SeaRose Newsletter January 2008

          Good morning dear lovers of the wilderness. Another January upon us, moving rapidly through the days. We have been blessed with an incredible array of weather and, so far, no untoward hardship here in the mainland inlets of the Broughton Archipelago. This morning the grayest of soft sea fogs has wrapped us in it=s dampening silence, I can hear the faintest of bird calls through the mist, the sweet little peeps of murrelets. We have experienced almost every manifestation of winter weather possible except for a deep snowfall and as most of us are not very romantic about snow  we are content without it. Lots of wind of course and from every direction of  the compass rose. Southeasterly predominating yet plenty of westerly angling in from the north and the south. Consequently we have had very cold sunny days, but only a few of them and very warm sunny days as well. I noted my foolish daffodils have poked their green shoots a good four inches above the earth and the pink hydrangea has large shiny nubbins on the ends of the old stalks. It does concern me to see the variety of flies and bugs moving around this time of year. One of the beauties of our seaside home is the dearth of annoying insects and poisonous creatures. I have never minded a freeze-up period, knowing that it keeps the bug population in check.

The short days and long nights of winter can sometimes weigh on me a bit. I really welcome the beginning of the return of the sun so this year I called a circle and three friends and I celebrated the Solstice under the ancient cedar trees in Echo Bay Park. We followed no defined prescription, only followed our hearts; acknowledged and honored the power and perfectness of our world and the grace that brought us into it and expressed our vision for the future.

Sometimes visitors ask us AWhat do you do all winter, don=t you get bored?@ To us this has got to be the funniest question in the world. We simply do not have a single second of a single  day to get bored. Last summer my brilliant E.G. (Engineering Genius if you recall) decided he would build a raku kiln. I had visions of a smaller brick construction like our big gas kiln however he had a different vision. The first thing he did was to salvage a little used generator /welder from our friends abandoned float. That thing is heavy, it took four or five of the young research scientists from the station next door to lift it off the sinking float onto our shake cutter neighbor=s boat and bring it over to our dock and lift it out of the boat onto our dock.               

 So there it has rested while E.G. monkeywrenched and jimmied things around and cursed a lot. It only cost us six hundred dollars to get it up and running. Then he bought angle iron and sheets of expanded metal, like a metal criss- cross mesh and fabricated a raku kiln that can be completely dismantled and transported anywhere. It is beautiful in its simplicity, it looks like an alter, an alter to fire. Before he could set it up, he dismantled our first generator shed at the edge of the garden and used the planks to construct a shed over the kiln. Of course come gardening weather, that wreckage will need to be completely cleaned up.

    Throughout the last six months he has been throwing and hand- building large roosters and we finally had a test-firing and a real firing, which I am pleased to say went off with gusto. The kiln fired up to temperature in twenty-five minutes and we had everything fired in just over an hour. Whew, that is one ceramic process that is not a long drawn out affair. We fired three of the five completed roosters,  lost some tail feathers in the process, a most fragile bit as you may imagine. My own large planter pots turned out well and gave me some good ideas. Have a look at the pictures to get a sense of the process....