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.

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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.

Island Cathedral

Let's go back a few years. A lifetime, almost. When I was a child some 65 years ago, we lived on the far coast of Nootka Island on a narrow strip of flat land above the high tide line. Behind us, the mountain rose steeply, Douglas-Fir clad, unexplored. To the right, a couple more houses, the abandoned remains of a fish cannery, an old dock. That was it. That was the “town”.

On our left, beyond my bedroom, on stilts above the creek, the forest was a green wall. We kids crossed the creek on a fallen log. On the other bank, salal bushes made an impenetrable barrier, but another fallen log, this one hollow, tunnelled through. We crawled through on hands and knees, and emerged into a dark, open space, the roof far overhead supported by wide, brown, bark-covered pillars. I called it the cathedral.

My brothers ran ahead, shouting, crossing the small promontory to the shore beyond. There, an islet, a pile of bare rock topped with sun-baked moss and a few trees, was accessible at low tide. I don't know exactly what we did there; run around aimlessly, poke into tide pools, climb the rocks and trees, my brothers shouting all the while. Once we carried lunch and had a picnic.

But often, I let the boys go on and stopped in the cathedral. Here were ancient monsters, trees so tall and wide that they shut out the sunlight, leaving the area in permanent shade. Nothing grew here but the trees, the moss, and evergreen ferns.

I would find a mossy log and sit. Just listening. To the silence, the deep, heavy silence of growing things, occasionally punctuated by a laggard raindrop, filtered through the moss far overhead. Plop!

The forest smelled of wet wood, of sharp-scented moss, of musty ferns. Outside, there was always the smell of salt water, ancient fish-scented lumber; here none of that penetrated. All was green and brown; those colours together still bring back the scent of that sanctuary to me.

Mushroom, Cathedral Grove. Not "my" cathedral.

Virgin forest: no saws had bitten into this bark, no chainsaws had broken the silence. Looking at Google maps today, I see that the area now is criss-crossed by logging roads, with large blank, clear-cut spaces. The little creek now enters a barren estuary. I can't find our house.

*************

Tomorrow: second-growth forest.

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Regresemos unos cuantos años. Una vida, casi. Cuando yo era niña, más o menos hace sesenta y cinco años, vivíamos en la costa de la isla Nutka, en un pedacito de tierra plana just arriba del alcance de las mareas. Atrás de la casa, la montaña se erigía alta, cubierta de abetos "Douglas-fir", sin explorar. A la derecha, dos casas, una enlatadora de pescado abandonada hacía mucho, un muelle. Eso era todo. Eso era nuestro "pueblo".

A la izquierda, donde mi recámara se alzaba sobre el riachuelo en pilotes, el bosque formaba una pared verde. Nosotros, los niños, cruzaba el agua a gatas en un tronco caído. Al otro extremo los arbustos de salal hacían una barrera impermetrable, pero otro tronco, este hueco, nos ofrecía un túnel suficientemente amplio para penetrar al bosque atrás, un espacio amplio, oscuro, con el techo, muy por encima, sostenido por pilares anchos, cafés, cubiertos de corteza vieja. Yo lo llamaba la catedral.

Mis hermanos seguían corriendo, gritando, hasta cruzar el espacio y salir a la luz y la costa al otro lado del promontorio. Allí había una islita, un montón de piedra cubierta en parte de musgos asoleados y unos pocos árboles. No me acuerdo que es lo que hacíamos allí; correr de aquí para allá, buscar entre los charcos que dejaba la marea, trepar a las rocas y a los árboles. Una vez, me acuerdo, llevamos sandwiches e hicimos picnic.

Pero muchas veces, dejaba a los muchachos que se fueran a la isla solos y yo me quedaba en mi catedral. Aquí se encontraban los monstruos antiguos, árboles tan altos, tan grandes que no dejaban penetrar ni un rayo de sol. Abajo, en la semi-oscuridad, solo crecían los árboles, musgos, y los helechos siempre-verdes.

Escogía un tronco cubierto de musgo, y me sentaba para escuchar. Escuchar al silencio, un silencio profundo, pesado, el silencio de cosas que se ocupan en crecer. De vez en cuando una gota de agua, filtrada por el musgo allá arriba, caía haciendo un ¡plop!

El bosque olía a madera mojada, a musgos (un olor un poco picante), a helechos maduros. Allá afuera, siempre se sentía el olor a mar, agua salada, y a madera impregnada de pescado viejo; aquí dentro, nada de eso penetraba. Todo era verde y café; aún hoy, esos colores juntos me traen el olor de ese mi santuario a la memoria.

Era bosque virgen. Esas cortezas nunca habían sentido los dientes de una sierra; nunca había roto el silencio una motosierra. Hoy día, buscando en Google, veo que el rumbo lleva caminos de madereros por dondequiera y que hay grandes espacios donde han cortado todos los árboles. Mi riachuelo se ha unido a un nuevo estuario sin plantas. No encuentro nuestras casas.

*****************

Mañana: bosque secundario.

Rust in peace

(continued from A bit of logging camp history.)

Simpson's Folly, they called it. Al Simpson, of the Iron River Logging Company, had built the causeway out into Georgia Strait, but the waves were too strong, and broke up his log booms. He added pieces of derelict ships to make a breakwater, starting with a 68 year old, three-masted clipper ship, the St. Paul, in 1942. The winter storms shifted them around, so he had them dynamited to the ground.

Remains of one of the Oyster Bay derelicts

Near the top of the breakwater, the old iron doesn't collect seaweed.

It wasn't enough. This is open coast, and the currents are strong.

In 1944, H.R. MacMillan bought the logging rights and camp. He expanded its operation, and brought in over one hundred worker's cabins. A cafe, the Blue Grouse, opened next door. And he began an ambitious program to protect the bay, adding, over time, a whole fleet of drowned ships.

The HCMS Matane, Royal Canadian Navy

... British Columbia's first Chief Forester. MacMillan reportedly gained considerable experience in world lumbering during World War I. With his colleague Whitford Julian VanDusen, another forester, MacMillan incorporated a company in 1919 to sell British Columbia lumber products to foreign markets. In 1924, they established a shipping company that would become one of the world's biggest charter companies. ( In response to competition, they began) ... to purchase mills and creat(e) the first truly integrated forestry company in British Columbia.
During World War II, MacMillan acquired numerous small mills and timber tenures on the south coast of British Columbia. (Wikipedia)

When World War II ended, many of the ships used in the war effort became redundant, and were sold off. In 1947, MacMillan bought and beached the Matane (almost new: built in 1943), the Levis, and the Charlottetown, from the Royal Canadian Navy.

Another view of the Matane. This was a large ship.

More ships followed:

• the WWI destroyer President Burns, 
• the Union Steamship steamer Lady Pam, 
• the Consolidated Whaling Company tender Gray (b. 1889), 
• the Island Tug and Barge Company’s chip barges Drumwall (aka. Puako) and 
• Betsey Ross (b. 1943), 
• the San Francisco car ferry Golden Bear, 
• the steam freighter Chatham, 
• the car ferry Border Queen, 
• two tugs (Cape Scott was one), 
• the 245-foot Muriel (built 1920), and 
• a large floating drydock.

The ships rested there, slowly rusting, until the mid-1950s, when rocks were brought in to replace them; the ships then were "removed". A 1956 report from the Campbell River Museum archives claims that "Removal of the hulks of old vessels has been underway for some years ... will be completed in 1956."

"Hat guy". Not much left of this ship.

Their footprints are still rusting peacefully today, in 2017.

Rust and barnacle remains.

As to how much they rusted and deteriorated, I put it down to the fact the tide goes out past them and exposes them entirely to air, twice a day, whereas sunken ships are entirely underwater forever and thus somewhat protected from oxidation (rusting.) (From Fransen CR; Graveyard of the Canadian Navy, Flickr.)

(Also see Ted Boggs collection, Campbell River Museum, for photos of logging camp and booming grounds, 1942 - 1945, and Helen Mitchell collection, for typical bunkhouses.)

A bit of logging camp history

In 1923, a pair of loggers set up a small logging camp at Oyster Bay, just north of the outlet of the Oyster River. The land is flat here; streams and creeks dawdle down to the coast, stopping here and there to make sloughs and flooded meadows. Roads across the wetlands were corduroy; cut logs laid across the road bed (or swamp bed), sometimes with sand or gravel fill. It made for a bumpy ride in those old logging trucks.

The bay itself is more a slight dent in the coastline, open to the waves and currents of Georgia Strait. Better a semi-bay for mooring log booms than none, and the flat surrounding land was a good place to lay out workers' cabins and logging machinery.

Looking inland from the tip of the breakwater. Flat river bottom land ahead.

The flatlands had other residents in those first years. Around the depression years, a relief camp housed young men otherwise out of work. They cleared land, worked on the roads; the cordwood road was gravelled; there were bridges to build and repair.

In 1938, a dry year, sparks from small logging operations set off dozens of small brush fires in the Campbell River - Courtenay area. Oyster Bay is in the centre. One fire grew into a raging blaze that eventually consumed 470 square kilometres of Vancouver Island Forest; at the end, over 2000 men fought it, hopelessly until the rains came.

When that was over, the Forestry department hired 40 men to cut a road through from Courtenay to Campbell River; they also replanted trees that had been lost in the fire.

The breakwater, today. Rocks and rust. Simpson's ship pieces.

As World War II was getting underway, the need for lumber grew. Al Simpson, of the Iron River Logging Company, bought the old logging camp and built a causeway out into the bay to enclose his booming ground. As added protection from the huge waves kicked up by winter storms in Georgia Strait, he sunk parts from dismantled ships as a breakwater.

Rusted ladder. One of Simpson's collection?

The causeway was here. Looking straight east across the channel.

And now, we have a real bay. Coastal currents have been bringing in sand and debris, piling up along Simpson's causeway at first, then on the added breakwater, changing the shape of the shoreline, even building bird habitat.

Three pilings left over from the causeway, with flying kildeer.

Google map. Oyster River at the bottom, the wide-open "bay", with the modern, enclosed bay at the star.

Tomorrow: MacBlo, the war's remnants, and today's hulks.

When trees were huge

One hundred years ago, Vancouver Island was covered shore to shore, high-tide line to high-tide line, with forest. The trees were huge; 30 feet around or more, 6 feet across. An old family photograph, now lost, showed my aunt, about 5'5" tall, standing in front of a downed trunk; it loomed over her, at least a foot wider than she was tall.

The weekly mail plane, Vancouver Island west coast, 1950s. One small settlement (Hungerford's place, I think, now gone). Forests still go to the high tide line. My father's photo.

Not so today; a Google Earth fly-over reveals huge logged-off patches, a network of logging roads, the brighter green of opportunist deciduous trees, and remains of old logging operations. Most of the forests now are second- or third-growth trees. Logging trucks carry bundles of skinny poles, matchsticks compared to the old logs, some of which were, singly, a full load for a big truck.

Log on truck trailer, 1944. Vancouver Archives collection.

Zeballos, a logging town on the west coast. 1940s. A few bare patches are visible on the left. When I knew it, in the 1950s, a large area of hillside had been logged off along the surrounding coast.

GoogleEarth view, mid-island. Darkest green shows unlogged areas.

Loggers were at work here since ancient times; the native peoples cut trees for houses, heating, canoes, and tools. The invading Europeans brought metal axes and saws, and used the wood for their own houses, boats, heating, and eventually power. (Some boats were run by steam power, with wood-fired boilers.)

In the 1920s, large-scale industrial logging started to change the map, including the creation of Oyster Bay. (continued tomorrow.)

Standing army

On guard at Oyster Bay, for the last eighty years.

A little decrepit, somewhat tipsy, but still waving flags and holding muskets.

I just realized I'd never written about the history of this bay. Must remedy that. Soon.

All the sky glows

I found myself yesterday evening at the entrance to Garry Point Park, on the southwest corner of Lulu Island. The shoreline was crowded with people on logs, on chairs, on benches, on rocks, apparently all there to watch the sunset. So was I, but I walked around the shore to the westernmost point, where Scotch Pond emerges to Georgia Strait.

From the south side of the point, and with my back to the sun, the sky was just beginning to take on a pink hue; the water was still blue.

(I'm posting the photos in chronological order to show how the light changes.)

Entering the south arm of  the Fraser River, heading for the docks in Steveston. 7:55 PM.

Goofing around with Picasa, and a photo that was too grey, I ended up with this: the tide coming in, swamping beach grasses and rearranging driftwood. Some of the pink hue stayed in.

When I turned to face west, the colours changed; everything was orange or black.

One of the many photographers already set up waiting for the magic moment.

The camera sees more orange than I do. My eyes are more flexible; I can squint into the too-bright light, without it affecting the whole scene.

From the outlet of Scotch Pond, looking directly west. There's enough reflected light from the slough for some of the green to show up.

All those poles! A few, farther out, are light beacons, but the rest are rotting pilings. In 1899, a cannery was built here (the Scottish Canadian Cannery, which gives its name to Scotch Pond). Rather than build on solid ground, the owners put it, with the workers' housing and net racks, all out on pilings on the tide flats, a good quarter of a mile outside the dike. It was still occupied as housing for Japanese families until 1942. The buildings have been gone for over a half century now, but the pilings remain, serving as perches for gulls and cormorants. There are two in this photo, or are those eagles?

From almost the same spot, looking north, over the Lulu Island tidal flats. What is that round thing? There's a row of them, all along this coastline.

10 minutes later. The sun is almost at eye level now.

While I waited, I' prowled around, looking at plants; beach pea, blackberries, some orange and yellow asters, a few lupins, gone to seed already, and purple loosestrife, struggling to keep its foothold. And there, below the point, on the rocks, were a couple of fishermen with their poles. Backs to the sun, intent on their lines, they stood almost immobile until the lines jerked; then they reeled in their catch and dropped it in a mesh bag at their feet in the water.

Peamouth chub, about 6 inches long. Everything is blue, because my back is to the sun.

I thought the orange fins and tail were an effect of the sunset, but no; that's their real colour.

These shallow bays are usually productive because when the tidal current is strong, most residential fish hide in them. Next time when fishing at Garry Point Park, instead of chucking a large chunk of worms into the fast water, try fishing close to the rocks with a float. Peamouth chub and some incredibly large northern pikeminnow usually rest by the rocks waiting for you to feed them. (From Fishing with Rod.) 

These are small fish, not especially good eating, but plentiful and easy to catch. They are a freshwater fish, but also live in brackish waters, such as this slough. While I watched the two fishermen caught a half-dozen fish, all small.

20 to 9. The sun is still there. A couple of kayakers head back inland, in an orange sea.

8:45. Just about sunset. The fishermen are still at work; those are their poles, angling across the slough.

Another photographer, waiting with his tripod and zoom lens on the high ground, told me that the best time to catch the sunset is about 10 minutes after the sun has dropped past the horizon. All the sky glows, he said. I should wait for it.

But the mosquitoes had found me, and they were vicious. I was slapping my head, my ankles, my ears, my wrists, my ankles again, my neck ... Too much; I turned off the camera, snapped the lens cap on, and hurried away.

(The mosquitoes followed me, and got their fill. I lost my glasses on the way across the park and had to look for them in the dark, to the great delight of the whining horde.)

A Skywatch post

They had heads back then

1913. 100 years ago. BC was still new, still half empty. White Rock was a railway station and a narrow strip of summer cottages along the beach and straggling up the slopes. On the Semiahmoo Reserve lands to the east of the station, some 40 Semiahmoo natives remained on their ancestral grounds around the mouth of the Little Campbell River.

In 1908, the Blaine border crossing, a mile to the east, had been opened. The next year, 1909, the Great Northern Railway line was rerouted to follow the coastline around Semiahmoo Bay, as it does to this day. The trains ran on steam; diesel came much later.

By 1913, developers had already seen the potential of the beach, the railway, and the proximity to the US border, but growth was slow.

Indeed, officials were so keen to develop White Rock that for a brief period in 1912, property lots could be had for free with the purchase of a subscription to a British Columbia travel magazine. (Super. Natural. British Columbia)

1913 changed all that. The Campbell River Lumber Company began construction of a large shingle mill on part of the Reserve lands. By 1918, . . .

The company, with its allied shingle mills and lumber camps, has a pay roll of over 300 men, running into some $35,000 per month. The big lumber mill is fitted with the latest and most up–to–date machinery and labor–saving devices, all run by electric motive power, with steam auxiliary, and turns out timber, flooring, siding, ceiling, shiplap, mouldings and other dressed lumber with an average cut of 100,000 feet per day. This lumber is shipped in carload lots to the prairies and other eastern Canadian points, as well as to a number of places in the United States.
Three shingle mills are operated by the Campbell River Lumber Company, . . . Each of these mills turn out some thirty thousand shingles per day, averaging about 560,000 for the week, the bulk of which is shipped to Pennsylvania. (Surreyhistory.ca)

 This is where the beach walkers came in. They had heads back then.

Row of footings and boards wander along the old breakwater, heading out to deep water.

The Campbell River mill was built on the slope below the present-day Semiahmoo townsite, and on pilings over the last curves of the Little Campbell River, on the inland side of the railway line. Beyond the line, the river was dredged and bordered with a stony breakwater, creating a straight, deep channel for boats.

The river still stays within these banks, though the tide covers them twice daily.

Logs were brought in from near Cloverdale to the east, by a temporary (removed in 1929) railway line, and from Hernando Island, in Georgia Strait; these were boomed down by tug boats, and moored in the bay. A few years later, logs cut near Cultus Lake in the Fraser Valley were hauled down to Bellingham by rail, then dumped into the bay, boomed up, and tug-boated back up to Canada. (A long way around, but transportation wasn't as easy then as it is now.)

The finished product, shingles, shiplap, siding, etc., was shipped out partly by rail, from the siding directly behind the mill, and partly from the scow berth at the end of the pier.

Layout of the mill, ca. 1923. From Surreyhistory.ca.

Most of the mill site was built on piles. Only at high tide was there enough water in the river to store logs. Continuous dredging was required, and piles placed every 12 feet in the river to hold back the sand and silt. Eventually, the dam was built to hold water, and store logs to keep the supply constant. ... The 1800 foot company pier was built in 1921.

And here are today's remains of that old mill:

Old cement footings, and the pilings holding the river in place. Taken from the path beside the rail line.

I have often wondered what those blocks were, down on the flats in the mud and silt. I'm glad I thought to look up my mysterious dog walkers.

This picture was taken from the top of the hill in front of the White Rock Hotel, on Dolfin Steet, looking east. ... The picture, taken in the 1920's, shows the Campbell River Saw Mill pier. At this time buildings were allowed on the beach. (Surreyhistory.ca)

There is an excellent, clear photo of the bay, showing the pier and the river channel, here, on Flickr. (Copyrighted, so you'll have to go there to see it.)

Here's a Google maps photo taken from the Dolfin Street corner, last year:

The current pier is behind us, to the right. The old mill pier is gone, except for the barnacled bits poking out of the sand. Seen full size, the border crossing at Blaine is marked by a white spot (the Peace Arch) near the centre, at the end of the bay.

The mill closed in 1927; many of the workers moved out, leaving empty housing in the community. The mill pier was dismantled. The buildings and machinery were removed. All that remains are the pilings, and those rusting walkers out on the tide flats.

Another Google view, slightly cleaned up. This is from the Reserve, looking over the mouth of the river, where the old mill was. Some of the pilings still stand, gently rotting away.

Google again. The railroad bridge, the mouth of the river, and the flats where the log booms were moored. If you look at it full size, (click) you can see, faintly, the crowds of metal and barnacle ghosts from the old booming grounds.

Not zombies, after all.

The mystery explained:

When I first posted photos of the headless dog walkers on the Semiahmoo beach, back in 2010, I suggested that they might be zombies. After all, what else would be walking around missing essential body parts?

But no; they're something much more prosaic. Scrap metal, remains of an old pier and shingle mill operation.

Here they are in 2010, as I first saw them.

Three walkers, headless and torso-less.

And a couple of weeks ago:

The left and center walkers of the previous photo. Still walking, after all this time.

And there's a whole mob of them!

Invasion of the body snatched?

Let's go look at them from speaking distance. They're safe, if only because they're so sluggish.

Runner, on tiptoes. Probably a dancer, too. Unusual, in that she has a torso. Just the head and arms are missing.

Cute little poodle. 

Is this doggie wearing sunglasses?

Under all those barnacles and mussels is a skeleton of rusting metal, firmly anchored deep in the sand. I couldn't move even the smallest of them. Here are a few spare parts:

Sharp edges. I wouldn't want to wade here if it were too deep to see what I was stumbling over.

Framework of some sort. Can't be moved, either.

Piece of something or other.

I'll tell the story behind all these, tomorrow.