Hello, Happy New Year! I shall cut right to the most interesting moments of 2008.
In the category of most recent best news is that after ten years, finally we have a games room and the pool table that E.G. salvaged from the logging camp in Shoal Harbour is at last installed. As I write I can hear the click and bonk of the balls as E.G. plays with his new toy. I realized that so much of our life is taken up with work of some sort or another ( to be honest mostly extremely enjoyable art work), nevertheless we do very little that is just plain fun. When we were courting, years ago, we used to meet at the “Ditch”, as we called the Ocean Beach Hotel in White Rock and played a lot of pool. This is a terrific setting for flirting and body contact opportunities, for example when “he” leans behind “she” to show her how to hold the cue properly for a tricky shot. I digress, but I am thinking I will run upstairs and have another game with him, win back the lead!
My singing daughter Theda and her friend Jeremy made it to Echo Bay in the one day window, Dec.23, when it briefly quit snowing. His flight from Ottawa arrived at one a.m., only briefly delayed by five hours, and they pulled an all-nighter, driving to Tsawwassen to catch the 5:15 ferry to Duke Point, then up island to Port McNeill and the final leg to Echo Bay of three and a half hours on Billy Proctors ”Ocean Dawn”. A long day for two weary travelers but we had a great time in spite of frozen waterlines.
This freeze up has lasted two weeks now, the longest we have seen since 1987. Everyone’s water line has frozen up and the first water conservation strategy is to fill the bathtub as soon as we notice the temperature dropping. It really makes you sit up and take notice of what it must be like to always struggle for water. It is a precious resource and here in the rain forest it is easy to take it for granted. The bright sunshiny days of a northern front are very beautiful but we were all ready for the rain and brief thaw after Christmas.
This weather is hard on the birds too. The eagles are hungry and go after ducks and gulls. We have found rafts of feathers floating near the dock indicating an eagle kill. Every day we have a bit of a treat for the raven pair that lives here. When Bill and I did the Bird Count Dec. 14, we could not get far enough up into Viner Sound to get a good look at the swans however I am fairly certain that the six white blobs we saw were trumpeter swans. They are driven out of the frozen lakes and it is hard for them to guddle around in the estuary to eat shoots and roots when all there is frozen solid and the tide only lifts and drops the layer of ice. I note that when Theda, Jeremy and I went in to Viner New Years Day, we had the great pleasure of spending an hour with a group of Pacific White Sided Dolphins and counted twelve Trumpeter Swans and thirty Canada Geese.
The saddest news of this year has been the closure of the Echo Bay School at the end of June 2008. The opening of the school in 1923 brought a lot of families to the area and it is now the lack of families here that has caused the closure. We miss our kids so much, most of the years social events were designed around fun for them. Hallowe’en at Proctors was the big event before Christmas, highlighted as usual with Billy’s spectacular fireworks display but there was no doubt that the missing children left a huge gap.
The really fantastic best news of the year has got to be the amazing volumes of coho and chum salmon we saw in the fall of the year. After several walks up Viner River through October and November we felt that 20,000 returning chum was not an unrealistic number. This return is somewhat inexplicable in the face of all the factors threatening salmon and must be a function of the amazing adaptability of the species. Factors negatively affecting the chum salmon of Viner River over the years have been extreme habitat damage through logging of the side hills of the river valley right next to the streams as well as sea lice infestation on exiting fry from the nearby fish farms. However wild Pacific salmon have a variety of adaptive techniques, one of which is three, four and five year return cycles, which can help to mitigate the damage from specific year classes being wiped out.
There must have been thousands of coho travel by our house, judging from the intense fishing by local and visitor alike. I managed my limit a couple of times and smoked and canned a couple of loads. Still I was hesitant to go after them really hard as it seemed a better idea to let as many as possible make it to their natal river, which did not appear to be our Scott Cove Creek the community has enhanced for twenty-five years. Data gathered by university researchers over the last five years indicate it is possible that the local run has been wiped out by the sea lice generated from fish farms in the Burdwood Group and all the other exits to Queen Charlotte Strait available to the fry.
An odd mix of good/bad news characterizes the Echo Bay Resort story. Last summer the resort was purchased by Jerome and Lucy Rose and Pierre and Tove Landry. This purchase brought a new enlivening energy to the Resort however the decision was made to tear down the old Echo Bay Hotel that was built by carpenter Louis Skidrow for Fidel Laviolette in 1933. I find it sad to see just a space now where once the hotel stood, however Pierre has saved the pieces and I trust will build something lovely out of the beautiful fir and cedar planks that were salvaged.
E.G. and I mounted an exhibit of our ceramic arts and my paintings at West Coast Community Craft Shop in Port Hardy Dec.6. E.G. was firing his “Lichen Glaze” bottles and raku roosters right up to midnight the day before we left for Port Hardy. My work focused on the development of crystalline glazes, which I have always loved. In June I attended a workshop at Metchosin Summer School of the Arts with Gordon Hutchens on the topic. Although I have a fairly old kiln with two switches of three settings, with the help of a pyrometer I was able to get amazing crystal development on the pots after only four firings. I have wanted to work with crystalline glazes since the very first time I saw one about twenty years and so far this complex and beautiful glaze technology has been wonderfully rewarding.
As for the painting, I finally had reconstructive surgery on my right shoulder in April which was a great success. After fifteen years of living in pain and experiencing increasingly debilitating loss of control of my painting arm, I have regained complete use of my arm and am painting both acrylic and watercolor with great enthusiasm.
We have had some wonderful visitors in 2008, primarily my cousin Marilyn and her husband Dan with one daughter and her friend, also a month with Theda in the summer and many other visitors to the studio between April and October. We look forward to many guests in 2009 and always welcome visitors to our home and studio.
Hope this moment finds you all well and happy and that 2009 blesses you with an abundance of joy, love and creative satisfaction.
PS I counted twenty-eight trumpeter swans in Viner in January, the most ever....
Cheers, Yvonne