge the market economy. Cheers to Gibsons and to making things right here!

Work (continued)

2010-03-10T20:16:00.000-08:00

Back to that thought about work. Thanks for bearing with me as I left it hanging - I was coming down with the flu as I wrote, and the virus was starting to muddle my thinking. After thirty-six hours of convalescence, I'm mostly lucid again.

Sometimes I talk about the Sunshine Coast to people who aren't from here. Conversations go kind of like this:

"It's sure pretty. I'd love to live here."

"Yeah, it is. You should definitely live here."

"Oh, I don't know. What is there for work?"

"Uhhhhhh."

I answer like that because - well - what can you say? There's no obvious answer in any of the job categories. There are some low-stress, low-paying, part-time jobs around here at the various cafes and stores, but those jobs never seem to appear when they're needed. For the traditional industries, well, I can't claim too intimate a knowledge of the fishing and forestry sectors, but I haven't heard much good news from either lately. And professional positions? There are some, sure, but they're few and jealously guarded. I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say that the Coast is a difficult place to find your dream job, unless your dream job is retirement.

But, somehow, I work, and so do most of the people I know here (unless they're retired). A lot of those people deal with the challenging job market by cobbling things together in a way that people don't have to over in town. And there's something in that that really excites me, and puzzles me all at the same time. I'd love to keep making a cobbled-together living and leading a pastiched life - but doing so, er, takes work.

For the past two and a half years I've been working for pay no more than twenty hours per week. (I know statements like that make parents anxious, so I apologize if you're a parent - or my parent - and you're growing anxious as you read. It's OK - we get by just fine.) Why? It's complicated, I guess. The first-and-foremost reason is that both of us want to stay here on the Sunshine Coast, where we have roots. It's where we love to be. At the same time, I'm trained in an academic field that doesn't open any big, obvious doors to me around here. There are few - I'm not saying there are none, but there are few forty-hour-a-week Gibsons-or-Sechelt-based jobs for historical geographers. I'm pretty sure that, whatever I do with my education, it'll be largely self-directed. That suits me fine, given that I want to write, and writing is a bit self-directed by definition.

The other thing, though, is that working forty hours doesn't leave time for the things I believe strongly in. For one thing, I really care about growing food. When I'm busy, though, the garden slips to the back of my mind and the broad beans wilt from lack of water. It goes on - I care about making food without cutting corners. And playing music with people. And participating in politics. And - much more to the point - I care about writing. If I didn't work three days per week, I wouldn't write, except in evenings and on weekends, and if I had to do that, I'd probably opt for a less taxing hobby. Part-time work gives me the time - well - to work on other things, even if they don't pay.

What I'm doing right now, in any case, isn't permanent. For one thing, I'm going back to school in the fall. Also, sooner or later our expenses will grow beyond rent, homebrewing supplies, unrolled oats, and the occasional new T-shirt. When that happens, though, I want to find a way of working - even if it isn't the most lucrative - that lets me stay here, lets me grow my own potatoes, and lets me contribute meaningfully to community. And, in fact, I don't know exactly what that work looks like. I think it looks like writing a little, and teaching a little, and gardening a little, and volunteering a little - but the specifics, for now, are unknown to me. All I can say is that I look forward to figuring it out.

I raise all of this not because I think I've invented some praiseworthy new way of life, but because, like I say, there are a lot of us in this boat. It seems to be just part of living around Gibsons. How's it going for you?

Work (to be continued)

2010-03-08T10:30:00.000-08:00

I've made quite a fuss to people about how I try to update my blog twice weekly. Of course, you'll see that it's been a full week since the last post. All I can do is make one of the most commonplace excuses you can make, which is that work got in the way.

It was a busy week. As in any other week, I spent three days of it working at my paying job. But I don't consider that my work ends when I stop getting paid. Another whole day last week went into recording drum tracks on the album that my band, Sweet Cascadia, is recording. I'm new to recording, and it's minute, repetitive work. Then there was the time I dedicated to writing, which, though it hasn't paid me yet, is the work I spend the most energy on. I spent several hours, divided over a few evenings and mornings, working on a short piece for a friend's online magazine. I'm satisfied with it - the first journalistic writing I've ever really done - but those thousand words were hard-won. And I also worked on a blog entry, which, after photographs were taken and the actual writing done, took me a few more hours.

Between all of that, a six-day work week blew by without giving me much of a chance to breathe. So I'm taking today off. I'll return to my normal blogging schedule very soon, and come to think of it, I'll probably write a few words about work, which, as it seems to me, has a lot to do with community, especially in a place like this where there isn't all that much of it to be had. For now, I'm going to read a book and, believe it or not, watch the snow fall.

It was hard to photograph, but - I'm serious - it just snowed. We had to pull our laundry in and everything.

Shortcuts, part 3: The Mahan trail and the White Tower Park trail

2010-03-01T15:27:00.000-08:00

It's a little-known fact, but there's more to this town than you can see from a car window. For those of you who've just tuned in to this blog, Shortcuts is an ongoing series exploring the back routes, byways, and secret paths available to cyclists and pedestrians in the Gibsons area. You can read other Shortcuts entries by clicking on the label under this post.

Today's entry is technically about two shortcuts, but since the main trail through White Tower Park ends (or begins) at its junction with the Mahan Trail, and since I never walk or ride one without walking or riding the other, I'm considering them one shortcut for the purposes of this blog. The Mahan Trail follows the Mahan Rd. right-of-way all the way from the dead end immediately south of the Sunshine Coast Credit Union to where Mahan resumes south of Gower Point Rd. It's a dirt road for about a hundred metres near where Fircrest Rd. ends; otherwise, it's a trail. White Tower Park is a small patch of forest and wetland south of Gibsons Way between Shaw and Mahan Rds. There are several trails that meander through the trees, and one wide trail that connects the Mahan Trail with the Christenson Village driveway. Both trails are well-used.

When I first discovered this shortcut, I was pretty surprised to find out that it even existed. Both trails are tucked away inconspicuously, with nary a sign to point you in their direction. If you're coming from Gibsons Way, and wander into White Tower Park, you suddenly find yourself in a stand of tall Douglas-firs, hemlocks, cedars, and spruces, dark green and smelling of soil and skunk cabbage. It's a pretty delicious contrast from the noise and (can I say this?) ugliness of the Gibsons highway strip. Then, turning down the Mahan Trail, you walk between rows of tall salmonberry bushes, usually noisy with birds, as you meander towards the beach. Over the course of your walk, you pass through some of central Gibsons' last patches of forest and farmland. It feels pretty special to be there. It also feels very fragile right now.

I've used this shortcut regularly for a couple of years, and in that short time, I've seen the area it traverses change pretty dramatically. The picture above was taken immediately north of Chaster Rd., on the east side of the trail. Until recently, this was a dense stand of trees. Now the trail is open on one side to an almost-barren patch of earth, and what it will look like in another year is anyone's guess. Further north on the trail, where land clearing has been going on for a while now, it's a similar story.

I find writing about this sort of thing to be very difficult. On the one hand, I feel like I've lost something, and that I'm on the verge of losing more. Those salmonberry bushes in the picture above used to make a secluded avenue through a quiet part of town where the only sounds were of songbirds and the occasional rooster. Now there are dump trucks and brand-new tree stumps. And it's hard to fight the sense that this is just the beginning. We all know that, sooner or later, the properties on the top of Gospel Rock will be developed. How long will the Mahan Rd. right-of-way, which connects Gibsons Way to Chaster Rd. over flat land, remain an unpaved trail?

But - and this might be foolish of me - I feel a kind of inevitability about all of this. I can't shake the sense that the sort of disturbance taking place along the Mahan Trail is nothing new. I can't prove that the land being cleared on the sides of the trail will be used to make some new and ghastly stucco-and-vinyl deathscape. Maybe that land will be used wisely and well. Maybe, when all of this is over, there'll be a neighbourhood there that we'll feel fine about. Maybe. I know I'm hedging here - I just can't forget that all of this, less than a century and a half ago, was all forest.

We'll see what happens. For now, this path is one of my favourite parts of town. I hope that doesn't have to change.

Solar radiation

2010-02-26T07:56:00.000-08:00

Name this plant.

That's salmonberry, Rubus spectabilis, and this picture was taken last Sunday on the beach at the foot of Pilling Rd. (just east of Chaster Creek). Now - I'm not the sort that records daily temperatures and the dates of the first things each year in a large, lined notebook (though I think I will be when I'm seventy), but it's my distinct impression that February 21 is early for salmonberry flowers. We even saw a honeybee at one, looking torpid.

Obviously it's spring now. There doesn't seem to be any sense waiting for the spring equinox to officially begin the season, because spring's functions are already well under way. Not for us the explosive, all-in-one-week rebirth of the eastern springtime - here it's a slow-burning four-to-five-month wait for things to get underway. Sheena and I agree that it's fair to declare it spring by the beginning of February, so long as the weather is cooperating. Then it's a long, slow process, broken here and there by days of such dazzling sunshine and warmth that your inner workings are affected. Sunshine days cause your muscles to relax and your political views to become slightly more liberal. You wander around in a blissful but temporary state of exception. You gravitate towards patios and beaches.

And then the weather changes, as it must, the dark smudgy springtime greyness returns, and we all quietly get our raincoats back out and go about our business. (Hint: if you want to figure out where in Canada someone's from, wait until it clouds over after a particularly sunny day and then study their facial expressions. If they look glum, chances are they're from Ontario. Easterners are used to higher levels of light in winter than are British Columbians, and most Easterners are Ontarians.)

A brief thought about sustainable community, brought to you by the Nearings

2010-02-23T21:39:00.000-08:00

I've been reading a lot of back-to-the-land books over the last year or so. I gravitate towards ones from the 1970s - you know the kind I mean; the covers are brown and the pages are sprinkled with whimsical pen-and-ink sketches of happy people and farm animals and things like that. I'd like to write more about back-to-the-landers on here one day, but for now, I thought I'd just share a couple of sentences from Helen and Scott Nearing's Living the Good Life, which, though originally published in 1954, was an integral part of the hippie-homesteader canon. When I came across this passage, Gibsons immediately sprung to my mind. Nearing's reflecting on the effects of "summer people" in Vermont:

The social consequences of turning the countryside into a vacationland are far more sinister than the economic results. What is needed in any community is individuals, householders, villagers and townsmen living together and cooperating day in, day out, year after year, with a sufficient output of useful and beautiful products to pay for what they consume and a bit over. This is solvency in the best social sense. (p. 12)

Isn't that a fine goal? What would the Coast look like if it weren't a "vacationland," as Nearing puts it?

Notes from that big sports tournament they're having in Vancouver

2010-02-19T21:08:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week we went to see what was going on in Vancouver. How could we resist? The Olympics have dominated public life from Port Renfrew to Fort Nelson all year and longer, and they'll stay with us for years to come in one way or another. We'd have been crazy not to take a look for ourselves, seeing as they're happening just on the other side of Howe Sound. We'd be able to say that we'd been there, thus gaining an edge in post-Olympic conversations - not to mention have all-you-can-eat sushi and visit the Alibi Room. Irresistible. So - for the benefit of those who chose to stay out of the fray, or who didn't get the chance to come to town, I'll share some impressions.

Watching the Games on television gives you a skewed perspective on the city. The crowd shots and the event footage, the Early Edition traffic reports and the continual feeling of political tension led me to picture Vancouver as a pulsing mass of Olympic hysteria. I half-expected to be able to hear the crowds from Langdale terminal. As it turned out, it wasn't until our bus got to Georgia and Burrard that I was sure that the Games were actually taking place, and weren't just an elaborate television stunt like the moon landing. Actually, one thing outside the downtown core did give it away - the roads were practically empty. The downtown streets, the Stanley Park causeway, the Lions Gate Bridge - traffic everywhere was flowing efficiently. The buses, on the other hand, were packed and leaving frequently. I think that there's a connection. If I were in charge of Translink, I'd take out a full-page ad in the Vancouver dailies that read "see? This is how things work when people actually take transit." But Translink probably can't afford to advertise like that, so this obscure blog post will have to do. Are you listening, Vancouver?

After a night spent partly at an often-crowded but now eerily quiet Main Street watering hole, we began our day of exploration by walking from a friend's place in Kits down to Granville Island, where we'd heard there were a few things going on. Sure enough, there were crowds. There always are at Granville Island, but these were obviously Olympic ones. The red mittens everywhere were a dead giveaway. So we looked around to see what they were doing, besides window-shopping for olives and charcuterie.

The epicentre of the crowd, we discovered, was the lineup to Atlantic Canada House, formerly the Arts Club Theatre. It stretched out the door and well down the block. We were curious to know what happened in Atlantic Canada House, but the prospect of paying a cover charge for the privilege of buying nine-dollar bottles of Alexander Keith's and maybe speaking with real live New Brunswickers dissuaded us from standing in line. It was just as well, as a kazoo-toting busker had just begun to work the patient masses. We moved on to the next happening, La Place de la Francophonie, only to find that it consisted only of a deserted outdoor concert stage, a sad-looking bar, and an indoor trade show featuring Quebec maple syrup and the City of Sudbury.

Granville Island didn't thrill us, but at least, on our way downtown, we had the opportunity to take the "Olympic Line," a free streetcar connecting the Island and the Olympic Village Canada Line station. Sadly, it's a temporary service, but Vancouver is using it as a demonstration project to show off its big ideas about the future of streetcars in the city, which I support wholeheartedly. The Canada Line train we took downtown was as crowded as a London tube train during rush hour, once again explaining the still-quiet roads. Maybe this spells good news for Translink's revenues, although someone told us that the police aren't enforcing fare evasion rules during the Olympics. Maybe that's a good idea, if only to show more people that public transit is fast and efficient.

We emerged at Georgia and Granville, where hundreds of people wandered this way and that and the air hung heavy with the smell of hot dogs. Hoping to pick up some of the Olympic buzz, we walked up to Robson Street. It's closed to vehicles right now, and as a result, it's a pretty decent place to be. I've never much enjoyed downtown Vancouver, but being able to walk down a central, pedestrian-only avenue made even glitzy Robson feel welcoming. Once again - City of Vancouver, are you taking notes? We stopped by the art gallery for a while, and through the glass roof of Robson Square, we could see that there was a figure skater performing for free. We'd have taken a closer look, but the lineup was forbidding. At least we weren't trying to ride the zip line they've strung up there.

Our milling was becoming aimless, so we changed course again and headed down to the Olympic cauldron. We couldn't get very close to it without climbing up to the raised viewing platform, and since the lineup there was as bad as any other lineup in town, we contented ourselves to view it from outside its cage (see picture at beginning of post). But that didn't last long. We were running out of steam, having been on our feet for hours. So we wandered off towards Germany House, hoping to find a sausage, a pint of weissbier, and a place to sit down. Instead, we found a round-the-block lineup and a twenty-dollar admission charge. Whatever; when we saw the pictures on the outside of the building, we weren't sure we wanted those sausages anyway.

When we finally sat down over cask ale at the Irish Heather that afternoon, we tried to make sense of our impressions. A few days later, I'm still not sure what I felt about all that I saw. On one hand, having so many people around Vancouver is exhilarating. There's a sense of celebration, of something really big happening, and I was glad to be a part of it. Maybe the energy the Olympics generated will help Vancouver to really pull itself together and constructively address its problems. I hope it does. On the other hand, I left the city feeling much like I did after the torch relay, wondering why it is that an event ostensibly about bringing people together has to be so heavily laden with advertising for Coca-Cola, the Royal Bank, and the Hudson's Bay Company. The ads nearly upstage the Olympics themselves - it wasn't until we were on the ferry home that we realized that we'd seen little downtown that celebrated athleticism in anything but the vaguest terms, and that, had we not known what was happening in Vancouver when we arrived, we might not have guessed that it was a huge sports tournament. It's perplexing and a little sad.

At least we can thank Olympic-inspired security upgrades for keeping us safe on our way home.

Big fir trees?

2010-02-14T20:25:00.000-08:00

The only road map worth having around here is the Sunshine Coast Super Map. I haven't been paid to write that - it's just true. It's a well-organized and extremely detailed road map of the Coast that includes not just paved roads and Forest Service roads, but also deactivated logging roads, horse trails, bike trails, and trails that are so obscure that you'd never find them if you hadn't put the map in your backpack before setting out. I often end up staring at the Super Map at home, daydreaming about exploring this black or that magenta line. Every now and then, Sheena and I actually take the map and go adventuring. That's what we did today.

Here and there on the Super Map are small labels identifying points of interest. The meanings of some of these labels is obvious - "DEEP DITCH" or "BRIDGE OUT." Some of them, like "OLD CABIN" and "BEAVER DAM," promise interest and discovery. Others are enigmatic, like "DOMIK." (Mapmaker Jason Silverthorne explained this one to me, but I've forgotten the details. It had to do with a buddy of his named Domik, and something kind of funny that happened to him while out in the bush on Mt. Elphinstone. He fell off his bike or got his car stuck or something.) Today's inspiration was one of those labels, from the second category. Northwest of Sechelt, just above the power lines, is a label that reads "BIG FIR TREES." We're borrowing a car right now, so we jumped in and drove away up the 101.

BIG FIR TREES was about two kilometres north of the top of Norwest Bay Rd., and about the same distance south of Crowston Lake. To tell the truth, we were a bit hesitant to return to the area. About four years ago, armed with a previous edition of the Super Map, we tried to get to Crowston Lake via Norwest Bay Rd., Gowland Rd., and then a maze of gravel roads; disorientation ensued and we ended up in what is now labelled "ACTIVE MINE SITE." Today's route took us more or less the same way, so we decided to be cautious in our movements.

Too cautious, it turned out - after parking the car just beyond the end of Gowland Rd. at the power lines, we walked a short distance and then turned left too soon. We walked about a kilometre up a bike trail and then down a wide dirt road. Trying to get our bearings, we took a side trail into the forest to see if it corresponded with the point on the map where we figured we ought to be. It was a nice forest, all sun-dappled, and there was even one genuinely big fir tree, but we were starting to feel like something didn't add up spatially. So we puzzled it out, retraced our footsteps back to the road we'd come in on, and walked the hundred metres or so between our erroneous left turn and the correct one. We felt a bit sheepish, true, but mostly we were pleased that the trail we were looking for actually existed. In our defense, the trail we'd originally turned on wasn't even marked on the Super Map.

The trail entered a clearcut, and we saw some big fir trees right away. They were pretty obvious. Emily Carr would've gone nuts for them.

At the far end of the clearcut we found a trail into the forest, and after following it for a few minutes, we not only discovered more big fir trees - in their natural habitat, as Sheena said - but a wheelchair-accessible gravel path and a picnic table underneath the biggest tree. The path led to a parking lot with signs and maps put up by the Forest Service. Obviously, we thought as we looked down the wide, smooth gravel road out, we'd failed to take the easy way. But at least we'd got some exercise. We turned around and started the walk back to the car.

On the way down to the power lines the - is grittiness the right word? - of our surroundings began to impress itself on me. There we were, on on an unmarked dirt road through a clearcut, and here and there were the cast-offs of industrial civilization - a smashed fridge in a creek, a trailer abandoned in a patch of trees, crushed cans everywhere. A couple of ATVs snarled past us at one point, the lead driver raising a hand curtly to my exuberant wave. Even at their most polished and tourist-friendly, the Sunshine Coast's backwoods have a roughness to them that you'd never see, say, on a trail in the Rockies.

Yet there's a here-and-there kind of accidental beauty to the hills above the 101 that I really, really like. I have a lot more exploring to do up there.

Shortcuts, part 2: Bal's Lane

2010-02-09T10:22:00.000-08:00

This morning I took a stroll down Bal's Lane.

In case you didn't know, Bal's Lane is the short strip of pavement that connects Gibsons Way and Seaview Rd. If you were driving down Gibsons Way towards Lower Gibsons, and you failed to make the ninety-degree right turn immediately after Fairmont Rd., you'd be on Bal's Lane (and quite possibly in trouble, as you'd then be careering down a very steep hill).

Like the last shortcut I wrote about, the Inglis Trail, Bal's Lane is a gift to Gibsons pedestrians. It combines form with function; not only is it a nice place to walk, it can actually save you time, depending on where you're going. Here's some local knowledge: if, like me, you happen to live around the North Fletcher/Creekside area, and you find yourself on a bus into Gibsons from the ferry terminal, try getting off at the stop opposite Marine Crescent. Take a few deep breaths, and then walk as fast as you can up the steps at the end of the sidewalk. Continue up Bal's Lane to your destination. If the bus was scheduled to do the loop along Franklin and South Fletcher, you'll beat it by entire minutes. If it wasn't, at least you'll have got some exercise. It also serves as the quickest way to walk to Armour's Beach from most of Upper Gibsons. This makes it especially useful in summer, when the water at Armour's is impossibly warm and the boomsticks around the swimming area are covered in chicken-fighting pre-teens. Oh, summer - I'm looking forward to seeing you again.

Some might wonder whether a paved road can fairly be called a pedestrian shortcut. I say it can, since it's blocked in the middle. That said, car traffic between the various lanes on the so-called Heritage Hill occasionally does use Bal's Lane, and it's then that you can see something truly sweet happen. Because the lane is narrow, and frequented by people on foot, the cars move slowly and the drivers make eye contact with you (they sometimes even wave!) as they pass by. It's as if they weren't in a glass-and-metal driving machine designed to insulate its occupants from the street and its users. I think this serves as an argument for traffic calming - it lets our neighbours still be neighbours when they get in their cars. So get out those hockey nets!

Because Bal's Lane is such a useful shortcut, you often end up in conversation with people when you walk on it. Sure enough, these conversations sometimes don't go any further than "pretty steep, eh?" Even so, I'm always glad to share platitudes with my neighbours when I go out walking. There are also a couple of admirably productive huckleberry bushes (good southern exposure) near the bottom of the lane, and you often end up waylaid by friendly cats, of which there are several in the neighbourhood.

A note about the name. Most people in Gibsons call it "balls lane," which, in fact, is an incorrect pronunciation. The name refers to mid-20th century Gibsons entrepreneur C. P. Ballantine, who was Bal (rhymes with "pal") to his friends. I like knowing this - it's a vestige of an earlier Gibsons, when people were less anonymous than they are now. I know a few people who know this town from days gone by, even the days before the car ferries, and they tell me that this used to be a much more familiar kind of place. So I think of Bal as I wander down to the beach some days, and try to picture what it would've been like to be a small-town notable, known to everyone and knowing everyone. All I come up with is caricature - some glowing Norman Rockwell-type image of the 1950s. "Say, isn't that Jimmy McCann? Shouldn't you be in school, young fella?" "Aw, shucks, Mr. Ballantine."

I ended up down at the beach, as usual. This morning a river otter appeared on the farthest boomstick, fish in mouth. So I hung out for a few minutes, while it enjoyed its breakfast and attracted the barely-disguised envy of a few crows. Then it slipped back into the water, and with a flick of its tail, it was gone. I never get tired of watching otters.

Two solitudes

2010-02-05T22:28:00.000-08:00

So the Olympic torch relay went past my workplace yesterday. Needless to say, I noticed.

In fact, I was on my lunch break. I was sitting on a bench at the top of Holland Park, right between the library and the big cedar, eating leftover quinoa and stir-fried vegetables and trying to stop my teeth from chattering. It was pretty cold out, and I wasn't dressed sensibly enough. Down at Winegarden Park, a remarkable crowd was gathered, and our MP, John Weston, was hollering platitudes about Canada and big turnouts and Gibsons and pride and athleticism. Everyone was cheering.

And then I heard the torch approach. Well, no, not the torch. The torch itself is pretty quiet. I heard the torch's motorcade approach. It sounded like ear-splitting reggae music. First the cop cars came into view, inching down Winn Rd. two by two, blinkers blinking and uniformed drivers stonily keeping watch. Then the sponsors' vehicles emerged from behind the museum, putting me in the direct line of fire of the ear-splitting reggae, which was coming from the bright red Coca-Cola truck. Someone was riding the roof of the bright blue Royal Bank truck as it followed the bright red Coca-Cola truck. She was dancing her ass off.

A few seconds later, and the torchbearer jogged down Winn Road - pat pat pat pat pat pat - stood at the four-way stop for a photo opportunity - pant pant smile pant pant - and then jogged over to Winegarden Park to pass the flame off to the next torchbearer. Everyone clapped, and then the party was over. That was my brush with the Olympics, and it was more or less what I expected: heaps of advertising, political figures, bad music, little plastic pennants that you wave once and then drop on the sidewalk, and remarkable athletes doing laudable things but being kind of overwhelmed by the hype.

There was something I found pretty interesting, though. After the torch had been whisked away to the next stop, I wandered down Gower Point Rd. to stretch my legs. The crowd was starting to move on, but there were still more people gathered around Lower Gibsons than I've ever seen outside of Sea Cavalcade weekend. Here's the funny thing - I didn't recognize anyone. Now, any other time that there's an event in Gibsons, I can't wander past without falling into conversation with at least somebody. Even without an event, it's a social town - I seem to have fallen into one accidental conversation after another this week while walking about. I don't mean that I have more friends than anyone else around here; it's just that this is a small place, and one tends to see the same faces here and there. But, on the other hand, maybe this place isn't as small as I've tended to think.

In hindsight, the whole thing was a pretty good reminder that there's more social complexity to Gibsons than you see at summertime festivals in the park, the farmer's market, and shows at the Wild. There are a lot of people, a good number of social circles out there of which I'm more or less ignorant. And yet we share a town. It's a funny thing that, even in such a constrained area, there can be such separate scenes - and yet there are. I shop at Seaweeds and Super-Valu; someone else shops at IGA. I get a bit cynical when the Olympics come up in conversation; someone else gets a little buzz.

That's one of the reasons why I find it perplexing to articulate my position on the Games. I know a couple of things for sure. One is that I'm really into watching the sports. Another is that I resent the excesses and the waste and the paranoia that accompany the Olympics. Already that puts me pretty squarely on the fence. What I struggle with is the idea, the possibility, that the Games build community by bringing us together - that's what they're supposed to do, right? On balance, it's not my scene - but obviously it's someone's, or there wouldn't have been such a staggering turnout yesterday. So are the Olympics actually doing something positive, and am I failing to notice because I'm the sort of person who prefers his entertainment with fewer corporate logos?

I don't know the answer. What do you think? Also, if thinking about the Olympics and Vancouver and so on interests you, you might want to check out the cover story of this month's Walrus, and the feature article from the current Vancouver Review.

Ukee

2010-02-03T09:37:00.000-08:00

We've just arrived home from a long weekend in Ucluelet, where our dear friends Warren and Ashley live.

That's them.

I've been making regular trips to the west coast of Vancouver Island since I was a kid. My folks and I spent a few spring breaks at a cabin on Cox Bay when I was in elementary school, and for day after misty day I would comb the long sandy beaches in search of interesting molluscs and their shells. Later on I found other ways of getting out there - youth enviro-events in high school, reading break surfing trips in university. For someone raised on the raincoast, even in its suburbs, the west coast of the Island feels like home place reduced to its elements - rain, wind, mist, and innumerable variations on green and grey. It's good to go there.

Since our friends moved out there a couple of years ago, the trips have become more frequent, and I've had the pleasure of getting to know the community of Ucluelet a bit better. Like a lot of visitors to the end of Route 4, I'd seen a lot of Tofino, but almost nothing of Ucluelet. Tofino is the obvious place for a tourist to go, and Ucluelet reveals itself much more slowly. Having a couple of guides has been helpful. It's pretty different from Gibsons. Both are small, but Ucluelet is smaller - it has less than half of the population we have here. They're at the end of the road, and we're at the start of the road. They're insulated from Vancouver by a hundred-and-some kilometres of winding road and the whole Salish Sea, while we can be downtown in an hour and fifteen minutes if we want to. The land is different - spruce and cedar and hanging lichen and not a single arbutus tree - and the ocean is wild. The eating, thanks to that wild ocean, is always good - the shellfish harvest depicted below resulted in panko-breaded deep-fried oysters and late-night steamed clams in garlic butter.

What Warren and Ashley are doing is, in a way, exactly what Sheena and I are up to - they moved to a small town and they intend to stay. Part of the reason I end up there so often (that is, besides panko-breaded oysters) is that I always return home inspired by the way that those guys have settled into their community. They're involved with loads of really good things - between them they teach yoga, help with the Whale Festival, organize shows, produce plays, participate in local food politics, and socialize unstoppably. And the community that they've settled into is a strikingly cohesive one. People turn up for things. People know each other's names. There are young people (because of the surfing, no doubt).

I always come back wondering whether Gibsons really is quieter than Ukee, or whether it's just that I can be a bit of a layabout when it comes to making time for community. I've gone back and forth on this one. There's no doubt that they're different places. For one thing, Ucluelet really is at the end of the road. Vancouver is a long haul away. Nanaimo is a bit closer, but it's small. If you live out there, you have to commit to making your own fun. The other thing, and this is a big one, is that Ukee has a younger population. (I just checked this at Statistics Canada. In Ucluelet, people aged 25 to 34 make up 17.4% of the population. In the Gibsons area, Areas E and F included, they account for 7.0%.) A place with lots of young people is usually a place with a lot going on. But even as I write that, I'm not certain that that should make a substantial difference, at least in building the kind of community of which I want to be a part. Plenty of 35-and-overs of my acquaintance do things that are fantastic. And plenty of 34-and-unders leave town before you can get to know them. Ukee may have more rowdy nights, but I'd wager that Gibsons has more bluegrass jams. Each satisfies in a different way, I guess. No - Gibsons has a lot going on. What Ukee has going on might just be more obvious to my 25-to-34-year-old eyes.

My conclusion is that I'm a community layabout. No longer! I'm going to look for things to get involved in. See you there. In other news, our garlic has come up - 72 plants so far! We're still waiting for a few to poke up their heads, but even if they don't, well, 72 bulbs would be just lovely.

Let's make (insert item here)

2010-01-29T09:17:00.000-08:00

I've just learned that I'm part of "maker culture." I have to admit that I feel pretty pleased about this. I've always wanted to be part of a recognized subculture. As a kid, I envied my older brothers for being part of Generation X. It sounded so cool! The label Generation Y never really did it for me. Y? People called me a hippie in high school, but that doesn't count - I technically wasn't a hippie, being thirty years too late, and they were just using the term as a put-down, anyway. I've always been an environmentalist, but that's no longer very much of a subculture. Being a committed cyclist, I might be part of bicycle culture, but I don't live in Vancouver, and there's something about cutting off cars in traffic and then yelling at them that strikes me as counterproductive. But it turns out that I'm a maker, so I need not worry.

Maker culture, apparently, refers to the sudden popularity of do-it-yourself activities among - well - lots of people, anyhow. I'd like to say "everyone in society," but I suspect that maker culture is especially strong among the left-of-centre and the younger-than-middle-aged. Even so, it's non-partisan. C'mon in!

I first stumbled into maker culture while taking classes at Queen's. I remember coming to a point in the year when I realized that all I did in life was think hard, read books, write essays, and drink coffee. I suppose my life had become a bit lopsided - I had been reduced to a brain and a stomach. It was then that I began to long for some kind of work that didn't involve theorizing about the social construction of this or that, or about nature-culture hybrids, or about the possibility of overcoming dualistic modes of thought. (Coincidentally, or not, I started reading Wendell Berry right then. If you haven't picked up Mr. Berry's books before, you might want to - he certainly makes an eloquent point or two about the value of a well-rounded life lived in place, among other things. A bit conservative for some, I'll grant, but I always enjoy an afternoon spent with his essays.) So I started making bread.

You can get hooked pretty quickly on making things. Once I started making bread, Sheena taught me to knit. And then we learned to make yogurt. And, a bit later, a friend taught us to make ginger beer. Our first batch ended in catastrophe - I'll just say we were lucky that the bottles didn't explode in our hands and cut our arteries - but subsequent batches of ginger beer and a variety of other homebrews have been increasingly successful.

(Two of last night's creations: the start of a toque, a black one, possibly to be worn while sipping Phillips's amazing Black Toque ale, and a jar of yogurt.)

Gibsons is a pretty great place for maker culture. Among our friends here are people who make clothing, make art, brew yogurt, brew beer, cook food, grow gardens, cultivate apple trees, scrounge apples for cider, make pottery, raise chickens, build boats, fix things, make dolls, make kimchi, knit toques, play music, pick mushrooms - the list goes on. Sometimes I wish that there was more of a barter system around here, though. So I'll put this out there: I make sourdough bread, ale, yogurt, and I roll my own oats. Does anyone want to trade?

Now I'm off to Ucluelet for the weekend, to visit dear friends who make beer, cider, tempeh, cedar hats, harvest shellfish, and write novels. So long!

Among other things, Canada's really big

2010-01-25T09:31:00.000-08:00

I see that the Arrogant Worms will be playing in Sechelt sometime soon. I won't be going - I never really found that band funny. But when I saw the poster, I couldn't stop the song "Canada's Really Big" from playing in my head. What could I do? Over and over again, my mind hummed "The economy is lousy/We barely have an army/But we can still stand proudly/'Cause Canada's really big." Purgatory.

But it did get me thinking about Canada. At least I can thank the Worms for that. I hope you don't mind if this post strays away from the local and into the national - community exists on different scales, after all.

The point of the song is that it's hard to say anything definite about our country. It's meant to be taken as a bit of a joke, of course, but only as a bit of a joke, because Canada really is an outlier among nations. Lots of things make us different - the contrast between a small population and a huge land, the balance of power between English and French Canada, and the lack of a single, widely accepted story of our origins. Canada isn't like other places. John Ralston Saul writes in Reflections of a Siamese Twin that "the central characteristic of the Canadian state is its complexity." He says that this makes us uneasy, and I agree with him. That unease causes us to look for simple things to anchor our patriotism, like our size, or, more to the point these days, our military. But do those things help us to find our place as citizens? Are bigness and soldiering the ultimate examples of Canadianness?

I noticed recently that Citizenship and Immigration has released a new study guide for the Canadian citizenship exam. I'd been interested in looking at the guide for a while, partly out of curiosity, and partly for slightly more embarrassing reasons. A couple of years ago I realized that I was a civic illiterate, or, rather, that I knew way less about the country in which I held citizenship than I should, considering my level of education. Since then I've been trying to make up for sleeping through Grade 11 Social Studies by reading heaps of books on Canadian history and politics. I've got miles yet to go, but at least I can now understand the news. Even so, a refresher course in citizenship never hurts. So I read the guide - an hour's work, if you're a slow reader like me - and as I did so, I wondered whether it would help new Canadians make sense of a country that's, according to UBC historical geographer Cole Harris, "not an easy country to know" (and he ought to know).

The guide's authors did one thing really well - they portray Canada as the creation of three founding peoples, Aboriginal, French, and British, who collided (and occasionally collaborated) on land that was formerly just Aboriginal. It's only a short step from here to Saul's idea that Canada is a "métis civilization," and I think that's an idea worth hanging out with. That's one pretty compelling reason why Canada isn't like a lot of other countries - we've evolved out of centuries of negotiation and compromise between very different people. Of course, not all negotiations are equitable, and I'm pleased to note that the study guide acknowledges that Canada hasn't always been a fair country, to put it very mildly.

Of course, it has its quirks - it's arguably heavy on the military and the sovereign, and it's awfully light on the land itself. It's the latter that I noticed most when I read through the guide. The fur trade appears in a sentence or two, and there are predictable mentions of "majestic mountains" and the like. But otherwise, the guide's history of Canada treats the land as a backdrop. I think that's a pretty glaring fault - I'd say that, more than anything else, the land is what really sets us apart as a country. Canada is pretty, and awfully nice, but it's cold, rocky, and austere. What we have in common as Canadians is a land that divides us.

Maybe we forget this as we become a more and more urbanized society. From the perspective of someone in Vancouver, it's puzzling to think that the nearest Canadian city of comparable size is some twelve hours' drive away. Is this a failing? It's not that way in the States, no. Well, this is where it helps to have a geographer weigh in. Not me, no - how about Cole Harris, who writes in The Reluctant Land that "the American past has to do with extension and abundance, the Canadian, slowly worked out near or beyond the northern continental limit of agriculture, with discontinuity, paradox, and limitations - with boundaries at almost every turn." That sentence reminds me why I'm excited to live here. Living in Canada is, inherently, a challenge - always has been. And it's especially challenging in these challenging times. Our modern country was founded on a get-rich-quick attitude toward the land; now, I think, we're gradually coming to terms with the fact that we have to live with it. If we figure out how to do that, and how to leave it habitable for coming generations, we'll have done well as a national community. And maybe we'll find it easier to say what makes us unique.

On a side note, I'm dying to improve my French. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Shortcuts, part 1: the Inglis Trail

2010-01-20T09:14:00.000-08:00

One of the perks of being a committed pedestrian, an owner of zero cars, is that you get to notice things that you'd miss if you were inside a vehicle. Sometimes this happens just because you get to travel the familiar routes more slowly and with all of your senses active (yes, taste too - I like to carry a cup of coffee when I walk). You notice things behind shop windows. You stop for conversations with people you know, or people you don't know but who have interesting dogs. You realize how many cigarette butts there are on this town's sidewalks. That's not good, no, but at least it's more interesting than whizzing along in a car. It gives you more to think about.

But the other way you notice things is on the times when you get to take a totally different route where there are no cars. I've put that noun clause in italics simply because I like it so much. Taking shortcuts - I refer to them as shortcuts whether or not they actually save me any time - gives me an indescribable feeling, a combination of the pleasure of having local knowledge and an exciting, stealthy feeling of secrecy. I even tend to use the term "secret route" as a synonym for "shortcut." Am I alone in this? I doubt it.

(An aside, on the idea of secret routes. Several years ago, in a small Maritime town, I picked up a small, otherwise unremarkable town map, on the front side of which was printed the grid of streets and parks. But on the reverse, in red ink, were lines indicating trails. When you held the map up to the light, the secret routes would show through. It turned out to be a project of the artist-in-residence at the local gallery. I thought it was a great idea, and I wouldn't be above stealing it, were I ever to make a map of Gibsons and area.)

Shortcuts will be a recurring feature on this blog. In each instalment I'll discuss one of my favourite Gibsons-area shortcuts. I have several favourites, so this will probably go on a while. Your comments, as always, are appreciated. What do you think about shortcuts? Enough preamble: on with part I.

(Note: in future instalments of Shortcuts I'll try to include photographs. For now we'll have to make do with a map gathered from the Town of Gibsons' website. The trailhead is by number 1.)

This trail - a top-notch shortcut - roughly follows the north bank of Charman Creek between Stewart Rd. in lower Gibsons and Shaw Rd. in upper Gibsons. At first it's a fairly steep, switchbacking climb, but the bulk of the trail is on a much more gentle grade. The trail passes through a particularly nice patch of forest, which tends more often than not to be sunlit, thanks to the south-facing slope and the largely deciduous forest on the bank above the creek. There's a pretty thick undergrowth in the forest, which seems to me to be a sign that it's decently mature. That undergrowth includes some first-rate salmonberry bushes, especially near the trailhead on Shaw Rd.

What makes this shortcut really superior is the way that it combines form with function. Unlike some shortcuts, this one really does save you time, at least if you happen to be coming from the south end of lower Gibsons and trying to get to Sunnycrest Mall. And, despite being so efficient, it's pleasant! An admirable combination. I'm pleased to note that it's well-used, especially by kids on their way back and forth from school.

I walked up the trail on Monday and noticed some early signs that spring isn't far off. There were pleasant forest smells for the first time in a couple of months. More remarkably, the salmonberry bushes were sprouting buds. It can't be long now. Just past the top of the hill I nearly tripped over a golden-crowned kinglet, who was busily rooting underneath the twigs and leaves for bugs to eat. She wasn't perturbed at all that I was only standing a metre or so away. We spent a few minutes together, she glancing up every now and then to make sure I wasn't making any fast moves, but obviously confident enough in her own nimbleness, and my comparative sluggishness, not to worry excessively. I ended up walking around her. She grudgingly fluttered aside to let me pass, then resumed the hunt.

Local knowledge

2010-01-18T10:09:00.000-08:00

Last night I finished reading The Earth's Blanket: Traditional Teachings for Sustainable Living by Nancy J. Turner (University of Washington Press, 2005), and since it's a book that works through a lot of the themes I'd like to mull over on this blog, I'll write a few words about it.

Nancy Turner is a professor at UVic's School of Environmental Studies. Not just any professor, either - more than any other academic I've known, Nancy inspires complete admiration from her students. Any UVic student with a claim to being an environmentalist has taken her class and speaks reverently of Nancy and her work, which belongs to the fields of ethnobotany and ethnoecology, and which focuses mainly on British Columbia. There are plenty of good reasons for admiring Nancy. For one, she's an outstanding instructor (I took her introductory Environmental Studies course. How could I not?). Maybe even more than that, though, I think people are fascinated by the insights her work gives us into how people have known this land for generations upon generations. Maybe I'm projecting here, but nevertheless: I think that a lot of us settler people, including those admiring UVic students, long for a deeper knowledge and understanding of the land we inhabit. Nancy's work gives us a glimpse of a deep human ecology that once existed right here, but is, for now, far away.

Maybe Nancy would agree that settler folk hunger for something like what the First Nations had. If she did, The Earth's Blanket would seem to be a direct response. The book, written for a general audience, describes "alternative ways of viewing the world" by weaving together stories of the traditional ways of (mostly BC) First Nations people. These stories are organized into themed chapters (Land-Based Stories of Peoples and Home Places, A Kincentric Approach to Nature, Honouring Nature Through Ceremony and Ritual, for instance) that identify common ground within a diverse body of material, drawn largely from Nancy's own work. That said, Nancy keeps a fairly low profile, and the voices telling the stories are more often than not those of her First Nations friends. Read simply as a collection of stories, it's compelling and richly detailed. Anyone interested in traditional First Nations lifeways will find the book worthwhile. But the book is more than that, hence the subtitle, Traditional Teachings for Sustainable Living. What I get from it more than anything else is a sense of the possibility of other ways of living here.

I doubt that's the usual outcome of reading about the First Nations. Certainly, the tone of The Earth's Blanket is far from conventional, in that hope shines through much more brightly than does regret. There's much to mourn in the loss of traditional ecological knowledge, and Nancy acknowledges this plainly enough. But instead of dwelling on the loss, Nancy points to ways that we might learn from what we know about the lives of indigenous peoples. The book ends by distilling eight "elements of ecocultural renewal and sustainable living" that can be applied to our society. The list is worth reading in its original context, so I won't reproduce it here. It's enough to say that The Earth's Blanket encourages us to pay attention to the places where we live and the communities in which we find ourselves.

It's an encouraging book. I'd eagerly recommend it to anyone pondering the idea of the local, which, I gather, is lots of us these days.

Ohhh, Lordy, can't you see/Got to build community

2010-01-13T16:03:00.000-08:00

...so goes a song that my band, Sweet Cascadia, has played to audiences at Roberts Creek's Earth Day celebrations, at its Creek Daze, at Music in the Landing in Gibsons, at the Salmon Festival, and elsewhere, time and again. It's a great song, and everyone always sings along. It's reliable. How could you resist singing along? Don't we all want community?

It seems funny to say this, but I've started this blog specifically with community in mind. It seems funny, to me at least, because I've tended to think of the Internet as antisocial by definition. I still do think of it that way in general. It's a crazy tool that we can use to dial up anything we like, from whatever place. The Internet gives us the chance to escape our local lives and our troublesome neighbours and head off in search of like-minded folks: fellow model railroad enthusiasts, fellow Esperanto speakers - and so on. Taken to an extreme (and we live in extreme times) it's just another one of those things that keeps us from talking to the folks around us, at the expense of, well, all of those real and complicated and intangible things that I'd like to get to sometime. But there I was, scribbling some notes about the idea of community in my notebook this afternoon - more on that later - and it struck me all in an instant that keeping my musings all personal and private was hardly any better than inter-chatting with web-friends from New Mexico. So I decided to exchange my circular, antisocial thinking for a conversation. Here it is: a local blog, with local thoughts, for folks around here (though visitors are warmly welcomed). I invite you to read it. I invite you to respond.

So. I'm Matt Cavers, from Gibsons, British Columbia. You probably already know me. I'm a - well - I guess I'm a few things. My background is in academia; I finished an M.A. last year in the Department of Geography at Queen's, though I wrote my whole thesis while living right here on the Pacific coast. My Ontarian life was only eight months long (but it was sweet. Ontario is a very fine place). Since 2007, I've worked part-time as a curatorial assistant at the museum here. I spend the rest of my weekday, daylight hours trying to be a writer. And I happen to be really interested in the idea of community these days. Aren't you? Let's face it. Community is a precious thing at a time when we're expected to be mobile, to keep moving. It's difficult to build it when we're all just passing though. And in a town like Gibsons, a lot of us just pass through.

The thing is, I know a little bit about community, but I don't know that much. I know it's something that I hear talked about a lot. So what I'd like to do is use this space to think through that big idea - and a few others, too, like place, nature, writing, eating, and maybe even homebrewing, though I'll try to stay on topic. And I'll try to write about things that you might find interesting. That is, I'll steer away from pure autobiography (bo-o-ring) and aim for meaningful reflection. So stay tuned. Thanks for dropping by.