Checking Out the Neighborhood

The winter is upon us with fearsome cold weather and wind; fearsome for us, anyway, with lows in the low 20’s F.  It’s not Minnesota or Alaska, but it’s more cold than I need.  So, given the cold weather, we chose yesterday, for some unaccountable reason, to drive around our next northern neighborhood—Delta, B.C. and particularly western Delta.

 Delta is exactly what it says: it’s the delta of the Fraser River, and like most deltas, it’s a sumptuous agricultural area.  It’s easy to forget that Vancouver is a river town because it’s also an ocean town with Burrard Inlet to the north and the Fraser delta to the south.  So, we were driving around in this freezing weather through farm land, filled with farm homes and farm industry of one sort and another.

There’s a lot to see that I hadn’t seen before.  We started in southwestern Delta on the Band Land of the Tsawwassen Nation.  There’s an exquisite cemetery (I’m a big fan of cemeteries…they say a lot about us).  It’s tiny with very simple wooden crosses for the most part, some standing straight, some easing into other positions as they will over time.  It looks old and it looks cared for, but not with that immaculate maintenance look that most urban cemeteries have.  And down the road from that, a spectacular ‘abandoned’ boat, which is only to say that it’s a lovely old wooden boat that is unlikely ever to go to sea again, but is conserved (if not preserved because preservation was just not in the cards) right next to a wooden house that is still preserved.  Yet further along the main road, here is a long house unlike any I’ve ever seen before; clearly a modern structure and it seems unlikely that it is based on some traditional structure, but it is surely a grand sight with its steep reddish roof and dormers (for lack of a better word) silhouetted against the big blue sky looking oceanward on a cold sunny day.

And on to the farmland.  It’s clearly farming in transition.  There are virtually no animals to be seen: 2 llamas, 2 horses, and 4 sheep were all I spotted, although maybe others were all indoors staying warm.  There are many collapsing buildings, barns and other out-buildings that please my eye in their state of disarray.  There are farmhouses that look like those in Iowa or Idaho, and there are farmhouses that look like they’ve been moved in from Greece or Italy, and farmhouses that look like they were designed for a sizable lot in Beverly Hills.  One house with a huge lawn, neatly cropped, was the home of about eight seriously-rusted pieces of large farm machinery.  A kind of museum, I think. 

The place is a very mixed batch.  At this time of year, there are still fields full of pumpkin residue, as well as fields with green cover crops, some kind of grass that I don’t specifically recognize.  But there are also great expanses of young blueberry bushes, the current newest occupier of farmland in Delta.  It would appear that blueberries are going to dominate the diet of the world.  And then there are the acres of also new greenhouses that are providing us with an abundance, year round, of red peppers and water-plumped, ‘vine-ripened’ tomatoes.  Not everyone, it would appear is happy with the greenhouses. 

Eventually, we ended up at the Reifel Bird Sanctuary to check out the sandhill cranes.  There’s a pair of them there who are permanent residents and this winter there are half a dozen visitor cranes as well.  We saw the great flocks of sandhill cranes in New Mexico (Bosquet del Apache) many years ago, and seeing hundreds of them fly in at dusk is in the same league as seeing thousands of snow geese flying around at Reifel.  The cranes’ feathers are just extraordinary, and you can stand around and talk to these birds, complimenting them on their lovely appearance.  They look right back at you with their bright orange eyes as if they understood every word and find you an absolutely fascinating conversationalist.  But they were pretty quiet, themselves.  The picture below is of their tail feathers.

And the mallards…thousands of them around the sanctuary, hundreds of them at your feet at any moment.  As we were leaving, I saw a three-year-old all bundled up in a pink snowsuit, standing a few feet away from her parents and surrounded by a hundred or so mallards.  They weren’t paying any particular attention to her; the flock was just walking along, as they do, slowly and with great disorganization.  The little girl’s mother called out to her to come along.  The girl looked around with great apprehension, raised her hands high up in the air, and called, ‘I can’t get out, I can’t get out!’  Clearly, she had no idea of how anyone could just walk through ducks.  One of life's skills that you can't learn early enough.