Tag: lake swimming

autumn thinking: wolves and bears

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autumn lake

Yesterday, swimming, I wondered how many days I could continue. John has begun to swim in the local pool and soon I’ll join him but I’m not ready to give the lake up just yet. Just yet. Though the water is very cool, I have to say, and there are moments when I can’t feel my toes. What I don’t want to give up: the kingfishers, the quiet, the muffled cloud over the other shore, the trout jumping for insects, how it feels to glide through the green water, eyes closed. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so alive as I do on these mornings. But one day, not this one, I will wake and think, No, it’s just too cold. As it is, John sits in a folding chair under the big fir in three layers, with gloves on. When I get out of the water, he holds my big towel so I can wrap up. I’ve been in the lake each day since May 19th, with a little break to go to the Island for Angelica and Karna’s wedding.

Last night I was awake for hours, thinking about the chaos of the world right now. How far we are from the civility I believe we are capable of. In the night the situation(s) felt perilous–and I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. I’d been reading a book before sleep, by flashlight because the power had gone out in our first autumn storm, and I didn’t want it to end. Gumboot Girls, a gathering of stories and recollections of women who’d arrived at Prince Rupert and Haida Gwaii in the 1970s to make new lives for themselves. They built houses, learned midwifery, grew food, towed logs to beaches to cut into firewood, canned salmon and clams, learned to dress venison, to smoke fish, make cheese from goats milk. One of them, Chloe Beam, wrote about going up the Skeena River in her skiff to pick up a box of tiny chicks in Terrace. She was also the woman who wrote so beautifully of wolves, a song I’ve heard in the early morning once or twice:

I stepped outside on the dock this particular night. I was astounded by the brightness. I looked up and behind undulating dripping curtains of aurora borealis filling the entire sky. I had just seated myself on the rocks of the point to enjoy the electromagnetic spectacle, when from the next point over, a pack of wolves started to howl. At first it was intermittent. Then the wolves got into full swing. They bayed and chorused, sometimes in unison, sometimes in solo arias, calling down the northern lights to dance and snap in rhythm.

So one world, the one that feels upended and troubling, and the other world, where women cut wood with a swede saw, tend babies next to tin stoves, make quilts together, held in a kind of uneasy balance. Part of the uneasy balance is closer to home. Yesterday I was shopping in Sechelt when a woman asked me if I’d heard about the grizzly seen on the beach that morning. The beach where I gather the stones to tie into linen for indigo dye work, where my grandchildren love to swim in the summers and explore the tidepools at low tide. The beach right in front of the condominiums, one hotel,the walkway usually lively with bikes, dogs, little kids on scooters, leading to the play park. This beach:

where the grizzly was seen

No, I said, I hadn’t heard. She said the RCMP and the conservation officers were at Chapman Creek where the bear had walked to along the beach (Chapman Creek is a salmon stream). And later I learned that the bear had been trapped and relocated. But grizzly bears are so rare in our area, almost always young ones who’ve somehow arrived by water –one swam Jervis Inlet to terrorize pigs in Egmont about 8 years ago– or across the ridge from Salmon Inlet to explore Gibsons. I’ve only seen one, and not here; in April, at the head of Bute Inlet, watching guys unload a tanker truck full of 70,000 Chinook salmon smolts to be released in the Southgate River, we were alerted to a grizzly bear at the Homathko River estuary, just on the other side of the inlet. It was leisurely grazing seaweed (it looked like), raising its huge head occasionally to look our way. We don’t often get to see something so completely wild and beautiful. Though three days ago I was at my desk when I saw the grape vines moving around a corner of the house just beyond my window and when I went upstairs to see what was going on, I saw two black bear cubs, this year’s, scrambling across the upper deck to the stairs leading down. No doubt their mum had alerted them to the possibility of grapes–bears have very sophisticated memory maps of food sources– though ours had been picked and they were out of luck.

When I swim later this morning, after John returns from the pool, I’ll be thinking about bears and our planet, and the shifts and dangers of being alive at this time in history. I want to believe we can do the right thing, as a species, as citizens, and that our precarious arrangements, social, political, ethical, and ecological, can somehow be brought into a healthier balance. I hope the bears can find a balance too that doesn’t require them to graze on seaweed on the beach of a small town on the Sechelt Peninsula because these stories seldom end well for them. When I swim, I’ll remember the bear prints I sometimes find in the sand at the edge of the lake and Gary Snyder’s lines for bears.

A bear down under the cliff.
She is eating huckleberries.
They are ripe now 
Soon it will snow, and she 
Or maybe he, will crawl into a hole
And sleep.


“Such strange illumination” (Emily Dickinson)

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imaginary 2

After a long hot spell, cooler weather has come. Yesterday and Sunday, brief rain showers. The lake is still warm and somehow my swims are more energizing. This morning, the islands were lit in the most beautiful way, hills behind dark still — the darkest one is part of this peninsula and the green one beyond is Nelson Island, across Agamemnon Channel. Decades ago, we often went to this island–we called it White Pine, for the little grove on its high shoulder. In winter, we’d make a fire in a ring of stones and roast hot dogs or marshmallows, carrying the smoke back in our clothing. In summer, we’d take picnics in the wicker fishing basket an elderly neighbour of John’s mother passed along to us, stressing she wanted it used. It held a lot: calzones I’d make the morning of the picnic, fruit, bags of chips, bottles of cider, tins of San Pellegrino lemonade. I had a bamboo mat I’d spread out on the low slope on the left side of the island, spread it out over dry golden grass, and I’d lie in the sun with a book and cold cider. Or at least this is the way I remember those days. So much now feels as though I imagined it.

Such strange illumination
The Possible’s slow fuse is lit
By the Imagination.

How do we know? How do we ever know what happened, truly? Did I imagine the years of my life thus far and am I living a dream? Last night I got up, driven from my bed by a small fierce mosquito. At my desk, I thought of the weeks to come, the years, and the ones already gone. I could hear the cat hunting on the upper deck (he gives a particular yowl when he’s caught a mouse), and I could see the moon, just past full, caught in the firs like a burnished lamp. I sat, and thought, and tried to do some work. But my focus was elsewhere.

In the morning light, the islands are transfigured, the distance between them and the shore foreshortened. I could swim out to sit on the golden grass, alone. Or simply stroke back and forth, from my grove of cedars growing from their nurse log to the other end of the beach where trout are surfacing for insects. Maybe none of it matters.

imaginary 1

Last night I went quietly upstairs, not wanting to wake John, but when I reached the bed, he said, There’s moonlight on your pillow.

And there was.

summer postcards, near Ruby Lake

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morning swim

Our summer is still deciding. May was hot, June was unsettled, and today we are promised sun, warmth, and we’re still waiting. But it was lovely to begin the day with a swim and for a brief few minutes, the sun came out. Because the last few weeks were so cool and grey, we swam in the local pool. (Three weeks ago, we were swimming most mornings in the lake and thought that was how we’d continue.) I thought to myself this morning that my lake swims are a very qualitative experience. The light coming through the big trees, the swallows darting to the water’s surface for insects, the sound of ravens, the cold rush as I swim what must be an underground spring, the dense feel of the sand as I come out to find my towel.

In the pool, it’s about time and distance. I swim 50 lengths of the 20 meter pool. That’s a kilometer. It usually takes about 35 minutes (I’m no athlete) but sometimes a little less time and some mornings, maybe 38 minutes. The lifeguards play music and sometimes I like it. Sometimes I don’t get it. I know kids pee in the pool (and worse) so I try not to open my mouth. If I do, it doesn’t bear thinking about.

This morning I could smell newly-cut cedar. Last year’s extended drought meant that many young cedars died over the winter. We saw them lose fronds in late summer but didn’t realize how many had died until late spring. The Hydro guys came to our door a few weeks ago to say that they’d be coming in a month to cut down the ones that are close to the power lines. They identified 7. I know we have more that aren’t in the way of the lines and we’ll either figure out a safe way to cut them down or else leave them as wildlife trees. But at the lake, I guess the Parks crew have been cutting the dead trees. I could see one in sections by the shore. That’s what I was smelling. Another way in which the morning swim is qualitative. You stretch out your arms and move through the green water and you smell the incense of fresh cedar.

The other day John picked about half our gooseberries (we have the green ones) and because it’s still not sunny enough to be outside, I made a dozen jars of jam with a few blueberries added for colour and a lot of ginger. As I type, I can hear the jar lids snapping, one by one. Opening a jar in winter is like a postcard from summer, near Ruby Lake.

gooseberry