Smuggling has always been with us–and no end in sight
Today, it’s narcotics and, sometimes, illegal immigrants. Unlike the latter, the narcotics flow both ways, B.C. ‘Bud’ going south, cocaine coming north, often as contra. Back then, it was narcotics from the Orient in the form of opium, then Chinese immigrants using B.C. as a doorway to the U.S., then rumrunning in the 1920s. As current news accounts remind us from time to time, this war between smugglers and law enforcement agencies, Canadian and American, goes on. For some of those involved in the heyday of smuggling and rumrunning, the returns out-weighed the risks and they not only ‘grew grey in the service’ but made their fortunes. For some of their clients, however, the possibility of arrest and imprisonment was the least of their worries. I’m referring to illegal Asian immigrants who made it to B.C. then had to...
Read MoreYou’ll Never Forget Fighting a Forest Fire Firsthand
It’s unlikely that anyone who has seen a forest fire at close quarters, or helped fight one, soon forgets the experience. The blaze which scalped Mount Douglas in Saanich in the 1960s was the single time I took my place in the fire lines. It provides a haunting memory to this day, composed not of crystal clear incidents, but rather a shadowy montage of colours, sounds and smells–a kaleidoscope of nature run wild. The arcing red glow of an auxiliary policeman’s flashlight greet us at the lane leading to Mt. Douglas’s summit, late that second evening of the fire. Finally locating a parking space, wmy friends and I, all in our early 20s, walked back to the men and teenagers standing in groups about the nearest fire hydrant. Shovels and picks leaned at crazy angles as their owners, many...
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Vancouver Island’s Great Forest Fire of August 1938
It’s the smoke that people most remember of that horrific forest fire in the summer of 1938. A mile high, it enveloped almost two-thirds of Vancouver Island and was reported as far south–400 miles (640km)–as Portland, Ore. Its fly-ash was so thick that two ships collided off Port Angeles. This was the lethal by-product of Vancouver Island’s worst forest fire ever, the Great Fire (so-called). At one point it was feared that flames would consume everything between Campbell River and the Malahat. Only a whim of weather saved us The summer of ‘38 was marked by the longest drought in 64 years. Everywhere in the Pacific Northwest, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and B.C., it was the same: So hot and dry that when a forester accidentally dropped his pick on a rock, a resulting spark ignited the grass...
Read MoreWestholme Tree Update
Well, so much for protecting the last of our endangered landmark trees. Not long after I wrote my post on the Great Westholme Tree and some of its sister giants, most of them long gone, it was reported that the B.C. Supreme Court had dismissed an application by the Western Canada Wilderness Committee and ForestEthics Solutions Society. They’d sought a ruling that the B.C. Government “fails to,” in the words of the Times-Colonist (May 10, 2014), “adhere to its own laws in protecting endangered coastal Douglas fir trees”. But Justice Gordon Weatherill “sided with the province that…the groups should have first applied to the Forest Practices Board, which conducts independent audits and investigations to determine if the province is complying with laws to protect endangered forests”. Neither audit nor investigation, by the way, is binding on the government. Nevertheless,...
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