Bound for Glory?

I wrote this piece while travelling across North Dakota in June. It seemed important to post it here when I read the following story in today's Dickenson Press:

The Bakken crude involved in the deadly train derailment and explosion in Quebec represents only a fraction of the oil shipped by rail from North Dakota each day. 

About 675,000 barrels of Bakken crude leaves North Dakota rail facilities daily, according to the most recent figures from Justin Kringstad, director of the North Dakota Pipeline Authority.

That averages to about 1,000 railcars per day, Kringstad said, and about 15 times the amount of oil shipped by rail from North Dakota three years earlier.
 

We left Minot, North Dakota on June 10, driving up the Mouse/Souris River toward the northwest. At first it felt like another wonderful prairie journey as we saw the way the land curls itself around the river’s necessity – water, transportation, and prairie flatness all flowing the way gravity takes it. The Mouse looks like a small river and is muddy this time of year, but in 2011 its floods took out about a fifth of Minot and it’s looking high again this year.

We'd left southern Ontario a few days earlier, caught glimpses of abandoned houses and neighbourhoods as we followed the freeway through Detroit and headed north. It’s been wet all across the Midwest this year, right into North Dakota. The ground is so saturated even a light rain pools up and runs off. Many fields are untilled; those that are, well, the furrows are shining. The road and railway ride through this flooded landscape on fragile causeways. Mirages of trees rise from vast pools reflecting the sky, barns are half-submerged, fences measure the depth of the water. Back in Wisconsin and eastern North Dakota people set up their lawn chairs along the highway and cast their fishing lines into the flooded fields. Walleye and Northern Pike, they tell us.

North of Minot, Highway 2 is busy. As we drove northwest, more and more huge mud-spattered trucks rumbled past carrying heavy equipment and big pieces of mysterious machinery. The attractive ranches tucked into the nooks and crannies of the land – always with long lilac hedges setting them off from the open prairie, maybe a white fence around a large lawn, and shining grain silos – began to be replaced by big tanks at oil collection sites. The occasional oil wells nodding their mechanical heads, yes, yes, yes, multiplied, and soon acres of modular housing appeared: containers stacked one on top the other with a couple of windows and a door plugged in; fields of trailers; vast stretches of townhouses that looked as if they had been built yesterday.

Some farms hunkered down into sections of green cultivation were surrounded, literally, by dug up earth, red dirt roads, well sites, and more work camps being built. The highway itself deteriorated into potholes and construction zones marked by miles of orange and white pylons. It shrank to two lanes and the small towns it passed through were muddied and diminished, their ‘welcome’ signs faded, their front yards and flowers splattered by the trucks trundling through from the oil fields.

As we waited at a construction halt on the highway, I remembered reading Woodie Guthrie’s account of the oil boom that came to his Oklahoma hometown when he was a boy and how it changed his community. Everyone scrambled to speculate on real estate, shoddy buildings were thrown up to house the workers – many of whom were killed in the terrible working conditions – the water was polluted and the town’s sense of itself evaporated. When it was over, and it was over pretty quickly, the town was left “tending the remnant damage” – which has a radiant kind of sound to it, but isn’t at all.

At that same traffic stop, we heard our first meadow lark. Sitting on the telephone wire just across the road from us, its beautiful song carried through the rumbling diesels. It sang the whole time we waited, a reminder to hold still and listen, to not be overwhelmed by the noise and enormity of what we’re seeing done to the landscape we’re travelling through, or of what some people want to do here in northwest BC. Indeed, the bird’s song was itself an act of resistance. This devastation, it tells us, is not what any of us needs. Slow down, it sings, slow down and listen.

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.

Canned heat

I'm not sure what Energy Minister Joe Oliver has against canning - canned salmon, especially half-smoked, is some of the best eating on the planet. And you know it's wild salmon in those jars because the farmed stuff is too puny for canning.

Over 4000 people registered to speak at the NEB hearings, but "only about 1440 people actually showed up," he said. Only. Good Lord. We should be happy so many people were willing to take the time to participate in discussions about this supposed "nation-building" project. To add insult to this, Oliver called the statements made at the hearings, "canned messages." (Pretty ironic coming from a Harper government cabinet minister.)

I treasure the wonderful home-canned messages so many people brought to the hearings. In the places where you were allowed to observe the participants, you know those were anything but ready-made. You saw the anger, the fears, the frustration, and the love and concern people have for the places they call home. You heard knowledge and understanding about those homes that could only come from people who had been paying attention for a long time. You heard knowledge and understanding about the forces driving the pipeline proposal and the costs it will incur if it's built.

Joe Oliver may think we're all too ignorant to create our own responses to Enbridge's proposed pipeline, but he obviously has no idea just how much skill, time, and hard work it takes to home can fruit, vegetables, meat and fish. Nor does he understand how essential that food is to many of us living in the communities this project threatens.

His response to this lively, engaged response is to create a new mechanism with a 10-page form you have to fill out if you even want to write a letter in response to an NEB proposal. Resumes and references suggested. I thought these guys were about reducing bureaucratic hurdles.

As Bruce Cockburn once sang, "The trouble with normal is it only gets worse."

Rest in the grace of the world

April is poetry month and April 22 is Earth Day. What could be a finer conjunction of events! I'm lucky to be joining two wonderful poets - Emily McGiffen and Melissa Sawatsky - at the Smithers Library beginning at 7 pm. We invite you to join us to celebrate the energy that drives us to speak out, sing out, shout out against the activities that threaten the earth while remembering to take the time to stop and go to the places that are the very source of that energy. To, as Wendell Berry suggests, "rest in the grace of the world."

Here's his poem.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

 

Smoke and Mirrors

Just last week we were having a good chuckle over David Black's harebrained scheme to build an oil refinery in Kitimat. Wonder what happened to that, we snickered. The next day he announced he had secured (or was close to securing, depending on the media outlet) $25 billion in funding for that very same oil refinery. The Vancouver Sun reported that a poll commissioned by Black showed a majority of British Columbians are in favour of this plan, including our very own premier, Christy Clark.

Aside from the fact that Black's proposal looks like the worst of all worlds – dilbit running across the unstable landscape of two major salmon watersheds, the pollution associated with an oil refinery, and oil tankers on the west coast – I was reminded of my early days in journalism. 

When I first came to work for the Smithers Interior News, I was fresh out of journalism school. A month after I arrived, the senior reporter quit and I was it. The next reporter hired had even less experience than I did. I plugged away, not very effectively I’m afraid, covering the usual town council meetings, community events, police and court. But even back then – this was 1977 – Smithers had its share of environmentalists keeping an eye on forestry practices, wilderness road-building for mining interests, wolf trapping and poisoning, and the air quality impacts of sawmill beehive burners.

One day, a gentlemen was sent back to talk to me about a fabulous new mineral find (was it gold, copper, molybdenum? I don’t remember) he and his partners had made and their plans for its development. He gave me a press release and some excited quotes, which I dutifully wrote up.

When the next paper came out, another gentlemen took me aside and, in a most avuncular manner, explained just how the exploration business worked. You stake a few claims, he said, move a little dirt around, and offer penny stocks for sale on the Vancouver Stock Exchange. A geologist’s report, one or two newspaper articles, and Bob’s your uncle. Next time, he said, suggest the fellow purchase an ad.

Well, David Black has his own newspapers, so there’s no need to purchase ads. He doesn't even need to move any dirt around. Others are doing that for him. But the story’s the same. Mr. Black is not going into the refinery business. I believe he just might think he's pouring oil on troubled waters.

You have to wonder how stupid these folks think we are. It's smoke and mirrors, my friends, smoke and mirrors.

Creative Jammers - Terrorists?

Birds of Our Coast by Sylvia Erlund

I spent a wonderful weekend in Prince Rupert with writers, photographers, painters and quilters. We shared ideas and each others work. We talked about old times (some of us are grandparents), we talked about battles, old and new. Former north coaster Kristin Miller, one of the Gumboot Girls, led the quilters' workshop and displayed some stunning quilts celebrating the coast and its rich bio-diversity. The Positive Energy Quilters are making them to fundraise for a tanker-free coast. These are people who contribute to their communities, who care about the world they live in and live from, and respond to it in positive, creative ways. Bravo! I say.

I drove home along the (unfrozen - a bit of worrisome climate change signaling there) Skeena watching for signs of the impending eulachon run on a beautiful sunny day.

In the mailbox sits the latest Guardian Weekly with a big fat headline: "US 'dark money' funds sceptics: Billionaries give $118m to anti-climate groups: Secret donations used to discredit science". Sigh. Stephen Harper and Joe Oliver might call Canadian charities money-launderers for "radical" American environmental groups, but I wonder if they're taking a close look at how much of this anti-science funding is finding its way north.

Okay, so that's really depressing. I turn the page to find another headline: "Canada's spy chiefs target anti-frackers". It describes how all the money given to security services post 9/11 (after they found we were at a low-risk from foreign terrorists) has been re-directed. "It's the new normal now for Canada's security agencies to watch the activities of environmental organizations."

"In a Canadian senate committee on national security and defence meeting last week, Richard Fadden, the director of CSIS, said it is more worried about domestic terrorism, acknowledging that the vast majority of spying is done within Canada. Fadden said it is 'following a number of cases where we think people might be inclined to acts of terrorism'."

Gadzooks, Batman, do you think they were there in Prince Rupert? (I did stop into the JRP hearings being held in the casino basement and there were banks of lawyers, technicians, and a greeter at the door.)

It's not funny, really. Anyone who reads history knows how the slow erosion of rights is a very effective tactic to silence opposition. Intimidating citizens is another. But I'm hoping we're smart enough to figure these guys out. The energy industry is getting so bad in Alberta, more and more people there are getting the creeps. One farmer's response is to say "Hey CSIS - here's my number."

We have to continue to do the work governments should be doing for us - using our heads and hearts and money to protect what gives us life itself - and that ain't fossil fuels. Me, I'm casting a ballot for the Positive Energy Quilters and their UnspOILed Coast Quilt Project.

Creatures Great and Small

Beached on Haida Gwaii

Norma Kerby sent me this gathering of poems after celebrating the launch of filling Station's northern BC writers edition in Terrace last week.

Beached on Haida Gwaii

in Hecate Strait, winds can blow over 150 km per hour

shallow waters waves tower more than 10 meters high

in Hecate Strait, any boat is a toy for the winter storms

           

Months after Randy Morrison spent eighteen hours in the frigid waters of Hecate Strait

building Randy Morrison with eighteen hours of torture in Hecate Strait

                                    W.C.B. ruling suspended  his claim

                        legs   in pain    skin burns from salt in stinging spray

                                           a doctor claims it's in his head

but they will be appealing        Randy Morrison           through shifting

            apparitions of bearded men that shout from boats of

            cold emulsion oil and ice like frozen drops of

                                            Caribbean sherbert lime

shipwrecked

lady at the store said

            he drove the boat full-throttle into the beach

                                    that or drown he told the insurance company

but in town they all know

buybacks and lack of quota

make fishing like wishing        to win the lottery

                                                                           beautiful lines       all wood

                                                                                                she fills with sand each tide

                                                                                    lists to one side

                                                                                           beached

excised

in the fast cold sweep

                                    of the flying wind

nightmares are flung into

                                                irrelevance they

            tumble off across the dunes so quickly there is no time to say goodbye

else

            do not be angry

when i say that i love the wind

                                                it was only that i would

                                                            fly

                                                                                    like a gull

                                                                                    hung suspended in the storm though

there was a gale

             wind so strong i

                        could not move but

                                                behind the dune

                                                a flock of seagulls

                                                waited

too windy even for them

soupfin shark

the shark had thrashed

a hole in the sand

                                                caught by the storm and

                                                falling tide

                                                it died in the

                                                sun

long bullet body

crescent slit of razor teeth

white skin scraped pink

                                                in cold north waters

                                                so odd

                                                a beast

                                                the currents sweep

                                                from other shores

glass ball

there

                                                                        caught between two cobbles

                                                                                    green glass

                                                                        base of a fishing float

            long journey from Japan bobbing across on foamy rollers

                                    winter storm     glass ball

                                                                                    smashed against the rocky shoals

                                                                                                pulverized to crystal sands

                                                except the bottom          dimpled where

                                    the master paused

                                       drew in his breath before he blew the           perfect bubble

                                                            emerald

                                                                     it glistens

                                                     green as cold Pacific waters

scallop

it was only a

                                                            tiny shell

                                                            pink and finely fluted

fairy scallop we called it

not knowing how such a                                  delicate

                                                            wing

                                                            landed on the cobble beach

in the gloom of the office it sits

on

the window sill

speaking of                                          winds so fierce

                                                            there was nothing but

                                                            the land and the ocean

                                                            fighting

Tlell

there are dunes

shifting dunes

                        moved by winds so wild

                        you lean

                                                a triangle into the frenzied

                                                fury

                                                waves curl back in funnels there are

dunes

with feral cattle

ancient village sites where once the

Haida raced before the storm

                    before the smallpox came

village on the shore

living on the fringe of the ocean

                        knowing that the edge of

                                    the sky    is the edge to

                                                    the other edge

                                                    of the ocean