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.

Eating Local

We could do it, but it means that we would be having fruit salad and a limited supply of vegetables (kale, lettuce, and zucchini) three meals a day.  Low on protein, of course, but awfully good food.  Fresh, full of taste. 

Here on the Sunshine Coast, people have apples and plums, especially, coming off the trees right now, and blueberry bushes are coming to the end, but still shedding ripe fruit.  Many kinds of apples are around us and either golden or Italian prune plums, for the most part.  The bears, of course, are out scouting their own meals and it would be okay to share if they weren’t so prone to breaking the tree down in the process.

Each year, the Okanagan Fruit Man shows up here on the Coast.  He comes from the Okanagan Valley, east and north of Vancouver, where they have towns that have names like Fruitland.  And the Fruit Man brings the fruit over to us on a Wednesday morning, setting up his truck by the side of the road and staying until it is all sold or until it is Friday afternoon.  I never quite figure out why it is that the Okanagan Fruit Man with his relatively small operation is able to bring us spectacularly fresh fruit from 150 miles away (I’m guessing at the distance), but the local supermarket has to store whatever fruits it has 3 or 4 weeks somewhere before it shows up on the store’s shelves.  The economies of scale surely do lead to low quality.

This week, while the Okanagan Fruit Man is providing us, for the last time this year, with several varieties of pears and apples, as well as peaches and nectarines, the local (Canadian) supermarket is, instead, offering us the same varieties of fruits, but only from the U.S. and from New Zealand.  They haven’t been picking apples in New Zealand for several months, I’d think, since that country’s farmers are now going into spring.  And how is it that the U.S. apples get up here but the B.C. apples can’t?  In the store yesterday, there were maybe 8 varieties of U.S. apples, not all of them even new crop, and only one B.C. apple, a small bin of Galas.  The U.S. and New Zealand apples were up around $2.00/pound; the B.C. galas: 78 cents.  And they were fresh and juicy and great.  Something about this business doesn’t make sense. 

Maybe the work of Archer-Daniels-Midland?  (here and here.)

Beautiful B.C.

Ed flies a helicopter around here and there occasionally and gets to see much more of the varied border terrain than do those of us who just hang around Point Roberts (that would be me).  A couple of weeks ago, he found a lovely pinnacle up in B.C. with, he reported, a spectacular view.  He had his camera with him, so he tried to do a 360 degree view of the sights in the nearby high mountains.  However, he didn't have a tripod with him and it didn't do it justice.

So, this week, he went back with a tripod and got it.  You can see it here.  Mt. Baker (the highest mountain around here next to Mt. Ranier, which isn't quite so much around here) is in the background of the first part of the picture that you see (the farthest left part).  We got the ocean, we got the mountains, we got it all.

Ferry Dangerous?

The ferries in B.C. in the summertime are not much fun. The schedules change so I can never keep track of when they’re leaving; they’re desperately crowded almost all the time; you have to get there two hours early or wait two hours when you come on time and they are already over-loaded. It just doesn’t do much for me.

Nevertheless, once you are on the ferry, there is little excuse for sitting in the car below decks throughout the forty-five minute ride. And yet, that is what we often do. It’s an almost 2-hour drive to get to the ferry and still we stay in the car for another 3/4 hour as if we had been glued there. I am reminded of the old phrase, ‘If you are tired of London, you are tired of life.’ If you are tired of looking out at the incredibly beautiful sights of Howe Sound from the upper ferry deck, you are tired of something, certainly. Mostly, I’m just tired of riding on ferries or, more precisely, of being confined by ferries. Too much an American to be entirely pleased that I cannot leave if the ferry says I can’t..

So there we were, the two of us, lightly drowsing in the car on the 4th deck. (The 4th deck means you are above the water and indeed we could look out the side of the boat and more or less see some water. But it’s not what you’d call a great view and it’s not light enough for me to easily read in the car.) Most of the cars around us—indeed perhaps all the cars around us—were empty, their passengers not yet being tired of life or ferries, or perhaps just in need of food and drink. And then two guys came up fairly near the car and started poking around and talking in such a way that we could easily hear them. One was in his mid-forties; the other younger, maybe 30-ish, with a notebook in which he was busily making notes.

My first impression was that the older guy was a ferry employee who was taking a (younger guy) safety inspector around to check various stuff. At the end, I’m not so sure of that. Ed’s view was that it was an older ferry mechanic taking a new employee around to show him the ropes.

Anyway, what he’s showing him and what the younger guy appears to be writing down is about the rust condition on the boat. The older mechanic is outraged by the amount of visible rust. ‘And,’ he pointed out repeatedly, ‘If you can see this much rust in the open, you gotta know that there’s even more of it behind the walls here where you can’t see it. And even more on the lower decks where you can’t see it.’

Does he think it’s dangerously rusty? I don’t know. Ed and I are looking at each other, rolling our eyes, feeling like we're in some George Clooney thriller. The two guys move around, inspecting more rust, inspecting more deficiencies. Finally, they are standing just ahead of us, looking at the fire door. The older guy points out that in the last refit, all the fire doors were serviced (not the word he used, but I can’t remember it specifically), but that within a few weeks, they were back to their old state. ‘This door,’ he says. ‘This door is not being held open. It’s supposed to go into a magnetic hold, but it’s not anywhere near it.’ He demonstrates this by pushing the door shut without detaching it from the magnetic hold, which it is obviously not attached to; then reopening and finally lifting the door upwards so that it can reach the magnet. ‘This door,’ he says with a very serious tone, ‘is simply holding itself open.’

Something about the despairing way he said this made both Ed and me burst into laughter. The mechanic guy turned, saw us there, winked at us, rolled his eyes, laughed, and guided his younger guy up the stairs.

I can’t decide to be alarmed or relieved. Just a moment on a ferry, of course. But then I asked Ed, ‘Was the mechanic guy wearing a life jacket? All the time during an ordinary ferry crossing on a perfectly calm day?’ ‘Maybe it was a down vest?’ he offered. Maybe, but the temperature that day was 85 degrees, so probably not. Maybe just a guy who knows when to be prepared.

Your Year, My Year

Today, a new form of wild life. Well, not new to the world or even to the Northwest; just new to my writing about wildlife.

Our log house features wasps. One of the many things about log houses is that in between the logs where they are parallel to one another and in the places where the logs meet perpendicular to one another and around the windows where there is trim across the logs, there are little insets, little hidden places, little dark areas where wasps can make small nests. Some kinds of wasps are willing to make small nests even though they are also capable of making large nests. They make a lot of them—I think the makers are yellow jacket wasps--in these little nooks and crannies of the log house.

They don’t pay much attention to people even though we are around the house all the time, around the logs all the time. They are going about their business much as the deer, the bear, the raccoons, etc., are and as long as we are not interfering with them, they do not find us of much interest. This is hard to believe, I know, because what conceivably could be of more interest than people? Hard to know, but in the world of wasps, people are not priority number one or even interest factor number one.

So, it is more of live and let live, life in cooperation. A few years ago, this folie de deux sort of fell apart when we had to have the logs refinished, which involved, in part, our washing off each individual log by hand. This genuinely required interfering with the wasps. We wore long gloves and long-sleeved shirts, we worked quickly and in the cool of the late, late day or early morning since the wasps were more around during the mid-day. I don’t know what else they were doing; maybe they had a big nest somewhere in the bush that they had to attend to. And we didn’t get bit very much and it hurt quite a lot only at first. And we got through with that project and we settled back into our old relationships.

In addition to wasps in the logs on the front deck of the log house, we have a barbeque on the front deck of the log house. It is fueled by natural gas so there isn’t smoke to disturb them. They don’t mind it and we don’t use it very often, anyway. Last week, as the summer season was setting in, Ed was looking to clean up the barbecue from its winter travails (it doesn’t have a plastic cover on it because it has a metal cover on it). And as he approached it, he noticed an odd thing. A wasp was going into a vent; and then a wasp was coming out of a vent; and then it became apparent that the wasps had built themselves a large nest inside the barbeque.

We are now thinking about this. Maybe we can do without a barbeque this year? This year, theirs; next year, we put a better cover on it and its ours. Or, what?

Twelve Days of Christmas

It’s been twelve days now since I’ve left the property, which is two acres (mostly woods, but with the house and one open field), and I haven’t even been much outside because it’s cold and because the snow is pretty deep and I don’t have much in the way of winter boots. In any case, it has been pretty much a white landscape which has an aesthetic appeal with respect to purity and cleanliness, of course, but lacks much in differentiation, at least it lacks much that I am used to looking at and differentiating about. I walked down to see the fishpond, but the fishpond was covered with ice and the ice was covered with snow, and that was that.

The snow remains abundant, even though the temperatures have risen (today, it is 2 degrees C./about 38 F.—I only do rough equivalents from C. to F. or F. to C., but before I came to Canada, I’d couldn’t do anything but 32 F.= 0 C.). The trees boughs have all given their snow up, but the ground is more accommodating. It is of course going to be very wet when this all melts, but unlike Whatcom County, the entire Sunshine Coast is on a fairly steep incline to the ocean, so the water goes away very quickly without flooding us. We live on a part of that steepness: steep road down off the highway and a driveway steeply down from the road. Christmas week is not proving to show much work ethic among the road clearers. They’ve got the highway tidied up, but we are on a road less traveled and, as Robert Frost warned, ‘that has made all the difference.’

Nevertheless, because we were really running out of all the things that we choose to consider necessities (milk, onions, garlic, apples, bananas, fresh vegetables of any kind), we got into the car to see whether it would succeed in the driveway and then succeed again in making a left turn onto the road in order to get us up the two blocks to the highway. The car is a 4-wheel drive Subaru Forester, but it doesn’t have snow tires and we don’t own chains, so it has to do what it can. It could, although it was having a little trouble in the driveway snow if Ed was urging it to take anything but the path of least resistance. Then it didn’t make the turn up the road to the highway. Instead, it wanted to take the turn down the road to the minor highway. The alternative was straight ahead into the big ditch. Down the hill: better choice.

Then, the next problem. This road has maybe 20 houses off it, but the steepest part of the road is at the bottom, and down at this part there are only us and one neighbor house. All the neighbors above us were going up the road, so not much traffic had made it as far down as our driveway. Thus, on the last downhill stretch, which we were on, the snow was still pretty well gathered where it had fallen. We made our way down that 600 yards an inch at a time, the car insisting all the way that there was actually plenty of stuff to slide around in. Then, at the bottom, there was the absolutely cleaned up minor highway. Having achieved that, I returned to breathing, and there we were, speeding to the world.

A few groceries, an audio splitter for the computer in order to use my new Bluetooth headphones in the most flexible way, and a 15-minute entertainment walk around the local Liquidation World, and I was more than ready to get back in the car and go home. Amazing number of people out there at the mall, with as many shopping bags in their hands as I imagine they had in all the days before Christmas. And lots of goods still to buy. Really, way too much to look at. No nice white cleanliness and purity.

Even in just twelve days in forced hibernation, I felt like I’d kind of lost contact with the world as it really is, the world of too much that I both long for when I don’t have access to it and am put off by when I do. I wonder if the bear, now in his hibernation, is dreaming about his ambivalent relationship to the world of human food scraps that he loves to mess with and the sight of the owners of those food scraps, the humans he could happily do without.

She's Canadian, You Know

Not enough that Michael Ignatieff turns out to be Canadian. Now Naomi Klein also turns out to be Canadian. Maybe Canada should take over the U.S. instead of the other way round? How come Canada is producing public intellectuals at such a pace? This past week’s New Yorker has a feature article on Naomi Klein and her role as the voice of the New, New Left in the U.S., and beyond, which provides some answers.

I don’t know a lot about her writing, other than a section of The Shock Doctrine (which I suspect was published in Harper’s) that I read several months ago, and which was very interesting in a provocative way. As a former member of the old new left, and a current member of the old old left, I’m very interested in the new new left, but I am somewhat surprised (and pleased) to find that Canada is producing its leaders and that its main voice is female. Take that, Hillary Clinton--next time try the left instead of the center.

But then the second part of being surprised about all this is to find that Ms. Klein’s parents live here nearby us in Roberts Creek, B.C. (at least they do while we are in residence here; when we’re in Point Roberts, they have to live here without us). I met the mom once, some years ago, but just in passing. She is also political in her orientation but currently as a disability activist, subsequent to a stroke which rendered her seriously disabled. So, assuming she and her daughter are on good enough terms, I will be looking to see not only Joni Mitchell but also Naomi Klein in the local grocery store. It’s getting to be like Beverly Hills up here. Except for the fact that this week the roads are covered with ice and the not-roads are covered with snow, which makes it more like Minnesota with hills, where the temperature is, day after day, about 20 degrees F., although, in B.C., it’s actually more like –5.5 degrees C.

Discussion or Shouting Match?

When the B.C. Ferry Corporation changes its schedules and policies, ferry riders usually feel that something is being done against them not for them. They frequently protest, although the effects of those protests have not been particularly noticeable. The Ferry Corporation is busy appointing citizen advisory panels and the like, but they pretty much seem like window dressing. Nevertheless, after the most recent cuts in the schedule, 300 or so people up here turned out to object strenuously not only to the reduced number of sailings but also to the ever-rising prices and surcharges.

And then B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell went on the TV and announced that there will be a one-time $20 million increase to the ferry budget in order to restore those ferry sailings that were being removed and to reduce the cost of ferry crossings by a considerable amount. Well, that is pretty amazing, no? Of course, the fine print is that these awesome changes will be in effect for December and January, periods when there is massive vacation travel on the ferry. Well, maybe not so much response to local outcry. Maybe more of a response to an as-yet unannounced upcoming election?

That’s what the local newspaper editor suggests. He also suggests that everybody ought to be grateful for Campbell’s gift, even if it is motivated by political calculations. I’m struck by my reflexive resistance to his argument. Since it’s reflexive, of course, it’s suspect. Have we become so weary of political action that we can’t imagine there is anything coming out of politicians’ mouths that is oriented toward the public good? Always working to their own interests, not ours? Can we imagine that an action could simultaneously serve their interests and ours, or that it could just serve the public’s?

I don’t have any answer to that. And that is part of the anti-government tendency of our times. We riders can, of course, enjoy reduced ferry costs. But what if they are held low just long enough to get these people re-elected, at which point the costs are increased from what they previously were? Or, alternatively, what if there really isn’t any reasonable way to reduce the costs of ferry transport and this $20 million gift is just a way of postponing some other day of reckoning, a day they don’t want to talk about because the public is too uninformed to accept it?

I am inclined to this last thought because I have been reading historian Andrew Bacevich’s new book, The Limits of American Power. Bacevich argues that the U.S. has come to the end of its economic, military, and political influence in the world (and he is writing a year or more before the current economic free-fall) because it has refused to accept that there are limits. A big part of his argument is that the U.S. has for decades put off the day of reckoning with respect to our dependency on foreign oil because those governing didn’t believe citizens would accept the bad news that they might have to do without some things or pay more for some things, if the country was to prosper in the future. No, we wanted cheap oil and we wanted it now and forever.

So, I’m thinking: what if there is no way to maintain cheap ferry traffic in B.C., at least not without giving up something else that is also important? Should the public and the government be talking about those tradeoffs and exactly what they are? Or should they just be talking about how the interest group identified as ferry riders is always trying to get something for itself and the interest group called politicians is always trying to get something for itself? Well, the ferry riders certainly can’t talk about tradeoffs if they don’t know what they are. And the government? Well, if they know, they’re not mentioning it. Maybe a folie a deux: those never end well.

Crows with News

Oh, who needs to hear this? Crows with West Nile Virus (WNV) have come to Western Washington. Public health people have, for the first time, found several dead crows who tested positive for WNV. It had previously been found in Eastern Washington, on the other side of the mountains, but apparently some corvid (crow, raven, jay) with the virus made its way across recently.

It’s not the worst possible news, of course. The birds transmit it to mosquitoes and then people get it from mosquito bites. Most bitten folks don’t get anything at all but WNV in their blood (which makes them ineligible for blood donating: all blood is tested for WNV). Some people get a mild flu-like condition called West Nile Fever. A few people, the elderly in particular, may end up with encephalitis. We have had two friends, of the elderly variety, who have recently had (and recovered from) encephalitis (probably not from WNV), but for neither was it a mild experience; more like life-changing. A very big deal. Background here.

Poking round on the net, I found that British Columbia does not appear to have yet found any evidence of WNV in its mosquito or corvid/raptor population. One would think it was just a matter of time, since it’s been found in all the provinces to the east of B.C., but maybe there’s something in the crow/raven/jay population that is just saying, ‘NO!’ Both the B.C. and the Washington public health agencies, however, are doing regular testing and want us to inform them about any dead birds we run into, particularly corvids and raptors. You can do it via the internet, although they may also want you to preserve the bird specimen by putting it in a double plastic bag. And don’t touch it with your bare hands, even though WNV can’t be transmitted that way. Just don’t.

It’s an amazing thing about dead birds. When you think about how many of them we see alive and how short their lives are, doesn’t it seem like you’d be seeing them dead regularly? I occasionally see a flutter of disconnected feathers and thereby know that some bird has dined on a smaller one, but they surely die of causes other than being eaten by something bigger and/or wilier. And yet, you almost never see one. I did see a dead towhee a couple of weeks ago, when we were out cleaning up litter on the roads. He was right there, spread out on the asphalt, as if he had had a heart attack midflight and had plunged directly down to the road, wings still spread. If I’d known I should report him, I would have. If only to see what happened next.

Well, for those of us in Western Washington, what should happen next is that we should make sure we’re not breeding mosquitoes in our yards--in tires, jars, bird baths, any of numerous kinds of receptacles sitting around that fill up with quickly-stagnant water. Not such an issue in the winter, of course, but now, still for awhile, and again in the spring, those mosquitoes will be looking for not-fresh water to repopulate the place with their young. And next year, some of those mosquito offspring will have WNV to offer us. People in other places: google your county name + public health + west nile virus, to find out your situation.

Which Way Up?

B.C. Transit or B.C. Roads or whoever in the B.C. government is responsible for signage on the highways simply never fails to disappoint. The agency seems to have a relatively random policy for highway exits: sometimes the sign is before the exit, sometimes right after, so it is never quite clear where or when you should exit if you don’t already know how it works. Because the Olympics is coming to Vancouver in January of 2010, barely a year from now, there are lots of new roads with new signs, particularly in the area to the north and west that leads to Whistler where much of the snow-based competition will occur. Also in that area is the Horseshoe Bay Ferry Terminal, which is the place to go if you want to go to the Sunshine Coast and Roberts Creek. And indeed that is where we were heading today.

About a mile from the terminal, there was a standard rectangular metal road sign indicating that there was a new routing for the ferry terminal. Okay, that’s good. And then there was a sign that said something like ‘ferry terminal and village to the right,’ which is also good, and we went right. And then, not so good: there was one of those signs that change, using light bulbs or LED’s or something. It showed the words, ‘Ferry Terminal,’ followed by a new sign that showed a right-pointing arrow. Okay, but that was immediately followed by a new sign that said ‘Village,’ followed by a new sign that features a left-pointing arrow sign. So, logically, you get: Ferry, go right; Village, go left. But it says that logically only if you come in at the right moment. It can equally well say, ‘left-arrow, ferry terminal; right arrow, village.’ Four instructions, but since they are not numbered on the sign, they can be read as 1,2,3,4, or 4,1,2,3, or 2,3,4,1, or 3,4,1,2. You have two choices to go right to the ferry terminal and two to go left. Go, sign designers! So many more opportunities before January 2010.