lichenology

split and stack

2008-04-17T11:38:00.004-07:00

I seem to have lost the habit of writing…or, at least, it has gone into a kind of dormancy.

What I have appreciated about the process of writing lichenology over the past few years has been the habit of writing and of the flow that comes with practice, but more than that, the habit of attending to the world.

When I know that I want to write a piece that will be engaging to a reader, and which will contain some truth, I pay a different kind of attention. I am reminded to step back from the mundane and see life in a larger frame.

The problem now is that I have become committed to the mundane—committed to earning some more money these next few years and establishing our homestead on a more solid financial footing. From this mindset of business and practicality, my personal musings on lichenology can seem frivolous, distracting, and decidedly unremunerative.

Our entire financial reality in North America is built on this principle of unwavering belief—this willingness to put aside art and conversation and community to serve some sense of economic interest.

When I studied economics in university I had a brief view into a contained and internally pleasing world where human behaviour conforms to curves and formulae. I could see how easy it would be, and how tempting, to buy into the reality of economics even though it clearly did not really fit with human reality, as the field of behavioural economics is now showing. Once inside economics, though, it appears as a clean and uncluttered world.

It’s hard to walk a middle ground here…to believe enough in our economic and financial systems to participate successfully while at the same time not losing a grip on the larger ecological and social picture. I suppose that is what is most valuable about lichenology, for me. It is that liminal space where I can mediate between these worlds.

And while I’m working more now and starting some new projects I’m also still busy around the homestead. This is the very practical and grounded aspect of life I hope never to lose touch with again.

My focus this past couple of weeks has been on getting our firewood in for next winter. It's rewarding to see the rows building in our newly extended woodshed. Even more than money in the bank, it brings a sense of security—the fleeting belief that we humans can build a bulwark against the cold of winter and the uncertainty of the future.

Photo: the growing woodpile beside our current, temporary kitchen space.

been walking

2008-03-07T16:18:00.003-08:00

I've been remiss. I mentioned that I would be taking a break from blogging a few months ago, and didn’t really take it, and now I have left off posting for almost a month with no warning.

Well, I'm still here, but running to keep up with other projects and developments in life. There was illness and travel, now community and work projects.

I have developed a running storyline in my life—a kind of meta narrative—that is the essence of my blog. It's a way I have grown to look at the world over the past couple of years, writing here—trying to be observant for stories and images that are meaningful in the world. I’m especially interested in the imprint of our human passage through life and through the physical matter of the planet.

Some days these stories and images accumulate so quickly that it is all I can do to keep up with the flow. Life has been like that lately. Little has changed, overtly, but somehow the world seems to be hurtling toward whatever it is that lies ahead.

The big event, and one of the projects that has kept me busy these past weeks, was our first community walk—an event that my family here on the land and some other friends helped to orchestrate.

Here is how we described the event in our little poster: “Connecting Cowichan is a series of walks in the Cowichan Valley. Everyone is invited to come along, meet people, see what is happening in the region, and talk about what is possible. How can we work together to build a strong, healthy, and sustainable local economy?”

My fear about the event was creating a forum for more divisiveness in the broader community. The way we got around that bugaboo was by offering no particular agenda, no experts, and no grand speeches for the walk. The format was much more horizontal—come and walk, see what is happening, and talk with your neighbours and community about it.

It came off very well in the end, much of it last minute and on the fly. I think perhaps part of the charm of the event was the relative smoothness of the logistics (our timing for the afternoon turned out bang on) without a heavy organizational structure and set of interests at play.

On a cool, overcast Sunday afternoon, threatening rain, over a hundred people turned out along with at least thirty babies, toddlers and kids to go for a community walk in the valley. As we had hoped, there seemed to be a lot of mingling along the way and a lot of discussion about land use, and economic development, and sustainability.

Fifty or sixty people stayed at the hall afterwards for Gen’s fresh muffins, tea, and coffee. We had a community mapping project where we hoped to elicit more stories and ideas, but most of conversation and exchange of information stayed informal as people milled about or tried to find their kids who naturally fell into several age-grouped tribes outside.

The great thing about the walk is that a lot of people came out who I had never met and who are not the ones who would come out to a rally, say, or a march. These were the folks that were just happy to have a facilitated community walk with their family and very interested to share information and ideas along the way. Suddenly it appeared to me that the critical mass needed for a fundamental reorganization of economics and land tenure in our region is possible. We just need to mobilize…or simply to walk.

We are committed now to at least one more walk, and have suggested there will be several over the course of the spring and summer. My concern is that we stumble on our own success and have difficulty organizing the logistics (while keeping a low organizational weight) for what could become a very large event. I suppose it is a problem we want to have…

The walk has been one project that has been occupying me and there are several others that I hope to write more about soon. Then there is the family, and the garden. Zena has been working the past two days digging our experimental grain patch where we are trying oats, red fife wheat, buckwheat, and quinoa. We have plans for greatly expanded production of food this year. The saffron bulbs I planted last year seem to have survived the winter although several of them already nibbled by deer. We are planning on lots of new fencing this spring.

In the midst of garden planning and planting, I just cut down our Brussels sprouts that I put in late last summer. I think we did not have enough growing season left at that point and so we will only get one small meal. They are potent little buds though.

The nettles are poking up again and we looking forward to lots of steamed greens very soon.

I will try not to fade out on lichenology again, but my postings here may be sporadic for the summer. I’ll be keeping a lookout though...and I think we best all stay tuned…

Photo: a bunch of walkers from this past weekend, cutting through a field in Glenora.

asher's one

2008-02-10T09:26:00.000-08:00

The future rolls away from us, along the horizon, where the sea meets the sky. It’s always there, just beyond the edge of vision, in the imperceptible curve of the Earth, receding as we tip toward the sun, tumbling onwards…

Asher turns one today.

It has been a big year for all of us. In addition to the challenges of building homes, growing food, establishing community, and fighting the galloping consumption of corporate forestry in our area, there has been Asher, continually growing, pushing the limits of his world, finding his place and his voice.

As a father, my practice is to see the world through his eyes and feel the world through the firm grasp of his fingers on a gritty ocean pebble. My practice is to participate in the immediacy of his dance with life— the sheer wonder of the sea, the startling apparition of a seagull, the taste of salt. “Oooooo,” as Asher says in his sing-song, prehensile language.

There are threats I can sense from my vantage, a few feet higher above sea level—the lurking fear that we humans will mess up, will not figure out how to live well and live simply in this moment. The immensity of our possible failure.

But here, Asher is at home, at home in his skin, scrabbling on the beach, at home in the world. I squat back down and see the world afresh—kaleidoscoping with him into the patterns of sand, the jumble of bull kelp, and the soft raking of waves on the shore.

Together, we breathe in the sea air and look to the horizon.

Photo: Asher on the beach, Victoria, B.C.

sapping

2008-02-06T19:59:00.001-08:00

Last weekend our family went to the first annual Bigleaf Maple Syrup Festival in the nearest town, Duncan.

As festivals go, it was a bit of a bust—it cost us $10.00 to get in and the “events” consisted of lining up for half an hour for a tiny taste of syrup and watching a steaming evaporator do its thing. One step up, perhaps, from watching paint dry. We passed on the line-up for the train ride that wound its way around a short course (although Asher enjoyed seeing it pull into the station), and we arrived just at the tail end of a tapping demonstration. Asher was also happy to receive his first ever helium balloon, but we left before the music started.

I don’t fault the organizers too much (The Sapsuckers)…it was their first year and I think they must have been overwhelmed by the turnout. What interested me was why so many people were there, jostling for a drop of maple syrup and a glimpse of a steaming vat. Two reasons I can think of: one, that people are yearning for family-friendly community events after a long winter. The event offered the promise of spring, of sweetness, and of seeing friends. Beyond that, people seemed genuinely intrigued by the possibility that maple syrup could come from the trees that grow with tremendous vigor around here—that our food can come from the local woods.

We ended up also bypassing the syrup vendors that had set up shop. With the going price at $18.00 for 250 ml (that’s about a cup, for my American readers), it was beyond our budget. Instead we invested in a starter tapping kit consisting of 8 spiles (these are the bits that go into the tree) and some lengths of hose. We hurried home eager to stage our own sugaring off, as it was a beautiful, spring-like day.

Our property is pretty well endowed with Bigleaf Maples and I quickly found a couple of clumps of trees close by our kitchen and set about drilling. Sure enough, the trees immediately began if not gushing, at least oozing sap. By the next day we had collected about 9 gallons of sap which should give us close to a litre of syrup when boiled down. Maple syrup is the main sweetener we use around here and the possibility of making our own and saving some money appeals to our neohomesteading intent.

Unfortunately, the following day the weather turned back toward winter again and the temperatures have barely been breeching the freezing mark since. The sap has stopped flowing and the snow has started falling again. The possibility of spring has receded.

To make matters worse, all of us have been laid low by a mercurial virus that has been passed around the valley for the past two weeks. Asher was the last one to succumb, now officially in the midst of his first real sickness, just coming up to his first birthday. We’ve been holed up for a couple of days, with Zena pouring over the seed catalogues (ever hopeful) and with me moping without the energy to even read or write. I’m a bit better today, but very congested now, and still low in energy.

I trust my nose will stop running and the sap will start running again soon. Zena, Asher, and I are taking a break from home starting next week, heading down to visit family in Arizona for ten days. I think I may have written that my transcontinental flight this summer past might be my last, but once again, the force of grandparents wanting to see Asher is fueling our trip. That and however many tonnes of emissions. Well, the dry air and sunshine will be a welcome change.

…

As a quick update on my last post, I am happy to report that my piece was picked up by a number of other blogs and listserves. Most impressively, for me, was the link from Complete Growth Investor, a web-based service with three self-described goals: “to make you money, to make you a better investor, and to save you time in the process.” Unfortunately, I can’t view the context in which they posted the link to my piece (it is not worth the $250 subscription fee), but I can only hope even one investor who was considering BIP was made just a little uncomfortable.

It got me thinking about the prospect of a blog dedicated to compiling the case against Brookfield and their timber subsidiaries, although I’m not sure I could keep up with the volume of environmental and social costs the company is inflicting on places like this.

Just a couple of days ago there was a major landslide from Island Timberlands’ logging that blocked the main access road to Port Alberni’s water supply, not too far north of here. In another Island community, Nanaimo, Island Timberlands is refusing to accommodate local citizens and government officials who are trying to preserve a significant wetlands area. In yet another unfolding drama, the company is set to cut the final fragments of a 1,000 year old Douglas Fir forest in the Alberni Valley and seem unmoved by the case for restraint. Clearly their directives do not come from these parts.

Unfortunately, I doubt I have the time or stomach to document the impacts of their profit margin. And I know I’d rather be boiling down our maple sap and readying the gardens for planting.

Photo: the pattern on frost on our car windshield a recent, chilly morning.

BIP, BAM, Thank You Ma'am

2008-01-31T08:26:00.000-08:00

...or how Vancouver Island's forests are drifting out to sea:

Today, January 31^st 2008, if all goes according to plan, a new listing will begin trading on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange: Brookfield Infrastructure Partners. For the first time, “BIP” will flicker across the electronic boards. A blip of a BIP.

The parent company of BIP is the somewhat more hefty sounding Brookfield Asset Management, or “BAM” as it’s known in the financial pages.

BAM controls approximately $90 billion in global assets comprised of property, power, and other “infrastructure assets” as they describe. That is to say, BAM managed these infrastructure assets until now. This corporate “spin off” has placed their timber and power holdings into the new entity, BIP.

Sounds innocuous enough. Indeed, the workings of these corporate takeovers, mergers, and spin offs are usually as remote and shadowy to us as the machinations of the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain.

We may get an occasional foul whiff from these corporate maneuverings and sometimes outright malfeasance is revealed—an Enron or a Hollinger will implode—but even then the repercussions seem remote from our daily lives. A kind of globalized theatre of the absurd is at work with over seven billion dollars lost in the latest fraud at Société Générale in France.

Financial markets have, for the most part, become unmoored from real transactions involving real commodities. In the rarefied cyberspace of “the markets,” corporate persons are involved in the games of leverage, acquisition, and speculation.

Meanwhile, in actual places, in our neighbourhoods and valleys, residents have real businesses involving tangible goods, services, and human interactions. Flipping through the financial pages of the Post, it's easy to believe these two realities—of the corporate and the community—exist in parallel, but separate worlds. If only it were thus.

I find corporate gamesmanship becomes disconcertingly relevant when their assets encompass our lands and the ecosystems on which we depend. I start to feel nervous when absentee and largely unaccountable powers own the very hills, trees, and waters of home. And when our forests and streams morph into their “infrastructure assets” it's worth pulling aside the corporate veil.

…

Vancouver Island has a legacy of privately held lands carried over from the E&N Railway grants in the late 19^th Century. Vast areas of the southeastern Island, along with all the incumbent rights, were traded for a railway line. After a dizzying lineage of deals and transactions, a few corporate owners have ended up with great stretches of private lands now valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The communities around here? Well, we got a walking trail along the defunct rail bed. This section of the Trans Canada Trail through the Cowichan Valley provides a pleasant way to view the logging, underway twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week on several sites. It's a sunnier walk now too, with the hills logged to the edge of the trail and the clearcuts stretching off into the distance. I'm sure it will be a tremendous boon to tourism operators.

Getting back to BIP...

One of BAMs earlier corporate birthings was of Island Timberlands, now one of the major private forest landholders in the province, with over 250,000 ha and almost all of it on Vancouver Island. As of today, by way of an obsure securities conjuring, BIP now holds a 37.5% interest in Island Timberlands and has, as they describe, the intention of “actively managing underlying assets to improve performance.” In other words, BIP intends take charge and squeeze the island of its forest wealth.

Now BAM, the proud parent, is a global asset manager that grew out of Brascan a few years ago and is headquartered and registered in Canada at least. Toronto is a long way from the Island here, but it is vaguely within our sight. BIP, on the other hand, is of a more truly global generation—born, bred, and registered in Bermuda. Why stay in Canada with such cold and blustery winters?

Even beyond the weather, there are some nifty benefits to carrying papers from Bermuda—the ability to avoid Canadian and US securities regulations, taxes, and court proceedings. Oh those sunny islands.

Bermuda is an exclusive club and BIP puts it best in their Prospectus for the new entity, filed with what used to be their Ontario securities regulator on December 21^st of last year: “It is the advice of our Bermuda counsel that an action brought pursuant to a public or penal law, the purpose of which is the enforcement of a sanction, power or right at the instance of the state in its sovereign capacity, is unlikely to be entertained by Bermuda.” In securities legalese, this is the equivalent of flipping us, the people who live here and might care about what happens, the bird.

Our sovereign capacity, as of today, has lost out to corporate rapacity.

This development is especially troubling given recent changes in Provincial laws governing private managed forest lands in B.C. Under current legislation, local government—and by extension, local people—are expressly prohibited from any say in regional land management: “A local government must not adopt a bylaw ... that would have the effect of restricting, directly or indirectly, a forest management activity” (Private Managed Forest Land Act, s. 21).

The offshoring of of the Island's forests through the creation of BIP does away with any final semblance of local control or oversight over the land base.

And what they have in mind for their infrastructure assets is clear enough: the maximum return to shareholders, with some hefty corporate bonuses and salaries thrown in for good measure. Here is how BAM sums up its corporate mission: “Our goal is to achieve superior, risk adjusted returns for our clients and partners by identifying investment opportunities across select asset classes on a value basis supported by sound fundamentals.”

I recommend downloading the Prospectus for Brookfield Infrastructure Partners—it’s available if you search the database SEDAR, under public companies, but please don’t print. At 361 pages, it’s a lot of verbiage and numerage. However, there are sections that provide a glimpse into the corporate persons mind, and into the direction our environment and our communities…I mean our infrastructure…is headed.

Of particular interest are the twenty pages of “risk factors” contained in the Prospectus. The Directors of BIP are obliged to inform potential investors of these uncertainties and eventualities.

While many of BIP’s risk factors relate to broader economic conditions, as with the rise and fall of currencies or interest rates, there are other troubling items flagged. They are worried about unruly unions; about any pesky interference by governments in the way of regulations or laws; about unsettled land claims and Aboriginal rights; about the possibility that they will have to leave some logs in Canada rather than ship them raw to their US and oversees customers where they can maximize their profit; and about the unpredictable forces of nature. While they don’t mention climate change directly, they do allude to the possibility of man-made disasters and other uninsurable losses.

If I were considering an investment in BIP, here's the proviso I would be especially concerned about: “There can be no assurance that our timber operations will achieve harvest levels in the future necessary to maintain or increase revenues, earnings and cash flows. There can be no assurance that the forest management planning by our timber operations, including silviculture [sic], will have the intended result of ensuring that their asset base appreciates over time.”

I live adjacent to areas that are being intensively cut by Island Timberlands now, and I can say with confidence that the asset base will depreciate over time. From what I’ve seen, the depreciation is already well underway. I saw the land base washing out to Cowichan Bay from flooding earlier this winter.

My advice to any investors who remain untroubled by regard to social or environmental damages, is to buy in for two or three years while the final old growth and high value timber is harvested and during which time all possible lands are flipped into real estate and sold with a blustery windfall profit.

But be ready to shift your assets quickly. From all appearances, Island Timberlands and their corporate masters have a similar approach to land management. BIP BAM BOOM.

Be wary too. Another risk factor conspicuously absent from the BIP Prospectus, a risk which merits consideration by potential investors, is that the people who live among their infrastructure assets might toss them all the way back to Bermuda. Perhaps their investment team needs a historian.

I say I wouldn’t invest in BIP as a costly matter of principle. Admittedly, they promise a healthy return on investment, but then I look at the very real damages and costs to the region where I live. These damages are adding up: increased flooding and erosion, loss of wildlife habitat, loss of local milling jobs and value-added opportunities, destruction of fisheries, loss of viewscapes and recreation opportunities, loss of tourism potential, loss of First Nations sacred sites. For the communities around here, it is a very costly return on investment.

As a final irony, it turns out that I do invest in BIP, by way of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. These are the “arms-length” folks who manage our retirement investments (to the tune now of $120 billion). The CPP IB is a large investor in BAM and in Island Timberlands and has entered into several other consortium agreements with Brookfield. By virtue of this new corporate spin-off we are all investors in Brookfield Infrastructure Partners as they drain away our real wealth.

The citizens of B.C. have a couple of choices. We can sit back and we can wait for our pension cheques as we watch any possibility of a sustainable local economy cut from underneath our feet and washed away with the hillsides, or we can muster whatever sovereign and civic powers we have left and wrestle our lands back from BIP and their Bermuda haven.

The tax system may be our most effective tool in the short term. As it stands in B.C., the Private Managed Forest Land Act cuts the corporations a deal, bypassing local government and taxing “managed” private forest lands at much lower rates than you or I. Local residents are, in effect, subsidizing unsustainable land management. If we were to start taxing these corporations at a rate commensurate with the full costs to local ecosystems and local communities, I believe investors would quickly look elsewhere for their infrastructure assets and we could get on with building sustainable local economies, grounded in place, by people who care.

BIP does in fact anticipate the troubling visage of tax policy changes in their Prospectus: “Any change in tax legislation (including in relation to taxation rates) and practice in these jurisdictions could adversely affect such company or entity, as well as the net amount of distributions payable to our unitholders.” Life is full of adversity.

Welcome to the world, Brookfield Infrastructure Partners. Congratulations unitholders. Bust out the ticker tape. (I just found the following complements of nyse.com. Apparently there is a web cast of the opening bell today if you want to see the real crowning of the baby.)

Now can we get our forests back?

Photo at top: Friends stopped at a logging road which now crosses the Trans Canada Trail in our valley.

blue monday

2008-01-21T20:46:00.000-08:00

The sun rose in the clear eastern sky this Blue Monday morning, January 21st, noted for being the unhappiest day of the year by some researchers in seasonal depression. For me, it was not so bad…

Global markets were skidding while I was getting a boost of sunlight, walking to the far, southwestern slope of our property in the afternoon and taking sun on the rocky hillside. I’ve even had the impulse to stretch and to breathe more deeply again which can only portend good things.

…

I’m also breathing easier as we begin to tidy up a bit around the property. It’s time for spring cleaning as the snow and rain finally take a break, and the blight of torn blue tarps starts to blow and flutter in the wind.

We were in such a rush to move into the new kitchen late this past fall, that a lot of stuff got stranded—piles of picked over lumber and wood scraps, leftover strips of galvanized roofing, partial coils and ends of pipes and fittings from the kitchen plumbing. I added another decrepit appliance to the collection we are developing under the cedar tree, by the driveway—this, the second washing machine, (which replaced our original wringer-washer) replaced in turn by a newer, and functioning one finally. All of them so far have been free or close to it.

The downside of our salvage economy here is having to collect and recycle the left over items that turn out to be beyond repair, and beyond reasonable hope. I’ll borrow the neighbours’ truck later this week and make a trip to the scrap yard and dump, recycling what I can and wishing the rest a peaceful burial.

On my walk by the pond today I was weighing up the damage wrought by the early winter flooding—how the water overflowed and blew a hole through the old beaver dam. I was considering the prospects of repairing the damage and reclaiming the lost depth of our pond as a refuge for amphibians, ducks, and the seasonal passage of birds and animals. The beavers, as it turns out, are long gone.

Apparently, the owners of the land before us, the ones who cleared patches in the woods for building sites and contoured the land in places with their excavator, had an ongoing battle with the resident beavers. I suppose these former landlords figured that maintaining the flatter, fertile land at the valley bottom constituted a better selling point than a messy, unproductive beaver dam.

The beavers, as it turns out, had the greater persistence and we bought the property with the pond and wetland area firmly established. As my readers will know, the pond has become my most cherished destination on walks with Asher—it’s a fecund and dynamic ecosystem. I imagine the beavers will be back someday, although it might be beyond our tenure here.

…

The full moon rose over the far eastern hills tonight, in the same place the sun will rise in July, in the height of summer. This glimpse of our relative position in the solar system always gives me hope, and some sense of order for the year ahead.

I don’t know what the financial markets will hold, but I know our lives here will continue to be illuminated by the passage of sun and moon.

Photo: moon rise in the valley tonight.

small steps toward a big walk

2008-01-12T20:40:00.002-08:00

The weather has broken out of its winter rut, at least for a short while. The temperature was up to 7 or 8 Celsius today, and the persistent crusty layer of snow is finally melting, washed away by the more than occasional showers. There's the possibility of spring in the air, the green and earthy notes of life floating in the breeze.

…

We had an unexpectedly full day in the valley yesterday.

In the morning, Zena, Asher and I went to visit our friend Bill. I’ve written about Bill before. He’s a big foodie in the region—a chef, author, and mushroom forager. The core of his business is based from his home, where he hosts occasional dinner events in a small, country kitchen. Bill will prepare a series of dishes based around a particular food or theme and serve his guests while talking about where the food is from, and how prepared.

Bill’s business epitomizes, in many ways, a strong economic current in the Cowichan Valley—it's built around a business model that is small, locally-based, value-added and, in a fundamental way, improvisational. All of the guests at Bill’s dinners share a couple of tables and by its nature, this sharing of food and talk builds a sense of conviviality, and of community.

Not surprisingly, this form of local economic development is diametrically opposed to the corporate model which increasingly dominates the life and the future of this place. The corporate model is large, exceedingly large--into the hundreds of billions of dollars when you trace back the lines of ownership. The corporate model is based on separation, rather than locality—my chances of ever meeting the people that make the real decisions around timber harvesting in our valley are less than slim. The corporate model is about volume, not value. A lot of the logging around here is happening 24 hours a day now, seven days a week. The trucks roar out of the valley by the hundreds every day.

And the corporate model does not particularly allow for improvisation. The structure of the whole enterprise rests upon control and premeditation. It’s the logic of the assembly line transplanted onto the world. My biggest hope for a flourishing economics of place is that this lack of flexibility will ultimately bring down the corporate machinery. Large corporations are not designed to adapt to the pace of change that is upon us. Eventually, the lines of ownership will fray and the whole edifice will implode. But people will go on living here, interacting and trading with each other, and we’ll get by.

Perhaps it's my own mythic imagination, but everywhere I look now I see this confrontation between the local and the industrial/corporate. The Trans-Canada Trail runs adjacent to Bill’s property and we took a walk with him yesterday morning. After a kilometer and a half we got to our destination—not a beautiful waterfall, in this case, or a magnificent stand of trees, but a massive clearcut, right down to the trail. More shocking even, the access road, where they haul out the timber, runs across the trail—we stood and watched for a few minutes as another truck was loaded up and belched pass us (paying no heed to the stop sign) taking with it another small piece of a possible, sustainable future.

Bill pointed out a small gate off the trail, beyond which stretched a messy clearcut, but which, until a month previous, had opened onto a forest lane connecting a nearby farm (another hub of the food culture here) to the trail and from there to Bill’s place. One of the annual events Bill had organized consisted of a food walk, from farm to table, through the woods and long this trail. The magic of the walk and of the experience has been written up by the San Francisco Chronicle, Gourmet Magazine, and many other publications. In a final note of disgust and resignation, Bill pointed out that this forest had also been prime mushrooming ground. Now it’s a sorry industrial landscape. We’re probably one of the few parties that will bother to make the trip to take in this blight. The magic of the place is gone along with the final truckloads of timber.

On the way back to Bill’s we stopped further along the trail, just up from his property, where a metal fabrication plant and excavating company is set to start up business. It reminded me of the recent conflict to the south of us, near Shawnigan Lake, where a developer was proposing a motocross facility adjacent to a Provincial Park, in the middle of a quiet rural-residential community. The notion of incompatible use comes to mind. I committed to writing a piece about the situation for the local paper.

Finally we made it back to Bill’s place and we loaded up a washing machine in the back of the car. The last time we had met at a local café Zena was doing laundry and Bill had offered us an extra machine he had in his basement. This social capital and gift economy is one of the rewards of a commitment to place and to neighbours.

…

From Bill’s, we headed down the road a bit to visit our friends David and Cara. Cara was five days overdue with their second child and was keen on a walk, so after a lunch of macaroni and cheese we set out to a more northerly section of the Trans-Canada Trail, once again walking alongside great, gaping clearcuts. At one point a smaller trail headed off in a loop through a forested gully—part of a Provincial Park (one of the very few in the sea of private lands on this part of Vancouver Island). The trail was beautiful, but we never got away from the presence of the clearcuts that hemmed in the small strip of land along the river. There is no feeling of deep forest left here—rather a sense of remnant forest, of vulnerability.

I appreciate it when my friends hold me to my best intentions—David and Cara took on this role during our afternoon together, asking me about plans I was making for a large event I’d been thinking about. It’s an idea I’d been floating to raise the profile of private forest land logging on Vancouver Island—I had an image of hundreds or thousands of people walking along the Trans-Canada Trail, converging from all over the Island, celebrating what is sustainable and local while bringing attention to the sorry state of land use, finally arriving at the Provincial capital in Victoria, at the Legislature, to demand a sustainable future for the Island. We need to make a grand gesture and this strikes me as such an event.

But despite my initial enthusiasm for the idea, my energy has been lagging. The sheer complexity and logistics of pulling off a large scale walk that would take place over the course of a couple of weeks, with a coordinated media campaign and coherent political strategy (and with no immediate prospects of funding or organizational support) was getting me down. All that in addition to everything I have already committed to.

Finally, David suggested that I scale back my grand vision and start small. Just start with an informal walk—a simple sharing of food and ideas on a Sunday afternoon. Pick a manageable segment of the trail to hike and a place to rendezvous, bring some background on land use issues in the area, and invite people to come and walk, to bear witness to what is happening, to write a letter. If it works out, make it a monthly event, exploring different sections along the trail, different questions of land use and local economic development. If it keeps working out, try to seed the idea in other regions around Vancouver Island and this way, build the infrastructure and momentum for a large, high-profile walk in the fall.

As soon as we started discussing these ideas I started to feel excited again—like it is a manageable project that will allow me to meet my other family and work obligations. We had a small community organizing meeting today, in fact, and we set a date for our inaugural walk, likely along the same stretch of trail that we explored with Bill. The clash of development paths is so stark there.

And I just heard that our walk yesterday led to other rumblings—Cara had her baby early this morning. Welcome to the world Avery.

…

Meanwhile Asher is still on his first go around the sun and the linear progression of seasons this past year is all he knows. Spring, to him, is as remote now as his first blurry perceptions of terrestrial life. But another month and his witch hazel tree will be back in bloom and he will perhaps begin to understand something of return and of the cycles of life.

Photo: Asher off and away.

naomi's song

2008-01-06T19:45:00.000-08:00

One of my intentions this year is to follow through on my commitments and responsibilities. This has always been my vague intention although I succeed in greater or lesser measure depending on the day. It is in this spirit of follow through that I want to reflect on some blog correspondence from recent weeks.

I should say, as I’ve said before, that I appreciate comments on lichenology. Often I’m working things out for myself, or trying to be provocative, so hearing your feedback makes the process of writing more real and more productive. Framing the entire blogging enterprise as a conversation makes the most sense to me.

I’ve noticed a few situations where my writing seems to provoke the most reader commentary—having a baby is one of those situations where an appropriate response is easy and spontaneous. I was happily surprised at how many readers were moved by the birth of Asher and felt compelled to send their well wishes…although that was almost eleven months ago now. Asher has grown into a chunky boy by this point and I have no plans to reproduce again soon, if ever, so I may have exhausted that stream of goodwill.

The other circumstance where my writing provokes the most response is when I speculate on gardening matters. Clearly I have many readers who are more experienced and more skilled gardeners than I, and I appreciate the practical tips about how to maximize potato harvest and when to top dress the garlic. We are anticipating a productive gardening season on the homestead and I look forward to more posts on how to feed ourselves, and more advice on how to do better.

To my surprise, I had many comments in response to my post last spring about stuff— my thoughts on buying less, and of making due with less. Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot more to say on this topic (or I would spin it out into a book—I’ve noticed that books on buying less are good sellers). Our consumption decisions here on the homestead are increasingly driven by economics and by common sense, rather than by any particular ideology of simplicity.

We make jam because it is more affordable and tastes better than store bought. We grow food for the same reason. We build houses out of clay and wood chips because it works. As a happy coincidence, the spirit of making and doing for ourselves is more fun and enduring than the brief glow of consumer satisfaction. In the long run, I’m convinced that we will all finally shift our behaviors out of necessity, rather than because of enlightened civic responsibility. I trust we will all have more fun and more connection with the world when this time comes.

…

More recently, there is a thread of conversation I started on living together, in shared households and shared property, as a form of simplicity and as a practical way to live a more sustainable life. I’ve had some good commentary on this post:

Gina asks “Do you ever have control or differences in personality styles issues? Or are all opinions and suggestions considered equally among the adults?” An anonymous commenter went on to respond, “When you have been trained to live your entire life as an individual in your individual box, marriage between two is extremely difficult to succeed at--when you add two or more its damn near impossible.”

It is true, it’s very difficult, the process of living in community. Hell, living with our own insecurities and neuroses is hard enough. It’s one of those areas where I don’t have a meta theory—I just know it is necessary, and we muddle through. I think at heart is a question of trust—to know and trust the people you live with well enough to sometimes let go of control.

I notice the more I try to control things, or to impose my will in our collective process, the more frustrated and disappointed I am. The more I’m open to some collective intelligence, and the more I can be forthright about my opinions but not overly attached, the more I am surprised at the things we can achieve. As an interesting footnote to this discussion, a post on David Pollard’s site today about the ideal size of intentional communities. He notes: “What's more interesting is the research that Christopher Allen has done (see his chart, and the accompanying link, above) showing that, while 150 is perhaps the maximum, the optimal is either 6 or 50.”

In response to my post about winter, and fire, close to life, in addition to some practical suggestions, this from one of my respected readers, Frank Black: “I often play a game in my head where I say, "Imagine you are standing naked in the middle of a field. There is no one around for miles in any direction. What do you do?" I liked this because I play similar games in my head, or thought experiments as I sometimes like to call them. I think what Frank is getting at here is the primary relationship between life and land, how much of the rest is an artifice that soon breaks down in the absence of food, or of warmth.

On my post entitled lengthening, wherein I question my priorities in life and the allocation of my energy among homestead, family, and broader, political change, my dear friend Juniper wrote: “My friend said when i mentioned that you were on the land and building a homestead: "living the dream." Luckily your questioning and your articulation of the questions in your public writing delve past the sheen of "the dream." Life is not having it pat.” Juniper is having a baby this year and she will be a tremendous mother—she has a deep sense of caring about the world, and a connection to life. She introduced me to the tidepools of the coast here, and I look forward to when her life brings her back this way.

And finally, to the folks that offered their best wishes for a speedy recovery to my sprained ankle, thanks. I had a good initial recovery, with ice and arnica, but then I seem to have pushed it too quickly and so it is still tender, but slowly getting better.

…

As it turns out, I’ve been away from home the last few days. I’ve been in Victoria, with Zena and Asher, staying with our friend Shefa. Zena is acting as a support person for a friend who is having a baby. Unfortunately the final stage of her birthing process has not been easy and is unfolding now in the hospital, in an increasingly medicalized context. (Just found out that the baby was delivered and all is well...)

I miss the land now, and the sense of our routine, but it’s nothing next to the profundity of birth and of that thin line that we all walk between life and death. Shefa put it well, that both birth and death cut through the mundane perception that life will continue as it always has. But life comes and goes, ebbs and flows.

Please keep your comments coming. I read and consider them all, even when I do get behind in responding.

Photo: bull kelp on the beach in Victoria yesterday.

hobbled

2008-01-03T11:47:00.000-08:00

I’ve been hobbled to start the New Year.

A few days ago, leaping across a median in an icy parking lot, I sprained my ankle. It’s well on the mend already but it was disconcerting. I need to be fit and mobile to live here—building earthen homes at the end of the road is a very physical process. It is still a grappling with the land and the materials of building and it’s hard to be incapacitated.

As fourteen year old growing up in rural Ontario I joined the wrestling team, in part because I was looking for a similar sense of raw physical engagement with the world. It sounds odd to describe and I realize now that not everyone relates to life in quite this manner, but something about the grappling and exertion of wresting worked for me.

Now I see Asher, and his constant physical exploration of the environment and his constant squiggling and worming and grunting and I understand there is something innate about this kinesthetic orientation. At this point Asher’s physicality has become partly socialized as I love to engage with him on this level—but there’s a quality of his way being in the world that is just who he is, that Zena recognized even when he was in utero.

I wasn’t very self-conscious about my physical being in the world back in high school, but it came to the forefront for me again through much of my 30’s, through various kinds of dance practice. I’ve discussed it before on this blog, under the tag soma.

Now it is a quality that I express through my engagement with the land and the work of shaping it to our needs (and, of course, allowing it to shape us back). It is a kind of dance.

But it’s hard for me to step back from this dance and ice my ankle.

When I was still a rookie on the high school wrestling team, back in Fergus Ontario, a promising, scrawny kid (I fought in the 94lb weight class in my grade 9 year), we won the National Championships. I wasn’t fighting in that tournament, but I got to attend and there was one fight I will never forget, where one of our less renowned wrestlers had made it to the finals.

I don’t remember his name—he was a sloppy, lumbering wrestler, but he had spirit. He was marginally ahead on points midway through the final of three rounds and he broke his ankle. It was clearly a serious injury at the time and someone probably should have intervened but he finished the match, not scoring, but managing to fend off his opponent for over a minute. It was an amazing feat with the air of heroism that I was perhaps looking for in those days. I don’t believe he went on to wrestle in university, so it was likely the last fight of his career. I wonder if he lived up to the heroism of that fight and the promise of his life at that moment.

I was reminded of that fight when I limped off the Country Grocer parking lot, after my less than heroic leap, on my way to rent an episode of The Wire from the Pioneer video store (our winter indulgence). I barely managed to hop away out of the path of traffic to let the waves of heat and pain subside a little, before grimacing my way through the rental process.

If nothing else, it’s good for me to remember that my physical relationship with the world is plastic and that I need to adapt my life to these shifting circumstances—how things can change in a moment.

Certainly it’s another advantage of the more communal living arrangements we have created, to have the presence of other able bodied adults around to keep on with the tasks of living and providing, while I sit and ice.

…

As part of my supine reading catch up, I’ve had my friend Shefa’s doctoral thesis to read. Just so I can be the first to cite it, here’s a passage. As I understand, he had to fight with his advisory panel to retain the strength of the final quotation. It makes good reading, as doctoral theses go…

There is no other commodity like gold, whose market has an irrational lifeforce that boggles most efforts to explain it. This near mystic irrationality evokes great surges of human activity. These surges are potent enough to help build regions—California, Australia, South Africa, West Africa, Egypt, Alaska—not just through the gold that comes out of the ground, but the economy that emerges around mining. That same irrationality also makes people feverish with desire. Unfulfilled desires are perverted into madness. “Gold,” as the French Trader Patrick Schein says, “is a holy metal. Man makes it into shit.” (Siegel, 2007)

I hear that as of today, gold and oil are hitting record highs as the markets get the jitters. If they don’t have the jitters, they should read Kunstler’s forecast for ’08.

Much that is holy in the world we seem to make shit.

…

I had another classic neohomesteading moment last week—Asher (almost eleven months now) started to eat the house.

We have yet to undertake our finish coat of plaster, so the rough coat, or scratch coat as it is also known, is understandably rough. Asher has picked at the bits of straw that knit together the plaster a few times, but this time he was well into a couple of bites before I got to him. I don’t really want him eating the walls, but it is nice to know that it won’t really hurt him…

My ankle is already well on the mend and I should be up for a walk through the woods with Asher again soon.

Photo: Our Christmas walk with some friends; Zylo in the foreground.

close to life

2007-12-28T20:23:00.000-08:00

Two years into our lives here and I'm beginning to understand that winter is about survival.

This season can be quiet and beautiful in an abstract sort of way, but it’s usually cold and inhospitable from a mammalian perspective. Living in the hills, at the end of the road, we are more exposed to this dark edge of winter. The metaphorical weight of winter, of death and quiescence, is more tangible.

The only things left in our garden are a few small nubs of Brussels sprouts, a couple of Savoy cabbage dusted over with snow, and a few leaves of kale, dormant, but still green. If it weren’t for the convenience of the local supermarket, we would be surviving on our own stores right now—the things we had managed to preserve and put by from the summer and fall. Or on whatever we could catch—the other mammals, and the fish, going about their business.

Winter would be a lean season, without the buttressing layers of convenience and of infrastructure we have built. We would no doubt celebrate the arrival of spring—the first buds of nettles poking up through last year’s layer of dead leaves and grass.

And it would be a chilling season without fire and the shelters we’ve knocked together—this cumulative fortress we’ve built to shelter us from the cold and wet.

We were remiss in our firewood preparations again this winter and lots of our wood is not dry. It burns well enough when there’s already a good fire going, but building up the embers and heat can take an hour of near constant tending—arranging and adjusting the driest pieces of wood, blowing occasionally to build the flames.

It’s satisfying work, when the fire is finally roaring under its own draw and throwing a steady heat, but it’s a precarious task. If you leave the woodstove unattended at the wrong time (to attend to a child as is usually the case) or throw on a wet piece of wood before the fire has a sustaining heat, you can be left with a pile of blackened kindling and burnt paper, no further ahead than when you started.

I remember a story that left a big impression on me as a kid, by Jack London I believe, about a man lost in a cold, snowy land, and his struggle to start a fire—his only possible salvation. He finally gets some tinder alight but the snow sloughs off an overhead branch, extinguishing his fire and his hope. Freezing to death, at least, is described as one of the better ways to die (presumably by people that have been thawed out and revived). In the end, a feeling of warmth, and peace.

We’re not in danger of freezing here, but there is the possibility of being cold and miserable, if we can’t start a fire, or we have no dry wood. If we are lazy, or careless.

But for now we still have our electric heaters when the fire is out, and our piles of blankets and duvets for the night. All in all, we are well insulated from the damp and pervasive cold of the winters, but not totally. I am aware, for the first time, that winter is more than a form of seasonal variety and decoration. To coexist alongside winter and to live well requires a significant amount of energy and ingenuity.

I'm gradually getting to know more of life through my time on the land. It seems self evident to me now, but I don’t think I could have articulated it two years ago—we learn about life from life. Since living here I've seen more of death, of the real dark of winter, and of the regenerative vigor of the spring. Somehow it all starts to make sense, that we are part of this same play of forces.

I’ve learned a lot from living in cities, among millions of other people, from living in apartment buildings, and from working in an office, but I don’t think I could ever have come to feel so a part of the world, so cleaved to life, without this time living closer to the land.

…

I don’t know what the future holds for our civilization, but some disjuncture is coming I’m pretty sure—is already upon us. Yet we carry on with the momentum of our routines and habits of thinking. I would say we are entering a time when humans will again exist closer to the membrane of life. It’s hard not to believe that our day-to-day existence will be less comfortable, but there is the upside, where for moments at least we will feel part of the world.

For the people who are not so attached to their comforts there will be abundant recompense in simply seeing the stars again.

lengthening

2007-12-23T20:56:00.000-08:00

We have slipped back toward the sun and now a steady rain in our valley.

The temperature this past month has hovered around freezing and we are never sure whether to expect rain, snow, or some slushy in between. Things get crunchy at night, but generally creep into a gray, intermediate zone by day. Precipitation of some kind is a given, save the odd, exuberant day of sun…

Here is how my friend David put it in one of his monthly e-mailouts, Northern Dispatches (weeks 11-15):

“At one point, Cara came out of her office and we agreed that rain can’t get any colder. A few minutes later, the rain morphed. Simon and I ran around to every window in the house to watch the fluffy flakes fall, before going out to play in a day that suddenly felt a lot warmer. We got only about an inch, but it was just enough to make a grass-flecked snowman and borrow our neighbor’s sled and hill.”

David is a transplanted American, recently moved here from the San Francisco area, who, along with his family, has quickly become a central part of our local community. Local around here means a relatively short car ride (20 minutes). But we are also connected by way of a long defunct railway bed, now part of the Trans-Canada trail, and I can get to their land by foot or by bike if need be, so they are within my physical, human sphere.

It turns out there are many strands of connection between our families (including similar aged children) and that we are, in a larger sense, part of some shared tribe. In true, ecumenical fashion, we have shared Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, and Solstice this year and are planning a Mexican Christmas dinner together, complete with piñata and, perhaps, some tequila.

If you want to hear more about David’s reflections on his transplanted life in Canada, you can check out this recent "postcard" he made for a California radio station KQED. David is a wonderful, urbane guy from the Bay area, a radio producer and a gentle wit, although, as he would admit, not the most practical of men. He makes me feel like a seasoned veteran here in the valley and reminds me to see our world with beginners (if not with American) eyes.

A few weeks ago I took our chainsaw over and helped him cut and split some lengths of fir that had been left behind for firewood by the previous owners of their property. I thought it best that I do most of the cutting, but I also wanted to give David some experience and teach him what I know of chainsaw technique, although it was a case of the short sighted leading the blind.
In the end, I was thankful that he didn’t end up with a firsthand experience of socialized medical care.

After our few hours of lumberjacking, he sent me home with a bottle of Zinfandel carried along on their move from California and it was one of the finest wines we’d enjoyed in a long while (having, of late, resorted to the odd box of wine). It was one of those classic neohomesteading moments, enjoying a fine red wine after a redneck sort of day.

I’ve encouraged David to start a blog, so that I can link to him, but for now his writing is by way of his personal mailing list….

…

I feel very much in a struggle these days as I swing between different ways of seeing my life. Specifically, the notion of providing for my family is wrought with ambiguity and irreconcilable questions of scale.

On the one hand there is the imperative to provide in the short term. This means having the money and wherewithal to take care of getting new tires for the car, putting food on the table, and making sure the bills get paid. It’s the notion of providing that my father passed along to me, as he struggled in his own ways with notions of security, and with the uncertainty of being an immigrant with a grade seven education and a trade that saw him unemployed for months at a stretch.

As much as I would like to focus on my role as breadwinner I am repeatedly pulled into a longer view of security, a kind of post industrial, peak oil, ecozoic notion where larger themes of environmental and social security enter the picture. When I’m thinking along these lines, the idea of economic security appears insubstantial and entirely relative. If I make sure Asher has a decent college fund, but fail to protect the forests and waters of our region, then have I really provided much?

Luckily, living here, there is a third, and most satisfying form of family care which is the most tangible and immediate. It is the responsibility and the collective task of getting through another day with warmth and food and the very gradual accretion of a home. It is this grounded, in-place relationship with life that I can come back to when the realities of economic survival become a drudgery, or when the scale of ecological survival appears overwhelming and beyond my influence.

…

Today was a fun day on the homestead. I found the time to write, to have a bath with Asher, and to bake a triple batch of buttery shortbread cookies. Zena and I had our first attempt at cooking duck, and it was a rich, greasy feast. Asher was thrilled to end up with a gristly drumstick in each hand, putting his first tooth to use scraping off some little bits of meat while sucking clean the bones.

I’m pleased, and a little relieved, that we have passed the nadir of the year and can now look forward to the slow lengthening of days and the return of sun and warmth. This is how we measure out our lives, ultimately, in the cycling of planets and the human rituals of passage.

Photo: the moon over the valley after a recent snow.

family circles

2007-12-18T20:09:00.000-08:00

We made a lot of decisions about lifestyle when we bought ten acres of land and moved away from the city.

On the one hand, for example, there were questions of proximity—rather than be close to cinemas and shopping centres, we chose to be close to the land, close to rivers and forest trails. Rather than embrace the convenience of consumer culture, we have opted for a more direct experience of life—growing some of our own food and building our own homes. Rather than maintain the variety of social and cultural experience available in the city, we now live in the simpler milieu offered up by our close friends and neighbours in the valley. And rather than hold onto the easy comforts of living in town, we have found ourselves at times cold, wet, flooded, buried beneath snow, and baked by the sun— physically wrestling with the land and elements to find our place here.

Two years into this shift we have no regrets about our decision to move. We have our moments, of course, our occasional struggles and frustrations, but the rewards of neohomesteading outweigh the costs—life is harder in many ways, but good.

…

Another of the things we chose, without a lot of premeditation, was a commitment to living in community, in an extended family.

Our land is home to seven people for now—there is myself, my partner Zena, and our child, Asher. We share one small house. The other family unit consists of Zena’s brother, Dan, his partner, Gen, and their two boys, Zylo and Oren. They all share another, even smaller house, affectionately known as the shack. We all share a common kitchen and hang-out spot where we spend a good bit of our time, cooking, eating, drinking tea, and cozying up in front of the fire.

This commitment to family seemed instrumental at the time—we couldn’t afford to buy separate places and live as individual, nuclear families and it made sense to share our resources. But the longer we live here, the value and necessity of family becomes all the more clear.

With cooking, for example, each family takes care of dinner and clean up on alternate nights. Not only do we end up eating great food every night of the week, but we have time to devote to other evening activities, like reading or writing, on our non-dinner nights. I know that if Zena and I were cooking for ourselves, our diet would be greatly simplified and preparation of food would be more necessity than pleasure.

Then there is child minding. I can hardly imagine how single couples have the energy and attention for their kids, let alone single parents. With four adults in the household there are many more opportunities for us all to get a break. For the kids, they have the advantage of non-parental adults for a different kind of support and perspective on the world.

We are also more productive, with the extra hands and combination of skills to draw upon. Sometimes it works out that Dan and I will work on a building project together, or that Gen and Zena will work together gardening, or canning food. Our co-living allows for a degree of specialization and same-sex interaction that creates a richer and more productive household. There are all kinds of other synergies too—shopping collectively, heating one common space instead of multiple homes, passing children’s clothes back and forth…

…

I’m increasingly convinced that part of the transition to a more localized and sustainable way of life will involve this movement toward a more inclusive, extended family—sharing space, sharing resources, and sharing lives. We don’t have any elders in our small community yet, but I’m sure that will come and I look forward to another layer of inter-generational complexity, another set of skills and experiences upon which to draw. And while we are just two families for now, I could easily see us opening our land to another small cabin or two.

You couldn’t really call our experiment here an intentional community. It’s more of a serendipitous community, a work in progress…

Photo: winter scene--the old kitchen with our house behind (the snow is gone again now).

highwater

2007-12-07T17:07:00.000-08:00

I’ve been writing a lot recently about what I see wrong with the world, although it doesn’t take much effort to notice the scope and the scale of problems we face. It gets more and more difficult to assume a willful blindness.

Two years ago I moved from the city to a more rural part of B.C., in part, to focus on building something positive--a family, a home, and some gardens--but I’ve had the problems of the world thrust upon me all the more directly, here in the hills of Vancouver Island.

I worked on watershed issues when I lived in Victoria, arguing against clearcut logging in the city’s watershed. It seemed like one of those obvious problems, but it took many people a lot of time to finally bring it to an end. Still, as much as I understood the argument for protecting the urban watershed, had seen the data and the evidence against clearcut logging, it was an abstract issue. The lands were gated and off limits, at some distance from the city, and I only had one clandestine photographic mission to the watershed in my year spent working on the campaign.

Now we live in our watershed—it’s our valley. We can follow the creek that runs by our land, trace it back up to the headwaters in the hills above. Likewise we can head downstream with the water and see what it carries along and where it flows. (As a local First Nations man put it to me recently, shit floats downstream.)

It was in this taoist spirit that I followed the floodwaters last week, the day following my last posting, when the temperature climbed to 11 degrees Celsius, the rains belted down, and two feet of wet snow began to melt in great buckets and rivers. Walking along the trails and through the woods was like having arrived in a water world—a great, saturated sponge of a world.

Of course this tremendous pulse of water arrived at the bottom of the valley soon enough and I was there to see the Koksilah River--the river where we'd spent hot summer days in cool eddies of water--thundering down, a chocolate brown torrent carrying logs, debris, and soil out to the ocean, to the Georgia Straight.

I was scared at one point, having scrabbled down to the banks of the river taking photos, wondering at what point the water would jump its banks upstream and carry me away. I cut higher up the bank, along to the old train trestle, where the river was channeled between the concrete piers of this massive timber structure.

I came back home to find our power was out, and all my excitement to write about the flood was redirected toward saving our new store of meat. We just spent over five hundred dollars on half a side of grass fed, local beef, now tucked away in our new freezer. With the balmy winds blowing in, I knew we’d be in trouble within twenty four hours without power.

I’d bought an old Honda generator at the auction, but it wasn’t working properly yet. Instead, I rounded up all the bubble wrap, blankets, insulation, plastic and tarps that I could find and set to wrapping the freezer. As it turned out, we had power back by the evening, but I wasn’t ready to take a chance. I plan to fix the generator before the next storm.

When the freezer was in hand, the rains were still belting down and the waters flowing everywhere. I set out on another long hike, to check out the creek above which our corporate “neighbours,” Island Timberlands, are clearcut logging. I wanted to see what was happening with the creek and make sure everyone was doing okay.

The creek, when I arrived, had lost all sense of its banks, and was braiding its way through the wide, flat valley. The water was within a foot of the small bridge over the Trans Canada Trail, and was eating away at the supporting banks. It looked a good possibility that the bridge would be washed away by nightfall. (My camera batteries were dead by that point, so I could only watch in awe).

I stopped by our neighbour Al, the machinist, who has been in the valley for fifteen years and he said he’d never seen anything like it, the sheer volume of water washing across the land. I had to wade through a foot of water flowing across his driveway and found him digging some trenches to carry the water around his shop. Unfortunately, he only had dead batteries.

I cut back up to the road then, across the wide floodplain of the valley, and had a moment where I seemed to find deep currents of water everywhere I turned and I could again imagine a wall of water washing me downstream, wondering if I'd be able to catch on to one of the Red Alders that grew in clumps about the lowlands. I finally found a way through the maze, after the icy water had breached my boots a couple of times, and I trudged further along the road hoping, at that point, for a neighbour to come by and offer me a ride home. I did finally get picked up, just before dark, riding home in the back of someone's truck, with the rain still beating down and the flood waters threatening to wash out the road.

It was pretty obvious, on my rounds that day, one of the many problems of large-scale clearcut logging in these hills. Not only have you lost the moderating influence of branches, moss, mushrooms, and roots upon the flow of water, but you have lost the moderation of temperature. On the clearcut slopes, with the pineapple express winds rushing down the valley, the previous day’s dump of snow was disappearing like a morning frost in the sun. In the woods, meanwhile, the snow was sheltered from the warm winds and was melting at a more measured pace.

The correlation between clearcut logging and peak water flows is well established even if the scale of the impact might not be precise. Suffice it to say that with the prospect of wetter winters and more weather anomalies from climate change, the fact of steep clearcut slopes cut across with great roads is not reassuring. Especially not when you can see these massive cuts spreading across the hillsides upstream, like a mange.

The costs and the risks to the environment and to communities and properties downstream are obvious. Yet the logging continues faster than ever on these lands. I suppose the corporate masters hope to have shifted their investments elsewhere before a truly catastrophic event wakes people out of complacency. This time they were lucky. We were lucky. A few people lost some property, had their homes flooded or their fields washed away, but no one died and no major bridges or roads were washed away.

…

I started this post wanting to relate a positive story after my recent spate of protest writing, but I have run out of time. I wanted to write about family, community, and locality because as obvious as the problems we face are the solutions, or the hope of them at least.

It comes back to building something that will displace the corporate profit motive, and reinstate a sense of place, of caring, and of responsibility.

This is happening now, in a thousand ways, and it’s part of our role in these days to join in this process, this counter movement that always arises in community, in the face of exploitation. We all face the future in our own way, but we face it collectively too.

…

I had a great walk in the midst of last weekend’s weather—it’s always exhilarating to feel the real force that is nature and to feel close to that edge where you are carried along in the flood. I also saw lots of my neighbours on my travels, and we shared stories, observations, and a sense of belonging.

This is the upside of our predicament.

Photo: the Koksilah River last weekend.

breaking point

2007-12-02T12:58:00.000-08:00

We are being lost beneath our first real snowstorm today—over a foot has fallen so far, and it continues to come down steadily, patiently. We think of our valley as quiet, but the snow brings a different kind of quiet—a muffled hush that contracts around the crunching of snow underfoot or the crack of a branch under this new weight.

It was in this hush that I knocked together a makeshift snow plow/shovel this morning—tacking a piece of board onto the end of a twelve foot two by two. I clambered up onto the potting table, behind the old kitchen, and got to work releasing some of the snow load. I could feel the old kitchen (as it will likely always be remembered--a shed-roofed, open-air building which serves as a workshop/storage space now) straining under the load when I'd ventured out to feed the cat. The forecast is for rain this afternoon, and the snow will serve like a great sponge that could easily reduce our little outbuilding to a heap of sticks and bent tin, barring any preventative measures.

There is a kinetic stillness in the air when a system is pushed to its limit, a kind of static charge ready to crackle apart. In social studies this has come to be called a tipping point, when system conditions change in their fundaments and a new kind of order emerges. In engineering it’s more of a breaking point, a material collapse. Living here, I’ve learned that it’s best to anticipate these limits of tensile strength and relieve the pressure—easier, at least, than dealing with the mess and rebuilding the shed come spring, but requiring a degree of foresight, a weighing of action and consequence.

This is the time of year when it’s easy to sit indoors and harbour regrets as the world is buried beneath piles of snow: the regret of having not tidied up around the property some more, of having not properly tarped a stack of lumber, of having not built the deck, or of having not laid in enough fire wood to last until spring.

But it’s also the time to let go of doing much, or of going very far. Days like this are ideal for staying home, drinking hot chocolate, and dreaming in the silence.

…

I spend a good part of these winter days reading, researching, and writing. (Thankfully, Zena has been very understanding of my obsession.) I’m trying to understand the forces that are ruining our valley and darkening prospects for the future. And the more I learn about the situation the more I’m flabbergasted and determined to take action.

The crux of the situation, as far as I can understand, is that the forests, lands, and resources of Vancouver Island (and, no doubt, of most other corners of the Earth) have been handed over to corporate powers who can only survive and grow through the inexorable logic of profit and of exploitation. The people who live here and want to steward the land for their children, as it turns out, have no say. No place to say it and no person to hear it.

All the private forest lands around where we live have been folded into a new, Orwellian regime where the corporate land owners pay very low tax and have virtually unfettered access to wrench out the timber and ruin the streams. In the endgame of their exploitation they get the windfall profits of flipping real estate out of forest lands and into real estate markets.

The new statutes that created this situation go so far as to prohibit local government (and, by extension, local residents) from presuming to exercise any influence. Here is how it reads in the legislation:

21 (1) A local government must not
(a) adopt a bylaw under any enactment, or
(b) issue a permit under Part 21 or 26 of the Local Government Act in respect of land that is private managed forest land that would have the effect of restricting, directly or indirectly, a forest management activity.

It’s an appalling situation in which we are subsidizing large corporations to plunder out own land. I don’t understand how things got this bad or why the situation is not exposed on the front pages of every newspaper—why the throngs aren’t agitating in the streets and tearing up these bogus statutes, calling to account the political representatives who sold us out.

I’m working on exposing the fraud that has been perpetrated upon us (we have been convinced, somehow, that this situation is normal, or that there is no alternative, it’s the way of the world) and I’m joining in with a growing number of people that are saying enough. We are fomenting consent.

I’m not interested in tinkering around the edges either—I want the communities here to reclaim our rights to manage the local lands and resources. More than that, to remember our obligations to this place and to our descendants.

I know that community control will not be a perfect solution, but at least then we will be dealing with real people, not corporate spokespeople or lawyers. At that point, we can begin the creative process of rebuilding some sense of right relationship with each other and with the world.

A couple of weeks ago, as I was launching full scale into this campaign work, I met up and went for a hike with Susan, the local woodlot owner. Thankfully for us, she holds the timber rights over a chunk of our valley through a very small Community Woodlot program. (Although her woodlot is a tiny pixel compared to the corporate holdings on Vancouver Island.) Susan is the mother of two girls and she makes her living by sustainable timber harvesting in the 1000 hectares of woodlands. Her lands are certified by the Forest Stewardship Council and her largest cut to date has been one hectare.

Together with Susan and another neighbour, we looked over some of the recent clearcutting carried on by Island Timberlands and she was also shocked at the scale of destruction: waste dumped into wetlands; small streams with zero riparian protection; big roads blasted through the hillsides.

While I can call Susan if I’m upset with something I see on her land, with these corporate lands there is no recourse, no accounting. Island Timberlands corporate spokesperson, in response to our call for them to repair previous damages to the local creek before considering more clearcut logging in our valley, responded that she doubts logging is responsible. Apparently the rain is the problem.

…

My internet connection is coming and going as snow clouds continue to pass through the valley. I may yet be up on the roof again before the day is out. It’s looking like a long winter from here and a long struggle ahead.

Photo: chairs around the campfire pit.

messy

2007-11-28T14:54:00.000-08:00

I’m missing the contained and tranquil world of lichenology. Writing here I’ve been able to step back and reflect on what I’m doing in the world and how I’m trying to live. Sometimes I fail to make the connections, but the process of posting here usually brings me some sense of coherence and narrative thread. It’s a small comfort, some days, but a comfort nonetheless.

Part of the reason I’m writing less frequently is my increasing involvement in local sustainability. And here I don’t mean sustainability in the abstract—not sustainability as captured in a well crafted posting, but as it is played out in the forests, rivers, human, and non-human communities where we live. It’s a messy business.

It’s not just the fact of trudging through clearcuts that is messy, although I’ve been doing lots of that lately, to be sure. The disregard for the processes of life is so blatantly displayed on these logged out hillsides and gullies, but most people don’t see it yet. It has not shown up as a serious threat to a sustainable way of life. Not yet.

I’d rather hike along a forest trail, but hiking through the recent cuts in our valley girds me for the work ahead, and focuses my attention. I spent much of my summers in clearcuts, all through my university years, planting trees and running a crew, so I’m familiar with their particular ugliness. Still, though, it has the power to shock me sometimes, to come out of a forest, into a gaping clearcut.

Also messy is the complexity of human community and of personality that I’m wading into. Ideas won’t change things around here, ultimately, but people will—people standing up for the place they live. And so I engage and try to muddle through.

I went to my first “green drinks” last night at a local brew pub in town. I was there to meet the greenies in my community, but also to drum up support for our “information picket” tomorrow in front of an Island Timberlands planning event. It’s our first action to bring attention to what is happening here, the first of a long series, I suspect.

We already got a front page plug in the local paper, with a large photo above the fold, so things are going well. I feel bad for the company, because as they explained to the reporter, they “want to be neighbourly.” I don’t know though, I’ve never found multinational asset management firms to be the best of neighbours. Their allegiances are elsewhere, it seems.

And while I had fun at the green drinks event, and we roused a lot of support, I’m not an extrovert at heart. Being around and meeting a lot of people takes energy for me. (Another reason I like the act of writing—an introvert's connection to the world.) Add to the realities of social networking the minefield of organizational politics and the cat-herding of message management, and it’s a full time preoccupation that I’ve taken on.

It’s a good thing that winter is here, and my energies can be rechanneled for a spell. I’ll try to come back to my writing from time to time—try to find that tread that will allow to be believe it all makes a kind of sense.

…

The creek behind our kitchen is running steady now, and will provide a backdrop to our lives for the next four or five months, depending on the winter. The ground is saturated above us, and the water is washing down into the river that defines our valley.

Photo: Asher standing up for the trees.

mast year

2007-11-17T09:45:00.000-08:00

It has been a remarkable and prolonged autumn here. The wet summer seems to have contributed to an extra depth of pigment in the fall colours.

Most of the leaves are gone, and winter is just setting in, but now I find is the most beautiful time of the fall, when there are just a few tenacious leaves clinging to a willow, set off against the brooding green of the conifers, and when a hedgerow of snowberries stands out like the atomic mapping of some obscure molecule along the roadside ditch. It makes the tinsel and glitter of the Christmas decorations going up in town appear cheap and tawdry.

It has also been a bumper year for mushrooms, by all accounts. I wasn’t sure if I was just noticing more this year than last, but I’m told that indeed we have been treated to a particularly fecund season. Just yesterday, I was reconnoitering some recent logging, and came upon a late and prolific bloom of chanterelles. It was a shame to know that the moss and shade out of which they were growing would be sun baked rocks next summer.

I don’t know if it’s true with mushrooms, but some species of tree have cyclical swings in the production of their fruit. The Gary oaks where we used to live in Victoria would put out a particularly large crop of acorns every three or four years. It may be triggered by some climactic influence, but it also has an adaptive function for the tree—if it were to put out a constant supply of acorns the population of squirrels, who make it their business to eat nuts, would grow to match the supply of food, not leaving many nuts to sprout. On the other hand, by keeping the supply tight for a few years, the population of squirrels falls off…then the tree puts out a big crop one year. It must seem a bonanza to the resident critters, and they end up further serving the tree, by squirreling away more nuts than they can eat over the winter, effectively spreading and planting new oaks. This year of abundance, of overflow, is known as a mast year.

Many species also seem able to call upon an enormous reservoir of energy when they are stressed, and dying, and put out a final crop of seeds, a kind of terminal mast year. The Hemlock trees in our valley are like this—you see them brown and dying, but covered with their small cones. There is a dying Hemlock on our property which we need to cut soon, lest the wind bring it down on our power lines this winter. There will be a great scattering of seed when it falls.

…

Meanwhile, I’m increasingly carried along in the push to organize and resist the forces of exploitation in the valley. On my bike ride yesterday, checking out all the recent and ongoing clearcutting adjacent to the Trans-Canada Trail, I could feel my urgency to act growing. It’s impossible for me to see what’s happening here and not speak out in some way. I could hide myself from reality a little longer, but I know it will eventually overwhelm us, and by then it will be far too late to act.

And with winter settling in and the kitchen now functional, I have been able to take some first steps as a local activist. A couple of days ago, I sent my first op-ed piece to the local paper and the editor says he will run it. I’ve also hatched rather a large idea, to try to galvanize a positive vision for an economics of place and community on Vancouver Island. I will be writing more about this soon. Today I’m off on a hike with the woman who runs the community woodlot in the valley, to hear her perspective on what is happening.

Photo: another kind of fall colour…an excavator punching another road through the forest here.

on course

2007-11-12T20:20:00.000-08:00

I saw a flock of

Canada

geese this morning, flying south, cutting through a heavy rain and strong wind.

Watching for a few minutes as they passed overhead, a group of about fifty birds, I noticed how a flock is not a static form—there's a constant jockeying and rearrangement. It’s a beautiful example of form and chaos as manifest through life.

…

I lost half of a blog posting last week in my first data mishap with the new computer—I had an unscheduled shutdown and auto-recover didn’t kick in for some reason. The post, funnily, was an explanation of why I was going to take a break from blogging, and I haven’t had the time or fortitude to launch into the logic of that decision again, until today.

One of the reasons for wanting to take a break is my desire to spend more time on a book project, and more time also writing about what is happening here in our valley, in terms of logging and economic development, so called.

I thought we had been given a reprieve from the immediate threat of logging in our valley—the coastal loggers had gone out on strike a few months ago and there didn’t seem a great likelihood that the issues would be worked out quickly. But an agreement was reached recently, and they are back at it.

Before the strike began, the company logging in the valley told us that cutting was scheduled for February, but for some reason they have accelerated the process and the chainsaws are starting up already. My friend Bill, the local mushroom guy and culinary guru, described to me this morning how a stand of trees was cut not far from his place, and how quickly it was gutted, clearcutting right down to the Trans-Canada Trail. We are being left with a denuded landscape and an impoverished set of options for the future.

Here in our valley, I suspect the company caught whiff of some grumblings among the locals and thought better to preempt any kind of organized community response. They know it takes time to pull together a coherent campaign, and that people don’t have the time or fortitude for resistance. But perhaps they are wrong.

I don’t fully understand the economics of what is happening with logging, with the Canadian dollar so high and the US housing market in a quagmire. The situation described in a recent Vancouver Sun article is of a “crippling downturn” for the forest industry, but companies on the Island appear to be logging at a furious pace.

I suspect the logging company’s decisions are rational, though—rational, at least, in the economic sense of the word, from the extremely narrow perspective of return on investment for investors and fat bonuses for corporate officers.

I’m pretty sure the economics are related to another trend on the Island—that is, the business of clearcutting private forest lands and flipping them to real estate for exurban subdivisions, golf courses, resorts and what have you. “Log and flog” in the vernacular. Companies that benefited from decades of preferential tax treatment, for supposedly maintaining forest lands, are selling off large swaths of land now and reaping huge windfalls.

I want to explore what is going on here in more detail and write about it—place some op eds in local papers and try to get something published in a national paper. Right now, there are very few people who seem to notice what is happening or who are putting up any resistance. In the '90's on Vancouver Island we had the war in the woods, as it was called. Now everyone seems all too battle weary.

…

One of the reasons I like blogging, and will likely not take much of a break, is that I notice more of my world when I am trying to distill it into language. To write well, I find, I need constantly to step back from the mundane and see things with a beginner’s eye. When I'm able to do this, our lives here in the valley appear as they are, full of beauty and of stories, and I am in turn filled to bursting with the desire to write.

But despite this, I constantly slip into the routine and the world begins to appear ordinary. When I lose the spark to write, I know I’m getting lazy.

One of our problems as a species is our amazing ability to normalize. On the one had it is highly adaptive, allowing humans to survive in some appalling circumstances, but it also can prevent us from changing course, always thinking that things are normal, that there is no alternative to what is happening. We can be plodding animals.

And while writing I find is one good practice for noticing life, parenting is another. Asher is nine months old now, but still lives in a state of constant wonder with the world. This is especially strong when we are away from the familiar surroundings of home, off on a hike in the woods. He’s amazingly attentive on these walks, making very little sound, taking everything in. When we stop, he'll sit on the ground and his attention immediately burrows down to a micro level. He will happily examine a growth of lichen, a fern, or a stick for ten minutes, and complain a bit when I suggest we keep moving. He maintains his habit of collecting some object on our first stop and carrying it for the rest of our walk, until he drops back into the routine world of home.

And on the home front, already seeming normal, we have a kitchen with walls, of a sort--a place to cook and bathe that is warm and dry. The wood fired water heater works well to our great relief. On the first day of hooking it up we ran four large baths, sinking into the buoyant embrace of hot water. There's still a lot of work remaining, building counters and shelves, but the space is livable, is luxurious by our standards. Having the bulk of building behind us should also give me more time to focus on writing, on local activism, and on some paid work.

I imagine those geese now, well on their way, pushing into the night.

Photo: pipe fitting equipment set up for plumbing in the outdoor kitchen. I like this iron age technology.

anticipating a bath

2007-11-05T16:54:00.000-08:00

I’m back home after a quick but tiring trip to Yellowknife. We flew over a good stretch of Canada, stopping in Edmonton and jetting north from there. Much of the landscape I saw was cold and rather desolate, the colour drained from the vegetation and the snow beginning the long months of accumulation.

Arriving home, I appreciated the moist and relatively warm air of the coast—the enduring prevalence of green here.

Ironically, we flew in and out of Yellowknife easily (we were concerned, having heard of a recent snowstorm that closed the airport for several days), but we were delayed half a day on the final leg of our flight home. It was raining in Vancouver when we arrived, but fog had piled up against the east coast of Vancouver Island, where we were scheduled to land in Nanaimo. Finally, after an aborted attempt, we were routed back through Vancouver airport and had to take a flight to Victoria’s airport instead, making our way back up island from there.

On the flight home I saw several babies being shuttled around the country and so I was yearning to see Asher when I got home, and to feel his solid weight in my arms. He has become the fulcrum around which our lives stretch and tip, defining the boundaries of home and heart.

Sleep for me is elusive when I stay in the humming, sterile space of a hotel, so I was also tired when I got back to our land, but awake the following day, at dawn, as usual. (The extra hour of sleep promised with the return of standard time and the setting back of clocks did not seem to work with Asher.)

On Sunday we puttered around the new kitchen, building a platform behind the kitchen, near the stove alcove, to support the hot water tank. The tank needs to be higher than the stove for the thermosyphon system to work and for the water to circulate without the assistance of mechanical pumps. Dan is working on plumbing the system now, so we should have hot and cold running water soon.

We also brought in the old cast iron tub from its previous location behind the current kitchen. (Having the bath and shower outside and in relatively plain view never seemed very comfortable for our guests). We bought the tub shortly after we moved to the valley, from a gentleman who repairs fiddles and lives on a local biodynamic farm. Many of our neighbours get a vegetable box from them through the summer. This meeting, to check out and buy the tub, was one of several serendipitous meetings precipitated from ads in the Buy, Sell and Trade.

I’d rather keep the tub outside, but Zena and Gen want an indoor bathroom—for this purpose we built a 4’x8’ room off the new kitchen, not far from the stove, which will have a curtain to separate it from the cooking area. I’ve only had a couple of baths since moving here as I can never justify using so much hot water and burning so much propane for my pleasure. (I should point out that I do take showers regularly.)

With the new system, however, the hot water will be a by-product of space heating, and will be warmed by our renewable supply of wood energy, so I will be able to enjoy guilt-free baths once in a while. After days of building in the cool and wet weather, sinking into a hot bath can be a lovely, bone-warming experience. (Our first winter here, with very little that was warm or dry, we built a steam lodge, styled on a traditional Aboriginal sweat lodge, just for the penetrating warmth of some steam.)

Today, with the kitchen space itself more or less complete, we played with ideas and designs for counters, and for arrangements of stove, fridge, and sink. We should be able to plumb in and install the sink tomorrow, then we can move over the stove and small fridge and start cooking in the new kitchen as we continue to build remaining counters and shelves.

Meanwhile, I have several other work projects coming on line, so my focus will be turning more to the confines of my office and the machinations of policy, financing, and sustainability.

…

November is turning out to be our redeeming weather month, at least for its opening salvo. We’ve had sunny and mild days, with cool nights, for most of the past week. The earthen mass of our walls warms up enough to carry us through the evening in relative comfort (although by sun up, a warm sweater and woolly hat are called for).

Photo: the underside of a local forest, eroded from a road cut.

all saints

2007-11-01T09:37:00.000-07:00

It’s the first of November—All Saints’ Day and my Mom’s birthday.

We are nearing the point where we can move into our new kitchen. I had hoped we would be in before the end of October, but what started out as a few days work, quickly evolved into a few weeks, as projects have a way of doing here.

We’d imagined a rather quick and rough job—a step up from our small, wall-less kitchen of the past two years, but only one step. I’d say we’ve taken a couple of steps up and that we’ll have a cozy, functional space where we will be able to gather, cook, and eat for a few years to come. It often turns out that with a bit of extra work we can make things a bit better. And inevitably, many small bits of extra work, like the stove alcove I described in my last post, add up to many extra days of work.

I’m looking forward to having a larger cooking space, and to having a space where the kids can play while we cook. I’m also imagining some small dinner parties again, eating with friends and being able to sit around the hearth after dinner with a glass of wine. We always have lots of big feasts and many guests in the summer, when we can sit outside, but the winter has meant more confinement these last couple of years.

Today, Gen, Zena, and the kids are away, taking in some Hallowe’en theatre in Victoria, so Dan and I are focused on the final kitchen jobs before we can move in. We finished dry walling the ceiling yesterday morning (still some patches to fill in with slabs of wood), and now we are painting the floor, getting the final coat on today.

We also took the hot water tank over to our friend Al’s place yesterday and will pick it up today. Al is the local machinist/welder, and he is going to install another fixture on the tank, so we can use the stove to heat our water, as I described in my last post. (If you are looking for info on the principles of using wood for domestic hot water, Fire and Water is the best site I found. He also explains how to hook up a combined wood-fired and solar hot water system, which would pretty much meet our hot water needs for the year.)

Once we are finished the painting and some of the plumbing work, we will be able to move our stove, small fridge, sink, counters, shelves, and food over. Already we’ve had a few meals in the new kitchen, clearing the tools and orphan nails off the table for the evening. We had our first meal in the heated space a couple of nights ago—with the walls more or less done (still some cracks and holes to seal up) and a fire in the stove. We had chili and garlic toast.

And when we’ve moved the kitchen over, we’ll be able to move all of our tools and wood into the old kitchen and set it up as a storage and work space. We’ve had so many projects, and so few covered spaces, that our place has been verging on the chaotic since we moved here—blue tarps the standard rural blight. I’m looking forward to having everything organized and tidy some day.

I also took the opportunity to finish the stairs last night, a project I started shortly before Asher was born (when it became apparent that Zena could no longer safely navigate the bamboo ladder up to our loft). I built the banister about a month ago (spurred on by Asher’s extended mobility), and have since added nosing and trim to the stairs. Last night I did the final sanding and applied a tung oil finish.

My next project is to build a covered deck off of our mudroom. Once again, Asher is driving the agenda, this time so that he can have a covered and contained outdoor space to putter around this winter. My plan is to build the deck entirely out of wood we salvaged from our friends’ pile of lumber milling rejects. I have started the project by digging a hole, of course, and planting a cedar post that will support the roof extension.

One day I hope to sit back on the deck with a cup of tea and just appreciate what we have accomplished here, before I notice the next project we need to tackle…

…

I’m off to Yellowknife again this afternoon for a meeting tomorrow. It will be my first billable hours in some time and so I am happy for the work. It seems crazy, of course, to fly that far for a day. It’s another relic of this period of history, the age of cheap energy, and it is fast coming to a close. It’s especially ironic, of course, to be flying up to the Arctic, where the impacts of climate change are so stark—not quite the apocryphal image of Southern California burning, but a pace of change as dramatic for the ecosystems, the animals, and the people that live there.

Photos: above, frost and morning sun on the Brussels sprouts; below, the completed stairs.

heat

2007-10-27T08:07:00.000-07:00

This is the time of year when thoughts turn to heat. Or rather, bodies turn toward heat, and thoughts follow.

We’ve had a few cold nights now, and mornings when there’s a thick growth of frost covering everything—mornings when you need a toque and heavy sweater to make a cup of tea in the outdoor kitchen. In the evenings, when the sun drops behind the trees to our west, the temperatures also fall quickly and we move inside.

Thankfully, we’re getting close to making the move over to the new kitchen. We might not quite make it by end of month, as we had hoped, but within a week or so. The cold evenings and mornings have been a compelling motivation for our efforts.

One of the things that slowed us down a bit was upgrading the heating system. We were getting close to installing the big woodstove our neighbour Victor gave us earlier in the fall when he dropped by for a visit. Victor often comes with suggestions, or to lend a helping hand—he was the one who made the initial suggestion that we move our kitchen to the new venue rather than tying to fix up the current outdoor kitchen. He’s a furniture builder, and an architect by training, and has a good way of opening up ideas about building.

(Victor is one of our regular drop-ins, and someone we are always happy to see. On the subject of all our regular drop-ins, I could write several posts, as they are a uniformly distinctive lot. One elderly gentleman, in his late-eighties, has hiked in our valley for decades, and drops in every two or three weeks since we moved here. Suffice it to say that he is a former Nazi who is now a proponent of Ek (don’t ask) and a prolific self-publisher. He carries a box of teddy bears and dolls in the trunk of his car which he gives out to any children he encounters. Or there is Big Al, a brain-injured patient in the care of some neighbours, who takes great pleasure in showing you his license to smoke marijuana for medicinal purposes, usually proceeding to fulfill his prescription on the spot. Given his effusive nature, and the challenges of hosting him, we have had to negotiate a drop-in limit of once per month…)

In any case, Victor took one look at where we were going to install the stove (more or less in the middle of the new kitchen space) and suggested that we put it outside the back wall instead. Like many of Victor’s ideas, it sounded unreasonable, for a moment, but I quickly began to see his point. As it was, the stove was dividing up the space and creating an obstacle and potential hazard for the kids. On top of that, it wasn’t very amenable to gatherings around the hearth. (You have to remember that while the new space is larger than our current outdoor kitchen, it is still small, at less than 300 square feet, a quarter of which is designated play space.)

I was mentally stuck on having the stove in the middle, partly for the perceived benefit of heating all of the space evenly, but mostly because our walls, for now, are double-walled plastic film. It’s conceptually difficult to imagine installing a woodstove in a thin plastic wall. The leap in design was to create a nook of brick or concrete to accommodate the stove.

Besides being a safer, more convivial spot for the stove, and maximizing our limited space, the new stove placement should also be much better from a thermal efficiency and comfort point of view.

In the process of building the stove nook, we’ve added a lot of thermal mass. After some additional hand-excavations (or course, more digging), and quickly dismantling the current wall (a benefit of plastic film, in this case),we built three new walls, creating an alcove about two and a half feet deep and about three and a half feet wide. We used some salvaged cinder blocks another neighbour had given us soon after our move here (for the price of hauling them away). We didn’t really know what we would do with the blocks, at the time, but we figured they would come in handy. Since then, we’ve had some wwoofers chip off the old mortar, and used half of the blocks in our small greenhouse. Most of what was left went into the new stove alcove. We filled the blocks with sand as we built the walls so as to maximize their mass and their ability to absorb heat.

This is the thing I have learned about heating with wood: a feeble, smoldering fire is of no use—it is inefficient, polluting, and leads to creosote build up in the chimney. The best way to burn wood is as hot as possible—this creates a much cleaner, more efficient fire. The problem is that running the stove at full blast all the time would quickly overheat the space.

The trick is to burn a short, hot fire and save up some of the heat. The way to store heat is with mass. It’s part of the principle we had in mind when building our house—the walls are thick, made from clay and wood chips, and they can hold a lot of heat, creating something of a thermal flywheel, storing up energy and giving it back slowly. As an additional bonus, the heat from clay or stone is slow and penetrating, unlike the more searing wavelengths of heat that come off a very hot surface, like a steel woodstove.

In our house, we generally have a hot fire in the morning, heat up our walls, and let the fire go out until the late afternoon or evening. Happily, it works in reverse, in the summer, storing up the cool of the night and keeping the house cooler than the ambient outdoor temperature for most of the day.

The idea with our kitchen stove alcove is that the concrete will store up the heat from a hot morning fire, and the blocks will give back the heat over the course of the day. A good thing to remember, though, in terms of thermal mass, is that the Earth is the biggest mass around. If your structure is not insulated from the Earth, it will suck all of your stored heat into the ground.

As it turned out, I knew of some Styrofoam I could get cheap. There was a local greenhouse that went out of business this past summer (we bought a bunch of irrigation hose off them) and at the time I noticed a huge pile of Styrofoam blocks—they are designed as planters, for seedlings, but I immediately saw their potential for building. I went by last week and picked up 20 in the car for a couple of bucks (10 cents each) and we used these to insulate our cinder blocks. Styrofoam is surprisingly strong, and we put close to 1,000 pounds of mass on top of a layer of these insulating blocks, and a layer around the outside three walls. We had an extra sheet of galvanized roofing that we used to build a small shed roof, and we poured a concrete hearth. The concrete should be set by tomorrow and we will install the stove.

The stove Victor gave us also has a water jacket which is a network of copper pipe built around the outside of the firebox, so we will be using it to heat our water as well. Yesterday Victor also dropped off an old water tank that was being pulled out of a house where we he is doing some work. The tank is a big old 60 gallon tank, which we will superinsulate and put outside beside the stove nook. Running the stove a couple of times a day should give us all the hot water and all the heat we need.

It is a comforting thought, on a cold morning in late October.

Photos: above, remnants of a former resident of our Styrofoam; below, the stove alcove taking shape.

a small, grateful post

2007-10-24T20:08:00.000-07:00

There is something about gratitude which keeps me sane these days.

I had a moment today and it was much needed. And as is often the case during such moments, I was with our eight month old, on a morning walk around the beaver pond.

Arriving out of the dewy quite of the forest, and sitting a minute with Asher in a sunny, quiet clearing, I was able to simply appreciate life—not to appreciate my good fortune, or any particular circumstances, just to feel, for a moment, the sheer animal joy of being alive.

The gratitude I’m describing is a first principal of life, and, as such, it is perfect and complete. It’s not an appreciation of any particular experience, but of experience itself. Gratitude and experience become one and the same thing.

The problem is that we always get in the way of this fundamental experience, of life. We have contrived so many devices, distractions, and obsessions that we never find a still moment for this primal gratitude to surface. Eventually our ability to notice life shrivels up, like a vestigial organ. But I believe it is always there, expectant.

Walking with Asher is the perfect practice in gratitude, I find. There is the perfection of the world, which is still apparent where we live—the quality of form, balance, and complexity that is always unfolding in the process of life. This quality mirrors something in us, it evokes our own sense of proportionality. One of my great fears for human kind is that we lose touch with this quality of life, having cut ourselves off from the world. What do they call it now, Nature Deficit Disorder?

Happily, Asher does not suffer from this affliction. He is my chunky Philosopher’s Stone, helping me tune in to life and see the world. While Asher can be fussy and restless at home, he always settles into a state of observant rapture when on a walk around the pond or through the forest. During these moments—when he sees a tree that interests him, or some clouds—he has taken to holding up his hand, palm forward. The gesture appears a kind of greeting and communion with the world.

To be with him in his state of communion is contagious. I also start to notice, and not just the big picture, but the minute as well, the full fractal perfection of the world. Today Asher picked up a Red Alder leaf on our first stop by the trail. It had been eaten away to a beautiful lacy structure, and he carried it, in hand, for the rest of our walk and over the course of a couple more stops. It’s clear that he lives life still so unmediated by worries and distractions, and for moments it is possible to join him.

Interestingly, Asher soon forget about his leaf after we were back among his toys, within the delineated and familiar world of our small home. (Although he did come back from another recent walk with a piece of grass, which he seemed to forget, but which would turn up in his hands occasionally over the course of the following few days. I imagine him starting a tiny compost heap somewhere, tucked at the back of the closet.)

…

Sometimes, I forget, in part, why I live here. I get caught up in worry or buried in obligations. So I’m glad that I have created a situation where I occasionally stumble upon these touchstones that lead me back to life.

All it takes is a small dose of the luminous to make some of the more mundane realities of our world bearable. The sun sometimes an unexpected benediction in this rainy season.

Photo: a garden of moss and lichen growing on an old stump.

smitten

2007-10-21T20:20:00.000-07:00

This was supposed to be another post about climate change.

I’ve recently read The Big Melt: Lessons from the Arctic Summer of 2007 and it is a shocking document. Not shocking in the sense that it is new or unexpected, but shocking to have the litany of trouble we are in compiled and so succinctly presented. It was the most concentrated jolt of climate reality I have read since Elizabeth Kolbert’s series in the New Yorker last year.

I was halfway through writing my post when Asher started to fuss in the next room. As is my habit, I brought him in to bounce on my knee while I tried to keep working on some other research (looking into how to hook up a hot water boiler to our woodstove).

Asher had a very small mallet with him, something he’d been using on the xylophone, and he began to tap on my computer, beside the touch pad. I didn’t think much of it, but after one mighty whack, a serious error message popped up and the computer started dumping memory and shutting down.

I would not have believed it possible, but an eight month old with a toy mallet destroyed my computer. I couldn’t reboot and could not even get the recovery disks to work.

It wasn’t part of my capital expenditures plan for this quarter, but yesterday I ended up buying a new machine, on which I’m now writing. The timing is not great, but I was needing another computer soon anyway, as my old Toshiba was more than three years old and showing its age. (I don’t like the built in obsolescence of technology, but it’s impossible to opt out of if I want to maintain my professional life.)

I can’t get mad at Asher for wrecking my computer (and losing a good piece of writing)—he’s a budding little Luddite. When I got over the fact of losing the computer, I was impressed with his dexterity and force. He has a talent.

…

It’s harder to get over the accumulating evidence and devastating implications of climate change. The essential point of The Big Melt report is that things are worse than most have imagined, and will likely get much worse before our human carbon fart has settled out of the atmosphere, however many millennia hence.

In a recent review of the The Big Melt, a writer at Transition Culture entitled his post “The Single Most Depressing Thing I Have Ever Read,” and these are not folks known for their lite reading, documenting, as they are, the realities of energy decent in the 21^st Century.

The data and trends compiled in The Big Melt make a mockery of the constant refrain we hear about having ten years or twenty years to really address our human atmospheric footprint (to say nothing of our other trampled terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems) before some serious disruption of planetary systems will take hold.

As it turns out, and to the chagrin of optimists everywhere, it’s already too late—critical thresholds have been crossed, and are being crossed right now, as our global emissions continue to gain momentum. Even our emissions in Canada—a supposedly educated, wealthy, and sensitive nation—are still trending up with no serious policy discussion about what must be done.

When I say it is already too late, I mean here that it is too late to come away from climate change with our comforts and habits intact. The choice now is between serious and far-reaching climate disruption on the one hand and biotic catastrophe on the other. Of course, it’s hard to motivate people by saying, “Look, if we all work really hard, make tremendous sacrifices, and unite in common cause, we may see out this century in a greatly diminished and impoverished way.” We may survive long enough, at least, to give our heads one last shake.

But people are not changing their habits or their governments, so I think a little reality can’t hurt.

…

The Big Melt makes clear one of the key difficulties we face in mounting an effective and coordinated policy response to our prodigious greenhouse gas emissions. The problem, as the authors describe, is one of “scientific reticence.” This describes the built-in scientific mechanism of caution and understatement. Scientists are not by nature subject to rash declarations.

When this professional reticence is further filtered through the extensive scientific, administrative, and political review process of a body like the IPCC (Nobel Peace Prize not withstanding), there emerges an overly rosy picture—or something that can be read as such. Feeding on this tendency to understate, the politicians in power, cautious of disrupting the mood of the electorate (or, more cynically, the mood of their corporate masters), undertake the final dissolution of any impulse toward real action. So we go on diddling.

Increasingly, I’m convinced that a meaningful response to climate change and human excess will not be initiated in Ottawa, Washington, or in the offices of the United Nations, in some brilliant act of political wisdom and bravery.

Rather, a real response will always come back to the individual—not in the manner of an enlightened consumer, buying fluorescent lights and driving a Prius, but in the manner of rebuilding our own social, economic, and community relationships, from the ground up. I already see this happening, where I live, even if in small and still insignificant ways.

Of course, we also remain locked into the larger economic and political systems, our efforts at relocalization peripheral to the main show. But when the larger systems begin to slide, I'm confident these local relationships will find their place and offer some hope, despite my pessimism.

Photo: the culprit.

sporadic growth

2007-10-17T17:43:00.000-07:00

In the woods,
the fungi are everywhere—
bursting through the earth
to release their spore, upon
the millions of millions,
to the green, moist air.

I favour the theory that
mushrooms came from outer space
(if not the rest of us)
carried to the upper atmosphere
of some distant planet,
by the force of
random molecular motion
and carried off in the solar winds,
ethereal emissaries of the galaxy
finding, in time, a young
and soupy planet, ripe with
the primal life of our crude oil
still breathing in the sun.

The fungi act at home now,
in their otherworldly way. They
have found their niche among
fibrous roots and things in decay,
sprouting, like great ears and noses,
the sensory organs of the forest,
listening and waiting for us to pass.

Photo: My friend Donna ordered me some shitake plugs and a bag of straw impregnated with oyster mushroom mycilium for my birthday. Here the box, just arrived, bursting with growth, the instructions half consumed.

before the rains

2007-10-16T19:36:00.000-07:00

In documenting our lives here, I often find myself beginning a post with an update on the weather. The weather has a reputation as a dull topic, among the smallest of small talk, but when you live largely outside, as we do, the weather takes on a much greater significance. (If weather makes up the daily physics of life, then climate is our metaphysics.)

It’s how I start my days—first guessing the time by the quality (or absence) of light, then gauging the sky through the skylight above our bed. Oftentimes, the awareness of rain, its soft patter, precedes full consciousness. Those days it can be harder to get up and face the endless and ever renewing list of jobs around the place.

But always, when I do find myself up, the pleasures of life on our homestead surpass any complaints about the weather, and I find myself engaged in some task or other about the land. I slip away, when I’m able, for moments to write or keep on top of some income-related project.

…

And after an unexpectedly beautiful weekend, it seems that we are back to gray skies and rain. It’s difficult—on a lovely, sunny day—to remember how a constant wash of precipitation can interfere with one’s intentions for projects on the land. It’s tempting, on such a sunny fall weekend as we just had, to sit back and simply appreciate this place, but there is little time for contemplation. We are still very much in the active phase of our neohomesteading practice.

Our existence here is always circumscribed by the realities of food and shelter, and the work required to provide these necessities. It reminds me of the Marvell poem, To His Coy Mistress, “But at my back I always hear / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” In our case, we not only have time, which seems to pass ever more quickly now we have a child, but also the rain and snow rushing up to meet us.

Generally, when the snow starts flying, we hunker down while unfinished projects and errant piles of scrap lumber are slowly buried, for a few days, or a few weeks. When winter really settles in it’s good to be able to focus on indoor projects—like sewing, or writing—not to fester with regrets about the lack of firewood or the unfinished kitchen.

Last year, we had our first major snow at the end of October. I’m hoping for a longer, gentler fall, given our cool, wet summer, but I’m not counting on it. If the weather could ever be counted upon, that time is past. Even the seasons are uncertain now.

…

Our current land project, which I have mentioned a few times now, is to move our kitchen out of its current, open-air location, and into a space where we will have heat, a floor for the kids, and a few other amenities to boot. I’m happy to report that we are making good progress, and well on track for making the switch over within a couple of weeks.

The new kitchen project is not to the same standard of “natural” building as our two small houses, but it’s inexpensive and many of the materials are salvaged or scrounged.

A few days ago some neighbours invited us over to pick through their “slabs.” These are the off-cuts from the milling process, usually the outside wood and bark of the tree, which are often thrown onto the burn pile. We loaded three pick up truck fulls and are using them a lot in the new building. They aren’t perfect, dimensional lumber by any means, but for this kind of organic, provisional building they are perfect, and bring some rustic charm.

The women and children were away from the property this past weekend, leaving Dan and I to devote our energies to the kitchen project, surviving on toast and sausages. (It’s not that I can’t cook, I very much like to cook, but at times like this I am able to subsist on a very simplified diet.)

We made progress on a couple of fronts including hooking up electricity and wiring in sockets, lights, and switches—mostly Dan’s doing, with the help of our new friend, Chris. In order to get enough power to the kitchen we had to pretty much rewire the entire property, cobbling together a few pieces of salvaged burial cable for the main power line. And of course, electricity is not something you want to cross. It demands a level of attention and care beyond the requirements of rough carpentry.

We also finished the walls in the kids play area so that I can work on other kitchen jobs while having Asher close at hand. Asher, for his part, is much more interested in the saws, nails, and pieces of wire than he is in blocks or kids toys, so it can still be hard to contain him in the play space. Still, we see progress where we can.

Now we just need to plumb the kitchen, install the wood stove, finish the walls, and figure out what we are going to do with the ceiling. Right now the roof is galvanized steel with no insulation. The main problem is that when it rains hard, the noise can be overwhelming and drowns out all attempts at communication. We are trying to figure out a cheap and simple way to dampen the sound, provide some thermal insulation, and avoid problems with moisture and condensation. Ideas welcome.

…

And we just picked up our next pair of WWOOFers yesterday—a couple from France, Nicholas and Audrey. They will be with us for two weeks, helping to get the gardens ready for the winter, working on drainage, splitting firewood, and the ever-renewing job of pulling Scotch broom.

It’s good, when you invite unknown people into your lives, to feel they will fit in. Zena, made a great meal of lasagna for their first meal with us and we splurged on a bottle of B.C. wine shared six ways. We all have a good feeling for Audrey and Nicholas. They both work in the theater, so should be well suited for our small homesteading drama here. Hopefully, with their help, we will be ready when the rain and snow hit in earnest.

Photo: the new temporary kitchen under construction.

weeds and economics

2007-10-12T17:15:00.000-07:00

It’s not sustainable, but some of my best ideas come on the brief drive into town or to the local café.

(Since hooking up the satellite internet at home, I limit these auto excursions to twice a week, simplifying my planning quite a bit and forcing me to cluster my meetings, errands, and thinking time. In the car, my thoughts are allowed some space since we don’t have a radio, and the roads are familiar to me. It's one of the few times when I can attain a certain stillness these days. I’ll need to step up my meditation practice again when peak oil starts hitting home or when we get around to hooking up a radio in the car.)

This week I was driving along on my regular Tuesday morning outing when I realized the solution to my chicory dilemma.

I’d decided to experiment with roast chicory as a coffee substitute (or coffee extender) and as local form of roasted hot beverage. Chicory grows in abundance around here, and it makes sense to put it to use. As one reader commented on my first mention of chicory, “I grew up on "New Orleans" style coffee, compliments of a southern grandma. I prefer the chicory these days.” Her suggestion, and a good one, I think, is not to wait until coffee is no longer available, but start blending now.

But the dilemma was this: although chicory grows well in these parts, its main niche is along the sides of the roads. The roadside doesn’t strike me as a good place to harvest a root for consumption.

The answer was pretty obvious, I suppose, but it took a bit of a leap. Even though chicory is largely considered a weed, it doesn’t mean that it can’t be cultivated. My realization coincided with the right time for seed harvest, it appeared, as I pulled over and started plucking seed pods, just a few late flowers still hanging on the tough stems.

Yesterday morning, I scruffed the seeds in the soil along the edge of our driveway. Here, I am confident, we won’t be spraying defoliants or leaking too many auto fluids. Hopefully I will have local, if not organic, chicory to experiment with next fall.

…

On a more troubling note, I was alerted about another community meeting last night. In this case, the meeting was arranged by the regional district and regarded a rezoning application for a chunk of land not far upriver from where we live. The proponents want to rezone the land to allow for a go-cart and motocross “park.”

After wolfing down my dinner, I hurried to the top of our road where I met up with a couple of neighbours and drove down to the community centre. If the local trestle across the river were in working order I could bike to the meeting in 20 minutes, but as it was, we had to drive out to the highway and back inland, about a 40 minute trip.

We arrived to a very full community centre—a few hundred people packed into a large, cinderblock gymnasium. It was apparent who was who from the moment we walked in.

The proponents have a membership club for the island and they had brought their people out in force. These folks, the people in favour of the zoning change, had largely taken up their seats on the right side of the room, and along the right edges. The “No” people, many sporting red “We Say No” stickers, generally a more colourful and eclectic looking bunch, stuck mostly to the left side of the room. More than anything, I recognized the footware of the valley folks—sandals, garden clogs, and Blundstones—while white sneakers and leather riding boots predominated among the motor enthusiasts.

I chose to mingle, and took up my seating on the right side of the auditorium, but near the aisle. I tucked my own tell-tale boots beneath the chair, but I imagine my broad cultural allegiances and markers were still glaringly clear.

The entire evening proceeded as a strange ritual of community theatre.

First there were a couple of presentations, one, rather stiffly and inaudibly delivered by a representative of the go-cart club for the island—an older, family woman—and one by a rather slick representative of the proponent. The proponent’s man was good, also a family man, an MC kind of guy telling stories about riding with his teen son and the values of responsibility and family instilled through the sport. He anticipated and gave credence to the critics, while showing how benign and family loving is the whole motocross and go-carting proposal. I could almost be lulled into believing him. The most galling moment, perhaps, was when he described, in support of his general argument about the inherent value of the sport, how, in motocross, one lives “more life in five minutes than most people do in a month.”

It begs the question of our lives, and our sense of being in the world, but the forum was not right for such philosophical discussion.

After the presentations, the people were invited to have their say, beginning with residents of the area. We dutifully lined up reiterating a few themes: mostly regarding the obvious problems one would expect from citing a noisy, busy land use in the middle of a quiet, sensitive area.

The lot in question is a couple of miles upstream from us bordering on a small Provincial park and the Koksilah River. As it turns out the lot is a couple of miles downstream from the large, fresh clearcut logging I wrote about recently. Wedged somewhere between this industrial logging zone and the would-be motocross park is the last tiny pocket of valley-bottom old growth forest left in the entire region, where I'd hiked a couple of weeks back.

This whole valley and its ecological and economic networks are very much on my mind. I don’t want to lose what we seem only just to have come upon, this sense of home and I've been working to figure out how I can contribute to a larger, sustaining vision for the valley.

The rezoning application for the motocross park showed up as another flashpoint in the clash around our society’s relationship to place. In Wendell Berry’s terms, it is the consumptive and exploitative versus the regenerative and nurturing.

More and more, I see these locales where disparate visions of life are grinding up against one another, all of these flashpoints gathering into a great firestorm around the world as people everywhere take a last stand to protect their homes and their land.

Episodes like this rezoning application and public meeting can take on an apocryphal weight, when I allow myself to take in the larger context of our planet.

I didn’t feel very articulate though—I’m better when I can sit with a coffee and work out my ideas in writing. I did, however, talk a bit about our family’s decision to move to the area, and about the quality of this place that set it apart from the other properties we looked at: silence. Almost everywhere else was adjacent to highways and roads, with the constant rush of cars and of trucks. In our place now, we can hear the very distant hum of the highway on a quiet night, but the hills surrounding our valley provide a usually, and increasingly rare, quiet soundshed.

It took me a while to get used to the quality of quiet here, but now I need it. In the absence of industrial noise— among the sounds of the land, insects, and birds—a place opens up and reveals itself. Sitting by the pond on a quiet evening, watching turtles with Asher, the world can appear as it is, in its fullness and its emptiness.

Or perhaps it is that quiet opens us up, and allows something more of a place to enter our spirits. In any case, it is a balm, and I treasure the quiet here.

I had not read the acoustical report commissioned by the proponent, but I attested to my experience of the valley and of how sound travels, echoing off the hills. Dan works in the yurt across the valley some days and we call him home for dinner, not with the cell phone, but with cupped hands: “Yo Dan. Dinner.”

The other thing I felt obliged to point out, considering myself something of an economist, was that I did not see how the application for rezoning fit within a plan for sustainable local development. Not only is this form of recreation dependant on fossil fuels—which can only grow ever more precarious and expensive—but by its invasive nature, motocross and go-cart racing will displace many of the gentler forms of economic and recreational activity in the valley.

Never mind my spirit or my sense of being in the world, it would be damn silly economic and social policy for the regional district to disregard the Official Community Plan and go ahead with the rezoning. It seems to me they could have made this determination without putting a damper on my Thursday evening.

I tried to make the best of the circumstances, but I have to say that it was a largely joyless evening. The lighting was harsh, the seats hard and unsupportive, and the level of seething anger and fear a dull undertone to the proceedings. Beyond the cultural interest, and a few entertaining moments, it was not where I wanted to be. I wanted to be at home, in our quiet and dark valley.

It is disheartening, compelled to spend an evening thus, to speak against what seems, on the face of it, a blatantly bad idea. But bad ideas so often seem to go forward with the mute approbation of the masses and so we step up to the PA system and have our say.

It puts me in mind of David Pollard’s thoughts on the notion of “joyless responsibility.” Most forms of responsibility, as for family and land, come along with an inherent joy and sense of human satisfaction, but with the state of the world and of our society: “sometimes we have to take responsibility that is joyless, a burden, a thankless chore.” Last night was such a burden.

…

My friend Victor and I left after a couple of hours, by which time we had a strong sense for the positions and tone of the evening. We stopped in at the local pub briefly for a game of pool and a decompressing glass of beer.

It was a relief when Victor dropped me off, his headlights washing over the galvanized tin of our roof, a few LED Christmas lights distinguishing the kitchen.

I walked up the drive, past the stretch where I had earlier shaken loose the chicory seeds. I’m looking forward to their purple flowers and roasted depth of their roots.

Photo: one of the last chicory flowers, along the side of the road.