Giant cedar as seen from the kitchen window

cedar outside the kitchen house window

The giant cedar is the centre piece of the Bird Cove property. It is both magnificant and tranquilt - a very impressive site.

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excerpt from a Shorelines short story

(from "ShoreLines - Memories & Tales of the Discovery Islands" - edited by Jocelyn Reekie and Annette Yourk)

.. excerpt from a short story by Burton Wohl entitled "Outer Islands"

" Fact is, living on the outer islands is a mix of few rewards and masses of hard work. Work like coming back from a periodic commissary junket in Campbell River carrying two or more tanks of propane, each weighing 25 kg., down a steep ramp (the tide is always low and the ramp is standing on its nose whenever you come back from town). So far you've got one round trip, car to boat and back, per tank. Now come 20 kg. containers of gasoline - say three or four. Next groceries -- anywhere from three to a dozen 20 Kg. boxes, depending on the size of the family. There may be; there probably is laundry, and lots of it because the old washing machine back on the island went belly-up over a week ago and Poppa couldn't get to fixing it because he didn't have time because he had to put a new cylinder-head gasket on the outboard engine, which also went belly-up that week; he had to buck up a windfall hemlock, clean and reset the carburator on the chain saw so that he could reduce the tree to blocks, split the blocks with an axe and/or maul into stove-size billets after shaving a new axe or maul handle (a full morning's work) to replace the one busted during the summer by a 16-year old guest who needed to show his Aunt Betsy what heavily muscled woodsman he was and then splintered an $18 axe handle with three wildly inexpert blows

If you get short of breath while reading that sentence I've made my point. Quality of life on the outer islands is directly proportional to the amount of skill and effort you are able and willing to provide. Actually, even to live badly is hard work and then one's sense of oppression is weighted even further by the discomfort of smoky chimneys, cold draughts, mounds of garbage, leaky boats, balky engines, sputtering lamps, overdue library books - and spam. Only the resourceful survive, only the resolute remain.

You've seen your outer islander lugging all those propane tanks, gas containers, laundry sacks, boxes of groceries and oh yes, let's not forget a 25 Kg. sack of dog food and oh yes, those three sheets of plywood, and the hummingbird feeder - my God! we forgot the hummingbird feeder - he and the family have lugged down the ramp and stashed in the boat. That's the easy part. The hard part happens when they all get home (assuming the battery in the boat didn't drop dead while cranking a colicky engine). Now they've got to bring all that stuff up from their own dock, trekking up their ramp across the rocks, up the path to their own back porch; dropping off a box here, a bale there, the sack of dog food - does it surprise you? - on the dog himself. Altogether then, the difference between living on an outer island and on a more developed infrastructured island is not unlike variations between life-styles in one and anther geological age."