Temporary Relief

We are about to be on the receiving end of the bears giving up their marauding and their instead just going down for a long and well-deserved rest.  In anticipation, though, they were marauding around this past week at the neighbor’s house, just up the hill.  The neighbors had left a downstairs window slightly open, there were apples stored in the downstairs, and the bear whacked through a window in hopes of finding a convenient route to the indoors.  Unfortunately (for the bear) a small, broken window doesn’t do much for the bear’s ability to enter a downstairs.  And, fortunately for the neighbors, the bear didn’t roam around and look for a larger window to break through.  Of course, the bear’s greater deficiency is his inability to deal with doorknobs, since people probably don’t much lock their doors at night.

It is surprising that they don't enter houses more frequently.  I have had friends report them wandering around on decks, checking out grills, sort of banging on windows; and I heard this year of one house where the bear had actually come in for awhile while there were people in the house (they locked themselves in a bathroom, I was told).  When the bear did his marauding down here in our yard last fall, I was pretty impressed with the teeth marks and the claw marks he left on the compost lid while trying to figure out how to open it.  Eventually, he figured out that just sitting on the whole thing would do the trick, but to see the deeply gouged claw marks on the lid surely gives one a sense of the bear’s enthusiasm for getting the job done.

But now that we are post-U.S. Thanksgiving and December closing in, the nights are getting colder, the trees have lost all their fruit, and the pumpkin, too, is gone from the ground.  And so, time for bears to bed.

Memorable Times

We have just said goodbye to the last of our children/grandchildren visitors for the summer. Always good to have them come, sad to have them leave, and then we lie down and take a long rest. This last visit featured accounts of all the recent animal mayhem, of course, as well as a bear sighting. While walking back from the beach, a couple of blocks from our house, they found themselves coming up the road while the local bear was going cross the road. Great excitement all round!

Mayhem continues in our life as a heron arrives at the frog pond to consume the frogs (2) and a host of goldfish. Of course, they’re always at risk; it’s like leaving chickens around for coyotes and raccoons. But you can’t very well put the goldfish from the pond in a bowl every night, the way you put chickens in their coop (or their ‘chicken vault,’ as my son refers to his daughter’s chickens’ very safe night-time abode). And even if you could or did, the herons are out looking in the daytime. In fact, the fish are probably pretty safe at night. It’s the day-flying herons that are the menace. And were not even used to thinking of herons as menaces. That is, I suppose, the trouble with romanticizing the natural world. There is a great chain of eating that we have sort of lost touch with…at least as participants. Well, not that we don’t hold our place in that great chain of eating, but we have lost touch with the fact that we’re in the chain. It’s more like, ‘well, they’re eating each other out in the fields, whereas we are going to a nice restaurant where it's called cuisine not animals.’

This past spring we watched about 5 DVD’s worth of the BBC’s Planet Earth, which had wonderful photography but the most tedious narration in the history of the movies, with its endless, ‘Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Look! There comes a big animal to eat this cute little baby-sized animal.’ More recently, we’ve been watching The Collected Shorts of Jan Svankmajer, which have a different format for their mayhem. The ones we’ve seen so far have tended to focus on a world in which objects take on a life of their own, and that life is not, necessarily, one that bodes well for people. Maybe we’re just in a time when we humans feel particularly threatened. Svankmajer is one of the most famous animators in the world (though not well known in the U.S.), and his stop-motion work is absolutely amazing, though a tad on the dark side. This is not Pixar or Disney, certainly.

We watched about a half-dozen of these short pieces with the visiting 12-year-old grandson and, although he allowed as he wasn’t sure at all what they were about (I had warned him this would likely be the case), he was very taken with them. Or led us to believe he was. Who knows with twelve-year-olds? But perhaps this is the role of the grandparent: to astonish, or at least to be memorable or to cause memorable things to happen. (Also to serve a lot of cuisine.)

When he’s forty, he can look back on the visit to the grandparents during which he watched weird Czech animated films and heard about herons eating the frogs and goldfish and saw a bear, right in front of him. You do what you can…

Animal Mayhem

In the past two weeks, there’s been considerable animal mayhem up here on the Sunshine Coast. This is the time of year when it usually happens if it’s going to, but this was quite a bit more destruction than usual. The customary bear, messing around with garbage a few miles from us, found itself on the wrong side of a gun and, although he is no longer available for shooting, his pal apparently is, as a second bear has been seen eyeing the same trash can area subsequent to the initial bear removal. (This is, perhaps, a bigger trash problem than that seen down in Point Roberts?)

Then, a few days ago, a cougar was fatally shot after having removed 5 llamas and 5 sheep from the living livestock/pet world inventory of Roberts Creek in three separate incidents/properties (2 llamas, 3 llamas, 5 sheep) over two weeks. The cougar weighed in at 135 pounds and at least some people say they have spotted a second, bigger cougar in the same area.

Llamas are pretty big and have hooves, surely, so I’m sort of surprised that cougars would attack them. But I guess they look like prey and probably have in their native world very little experience with big cats. A lot of loss and a lot of worry from people in the neighborhood. My first thought was that a llama probably looks about the same size as me to a cougar. Not a pleasing thought. They have also had trouble with cougars over in Squamish (near Whistler) this summer. Maybe the dry spell? Maybe more construction of houses and loss of cougar habitat? Well, whatever the reason, the outcome is not likely to be a boost for the ‘live and let live’ ethic. And not likely to be an improvement in the quality of life of cougars, either.

Our bear is around, according to my neighbors who had him strolling through their back yard this week. I’ve given up composting anything but plant stuff so as not to encourage him to be dealing with food in our yard but the trees all round are beginning to fill up with ripe apples so it’s hard to discourage the bears from coming round with that attraction. And cougars? I don’t know what they want (other than livestock), but I’m definitely hoping that we don’t have any of it.

Cooperative Living

(A cheeky bunch, the deer; or maybe they just have a special appreciation for Ed when he comes by with his camera.)

Here is the deer thinking; here is the deer eating. She and her friends have consumed all the still-very-small fruits and leaves off the lower branches of our (remaining) apple tree and off of all our neighbors’ apple trees. In the same way that she and her friends ate the leaves and not the flowers from the hydrangeas, she and her friends have found a way to share by leaving the fruits on the higher branches for us. I am hoping that she is discussing this effective strategy with the bears. As well as pointing out that if you break the tree down to the ground, as he did, there are no fruits after that for anybody.

But quite apart from that, this is the first year the deer have paid any attention to our apple tree, either early or late. Must be something going on with this big change in eating behaviors.

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.

The Bear Comes to the Market

The other bear; the other market. This past week, a bear dropped in on the dumpsters at the back of the supermarket at the mall in Gibsons. It was evening, but not late enough in the evening that everything was closed. There were cars in the parking lot, people in the mall and the parking lots, and now a bear had joined the mix. The bear was just after the food potential in the dumpster, but somebody called the police; the police notified the bear conservation officers. Somehow, that notification got lost and it was the police (in this case, the RCMP) and the bear and the parking lot and the public that wrote the story.

The police were obviously concerned about what the bear might do. At least some of the people in the lot were concerned about what the RCMP might do. And eventually, the police did it. I would have thought that they would have tranquilized the bear and carted him off to sleep it off up in the mountains, but apparently when a bear is hit with a tranquilizer dart, he doesn’t obligingly fall down to the ground in a comatose state. Instead, he runs around with a strong sense of irritation and of having been violated. Not a good idea when there are a lot of people around.

Lots of concern after the fact. The bear conservation people say they wouldn’t have done anything differently; the police say they couldn’t just leave and hope for the best; the unhappy observers felt there must have been some other way to handle this than the way it was handled. The police suggest that it’s the mall businesses’ fault for leaving food in the dumpsters, just as they regularly tell the public that they are at fault for leaving food outside their houses, whether in compost bins, garbage cans, or on trees. I have a vague sense that lots of people think it’s the bears’ fault for not staying up on the mountains. Whoever is at fault, the bears have paid this year for their deeds. According to the local newspaper, 10 of them have been killed for bad behaviors in the face of over 600 calls from the public concerned about bear appearances.

The fact is, we can’t live with them and they don’t see any need to move somewhere else. Or maybe that’s, they can’t live with us and we don’t see any need to move elsewhere. In either case, we always have easy food and much of the time they don’t. And then they want our easy food. And we don’t mind all that much sharing it with them, but we want them to be grateful. And they aren’t.

I’ve never called the police about our bear but our bear has never shown particularly alarming tendencies, although he is not afraid of us, which is not a good thing. I get the fruit off the trees before it ripens, but we have an acre of wild blackberries that both bear and we eat, and there’s no way in the world that I’m going to be able to get rid of all those blackberry bushes, even if I wanted to. He rarely messes with the compost bin, but it does occasionally happen and that is a black mark against me for having failed to get it mixed up enough with leaves and previously composted vegetation. Mostly, I freeze such material and deliver it to the garbage can about 15 minutes before the garbage truck arrives.

That’s not a viable solution for everybody. You've got to have enough freezer space; you've got to be around 15 minutes before the garbage truck comes. The individual public can do more to discourage bears, certainly, but the common public (what we call the local government, I mean) is going to have to make it more possible for individuals to act responsibly. Otherwise, we’ll just be killing the bears one by one until they are all gone. We did it to the buffalo, we did it to the passenger pigeon; we can surely manage to do it to this small population of black bears on the Sunshine Coast. And then we'll be sorry. And then, after awhile, we will have forgotten that there used to be bears here. That's how we tell the story.

Bear Market Expands

All this spring and summer, I’ve been very careful about mixing the fresh compost thoroughly into the older compost. In the past, we have occasionally had trouble with bears tipping the container over but now that we have a resident bear, it seemed greater caution was called for. And it’s been successful. Or maybe I’ve just been lucky.

This morning, I went out, dumped a pail of coffee grounds and apple cores and egg shells and potato peelings into the compost, sifted a little of the old, and shoveled four shovels-full of the old compost on top of the new, then mixed it all round with one of those compost tools that involve a long metal rod with two half arrows at the bottom for thoroughly displacing compost, and returned to the house, ready to get on with my daily tasks. I do this, when I do this, in the morning because bears are nocturnal, I read, and thus there is a greater opportunity to have the bear-appealing scents dissipate before the bear gets there in the middle of the night.

Alas, the bear and I are reading different books. The bear has been all over the financial system these past weeks and now he’s outside our kitchen door well before noon, as well. Not a half hour passed from my outside work until Ed walked out the door, interrupting bear in his work. In the first photo, bear has already knocked the top half of the compost container off and is working—apparently not all that successfully—to find something to eat. That was the good effect of my work, I guess. In the second photo, he has given up on the compost and is trying to eat the tire on the wheel barrow.

We whooped and hollered (after getting the camera), but he proved largely indifferent to our noisiness as well as our nearness (we’re about 12 feet away from him at most). Once, he looked up at us, but with exceeding boredom...kind of like, 'Do I know you? No, I don't think so.' Then, after about five minutes, he wandered off, around the corner of the house and across the front yard, crowning his bearish behavior by walking right through a small hydrangea bush and breaking off the strong stick that supported it.

Well, as Jennifer Lopez once said, ‘The bear is what we all wrestle with. Everybody has their bear in life. It's about conquering that bear and letting him go.’ I don’t know the occasion for this philosophizing by Ms. Lopez--apparently the music business--but I think that I’ll let the bear go but just pass on the conquering.

Wild Life in Our Life

Word comes round that gunshots have been heard and that it may be people shooting coyotes in Point Roberts. Certainly possible; there are plenty of coyote around and doubtless people with guns, as well as people who don’t feel kindly toward coyotes. Coyotes are not considered game animals in Washington, but you do need a license to hunt or trap them, unless the coyote are causing damage to crops or domestic animals on your property . In the latter case, you can trap or exterminate them without a license.

When I lived in Los Angeles, we had a cat who was killed/eaten by coyote and it was not uncommon to hear and even see coyotes walking down the streets of West Los Angeles, coming down from the hills to the north. I hear them occasionally here on the Point and less frequently have seen them. Our neighbors have lost chickens to coyotes, but their chickens run around on the unfenced lawn, so that is not surprising, and several people I know have had cats disappear. The conclusion is that they met up with local coyote.

It’s a little hard to imagine people shooting coyote on local streets, in the same way that it would be difficult to imagine people shooting coyotes on the streets of Los Angeles. Not so densely populated here, but still, this is hardly hunting land. We have deer, too, but I don’t think anybody would think it was okay to shoot/hunt them here since when seen they are usually in someone’s backyard.

I don’t have small pets or small children or sheep or cattle or goats, so I’ve got nothing at stake in this dispute between people and wildlife, but it does seem to me that people tend to think that wildlife ought always to defer to people. It’s like, ‘Well now I want to live here, so you have to move someplace else.’ But exactly where are the coyotes on Pont Roberts to move to? Richmond? Vancouver?

Up on the Sunshine Coast, where we have a plentiful supply of bears as well as coyote and cougar (and deer), there is a steady public education program encouraging people to learn to live with the wildlife by NOT encouraging wildlife to get too friendly with people, too used to hanging around people. The same advice goes for coyote. They’re less likely to be a problem to people if people are not encouraging them to come around houses. According to the Washington wildlife people, don’t leave pet food outdoors (including food for feral cats), don’t feed the coyote, don’t leave small pets out at night, don’t leave fruit lying on the ground when it ripens because coyotes eat fruits and vegetables as well as meat prey. With bears, you can’t even leave fruit on the tree, but coyote happily are not capable of getting up in the tree as the bear can.

I grew up in a hunting household, but not in a ‘varmint’ hunting household so I can’t really understand the impulse to shoot coyotes just because you don’t like having them around. If they’re a problem, the wildlife people will come and trap them or deal with them otherwise. That would be my response. But it at least appears that others here may feel differently. Of course, when the coyote are gone, we can then rage about the way that rabbits, mice and other rodents are eating all of our whatevers. Coyote keep those populations in check, doing some excellent work for us. Think Aristotle, think moderation, think reasoned responses.

Apples, Pies, Now, Then

Our apple trees are overflowing with apples now that September is winding down. Or, no, how about: We have no apples on our apple trees as September winds down. The first is true of our apple trees in Point Roberts where, as we drove away this past week, I was still trying to figure out whom I could call to come over and use up plums and apples that would otherwise just fall on the ground and rot while we were gone. The second sentence, however (and sadly), is true of our apple trees in Roberts Creek, B.C. So that’s a problem because September is when one really needs apple pie quite frequently.

Our trees are bare because one of them is dead, slain by our local bear who several years ago tried to climb it while engaged in apple collection work, and broke it off sort of at the base. Ed applied emergency ICU care (mostly duct tape and a stick), and it did manage to survive another couple of years, but then this spring it bloomed and every part of it subsequently died. The other one (a Cox’s orange pippin) did bear this year but the fruits were not yet ripe when we left at the end of August. I’m willing to pick them a little short of fully ripe, but these were yet short of even mostly ripe. They were hard, green little apples. They might well have ripened during the three weeks we were away. And if so, the bear might well have eaten them all. He needs quite a bit of food and he does like apples. Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence of bear in the yard, although most of the evidence suggests that what he’s eating is blackberries.

Once I found we had no apples, I walked up to our uphill neighbor who has several trees and she generously responded to my plea. This week, I have had apple pie and, if not enough to sustain me for a year, it has been very satisfying. Apple pie is good on its own terms, but it is also a family thing for me. Most of the cooking I ever learned, I taught myself. My mother taught me baking (cakes, cookies, bread), but pies I learned from my grandmother.

I think the things one learns from a grandparent are things that stay with you. Not only stay, but may not be adjusted, if my piecrust making is any indication. My grandfather never taught me to do anything, so I don’t know whether the same would be true of his educational work. In any case, whenever somebody tells me that pie crust is so much better if you make it with half butter, or with ice water, or if stored in the refrigerator for awhile, my inner grandmother says, ‘I don’t think so.’ Piecrust is to be made just as she told me to do it. That means you use shortening or lard, that you use one of those circular blade things with a wooden handle to cut the shortening into the flour, that you use cold water from the tap, that you don't handle it any more than you absolutely have to, and that you roll it out with a marble rolling pin. (I do use saran wrap to roll it out on, though. My grandmother would have included that if she had lived long enough to use saran wrap, is my belief.) There was a time when I didn’t have a marble rolling pin and it never worked as well with those wooden ones covered with knit sleeves. When my 18-year-old granddaughter, Gianna, was here this summer, piecrust making was one of the things she wanted to learn, so I passed on my grandmother’s methods. Of course they are also Gianna's grandmother's methods. I hope they’ll stick.

My grandmother was born in 1889, and her father fought in the Civil War, although I never knew him. Still it seems an enormous bunch of history between her awareness of the world before her birth and today, history that I, somehow, having known her well somehow have a purchase on or a place in. The piecrust is part of it. And the apple, something else that has a big part in our common history: see, e.g., Garden of Eden. Even more interesting, see Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan, a book that will help you to understand why apples are so quintessentially American and what Johnny Appleseed was really doing in his travels.

Good advice from me and my grandmother: the month is almost over, so remember to have some apple pie. It won't be the same in October.

Barely There

This morning, Ed set out to dismantle the decaying logs that make up the retaining wall in our front yard in order to replace them with a more permanent kind of retaining wall (that would be concrete blocks), while I took to the dye pots to turn hundreds of yards of tencel thread into variegated embroidery thread. Tencel is made from wood, like rayon, and has a wonderful sheen that really shows up beautifully on fabric, but I’ve never found a commercial source for it so am obliged to dye it myself, a fairly labor intensive activity. By three, we were ready for a coffee break with fresh cheese bread stuffed with ham. Sitting on our front porch on a day that had all the markings of early summer, I could not but think, ‘This Is the Life!’

Then, out of the corner of my eye, about 10 feet away but behind a bush, I saw a black dog coming out from under the carport. Once it got past the bush, I realized I was looking not at a dog but at a mid-sized bear, not as tall as me but outweighing me significantly. He was ambling along at a casual pace coming out to the driveway. He had the teeny eyes, that long bear-jaw grin, and a ratty patch on his left hind quarters reminiscent of a moulting buffalo. Clearly, this was last year’s abandoned young bear, now grown to late adolescent size.

‘Ed, there’s a bear.”
‘Where’s a bear?’
‘Just to your right.’

At about that moment, both Ed and the bear became acutely aware of one another. My first thought was, ‘Oh, dear; I am eating a ham sandwich, a sandwich that the bear is going to want.’ The bear’s first thought was apparently not about the ham sandwich but more about his sudden realization that two people lurking on their front porch were watching him, and he altered his pace from the shambling walk I had first seen to a much more sprightly trot as he turned left and proceeded to head for the open fields, but directly in front of us: maybe 15 feet away. Then he moved into a full bear run as he got past us and into and past the open field, and thence to the woods. Ed went after him but saw him no more.

We don’t see them very often, but when we do, I am always afraid first thing. I know that more people are injured by deer than by black bears, but I’m never afraid of the deer that pass by me as closely as did the bear. I know that the bear are more afraid of me than I am of them. But still, reason takes a back seat to the fear of bears. If Walt Disney had made a movie in the 1940’s about bears that was as heart-wrenching as Bambi was, maybe I’d feel differently. Instead, I grew up near Yellowstone National Park and each spring heard both my father’s and the park rangers’ endless lectures about how dangerous bears are. The head has a tough job when the heart has been reached, I guess.

This bear’s mother was killed a year or so ago, and he has been raising himself. I’m glad to see that he has learned to be afraid of us, as other neighbors had been concerned that we was too easy around people, spending too much time on house decks. Too easy around people, for a bear, means capture and removal or, more likely, death. He was at least getting out of our way once he heard us, even if he just walked past our kitchen door first. Good Bear!

Meet the Old Neighbors!

Yesterday, Ed and I were sitting on the porch having mid-afternoon coffee and observing the various changes in the yard that the slowly advancing spring was making. There are pasque flowers blooming, even though Easter came through quite a while ago; daffodils and tulips are making a simultaneous appearance, even though the tulips normally don't start until the daffs are finished; and lilac buds are yet tightly furled, although they usually bloom by May 1st. I’m afraid that won’t happen this year, but it’s all to the good, I suppose, since I will be gone by then.

As we talked, into the yard strolled a medium-sized deer. It was the second deer I’d seen this week, which is unusual. They’re around all the time, but I don’t usually see them: just signs of their passing. This one was about 15 feet away from us and he stopped to eat the leaves off the rose bushes. These are rugosa roses, very fragrant but not awfully showy bushes and we have rows of them, so I wasn’t too concerned about the deer’s feeding. But I was surprised to note that I had never before seen them do this nor seen any evidence of their doing it. They eat blackberries regularly and you can see where they have been lunching, but no sign on the rose bushes. We were talking and the deer was paying no particular notice to us. Then a second, smaller deer wandered in; the two touched noses communicating something about the quality of the rose leaves, maybe, because the second one did not participate in the lunch. But the two of them stood there, looking around, cocking their ears, for all the world as if they were concerned about something. But it definitely wasn’t us. Never glanced our way.

Earlier in the day, I’d been walking up the road when I came upon a 15-inch snake of the grass sort: yellow stripes and a darting red tongue. When I first saw him, he was so still I thought he was dead. I was standing right next to him and there was no sign of life in him. Then I nudged him slightly with my foot and, although he did not move his body, he did make his red tongue go in and out very fast. This seems an evolutionarily weak response. I mean, my foot was nowhere near his tongue so it’s hard to think that he was actually concerned about me standing there, enormous me.

We have raccoons around all the time, too. Here they mostly come round at night and we hear them rattling around more often than we see them. But down in Point Roberts, they are perfectly content to walk within five feet of us and never give us a glance. It almost seems rude, their failure to acknowledge our presence. Hummingbirds, too, fly in and around us desperate for sugar water but without any concern about us. These are an interesting kind of neighbor, and it is always a little strange, after years of city living, to have them around so much of the time. And to have them so uninterested in us. The bears are not like that, though. They see you, they move right off. Of course, when I see them, I’m inclined to move right off too. The cougars, I never see; but they see me, I imagine.

When I first came here, I would voice some alarm about the bears, but long-time residents would say, ‘What did you expect? You moved to a place where there are bears.’ I got the message quickly: you don’t want to live with bears, don’t move here. I’m okay with them, now, but I never expected to live with wild animals who were absolutely indifferent to my presence. Don’t they know I could be dangerous?

Bearing Up and Out

We first washed up on the Sunshine Coast in the fall of 1989. There were about 25,000 people on the Coast at that time, spread out across a narrow 50-mile long strip of land from the ferry terminal at Langdale to the next ferry terminal at Earl’s Cove. When I first saw it, I thought it was British Columbia’s Malibu. And indeed it has proven to be. If global warming is going to to warm the land temperatures here as well as the ocean ones, it will be even more Malibu-like. It was beautiful, wild, quiet, sleepy, slow, and there was always someplace to park if you had to go somewhere, even as there were relatively few places to go to. One movie theater that reminded me of a small Grange Hall auditorium in a small Idaho town, and another that was like a weary, equity waiver theater in L.A. There were three big-enough grocery stores, and nothing remotely like a big box store. It really was small town, rural, out of the rush for nine months of the year, and then in the summer, it got a little jazzy what with the tourists coming in to spend a little time with nature.

I was pushing my cart around the local SuperValue market the other day when I ran into an old quilting friend whom I hadn’t seen for 4 or 5 years. Her 8-year-old is now a 13-year-old, the old job is now the new job, etc. Then she asked me whether I was as discouraged as she was by what was happening to the Coast. Like me, she lives kind of out of the way and as long as she stays home, she noted, it’s pretty much like it always was. But driving in to town forces you to see change on every street, every landmark.

The traffic is one change; another is the fact that you often can’t find a parking place; and a third is that we now have three big chain stores here that we didn’t use to have (London Drugs, Canadian Tire, and Easy Foods, the last of which is sort of WalMart like), and more trying to move in. We have a whole new mall, three or four Dollar Stores, and two Starbucks, and rather fewer small, local businesses. But the biggest change, of course, is the increased population—now 60,000 people--that drives the commercial expansion. And all those extra people are living in new housing.

Ed, who is a regular coastal kayaker, says that when he first started paddling up the coast, there were long stretches without houses, or at least without visible houses (meaning there possibly were small cottages hidden by the trees and bushes). But of recent years, it is just one big, new house after another smack on the beach as he heads north. I’ve been in a few of those houses, and they are like medium-sized palaces. Just down the street from us on the beach there is a house that my neighbor says has 8,000 sq. feet. It is a vacation house for some Vancouver executive. Numerous developments have been, and are being built, with still more—big ones, gated communities, walled communities--in the planning stage. The Coast is not what it once was, and I would be discouraged, like my friend, if I had ever imagined that I would stay here forever. But the changes do lead me to ask myself whether it is time to move on, as my friend is considering doing. It has more and more become a place that feels like it is driven by big money, by a fascination with excess, by the loss of any concept of enough.

There’s still wildlife aplenty around: bears, deer, raccoons, maybe cougars. We never used to see them much, but they’re getting a little more pushy as the wild land where they can avoid us is depleted. Although we’ve always had evidence of bears around, I’d never actually seen one until last spring when I walked out the kitchen door at noon and found one 20 feet away from me, strolling down the driveway. Quelle surprise! It’s been a big change for them, too, but where are the bears to move on to? Closer and closer to more and more people, they risk becoming problem bears. That designation will get them moved on, of course. On to the after life. Last decade’s attraction become today’s tiresome problem.

I suppose that if you invest in a half or three-quarter million dollar house, you probably are not going to be happy to find that it comes with bears at your barbeque or deer in your garden or racoons that mess with your garbage. Those kind of houses expect something a little more disciplined. Those houses didn’t come here for the wild, I suspect.