……and then!

 

Just a birthday beach party?

My son got married! 

It had been a well kept secret, from him anyway. Izzy had insisted through the years that she never wanted to marry. He’d resigned himself to the fact and then, on his 40th birthday, she presented herself to him, with a celebrant standing by and a marriage certificate ready to sign.

It was a beautiful day. Friends had participated in the subterfuge and in expertly organised fashion, set up the ceremonial stage on the property beachfront while William was canoed away for an apparent spot of birthday fishing. He duly complied in spite of his bemused reservations at having to leave his birthday party and when well out of sight of the activities at home he was presented with the proposal - by a series of photos on a fellow canoeist’s phone of the four Maine Coon house cats, each with an attached note to spell out “Will….you….marry….me?” Returning to the beach he had to hoist a Welsh flag for ‘yes’, which he duly did and a surrendered Izzy drifted diaphanously out to meet him with Lewie, the biggest cat, in her arms. 

William had never suspected a thing in all of the months leading up to the occasion.

So my two younger sons are now married. Richard and Libby marry shortly after I return home from here in BC and I will have a clutch of daughters-in-law. I’m getting used to the idea of being outnumbered but I’m so grateful for the additional female energy they bring into the family, along with my two little grand-daughters.

There’s nothing like a wedding to make one emotional, and this was no exception. Tears were order of the day for a good few of us, each with our different reasons. Listening to a couple make their vows to each other, gives everyone pause for thought. Those are big promises. As a mother I enjoyed seeing my son’s happiness shine out as he embraced his lady and looked into her eyes as he made those vows. As a woman who broke her own wedding vows I reflect on the challenges of keeping them. My darling sister, whose marriage is still strong (see previous blog post) stayed beside me, knowing instinctively what was churning in my mind.

Back at home my steadfast partner, Gareth, holds fort. He came to this ceremony as a finger puppet along with William’s brothers and their little families. He and I have been together now for twenty seven years without taking the step of getting a marriage certificate. Maybe we will and maybe we won’t. Who knows.

In another life I might have been like my sister, carving out a life and living in this vast country with my husband. It scared me then and it scares me now even though I sit comfortably on the beach, signs of the weekend party mostly cleared away, waves on the the lake rocking me gently, forested mountains basking benignly in a smoke-free sky and nothing for the moment to worry about. I can’t help but think, however, about my attachment to home, my partner and the rest of the family. I will be going home before long, leaving the newly weds to their life together. I am thankful and assured that my middle son has made a choice that brings him happiness and this is the place now where he belongs.

Why am I going fishing?

That’s it! Signed!

Look what I got for my birthday!

The family came too!

All together now

The land of the free and fearless

The farm - it was the second family home

It rained again -  a real blessing for the heat and fire-fighters. At my sister’s lovely home the other night we sat on her deck watching the storm. It was better than any firework display. Drama in the sky. 

It’s impossible to be in this environment, so recently a new frontier for Europeans, not to be awed by its wild grandeur. My sister and brother-in-law forged a life here from the moment of their arrival in British Columbia nearly forty years ago. I remember the scale and difficulty of what they’d embarked upon having seen it first hand when we joined them for a few months in those early days. They succeeded, after mighty efforts, and against all odds it seemed at the time, in making a home, a family and a livelihood, putting Clearwater on the map for tourists and becoming an essential part of the growing community. Now, while they live comfortably in the lovely riverside log home that they built near town, they are still frontiersmen, constantly pushing the boundaries of possibility. The family are a firm, involved in a multi-faceted business that includes farming, logging, tourism packages and fire-fighting. My tiny niece Rebecca manfully leads one of the crews. She is impressive, with all of the indefatigable nature of her dad and an independence of spirit like her mother. She, her sister Holly and older brother Ben were brought up in this environment and are formidable products of a life built on the edge of wilderness. Holly, a photographer, treks into impossible places taking brides and grooms for spectacular backdrops to their nuptials. Ben, an engineer, has narrowly escaped death many times with his adventurous and dare-devil adventures. Their partners are no less impressive. Ben’s Claudia is a vet who can manhandle cows with ease. Holly’s Angus has bagged bear and deer, so they’ll never be short of a meal for their imminent little family. Adam, who towers over tiny Rebecca has settled into life here from his home in Tasmania and has proved himself fully up to the tasks of building a home and living in the extremes. The lives of these young people are following in the footsteps of the alpha male and female. As I write, the family are busy in the rain pulling up the maintenance-requiring pumps from their well. It’s no small operation! 

Seeing how this family lives and works, in spite of the many developments that have made life easier for them, I am made to think about how so many of us have forgotten how to be resourceful. We have become so dependent on institutions to provide for our health, wealth and security. We have enslaved ourselves to so many things in our desire for comfort. One major consequence is the extent to which addiction is a feature of modern life. In a world where living on one’s wits, fitness and resilience appears to be unnecessary, where the god is Mammon and it’s so difficult to discern truth from deception, is it any surprise that so many take potions to deaden the angst and confusion.

This house is fuelled by conversation. There is a daily mid-morning coffee ritual that draws in friends and neighbours for a catch up on news and business, of social issues that could benefit from some kindly intervention, of politics, dark or otherwise and of more lofty spiritual things. My feeling is of a well established, wholesome environment headed by two now-mature, if eccentric, characters - my younger sis and her hubby, a great team that I’ve seen develop through the many years. He has described her as the CEO of the family and she describes him as Methuselah. The titles are spot on.

Sis assessing the work needed at the farm house

Sis researching stuff

There’s a big river at the bottom of the garden

Sis in her veg garden 

All hands on deck

 

Call of the Wild

100 Mile House

Rain. Such a gift when so many wildfires are out of control. Today I can see the other side of the lake with its forested domes beyond. The air is clearer and less smokey. I hope there’s some respite for the wildlife too. I’ve heard so little by way of bird calls though we did see a flock of geese flying in the smoke the other day. Many people here in BC have fire insurance on their homes. Creatures of the forest don’t. 

Sitting in my cabin the other day, staying indoors to avoid breathing in too much smoke, I had nothing to do except think about how I can contribute to a shift in the collective human consciousness; a shift towards recognising that, in the words of a friend, “we are burning our own house down”.

As you can imagine, there are campfire bans here in British Columbia. Lightening strikes are scary as they create hotspots in the ground that can suddenly, maybe weeks later, inflame the area and start a wildfire. Farmers here are very worried about their crops which aren’t ripening because of the smoke. Hay cutting is badly affected because of the heat scorched land so there won’t be enough winter cattle feed. The knock on effect for all of us initially, of a climate becoming violent with fires and floods around the world, is food shortages and high prices. And that’s just the beginning. What about the wildlife, I ask, too? It’ll have another threat as we humans return to hunting in order to put food on the family table and we find that we’ve already wiped out so much of it.

Our usual response to what is happening around us is to bury our heads in the sand. “It is what it is” I hear everywhere as we suffer our sense of helplessness. As a Canadian woman yesterday remarked as she anxiously counted the lightening strikes, “the bible warned us and here it is”. 

My friends in Extinction Rebellion at home are calling people to assemble in London this month from August 23rd. How else can we mobilise our governments into doing something effective to tackle this emergency? They must be held to account for lack of leadership, intention and motivation. Only through a real groundswell of frustration can we bring about the gargantuan change needed in the way we humans operate. It’s time, folks; time to put out the flames of consumption, greed and corruption. How foolish are we to party while the house burns down?

Lightning strikes setting the land alight

Vancouver Island

These are not my photos. I have taken them from Google - they are photos of current  fire activity in the province.

Canada, Covid and Climate

At last, something to blog about! I’m in Canada! 

This August, my son William turns forty and he’s having a party. His brothers, keen to share in the occasion, were faced with the logistical challenges (and costs) of getting to the event……in Canada……in a pandemic. Solution? Club together to send Mum. And here I am, bless their dear hearts!

It was touch-and-go whether I’d get here given the red tape involved. As all but essential travel out of the UK into Canada was banned by the FCDO I had to meet various criteria for exemption. I had to be double-vaccinated and have proof of a close relationship with a Canadian citizen. Wanting the visit to be a birthday surprise for William, my sister, who has lived in Canada for many years, went through the rigmarole of providing a legally witnessed declaration to prove our sisterhood. Being able to get insurance, however, was looking highly unlikely. 

We did eventually find an insurer (with an exclusion for anything Covid related) and started feeling optimistic about the plan working. For weeks we studied the changing picture on the UK and Canadian government websites and ticked off each bureaucratic requirement as we met it. Then western Canada was hit by a heatwave, the likes of which they’ve never had before and British Columbia, where my Canadian kin live, was bursting into flame. My sister was sending pictures of their town, Kamloops, ringed in burning forest, with news that one of its neighbouring towns had been completely burned out. Her family are all in the fire-fighting business, so it was a tense time. My son and his partner, Izzy were also (they still are, in fact) evacuation prepared, though living lake-side is something of a saving grace. Now that I’ve become temporarily resident in their property, however, I can see how vulnerable it is, being set in woodland like most homes are here. Wildfires are not unusual of course, but they are becoming more frequent and widespread as the climate warms. A couple of days before I arrived the map showing wildfire and smoke presented a dire picture. I lucked out as the air cleared in time for me to make the flight! My sister had told me that flying in smoke is no fun and being a rather nervous flyer, I was losing sleep about it.

Throughout the preparations for my visit, Izzy and I had fun colluding on Messenger about how to surprise William. However, as my Canadian niece Holly pointed out, William would need some notice in order to arrange time off from work to spend with me, so we decided to tell him, and it’s just as well we did. I was already braced for the possibility of being refused entry by border staff regardless of having the right paperwork and if I hadn’t, as a back up, got a copy of William’s Canadian passport and his birth certificate I may well have been turned back. The border guard in Vancouver only accepted me on the basis of having a son in Canada. The connection with my sister wasn’t enough for him!

I’ve been wondering whether and how many people were turned away by the border guards, either before boarding at Heathrow or on arrival in Vancouver. Travelling on the 9th of August just days after restrictions on travel were lifted, I was surprised at the number of people who had jumped on the opportunity. I was also surprised, like most of the passengers going through border controls with me in Vancouver, to be subjected to a Covid test, in spite of having my UK proof of a negative PCR test result as required before leaving the UK. Some of my fellow travellers became very vocal in their objections to another test, given the Canadian government’s own travel advisory that mandatory arrival testing had been suspended. 

But I got in, and arriving in Kamloops airport after 24 hours travelling the sight of my dear boy in the flesh, instead of on a video call, filled my heart and my eyes. 

How easily we all took for granted the freedoms of our time pre-Covid, freedoms which have now, for the most part, been taken away in the cause of fighting a virus. It gives me pause for thought for sure. I have, as a utilitarian, complied with being vaccinated, in spite of my misgivings, worn a mask as a courtesy to others, exercised rigorous hand hygiene and maintained social distances in public places. Now, there is a feeling of things returning to normal and, like childbirth, the pain of the pandemic is being forgotten, lockdowns just a gap in one’s memories. And yet there are reminders. Many are still choosing to wear a mask and back home in Wales it is still mandatory to wear one in shops. I was reminded by an email from the Canadian government that I might be checked up on in spite of my airport test results coming back negative. I am not entirely free to wander at will here; my son having to account for where I might be if necessary. Freedom is a tenuous concept.

The last couple of days have been filled with smoke and the beautiful Shuswap lake in front of me has disappeared from view. Eyes prickle and chests suffer from the effect, like when sitting by a campfire. When the air clears a bit in this popular holiday destination people around here are trying hard to play and party in their speedboats and houseboats. But these continue to be strange times.

The beautiful Shuswap lake 

Shrouded in smoke

I am delighted to be here, though, hanging out with my son, his lady and their four Maine Coon cats, lunching and planning adventures with my sister and generally just ‘being’ in every moment. It’s a beautiful world, inhabited by beautiful, precious creatures. My love for it and all within it is boundless. I call to those with vested interests in fossil-fuel-hungry enterprises to love it too. Nature is doing its best to wake us up to our fragile hold on existence, so let’s not act like sulky sleepy teenagers refusing to get up for school.

The Shuswap tree

Post-script:

I’d love if my readers could subscribe to my blog and even comment if you feel moved to. I don’t intend to monetise the blog but in my own little way I am trying to provoke discussion of the things that should matter to all of us. By subscribing and sharing it might happen that the conversation will widen out. I don’t want to be too evangelical, but as I’m sure you’re aware if you’ve read much of my blog, I am concerned about what we are doing to the planet and each other. Take a look at this from Global Optimism:

The #IPCC #ClimateReport is the final alarm bell. Scientists are 'yelling from the rooftops'.

#OutrageAndOptimism brings a special analysis of the report with Michael E. Mann, looking at what is still possible if we all take decisive action in a narrowing window of opportunity.

Tune in: https://bit.ly/2VJwc1j