For a year now I have been working on the text for a book on the shield volcanoes and lava plains of Central British Columbia. I found the volcanic rocks above in the Thompson River Canyon, crumbling to dust where they fell out of a cliff face folded out of a collection of volcanic islands that formed in the middle of the Pacific Ocean before drifting up against the continent. For images of the book, check out the Chris Harris’s newsletters. He has taken the pictures. The book is coming down to the wire now, and it’s a gem: art, science, passion, and mountains the colour of migrating salmon. We’ll launch it in 100 Mile House in October.

Sacred Work at a Sacred Site

Ken Blackburn and I and the artists and writers of the North (and South, you bet) Island, and anyone else who can get here, are going to explore sacred geometries in visual and poetic work, together, at Ocean Resort south of Campbell River. Walk the labyrinth. Heat up in the Sauna. Cool down in the sanctuary. Feel the stones along your spine. Feel the words in your blood and your blood in the words in the sea and in the Garden. Create the future with us. Enter the landscape. This is going to be great. See you there. Be eternal.  Shantie.

Sea Turtle Beached Since the Dreamtime at San Josef

I followed the rains back down to salt water, and stood in this old story at low tide, and knew the purpose of words. We are telling the story of the world. As Ezra Pound said of the love for his daughter that kept him in Italy during the Second World War: the rest is dross. We need to get together to tell this story. Now that so much of it has been forgotten, we might have to start mapping it up piece by piece, but this time not with maps of rivers, plateaus, and trade routes, but maps of story. What a great way for books to return to the world after long journey.

Listening to Ronald Wright on Denman Island

I’ve just returned home from the Denman Island Writers and Readers Festival. And a fine time it was, riding there in the on the north shores of the Salish Sea, with all its ghost apple trees, and all its ghost turnip farmers from the Orkneys, and the delightful interchange of community writers who could easily hold their own on the mainstage and visiting writers, like myself, who were rejuvenated by reading them, and, of course, the tricksy ravens. For just a moment (well, three days), Denman Island showed the world that it is the world. I gave a workshop on trickster writing. It was a gas, and lead to some great conversations about witches and birds flying to the underworld and back, all while sitting in the sun watching children clamber over the Denman Island playground, while Sheldon served his inimitable coffee in the background. Folks, a little trip to the island to salute Sheldon’s Denman-roasted trickster-dreams-in-a-cup would be time well spent, no matter how far you come. Everybody but everybody was there, except, I think, the two residents above, and I think you can see that they were listening intently from across the street and wishing, as I am now, that they were there.

In honour of Charles Lillard, who wrote about the logging camps of Centralia, I paid the town a visit two weeks ago, on my way to the mouth of the Columbia River at Astoria. They’re milling hardwoods there now. Presumably everything else has been cut down and is growing back as industrial stands of timber, not forests.

Walking the blues away in Centralia, Washington.

Sometimes you find mouths where you don’t expect them at all.

Here on the Pacific Coast, the ocean is rarely distant. Well, sure, in the Similkameen or Cariboo Grasslands, or in the antelope brush prairie of the Columbia Basin, it sure seems distant. It isn’t. There’s the shore, of course, that line where the tide meets the beach, and there’s the sand of the beach itself, in the canary grass and wild crabapples and alders. The Coast, though, goes hundreds of miles inland here, on this one breaking wave: tideline, intertidal zone, foreshore, fog zone, rainforest, subalpine rainforest, rainshadow, and then, miraculously, the rainforest again, breaking against the Cariboo Mountains and the Selkirks, at the head of the Thompson and Columbia Rivers. The one constant is the salmon, that swim up these rivers to spawn, and the forests that are built out of their bones, and the cultures that have sprang up in response to them. Recently, I travelled from the mouth of the Columbia in Astoria, Oregon, up through the Columbia Gorge and the Columbia basin, up through drowned Kettle Falls, to Robson, B.C.

Here is the guide I met up with at Beacon Rock.