Recently, my friend Faye Mogensen and I were invited to tell a story at the First Unitarian Church in Saanich (near Victoria). It was our second opportunity to tell "Big Trees," which we had prepared for the Storytellers of Canada/Conteurs du Canada conference in the Spring.
I was glad to tell it again, since we had laboured long and hard on the story, debating how we might evoke a feeling of reverence for the coastal forests, and for trees and forests everywhere. I provided a frame narrative and Faye shared three folktales from different parts of the world.
My narrator was a young woman, welcoming visitors to Seal Bay Park and Forest, a 1500-acre park near Courtenay on Vancouver Island. I introduced my character as MacKenzie, a youth at risk who was participating in a Youth Ecological Survey Project.
Seal Bay Park is mostly second-growth Douglas Fir forest. It's a magical place, full of huckleberry bushes and salal. Steep valleys lined with sword ferns lead down to the rocky seashore where seals lounge on the half-submerged boulders. Across the road, winding paths take visitors to Melda's marsh, where ducks and beaver can be spotted, coasting through the water, and blackbirds sing out as they balance and sway on the tall grass.
Local walkers, and those on horseback and bicycles, know the park well. On the west side of the road that divides it in two, there is a cairn and a plaque honouring two women whose dedication and vision led to the protection of many local green spaces, including this one. One of them was my old friend Melda Buchanan.
Melda came to Vancouver Island in 1932, when she was eight years old. I imagine her arriving with her family by steamship at the wharf in Comox. There she had her first sight of the giant trees, only they weren't standing tall, surrounded by other trees. The mighty trunks jostled against each other in a log boom near the shore. Exploring the area, in the early 30's, Melda would have seen huge areas of logging slash, at the edge of farmers' fields, evidence of more than twenty years of clearcut logging. Melda lived through the Great Fire of 1938, which started in a logging camp north of Campbell River and destroyed over 75,000 acres of forest before it burned out. She went east to study and became one of the first women meteorologists in Canada. When she returned to Vancouver Island in the 1960's, she resolved to devote the rest of her life to environmental protection and education. She believed that having a strong local park system would encourage people to care for the wilderness, even if they rarely visited more remote areas.
In a time of climate uncertainty and disruption, I hope my stories will remind listeners to appreciate the trees and forests where they live. Stories can help us remember that we belong to the natural world. We can actively care for the environment where we make our home. We can make choices that support environmental protection in our cities, in our country and beyond.
In preparing the story, I visited Seal Bay Park a number of times, taking my sketchbook and walking slowly along the paths, looking for evidence of the history of logging here. I discovered one magnificent trunk of a cedar tree, with the springboard notches still visible, and from the hollow centre, a young hemlock growing up.
I became aware of other stumps dotted throughout the park, shaggy mounded shapes, covered with salal. There were also many nurse logs, fallen trees out of which other trees were now growing through the moss.
The theme of our story was "Thinking Like a Forest."
What does it mean to think like a forest, in practical terms?
In one essential way, it means taking a long-range view, a view that leaps over the inter-personal challenges we face, or the dilemma of how to earn and spend our money, and considers the Garry Oak forest under threat of development, the eroding seashore, the problem of plastic pollution in the oceans, the loss of habitat. It means seeing our lives as ripe with potential to be of benefit to others, in every choice we make, in the way we live our lives every day. And when we die, if we have lived according to our highest aspirations, death is not the end of the story, because our legacy is one that continues to give. Just as I continue to be moved and inspired by the quiet resolve of climate activists in the past and in the present, and just as I continue to learn from the patience, generosity and kindness of my teachers, so I can also shine a light forward on the path.
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