Chemainus Lake

Returning from a trip to the Cowichan Valley in January for some misty morning photography, I stopped to check out Chemainus Lake. The last time I had been there was years earlier, and it had, at that time, felt sad and overused. This time, however, I found a new robust dock, excellent roadway, and fresh gravel at the put-in. I thought, "Time to bring the canoe."

So, on the last day of March, I got up early, canoe already on the roof, and head south. I arrived while it was still dark, put the canoe in the water and set out onto the little lake amid a rising mist and almost total silence.

I paddled around in the cold pre-dawn light, watching the mist swirl and listening to the birds waking up and becoming active. That time of day, on a small body of water, is perhaps the best time of all. The feeling of positive aloneness (sabi) and the feeling of connection to the natural world work to create a rich sense of contentment and hushed awe.

I drifted around, watching the sun slowly rise, painting the tree tops first, with it's golden glow, then eventually the mist, which became thicker with the change in temperature.

I surrendered to the beauty, feeling the cares of the week drifting away amid the mist. There is something about this kind of beauty, the majesty of it, the power of it, that creates an especially receptive mind. I thought about work, relationships, harmony and discord. A wetland is a place that mirrors these qualities. So much life, and with it, so much death.

I experimented with my new camera and the even newer vintage Pentax 28mm lens. It is always difficult to capture the scale of a place like this. Chemainus Lake is small, but also packed with endless views, sights, and details. There are so many nooks and gaps in a wetland and in fact this little lake has channels between the main lake and the shore, bands of water that curve around behind reed banks and a beaver store.

Then, the sun broke over the trees and the morning began in earnest. This always causes me a bit of excitement, the golden hour has begun! I race to get photos, everywhere I look a new subject, a new breath-taking image.

The first shots were of the reed banks, as the light broke across them. I paddled to two spots of the lake to get different perspectives.

As I did, the nesting geese started honking, and within minutes a flock of new geese arrived.

In the reeds, marsh wrens and song sparrows started to mill about, joined by red-wing blackbirds going from perch to perch and back again. The morning chorus, or racket, had begun.

Song Sparrow

Male Redwing Blackbird

Female Redwing Blackbird

Resident Nesting Canadian Goose

About that time, a paddling fly angler joined us on the water. I was off in a corner with my long lens, trying to get portraits of some of the smaller residents, but I snapped one of this young fellow. We humans tend to dominate the landscape, with our impressive tools, including tackle and vessel.

Young Male Human

Another angler arrived on the dock, so I headed down to the far end of the lake. Along the way I marveled at the beauty of this little spot. The shoreline from the water is truly stunning.

As more humans came onto the water the non-resident geese took flight to the air, and I retreated further into the reeds.

Canadian Geese Take Flight

My Hideout Amid the Reeds

In a shady corner I took out my other new vintage lens, the Revuenon 55mm 1.2. This bokeh master lens creates unique artistic renditions that, in some ways, capture a place better than razor sharpness ever can.

Revuenon 55mm 1.2 - #1

By that time, there were anglers arriving every few minutes. I waited against the reeds near the dock as two young fellows in kayaks, a woman in a float tube, and two older guys in a tinner made there way out. I took a photo of the men with kids on the dock. "Can I touch it?" came the call of one child as a fish was held out flopping for inspection. The curiosity and excitement in the kid's voices was a welcomed sound.

Men and Boys Enjoy the Sturdy Functional Attractive Dock

I was glad that these folks would enjoy their time, AND was also glad I was leaving. I packed up while another fellow prepared to head onto the water in a pontoon boat. I would be back to take more photos on this fantastic jewel of a lake on this special island.

Sedge Bending

The world if full of grand vistas. People flock to the Grand Canyon for example, or the Rocky Mountains. People huddle their houses together for a view of the ocean, to take advantage of a steel and glass cityscape, to share the sight of a volcano. There is, on the other hand, no rush to view alleyways, boarded up factories, or a vacant lot.

Here on Vancouver Island, you can view a volcano, a beautiful cityscape, and everywhere the changing plane of ocean. It is a common blessing, like being Canadian, like shopping in a super market. It comes with the territory. We sometimes stop to wink at each other, "can you believe we have it so good?"

Evan so, and perhaps because we are saturated by the ubiquitous privilege of our situation, there are beauties we miss. In the brace of affluence it is actually the case that saturation can be the problem. We have the good life, but it has us too, in it's teeth, and it is biting down hard. We are overweight, we are stressed, we are depressed, we are trudging along. What good is it to live in paradise if we slave each day to stay here?  That my friends, is the middle class dilemma.

Sedge Bending might not be the antidote to that, but it might not hurt. So let me tell you how it works.

The Sedge Bending Formulas 

The intro formula: 1 self powered water craft + 1 quiet shoreline with sedges - all electronic distractions = Bliss

The committed formula: 1 beautiful self powered water craft + 1 quiet shoreline with sedges and a few other specific features  - all the distractions of electronic life + a list of "experience enhancing" extras = Bliss2

I agree, the formulas seem too simple to really work, and to be frank, they only work for a certain segment of the population, maybe 10%. But if you are in that 10% you could be missing out on, well, bliss. So might not it behoove you to read a little more about it?

 
The Sedge Bending Secret 

The secret to sedge bending bliss is the Vita Ora. Vita is the Latin root of vital, and generally refers to life; and ora mean edge, rim, border, boundary /coast, coast-line. Thus it is the vital edge, the border of life, the rim of vitality, or the boundary of being.  This is the place on a lake that biologists call the Littoral zone. It is a biogeographic region where conditions are favourable for life. Not just sedges, but rushes, reeds, auquatic plants cluster along this threshold between the relatively barren deep water and the dryer expanses of land, dominated by the light soaking conifers and angiosperms.

In short, there is a magic region of water loving plants and animals that for some of us, not only epitomize life, but impart it to us just by going there. We come alive in this district of dragonflies and redwing blackbirds.  We feel at home amide the frogs and turtles. We belong.

Are you a Sedge Bender? I'd love to hear from you.

A Rose is Not a Stink Prickler

There is a paddling term that stinks. It needs to be changed. But changing the name people use for a thing can be difficult, and sometimes we assume names don’t really matter that much. Shakespeare’s famous line, “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” is often interpreted to mean that names are not important.

This assumption is dead wrong. In actual fact the Shakespeare line is not an argument to ignore names, but to discard them if they are inadequate. Juliet, who utters this line in the play “Romeo and Juliet” is telling her fair Romeo that he is misnamed, that he is not a Montague. She tells him to take off his name and identify himself with her instead.*

Imagine that instead of calling it a birthday we called it our “placenta discarding day” or our, “causing mother to howl in pain day.”  Would we bake a cake for such a day, would we gather to sing a happy song? Probably not, but fortunately it is aptly named. We call it our birth day, the day we became an entity outside our mother’s womb, took our first breath of the air of earth. We celebrate the best part of it, not the blood and pain and extravagant loss of the water world of prenatal bliss. It is right that we do.

Some of us, gripping paddles in our hands like placards at a rally, would like to change the name of an activity we love, but which either has no name at all, or has a real clunker. Someone named it badly, and it is time to fix that.

So, what is this name? This misfortune, this grievous insult? I’m putting off typing it. As soon as you read it you will cringe. I’m thinking of the beautiful activity, and I don’t want to taint it with that word. People know the name, and are embarrassed by it. They hang their head when it is said out loud. The old name, harsh as Orc guttural, has a certain descriptive quality which is not entirely inaccurate. But certainly not the name a lover would use. Juliet would not approve. It is not the name an enthusiast would use, not the name an aficionado would use. The name must, I’m afraid, be written, if nothing else to be examined for it’s inadequacy before suggesting a raft of better alternatives.

The name is Gunkholing. There I’ve typed it. If you google the term you will quickly discovery that the majority of references are for saltwater cruising and involve not only the visiting of “gunkholes” but going from place to place in search of them. Gunkholes are secluded shoreline places with gunk. Gunk, according to Wikipedia is any filthy, sticky, or greasy substances. This is the identical definition found in my trusty desk copy of the Houghton Mifflin Canadian Dictionary of the English Language. Gunk, in this context is supposed to refer to the mud and slime that is evident at low tide in saltwater marshes, estuaries, and bays.

The application of the term to freshwater locations is secondary, occurring I suspect because no other term has been widely used.

It is time to change all that.

So, before suggesting alternatives, this first post will critique the word Gunkholing. There are three main reasons for abandoning it outright, and a further one for questioning it’s use in my world of freshwater paddling.

1. Is the Gunk the thing? The mud and slime of marshes and estuaries is seldom sticky or greasy. Slippery, yes, and when you step in it up to your knee or deeper, it can be difficult to get out of, but most of the mud is made up of fine silts and decaying organic matter. One might just as easily describe it as silky, soft, or smooth. I will grant that such mud can be filthy. Filth is from the root word for putrid, and since there is decay at work in such places, fair enough, yet the attraction of such places lies not in the filth. So why include it in the name?

2. Where is the hole? Most places enjoyed by gunkholers are bays, bights, inlets, and coves. If these are holes, they are atypical. Holes evoke first and foremost a sense of depth, but in fact, most gunkholes are shallow. Holes are also generally round. Not very common in gunkholes.

3. Does it describe the love for doing it? The term is often used with an attached apology; “gunkholing, if you’ll excuse the term,” or similar phrases. Why keep apologizing, why not create a better term?

4. And finally, since the level of water in freshwater marshes and swamps moves less dramatically, usually a yearly and not daily cycle, the mud is generally covered for most of the year — only peaking out where reeds, rushes, sedges and grasses have not yet colonized. Take away the mud from the experience, and you take away a lot of the sense of filth.

In the next post I will review some better alternative names, and tell you the one that a small group of us paddlers have settled on.

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*"It is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What's in a name? that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet; So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd, retain that dear perfection which he owes without that title. Romeo, doff thy name, and for that name which is no part of thee take all myself."