Northword editorials and cartoons

editorial

In Other Words

Northword Magazine Editorials by Joanne Campbell Cartoons by Hans Saefkow

We missed a few due to computer crashes and MIAs but here are most of them from Aug, 2007 to Aug, 2016. Missing: June 2006 June 2007; Dec, 2007; Feb, April 2008; Oct 2009; Aug 2010 (toon); Oct 12. The Feb issue was discontinued starting 2013.

editorial

In Other Words Thinking ‘about’ the box

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l edit or ial@no rt hwo rd. c a

an extremely creative designer who, after I left, painted the office a deeply disturbing eggplant and dark teal green. It was definitely an ‘outside-of-the-box’ colour choice (even though when you were inside the room you felt like you were literally inside a box, and that no one was ever going to open the lid and let you play in the sunshine again).

Sometimes you don’t need more stimulation, but rather, the right type of stimulation. Sometimes, less is more.

Instead of thinking outside the box, as Taylor usually does, perhaps this time he thought about the box. Instead of going along with what everyone else felt was the right choice, he did as Sandra always suggests and asked, “What are the objectives?”

When you spend a third of your life in a box, you’d better be happy to be there. Brown with grey may have triggered unpleasant childhood memories—his mother’s diced liver and onion loaf, perhaps, or a guilty recollection of squashed snails on rain-

soaked pavement. Who could work with those images simmering away in the back of one’s consciousness?

Perhaps Taylor’s choice wasn’t a turning away from brown and grey, but rather toward brown and cream.

Could it be that he finds the colour combination soothing, like a chocolate mocha frappuccino? Or that his nursery was decorated in cocoa colours? Or that he just likes cream in his coffee?

Maybe he thinks better when he’s relaxed.

Taylor was also obviously privy to more information than we were about the context of the room.

Context is everything: what’s going to go in the box? What’s going to go on in the box?

I suspect Taylor is confident in his abilities and doesn’t need external validation for his thought processes.

His conservative colour choice shows maturity and self-confidence.

By doing the unexpected, he inadvertently thought outside the box— not in an obvious ‘look at me’ kind

of way, not as a directed outcome, but as a natural progression of the thought process.

Our focus shouldn’t be to avoid thinking ‘inside’ the box, or striving to think ‘outside’ the box. Our focus should be on considering our objectives, i.e. thinking ‘about’ the box.

Consider the Aspenware in Taylor’s article. A change, such as moving from non-biodegradable, nonsustainable disposable cutlery to biodegradable, sustainable—but still disposable—cutlery is a change in the right direction. It’s thinking ‘about’ the box. A box lunch, maybe—but still a box.

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Errata from the June/July issue The Edge of the World Music Festival (Aug.10-12 at Tlell, Queen Charlotte Islands) will be held at the Tlell Fairgrounds this year, on BC Parks land. There is no camping allowed on-site.

Also, volunteers must work eight hours to receive a festival pass (not 4-8 hours as was reported).

We regret the errors. For more info, visit www.edgefestival.com.

The photo of the “peeing tree” on page 9 is by Stephanie Waymen of Rosswood, not Heather Ramsay.

The Gyger family, the original homesteaders of the Lunan Estate property near Smithers (Lunan Estate: Keepers of the history) did not leave the area when they sold the property in 1947; they stayed in the Bulkley Valley and became major contributors to its history.

Letters

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Taylor Bachrach (whose article Aspenware leads off this issue) was painting his new office (which, handily, is right next to mine). He chose a nice beige colour for the upper wall and a rich hot chocolate for the wainscoting.

For the trim he chose white, but wasn’t thrilled with the result. He invited everyone who wandered by his door to lend an opinion.

Fanning his colour chips, he asked “Should I stick with the white or go with cream, or how about one of these browns?”

I spied a grey card in the mix and said, “This would make your room look mighty masculine.” Sandra, Northword’s designer (who works in the office handily next to Taylor’s), suggested that it reminded her of licorice and chocolate ice cream (mixing it with the hot chocolate wainscoting would make it at once ‘hot’ and ‘cool.’ And chewy.)

Everyone agreed: a designer’s office should be cutting-edge. Consensus was, go with the grey.

Taylor went back to the hardware store. He painted. We peeked.

What the…? Taylor went with the cream! What was he thinking?

A designer isn’t supposed to think ‘inside the box.’

But, let’s face it: an office is a box.

It has four walls, a window, a desk and, occasionally, clients. In nature, form usually follows function, so why does an office need to be more than a comfortable place to spend eight or nine (or twelve) hours a day?

Shouldn’t the walls therefore be neutral and pleasant, a blank canvas on which to project your thoughts cleanly and without distraction?

Our collective justification for choosing grey was based on the fact that Taylor is (among other things) a graphic designer; he therefore must be creative in his colour choice! His office isn’t just a box, it’s part of his branding: i.e., his room is ‘creative,’ so he must be too. Designers think outside of the box. Taylor’s a good designer. Therefore, grey trim was a no-brainer.

But is creativity an end unto itself?

Something one does on principle?

Or is it just one of many tools we use to achieve our objectives. What does it mean to be ‘creative’?

I once worked in an office with

We welcome letters to the editor. They may be edited or rejected for length, clarity, and taste. Max. 250 words. E-mail to editorial@northword.ca. Include name, address, and daytime phone number for verification.

Deadline: Aug 17, 2007.

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| AUG / SEPT ‘07 | 5

editorial

In Other Words Dig this:

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

According to Wikipedia (the layperson’s popular on-line resource), the goals of archaeology are “to document and explain the origins and development of human culture, understand cultural history, chronicle cultural evolution, and study human behaviour and ecology for both prehistoric and historic societies.” It is the “science that studies human cultures through the recovery, documentation and analysis of material remains and environmental data.”

As you can read in this issue, archaeologists are studying prehistoric societies in northern BC, with fascinating results.

But what about our current cultural evolution? If archaeologists were to excavate the household detritus found in our contemporary equivalent of middens, what would they find? Since I consider my household to be typical of the average Northword reader, I offer up a gander at two of my household middens: the central vacuum cleaner’s contents, and the floor of the family mini-van.

Based on completely non-scientific speculation, an examination of the typical filth accumulated during the course of this October/November would read something like this: Vacuum cleaner: the lower layers laid down in early October exhibit copious quantities of dog hair, presumably still being shed thanks to the humongous hair growth stimulated by last winter’s excessive length and snowy depths (which had better NOT be repeated, or the dog gets waxed).

This huge dog hairball is interlaced with several ounces of dismembered moths, wasps and spiders. Cobwebs are present in significant amounts, indicating an end-of-sun-season screen-cleaning. Overlaying the cobwebs is an enormous quantity of standard household dirt combined with leaves, twigs and pumpkin seeds, no doubt the result of frantic pre-Thanksgiving cleaning. This is topped with a dusting of desic-

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cated bread and celery stuffing and piecrust crumbs mixed in with a curried housefly.

Next, a quantity of pins and needles, sequins, beads and feathers.

Glue stick caps, orange crepe paper, mini chocolate bar wrappers, and unwrapped molasses candies (from a day when a child did the vacuuming).

The most recent stratum features sand and gravel mixed in with fragments of candied fruit, walnuts and maraschino cherries.

Floor of the mini-van: In the front passenger compartment are three Tim Hortons coffee cups (with heat sleeves), a gas receipt for $77.92 from the Burns Lake 7-11, one Theatre Northwest show program, and an unwrapped stick of Trident gum.

In the rear passenger compartment, 257 grams of sweet-chili nacho chip fragments, two straws containing Sprite soft drink residue, one mostly empty Dairyland chocolate milk container, one half-eaten A&W papa burger, one half of a Gravol tablet, a dented iPod case, one unbranded broken ice scraper, and one generic dustpan. Under the

front seat: one school library card, a set of werewolf teeth, two poppy pins, one bear-in-the-schoolyard notice, and the missing order forms and cheques for the gymnastics club cookie-dough fundraiser. Under the back seat: an oblong furry organic object currently undergoing DNA analysis at UNBC. In the rear storage area, three well-worn all-season tires and the remains of a retread road kill, one half-empty (or is that half full?) jug of antifreeze windshield washer fluid, one shredded windshield wiper blade, four frozen sandbags, one bulging two-litre carton of buttermilk, 24 large fireplace logs, and 47 spider egg-sacks.

Conclusion? Judging from the junk…October/November is a transitional time of year, marked by economically significant spending events and cultural rituals to ease the journey from harvest to the start of the cold season; specifically, ritual consumption of high-fat and/or high-carb comfort foods. Family and community bonding events are big too. We meet, we eat, we laugh.

Thanksgiving is a ritual event

marked by friends and family invited from far and near for a fatten’em-upfor-winter feast.

Halloween preparations include buying hundreds of treats for underprivileged kids who are bused in the town’s suburbs for candy subsidies. (It strikes me that Halloween is evolving into a children’s carnivale—by dressing up and “trick or treating” in the presumably more affluent suburbs, it’s their annual way to ‘stick it to the man’). In the north, costumes are not merely designed to go over the wearer’s winter clothes—they are winter clothes. For example, our eldest son once went out as a man who had fallen into a vat of toxic chemicals.

He was quite cozy in his costume— unable to sit, mind you, but quite toasty. You could even say he glowed.

Inter-regional travel to a major commerce centre for shopping and/ or recreation is still undertaken, despite the ridiculous unpredictability of the weather. Neither snow, nor ice, nor moose will stop the November trek to a really great craft fair. Or to Remembrance Day ceremonies at local cenotaphs.

With global warming redirecting our cultural evolution, what artifacts will define us northern British Columbians in the future? What trash/treasure will turn up in our middens of 2507?

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Letters We welcome letters to the editor. They may be edited or rejected for length, clarity, and taste. Max. 250 words. E-mail to editorial@northword.ca. Include name, address, and daytime phone number for verification.

Deadline: October 12, 2007.

Website Comments Comment on our stories at www.northword.ca and you may start a dialogue! Comments are moderated and may be printed in a following issue of Northword.

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| OCT/NOV ‘07 | 5

editorial

In Other Words I have a green thumb.

Too bad it’s green with envy, not ability.

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

My father’s family tree is firmly planted on a Canadian prairie family farm. How could such a fertile gene pool of gardeners and farmers sprout someone so agriculturally challenged as me? Perhaps I have been genetically modified. I certainly can’t blame my upbringing.

Dad left behind the fertile fields of his youth when he embarked on his grand Canadian adventure. Years later, he put down roots in a Lower Mainland suburb but that didn’t stop him from plowing up the back yard. You can take the boy out of the farm but you can’t take the farm out of the boy; depending on my parents’ needs we also annoyed the neighbours with chickens and a cow.

My parents relied on their market garden to provide a year-round supply of produce (for eating fresh, frozen and canned) and to supplement the family income. Every summer, Mom hung a sign at the end of the driveway and set up shop in the garage where she sold produce, weighing it on a bathroom scale. If she liked you, she’d give you an extra cucumber. As a kid, I’d supplement my income by packing my bike carrier high with bags of tomatoes or pears and selling them door-todoor for 50 cents.

And dinosaurs browsed between the pea patch and the potato hills.

Many years and concrete yards later, I moved to Smithers and bought a house with a back yard large enough to support a decent-sized garden.

My new place even had a greenhouse with shelves and a potting table. It was inevitable that I turn some sod and get dirty.

That summer, I spaded and hoed, weeded and pinched and strung string. I cultivated an aura of aged manure. By mid-August, I had a gorgeous crop of cauliflower-loving emerald-green caterpillars, and my cilantro hosted a precocious colony of aphids. The ladybugs were ecstatic. My pesticide aversion had created a creepy-crawly club med. I had started to read the books on growing gardens but stopped before the chapters on natural pestcontrol.

Having been beaten by the bugs without even putting up a fight I slunk back to the couch and decided to leave organic gardening to the experts.

I’d grow flowery things instead. At least if the clematis got bugs I didn’t feel obliged to eat them.

I could still go to the office with dirt embedded under my nails, proud that I retained a vestige of my prairie-farming genes. If I couldn’t eat what I grew, I could at least drink it in with my eyes. If the flowers didn’t grow, the only thing I’d regret

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was the empty wallet, not the empty root cellar.

Not that we have a root cellar. Yet. With the price of fuel heading nowhere but north, I’ve reconsidered my vegetable gardening celibacy and am again flirting with the idea of a kitchen garden. Not a casual summer fling this time; this time the commitment would be for the long term.

I’ll give it a year. If the vegetables grow, and if I can grow enough to last a year, and if the vegetables actually last the year without growing fuzzy vegetables of their own…. I’ll do it again next year.

This time, I will research my topic more thoroughly. Talk to experienced gardeners. Read books by local experts. Tricia Kapelari’s Northword

article on the $100 kitchen garden is a great place to start.

Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a cache of homegrown vegetables? I can imagine it: next spring, while the snow is still on the ground I go to the root cellar (or the basement fridge) and pick out a perfectly good cabbage. I’d combine it with some home-canned tomatoes (better buy a pressure cooker), and rice (not hoarded from Wal-Mart), and ground beef (we could keep a cow or two out back behind the garden) and cook up a big batch of cabbage rolls that I could then sell from a little stand at the end of my driveway!

Perhaps this apple didn’t fall so far from tree after all.

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| JUNE / JULY ‘08 | 7

editorial

In Other Words Finger tight, then a bit to the right.

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

It’s that time of year again, time to make like an ant and put food away for the winter.

Increased costs of food production and transportation have caused us to re-examine our food sources.

We’ve researched locally available foods and planted gardens—many of us for the first time. Now it’s time to reap what we’ve sown.

So, what does one do with 18 sacks of potatoes? Invite friends over for shepherd’s pie? Trade your potatoes for jam or eggs? Try your hand at making moonshine? Or just give some away and see what comes back?

You can store some of your hardearned or hard-found produce in a root cellar or old fridge in the basement. Or you can freeze it, dry it, or can it.

I recall my mother’s first canning attempt. She couldn’t read English but a detail like that never stopped her. That year she put up 375 jars of 6-inch dill pickles made with apple cider vinegar. I’m sure there are still jars of toxic rubber cukes moldering in a back cupboard in Dad’s garage.

In the years following, she expanded her repertoire to include corn on the cob, green beans, tomatoes, romano beans and delicious peaches, plums, and cherries. All without benefit of instructions—or, in some cases, a pressure cooker.

I’m sure I’ve escaped death-bycanned-goods due to my resilient constitution, the only lingering effect being a small phobia of botulism. Despite my Ma’s good luck, I feel one shouldn’t mess with prescribed canning methods. In spite of my terror of poisoning family and friends, I do make jelly and preserves—including peaches, the ultimate canned joy. It’s a comfort to know that in thousands of kitchens across our region other canners too await the affirming snap of lids on cooling fruit jars.

Peaches are not locally sourced— at least not yet. But who can resist the Okanogan fruit truck? It’s always parked on the same corner and it’s never cheap. But is there anything finer than watching the snow fly outside your window as you dig into

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packed along a two-person tent from Zellers (I found out later it was a toy). We snacked on generous quantities of prunes, and supped on fried potatoes and ham. That night a wind came up and blew our tent down (it was a toss-up whether the wind was stronger inside the tent or out). The next morning we picked blueberries in the rain.

Of course you don’t need to beat the bushes for your local food supply.

What you can’t find or grow yourself can probably be procured in a couple hours at your local farmers market.

Just remember, budget 10 minutes for shopping, 100 for visiting.

As for protein, get a dozen fresh eggs from a farmer—and, if you’re lucky, a free-range chicken for your birthday. (I got one last year; it was the best!) And, now that the Meat Co-op is just down the street, I’m looking forward to filling the freezer with locally grown beef and pork.

Perhaps all of this is just making lemonade out of lemons or, in this case, rhubarb pie out of rhubarb. But then, pies are for picnics—and who loves a picnic better than ants?

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buttermilk pancakes with warm peaches and maple syrup?

Sunshine pancakes, we call them, and they always remind us of our friend Kate, the most dedicated suburban-girl-gone-rustic I’ve ever met. She not only cans the most delectable peaches, she also bakes bread, chops wood, and makes music.

She’s an artist, mother, teacher, and as generous with her laugh as she is with a jar of peaches. Born a couple of hundred years earlier, she’d have made a fine homesteader. Or, in another life, a fine ant.

Now, I’m no ant, but I do enjoy Saskatoon jam in January and crabapple jelly in May. I clean and freeze the fruit as it ripens and make the preserves when I have time.

My freezer also makes it possible to make green tomato stew long after the last tomatoes have turned red and salsa’d away.

However much we’d like, some local treats can only be savoured in

their moment. Nothing is as exquisite or as fleeting as a perfectly ripe wild strawberry. I’ll eat 50 of them in pursuit of that perfect one. They remind me of being five, a wild child hunting berries along abandoned dirt roads.

Then there are wild blueberries.

Like every blueberry fan in Prince George, our family had a secret blueberry patch. On one picking trip, I convinced my little sister it would be fun to ditch the parents and walk home, a 20-mile hike which included a railway bridge and a major river. When I heard our car coming I stuffed us in a culvert; annoyingly, my party-pooper sister jumped out and waved our parents down. I wonder about the adventure we missed.

The first wild Bulkley Valley blueberries I picked were on a Labour Day-weekend hike to Hunters Basin in the Telkwa Range—the first camping trip Hans and I went on. I

ERRATA In the Waiting Room department of our June/July issue, comparing the risks and benefits of sunscreen, the third paragraph in Julie Chaplin’s article should have read:Each sunscreen has a Sun Protection Factor (SPF) which is the product’s ability to block UVB radiation. A sunscreen with SPF 15 will protect your skin 15 times longer than if you weren’t wearing any protection at all. SPF 15 will block 95 percent of UVB rays. But SPF 30 does not work twice as well; it provides an additional three percent protection.

We apologize for the error.

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| AUG / SEPT ‘08 | 5

Survey says... you love CBC

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

You love the CBC—radio, that is.

Overwhelmingly, Northword readers checked off CBC radio as their favourite and only radio station they listen to. Of our survey respondents who listen to radio (8% of you do not listen to radio at all) 79% are tuned to the CBC, 6% listen to CJFW, 2% to the Wolf, 2% BVLD, 2% to CFNR, 2% to cable or Sirius Radio.

What does this say about the average Northword Reader? Or, more accurately, what does this say about the average Northword survey respondent?

The Northword survey in question was included in our September/ October 08 issue—if you wanted to participate, you had to physically pull it out, spend time filling it in, then more time and money to either mail it (and they came in from all over the north) or bring it to our office in Smithers. Considering that many Northword copies are distributed to coffee shops, restaurants and libraries, this meant sneaking the copy home— which is OK, encouraged even—or tugging the survey out of a shared public copy, which can make you pretty uncomfortable if you’re shy.

Compared to a web survey, delivering our survey presented a degree of sacrifice. As such, each returned survey represents more than a set of answers. It represents a passionate Northword reader’s’ response.

We like passion. It excites us.

Northword speaks to people who are passionate about where and how they live, so receiving a passionate Northword reader’s survey response is, well, exciting.

CBC radio doesn’t subscribe to the BBM (Bureau of Broadcast Measurement) so you won’t hear private radio stations include CBC listener shares in their stats. But don’t be fooled: when it comes time to tune in, northern listeners consistently make CBC one of the most popular stations across the North, not to mention across the country.

CBC is important to Northword listeners, probably because it fills so many functions. Living where we do, our identities are influenced by how we perceive ourselves in relation

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to our neighbours, our community, other far-flung communities down the road, the rest of BC (mostly ‘the south’), the rest of Canada, and the world. The MotherCorp’s challenge is to provide programming that addresses each of these relationships while trying to accommodate the huge variety of interests in the population at large.

As would be expected in a demographic that is used to having its every infotainment whim catered to by the media, not everyone agrees that CBC programmers are doing a great job. None-the-less, we still tune in.

Why? In this age of instant-access information, current events and breaking news are just a CNN or a Google away. Shock-talk radio fills the need for jaw-dropping rudeness and superficiality. (CBC certainly hasn’t caused many knee-jerk turnoff-the-jerk responses—in my household at least). And you won’t win any cars or trips or restaurant gift certificates on CBC either. If you win a Daybreak Mug you display it proudly—not because it’s beautiful

stuff but because it’s symbolic. It’s not fortune, it’s a little piece of fame.

I enjoy waking up to CBC Daybreak North and hearing someone I know win a mug, or request a song, or leave an editorial comment. I’m interested when someone I know, or know of, is interviewed or featured in a story. It makes me feel part of a larger community, especially when I know so many bed-heads are sharing the same information at the same moment in time.

While reading is lovely, there’s an almost primal enjoyment in hearing a good story, fictional or otherwise. In this, CBC excels. A good sound bite might be tasty but it can’t compare to some of the meaty presentations CBC has offered up over the years.

Talking about good stories, Betsy Trumpener, news reporter with CBC Daybreak North in Prince George (and Northword alumna) keeps us tuned in to the heart of what’s happening across the north. Now, she’s also a published author. I can’t wait to tuck in to her book, The Butcher of Penetang.

editorial

In Other Words

I assume that because you’re reading this column, the name Betsy Trumpener is quite familiar as would be many other CBC types. Here’s a quiz to test your knowledge: just match the name to the program.

Jian Ghomechi, Stuart McLean, Jonathan Goldstein Jo-Ann Roberts Terry O’Reilly Rick MacInnis-Rae Paul Kennedy Chris Walker and Carolina de Ryk Randy Bachman Anna Maria Tremonti Sook-Yin Lee Robin Brown Eleanore Wachtel Sheryl MacKay Bob McDonald Rex Murphy Mary Hynes Carol Off and Barbara Budd Judy Maddren Quirks and Quarks Daybreak North Tapestry Wire Tap Q DNTO Vinyl Tap Vinyl Café Dispatches Cross country Checkup Age of Persuasion The Current As it Happens Inside Track, Writers and Company North by Northwest All Points West Ideas World Report As for Northword’s survey: our readers’ radio listening habits is just a teaser; we’ll have more survey responses in a future issue, as well as more on what CBC radio means to us in the north. In the meantime, don’t touch that dial.

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| DEC / JAN ‘09 | 7

Is it spring yet? How do we know?

editorial

In Other Words

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

hans saefk ow

January is winter. April is spring. Nice, unambiguous months. February, on the other hand, can fool you into prematurely putting away your felt-packs while March can make you wonder if global warming is a cruel joke.

If it’s tough for us, imagine what the birds go through. After a warm week of sunshine they relax, unpack their bags, and line up for the bug buffet only to find that someone turned up the air conditioning and lunch has crawled back under the covers.

As for bears, at what point do they poke their noses out of their dens and say, “yep, this is it!”?

Do they ever wander out for a day or two, then change their minds and go back to bed?

And what about the Sasquatch? A bipedal primate-type creature, it seems unlikely to hibernate. After slogging through months of snowdrifts it may well share our appreciation of the fairer months.

Yes, winter can be fun if you’re dressed for it, but at some point the clothes have to come off. What if your clothes are attached?

Put yourself in the Sasquatch’s skin. The sun rises, the temperature climbs, and under that winter coat you start to sweat…then itch. You back up to the nearest pine tree and, Oh yeah! Let the shedding begin! It explains those random tufts of Sasquatch hair. I wonder, do they worry about increased exposure to UV rays—especially in higher elevations—when their tender winter skin is laid bare to the reflective power of spring snow?

Does the warming spring sun also inspire young Sasquatch males to strap slippery boards on their feet and hurl themselves down mountains? Does it induce the adolescent females to, like, totally lose their winter wear, causing them to huddle closely for warmth and grooming?

I know it’s spring when my underwear feel too tight and my boots too big.

It’s a fact that my underwear shrinks in winter. I believe it’s caused by the hot, dry air that blows around our houses and other indoor spaces. As for the boots, they fit just fine when I have two pair of woolies in them and I’m out hunting Christmas trees in –20 degree

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By the time the sandals sprout on the store shelves, my toes are screaming for daylight!

weather. Come spring, though, my feet are free-floating and those big ol’ boots turn from pretty practical to pretty ugly.

By the time the sandals sprout on the store shelves my toes are screaming for daylight!

I also know it’s spring when I revisit my annual dream of trading my day job for that of a shepherd. That way, when I had a bad day at work I could just eat what’s bothering me. Bite for byte, I’m sure sheep are more tasty than computers. More wooly perhaps but less expensive to replace. If a sheep loses its memory (as my computer did right before this deadline), I’d just show it where the

grass is and remind it to mind the dog. Much less stressful.

I especially know it’s spring when I inhale that first big breath of fresh air spiced with the scent of tons of thawing dog poop. Also, the Christmas tree we tossed into the back yard for temporary storage starts to throw out roots. The chickadees are eyeing it up and getting all nesty.

One way we all know it’s finally spring? It’s when our shoulders relax down from up around our ears and we lift our eyes from our feet as we shuffle down the street. We look up. The leaves are still weeks away so we can see even more of that bluest-of-blue spring sky. And the skiing is fantastic. Just remember: don’t forget the sunscreen and let the Sasquatch pass on the left.

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| FEB / MAR ‘09 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

The Up Side of Down

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

Employment rates. Retail sales.

Spending. It’s all going down, down, down. It’s enough to precipitate a recession depression.

After all your investment portfolio’s been through these last few months, it’s enough to make you look to the skies and mutter, as my mother often did, “Good Lord, what did I do to deserve this?”

The first time I heard her speak these words, she was frantically unpegging laundry from the clothesline while an April drencher snapped the diapers around her ears.

As she stuffed clothespins into her mouth and flung baby clothes over her shoulders, my brother and sister and I stopped toddling and sat in the mud to spectate. I thought it lovely but odd that she was so thankful in the face of adversity.

Metaphorically, we’re in a similar situation now. Thanks to a few sunny earning years, we happily hung our money out in some RRSPs, or a house or the stock market. All we had to do, we thought, was wait for the laundry to dry as it were, then reel it in and enjoy it. Instead, we got rained on (or hosed, some might say).

What did we do to deserve this?

Well, we do know what we did to deserve this, don’t we? We’ve been scolded quit roundly about how our quest for material gain is at the root of all evils.

Fortunately, there is an up side to this downturn, and much of the benefit will accrue to the environment.

My mother may have cursed her luck that day, but in general her life was good, and simple. We didn’t have a lot of “stuff.” Hey, we didn’t even have running water! But we had electricity and a car, and a chicken coop. We weren’t living ‘off the grid’ so much as hanging on to the edges. Our environmental footprint was small in comparison with the shoe size my family of five has today.

Back in the day, our family had one car, one income. Today, like most of use who live in the north, our two-income household has two cars that we use a lot; distances and scheduling mean public transit

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is often not an option. With so much time spent behind the wheel, anything we can do to cut fuel costs is welcome. In response to higher fuel prices we bought a fuel-efficient car. It gets better mileage and fewer emissions than the one it replaced, but now, the trick is to use even less gas— so Tanya Davidson’s tips on hypermiling in this issue will come in very handy.

When we were kids, hand-medowns were a fact of life. The seasonal trip to the thrift store was a highlight when we were little, but as a teen it was mortifying. I would buy second-hand clothes for my kids, but I’ve found that used kids’ clothes are usually very, very well used. Thankfully, my boys and their dad are the least fashion-friendly folk you could find, and when they find something they like they wear it forever out of self-defense (although they are right

to fear a fashion-intervention). My daughter is likewise severely fussy so her clothing bill is also minimal. As for me, I love a bargain and nothing makes me happier than finding a previously loved Armani jacket for less than ten bucks.

It frees up money for other expenses I can’t avoid like pencils and tuition.

Participating in the community clothing exchange is as easy as dropping by the local thrift shops.

Composting is easy, too. It just requires a change in habits: put peelings in this can instead of that one. Then either stir ’til it’s done and dig it into the garden, or bring it to the local landfill and let them do it for you.

Plastic, tin, glass and cardboard are unfortunately not easy to recycle here in the north, due in part to the high costs of transportation and low prices for the materials.

We live in the north because we

We live in the north because we have acres and acres of nothing but nothing…

have acres and acres of nothing but nothing (‘nothing’ being ‘everything,’ of course). Let’s keep it that way by reducing our garbage and diverting as much reusable material from the landfill as possible. In addition to composting, this means buying and using local products, choosing minimal packaging, and nixing plastic bags.

With few exceptions, we could all stop buying things new and just reduce, reuse and recycle. In environmental terms, the world would be a better place. But how are we going to feel when we finally break down and decide to treat ourselves to a double decaf latté and the coffee shop just isn’t there any more?

Or when we want to splurge on the beautiful dress for our niece’s wedding and the clothing shop is an empty storefront?

Merchants can’t afford to stock their shelves and wait for us to have a spending moment. If our recession depression keeps our hands in our pockets and stops us from spending on new goods entirely, the goods and services we take for granted will be gone.

Unless we miraculously adopt an ideological model to replace consumerism, the trick is to find a balance between spending wisely and saving wisely. Until then, at least the environment’s getting a bit of a breather.

And don’t our kids deserve that?

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N | APR / MAY ‘09 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

Go outside and play!

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

Do yourself a favour this summer: at least once a week get up, go outside, lock the door behind you, and don’t let yourself back in until it’s too dark to see the trees.

Go play, why don’cha!

Take your shoes off, go! Run in the sun. Get hot. Sweat. Sit in the shade.

Eat your strawberries wild, right out of your hand. Drink your water cold, right out of the tap. Now stick your head under the tap. Give your head a shake. Fall down! Laugh!

It sure beats doing the laundry.

And while you’re out there, forget about being ‘productive.’ The weeds aren’t going anywhere—but summer is! Get your daily dose of Vitamin P—‘P’ for ‘play,’ that is. It prevents all sorts of ills, such as grumpomas and stale-brainitis.

Be a kid again. Your play can be as technical as you like; kayaking, mountain climbing, golfing even.

Just remember, the over-riding objective is to get back down to earth, to taste the dirt through your fingers and toes. Touch the concrete through the abstracts.

This backyard we Northerners have to play in is huge; the choices for play endless. If you find yourself overwhelmed by the options and need a little direction, this issue is packed with ideas, starting with Matt J. Simmons’ piece on Mount Edziza. Even if you never wanted to climb a cinder cone, even if you didn’t know Mount Edziza existed, Matt’s piece will leave you wanting to know it first-hand.

If water play is your thing, check out Tanya Davidson’s piece in the Northern BC Tourism section on water-based recreation. It’s enough to wet your whistle.

Rob Sturney has a few words to say about his favourite swimming hole at Ross Lake in Hazelton. But we all have our own version of Ross Lake. My family has two favourites: Tyhee Lake in Telkwa is our current refuge come high noon in the hot sun. When we lived in Prince George, Ferguson Lake was our summer escape. At this wildlife oasis just minutes from the city we’d circle the lake on the boardwalk and

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marvel at what at first glance looked like ant hills but actually consisted of hundreds of tiny toads. The leeches, too, were…interesting.

Prince Rupert also has its share of play options—so many that when we visit my kids never want to leave.

Every time we head home one of them says, “What would happen if one of those huge trees fell down and blocked the road and we had to stay for a few more days?” The thought makes them happy. I’d be happy just to camp by that salty, wide Skeena River and explore the shore. At low tide, it looks like you could walk and wade what seems like miles to the other side. But, if sternwheelers

paddled up it, and if Ali Howard can swim down its broad tail end, the mighty Skeena must be deeper than it appears.

Another summer favourite: music festivals, especially the camping kind. We’re so lucky to have such a variety to choose from across the north!

The Midsummer Music Festival in Smithers is a sentimental favourite as Hans and I have been going since 04 BC (4 years Before Children). Now that the kids are old enough to know better, they too want to do it again, and again, and again.

Even with all the options mentioned herein, there are

dozens—if not hundreds—of other northern BC adventures waiting to be discovered. And none of them feature laundry as a highlight.

At the end of the day, my favourite part of summer is always that bright band of sky that lies across the horizon all through the night.

In the depths of December, when it’s 40 below and darkest dark at 4 pm, it’s the memory of that band of light that keeps me warm.

But, enough about winter! Who let that thought in here? Just remember: summer waits for no-one, so get out there and play!

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| JUNE / JULY ‘09 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

Gotta Go?

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

Everyone’s going places: we’re going hiking, going swimming, going to school…or just plain going away. No matter where you’re going, eventually you’re going to have to…go.

A friend commented that he knew his gas mileage was getting in the awesome range when he had to pee before he had to gas up. I don’t mean he had to go to the washroom before he filled up the tank; I mean he had to stop to go before his gas tank was empty. Theoretically his car could go from Smithers to Vancouver without having to stop for gas. Unfortunately, he could only hold it for eight hours so he couldn’t quite make it without pulling over.

Talk about mileage! That’s right— eight hours between pee breaks!

As my family can tell you, even driving the half-hour from Telkwa to Houston without a pit stop is sometimes a challenge for me. Eight hours? I have bladder envy.

Since highways are essential for getting anywhere up here (unless you own shares in an airline company), you’ve probably got your favourite pit stops. Mine include any washrooms that don’t require waiting in line for a key dangling from the end of a piece of lumber.

But getting back to the eighthour bladder: How handy is that? If you’re out picking pine mushrooms for example, you could go the whole day without piddling distractions— although I wonder how many pine mushrooms have been spotted while tinkling in the underbrush. Note: always wash your pine mushrooms (just kidding).

And it would be good to hold off when swimming too. It’s impolite to pee in the pool, even if the pool is a lake—even an icy green glacial lake that could benefit from a little localized warm spot, just enough to melt the ice forming around your middle.

If you’re hiking with camping gear it’s just so darn inconvenient to have to unpack yourself every couple of hours, dig out the tissue or find a non-irritating leaf (learn to identify stinging nettle). Drip-dry isn’t an option you want to consider.

Yes, you’re right—most of these situations are common to women.

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An eight-hour tank is pretty much wasted on a guy who can sneak a pee just by turning his back (in the woods of course; this won’t work at the office). Gals’ plumbing being what it is, an eight-hour bladder would be pretty useful.

Think of it: if men’s and women’s bathroom breaks were synchronized they could spend so much more time together, getting to know each other, talking and generally fraternizing. And with fewer breaks needed, the lineups for women’s toilets at music festivals and fall fairs wouldn’t stretch around the block;

we wouldn’t have to duck into the empty men’s toilets in desperation.

This is not a good way to meet men.

And what is a good way to meet men? That’s what many good women are asking themselves.

We’ve noticed an alarming trend recently: an exodus of talented, intelligent, creative women who’ve pulled up roots and gone elsewhere.

Despite enriching their communities and pouring their hearts and brains into growing their lives here, they’ve decided that it’s not enough.

If they can’t have an eight-hour bladder of their own they want to

have someone who does.

A recently separated friend commented that there is nowhere in Smithers for singles to mingle; all the meeting places are oriented to sports groups or families or singles eating and running. If you just want to go somewhere to meet-’n’-greet, forget it. But when I mentioned the gender imbalance to another friend (not single), she was surprised; she has way more single male friends than female.

Hark, is that the sound of a niche N screaming to be filled?

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| AUG / SEPT ‘09 | 7

...Not that there’s anything wrong with that

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

If I could suggest a ‘read me first’ piece in this issue it would be Rob Budde’s Top Culture column on political correctness. It’s interesting in its own right, but its perspective informs our understanding of the rest of an issue in which some stories cross the border between the PC and not-so-PC. Time for a Wikipedia definition: ”Political correctness (noun) and politically correct (adjective) are the terms applied to language, ideas, policies, and behavior meant to enforce ideologic conformity to an orthodox authority.” It continues, “The adjectival term politically incorrect denotes language and ideas, unconstrained by orthodoxy, that might offend the orthodox PC folk.”

Ironically, Wikipedia editors post a disclaimer: “The neutrality of this article is disputed… Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved.” Apparently the definition wasn’t politically correct enough.

Some of us choose to live in the North to avoid the more onerous ‘rules’ of urban society, to have more freedom in self-determination.

Anything that enforces “ideologic conformity to an orthodox authority” gives us the shivers. Sometimes being politically incorrect isn’t about wanting to hurt people; it’s about freedom of speech, of ideas. Those ideas run the gamut from heinous to hilarious.

Northword writers don’t set out intentionally to be politically correct.

We’re not trying to be ‘nice’; we’re trying to present stories that show the glass that’s half full. Sometimes the glass is cracked, but we do try to be optimistic.

In this issue, for example, Emily McGiffin features Smithers’ Broadway Place shelter for the homeless. Sarah Artis has a piece on the shortage of support services for gays in the north. Amanda Follett writes about bear avoidance and hunting, and entrepreneurial development.

Then there are the not-so-PC stories such as Rob Sturney’s reminiscences of egging most of New Hazelton during Hallowe’ens gone by. Thank goodness Rob’s all grown up now, and a teacher to boot. I suspect he can relate to adolescents with ants-in-their-pants better than

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In Other Words

most. Maybe it’s not PC to talk about the Hallowe’en pranks he pulled, but it sure is funny. Don’t try these things on your own, kids: be sure you have an adult along to stop you.

And then there’s Josh Massey (aka Grizz Daddy)’s response to Amanda Follett’s Dame Drain article from Northword’s August/September 09 issue. In Amanda’s piece, she presents the case of mature, intelligent, community-active women who are leaving the north in part because there are too few good men.

Josh has many things to say in response to the original article, but one of his ripostes in particular caught my attention: he suggests that in some cases a guy who spends time with a strong woman is worried he’ll be called ‘gay,’ in this case meaning ‘un-masculine.’ But wait a minute! Uber-masculine Hollywood actor Rock Hudson was gay. Lots of gays are masculine. To equate ‘gay’ with un-masculine is kind of…silly.

Gay folk come in a variety of masculine and un-masculine models, just like the rest of us.

I assume, therefore, that Josh doesn’t mean gays are un-masculine, just that in the north, the word

‘gay’ is sometimes, unfortunately, synonymous with ‘un-masculine.’

It’s less a commentary on gays and more a commentary on those who use the term in that way. Josh uses it to explain why some northern men feel threatened when confronted by ‘masculine’ women.

All of which leads to the question: what does it mean to be masculine—as opposed to feminine—here in the North? Geographical determinism ensures a different definition. How often does a woman in Vancouver have to chop wood? Shoo a bear out of the compost? Change a tire in the slush? A single woman in the north has to be more ‘masculine’ (meaning ‘gutsy’ or ‘independent’ or—as Josh says—“the master of material things”) in order to survive.

The frontier mentality is alive and well in many corners of the North.

And you don’t have to be a redneck to be a pioneer.

If, following Josh’s line of thought, being sensitive + kind = gay, and gay = un-masculine, then I would hope every red-blooded man out there who likes sex with women would be clamouring to be ‘gay’ because

if gay = sensitive + kind, then the ‘gay’ guys are the ones women want.

Confusing? Yes. Illogical? Most likely. But since when are m/f relations logical and not confusing?

Being sensitive and kind is sexy.

Who cares if some people think it’s gay (not that there’s anything wrong with that)(not that gays can’t be kind and sexy)(Oh, no, I’m stuck in a PC/anti-PC whirlpool and I can’t get out!)?

Josh is right, guys, once you get over proving how much more ‘masculine’ you are than the women you’d woo, the closer to winning their hearts you’ll be. If you resurgent gents want to stop the dame drain, give the gals what they want and stop playing the definition game! Aren’t you living here so you can get away from stifling labels?

And a note to Rob Budde: once the single northern women who have difficulty finding suitable suitors read your column, you may be overwhelmed by a swarm of grateful coffee-drinking, sustainably intelligent/entrepreneurial/grad students.

Be prepared to sip a lot o’ joe.

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N | OCT / NOV ‘09 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

The Dog Days of Winter

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

People from warmer climes assume we northerners worry about being cold in winter. All those negative numbers—Brrr! Our warm-weather friends’ concern is partly justified: winter is frosty, frigid, and wh-whwhite on the outside. Little do they realize that inside it can leave you hotter and more bothered than any dog day of summer.

Hypothermia is a danger, certainly, but one that’s expected and, therefore, hardly a danger at all. We (at least anyone who’s not adolescent) dress for the outdoors, the predicted wind-chill being the deciding factor.

When you go skiing, for example, do you dress for the lounge? No! You dress for the chair-lift. Those arctic cross-winds can parse the -Tex from the hardiest Gore. Dress in layers… so when you shred the gnar you can shed the nougat. (What does ‘shed the nougat’ mean? Who knows?

What the heck does ‘shred the gnar’ mean?)

Hyperthermia is not something you expect in mid-winter—and therein hides the danger. A little harmless Christmas shopping, perhaps? Nothing will boil your brains quicker than strolling the mall in double-socked Sorels and a poofy blizzard-rated parka wrapped up with mitts, toque and scarf. Oh, you can take it all off…but only if you don’t actually want to carry your purchases too. That’s what shopping carts are for—to carry your outerwear. Or your children when they melt down into frantic puddles from—you guessed it—heat stroke.

Once outside in the parking lot, we squeeze our big, fluffy selves into our small, fuel-efficient cars which take five minutes to go from icebox to oven. What do you wear then?

Air-conditioned earmuffs?

When you get home, your bed awaits and the snow is scratching at the window. But a mere blanket is so…temperate and inadequate.

What you need—no, must have—is a duvet! The loft, the thread-count!

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So cozy and snug—so warm, in fact—you have to open the window to keep you from overheating. By morning your room is cold enough to make the duvet bearable, but fear of frostbite keeps you in bed.

Unless, of course, you have the ultimate heat source. Not gas; not oil. Certainly not electric, which is so unromantic. The ultimate heat source is a wood fire. So compelling is it that there’s even a TV channel dedicated entirely to a crackling fireplace, one hand feeding it logs in an endless, blazing loop. It’s mesmerizing— keeps small children entertained for hours—and no ashes to clean up. No smoke up the chimney to feed the latest inversion. No slivers to pull, no kindling to cut. Dust the screen periodically, and at night don’t bank the coals—just hit the ‘off’ button on the remote.

A couple of winters ago, when the minus 30s came for an extended visit,

our gas furnace went on holiday. We had to use wood heat exclusively for two weeks until the ordered part came in. It was a pleasant surprise.

It may have been Iceland outside, but inside we were channeling the Bahamas. No wonder the dog gained/lost 50 pounds of hair that winter! Then, as now, she curled up on the rug in front the fire like foreground in a Rockwell painting.

We built the fire the way we always do—from the bottom up: ball up a few pages of newspaper (or Northword Magazine, BC’s hottest read!), lay it in the firebox, top with some fine kindling and some medium-sized sticks, lay a couple of bigger logs to the side or tee-pee them over the rest, then strike a match and prepare to blow. And blow. And blow. After inhaling much small and not-so-small particulate matter, the fire’s ready to burn on its own.

But just today, I learned a new thing: a new way to start a fire, from the top down. I told Hans about this new method as I read it from the website (www.woodheat. org/tips/topdown.htm), expecting an incredulous eyebrow or at least a considered “but what about…”

He had just finished re-gluing the gasket seals and cleaning the glass doors on our RSF Opel and decided to try the ‘new’ fire-building method for himself. Place some nice-sized logs in the fire-pit. Throw on some big kindling followed by smaller stuff, and finally four or five newspaper knots. Strike a match, close the doors, and watch the miracle happen: the fire burns from the top down.

After a very few minutes, nineyear-old Emerenne looked in and exclaimed, “Hey, a Hi-Def fire!” The dog groaned happily and dropped another pound of hair.

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| DEC / JAN ‘10 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

We be jammin’

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

Last night a group of us got together to celebrate a friend's birthday by belting out three or four hours worth of Beatles’ songs. Everyone brought munchies and drinks and after some happy small-talk, we migrated to the comfy room and gathered ’round.

From various corners appeared three guitars, a flute, a violin, a couple of djembe drums, and assorted shakers.

Sheet music and lyrics were passed around and without so much as a do-re-mi we were off.

And we were hot! We all said so.

Perhaps the wood stove contributed to the warmth but I like to think we’d have been smokin’ without it.

We jumped into that Yellow Submarine with both feet! She Loves You, ya, ya, ya! Twist and Shout! Even, hilariously, A Day in the Life! Yeah, we were dreaming, but it was fun. One thing about a Beatles-themed night: everyone has a repertoire of Fab Four favourites.

This wasn’t a random act of musicality, a spontaneous musical flashmob. We didn’t bump into each other on Main Street and go, “Hey, come on over tonight and we’ll jam!”— our schedules are way too busy to be so spontaneous. These nights are planned and anticipated— like Saturday night dates with the spouse. This event had been in the “we should get together” stage for weeks and it was only when it had a raison d’etre did a date get set.

We squeeze these musical celebrations into our lives as often possible.

We had a Christmas sing-along at our house, and in three weeks we’re heading to Prince George for another music night—a trek we make at least twice a year. Whenever Caitlyn puts out the call for a music party we’ll be there, work schedules and road conditions willing.

Every summer, Hans flies half way across the country to take part in an annual country jam with a group of (amoung others) music and art therapists. They too find comfort in song.

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The songsters involved in these music nights are mostly amateur, just-for-fun types. A hardy few, though, make a living teaching, performing, or facilitating music.

These pros are good sports because— at times—our productions may be exquisitely painful to the trained ear.

At such gatherings, the technical aspects of singing and playing are mostly incidental; if we don’t know/ can’t find/forget the lyrics, lalala-ing and humming are quite acceptable substitutes. If a guitar gets out of tune we just take a break and tune it…or not. If we sing loud enough we probably won’t even notice.

A professional singer or musician strives for technical and creative excellence in order to communicate a feeling, idea or story to an audience. The earned applause gives the performer a sense of acceptance and well-being. As musical participants, as opposed to performers, we share with our group something in addition to the musical content. We engage in a bonding ritual, like a pack of wolves baying at the moon (and yes, at points last night that’s probably what we sounded like).

Occasionally, when everything works, we also get a sublime feeling

of belonging—or at least forgiveness—for our harmonic tremors.

If by chance some individuals were to play especially well together, they might get together privately and explore their music further. With enough practice, they may go public and cross the line from participant to performer. With enough experience, they might even record the sweet music they make together and share it with a broader audience.

Perhaps their score sheets will one day be included in a random group sing-along in some tiny town far, far away.

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| FEB / MAR ‘10 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

Growing a green thumb

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

I have a green thumb. Too bad it’s green with envy, not ability.

My father’s family tree is firmly planted on a Canadian prairie family farm. How could such a fertile gene pool of gardeners and farmers sprout someone so agriculturally challenged as me? Perhaps I have been genetically modified. I certainly can’t blame my upbringing.

Dad left behind the fertile fields of his youth when he embarked on his grand Canadian adventure.

Years later he put down roots in a Lower Mainland suburb, but that didn’t stop him from plowing up the back yard. You can take the boy off of the farm but you can’t take the farm out of the boy. Depending on my parents’ needs we also annoyed the neighbours with chickens and a cow.

My parents relied on their market garden to provide a year-round supply of produce (for eating fresh, frozen and canned) and to supplement the family income. Every summer, Mom hung a sign at the end of the driveway and set up shop in the garage where she sold produce, weighing it on a bathroom scale. If she liked you, she’d give you an extra cucumber. As a kid, I’d supplement my income by packing my bike carrier high with bags of tomatoes or pears and selling them door-to-door for 50 cents.

And dinosaurs browsed between the pea patch and the potato hills.

Many years and concrete yards later, I moved to Smithers and bought a house with a back yard large enough to support a decentsized garden. My new place even had a greenhouse with shelves and a potting table. It was inevitable that I would turn some sod and get dirty.

That summer, I spaded and hoed, weeded and pinched and strung string. I cultivated an aura of aged manure. By mid-August, I had a gorgeous crop of cauliflower-loving caterpillars, and my cilantro hosted a precocious colony of aphids. The

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ladybugs were ecstatic. My pesticide aversion had created a creepycrawly Club Med. I had started to read the books on growing gardens but stopped before the chapters on natural pest-control.

Having been beaten by the bugs without even putting up a fight, I slunk back to the couch and decided to leave organic gardening to the experts. I’d grow flowery things instead. I could still go to the office with dirt embedded under my nails, proud that I retained a vestige of my prairie-farming genes. If I couldn’t eat what I grew, I could at least drink it in with my eyes. If the flowers didn’t grow, the only thing I’d regret

was the empty wallet, not the empty root cellar.

Not that we have a root cellar. Yet. With the price of fuel heading nowhere but north, I’ve reconsidered my vegetable gardening celibacy and am again flirting with the idea of a kitchen garden. Not a casual summer fling this time; this time the commitment would be for the long term.

I’ll give it a year. If the vegetables grow, and if I can grow enough to last a year, and if the vegetables actually last the year without growing fuzzy vegetables of their own… I’ll do it again next year.

I can imagine it: next spring, while the snow is still on the ground, I go

to the root cellar (or the basement fridge) and pick out a perfectly good cabbage. I’d combine it with some home-canned tomatoes (better buy a pressure cooker), and rice (not hoarded from Wal-Mart), and ground beef (we could keep a cow or two out back behind the garden) and cook up a big batch of cabbage rolls that I could then sell from a little stand at the end of my driveway!

Perhaps this apple didn’t fall so far from the tree after all.

Due to extenuating circumstances, this editorial is reprinted from our June/ July ’08 issue.

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N | APR / MAY ‘10 | 7

Wild thing, I think you move me...

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

This issue of Northword Magazine is devoted to wild things we love: critters that hop, swim and scurry; greens that regenerate and rejuvenate; and of course people—freed spirits who dance barefoot in the grass at midnight, trend-buckers who do what they love and get paid for it, and brave beings who lead us where we didn’t know we wanted to go.

Speaking of wild things, our house sits on a bench on the side of a hill, in a mature aspen forest.

Peeking through the branches on the downhill side we can see Telkwa and Highway 16, even a piece of the Bulkley River as it flows toward Smithers with Hudson Bay Mountain in the background. Overlooking our house on the uphill side is the Telkwa High Road and, over the ridge, Tyhee Lake. We live in a zoo, surrounded by wild things but bordering on civilization.

We live with mice, deer, and foxes.

Birds of all sorts. The occasional toad and salamander. And ants, billions of ants. Every spring they march through my back door to my kitchen looking for crumbs to bring home for the kids (crumbs which, they seem to have no trouble finding) and every summer the bears tear up the ant nests looking for their own tasty snack.

The bench our house sits on is situated in the midst of an animal highway. Jane Stevenson, a Northword writer who lives over the ridge and across the field, also lives on this critter right-of-way. In summer, my view looks inward to the trees while her line of sight encompasses the big field. She gives me traffic updates on the creatures I (or at least the Dog) can sense but not see. Updates such as, “We’ve got a momma with three cubs and a big ol’ male this year,” or “the coyotes were making wild whoopee last night,” that kind of thing.

Bears in the backyard are exciting, but the wild thing that moved us most is a moose: the biggest, moosiest moose we’ve ever seen—so moosey, in fact, it’s practically a giraffe. When I saw it this spring a skiff of overnight snow had dusted the ground and it stood, hidden by

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the shrubs on the uphill side of the house, staring intently down at our back yard. After a few minutes it seemed to have moved on so I let the dog out, on her lead, to do her morning business. The moose must have just hidden behind the next tree because Dog caught a whiff of it and, doing her fierce moose-eating hellhound impersonation, lunged to the full extent of her unbreakable line…

And broke the clasp on her collar.

The race was on: up the hill toward the road, over and under fallen trees; moose kicking, Dog dodging. I gave chase because Dog is NOT allowed to chase the wildlife. I tracked them to the local cemetery where, on the far side of the headstones, they had paused to catch their breath, happily ignoring each other. After

a pause, they were off again, like two kids playing tag. Dog heard me screaming her name in what had until then been in vain and uncharacteristically came trotting up, tail wagging, tongue lolling. She and her friend had apparently agreed to play again another day.

A couple weeks later, my nineyear-old daughter was riding her bike down the big hill to school when she looked up the bank and saw the moose staring back at her. Powered by adrenaline, she got to school in record time. Coming home, there again stood the moose, in the same position, on the same spot, watching her walk her bike up the hill. Unnerved, Em took the school bus the next day, only to come home to find the big tall one standing in the backyard

My girl is convinced the moose is stalking her but really it’s after the dog.

where it stared at her through the front window, much to Dog’s dismay.

My girl is convinced the moose is stalking her but really it’s after the dog.

But seriously, it’s no wonder the moose likes to hang around; we certainly have enough wild edibles to share—as if we have a choice— including two canes of wild raspberries growing in the one square foot of our ten-acre wood that gets more than two hours of direct sunshine per day, plus my favourite: wild strawberries. Thimbleberries and high-bush cranberries abound but I find thimbleberries juicy as dry oatmeal and high-bush cranberries smell yummy as rotting socks.

If you head up the hill to Tyhee Lake this summer you may glimpse a woman ducking out of the bushes with a pail of saskatoons and flicking ants out of her hair, or walking the ditch with a smaller bucket (i.e. cup) of strawberries. Just wave and smile.

It’ll be me, baiting the moose. The Dog would like another playdate.

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| JUNE/JULY ‘10 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

Savour the flavour

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l edit o rial@no rt hw ord. c a

Connoisseurs characterize wine according to its terroir, or sense of place. Terroir—from the French word terre, or “land”—refers to the unique flavours conferred by the local environment: factors such as soil, climate, and horticultural practices combine to create a wine’s special characteristics.

Now, we in the North are not known for our spectacular wines, but we don’t need a vineyard to have a sense of place.

Though our towns, villages and cities share the label ‘Northern BC’ (i.e. ‘north of Vancouver’), our individual communities are as different as the wines on the shelves at the local L.C.B. In chatting with Northword readers I hear that they think of communities across the region as having different personalities. Terroir is more complex than personality. It’s more akin to character—deeper, more enduring.

How would you describe your community’s terroir? Take into account physical characteristics such as topography, soil, climate, vegetation, and wildlife. Then, consider human elements of culture: population, work and business opportunities, politics, neighbouring communities, volun-

teers, and visitors. How do all these factors combine to create the local flavour of your community?

Taste the local terroir—it’s easy!

You don’t have to stoop to tasting the soil like a die-hard vineyardist; just go for a drive along Highway 16 and stop every hundred kilometers or so to sample the saskatoons—or if you’re really keen on doing your research, do a little networking and suss out the local blueberry patches.

Local farmers’ markets are Meccas for ‘terroirists.’ We may not be famous for our champagne or shiraz, but we do grow fantastic produce and free range meat products, and offer a yummy variety of artisanal products.

Fall fairs are also an excellent way to sample local flavours in both the raw resource and value-added categories—not just in the displays of locally grown produce and livestock, but in the baking and canning exhibits; the crafts and creative categories. Locally sourced musicians and entertainers add extra zip.

Taste the local terroir—it’s easy!

Like vintners, there’s more than one way that local economies can utilize the local terroir. They can use it to create a distinctive place-based product (such as river-rafting the Skeena). Or, they can situate their business (which could be anywhere) here, and incorporate the local terroir into their plans. In the first case, the terroir is the primary feature (as in destination-based tourism), and in the second it’s the supporting feature (such as a restaurant franchise, university or call centre).

We don’t need local wines to showcase the deliciousness of our local terroir. We can savour it in so many ways.

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Letter to the Editor

Harvard Law School criticizes BC government My article “Fighting for the sacred at Shus Nadloh” (Northword April-May 2010) looked at the Nak’azdli people’s concerns about the approval process for the Mount Milligan gold and copper mine on their traditional territory.

A recent Harvard Law School report, Bearing the Burden: The Effects of Mining on First Nations in British Columbia highlights the troubling situation of Takla Lake First Nation (the Nak’azdli).

It concludes that the special rights guaranteed to First Nations receive inadequate attention in BC when compared to mining interests, and that First Nations currently bear “unfair burden at every point in the mining process, from the registration of claims to exploration, production and abandonment of closed sites.”

The report urges law reforms to shift more of the presumptive burden onto government and industry. The researchers suggest that First Nations should be involved in decision-making processes relating to their traditional territories, that environmental and cultural protection should be increased, and that the potential benefits

among all stakeholders should be balanced.

BC Minister of Mines Randy Hawes called the report “hogwash” and is quoted as saying that “First Nations reject mining for a more traditional lifestyle,” and that “traditional ways are linked to lower birth weights, higher birth rate deaths and lower life-spans. The way to improve these outcomes is to share in the wealth and jobs that come from mining.”

I believe that there is an understanding of “wealth” that places at its centre untainted watersheds, healthy land and respect for people’s fundamental human rights which, in the case of First Nations, includes Aboriginal rights on their traditional territories.

That is the kind of wealth I, for one, would like British Columbia to maintain.

Mary MacDonald, Prince George For more information and to read the report, go to www.law.harvard.edu/programs/hrp/newsid=831. html N

w ww. no rthwo rd .ca

| AUG/SEPT ‘10 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

It’s a sign...

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

I found mouse poop in my car today. It was scattered in a nest of finely shredded tissue on the floor behind my seat. It’s a sign—not that I need to clean my car more often—although I get the hint.

It’s a sign that winter is coming.

Here’s another sign that winter’s coming: you’ve cranked the thermostat up to 25º and the thermometer says it’s 25º, yet you’re shivering through your long johns and wondering if you’re sick. You sweat, even as your teeth chatter. As that old cliché old man winter would say, “You can feel the cold in your bones, right down to the marrow.”

(My 10-year-old asked her dad what marrow is and he said it’s a kind of vegetable. That there are two types of marrow is true; the difference is that when a vegetable marrow encounters this kind of cold it turns into a mush bomb; when your personal marrow encounters this kind of cold, you could imagine it’s turning into a popsicle… no, wait, a creamsicle—with a really hard shell…

Eww. But I digress.)

People from southern climes don’t visit here in December or January; they reason that if they come for Thanksgiving rather than Christmas they’ll miss the really bitter winter cold. The folly of this logic is that those first few degrees below freezing, when moisture from autumn rain still lingers in the air, are the nastiest of the whole season. Inside, the warmth from the furnace gets sucked right into the walls. Your furnace can blow ’til it’s blue, but your house will never feel warm.

Even though the thermostat reads 25º, you’ll be wrapped in a duvet with the sweating chatters.

Outside, no amount of clothing will keep you warm.

A few years ago my nephew from Vancouver came to stay for a few weeks in the fall but left early complaining it was too nasty cold! I kept telling him, “Wait until it gets down to minus 10—you’ll warm right up!” Being from Vancouver he was familiar with damp cold. He just wasn’t familiar with the dry cold that follows. Before the moisture in the air finally freezes into the ground, minus 5 can be the most bitter. As soon as the moisture is finally locked up, the dry cold is very comfortable to be out in—as long as you’re dressed for it. At least you can dress for it,

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unlike the hideous damp cold that sucks itself into your…bones.

Getting back to the relationship between signs and winter and bones: you know winter’s coming when the old bones of trees, cut and dried, warm our toes in front of the fire. Turkey bones from thanksgiving give up savoury broth for school lunches. It may be a few weeks away but before you know it, Boney M’s Christmas song will be hauled out of the vault at the local radio station and decorate the air come December.

Why do we look for signs of winter? It’s not as though we expect it might decide to stay home and

I kept telling him, “Wait until it gets down to minus 10—you’ll warm right up!”

cool its heels in the Arctic for a change. I think it’s because this time of year is too late for biking or barbecuing or hiking, but too soon for skiing or skating or Christmas baking. It’s limbo season.

We’re poised on the brink of winter, in the transition, and as any Mom will tell you, transitions are the toughest part of any endeavour.

Just be patient. Come December there’ll be enough skiing and baking and socializing to keep you warm until spring. In the meantime, bundle up, work on your window scraping technique, pump up your snow shovelling muscles and polish up the skis. Chop more wood to keep warm and put away the bikes and the canoes. Winter will be here before you know it.

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w w w. no rthwo rd .ca

| OCT/NOV ‘10 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

And you like skiing....why?

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

Superficially, our enjoyment of winter would seem to be about that which is obvious. Look out the window and there it is: S-N-O-W. Everyone has a reason why they enjoy the snow: it’s pretty (not grey!); it’s dry (not rain!); but mostly, it’s fun (not work!). This fun can take the form of sledding, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing or snowmobiling. But for my kids, the best fun of all is on the ski hill.

When Emerenne was introduced to the ski hill at the tender age of five, she quickly decided that it was simply the most diabolical way we had yet devised to torture her. We spent hours just persuading her to walk from the lodge to the beginners’ rope tow. At one point, she stomped with her stubby skis to the edge of the bank overlooking the ski-hill road and the valley beyond and screamed, “I hate skiing! I’m going home!” and prepared to pitch herself over the edge.

Fortunately, I was still quicker on skis than she was and I scooped her up and set her up at the rope tow. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth I calmed down enough to get her to latch on and lurch up the little hill. She went up, she fell down. She went up, she fell down. She went up and didn’t fall down. She went again, and made it back down to the bottom. A pretty good day!

The next weekend, she tried the T-bar, fell at the first tower, got dragged a wee ways and re-proclaimed her hatred for all things white and slippery. But then she tried again and made it a bit further. Next time she made it to the top. Then she did the runs on the chairlift side. Then she was skiing faster than anyone else in the family.

Truly frightening.

Em’s not the only dare-devil-on-skis in the family. Teo’s been known to get himself into deep trouble—and I don’t mean powder. He and a friend were riding the chairlift and each dared the other to jump with their snowboards. Well, Teo jumped and his friend didn’t.

Teo was lucky, as he usually is: he landed the jump without breaking anything. Too bad luck isn’t genetic. The following year, Teo and his brother Kristan were racing down Panorama, throwing snowballs at each other. When Teo zoomed ahead, Kristan caught an edge, pinwheeled, and broke his arm at the growth plate. Now it hurts when it’s about to snow.

At least my kids are learning at a good age.

The first time I went skiing I was 33. I had to borrow a jacket and snow-pants that were about seven sizes too big; I looked like the Michelin Man. Of course, following my vastly more experienced hosts, whose bright idea this introduction to skiing had been, I flailed my exit off the T-bar only to find myself staring down one of the killer runs at Hudson Bay Mountain. I don’t remember much of that day except my gratitude that it really is possible to swim in powder, even if you are

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I don’t remember much of that day except my gratitude that it really is possible to swim in powder, even if you are dressed like a man made of tires.

dressed like a man made of tires.

Ironically, it is not possible to roll.

Yes, there’s tons of fun to be had at this time of year, but it doesn’t all involve snow. Just check out Sarah Artis’ spread on winter activities in the North.

Beneath the snow some really interesting stuff is going on, too: Rosamund Pojar informs us that mice and voles and spiders are making merry under the snow.

When it’s 30 below above, at ground level they’re practically frolicking about in their shorts.

A sport as roll-up-your-sleeves simple as ice fishing is about more than just fish at the end of the day for author Gillian Wigmore. It’s about connecting with another special human being.

And speaking of special people…

In this issue, Amanda Follett interviews Alex Cuba (the artist formerly known as Alexis Puentes—he may be a Grammy award winner but, at heart, he’s a small-town boy, as community-

oriented as any of his neighbours), and Hans Duerichen (he’s at it again, heating up the scene with his latest warming invention).

Anastasia Ledwon lets us in on the process of successfully reclaiming old mining exploration sites. Geoff Langford skates right up and fills us in on the return of pond hockey in the North. Jane Stevensons’ historical piece on the old Quick Bridge lets us know it isn’t history yet!

Rob Budde lets us share the experience as he invites some young students to get under the surface of his poetry. Rob Sturney waxes sort of poetic about the ubiquitous northern toque. Julie Chaplin warms to the topic of thermography, and Charlynn Toews says she’s out of the office (but I don’t believe her).

So, here’s to winter fun and a great snowy season for all, from all of us at Northword!

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w ww. no rthwo rd .ca

| DEC/JAN‘11 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

Train song

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

Some nights, as I lie under the covers waiting for sleep to come to bed, I hear the train rolling along, down by the river. The rumble rises quietly in the distant west, finding its voice as it approaches the railway crossing at the Telkwa bridge. It blows long-long, short, long-long-long, looonnnggg. The train-song’s high notes are absorbed by the snow, leaving the train rocking a low, easy, masculine beat. It’s the Barry White of trains, rolling and rolling and rolling.

The trains roll on by just below my father-inlaw’s place, on a bench of land across the river from us. In summer, the whistle’s high notes seem to refract and expand in the dawn-scrubbed air so the noise of it jumps you awake. This section of track is the one our family treks along to get to the river to swim, to pick blueberries, to find old moose bones, and to reach our traditional Christmas-tree hunting grounds. When I was pregnant and living with the in-laws on the bench by the river, I always wondered, “When I go into labour, will I have to wait for the train to cross the tracks?”

When I first moved to Smithers I purchased a house on Railway Avenue. The engines respectfully crawled into the train yard across the street.

There was certainly no rocking and rolling train song there, and I took little notice throughout the week. I’m pretty sure, though, that the CN guys and gals waited for the weekend to practice their moves. The explosive sounds of trains coupling in the wee sleeping hours of a Sunday morning are quite arousing.

Many years later, when I signed up with Northword Magazine, a handful of the hard-core crew took the Via Rail passenger train from Smithers to Prince Rupert for a weekend retreat.

We were to meet some of our West-Coast people, give and take a workshop or two, share some wine and good food. The time in Rupert was wonderful but it was the gorgeous train trip (and a tres intérressant French-Canadian conductor) I remember as the best.

As I write this, four trains have whistled their way by. I don’t usually ‘hear’ them, being so accustomed to them. But now that they’re on my mind, their call is clear. I rarely have to cross the tracks to get where I need to go—but I’m one of the lucky ones.

Many northern BC communities are bisected by the railway line; often it runs right through the middle of town—Terrace, Houston, Burns Lake, and Vanderhoof, to name just a few.

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I am particularly fascinated (and freaked out) by the trains as they fly through Vanderhoof. I am always amazed to see such long, high, heavy trains blast across a town’s main street.

As the port business at Prince Rupert progresses to Phase II, resulting in a multiplication in the number of rail freight units, what will happen to communities that lie along the route? I foresee a booming business in rail overpasses.

Otherwise, living on the wrong side of the tracks could mean significant geographical isolation: community fairgrounds and subdivisions on one side, town hall, pub, and elementary school on the other. The top excuse for being late for work or school could soon be, “I

The explosive sounds of trains coupling in the wee sleeping hours of a Sunday morning are quite arousing.

missed the train,” meaning the train beat you to the level crossing.

What does the train mean to those of us who live along the east-west line—which is the majority of people who live in the north? I’ve heard Via Rail travel getting rave reviews lately— an inexpensive, relaxing way to get from here to there along the line from Prince Rupert to Prince George. The crew is friendly, the scenery gorgeous.

The only down side? The amount of time spent on the sidings, waiting for freight trains to pass.

It’s symbolic of the old tourism-vs-resources battle that we’ve become sadly accustomed to here in our beautiful, valuable corner of Canada.

Surely we can arrange a way to sing this train song in harmony? Conductors, please?

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w w w. no rthwo rd .ca

| FEB/MAR‘11 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

Spring: time to re-boot

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

Take a hike. No, really, pull on your boots, pick a direction, and go. See what treasures you can find liberated by the melted snow. This time of year, especially after the winter we’ve just had (thanks, La Niña!), the green is pretty much irresistible.

What is it that’s frozen into our wintered souls that is released by a northern spring?

Mentally, warming breezes melt the footprints we follow daily and inspire us to seek new paths, different directions.

Physically, our shoulders thaw and recede from our ears. Feet shed winter boots, replaced by wishful thinking about open toes in sandals. The snow is gone, but the ground is still waterlogged and, although mud oozing through your toes may be sensually bohemian, it’s also damn cold. For a while, at least, think “waterproof.”

As the earth warms and dries, earthworms stretch and give robins pause. Amphibians emerge from their dark places, inspired by the sounds of water: gurgles, giggles, drips, seeps; if it’s moving, it must be spring. All eyes are on the forest floor as the renewal begins: arnica, ferns, false solomon’s seal, dandelions. Winter-worn deer, moose and bears finally get their greens.

The boots on our cover look like they just thawed out from a winter snowdrift. Were they left behind on a last summer hike? Tied to a pack when the strap holding them broke? Or are they discarded, abandoned when they wore out? If you were to pull those boots up out of the spongy, wet ground would you expose a roughskin newt scurrying for cover?

The snow has retreated like a seasonal tide, leaving all sorts of stuff behind. In town, the streets are messy with gravel that waits to be swept up in a cloud of fine particulates. The sides of the highways are dotted with freshlystuffed trash bags, bulging with a winter’s worth of litter tossed by people wanting to keep their vehicles clean, collected by people trying to keep the world clean.

Backyards are spotted with thawed dog poop, the perennial first smell of spring. The little doggie bombs are there to remind kids not to put off their chores until later—popsicles are much easier to pick up than goop. Lawns are netted with the remains of whatever fell out of the skies and didn’t get washed away during the smokier months. It’s enough to put you off eating snow altogether. At least if it’s yellow you know it’s not going to be good for you, but what’s all that insoluble stuff in the snow that gets left behind?

Oops, here I go, off into digression-land. It’s an easy thing to do when tied to a desk, forced to ignore the sun shining in the window and the

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birds flaunting their flightiness.

Focus is fleeting. Spring-induced ADHD… Back to the topic of hiking to where the snow-melt treasures are… You can get out in the open: fields, meadows, former tobogganing slopes. Go where the sun shines on your face, your back, your arms, your legs. Soak it up while you expand your gaze to the horizon. Get the big picture: survey the vista.

Or, go under cover of the woods: aspen, cottonwood, spruce, pine, cedar, hemlock. Each forest type offers an intimate, small-picture experience: look closely for the smallest creatures, the tiniest lichens. The closer you look, the more you see.

Naturally, you don’t have to choose one or the other—if you hike up the ski hill, for example, you’ll have both horizon and forest, plus you can add to your collection of random ski mitts, toques, iPods and lip balms that have fallen like snow

In this part of the world, you can pretty much just throw on your boots, open the door, pick a direction and go.

from the skies, or rather from skiers on the chairlift.

The lovely thing is, in this part of the world, you can pretty much just throw on your boots, open the door, pick a direction and go. In just a few minutes you’ll have shed your winter coat and be exploring new territory.

Not that I’m advocating for random wilderness wandering—I don’t want anyone getting lost— but just getting out of the office and away from the concrete does wonders to renew your spirit.

Shake off the cobwebs and gather a few freshspun wonders.

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Errata:

The Sterling Sturgeon Film Festival takes place in Vanderhoof, not in Burns Lake as stated in Char Toew’s column, Barometer, in our last issue. Please note though that the festival is postponed this year; watch for details for next year’s festival. We regret the error.

w ww. no rthwo rd .ca

| APR/MAY‘11 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

Being here...

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

When I go to bed, my dog Sibby—a big, shepherdcross love sponge—is always there, lying on my pillow. She knows that I am going to shoo her off, but she also knows that first I am going to scratch her head, stroke her chin and generally love her up. Eyes closed tight, she groans and moans, and indecently enjoys the itch being scratched without wasting a second thinking that soon she’ll be banished to her cold, hard mat on the floor. She exists only within the moment.

I want to live in the moment, as Sibby does, knowing but not worrying about what came before or comes next. I would wake with the window open so the morning bird-song could roll over me. I would walk, for no other reason than to walk. I would eat ice cream for lunch, the kind with chocolate, fudge and caramel. And some nuts. I would hike more, too.

On a July-first long weekend many years and several children ago, eight or nine of us gathered at a parking lot in Smithers, faces turned to the rain-soaked clouds rolling over Hudson Bay Mountain. We were united in the thought that, as it was the first long weekend of the summer, we should be hiking and camping and making merry somewhere near treeline. We agreed that if the weather broke by noon we’d make for the Blue Lakes, towards Hazelton. The sun tore a tiny patch in the clouds and that was all we needed to scramble into our cars and head out.

There were many moments on that trip. After passing through fairy-tale forests and switchback trails, we reached the edge of a glacial creek just as the rain returned. We waded through the stream, ice-water pounding around our knees and rain-water pouring around our ears.

By the time we reached the campsite, it was sleeting. Our clothing, tents, and everything not wrapped in plastic were saturated. And the only thing that was wrapped in plastic was an old camp guitar one of us had packed up, so we had musical accompaniment to our teeth chattering and the rain drum-

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Those in the other tent just talked all night. No use pretending we could sleep.

ming on the tarps. Our guitarist slept, curled up with his guitar, in the only dry corner of our tent, while the rest of us contended with a small stream running through, just above our heads.

Those in the other tent just talked all night. No use pretending we could sleep.

Come morning, it was still raining. Back down the trail, we arrived at the now not-so-little stream we crossed going up, now thigh-deep, very fresh and pushy. Our packs weighed considerably more wet than dry and made the crossing precipitous with the stream trying to throw us over and roll us down the mountain. We squelched the rest of the way down to the parking lot and met up at

my place on Railway Avenue where we ate lots, drank much, and collapsed around the woodstove, inexplicably sober and immediately asleep.

Hey, we coulda died! What a bunch of idiots!

But we didn’t. We had an adventure instead, most of it living in the moment (instead of planning, like we should’ve).

So yes, I’d hike more, at least more safely, so I truly can fully experience “being here” without the worry of consequences.

I would also sing more, play more. And look at old dandelions as if they were magic wands ready to cast a spell. Mostly, I would stop saying “I would,” and instead, say “I am.”

What would you do if you could just...be here?

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w w w. no rthwo rd .ca

| JUNE/JULY‘11 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

The tastiest bite of all

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

It’s slightly sweet, somewhat chewy, a bit zingy.

It’s perfect with butter or cheese, or a slice of cervelat. It’s not fluffy, it’s not white, and it’s not cheap but each bite reassures you that it’s worth every cent. “It” is the cranberry orange bread from Meg Hobson’s Rustica Bakery that I get from the Bulkley Valley farmers market whenever my resolve weakens (which is basically whenever I’m there).

Seriously, I’ll be sitting in my comfy chair, watching something educational (snort!) on the TV, when I hear the bread calling to me. It doesn’t go, “hey, Joanne, eat me” or anything so obvious; it disguises its voice so it sounds like an apple. I like apples, they’re tasty and low calorie so I get out of my comfy chair, go down to the kitchen, reach for an apple and end up with a knife in my hand sawing away at the loaf, then shaving off a slice of butter, just the right size for my piece of bread. Then, tasty buds happy, I return to my chair until a cup of tea summons me back to the kitchen where the bread lays in wait, right next to the damn butter and the knife. This scenario repeats itself until the bread is gone and the butter has a large dent in it. At least I get some small exercise from the short flight of stairs that separates chair from temptation. I am helpless to resist.

A character flaw? I don’t think so; I think it’s the evil cranberry orange bread. But even so, hey, it has fruit in it right? So, there should be some vitamin C in there, some antioxidants to combat the effects of the flour and butter? Surely? Maybe?

A teensy bit? C’mon, give me break, there has to be something redeeming about eating a whole loaf of this stuff whenever it manages to sneak into my bag at the farmers market?

It turns out it does have a redeeming feature (aside from making me happy). It encourages me to support an amazing local bakery that is more than worthy of my support. It’s also just one of many products that lure me back to the farmers market each Saturday morning.

My favourite deck chairs? Purchased at the farmers market from regionally sourced, locally milled wood that is crafted within minutes from my house into handsome furniture that precisely fits my bread and butter-fed butt. My favourite ceramic bowls? Likewise purchased at the market.

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Baclava, the only food my daughter will eat on a Saturday morning? A must-have from one of the bakery stands. Other favourites include moisturizer, hand-made jewellery, bedding plants. Did I mention the giant addictive ginger cookies?

Of course the stars of a farmers market are the farmers. The produce is amazing and would be enough to turn me vegan if it weren’t for the great selection of locally grown/organic/free range/grass fed red meat, white meat, round meat (i.e.eggs).

Berries to beef, pork to petunias, it’s all here and it’s all good.

People claim they go to the farmers market to pick up their weekly vegetables but we know that’s not the whole truth, nay, probably not even the biggest part of the truth. Sometimes people go and---it’s true—don’t buy a thing, yet they can

spend hours getting from one end of the market to the other and back again. This is because the farmers market is also a meet market. Not only can you catch up on your community gossip, you can do it while being entertained by the finest musicians you can entice to play al fresco. And towards the end of the season, some mornings are more al fresco than others.

But back to that cranberry orange bread. It’s symbolic of a farmers market that’s flavoured by the creativity and hard work of people like Meg Hobson, people who’ve made a commitment to make this valley their home, and offer the best of themselves for their neighbours to share each Saturday morning. That is the tastiest bite of all.

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www. no rthwo rd .ca

| AUG/SEPT‘11 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

Now that’s special...

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

While standing at the check-out the other day, spying on other customers’ purchases, I noted kiwis and frozen cabbage-rolls, instant single-serve packets of Starbucks coffee and microwavable precooked bacon. Cashiers swiped customers’ loyalty cards for instant savings and immediate air miles.

People paid with debit cards, received online game cards and redeemable cents-off-gas coupons. I was so stimulated by all the instant gratification I was at once hungry, full, filled, and bored.

It made me wonder: What is special anymore?

In a time that celebrates the commodification of gratification, does anything still make us weak in the knees with anticipation? Even the cliché ‘weak in the knees’ is becoming less cliché because few recall what being weak-kneed was all about.

Is it an arthritic condition, or like water on the knee? Does it refer to a character trait, akin to being ‘yellow-bellied’? For that matter, what is ‘anticipation’?

Anticipation is special.

Mandarin oranges at Christmas used to be special.

Now, any fruit you desire is available whenever you put it on your shopping list, shipped to your local grocery store from another continent if need be. ‘Special’ used to describe the someone for whom your anticipation of contact (of any sort) made you dizzy with desire. Now, he or she is available by cell phone 24/7. As are you. With all this instant messaging (if not massaging) going on, exactly when are you supposed to compose your daydreams? There is no untouchable space in which you can fantasize about your next…text.

This past August I took part in the Gathering Strength Canoe Journey. Over 200 participants, mostly First Nations youth, paddled nine sea canoes over 250 nautical miles, following ancient sea-trading routes that visited native coastal communities tucked into the coastline between Kincolith and Hartley Bay. After long days paddling, we either camped on the beach or

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With all this instant messaging going on, exactly when are you supposed to compose your daydreams?

were welcomed with feasts and festivities at coastal First Nations communities.

This fantastic journey will be featured in our August 2012 edition. But for now, let me tell you: it was special.

Here’s what was not present on the journey: cell phones, iPods, video games, TVs—no emails, Internet, Facebook, Twitter or Skype. Also, no light pollution, pulp mills or air brakes at midnight. No Safeways, 7-Elevens or McDonalds. And no microwaves or insta-bacon (although Spam made a surprise appearance).

What was there was the scenery and the wildlife: stunning, as you would expect.

National Geographic doesn’t lie: the environment is literally awe-inspiring. But the people I met on the journey were equally memorable for their humour, joy, kindness and generosity. The elders’ and community members’ support of

the Gathering Strength Journey represents hope for their young people, even in the face of the latest threat to their traditional way of life.

The people who live on our west coast don’t live by the sea, they live the sea. It’s the foundation of their culture, it informs their lives in every conceivable way.

A tanker spill on the west coast would not only impact one of the world’s richest coastal ecosystems, it would decimate a millennia-old culture, grounded patiently in the seasons, that is finding its footing in an instant-access world. There is so much more to lose than just a pretty piece of real estate.

It’s symbolic, too. If we lose this, one of the planet’s last truly unique, unspoiled places, what’s left? What’s special? I’m pretty sure it’s not instabacon.

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| OCT/NOV‘11 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

Vector events

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l edit o rial@no rt hwo rd. c a

Winter solstice Imagine our forebears, slogging through winter, watching with trepidation as daylight hours (and their tempers) grew progressively shorter. Then one day the high priests observed a change in the sun’s transit. They crossed their fingers and checked their signs and yes, the next day the last light lingered a smidgen longer than the day before.

Woohoo! That smidgen was the signal the gals in the kitchen had been waiting for—the seasonal light at the end of the tunnel. The sun wasn’t going to just fade away and plunge them into eternal darkness after all! Winter would eventually find it’s way out! Not overnight, mind—it would get colder before it completed its turnaround—but at least they knew spring would return. What better excuse for a party than that?

Of course, good food takes time. The solstice feast takes place four days after the sun turns—a couple of days to confirm the good news and a couple more to slaughter a sheep, bake a few mince pies and decant the wine bladders.

Winter solstice celebrations (or Christmas, which took over the popular time slot) is a welcome bridge between the early-winter state of mind—the one that goes to work in the dark, lunches in the dim then comes home in the dark— and the bright light of sanity known as spring that shines off in the distance. But between December 25 and March 21 stretches a long shadow of time.

If you love winter, it’s heaven. If you can’t wait until the last of the snow finally slumps off your roof, it can be hell. It can make you sick with an affliction called cabin fever, well known to people of the North.

The Space Bar Valentino’s, Klondike Days, the Space Bar—call it what you will, this miraculous event is timed specifically to defuse the post-winter pre-spring

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What the heck is a vector event? Vector events are goings-on that act as bridges to get us from one state of being to another. Here are three standouts for the season:

It can make you sick with an affliction called cabin fever, well known to people of the North.

plague that is cabin fever. Last year, Smithers’ Klondike Days were especially cathartic; so much fun in fact that in anticipation of the next one, I had my costume ready for the 2012 event even before the ice broke on the river.

I was a bit premature. This year’s annual winter blow-out will not be a gold-digger extravaganza of song and dance and games of chance but a more galactically oriented event named The Space Bar. The post-Christmas blahs won’t have time to take root if one’s mind is engaged with the task of creating the funkiest extra-terrestrial pub-wear. Getting a designated driver for some of the out-of-town guests might be a challenge.

Enbridge opposition Solstice celebrations and a cabin-fever beater—

these two events offer ways to mediate between seasonally predictable states of mind. The ongoing Enbridge opposition is a vector event of a different sort.

It’s not just a reflection of how northerners feel about a threat to their way of life. Ultimately, it could bridge two entirely different mindsets: one that entertains itself with long drives to intergalactic space bars and armfuls of Christmas presents containing disturbing amounts of plastic... and the other which encourages respectful use of our non-sustainable resources and development of alternative, sustainable sources of energy. If we can find solutions that bridge that divide, we’ll really have a reason to celebrate. Like the priests on a solstice watch, perhaps we can mark this event as a turning point in how future events will N unfold.

www. no rthwo rd .ca

| DEC/JAN‘12 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

Granny’s not for sale

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

It has been said that those who are pushing for approval of the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline are so greedy they would sell their own grandmother. But, that is not fair to say. It’s not their grandmother they’re trying to sell.

The grandmother they’re trying to sell is old and fragile. She lives in the bush, and minds her own business. She doesn’t pay much in taxes. What is she worth, if not on the open market? A few cans of salmon? A couple of stories about berry picking? Pffft. Sell her! We can use the money.

Isn’t losing someone’s grandmother just the cost of doing business?

This ‘grandmother’ is the First Nations that live along the path of the pipeline.

Most of the arguments against the Northern Gateway Pipeline are made on the assumption that the pipeline will eventually leak, and not just once; and that an oil tanker will eventually rupture and oil will foul BC’s pristine shores. Enbridge cannot guarantee its pipeline won’t leak and we all know that if ships don’t fail, their captains can and do. As it’s been said many times: an oil spill is not a matter of if but when.

I’ve heard proponents from Alberta cheerfully claim, “Hey, we’re used to pipelines, you’ll get used to them, too! We even have them running through our back yards!” Most of Alberta is flat and unshakable but imagine the outcome if a freak accident occurred—say an oil tanker-truck careened off the highway and into one of those flat Alberta back yards and smashed a hole into one of those pipelines. If, by luck, only their vegetable garden was contaminated, the home-owner could shrug nonchalantly and pick up their lettuce from the local supermarket. If their entire back yard became unusable, the home-owners would curse their luck and move to another house with another back yard.

On the west coast of BC, mud slides and earthquakes aren’t freak occurrences; they could cause pipeline ruptures that would foul streams and rivers with long-term effects on associated watersheds. If super-tankers founder in our treacherous winter storms, oil would grease hundreds of kilometers of BC’s pristine shoreline ecosystem.

First Nation populations have lived on these lands for thousands of years, they can’t just pack up and find another back yard. Their culture, their spirituality, their history is embedded, some-

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times literally, in their territories. If their fisheries are decimated and harvestable plants and game animals poisoned they can’t just go the local grocer to replenish the foods that fuel their culture and feed their communities.

First Nation elders are reintroducing aboriginal youth to traditional ways in an effort to reduce the heartbreaking suicide rate. This hands-on cultural education of the younger generation gives them pride in their heritage so they can regain their strength. Interrupt that process with an oil spill and there may be nothing left to learn. By the time the land or sea is healthy again—which the Exxon Valdez experience suggests may be hundreds of years—the elders will have died and taken their knowledge with them.

Canada is still a young country, we can’t comprehend what it’s like to be rooted in a territory that our ancestors have lived on for millennia.

Is it fair to endanger such continuity in exchange for monetary benefit? Why not keep the oil in Canada and refine it here—use it instead of the oil we import for use in eastern Canada? Or refit the existing pipelines that run east and ship it out that way. Or keep it in the ground for future use.

Or redirect some of the billions that are spent to extract the bitumen into research and development into cleaner energy sources.

Enbridge proponents say that emotion doesn’t have a place in this argument. If someone was holding a double barrelled shotgun to your grandmother’s head in a game of Chinese roulette would you calmly say, excuse me a moment while I compile some logical reasons why she shouldn’t be the one staring down the barrel? Wouldn’t your hands shake a tad as you compiled your case?

Opponents of this pipeline can be forgiven an occasional bout of emotional reasoning. To their credit, the discourse has been eloquent, intelligent, respectful and firm. No one’s hands are shaking yet.

This isn’t a NIMBY situation, about possibly polluting someone’s back yard or spoiling property values. It’s about preserving a people’s culture, food security, spirituality. Which do we value more highly: profit margins or a people’s survival?

What is granny worth?

It doesn’t matter what granny’s worth. We don’t sell grandmothers. Do we?

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| FEB/MAR ‘12 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

Shoe-be-do-be-do...

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

Goodbye snow, and good riddance! I don’t miss the icy pompoms that glue themselves to the bottom of my jeans when I go for a walk around the yard. And I don’t miss the three-pound sweat boxes that get strapped onto the end of my legs for five months of the year. Yes, it’s finally time to throw the winter boots into a box at the bottom of the basement stairs and exchange them for tentoes-a-wiggling in the spring air. It’s time to bring on the sandals!

And no, it’s not too early for sandals. I wear sandals from the time the snow leaves the ground until it flies again in fall. Yes, I do get peculiar looks, but my feet are insensitive to the judgement of others. My feet are well tended, have some pretty polish on the nails and aren’t crusty or disgusting—so really, what’s the big deal? I like to feel the air sweep over my toes and around my arches and ankles. It’s refreshing.

At least I’m wearing something on my feet. When I was a kid growing up in the wilds around Prince George, I didn’t wear shoes much at all. I could dance barefoot under pine trees. Run for miles down gravel roads. Pop bottle caps with my big toes. It was heaven. But then I moved to Vancouver, where civilized society had its way with me and demanded I be shod summer as well as winter.

My calluses disappeared and soon I could detect a dime through three layers of socks. It made me soft.

Occasionally, I’m delighted to find a holdout from the old ways, a rough-grounded sole-mate. Many years ago, our friend Gavin played slow-pitch barefoot. I seem to recall that he had prehensile toes, but I may have manufactured that detail to embellish the memory. Being barefoot did limit his entry to the bar for after-practice drinks, however. And I swear that I’ve seen our editor, Paul Glover, darting around his fire-pit, feet naked as they were the day he was born.

Eventually, my feet travelled all the way from barefoot bliss and innocent sneakers to full-on status quo. When I worked for an advertising agency in Calgary (about the time of the last ice

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I had assumed my toes were permanently welded together and took it for granted they wouldn’t move as single entities ever again.

age), I wore four-inch heels to work. Every day. That was when I was a big-city gal who wore dress suits and lipstick and didn’t care if tiptoeing around on the balls of my feet would one day lead to shortened hamstrings and frozen toes. Just recently, it took three months of yoga before I could separate my pinky toes from the rest and wave them feebly on their own. I giggled because I had assumed my toes were permanently welded together and just took it for granted they wouldn’t move as single entities ever, ever again. The idea that individual tootsies could once again wave freely in the wind was kinda cool.

Now, in addition to the ubiquitous sandals, my non-snow-oriented footwear includes water shoes to protect my silky soles from barnacles and crab bites and those pointy little rocks that poke my tender insteps with their sharp extrudy bits. Man, I’ve gotten weak! I should run down to the gravel pit and do some laps sans shoes; build up a good slab of callus!

Who needs sandals anyway? Well, OK, for work…yes, I can see that…and maybe when I’m downtown—I wouldn’t want to give some tourists the wrong impression. But when I’m home and you come to visit, be warned! My feet will be naked. And my pinkies will be waving at you.

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www. no rthwo rd .ca

| APR/MAY ‘12 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

There’s something in the water

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l ed i to r ial@no rt hwo rd. c a

Be quicker with a dicker to wring out some mighty fine deals.

Residents of Telkwa’s Woodlands subdivision go garage-sale gung-ho, usually mid-spring. It’s like Halloween, but with bargains instead of candy; instead of a costume, bring small bills and change.

It doesn’t happen every year, probably because it takes a while for the stuff in people’s houses to age enough to become ‘yard saleable,’ but it makes the event even more welcome when it does happen.

This year, I scored an Arc’teryx backpack (for those hikes I plan to take when I get my knee fixed), a berry squisher (for those huckleberries I expect to fight the black bears for), and a stride ’n’ glide exercise contraption (to use while watching nature shows on TV). And all for only a couple of 20s and a couple of hours spent trolling the neighbourhood.

Sweat is wet.

Right now I am in full-on kayaking-preparedness mode. I asked my brother, the kinesiology student, to design an exercise program that would make me strong enough to lift my 55-pound kayak onto the roof of my car, have the endurance to paddle it for three days non-stop, and chase the bears from the prime beach-camping spots. I must have offended him as a child: his weekly fitness prescription includes six hours walking, two-three hours yoga, three-four hours rowing or cycling, plus two-three hours of weightlifting/cardio circuit-training. If I follow his advice, by the time you read this I’ll be able to juggle two kayaks while towing the RAV 4 with my teeth. I might even have developed a discernible gastrocnemius muscle.

For the walking portion of this program, I power up the Telkwa High Road, a five-kilometre loop from my house to the mailbox and back. I share my walks with bluebirds, red-winged blackbirds, eagles, ospreys, hawks, jays, woodpeckers, ducks, loons, plus the ubiquitous robins/crows/ravens, as

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Living here is exhausting. And that’s a good thing!

I find that there is no such thing as a quiet weekend or a take-it-easy week—and it’s not just me! Most of the people I know are so busy this time of year it can be a challenge to pin them down for the next event. Why is life so darn full?

It must be something in the water.

As for me, between getting in shape for kayak season, garage-sale-ing, and keeping up with Enbridge, I somehow find time for everything else—like jogging my kids’ memories (remember to flush), running a magazine (remember to breathe), and skipping chores (don’t forget the dishes are still soaking).

In my previous lives, exercise was done to look better; shopping involved fluorescent sunshine at maxi-malls; politics was boring and protests were scary. It was a pretty dry way to live.

Life here is decidedly juicy, if you know how to squeeze it.

well as moose, deer, foxes, horses, cats, dogs, bears, and fellow walkers I swear I didn’t know were my neighbours. I walk past a lake, fields, marshes, aspen forests, horse-and-cattle pasture, a bakery(!), a trailer court, a float-plane base, a provincial park, a cemetery, and assorted lake-front properties including, perhaps, Dick Cheney’s. (Well, rumour has it that ex-US vice-president Dick Cheney has property on the Telkwa High Road, and it could be on my end. I heard this rumour at the Enbridge Joint Review Panel hearings here in Smithers.)

Politics and protests: dive in, the water’s fine Funny, the things you hear at an Enbridge hearing.

Funny—but mostly inspiring, heartbreaking, touching, stirring, infuriating, loving. The

presenters are speaking to us in the peanut gallery as well as to the Joint Review Panel members, now that the Prime Minister has said he will override the panel’s decision if he feels like it. It’s become a show of solidarity, a powerful exercise in community building—strengthening the resolve of those who support our waters running free and clear for many generations to come.

Nowadays, I pay closer attention to politics than ever before. I enjoy shopping with my neighbours and try not to buy new when good used will do. And I try to minimize my energy consumption whenever possible, replacing non-renewable sources with super raw-muscle power!!! (still working on that).

It’s not easy, and it’s not always possible. I consider it a sweaty exercise in progress.

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Correction Some concern has been expressed that our story “The Upside of Going Downhill: Mountain Biking in Northern BC” (Northword, April/May 2012) caused some confusion concerning the management of the Pidherny Recreation Area and mountain biking programs. We apologize for the confusion, and would like to clarify this.

The Prince George Cycling Club is responsible for the development and maintenance of the Pidherny Trail system. Several cycling shops throughout the city support their efforts, as do many volunteers. Contact the club directly through its website for more information: http://www.pgcyclingclub.ca.

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|JUNE/JULY ‘12 | 7

Are you a traveller, or a tourist?

editorial

In Other Words

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

\What’s the difference, you say? The tourist has an itinerary, a destination, a goal. The traveller plays it by ear. For the tourist, travelling is a means to an end while for the traveller, the journey is what it’s all about.

A tourist likes to feel at home wherever they go.

That usually means a motel or well-appointed RV, with breakfast at Denny’s, lunch at McDonald’s and dinner cooked from Safeway groceries or a sit-down at Boston Pizza. It’s a cultural continuation, discovery by comparison.

The traveller is more adventurous—they’ll bunk at a hostel or camp in the wild; they’ll try the local restaurants and sample the local music. It’s cultural discovery by immersion.

Whether you’re a traveller or a tourist doesn’t really matter. You’ve heard the saying: make like a tourist in your own home town (it was likely me that said it). If you haven’t visited the tourist attractions before because, well, they’re for tourists.... get over it! Learn what the tourists are learning about where you live. What’s your impression of the impression they’re getting? Or, go big—get out of town and go to Haida Gwaii— you know you want to! It’s on everyone’s to-goto list, not just here but the world over. And it’s RIGHT THERE—just an inch or two to the left of us on the BC map!

But how about being a traveller in your own home town? Or anywhere in northern BC? Instead of blasting down the highway to points south, why not take an extra day (or week!) and turn off the highway to explore those backroads you always wondered about. Find out where they go. Turn left instead of right. Get lost, go find yourself. Be spontaneous!

Stop at that funky hotel in Endako or that cluster of old buildings in Vanderhoof. What’s the deal with the store in Decker Lake? Stop and inspect the shoe tree outside of Rupert or the gazillion little lakes along the way. You have a list, you know you do—places you always glance at through the window and puzzle at for a second every time you race by at 110 km/hr. Well, stop!

Give yourself permission to be curious. Be a traveller in your own backyard.

For example, just for a lark, my friend Sylvia hopped on the train from Smithers to Jasper, where she spent the night at a hostel. It was her first time at a hostel, and from the enthusiastic review it certainly won’t be her last. Along the way, she chatted with all manner of travellers and tourists alike.

When you’re playing tourist, consider the geography, the culture, the smells, tastes, light...

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Explore those backroads you always wondered about. Find out where they go.

Turn left instead of right. Get lost, go find yourself.

Pretend you’re in a different country—say, Peru, or Ireland— and you’re seeing it for the very first time. Take a picture. Take a few. Just this evening, as I was writing this, the sun was setting and the light was just so... I grabbed my camera, jumped in the car and zoomed out to farm land in Woodmere, just outside of Telkwa. I imagined it was New Zealand and marvelled at how bucolic it was. (If you see a person taking photos out the window as she’s driving, just stay out of her way. She has a deadline she’s happily avoiding.)

We’ve heard of arm-chair tourists, but is there such a thing as an arm-chair traveller?

I’m probably the biggest arm-chair tourist there is. If I can’t physically get away (thereby making

the roads a safer place), my thoughts will certainly find a way. Just picking up this issue and reading about the beaches is enough to give me a virtual suntan, and seeing our wildlife through a new Canadian’s eyes is rather fun. Being an arm-chair traveller is a bit tougher though, since the whole point of travelling is to experience the new first-hand, but I hope some of the articles you’ll find in this issue will inspire the traveller within.

Just remember the words of travel writer Bill Bryson: the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.

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| AUG / SEPT ‘12 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

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A warm start...

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l ed i torial@no rt hwo rd.c a

I sat across from the fireplace, keeping an eye on the fire to see if it was burning hot enough to leave it untended. It was touch-and-go—the flames were showy but were now dying down before a bed of coals could be created. I’d brought the logs in a few hours earlier—was the wood warm enough? I wondered.

I’ve heard people talk in the summer, about the number of forest fires dropping because the weather turned colder. Is this true? Does wood burn more reluctantly when it’s cold? At the time, I thought it silly, but now I wondered: could it be so? If true, I assumed that cold wood would burn less quickly than warm wood because more energy is used to heat the wood to the temperature of combustion. If only a finite amount of energy (heat from kindling fire) is available to heat the wood, and if the wood is cold (especially a big log), would warming the wood to room temperature give it a head start to make a better fire?

Well, I’m obviously not a scientist, so I googled the subject. It appears that either I’m the only person in the world that doesn’t know the answer to this question or I’m the only one who’s ever wondered, because I couldn’t find a single website that mentioned if the starting temperature of firewood mattered. I found that jet fuel burns better if it’s pre-heated, but wood? No one’s saying.

Left hanging by Google, I wandered back to my seat by the fire. As I watched the flames, I thought of this issue of Northword and of the many people in this region who are keeping an eye on the slow burn surrounding issues such as sustainable mining in general and the Northern Gateway pipeline in particular. In regards to the Enbridge line, we’ve been told that the Joint Review Panel is only interested in presentations of cold, hard facts. As with other resource-oriented projects, we’re told their review needs to be

driven by scientific data—no hot-headed or sentimental emotions, thank you, ma’am.

The logs shifted and opened up a path for the air to flow; new flames burst into life and the fire was on again!

In the same way that wood without oxygen does not a fire make, a debate without emotion is just a cold pile of facts. A good fire needs fuel and oxygen.

A good debate needs facts and emotion. Rub people the wrong way and you get sparks—friction causes heat and heat causes change: you can’t make a soufflé or forge iron without heat; popcorn is just corn without the pop. Heat is survival: light, warmth, sustenance.

Without fire and the resulting changes in our behaviour, we’d have just wandered out of our caves and off into the jaws awaiting us in the dark. The way we evolved was to light a fire in our intellect. The evolved human doesn’t mean the emotionless human—it means the human who can add intellect to emotion for a practical, academic or philosophical outcome. Intellect fuelled by emotion gives us passion and passion is what gets things done.

Now, getting back to those warm logs and the rest of this metaphor: to keep the heat on the debates to ensure sustainable, responsible resource management, we have to manage the combustion process. Always be informed; don’t be surprised by new situations—you’ll be more effective with a warm start.

And don’t go all combustible right away! You don’t want to spend too much energy at the outset in case you fizzle out of energy before you reach completion. Keep the fire burning, build a good base of coals, but pace yourself: keep some energy for that darkest hour before dawn when you’ll need your energy most.

You never know—it could be a long night.

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| DEC/JAN ‘13 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

Wait for it....

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

Ah, spring! The season of birth and revelation and renovation. Most of all, spring—around these parts anyway—is the season of......wait for it..... waiting.

Patience is what’s needed this time of year, the shoulder season between snowfalls and waterfalls. Patience is what’s needed when you see the sky reflected in mud-puddles for the first time in months, when you see lake water rise up and over slabs of rotting ice, when you hear the birds frisking in the bushes.

While you’re waiting, patiently, for the right time to begin your favourite warm-weather activities, you prepare. You dig out the hiking boots.

Uncover the kayaks and canoes. Rattle out the shovels and rakes and hoes. You take warm-up walks in the hills and small, cold paddles at the lake’s edge and munch up the top layer of the garden so it can warm up a bit faster and be ready a day or two earlier. Nothing comes fast enough even though you know the longer the days, the shorter your wait.

It will all come in its own sweet time.

Now, a word about something else coming in its own sweet time: if you’ve been waiting for Northword’s next edition since January, your patience will be rewarded here, too. Not to worry, the Northword Magazine you know and love isn’t changing or going anywhere—quite the opposite, actually. As in birth, a contraction precedes the big push—which is why you didn’t see a Northword edition in February/March: we’ve been gathering our resources for the new edition and a new addition—the new edition being this issue, April/May (aka the Spring issue); technically, the new addition is not really an addition, but an expansion.

Spring is also the renovation season, right?

Our expansion is our website: www.northword. ca. It’s been with us as long as we’ve been around (since 2004!) and it’s been a handy way to check out our writers’ contributions and a small selection

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of photos plus our regional Events Calendar which is used quite extensively. As our print readership has grown we’ve come to realize that Northword readers have so much to share that we just don’t have room for it all in print—by expanding our website we’re providing a community space where we can share what our neighbours across the north are seeing/hearing/thinking/feeling.

As a result, as of this writing, our website’s been turned inside-out and upside-down to make room for more. After April 1, we’ll have a brand-new website, designed by our talented friends downstairs at Spark Design.

In addition to a gorgeous makeover (it looks pretty spiff!), all the good stuff from our printed pages will be there (articles, photos, columns) plus a Life section that invites reader contributions with lots of new categories. You’ll be able to comment on stories, post letters to the editor,

add photos, follow new Northword blogs, regional books, musical events and performing arts, northern recipes, travel tips—and who knows what else will find its way in. Plus, you’ll be able to check out the CBC news feed for provincial/ national/international news. Like spring shoots and leaves, new categories and sections will pop up unexpectedly. You never know what you’ll find at www.northword.ca.

Unfortunately, one thing you will have to wait a wee bit longer to see is our new online Events Calendar; it’s still under construction so is absent from this print edition but will be back as usual for June/July.

In the meantime, we’ll continue to patiently wait—for the soil to warm, the lakes to thaw, the mountain passes to open up. And for www.northword.ca.

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| APR/MAY ‘13 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

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Decisions, decisions....

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l ed i torial@no rt hwo rd. c a

Ah, the shampoo aisle. Some days I can be found here, pacing the row, trying to read the small print without my glasses, contemplating my options.

Do I want my hair smooth, shiny, fluffy, or curly?

Clarified or volumized? Infused with coconut, argon, keratin or silk? Do I want shampoo that’s sulphate-free, hypoallergenic, non-comedogenic?

Stock boys dolly around me as I stand twiddling my hair, wondering why we have to have so many choices.

If I’m going to spend precious time deciding, it should for a product that will give me a good return on that time spent. Where do I find the shampoo that will mow my lawn and sort the kids’ laundry? Since that shampoo apparently doesn’t exist and I get overwhelmed choosing between those that do, I sometimes simply tuck my hair behind my ears, and give up and go home, defeated. It makes me want to wash my hair of the whole mega-choice business.

Sometimes life is like the shampoo aisle, especially life in the summer in this part of BC. Our choices for summer fun, if we dwell on them too long, can leave us twiddling our hair, paralyzed and wondering which is the best use of our precious summer time.

Where do I find the shampoo that will mow my lawn and sort the kids’ laundry?

Should we bike? Mountain or touring? Hike? Ridges or valleys?

Barbecue? Charcoal or gas? Or maybe a picnic is more our style?

Should we kayak or canoe—in the river, lake, or ocean? Or boat—sail, motor or ferry?

Fortunately, we live in proximity to such a wealth of recreational options that it’s barely a stretch to say: Do it all! As long as the sun shines and the time and pocketbook allow, there are so many options to choose from that there are no wrong answers.

In this issue, we offer a few options for your perusal: Matt J Simmons’ roundup of northern music festivals is back so you can plan your magical, mystical, musical camping tour. You’ll probably find yourself aligned with a group (or groups) of like-minded festivalophiles whom you’ll come to recognize from venue to venue. Beware: campfire parties may ensue!

If mystical quiet and nature camping is more your style, check out Al Lehmann’s piece on the

Zen-like peace of Campania Island on the north-central coast.

Reading Al’s piece, I’m struck by how exotic it sounds and how I want to be there now.

And if you just want to dive right into the dirt, and start processing the fruits and vegetables from your garden, you’ll really dig Norma Kerby’s article on dehydrating fruits and vegetables. I have tasted Norma’s dried apples, tomatoes and zucchini chips and I tell you, they are intensely delicious nibbles of summer, ripe for snacking at any time of the year (as long as they last, that is!). I’m so glad she’s sharing her tips with you here!

In addition to the options in this issue, you’ll find a good selection of summer-fun options at www.northword.ca. Just click on the Recreation menu drop-down, or research our archives under The Magazine drop-down > Past Issues. No one ever need be bored here!

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| JUNE / JULY ‘13 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

If you have miles to go before you sleep, you must live in northern BC

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

Here, we don’t sleep in one room, in one house, in one town. We sleep right across the region. We usually lay our heads down in our own beds, but it’s just home base. Camping, family reunions, school field trips, competitions: on any given night we could be bunking down anywhere from Port Clements to Valemount.

My son, Teo, who has slept on his fair share of art gallery floors on high school trips, has recently been bitten by the backcountry hiking bug and he’s started to collect the gear he needs to head out into the hills for some overnight adventures.

I gave him my two-person tent, he bought a hiking backpack and now he’s considering which sleeping gear to buy.

When I first tented on the side of a mountain, I slept on the tent floor, in my Kmart sleeping bag, curled around a large rock. Oh, did I say “slept”? I meant to say “shivered.” The ground sucked away my body heat quicker than I could generate it. As a heat sink, the rock failed miserably. I promised myself I would never again set up camp in the dark and to never, ever again “sleep” on the ground with just a millimetre of plastic between me and the heat-sucking earth.

To a sleep addict like me, self-inflating, thermal shield mats that fit neatly into most backpacks are the best camping invention ever. But they’re not just for backpackers.

As northerners*, we often find ourselves facing a variety of floors right before bedtime—tent floors, as mentioned, but also basements, gymnasiums, living rooms, campers, even SUVs. Sometimes, a motel just isn’t in the plan or the budget. But, have mat, will travel—it makes the gym floor so much comfier and puts a welcome layer between you and the sneezy old carpet or cold concrete.

I bought three of the largest two-inch-thick mats for the kids to take on school trips and a couple of the thinner, slimmer kind for backpacking. The big ones come in especially handy for family camping trips. They roll up tightly for stashing and, unrolled, butted up against each other, make a super-mattress so no one has to roll off onto the floor.

In the good old days, when we camped with kids, we would take two or three three-inch-thick foamies. While they are very cushy to sleep on, they don’t fold well. The camping gear took up the back left corner of the mini-van and we occupied our seats; the rest of the space was floor-to-ceiling foamies. On most trips, the children couldn’t sit up straight: not because they were children but because their heads were pushed forward by the foamies unfolding out from where they were stuffed behind the seats. Good thing some of the kids were short.

After the foamy era, I thought I’d be smart and buy a couple queen-sized heavy-duty air mattresses, guaranteed not to leak, ever. They’d roll up tight, be easy to inflate, and keep us off the ground at night. I’d had bad experiences with air mattresses before—inevitably, they’d leak, leaving

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us to heave up and down every time someone rolled over, ultimately depositing us on the cold, cold ground (or basement floor) by morning. Not wanting to revisit the cold-sucking-ground theme, I thought a lifetime warranty against leaks would promise a good night’s sleep but—like that rock on my hiking trip—it was too hard to keep. The lifetime guarantee was attractive—not because I was worried about getting my money back, but because I thought it was indicative of quality.

Like the sleeping experience it provided, all the mattress guarantee delivered was a pain in the butt. (Just out of curiosity, I wonder what an air mattress—non-leaking!!—would be like if you added a touch of helium to the mix?)

Now, I should clarify: when I refer to a “selfinflatable,” I don’t mean the type of mattress you inflate yourself, such as the afore mentioned and

Erra ta

much hated air mattress. A self-inflatable mat is the kind that inflates itself—all you have to do is unroll it and watch it puff up like magic. Its natural state is open, that’s how you store it. You only roll it up to pack it when it’s time to go. They are much different than air mattresses in construction. And vastly better in performance.

So if you have many miles before you sleep, you must be out exploring our wonderful backyard. If a regular mattress isn’t in your dreams, just roll out a self-inflatable. It makes getting your ZZZs easy. *Many Northword readers who came (or returned) here from Vancouver or the Lower Mainland refer to the region between Haida Gwaii and Jasper as “northern BC.” The reference is cultural, not geographical. Most of us came here from “down south”; therefore, we consider ourselves “northerners.”

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Photo confusion: In the previous issue of Northword, two photos in Al Lehmann’s Campania Island: The Beauty of Emptiness were incorrectly attributed to Lehmann. Photos of salmon fry in McMicking Inlet and a kayaker near Mount Pender were, in fact, snapped by photographer Warren Wilson. We regret the error.

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| AUG / SEPT ‘13 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

Work to live...or live to work?

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l ed i to rial@no rt hwo rd. c a

Obviously.

When Fred took the stage and saw the kids bouncing in their seats in the first row his eyebrows raised up mightily. After a quick consult with the other band

On the African plains, antelope know that when the lions slink out of sight, there’s trouble on the way, and they are being hunted.

There is a modern equivalent

members, it was decided that in deference to the raucous university crowd that had also paid to see them they would not change their rocky, raunchy and extremely loud musical line-up, but instead kindly rounded up some ear plugs for the kids.

Thankfully, due to a combination of stimulation overload and sensory shutdown, the boys slept through most of the show, with their Fred Head buttons and earplugs in place, curled up next to me on one of the ArtSpace couches.

Jim followed his dream and made it a success.

In a typically northern way, he knew what he wanted and worked it. He doesn’t just facilitate other people’s creativity; his business creativity is a work of art in its own right.

But sometimes, if your lifestyle is your dream, you’ll work at whatever it takes to make it.

On a misty late-August day in Port Clements, I stopped by Harmonie’s Place for lunch. It’s a cozy place, built in 1911 to accommodate the local newspaper. Today, it’s home to the café and monthly music coffee houses.

I ordered the mushroom cheeseburger. Kazamir, husband of Harmonie, informed me that I could indeed have the mushroom cheeseburger, right after he went to the market to get some fresh

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There are two types of modern day pioneer that make their way here in north-central BC. There are the kind whose work is their life and the kind whose life is their work.

In his column, Rob Budde praises two of Prince George’s literary heroes, one of whom—Jim Brinkman—I’ve known for many years and is a fine example of the first type. In Char Toews’ column, she smacks her lips over some of her favourite places to eat, including a spot on Haida Gwaii called Bud’s Diner in Massett. I ate a great breakfast at Bud’s this past August, but that’s not the story I want to tell—it’s about the people who run a little place called Harmonie’s Place just down island in Port Clements, people who exemplify the second type. But first, let me tell you about Jim. I knew Jim when he lived in Smithers before he sold Interior Stationery and packed himself off to Prince George in the late ’90s. He bought a huge building that had previously housed a Danish furniture store and installed Books & Company, a funky independent bookstore with a little coffee shop called Café Voltaire. I had also just moved to PG from Smithers and was publishing Forte Magazine—similar to Northword in content, but focused on the Prince George area. Our first edition featured a story on Jim’s new art gallery space that he was putting the final touches on for opening in June 1999.

In the Forte article Jim said, “I always have these visions of what I want, and I end up trying to put it together. The vision doesn’t really change…I’ve had this idea for the bookstore for the last 15 or 20 years. I always wanted the coffee bar incorporated into it, a jazz club in the basement would be nice too, but this little gallery project is basically the next step toward the original vision.”

His “little gallery project,” now called ArtSpace, would feature a big open showroom in the middle that would serve as the gallery. All around the showroom were satellite rooms that could serve as offices and/or studios for working artists. Forte was located in one of those offices, right over top of Café Voltaire. I was pregnant for a portion of my time there and, to this day, the warming smell of chai tea evokes morning sickness memories.

In addition to a working gallery, Jim also envisioned using the space as a performance venue.

Mark Perry played ArtSpace many times (in fact, he’s playing there again, Oct. 5) and he was always a favourite, as was Fred Eaglesmith, another early headliner. The first time Fred played ArtSpace, we brought our boys, who were then about five and seven, expecting the same folky-style delivery we listened to at home. We’d never experienced Fred Eaglesmith in concert.

mushrooms. He was sole cook/dishwasher/waiter that day while Harmonie was in Smithers getting the kids swimming lessons—she was camping with the kids at Tyhee Lake, about a kilometre from my house. (It is a weirdly small world!)

Kazamir sprinted across the street, brought back the mushrooms, thawed out the hamburger to make the patty, sliced the onions and put them on to fry, and apologized because he didn’t have time to make the buns fresh as he usually does.

As he cooked, he chatted about what an amazing place Port Clements is to raise a family, the state of the local economy, the relative personalities of the island communities... and his wife Harmonie who, it turns out, is more than just a café owner.

She’s also a musician. Paramedic. Volunteer firefighter. Canadian Ranger. Artisan (knitted toques, etc). Did I mention she has six kids including a toddler? And Kazamir, much as he touts his wife’s many virtues, is—as far as I could tell—just as crazy-busy as she, doing whatever it takes to stay where they love.

By the way, that mushroom cheeseburger was the best I’ve ever eaten. Juice-running-downyour-chin delicious.

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| OCT/NOV ‘13 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

False Pretences

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

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This afternoon, I was pouring hot water for tea when my dog started barking. Out the kitchen window, I saw the neighbourhood deer standing squarely in the middle of our tiny lawn, facing the patio door at which Dog was barking furiously.

Deer, who was waiting for Dog to notice her—and unafraid because she’d done this many, many times before—took two steps toward the door and extended her nose toward the noise. Dog, who doesn’t understand that Deer is an expert dog-button-pusher, barked off to a different window. Disappointed, Deer withdrew a step. Dog bounded back; Deer re-engaged and stepped forward. Changing tactics, Dog raced up the stairs; perhaps she thought she could ambush Deer from an open bedroom window.

With Dog shrieking at her mutely through the glass, Deer mentally shrugged and moseyed off toward my dormant lilacs and berry bushes; with Dog safely contained inside, she could browse on any juicy yard buds she wanted. She didn’t count on me, though. I opened the door and showed her what Hyah! meant. She stood and stared at me, wondering why I was able to address her so.

It wasn’t until I was a bush-length away that she

realized I meant business. Insulted, she took a step back. I persisted. She turned uncertainly. I persisted more. She bounced off into the aspens. I bounced inside, pleased at my power.

Too late as always, Dog thumped down the stairs. Now that Deer was gone, I put Dog out on her lead so she could sniff and bristle at opportunities lost.

Dog isn’t allowed out without a lead, you see, because Deer would entice her to play and, doggish creature that she is, Dog would follow her deep into the woods. She would eventually return, a conservation officer on her tail waving a fine for me, the owner of this deer-harassing dog.

Creatures pretending to be something they are not are numerous in this neck o’ the woods.

In this case, the deer is an interloper that stimulates a territorial reaction in the dog. She also promises to be a tasty tidbit should the dog ever be lucky enough to get close enough to take a bite.

She’s a creature that should be wary of dogs, and flees at the first whiff, never mind a woof!

But this deer is a poseur. Far from haplessly wandering into the dog’s yard and then fleeing at the first warning, she brazenly steps up to the

gate and pushes it open, then waits for the dog to notice. She knows the dog will be furious that she’s there, but she doesn’t care. She knows she’s safe.

That dog can’t get her. The dog’s exit is blocked by the door, and the ideology that prevents the door from being opened. The deer enjoys provoking the dog’s impotent, raging response. Confirming the dog is powerless, the deer feels free to wander over and eat the yard greenery, at least until one with the power to open the door does so and chases her off.

Deer are cute and all but I much prefer my dog.

Ideology I have to live with, my dog I love to live with. The deer, well, I’d like them better if they didn’t eat the greenery that I depend on for a) sustenance and b) aesthetics. They can hang out in their own forests, provide entertainment for wildlife aficionados and meat for wildlife eaters.

I just don’t like them in my back yard, provoking my dog and messing with my stuff.

Shoo deer. Go back to the woods where you belong.

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| DEC 13/JAN 14 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

What colour is happiness?

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l ed i tor ial@no rt hwo rd. c a

Blue is the colour of happiness.

In 1908, Maurice Maeterlinck of Belgium wrote L’Oiseau Bleu (The Bluebird of Happiness). In this Nobel Prize-winning play, the son and daughter of a poor woodcutter are sent out by a fairy to search the world for the Bluebird of Happiness. On their quest, they learn to respect their environment and cherish their elders, and discover that life’s greatest joy is found in the journey, not the destination, the search, not the reward. Ultimately, material happiness can’t compare to the warmth and happiness to be found in one’s own home.

Of course, I only learned of Maeterlinck’s play when I started to research bluebirds for this piece.

My pleasure in seeing bluebirds is pure and simple, but I must say that reading the moral of this story adds to my happiness—as any ideology that conforms to my own beliefs is wont to do.

We’re all about respecting our environment and cherishing our elders. As our readers know, travelling is fun, interesting, mind-expanding, but even though the journey is the most interesting part of the trip, the best place to unpack is home, making it the exception to the rule about journeys and destinations.

The colour of unhappiness? I don’t know; does news have a colour?

The news is usually on in my car or on the TV, online forums, Facebook feeds and e-newsletters.

It constantly alerts me to potential threats to our environment, that access to healthcare is under attack, jobs are either scarce or of the wrong kind, quality education is either too hard to find or too expensive to afford. Marinating my poor adrenal glands in a media-fed stew of global climate change, arctic vortexes and 100-year droughts, mysterious oil leaks and fracking earthquakes, exploding oil cars, genetically modified whoknows-what’s-next, and close encounters with rogue asteroids—well, it can take a toll on one’s sense of humour.

And then, a bluebird. A bluebird is just the ticket to get me off the depression train and onto a flight

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Driving home from work I travel the back road; it’s long and straight with fallow fields fringed with forest on either side. The way rises ahead of me, disappearing in the distance as it turns a corner at the top of the far-off hill. Today, the sun is warm, the sky is wide open, the radio—and the news—is off.

Suddenly, I glimpse a flash on the upside of the wide ditch: a brilliant swatch of blue sky skips and swoops in the air along the fence line. Then another! And another! Either the sky is falling… or the bluebirds are back.

to hope.

This issue of Northword is positively full of positivity. Oh sure, you’ll read about some of the issues we have in the North surrounding airshed quality, recycling and food security, but in those stories you’ll also see how those issues are being addressed. Plus, you can learn where the wild things are (bear-watching, anyone?), how to make your own cheese (confess, you’ve always wanted to), and—in Brian Smith’s column, On the Fly, our newest addition to Northword—get tips on flyfishing our northern rivers.

And if you want to go straight to hope, go to

Greg Horne’s article on energy alternatives: How three innovative communities are re-thinking energy. You’ll learn about northern communities that are heating with biomass or bacteria, and converting trashed plastic to oil. It’s amazing, heartening stuff: almost as good as the first bluebird of spring.

To learn more about the lovely mountain bluebird, check out the article by John Franken.

And turn the news off, for a little while.

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| APR/MAY 14 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

Ants in your pants

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l edit o rial@no rt hwo rd. c a

Work the garden: Those who know me know that I am not even going to pretend to know what to suggest here.

All I know is it involves dirt, bugs and probably bunnies—in my pretend garden, anyway.

Go outside and play: You have your bug spray and your bear spray and your sun spray and, come the weekend, nothing will get in your way of getting to that good outdoor fun: not work or chores or the garden… well, the garden might pose an obstacle. So delegate. Get a garden sitter. Or make a very large salad to go.

Entertain visitors: If they’re from out-of-town, and by that I mean from the city, be sure to match their interests to what’s available. Take my sister, Louise, for example: after her last visit, she threatened to push me off a mountain. My city sister, who introduced

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Welcome to Junely, when we at Northword get all al fresco and touristy. We’re always happy to toot our region’s horn, it’s just that at this time of year it’s an imperative; we can’t help it. We point our faces out the window, sunshine touches our cheeks and bam! Ants in our pants.

Not literally of course, although last summer was a different story: the number of ants, gnats, wasps, caterpillars, spiders and/or moths (depending where you live) was ridiculous. No, these ants in the pants get stirred up every year around this time in response to climate change: it goes from cool to hot. Spring to summer. Indoors to outdoors. Boredom to joy.

It’s not just us Northword types. Admit it: you’re affected by this, too. What do you do when you just can’t sit still? Work is torture, Monday is an eternity away from Friday, 9 is a millennium away from 5, and every rainy day pushes the beach to the other side of the galaxy. When the sun comes out, we become solar-powered Energizer bunnies, hopping around outdoors like it was speed-dating season.

Bunnies with ants in our pants, that’s what we are. What is to be done (after work is finished, of course)? Our options include, but are not limited to, 1) work the garden, 2) go outside and play and 3) entertain visitors.

me to sushi before it was trendy and had never hiked a day in her life, was, shall we say, surprised when I sprung our weekend plans on her—a group hike-camp up the boulder field on the back side of Hudson Bay Mountain. After much to-doing, we all got off to a late start, which resulted in our setting up camp in the dark, and sharing cheese and oranges while being teased by water running away in the distance. A lineup of mosquitos, silhouetted by the full moon, cued up for dinner along the edge of our tent door.

After a night of pretending to sleep curled up in our respective boulder holes, we woke to discover we had camped in a dry creek bed. After we relocated next to the stream, we (not Louise) left for a day hike to explore higher elevations. I recall

looking back at her as she sat, wrapped up in her sleeping bag atop a giant square boulder, watching us with glittering eyes.

I confess, I did exaggerate when I said she threatened to push me off the mountain. What she actually said was, “It’s a good thing you didn’t go near the edge, ’cause I would have pushed you off.”

She’s coming for another visit this weekend, just 20 years later. I wonder what we’ll do for fun this time. Odds are, it won’t involve ants or bunnies or boulders. Wine, definitely. Maybe I can get her into a kayak… I probably shouldn’t press my luck.

What will it be for you this summer my fellow bug-bugged batch of bunnies? Whatever it may be, bound joyfully into the sun and don’t look back— the long stretch of summer awaits.

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| JUNE/JULY 14 | 7

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The sweet, simple life: bikes, tomatoes and putting down roots

editorial

In Other Words

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l ed i torial@no rt hwo rd. c a

“I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.”

- Henry David Thoreau If there is one through-line in this issue of Northword it surely reflects the quote above: at its heart, it’s about our search for simplicity, and for that which is necessary and real. We don’t get into how to “simplify the problem of life” because, so far as I can see, life isn’t a problem. The act of simplification—now that could be a problem, but one that’s not too great to tackle.

As our bookkeeper will tell you, I’m not a mathematician, but I am pretty good at adding two and two to get five. That’s a real skill, and if I could figure out how to make it work with money, I’d bottle it and probably give it away. It’s all about getting the whole to exceed the sum of the parts,

and it’s simpler than it sounds.

For example, two people, two bicycles, one Haida Gwaii highway. It should be fun, good exercise, a nice holiday. Simple. I know several people who’ve taken this trip and I know for a secondhand fact that it is so much more than four wheels and two raincoats. It’s magic. Everyone should do it. Everyone. OK, maybe not everyone. If you’re a bit flabby or have bad knees, take the car. Drive slow. Pull over, let people pass. Smell the seaweed, dodge the little deer, eat some crab. Enjoy the bejeezus out of it.

Here’s another example: tomatoes. My dear tomato benefactors give me tomatoes every year: the yellow cherry tomatoes that taste like summer sun feels (thanks Hermann!) and dried tomatoes that snack like sliced candy (thanks Norma!). This year, I hope to lessen their tomato-giving burden by growing some of my own. Do the imperial math: nine tomato plants, 20 pounds of dirt, a few ounces of plastic (to keep off the pounds of aphids the rains knock down from the trees) and gallons and gallons of water. Turn on the sun and presto!

I’m optimistic that it will all add up to the simple pleasure of baskets of gorgeous homegrown

tomatoes. Maybe this year, I can be a tomato fairy and give unto others what they cannot grow unto themselves. What does tomato joy weigh?

Of course, it’s still early. I still have time to fail.

But at least this year I’m giving it a good go and, next year, I’ll read my notes from this year and the result will be even better. The process will be simplified, and I will know more of what is necessary (and not). I will learn the truth of tomatoes and the first steps toward vegetable self-sufficiency.

What else do we have in this issue besides cycling and agriculture? The simple pleasures of an alpine garden and the simple happiness of sighting a whale—and telling about it. The truth of the Tseax volcanic eruption in the Nass and early BC immigrants. The necessity of learning more about LNG and salmon beds and giant bugs caused by climate change. We have apple trees that have been climbed and ridges waiting to be hiked, steelhead to catch and First Nations landculture to learn about.

“Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.” We’ve got some great places to start.

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| AUG/SEPT 14 | 7

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Ten years already? We couldn’t have done it without you!

editorial

In Other Words

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l edit or ial@no rt hw ord. c a

Light the candles and roll out the cake: Northword Magazine is celebrating its 10th anniversary as BC’s top read! It’s an anniversary rather than a birthday because we’re celebrating a relationship—many relationships, actually.

Some members of our community have been with us since the beginning. One, our designer Sandra Smith, has been with Northword even before it was Northword—she started at Connections Magazine, the creation of Phillipa Beck in 1997 (who now keeps us all bendy at Full Circle Yoga here in Smithers). Phillipa established Connections across the region as the voice of an eclectic, earthy, energetic northern lifestyle.

In 2004, Connections was reborn as Northword Magazine under a new owner, Lottie Wengelin.

Her vision was athletic and outdoorsy, with a newsier take on northern events. I came to work for Lottie in November 2005 as a part-time sales rep. One day she breezed into the office and proclaimed, “I’m getting a divorce, moving back to Sweden and selling the magazine. Do you want to buy it?” I said, “Hell, no!” and went home to

laugh about the funny thing that happened at work that day.

So it was that in April 2006, Northword shifted gears again and over the next few months became the magazine you see today. Each owner-publisher brings different perspectives on what makes northern living special. My take is reflected in the stories you see in our pages.

I love living here, in the special region that is “north” of all that is southern BC. Our writers love it here, too, as do our readers. Amenity migrants, we are. We don’t live here to work; we work to live here. As a result, we’re pretty keen to learn about our region: our neighbours and our recreational options, our history. Our future is a hot topic as well, so we try to include a bit of background on issues that affect this place we love.

Many individuals have contributed to the Northword effort over the years—too many to mention by name. Presently, in addition to our stalwart designer, we have writers (dozens), editors (2), proofers (so many!), sales people (3), distributors (4 primary, many volunteers), book-

keepers (1), plus the folks at Spark Design, BC Web, International Web Express and Bandstra Trucking, as well as our distribution outlets (over 200).

And then there are our advertisers. We bring you, our readers, to them, and in return they make it possible for us to bring Northword to you.

Our advertisers are our only source of income so if you like us, please like our advertisers too. Their support is infinitely valuable. Many have been as faithful as our readers, having stayed with us since the beginning (some have been with us since Connections!).

But, the relationship we want to celebrate most is the one we have with you. One of my biggest joys of publishing Northword happens on delivery day when people see me coming with an armload— nothing is as affirming as having someone grin at you and say, “I love your magazine! Can I have one?” before you even get in the door.

Let’s keep the relationship going! Let us know what you’re thinking: you never know—we might be on the same page.

Happy 10th, Northword! Here’s to many more.

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| OCT/NOV 14 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

Enough with the semantics already.

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

Now that winter has arrived and put me in my place—which would be in my big blue chair in front of the fire—I have time to contemplate northern life. On this cold, dark day, while waiting for some snow to brighten up the place, I have come to the conclusion that…

You know how sometimes after you’ve read a word a few times it stops making sense? You’ve stared at it so long that its symbolic content has leached out, leaving a useless blot of random letters? This just happened to me with the word place. Here, try it for yourself: Place. Placeplaceplaceplaceplace… place. Place.

Place. P-llaay-ss. Has its meaning dissolved for you yet?

Here are a few definitions to help bring it back: The point in space where you keep your etchings, as in, “Your place or mine?”

The locale where your geographical sentimentality resides, as in, “There’s no place like home.”

Your position in hierarchical society, as in, “She sure put me in my place.”

Your mind’s favourite destination, as in, “I’m going to my happy place.”

And, of course, your spot in the universe, as in, “I lost my place.”

You can also verb it, as in, “Place your trust in me,” or “I can’t place your face.”

Place is a mighty word loaded with a multitude of significant symbolisms. Even so, repeated too often, it can become just another mouthful of plosives, fricatives and diphthongs.

It’s intriguing that such a fundamental word can so easily dissolve into meaninglessness. This

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phenomenon is called “semantic satiation.” (The Urban Dictionary describes semantics as, “the study of discussing the meaning/interpretation of words or groups of words within a certain context; usually in order to win some form of argument.”

In my dictionary, satiation is defined as “being full of it.”)

Curiously, semantic satiation seems to affect not just hapless individuals but also whole populations. Repeat certain words or phrases in the media enough times and people will eventually start to disassociate their sounds from their meanings.

With enough repetition, words loaded with symbolism (such as democracy, transparency, world-class, consent) become verbal fluffs, whiffles of air that merely hint at their origins. At such times, it’s wise to hold one’s nose and reassess what’s really being said. The same talking points, cycled ad infinitum, will eventually cause the reader’s eyes to glaze over, with the information going in one eye and out the other. Clever, if that’s what you want.

There you go: semantic satiation, your concept for the day.

Bonus concept: The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon,* otherwise known as “frequency illusion.”

You’ve probably experienced this one too: after experiencing a new concept or getting a new thing, you then see it everywhere. If you become pregnant, suddenly everyone is pregnant. If you have a pipeline, soon everyone has a pipeline.

How is this possible?

It’s a two-part process: the first part is selective attention—what you unconsciously look for, you will inevitably see. Then, confirmation bias kicks in, affirming your belief that the thing you’re seeing, now that you’ve looked, has magically appeared everywhere. Things like the phrase “confirmation bias,” which co-incidentally (really!) also appears in Hans’ cartoon on this page. You can be pretty sure it’ll come again soon to a place place place near you.

*Coined by a chap after he heard the name Baader-Meinhof, an ultra-left-wing German terrorist group, twice in 24 hours.

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| DEC ‘14 / JAN ‘15 | 7

editorial

In Other Words

hans saefk ow

On Mud Month, planting seeds, and watching things grow

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l edit o rial@no rt hwo rd. c a

Ah, April: AKA Mud Month, when all that white turns to brown. Mercifully, it’s followed by May, when all that brown turns to green. This landscape fashion show designed for us courtesy of the House of Spring.

The melt water moving below ground stimulates in me a ridiculous need to stand in a fallow field, preferably in the sunshine and naked to the ankles. There, in the dirt, I can practically feel the pushing and shoving as roots root and shoots shoot and worms worm their way through it all.

If I dig my toes in deep enough, maybe I’ll tickle Mother Nature in the ribs.

No wonder my floors are dirty.

Which brings us to spring cleaning.

This behaviour is part of the recovery that happens after your cabin fever breaks—it starts when the last ditch-snow melts and exposes all the junk and plastic corruption that’s accumulated under the snow since fall. This accretion inspires a ferocious focus on winter dirt in our homes, at work, even our car. The pursuit of spring cleanliness can become obsessive: Scrubbing. Dusting.

Sorting. Garage-sale-ing. Swap-shedding. Even

the cursed ants are spring cleaning, shoving a winter’s worth of ant poop out their little ant holes. Bees got nothin’ on ants being busy.

If you’re an avid gardener, then you’re already busy as a...n ant. You’ve got green things sprouting out in little peat pots on your sunniest windowsills or outdoors, planted under cover. Not a gardener? You can still be busy anticipating their fresh produce that is (or soon will be) available at the local farmers’ markets: fiddleheads, asparagus, spinach, lettuce, radishes (radishes, roasted, are a revelation!).

These farmers’ markets are a testament to the fact that this is a fecund time of year. Pregnant friends waddle, mommas with babies coo, and flocks of wee ones run around the farmers’ market like lambs on a frolic. Our local demographic appears to be skewing younger.

And, you know what they say about “all work and no play.” Work-life balance and all that.

Summer is coming and you must plan your precious time wisely. When everything is cleaned and planted and watered and birthed, be sure to slice off a few juicy days here and there to chase

your fancy. (What’s yours? Fishing? Cycling?

Hiking? Camping?)

For me, summer is about kayaking, so in spring I haul the kayak up from the basement and out onto the lawn, where I can see it, and the gear gets moved to the back of the SUV. The kayak saddle stays on my car year-round, not because I may need to make a Baja run in January, but because it reminds me of hot summer days hanging out with the loons on the lake or the possibility of an ocean-kayaking trip on Haida Gwaii. Having these things visible reminds me that anticipation is at least half the fun! And April and May are all about anticipation.

Summer fun isn’t the same fun you get from hanging out on a tropical beach for a week in the winter—that’s more like therapy. A summer adventure in northern BC is more of a personal investment: enrichment by way of quality deposits into your memory bank.

Plant the seed of your summer fun now and then sit back and watch it grow. Just like everything else this time of year.

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APR / MAY ‘15

| 7

editorial

In Other Words

The three Rs of pest control

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l ed i to rial@no rt hwo rd. c a

Reframe Take ants and aphids: Ants dig aphids because aphids ooze delicious honey-pee that makes everything sticky and mildewy-black and disgusting. But birds chow down on ants and aphids like kids on cupcakes at a birthday party.

Birds eat ’em like candy, so if you like birds, you’ve got to learn to love ants and aphids. Reframe how you think of them—not as miniature aliens and their vacuous sap-slaves, but as plentiful, free bird food. If loving them is not in your emotional repertoire, then consider this: Chickens eat them too, and we eat chickens. Reframe it as vengeance by vector.

We can also reframe how we think of spiders (my personal challenge). In tropical climes, bathroom geckos eat bugs that wander into the loo. Of course, I don’t have a bathroom gecko, but I do have a bathroom spider. Overcoming my shudder instinct, I taught myself to tolerate a single, large, crab-type spider that lives in my bathroom. His name is Horatio and he’s good-looking, for a spider. He doesn’t spin webs, at least none that I can see, and because he is handsome and loyal he

hans saef kow

Pest: “A destructive insect or other animal that attacks crops, food, livestock, etc.” Also, “An annoying person or thing; a nuisance.”

If your understanding of the word pest hinges on the word annoying, the surefire way to get rid of your pest is to stop it from being annoying.

When we stop thinking about pests as problems, they cease to be annoying and, by definition, they are no longer pests.

To eradicate pests by reducing or removing their annoyance factor, consider the three Rs of pest control: reframe, redesign and repurpose.

Following, are ways to implement them, using examples of pests that plague many of us here in the hinterland. Just remember, as with all types of social marketing, habitual use of the three Rs might be difficult to ingrain; baby steps may be needed to get started.

is allowed to hang out on or near the ceiling, so long as he doesn’t go near the floor. He is large, which means he must eat a lot of insects, for which I am grateful. All other spiders in my house can go straight to hell. Baby steps, like I said.

Redesign Deer are pretty, aren’t they? So graceful while they bound away after you throw your broom at them for eating your petunias. As my friend Sandra said, “Why can’t they eat dandelions instead of tulips?”

Why indeed? Now here’s a case for a little GMO: Designer deer that find dandelions delicious.

Repurpose Dandelions were once regarded as horrible pests.

That designation seems to be easing, thanks to the third R in pest control—repurposing. We’re starting to repurpose them as consumables: Their fresh young greens make nice salads and their

cheery yellow flowers make good wine. What other type of pest could we repurpose as a consumable?

Take the uber-pestiferous mosquito. If we can make wine out of dandelions, why not them, too?

It would be a full-bodied red, of course. We could bottle it and sell it as a unique northern offering and it would pair nicely with those moose-poopshaped chocolates you see in gift shops. Or maybe mozzy beer! I can see it on the shelves now: “Buzz” and “Buzz Light.”

So there you have it—the three Rs of pest control: reframe, redesign or repurpose. With them, we have the power to control anything that bugs us about living in the North!

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JUNE / JULY ‘15

| 7

editorial

In Other Words

Zombie fighters grow here

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

I’d been feeling rather grumpy about the world.

My latest codger complaint: humans are becoming connected to a hive mind through communication facilitated by e-media and are disconnected from the natural world. We’ve created a virtual zoo where we can see our neighbours but can’t touch them. We pace the Internet like bored animals, hardly able to recall what it is to be free of our electronic cages.

Yes, I think like that sometimes, and sometimes I even say it aloud. Not in public, but to my children—poor children.

I was thinking about this virtual zoo one morning as I was driving my 14-year-old daughter to town. We were sharing the special silence only possible with a teen who’d been fully asleep just 10 minutes earlier. Suddenly she said, “Some of my friends think a nuclear apocalypse would be cool.”

The virtual zoo slid away, replaced by radioactive wastelands. Cool? Cool? What part of this scenario would be “cool”?

After determining the extent of this “cool” apocalypse (utter devastation, a world-wide retaliatory response), I launched into lecture mode.

“Surviving a nuclear apocalypse wouldn’t be the same as surviving an asteroid impact—you couldn’t just come out of your bomb shelter in a year and go find something to eat. If you could come out in a million years, you’d look around and see if a) anything had survived at all and, if so, b) what it evolved into. The world wouldn’t be the world you know now, with cell phones and grocery stores.”

“Exactly!” She clarified: “Maybe it’s not so much a nuclear apocalypse that would be interesting… maybe it’s more of a zombie-type thing.” Ah, that’s good—physical destruction of the natural world isn’t what she and her friends want; cultural obliteration would do the trick. A zombie apocalypse. And I thought I was grumpy.

And the reason why…would be…??

“There’d be no more politics, or terrorism, or worry about climate change or pipelines. No more worrying about who’s liking us on Facebook, or whether we’ve got the right clothes or right music.”

Warming to the topic, she threw out more words, trying to explain: “There’s something missing...

We want something real, concrete...”

“Something satisfying, authentic....”

“Yeah, we don’t want superficial, we want to be connected, and creative, and not always told what to think.”

“You want to experience life as it really is, not a virtual model?”

“Yeah!”

“You want to be animals.”

“Pretty much. Zombie-slaying human animals!”

hans s aefkow

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And I laughed. Hahaha—what a glorious day! My feelings of disconnection were being validated by someone at the other end of the generational divide. I wasn’t just an old fogey cranking on about society going to hell.

Young people were feeling it too.

We’re asking the same questions about the superficiality of our lives, the disconnect with our physical-not-virtual community, asking about what really matters in this one life of ours.

You know, the things people talk about over breakfast, or on the drive into town.

Like zombies and stuff.

This summer, my 22-year-old son—who is not a zombie—took a couple of months to travel across Canada in his car. No agenda; he just wanted to taste the air, swat the bugs, see what people see in other parts of our country. When he left, he said he’d be open to staying somewhere long-

term if he found it to his liking, but expected to come home to Smithers because this is where his family is; this is where his friends are. And come home he did.

Some of us were jealous—not of sleeping in a car so much (although kind of), but of his being able to ship anchor any time he wanted. No pressure, no deadlines, no structure save that of the highway. And no data plan on his phone. He talked via text only. He saw icebergs. Farley Mowat’s grave. Scary drivers.

Scarier mosquitoes. Real lobster.

Real hospitality. He was a creature exploring the physical, not pacing the Internet in a virtual zoo.

Maybe it’s the air, or the mountains. Or the people we share our watersheds with. Whatever it is about where we live here in the North, it’s good for our kids and, therefore, good for our world.

Zombie-fighters grow here.

N

I wasn’t just an old fogey cranking on about society going to hell. Young people were feeling it too.

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AUG/SEPT ‘15

| 7

editorial

In Other Words

Take a right instead of a left...

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

I played hooky and went for a drive. And what did I discover? That I can still be amazed by how little I know about where I live.

A few days ago, Paul and Sandra came back from a bike tour around Francois Lake—or at least part of it. Our cover photo shows Paul riding beside a herd of cattle that are hoofing it up the road for no apparent reason, just sprinting from point A to point B, post haste. It’s a fun cover shot, but it was their other photos that really grabbed my attention. So this was Francois Lake?

It’s huge! Not wide, but long. Much of it is wild, but a good stretch of its northern shoreline is neat, tidy and farmy.

And a complete surprise. Francois Lake is beautiful, and just a couple hours down the road! Why was I so surprised?

I’m ashamed to say that although I’ve lived in the Bulkley Valley for the best part of my adult life, until I played hooky that day I had never been over the bridge at Burns Lake. Oh, I’ve marvelled at how cold Burns Lake gets in winter, and I know they have fantastic mountain-biking and cross-country skiing. I like their curvy downtown and usually stop for a convenience on the way through. But I’ve always kept going left up the hill to wherever I was going.

What an idiot.

As I sat in my chair at my office in Smithers, doing my job (whatever that is), I wondered about this place, this Francois Lake. The more I thought about it, the more obsessed I became. I got through lunch before I succumbed; I climbed into my dusty Rav4 and drove to Burns Lake, gateway to the Lakes District.

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What else have I missed by always turning left when I could have turned right?

Of course I knew a bit about the Lakes District. I drive by those lakes on Hwy 16 all the time— Rose Lake, Decker Lake, Burns Lake, Fraser Lake and all those little lakes that dot the roadside.

On maps, and from the air, I saw bird’s-eye views of Francois Lake, and Ootsa Lake, Uncha, Cheslatta and Eutsuk Lake. My daughter’s always telling me how much she loves camping at Takysie Lake and, judging by the map, these are but a few of the hundreds—perhaps thousands—of lakes literally splashed across the landscape.

But on this day there was just one I wanted to see.

In case you, too, have yet to venture across the bridge at Burns Lake, let me paint a picture of what you’re missing. (Keep in mind that this is only a tiny part of what you’re missing because I was playing hooky and had to get back before I got in trouble with the boss. I intend to go back for the big picture when I can spend some quality time.)

For starters, let’s talk scale. Do you think Fraser Lake is big? You could fit four or five Fraser Lakes end-to-end into Francois Lake! Of the natural lakes in BC, only Babine Lake is longer.

Despite its amazing length, or maybe because of it, the only boat to be seen that day was the ferry to Southbank—which runs every 50 minutes or so, and is free. The quiet roads meandered through voluptuous, rolling hills, the sparkling...

But wait—you know what? You should see it for yourself. Play hooky if you have to but preferably take some time and explore it properly. Then you won’t have to wonder what you’re missing the next time you don’t cross the bridge at Burns Lake.

Were it not for the racing cows on our cover, I might never have seen Francois Lake (and many others I’ve still to see), and that would have been a shame. That I had driven past—oblivious—all these years makes me wonder: what else have I missed by always turning left when I could have turned right?

So please, tell me! Send me pictures. I’m always looking for a good reason to play hooky.

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OCT/NOV ‘15

| 7

editorial

In Other Words

hans saef kow

What brings you home?

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l edit or ial@no rt hwo rd. c a

What brought you here, to this place you call home?

If you’re like most Northword readers, you could have found your way here by any number of means: you came for work and never left. You came as a tourist, left, and came back as soon as your life allowed. Or you were born here and never left or, if you did leave, you came back when you realized what you’d left behind. Whichever your story, something about this place resonated with you, something that made it home.

If you’re one of those who came here from away, do you remember what whispered in your ear and said, “you’re home, don’t go… stay”? Was your feeling for home love at first sight? Or a love affair that grew over time? Was it like recognizing an old friend you just hadn’t met yet? Or maybe it was like finally coming home after a long journey.

For me, it was all of the above. It was cresting Hungry Hill for the first time and seeing the Bulkley Valley with her arms spread wide, from the Telkwa Range on one side to the Babines on the other; Quick laid out the welcome mat ahead and Hudson Bay Mountain beckoned on the far left with Brian Boru marking the edge of the valley over her shoulder in the distance. I just knew this was it. The valley’s first big hug was welcoming me home. It was exciting. It was comforting.

Every time I come over that rise, I re-live that first thrill of belonging.

When I meet people who are new to town—whether it’s my town or any of the communities that dot the highways crossing the top half of our province—I look for that spark in their eyes that reflects how they feel about the place where they’ve moved. Is it home? Or is it home? How does it feel? What does the air smell like to them, how does the water taste? Are their neighbours friendly, do the folks at the grocery store treat them well? Do they like the food? Can they handle the snow? Does it feel like they should—perhaps—

stay a while?

It doesn’t happen often but occasionally I’m lucky enough to run into someone who’s been here for a week and simply doesn’t want to go. More often, I’ll talk to people who came for a week 20 years ago and, well, here they are!

If it’s the love-at-first-sight kind of love that enticed you into staying and making this place home, what made you stay after the honeymoon was over? It’s so easy to be overwhelmed by the physical beauty we’re surrounded with, it’s hard to resist its charms. After the first sight of the ridiculous beauty of our North and the warmth of that first visual hug, then what? Even when we take the scenery for granted, if we’re here for the long term it’s because we’re compatible. There are lots of beautiful places in the world; time and money willing, we can visit them whenever we want. But how many of them would you call home?

When I read Kelsey Wiebe’s article in this issue about Curtis Hampton, the blacksmith who forged a relationship with Terrace while he was working in camp at Kitimat, it brought home all those first feelings of discovery. Curtis may have gone on to other jobs in other places, but he could well be one of the many who came for work and left only to return.

Some day. Or maybe it was just a flirtation.

And the Syrian families who will soon be joining us—in Smithers and across the region—what will be their reactions to these places we call home? My guess is, for them, the whispers of the landscape will be secondary to the warmth of the people who welcome them. Our new friends will bring another meaning to the concept of home that we can only imagine.

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DEC ‘15/JAN ‘16

| 5

editorial

In Other Words

hans s aefkow

Pick your plan: A, B or C?

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l ed i to rial@no rt hwo rd. c a

The saying goes, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” Usually planning works.

Sometimes, though, it can be as difficult as predicting the weather.

Take Northword, for instance: When we’re in the last stages of putting the next issue together, there is a point at which the articles and the ads are laid out on their pages, based on how many ads we have sold. This layout is Plan A and we go with it until the last possible minute. Usually, Plan A works just fine; it’s a breeze. Everyone gets their ads in and off to the presses we go. Sometimes, on the last day before we go to press, things get a little stormy: fewer ads come in than expected and that’s when we go to Plan B, the alternate layout. On the other hand, if more ads than expected come in, we happily go to sunny Plan C and change the layout accordingly.

That last day can be a nail biter, I tell ya, but whether the day be breezy, stormy or sunny, there’s always a plan: A, B or C. But this is just weather.

What we really have to watch out for is a change in the >climate</i>. Literally.

Like most of us, we roll with the northern economy, which, in turn, rolls with climate change: the declining market for oil and LNG has affected extraction, processing and shipping. Warmer winters enable pine and now spruce beetles, which affect the logging industry. It’s difficult to plan for the future when climate change clouds the visions in our crystal ball.

As I write this, in mid-March, the winter is getting kicked out the door by an over-eager spring. The snow is nearly gone and the birds are flocking back. The dog lies on the deck soaking in the sun and I saw my first mosquito two weeks ago. At this rate, by the time May rolls around, the snowpack will be nearly gone and we’ll be in forest-fire season already. Hopefully, it’ll be

a lovely, warm (but not hot) spring with gentle rains and caressing breezes.

Flowery but not too frisky.

Hope aside, it’s all a guess at this point. We can’t predict the weather for next week, never mind April and May or the rest of our adult lives. But what else can we do but plan?

I’m a planner. Here’s my plan: Plan A (status quo, situation Normal): Start tomato seedlings for the deck greenhouse. Put mosquito screens on windows. Dust off kayak. Walk dog and mow lawn as needed.

Plan B (longer, hotter spring/summer/fall): Plant tomatoes directly into ground. Buy litres of citronella. Shave dog and replace lawn with gravel.

Plan C (summer only; abolition of winter): Select Pinot noir root stocks for the vineyard and draw up blueprints for the tasting house. Invest in DEET shares or replace kayak with camel and hold sand-dune boarding lessons on the hill behind the house.

As you can see, I’m unsure as to whether this future involves too much water or too little, resulting in a condition known as “flailing to plan.”

Planning for every eventuality is kind of fun and a decent distraction. It makes me feel less impotent in the face of an uncertain future. Perhaps, when it comes to worrying about how to deal with the effects of climate change— instead of planning how to roll with the punches—I should do my bit to help avoid the fight altogether if it’s not too late to pull our punches. Then I could just stick with Plan A and business as usual.

In the meantime, anyone want to invest in a vineyard?

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APRIL/MAY ‘16

| 7

editorial

In Other Words

Time to Put Me Out to Pasture

hans saef kow

...

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l edit or ial@no rt hw ord. c a

On days when work and life and everything that’s crazy in the universe converge at a singularity inside my head, I get overwhelmed to the point of having trouble speaking. Sentence structure goes out the window and words hide under ideas.

This usually manifests itself at our Northword proofing sessions: after our articles have been written and edited, a fantastic group of grammar nerds meet over wine and pizza and, armed with coloured pens, go over everything twice more. At this point, after riding shotgun the whole process, I sit in the corner and try not to drool or, god forbid, talk because when I do open my mouth to speak incoherence falls out.

I’m sure my proofers think I’m simple.

It’s at this point in the process that I need to be put out to pasture. No, literally, put outside, in a pasture, with cows and bugs and fresh air, with no computers or cell phones or Netflix or anything that at some point in its cycle has to be plugged in to work. I need to be unplugged in order to recharge Here’s how I’d like to see it unfold: Take me away, by the hand if you need to, do whatever it takes to get me away from electronics and memes and likes and YouTube. Replace them with rolling fields with a view of a valley, banded by rows of mountains and maybe a lake or two. Sit me down on a thick cotton blanket spread in the grass with a little stream nearby. At hand, a picnic basket full of good things to eat, like triple-cream Brie with blueberry chutney on a fresh sourdough baguette, a

handful of sun-warmed wild strawberries, maybe some nice chocolate and a bottle of merlot. White china, heavy silverware, crystal glass.

Also in that basket, a real photo album with hardcopy photos of family and friends, and heart-bound events I don’t ever want to forget.

Even better would be some actual family and friends. And a dance floor.

Yes, that would be very good indeed, a great big dance floor laid out perfectly, out in the pasture. And a stage for music. Acoustic, of course, heavy on the percussion. The cows won’t mind. We’ll invite them to join us and we’ll all dance and play until after the sun slides under the horizon, leaving that tantalizing slice of electric blue, and the stars would dance with the aurora until we all fall down exhausted.

But, you say, wait—what about the fire? You can’t have a pasture party without a fire! Given how dry our summers have been lately, the fire-pitin-the-pasture party might have to wait until the fall (unless the rain gods giveth what the sun gods taketh away). We’ll just have to dance by the light of the silvery moon. And our solar patio lanterns.

Of course, at this very moment, this pastoral interlude is still just another thought stuck in the singularity, something to look forward to when I’m able to speak again. I need to unplug in order to recharge, but don’t we all? Isn’t that why we live here, to have quick access to the great unplugged?

Point us to the pasture. We’ve got some recharging to do.

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JUNE/JULY ‘16

| 5

editorial

In Other Words

Surviving change

by Joa n n e C a mpb el l

On my drive home, I see a mountain in the Telkwa Range just south of the Bulkley Valley. Every time I see that mountain I think, Now there’s a survivor!

I’m not referring to the mountain, strictly speaking, but what’s eroding out of it on the other side.

If you were a bear going over that mountain, what would you see? If you were a very clever bear with a GPS, you would find a prehistoric singularity, perhaps the only one of its kind in the world. It predates mammoths. It predates most dinosaurs. It even predates the continents.

It is a fossilized coral reef, remnants of one of the earliest, and perhaps the only reef to survive the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event approximately 200 million years ago.

The cause of that extinction is still debated: climate change, asteroids, massive volcanic eruptions. Whatever the cause, over a period of just 10,000 years more than half of Earth’s life became extinct, including most corals. But not our corals.

What remains on the other side of that mountain is evidence of an ancient survivor from an arc of tropical islands in the ancestral Pacific Ocean, then located near the equator. And it’s practically in our backyard.

The proof that we northerners are survivors is right there. The stuff that makes us tuff is not in the air or the water. It’s in the rocks.

The physical evidence of this fossil reef—right there where I can almost see it—makes me inexplicably happy and hopeful. It also works as a metaphor for surviving change, something that resonates across this region right now.

Economically, businesses are holding their breath to see which changes will happen with LNG, Site C, oil tankers on the coast, mining development, even the US election—just a few of the events that may impact cash flow across the region in one way or another.

Climate change is a significant player that is affecting our forests, first decimating pine stocks and now possibly threatening our aspens.

Streams are warming up and drying up, affecting our salmon runs.Glaciers are melting. Creepycrawlies are migrating.

But, change isn’t all bad—and we are resilient, after all. Tourism is flourishing (got to see those glaciers before they’re gone). Historic sites, such as the Port Edward canneries, are being revived and First Nations exhibits in northern museums satisfy those in search of enlightenment. Fossil aficionados are travelling north to see dinosaur remains in Tumbler Ridge and they can explore the new Global Geopark while they’re there.

The resource industry can also respond to changing public concerns with some pretty amazing innovations. Just ask Harvey Tremblay at Hy-Tech Drilling about his new closed-loop drilling centrifuge that reduces fresh water usage by up to 90 percent.

We roll with the punches because we’re survivors. And, we’re still here—which begs the ques-

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tion, “Why are we here?” In many cases, it’s the same as asking, “Why are we here?”

Which, of course, brings me to Hunter S. Thompson and his thoughts on finding purpose in life: ...a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES. In doing this, he is fulfilling a need (giving himself identity by functioning in a set pattern toward a set goal), he avoids frustrating his potential (choosing a path which puts no limit on his self-development), and he avoids the terror of seeing his goal wilt or lose its charm as he draws closer to it (rather than bending himself to meet the demands of that which he seeks, he has bent his goal to conform to his own abilities and desires).

In short, he has not dedicated his life to reaching a pre-defined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he KNOWS he will enjoy. The goal is absolutely secondary: it is the functioning toward the goal which

is important.

Or, as he put it more succinctly: Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life.

When I decided to move back to the valley after a time away, I didn’t have a job waiting for me. I decided that this was where and how I wanted to live and that I would work at whatever I could find to support that desire. Fortunately, I’ve been lucky enough to immerse myself in Northword—work that gets what we all love about this northerly place. And I hope I will always be so lucky, wherever I am on life’s path.

Like our Jurassic reef, we survivors of change know a good place to make a stand during changing times. It’s called “right here.”

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