Vancouver’s Lifeguard Legend

“Ruby Smith Diaz (l.) examines the life of Joe Fortes, a Black lifeguard in Vancouver, during a time of rampant racism, exploring his legacy and identity through research, personal reflections and poetry.FULL STORY

 

#47 Strange creatures abound

December 09th, 2015

Hello darlin’,

Yahoo, monsoon season on the west coast of the Island! It’s not cold yet. But the wind comes and goes, often howling like an insane beast, sending the rain sideways, picking up the water on the roof and launching it in a mid-air spray.

At times the rain is so intense it looks like strings of water coming from a sky which is sitting on the tips of the trees.  Other times the rain looks like the water coming directly from the shower head.  And almost all the time it sounds like the interior of a car wash facility.

I like animals and one of the true pleasures of living in Tahsis has been the presence of wildlife.  The California sea lions are sprawled on the breakwater at the marina, honk, honk, honking and bark, bark, barking. The noise is at first novel, intriguing even, but after a few hours it’s annoying, and by the end of the week, with that din assailing night and day,  I can well understand the feeling of a friend who said if it didn’t stop soon he was taking a shotgun down to put an end to it himself.

I’m not fond of California sea lions either.  Not because of the noise, not even because of the stink.  It’s the look of them.  These are apex predators and they’d as soon gnaw on us as on a fish or a seal.  Resident Orca seem to have decided to tolerate them but when the Rovers pass through it’s war of a sort seldom seen in the animal world.  The Orca have been seen ganging up on California sea lions, picking them off one at a time, charging in, slashing, butting, bashing, and they aren’t interested in eating them, they just want them dead and gone.

We have deer who walk around the Annex nibbling on grass, trying to eat rose bushes, and, yes, it griped me no end when the beautiful little darlings feasted on my Stargazer lilies, but as miffed as I was it seemed a fair price to pay for having watched the young doe with her twin fawns.  I have no idea where or how she acquired the third, but one morning there she was with three spottybacks tagging along with her.  Made me wonder about adoption and babysitting and whether or not she could count. Did she know she had an extra or was it all the same to her.

There’s a very small black bear still bumbling around, possibly a yearling male whose mom has told him get thee hence and make a life of thine own.  Or it might have been orphaned.  There isn’t much out there for it, and I’m not one to feed wildlife (except for the Stargazer lilies and that wasn’t intentional) but I do hope Cubby manages to survive the scant season.  We hope nobody gets ridiculous and phones Conservation about Cubby because that’s a death sentence for the bear.

We used to have any number of bears but in the past few years the toll has been enough to churn anybody’s stomach.  One of the cops we had to endure seemed to be a frustrated African Big Game Hunter, and at the first hint of bear he was out there with his gun.  He must have “put down” a near dozen of them.  Maybe he had grown up wishing he could be a Stewart Grainger type… You know, the tall, sort’a blondish, bwana sahib with all the answers.

There are so many fascinating creatures in the animal kingdom. Take, for example, Donald Trump. Those who claim to know such things want me to believe this rich arstle is the leading contender for the Republican presidential nominee.  I thought they’d scraped the bottom when they unearthed Mad Man McCain, but no, seems there’s no end to the arstle contingent.

Sometimes I think The Donald is really a secret agent… put there and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s handlers in a move to guarantee she’ll be the next POTUS.  Because you know they aren’t going to smarten up and vote in that nice older man who actually sounds sane when he speaks.

And up here we’ve got Junior, the boy who has promised everything to everybody.  I probably wouldn’t be so negative about him if he’d just stand up and talk sense.  But no, everything with Justin has to be a capital-P Presentation, complete with dramatic effect.  And he just flat-out is not a good actor.

Now Premier Puff ‘n’ Stuff doesn’t like Junior’s idea about reforming the Senate.  As if she had a better idea!  Now that she has publicly picked a fight with Junior she can claim any move he makes to stop Site C or those pipelines is a vengeful attack on her for not clapping and cheering his senate reform idea. If those kids can’t get along we’re going to have to deny them access to the sandbox.

Maybe I’m a tad ornery of late because my back kind of blew up on me.  The dragon who lives where my spine used to be came roaring out of her cave, tail swishing, claws scraping, snorting smoke and breathing fire, raging furiously.  I don’t know what ticked her off but she was in a right rare state that had me bent double, barely able to move. When the pain level got to the point where I was hurling, I went to the Clinic.

A shot of this and a shot of that, home to bed, a prescription for something else and I’ve made it to the point I can at least get to my chair and this machine and drop a line or two.  So this is just my version of the note in a bottle.

Season’s Greetings to all.

And to all, a good sleep.

Anne Cameron grows pussywillows on the western edge of Vancouver Island. She received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award for an outstanding literary career in British Columbia in 2010. Her 23 books include Daughters of Copper Woman, the bestselling work of fiction ever written about B.C. and published from within B.C. She has banished herself to Tahsis, a small town not far from Friendly Cove where the shenanigans called British Columbia all began.

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