Three years on

I walked over to Driftwood Creek this evening to see if I could spot the harlequin ducks that make their way up into the mountains to breed every spring. I’ve written about them often because as well as being beautiful birds, they’re a wonderful signal about the way in which watersheds connect us all, both up and downstream.

 As I stood on the bridge, I realized it’s been almost three years since I started this blog. Three years of a rollercoaster ride of information, of emotion, and of empowerment. We’ve informed ourselves, we’ve told our stories about this amazing region, and we’ve put both the pipeline industry and the National Energy Board on notice. The latest Enbridge news shows us just how complacent both the industry and its regulators have been about safety regulations.

To quote today’s Globe and Mail article,

Canada’s energy regulator has given Enbridge Inc., one of the country’s two pipeline giants, until 2016 to comply with rules tied to its emergency shutdown requirements – demands the watchdog made after finding 117 of 125 pump stations across the country were not up to snuff.

The National Energy Board approved Enbridge’s proposed plan last week after determining a number of the company’s pump stations lacked emergency shutdown push-buttons and an alternate source of power needed to operate the shutdowns.

Enbridge’s regulatory shortcomings arrive as energy companies face fierce opposition, with critics pointing fingers at the industry’s stumbles. However, while the NEB found Enbridge violated the rules, the regulator also admits it only recently started pursuing investigations tied to emergency shutdown mechanisms.

So when Enbridge "claims that it is recognized as 'an industry leader in pipeline safety and integrity,'" we know just how little that means. 

When spring finally arrives in the north, it feels like a runaway freight train. Daylight increases so quickly, night feels like a quaint relic from some distant era. Plants shove themselves up toward that light, gobbling it like young lambs batter their mothers’ udders. Wild onions, nettles, and morels offer themselves to impatient gardeners. Bears paw through ant hills and gobble cottonwood buds. Warblers and winter wrens sing their melodic love songs while ravens and jays scavenge for food to feed the hatchlings in their nests. 

Meanwhile the creek’s clamour rides in through our open windows and cliffs slump their muddy debris into the runoff, a wild ride that has barely begun. This is a time to remember and respect water and its gifts, its strengths, its danger. If we hold anything sacred, these creeks and rivers should be it: hallelujah to its wild ways.

If you’ve found yourself distracted from the true stories of the north, distracted by the oil industries prophecies of disaster if we actually elect a government that won’t do its biddings, you might want to give a good listen to Rachelle VanZanten. She’s just released a new album, Oh Mother, which includes some songs that will raise your spirits - to find out when she’ll be in your neighbourhood, check out Rachelle's tour dates. 

Or you might want to have another look at the Driftwood Foundation’s 4000 Reasons Video made in June of last year. We are still here and we’re still singing.

The harlequin ducks are back on Driftwood Creek

We've been out looking for a couple of weeks now, wandering the edges of the creek, noting the rise and fall of the water, the muddy and nutrient foam tricking our eyes into seeing ducks bobbing in the back eddies.

 

This morning, just across from a small viewing platform in Driftwood Canyon Provincial Park, we saw the usual three: two males and a female. We stood high up on one bank of the creek; they hopped up onto rocks on the other side and we all had a good look at each other.

There's a fascinating Species at Risk Study that outlines their use of creeks for breeding - they tend to form long-term bonds and the females will take up to four years to reach reproductive maturity. Having clear, fast-flowing streams seems to be essential to their survival because they feed on the "invertebrates in the substrate" - i.e. all the little creatures wriggling around in creek gravel. Dippers eat from the same table. 

If you've read my submission to the Joint Review Panel (see Tuesday, April 24 - Congratulations to our community), you'll know why seeing these ducks this morning, and a dipper two days ago,  has such significance.They are markers of the ways in which home is both one specific and familiar place and also connected to the greater world in ways we barely comprehend.

Congratulations to our community!

It has been the most amazing couple of days in the journey this pipeline project has precipitated. The oral presentations began in Smithers yesterday; as well as giving my own oral testimony, I heard person after person present thoughtful, intelligent, heartfelt, analytical, emotional, and moving presentations. Every person had a unique perspective; some brought in family history, biological research, new impressions, childhood memories, you name it. One presenter, an organic gardener, asked for a moment of silence in memory of the rivers we've already killed...you can listen in live at The National Energy Board Site.

Here's what I presented: I'm hoping to have more presentations in the next few days. 

I’m a writer and publisher; working with words has been a part of my life as long as I can remember. So before I go any further, I want to be clear. When asked the question, should Enbridge’s Northern Gateway project be built, my answer is no. Absolutely not. And if you believe in this government’s so-called economic policy that claims building war ships, prisons, and exporting raw bitumen to China is in the national interest, while it suppresses or vilifies the voices of anyone who might actually have some data to refute that claim, well, I have a bridge you might be interested in. No, not the famous one in New York, not even that new Peace bridge just built in Calgary, no, a lovely little footbridge that crosses Driftwood Creek beside our home. A creek our boys fished in, swam in, skated on, and played beside from their earliest days.  A creek that has watered my garden and my creativity with its many voices, a voice that in spring, I like to imagine speaks with the thousand tongues of winter. A creek that is in one of the watersheds this pipeline proposes to cross.

And while you may think water runs only one way, spend enough time beside a creek and you’ll realize your mistake. The salmon and oolichan travelling upstream to spawn are obvious and important examples, but every spring – and I mean that literally – we stand on that bridge and watch two or three harlequin ducks paddling up Driftwood Creek, often while patches of snow still line the banks – usually two males and a female – who have travelled hundreds of km upriver from the coast to build a nest and rear their young in the high alpine.

And every year, from that same bridge, we see dippers managing, even when it’s forty below, to find an opening:

A quiet seepage –

too quiet, really, to be called a spring –

can unlock the earth’s heat.   

The ice exhales and opens

a pool for this dipper

bobbing on a rock.

It dives in and finds a current

that’s warmer than the winter air.

There’s spirit in there somewhere,

and bouncing back, the bird

it dipsy doodles

on the slippery dance floor

tapping out some bebop riff

we all wish that we could follow.

Something in the key of home.

That one small creek and the river it flows into are all part of the watershed that my family calls home.

                                                           

And home is what I really want to talk about. It was 1976, and I was on my way into the northwest for a newspaper job when I passed a sign planted on a hill somewhere between Burns and Decker lakes. Eternity, it said. Where will you be? Well, I knew it wasn’t going to be here. After one northern winter, I was heading back south, back to school, back to civilization.

But before that, I had a trip to finish. Coming down Six-Mile Hill, the muffler on my car dropped to become a rattling sparking percussive accompaniment to my precipitous descent. Instant comeuppance for my sneer at eternity. A friendly northerner gave me wire to bind the muffler back into place until I reached my destination. Which, like the Enbridge pipeline, was Kitimat. I spent a few days there, and a few months in Terrace before I moved to Smithers in 1977, where I’ve lived pretty much ever since – always within earshot of Driftwood Creek.

So, about the sign. It was located right about where the pipelines would cross Highway 16, the Endako River, the CN track, and continue west across Gerow Creek (still in the Fraser River watershed) to Maxan Creek. A height of land. Maxan Creek flows into Maxan Lake which drains into Bulkley Lake, the headwaters of the Bulkley River and the Skeena watershed. The pipeline would then cross Foxy and Klo and Buck creeks, Owen Creek and Fenton Creek all on its way to the Morice that used to be called Watsonquah. All the history in those names. All flowing into the Bulkley, the Skeena, the Pacific, right out to where those harlequin ducks spend their winters on an intricate coastline that defies measurement.

Just last summer we spent a few days on Porcher Island; one day we paddled over to Oval Beach on the eastern shore of Hecate Strait. This poem, Fractals on Oval Beach came from that day. (Fractals are irregular shapes that can be repeatedly subdivided into increasingly smaller copies of the whole. They are used to model natural structures that, unlike pipelines, do not have simple geometric shapes.)

A fat black raven stands just above the surf line.

Another perches on a nearby log. Something glints

as the water rolls and drops it, stranded on the gravel.

One raven hops down and nabs the wriggling silver streak.

He jumps back before the next wave crashes,

a surf smelt thrashing in his beak.

He gulps, 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

slivers of fish roll and tumble in each wave.

The other raven hops down, head sideways.

It plucks another smelt

from the sand. Both birds eat.

Both watch and wait for more.

The sun lights their feathers

with the iridescence of oil floating on water.

On our way here,

we paddled through a narrow opening

between two outcrops. Inside these waters

it’s hard to tell which rocks are islands

and which are part of something bigger. The tides change

the answer every minute and this week

the tides are over twenty feet. Our boats slipped through,

the hulls skimming hundreds of anemones 

and sea cucumbers, sea squirts, sun stars, bat stars, starfish,

some dangling high above us, waiting for the tide.

Crabs scuttled, as crabs do

and dug trenches in the sand, claws up for battle.

All this seen in one small pause

in one small opening

in the coastline of one small island.

How long, you might ask, is the coastline of Porcher Island?

It all depends on how carefully you measure. The closer you get,

the longer the coast becomes. Much longer

than you might have thought. Infinity, in fact,

contained within this finite space.

This is not just a measurement to amuse mathematicians.

It’s a line drawn by the daily wash of water,

full of invisible life,

filtered to feed the anemone

and the humpback whale,

to feeds the smelts,

the herring,

the oolichan,

that feed the salmon,

that feed the silver-sided dolphins we floated among

as they thrashed back and forth across the bay,

 over a hundred of them jumping, turning, tail slapping the water into a chop.

To feed the wolves that pace the shore.

It’s a line that would become

an oil slick underscored by globules of bitumen

rolling and tumbling onto the same beaches

the surf smelts needs to spawn.

Into each kelp bed, each low tide cranny

where complexity resides.

Where our harlequins return in late summer with their young.

There’s a new sign now that say, Jesus Cares for You. While I’m tickled to have outlasted that sign just this side of Burns Lake, I have come to miss its urgency, urgency we need now. It isn’t the fabricated urgency the oil companies and their political preachers profess from Ottawa’s pulpits. It’s the urgent voice of a river in full flood, a swollen muddy thing that rips out cottonwoods, bridges, roads and even houses if you’re not careful. Not to mention pipelines. I encourage all of you, as the high snows melt, to go down to the water and listen. The water is asking us that same question. Eternity – where will we be?

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.