Fifty Shades of Black (12 page)

 

 

It's a Jungle Out Here

A
nother winter. I've been here before. I've passed winters in the Atlas mountains of North Africa and the boggy suburbs of London, England; I've shivered through winters in Quebec, in PEI and in Ontario, north and south—but the flat-out weirdest winters I've ever gone through are right here on Salt Spring Island.

Un-winters, really. The place never stops being green. Several shades of green. They're darker than your spring and summer greens—but green! Tell that to somebody in Thunder Bay trying to get their car engine to turn over on a minus 40 degree morning. And something vegetative is always pumping out new growth here, every month of the year. Bizarre bushes I've never seen before popping blossoms in December, shedding leaves in March. That kind of thing doesn't happen in Yellowknife or Corner Brook. Or Edmonton or Toronto.

I'll tell you another thing that doesn't happen too often in a Canadian winter. It's the thing that happened to me the other morning. I'm out on my front porch to get some wood for the fire and suddenly there's an outboard motorboat revving by my ear.

It wasn't an outboard motorboat; it was an Anna's hummingbird. A smidge of iridescent feathers about the size of your thumb that weighs as much as that quarter in your pocket. Alive and foraging in Canada. At the end of November.

I thought I was hallucinating but it turns out it's true—this one species of the family of the world's smallest bird does overwinter in the nethermost regions of British Columbia. They haven't been doing it for long—Arizona and California are their preferred wintering grounds. The first recorded Great White North sighting occurred in the 1950s just north of Victoria. Experts estimate there are maybe five to six hundred nesting females on Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland. And in case you're wondering who Anna was, she was a nineteenth-century duchess. Anna Massena, the Duchess of Rivoli.

Cynics say there's no such thing as miracles but is it not just slightly miraculous that I could have a hummingbird thrumming at my ear in Canada at the end of November?

Close enough for me. I know what that hummer was after, too—the feeder that I took down six weeks ago because I thought all the hummingbirds had gone south. Hummingbirds are tiny but they aren't meek. The bird was buzzing me to tell me to get with the program.

Point taken. The hummingbird feeder is out there again, full of hummingbird nectar—three parts water to one part sugar. It could freeze, of course. Salt Spring winters are mild but this ain't Honolulu. So I take it in last thing at night and put it out before dawn. No return visits yet, but what the heck? It isn't even Christmas. And that's just early spring to an Anna's hummingbird.

 

 

Island Hopping

H
ow unlikely is this? I'm sitting in a rec centre in the middle of a Gulf Island in the middle of the afternoon of a Canadian winter day when four women with flowers in their hair, one of them strumming a ukulele, weave down the aisle in muumuus bedecked with garlands of flowers, singing . . . Hawaiian love songs?

It happened. And I wasn't dreaming, drinking or ingesting dubious chemicals.

It wasn't all that unusual when you think about it—this is Salt Spring Island, after all. And if we're not the national melting pot we're at least the tossed salad of Canada.

We live here at the behest of First Nations people who called this island home for at least a couple of millennia before we showed up. And even before Canada was a country we had substantial black settlements from one end of the island to the other. In 1895 a Victoria newspaper reported that Salt Spring was inhabited by “160 English, 50 Scots, 20 Irish, 22 Portuguese, 13 Swedes, 2 Norwegians, 34 Americans, 10 Japanese, 1 Egyptian, 2 Germans, 1 Patagonian,” and, according to the reporter, “90 half breeds and 40 coloured.” Unquote. No political correctness in 1895.

Ah, but there's one group of Salt Springers on the list that you wouldn't find in many parts of Canada then or now. Between the ten Japanese and the one Egyptian the report speaks of six “Sandwich Islanders.”

Those would be Hawaiians. And that would be the reason for the four women swaying down the aisle of the recreation centre with flowers in their hair and a Hawaiian love song on their lips.

Hawaiians—Kanakas they are called here—are alive and well on Salt Spring. Have been since the mid-1800s when their ancestors came here to work as contract labourers for the Hudson's Bay Company fur traders. The Kanakas were — are — versatile and talented people. The fur trade died but the Kanakas diversified—fishing, farming, logging, construction—even politics. Mel Couvelier, who was once BC's finance minister, was a Kanaka descendant of the Mahoi and Douglas families of Salt Spring.

By and large, though, Salt Spring's Kanaka community was a pretty well-kept secret—until 1970 when a Hawaiian newspaper got wind of it. The
Honolulu Advertiser
turned what it called The Lost Hawaiians into a front-page story. It teamed up with CP Air to fly a whole raft of Salt Spring Kanakas to Hawaii free of charge, where they were wined and dined and introduced to a princess of the Hawaiian royal family who embraced them and asked, “Why have you been gone so long?”

“Well, Princess,” said one of the Salt Springers, “we didn't realize you were looking for us.”

That's how the Kanakas stay alive and well on Salt Spring. They sing their songs; they dance their dances. They keep their stories alive. And just when you're not expecting it, they give you a playful poke in the ribs.

 

 

The Naked Truth

T
en years ago, a war broke out on Salt Spring. The People versus Texada Land Corporation, an Alberta-based consortium, and the bone of contention was five thousand acres of pristine, undeveloped Salt Spring forest. The stakes were high and simple: Texada wanted to clear-cut the land and sell off the bald lots. The people thought not.

The war was fought in all the usual ways that non-shooting wars go. Sit-ins. Rallies. Songs were sung, speeches were made, letters were written, politicians were poked to see if they could be dislodged from their fences. Mort Ransen, the filmmaker who gave us
Margaret's Museum
and a long-time resident of the island, put out a hilarious, biting documentary called
The Money, The Money, The Money
(which was the explanatory mantra actually chanted by one of the Texada owners when asked why a Calgary company had the hots for Salt Spring timber—but I digress).

All the usual protest bases were covered but there was a serious lack of cash. Protests cost money. How to raise it? Someone said: Why not put out a calendar? Why not . . . a nude calendar?

Sounds pretty mundane now—nude calendars for charity are a dime a dozen these days—but a decade ago, this was provocative stuff. And Salt Spring was pretty much a perfect springboard for a nude calendar. For one thing, the island had Howard Fry, an internationally famous fashion photographer, lately retired, who was willing to lend his talents. For another thing, the island had the, uh, requisite natural resources for a nude calendar. Beautiful women. Lots of them. Too many, in fact, for a mere twelve-month calendar, as it turned out. In the end, thirty-seven amateur but passionate models made the final cut. They were photographed by island lakes, in island farmyards, on island mountaintops and peeping out of island old growth. All natural surroundings and all
au naturel
.

Was it successful? It was a sensation. The story was picked up by the
Vancouver Sun
, then
The Globe and Mail
, then
Harper's Magazine
. Popular, too. Over a hundred thousand dollars was raised from calendar sales. Which contributed significantly to the successful resolution of the Salt Spring/Texada Corp. war. The Calgary developers were sent packing (albeit with a fat cheque in their carpetbag); the land was saved and covenanted against future depredation. As a matter of fact, I took my dogs for a walk through part of it the other morning. Saw one blue heron, two eagles, a family of otters, several deer . . . and zero logging trucks.

 

 

 

Pecha Kucha Power

S
o I get this phone call one evening and a voice I don't recognize says, “Arthur, we'd like to invite you to a special event next Friday. It's a PATCHOOKACHA!”

“Gesundheit,” I say into the phone.

My bad. The lady wasn't suffering from hay fever, she was inviting me to a Pecha Kucha. A very specialized presentation night, where a few selected people from various walks of life get to talk about their passion in a strictly controlled format.

Pecha Kucha
, a Japanese term because that's where the idea began, means approximately “sound of chit-chat.” Here's how it works: People get together in a space. It can be a living room, a town hall, a community centre—mine happened in a barn—and they mix and mingle. Presently, the formal part of the evening begins. A speaker gets up and talks about his or her passion, while slides are shown on a screen. Here's what makes it Pecha Kucha and not an evening of crashing boredom. Each presenter has exactly twenty slides to illustrate their presentation. Each slide is shown for exactly twenty seconds (there's a timer on the projector). This means nobody gets to talk for more (or less) than six minutes and forty seconds.

You will not fall asleep at a Pecha Kucha get-together.

There were six presenters at the Pecha Kucha night I attended. An island chef spoke of the circular equation that rules his life: Food is Love is Food. There was a photographer who doubles as a house and pet sitter. Her presentation was a series of photographs called “I Woke Up Here.” She took photos each day for years to, as she put it, remember where she'd been. We heard from a man whose passion is BC's spectacular answer to the cactus—the living fossil that's known as the monkey puzzle tree. We heard from a woman who sculpts in native island stone, and from a potter who tries to emulate the lines and forms of nature in clay. And we heard from a school principal whose passion is the children who mine the biggest, most dangerous resource site in all of the Americas—the garbage dump outside Guatemala City.

We heard all six presenters—each one for exactly six minutes and forty seconds—and then we all got up to mix and mingle again to talk about what we'd seen and heard and felt.

And it was fabulous. It was like a cocktail party that actually works. That barn was crackling with energy and creative spark. Which apparently is how it goes with Pecha Kucha. The phenomenon is going viral. That first Pecha Kucha night in Tokyo in 2003 has led to Pecha Kucha nights in 417 different towns and cities all around the globe including Vancouver, Victoria, Whistler and Salt Spring. One of the many great things about Pecha Kucha—aside from the fact that there's no admission charge, it's exciting as hell and it leaves you feeling supercharged as a teenager, only smarter—is the fact that it's democratic. No need to rent the Rogers Arena or bring in big-name, expensive presenters. That's top-down stuff. Pecha Kucha is bottom-up. Those are your friends and neighbours up there talking about their passions. If you want to find out more, just google “PKN.” That'll get you there, eventually.

And remember, the next time you're on a bus or in an elevator or standing in a lineup and someone behind you goes, “ah . . . ah . . . ptchKOOcha!”

Don't say gesundheit. Say, “Oh! Can I come, too?”

 

 

Whale Watching

W
e get a lot of tourists on Salt Spring in the summertime. They come in by ferry or by private boat or by seaplane so it really shouldn't have been all that noteworthy to see the party of six that came in by water a couple of weekends ago. They stopped off for lunch at Second Sister Island, then continued on into Ganges Harbour, probably to check out our Saturday market, as so many tourists do.

The lunch they had at Second Sister Island was, um, seal. Raw seal. The tourists? A pod of transient killer whales.

I knew something was up when I saw the red and black Zodiacs full of pink faces clustered together out in Long Harbour. Those boats belong to whale-watching companies in Victoria that exist to track down pods of orca and then transport boatloads of tourists to see them.

Call me Eeyore but I find it kind of sad, the whole whale-watching business. They use land spotters and boat spotters cruising in Zodiacs that can hit fifty or sixty knots. The animals are even tracked by satellite, so there's really nowhere to hide.

The Coast Guard did a good job looking out for the Salt Spring visitors. They made several marine broadcasts reminding the rubberneckers that they were watching an endangered species and to stay clear.

The rules say that no boats are to harass or get within a hundred metres of an orca, but an orca's sense of hearing has to be ultra-sensitive—they navigate by echolocation. Have you ever heard an outboard motor with your head under water? Even to a human ear a hundred yards away, it would sound like a chainsaw parked on your shoulder.

It's a double-edged sword. Sleek and lithe and long as a bus, up to nine tons in weight, the orca moves like a ballerina. It is a wonder of nature, and people should get to be wonderstruck by the majesty of these creatures. But if we mess them up through intrusive gawking, what's the profit?

Still, on the bright side, all those people ARE just gawking at the orcas; they're not shooting them, or capturing them to turn them into entertainment clowns in pens like SeaWorld in California or MarineLand in Niagara Falls. That wasn't true less than a generation ago.

And I'm happy to report that the machine gun at the entrance to Pender Harbour is gone. Not making that up. Less than a generation ago, orcas in BC waters were shot for sport. And as recently as 1960 there was a machine gun at Pender and others elsewhere in the Georgia Strait. Purpose: to, ahem, cull orcas. Government-approved, too. It was thought that they were “costing us money” by eating too many salmon.

There's an old Cree proverb that goes: “Until you catch the last fish, until you cut the last tree, until you poison the last river, then and only then will you understand that money cannot be eaten.”

The Harper government has recently “streamlined” the environmental assessment process for all of Canada. “Streamlined” means that nearly 90 percent of existing environmental assessment agencies have been evaporated. Government says the move will attract significant investment dollars.

No comment from the environment.