I’ve firmly come to believe that some people are just genetically wired that way. That’s why we can’t help becoming activists – we are genetically programmed such that we just cannot stop and do nothing when we see something is wrong.

But it is hard to live with, when you feel compelled to act on everything you see that could be better. Partly because it distracts you from other things that also should matter in your life (like earning an income, or personal relationships). And partly because it is frustrating when you hit roadblocks, and can’t influence or exact the changes you see are needed…

I’ve had a really tough time lately. I’m in a bit of a love-hate relationship with my town, Tofino. You’d think a tiny little community on the idyllic surf washed west coast of Vancouver Island would be paradise to live in, wouldn’t you? To visit maybe. But not to live in.

I feel like I’ve been battling to “help” my community – to stand up for residents’ rights, like having affordable housing, or not having to pay more for water than our for-profit businesses pay. And, for the last three and a half years, I have been using my earth sciences background (PhD in Structural Geology) to try to help our community come up with an emergency plan for the coming earthquake/tsunami, that is better than the current one – which actually puts people’s lives in greater danger than if they just ignored instructions. (All of these battles are chronicled on the Tofino Residents blog, which I started but am pretty ready to give up on).

So I’ve been feeling really down: wondering why, when I take the time to volunteer my expertise for the community, it must be a battle. Why I feel compelled to fight the battle, in spite of the opposition. Why there even is opposition and antagonism to simply getting a plan that helps my friends, my community…

It’s not only Tofino. I feel really down about the world. About global warming, about right-wing journalists who are not even scientists but who do their best to bamboozle the public into believing there is even any legitimate debate about human-caused climate change, about the oil spill. I left my high-paying job in the mining industry (yup, that’s right! that’s were I used to earn big bucks!) ten years ago, to earn a pittance as a writer/photographer (and nothing as an activist) in order to try to right some of the wrongs on our planet.

But lately, I’ve been feeling really negative about it all. Sure, the difference I make – be that on Tofino’s tsunami plan or on global environmental issues – is ultimately positive. But it is so negligible on the scale of things. I don’t feel like I am making any real difference.

This week, though, when I was feeling my lowest, I stepped out my front door – and there on my doorstep was a big heart drawn in chalk on the pavement. I knew right away who had drawn it – a little 5 year old girl who lives two doors down. The week before, I had helped her learn to draw a heart with chalk by herself, as I watched her sister learn to ride her bike without training wheels all by herself.

I mostly ride my own bike, rather than drive, so I have got to know the six kids here on my little townhouse driveway . They’re all between 5 and 7 years old. (They talk to me, because they don’t have to flee off the driveway for me and my bike, like they do when a car comes in). I always make time for them, even when I am busy. The last few months, they have been knocking on my door, asking me to “come out and play” with them. I nearly always do, no matter how busy I am – even if only for a few moments.

In my utterly crappy mood, that chalk heart on my doorstep the other day just warmed my jaded and cynical heart.

Maybe I am setting my goals too high, trying to change things that are just too unchangeable. But that chalk heart made me realize that I am making a difference in this world – at least on the scale of those kids’ lives.

And so they make a difference in mine.

Yesterday, Merry Bewick down on Chestermans Beach called me up and asked if I would come over and sign a copy of one of my books, that she had purchased as a gift.

I’ve been carefully tending my tomato seedlings since March. I’ve done a great job, I must say – some are approaching a foot in height, and a few even have buds on them.

So imagine my surprise when I saw Merry with a window-full of full-size tomato plants, many of them laden with fruit!

The challenge growing tomatoes here in Tofino is that we are on a skinny peninsula, surrounded by the North Pacific. Although we get a good deal of sun most summers, we just don’t get the heat that you need to ripen tomatoes. The plants grow; they even look great. And you can usually manage to get some hard little green tomatoes by September. But to get them to ripen before the winter starts to set in again (usually the second week of October; we don’t have fall), you really have to grow the fastest-ripening varieties. I have had the best luck with cherries: Tumbler and Golden Nugget. In the full-size varieties, Early Girl, Early Cascade and Alicante work best.

So I asked Merry what variety they were. “Oh, you know, stolen seeds,” she said. “Tomatoes from the store, that I ate and took the seeds out of.”

June tomatoes, I thought… no bugs around in winter, when they’re blooming. “Did you pollinate them yourself?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” she said, holding up a little blue paint-brush (see photo, above). “This is the bee!”

Merry said that some of the tomatoes were plants that she seeded about a year ago, and others she had grown from cuttings. “I just lop the tops off and thrown them in there,” she said, pointing to a bucket on the floor.

Well, you just keep on learning, don’t you? I am surprised that the tomatoes continued to grow through the short days of winter. But then again, I kept a green pepper plant alive and growing at a south-facing window a few winters ago, using a Q-tip as my bee, and getting some early spring green peppers too. I think the secret is two-fold: lots of light, and also that the plants don’t chill down at night, as they would in a greenhouse.

Thanks for the tips, Merry! And especially thanks for the tomato, which I enjoyed with my fresh home-grown Port Alberni lettuce (transported that same day from Port by bike!) in an extremely tasty and environmentally-friendly salad last night.

Norm Hann was our instructor – giving us a chance to try out something new, as well as to find out about a new and different way of getting a core workout. (The core muscles are all of the big muscles in the centre of your body – stomach, back, glutes – that support and stabilize the rest of your body. A strong core helps prevent injury as well as makes you stronger all-round). This morning clinic was one part of the program of this weekend’s Tofino running camp, led by ultra-endurance athlete Jen Segger.

Norm has just come back from a major SUP trip through the Great Bear Rainforest – “standing up” (literally and figuratively) for the Great Bear Rainforest, in particular about the proposal to have oil tankers pass through this pristine region. The oil well spewing out tens of thousands of barrels of oil per day unfortunately illustrates Norm’s point perfectly – the devastating effects that accidents can happen. So, to raise awareness about the risks to the region, Norm travelled nearly 400 km on the SUP in 11 days.

The boards are broad and quite stable. I felt a little wobbly on it at first, but it is not what I would call “tippy”. Not one of us fell off – which says something about stability, considering we were a group of first-timers. I think for straight-out travelling, I’d prefer a sea kayak – both for the ability to hold more gear, and for the stability in rougher seas. But the view from up high was definitely quite nice. The view around is better, but what surprised me is how much you can look down into the water from the SUP, views that you mostly miss from a kayak. Who ever knew there are so many big crabs down there!

I think what the SUP is really great for, though, is for that core workout. You do really need to hold your body stable while paddling – can’t slack off and lean back and lily dip like you can in a kayak. But also, the stroke is very different, hoding both arms straight, and using mainly body rotation to pull the paddle through the water.

I’ve been wanting to try this out for a while, so I’m really greatful to both Norm and Jen for making this opportunity happen. Apparently, SUP is currently the fastest-growing watersport. And it’s not only for flat water. Norm had it out there on the waves every day, surfing some really good rides at Cox Bay, one of Tofino’s biggest and best surf spots.

What do you think about SUP? Have you tried it yet? (For any Vancouver Island visitors who want to try: they’re available to rent on Nitinat Lake, abotu a 45 minute drive from Port Alberni).

No one else pays attention to this date, but I always do. The anniversary of our earthquake is perhaps not pleasant to think of, but it is important. Kind of like Remembrance Day.

It was 310 years ago today – around 9pm on the night of January 26th, 1700, that the last big quake hit. How do scientists know that? Native people up and down the coast have earthquake stories in their oral history – but as non-written cultures, they are not able to provide exact calendar dates for these events.

Geologists can recognize ancient tsunami deposits by taking core samples in the mudflats – some of their data come from right here beside Tofino, in Browning Passage (pictured in photo). Whenever there is a tsunami, a layer of sand gets thrown up on the mudflats, smothering and killing the vegetation below (eelgrass, algae, etc.) Geologists can carbon-date that killed vegetation layer, thereby dating the tsunami-lain sand layer.

That’s how they know the last big earthquake/tsunami event was in the year 1700, with an error of plus or minus 20 years. By the way, the 1964 tsunami was nothing, in comparison. Click here for a map that shows the reach of both the 1700 and 1964 tsunamis in Port Alberni. You can see that the 1700 one (thick black line) went much higher than the 1974 one (shaded area).

Lower down, the geologists found more sand layers that represent other large earthquake/tsunami events that took place in the years 1310, 810, 400, 170BC and 600BC. All together, they have identified a total of 13 earthquake/tsunami events here, and that is how they know that the average recurrence interval is 500 years. (That is just the average – they have been anywhere from 200 to 900 years apart; this means that, at 310 years, we are in range right now).

So, from carbon-dating below the sand deposits, they had the date narrowed down to between 1680 and 1720. Then they found a trees that were knocked down around that time, preserved under a lake. By dendrochronology – looking for patterns in the sequences of tree rings (that relate to seasons, e.g. harsh winters, droughts, good growing seasons) and comparing them to the ring patterns in living trees today that are greater than about 350 years old, they could count back on the rings and narrow the earthquake down to the winter of 1699-1700.

Then they went to Japan, which has had written tsunami records for centuries (or perhaps millenia, I am not sure), and they found a record that winter of a big tsunami that hit Japan, but with no known earthquake related to it. Back-calculating from the time of the tsunami in Japan, and knowing how fast a tsunami wave travels, they figured out that this big magnitude 9 earthquake hit here around 9pm on January 26th, 1700.

Wondering why we have earthquakes here? North America’s Pacific Rim region is an area where tectonic plates are colliding. The oceanic plate is subducting under the continental plate.

There is no such thing as a fault “line” – you have to think of the Earth in 3D. People think of a fault is a “line” only because that’s how you draw it on a map – but the map only shows the Earth’s surface, and you need to imagine what is going on below the surface. A fault is really a plane – which represents the boundary between two masses of rock – in this case, between the two tectonic plates.

That boundary comes to the Earth’s surface roughly 75 km off the shore of Vancouver Island – under the ocean. You can draw where it comes to the Earth’s surface on a map, and that’s why people looking at maps think of it as a line. But that plane actually angles downward to the northeast, dipping right under Washington State.

This map, from the United States Geological Survey, shows the plate boundaries. The thin red line with the triangles on it (labelled Cascadia Subduction Zone) is where that fault plane hits the surface. The triangles show which side it is angling down towards. Here in Tofino, that fault plane – the top of the subducting oceanic plate – is 25 km below the Earth’s surface, and getting deeper as it moves eastward. Eventually it melts… and that magma rises up to form volcanoes. That’s why all the volcanoes are located in a defined arc, 150 or so km to the east of where the fault “line” is on the map.

So, if you can imagine in 3D that oceanic plate sliding downward, below the coasts of northern California, Oregon and Washington and below Vancouver Island, you’ll find that it makes sense why the earthquakes occur where they do, in the region outlined in black. That is the region directly above where the two plates are moving against one another. The high pressure deep in the Earth makes them get stuck. When the pressure build up to the point that they move, that’s the earthquake.

Subduction earthquakes are the strongest type of earthquakes. (Other types of earthquakes occur from plates moving sideways past one another, rather than downward – such as the San Francisco earthquakes). The earthquake we are expecting here will likely be a magnitude 8 or 9 event - that is between 10 and 100 times stronger than the Haiti earthquake earlier this month.

I hope that this info helps people to understand why we get earthquakes, and how scientists know these things. I don’t think this is talked about enough. If people are not informed, they cannot prepare. When this earthquake comes, it will affect a huge region and the damage (and casualties) will be extensive. We will experience what the people of Haiti are living through right now. If you want to hear more about my views on our emergency preparedness, please check out my post today on the Tofino Residents blog.

“Yup,” I smile. Damp is good. Damp means that the temperature is still above freezing.

The last week or two has been warm even for Tofino. My witch hazel bloomed a couple of weeks ago. Which is normal; it usually blooms the first week of January. But riding my bike around town yesterday, I noticed there are actually a lot of flowers in bloom right now.

So I got back on the bike today, camera in hand. These are no amazing photos – I only took my point-and-shoot out – but I was sure surprised, once I started looking. Remember, this is Canada, in the middle of January!

In a short little lap around town, I came across dozens of different types of flowers in bloom! I didn’t even photograph every single one, and there were four that I did not know the names of, either. But, of what I could recognize, I found: witch hazel; pink, blue, yellow and white primroses; pink and white heather; rhododendrons; azaleas; viburnum; geranium; three types of daisy; lavatera; pansies; violets; periwinkle; fuschia; California lilac; lobelia; calendula and hellebore – even one red rose and some mums trying hard. Oh yes, and strawberries (on my own back deck!).

Counting the four I didn’t know the name of, that is 26 different flowers in bloom here in Tofino right now.

Amazing what you see, once you start paying attention. Hope you enjoy the pix.

[One day later] Oh, I just couldn’t help myself, I had to go out and take more flower pictures again today. So here is instalment two of the Tofino Flowers in January photo essay. I found crocuses and even blackberries in bloom! Counting them, as well as Scotch broom (oh no, invasive but pretty), two more types that I don’t know the name of, and the snap dragon that I forgot to mention yesterday, that makes a total of 31 different types of flowers in bloom in Tofino right now! Enjoy…

It is a soft grey evening (yes, this time of year, 4pm is evening…).  Tonquin is a small beach, but the tide is low, so the beach is nearly as long as it gets, maybe 400 or 500 m?  I touch the rock at the south end with my rubber boot, as is the custom.  The winter surf curls beside me and I turn and now follow the tideline towards the north end.  The sky is grey. The sun setting over the open ocean touches the cloud-bottoms with hints of peach and rose.

I take a deep breath of cool salt air.  I exhale slowly, then focus on breathing steadily, deliberately: in with the good, out with the bad, letting go of thoughts of deadlines, overdue obligations, mortgage payments, year-end tasks, as I gaze out to sea.

A flash of black on the water catches my eye.  I watch the spot as I walk the waveline, stomping through the salt water in my gumboots.  A moment later, it reappears: two large dark faces, the silhouetted, crumpled brows of a pair of male steller sea lions, swimming side-by-side into Tofino Harbour against the swift ebb current.  I stop to watch them, letting the salt waves swirl around my boots.

I breathe out. Forcefully. Out with the bad, in with the good. And while I watch the sea lions, another black shape appears – even closer, at the edge of the break.  The rounded face of a harbour seal hangs by the peaking wave-crests, turning his head left then right, as he watches me.

Here I live, a stone’s throw from Nature (yes, Nature with a capital N). That’s what I came to Tofino for, some 15 or so years ago, to live on the edge (or, hopefully, beyond it).  Yet I realize that I have barely spent any time out in Nature for several years now!

I have been messing up on my life plan… (and, by the way, didn’t I go through this exact same thought process a year ago, when I promised byself that this summer I would get back in my kayak, back into the wilderness, But what’s happened?)

It’s a tough time to be a writer, with magazines folding left and right (National Geographic Adventure mag folded earlier this month!) and with web media not having any model by which they can charge users… and therefore pay their writers. I’ve been stressing so much about planning my career, plotting out how I can survive (financially) in this world… that I am forgetting to simply live in this world, to appreciate the parts of it that I value, that feed me.

I don’t have an answer.  It is a tough period for me.  If I am to partake in society, I have to earn a living in it (where “living” equates to $$). In that case, my Nature time comes down to being “vacation”.  And taking vacation is pretty hard to justify, when you are self-employed in a seemingly dying industry.  Or, the alternative: I return to Nature… and leave the conventions of our Society behind?

I’m not sure what I’ll do in the long run. But I know that on the shorter term, I have to make time to get “out there” more. To feed my soul. Because, right now, I am living the worst of both worlds.

As far as towns go, Tofino is lacking in many things – it is expensive to live here; our schools and hospitals are underfunded and the services are under threat; we don’t have facilities like sports centres or movie theatres or shopping malls.  The trade-off is that we have the grandeur of Nature, the rainforests and oceans that make Clayoquot Sound one of the world’s cradles of biodiversity, at our doorstep.  But if I am not going to take advantage of what this place has to offer, what am I doing living here?

So I sit here, tapping away in front of the computer screen, warm in this room with my electric heat and electric lights and the radio chattering away, thinking of those sea lions and that curious seal, and of the whales and the bears and the sandpipers and the eagles, and of the barnacles and mussels that right now are being washed by cold sea-surf on the new moon’s rising tide, all of them living their lives right here, all around me, and reminding me that there is so much more, so much more, out there.

I brought them inside at the end of summer – you can read about them up to that point in my September 5th blog entry.  I thought that was that – a “technical success” in that I had plants, but no actual rice.  But the plants were just too beautiful to throw out, so I brought them inside, to the south-facing window in my bedroom.

I didn’t think that the plants were doing much there, but now looking back to those September photos I can see that they have definitely bushed out.  Interestingly, I left one bucket of plants downstairs, on my heated tile floor at my front entrance: more heat, much less light.  Those plants have died.  So clearly the light is what they really need.

I haven’t paid a real lot of attention to them – not even watering them to the point of keeping them always saturated like before (I wonder if that is what has stressed them to bloom?).  But they’ve been looking great…  And then, this morning, I went for a closer look and noticed that two of the plants (of a total of  12) have little blooms coming out – and it looks like  few more will bloom soon.

So, the Tofino rice experiment is not yet over!  I don’t anticipate getting more than a tablespoon or so of rice – but even if I can start to select for a line that is more cold-tolerant and faster-maturing, well… that will be a good start.

Next year I will do two things differently:

1.  I will try to get a seed that is already from a colder climate (these were from California; I’ll see if I can get some from Japan).

2.  And now that I have a garden in sunny Port Alberni, I will move some of my plants out there to see how they do.

And you know what is the most interesting thing about this?  On this blog, I can check the stats, to find out what search terms people are using to find my site.  And you know what the most common search term that leads people here is?  “Growing rice in Canada”.  So, even though this is not being talked about a lot in the media, it is pretty clear that it is on a lot of people’s minds.

I’ll keep you posted on what happens, so be sure to check back!

But the event just got more and more exciting as local boy Pete Devries made it through heat after heat after heat.  By the Saturday, he’d advanced into the quarter finals.  By now, down to the last 8 competitors of the original 144 (most of the top-ranked surfers who are seeded on the international tour, and from all over the world), there was almost no waiting between Pete’s heats.  More quickly than most of us could realize it, suddenly our boy had won the competition!

There were about 1000 people on the beach to watch Pete in the finals – some people even estimate 2000!

People walked away from their jobs, and businesses just closed up, locked their doors, so they could watch Pete surf.  I have never seen the entire population of Tofino so united and positive.  Talking to Keven Drews, editor of the Westcoaster newspaper, we both were just so happy to be “media” covering such a happy story.

So, finally, I am posting some photos of Pete surfing here at the Coldwater Classic.  And you can read and listen to my reports about the event, including:

- an article in The Tyee newspaper

- radio piece about Pete Devries for CBC Radio

- radio piece about surfers Pete Devries and Noah Cohen for local radio CHMZ

- radio piece about the Canadian surf scene for ABC Radio Australia

The power goes out a lot in Tofino in winter. Our single power supply line follows alongside our single road connection to the outside world, winding away along steep forested slopes above Sproat Lake, then over Sutton Pass, then skirting the margins of the Kennedy Canyon for 125 km. One winter storm with one branch down across the lines, and all power here on the west coast is gone. It happens a lot. It is much less common here in summer, usually the result of a car leaving our winding road and slamming into a power pole.  The power went out abruptly this afternoon, on a calm and sunny day, so I suspect that that is what happened.

Sometimes the power comes back like a unexpected blow to the head – lights switch on abruptly, painfully, while the smoke alarm blurts out a piercing screech and the fridge fires up with a hum. But tonight, so far – no. As the light faded this evening, I set up my candles around the kitchen and put on some mellow music, assembled my camp stove, and cooked my dinner. Yes, I admit, I am not fully electricity-free this time!  I have a new speaker system for my iPod, so can enjoy music even while the power is out! Then I lit a fire, and lounged back on the couch in front of the crackling fire for a slow-paced and peaceful meal. Why don’t I do this more?

Now I am back upstairs, typing away by candle-light as the battery on my laptop goes down before my eyes, linked to the world via my Rogers internet stick (it works on cell frequencies). I am more relaxed than I have been in weeks, and hope that I won’t get abruptly jerked back into that world of bright lights and loud noises. But for now, no signs of that. All is still good, the power is still out.