Candlestick Cove.

   

 In the stillness of a summer moonlit night, shadows define bright branches and sandstone beach rocks. The black sea sighs and mutters and leaves flicker with the passing of a fugitive breath of air.

In winter these islands show a cold and sometimes forbidding face but then at least we know where we stand. Here now, all is illusion that dances before our eyes,  - magic and spells.

A branch snaps and drifts to the ground. What was that? All our instincts say run, but we are frozen on enchanted ground. 

 Candlestick Cove.

I made this image using printer's ink rolled out on glass and then drawn into with reference to my sketch of Candlestick Cove at Nose Point, Saltspring island. I took a mono-print from the wet ink surface and then adjusted and modified it using a felt tip pen, ink washes and fine lines of white watercolour paint.

I was thinking about the many faces the Gulf Islands present to us, about the long history of First Nations among the islands, the short period of settler occupation and about my own spooky experiences while anchored in dark coves.

The Green Man.

The vegetable garden and orchard are showing how hours of labour can pay off as everything comes to fruition. We picked the plums today, the corn is ripe and ready for the freezer and Heather already has jars and jars of pickles and fruit. The food-dryer has been at full throttle for weeks and the freezers are chock a block. We get a lot of satisfaction from this yearly occupation and all the rest of the year we will be eating pumpkin and squash plus all those preserved vegetables and fruit. And this makes a large difference to our monthly food bill - and we eat so well.

Now could we not simply buy all this from the grocery market and save the hours of work? Sure, but there is a satisfaction in this growing business that is difficult to quantify. While I may joke about Heather being mugged and pulled under the leaves in the Zucchini patch, I know that behind the humour is an awareness that the garden is our contact with the life force of nature – the mystery itself, clad in green leaves.

Seeds, soil, water, sunlight and voila!

Exploring the coastline regional parks near Nanoose, BC

It's windy today and not really safe for the canoe on open waters so Adam and I drive along the rocky coast and visit small community parks. We have stopped at the Parksville tourist bureau and picked up some maps to go along with Adam's mother's advice. Our daughter works in the regional park planning office so her suggestions lead us to explore beautiful and interesting places, some still in the process of development. This part of the coast has filled up with many folks from cities and they have more varied expectations of their environment from the regular more industrial users of the land. Small regional parks like these are being developed and happily populated by families, joggers, walkers, scuba divers and, in our case, grandparents and their summer relatives. And what a great experience it is to explore the rocky headlands and beaches, backed by arbutus and fir clad slopes and dry summer grasses.

Adam tries fishing from some low tide rocks but somehow the possibility that he might actually snag a large fish on his homemade rod limits his fishing time this morning and we drive on to new parks. We take a timer selfie on a headland and this is so interesting that he determines to have a camera and small tripod too. All these activities and experiences.... you never know when one of them might stick with him into later years.

Adventure at Spyder Lake.

We drive down a gravel road and there is Spyder Lake*, just brimming full of fish for Adam, the obsessed fisherboy. He has made his own rod and reel and has a large artificial worm on his hook and immediately starts fishing among the minnows at the water's edge beside the yet to be launched canoe. At six coming on seven he is an inventive boy, probably pretty much like me at that age ( and continuing) .

 We slide the canoe in and head out on this calm, overcast early morning among a maze of small, gravelly, pine-clan islands. “Can I go ashore here to fish”? “Could you stop the canoe so the lure will sink?”and on and on..... So I decide to put aside my own wish to paddle around and look at things and let Adam satiate himself fishing. It takes some time, and while he fishes unsuccessfully from an island I have time to look around more carefully and get a feeling for the subtleties of this landscape. It feels very much like an eastern Canadian lake, something Tom Thompson-like, and when a pair of loons pause from fishing to call across the bay that seals it.

At long last Adam declares he is “Done fishing!”and I am free to paddle around with the boy plying his new paddle in the bow. An eagle screams from the top of a tree. Bass jump, but never into the canoe. Later Adam's dad will tell us that this eagle has learned to swoop down over fishermen's shoulders and steal their fish just as they are about to lift them into the boat.

Imagine getting a brush from an eagle's wing as your lunch flies away! Worth it!


* Spyder lake is north of Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island.

Small scale canoe adventure on the lower Englishman River

    

There is a thunderstorm lurking somewhere on the horizon but my grandson and I are itching to get going on the first adventure day of the week's activities.

We drive through light rain to the Englishman River and slide the Chestnut canoe down the bank into shallow water. Six year old Adam slithers after it, puts one foot inside and the canoe slips sideways from under him. He corrects just in time and soon we are off down the shallow summer-time river. The rain comes down in torrents.

Soon we come to the first rocky set of rapids, land to check them out and decide to lead the empty canoe down the edge. Adam takes the stern line and together we drag it through to calmer water. Almost immediately we come upon another chute and after scouting this one I decide that we can shoot it. We gather speed and rush downhill only to get hung up on shallows at the bottom. My elderly wood and canvas canoe creaks, leans to one side and Adam says anxiously ”Are we going to sink Granddaddy?” But no, I calmly step into the water, slide us into deeper water and we are off again, steering through narrow passages between rocks and soon we are into the calmer waters of the estuary.

Adam strokes away up in the bow with his new paddle that I have carved to fit him and we enter the strange world of high gravel bars that we wend our way through, still sliding down hill on a low and falling tide. Then the sea, some small breaking waves we bounce through around the point and finally we work together to haul the canoe on pieces of driftwood to the high tide line near a taking out place.

The storm had drifted off to sea, things are brightening up and it is now time to walk back along trail to get the car left at the dropping off place. We find wild blackberry vines and stop several times to gorge ourselves, learn to discriminate dark red from really ripe by taste test, and eventually the car is there ahead and we drive back to the beach. We load the canoe first and then eat our lunch companionably like intrepid voyageurs. Our short journey was exciting but nearly all of it was in shallow water - an adventure cut to size for a small boy and an elderly canoe.

From word to image.

“In the purity of the morning, I understand how much more there is to the world than meets the eye, I see that the world fails to dissolve into myth and dream only because one wills it not to. Now I begin to understand the meaning of that vision, Now I see the truth of it.”

'The perfection of the Morning' Sharon Butala

First published in 1994, I found this paperback at home and decided to re-read it. In the years that it sat on our bookshelf my own life experiences have brought me closer to understanding these final words of a thoughtful book. Sharon writes of things that we all at least vaguely intuit but she finds the words to express them - the role of the writer and of the arts in general. So easy to read, and, I would think, so challenging to express in words.

She writes of her life on a ranch near Eastend, Saskatchewan, a dry, wide open landscape, and of her struggles to grasp its true reality. A reality that for her is wider and deeper than its surface appearance of rocks and grasses.

The paintings I include were a co-operative effort between myself and two of my grandchildren ( 7and 4) and which were surely influenced by my reading of 'The Perfection of the Morning'. When they asked if I would 'teach them watercolours' I decided that I would do just that rather than take the easy way and simply let them mess around. It was tricky to guide their brush strokes and other technical matters but satisfying for all concerned. In a visual medium we were learning to conjure up a landscape that Sharon had written about so sensitively.

Courage

“Courage”. he said, and pointed towards the land,

“This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon”.

'The Lotus Eaters' Tennyson

My bamboo brush was loaded with what I had thought to be dark blue, but a broad sweep across the white paper told even my colour challenged eyes that this was really a wine colour. OK, I thought and used the remaining twist of the brush's hairs to draw in an island. A few more dabs of colour, a distant galley and I had stumbled into a page from Homer and his 'wine dark sea'. Ulysses, on his torturous way home from Troy has been storm blown beyond the known bounds of the world and while his crew cowers in fear and trembling he sights land by morning's light, tells them to have courage, there is land to leeward. That of the Lotus Eaters, it turns out and the beginning of a new adventure.

I remember telling Homer's story to an acquaintance some years ago who like the crew was in despair with no obvious passage through her life's travails. Sometimes we all need to turn to face into the future and say to ourselves 'courage', because no matter how faintly it shows itself there is something new on the horizon. No matter how dire things may seem this is not the end but a new dawn, a new beginning.

Clouds: looking at life from both sides now

Rows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air

                And feather canyons everywhere......

Joni Mitchell. Both Sides, Now

The chatty CBC weather person in Vancouver mentions that she can see interesting clouds through her office tower window – like popped corn. I hop outside and look up. Sure enough there are puffy balls of white and grey across my tree-narrowed upward view.

A sea of clouds scattered evenly across a blue sky. How insubstantial, a crowd of wanderers melding and breaking apart, drifting with the breeze. What is the subject? Just this forming and changing, always changing, in transition.

My life and yours.

Stieglitz took a series of cloud photographs in the 1920s he called 'Equivalents'.

You might wish to google this if you are interested in photography.

When I am far away on the stormy ocean tossed

It is busy in Ganges, our local town, with visitors celebrating Canada Day, July 1st. Here is a memory from our Pacific voyages about what Canada means for me.

At last the moon shows beneath the clouds, a sign that the long gale is coming to
 an end and we can resume our voyage to Australia. It took us a whole
 24 hours of sailing to make up the distance
 we had lost while hove to and drifting slowly back to New Caledonia.

We are four hundred miles off the east coast of Australia, the wind is gusting to forty knots and our schooner is hove-to in chaotic seas. This is the forth day of this gale and we are more than ready to move on to the end of our long voyage across the Pacific from our home in the Gulf Islands of British Columbia. I sit on my night watch, wedged into the cockpit, listen to my daughter Anne's music on the headphones and watch our big traditional gaff-rigged schooner poke her bowsprit high into the dark sky, heel lee rail under and slide away from the punch of the next breaking wave. She has been performing this dangerous dance for what seems like forever and has never missed a beat. So far.

Perhaps it is the music that sets my mind to wandering, a collection of tunes from 'Great Big Sea' about the 'Bluenose', the Myra River, about a vessel like mine running before a gale in the Atlantic, but I begin to think what it really means to be Canadian. Those songs are from the other side of the continent from my home, but like most wanderers I have a larger view of my country than I would have back on my island. There I might feel that Toronto was on the far side of the moon and Halifax in another orbit altogether, but now, hanging on until morning’s light, I am deeply touched by 'Farewell to Nova Scotia' singing in my ears.

The wind direction has shifted at last and is rapidly building a wicked cross sea. The regular wave pattern is now broken and chopped and this presents a new challenge. Our schooner staggers, looses her stride, smacks her broad stern hard down on the back of a wave and then shrugs, finds a new furrow in the seascape and carries on. I think of all those nameless east-coast fishermen from the past who stood on deck in seas like these and observed carefully how their schooners swam among the waves. They thought about how they would improve the design of the next boat they would build, perhaps a little flatter curve to the turn of the bilge, a steeper run to the stern. Slowly the design evolved that is keeping my ship and family safe from harm. ``Good old boat!``, I give the deck a pat just as a slosh of warm salt water trickles down my neck. I stand to check for shipping, catch the full roar of wind in rigging and crash of waves and then settle back to the music in my ears.

I am thinking about that country of mine far back around the curve of the earth: about those things we pretty much take for granted; our communities, our system of government, our social programs that reach out to support all of us; even those obvious things like the railways that were built for us by preceding generations. They were built by people like that nameless fisherman, like the creators of the music now playing in my ears. Step by step, piece by piece, like designing and building a boat, a lot of dedicated folk pouring out their lives to build a better country. A fair and generous community that we could be proud of, that could ride out storms and carry us and future generations safely home.

At last the moon breaks through the clouds and the wind is definitely easing. A few more difficult hours of bone shaking seas and by morning’s light we will hoist our sails again and resume our voyage westward.

Framing while walking, my dear Nudnik

A framed image. Quite flat, all elements carefully organized.

While there is information here, that is not the

intent of this art photograph.

Walking with the hiking club along the Ruckle Park waterfront, I chose to

trail along behind the rest so I could look around me , not engage in conversation, and use my camera. I must have been annoying to leaders intent on shepherding all along in one neat package.

A standard informational type photo.

And yet it is carefully composed.

I have recently started working in watercolours, little miniatures, using the caravan as my studio and I noticed right away how that practice was affecting my photographic awareness. The small paintings must keep things simple or they loose their effect. What is the essence of the scene? My lens selected carefully to encompass fewer elements. The photographs began to emphasis strong lines, textures, blocks of colour and tone. They became flatter and more severely ordered. More painterly, musical, or poetic perhaps.

A sailboat on a sparkling sea,A pretty standard informational picture

without the added tree frame that directs out attention.

I have included one standard informational type image of the walkers in Ruckle Park to show the difference. It is  more expansive, includes the background, a sense of perspective etc. It details a standard reality as we have come to expect from photographs. Neither type is 'correct' however, there is no right or wrong, they simply aim at different things.

By severely restricting the information within the frame we are lead to think about the twisted tree trunk and not boats and distant islands. Photography is about communication and here I have chosen one subject and emphasized it.

“Veery interesting, my dear Nudnik”* ( that's a line from 'Laugh-in', an old TV show some may remember.)

• *my writing program of course questioned 'Nudnik' and suggested 'nonstick'. I think there are some poetic possibilities in this dear robot.

The smooth skin and rough bark of the arbutus tree.

One dominant element that fills the frame makes a powerful statement.

The pitter-patter of the rain

We woke this morning to a genuine drenching rain, something rare around here on the south-west coast for many weeks. I took a walk around the place with the camera to see what I could see. A couple of fauns, the shine of wet maple leaves, grasses pressed down by the wet and the last of the foxgloves bowed over. The more I looked the more I saw. As if the act of looking was not just me looking but the world opening itself to my gaze.

All because it was too wet to do my usual chores and keep my eyes firmly focused on my work.

'Takutu', our Chestnut canoe.

We launched our 50 year old Chestnut canoe, 'Takatu'* in Fulford Harbour on Saturday and paddled around for a few hours. Those are the facts, but they doesn't tell the whole story. This wood and canvas canoe has been our life companion and has had many adventures, mostly as we paddled and camped our way through the Gulf islands of BC. The familiar stroke of our paddles, the surge and lift of the canoe and sounds of wind and waves was so evocative of a once younger couple of kids just starting out on their life's adventure together.

The weather forecast was not promising, North-west winds gusting to 50 km., so we selected a local launching site that should provide a sheltered lee and were soon running out the harbour along the southern shore before a gusty breeze. “Look”, says Heather, holding up her paddle as a sail, “see how fast we are sailing”! Oh, oh, I could see that the wind would soon force us into the beach at that rate and so we angled back across the bay seeking more shelter along the northern shore. Further out in the bay the gusts were powerful and kicking up a chop and it took some extra effort to keep the bow from blowing off down wind and carrying up with it out of the bay. Soon though we were skimming past the beacon and the Skeleton Islets, disturbing an eagle busy eating a large fish and nodding to some oyster catchers nesting on the rocks and then we were in the shelter of Indian Point at last. We gently nosed our way among the low tide seaweed, rolled up our pants, stepped out and pulled our canoe ashore. How good we felt, still filled with the adrenaline of our windy trip across the bay.

After a snack and stretching our legs we began a hard slog against the wind back up the northern shore, gaining shelter from every little bay and point of land. Whenever a gust arrived however we had to paddle directly into it or be blown onto the rocks. Dig the paddle in, lean into it, keep up a fast pace - we made good progress especially in the gaps between the gusts, and the closer we came to the ferry dock at the head of the bay the easier conditions became. We pulled ashore for lunch on a beautiful shell beach and sat and admired our canoe, red against the green seaweedy low tide beach. From there it was just a few more minutes back to the dock and the carry up to the car. A very satisfactory first paddle of the summer.

* We named our canoe 'Takutu' after a river in the Rupununi district of Guyana where we once lived and worked with CUSO.