April in the World

I’d been starting to feel some survivor guilt being up here in the beautiful, clean air while my friends and family suffer through terrible air quality in the Bay Area.  But that changed as we woke up Saturday morning to find that the smoke from Oregon and Washington had arrived at Vancouver Island during the night and the clear air had turned hazy.  We left Hornby Island a day early and are now back in Vernon where the air is equally dismal with smoke from… Read More »Orcas and Otters and Water Tanks, Oh My!

Haha!  I know.  Portland is landlocked so how could I sail there?  North of Victoria, BC, is Portland Island.  On Sunday, John and I had the pleasure of sailing there from the Northern tip of the Saanich peninsula with our friends Susie and Peter.  Susie is my friend Angela’s sister and Peter is her sailing and life partner and they live in Victoria.  They have a C&C 37 sailboat named Cilantro and are experienced sailors who go off for several weeks at a time on… Read More »Sailing to Portland

I’m feeling a bit sheepish about writing a blog about Victoria, BC.  Every morning when I haul out my iPad and click on my various news sites, including the SF Chron, I’m confronted by an apocalyptic spectacle of fires and smoky air all around the Bay Area.  The idea that it took raging fires to knock coronavirus and racial protest news from the top of the daily paper is sobering. Despite my feeling vaguely guilty, as well as grateful, that I am not in the… Read More »Island Life

On Tuesday evening, I attended via Zoom my third of six Intro to Wake Up workshops.  Our assignment for this session (there are 20 of us) was to read My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem.  I made it only halfway through since the many exercises make it slower going than a regular book.  The author, a therapist, puts forward the thesis that trauma, which exists both for victims and perpetrators, resides not only in… Read More »Trauma and Telephone Poles

I am in Victoria now, on Vancouver Island, staying in a charming 1908 Craftsman bungalow that is like a miniature version of my Berkeley house (back of house and kitchen pictured below).  John and I brought our e-bikes up here with us, pulled behind my old Prius on our fancy Kuat bike rack.  On previous visits, I’d heard about the Galloping Goose trail but I’d never ridden it so I’ve been excited about doing so. Similar to the rail trail in Vernon, they took a… Read More »Galloping Goose

It really is something to be in Canada reading about the early volleys of what is likely to be a hair-raising election season with Trump already embarked on a violent, authoritarian strategy with his militia in Portland and now Seattle.  Along with his statement that he isn’t willing to say he’ll accept the results of the November election, it’s not hard to imagine where this might be headed.  In today’s Globe and Mail, which I read every morning in paper form, there is an OpEd… Read More »Plants, Not People

Our quarantine is over so we are out and about. However, despite how well BC has been doing around COVID, there was an outbreak of 35 infections in Kelowna (30 miles South of us) due to young folk partying in hotel rooms so it is creeping closer. Yesterday, we took our e-bikes to a winery in Lake Country, just South of Vernon, and then rode about 30 minutes to another, had a tasting, and then rode back to the car and drove down to the… Read More »Lakes, Vines, and Wine

We’re living in strange times, eh?  Catch that Canadian accent?  When I tried to rent a house in Victoria for us to stay in for the month of August, I got the cold shoulder from several owners because they perceived that I was American by my phone number.  One even found me on Facebook and saw that I live in Berkeley.  Rules here are that only travel within the province is allowed so unless I could prove we were BC residents, folks did not want… Read More »In Quarantine

The last time I wrote a blog was back in 2012-2013 when I lived in Africa for 8 months, first in Tanzania and then in Zambia.  While British Columbia is a less exotic location to be writing from, the world as a whole is in much greater turmoil than it was back then.  And the U.S., in particular, is one of the countries struggling the most to contain the COVID19 pandemic and to deal with a range of other underlying problems that the pandemic and… Read More »Heading North