Pavilion Lake Fire

The cross hatching is the area of the fire, the lake is Pavilion Lake
the upper right north side of the lake is where I lived

There is a fire burning not far from where I lived on Pavilion Lake, less than 4 kilometres down the road.

Living in the Lillooet area I got used to forest fires somewhere in the area every year.  It was part of life in the dry and hot climate of the region.   

My friends at Ts'kw'aylaxw are all under evacuation alert, though the fire is apparently now 85% contained. I think the risk is over for them.   I am 99% certain there was no chance of a risk to people living at Pavilion IR #1, it is the Marble Canyon Reserve that is less than 1.4 kilometres from the fire, though fires do not tend to burn downhill.

I know the forest that has been burned.   It is largely in the Marble Canyon Park and was/is old growth forest.   I often drove the road behind the park to get up on the cliffs above Pavilion Lake, this road goes through the location of the fire.   It is a beautiful view and a peaceful place.    That fact that a bunch of it has burned is very personal to me.

It looks like the area right above the well know ice climb Icy BC has been burned.  I have no idea if this will have any impact on the climb next winter.

962 Bayview Drive - it is for sale

This is the house I grew up in.   My parents bought it in May 1966 and we sold it in April 2009 when my mother died.   For my brother Nik and myself this is the only house we ever knew.

We sold it for a little less than $500k.   We were realistic about the price and the market was very, very slow when we hit the market.    The house has several decades of deferred maintenance - my parents were heavy smokers for many years, once all of us kids left the house the spent more money on cigarettes than on food.   We may have priced it a bit low, but we did manage to get it sold quickly in a market that had been dead.

The people that bought seem to have been flippers.   They started work on the house and gutted a lot of it.  They also took a very long time to get anywhere with it, there were times when it simply did not progress.  

My brother Nik bought a house one block away about ten years ago so he lives in the neighbourhood.   This summer we had a big family gathering at his place and the lot of us wandered over to look at this stalled out reno.   About 15 of us were wandering around and looking in the windows to see what we could see.

I know many people have lived in various houses growing up and then had their parents sell the house when the all moved out.   For Nik, Beatrice and myself this house was really our one and only family home.   Given the nature of our parents and their unwillingness to spend money on material things, the house really did not change much at all over the years.   It was a rock steady point in our lives.

To see the renovations going on was weird for something that was for us almost unchanged for our whole lives.

The renos are now done and the house is on the market.   Nik went to look at the house

We went to the Open House yesterday. It was packed with all the neighbors. It was also quite weird walking through the house. The kitchen looks cool but generally all the finishing quality was very low. From a cosmetic point of view it was good but very shoddy and cheap (cracked tub, particle board closets etc. etc.). They also did not do anything to the driveway or landscaping. The Master Bedroom is now my old little bedroom upstairs.

All in all very strange (especially standing where Api’s chair was and the Christmas tree used to stand).

Nik

I am not surprised that the quality of the renos were not the best.   In looking at the pictures, I am not sure they have really done much to improve the house.   The choice of my old upstairs bedroom/ Tante Sabines bedroom/ the TV room (use changed over time) as the master bedroom is strange.   The space in that room is not really there to make a master bedroom.  Also the window is very high up on the wall.

One aspect of the house that has always been odd has been the high windows in two of the upstairs bedrooms, the light into the rooms has always been affected by this.  

The entryway through the formal door has been made much less useful in my opinion, previously it was a great entrance for company, though the door was hidden around the corner.   There was space for people to say good bye at the door and a nice closet right at hand.  This is now gone and there seems to be no natural gathering space at the door.

The former kitchen door is gone.  It went into the carport and was the real way we came into the house, it was not ideal.   The new renovation seems to make a new sliding glass door into the kitchen as the primary entrance.  Three sliding glass doors onto the deck?   Then a railing that is completely see through?  It makes it all to exposed for people to like the rooms.   The sliding glass doors are going to create a dead zone in the living room - dining room kitchen as no furniture can be in front of them.   Also with all the light from one side the room is always going to feel very unbalanced.  There has always been the need for a window to the right of the fireplace.

In general it looks like the use of space in the primary living space has been dramatically harmed by the design.

Downstairs it looks and sounds like they have removed all the storage space.   We had a room under the kitchen that was not insulated and surrounded by earth on three sides.  It was naturally cool year round and allowed for fruit and veggies to be stored there.   It is now a useless alcove area downstairs.  

Missing from downstairs are the doors we had to close off the rooms.  This matters because otherwise you heat the whole house from downstairs - my dad was a constantly making sure we did this to keep the natural gas usage down.   There is nothing to indicate they have a new furnace so it is still the old one with the registers through out the house.   The downstairs is going to be cold and cause the upstairs to be heated.   The downstairs heat is still coming from registers in the ceiling.

Outside they have done nothing to improve the yard.

The house is on the market for $819,000.   They are dreaming.   For that price in Tsawwassen you can buy a better house with a swimming pool in a better location.   The realistic price for the house is $590,000 and even then it is too much for a house that has been made more flawed than before.

I am sure I am also being critical because these people changed the house that was there for 43 years of my life.

How history is taught

My son in grade 10 came home today and said his homework was to draw map of Canada in 1820. I asked if he would include the First Nations of BC as they were still independent. He told me that in class they learned that BC was jointly ruled by Britain and the US, this set me off.

Legally before 1848 there was no infringement of First Nation sovereignty in BC. Communities were not subject to any rule of law from either the US or Britain. The Hudson's Bay Company in the interior of BC had to seek permission from communities like Xaxli'p to take part in the annual trading fairs. Communities like Ts'kw'aylaxw made it entirely clear that the English did not apply to them or anyone under their protection.

Canada has this ongoing problem of how to deal with the narative that is BC history. It is 2010 and the schools continue with the fictions written in the past about this being terrus nullius. The courts of Canada specifically ruled this was not the case decades ago.

The Nuu-Chah-Nulth in the early 19th century had the military power to deny access to the west coast of Vancouver Island, there is a long list of ships they captured or sunk. They made slaves of some of the crews.

At the same time, starting at the end of the 18th century, some aboriginal people from BC were joining whaling crews and seeing the world. It was not just the Kanakas that sailed the world.

In the 1860s the Tshilcotin were militarily powerful enough that the British could not defeat them. The British only managed to win the Chilcotin war was to trick the leaders into coming to a parley and then taking them prisoner. They then executed them outside of any form of due process of law, sure the British had a judge there but they did not treat the leaders as prisoners of war as they clearly were.

The narrative of Canadian history has been one of a smooth timeline from the European discovery of the east coast up to the settlement of the prairies and the building of the railway. BC does not fit into this.

At a minimum, here in BC we should focus on the history of the region we live in, this means not only the history of BC, but of the related areas in the US such as Washington and Oregon. We need to make a stand and claim our history and know it. Without doing this we will never be truly at home where we are living.

The program that created the green signs like at the top of this blog needs to be expanded, we need to actively learn our history and then ultimately make sure all people in Canada know the history of BC. There really is no province in the country that people are less aware of in historical terms than BC.

Here ends the rant for the day....

Trutch Hall - Renaming Buildings and Places

This week some students at UVic said they wanted to have the Trutch Hall remamed because it is named for Joseph Trutch. As someone that has spent many years working for First Nations on land issues, I am very aware of his place in the history of BC as one of the men most responsible for the oppression of the aboriginal people of BC. I can see the case for removing his name and using a different one. I also see that the problem comes from a very western North American thing, naming almost everything for people.

In the past names for places and things came about organically. Abbotsford in the UK comes from it being the ford controlled by the abbot. Green Lake is named that way because it is green. Names were descriptors of where you were, the name meant something that related to the geography.

Here in the west of North America we have created names for places that have no organic connection to the place where we are. We are naming locations for people. The names of places like Oliver, Bowser and McBride in BC are all named for BC premiers. There is nothing about their names that lets you know anything about them. Bowser would have been better named Oyster Beach and Oliver would have been better known as Fruit Garden or Orchard. The name tells us nothing of the place. You give no identity to the community.

When one uses the name of a person to give a location an identity, you run the risk of two things: people decide the person was actually a bastard or people simply forget who the person was. Trutch hall is clearly the case of people come to realize he was not a nice man and huge amounts of damage to BC through his capricious actions. Lansdowne residence also has Hodges, Ravenhill, Helmcken, Carroll and Sanderson halls. I know who two of these people were but the rest I have no idea. The name of the complex comes from a former Governor General of Canada.

Naming is also often the chance for people in power to honour their political buddies. Over in Vancouver there is a bridge named the Arthur Laing bridge. The bridge was named for him because the Liberals were in power in Ottawa and the federal government built the bridge. During this era the Liberals were very unpopular in BC and Arthur Laing was one of the few politicians they had in the 1950s and 60s.

Using names of people that are barely known during the height of their career means we create names that are meaningless for us. When places do not have names that mean anything we disconnect ourselves from the place we live in. Examples of good bridge names in the lower Mainland are the Oak Street Bridge, the Knight Street Bridge, and the Cambie Street Bridge. We had two river crossings that had good names that were renamed, the Deas Island tunnel became the George Massey tunnel and the Second Narrows Bridge become the Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Crossing.

At a university there are obvious names that can be used for buildings - the Library, the Administration building, the Recreation building and others. There are buildings at UVic that make sense, University Centre, Human and Social Development building, and the Medical Sciences building as examples. Many of the residence buildings at UVic do not have names at all but are known by a number, not ideal but at least not a random choice of some name of a person.

There is a role for something like a building to be named for a person from time to time, but only when the person is crucial to the place. As an example, Howard Petch saved UVic in the mid 1970s and by the time he retired in 1990 he made UVic a good school. I would argue no one person is more responsible for UVic as we know than he is. A person like this comes along less than once a generation. Naming a building for someone should not be done because they gave a lot of money or they did many years of loyal service to the institution. Both those choices are all about vanity and not real honour.

I hope the students succeed in getting the name changed but only all of the names of people are removed from buildings. The time has come to set a better standard for how things are named, UVic is a good place to start.

Growing Alienation in Society

On Saturday I went to listen to Richard Louvs, author of Last Child in the Woods, Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, talk last Saturday at the Victoria Conference Centre. Much of his talk resonated with me strongly. I have been concerned and worried about the disconnection in our society from the natural world, from a world were it is not all dominated by what it is possible for human comfort.

I have my boys in Scouting so that they do will grow up camping, that they will do works to make our world a better place and so that they will not fear the outside. I see the alienation of the outside among so many people now. There is a tangible fear of the outdoors and of all animals in people.

My hope is that all the boys will have the skills at age 15 or 16 to be able to look after themselves in the wilderness if something happens. I also want them to have the confidence to be able to undertake real adventures as young men. With that confidence comes a respect for the power of the wilderness.

Building a shelter to survive the night and make a fire are skills that every person should know, but these days less than 5% of people can do it. I know that there are a lot of people out there who think this is no longer something important to know, they are distainful of the need to know this. But to learn it takes so little that only a fool would not try and learn how to survive a night in the wilderness.

I also raise chickens so that the boys will see where food comes from. The chickens will also instill some thrift in the boys, it is cheaper to keep chickens than to go to the store and buy eggs. Meanwhile in Vancouver there is a strong backlash against people keeping chickens. The agruements against the keeping of chickens are all fear or disgust based, they are responses coming from alienation from alienation.

My children know that chickens shit, that they are dumb birds. They also know that the omletter they have from breakfast is from their yard and their chickens. They know the feeling of picking up an egg still warm from being laid. They can see the weird habits the birds have.

Someday they are also going to have kill these birds when they reach the end of their lives. Our society expresses alienation with animals by anthropomorphizing them. Much of our food comes from animals that we eat, being squeamish about killing them yourself is a complete disconnection from life, it is alienation extended to the point of mental illness.

They will never in their life look at a dozen eggs and not have an emotional and intellectual connection to where this food has come from and what it takes for those eggs to be in their hands. They will know that chickens lived and died so that those eggs could be laid.

I would like to hunt with them as well. They need to know the process involved to get meat, they need to know that killing animals is part of how we eat and ethically you have to be able to kill to be able eat meat.

The funny thing is that the most alienated and disconnected people tend to be urban dwelling, univiesty educated professionals. It is very clear to me that the highest density neighbourhoods in Vancouver are the ones with the people most alienated from the natural world. The alienation is primarily expressed in sarcasm, disgust, and being dismissive.

The human soul requires a connection to other people, to a society, but it also requires a connection to the seasons and the natural world. The urban people have become disconnected on many levels from what it is to be a human being.

Knowing seasons means we know what foods in our stores are fresh and local. People that shop for produce at places like Save-On-Foods, Costco or Safeway live in a world that is disconnected from seasons, they buy without thought to where and when or even flavour.

Knowing seasons means being in touch with the cycles of a year and being able to mark and note the passing of year. Stores and society do a better job of promoting Valentines Day, Christmas, Halloween and other shopping events than spring, summer, fall and winter.

People need to go out and hike in all weathers and at all times of the year. Urban people need to go camping on a regular basis to reconnect to something real and ageless. Our schools need to take the kids into nature on a regular basis. The human soul needs to be in the sort of places that our ancestors lived in 200, 2000 and 20 000 years ago. Our human soul requires us to know the ageless and ongoing power of the world outside of what we build for our comfort.

Richard Louv Speaking in Victoria

Richard Louv is the author of the book Last Child in the Woods. He is speaking in Victoria on Saturday March 7th at 7pm at the Victoria Conference Centre. Admission is free.

The talk is sponsored by Royal Roads, The BC Youth Climate Leadership Alliance and the Kesho Trust.

I am very active on an almost daily basis with what Richard Louv's is talking about. Three of my kids are in Scouting and get direct and constant exposure to the outdoors and nature. I am dismayed at how few parents put their kids into Scouting, but even more than that, I am utterly disgusted at how few parents take the time to become active in Scouting.

Each year the 3rd Douglas Scouts camp about 20 nights, take part in at least one environmental project, hike on numerous trails in the region, learn and talk about the natural world around us, and learn how to take responsibility and become good stewards of our society.

Scouts Canada is an inclusive organization, boys and girls can be members. Sexual orientation is a big issue in the US, but not an issue in Canada.

Richard Louv's makes it clear how important this connection to the world around us is for the development of kids, but it is amazing how few people take even the easiest action and get their kids involved with Scouting. Scout House is at 505 Marigold, the shop is open Tuesday and Thursdays from 4pm to 8pm and Saturday mornings. Scouting has a program for youth from age five to eighteen. Go into the shop and find out about what is available locally.

I also have chickens and grow some of my own food so that the kids remain connected to where food comes from and what it takes to go from a seed to the dinner table

Gwendolyn Southin Books - A Great Series of Mysteries

Touchwood Editions has been doing a wonderful job of publishing mysteries based here in BC. They are an imprint of the Heritage Group.

I have really been enjoying the mysteries that Gwendolyn Southin has been writing in her Margaret Spencer series. The sleuth is a 50 something year old Kerisdale housewife that becomes a detective by accident of taking a secretarial job.

There are three books published so far - Death in a Family Way, In the Shadow of Death and Death on a Short Leash.

They take place in the early 1960s in Vancouver. The setting is a few years before I was born, but Southin does an amazing job of capturing the time and place. I remember vestiges of that Vancouver when I was growing up, the city when it was a provincial backwater and dominated by Central Canadian and English traditions and morals.

In the books Maggie Spencer eats at the Aristocratic at Broadway and Granville, a place my grandmother took me. In the second book she travels to the Cariboo on the PGE - the timing of the trip and scenes were the same ones I experienced when I took the train from 1996 to 2002.

The main characters, Maggie Spencer and Nate Southby, are likable and not too flawed - I may like Rebus, but the flaws overwhelm the character. If I have a complaint, it is that the reoccurring secondary characters are two dimensional.

Southin chooses interesting plot lines for the reader that allow reflection on how the times were changing in the city.

I highly recommend this series to anyone that wants a good mystery because they stand up as mysteries in their own right. The connection to the place we live in here in BC makes them an important connection for us to our past. It is important for us to read stories that take place where we live - it is also nice for it not to be a chore.

Stranger Wycott's Place

This is a new book in the Transmontanus series published by New Star Books. The series editted by west coast author Terry Glavin and is now at 17 books.

I went to a reading by John Schreiber at Bolen Books last night and I was captivated. His book speaks to my heart and the landscape that is within me.

I finished the book this afternoon - it is not a long one. I could not put it down because each and every page spoke about the lands and people I knew, of the stories I have heard and the ones I learn in my research.

John Schreiber has written the book I have in my head about the land just a little bit to the south of the Cariboo Chilcotin.

Kudos to Terry Glavin for another great installment in Transmountanus.

Connecting Kids to the World

I offered to the my son Stephen's teacher the chance to come and see our chickens. So today we have 20 kids from Mrs Favell's grade two class from Tillicum Elementary come and see the chickens.

It went quite well. The kids enjoyed holding the chickens, petting them, feeding them and seeing where eggs come from. Mrs Burleigh the principle as came along and took some pics.

I plan of telling them that the chickens are available for other classes to come and see.

This fits into my plan to have people understand that you can produce your own food. I think it is really important for kids to see this because we are getting further and further removed from our agricultural roots.

Before world war two, most people in Canada were still connected to a farm is some way. For my generation a lot of us had parents that grew up on the farm. For my children, this means their grandparents generation where the ones on the land. The connection is getting further and further away.

Children seem alienated from where their food comes from and how the natural world works. What I find most interesting is that is seems to be the youth that are better educated that are more disconnected.

Food is so cheap to buy at the big stores or the Red Barn Market that it makes very little sense to grow any of your own. Since most people no longer grow their own, their children are not connected to the land where the food comes from.

Yes, I know you are all thinking this is going so some sort of 'food security' or neo hippie eco thing, but it is not. I find the concept of 'food security' as an issue fundamentally flawed. I find the 100 mile diet ideas also fundamentally flawed - most small scale growers produce a larger environmental footprint than a large scale grower in a different part of the world.

For me having chickens, growing food, making jams, and other things like that are all about being connected to the place where I am. There are no people on earth as disconnected from the places where they live than the people on the west coast of North America. How can I really say I live in Victoria if I do not know what grows well here and when it grows?

I glad I gave classroom full of kids the chance to hold real chickens and fresh eggs that were still warm. It is a piece of my Illahie revolution.

Peter von Tiesenhausen

Peter is a 5th cousin of mine - he and his family are the closest relatives I have outside of Europe on my father's side of the family.

My father Axel von Schulmann was Peter's god father. I remember as a kid going on VERY long car trips up to Demmit Alberta to visit the Tiesenhausen's My father also bought Peter his first art supplies - totally out of character for my father to hit a present so correctly and so I think it was my mother than did the buying.

The Tiesenhausen's homesteaded in the Peace in the early 1960s. The land and climate reminds me a lot of the place where our families are from - Estonia.

I can remember the day that I was struck still by the sight of Peter's art. It was about 11 or 12 years ago and I saw an image of his ship in his hayfield. The thoughts and ideas that came into my head when I saw it were almost too numerous to name.

First off all, how cool to build a ship shape out of aspen branches in the middle of field?

Second, the hayfield is still used and the mower goes around the art - The Art Has Left the Building!

Third, I am captivated by the concepts of land, language, people and the environment and how it all comes together. I can see how much I have become disconnected from the land and the language of land since I left Lillooet for Victoria four years ago. Taking art out onto the land is brilliant.

Fourth, Canada is a big empty natural landscape where the forces of nature over come human creations. In the cities we do not see this, but such a tiny piece of Canada is located where the majority of the people live. Most of this land still has natural forces

Fifth - the very act of decay on the creation. His art on the land does not last, it decays, it can not last, it is consumed by the natural world around it. So much art is about preserving a single momentary vision forever. Keeping a painting static and the same generations after the artist has died.

Sixth - Peter's art is dynamic and changing, it never sits still.

Seventh - it is fun and unpretentious

Eighth - the themes are easy to understand but so complex that you could spend a lifetime thinking about it.

After seeing that one work I have been fascinated to see all the other things he has been doing. The complete brilliance of what he does leaves me in awe of the visions that live within his head.

A quote from Peter

"Having things go wrong always happens for a reason," he says, "whether it is the truck breaking down in the middle of nowhere or a painting not working out. If I'm open to the chaos that follows, the right path presents itself. Call it fate, karma, whatever – but something better than I could ever have imagined happens when my initial plan falls apart."

I showed some of his art to my middle son today and he fell in love with it. Ben has a skill with drawing that I would like to encourage. I had hoped showing him some inspired genius in art would open his eyes - my fear was that he would be too young to understand it.

Salish Sea

The name the Salish Sea has been gaining popularity as a term for what is at the moment known as the Strait of Georgia. At the last First Nations Summit meeting, the leaders of the First Nations suggested to the BC Government that it rename it to the Salish Sea.

I think this is a wonderful idea. The name certainly better represents this place where we live and I believe that it better represents the geography of the area - the region is much more like a sea than a strait.

The province and the First Nations Summit started a process just over ten years ago to address issues of geographic naming. The process started then because of the use of the word squaw. The civil servants that deal with naming issues seems at the time to be open to renaming of places in BC at the request of First Nations, though I have not heard of anything this big to date.

There is a degree of resistance among many people to renaming places, but maybe these people need to look at how the current name came into use. I have heard complaints by people that many aboriginal names are hard to pronounce or the spelling makes no sense them. I counter that it is good for us to have names that reflect the place we live in, names that have a long connection to this place and not just named for some rich white man out of England.

Our very province is called British Columbia - neither part of the name makes any sense here. We need a name that comes from our shared history and not from some temporary colonial history. We have towns like Prince Rupert and Prince George - neither of these men ever set foot here but they are on our maps, they are taking up space that could be used for names that are part of real history and geography.

We have names in use that come from our own history of this place - Saanich, Tsawwassen, Coquitlam and many more but we need more to ground ourselves in this place in this part of the world.