Drawn Home

by Katherine Bell
 

This is what it is to be born into the Kitimat. Water that flows through our veins and calls to us. Water that soothes and feeds both our bodies and souls. Water that called to me from thousands of miles away and brought me home. 

After two years of living in Dalian, China, I dreamt, smelt and tasted home. I had become tired of a city of five million being considered small, saddened by the plastic bags adorning the trees on the side of the road, concerned about seeing black on the tissue every time I blew my nose. Going home became a craving that I was determined to feed.

And I fed it.  In July 2001, I returned to my hometown after thirteen years of living away. I returned to clean air, vast mountain ranges and a river that empties into the Douglas Channel. That river is the Kitimat.

The orange bridge over the Kitimat has always signaled home for me. Every time I pass over that bridge and see the water flowing under it, the corners of my mouth lift even before I realize they are doing it and my inhale deepens. Memories are carried in that current; they catch me and I follow them.

My first time river kayaking was below the wooden bridge near the old scout camp. Dave Littler, an experienced paddler and patient teacher, took me. Despite the low water levels and the gentle flow of the river, my heart beat rapidly as we slipped the boats in. The current moved us, the paddle my only brake.  Dave showed me how to turn into eddies where the calm water lies. Here he taught me different techniques like the j-stroke and bracing. I was part of the water as its energy pushed me downstream. Dave was a constant, either beside or just slightly behind me. He tried to show me how to find a line in the rapids and follow it. I managed, just not with the same grace as him. Too soon we exited at the orange bridge. We emerged from the water energized with wide, irrepressible smiles.

Just passed the bridge lies the first wash out which is the spot at which I almost washed out myself. One day while I was in a contemplative, loner mood, I decided to fish on my own (smart like fish).  While crossing the river, my feet slipped out from under me, my waders filled with the icy water of the Kitimat, while I desperately grabbed at the rocks. I did manage to drag myself back onto the highway side, but adrenaline pumped strongly as I berated myself for such foolishness. 

In saner times, I would fish with friends. I’ve gone down in drift boats in which a line is thrown in and dragged as the current carries its load. Although I find this style a bit boring, I did catch my largest fish this way: a 40 lb Chinook. Silver, shiny and thick. However, I much prefer jigging in a pontoon boat, although my method of pontooning is slightly comical. One of my friends would attach a seat to the back of his pontoon boat and we’d float down the river together. He always steered us clear of danger while I, content, sat in the back wearing my wetsuit jane, dangling my feet off the back and jigging. In calm pools on a warm day, I would slip off the seat and join the other fish.  Those were dream moments.    

On any float downstream, we would have to pass by Cablecar. Cablecar triggers older memories for me. Memories of donning scuba suits, fins, masks and snorkels and launching off the sandy banks. An old boyfriend and I would float down feet first, legs bent. Feet first usually allowed us to angle our bodies so that we could steer clear of most log jams. If we did hit one, bent knees allowed us to cushion the impact and push off with a strong kick. In the popular fishing spots, my boyfriend would dive down to the river bottom in search of lost lures decorating underwater snags. Later, he would stroll down the bank selling fishermen back their lost lures. 

           

Farther down, where the Kitimat meets the ocean there is a maze of high banked channels. Long grasses house water fowl, other birds and many small creatures. In high tide maneuvering a kayak is simple and, if we backtracked, we always found our way out. Sometimes we would come out on the ocean by the narrow channel that leads into Minette Bay. If we didn’t pay attention to the tides, we would have to battle the out flowing tidal current and would wear ourselves out. If we planned well, we would be swept back to Minette Bay by the inflowing tide. Once in the bay, the black heads of seals would often pop up, their beady eyes assessing us, bizarre colourful creatures sitting on the water. No matter what conditions we paddled in—clear, warm, gusty or rainy—we have always left those waters knowing that we would return.

The Kitimat River runs through all of us who grew up in this valley. It is part of who we are whether we want it to be or not. Like many others, I am one who wants it to be. No matter how far we travel, we will always be drawn home.
October, 2011

The Dog's Grand Passion

by Valerie Laub

Thanks to Valerie for sending in this poem - and if you haven't already heard, she and the cast of Alberta Tarzans: The  Musical are working on another play.

There is a dog, small, black, 

and wet, who loves to chase 

rocks in the river shallows.

(And when I say, “love,” 

believe me, I mean “love.”)

My role in the play of this small, black dog 

is to throw the rocks. Rock after rock after rock. 

I throw rocks until my arm hurts and my shoulder aches. 

I throw rocks until the river is choked with stones, 

the beach bare, night threatens and winter bites the air.

I throw rocks as this small black dog dashes, 

careless of stars and seasons,

through the riotous, rollicking waves. 

Once home, I return to my passion -- 

seeking words that bring my day to life.

The dog, sprawled under the dying sun,

dreams of rocks flying; 

the sheer glory and glint of river spray; 

her sweet, sleek black body plunging 

through the perfect poem of her day.

Resistance Art

The latest news about the ship breaking up off the coast of New Zealand and spilling hundreds of tonnes of oil near Tauranga is heartbreaking - people in The Bay of Plenty are heading out to clean up the mess with sand pails and rubber gloves. I remember as a kid, sitting on the veranda as my mother struggled to remove tar from my hands and feet - butter was the chosen remedy but it wasn't very effective. It seemed to take forever, the time lengthened, no doubt, by her irritation. How was I to know the newly-laid asphalt was still sticky? Lucky for both of us, we didn't have to lick each other clean because the toxins would likely have made us very sick.

Meanwhile, in Smithers, geomorphologist Jim Schwab has just released a report assessing the likelihood of pipelines breaking apart in landslides as the unstable landscape of the northwest shifts in winter freezes and thaws, rainstorms, avalanches and the kind of slippages that are a part of day to day life on uneven ground.

So, none of us are alone in our concerns; each of us chooses our way to respond to those concerns. Check out the article I wrote for the latest issue of Northword - "Resistance Art: A Special Beauty." It celebrates all of you who use your creativity to resist...

A River Mouth Caught Many Nations

by Betty Geier

 Rhythms and Cycles

Plants wait for the return of high water

Need sustenance from

Rich waters of spring and summer

Sea roaming salmon

Consumed by urgent longing

Return to the river mouth

Out roaming green hills, bears eating berries

Long for the taste of fish at the river mouth

Compelled to return

High soaring eagles seeking eulichan

Eulichan compelled to spawn

Strong force driving them upriver

People waiting at the river mouth

Starving all winter

Desperate with longing for the first eulichan

Hunting people seeking fish oil

Living too long on lean dried meat

Return to the river mouth

Seafaring traders

Consumed by longing or greed

Return to the river mouth

Infinite rhythmic pulsing

Many nations

Caught in a river mouth

All of us, all of them

Caught in a circle

Spun by a river

Crooked River revisited

On Sept. 22, we travelled to Summit Lake once again to pick up our canoe, Buttercup - miraculously unharmed after three months in the willows beside the Crooked River  (see June 15 posting for that story). Thanks to Hilary and Floyd Crowley and their friends who brought Buttercup out and also found Hilary's kayak. Subsequently, Hilary wrote these two pieces for the blog. 

Crooked River

by Hilary Crowley

The Crooked River runs north out of Summit Lake, which is situated on the Arctic Divide. Prior to the 50s, it was the main transportation route north to the Parsnip, Finlay and Peace Rivers as the road ended at Summit Lake. There is also a twelve km portage from the Fraser River connecting the Pacific and Arctic watersheds. These routes were important for carrying supplies up to northern communities and Hudson Bay posts and for shipping furs back south. Dick Corless made the river boats at Summit Lake and many brave and experienced boatmen plied these loaded boats down the river. 

The long riffle was a notorious section as here the river narrows and speeds up as it wends its way through the willows and around the gravel beds. Previously the trappers kept the beavers in check but now there are numerous beaver dams to negotiate. The pine beetle epidemic has caused many log jams to develop which also hinders navigation. It was into this situation, in the long riffle, that my kayak and I happily paddled but soon came to grief. 

Sheila Peters and her husband Lynn had phoned me a few days earlier to say that she’d heard the Crooked River was in flood and could be dangerous. My reply had been, “Oh no, you don’t need to worry about the Crooked River. It’s a piece of cake!” It was the end of May and rivers were in flood all over the region but the Crooked isn’t fed by any high mountain freshets. I know the upper section well, as we paddle it frequently. In fact, the day before, 30 of us paddled this upper section. I am much less familiar with the next section but have done it previously and didn’t remember any hazards. The sun was shining. A moose swam across in front of us and an osprey accompanied us for a while. It was so peaceful just having the two boats. Sheila and Lynn in their canoe, Buttercup, and me in my camouflage kayak. There were several faster sections but I had a big smile on my face revelling in it. 

Suddenly, around the next bend, appeared a log jam which had developed on a small island in the middle of the river with a fast narrow channel on either side of it. I opted for the left channel but the kayak was swept into the log jam and all I could do was hold on to a small willow growing up through it. The next thing I knew the kayak skirt was around my waist but the kayak was no longer with me. Luckily Sheila and Lynn managed to grab a willow and pull to shore. I struggled for some time to try and pull myself out of the water onto the logs but every time I got a knee or a foot-hold, the supporting log would float away under the pressure. By the time I managed to pull myself on top of the logs, I was exhausted and light-headed. Without Sheila and Lynn, I would never have made it. I was on a tiny island in the middle of this fast river and the only way to reach shore was to get back into that swirling water and wade or swim across to where Sheila and Lynn coaxed and encouraged me and threw me a rope to pull me to safety.

They had already determined that further navigation was impossible as further downstream, a giant log was right across the river. They pulled their canoe up into the willows. We still had to wade waist deep through numerous willow channels but eventually reached solid ground. Luckily my dry bag had been in their canoe so I was able to change out of my soaked clothes but I still shivered for a long time. It took us a while to find a logging road. Each of us walked a whistle-sound length from each other and after three attempts, we were thrilled to find ourselves on the logging road. We decided to walk north. A bear greeted us early on but was only interested in grazing at the edge of the road. Sheila and Lynn only had their neoprene footwear so Sheila soon developed blisters. It was Spring break-up so we travelled 4kms before a truck came along and picked us up. We were relieved to reach Bear Lake and aborted our plan to paddle to McLeod Lake. Instead we headed back to the comfort and safety of Summit Lake. The early settlers must have been a tougher breed!

There is much history all along the river as Hudson Bay posts developed. Family sawmills sprouted up and settlements with schools and post-office flourished. The proposed Enbridge pipeline is due to travel east from Alberta through pristine wilderness to Tumbler Ridge and from there across rivers and through forest to Bear Lake and beyond. Bear Lake is renowned for its pure water. Summit Lake residents collect their drinking water from the Crystal Lake spring. Livingstone Springs, on the Crooked River, stays open all winter and together with other warm springs enables Trumpeter Swans to winter on the Crooked. This is the southern point of their migration. The pipeline is due to cross the Crooked River just south of Davie Lake, close to Bear Lake, where there would be a pumping station. Grayling, which used to be in the Crooked River and are still present in the Peace, are now red-listed. How can we consider a pipeline through our region? Do we want to pollute our drinking water, cause grayling to go extinct and cover our magnificent trumpeter swans in oil? Even a miniscule leak would threaten their habitat.

The river is named Crooked but isn’t it the corporations and government who push forward these developments that are crooked? 

We are the stewards of this area of our province and it is our duty to stand up and protect our heritage for wildlife and future generations – both of which are threatened.

  

CROOKED RIVER

Crooked an apt name for the river

Home to trumpeter swans, loons and moose

Threat of oil spills make us shiver

We cannot let machines get loose

Enbridge wants to build a pipeline

It would carry Tarsands oil

From Earth’s most destructive mine

To Asia, beneficiary of our spoil

We need to stand up and stop this line

Protect our land and watershed

Such pollution is a crime

Too late when all the swans are dead

Naming the Rivers: Hirsch Creek

Joan Conway

In August when summer has not let go
of dappled green sunlight,
liquid reflections capture red bodies like ruby jewels
slipping through speckled gravel beds rubbed smooth
by their return.

We witness salmon's quiet determination,
bring our visitors awestruck
by this turbulent journey
from the ocean.

One visitor, a monk in exile from Tibet
stops at the river bank to rest from his teachings,
steps into Hirsch Creek,
his sandaled feet brush the ever moving bodies
a mirror to his own journey
where stories anchored
in another place in time
too search for their birth place.


His crimson robes are gathered in folds
above the moving water
as though these sockeye have exploded
in waves about his shoulders,
for a moment free to travel
unencumbered in a current of wind
a flag warning us
of this ever fragile landscape.

Fractals

Sheila Peters

A fat black raven stands just above the surf line on Oval Beach. Another perches on a nearby log. Something glints in the receding water, something left stranded on the gravel as the water rolls and drops it. The raven hops down and nabs the wriggling silver streak. He hops back as the next wave crashes, a surf smelt thrashing in his beak. He gulps it, gagging as it struggles in his throat.


We walk into the waves, looking. And there they are. As numerous as the shards of fractured light themselves, slivers of fish roll and tumble in each wave, fish that seem beyond counting. (A dangerous thought, that one.)

The other raven hops down, head sideways, watching for light. The waves roll and suck at the gravel. The gravel hisses a long response as the wave retreats around the curve of the bay. The other raven plucks another smelt from the beach. Both birds eat. Both watch and wait for more. The sun lights their feathers with the iridescence of an oil slick floating on water.

As we walk the trail back through the hemlock and cedar, red huckleberries glow brightly in the gloom, their branches reaching out toward the light. It is what most plants do, each in their own way, but there is something about the way red huckleberry bushes inhabit the forest, the way their berries become light itself, their branches floating green even, sometimes, through the winter. They don’t fill up the space they are given. They inhabit it the way young girls inhabit summer dresses (I remember this feeling from summer dances outdoors, the band playing in the pavilion at the beach), their bodies giving the clothes shape and form and the joy of movement. But they inhabit them lightly. The air filters into these places and the berries and the girls shiver.

We are walking back to our boats, pulled up on the inside of Welcome Harbour, a sheltered inlet on the northwest tip of Porcher Island, about 40 km southwest of Prince Rupert. At low tide, on our way here, we paddled through a narrow opening between two rocky outcrops. Inside these waters it’s hard to tell which clumps of rock are their own islands and which are part of Porcher – the tides change the answer every few minutes and right now the tides are over twenty feet. Our boats slipped through, the hulls mere inches above the hundreds of anemones – white frills, orange feelers, succulent green openings, squat brown sausages – and sea cucumbers, sea squirts, sun stars, bat stars and starfish, some dangling high above us, waiting for the tide to rise, other rocks dripping with dangling tunicates, each its own tiny watershed of cascading molecular systems, alive in its own intricate way. Crabs scuttle, as crabs do, some through the complex forests of kelp, others digging trenches in sand, claws up for battle.

This tiny opening where we pause is changed minute by minute as the water rises, slacks and falls not quite twice each day. In how many places and how many times is this duplicated? How long, you might ask, is the coastline of British Columbia? Benoît Mandelbrot wrote a paper which asked, how long is the coastline of England? It all depends, he argues, on how you measure it. The shorter your measuring stick, the longer the coast becomes. If you measure each tiny outcrop and then in between each stone, each pebble, each grain of sand and deeper in between smaller and smaller increments, each molecule, each atom, well, you can see it’s longer than you thought. And is it the high or low tide coastline you’re measuring? This fractal geometry becomes an illustration of how infinity can be contained within a finite space.

This is not just a measurement for mathematicians to take. It’s a line that is drawn by the wash of water every day, water that is full of invisible life, water that is filtered to feed millions of small intertidal creatures and humpback whales alike. That feeds the smelts, the herring, the oolichan, the salmon, that feeds the Pacific white-sided dolphins we floated among as they thrashed up the bay offshore of our campsite, over a hundred of them jumping, turning, tail slapping the calm water into a one-foot chop.

The wolves that pace the shore.

It’s a line that can be drawn by the iridescent skim of oil floating on water, underscored by the globules of crude oil that would roll and tumble in the same waves and onto the same beaches the surf smelts find to spawn. Into each tidal pool, each kelp bed, each low tide cranny where complexity resides. Drawn by the ancient call and response of the ocean upon the shore.

Buttercup has been found

I got some wonderful news last week from Hilary - after several heroic attempts, Buttercup, our canoe, and Hilary's kayak have been found and brought back from the Crooked River (see Crooked River Hindsight, June 15).  Here's Hilary's description:

The canoe was totally full of water and hidden in the vegetation so we could only see the water and white ends! No, we didn’t get my camera or paddle but got well-fermented lunch bag! The kayak was upside down on the bottom, a fair bit downstream of that tree which was across the river. We found it with probes and were walking waist deep in the river. It was a very successful afternoon. We went with 1 canoe and 2 kayaks then one guy paddled your canoe down from there and we towed my kayak. We took out at the 200 rd which still took us over 1 hour of paddling from the capsize.


We are planning a trip back to Summit Lake to celebrate and bring Buttercup home - maybe even in time to travel up the Fulton River to see returning sockeye...thanks, Hilary.

Opposition

Sheila Peters

Earlier this week, Greg D’Avignon, president and chief executive officer of the Business Council of BC was interviewed on CBC's Daybreak North morning show celebrating the rise in timber sales to China and the need for a strategy to cash in on the opportunities available there, especially around energy exports. (He called fracking for shale bed gas, a process that turns huge quantities of water toxic, a sustainable and environmentally responsible source of energy.)

One of the things keeping us from “moving forward” he said, is that “thirty percent of British Columbians would oppose a cure for cancer if it came about” implying that people raise concerns about the impacts of projects like the proposed Enbridge pipeline out of some innate contrariness. 

This is a common industry message. When a company (which could be from literally anywhere in the world)  proposes to bring their next big thing (mine, pipeline, oil well, garbage dump) into a region, and the locals have concerns about its possible effects on the quality of life in their community – economic, environmental, social, cultural – the locals are “against development.”

However, if you look at the record, industry has been by far the biggest naysayer opposing many of the really good strategies Canadians have supported over the past years.

• Physicians and the private insurance industry opposed the introduction of provincial medical insurance.
• Oil companies opposed the removal of lead from and the reduction of sulfur in gasoline.
• Companies producing electricity from coal-fired generators opposed cutting their SO2 emissions to reduce the acid rain that was killing lakes in eastern Canada
• The tobacco industry opposed the science showing smoking carried health risks, the science showing second-hand smoke was dangerous, and the restriction of smoking in public places like airplanes and hospitals.
• Industry opposed efforts to reduce the chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) emissions that were causing holes in the ozone layer and increasing our risk of skin cancer.
• After losing the fight to stop the use of asbestos in Canada, the industry has steadfastly opposed a ban on asbestos exports.
• The food industry opposed labels telling us what their products contain, and it opposed the call for a reduction in trans-fats.
• The agriculture industry has consistently opposed increased regulations on pesticide use – as did the D’Avignon’s Business Council of BC in the province’s recent consultation on the cosmetic use of pesticides.

Mr. D’Avignon is likely right: if a cure for cancer is found, someone will oppose it. If that cure involves introducing more good strategies like the ones listed above (and doesn’t require expensive drug therapies), it will likely be a consortium of industries working the hardest to oppose that cure. In fact, they’ve been doing it all along.

The salmon are in the rivers

Sheila Peters

The salmon are in the rivers now and still there are more stories of oil pipeline leaks - is it just because I'm thinking about pipelines these days, or are there more happening? (If you want to get really depressed,  you can go to the American Checks and Balances Project to get specifics). As roads washed out yet again in the Peace, I thought about all the stream crossings, and the ones that are salmon-bearing.

On a more positive note, I heard about the work that Neil Ever Osborne, a Toronto member of the International League of Conservation Photographers, has begun. He's flying the proposed route: got to Great Bear Rainforest Tripods in the Sky Project for details and photographs.

Irony

Sheila Peters

Between the tasks necessary to get a book ready for publication, wondering where our hummingbirds are hanging out this summer, and urging our reluctant garden to grow, we’ve been on the road a lot the past couple of months. And yesterday as I began writing on this posting, the washouts up Highway 97, just north of where Buttercup still waits in the willows for rescue, are beginning to make the Crooked River look like an efficient alternative to the haul around to Hinton and Whitecourt to get to Peace River country.

The book we’re working on. Sidetracked: The Struggle for BC’s Fossils by Vivien Lougheed, illustrates, in part, how concerns about erosion and sloughing put pressure on researchers trying to find the time and resources to examine the fossil record before it crumbles into the kind of rubble and silt that is blocking streams and road. Fossils, many of them found when geologists are looking in the landscapes for the carboniferous remains of ancient plants that give us coal and oil and gas. 

Whenever I close my eyes I see water pooling in hayfields, spreading through a tangle of willow scrub, flooding community beaches and leaving picnic tables to “float” on the water, their benches submerged.  At Beaumont Park on Fraser Lake, we watched a pickup drive out through the couple of feet of water flooding the boat ramp, drive out, back up, drive out, back up, the water spraying up and around his vehicle like a carwash. At McBride, the Fraser has risen over its banks to turn adjacent pastures into a lake. Turning south, we cross into the North Thompson watershed.  In the circuitous way of water, this spring’s rising star, a trickle can be deflected by a pebble into making a tiny turn that becomes, eventually, momentous. The North Thompson doesn’t join the Fraser until Lytton, hundreds of km south and west.

As we drive the rough road into Murtle Lake in Wells Grey Park, we cross mountain creeks that are white torrents. As we portage our kayak and gear down to the lake, the creeks we cross are in full flood. Several of the campsites are flooded, the park operator tells us. We’ve paddled up to Campsite #2 to find it a virtual island. On the map, he describes the options:  the fire pits are flooded here; you can’t get to the food caches here; the outhouse is across a small pond at this site. All the famous sandy beaches are awash. We stop at Sandy Point, where a tent is pitched on a tiny patch between the bush and the lake. 

We find room for our two tents at Arthur (#4) and spend three lovely days on North America’s largest non-motorized lake, watching, as all lake travellers do, how the wind can churn the lake into a wild ride in just a few minutes; how just as quickly the whitecaps can settle into a heavy liquid reflecting the grey clouds and patches of sun in a thousand pools of metallic light. The colour of iron.

Irony, an etymological reference tells me, has no connection with iron. It comes from the Greek and is used when “deliberately pretending  ignorance, particularly as a rhetorical device to get the better of one's opponent in argument.”   It has a more complicated meaning, of course.  It’s a kind of metaphor, really. Placing two things together in a way that questions the meaning each apparently has on its own. The road sign signaling danger that distracts a driver and causes an accident. The adulterous politician talking about family values.  The physician whose name is Butcher. Water and oil. 

And we use it to mean dissembling, that polite word for lying. Like oil producers saying they need to, they are obligated to, it is their duty to extract more oil to fill the world’s need for this product. 

As the Souris River rises yet again in Manitoba and thousands of people are evacuated, we watch water wash out much of the infrastructure we hold precious. Roads, water systems, power lines, homes, schools, bridges. After the fires that burned Slave Lake, the tornadoes that ravaged the US, it has become a tired cliché to talk about climate change. Extreme weather events.  How about pouring oil onto these troubled waters?

Speaking of irony, in Vancouver hundreds of youth rioted because of a hockey game, many of them wearing Canucks regalia. The price for jerseys starts at $85. They are made of 100% polyester, an oil product. They are all made in China. This is why Enbridge wants to build a pipeline to send crude oil to a port in Kitimat? So we can protect our right to work hard at lower and lower wages with no pension plans (“responsible labour settlements”) so we can buy our children plastic hockey jerseys? 

If you don’t get it, don’t worry. It doesn’t make sense. And we’re smarter than some folks think. The pipeline is not going to get built. Not for that. 

And now a mudslide has washed out the TransCanada highway down where the mountains close in around the Fraser River between Chilliwack and Hope…

Crooked River Hindsight

Sheila Peters

Looking down the Crooked  River

 

I wrote earlier about our first day on the Crooked River and have been thinking a lot about our second day. Carlie Kearn’s stories about paddling the Morice River has spurred me to action. I think it was Edith Iglauer in her 1988 memoir, Fishing With John, who said she was a not very coordinated (athletic?) person who liked doing things that required, unfortunately, physical skill.  I believe she was referring to an incident when she was required to climb a very tall and slippery ladder from the fishing boat to the dock. Edith made it up the ladder. We weren't as lucky - we didn’t make it down the Crooked River to McLeod Lake as we had planned.

I’m not just looking for pipeline stories, I’m researching a novel which is partly set on this river and I wanted to smell it, see the way it turns, compare it to R.M. Patterson’s description from the book, Finlay’s River, which he wrote about a canoe trip that began here in 1949 and ended at the portage above the Peace River Canyon, not yet flooded by the Peace dams. Hilary had agreed to take us further down the river, Lynn and I in Buttercup and she in her kayak. We put in at a little forestry campsite at the 100 road, north of the previous day’s takeout. We’d arranged for Floyd to pick up our van, drive it to Kerry Lake where we would spend the night before deciding whether or not to go on to McLeod Lake.

Hilary and her kayak

Lynn and Buttercup

It’s a nice put in ­­– a long lagoon edged by wide tangles of scrub willow and red-osier dogwood. All the feeder creeks are buried in the willow – we never really saw one creek though the map shows several. Or at least that’s what we assumed. We’d forgotten to bring the map along. We paddled by a house up on the ridge, virtually beside the highway; we paddled past Bear Lake Park; and we paddled past Coffeepot Mountain, but because of the way the river twisted and turned, the mountain somehow shifted from being at our backs to being ahead of us.

I did think as we meandered along that we’d never make it to Kerry Lake at this rate. But I wasn't too worried. I liked the pace, the birds, the ducks rising in front of us, the way the train whistled in the distance, the way a moose crossed in front of us, the way Buttercup moved placidly through the water. We’d didn’t really know where we were, just that the highway was somewhere on river right and the 100 logging road was somewhere on river left. In the end, it turned out that our slow pace was not the problem – it was speed that would cause us trouble.

About 11:30 we came to Rip Kitchen’s place. In the 1980s Rip and Marion Thomson built a big log house on some flats beside the river, completely off the grid – no hydro poles, no generator, a long driveway only navigable in summer. As we pulled our boats ashore, eight Canada geese lifted squawking up from the big lower field, the grass flattened and streaked with mud and in some places still awash. Marion used to always have to wait to plant her garden, Hilary told us, because it takes a long time for water to drain away here.

Rip had been found dead in his house a few years ago when Marion was away visiting relatives back east, and she’d had to sell the place. Hilary didn’t know who’d bought it, but there was no sign of anyone around, so we had a wander while Hilary told us about the pleasant evenings they’d spent there in animated conversation around the huge dining room table, the only light from kerosene lanterns. Their first reception was not so friendly though; Floyd was helping search for a missing youth and when he arrived at the house, Rip greeted him with a shotgun.
 

Rip was raised along the river and Cherry Corliss said he’d told her he’d been hired one summer to help keep the river clear for traffic. He also wrote a column for the Bear River newspaper, columns collected in Crooked River Chronicles.

As we wandered around, peering in through the big windows to the huge dining table (he’d built all the furniture, Hilary said) and animal skins on the floor, at two typewriters facing each other on a desk in the bedroom, the chairs situated so the writers would each look out across the field and down to the river, one upstream and one downstream. A big four poster bed was visible, an enormous chimney and oh, what a book collection they’d had, Hilary said.

We all itched to open the door and poke around inside but restrained ourselves. Probably a good thing. While there were many signs of neglect – bloated insulation spilled out the open door of a shed, rocks tumbled in the pathways, the garden unploughed, the hot bed frames rotting and unplanted, dozens of stubbies stacked outside (Rip and Marion had made their own beer and wine), a tall beer bottle open on the table was a sign of recent occupation. We were later told the new owners most definitely did not welcome visitors.

Another of Rip’s passions was collecting old farm equipment; 13 old tractors were lined up along the garden fence – a beautiful lichen garden in itself – and old rotting cold frames – big ones.
 
It doesn’t look like he just died a couple of years ago – it looks like it’s been abandoned for years. But a mansion of sorts. I would have liked to stand inside and look up to see how the ceiling was put together, to see if there was an upstairs,  
It doesn’t look like he just died a couple of years ago – it looks like it’s been abandoned for years. But it feels like a mansion of sorts. I would have liked to stand inside and look up to see how the ceiling was put together, to see if there was an upstairs, or a high vaulted ceiling. You couldn’t tell, looking through the windows. All the while the geese croaked overhead, wheeling and turning.

 


We continued downstream from there, still pleasantly coiling through the newly greened landscape and past Livingston’s springs. It was there the river picked up speed and the lazy pleasure of the morning vanished. We tried to remember the lessons we’d learned the day before and managed to negotiate several turns, avoid a few sweepers and find passage through the rapidly braiding mess somewhere in the middle of which ran the true course of the river.

Hilary was moving faster than we were and disappeared ahead just as the current caught the back of our boat and swung us around to face upriver. I grabbed the willows and we both cursed as they clawed at our faces, but we collected ourselves enough (after carefully talking through our strategy, a couple of paddle strokes that would have come automatically to an experienced paddler) to swing back out and around another couple of bends to find Hilary again, waiting for us. Nothing for it, really, but to continue.

The river was running through back passages, through the willows, and you couldn’t tell what might be a log jam, what might be a beaver dam, and what might be just the river flooding into the bush. Then we heard Hilary say, “This might be tricky,” and caught sight of her heading into a narrow channel where the river split yet again. The route she had chosen was the fastest. Once more I grabbed the willows and pulled us to the side (I’d become fond of this maneuver) just in time for Lynn to catch sight of Hilary in trouble – first struggling to get her boat out of a jam of brush and logs that created a small churning island. Her boat, as far as we can tell, sank beneath her and she was left trying to haul herself onto the jam. We managed to tie the canoe, clamber out and through the willow scrub to the edge nearest her, all the time calling to her, encouraging her and wondering how we could help her. The water between us was deep and fast.

It took a while – probably fifteen excruciating minutes – but she finally pulled herself up and sat down for a few minutes to regain her equilibrium. I saw her paddle rise to the surface and float away downstream. Her rain jacket was snagged, unreachable, underwater.

During this time, Lynn scouted downstream and saw several nasty sweepers, a log blocking the whole span of the river and we realized, once Hilary was safe, that it was a good thing, really, that we didn’t get any farther. There was no river bank, no gravel bars, no access through the mess of willow to line the boat anywhere. And our hatchet was in Hilary’s boat.

We had a throw rope with us and managed to bring Hilary over to us where we had food, dry clothes and dry land a couple of hundred metres away. We were on the side away from the highway (which also turned out to be a good thing). After getting Hilary into dry clothes, we slogged our way out of the willow marsh up into the forest, leaving Buttercup and her paddles in the bushes, abandoned like poor Moses in the bulrushes. After much discussion, we decided to try to find the logging road; we had hours to wait before Floyd would know we were in trouble. And probably a night out before anyone would come looking for us.

After a bit of dithering and careful bushwhacking, we did find the big logging road, though not much chance of a ride because it was breakup and a Monday. Nine km back to our put in point and fewer, we thought to Davie Lake. So we headed north – the much longer way, we discovered later, but luckily, about four km and a black bear later, we were picked up by a couple of men on their way out of the bush. They dropped us at Bear Lake, where Hilary’s amazing daughter Brenda came to get us and took us to Kerry Lake where we were scheduled to meet Floyd and Cherry, just fifteen minutes before they arrived. In any case, even if we’d had the skill to manage the fast water, we likely wouldn’t have found our way through the flooded lakes and creeks between our inadvertent takeout spot and the planned campsite. The whole place was under water.

So we made it back to Summit Lake, happy not to be spending the night in the bush, happy not to have set a search and rescue mission into motion. Sorry about our boats. We drove home the next day without going downstream to the proposed pipeline crossing. Without reaching McLeod Lake. Without Buttercup. But very glad to have delivered Hilary home.

Some of Hilary’s friends tried a rescue last weekend, but couldn’t find either boat. Though disappointed, they were glad they went. “The river was wonderful and very dynamic,” said one of the crew, “and we are glad to have done it.”

To think of crude oil spilling into that dynamic web of willow, water, moose, bear, beaver and waterfowl – to imagine it could be cleaned up, is beyond laughable. It is appalling.

Morice River Stories

Carlie Kearns

When we moved to Houston in the fall of 1974 we had a bright yellow and blue rubber dingy with plastic paddles. It became our mode of transportation for exploring the Morice River that first year.

On Friday evening we would spread the dingy out on the townhouse floor and pump it up. In the morning we would put the dingy on the roof of our Gremlin hatchback and tie it to both bumpers. By the time we parked near the river the raft would be deflated from the cold air and we’d have to pump it up again.  We’d usually drive out the Morice River Road and float a stretch of the river, fishing along the way. The river was a pristine blue-green with darker pools, strong currents, and shallow riffles. It was absolutely glorious. We caught Coho salmon, Steelhead, Dolly Varden and Rainbow Trout and always planned to keep a trout or salmon for dinner. At the end of the day Les would walk or hitch-hike back to the car while I bundled up our gear and deflated the raft. 

Les had noticed a creek, Houston Tommy Creek, on the map and thought it would be a good place to fish. Early Saturday morning we drove up the Morice River Road about ½ mile past Aspen Park Campsite. We carried the raft and our gear down a steep embankment through the tangle of alder, windfall, and tall spruce. We launched the raft into the strong current and paddled like mad to get across the river before we were swept past the mouth of Houston Tommy Creek. It was terrifying the first time we did it. There was a nice open sandbar at Houston Tommy with a beautiful run for steelhead and a deep pool at the mouth of the creek.  Les was the keen fisherman so he fished most of the day while I relaxed on the sandbar or explored up the creek picking high bush cranberries. It was idyllic! The run downstream to pull out was a little less stressful and we could relax and enjoy the ride. We’d pull out on the rocky shore just upstream from Aspen Park and Les would trudge the ½ mile back up to the car while I deflated and bundled up the dingy. This became a favourite destination for many years. 

The following year we bought a 16 foot broad-beamed Frontiersman canoe. This was a huge step up for navigating the river. It was wide and stable and so much easier to handle then the raft, but still a challenge with our limited skills and the incredible changing river currents! We would often drift from Aspen Park to By-Mac Park, stopping only at Knapper Creek (Gold Creek) to fish and have lunch. Les usually lit a campfire so he could have hotdogs – a favourite!  The current on the corner just upstream from Knapper Creek seemed treacherous but we enjoyed the challenge! 

Our other adventures those first years on the river were with Sam Wright in his motorized river boat. Once we camped at Morice Lake where the Morice River starts, enjoying a great evening of fishing for steelhead and telling stories around the campfire. The next day we went in his boat down to the Gosnell. That was the first trip for us on that section of the river and it was awesome! There were sections of ferocious turbulent current followed by gentle stretches of calm clear water over deep pools and shallows with hundreds of spawning spring salmon. We stopped at a small creek and fished for Dolly Varden – catching one with a vole in its stomach. I don’t remember The Morice West Road or bridge – perhaps it had not yet been constructed. The only sign of civilization I remember was the cable across the river about a ½ mile downstream from Morice Lake. Those camping and fishing trips were wonderful wilderness experiences.

When our daughter was about 5 years old we camped at the Morice West Bridge. The following day we canoed with friends from there to a pull-out where guides launched their boats upstream from Owen Flats. The girls were on the bottom of our canoe beside the yoke and Steve was with Cheryl and Jim in their canoe. It was a beautiful sunny day and we were floating and paddling along not paying a lot of attention when we saw the swirl of current indicating a large rock near the surface a few meters away. Jim and Cheryl were ahead of us and saw that we were potentially in trouble so they turned their canoe and watched in horror as the stern of our canoe caught the rock and some water sloshed over the gunnels. Fortunately there was an open rocky beach just downstream and we were able to paddle the canoe to the shoreline. The only damage was a scratch in the fibreglass and the loss of one of Les’s shoes that he’d taken off to be more comfortable. We were very lucky we didn’t capsize. We were all shaken up and felt fortunate no real damage was done – except for our embarrassment about being so careless.  

Another year floating from By-Mac to Barrett Station Bridge, with Glennie and Marie, we had a neat experience. The day was glorious with fall colour and sunshine and the river was a beautiful placid mirror. Just upstream from Jaarsma’s fields we heard some rustling in the bush and a loud crack and then a splash behind us – a huge cottonwood tree fell into the river. A beaver must have chewed through the tree just after we floated by! 

Barrett Station was a wonderful place to camp and fish. Late one August, we camped for a few days when it was blistering hot. The girls had such fun playing in the backwater and the mud just downstream from our campsite and the train bridge. Les spent most of the day fishing the stretch of the river from the trestle down to Emerson Creek, sometimes walking up across the trestle and along to Emerson creek so he could fish the mouth of the creek from the west bank. At night you could hear flocks of hundreds of cranes flying over for hours. There was a full moon and it was so peaceful with the sound of the river, the crackling fire, and the cranes. Often there would be flocks of geese as well and sometimes trumpeter swans. It was an idyllic ending to the summer.

Last year, in 2010, when driving along the Morice River Road in late August I was astounded with the number of boaters and fishermen in the Morice River. There were folks in pontoon boats, canoes, kayaks, and jet boats visible all along the route!  In the spring of 2000, the Jaarsma’s had locked the access to the Barrett Station camping area and lent keys to folks for using the camping area just to limit the number of campers and traffic through their grazing land. The Morice River has become a very popular destination for tourists and locals who love to fish or enjoy the outdoors.

Fritillaria camschatcensis

Lynn Shervill

June 7, 2011

 

Down on the floor of Driftwood Canyon, about 15 kilometres east of Smithers at the foot of the Babine Mountains, it’s understandably colder and darker than up on the canyon rim. In winter we can get as little as two hours of direct sunlight a day, depending on the month, and in summer, even on the longest day of the year, the sun drops below our horizon at 5:30 p.m.

Still, by the end of the first week in June, the birdsong starts at 4 a.m., the sun is coming through the windows by 5:30, there are harlequin ducks on Driftwood Creek (known to the Wet’suwet’en First Nation as C’ide Wi’ kwah which translates as “it flows into it”) and the sweet smell of the cottonwoods fills the air.

And there’s something else in the air, something one horticulturalist from York, England refers to as “poo-filled smelly socks.” Fritillaria camschatcensis, also known as the chocolate lily or northern rice root, is a bulbous perennial with lance shaped, glossy, light-green leaves and pendent, cup-shaped, dark black, purple, green or yellow flowers.

In Plants of Coastal British Columbia, Pojar and Mackinnon say the chocolate lily “is pollinated by flies attracted to the flowers by their colour and the smell of rotting meat or faeces.” It’s not surprising then to learn that the plant is also referred to as the skunk lily, dirty diaper and outhouse lily.

Despite its smell, which occurs when the flowers bloom and is short-lived, the chocolate lily was a staple in the diet of virtually all of the Indigenous northwest coast people of British Columbia and Alaska. The bulbs, which resemble tightly packed clusters of rice, were cooked immediately or partially dried and stored for winter when they would be eaten with eulachon grease or ground into flour which could then be added to soups or stews.

According to some, the bulbs have a slightly bitter taste which can be reduced by soaking them overnight. Others say the bulbs taste like baked chestnuts.

This is a plant that likes the wet. It grows on moist tidal flats, in meadows and open forests, on rocky beaches, stream banks and coarse grained soils of glacial origin. It can be found in a geographical arc which runs from Japan, Kamchatka, northeastern Siberia and into Alaska, British Columbia and as far south as Oregon.

Unfortunately, it has become much less common than in previous times due to the loss of salt marshes, estuarine wetlands and freshwater wetlands. It is also threatened by timber harvesting, trampling, hydrologic changes and collecting.

Such is the concern over the loss of this iconic food plant that the Squamish First Nation, north of Vancouver, is working with a researcher from the University of Victoria to create an experimental plant garden in the Squamish Estuary with an eye to establishing a population of chocolate lilies “high enough to sustain a certain level of food harvesting in the future.”

Closer to home, there is also reason for concern. One of the healthiest populations of the chocolate lily can be found in Old Man Lake Provincial Park, 326 acres described by BC Parks as a “significant complex of small lakes, marshy shorelines and wetlands … known for wild rice (Fritillaria camschatcensis) and wild celery” 20 kilometres east of Houston. According to BC Parks there are plans to drastically reduce the water levels in the park by removing an old dam, which could put the lilies at risk. The park is also in an area of intensive logging and is located about 20 kilometres north of the proposed Enbridge pipeline route.

Meanwhile, back in chilly Driftwood Canyon (there was frost last night), we are putting wild onions in the stew, eating breaded morels fried in butter, making a Spring tonic with the nettles and wondering if this year we should try the outhouse lilies. Blue cheese, after all, isn’t that appealing until you try a piece.

Buttercup goes to the Crooked River

Sheila Peters

Another watershed and thirty people gather at the Crooked River’s outlet at Summit Lake. It is Hilary Crowley’s birthday and Floyd and Hilary’s anniversary. They have been part of this community for over forty years and are one of the few families still living at the lake year round. The sun is shining and twelve canoes and two kayaks splash over the first riffle into the river. Grandparents and grandchildren, fathers and sons, husbands and wives, young friends. It is the second trip of 2011; the first, a month earlier, travelled between banks of snow. There’s plenty of water in the river, even for this time of year.

We’re back in country we camped and hiked in 25 years ago, back in the place that first really made me think about watersheds. Nothing as dramatic as the Columbia Icefields where the scale of the landscape declares itself as a power spot, a place where weather is made, where great psychic and geographic shifts are inevitable. Driving north of Prince George along Highway 97, the land flattens itself into fields and black spruce swamps, and the only visible mountains are called Teapot and Coffeepot. The nine-mile Giscome Portage that marked the crossover from the Upper Fraser to the Parsnip/Finlay/Peace passes through this unremarkable terrain to Summit Lake at an elevation of about 2330 feet, one of the lowest points on the continental divide.

Summit Lake has a venerable history in river freighting. Up into the 1960s, until the completion of the highway north through Pine Pass, and of the W.A.C. Bennett Dam which flooded the lower reaches of the Parsnip River, it was the main route for freight into Finlay  Forks, Fort Ware, Fort Graham and all the trappers, prospectors and First Nations people calling that country home. Special 40-foot long river boats were designed and built to navigate the shallow water and dramatic turns the river takes as it searches out a downhill trajectory in a terrain that can’t seem to make up its mind. The resulting wetlands are rich and protected country for birds, fish and wildlife. Old cabins, the remnant wing dams made when the freighting traffic worked hard to keep the river clear, the brushed in trails and camping spots speak of a disappearing history. Cherry Corliss, whose father, Dick, was one of the foremost of these river freighting men, is with us on this trip, skirted into a tiny kayak.

The low hills also hide the relentless clearcuts and pine beetle kill on the land just beyond the willows. As we slip into the river, we are afloat, half our own height above the waterline and as close to being part of the river as we are able. Buttercup, our yellow canoe, is glad to be afloat. She has been neglected for Mango, our long tandem sea kayak which rides like a Cadillac on ocean swells but would lumber and wallow in a river like the Crooked.

 

We had taken Buttercup down to the lake earlier and she is a flighty thing – moves so much more quickly than Mango. She is light and lovely and you don’t thunk down into your seat, you perch or kneel, you, too are more sprightly. We paddled around Corning Island, which belonged to Cherry Corliss’s grandmother and where she still has a place. The sun, hardly any bugs, smooth water, lots of summer cabins up here – A-frames with large, solid docks, lawn chairs out on them, a place to drink morning coffee.

We have never paddled in moving water before, we tell our companions. 

We get instructions:

• If you’re heading for a beaver down aim straight for the V and, when you go over, the person in the front leans back to keep from tipping.
• When there’s a log jam, hold onto the reeds at the side until Floyd clears it.
• When there’s a sweeper, duck.

We are told not to worry, and we do find we can make those turns, Buttercup does ride right over those submerged beaver dams without a hitch, and sometimes we can find the dark V of water and follow it down the little rapids. We begin to think we know what we’re doing. 

We don’t. 

How do we stop? I ask as Buttercup bumps into another canoe waiting for us to catch up. It’s like the way I used to stop when at the skating rink – by crashing into the sideboards. The expert looks at me, not really registering the question. “Paddle backwards or just go to the back eddy,” another paddler says. Brilliant.

Many of the paddlers with us enjoy the faster water, but we are happiest when the river widens into a lagoon and we can look around a bit. Enjoy the sunshine, watch for warblers in the willow thickets, and visit with the others. Many of them are avid canoeists and have paddled northern rivers for years: the Fraser, Driftwood, the Nahanni, the Spatsizi, the Skeena, the Morice, the Stikine, and the Nechako.

When the ice finally goes off the Nechako, one woman says, I can’t wait to get on it. It feels like I’ve come home. I don’t realize always how much I’ve missed it. 

About 20 km downstream (as the crow flies) or 28 km as the river twists and bends, the proposed Enbridge pipeline will cross somewhere downstream of Caine Creek, Alford Creek, and Little Dell Creek. Near the upstream end of Davie Lake, upstream of Angusmac, Chuchinka, Redrocky Lake, Redrocky Creek, Kerry Lake, and McLeod Lake, the site of BC’s oldest colonial outpost. It takes a cognitive shift to think of downstream being north. North and east. 

And on the country stretching west between Davie Lake and Fort St. James, the pipeline would cross a landscape threaded with creeks and a scattering of lakes, hundreds of them -- Merton Creek, Slender Lake, Muskeg River, Mossvale Creek, Salmon River, Teardrop Lake, Great Beaver Lake -- until it found its way across the Necoslie River.

We make it to the takeout spot, the old BCRail line to Tumbler Ridge jammed between the river and the highway. Only two fellows tipped out of their boat on the way down, mercifully behind us, so we didn’t notice until we were past that tricky spot. We gather back at Hilary and Floyd’s for dinner and birthday cake. People tell stories of how and when they met Hilary, who came to Canada from Britain to work as a occupational therapist forty years ago. For a short visit. She loves England. She loved Montreal, where she spent her first year. She had mixed feelings about Vancouver and took a locum in Prince George. A three-week stint was all she planned. Like so many of us, she surprised herself by staying. She waters her garden with water drawn from Summit Lake, with water from that threshold opening into the Arctic. Summit Lake water may be upstream of the proposed pipeline crossing, but the river doesn’t move in only one direction. The river is as threaded into the landscape as Hilary herself.