A domestic altercation last night, a bunch of  angry texts from the driver of a car with whom I shared a fender bender last Friday, a discovery of the non-function of our solar electric battery, and troublesome noises from the inverter during yesterday’s 107 degree heat wave, the dogs poops continuing black, the news–all these troubled what sleep I could find and had me up at 4:00 am.

Still unsettled after returning from the dog beach, I bike to the Creek. I sit on a stump and dictate into the phone.

Gurgle and birdsong. Vegetation fresh and green on both banks.  A place of merciful miracles, long into the dry season in the middle of the city. Nature’s regeneration and purification of a place formerly ravaged and abused.

These living waters arise from the aquifer, pressed by the sediment above into the channel first excavated 15 feet in the 1930’s to drain the fields, climb from down here in wells, flow through irrigation pipes and sprinklers onto crops, then percolate back down to join seeps from from the water table.

Dug and realigned repeatedly by heavy machinery, the channel has greened itself and generated aquatic and terrestrial wildlife.

The most recent chapter unfolded during the last three years as volunteers and students converted the channel from a littered encampment into a trail-lined park. Across from where I sit now, stands a 150 foot Shamel Ash creating  a microbiome for shrubs, sedges, willows, grasses, horsetails and also for weeds like Burdock and oxtongue that need cutting by a gardener who observes and responds.

A sanctuary I repair to from the subdivision where I live across the road, either out of desire or, like today, out of need.

I stand to flex my achy joints, and a monarch flutters onto the willow shoot in front of me.

A Black Phoebe flies overhead across the creek. A flock of house finches twitter in harmony with the Riffle’s tumbling water.

[forthcoming in the Lund Barnacle]

Louise Blight’s recently published book, Where the Earth Meets the Sky: A Story of Penguins, People, and Place in Antarctica https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Louise-K-Blight/243376424 is an enthralling read or audiobook listen.

It came to my attention via an unexpected email from its author two years ago recalling her summers’ attendance at Lund Farm Day Camp in 1973 and 1974. That led to an exchange revealing that Louise lived for a while in the first house on the boardwalk later replaced by Nancy’s Bakery. Afterwards she attended UVic, earned a PhD in wildlife and conservation biology and began an esteemed research scientist’s career that included a three months’residence in a hut on Ross Island in Antarctica.

The book about that residence is distinguished by the author’s accomplished writing style, ranging from lyrical descriptions of crystalline landscapes to graphic reports of pissing and shitting into containers that have to be stored and shipped off-continent to avoid contaminating the pristine environment. Another of its themes is coming to terms with grief attendant upon the untimely deaths of her father and sister. Framing her narrative is an impassioned commitment to the scientific effort to document, understand and reduce the ongoing catastrophe of human-caused climate change.

The book is notable for its detailed accounts of rigorous scientific practice, of the lives of Adelie penguins—at times cute and at others brutal– and their neighboring predators, the fierce leopard seals and skua gulls, of the other-worldly beauty, starkness and violence of its topography and weather, of the historical and present-day society of its human inhabitants, and of the ordeals and exaltations her sojourn provided.

I think those accounts can have special resonance with life at the other end of the road in Lund, which Louise reported she’d recently passed through on the way to a research expedition censusing gull and cormorant populations in Desolation Sound.

Many international reviews and appreciations of the book are available through the publisher’s website, but the Lund connection is further significant because of another personal encounter  converging on the seventies daycamp. During a brief visit in late August 2026 my wife Jan and I were introduced in the pub by Peter Uhlmann to his colleague and local resident Evan Adams, film star and Chief Medical Officer of the First Nations Health Authority. It took just a few moments to discover that he too attended the camp along with his sister Maureen and Elsie Paul’s daughter, Marlane, at ages 7 and 8. I found a scanned photo in my phone of them swimming in Sliammon Lake during a field trip. Further correspondence determined that Louise Blight and Marlane were part of the same extended social group during high school.

And here’s a reason to include all this local gossip.  Sandy Dunlop, the editor, said I could write a review of Louise’s book for The Barnacle of about 500 words. To get started, I thought I’d check out what Google’s Gemini would come up with, and in five seconds it produced an informative, accurate review that could have saved me time and effort and confirmed my fear that the human brain is becoming obsolete. But then I realized that AI could not yet replace the particulars of experience, memory and community.

Thursday August 20

After a multiple year absence from Lund induced by a wish to travel to new places abroad and also by the need to distance ourselves since having sold Knoll House, in early summer we decided to return, though only for a brief visit.

The lengthy journey began at the San Luis Obispo airport, where we learned that its first leg, to San Francisco, was indefinitely delayed. We were rerouted to LA, where the flight to Vancouver was also delayed, threatening a missed connection to the last leg from Vancouver to Powell River.  Despite the spectacular views from the small Pacific Coastal plane, rather than eager, I was apprehensive about how I would feel and  we’d be received at our destination and tried to elevate my mood with a microdose of a gummy.

Upon arrival we connected amiably with the car rental agent who knows Tai and Theo. Things warmed up further during a delicious meal at the Indian restaurant across from the Mill, including a can of Zunga beer brewed down the street.

The AirBandB rental cabin perched on a cliff above Lund delivered its promise of fine design, privacy, a hot tub, magnificent views and a 138 step staircase down to the water.

Friday August 21 (more…)