InFocus Magazine

Martin McNabb believes education is a catalyst for change.  It’s the main reason he became a teacher, however his ‘education’ encompasses a wider world than the official world of formal schooling.

“A friend of mine was complaining to me that his wife was refusing to wash his work clothes. ‘She says I should throw them out, they stink so much, but I can’t put on a new set of work clothes every day,’ he was saying to me,” says McNabb.

That friend works in the construction industry and is required to work with wooden forms for concrete to be poured into.  The traditional method of preparing the forms involved spraying the wooden forms with diesel oil.  This allows the forms to be pulled off the hardened concrete.  “That diesel oil—it stinks!” McNabb says.   “It’s also toxic.  If you’re working in summer heat, it makes you feel all woozy.   If you’re working in an enclosed space, you have to wear a mask.”

McNabb pondered the dilemma his friend—and many other construction workers—was in.  “As a person who knows a little about science, I thought there has to be a better way… and that was the beginning.  I experimented with various substances and came up with a mixture of vegetable oils and some secret ingredients.  After a good bit of trial and error, I eventually came up with a formula—and voila—it worked!”   Thus was born GreenRelease, McNabb’s company.

Six years have passed since that experiment and quietly and single-handedly McNabb has been going to professionals in the construction industry and telling them about his invention.

“It’s a win-win situation,” McNabb says. “Not only is the oil available locally, it’s non-toxic.  When the concrete made in diesel-sprayed forms is finished, the rain eventually washes the diesel off—into our groundwater, into our drains, poisoning everything it touches.  Trucks were bringing the diesel up from Texas and Ohio—more poisoning of our air.  Almost the whole of Vancouver Island has converted to vegetable oil for their concrete forms.  It’s fantastic.”

Surprisingly, in the age of internet and hard-sell, most of McNabb’s customers have been swayed by word of mouth.  “No one liked using the diesel oil,” he says frankly, “but at the time, there were no alternatives.  Prolonged use of diesel makes the skin on your hands crack, and the strong smell permeates your body—not to mention your clothes.

“When I began my rounds of concrete companies and construction sites, the first question was invariably, ‘Is it more expensive?’  You see, even although people know what they’re doing is harmful, we’re all conditioned to putting money first.  Fortunately, my product isn’t more expensive, and once people heard it was vegetable oil, they were keen to give it a try.  One man told me recently that when he went to pull the forms off the concrete, he pried off the first board and the rest just fell off!  ‘I’m sold,’ he told me.”

Born in Toronto 52 years ago, McNabb is the child of immigrants from Northern Ireland.  “It was easier to get into a commonwealth country back then,” he explains, “but my parents held the United States as the ideal place to live, so when I was two years old, we moved to Los Angeles.  After 13 years there, McNabb moved to Oregon where he stayed for the next 27 years, completing a Bachelor of Arts degree.  He had a four year stint in Germany and a year in South America before coming to Vancouver and earning his teaching degree at UBC.

“I initially went into teaching because I had a desire for a world run on better principles, but found the reality extremely frustrating,” he says.  “The education system is a world unto itself and many teachers and administrators are not in the slightest interested in shaking the status quo.  I wasn’t too popular with quite a few head teachers!”  He laughs.  “I was too much of a free-thinker, didn’t wear a suit and tie, and had a non-authoritarian rapport with the kids.”

But, he adds, “I always got on really well with the kids and still do.  I work as a teacher-on-call and when I go to a class I regularly sub for in Port Alberni, the kids have a big smile and say, ‘Hooray, we got the McNabb again.’”

Finding his chosen profession to be rather hit-and-miss, McNabb had been dabbling in various other business ideas.  “You know, it’s a bit frustrating in Canada as a small business person,” he says.   “Having grown up in the States, I saw that small businesses were encouraged and seen as a positive force in a local economy.  The Canadian government seems to have no interest in supporting small business; they’re more concerned with protecting their benefactors.  I found Canadians to reflect that attitude, and be rather suspicious of small businesses.  They seemed to be under the impression that large corporations would be more reliable, and they felt somehow safer dealing with them—not that there’s any real evidence of the truth of that belief.  The reverse, I would say.”

McNabb shrugs his shoulders and looks thoughtful before continuing.  “I think that attitude is changing though, and it’s part of the slow ‘greening’ of our ideas.  Certainly in the Comox Valley there is growing support for small businesses like mine.  Also, I think the slump in the construction industry last summer gave everybody involved in it a bit of time to reflect.  They were all so frantically busy in that building boom that swept through here, no one had time to consider new ways of doing anything.  ‘If it’s working, let it be’ seemed to be the philosophy.  People are more open to listening to what I have to say about not using diesel oil, and really, we all know the writing is on the wall as far as the oil industry is concerned.”

Over the past two years, McNabb has seen a big shift in attitudes.  “Lots of the guys I talk to in the construction industry love to fish, and I say, ‘Why would you want to pollute the oceans and poison the fish when there’s an alternative?’  They can’t disagree, and ultimately, most people want to do the right thing, so if it’s made affordable, they jump right on board.”

One of the delights in operating GreenRelease for McNabb is that all his oil comes from restaurants that would dispose of their frying oil anyway.  Oil can only be used for a limited time for frying before becoming a health hazard and has to be thrown out.  Most of it used to go into pet food, but now there are quite a few businesses that are more than happy to take used oil.  As more cars convert to bio-fuel, there is more demand for used oil.

McNabb’s attention to his own ‘carbon footprint’ is obvious in his enthusiasm for GreenRelease’s growing number of clients.  He also runs his own car on used vegetable oil, and sees that although bio-degradable oil isn’t a total solution, it’s part of the puzzle of finding better ways of doing things.

At the moment, McNabb is still doing most of the collection and delivery of oil himself.  “I collect all the used oil myself in containers in the back of my truck, and take it to a little plant I have and mix it into GreenRelease and then I deliver it from Campbell River down to Victoria.  I’m not really a salesman, though, and just recently I’ve been able to hire another man to work with me, and he drums up more customers.  Up till then, though, I’ve had to do everything myself—advertising, delivering.  It’s been a lot of work over the past six years, but it’s beginning to pay off, finally.”

One of the first commercial outlets to use GreenRelease was Island Forms in the Comox Valley.  “I talked to the owner and asked what he was using, and it was diesel oil, or engine oil, of course.  Everyone used that because it’s cheaper than regular oil, as it’s used off-road and isn’t taxed.  He was using 3,800 litres a year—all of which was going into the environment afterward.  One of the other beauties about GreenRelease is that it’s totally bio-degradable—it turns into mold within a month,” McNabb says.

“Island Forms tried it and really liked it, and it’s a small community where the concrete delivery people talk to their customers, and word spread.  Another big outfit is Highland Concrete and they’re now using GreenRelease—it’s exciting.

“Concrete is in everything,” McNabb says.  “It’s ubiquitous—in our roads, our homes, all the pipes that carry waste, as well as clean water—and for centuries we’ve been using products that are harmful to the environment, as well as ourselves.  But slowly and surely, things are coming around.  I knew from my own experience how toxic diesel oil was—I’ve done my share of spraying it on forms—so I’m delighted that there’s something better for us all.

“Of course, there are still some people who are stuck in their old attitudes, even though they know it’s bad for them.  Some people don’t like to change,” McNabb says.  “But I look on the fact that I delivered 20,000 litres last year—that’s 20,000 litres less of toxic oil being trucked hundreds of miles to end up in our watershed.  That gives me a lot of hope.”

For more information visit www.greenrelease.ca.
Poor old Qu Yuan, remedy
an ancient Chinese statesman (475-421 BC), sickness
was something of a hard-luck case during his own lifetime. Yet he left a legacy that is celebrated throughout much of the world today as the fastest growing water sport on the planet—dragon boat racing.

Qu’s connection goes like this: He had been banished from his state of Chu by a corrupt king.  Then he learned of the impending invasion of Chu by a neighbor state.  This was too much for him so he tethered himself to a rock in a river to commit ritual suicide as a protest against the invasion. The good people of the kingdom rushed into the water in their fishing boats to try to save Qu, but it was to no avail.  So, they beat drums and splashed water with their paddles to keep evil spirits from his body.

Ultimately Qu Yuan’s legacy in China ended up being commemorated century after century on an annual basis by boat races that take place on the anniversary of his death.  The boats are traditionally long and narrow canoe-style vessels decorated with carved heads and tails of dragons, which are held to be the rulers of the rivers and seas.

Eventually the dragon boats spread beyond the confines of China and the races have now annual events in some 40 countries.  And, as many Comox Valley residents—at least those that ever find themselves near local waters—know, dragon boating is very much a facet of the local scene.

In British Columbia, dragon boating is part of the legacy of Vancouver’s Expo ‘86.  At that event the Chinese delegation brought with them six teak dragon boats.  From that grew the Canadian International Dragon Boat Festival, the first of its kind nationally, thanks to the efforts of David See Chai Lam and Milton Wong.  This was the first dragon boat race/festival outside of Asia, created as a showcase of Vancouver’s growing cultural diversity and to promote racial harmony and cross cultural understanding.

A decade later Dr. Don McKenzie of the University of BC, in conjunction with physiotherapist and breast cancer survivor Dr. Susan Harris, formed the first breast cancer survivor dragon boat team in Vancouver.  Their intention was to prove that upper body exercise has a large role in recovery from breast cancer and lymphedema because it can improve the range of motion, reverse muscle atrophy, stimulate the immune system and activate skeletal muscles.  The only criteria for becoming a member of a breast cancer survivor team is having had a history of breast cancer.

Since that time dragon boating has grown immensely in popularity, with breast cancer survivor teams being a part of all festivals. In the Comox Valley the breast cancer survivor team, and the first dragon boat group on the local scene was Hope Afloat, which was formed in 2001 in conjunction with the Comox Recreation Commission.

In the case of Hope Afloat a group of women in a support group were discussing full-time return to work after having completed their cancer treatments.  It was at that meeting the topic of dragon boat racing came up.  As it stood, the nearest option for getting involved in the sport was in Nanaimo.  This was hardly practical for women who were working.  As it turned out, four local women were involved with the mid-Island team. They were contacted and the wheels were set in motion.  Within a few months, thanks to the support of Valley businesses, service clubs and individual donations, enough funds were raised to purchase the Valley’s first dragon boat.

From that first purchase the concept of dragon boating took off in the Valley.  Hope Afloat gifted their boat to the Comox Recreation Commission, which agreed to make it available to other groups who were interested in getting into the sport.  The rest of the tale is, as they say, history.

There remains, however, says Christine Saunders, Comox Valley Dragonflies team manager, a widespread assumption that dragon boating is still confined to breast cancer survivors (though they remain integral to the sport).  Many teams, like the Dragonflies, are strictly recreational.

The Dragonflies team (the oldest in the Valley after Hope Afloat) was formed in 2002.  The Dragonflies compete in approximately four to five events through the racing season, and primarily compete as a mixed competitive team.  However, they have also raced in a number of women’s festivals through the years.  The Dragonflies are one of six teams in the Valley, including the original Hope Afloat team.

Going back to the beginning for the Dragonflies, and for Saunders, it all came about due to an ad placed by Comox Rec in which they asked if anybody was interested in a dragon boat, as the Hope Afloat boat was now available for other user groups.

“I phoned and then went to a meeting in January of 2002,” she says. “There were a good 40 people there and I became a member of the first team.  We had a 6-16, which is the standard dragon boat worldwide.”

Part of her personal motivation, Saunders says, was that she felt she needed to get involved in some sort of a sport, mainly because she needed the exercise and wanted to do something that appealed to her.  Since she was raised by the sea, she felt that something to do with the water would work for her.

“I’d never been particularly active in sports,” she says.  “I like to say I’m a great spectator, and when my kids were growing up and playing baseball or soccer I was always out there to cheer them on.  But, I wanted and needed something for me.”

Right from the beginning she found it to be a fine fit for her.  It was a good group of people to be with and the sport demanded team solidarity in that all must pull together.  People get tight with one another—figuratively and literally—in relatively short order.

“For us it’s basically recreational,” she says. “There is the competitive aspect and we have achieved a considerable degree of success, but essentially we go out to be on the water and to have fun.  One of our biggest challenges is to get more men involved.”

A further misconception about dragon boating (the first being that it is confined to breast cancer survivors) that Saunders would like to set straight is that it is not exclusively a female endeavor, but decidedly calls for gender mixed teams and they are, she says, always trying to attract men to the sport.

Many men, Saunders adds, believe that dragon boating is strictly a female involvement, and at a certain level females must predominate.  There are no exclusively male teams, but in any of the major competitions in which they have been involved, such as Victoria and Nanaimo, the biggest section is the mixed group.  And, of the 20 people on a team, at least eight must be female.

As for the physical aspects of dragon boating, Saunders describes it as “a wonderful sport.  It’s whole body exercise,” she says.  “While it creates certain demands on the novice it doesn’t take long to adjust to the stresses of the sport.”

She notes that Fitness Excellence in the Valley offers dragon boat training and that it’s a good idea to take that sort of training, especially in the winter, before the season begins.

“Winter is definitely a good time to get started,” she advises, as competition season isn’t the best time to learn, so it can be a bit disappointing for the newcomer since the others on the team are more advanced.

Part of the allure, Saunders says, is the sense of solidarity that comes about from the experience. Everybody must be able to rely on everyone else in the boat.  There is no hierarchy in that regard.

“The speed of the boat comes about from everybody paddling as one,” she says. “Everybody must hit the water with their paddles at exactly the same time.”

While the Dragonflies initially used the boat made available from Comox Rec they have, since 2007, had their own boat—a boat with a special legacy and of which the team members are very proud.

It came about when team member Monica Greenwood and her husband, Mel, donated the boat in memory of their son, Stephen, who had died in a car crash four years earlier. The boat is a BuK, which is built in Germany and is a crème-de-la-crème craft of the sort that has been used in many international competitions.

But, the Dragonflies boat is even more than that, Saunders says. The boat has been enhanced by the talents of local artist Robert Lundquist, who endeavored—after listening to the Greenwoods’ story of their son—to bring his spirit to life as represented by the boat.  Appropriately, the boat is called Stephen’s Spirit.

Team solidarity is of course everything, and aside from having the boat that they cherish so greatly, the Dragonflies deck themselves out in T-shirts that follow the design of the boat.

“With our team we knew we needed a good blend of personalities, and that’s what we have,” Saunders says. “We have 20 people plus a drummer.  Once we join up we make a definite commitment, but we know that we all have other things going on in our lives, and that has to be respected.”

During the season they practice twice a week for an hour and a quarter, and in the winter, come rain or come shine, or sleet and virtually everything but heavy winds, they practice once a week.

There is a definite process that must be learned and a participant’s skill can only improve with practice, she says.  The paddlers in a dragon boat face forward (unlike aft-facing seated rowers) and use a specific type of paddle, which is not connected to the craft in any way.  They paddle canoe-style with a very distinctive paddle type.  The leading paddlers set the pace for the team and it’s essential that all paddlers be synchronized.  Each paddler, Saunders says, should synchronize with the stroke or pacer on the opposite side of the boat.  That is, if you paddle starboard side, you take your pace from the paddler on the port side.  Meanwhile, the two pacers in the bow set the pace for the rest of the paddlers.

“We truly have to be a team,” Saunders says.  “There are no star performers, just a group of people literally pulling together.”

Currently their team quotient is good, Saunders says.  A number of new members have come out, which is good since five or six members left within the past year.  And, as always, they are seeking more male participation.  As far as age is concerned, there is no upper or lower limit, though participants should be physically mature due to the strength demands.

“Right now I believe we range in age from about 30 to 70 years,” she says.

This fastest growing of water sports on the globe is seconded only by outrigger paddling, which uses the same strokes, and the teams are often mutually supportive, says Saunders.

“The primary difference would be that outriggers are suited for long distances, whereas our greatest distance in competition is 500 metres,” she says.  “CORA (Canadian Outrigger Canoe Association) held a competition in Comox Lake last year, and our team supported theirs in that competition.”

What appeals to Saunders and many others in the sport is that it’s not encumbered by regulations limiting the involvement of its members.  As an example, she will shortly be going to Victoria to race with another team and she observes that the teams change from one race to the next.  At the same time, competition, such as the BC Seniors Games (Comox Valley and Campbell River, September 15-18) and festivals like Nautical Days in Comox bring out the apex of team spirit.

For the Seniors Games, Saunders says, she’ll be on a mixed team, along with seven other members of the Dragonflies.  She further notes that for competitions in other centres they do not, due to difficulty of transport, take their boat with them.  Which, she admits, is too bad in one respect, but the logistics have to be respected.

“It all truly stirs the spirit,” she says.  “I’m looking forward to Nautical Days and the Seniors Games in the early fall.  We’ll be there and loving it.”

For more information on the Comox Valley Dragonflies visit www.cvdragonflies.ca.

For breast cancer survivors who would like to be connected with Hope Afloat, go to www.hopeafloatcanada.ca.

Poor old Qu Yuan, cure
an ancient Chinese statesman (475-421 BC), treat was something of a hard-luck case during his own lifetime. Yet he left a legacy that is celebrated throughout much of the world today as the fastest growing water sport on the planet—dragon boat racing.

Qu’s connection goes like this: He had been banished from his state of Chu by a corrupt king.  Then he learned of the impending invasion of Chu by a neighbor state.  This was too much for him so he tethered himself to a rock in a river to commit ritual suicide as a protest against the invasion. The good people of the kingdom rushed into the water in their fishing boats to try to save Qu, but it was to no avail.  So, they beat drums and splashed water with their paddles to keep evil spirits from his body.

Ultimately Qu Yuan’s legacy in China ended up being commemorated century after century on an annual basis by boat races that take place on the anniversary of his death.  The boats are traditionally long and narrow canoe-style vessels decorated with carved heads and tails of dragons, which are held to be the rulers of the rivers and seas.

Eventually the dragon boats spread beyond the confines of China and the races have now annual events in some 40 countries.  And, as many Comox Valley residents—at least those that ever find themselves near local waters—know, dragon boating is very much a facet of the local scene.

In British Columbia, dragon boating is part of the legacy of Vancouver’s Expo ‘86.  At that event the Chinese delegation brought with them six teak dragon boats.  From that grew the Canadian International Dragon Boat Festival, the first of its kind nationally, thanks to the efforts of David See Chai Lam and Milton Wong.  This was the first dragon boat race/festival outside of Asia, created as a showcase of Vancouver’s growing cultural diversity and to promote racial harmony and cross cultural understanding.

A decade later Dr. Don McKenzie of the University of BC, in conjunction with physiotherapist and breast cancer survivor Dr. Susan Harris, formed the first breast cancer survivor dragon boat team in Vancouver.  Their intention was to prove that upper body exercise has a large role in recovery from breast cancer and lymphedema because it can improve the range of motion, reverse muscle atrophy, stimulate the immune system and activate skeletal muscles.  The only criteria for becoming a member of a breast cancer survivor team is having had a history of breast cancer.

Since that time dragon boating has grown immensely in popularity, with breast cancer survivor teams being a part of all festivals. In the Comox Valley the breast cancer survivor team, and the first dragon boat group on the local scene was Hope Afloat, which was formed in 2001 in conjunction with the Comox Recreation Commission.

In the case of Hope Afloat a group of women in a support group were discussing full-time return to work after having completed their cancer treatments.  It was at that meeting the topic of dragon boat racing came up.  As it stood, the nearest option for getting involved in the sport was in Nanaimo.  This was hardly practical for women who were working.  As it turned out, four local women were involved with the mid-Island team. They were contacted and the wheels were set in motion.  Within a few months, thanks to the support of Valley businesses, service clubs and individual donations, enough funds were raised to purchase the Valley’s first dragon boat.

From that first purchase the concept of dragon boating took off in the Valley.  Hope Afloat gifted their boat to the Comox Recreation Commission, which agreed to make it available to other groups who were interested in getting into the sport.  The rest of the tale is, as they say, history.

There remains, however, says Christine Saunders, Comox Valley Dragonflies team manager, a widespread assumption that dragon boating is still confined to breast cancer survivors (though they remain integral to the sport).  Many teams, like the Dragonflies, are strictly recreational.

The Dragonflies team (the oldest in the Valley after Hope Afloat) was formed in 2002.  The Dragonflies compete in approximately four to five events through the racing season, and primarily compete as a mixed competitive team.  However, they have also raced in a number of women’s festivals through the years.  The Dragonflies are one of six teams in the Valley, including the original Hope Afloat team.

Going back to the beginning for the Dragonflies, and for Saunders, it all came about due to an ad placed by Comox Rec in which they asked if anybody was interested in a dragon boat, as the Hope Afloat boat was now available for other user groups.

“I phoned and then went to a meeting in January of 2002,” she says. “There were a good 40 people there and I became a member of the first team.  We had a 6-16, which is the standard dragon boat worldwide.”

Part of her personal motivation, Saunders says, was that she felt she needed to get involved in some sort of a sport, mainly because she needed the exercise and wanted to do something that appealed to her.  Since she was raised by the sea, she felt that something to do with the water would work for her.

“I’d never been particularly active in sports,” she says.  “I like to say I’m a great spectator, and when my kids were growing up and playing baseball or soccer I was always out there to cheer them on.  But, I wanted and needed something for me.”

Right from the beginning she found it to be a fine fit for her.  It was a good group of people to be with and the sport demanded team solidarity in that all must pull together.  People get tight with one another—figuratively and literally—in relatively short order.

“For us it’s basically recreational,” she says. “There is the competitive aspect and we have achieved a considerable degree of success, but essentially we go out to be on the water and to have fun.  One of our biggest challenges is to get more men involved.”

A further misconception about dragon boating (the first being that it is confined to breast cancer survivors) that Saunders would like to set straight is that it is not exclusively a female endeavor, but decidedly calls for gender mixed teams and they are, she says, always trying to attract men to the sport.

Many men, Saunders adds, believe that dragon boating is strictly a female involvement, and at a certain level females must predominate.  There are no exclusively male teams, but in any of the major competitions in which they have been involved, such as Victoria and Nanaimo, the biggest section is the mixed group.  And, of the 20 people on a team, at least eight must be female.

As for the physical aspects of dragon boating, Saunders describes it as “a wonderful sport.  It’s whole body exercise,” she says.  “While it creates certain demands on the novice it doesn’t take long to adjust to the stresses of the sport.”

She notes that Fitness Excellence in the Valley offers dragon boat training and that it’s a good idea to take that sort of training, especially in the winter, before the season begins.

“Winter is definitely a good time to get started,” she advises, as competition season isn’t the best time to learn, so it can be a bit disappointing for the newcomer since the others on the team are more advanced.

Part of the allure, Saunders says, is the sense of solidarity that comes about from the experience. Everybody must be able to rely on everyone else in the boat.  There is no hierarchy in that regard.

“The speed of the boat comes about from everybody paddling as one,” she says. “Everybody must hit the water with their paddles at exactly the same time.”

While the Dragonflies initially used the boat made available from Comox Rec they have, since 2007, had their own boat—a boat with a special legacy and of which the team members are very proud.

It came about when team member Monica Greenwood and her husband, Mel, donated the boat in memory of their son, Stephen, who had died in a car crash four years earlier. The boat is a BuK, which is built in Germany and is a crème-de-la-crème craft of the sort that has been used in many international competitions.

But, the Dragonflies boat is even more than that, Saunders says. The boat has been enhanced by the talents of local artist Robert Lundquist, who endeavored—after listening to the Greenwoods’ story of their son—to bring his spirit to life as represented by the boat.  Appropriately, the boat is called Stephen’s Spirit.

Team solidarity is of course everything, and aside from having the boat that they cherish so greatly, the Dragonflies deck themselves out in T-shirts that follow the design of the boat.

“With our team we knew we needed a good blend of personalities, and that’s what we have,” Saunders says. “We have 20 people plus a drummer.  Once we join up we make a definite commitment, but we know that we all have other things going on in our lives, and that has to be respected.”

During the season they practice twice a week for an hour and a quarter, and in the winter, come rain or come shine, or sleet and virtually everything but heavy winds, they practice once a week.

There is a definite process that must be learned and a participant’s skill can only improve with practice, she says.  The paddlers in a dragon boat face forward (unlike aft-facing seated rowers) and use a specific type of paddle, which is not connected to the craft in any way.  They paddle canoe-style with a very distinctive paddle type.  The leading paddlers set the pace for the team and it’s essential that all paddlers be synchronized.  Each paddler, Saunders says, should synchronize with the stroke or pacer on the opposite side of the boat.  That is, if you paddle starboard side, you take your pace from the paddler on the port side.  Meanwhile, the two pacers in the bow set the pace for the rest of the paddlers.

“We truly have to be a team,” Saunders says.  “There are no star performers, just a group of people literally pulling together.”

Currently their team quotient is good, Saunders says.  A number of new members have come out, which is good since five or six members left within the past year.  And, as always, they are seeking more male participation.  As far as age is concerned, there is no upper or lower limit, though participants should be physically mature due to the strength demands.

“Right now I believe we range in age from about 30 to 70 years,” she says.

This fastest growing of water sports on the globe is seconded only by outrigger paddling, which uses the same strokes, and the teams are often mutually supportive, says Saunders.

“The primary difference would be that outriggers are suited for long distances, whereas our greatest distance in competition is 500 metres,” she says.  “CORA (Canadian Outrigger Canoe Association) held a competition in Comox Lake last year, and our team supported theirs in that competition.”

What appeals to Saunders and many others in the sport is that it’s not encumbered by regulations limiting the involvement of its members.  As an example, she will shortly be going to Victoria to race with another team and she observes that the teams change from one race to the next.  At the same time, competition, such as the BC Seniors Games (Comox Valley and Campbell River, September 15-18) and festivals like Nautical Days in Comox bring out the apex of team spirit.

For the Seniors Games, Saunders says, she’ll be on a mixed team, along with seven other members of the Dragonflies.  She further notes that for competitions in other centres they do not, due to difficulty of transport, take their boat with them.  Which, she admits, is too bad in one respect, but the logistics have to be respected.

“It all truly stirs the spirit,” she says.  “I’m looking forward to Nautical Days and the Seniors Games in the early fall.  We’ll be there and loving it.”

For more information on the Comox Valley Dragonflies visit www.cvdragonflies.ca.

For breast cancer survivors who would like to be connected with Hope Afloat, go to www.hopeafloatcanada.ca.

You wouldn’t necessarily think that writing botanical reference books is an adventurous vocation—until you talk to Kahlee Keane.

Keane, health who moved to Vancouver Island in January, opisthorchiasis
has just published Wild Medicine of Coastal British Columbia, click a practical guide to BC’s medicinal plants. She estimates that it is her 25th book—or thereabouts.  In fact, she’s lost count.

Keane has spent more than three decades researching and writing these books, as well as teaching workshops, leading educational walks, and writing newspaper and magazine articles.

Along the way she has been renamed, honored, and royally told-off.  She’s made great friends and stood up to worthy enemies.  And she has consistently been awed at the healing powers of the plants that grow in the Earth’s wild places.

Keane’s work has taken her into communities all over North America, where she has played a number of pivotal roles: anthropologist, historian, biologist, educator and activist.  Wherever she goes, she galvanizes people to understand and appreciate the healing properties of native plants, to treasure them, and, if necessary, to campaign for their protection.

Each of Keane’s books is dedicated to the plants of a certain geographical area, as broad as the province of Ontario or a specific as Grand Manan Island, a 135-square-kilometre fishing community of 2,500 people off the coast of New Brunswick.  And each book has a different tone and structure, reflecting not just the local uniqueness of the botany but also the needs and inclinations of the locals.  Although her books are all about plants, her research very much includes people.

“Wherever I go, the first thing I do is look at the lay of the land and talk to the people who live on it.  In Newfoundland, people had lots of information and what they needed was for me to collect and publish it.  They were happy when I published their recipes.  In Ontario, there was a real lack of information, so my job was to offer what I knew,” she explains.

Her new book, she says, reflects her observation that BC is a relatively sophisticated audience for this material.  “The knowledge is already very alive here; there are lots of people teaching, learning about, and using wild medicinal plants.  So I included more detail, such as the chemical constituency of the plants.”

One thing Keane loves about her work is the connection it gives her to other cultures.

“Because this is North America, I get the chance to learn about different approaches.  For instance the Ayurvedic tradition [from India] has a huge body of knowledge.  All our different immigrant groups bring their experience and information with them.”

Keane says she is happy to trade information with different cultural groups, but she also needs to respect their autonomy.  “For instance, in some areas the First Nations people have suffered a great injury in the loss of their medicine.  But it’s not for me to replicate their traditions.  All I can do is offer what I have.”

It was a multi-cultural encounter that gave Keane her nickname, Root Woman, under which she wrote several books.  “I was researching down in Mississippi.  The people of color there have a rich folk healing tradition.  They were quite wonderful, and we all got to know each other pretty well.  One day we were out working in the soil together and they said to me, ‘We name you Root Woman.’  That’s what they call their healers.  I was so moved, I sat down and cried.”

Keane’s mission is to restore balance in the relationship between people and medicinal plants, both for the sake of the plants and for the sake of the humans.

“I’m putting the folk back in folk medicine,” she explains.  “I want people to understand that this knowledge is their birthright.  It behoves them to learn about their allies.”

It also behoves them to make sure these plants continue to grow and thrive in their natural habitat.  This is the other component of Keane’s mission.  “As an eco-herbalist, activist and conservationist, my goal is to protect bio-diversity.  My craft insists on a heightened ecological awareness and a deep respect for the living Earth,” she says.

Not everyone understands that Keane’s work aligns with environmentalist aims, she adds.  In fact, some people think she puts the plants at risk by encouraging humans to harvest them.

“Oh, I’ve been confronted pretty aggressively,” she says with a wry chuckle.  “I remember hearing a loud knock on my door one day, and I opened it to this big tall environmentalist who started in on me—‘How dare you publish this? You have to stop immediately!’ That kind of thing.

“I was actually scared of him.  But when he stopped talking long enough for me to answer, I told him: ‘I teach people to use the plants so that they respect and protect them.’  And it has always worked that way.”

The angry environmentalist did have a valid point, says Keane—medicinal wild plants are being lost due to over-picking.  But Keane says this is a result of commercial harvesting, where big companies harvest in bulk to make products they sell all around the world.  This is a far cry from what she teaches.  In her books and workshops Keane encourages small-scale wildcrafting, where individuals go into the wild to harvest plants for the use of themselves, their friends, and their families.

Wildcrafters respect the plant, and are often willing to work hard to protect it, she says.

“I’ve seen this just about everywhere I’ve worked, but it really came forward for me in Saskatchewan,” she says.  “I stayed there for 15 years, trying to save one plant—Seneca Root—which is a powerful remedy for the respiratory system.  It is also an old snake-bite remedy. The problem is, you need 250 roots to harvest a pound of it, and it takes seven years to grow one plant.”

Seneca Root was being threatened both by over-picking and loss of habitat due to development.  Keane worried it might be headed toward extinction.  She’d seen this before—for instance, with Wild Ginseng in Ontario, which, she says, is now completely gone.

“But the way to save it is to get it listed as endangered or threatened, and it is very, very hard to do that. You need to count it and monitor it, which is a huge undertaking.  Thankfully, the little farming communities of Saskatchewan have a great understanding of their medicinal plants, and they grasped the particular situation of this plant.  They came forward and volunteered to help, counting, recording, monitoring, so I could make an evidence-based case for the plant.”

Keane and her allies formed a non-profit group, Save our Species, which took as its first task the preservation of Seneca Root.  They are still working on it; Keane remains hopeful, although cautiously so.

While the fate of Seneca Root in the Canadian Prairies still hangs in the balance, the ongoing campaign to have it listed as endangered has brought people together in a powerful way, says Keane.

“My years in Saskatchewan were very exciting; there was so much camaraderie, so much willingness to cooperate and pitch in to do the work to save this plant,” she says, sitting back in her chair with a smile of satisfaction.

Another source of satisfaction, for Keane, is seeing people wake up to the realization that they can use plants to heal themselves.

“I’m giving people control over their own health,” she says.  “These days, we are steeped in pharmaceuticals, and people are looking for alternatives.”

Humans have used plants for healing for millennia, all over the world, she points out.  Our modern pharmaceutical system is, in a way, an outgrowth of this.  Nearly 50 per cent of the thousands of medications prescribed today are either derived from plant sources or contain a chemical, synthetic imitation of a plant compound.

“Since we did not evolve with these synthetics, our bodies do not always have pathways for their distribution and elimination,” she explains.  Although synthetic drugs have certainly performed miracles and saved lives, virtually all of these drugs have side effects ranging from the unpleasant to the lethal.

Using wild medicinal plants not only offers an alternative to the use of pharmaceuticals, it also provides a very different experience of healing.  Instead of visiting a doctor’s office or a hospital, people go out into the forests and mountains; they can make the medicine themselves and they know exactly where it comes from.

“When people see that this works, they are thrilled!” Keane says.

Keane doesn’t consider herself a healer; she would rather see people learn to heal themselves.  This is why she became a writer.

Originally, Keane was an accountant, a profession she found “terribly dry,” she says with a merry laugh. Thirty-five years ago she left accounting to study herbal medicine.

“I was drawn to the plants. But I didn’t want to work in a clinical setting. I figured the best thing was to write.  I can educate people this way; a book gives them time to absorb the information by slow osmosis.”

When Keane feels her research is complete and she is ready to write a book, she throws herself into an intensive period of writing, writing, writing till it’s done.

“I chain myself to the computer.  Something happens—an upheaval in my brain, and I start to see the whole book form.  I work 8-12 hours a day.  I just keep going and going.”

The new book has been particularly gratifying because it represents her return to BC, where she lived decades ago.  “I love it here; it’s like heaven to be back.”

Keane says BC has a plethora of wonderful healing plants.  However, she is able to choose a favorite.

“I’m very fond of Devil’s Club.  It only grows here in BC, a little bit in Northern Alberta, and in one very small enclave in Ontario near Lake Superior,” she says.  “It’s strong, it’s a warrior, it’s substantial and resilient.”

Recent research has confirmed the use of Devil’s Club, a member of the famous ginseng family, for respiratory problems, including Tuberculosis.  This is of particular interest to the medical world, since some strains of Tuberculosis have been developing a resistance to commonly used pharmaceutical drugs.

There is more information about Devil’s Club, and 42 other medicinal plants, in Wild Medicine of Coastal British Columbia.

For more information and to order books visit www.gaian.ca.
You wouldn’t necessarily think that writing botanical reference books is an adventurous vocation—until you talk to Kahlee Keane.

Keane, discount
who moved to Vancouver Island in January, vitamin
has just published Wild Medicine of Coastal British Columbia, a practical guide to BC’s medicinal plants. She estimates that it is her 25th book—or thereabouts.  In fact, she’s lost count.

Keane has spent more than three decades researching and writing these books, as well as teaching workshops, leading educational walks, and writing newspaper and magazine articles.

Along the way she has been renamed, honored, and royally told-off.  She’s made great friends and stood up to worthy enemies.  And she has consistently been awed at the healing powers of the plants that grow in the Earth’s wild places.

Keane’s work has taken her into communities all over North America, where she has played a number of pivotal roles: anthropologist, historian, biologist, educator and activist.  Wherever she goes, she galvanizes people to understand and appreciate the healing properties of native plants, to treasure them, and, if necessary, to campaign for their protection.

Each of Keane’s books is dedicated to the plants of a certain geographical area, as broad as the province of Ontario or a specific as Grand Manan Island, a 135-square-kilometre fishing community of 2,500 people off the coast of New Brunswick.  And each book has a different tone and structure, reflecting not just the local uniqueness of the botany but also the needs and inclinations of the locals.  Although her books are all about plants, her research very much includes people.

“Wherever I go, the first thing I do is look at the lay of the land and talk to the people who live on it.  In Newfoundland, people had lots of information and what they needed was for me to collect and publish it.  They were happy when I published their recipes.  In Ontario, there was a real lack of information, so my job was to offer what I knew,” she explains.

Her new book, she says, reflects her observation that BC is a relatively sophisticated audience for this material.  “The knowledge is already very alive here; there are lots of people teaching, learning about, and using wild medicinal plants.  So I included more detail, such as the chemical constituency of the plants.”

One thing Keane loves about her work is the connection it gives her to other cultures.

“Because this is North America, I get the chance to learn about different approaches.  For instance the Ayurvedic tradition [from India] has a huge body of knowledge.  All our different immigrant groups bring their experience and information with them.”

Keane says she is happy to trade information with different cultural groups, but she also needs to respect their autonomy.  “For instance, in some areas the First Nations people have suffered a great injury in the loss of their medicine.  But it’s not for me to replicate their traditions.  All I can do is offer what I have.”

It was a multi-cultural encounter that gave Keane her nickname, Root Woman, under which she wrote several books.  “I was researching down in Mississippi.  The people of color there have a rich folk healing tradition.  They were quite wonderful, and we all got to know each other pretty well.  One day we were out working in the soil together and they said to me, ‘We name you Root Woman.’  That’s what they call their healers.  I was so moved, I sat down and cried.”

Keane’s mission is to restore balance in the relationship between people and medicinal plants, both for the sake of the plants and for the sake of the humans.

“I’m putting the folk back in folk medicine,” she explains.  “I want people to understand that this knowledge is their birthright.  It behoves them to learn about their allies.”

It also behoves them to make sure these plants continue to grow and thrive in their natural habitat.  This is the other component of Keane’s mission.  “As an eco-herbalist, activist and conservationist, my goal is to protect bio-diversity.  My craft insists on a heightened ecological awareness and a deep respect for the living Earth,” she says.

Not everyone understands that Keane’s work aligns with environmentalist aims, she adds.  In fact, some people think she puts the plants at risk by encouraging humans to harvest them.

“Oh, I’ve been confronted pretty aggressively,” she says with a wry chuckle.  “I remember hearing a loud knock on my door one day, and I opened it to this big tall environmentalist who started in on me—‘How dare you publish this? You have to stop immediately!’ That kind of thing.

“I was actually scared of him.  But when he stopped talking long enough for me to answer, I told him: ‘I teach people to use the plants so that they respect and protect them.’  And it has always worked that way.”

The angry environmentalist did have a valid point, says Keane—medicinal wild plants are being lost due to over-picking.  But Keane says this is a result of commercial harvesting, where big companies harvest in bulk to make products they sell all around the world.  This is a far cry from what she teaches.  In her books and workshops Keane encourages small-scale wildcrafting, where individuals go into the wild to harvest plants for the use of themselves, their friends, and their families.

Wildcrafters respect the plant, and are often willing to work hard to protect it, she says.

“I’ve seen this just about everywhere I’ve worked, but it really came forward for me in Saskatchewan,” she says.  “I stayed there for 15 years, trying to save one plant—Seneca Root—which is a powerful remedy for the respiratory system.  It is also an old snake-bite remedy. The problem is, you need 250 roots to harvest a pound of it, and it takes seven years to grow one plant.”

Seneca Root was being threatened both by over-picking and loss of habitat due to development.  Keane worried it might be headed toward extinction.  She’d seen this before—for instance, with Wild Ginseng in Ontario, which, she says, is now completely gone.

“But the way to save it is to get it listed as endangered or threatened, and it is very, very hard to do that. You need to count it and monitor it, which is a huge undertaking.  Thankfully, the little farming communities of Saskatchewan have a great understanding of their medicinal plants, and they grasped the particular situation of this plant.  They came forward and volunteered to help, counting, recording, monitoring, so I could make an evidence-based case for the plant.”

Keane and her allies formed a non-profit group, Save our Species, which took as its first task the preservation of Seneca Root.  They are still working on it; Keane remains hopeful, although cautiously so.

While the fate of Seneca Root in the Canadian Prairies still hangs in the balance, the ongoing campaign to have it listed as endangered has brought people together in a powerful way, says Keane.

“My years in Saskatchewan were very exciting; there was so much camaraderie, so much willingness to cooperate and pitch in to do the work to save this plant,” she says, sitting back in her chair with a smile of satisfaction.

Another source of satisfaction, for Keane, is seeing people wake up to the realization that they can use plants to heal themselves.

“I’m giving people control over their own health,” she says.  “These days, we are steeped in pharmaceuticals, and people are looking for alternatives.”

Humans have used plants for healing for millennia, all over the world, she points out.  Our modern pharmaceutical system is, in a way, an outgrowth of this.  Nearly 50 per cent of the thousands of medications prescribed today are either derived from plant sources or contain a chemical, synthetic imitation of a plant compound.

“Since we did not evolve with these synthetics, our bodies do not always have pathways for their distribution and elimination,” she explains.  Although synthetic drugs have certainly performed miracles and saved lives, virtually all of these drugs have side effects ranging from the unpleasant to the lethal.

Using wild medicinal plants not only offers an alternative to the use of pharmaceuticals, it also provides a very different experience of healing.  Instead of visiting a doctor’s office or a hospital, people go out into the forests and mountains; they can make the medicine themselves and they know exactly where it comes from.

“When people see that this works, they are thrilled!” Keane says.

Keane doesn’t consider herself a healer; she would rather see people learn to heal themselves.  This is why she became a writer.

Originally, Keane was an accountant, a profession she found “terribly dry,” she says with a merry laugh. Thirty-five years ago she left accounting to study herbal medicine.

“I was drawn to the plants. But I didn’t want to work in a clinical setting. I figured the best thing was to write.  I can educate people this way; a book gives them time to absorb the information by slow osmosis.”

When Keane feels her research is complete and she is ready to write a book, she throws herself into an intensive period of writing, writing, writing till it’s done.

“I chain myself to the computer.  Something happens—an upheaval in my brain, and I start to see the whole book form.  I work 8-12 hours a day.  I just keep going and going.”

The new book has been particularly gratifying because it represents her return to BC, where she lived decades ago.  “I love it here; it’s like heaven to be back.”

Keane says BC has a plethora of wonderful healing plants.  However, she is able to choose a favorite.

“I’m very fond of Devil’s Club.  It only grows here in BC, a little bit in Northern Alberta, and in one very small enclave in Ontario near Lake Superior,” she says.  “It’s strong, it’s a warrior, it’s substantial and resilient.”

Recent research has confirmed the use of Devil’s Club, a member of the famous ginseng family, for respiratory problems, including Tuberculosis.  This is of particular interest to the medical world, since some strains of Tuberculosis have been developing a resistance to commonly used pharmaceutical drugs.

There is more information about Devil’s Club, and 42 other medicinal plants, in Wild Medicine of Coastal British Columbia.

For more information and to order books visit www.gaian.ca.

Vancouver Island’s newest micro goat dairy is located on Holiday Road in Fanny Bay.  Unless you knew that fact, salve
you could easily drive by the Snap Dragon Goat Dairy and be unaware that it was there.

Karen Fouracre and Jaki Ayton have been developing their compact 1.6 acre farm for the last 14 years.  A mixed farming operation, they raise hogs for meat, goats for milk, and chickens for eggs.  There are gardens and a 40-foot greenhouse in the front yard.  Peach, pear, cherry, apple and plum trees are sprinkled around the property.  Behind the house you’ll find various small buildings, the new milking parlor, several paddocks and pastures.

Over the years they have tried raising ducks, turkeys, sheep, rabbits, peacocks and cows to see what works best for them and their property.  Goats have been part of the herd from the start.  In addition to providing milk, the goats have contributed to Ayton and Fouracre’s recreation opportunities and extended their network of friends.

Ayton shows some of the purebred Toggenberg goats at the summer fairs.  One of them, La Mountain Dutchess, is very close to achieving permanent grand champion status.  Both women are active in local 4-H Club activities giving goat care workshops and assisting as judges.  “They can’t have the parents sitting in on their kid’s presentation; they need spare adults to come,” says Fouracre.  “They do some amazing presentations, it is the most fun, and it is really entertaining.  They put a lot of work into it.  So it has really enriched our lives.”

The idea to establish a micro dairy came when David Wood, the owner of the Salt Spring Island Cheese Company, approached the Vancouver Island Goat Association (VIGA) last fall looking for milk from Island producers.  He was buying milk in the Fraser Valley and wanted to find sources closer to home.  As members of the VIGA, Fouracre and Ayton heard of the enquiry and they immediately began to investigate whether or not they could start a dairy.  Selling their milk to the cheese company would provide them with a way to offset the costs of keeping their ever-growing goat herd.

“I have quite a few goats now and quite a few purebreds and they’re not cheap,” says Ayton.  “We did some stats for the Vancouver Island Goat Association a couple of years ago and it is about $750 per year to keep an adult female goat.”

Logistically it worked because Salt Spring Island Cheese was already purchasing sheep’s milk from a farm in Black Creek, thus making a Fanny Bay stop convenient.  High start up costs had always been a stumbling block to the idea of setting up a dairy.  Cow dairies have setup costs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Also, the milk marketing board establishes quotas that can be both difficult and expensive to purchase.  They discovered that the small number of goat dairies in BC makes quotas unnecessary thus leaving the question of the start up costs.  “We got a tour of the sheep dairy,” says Fouracre.  “The fellow was very nice and let us come and take a look.  He has a very simple operation and we went and looked at it and said we can do this.”

They have decided to milk 14 of their 33 goat herd.  Most of the commercial goat dairies in BC have herds of 200-500 animals.  The approximately 300 litres of milk per week that Snap Dragon will produce would be the equivalent of a large dairy’s single day output.  However, that amount of output spread over the eight months of the year that they will sell to Salt Spring Island Cheese should achieve the objective of “getting the girls to pay for themselves.”

In order to get licensed as a Grade A dairy, Fouracre and Ayton had to absorb the very detailed regulations of the BC Dairy code and build to its strict specifications.   “It was a matter of finding people who could help us out,” explains Ayton of how they approached the task.  “Island Dairy Products is the guy who services all the big dairies.  So we phoned Lawrence, we talked to him.  He’s been a really good resource.  We talked to Gerald Smith who has a sheep dairy and asked him tons of questions.  I talked to some of the big goat dairy people on the mainland, and just asking questions, reading it, checking, emailing the BC licensing place back and forth, etc.”  In the Fanny Bay community they found many people to help them, including retired dairyman and neighbor Glenn Plewis, who assisted with contacts to source the various components needed.

“One of the hardest things is to do was find a dairy tank that was small enough,” says Fouracre.  Adds Ayton: “Getting the equipment small enough has been expensive.  Everything is very big.  There is commercial stuff that is big or there is specialty stuff that is completely out of line expensive.”

It took three months to find a dairy tank that would work.  They finally found one in the Fraser Valley—at 1,000 litres it is bigger than they need but the smallest they could find.  Karen had to significantly modify the plans for the milking parlor/processing building in order to make it fit.  In order to meet the goal of shipping milk in May, many of their friends and Holiday Road neighbors have been called upon to assist with their expertise and a helping hand.  They are most appreciative of all the assistance they have received and they look forward to paying it back with their own labor.  “We’ve had friends, three or four times now, we’ve had anywhere from two to seven of them show up for a day and help us build,” says Fouracre.

On May 10 their dairy dream became a reality when Salt Spring Island Cheese owner David Wood came to help pick up the first shipment of milk.  Wood, originally from Scotland, moved to Toronto in 1973 to work as executive director of Pollution Probe.  His entrepreneurial endeavors prior to establishing Salt Spring Island Cheese in 1994 included Solartech, a renewable energy company, and, the David Wood Food Shop, which by 1989 included three Toronto stores and a catering division.  Salt Spring Island Cheese specializes in handmade goat and sheep cheeses.

Fouracre and Ayton are pleased to share their knowledge of raising goats and how to approach setting up a micro dairy.  “If you are going to start with animals, join all the animal clubs first,” says Fouracre.  “Then get your animals.”

Ayton agrees.  “It’s like getting a dog.  You want to know the community, know the breeders, get the history and background and then start spending large quantities of money.”

Mastering the art of animal husbandry is their number one recommendation for anyone thinking of setting up a dairy.  Get to know your animals and how to care for them.  This will keep them healthy, which will ensure a good product and will keep the vet bills down. They are very proud of the fact that their goats have nice personalities and, on average, they live to be about 24 years of age.  The average life span for a goat is about 15 years.

Another tip from Fouracre:  “Keep the farm clean and tidy because if you don’t, you’ll have a vet bill.  If there is something lying around that shouldn’t be there, you should move it.  Either that or it is going to be tripped over, stepped on or swallowed.

“One thing we learned early is there is no such thing as tomorrow,” she adds.  “There’s no such thing as later either—we’ll do it later.  It’s like, okay, that fence is looking wobbly.  No, you fix it now!  Whatever you were doing you fix the fence now.  Or you’re searching for the goats later, or you’re getting up because they’re in the garage and they’re in the feed.  Or, the buck is breeding the does you didn’t want bred, you know!  When all you had to do was stop for 20 minutes, get the nails and the hammer and fix the fence.  But you didn’t do that so now you’ve got this!”

Ayton outlines some of the essential elements for setting up a dairy:  “Estimate high on all your expenses—we had a business plan and a business plan budget.  There are a couple of really good ones online and we went through and figured it out,” she says.  “I know our price point of how much each goat has to produce per day.  Each one has to produce a good amount of milk, we can’t have loafers.  And you have to be willing to be a farmer, which means cull.  And cull to us means kill.  It means different things to different people.  You have to be willing to look at your herd and say. ‘Okay that one’s no good; they have to go to the butcher.’  I mean you love them to death, like the babies, you get lots of babies every year, you can’t keep them all.  And that’s just part of the animal part of it.  Seeing these are the good ones, these aren’t good ones.  Taking the time to figure it out and then getting rid of the ones that aren’t productive.”

Fouracre agrees, adding, “That took a long time to learn.  That is a whole mind set that took two or three or four years to start thinking that way; to actually be able to do it.”

Adds Ayton:  “Most people only have goats for four years, because they’re not farmers and they don’t get rid of them.  If you start with two goats you can have 15 in four years if you don’t get rid of them.”

The women have obviously worked hard to learn all the necessary parts of farming.  Listening to them describe their dairy and how they take care of their animals it is easy to assume that farming is in their background.  In fact, says Ayton, it took some years to learn how to view their goats like farmers.  “I wasn’t raised on a farm; I grew up in a townhouse.  We’re not farmers by birth.”

But they are now dedicated farmers by choice.  Ayton still works off the farm in public health but with the launch of the dairy, Fouracre is now working at home full time.  In addition to her dairy chores, she will also be selling produce, flowers, eggs, fruit and hand-drawn art cards from a farm stall.   They love what they do and where they live.  They also love sharing the experience with others.  This past April they held their second “Open Farm Day” where anyone interested was invited to visit the farm and see the animals up close.  Donations are collected to go to YANA and it also serves as a form of self-preservation.

“It’s just for fun,” says Ayton.  “Everyone wants to come and see the babies.  They want to see the farm and see the goats, so we open the farm.  We have so many people who want to come and see the babies we figured we better designate a day, otherwise you don’t get anything done.”

Watch for their ads next year so you don’t miss the chance to visit these two interesting women and see this most unique micro dairy operation.
Poor old Qu Yuan, help
an ancient Chinese statesman (475-421 BC), decease
was something of a hard-luck case during his own lifetime. Yet he left a legacy that is celebrated throughout much of the world today as the fastest growing water sport on the planet—dragon boat racing.

Qu’s connection goes like this: He had been banished from his state of Chu by a corrupt king.  Then he learned of the impending invasion of Chu by a neighbor state.  This was too much for him so he tethered himself to a rock in a river to commit ritual suicide as a protest against the invasion. The good people of the kingdom rushed into the water in their fishing boats to try to save Qu, but it was to no avail.  So, they beat drums and splashed water with their paddles to keep evil spirits from his body.

Ultimately Qu Yuan’s legacy in China ended up being commemorated century after century on an annual basis by boat races that take place on the anniversary of his death.  The boats are traditionally long and narrow canoe-style vessels decorated with carved heads and tails of dragons, which are held to be the rulers of the rivers and seas.

Eventually the dragon boats spread beyond the confines of China and the races have now annual events in some 40 countries.  And, as many Comox Valley residents—at least those that ever find themselves near local waters—know, dragon boating is very much a facet of the local scene.

In British Columbia, dragon boating is part of the legacy of Vancouver’s Expo ‘86.  At that event the Chinese delegation brought with them six teak dragon boats.  From that grew the Canadian International Dragon Boat Festival, the first of its kind nationally, thanks to the efforts of David See Chai Lam and Milton Wong.  This was the first dragon boat race/festival outside of Asia, created as a showcase of Vancouver’s growing cultural diversity and to promote racial harmony and cross cultural understanding.

A decade later Dr. Don McKenzie of the University of BC, in conjunction with physiotherapist and breast cancer survivor Dr. Susan Harris, formed the first breast cancer survivor dragon boat team in Vancouver.  Their intention was to prove that upper body exercise has a large role in recovery from breast cancer and lymphedema because it can improve the range of motion, reverse muscle atrophy, stimulate the immune system and activate skeletal muscles.  The only criteria for becoming a member of a breast cancer survivor team is having had a history of breast cancer.

Since that time dragon boating has grown immensely in popularity, with breast cancer survivor teams being a part of all festivals. In the Comox Valley the breast cancer survivor team, and the first dragon boat group on the local scene was Hope Afloat, which was formed in 2001 in conjunction with the Comox Recreation Commission.

In the case of Hope Afloat a group of women in a support group were discussing full-time return to work after having completed their cancer treatments.  It was at that meeting the topic of dragon boat racing came up.  As it stood, the nearest option for getting involved in the sport was in Nanaimo.  This was hardly practical for women who were working.  As it turned out, four local women were involved with the mid-Island team. They were contacted and the wheels were set in motion.  Within a few months, thanks to the support of Valley businesses, service clubs and individual donations, enough funds were raised to purchase the Valley’s first dragon boat.

From that first purchase the concept of dragon boating took off in the Valley.  Hope Afloat gifted their boat to the Comox Recreation Commission, which agreed to make it available to other groups who were interested in getting into the sport.  The rest of the tale is, as they say, history.

There remains, however, says Christine Saunders, Comox Valley Dragonflies team manager, a widespread assumption that dragon boating is still confined to breast cancer survivors (though they remain integral to the sport).  Many teams, like the Dragonflies, are strictly recreational.

The Dragonflies team (the oldest in the Valley after Hope Afloat) was formed in 2002.  The Dragonflies compete in approximately four to five events through the racing season, and primarily compete as a mixed competitive team.  However, they have also raced in a number of women’s festivals through the years.  The Dragonflies are one of six teams in the Valley, including the original Hope Afloat team.

Going back to the beginning for the Dragonflies, and for Saunders, it all came about due to an ad placed by Comox Rec in which they asked if anybody was interested in a dragon boat, as the Hope Afloat boat was now available for other user groups.

“I phoned and then went to a meeting in January of 2002,” she says. “There were a good 40 people there and I became a member of the first team.  We had a 6-16, which is the standard dragon boat worldwide.”

Part of her personal motivation, Saunders says, was that she felt she needed to get involved in some sort of a sport, mainly because she needed the exercise and wanted to do something that appealed to her.  Since she was raised by the sea, she felt that something to do with the water would work for her.

“I’d never been particularly active in sports,” she says.  “I like to say I’m a great spectator, and when my kids were growing up and playing baseball or soccer I was always out there to cheer them on.  But, I wanted and needed something for me.”

Right from the beginning she found it to be a fine fit for her.  It was a good group of people to be with and the sport demanded team solidarity in that all must pull together.  People get tight with one another—figuratively and literally—in relatively short order.

“For us it’s basically recreational,” she says. “There is the competitive aspect and we have achieved a considerable degree of success, but essentially we go out to be on the water and to have fun.  One of our biggest challenges is to get more men involved.”

A further misconception about dragon boating (the first being that it is confined to breast cancer survivors) that Saunders would like to set straight is that it is not exclusively a female endeavor, but decidedly calls for gender mixed teams and they are, she says, always trying to attract men to the sport.

Many men, Saunders adds, believe that dragon boating is strictly a female involvement, and at a certain level females must predominate.  There are no exclusively male teams, but in any of the major competitions in which they have been involved, such as Victoria and Nanaimo, the biggest section is the mixed group.  And, of the 20 people on a team, at least eight must be female.

As for the physical aspects of dragon boating, Saunders describes it as “a wonderful sport.  It’s whole body exercise,” she says.  “While it creates certain demands on the novice it doesn’t take long to adjust to the stresses of the sport.”

She notes that Fitness Excellence in the Valley offers dragon boat training and that it’s a good idea to take that sort of training, especially in the winter, before the season begins.

“Winter is definitely a good time to get started,” she advises, as competition season isn’t the best time to learn, so it can be a bit disappointing for the newcomer since the others on the team are more advanced.

Part of the allure, Saunders says, is the sense of solidarity that comes about from the experience. Everybody must be able to rely on everyone else in the boat.  There is no hierarchy in that regard.

“The speed of the boat comes about from everybody paddling as one,” she says. “Everybody must hit the water with their paddles at exactly the same time.”

While the Dragonflies initially used the boat made available from Comox Rec they have, since 2007, had their own boat—a boat with a special legacy and of which the team members are very proud.

It came about when team member Monica Greenwood and her husband, Mel, donated the boat in memory of their son, Stephen, who had died in a car crash four years earlier. The boat is a BuK, which is built in Germany and is a crème-de-la-crème craft of the sort that has been used in many international competitions.

But, the Dragonflies boat is even more than that, Saunders says. The boat has been enhanced by the talents of local artist Robert Lundquist, who endeavored—after listening to the Greenwoods’ story of their son—to bring his spirit to life as represented by the boat.  Appropriately, the boat is called Stephen’s Spirit.

Team solidarity is of course everything, and aside from having the boat that they cherish so greatly, the Dragonflies deck themselves out in T-shirts that follow the design of the boat.

“With our team we knew we needed a good blend of personalities, and that’s what we have,” Saunders says. “We have 20 people plus a drummer.  Once we join up we make a definite commitment, but we know that we all have other things going on in our lives, and that has to be respected.”

During the season they practice twice a week for an hour and a quarter, and in the winter, come rain or come shine, or sleet and virtually everything but heavy winds, they practice once a week.

There is a definite process that must be learned and a participant’s skill can only improve with practice, she says.  The paddlers in a dragon boat face forward (unlike aft-facing seated rowers) and use a specific type of paddle, which is not connected to the craft in any way.  They paddle canoe-style with a very distinctive paddle type.  The leading paddlers set the pace for the team and it’s essential that all paddlers be synchronized.  Each paddler, Saunders says, should synchronize with the stroke or pacer on the opposite side of the boat.  That is, if you paddle starboard side, you take your pace from the paddler on the port side.  Meanwhile, the two pacers in the bow set the pace for the rest of the paddlers.

“We truly have to be a team,” Saunders says.  “There are no star performers, just a group of people literally pulling together.”

Currently their team quotient is good, Saunders says.  A number of new members have come out, which is good since five or six members left within the past year.  And, as always, they are seeking more male participation.  As far as age is concerned, there is no upper or lower limit, though participants should be physically mature due to the strength demands.

“Right now I believe we range in age from about 30 to 70 years,” she says.

This fastest growing of water sports on the globe is seconded only by outrigger paddling, which uses the same strokes, and the teams are often mutually supportive, says Saunders.

“The primary difference would be that outriggers are suited for long distances, whereas our greatest distance in competition is 500 metres,” she says.  “CORA (Canadian Outrigger Canoe Association) held a competition in Comox Lake last year, and our team supported theirs in that competition.”

What appeals to Saunders and many others in the sport is that it’s not encumbered by regulations limiting the involvement of its members.  As an example, she will shortly be going to Victoria to race with another team and she observes that the teams change from one race to the next.  At the same time, competition, such as the BC Seniors Games (Comox Valley and Campbell River, September 15-18) and festivals like Nautical Days in Comox bring out the apex of team spirit.

For the Seniors Games, Saunders says, she’ll be on a mixed team, along with seven other members of the Dragonflies.  She further notes that for competitions in other centres they do not, due to difficulty of transport, take their boat with them.  Which, she admits, is too bad in one respect, but the logistics have to be respected.

“It all truly stirs the spirit,” she says.  “I’m looking forward to Nautical Days and the Seniors Games in the early fall.  We’ll be there and loving it.”

For more information on the Comox Valley Dragonflies visit www.cvdragonflies.ca.

For breast cancer survivors who would like to be connected with Hope Afloat, go to www.hopeafloatcanada.ca.

The past is very much present in Cumberland—and a tangible expression of this intersection of the historic and the contemporary is the annual Miners’ Memorial Weekend.  Presented by the Cumberland and District Historical Society, this year’s 25th anniversary event on the weekend of June 18-19 commemorates the miners who worked, lived, and died in the mines at Cumberland as well as throughout the world.  By means of music, story, and ceremony, the event is a celebration of workers and their families.

In the quiet dimness of the Cumberland Museum, plans for the event are at full steam.  Museum board members Meaghan Cursons and Brian Charlton sift through boxes of archival material for a possible exhibit.  Joined by Anne Davis, president of the Courtenay, Campbell River and District Labor Council, the group looks through the old newspaper clippings, posters, and photographs of past events.

“This is the Miners’ Memorial Day Box!” says Cursons, pulling from it an old program with a photo of the Memorial Cairn from #6 Mine. “1986—that would have been the first event,” says Charlton, reading the date.  “Here are some of the press releases.  Who’s in that picture?” Cursons wonders. “Rosemary Brown, Wayne Bradley, is that Roger Crowther?” begins Davis, and Charlton completes her thought:  “They all look so young!”  Everyone laughs.

“Here’s Barney McGuire,” continues Charlton with one of the clippings.  “He was one of the initiators of the Miners’ Memorial event.  He was with the CAIMAW union—the ones who broke away from the international unions in the Canadian Independence Labor movement.”  Cursons wonders if he was the same McGuire that had left markers seen in museums across the province, with the famous labor slogan, “Don’t Mourn, Organize.”

“That’s a different guy—Barry McGuire!” says Brian Charlton. “It’s all the same family,” Davis adds with a laughs: “Brian is a McGuire!”

With his personal labor heritage, Brian Charlton is also very aware of the history of the Miners’ Memorial event.  “It actually started in Sudbury in 1984, that was the first one,” he says.  “I don’t know if they still do the Sudbury one, but Cumberland has kept up for 25 years now.”

“They aren’t in every mining community across Canada—Cumberland is very unique in that,” says Cursons.  “People are coming from unions across the Pacific Northwest and sometimes further afield—they make it their summer trip.  There’s groups of people that camp at Comox Lake, there’s groups of university students that have always attended, there’s the bus drivers in Victoria that actually get a city bus and make the trip every year—really interesting traditions of attendance that aren’t just local.  I think that’s why it’s such a big deal.”

The interest in the event has been increasing over the last several years.  “It comes from the nature of issues in the province,” Cursons says.  “That seems to make a difference—it goes hand in hand with general activism, and where we’re at in an election cycle, lots of reasons why people are more animated at different times.”

Adds Charlton:  “One of the reasons that Cumberland’s event has lasted so long is that it isn’t just the memorial ceremony at the cemetery.  There’s so much else going on, with ‘Songs of the Workers’ the night before, the pancake breakfast, the camping… One of the best things has been the Saturday night around the bonfire—one time there were at least 10 people with guitars.  Somebody even brought bagpipes!”

“It’s how I got my whole introduction to the labor activist community in the Comox Valley, and to the Cumberland Museum,” says Cursons.  “Both of those were 15 years ago.  The second year I was here, I ended up involved in Miners’ Memorial Day—I spoke and played music at ‘Songs for the Workers’.”

‘Songs for the Workers’ opens the Miners’ Memorial Weekend with a Pub Night on Friday, June 18 from 7 to 11pm at the Cumberland Cultural Centre, admission by donation.  “It’s a combination of scheduled performers and open mic—everyone is welcome,” says Cursons.  “There’ll be a combination of some traditional stuff and stuff you haven’t heard before. We have George Hewison playing, Doug Cox, Gordie Carter—we do a constant rotation of tunes.  We pass the hat and share the proceeds between the musicians and the event.”

Charlton in particular is looking forward to hearing songs from Gwyn Sproule.  “She does these traditional Geordie songs—English coal mining songs,” explains Cursons, adding that the event “goes as long as we can keep the energy going!”

The next morning the BCGEU hosts a pancake breakfast from 8-11am. “Again this is open to community, here at the OAP,” says Cursons.  “All the proceeds go to the museum.”  At 11am there will be a guided tour of the Cumberland Museum.  The Campbell River, Courtenay and District Labor Council, the Cumberland OAP and the Cumberland Chamber of Commerce are all supporting the event to benefit the museum’s programming, operations, and labor and mining history exhibits.

“At noon on Saturday, there’s a group who are going to walk to the cemetery—recreate the funeral walk from Ginger Goodwin’s funeral,” Cursons continues.  Ginger Goodwin was the well-known coalminer and labor organizer whose leadership of several strikes and outspoken opposition to the 1914-18 war brought him to the attention of authorities.  Despite his health problems, his conscription status was changed from ‘unfit’ to ‘fit for service in an overseas fighting unit’.  He went into hiding in the bush near Cumberland, with the help of townspeople, but was tracked down and shot by a hired private policeman on July 27, 1918.   His death sparked Canada’s first General Strike.

“There was a processional of people from Cumberland all the way to the graveyard—and there wasn’t a single dry eye,” says Cursons, quoting the reports of the time.  Anne Davis has researched the route described in Ruth Masters’ book of local history at the museum, and the group will try to recreate the same route for the procession on June 19.

The name Ginger Goodwin still elicits a strong response in the community.  “It’s interesting that he died in 1918, and he still provokes a lot of feeling,” says Charlton.  “He’s been dead for almost 100 years and we’re still battling it out because issues that were debated back then and fought about back then are still relevant today.”

Davis has a personal story of Ginger Goodwin’s influence.  “When I moved here in 1974, I was 19, and my then partner and I bought one of the old houses on Camp Road.  It had belonged to Jimmy Ellis, who had gone into care at that point,” she says.  “I went down one afternoon to meet him at the old folks home to just ask him some questions about the house and he sat me down and told me the story of Ginger Goodwin.

“As a kid, Jimmy had gone up to the lake with his father and was taking food up to those who were hiding out.  When he told me this story he had tears in his eyes, and it was tears of anger.  I grew up in Victoria and I had never heard of Ginger Goodwin but I got the message that something really important had happened here.  That was my very first introduction to labor history, and I’ve ended up being a labor activist for all of my adult life.  It was so important to Jimmy to pass that story on to the next person who was going to live in his house in Cumberland.  It had quite an impact.”

Adds Cursons:  “Something really important happened in Cumberland that connects to what all of our lives look like right now, and connects to struggles that are still going on.  That kind of thing never gets written down by the official establishment.  When you go to the archives, it’s only going to read a certain way if it’s a newspaper clipping from the mainstream press.  So the real story only lives because people have told it through stories and music—it doesn’t exist in the official record the way it needs to exist.”

The ceremony at the heart of Miners’ Memorial Weekend is the Graveside Vigil at the Cumberland cemetery at 1 pm on June 19.  “Miners’ Memorial Day for labor activists is a bit like getting back to your roots—that reminder of the struggles of the past,” says Davis.  “At the time Ginger Goodwin was killed, people were fighting for—and sometimes dying for—the eight-hour day, the two-day weekend, basic health and safety standards.  Because we’re not taught that history in school—the history of unions, of organizing—we have to go out and find it, and remind ourselves and others of our roots.  I think it’s a really important event for that, for connecting again, and remembering that the struggles we’re involved in today are sometimes not so different from what they were fighting for back then.”

Speakers at the cemetery will include labor leaders and historians.  “It’s an open mic, which can be interesting!” says Charlton, “because you get some fiery rhetoric—young Turks—like a lot of the Wobblies (the IWW – Industrial Workers of the World) and some of the other political groups.

“Marianne Bell, who used to be president of the Labor Council, is going to be speaking about women in Cumberland at the cemetery,” he adds.  “And one time there were some Chilean miners here, and they introduced their tradition of honoring people who had died in the last year—they would say the name, and everybody in the crowd would say ‘Presente’, meaning ‘Here’, which was quite a touching thing.  Another time when Roger Stonebank was researching the book that he did, he got in touch with some of Ginger Goodwin’s relatives in England.  They thought he was some kind of black sheep shot by the cops and Roger told them that there was actually a ceremony going on in Cumberland, BC for the last 20 years celebrating Ginger Goodwin—so they came up the next year.”

“It was very emotional the first year they came,” Davis recalls.  “They were quite tearful at the cemetery talking about him.  It blew them away that he was being honored.”

Adds Cursons:  “When we’re down at the cemetery we’re standing together and talking together, there’s music, and the act of doing ceremony and ritual—it’s a really neat blending of culture and politics, which strengthens both, which is why it’s such a powerful event.”

Davis agrees.  “I think that’s partly what draws people to come from Vancouver and Victoria too,” she says.

“The graveside part is really important to people, and because there’s a whole lot of activities over the whole weekend it’s worth coming the distance to be part of it.”

The ceremony consists of a “combination of music and speeches, and laying of the wreaths—bouquets this year,” says Cursons, noting that the memorial flowers are traditionally ordered and placed by unions, but any family, business or individual can order a commemorative tribute.

“We call out the different unions or individuals who want to lay a bouquet, and they come up and lay it at Ginger Goodwin’s grave,” says Charlton.  “We go down to Miners’ Row, for miners who don’t have marked graves, and lay some there.  And this year we’re also going to be laying some flowers for the women of Cumberland, the wives of the miners.  Then we’re planning a ceremony for 2:30 at the Japanese and Chinese cemeteries.”

Cursons recommends ordering the tribute bouquets before June 10 through the Cumberland Museum. “It’s also a fundraiser for the museum,” she says.  “But something we’ve discussed this year—talking about workers and workers’ rights—is that the international cut flower industry is devastating for women.  There is heavy pesticide use throughout the cut flower industry.  So this year we had a real serious conversation about where those flowers are coming from—we’re doing fair trade flowers for the bouquets from Comox Valley Flower Mart.

“It’s funny how you don’t necessarily connect the dots—especially something that symbolized love and mourning and respect—like roses,” she adds.  “You really need to think about who is producing roses, what is their wage like, what is their quality of life like, and how far are the flowers flying in jet planes—some really important questions.  So I hope that every year that we’re challenged by doing this right.”

At 3:30 pm on Saturday local historian Gwyn Sproule will lead a walking tour leaving from the museum, of the Cumberland mine sites.  Registration for the tour is not required; however advance tickets for $15 are necessary for the Miners’ Memorial Day Dinner at 6 pm.  “The big dinner is put on by the Cumberland Museum Board,” says Cursons.  “At that event Stephen Hume will be speaking, and Jim Sinclair.  There will be music and TheatreWorks is going to be doing a performance.”  Depending on numbers, the dinner will either be at the OAP or the CRI.  All food for the dinner is donated from local businesses, with proceeds going to the museum.

Music is threaded throughout the weekend.  “There’s music Friday night, music at the cemetery, music as part of our dinner,” Cursons says.  “Worker’s music is also folk music in its purest form.  It’s people’s music, songs of the workers—those have been sung for political reasons or for mourning or to set a pace to your labor.  And new verses show up, where some sort of relevant current event changes the lyric.  We may not be mining here anymore in Cumberland, but people all over the world are still doing really dangerous, horrendous work.  This last year has been a huge year for deaths in coal mining.”

“I think Miners’ Memorial Day is where people’s politics and their cultural expression line up— it’s not a dry political event.  It has a very political cultural component.  I like politics in our art and our craft!” Cursons says, acknowledging she also wrote a song that came out of Miners’ Memorial Day.

That thought further inspires the planning group.  “I think we’ve got enough songs now for a CD!” says Charlton with a laugh.  “As a fundraiser for the museum,” adds Davis.  “Brian’s got a line on pretty well every Ginger Goodwin song that’s been written!”  The idea catches on, with suggestions of songs to include: Cumberland Waltz by Wyckham Porteous, The Day They Shot Ginger Down by Gordon Carter, and songs by Joey Keithley, David Robics and Richard von Fuchs.

“There’s so many new people that live in Cumberland and in the Valley who don’t have a total connection to this history, so we’re working really hard this year on inviting the community as a whole to come out,” says Cursons.  “As part of that, we’re inviting other musicians who haven’t traditionally been involved in the event because we just want to hear workers music—it doesn’t have to be a particular union or labor song.  This event is totally relevant for all workers.  It’s going to be what we make it, as a community, for the next 25 years.”

Clearly Miners’ Memorial Weekend isn’t just a memorial caught in the past.  Cultural elements of the event are constantly being renewed, in a continual connection to contemporary issues.  The 25-year history of the memorial event itself is now part of the story of Cumberland as a community.

“We have an exhibit case that we want to get some of this material into,” says Cursons, placing the past event posters and flyers back into their folders.  “We want to keep everything intact and keep it safe, so people can see the progression of the event—this event is now part of our history.”

For more about the event visit: www.cumberlandmuseum.ca.

The past is very much present in Cumberland—and a tangible expression of this intersection of the historic and the contemporary is the annual Miners’ Memorial Weekend.  Presented by the Cumberland and District Historical Society, thumb
this year’s 25th anniversary event on the weekend of June 18-19 commemorates the miners who worked, lived, and died in the mines at Cumberland as well as throughout the world.  By means of music, story, and ceremony, the event is a celebration of workers and their families.

In the quiet dimness of the Cumberland Museum, plans for the event are at full steam.  Museum board members Meaghan Cursons and Brian Charlton sift through boxes of archival material for a possible exhibit.  Joined by Anne Davis, president of the Courtenay, Campbell River and District Labor Council, the group looks through the old newspaper clippings, posters, and photographs of past events.

“This is the Miners’ Memorial Day Box!” says Cursons, pulling from it an old program with a photo of the Memorial Cairn from #6 Mine. “1986—that would have been the first event,” says Charlton, reading the date.  “Here are some of the press releases.  Who’s in that picture?” Cursons wonders. “Rosemary Brown, Wayne Bradley, is that Roger Crowther?” begins Davis, and Charlton completes her thought:  “They all look so young!”  Everyone laughs.

“Here’s Barney McGuire,” continues Charlton with one of the clippings.  “He was one of the initiators of the Miners’ Memorial event.  He was with the CAIMAW union—the ones who broke away from the international unions in the Canadian Independence Labor movement.”  Cursons wonders if he was the same McGuire that had left markers seen in museums across the province, with the famous labor slogan, “Don’t Mourn, Organize.”

“That’s a different guy—Barry McGuire!” says Brian Charlton. “It’s all the same family,” Davis adds with a laughs: “Brian is a McGuire!”

With his personal labor heritage, Brian Charlton is also very aware of the history of the Miners’ Memorial event.  “It actually started in Sudbury in 1984, that was the first one,” he says.  “I don’t know if they still do the Sudbury one, but Cumberland has kept up for 25 years now.”

“They aren’t in every mining community across Canada—Cumberland is very unique in that,” says Cursons.  “People are coming from unions across the Pacific Northwest and sometimes further afield—they make it their summer trip.  There’s groups of people that camp at Comox Lake, there’s groups of university students that have always attended, there’s the bus drivers in Victoria that actually get a city bus and make the trip every year—really interesting traditions of attendance that aren’t just local.  I think that’s why it’s such a big deal.”

The interest in the event has been increasing over the last several years.  “It comes from the nature of issues in the province,” Cursons says.  “That seems to make a difference—it goes hand in hand with general activism, and where we’re at in an election cycle, lots of reasons why people are more animated at different times.”

Adds Charlton:  “One of the reasons that Cumberland’s event has lasted so long is that it isn’t just the memorial ceremony at the cemetery.  There’s so much else going on, with ‘Songs of the Workers’ the night before, the pancake breakfast, the camping… One of the best things has been the Saturday night around the bonfire—one time there were at least 10 people with guitars.  Somebody even brought bagpipes!”

“It’s how I got my whole introduction to the labor activist community in the Comox Valley, and to the Cumberland Museum,” says Cursons.  “Both of those were 15 years ago.  The second year I was here, I ended up involved in Miners’ Memorial Day—I spoke and played music at ‘Songs for the Workers’.”

‘Songs for the Workers’ opens the Miners’ Memorial Weekend with a Pub Night on Friday, June 18 from 7 to 11pm at the Cumberland Cultural Centre, admission by donation.  “It’s a combination of scheduled performers and open mic—everyone is welcome,” says Cursons.  “There’ll be a combination of some traditional stuff and stuff you haven’t heard before. We have George Hewison playing, Doug Cox, Gordie Carter—we do a constant rotation of tunes.  We pass the hat and share the proceeds between the musicians and the event.”

Charlton in particular is looking forward to hearing songs from Gwyn Sproule.  “She does these traditional Geordie songs—English coal mining songs,” explains Cursons, adding that the event “goes as long as we can keep the energy going!”

The next morning the BCGEU hosts a pancake breakfast from 8-11am. “Again this is open to community, here at the OAP,” says Cursons.  “All the proceeds go to the museum.”  At 11am there will be a guided tour of the Cumberland Museum.  The Campbell River, Courtenay and District Labor Council, the Cumberland OAP and the Cumberland Chamber of Commerce are all supporting the event to benefit the museum’s programming, operations, and labor and mining history exhibits.

“At noon on Saturday, there’s a group who are going to walk to the cemetery—recreate the funeral walk from Ginger Goodwin’s funeral,” Cursons continues.  Ginger Goodwin was the well-known coalminer and labor organizer whose leadership of several strikes and outspoken opposition to the 1914-18 war brought him to the attention of authorities.  Despite his health problems, his conscription status was changed from ‘unfit’ to ‘fit for service in an overseas fighting unit’.  He went into hiding in the bush near Cumberland, with the help of townspeople, but was tracked down and shot by a hired private policeman on July 27, 1918.   His death sparked Canada’s first General Strike.

“There was a processional of people from Cumberland all the way to the graveyard—and there wasn’t a single dry eye,” says Cursons, quoting the reports of the time.  Anne Davis has researched the route described in Ruth Masters’ book of local history at the museum, and the group will try to recreate the same route for the procession on June 19.

The name Ginger Goodwin still elicits a strong response in the community.  “It’s interesting that he died in 1918, and he still provokes a lot of feeling,” says Charlton.  “He’s been dead for almost 100 years and we’re still battling it out because issues that were debated back then and fought about back then are still relevant today.”

Davis has a personal story of Ginger Goodwin’s influence.  “When I moved here in 1974, I was 19, and my then partner and I bought one of the old houses on Camp Road.  It had belonged to Jimmy Ellis, who had gone into care at that point,” she says.  “I went down one afternoon to meet him at the old folks home to just ask him some questions about the house and he sat me down and told me the story of Ginger Goodwin.

“As a kid, Jimmy had gone up to the lake with his father and was taking food up to those who were hiding out.  When he told me this story he had tears in his eyes, and it was tears of anger.  I grew up in Victoria and I had never heard of Ginger Goodwin but I got the message that something really important had happened here.  That was my very first introduction to labor history, and I’ve ended up being a labor activist for all of my adult life.  It was so important to Jimmy to pass that story on to the next person who was going to live in his house in Cumberland.  It had quite an impact.”

Adds Cursons:  “Something really important happened in Cumberland that connects to what all of our lives look like right now, and connects to struggles that are still going on.  That kind of thing never gets written down by the official establishment.  When you go to the archives, it’s only going to read a certain way if it’s a newspaper clipping from the mainstream press.  So the real story only lives because people have told it through stories and music—it doesn’t exist in the official record the way it needs to exist.”

The ceremony at the heart of Miners’ Memorial Weekend is the Graveside Vigil at the Cumberland cemetery at 1 pm on June 19.  “Miners’ Memorial Day for labor activists is a bit like getting back to your roots—that reminder of the struggles of the past,” says Davis.  “At the time Ginger Goodwin was killed, people were fighting for—and sometimes dying for—the eight-hour day, the two-day weekend, basic health and safety standards.  Because we’re not taught that history in school—the history of unions, of organizing—we have to go out and find it, and remind ourselves and others of our roots.  I think it’s a really important event for that, for connecting again, and remembering that the struggles we’re involved in today are sometimes not so different from what they were fighting for back then.”

Speakers at the cemetery will include labor leaders and historians.  “It’s an open mic, which can be interesting!” says Charlton, “because you get some fiery rhetoric—young Turks—like a lot of the Wobblies (the IWW – Industrial Workers of the World) and some of the other political groups.

“Marianne Bell, who used to be president of the Labor Council, is going to be speaking about women in Cumberland at the cemetery,” he adds.  “And one time there were some Chilean miners here, and they introduced their tradition of honoring people who had died in the last year—they would say the name, and everybody in the crowd would say ‘Presente’, meaning ‘Here’, which was quite a touching thing.  Another time when Roger Stonebank was researching the book that he did, he got in touch with some of Ginger Goodwin’s relatives in England.  They thought he was some kind of black sheep shot by the cops and Roger told them that there was actually a ceremony going on in Cumberland, BC for the last 20 years celebrating Ginger Goodwin—so they came up the next year.”

“It was very emotional the first year they came,” Davis recalls.  “They were quite tearful at the cemetery talking about him.  It blew them away that he was being honored.”

Adds Cursons:  “When we’re down at the cemetery we’re standing together and talking together, there’s music, and the act of doing ceremony and ritual—it’s a really neat blending of culture and politics, which strengthens both, which is why it’s such a powerful event.”

Davis agrees.  “I think that’s partly what draws people to come from Vancouver and Victoria too,” she says.

“The graveside part is really important to people, and because there’s a whole lot of activities over the whole weekend it’s worth coming the distance to be part of it.”

The ceremony consists of a “combination of music and speeches, and laying of the wreaths—bouquets this year,” says Cursons, noting that the memorial flowers are traditionally ordered and placed by unions, but any family, business or individual can order a commemorative tribute.

“We call out the different unions or individuals who want to lay a bouquet, and they come up and lay it at Ginger Goodwin’s grave,” says Charlton.  “We go down to Miners’ Row, for miners who don’t have marked graves, and lay some there.  And this year we’re also going to be laying some flowers for the women of Cumberland, the wives of the miners.  Then we’re planning a ceremony for 2:30 at the Japanese and Chinese cemeteries.”

Cursons recommends ordering the tribute bouquets before June 10 through the Cumberland Museum. “It’s also a fundraiser for the museum,” she says.  “But something we’ve discussed this year—talking about workers and workers’ rights—is that the international cut flower industry is devastating for women.  There is heavy pesticide use throughout the cut flower industry.  So this year we had a real serious conversation about where those flowers are coming from—we’re doing fair trade flowers for the bouquets from Comox Valley Flower Mart.

“It’s funny how you don’t necessarily connect the dots—especially something that symbolized love and mourning and respect—like roses,” she adds.  “You really need to think about who is producing roses, what is their wage like, what is their quality of life like, and how far are the flowers flying in jet planes—some really important questions.  So I hope that every year that we’re challenged by doing this right.”

At 3:30 pm on Saturday local historian Gwyn Sproule will lead a walking tour leaving from the museum, of the Cumberland mine sites.  Registration for the tour is not required; however advance tickets for $15 are necessary for the Miners’ Memorial Day Dinner at 6 pm.  “The big dinner is put on by the Cumberland Museum Board,” says Cursons.  “At that event Stephen Hume will be speaking, and Jim Sinclair.  There will be music and TheatreWorks is going to be doing a performance.”  Depending on numbers, the dinner will either be at the OAP or the CRI.  All food for the dinner is donated from local businesses, with proceeds going to the museum.

Music is threaded throughout the weekend.  “There’s music Friday night, music at the cemetery, music as part of our dinner,” Cursons says.  “Worker’s music is also folk music in its purest form.  It’s people’s music, songs of the workers—those have been sung for political reasons or for mourning or to set a pace to your labor.  And new verses show up, where some sort of relevant current event changes the lyric.  We may not be mining here anymore in Cumberland, but people all over the world are still doing really dangerous, horrendous work.  This last year has been a huge year for deaths in coal mining.”

“I think Miners’ Memorial Day is where people’s politics and their cultural expression line up— it’s not a dry political event.  It has a very political cultural component.  I like politics in our art and our craft!” Cursons says, acknowledging she also wrote a song that came out of Miners’ Memorial Day.

That thought further inspires the planning group.  “I think we’ve got enough songs now for a CD!” says Charlton with a laugh.  “As a fundraiser for the museum,” adds Davis.  “Brian’s got a line on pretty well every Ginger Goodwin song that’s been written!”  The idea catches on, with suggestions of songs to include: Cumberland Waltz by Wyckham Porteous, The Day They Shot Ginger Down by Gordon Carter, and songs by Joey Keithley, David Robics and Richard von Fuchs.

“There’s so many new people that live in Cumberland and in the Valley who don’t have a total connection to this history, so we’re working really hard this year on inviting the community as a whole to come out,” says Cursons.  “As part of that, we’re inviting other musicians who haven’t traditionally been involved in the event because we just want to hear workers music—it doesn’t have to be a particular union or labor song.  This event is totally relevant for all workers.  It’s going to be what we make it, as a community, for the next 25 years.”

Clearly Miners’ Memorial Weekend isn’t just a memorial caught in the past.  Cultural elements of the event are constantly being renewed, in a continual connection to contemporary issues.  The 25-year history of the memorial event itself is now part of the story of Cumberland as a community.

“We have an exhibit case that we want to get some of this material into,” says Cursons, placing the past event posters and flyers back into their folders.  “We want to keep everything intact and keep it safe, so people can see the progression of the event—this event is now part of our history.”

For more about the event visit: www.cumberlandmuseum.ca.
There is an interesting document hanging on the wall of the Comox Valley Chamber of Commerce’s (CVCC) boardroom on Cliffe Avenue in Courtenay. It is the original 1919 certificate of incorporation for what was then called the Courtenay Board of Trade. If you look closely, sick you will notice that many of the 32 surnames listed on this official record are familiar to Comox Valley residents. Today, generic
we may identify the names Kilpatrick, remedy Simms, Willemar, Rickson, Idiens, McPhee, Guthrie and Wood—to name a few—as the names of local roads and landmarks, but they are, in fact, the names of insightful pioneers of industry and commerce for the Comox Valley.

Over the course of more than 90 years, the Board of Trade—now known as the CVCC—has been required to adapt to changing times. It has supported economic development and community collaboration through the Great Depression, the market crashes of the 1980s and today’s global economic crisis.  Despite recent trade and industry challenges—or perhaps because of them—membership in the CVCC has increased dramatically in the past five years and is currently at a record high.  If there was ever a time to “rally the troops” this is it!

Alongside the long list of new CVCC members are many who have supported the Chamber for decades. CIBC, for example, joined the Courtenay Board of Trade in 1919; Central Builders lays claim to a 50-year membership, with the exception of a short lapse in membership during a change in ownership; and Mike Finneron Pontiac-Buick (Now Hyundi) has been a member for more than 25 years.

“It is not just the local Chamber that has grown, there are now 130 Chambers of Commerce in BC,” explains CVCC’s Executive Director, Dianne Hawkins. “This is the third largest Chamber on Vancouver Island and the 10th largest in the province. Despite the fact that we have had three name changes over 91 years, our mandate remains true to the vision of our founders—to be a voice in the local community and beyond, and to promote the commercial well being of the Comox Valley.”

The ways in which the CVCC promotes our region are both varied and impressive. Its main goal is to create and sustain programs designed to help member businesses build relationships and create strategic alliances that will promote economic growth.  That said, while promoting ‘business,’ Chamber members never forget the importance of ‘community.’ It champions grassroots programs such as environmental awareness initiatives and, along with various other community partners, was one of the sponsors of the recent 30-Day Local Food Challenge.

A great example of an environmental awareness initiative is the CVCC’s Bagless Comox Valley program, launched in 2009.  This was a major undertaking that was embraced by both businesses and individuals in the community. After lengthy discussions and collaboration with retailers, CVCC secured a bulk order for 85,000 reusable shopping bags that retailers could purchase and then sell or use as giveaways. The bags, which featured the Comox Glacier on both sides, came with the option of being printed with each individual retailer’s name and logo.

“The ability to include all businesses, large and small, was imperative to the success of this program,” says Hawkins.  “As a result, an estimated 85 per cent of all local retailers participated by ordering and distributing reusable shopping bags. The project was well promoted by the Comox Valley Regional District, who are now considering a full ban on the traditional plastic shopping bags.”

An initiative of Our Big Earth, the Second Annual 30-Day Local Food Challenge, for example, encouraged Valley residents to ‘Dig in and Eat Local!’ (www.eatlocalcomoxvalley.com).  The Food Challenge is a series of hands-on workshops, tours and fun community events celebrating the agricultural sector in the Comox Valley.  More than 30 vendors representing food producers and restaurants banded together to present this event and encourage people to taste, explore, connect and learn about farmers, food producers and the people who create our food.

“Look around and you’ll see that the agricultural sector is alive and thriving in the Valley.  You can see it—sometimes you can even smell it!” says Hawkins with smile. “I think that sometimes people lose sight of the fact that farmers have always been at the core of this community and the Chamber is committed to support this and other agriculture-based initiatives.”

The CVCC, which operates the Visitor Centre out of their building in Courtenay, also forges partnerships with various community stakeholders to promote tourism and commerce in the Valley. A recent project that gained considerable media attention was sponsoring the Ghana Ski Team’s 2010 Olympic training. Hawkins worked with Sarah Nicholson, manager of Tourism Mount Washington, to find 10 Chamber members to sponsors the ‘Snow Leopard.’ This backing included extensive media coverage, team accommodation, a team vehicle for transport, and even a Tourism Vancouver Island sponsored eco-tour in the Seymour Narrows with the team and the Australian television media.

“The team was well aware that without the vision and determination of Tourism Mount Washington and the Comox Valley Chamber of Commerce, the Ghana ski team would not have had a pre-game training facility in Canada,” says Richard Harpham, team manager.

Not only did the Snow Leopard program help the Ghana ski team, it helped bring some of the thrill of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics to the Comox Valley.  Kids lined up to get Snow Leopard autographs and waved with excitement when the gaily-decorated Snow Leopard van drove by.

The Chamber is also the voice of business in the Comox Valley and effectively advocates to all levels of government on issues relevant to the local business community.  In 2009, for example, CVCC made formal presentations to both the Town of Comox and the City of Courtenay, asking that a reduction in the property tax multiplier for business properties be considered.  They were successful in getting the multiplier reduced in Courtenay and were invited back to both councils for 2010, to ensure the issue is given due consideration for future budget discussions.

Another major initiative of the CVCC was providing input to the Regional Growth Strategy.  Working in partnership with the Cumberland Chamber of Commerce, The Comox Valley Regional District, Comox Valley Land Trust and local business leaders, CVCC drafted two working papers with specific recommendations; these are posted on their website.  The Regional Growth Strategy covers a wide range of issues, from population and demographics to affordable housing, farmland, food security, economic development, transportation, infrastructure and much more.

“The goal is to ensure that the Regional Growth Strategy takes into account a combination of our current environmental attributes and pairs it with good business practices to lead to a sustained positive business environment,” explains Hawkins.  “This is still a work in progress for the Regional District and we are very hopeful that many of our recommendations will be implemented.”

Another important aspect of the Chamber is creating an environment for members to encourage connections.  Efforts in this area are believed to be one of the major reasons for the Chamber’s growth in the last five years.  “Networking is a word that is overused—it is really about developing relationships and it is not easy to make business connections on your own,” says CVCC past president, Linda Oprica of Ascent Coaching.

“Various Chamber events provide opportunities where members actually get to speak with one another in person—it is not distant and impersonal like web-based communications.  Interacting one-on-one generates ideas for cross promotion, links people with like-minded values, and, in the end, true friendships often develop.”

The efforts of the CVCC have not gone unnoticed.  Impressed by the work the Chamber is undertaking in our community, Courtenay Mayor Greg Phelps submitted a nomination for it to be considered for the BC Chamber of the Year Award.  This nomination required the CVCC to submit extensive supporting documentation outlining some of the group’s key initiatives, as mentioned above.  In early 2010, they learned that they, along with the Greater Victoria and Langley Chambers, were finalists for this prestigious designation.  On May 29th, at a gala reception at the BC Chamber Annual General Meeting and Conference in Vancouver, the Comox Valley Chamber was presented with the award.

“While the Chamber of the Year award was given to the CVCC, it really could not have been achieved without the support of the Comox Valley as a whole,” says current CVCC president, Jeff Lucas, territory manager for Labatt Breweries on north Vancouver Island.  “Everything we do is an inclusive effort.  It was this collective support that allowed us to shine.”

The CVCC may soon have another opportunity to shine. Dianne Hawkins has been nominated for the Canadian Chamber of Commerce Executive of the Year Award.  To the best of their knowledge, it is the first time anyone from Vancouver Island has been nominated for this honor.  The winner will be announced in September at a ceremony in Gatineau, Quebec.

Hawkins bubbles with enthusiasm when asked about Chamber activities, but appears humbled when one mentions the most recent nomination and her individual contribution to the recent achievements of the CVCC.

“I was born and raised in the Comox Valley and then spent 10 years working in Victoria,” Hawkins says. “When I moved back here with my family in 1989, I wanted to get involved with something that would help this community grow.  I spent the next 14 years working at Excel Career College and helped grow that small business.  In 2004, the opportunity to work at the Chamber presented itself.  I thought, ‘This is it!’  I work hard and I really love what I am doing.”

Don Sharpe, another CVCC past president and director of business operations at Mount Washington, explains that Hawkins was hired six years ago in an effort to create better credibility for the board.  “Dianne’s leadership and enthusiasm, under the direction of the Board of Directors, supported by a great staff and amazing volunteers, has resulted in the CVCC having a voice that is not only heard, but one that is listened to,” says Sharpe.

“The Chamber of Commerce makes a difference in the community. We are proud that this has been recognized on a provincial level and Dianne is well-deserving of the nomination as Executive of the Year.”

Oprica agrees.  “The BC Chamber of the Year award is justifiable recognition of the last six years of very dedicated and focused effort,” she says. “There has been a real shift in energy since Dianne was hired as the executive director.  It is important to have one key person to maintain the vision and carry it forward, but it is a cumulative effort.  We all rolled up our collective sleeves and got to work.  It was time for change and Dianne was the right person to lead the charge.” Sharpe adds that one of the key reasons for the success of the organization, especially in the past decade, is that considerable effort is now put into succession planning.  Key positions on the board change annually, which encourages new people to bring fresh ideas and energy to the various roles.  Substantial effort is also put into ensuring that each new board is diverse, representing a variety of industries and commerce. “It is important to have varied opinions and areas of expertise,” Sharpe says.

Hawkins says she likes this about the board, as it gives her a new “boss” every year. “When you work with good leaders you gain so much knowledge,” she says.  “They become mentors to me and the staff.”

For current President Jeff Lucas, the Chamber is well-situated as the voice of business in the Valley.  “I think that we are in a very fortunate position right now,” he says. “Our membership has never been stronger and there is open communication and strong dialogue between us and every governing body in the Comox Valley.

“Ten years ago we would not have been solicited for our opinion on matters such as regional planning, but we are now being consulted for our input and we are grateful for that.  Much of this is a result of our Advocacy Committee, which was formed almost three years ago.  The Chamber wanted a vehicle that could look at current events and move at a faster pace than we had historically done. With board meetings only being held once a month it was hard to react quickly when required.  With this new committee, we are not only advocating but we are effectively advocating.”

Still humble, Hawkins explains that she lives her life and does her job at the Chamber guided, in part, by the wise words of one of North America’s most highly quoted individuals, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“Emerson said: ‘What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us’,” explains Hawkins. “To me, this means while we must honor the achievements of the past, we must also respect the views of those working with us in the present… and look forward to the future with eyes wide open and full of optimism. Who knows what the future will hold?”

The Chamber office is located at 2040 Cliffe Avenue, Courtenay.

For more information about the Comox Valley Chamber, upcoming events, benefits of membership or to become a member phone 250-334-3234 or visit their webste at www.comoxvalleychamber.com.