Quake

At 9:00 on Saturday night I had a call from a very bleary-sounding Number One Son, calling from Ottawa where it was midnight. "Did you hear about the earthquake?"

I hadn't. I had been putzing around the intertube looking at this and that. It seems a 7.7 earthquake had struck off Haida Gwaii and a tsunami warning was in place for the west side of Vancouver Island, including Tofino of course, and beyond. For the next few hours I kept my eye on the reports, waiting to see what would happen with the tsunami. Despite the fact that I'm not on Facebook (closed up shop there after a very short time), don't twit or tweet or whatever, nonetheless the word was spreading among friends and family - the phone call, a few emails and text messages. After a few hours the tsunami warning was cancelled and off I went to bed but not before I had thought a lot about earthquakes and Tofino, among other things.

Since 2004, I have looked at some of the sea level, beach front places we've stayed at on the island and elsewhere, calling them "tsunami bait". In recent trips in Ucluelet and Tofino this year, I've been very aware of the fact that if a tsunami did hit, as it has in the past, if we didn't get to higher ground in time we'd be toast. On our last trip to Tofino in September I checked out the evacuation route on our way in to town so I'd know where it was - safe ground is a bit of a hike along the two-lane highway past Long Beach. I wondered at the time how the town would be informed and what an evacuation would look like. I even said to the others that we should park outside in front of the condo building rather than underground behind the electric-run gates. Perhaps my imagination is too vivid, I'm sure it is, which I don't consider a bad thing, but I started imagining what it would be like if an earthquake happened at Tofino and you had to hightail it out of there after finding your car in the darkness of a power outage (as it was in Haida Gwai on Saturday night) and getting it out of the garage - all the while chaos reigns and somewhere out there a big wave is headed your way.

I also noticed during that trip, that the vacation rental condo we stayed at had no information about what to do if... No maps, directions or instructions about how to proceed if natural disaster struck - information I would think would be useful to travellers who don't know their way around, or are even aware of what a precarious part of the planet this is. Check out this map - in the past month over a hundred earthquakes have occurred in coastal British Columbia up through Alaska. Not all of course were felt but it is continuous, all around the Pacific Ring of Fire.

And more big ones are to come.
 

I've been reading a book lately called Cascadia's Fault which is a science thriller - but all true. It tells how scientists have over time found out that the Cascadian fault line which stretches along the North American coast from northern California up along Vancouver Island, that they used to think was inactive, is "virtually identical to the tectonic time bomb that decimated Japan in 2011, and when Cascadia's fault ruptures, it will generate the same kind of earthquake, at magnitude 9 or higher."  It is this type of fault that will cause a huge tsunami, unlike Saturday's which is on a different fault line, the Queen Charlotte Fault and generated a sideward movement of the plates which doesn't cause the big tsunamis an upward thrusting plate movement does.

The author, Jerry Thompson, has been on the earthquake story for 25 years and is brilliant at explaining the science and following the story of the earthquake scientists as they puzzled out the truth about the Cascadia subduction zone. The last big one was January 26th, 1700 (the story of how they figured out that particular date is a good read in itself) and according to the people who get paid to know these things, another one is coming, bigger than anyone has prepared for (or built schools and hospitals to withstand). Certainly the ordinary Joe Blow citizen (or another JB I could mention) is not at all prepared for natural disaster.  They know they should be, but they're not. And I'm sure, most aren't even aware they're living on a timebomb.

Back to Saturday night's Haida Gwaii earthquake. A couple of weeks ago we were at Thanksgiving dinner at our neighbor's house across the street where I met her grandson, a commercial diver. He  was about to leave for a couple of months work up in Haida Gwaii, harvesting geoducks (pronounced 'gooey duck', a species of large clam) for export to Asia. As it turns out, shortly after he started work up there one of the divers on the project died on the job. Not only that, the young man was involved in the rescue and performed CPR on the man, to no avail. I can only imagine how he must be feeling. Now this earthquake has literally rocked their boat. I think it's time for him to come home.

While the scientists know that this part of the Ring of Fire is due for a big one, there is still no way to predict exactly when, which makes the recent criminal conviction of 6 earthquake scientists in Italy particularly bizarre. Convicted of manslaughter, last week they were sentenced to 6 years in prison for failing to warn the public prior to the L'Aquila earthquake in 2009 which destroyed the town and killed 300 people. Other Italian scientists are now saying "take this job and shove it". There is some precedent for this trial and conviction it seems. In 1633 Galileo was tried by the Vatican for claiming the earth revolved around the sun. How far we've come. Not.

Freedom Cove

We stayed in the town of Tofino looking out on the view that had captured my heart the first time I ever saw it and for every visit since - across Clayoquot Sound to Meares Island and the other smaller islands,  with the Vancouver Island mountain peaks behind. Watching the boat traffic in the Sound, going to and fro, weaving through the islands till lost sight of around the bend and behind. It makes me want to go across, go further, see what lies behind up the inlets and coves further up Clayoquot Sound and beyond.

The view from my pillow in the loft of the condo in Tofino - dawn - the sport fishermen are just leaving

So, we hired a boat with Captain Mike Little of Browning Passage Boat Charters to go take a look at what lay beyond.

It was 3:00 in the afternoon when we climbed aboard, heading around the back of Meares Island and beyond to a place called, by its residents, Freedom Cove. The boat would take a minimum of 3 people, maximum 12. Howard, Number 2 Son Mike and I make 3. It's just slightly passed high tourist season this day in early September, and we find we have the boat to ourselves.

We travel across the harbor towards the native village that has been there continuously for 5000 years. At least. Then around the west side of Meares Island where we pass a complex of old buildings. This used to be a residential school for native children. Even the sound of those words these days sends a chill but Captain Mike who was born here talks of friends of his who were there and who themselves speak of the education they got as worthwhile, as well as some usefulness of learning the ways of the "white guy", which was the point of the schools. Lots of points of view I guess.

We continue past a view of a looming Cat Mountain, a wall of green forest, where some company is proposing building a copper mine. Friends of Clayoquot appear to be all over that one, I was asked to sign something, or send a postcard or whatever, when I stopped at their booth at the Saturday market. Apparently it would mean defacing the mountain. According to our Captain Mike, a retired Coast Guard captain, he can't see how they'd get the copper out of there, through the relatively shallow entrances to Clayoquot Sound from the Pacific. Apparently something similar was proposed many years ago and not proceeded with for this same reason.

 Then past more small islands, past several large fish farms, till we reached the entrance to a small bay, turned the corner into its smoother waters and came upon a quite amazing sight. The floating gardens of Freedom Cove.

You won't find the name "Freedom Cove" on any local chart, but that is what it is called by its residents,  Catherine King and Wayne Adams, who approached us as we stepped off the boat to their dock. They welcomed us with hands full of containers of cherry tomatoes, gifts for us.  Here we are at their float home, with its huge connecting floating gardens, greenhouses, studios, guest houses, dance platforms, candle studio, carving studios...This is their home of 20 years, and their ever changing art installation.

An aerial view...

Catherine takes us on a tour - she is a dancer, a poet and a sculptor, and above all a gardener. She explains that they have live a subsistence lifestyle out on their float home, an hour's boat ride from the town of Tofino. All the building materials for their floating garden and its multiple greenhouses and other structures are from salvaged materials, some from the neighboring fish farms. They grow all their vegetables and fruits, everything in containers as the whole structure floats in the bay, tethered in multiple locations to the cliffs along the shore. They are not alongside the shore, they can't step off the dock to go for a walk, they are surrounded by water. Fresh water for themselves and for the gardens comes from a waterfall on land a distance away, gravity fed to their complex. The whole structure looks like a series of lagoons, you walk along deckways and across bridges to get from one greenhouse (there are about 6) or studio to another.

One of their greenhouses is dedicated to growing strawberries. They have every other berry as well as apple, pear, fig and other trees growing in huge pots. They grow every kind of vegetable you can imagine, and then some.

We were with them for about an hour and a half, looking at their structures, their art projects, their home, their plants, garden art, candles they pour from molds made from their carvings from bone and other materials. I could barely follow half of what she was saying, as I looked at her pots and plants and how her irrigation system was set up and all that.

I told Wayne about my desire to see what lay beyond my view from the town of Tofino. He said that he had felt the same way in the years he lived there and then look what happened - he ended up living out beyond these past 20 years.

What a great visit, to an artistic couple whose art is also about how they live their lives in this place of isolation and breathtaking beauty. A chance to get to know, if briefly, some of the people who have made this far place home for so many years. They are not the only artists who live on float homes in the wilderness around here, but they may have the most extensive structure and certainly the most flamboyant.

Meanwhile, later that day, back in Tofino's waterfront...