Excerpt from bestseller Bill Arnott’s new memoir, A Season on Vancouver Island

Bill Arnott’s Beat:

A SEASON ON VANCOUVER ISLAND

familiar sites: forest, sea, the lands of Indigenous Nations. I’ve included a note as to names and transliteration, doing my best to accurately relay regional narratives. The result, I feel, is a time-bending present day journey, imagery of place and people, recollection of past while glimpsing the future. Meanwhile the star of this show, the Island, in fact each island and coast, continues to reveal remarkable, intimate secrets. It’s a sensory excursion I’m grateful and pleased to share. A season I hope enjoy.

A feeling of departure, and possibility

Introduction

First things first. This is a part of the world that I love. Vancouver Island and its surrounding archipelago, British Columbia’s Gulf Islands, remain one of the planet’s most magical regions. When RMBooks publisher Don Gorman asked if I’d write a memoir about time spent here and include original visual art, not only was I delighted, but eager. Truth be told, I’d have created it anyway. Only now we can experience it together. Which is an incredible privilege, sharing vignettes and digitally painted photos, discovering new and

Ten thousand horses rumble to life. With a diesel vibration, water churns into chop and a blue and white ferry shoves us into the strait, in the direction of Vancouver Island. On the other side of the water, Nanaimo. Snuneymuxw. Coast Salish land. A sense of connection is what I feel, gazing through open steel portals. The horses pick up their pace, trot to canter, as a ripple ricochets through rivets and railings. The result, a feeling of departure, and possibility.

It’s what I felt as a child, venturing into hills behind our home on a north arm of Okanagan Lake, bubbles of land carved by glaciers, the big lake fed by a narrow, deep creek. It was that

sense of departing on a grand adventure that’s never gone away, each time I’m off somewhere new. Even places familiar, for that matter, seen for the fi rst time again. As a kid I’d pick a stick from the deadwood, pry my way through barbed wire like a wrestler entering the ring, and climb. Over the hill cattle grazed, and the land beyond that was orchard. It always smelled dry. Of course, I’d take care, watching for cow pies, rattlesnakes, and undetonated mortars. An army camp was across the lake, and a few decades ago the arid grass banks served as target practice, bombs lobbed across the water.

Now, aboard a westbound ferry, the day’s rolling out somewhat dreamily. The ferry is full, the fi rst at capacity in months, and the crew’s a bit overwhelmed by an onslaught of passengers awaiting their Triple-O burgers, like kids released into summer following a particularly miserable winter. A winter that’s lasted two years.

Our vehicle is on an upper deck berth aboard the MV Queen of Cowichan and we’ve chosen to stay put, hunkering in our well-worn car with the aroma of road trips, fast food, and bare feet. Meanwhile, Horseshoe Bay’s showing off its photogenic cliffs and arbutus, copper-pistachio peelings of bark as though they’ve been outdoors too long, overdue for a coating of sunscreen. Bowen Island rises from sun-dappled water like a child’s likeness of a surfacing whale, a round hump of a back, the only things missing being fl ukes and a blowhole waterspout. Sounds and smells mingle, wafting amidst cars: cell phone chatter, sneaky second-hand smoke, laughter, coffee, the vibrating basso of ferry engine, and the inevitable bleat of a car alarm, its owner nowhere to be found.

Tatters of cloud stream past as we venture west by southwest. Midway across the Salish Sea we pass our doppelganger going the opposite way, the visual striking. A weather front’s hanging in place at the halfway point of the crossing, a vertical line of rain and smudgy dark cloud, monochrome seascape in a rinse of blue-grey. I watch the ferry pass through the wall of weather, easing from dark to light, like Dorothy stepping from blustery Kansas to the technicolour of Oz. Unbeknownst to me we’re making our very own leap through a time-bending lens, as we’ve come for fi ve weeks, but will go home in three months from now.

About the Author: Bill Arnott is the bestselling author of Gone Viking: A Travel Saga, Gone Viking II: Beyond Boundaries, and A Season on Vancouver Island. He’s been awarded by the ABF International Book Awards, Firebird Book Awards, Whistler Book Awards, received The Miramichi Reader’s Very Best Book Award for nonfi ction, and for his expeditions Bill’s been granted a Fellowship at London’s Royal Geographical Society. When not trekking the globe with a small pack and journal, or showing off cooking skills as a culinary school dropout, Bill can be found on Canada’s west coast, making music and friends. @billarnott_aps

Patricia Said Adams

INTVW by Nick Stephenson

Patricia Said Adams, author of the book Called to Help the Poor and Needy, composes a book that acts as a helping hand to the vulnerable through the words of God. Her vision greatly explains how an altruistic person lends a hand to those people in need, whether it involves personal ties or not, it is the concern for the well-being of others that matters the most. This book is given a detailed overview by the author herself, Patricia Said Adams.

NRM: Could you please give us a little background on who the author Patricia Said Adams is?

Patricia Said Adams: Pat is a spiritual director, a blogger, and an author of four books whose lens is that of a spiritual director: how do I, how do we, live this life in Christ? I was a wife and mother for most of my adult life with no profession. I gave my life to Christ in my early forties and have followed Him ever since. Close to retirement age, I took a course in spiritual direction from the Mercy Center in Burlingame, California. Then, after my husband died in 2001, the Lord pointed me towards a career in writing through taking a course in Spanish which required me to write a paragraph in Spanish each week. At fi rst, I wrote about all the things going on in my life, my kids and friends, but soon all I wanted to write about was living the spiritual life. As I moved to Charlotte NC in 2008, I was becoming a bi-lingual blogger with my tutor as my Spanish editor. She fell in late 2008 and could not work anymore, so I dropped the Spanish version. Since 2011, I have posted my blog every week. I published my fi rst book, Thy Kingdom Come!, in 2015, Exodus: Our Story, Too!, in 2017, A Study Guide to the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount, and Called to Help the Poor and Needy in 2021. NRM: What inspired you to start writing? Patricia Said Adams: The Lord inspired me to start writing. I had never thought about being a writer, but I did fi nd a lot of help in journaling what was going on in my heart and mind. As I hinted at above, the Lord kind of tricked me into writing by suggesting that I learn Spanish. And that led me to write about the spiritual life. So, here I am fourteen years later, still inspired by God to write what He suggests to me.

NRM: How does your book Called to Help the Poor and Needy help those people in faith practice acts of service, especially to the unfortunate ones or brothers and sisters in need?

Patricia Said Adams: I hope that my readers are inspired not just to feed the poor and needy, but to get to know them and why their lives have come to be the way they are, to value them as children of God. The model of the kingdom of God is one of a community in which all people are valued and included. And that is what Jesus did particularly with the outcasts of society at that time. He healed, He listened to their stories, He fed them, He showed others how to be with those who were excluded, and He called upon the Pharisees of His time to drop their pretenses of “godliness” so that they could be one with the people they served.

NRM: What propelled you to gather these verses in new and old testaments covering the subject of helping those in need? What was the process of completing your book?

Patricia Said Adams: I felt called by God to do a video about the poor and needy, but, as I looked into the subject, I knew that a video would not do it justice. Around the same time

I read that Rick, a long-time pastor had declared this: how could he not know that the Bible had more than 2000 verses about helping the poor and needy? So I began to read these verses and felt inspired to write this book. It just took time to identify the verses and the scope of what they talked about. Writing the book was about organizing the relevant verses and then commenting on what they mean today.

NRM: How can this primary theme of your book and as stated and demonstrated by God in the Bible, be an essential part of our lives? Is it simply just an act and our proof of obedience or does faith entirely anchor on this one noble act of helping others?

Patricia Said Adams: It is simply just an act and our proof of obedience or faith entirely anchored on this one noble act of helping others. We can believe in God and still not change our lives at all. But Jesus is calling us to follow Him, to use Him as our inspiration for what we do, to take care of people as we are called to by the Holy Spirit.

Each of us is called by God to act for Him in our world, to show His love and forgiveness. Each of us is called by Him to a purpose that He designed for us at our conception. All we need to do to follow Him faithfully is to listen to His suggestions and desires for us and then do what He asks of us. In this way, we will fi nd what our purpose is and how we are to help people.

NRM: From your other books, Thy Kingdom Come!, Exodus: Our Story, Too!, and A Study Guide to the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount, what makes Called to Help the Poor and Needy similarly spiritually fulfi lling but signifi cantly different?

Patricia Said Adams: The fi rst one about the kingdom of God was more of a description of all that the Bible says about the kingdom of God. In the Exodus book, I sought to bring that story up to date in our lives today. The study guide is a weekby-week guide to all that Matthew chapters 5-7 say in the best summary of Jesus’s teaching. Called to Help the Poor and Needy details what the Bible says in the 2,000 verses about this major theme and then suggests ways to follow Jesus in helping others. Hopefully, it will inspire the readers to faithfully follow Jesus into the purpose that the Lord created them for, that will fulfi ll their lives.

Up to this day, author Patricia Said Adams is a fi rm disciple of the Lord who continues to provide a light at the end of the tunnel for people who seek help and guidance. The meticulous research on Bible verses which provides an organized structure of the verses and the articulation of their meaning only proves her determination and perseverance. Adams continues to write for people to discover the love of God and expresses the value of compassion towards the outcasts of society.