AN ECONOMY OF SHARING

Lots of folk on the Coast still subscribe to the old adage: “If you’ve got it, share it.” There’s even a sense that if you don’t share, the fish will stay away from your nets, the crab from your traps, and the slugs will have a field day in your garden. It’s part of respecting the creatures that are our food.

Our surpluses are usually crab and shrimp or prawns, sometimes berries or garden greens. As often as we can, we take crab and shrimp to church. For some of the older folk, it’s the only seafood they have access to. Jim brings rhubarb, herbs and garden vegetables to share. Donna brought down a wonderful Smithers cheese. Gil saved out some brass fixtures he thought we might use from the rummage sale.

The makings for a rhubarb and salmonberry pie

Anne, Ron and Elizabeth

When Anne and Ron came down with all their goodies, they had hoped to take back, along with crab, shrimp, etc., some salmon. But the one lovely spring we had on got away. Coming back into the yacht club, Jo’s friend Steve called out from the fuel dock: “Did you catch anything?” Ron answered, “Rockfish, but no salmon.” A fisherman, overhearing, reached down into his hold and held up a sockeye: “Here, take this.” And Jo had a coho in her freezer she wasn’t going to use.

Anne and Ron on La Sonrisa

We had hoped to be able to begin canning some salmon ourselves. The next morning, neighbour Mark kayaked over: “My motor isn’t running and I need a ride to the ferry. And by the way, I have three jars of sockeye that wouldn’t fit in my canner. Can you use them?” A day later Gordie phoned: “We limited out yesterday. Do you want a coho?”

Discussing fishing plans
Kimbo in his life jacket, ready to go fishing with Gord

Aunt Chris loves her crab. She shares it with sons Lennie and Herman and families, and always takes some down south to her sisters. She also loves going to garage sales, which is great for us. We put in our order and Chris keeps a look out!

Aunt Chris makes sure Thomas keeps warm

Cooking crab on the beach at Crippen Cove with Chris, Herman and Lennie

Foster and Hilda and Gordie are the last of the moose-hunting men, bridge-playing couples mom and dad were so fond of. Foster and Gordie are constantly offering to drive us around town, inviting us up for a meal or to do laundry, etc. The other day Gordie came up with a last package of moose burger from his freezer; earlier Foster contributed (along with making the most wonderful smoked salmon) four delectable octopi.

At least half the crab we give to Foster and Gordie get given away to others. It’s one of the ways Foster and Gordier continue to participate in the economy of sharing.

Gordon, Foster and Thomas telling after dinner tales

Hilda and Elizabeth

Scripture says that it is more blessed to give than to receive. Certainly it is a blessing to be able to share. But to receive is almost a double blessing. First is the delight in the gift itself; second is the delight in the pleasure people derive from giving. We are discovering that gracious receiving is, in itself, the giving of a gift.

Tonight Foster is serving fishcakes… and Gordie is picking us up! And tomorrow we head over, by ferry, to Haida Gwaii, with crab, shrimp and garden greens for Sara.

Appalachian Porch

Rocky Mount, Virginia home

Some of my most cherished memories are of my grandmother’s porch. Extending around three sides of the early 1900’s large wooden house, it has been the scene of many chapters of my life. The two porch swings on either corner have been there since before I was born, looking out on Court Street, in Rocky Mount, Virginia. I’ve just returned from a summertime visit.

Here’s Thomas telling one of his stories from the porch swing, Sept/07

This is my mother today. In my mind there’s another picture of a much younger woman on the swing beside my once-handsome father, reduced to skin and bones by cancer in 1984 but still with those same intense blue eyes. And way before that, the 1944 wedding pictures on the porch and all the beautiful bridesmaids in their pastel dresses. There are all the memories of coming to visit Aunt Ebby and Mammie/Mama Emma/Miss Emps. Of playing on the porch with cousins, and finding neat places to hide in the wonderful expanse of bushes and paths, and little secret places. Of the 2 gigantic elms that used to tower above the porch, and the Franklin County red dirt. Listening to the wonderful night sounds and catching lightning bugs. And most of all the feeling that there was so much love around me that no matter what I would always be cherished.

Appalachian red dirt

There was the year my first two children and I spent with Mom and my sister Ebby, when I needed a break from an abusive marriage. I have a photo of 7-year-old Cosmo in cape, tights and underpants, Superman about to fly from the porch rafters. Then there was the summer Cosmo bought an old van so that teenage Josh and Will and I could drive across the hot, humid continent - we finally got cool on the porch swings. Grown up Tamaya brought her handsome beau from North Carolina and his handsome dog Cisco to sit on the porch swing, before she brought them home to BC.

Maybe it was the cold spring and summer on the north coast that made me unable to resist this summertime visit to a beloved place and people. It's my sister Ebby's house now and she's doing a wonderful job of restoring a much loved home.
This is cousin Emma, one of Franklin county's best loved teachers. She's now retired but all ready to give nephew Matthew a chance to learn about taking pictures - of the porch swing.

Niece Kristy and Jenna and Ryan with grandma on the swing.
So many cousins have spent time together on this porch!
Freckles the cat was a stray that chose this porch, and family, for her own.
The ministers came for dinner – John and Rachel are the husband and wife clergy team at Trinity Episcopal Church (my father’s first parish)
John and Rachel's son Boyden loves watermelon

and so does Matthew.

Mom appreciates her walking partner Susy
and the return home to the porch.

Ebby and John's wedding anniversary on July 11, same day as my mom and dad's.

This time of year it’s hot in Virginia

Nephew John keeps cool on Court Street
The pond behind the school was rumored to have trout -
but they must have been hiding in the cool pond bottom

Too hot for a zebra even – nephew John knows we love animals and wanted us to see some different ones at the drive through animal reserve near Natural Bridge, Va.

It’s still wonderful to visit Mama Helen – now at the Franklin County nursing home. Here with Mom, my sister Ebby and cousin Randolph.

We also visited Uncle Skeeter. And had our traditional smorgasbord lunch at the Dutch Inn in Martinsville – now how did they know how to fix Mama Helen’s brown beans and corn bread?
Uncle Skeeter has long been a gardener, and knows every bird in southwestern Virginia. I had to ask him about that sweet singing mockingbird that calls me out to the porch swing every morning.
Here’s Ebby’s garden. From it we ate tomatoes, cucumbers and green beans – a real treat for me on my 100 mile diet!

Virginia full moon July full moon shines on Ebby’s garden

Here’s a website link for anyone wanting to learn more about the joy of local food.
http://animalvegetablemiracle.org/index.html

One of my favourite authors is Barbara Kingsolver. She’s the one who restored my love of literature with The Bean Trees. Then came Prodigal Summer some years later. And what do you know – she set this wonderful book in a fictional county next to my own Franklin County. And now guess what she’s done – moved to the Appalachians herself! She and her husband and 2 daughters are on a local food diet, and growing most of their food. There’s some challenging stuff and lots of new inspiration in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, A Year of Food Life. From her website (above) we found a source for locally grown heritage turkeys. We 've ordered one for the family reunion at Thanksgiving.


An important part of the live-aboard lifestyle are the book exchanges along the coast. Reading material comes along in its own way. When I opened Up from Slavery, written in 1901 by Booker T. Washington, I read: “I was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia.” I slipped the book into my pocket. Being also born in Franklin County, some 90 years after him, Booker T. Washington feels like a familiar part of where I come from. He would have run barefoot in the same red dirt. As a child we often drove past the Booker T. Washington Memorial, and I learned in elementary school that he founded the Tuskegee Institute, but what a vision he had! His own struggle from illiterate slave to world-renowned educator gave him great confidence in education for others. He writes of “this experience of a whole race beginning to go to school for the first time.” (I was reminded of Pablo Friere and the powerful literacy movement of popular education in the 1980’s in Central America.) He had a way of powerfully challenging and uplifting without being confrontational. It was the respectful approach needed during the chaotic reconstruction period in the South. It was right for his times, and he was able to accomplish major fundraising – people from so many perspectives appreciated his work at Tuskegee.

What I loved most was what they did at Tuskegee. The students learned practical skills along with their academic education. They built their own dormitories, and beds, and ran the laundry. They built all the buildings at Tuskegee, and made the bricks in the foundry they built. He didn’t think to even mention that of course they grew their own food.

Booker T. Washington had a combination of compassion, vision, intelligence and unstinting hard work. And now in our century we have such another among us. I just wish I could find my old US Social Security Number so I could register to vote for the Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama.

Sharon's Garden

Sharon's Garden in Dodge Cove

By now it’s pretty obvious that we’re into some kind of (modified) 100-mile diet. We’ve recently heard of a local meat cooperative and even a cheese-maker (wonderfully tasty and reasonably priced) in Smithers. So maybe as far as Prince Rupert is concerned it’s going to have to be a 200-mile diet!

Friend Ken, who teaches at the local community college, is planning a “Geography of Food” course. We’ve suggested making some of the classes evening sessions, inviting the community to sit in and featuring PR people who actual grow food. Students could follow up with interviews and maybe put together a handbook on growing food in Prince Rupert.

Who knows, it might be the beginning of the PR 200-mile diet club! Maybe half a dozen families could get together and purchase a gillnetter-load of fish and have a block party cleaning, cutting, freezing and/or canning. Maybe half a dozen families could take turns traveling to Smithers for cheese, meat and farm produce. Maybe half a dozen families….

Several years ago I sketched out an article entitled “Cousin Sharon’s Garden.” As I remembered it, she had three raised-beds, a simple plastic-sheeting 8’ x 12’ greenhouse, half a dozen berry bushes, some raspberry canes, and a clump or three of rhubarb. Quite modest. But there were only her and Rob at home then, and they were away fishing half the summer.

Early Spring garden
in the greenhouse

I remember Sharon saying that raised beds are the key in this rain country. Build them high and half fill with rock before adding back the topsoil (enriched with starfish and seaweed). That way you get good drainage and save your back as well.

Crippen garden

Sharon’s garden was the inspiration for our own raised bed at Crippen Cove, our Digby Island northern home. And much to our delight this year we discovered that young Sean, a second-generation Crippen Cover, is experimenting with a small market garden, selling his produce at the Thursday craft market in Rupert.

raised garden bed in Crippen Cove

Sean’s newly planted garden.

Sean's produce ready for market

path to the greenhouse

Sister Anne and Ron came down from Telkwa for a few days bringing strawberries, local chicken and lamb, and a wonderful box of preserves. They took back fish, crab and shrimp.

The really good news, though, is that niece Margi (Anne’s youngest), who teaches in Osoyoos, has received a grant to enable a “Farm to School Salad Bar” program. The program links a school with several local farms. The farms provide fresh, nutritious food for the school lunch program, and school children visit the farms to learn about composting, greenhousing and growing food in general. What a great idea!

A sad time, Sharon preparing cousin Rob’s boat, Ganhada, for sale.

Cousin Rob is gone now, and greatly missed. But Sharon is busy tending her garden, which seems to have expanded considerably. And we’re busy resurrecting a second raised bed at Crippen Cove.

Sharon's peas

The 100-mile diet seems to naturally begin in your own backyard or balcony. Growing a lot of food may not an option for everyone. But growing some food is a pretty fine thing!

Ebby's tomatoes on the porch stairs

SALT AND WHEAT

Son Bruce and daughter-in-law Cheryl are musicians. They travel across the country leading workshops and giving concerts. Somewhere in Saskatchewan an elderly gentlemen came up after an event and said: “I would really like one of your cd’s but I don’t have any money. Would you take a bushel of hard winter wheat in exchange?” Bruce, much like his father, will barter anything. “Sure,” he said, not realizing that a bushel of wheat weighs 55 pounds!

Somehow they got it home. And now we have bags of wheat stashed in every corner of the boat. We sprout it for salads and stir-fry. We crack it and add it to bread and muffins. We made sprouting kits for our children and grandchildren. We trade it away. But we’ve still got a lot of wheat stored in nooks and crannies!

wheat berries in sprouting mix
jam tart

The other day I was up in the attic of the cabin at Crippen Cove.

There, stored where it keeps nice and dry, is a 20 kilo bag of “fishermen’s” salt. Under the sink in the forward head is another 20 kg bag, barely opened.

Telling stories at the cabin

For years now we have salted surplus fish during the summer for pickling in the winter. Without refrigeration we have had to re-learn how to preserve food in the old ways—salting, drying, pickling, canning. Two years ago we discovered that if we salted the fish carcasses, prawn heads, etc. in the bait bucket, our guests on board and neighbours in an anchorage on hot summer days, appreciated it. But it always bugged me that we could only buy coarse salt in 1 kg packages, and at a price more expensive than iodinized table salt!

Salting bait

Last year, in an out-of-the-way corner of a store in Prince Rupert, I discovered fishermen’s salt: 20 kilo bags for 13 dollars and change. I bought three. We’ve got two left!

Paddling the kayak in Salt Lake

In earlier cultures a surplus of salt and wheat was a sign of abundance, of blessing. Looking in various corners of the boat, and up in the attic at Crippen Cove, are we ever blessed!

CLAM GARDENS

We’ve just read Judith Williams CLAM GARDENS, ABORIGINAL MARICULTURE ON CANADA’S WEST COAST. We found it at Billy Proctor’s Museum in Echo Bay. It’s changed the whole feel of the Coast for me.

Early in my sailing days I read about an amazing light-keeper’s family at the Scarlett Point lighthouse. William Hunt of Fort Rupert, his native wife Vivian and 2 sons, went to Scarlett Point in 1908. They had 7 more sons and a daughter. William, Vivian and family kept the lighthouse for 30 years and the family thrived. The keeper who came after them ate only canned food and complained that Scarlett Point was “impregnated with the odour of smoked fish and clams.” He almost starved when the supply ship couldn’t come in. After only one winter he was taken to hospital with “gastric disturbances.”

Dried clams have been a major food source on this coast. Dipped in oolichan grease they provided a spectacular balance of protein, carbohydrates and Omega 3 oil. They were easy to store and trade. In 1792 the explorer Valdes described a gift from Chief Tetacus’s people as “dried floury fruits.” They must have been smoked clams! When I lived in Boiler Bay in Egmont, clams and oysters were our basic staples, alive and available depending only on the tide and our own efforts.

In past years, as we’ve traveled up and down the Coast, I have sometimes felt lonely, longing for human community, saddened to think of years gone by at a crumbling cannery or mill town, or watching a sunset in a long ago picturesque homestead imagining the people resting at the end of a hard-working day. The clam gardens are much older than that. And they are still here, still providing sustainable protein to people who are in touch with this coast. As we gather food, in the company of all our animal neighbours, we are also surrounded by the special places of the people who came before.

This clam garden is in Monday Anchorage in the Broughton Archipelago.

The "wuxwuthin"--clam gardens--are butter clam terraces that have been enhanced and maintained by First Nations people since before memory. Described as “making things better for the next time, removing stones,” the wuxwuthin, over time, became raised beds fronted by rock walls. Creating the rock walls not only enhanced the productivity of the clam beds, it raised the level of beds otherwise only accessible at the lowest tides.

Clam Garden rock wall

Judith Williams first became aware of the wuxwuthin while she was researching a project for the UBC Museum of Anthropology. She talked with Elizabeth Harry (Keekus) of Sliammon Village, and decided to visit Waiatt Bay on Quadra Island where Keekus’s family still harvest “the best clams on the coast.” This visit was the beginning of her enthusiam for clam gardens. But she found a strange silence in the whole body of research about them. “It was perplexing to think that many theories about West Coast Native culture had been formulated by observers who had taken little note of Native husbandry and who were, apparently, unaware of the clam gardens that produced one of the dietary staples.” Why has the evidence of clam gardens been ignored? Perhaps because clams were dug by women and children. Male anthropologists were more interested in hunting, fishing and masculine ritual lore.

Note one delightful detail from an elder: We didn’t harvest the beds closest to the village in the winter. We left those for the grandmas and the aunties who stayed behind when we went fishing and food-gathering in the summer. We would even stock them with clams, cockles and sea urchins for them to gather.

Clam garden with canoe access,

By paying attention to native oral history, knowledge about clam gardens has grown. There are now 365 clam garden sites recognized. This awareness opens our eyes to who these people were and are on the land. As we travel the Coast we see or are reminded of silverweed patches, camas and chocolate lily fields, carefully tended berry patches, culturally modified trees. Historically, coastal First Nations people were not simply hunter-gatherers; they were people who sustainably cared for the land and gently enhanced its ability to produce food.

field of chocolate lilies

Culturally modified tree

Grace Harbour

We have often anchored in Grace Harbour in Okeover Inlet. When Thomas first heard about clam gardens he felt sure this was one. It turns out that this was a winter village, and the upper and lower clam beaches are still harvested. There was a Big House; winter ceremonials included the lovely islet that was used as a podium

Grace Islet

Learning to walk in a clam garden

Codville Lagoon Pictograph.

Another favourite spot turns out to have pictographs and a clam garden!

Billy Proctor directed us to our first clam garden in the Broughton Islands, and from there we have discovered more clam gardens, just by looking closely at low tide. From Judith’s book we learned that Billy has been creating his own clam garden for over 40 years, harvesting it carefully each winter.

Billy Proctor on his dock

Thomas remembers being in Strasbourg, France, one summer. The people there were celebrating their 2000th anniversary. Our family property in Crippen Cove, originally a First Nations site in Metlakatla Pass, goes back 5000 years. Human habitation at Namu goes back almost 10,000 years!

Often when we come into a First Nations’ site we are met by the “old ones”--the spirits who are still very much there. And the spirits are very often women; maybe because it was the women who cared for the land—the clam gardens, berry patches, silverweed and camas fields. And so, as we slip quietly into a cove with a terraced beach at low tide, somehow I’m not lonely anymore.
And we might just start a clam garden for our grandchildren at Crippen Cove.


Books:
CLAM GARDENS, Aboriginal Mariculture on Canada’s West Coast, Judith Williams, New Star Books, Vancouver, 2006.
LIGHTS OF THE INSIDE PASSAGE, Donald Graham, Harbour Publishing, 1986.
HEART OF THE RAINCOAST, A Life Story, Alexandra Morton and Billy Proctor, First TouchWood Edition, 1998.
FULL MOON, FLOOD TIDE, Bill Proctor’s Raincoast, Bill Proctor and Yvonne Maximchuk, Harbour Publishing, 2003. (Bill’s section on clam gardens pp. 33-35, expresses the same awe we are experiencing.)

Links:
http://vancouver.kijiji.ca/c-events-Archaeological-Society-of-BC-Dr-John-Harper-Clam-Gardens-W0QQAdIdZ53734826

http://thetyee.ca/Books/2007/02/08/ClamGardens/

Native Ingenuity, Christopher Arrnett
http://greatanotherone.googlepages.com/LRCArnettJan-Feb2007.pdf.

SFU research
http://www.sfu.ca/pamr/media_releases/media_releases_archive/media_release06020801.html