16 January 05

Snow on Salt Water

I just got in from a trip to Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia to meet up with some birding friends from Massachusetts and also from here. We did go looking for the rare birds reported and saw them all—the redwing, the Baikal teal, the falcated duck, and the McKay’s bunting. We also took an overnight trip from Vancouver to Victoria to look at the resident skylarks. I’ve seen both the skylark and the redwing in Europe but never in North America; it was a fabulous experience to go on Canadian ferries and to navigate the various islands with conifers looming right down to the water.

Halfway across yesterday it started to snow. It became horizontal quickly. An inch or two is quite severe weather for Vancouver Island and we hunkered down in the inn we found called the Waddling Dog. Everyone-from the guy in the customs booth to people on the jetty we walked out for the McKay’s bunting to the helpful receptionist at the Waddling Dog-sounds like me. It was an extraordinary experience, like echoes of a former life; the inn reminded me of a restaurant in Uttoxeter where my father used to take me when he was visiting me in boarding school. I smelled the roast beef and yorkshire pudding right away…

Chris Corrigan lives across the sound on Bowen Island. I’m not able to see from the map whether the ferry takes him to the mainland or just over to Vancouver Island. I have enjoyed his descriptions of ferries and ferry trips and see now that it’s very much part of life in these parts.

As we left Sidney on the ferry this morning six marine foraging river otters cavorted around the boat. We saw Pacific loons and a rhinoceros auklet, pigeon guillemots and common murres, pelagic cormorants and mew gulls in among the glaucous-winged. It was this morning. I can still feel the cold air on my cheeks as we stood in the bow trying to turn driftwood into alcids. I’m many hundreds of miles away now, many degrees warmer.

Posted by at 07:32 PM in Nature and Place | Link |
  1. Oh, you are making me homesick now with those evocative descriptions! There were a couple of years of my life up there in British Columbia during which I was taking one ferry or another weekly…. Otters, whales, birds—and always the weather, with odd and rare snow is what I remember very well from those trips back and forth to the Island and also up the Sunshine coast when I was headed for Desolation Sound….

    — maria    16. January 2005, 21:29    Link
  2. Yes, but it takes a fine hand to romanticize Cascadia in this season! Snow at sea level is a rare thing even as far north as Vancouver …

    In his love of natural rhythms, Chris Corrigan can make Bowen Island seem very rustic, like a few cabins huddled in the wilderness. It’s a little more urbane than that … just 15 minutes by ferry from West Vancouver, as http://www.bowen-island-bc.com/ points out a little too eagerly.

    Welcome back.

    — Jarrett    17. January 2005, 12:38    Link
  3. It is very close to West Vancouver, but West Vancouver takes a while to get really urban. It’s still 30 kms from downtown Vancouver, and living here in a small house looking out over the channel at the mouth of Howe Sound, you’d be hard pressed to say it’s urbane. We have two pubs, two decent restaurants, no gas station at the moment, regualr power outages, regular water shortages.

    It’s close to the city, but it ain’t urban. And the longer I live here the more interesting this tension between pulling towards the continent and this desire to stay rustic seems to become.

    It’s a both/and thing. But come for a visit and I’ll show what’s what!


    — Chris Corrigan    19. January 2005, 15:51    Link
  4. Pica visit me in Portland next time. I dare say you’d find birds while you were here that I’ve never seen in the 20 plus years I’ve lived here.

    — susurra    25. January 2005, 12:33    Link

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