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I apologise to my peers for the light blogging recently. Thank you for holding up the blog-o-sphere while I have been busy. Man! I’ve been busy!I was fortunate to join some Sisters on Saltspring Island last weekend for an annual weekend together. We share food, music, books, recipes, patterns and so much more. This tradition started with my Grandmother, Ivy and her daughters and then one year they extended their hands to their daughters. We have a tablecloth that we write highlights on every year and someone takes it home and carefully embroiders the additions into a permanent record. Grandma Ivy is gone now, but she attends every year nonetheless, through our photographs and stories.
Saltspring Island is a magical place, it reminds me of Metchosin with it’s pastoral vistas of grazing sheep and astonishing views of un”developed” shoreline. The Island is a mecca for artists and artisans, foodies and environmentalists. From the time you disembark from the tiny, open ferry, you are greeted with open arms, friendly smiles and a sense of standing outside of time. I wanted to live there. I still do. Even though I am from Vancouver Island and I can remember a time when my island felt just the same. Rural.
I bet just about everybody feels that way when they visit Saltspring. If everybody moved there, like they did on the big Island, it would become another satellite city of faceless corporate consumerism. Big box mcjobs crowding out the Saturday market and absent offshore ownership contributing nothing to the real economy.
One thing I really admire about small agrarian or resource based societies is that they tend to celebrate the arts. Folk art and music, poetry and punditry. And politics. In a community based on co-operation, farming, the arts and tourism one thing they all agree on is sustainability. So imagine my surprise late Friday morning to witness a tanker passing through the narrow straight on it’s way to Crofton, I presume.
Later that same evening we went for a walk down to the beach at sunset, the water was that calm you get with a slack tide and the colours tinged with the golden hue that only sunset can paint. Suddenly we became aware of a fire ignited on the shore across the Straight. Thick, black, toxic smoke spread across the otherwise clear sky. We watched for several minutes before we started to smell the acrid smoke. We rushed up the hill and took refuge indoors and watched the spectacle unfold to it’s conclusion, which took hours. The next day we heard through the grapevine that it was a yacht burning to the waterline. There were occasional explosions of propane and other flammables as some brave souls towed her out to sea, away from other vessels.
Sunday, when I returned home on the news I heard that Naniamo harbour had suffered a large Deisel spill too.
One week later, the Malahat was closed for two days because a tanker truck overturned and spilled close to 40,000 litres of gasoline into Goldstream River. The driver was alledgedly impaired. That strikes me as an allegory of our fossil fuel induced behavior as a nation. And our politics.
No Tankers. No pipelines. No GMO agribusiness. BC is not for sale. Canada is not for sale.
It is ^NOT Paradise Island.
Maybe it was until 1989.
I have lived here 23 years.
There are 10,000 car trips on the main road thru and about town everyday.
Renting is the pits and jobs are scare.
It is paradise for people who own property and have money.
Sounds like Vancouver Island. I remember the days growing up here, before the Corporation came to town. Back then you could leave highschool for a good job, buy a house on an acre for $80,000 and most of the forests were crown lands and we could go freely, build a cabin on a lake…
The word got out and Campbell came to town and Paradise was lost. If we want the right to carve out an existance here now, we are going to have to fight for it.