Greenstorm's Journal

I think I'm figuring out that work right now is really emotionally intense.

It's an intense fire season in North America. I'd say historic, but it's actually ahistoric: this is the worst on record by a significant amount for both area and intensity of fires. I've been talking for years about global warming to ecosystem change and now the tactical-level science is coming out: "regeneration failure" (the forest doesn't recover into a forest, or at least not a similarly-functioning ecosystem) is influenced in the short term by the intensity of fires, so if we can keep the intensity of fires low we can keep our forests closer to how they were for a little while longer, until climate change more fully catches up with species range.

I'm never sure that's a great goal, to preserve what was there. On the other hand humans have a terrible track record of deliberately intervening in ecosystems. Our culture is particularly bad: two that came into conversation this morning were "stream cleaning" (straightening a stream and removing all woody debris from it to help salmon populations, turns out that's counterproductive) and national parks (removing indigenous people, preventing indigenous practices, and doing fire suppression all to make a "natural" state which it turns out creates megafires and other large-disturbance issues). On the other hand we cannot pretend we have not and are not intervening in everything -- that's why it's the anthropocene -- and so we have a responsibility to do those interventions in as thoughtful, research-driven, and future-based ways as possible.

We cannot do nothing, that's not in our power, so throwing up our hands and pretending that what we normally do is "nothing" and that anything we haven't done before is overreach is disingenuous. So I think we need to be very active and do deliberate interventions, but carefully and at hopefully non-disastrous scale.

In this context I'm one of a handful of land managers with jurisdiction over one of the larger chunks of actively and structurally/deliberately managed land there is. Canada has a huge proportion of "crown land", land managed by the state. It is of course complicated: there are many players, including indigenous people who are having their rights slowly re-enshrined; settlers who also live on the landscape; government groups of many kinds, including those tasked with increasing carbon, wildlife, firesmarting, biodiversity, recreation, and housing; large and small industry; people who have never been to this area or to the country but who feel strongly about management in different ways; and groups that overlap those categories.

(I am sitting in my chair at the office at work and trying to formula this while the room literally feels like it's spinning around me, I may have to come back to it).

The state's inclination is to move cautiously and to include careful discussion and many stakeholders, possibly now leaning towards finding ways to prioritize indigenous input, and it's a big slow machine. Indigenous inclination is varied, since these are varied groups of people with varied types of governance and varying opinions, much like any group, but culture, power, comfort, and safety play into their motivations. Settlers on the landscape are also varied but tend to fall into two groups: transients and people with deep attachment, though those groups aren't exactly always separate, and many of them value access to the land. Industry has a variety of hands but at heart is driven by shareholder value over the short term, usually quarterly. People who aren't from here quite honestly I'm pretty bitter about some days, but esthetics and simplicity of narrative play into their desires.

My personal, western-educated and paganism-animism-informed preferences don't significantly align with many of those folks pre-discussion. I sit much more in the rewilding and novel ecosystems camp than most typical environmentalists, but I'm also much more cautious and less one-size-fits-all than many of the new tech-based environmentalists or industry. I'm significantly more pro-science than some indigenous groups, and pretty much more pro-humans-on-the-landscape (including indigenous and settlers) than nearly anyone. But I'm also deeply in favour of the kind of education and contact indigenous folks promote. And there's a bunch more I could say there.

But in the end my formal job is to consider perspectives and align with the laws. The laws are somewhat contradictory, for instance now that we've adopted UNDRIP there's active contradiction between typical practice, legislation, and direction from folks with various forms of enshrined and/or functional power. Making anything harder for anyone with power is frowned upon but can be done with care and skill.

It all makes me wish I could still think and write clearly. It might be worth figuring out accommodations for speech-to-text at work if I actually want to dig into this.

But I'm not sure how much I do or can dig into it. I'm more aware of what the next fifty years will look like on the landscape than almost anyone, but it's just as difficult for me as it is for anyone else to live with that knowledge of change. Your personal relationships are very likely to outlive your relationships to the ecosystems you know, though some level of normalizing will help shield you from awareness of that. If there's a set of ecosystem relationships you're attached to, especially the further north you live (warming happens faster at high latitudes, though actual change has some breakpoints around tradewinds, glaciation, and ocean currents) you'll be saying goodbye to them instead of them saying goodbye to you. If you're buried there your ghost will be resting with their ghosts, not in the landscape eternal you might perceive it to be.

And I am a part of the landscape. I don't know that many people have this same sense. I know the Christian separation of animals and humans, the concept of dominion and even stewardship woven into our society, it runs deep. Maybe I lie closer to the indigeonus concept of the land as kin, but also I think of myself, as I think many sciencey people do, as (one of) the land's ways of knowing itself. I am itself, an expression of the land as much as any mountain or tree.

"Climate grief" is a term that gets a lot of press recently, and sure, the fact that things are changing can be a cause for grief. Lots of people are in very legitimate fear and many of us will die for reasons in varying places on the "act of god" to "no social support" spectrum. Those things are important to the human part of me but I'm not sure how much I live in the human part of me.

What I feel is more like jumping out of a plane with a parachute and something between mother and child in my arms. Threshold- it's easy for me, life linked to it as it is, to cradle and comfort and protect and learn to the best of my ability in that situation. But when I'm holding a sort of diffuse whole of the Stuart Nechako forest district, well, that's a lot. Doing it civilly in the full sense of the word, within the constraint of law and in partnership with so many different perspectives from commodity to spiritual ownership, well.

It might have been better to do when I was younger, and believed more in people's shared values, and when I had more energy to change the world.

I'm still thinking about the landscape here.

Part of love, for me, is knowing something deeply. I love things that reveal themselves to me. I love being aware of patterning, of uniqueness, of what differentiates the beloved particularly from others of its kind.

When I left the coast I had a sense, not just of the ecology of the landscape, but of the ecological history and much of the geology. When I walked there I had a sense of the depth of sediment in the Fraser Valley underfoot, of the thick layers of sand out by point grey and laid down by an explosive reversal of the Fraser River, of the old edges of the ocean that etched flat places into the north shore mountains as the weight of glaciers lightened and the crust rebounded in fits and starts. I could feel the tall ghost cedars from the past marching around me in the city streets and the echoes of millions of wings and bird cries in the now-drained migratory stop in the wide sweep of wetlands now cut into suburbia and fields. Knowledge of the landscape lived within me, I was a part of it, and I loved it.

The north was so overtly a shock in not being able to recognise the plants around me that I didn't think of the landscape at first. There are so many plants here that I've learned through visuals and physical interaction first, and many of them I don't know their names yet even. The names get hitched on to my knowledge of the plants easily when I see them now, and regardless of names they're becoming old friends.

But plants are not the only thing here. The landscape is so present. One of the reasons I love it here is that the sky and the vegetation are in balance: unlike the prairies there's a definite topographic and vegetative presence, and unlike the coast the sky is actually visible through trees and hills.

That's not what I was trying to say.

What I was trying to say is that I can read the landscape here reasonably well now. A glance at the vegetation, at the soil texture in a road cut, and I can see into the past to the old edges of glaciers receding and dropping gravel, to under-ice rivers of sediment carrying and sorting gravel into sinuous wrinkles. The silhouette of the top of a black spruce, that little bulbous knob, speaks of rock ground to the finest dust and then left to settle in ponds left by chunks of lingering ice. My own land, Threshold, has deep rich clay from the huge lake that stretched for a huge swathe of the interior before it poured out towards the coast and made what we know now as the Fraser River.

I'm learning to know the land. I'm learning to know it in the back of my mind, without thinking about it, cataloguing knowledge that I can pull out later if asked.

As I know the landscape it becomes part of me. It becomes as much an extension of me as anything, maybe not as layered with connection and interaction as Threshold but certainly the cradle of time and space in which I am rocked, held, loved. The north welcomes people in a way that the coast never did in my experience, maybe because it was so disfigured and damaged by development down there. Those forests shudder at the continuous lines of hikers snaking through every green space, trailing urine and trash and compaction and status-seeking fitness experiences through every bit of every type of ecosystem that's left intact. Here? The land draws you in, revealing little pockets of this plant or that soil or a scar on a tree to indicate an old oolichan grease trail. We remade the lower mainland in our image; the north remakes us slowly but surely in its own image.

It's not to say I'm done learning here: there's more to learn than one or even a thousand lifetimes can encompass. It's to say I'm a person of this land now, our traditional frame of ownership reversed if you will, it will always live in me and it feels so familiar now, like perfectly worn-in clothing. Like home.

These have flitted by; I want to capture them.

Beltaine

They jumped through the fire, it is said.
Were wed. His arms, oak-twisted, fastened
to her fields. Her blue rose erupted in his
glen. And the cows were chased between
twin pyres of smoke, became smoke, became
bread and breath and light. Behind the hedge,
my great-grandmother whistled shy as blue,

stung and dark as night, the song of the nightingale.
Until a boy, entranced, felt velvet nubs bloom
on his head, used new horns to pierce the bramble
boundary of his beloved.

My blood is seas of space, handfuls of moon,
from the fires of my grandmother's mother.
The spark I kindle on a hilltop solitary,
the wood wrong, the smoke yellow as pain.

When will the handfasting ceremony
commence? When will the stag charge from
the pines? Come to answer my
-- "Is it time?" with: It is time.

Am I breaking with the past? Is the past
so brittle it can break? How can I know?
This time, I jump through the fire alone.
I do not wed a man, I ed a place. Surface
through the smoke, mountain-born, naked
as a star. Finally whole.

Sophie Strand


When people say, “we have made it through worse before”

all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones
of those who did not make it, those who did not
survive to see the confetti fall from the sky, those who

did not live to watch the parade roll down the street.
I have grown accustomed to a lifetime of aphorisms
meant to assuage my fears, pithy sayings meant to

convey that everything ends up fine in the end. There is no
solace in rearranging language to make a different word
tell the same lie. Sometimes the moral arc of the universe

does not bend in a direction that will comfort us.
Sometimes it bends in ways we don’t expect & there are
people who fall off in the process. Please, dear reader,

do not say I am hopeless, I believe there is a better future
to fight for, I simply accept the possibility that I may not
live to see it. I have grown weary of telling myself lies

that I might one day begin to believe. We are not all left
standing after the war has ended. Some of us have
become ghosts by the time the dust has settled.

Clint Smith


Sorrow is not my name

—after Gwendolyn Brooks

No matter the pull toward brink. No
matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.
There is a time for everything. Look,
just this morning a vulture
nodded his red, grizzled head at me,
and I looked at him, admiring
the sickle of his beak.
Then the wind kicked up, and,
after arranging that good suit of feathers
he up and took off.
Just like that. And to boot,
there are, on this planet alone, something like two
million naturally occurring sweet things,
some with names so generous as to kick
the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon,
stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks
at the market. Think of that. The long night,
the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me
on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah.
But look; my niece is running through a field
calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel
and at the end of my block is a basketball court.
I remember. My color’s green. I’m spring.

By Ross Gay

So regardless of what happens I enjoy the problem. Er, problem I meant in the sense of something to solve but I don't like that word to refer to a land relationship. I like the process anyways.

So here we have a property.

Cool, wet, zone 8ish in terms of freeze but with:
1500 base 5C degree days historically, moving towards 1800 in the next 20 years at a conservative estimate (all this is based on Canadian gov data, including Canadian gov climate change models, I have used the most conservative in all cases)
600 base 10C degree days historically, moving towards 800
100 base 15C degree days historically, moving towards 200
Frost-free season 200 degrees historically, moving to 240
200 days with rain per year, anticipated not to change
Mean maximum August temperature moving from 20C to 22C
Mean minimum winter temperature moving from 0.6C to 0.8C
Mean winter temp moving from 2C to 3.2C
Mean summer temp moving roughly from 15C to 16C

Mean annual temperature (which is an ultra weird measurement, but sure) moving from 8C to 9.4C

More usefully,
70 days with some time below zero (frost days) historically, moving to 42
9 days where it doesn't rise above zero at all during the day, moving 6 days
0.4 days below -15C, moving to 0.2 (obviously a notional concept, but it means it should hit that every so many years)

0.7 days with some time above 30C, moving to 2 days
8 days above 25C, moving to 18 days
There are zero expected nights above 20C in near future
Highest temperature of the year is anticipated to be right above 30C

As you can see, it's not warm very often, but there's also not a lot of freeze. Sunlight is an issue in winter with the level of overcast.

There is plenty of moisture, though I haven't figured out the actual precipitation I'm expecting it to be relatively high, and to follow the mediterranean pattern of the west coast: lots in winter, sometimes a bit of "drought" (many days in a row without rain) in summer. Humidity is around 80%. This means that growing without irrigation is definitely possible with correct breeding and varieties BUT there's hella disease. I know of my own knowledge that powdery mildew is a big problem in the area: the general humidity keeps spores around and the drought stress of summer makes the plants susceptible.

The soil is listed in the BC soils survey as silty clay loam for much of the property, but that's a pretty high level survey.

The property is on a slope, with the main garden area in probably a 100-to-500-year floodplain for the Salmon River as far as I can tell from maps. The garden is at the base of a slope (there's a waterfall on the property coming off the slope) so it's water-and-nutrient receiving from the slope flow.

Just listing off this information you can see this is a leafy green veg paradise. Lettuce, kale, carrots, parsnips, all will overwinter here easily without cover unless there's a rare -15C cold snap, and even then it might just bite back the lettuce a bit. There isn't a ton of heat in summer -- that's the base 10C and base 15C growing degree days -- so squash and tomatoes will have the same trouble ripening that they do here up north and their prime growing temperatures coincide with the least amount of moisture and that powdery mildew issue. Crops that need to dry down in the field (beans, corn, small grains) need to be carefully-timed so they ripen within that dry window or they, too, will mold.

Perennials, including woody perennials like trees, need to be able to survive freezing. They also need to be able to ripen fruit in cool weather, if they are fruiting trees, and most importantly their microsites need to be assessed for drainage and/or have high moisture tolerance in winter. I think quince rootstock is good for this, for pears and quince?

With no snow cover in winter and little freeze, a clay-leaning soil will be sensitive to damage through overworking. This isn't a place to cultivate heavily. It is a place where annual and perennial weeds won't get easily knocked back by frost, so keeping the soil covered/weeded is a year-round project to avoid banking weed seeds and root propagules. Up north it's ok to let the soil be bare under snow and in spring before ploughing; down there I'm not so sure.

Therefore my first instinct is, when the land is cleared, to seed any bare soil with two things: a mix of desireable leafy greens (kale, lettuce, miner's lettuce, corn salad, spinach, chard, chicories) immediately in cool weather and then, when summer begins to heat up a little, planting squash, potatoes, corn, and other smothering warmer-weather crops through the greens mix to keep continuous cover as the earlier greens go to seed. Hoe out the first 30-50% of the greens to throw up flower shoots, then let them flower and seed to contribute to a seed bed of desireable greens as the squash etc is growing.

The first goal is to maintain a fall/winter/spring in-ground seedbank of harvestable greens (a yield even the first year of both seed and food) that both don't need to be planted and serve as a smothering mulch for other weeds. Yearly maintenance on the genetics of this greens mix is required: just remove anything that bolts before it produces tasty leaves. If that maintenance isn't followed then earlier, bolting genetics will take over and the usefulness of the greens seedbed will be lost. These greens can easily be ploughed into the soil in later years once the seedbed is established, but some good (non-bolting) specimens should be left to seed most years to maintain the soil seedbank. Further genetics work is as easy as eating leaves rather than cutting the whole plant, and leaving the tasty ones to seed while hoeing out the less tasty ones (or whatever the desired traits are). This might just mean carrying a couple wire flags when harvesting and putting them next to the best plants.

The second goal is to keep the soil covered with potatoes, corn, etc while getting off a crop for animal feed/winter storage. When the greens crop goes to seed the annuals like spinach and lettuce will die and/or reduce to stalks rather than ground-covering rosettes. The squash/corn/potatoes are all crops that don't require well-tilled seedbeds and can be popped in through existing greens. They also don't require much maintenance so in the first year of the project can happily produce some yield and cover the ground without a lot of intervention; it's to be expected that crops with the least person-energy requirements will do best in the first year when setting up everything else will keep people busy.

During this time assessment of water tables, soil fertility, microclimates, microtopograpy, local genetic resources, etc can occur in preparation for putting in perennial crops. Having known crops in place over the cleared area will also allow rough assessment of soil capability: nutrient or oxygen deficiencies will show up in a recogniseable way which should allow remediation before perennials are put in.

Anyhow, this is what I do for fun but I do think I want a cup of tea now.

An exercise for farm school is to envision what arrival would look like: if everything turned out right, far in the future, on an average day. A lot of participants talked about people and people are important; I love the idea of the land swelling during the quarters and cross-quarters with harvest celebrations and workshops, with a tiny village springing up of tents and tiny houses and camper vans. I want that feeling of people bustling, everyone cooking or making something, all the campstoves and outdoor kitchen full as folks prepare for an evening bonfire potluck. I want to see everyone chattering excitedly around the fire about what they learned that day, sharing experiences where everyone noticed something slightly different and it bubbles up as enthusiasm to share and talk and process and then, if these are the right people, as the fire dies down the talk drifts towards how to make the world better in concrete ways. Can you use cottonwoods to bust up concrete and plant in it? What does functional aquaponics look like on a small scale if you're trying very low inputs? What does a system look like if you prioritize aquifer replenishment? And also questions about the space right here under our feet: would it be better to shade the creek a little more? Maybe it would be more efficient to have the goosehouse downhill? What about trying a long-straw wheat?

There also need to be days when I wake up and go out alone and walk and look at everything. Every day there will probably be something that surprises me, a question that makes me think, something that I work at in the back of my mind when I go to bed that night.

The land itself isn't a jigsaw puzzle, it's an organism. When you go to a garden someone will point to a plant and say "that's a rose" or something like. I want to be able to point to something and it has so many uses and interconnections and purposes that I don't really stop until I've described the whole farm: this is an apple tree, it feeds us apples, it feeds the geese apples, it purifies the goose water, it shades the rhubarb, it stabilizes the slope, so on but more. Like any organism change is always occurring and homeostasis is more conceptual than real: annual crops come and go, numbers of animals or plants wax and wane, predation on crop plants swells and diminishes through the years. New organisms are added, seeds are selected so even remaining organisms change over time -- the Mammoth Russian sunflower I started with is maybe squatter and stronger two decades later, and occasionally throws multiple heads, or the KARMA mircle tomato is bigger and a little earlier -- but the whole is still itself in the same way that eating a sandwich instead of a steak or going to sleep or getting a sunburn or even replacing an arm with a prosthetic doesn't change your own essential nature.

For this visioning we are asked about customers and what they appreciate about this specifically, and the thing folks receive from me would be the story of interconnection. There's never just one thing: this is not a goose farm, or a soap farm, or a seed farm. This is where the soap is made from the same molecules as the charcuterie goose breast because it is one system. Everything isn't available all the time: it's a seasonal celebration of the land's generosity, maybe a basket per season that goes out full of treats and stories. Folks could open it and learn, open it and play with things within that they'd experienced before but differently, and things they hadn't experienced before. Breeding stock, seeds, and workshops connect the place to the places and the work of others. Part of the joy of it is that folks don't need to know what they need when they come: there's room to talk and discover that on the way.

The exercise asks, who supports you? Who is there to help you on the farm? I think of a workshop, many hands making light work, and that is one kind of support. There's another kind of support that is the recognition of purpose, that is belief. This is the support that acknowledges that it is worthwhile and desirable and sometimes achievable to change a little corner of the world. This is the support that also loves the land. I can't imagine having this kind of support.

The exercise says: you have just received word that the thing that happens next is about to begin. What is that thing? And that thing is that the organism produces offspring. The next thing would be that people with ossabaws and ancient grains and weird corns and geese have their own Places and there is a flow of information and genetics back and forth and the world is actively changing because more of these things are being grown and preserved, because people feel they have a network that helps to support them, because we're enabled to do this and we aren't alone. That's the long future, the next step.

Then we were asked to write a vision statement, which is the big soul-goal of the place and how it fits into the world as a whole and isn't to be shared, and a mission statement which is more concrete and achievable.

The vision statement will be something like: We who touch this land all know, together, that we are so many kaleidoscopic pieces of one intricate glorious system of systems; we all come away with better tools to steer those systems as authentic selves in collaboration with other entities. Standing on this land is to feel all the systems ticking like clockwork, to love those systems, and to know we have a place within them.

Or a little less woo:

Plants, humans, and other animals knowing together that we are so many kaleidoscopic pieces of one intricate glorious system of systems and giving humans better physical, intellectual, and emotional tools to steer our piece of that collaborative system.

The mission statement will be something like: Promoting creative place-based systems through hands-on experiential knowledge that supports diverse human, plant, and animal partners in flourishing in appropriate interlocking niches.

Yesterday we pretty much finished rendering the soap lard, and I have a 5 gallon bucket full of it. It's a good thing I love making soap; also what an amazing object to have! Overnight last night/tonight the cooking lard from leaf fat is rendering.

21 500ml and 8 750ml jars of stock are done and in the pantry.

Cheryl has been given her meat for the chicken trade; Ron has not yet.

Tomorrow the coppas actually go into cure and 3 more primals get broken down. The pace is slowing.

The chickens hopped the fence yesterday and were in the grain trial so I chased them out, then we harvested eveything that was ripe. That means amolinka, bishop, Ble de arcour einkorn, blue durum, ceres, marquis (pr seeds planted May 6 but not the cedar isle stuff planted may 11), pelisser, pembina, reward, and white sonora. Pelissier and blue durum are exceptionally beautiful: almost lavender coloured heads with dark awns. The einkorn was green long after the other wheats started to go golden, but it was as ready as the rest of them yesterday.

Still remaining in the grain trial is rivet (which I love and really want to ripen), rouge de bordeaux, braveheart triticale, and khamut from salt spring seeds. Also the two cedar isle patches, AC andrews and marquis, are still unripe.

There were a couple stray bits of ergot in a couple of the wheats, and also in one barley. The triticale has a bunch. It seems to be easy to pick out since it replaces the grain with a huge black fungal body, and I'm further told that it floats where the rest of the grain will sink.

I brought in a bunch of broccoli raab seeds from the sorrento from William Dam seeds. I made no effort to keep it from cross-pollinating with other brassicae but I think only radishes were also blooming at that time, if anything. It'll be interesting to see. The ones I let go to seed in the greenhouse have dropped their seeds and are trying to grow me some of a fall crop already, though it may be too late for that.

The crock got half-filled with cucumber pickles. I'm pretty happy with the way the cucumbers turned out. They're very sweet compared to bought ones, except for a single bitter one (we cut off the very end and tasted them all out of curiosity). I grew boston, national, and morden pickling cukes this year. National produced first, morden and national were similar in production. Boston started later but seems to be ripening more all at once; Aug 23 or so was the first serious pick from it so it might not make it in a cooler summer.

I brought in several lovely ripe mikado black tomatoes the other day from both deck and field. I think it's in the lead as the best black tomato here this year. The tomatoes are fairly sizeable, slicers, and have great form. I will be tasting them soon. Meanwhile cabot, glacier, minsk early (the most productive) and moravsky div have set and will ripen large quantities of fruit each. Matt's wild cherry is finally hitting its stride. Katja probably will, as likely will silvery fir tree and a couple others. I think the trial can be considered a success: I learned a lot a lot a lot. The chickens have discovered the garden and are helping me eat tomatoes. Boo.

I harvested several unripe North Georgia Candy roaster squash from the vines and ate them like zucchini in a pasta sauce the other day. That was really good. I also tucked some into the pickling crock and am curious how that goes down. A lot of the squash look pretty immature, we'll see how much more heat we get this year to ripen. In future I might try to grow them up a trellis on the inside of the greenhouse/woodshed. Of the squash trials, burgess buttercup started putting out female fruit and squash earliest. Several of the kuris and the lofthouse squash are catching up, and gete oksomin and north georgia candy roaster seem to be doing ok. Fingers crossed I get some seed from something to plant next year. Again no attempt to keep things from pollinating each other; it was a hard pollinator year I think too. Likely that's because it was so warm then so cold then so warm over and over.

Though maybe bees should be in my three year plan. I'm getting some honey from a friend who has bees in town. I bet she could teach me.

I need to remember to call the bird butcher in Smithers to set a time for ducks and geese.

Doing a daily writing practice for a bit on whatever.

I don't do my relationships with landscape any differently than I do my relationships with people. They don't feel different to me, and they have a similar enormous range that my relationships to people do. Within them I commit similarly, compromise similarly, and love similarly.

What makes land easier for me than people is that it cycles. It gives the underlying security of structure, which I need: it will be there for me when I come back, and any given season will leave and then will certainly, inviolably come back around. It will come back to be a little different; like people land evolves and grows. Like many people, it changes and remains recognizable and linked to its past by both form and chains of causality and so remains captivating.

As I said, it comes back around. Mostly unlike people.

Like people land has certain requirements, and if the requirements aren't met the relationship can shift. Working together with the land to achieve goals brings a sense of partnership. I wrestle with either abandoning any particular land or watching it be harmed by another, though like people I don't generally feel like it's my place to intervene: landscapes are no shrinking defenseless archetypes. They're less quick to act than we are, and more enduring: in the end they will always prevail.

Every piece of land has its own character. Our society leans towards seeing the land as one single piece rather than individual pieces; contrariwise we see people as discrete individuals rather than the network of flowing feelings and actions and responses that knit us into a society (I think it's Christakis and Fowler whose work counters the rugged individualism belief). Of course the truth of all of us is in the middle, and our relationship to land is as much of an influence as our relationship to people. All relationship is shaped around true seeing, constructing, or ignoring; scarcity and abundance; a synergistic match of what each party has to give and has to take; and of course love.

I love the character of a new landscape land like I love strangers in the normal times when I love people: pre-emptively, hopefully, expectantly, undemandingly.

Like most strangers the land loves me back, but unlike most strangers it keeps loving me back once it gets to know me and it accepts when I must move on.

The first of the mass graves of children was officially excavated in Canada this week.

Everywhere people are talking about the 215 children found in that grave, from age 3 on up. Everywhere they are grieving and honouring.

I've always lived a little in the future. Working in forestry, on the landbase with the Indigenous Nations whose children these are, I've had to learn about our history with these Nations both professionally and personally. I live in a town that's very Indigenous, maybe 30-40% of the folks in town depending on how you look at it?

And so I know that 215 is the tip of a very large iceberg.

Canada's policy of removing children and sending them to these residential schools lasted a very long time. A very high percentage of these children died, the figure I've heard most recently was around 25%. 1 in 4. The abuse in these schools was horrific so it's not just that these kids died. These kids died far from home while enduring the kind of tortures Christians describe in their hell. They were buried by their surviving siblings and friends and other fellow children who then went home and, having experienced only institutional abuse sometimes for a couple generations, tried to parent their children.

Mourning these 215 children, seeing them, is a release. They are loved in death, as they were no doubt loved at a distance by powerless parents in life. But there are so many to come, so many, so many.

I was abused a little as a kid, not enough to really grasp the enormity of this but enough to know that with enough support I could come back from it and find love and connection and trust in the world again. The Nations as a whole are doing this, their people slowly knitting themselves back towards wholeness.

I had that chance so I know what it would have meant to not have it. I know what it would have meant to die knowing that no one in the world would save me, that there were people cruel enough to make that happen and no kindness was powerful enough to stop it. I know what it would have meant to die knowing that the balance of the world was against me.

None of this is new. The exact numbers aren't known because when too many kids at these schools started dying Canada stopped keeping count. The Catholics who ran the schools may have numbers but they aren't telling. The official, likely very low numbers, are in the thousands. This has been sitting on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission website since 2015, along with some calls to action to try and fix things (this is the "reconciliation" Canada talks about). I had to learn about it in a couple different places in school, and in communities with any reasonable sized First Nation population it's just known; many of these folks went to the schools and basically all their parents did, after all.

But there's something about seeing this exact number going around, 215, that's so hard for me. Maybe it's the press of the rest of them, waiting.

There's nothing about this that was ok. Genocide, knowledge loss, family separation, abuse, death, removing people from their ecosystems: none of it was ok.

This week I am carrying grief for the as-yet-uncounted dead.

It's bigger than I am.

This is my personal laptop. The keys feel different than my work laptop, smoother, more intimate. I've had this laptop for almost ten years now. I haven't opened it for a couple weeks or more, things have been busy, and sometimes I'll post updates here from my work computer.

This post requires intimacy and safety. I fed the animals and stacked a full rack of wood downstairs. Two cats are lined up next to me. I've put off writing about some things so long that I don't know where to begin.

When I came to Fort I was going to live in Fort forever. During the first wildfires, when I was evacuated to Josh's, I buried myself in the garden one night here in an internal ritual. There are so many parts of me that can never leave this land.

When I came here I thought of land as a primary relationship, I thought of it as the one that vetos or trumps all others. My human relationships were secondary. In many ways they still are. I was looking for a place to finally be still, to form roots, to sink myself into immobility which I understood to be stability.

Since then Josh moved to Vancouver and may well move to Arizona for a couple years for work. We talk more often than I talk to almost anyone else, sometimes more often than I talk to anyone else. He didn't come into this as poly, but he is willing to hold space for this relationship in anything he engages in going forward. I trust him to hold that space for me, partly because when he was with me he held that space for other people and continues to do so. That is a strong relationship and I lean heavily on it for support. It flexes and fluxes with our lives and I still feel I can rely on it. There may be years I don't see him at all? Those haven't happened yet.

Since then Tucker moved up here. First he came up here one week per month, then inverted that and got an apartment and went down to the coast one week per month. With covid he's barely been down at all. It was supposed to be information gathering, to see if he could live in Fort. It's been comfortable, which sounds like so little but means so much to me: incremental progress learning boundaries together, shared dinners, supportive touch and conversation. A couple weeks before covid he decided he couldn't live up here, but where else would anyone want to be during this time if not somewhere you can safely move around on the streets and go outside whenever you want without worry? So he slid underwater, we didn't talk about it despite some of my early proddings, and it rested there until he put an offer in on a condo in the city last week.

Understand that in my life I usually change quickly. I move along at such a rapid clip that few people can keep up with me, and one of the things I love in my current set of partners is their ability for personal growth themselves. I like dating people with qualities that impress and inspire me. It makes me feel less like a parent.

So anyhow, the offer on the condo was his way of bringing up that it was time to get those negotiations going again. I figured, after a year or two in this house, that I had another move in me. I've been here longer than I've lived anywhere since I was seventeen and some of the trauma of displacement has healed. I've learned, too, that my relationship to the land is as much a process as my relationship to people: it's not something I obtain and then have, but is instead something I do or else do not do.

Now comes a negotiation stage, except that neither of us know how to negotiate. So, we need to pick up those skills. Then I need to figure out: what do I need from a home? Can I actually share a house with someone or are we looking for multi-house solutions? What are my dealbreakers? What are dream-fulfillment bits? Is there a way to leverage coupleness into cheaper living? If we look at both of our lists of dealbreakers, is there an actual real place we can find to live that's ok with us? How will finances and relationship end work in any such situation, including combined situations? If we look at our lists of joybringers, can we find a situation that contains those for both of us? How many towns in BC have a gaming store and nearby acreage anyhow? Should we move to Scotland and leverage the commonwealth country job opportunities? How important is living closer to Josh, or to my other friends in Nanaimo and Sechelt? Is there somewhere in BC where winter isn't solid mud and also where it isn't -40C? How many towns are left, in a province where pot is legal, that I can walk down the street and not get sick from exposure to it? How do I feel about my job, about doing it somewhere else and/or about doing something different? How do I feel about working for government? Is there a way to make this work or is there not?

And so on.

I've found a way to go back to the counselor that I had at my old job, basically my current insurance doesn't let me pick a counselor and has a max of 4 sessions on a topic so that's not great. Seeing my old counselor sounds great. The gender piece is pushing at me too, and I think this whole kaleidoscope probably needs to be holistically resolved.

I've also been-- remember in spring, when I was planning a fall butchering party/workshop up here because I needed community? I still need community. So that's another piece of the puzzle.

I'm maybe starting to wake up, but I still feel just so tired. Hope usually comes naturally to me but I feel like the near future is a bit of a sticky slog right now. I am usually pretty confident in the further future.

So there we are.

The backdrop to all this week (if I don't record it I won't be able to anchor it in time in the future) is a series of protests and other actions with regards to control of land in the Interior (somewhat west of me, I'm not in the specific territory under discussion).

A pipeline has been planned to go through and at least a significant faction of the people indigenous to that area are very opposed. They've been working on significant peaceful resistance for a number of years through various strategies. The many labyrinthine branches and levels of Canadian/British Columbian government are not all in agreement as to what should be done.

For work I spend time immersed in a lot of legal reading, and Tsilhqot'in and Delgamuukw are fairly snappy and straightforward reads.

Also at issue is the question of who leads the particular indigenous group: whether a colonially-imposed democratic system or a pre-contact traditional system has jurisdiction.

I have a bunch to say about this and perhaps I should write it out at some point. I'm enormously sympathetic to anyone who has a personal, cultural, or spiritual relationship to a particular piece of land. I'm also-- well, I can see government workings from the inside right now and doing anything with it is probably like trying to carry six tons of cooked spaghetti in your arms: there's too much and everything goes all which way no matter what you try. That said, there's a lot moving very fast to support aboriginal land rights currently, things which are establishing groundwork for much more flashy and visible things down the road. I end up being too moderate for any particular side of the general discussion: both those who want full indigenous government with no settler representation starting yesterday and those who want full settler government with no non-assimilated representation.

The point of this post is that the protests have been shutting down trains, highways, bridges, and the legislature and throne speech so far. The whole thing has also kind of shut down my facebook: I prefer to paraphrase rather than share information but anything I do share -- related or not -- is getting set to private security settings after the fact so no one gets to read about my current interest in regenerative agriculture or some kind soul in Wuhan who's feeding cats of quarantined folks. Friday the call is to protest at government buildings.

I am very happy to respect this protest; it would be the first where I need to make that decision. But I'm not sure what to do in the (likely) case that I arrive at work and protesters arrive later in the morning or in the afternoon. Is one supposed to leave the building at that point and drive (out) through folks?

I guess we'll see how it goes. But that's the backdrop to all the geese and trailers breaking down and PTSD angst and whatnot.