Perseids in the Sky

An August hiatus, precipitated by the season, and explorations of our surrounds. Breathing time after a fast flowing month, and time to jot some notes of the summer.



Campbell River is 25 kilometres east of Strathcona Provincial Park, BC's oldest at 96 years of age. The park is a bit bigger than Te Urewera National Park, if that helps anyone. Just under 2,500 square kilometres for the others, about 8% of Vancouver Island. The highest peaks of the Vancouver Island Ranges lie within Strathcona. Our first foray into the park was with Paul, a Montreal student working the BC summer and Hersh, Sarah's PW ulti friend from way back, and my friend from when I met him at Jericho Beach second day in Canada.

We entered the park from the road to Gold River, hiking the trail running alongside Elk River. Our destination was Landslide Lake, at the base of Mount Colonel Foster, 4th highest of the range at 2,135m (and considered the "unrivalled alpine climbing mecca" of BC by Philip Stone, Island Alpine.) The mountain was named after some battler; Landslide earned its with the 7.2 Richter earthquake of 1946, when one of Colonel Foster's shoulders slid into the lake. The displaced water scythed a way down the upper Elk Valley, sluicing to bedrock near the lake. The walk in was easily paced. Paul, in one of many frequent unrobings, whipped 'em off to shower beneath ribbons of falling water.

We pitched camp by the river and progressed onwards and upwards. The final stretch took us over the exposed bedrock under reclamation, mosses, lichen, the odd dwarf tree toughing it out. Sarah pointed out White pine afflicted with blister rust. We hopped a few streams and found the lake in sight, and beyond, the imposing granite face of Colonel Foster. Taking in our surroundings, the four of us shared yerba mate sitting on a rock by the water. The scar of 1946 was plainly evident, with young trees encroaching on a broad section of cleared mountainside. We made our way around Landslide Lake to a smaller lake higher up, at the base of the mountain face. The lake was iced over, except at its exit point. Sarah and Paul were brave enough to dunk, but not slow coming out either.

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We tripped into the interior of BC later in the summer, lured by music and friends, with a Subaru to name. The road looped through Mt Washington, for a wine festival that became a chalet blender drinks session, Victoria, where Sarah's sister Katy was moving into a new house, and across on the Queen of Oak Bay to Vancouver and mackerel Korean-style. We met Trish and Regan, another BC-NZ connection, in Squamish and drove fresh country for me, along the 99 through Whistler and Pemberton. We camped at a BC Hydro site (the province's power monopoly) and cooked up a feed while 20-30 kids had a party next door. It was probably the metal blasting out of car speakers that got them booted out. The old lady running the site steamed up in her old Ford pick-up, and she was pissed, ranting about their drinking and swearing. I nearly got chucked out for suggesting they were doing normal things for teens. She ended up calling the RCMP, while we sat back and watched bats flitting through the light emitted by her truck, hunting. After things cooled down, we slept under the stars, watching Perseids meteors trailing across the night sky.

Next day we drove to Salmon Arm, via a welcome swim in the Thompson River. The dry hills of the Okanagan region in summer recalled Central Otago. Red conifers signified pine beetle kill: the scale and spread of the infestation is awesome and awful. We drove straight to our destination, the Salmon Arm Roots & Blues festival. The diversity of music was impressive. Personal favourites were Andy Palacio and the Garifuna Collective, a mostly Belizean band singing to maintain their Garifuna culture. The Collective travelled with a 79 year old Garifuna legend, an aged dude in hat and suit who sang a song a day in strong voice. Other elements of the festival included Amazones, African women drummers from Guinea; Galant tu perds ton temps, five women singing Quebecois songs accompanied by a big, red-bearded percussionist who tapdanced and played spoons and a suitcase like a drum; Los de Abajo, a Mexico City ska-punk-salsa outfit full of beans; and the best fusion of them all, Ellika & Solo, a Swedish woman on fiddle and a Senegalese dreadhead playing the 21 strings of a kora. Michael Franti and Spearhead were the Friday night headliners, and they closed the night with energy. Franti's a consummate performer, a worker of the crowd. Spearhead were tight; the drummer was bursting with quick staccato lyrics, and the bass player plucked a mean blade. The last act we saw at the festival was Xavier Rudd, an Australian, who sat on stage surrounded by drums, a few didgeridoos, some electronic devices and other noisemakers, a guitar never far from his hands. I thought of Ganga Giri, though Xavier had a few more candle burners in his repertoire.

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I've experienced more bonfires by the shores of lakes and ocean this summer than in living memory. S'mores have been sweet. The water - river, lake, ocean - has been refreshing, despite the inconsistent nature of the season. And yesterday, as September brings a Pacific high hanging over the Island, I cruised Quadra Island, biking roads and trails east to views of Cortes and Read Islands and the Coast Mountains backdrop. Dropping south west to the Cape Mudge lighthouse, I found a log by the water and sat back, watching the boats fishing in the channel, the tug and barge passing by, looking across the water at Campbell River. On the ferry back, a guy from Quebec and I got talking. A pair of out-of-towners, we agreed on the sweetness of BC.

River City Rip

Sarah and I live in a place called Campbell River, in British Columbia, Canada. A river of the same name flows through the northern reaches of Campbell River. The river is believed named for the ship surgeon of the HMS Plumper, cartographing in 1859. The community took the name with the construction of its post office in 1907. Tla'mataxw is the aboriginal name for the original Wiwekam settlement at the river's mouth; the First Nations band resides there still, under the designation Indian Reserve #11.

Campbell River, our first fixed location since Garak-Dong, Seoul, is a city. But Campbell River isn't a Seoul, for which I'm glad. A city in name, but by feel a town; in British Columbia, a community can be incorporated as a city if its population exceeds 5,000. Despite its city status, the town of Campbell River, population 30,000 or thereabouts, attracts those looking for a slower life. Retirees from Alberta, so I hear, and citizens of the US and BC Lower Mainlanders also. These outsiders are fuelling a transformation in the River City, a gradual shift from industry town to something less single-minded, more broadly cultural, artistic and active. A creeping transformation making its way up Vancouver Island - transmitted from Vancouver and Victoria, a dash of West Coast culture coupling with healthy doses of Island mentality - and flowing through the east coast urban centres. Campbell River is within the tidal zone of this wave, not yet subsumed.

The River City is a logging town first. Trucks and pick-ups dominate the roads; highway logging trucks, loaded with fresh cut forest behemoths or smaller pulp grade logs, plough through town. Tugs towing timber rafts or ships carrying logs ply the Discovery Passage, the channel between Quadra Island and Campbell River, heading south. When the wind blows from the north the captivating scent of the pulp mill up the coast wafts over the town. Other extractive industries are prominent. Mining - zinc, copper, lead, gold, silver, coal - plays a role in the region, as does commercial fishing. Campbell River serves as the operations base for several salmon farm companies, and sport fishing attracts the tourists. Even as fewer salmon run the rivers of BC, not least due to the operations of those fish farms, Campbell River trumpets the slogan, "Salmon Capital of the World."

This kind of dichotomy is apparent throughout Campbell River. The beautiful surroundings of coastal British Columbia - the waters of the Strait of Georgia; the mountains of the mainland to our east and Vancouver Island's backbone to our west; the layers of forest covering this coast, the myriad tree species, the bountiful berry bushes, the ferns that recall New Zealand; the fauna of the land that do not, mammals unfarmed, undomesticated. And the ugliness of the town centre - strip malls and branded big box stores and glorious acres of asphalted parking. A place where I can find shiitake mushrooms, kimchi ramyeon, and sashimi prepared by knife wielding Japanese - as well as Samson's Janitorial World: no Delilah, no mop bucket roller-coaster rides (sorry kids), but bristled brooms and advice on septic tanks. Streets where I pick berries beside the footpath - huckleberries, salmonberries, thimbleberries, native trailing blackberries, with exotic blackberries coming on line later this summer - while heroin junkies float on by.

Today I took my bike out, pedalled for five or ten minutes through a buffeting wind and was surrounded by the trees of the Beaver Lodge forest lands - a combination of Douglas-fir, western redcedar, Sitka spruce, grand fir, big leaf maple and red alder. I rode trails edged by sword ferns for a couple of hours, encountering other bikers and people walking dogs. Later, I found a perch by the beaver pond for a breather. Dense forest surrounded the water. A mallard duck called greeting to a companion dropping in from the sky. Seven female mallards drifted to my end of the pond, and frolicked in the trickling rapids flowing past. One stood sentry on a rock, a leg tucked away, keeping half an eye on me. Above the wind whistled by, but within the forest all was calm. I breathed the air, clean and fresh. Seoul, this is not.

Naming

Why Orangapai? The roll of the name curling off my tongue, perhaps. The scents the name floods into my mind's nostrils. The sense of time, the unrecorded and unknown histories, the name conjures. The location, looking out over familiar formations, known geography.

Orangapai is a place, nestled in the foothills of the Rock and Pillar range bordering the Maniototo plain. The name, I believe, translates roughly to well-being - my Maori speaking friends are welcome to correct if otherwise. From Orangapai, you look over the plain, to the rising folds of the Kakanuis, the evergreen beard growing around Naseby, the spiralling smoke ascending from Ranfurly's town dump. At the top of the Rock and Pillar, above Orangapai, you can see farther, over the back of Rough Ridge, with the plain laid out before you. In dry months the Maniototo becomes a patchwork of irrigated green and agonising brown. The tracery of willows across the plain marks the flow of the Taieri. I used to swim in the Taieri, by Kokonga and further west at the Creamery, but the dairy farms upstream have polluted the river now.

A brief, cobbled together history for you. The Hamiltons gold field, created in the 1860s, shares the same space as Orangapai, overlapping spheres of naming. A Union Church, built in 1865 of corrugated iron and tongue and groove, stood at Hamiltons. “An oven in summer and a refrigerator in winter,” according to one settler. In 1914, a sanatorium for sufferers of tuberculosis was constructed, with 112 beds. This facility was later managed by the Justice Department as a boys' borstal, a reformatory institution for juvenile offenders. How reformatory? Some of these boys worked on Maritanga Station, my parents's farm, picking rocks off paddocks for lunch and cigarettes. The place is now a private Christian retreat centre; the Quakers in Aotearoa had their summer gathering there in 2006. I'm still pondering what Christians are retreating from.

I believe I first visited the area when I was 11 or 12. The large complex was seemingly incompatible with the surrounding landscape. The dated buildings, the abandoned, institutional feel, conveyed an eerie sense, of decaying time, history past. I recall the greenhouses were full of growing plants, tomatoes and the like, so perhaps the Christians were in residence at the time of that first exploration.

The greenhouses allow me to segue away from the naming of the blog, and to the intent. I presume Orangapai to be a vessel, a documentary voice for myself, and a connection to and for my friends. You are able to follow life's arc, and I may disseminate observations, perspectives and modest learnings for others, hopefully, to enjoy. But the greenhouses, you ask, where is this segue link? To the brimming green on a balcony. That is the link. Growing there are tomato plants, hot peppers (including Bolivian Rainbow, Chimicheka, and Ivory Banana - the imagery of names), shiso, and herbs: basil, coriander/cilantro, rosemary, sage and spearmint occupying space on the balcony. Yellow flowers and little bulbs of green mark forming tomatoes and Sarah's bursting enthusiasm.

The balcony is attached to an apartment, of Discovery Village apartments, bounded by First Avenue, running approximately east-west, and by Alder and Birch Streets, running perpendicular to First. In habitation within are Sarah and I. We live on the east coast of Vancouver Island. From our balcony we see a pair of rows of two-storied town houses, windows and roof eaves like eyes framed by squared hair staring back, and behind a line of Douglas fir. Across Alder, the view is of the southern tip of Quadra Island, including the lighthouse at Cape Mudge. Surrounding are the waters of the Strait of Georgia, making turbulent passage through the narrow channels of the Discovery Islands, of which Quadra is one. Beyond Quadra, disrupting the horizon, are the Coast Mountains. The place we live is the River City.