christine

After growing up in Vancouver, then spending five years in England, I found that my activist leanings led me here, to the west coast of Vancouver Island. I was led to something I'd never heard of: temperate rainforest. Here were immense western red cedars as old as 1500 years, possibly even 2000 years, upon which the moss appeared to grow as thick as the walls of some castles I’d seen. My fellow Canadians were clearcutting the trees for a New Zealand corporation.
Hiking past waterfalls on the Walbran River, I gaped at creamy Salvador Daliesque canyon walls reflected in jade-green water. Beyond a campsite dubbed Giggling Spruce, a landlocked lake supported its own exclusive species of trout. Some of the cedars were natural works of art themselves. With their gargantuan candelabra crowns, they looked like multi-headed elephants, every trunk raised.
As scientists searched for endangered marbled murrelets and activists gave tree-climbing workshops, I began to feel at home in the rainforest. Addictions to junk food and certain television shows fell away. Poems about roots and bugs seemed to write themselves. An unmistakable sensation of time slowing down permeated my blood, and a week went by without use of a mirror. Being a temporary inhabitant of an ecosystem that took ten thousand years to evolve stretched and calmed my mind.
The creation of this blog is a mind-boggling, heart-expandingly generous act.
SAVE THE WALBRAN.
Christine Lowther (Raggy)

November 14, 2008 11:58 PM