It sort of feels like summer is over although we are enjoying a warm stretch here in mid-September that has brought sun and warm temperatures and calm winds to the island. This is more typical of the summers I remember from half my life ago, before we experienced extreme heat and drought. There was always a dry patch between the middle of July and the middle of October with a bit of rain usually in August and more at the beginning of September. But in the past 20 years that pattern has changed. This summer seemed like an anomaly.
But as a result of the warm spell we are having there is a second dawn chorus in full swing. Yesterday I recorded 24 birds including forest and ocean and this morning the birdsong was so overwhelming that I just from my porch I have already recorded 27 in less than a half hour. Visiting sparrows make up the interesting bits: Savannah, Fox, Lincoln and a White-throated Sparrow clear as day. All of them added to the list of this year’s birds, which is up to 315 now. It might yet hot 365, but it’s going to need some additions from the mudflats of Reifel sanctuary and October migrations in Ontario.
Here on the island, the rhythm has returned somewhat to the quieter days of the shoulder season. With a pleasant weekend coming up I have no doubt that we will be overrun by visitors. Another few weeks, when the rains return and the daylight grows shorter, our visitor levels will return to “we aren’t complaining” levels.
In the meantime, a pair of visitors to the inlet were taught the lesson we all know about how volatile and unpredictable the sea can be here. Two kayakers, after being unable to find good information online, resorted to ChatGPT for advice about paddling in Howe Sound. The ended up being caught in a strong wind – both inflow and outflow winds can come up in mere minutes – and capsizing. They were very lucky not to have been killed in the process.
Howe Sound is an extremely dangerous body of water. The only way to navigate here is paying attention to conditions that you are faced with and understanding how forecast models might imply particular changes for particular places based on wind direction and tide. It takes years of observation and local knowledge to properly navigate here, especially in a small craft. Our local kayak shop supplies paddlers with this information tailored specifically for the moment you are setting out. That’s the reason it is hard to find good knowledge. The knowledge is context specific and changes by the hour or minute. If there is a small craft warning issued and the water looks calm, it may be perfectly safe to paddle. Or you may begin your paddled and few minutes later get caught up in what seems like two meter waves that come out of nowhere.
Yesterday I travelled into the city across a beautiful calm sea, and Adam Taylor and I spotted five or six humpback whales. Adam, who has done more for ocean awareness and conservation on our island than anyone I know, said that he thinks September and October are the high seasons for humpbacks now. It’s hard to know what their rhythms are as they travel through our waters or take up summer residence, but the herring schools start maturing around now so the whales of the Salish Sea have less urgency to head south to their birthing grounds. Some whales even stay well into the winter now before making the journey.
Whales are new to the inlet. It has been five generations or so since we had regular folks noticing whale behaviour, because they were almost hunted to extinction. They are back now, and people like Adam, whose family have lived for more than a hundred years on Bowen have memories of the cetaceans that live around us. We talked about a famous pilot whale that for years was the only cetacean in the Sound who was always drawn to the hum of crew boat engines and tugs.
TH generations of people who have lived in these parts are being honoured in a couple of ways. Pauline Le Bel and I have reached our first fundraising goal for the Squamish Welcome Figure Project which will be installed at the Community Centre once it’s completed. This first $15,000 allows us to pay our career Xwalacktun to begin work on the log he has secured for the carving. The next $15,000 we raise will pay for him to complete and deliver it and to host a ceremony and event to have it installed. You can donate here.
This week’s Undercurrent contained a story about another project honouring ancestors, as the Nexwlelexwm/Kosei Peace Park will open next weekend. The Park recognizes the Japanese-Canadian families that settled here in the early part of the 20th century and who were interred during the Second World War along with many other Japanese settlers on the west coast as part of an egregious chapter in Canadian history. This history will be commemorated at Sandy Beach where apple trees have been planted taken from cuttings of the original tress planted by the Yamada family who homesteaded on King Edward Bay.
Corina Enache îs fast become one of my "must read" writers. Her perspective and reflective capacity as practitioner is inspiring. Her deep understanding of story and narrative and her wealth of experience gives her lots of material from which to generate beautiful essays. And her generous engagement with commentators and connections is exemplary.
Her latest post is about "making rules you are willing to be bound by" and has a number of gems. I encourage you to read the full thing, because among other things it will probably change your mind about pirates. But if you are a person who works with groups, this story will land with you:
…the alarm rings, and the anxiety arrives on top of me before my feet are on the floor. Did I account for everything in the design? Is there enough time for all the topics? Can I do a good job?
And then we are in the conference room and it is about to start, serious men in a serious room, a tidy little chess game, and Anansi is somewhere at the back of my mind smiling, and I hear myself say, before we begin I want to draw your attention to this chair. A red plush chair at the back with a small bell on it, and it had taken me some time to find one. I want one of you to be our disrupter for the day. Your only job is to watch us, and any time you feel something is missing, that the energy has gone, that we are too boring or too structured, or you just feel we need disrupting, go and sit in that chair and ring the bell, and all of us will stop whatever we are doing and look at it and change it.
My colleague Jen Williams and I decided that we were going to try this. But it requires this of the host:
I could not free those men, dear reader, I could not make them pirates, nobody has ever freed anybody. What I could do was write one new obligation into the room and put it where I could not reach it. A chair, a bell, a named role, and a rule with teeth, which is that when it rings we stop, agreed in advance and binding on all of us including me. I could have built a hundred other things into that room. I could have kept the disruption in my own hands where it was safe and deployed it when I judged the moment right, and I did not, because smuggled freedom belongs to the smuggler, and a disruption I kept in my own hands and deployed at the clever moment would have been one more thing I was doing to them. The bell was for somebody else to ring and I put it at the back of the room in a red chair and gave it away before the day started. The agenda I had worked on for a week, the timing I was anxious about at six that morning, the whole careful structure that was the only thing standing between me and a room full of serious men deciding I was a strange woman, all of it surrendered in advance to whoever felt like walking to the back of the room. Written into the agreements, it was theirs, and I was under it with them…
Then I stopped caring whether anyone rang it, because the point was that for one day the room contained a thing a person could be, someone who stands up in front of his superiors and rings it, and that whoever saw that done would know it was survivable.
That, dear reader, is really what is asked of us.
We don’t actually “host emergence.” We host interactions and work with constraints that change what is possible. In human systems, interpretation matters too: how people, including facilitators, make sense of what is happening changes what happens next.
Some good recent reads which didn’t make it into full blog posts:
Peter Levine offers a close reading of Wendell Berry’s poem, September 2: “If his leaves are his writings, I do not think they will soon dissolve.”
A beautiful Guardian article about slime moulds and the people who study them: “So confounding were they that Carl Linnaeus, who spent his life taxonomising life, lumped them into a genus called “chaos”.”
“We are fixing up the record” says Jungurrayi Simms Otto in this short and beautiful documentary. He is summarizes the work of a collaboration between the English artist Patrick Waterhouse and a slew of Warlpiri artists as they revise historical records of the British colonial occupation of the Warlpiri homelands .
Who doesn’t like some deeply evidence based takedowns of terrible research or policy? Here’s a couple from Dougald Lamont. One on a “racist and sexist” report from the MacDonald-Laurier Institute on the productivity cost of DEI policies in Canadian universities and another that dismantles the case for Alberta separatism because, well, its based on fever dreams. That one got a follow up.
Issues of Aboriginal rights and title are important in British Columbia, and actually have been since 1851. Political mischief has turned these issues of fundamental justice and law into a political football. As Canadian citizens we have to understand the LAW of the situation not just the politics. Aaron Pete, another voice I dont always agree with, has a good piece on this today.
Through my library I subscribe to The Paris Review, one of the world’s premier literary magazines. The first story in this issue is called Bubble by Angie Sijun Lou and I highly recommend it. A story of a Spokane high school student who is sent to her father’s home village to China. A beautifully crafter coming of age story for introverts. Lots of her writing is also available on her website.
Pointing you to a recent podcast from The Hub, my favourite source of conservative policy opinion, on the role of private capital in public infrastructure.