Never forget

This will be another very personal post. If you're here only for nature photos, you might want to come back tomorrow.

I have been writing at this since last November; here's where I am right now.

I was a war baby. 1942: WWII had been going on for three years already. Even the US had gotten involved by then. Dad was away in the Canadian Air Force, working on radios. He was almost 30 when I was born; they were calling up older men by that time. When Dad came home, "demobbed", we ended up on the west coast. There was no TV; I hadn't seen any movies, but I must have heard stories; I cringed when airplanes flew overhead, half expecting bullets or bombs. I was 5 then.

We took in a refugee family from Ukraine; Johnny had seen his father shot and killed. Dad took us to the lookout tower where our soldiers had watched for enemy submarines.  In our one-room school, grades 1 to 8, we watched Canadian government films about the "war effort"; I ran the film projector. The war was an ever-present memory.

In my teens, I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Twice.  I met survivors of Hitler's camps and Japanese prisons. Later, I read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. I read Babi Yar; in my dreams I saw the pits where today's dead and dying bodies lay piled on yesterday's dead.

Life has been good to me. I have a loving family, decent health, beauty all around me. But always, always, there is that dark remembrance deep inside. War, torture, prison, death. "Man's inhumanity to man," they say, but it is all too human. Never forget.

A quote from the ending of Babi Yar: "Let me emphasize again that I have not told about anything exceptional, but only about ordinary things that were part of a system; things that happened just yesterday, historically speaking, when people were exactly as they are today."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The world around us has changed since then. We no longer die - usually - of minor injuries, things like an ingrown toenail. Most children survive their first five years; half of them didn't in my grandmother's day.  We have vaccines; we don't all catch the measles or chicken pox. (I caught both, so did my son, but I  was spared mumps and polio, which my brother caught.) And we have antibiotics; I'm here today due to sulfas and then penicillin when it became available. I don't personally know anyone whose mother died in childbirth, the ever-present fear of days gone by.

But, "historically speaking, people were exactly as they are today." Turn that around; people today are exactly like the people in our history books.

We, here in Canada, are not currently at war. For that, I am grateful. But we have challenges our forebears missed out on. Climate change. Global warming, the not-so-appreciated term for it. Sea levels rising, slowly for now, but accelerating. Pandemics; Covid wasn't the first, won't be the last. People haven't changed; if we don't like the facts, we deny them, refuse to change our behaviour, attack anyone who keeps insisting that we do something to correct the situation. But the fact remains; disasters are accumulating, and our very survival is threatened.

I have seen this with my own eyes. I have been watching the life around me for decades, and the changes are evident. The weather patterns have changed. Flowering plants and their pollinators are out of sync. Huckleberries bloom unvisited and there are few berries. On the shores, there are dead zones; they stink. Starfish, in the millions, died of an unexplained illness. Flocks of birds that used to darken the skies and the water now are reduced to a few dozen here and there. The insects the birds fed on have disappeared, and with them, the spiders. A great kelp forest I saw on my first visit to Campbell River, over 10 years ago, no longer exists. 

And the response to this has been, in large part, to attack. Not the warming, but the science. The scientists. The writers who try to alert us. And even the children pleading with us to save their world while there's still time. 

And there's still the war. Not here, not for the moment, but the war wherever. Or, to call it for what it is, the genocide. Wherever it is, no matter how far away, it still affects us here. (And adds, immensely, to the global warming situation.) 

And next door, the US is rapidly turning itself into a banana republic. I try not to doomscroll, but I can't miss the daily updates. And what I'm seeing is a repeat of the run-up to WWII.

I remember seeing the news about 9-11. I was standing in my daughter's cabin on the hillside above a rural lake, watching her TV. I was not surprised; disasters like this had been happening around the world. Just not here. But it was inevitable; no one nation is immune. I was, instead, dismayed. "Here we go again," I remember saying. The panic, the scapegoating, the paranoia, the calls for revenge; it's a basic human pattern.

I remember standing at my window listening to the radio as George Bush's "Shock and Awe" attack on Iraq went down. How many people, how many children, how many nobodies, died in those moments? I felt sick. "Here we go again." Will we ever learn?

I doubt it.

And now, the blatant attack on law, on science, on medicine, on anyone "different".  The deportations, the internment of people the wrong colour in camps. The sudden expansionist theme; Greenland, Canada, Panama; where next? They're following HItler's playbook, Stalin's programs. How many millions died of starvation because of Stalin's denial of so-called "Jew science"? How many good people died in Hitler's prisons for telling the truth?

Here we go again.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is a nature blog. I write about mushrooms and birds, rocks and trees and shores; the world as I find it where I am today. So, how does all the above tie in?

Just this: it seems to me, in my more pessimistic moments, not as rare as they used to be, that we are coming to some kind of an end. Each war, each "little" skirmish, is more violent, more destructive than the last. The unravelling of the advances in medicine of the last century is accelerating. And each of the climate disasters, the fires and the storms and the disappearance of our food stocks, is worse than the preceding ones. We, all of us together, seem to be running full-tilt towards a cliff to fall and drown like lemmings. Yes, I know lemmings don't really do that, but we are providing them with a good example to follow.

In mid-summer I look for the beautiful orange-backed cross spiders around my garden, where they used to hang their webs. Not one. Not even a small one. There are no fat Steatodas, like glossy brown marbles with legs, either. On the beach at low tide, under a rock, I find a half-dozen purple starfish. One seems to be sick. I drive and drive, on the empty north-bound highway, watching the skies for dark wings, an eagle, a turkey vulture, a raven; after a couple of hours, going and coming, I have seen one.

And I feel like giving up. Am I now just documenting the disappearing act of the world I have known? Making some sort of a record; things as they were, so they won't be completely forgotten? Is it worth it? Will anyone be around to remember?

Some days it seems just too hard to look at photos and process them, to ask questions and search for answers; what is this, why, how, when? What's the point?

I have been writing this at intervals since mid-November.  Yesterday, in an interview with Ed Yong, I read this: "These ... ideas anchor me in these moments when it feels like the gulf between what we hope the world should be and what it actually is seems vast and growing. That gulf is agonizingly difficult to bear, but we bear it nonetheless."

And he is writing a book about life at different scales, "The Infinite Extent", the third in a nature trilogy. Bearing that gulf.

If he can still hold on to hope, who am I to wimp out? Onward! Maybe there is a tenuous hope; maybe we'll make it. Chastened, maybe, sadder and wiser, I might hope. Maybe we're not lemmings, either. Maybe.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Otra vez estoy subiendo un poste muy personal, sin, por el momento, una traducción. Apenas hoy subí la traducción del poste anterior. Este seguirá en unos dias.

Out on the edge of the world

Vancouver Island sits off the west coast of Canada. Nootka Island sits off the west coast of Vancouver Island. Only the Queen Charlottes, to the north, take Canada further west. Looking straight west from the west coast of Nootka Island, the closest land is just north of Japan, 7,000 km. away.

Shortly after Japan attacked Pearl Harbour, during World War II, the Canadian and U.S. governments, jointly, established a radar station on a peak on the farthest west point of Nootka Island, tasked with watching for submarine and air activity in the northern Pacific. Barely three years later, the war having ended, the site was evacuated.

A few years later, the staff at Esperanza Hospital, some 30 km away as the crow flies, if ever a crow flies in a straight line, about 4 hours away by boat, as we measured distance, were permitted to use the abandoned facilities for a summer camp for kids from the surrounding communities, Tahsis, Zeballos, Nuchatlitz, Ceepeecee, Yuquot, and floating logging camps. And us, at Esperanza and Hecate, of course. I spent most of the summer here for several years; Dad was camp director, Mom the nurse. We arrived early, stayed through several batches of kids, stayed to close down the camp at the end. Summer, to me, meant Ferrier Point.*

The Point itself is surrounded completely by water, making it its own island. On the "inside", in a deep bay, is the sandy beach from yesterday's post. The inlet cuts across to the far shore, the "outside" along a narrow tidal creek. Everywhere else, the shore faces open water; on the west, 7,000 km. of open water.

The west end of the tidal cut between the Point and Nootka Island. A camp outing.

On the rocks. "That's Japan, over there," we used to say, ignoring the fact of a round earth. We did know better, but it was fun to imagine.

The view from the radar tower, looking southeast. The "lagoon". The island was densely wooded; still is, even as the rest of the islands are logged off.

From the campsite, looking north, past the "Ocean Spray" cabin. There was a short trail going down to this shore, a narrow strip of pebbles where we sat around a campfire and watched pounding waves. We were told never to set foot in the water, no matter how quiet it looked; there was a dangerous undertow and it would drag us down and away. We behaved. We all knew the power of the sea.

Google maps: Ferrer Point. Looks like some sort of eared beast. The lagoon is the eye. the mouth cuts the island off from Nootka Island.

The old buildings are gone now, the board road across to the tower crumbled into the earth, but occasional visitors still show up. And in the waters around the point, the fishing is excellent.

*We called it Ferrier Point; today's maps say Ferrer, but the campsite is still labelled as Ferrier on Google maps.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

La isla de Vancouver queda al oeste de la masa continental de Canadá. La isla Nutka está situada al oeste de la costa de la isla de Vancouver. Solamente las islas Carlotas, al norte, se sitúan más al oeste, entre las tierras canadienses. Mirando desde el punto más occidental de la isla de Nutka, la tierra más cercana es Japón, a unos 7.000 kilómetros al oeste.

Poco después de que el Japón atacó a los EE. UU. durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, los gobiernos canadiense y estadounidense, en conjunto, establecieron un sitio de observación con una torre de radar en el punto más al oeste de la isla de Nutka, con el propósito de observar actividades submarinas y por aire entre Canadá y Japón. Apenas tres años más tarde, al terminar la guerra, abandonaron el sitio.

Unos pocos años más tarde, los encargados del hospital en Esperanza, unos 30 km. de distancia como vuela el cuervo (si es que los cuervos alguna vez vuelan en linea recta) o como lo medíamos los habitantes de la región, a unas cuatro horas por barco, fueron permitidos a ocupar el sitio para campamento de verano para los niños de las comunidades cercanas, como Tahsis, Zeballos, Nuchatlitz, Ceepeecee, y Yuquot. Y nosotros en Esperanza y Hecate, por seguro. Yo pasé la mayor parte del verano aquí por varios años. Mi papá sirvió como director y Mamá fué la enfermera del campamento. Llegábamos temprano, nos quedábamos mientras venían y se iban varios grupos de niños, y nos quedábamos a limpiar el sitio al final del verano. Para mí, el verano significaba el Ferrier Point.*

Ferrer Point está completamente rodeado de agua, lo que lo hace también una isla. En el lado "de adentro", como lo llamábamos, queda la playa arenosa que subí ayer, en una bahía larga que corta hacia las rocas en el "exterior" por medio de una especie de rio sujeto a la marea. En toda la costa aparte de esto, la isla mira hacia mar "abierto", en el oeste, hacia 7.000 km. de mar abierto.

Las fotos: caminando hacia el exterior. 

En las rocas, mirando, decíamos, a Japón sin mencionar que la tierra es redonda y no se puede ver más allá de las nubes.

Desde la torre, mirando al sudeste; la laguna. Toda la isla estaba cubierta de bosque denso; aún hoy, sigue igual, aunque en el resto de nuestra isla la industria forestal ha dejado grandes espacios vacíos.

Una vista desde el campamento, mirando hacia el norte. Hay un caminito hacia el borde del mar aquí; una playa angosta de piedras redondeadas por el agua. Aquí no nadábamos, ni siquiera nos mojábamos los pies; el mar aquí nos podría agarrar y llevarnos rapidamente al fondo. Nos portábamos bién; todos sabíamos el poder del mar.

*En el mapa de hoy, el lugar se llama Ferrer Point, pero en aquel tiempo, lo llamábamos Ferrier. El mapa Google mantiene este último nombre unicamente para el sitio del campamento.

Rusted Ghosts

Long, long ago, back in the 20th century (it seems strange to say that now, to me who spent most of my life in that century) when logs were logs, when the saws in the woods were manned by two lumberjacks each, perched on supports jammed high into the stump, where the 12-foot-long saw could reach across the width of the trunk, the felling of a tree was only the first part of an arduous undertaking. Somehow, those monsters had to be hauled out of the dense BC bush, loaded onto trains or trucks, and dumped in a handy harbour. From there, they could be boomed or loaded onto barges and towed to a mill, usually some distance away over treacherous waters.

Google map: Comox Harbour, Goose Spit, Royston.

One such handy dumping ground was Comox Harbour, a deep river mouth with a spit partway across the opening, creating a safe place to store log booms. A logging railway came down the coast to Royston, on the far side of the harbour.

Starting in 1911, steam locomotives hauled logs from logging camps throughout the Comox Valley to the Royston log dump. The logs were sorted into booms and towed to more protected waters on the inside of Goose Spit. From there, the steam tugs towed the log booms to Fraser Mills in New Westminster. (Royston Seaside Trail website)

The ocean here can be stormy, and the Royston log dump had no protection. In 1937, the logging company started to sink derelict ships to form a breakwater. It was the age of the steam engine, and the old sailing ships could not compete; they were among the first to be riddled with holes and left to rot on the tide flats.

The Riversdale, a steel-masted Cape Horn windjammer, launched 1894, stripped and used as a barge before she was finally sunk. The bowsprit is all that remains of the superstructure.

From the sign at the trail.

The first member of the Royston ghost fleet was the five-masted auxiliary lumber schooner Laurel Whalen. Built in 1917 by Cameron Genoa Mills Shipbuilders in Victoria, the Laurel Whalen had a brief spell as an ocean going cargo ship before being converted to a floating cannery in the 1920's. Eventually she outlived her usefulness and was brought to the breakwater site in the 1930's. (Forgotten British Columbia Facebook page)

The Melanope and the Orotava. The Melanope is the oldest of the sailing vessels, built in 1876.

A world traveller: Liverpool to Australia to Asia to Royston, hauling everything from coal to rice, later stripped down and used as a log barge.

Then came WWII.  When it was over, many of the old warships were scrapped. Several ended up in the Royston breakwater.

The Prince Rupert, a WWII frigate.

In her active days.

In all, there are 14 ships rusting away on the old breakwater: "... three windjammers, three frigates, two destroyers, three steam tugs, one (maybe two according to some accounts) harpoon boat, and two barques (a kind of “workhorse” of the 19th century sailing ships)." (atlasobscura)

Another view of the Melanope and the Orotava

320 feet long, four-masted. Captured from the Germans, WWII.

When I arrived, the tide was low, but not as low as it gets at other times. I could see fragments of other ships, barely above the surface. Some, though, even at the lowest of the low tides, are now so rusted and rotted that they have almost disappeared.

On the shore, the remains of an old rail heading out to sea. A slipway, maybe?

For more complete info, see the book The Ghost Ships of Royston, by Rick James.

Related: about the breakwater at Oyster Bay: Rust in Peace.