Just for today

 Pause. Breathe.

Maple leaf. Quinsam River.

Blue water

... and a few birds. Photos from various points along the shore.

Logs, waves, distant mainland

This stretch of shore, near Salmon Point, gets the brunt of any wind or storm that blows up the channel. And I think because of that, it has built up a wide log barrier, difficult to climb over, especially carrying a bag for trash and a camera. This is an "easy" spot; some include huge tangled root masses, upside-down, and precariously balanced, teetering trees.

Mallards, objecting to my approach. Off Shell Road beach.

The third erratic, that I haven't reached yet because I was trying to keep my feet dry. What treasures lie beneath?

Great blue heron, just before he left, too. 

A small flock of wigeons. At the boat launch near the 50th parallel marker.

Dividing the waters. Strathcona Dam.

I was born under a wanderin' star*.**  I can't resist a poorly travelled side road, curving out of sight under the trees. The Strathcona Dam was down one of these, about 30 km. out of Campbell River.

View over Upper Campbell Lake, from the top of the dam.

The dam is a wide earth-mound dam built by BC Hydro, dividing the Upper Campbell Lake from the smaller Campbell Lake. With two other local dams, they produce 11% of the electricity used on Vancouver Island. Below the dam, Hydro has provided a free campsite, open year-round. I didn't go down to it, and I don't think I could stay there; I watched a smaller dam disintegrate and take out a bridge that I'd just crossed when I was a teenager, and the memory sticks. I drove out onto the dam itself, took a few photos and went back to the safe road alongside the reservoir.

Through a gap in the trees. The distant mountain may be Victoria Peak, 2100 m.

Another view of that mountain.

Weak sunshine behind the clouds, reflected on the water.

I drove slowly, checking the bush on either side of the road as I went. When I saw a deer on the shore, I stopped the car, hoping it would ignore me. But it ran out of sight, and as I sat there, watching, five deer dashed out of the forest ahead of me, leaped across the road, and sprang up the hillside into deeper cover. There's nothing more beautiful than a half-flying deer. Except, maybe, five of them.

A slight foot trail led down the hillside to the water. I got out, now that there were no deer to startle, and walked down. This was where I found yesterday's cup mushrooms.

The area has been cleared. There's a fire pit down on the shore. And my car, hiding behind a tree up on the road.

This was strange. About 4 feet above ground, a dense clump of something grew from the bottom of a branch, curving upward. The stalks are not like the branches around them; darker, more solid-looking, newer (no lichen). Does anyone know what this is?

Water, water, everywhere. In the lakes, in pools, in ditches running along the roads. Dripping from the trees. And pouring down the hillsides around every curve. A zillion creeks with no name.

On the way home, I stopped to watch common goldeneyes in one of the small, green pools beside the highway. (They swam out of sight before I turned on the camera.)

The road was gravelled, muddy in spots, and pot-holed. Now I need more water. With soap.

*(Lee Marvin, YouTube)
** I came by it honestly. Dad used to say he had "itchy feet." I inherited them.

Water always wins

Since I was a child, so long ago, I loved to sit on the shore or a dock, just watching the waves. On they came, one after another, never ceasing, always changing and never changed. On and on and on; they'd been rolling in since time immemorial, and they'd be rolling in when we were long gone. More than the mountains, more than the stony cliffs, more even than the stars above me, the ocean settled me, gave me a sense of permanence, of something to count on.

Two old pilings catching a wave; constant  movement meets stolid resistance.

I've grown old, and the waves still roll in, as always. And I'm still awed by their power; such a soft, yielding substance is water, yet it hammers away, year after year, rolling stones, crumbling breakwaters, consuming pilings, rocks, cliffs, entire land masses.

Rolls, circles, droplets, and Velcro hooks (Far left)

I walked on the quiet beach the other day; the only sounds were the constant swish, swish, swish as each wave landed on the beach. And the rattle and rumble of stones pushed to and fro, the shore being shaped, yet again, by the encroaching tide.

Patterns at low tide

Wading around the eel-grass beds in Boundary Bay, we watch our feet in case of big crabs. And the tide makes pretty patterns for us.

Clam-shell graveyard, ankle-deep. With unexpected art.

Line drawing from the photo above. (Inverted)

Crab molts, eelgrass, sand and wave fronts.

Deeper water, with eelgrass and a few shells

More shells. Gull dining room. With more artwork.

I see a few faces in that photo; a blond guy with a Pinnochio nose, a disgruntled alien, several cartoon characters. What do you see?

Bubbles over eelgrass.

We got too close to a heron, and he flew away indignantly, leaving behind a token of his displeasure.

This I'd never seen before: heron poop, underwater, not washed away yet.

A sad post

I've been putting off writing this post, procrastinating in the futile hope that it will go away. It never works, does it?

November 26, three weeks ago: In the aftermath of the storm system that blew over most of BC, we went down to White Rock beach to see what had blown in. Just logs and broken plastic, it seemed. I wrote about it here.

I collected some fresh seawater for my critters in the tank at home; only about one litre, since I'd forgotten my regular 2 litre bottle. The water was dirty, with bits of eelgrass, wood chips, sand and muck, all whipped up by the crashing waves. It didn't matter; at home, as I have done before, I filtered it well, then let it sit for a few days for the fine silt to settle out.

The next week, as usual, I replaced 2 l. of the old water in the tank with new, including the latest beach collection.

All seemed well for a day or two. Then one morning, I noticed that my female crab was having difficulties. She stood on her head, with the hind legs swaying in the water, spread out. It took her a long time to right herself, but then she seemed ok. Until the next time I checked on her, when I found her caught upside-down in some seaweed. Something was wrong. (And she was in berry after their recent mating!)

The other two crabs seemed fine. But the big anemone was writhing and contracting oddly, making himself into a series of balls, then flat, then one ball with a pin-head tip, then a wide tip balanced on a pointed base, never opening tentacles to feed. A smaller anemone had disappeared entirely; so had the eelgrass isopods. I couldn't see any limpets, nor any pairs of amphipods waiting to mate. And the snails, those indestructible nasas and mud snails, were lying about, half out of their shells.

I hurried to change as much of the water as I could for freshly-prepared artificial seawater, adjusted for just-right salinity and temperature.

The next day, the anemone was worse; only a few snails were moving. Three clams were holding their siphons well out of the sand, about an inch high. I've never seen them do that before. And the big male crab was lying paralyzed, with legs stretched out and up, towards the back. The female was upside-down more often than not. The little male had disappeared.

I did what I could; removed everything to a "hospital" container with fresh water and clean stones, twice; watched and hoped. For a while, it looked as though the male would recover, but no, he relapsed. The snails died.

When the little male (that I had raised from crab babyhood) floated belly-up, too, I gave up. I drained off the water and replaced it with alcohol. They died quickly.

The baby, with anemone, in happier days.

What had happened? I have gone over and over each step of those days; the only source of whatever killed my tank would have been the water from the White Rock beach, where I have always collected water. And the only difference there would have been the after-effects of the storm. Was it contaminated rainwater from the city on the hill above the beach? Or something brought in by the wind and waves? I don't know.

(My previous die-off, not as complete, was caused by local pollution, blown in from next door. There was no sign of that this time, and the symptoms and species attacked were different.)

We have seen, on occasion, areas of the beaches we visit where large numbers of dead animals lie half-buried in the sand. (May, 2008, baby sand dollars, for example.) There are spots where dying clams lie thick on stinking mud; patches where we find no live animals at all, no matter how many rocks I flip, or how much sand I filter through. Sure, the areas recover, often, at least in part. Or become hosts to new forms of life, like the invasive mud snails that now cover much of the Boundary Bay beach on the Tsawwassen side. Sometimes they don't; years ago, Mom used to tell me of a beach on Vancouver Island where she could not find anything alive. It seemed impossible, back then; now not so much.

I have emptied and cleaned the tank and all the equipment, and hidden them away. I moved the furniture around so that the gap where they were doesn't show. I dumped everything previously alive in the garbage; I would normally bury it in the garden, as fertilizer, but I can't take the risk of poisoning the many animals that live in my soil. The sand will be spread, well washed first, in the most gravelly, polluted area of the vacant lot.

In the spring, I'll probably have the courage to start again. For now, I'm grieving.

I originally started bringing home beach invertebrates to learn something from them. More than just how to identify them, I wanted to know how they lived, how they interacted with other animals. I was even privileged to learn something about how they think, to see them show a reciprocal curiosity, watching me through the glass, responding to what I was doing. What kills them, how they suffer and die (that anemone's tortured contortions still break my heart!) is also something I have unhappily begun to learn.

It has made me very aware of what I buy, what I use and discard; it all enters the environment; it has the potential to do much damage. We can't turn back the clock; we've fouled our nest already, but at least I can keep from adding more poison to it.

Water makes all the difference

Rock Flipping Day 2011, continued...

It was a relief to come back to my own sheltered, well-watered garden after the expedition to the desert-like conditions of the vacant lot. (Between a rock and a dry place).  I recovered my enthusiasm for the search, and decided to turn over some of my own rocks. And here, the moisture lovers thrive.

A few rocks and turtles holding down the base of a wooden heron.

Under the rocks, an orange slug nibbles the heron's toes.

Every rock concealed at least one or two earthworms.

On the bottom of a paving stone, a clump of snail or slug eggs, and a woodbug.

Tiny white springtails. These don't tolerate drying out.

I thought this was a single snail egg until I saw the photo; it is covered with white silk. A spider egg sac, probably.

Millipede. One of many.

The large fake rock (styrofoam) sheltered hundreds of beasties. Slugs and woodbugs clung to the underside of the "rock".  On the ground, rove beetles and millipedes dashed for cover, centipedes and worms burrowed quickly into the soft soil, leaving only many more woodbugs and slugs.

Temporarily tame woodbug.

So my summer schedule of watering every night has paid off; the garden is alive, top and bottom.

The rough with the smooth.

Streets of Strathcona, 2009: The Textures.

(I couldn't decide which ones to omit, so this post is image-heavy.)

A rough-leaved fern in a shady garden

Daisies and slats

Asphalt shingles and old brick

Stucco and balcony

Wet T-shirt

Bubble wrap used as window covering

White hollyhock

Pottery in the making. The shop of Gailan Ngan.

Compost bin

String

Lychnis on fence

Tangle of wires

Pale yellow walls

Back alley door

White hydrangea

Diamond in the rough. (Stucco wall.)

The smooth skin of pears

And the bloom on a green fig.

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