by Anny Scoones
How beautiful the jellyfish are! Their sparkling dark red glints through the cool water amongst the kelp and shells as their lacy outer frill taps the shoreline with each little wave. I read that the presence of jellyfish indicates a high level of nitrates in the water—pollution from chemicals. How ironic that something like toxic pollution can cause something so beautiful to occur! But of course the other theory is that they are simply seeking out a route. Who can read the mind of the beautiful jellyfish? One would ask them, “Beautiful jellyfish, are you here on Dallas Road just passing through, or are you here to eat nitrates?”
Other strange but beautiful sea creatures wash ashore in the autumn wind storms, such as the great Pacific chiton. When I first noticed these primitive-looking, burgundy-shelled humps in the kelp beds, I was quite intrigued. And when they were upside down (in that vulnerable position), they looked positively fleshy and, well, rather sexual. I am not really a sexual person, but a sexual thought crossed my mind! Those soft, oval, beige, benign and harmless creatures really looked like something out of a female-anatomy textbook, and they were the size of, say, a small football!
One cool winter’s grey and drizzly day, tossed in the grey-green waves slapping against the black pebbles from the whitecapped sea, there was a shimmering mass of pink, and on a closer look I realized it was an octopus—its arms, lined with their distinctive white suckers, were limp and twisting gently in the rhythm of the waves. An ambitious seagull was trying to pull it to shore. The octopus was the same colour as the pink granite rocks that bounded the little bay.
I feel I must mention also the lowly sponge, although I have not seen a sponge washed up on our shores so far on my beach walks. We do have a lovely sponge in our waters called the yellow or lemon sponge. I mention sponges only because of a memory of a biology class I took thirty years ago. I had a tiny Asian instructor who was just learning English. She was describing the sponge’s anatomy and said that a sponge uses the same cavity to take in food and release waste. “Sponge has no anus,” she said seriously. “Sponge has only one hole for feeding and excretion, so moral of story is, never kiss a sponge.” Well, I never forgot that! And it set me on a course of a lifelong interest in sea life.
If you’d like to see (and feed) the puppy-like harbour seals, the best place to go is Fisherman’s Wharf, a charming part of James Bay on the Inner Harbour. It comprises a community of colourful floathouses (one is covered with salty “sea trash,” including corroded cellphones obviously recovered from the local depths) and a flotilla of ice cream kiosks, cafés, kayak-rental outlets, seafood shops, and other ventures. One of the best ways to visit Fisherman’s Wharf is to take one of the little Harbour Ferries from the main wharf off the lower causeway in the Inner Harbour.
These little tub-like boats, operated by retired sea captains, chug all around the harbour and stop at many interesting locations—heritage sites, pubs, parks, and walkways. It’s a delightful way to see the city and its waterfront neighbourhoods, and in the summer months, on Sundays, the boats perform a “waltzing water ballet” to the music of Strauss in the harbour, which you can see from the cool stone wall above the causeway while enjoying an ice cream or lemonade. It’s very comical but also endearing, seeing these grown men (some of whom were probably at one time in the navy fighting sea battles) manoeuvring their little boats in unison between gleaming, expensive yachts, with the float planes coming in to land overhead.
One morning Archie and I were alone on our beach walk; washed up on the shore with a fish head was a small corked bottle. The bottle had no label and was murky from its time in the salt water. Well, you won’t believe this, but there was a message in the bottle! This is what it said, written with good penmanship:
Please to be helping me!
First I say free Tibet, now made I to make glass bottles in factory as prisoner!
I doctor not see family in 4 years.
Help Please!!
Do you think this could be a joke? These words were followed by some Chinese writing, which I plan to decipher with the help of a friend in Chinatown. The paper seemed very new and white, not what I would think Chinese paper from China would be like. In the end there was no contact information, so there was little to be done, but the exercise certainly made me think and wonder.
I wonder why it’s so exciting to find a message in a bottle. Every time I see a bottle in the ocean, my heart leaps and I think, “I wonder if there’s a message in it.” Is it the anticipation of making a strange and new contact in the world with the sea as our mediator? I think it would be far more interesting to meet friends in this way than on Facebook. Maybe the computer, with all its speed and instant answers, and Facebook with all its “friends,” are taking away our thrill of anticipation, of waiting and wondering and hoping, of imagining a wonderful outcome, which may be found in a message in a bottle.
In the summer, on warm Saturday nights, movies are shown outdoors in Beacon Hill Park. Residents of the surrounding neighbourhood, most wearing their pyjamas, stroll up the streets carrying blankets, cans of popcorn, folding chairs, and thermoses of coffee. We traipse over the medieval-looking stone bridge and converge under the great oak and maple canopy in front of a huge blow-up screen at the bandstand, an old stage painted pale green, which sits in a grassy dell surrounded by ancient, wild, pink rhododendrons and towering firs that house a massive number of blue-heron nests. The eagles and other raptors get some of the baby herons, but I have noticed that there are definitely more herons in the park and on the beach. We hunker down, all of us strangers, in our blankets under a cool, starry sky to watch old Pee-wee Herman and Muppet movies as the park peacocks and mallards settle down to rest for the night.
There’s something very special that bonds together strangers and neighbourhood residents on movie nights—I think it’s the fact that we are all wearing pyjamas in a public place. When we’re wearing pyjamas, we are all one step closer together, not naked, but all acknowledging that we are ready for our bedtime. It’s something all humans have in common—the desire to unwind, to sleep, to go through this nighttime ritual of wearing pyjamas and watching a movie with popcorn under a warm blanket, and that’s what happens on summer Saturday nights in Beacon Hill Park: the nonverbal closeness of bedtime.
Just on the edge of James Bay, quite near Dallas Road and across the road from Beacon Hill Park where a statue of Terry Fox and Mile Zero look out to sea, is the historic Beacon Drive In, which first opened in 1958. The café, with its yellow awnings and painted menu outside and its green vinyl booths and bad lighting inside, became famous for its soft ice cream; those were the days when there was great comfort in licking an ice cream and strolling around the park’s ponds under the shady maple trees and through the rose garden. It is still very much a comfort. On warm summer days, the lineup for ice cream and burgers goes around the corner and into the alley.
Sea Life off Dallas Road
What is it about the Victoria coastline? It turns out that the jellyfish and the chiton I found washed up on the beach on an autumn day are the largest of their species in the world! People who love jellyfish refer to them affectionately as “jellies.” The beautiful amber jellies that I discovered on the beach turned out to be lion’s mane jellyfish. They can be over six feet across, with sixty-five-foot tentacles; they pulsate along our coastline—the big ones are in the colder northern waters. They have a one-year lifespan, which explains why they end up on the shore regularly (yearly). And apparently they can still sting when they are dead! (One suggestion for treating the sting is to use vinegar). When jellies reproduce, they enter a polyp phase—little polyps reproduce and stack up, then develop and swim off.
Now our red chiton is a primitive mollusc and can grow to over a foot in length! The giant Pacific chiton is also known as the “gumboot chiton” because it truly looks like the thick rubber sole of a gumboot. It is also known as “the wandering meatloaf,” which I think is a bit of an insult.
The chiton’s shell is composed
of numerous plates, called butterfly shells because they are butterfly-shaped. Our great chiton therefore is sometimes referred to as “the coat of mail,” which is much kinder than “meatloaf”—it sort of gives it a knighthood! The word chiton is Greek for “tunic,” which can apply to the chiton’s fashionable shell; it is rather toga-like and clings to its soft, beige body. I felt sad for the chiton when it was upside down on the shore—it seemed so vulnerable, its soft tissue exposed to the world and its armour, its only protection, facing the earth.
This old, odd creature can live for forty years as it clings to the sea rocks and eats algae and sea lettuce at night. Red algae may give this chiton the burgundy colour of its shell and plates. Our great winter storms can knock the chiton off its rocks, so that’s why it often ends up in the kelp beds on our shores, upside down for all the world to see.
Why do creatures seem so much more vulnerable when they are on their backs? Is it because they are helpless in that position? Is that position, to us, more undignified? We might wonder why it is not a position of strength and pride and openness and freedom, and therefore power and courage, when a heart faces the universe, the sun, and the heavens. Why do we feel more secure facedown?
The giant Pacific octopus, another creature we have here, is the largest in the world. The octopus has eight arms; that explains the “octo,” but what about the “pus”? Though our octopus is a mollusc, it does not have a hard protective shell, which means it can squeeze into a rock shelf or crevice easily for protection or to lay eggs. There are two hundred and eighty sensitive suckers on each arm, which grab hold of food; the octopus has a strong beak (mouth) and a barbed tongue that can crack open a shell for a feast.
Our octopus is colour-blind, but, ironically, it can change colours easily as a defence against predators. Imagine being able to blend in with your surroundings when you’re nervous! How many times have we wished we could do the same thing? The octopus can blend into a rock or a bed of seaweed. If I were nervous, say, downtown, for example, I would love to be able to blend into a shelf of calendars in a bookshop, or a glassed-in display of tarts and cakes in a coffee shop!
A great part of the octopus’s body is enclosed in the “mantle,” a sack-like structure that contains his organs, including three hearts. (His blood is a pale blue—he’s a “blue-blood,” like the monarchy!) Our giant Pacific octopus is also very intelligent. Tests have been done in which the octopus actually figured out how to open a jar and go through a maze (in a lab). This endears our slimy pink marine friend to me—not only is he smart, but he was made to prove it.
The final fact about our dear octopus is how they lovingly care for their young. The female lays her eggs and spends months caring for them, cleaning and protecting them, and then she quietly dies—her duty is done. The males die as well, after they breed. The lifespan of our octopus is short, from three to five years.
Apart from walking Archie along the Dallas Road beaches and through the park, I regularly visit James Bay Coffee and Books, full of used books and with local art on its walls. The wooden tables are covered in green plastic tablecloths and are surrounded by musty old, yellowed, cellophane-covered books about nature and history and local heritage, many illustrated with faded watercolour sketches and charming ink drawings. There is never any pressure to leave or to rush, and on Tuesday evenings the locals gather for Scrabble nights. (Did you know that qa is an accepted word? And so is em—that’s how you spell the letter M ! They are in the Scrabble dictionary but not in Webster’s.) On Friday nights the place is lit up for an “open mike” where locals can get up and sing, followed by a featured performer. The event is hosted by a lovely, happy, smiling woman with a grand sense of humour as she announces the acts in front of the old wooden bookcases crammed with self-help books and historical novels.
The bulletin board is full of colourful ads for psychic readings, massage therapy, and spiritual solutions to the many problems that ail us. The place smells of old wood and plaster, simmering soup, brewing coffee, old books, and herbal oils (which are most likely on the patrons).
I love books, and I think you can love books more than you can love reading them. What is it about books that is so appealing? They are like little condensed works of art—thoughts on paper rather than in one’s imagination (maybe when something is written, it becomes more real). And I love the coziness of books, just like the coziness of a fire in a wood stove. I care very much for the environment and believe in saving trees and paper, but my heart is pulled toward the cozy and comfy feelings that books and fireplaces provide—between us, the coziness wins over my conscience.
That is why I think books and bookshops, especially used-book stores, will always be with us, because we innately crave the comfort, and I pity humanity if we ever lose that need. And that’s why electronic books will never replace paper books, because you cannot display electronic books, and there’s no aesthetic delight for our senses with electronic books. Come to think of it, oral storytelling will never fully disappear either. If it did, that would be one step toward shutting down our imaginations, which, I suppose, human beings may choose to do (to not tell stories), but it would be a shame. It might mean the demise of a type of creative and philosophical thought that has occupied us for centuries, since humans first decorated their caves or carved pieces of bone.
Dallas Road in Snow
Every so often it snows in Victoria! It’s a great event; even with two inches, the schools and businesses usually close for the day, and the gentle slope at Beacon Hill Park is dotted with little figures in red snowsuits tobogganing down toward the sea.
On one snowy walk, Archie and I tromped along the beach early in the morning. The winter dawn was a sight to behold. There were three continuous ribbons—the deep, frigid, mineral-grey-green sea, the black strip of pebbles, and the white snow above. The only colour was a little smudge of yellow under the snow on the beach—a frozen bouquet of chrysanthemums, left in memory of someone who loved the sea. One light shone dimly, far out on the misty winter ocean, from a lone tanker.
Well, back to my coffee shop. I found a book about hedgerows, which I thumbed through with a cappuccino. Slightly mildewed with yellowed and musty-smelling pages, it had numerous illustrations of shrubbery and hedgehogs and hares and other wildlife under berry bushes. The hedgerows of today in our urban neighbourhoods and rural areas are composed of natural growing trees, shrubs, and wildflowers. They still provide protection from wind and erosion and also supply food and habitat for country wildlife and pollen for bees in our region.
In some ways, James Bay is like a used-book store—a place of great heritage, a quirky haven full of tales, musty secrets and remnants, with a treasure here and there.
Cook Street Village
CHAPTER TWO
Fairfield, Cook Street
Village, and Rockland
Fairfield is a lovely neighbourhood just along the beach from James Bay. The very name Fairfield evokes country pleasure, fresh air, and urban charm. Fairfield is an old English place name from fair which means “beautiful,” and feld which means “open country.” James Douglas, the second governor of Vancouver Island, owned a large, rambling estate just east of James Bay, and he named it Fairfield.
Cook Street Village is an ambling portion of Fairfield. The huge shady canopy of horse chestnut trees that lines the village provides you with a feeling of rest, of being able to slow down and have a coffee at an ornate little metal table on the sidewalk and know that at that moment, you are content and happy within your world. You may be able to feel a little state of bliss in Cook Street Village. It’s a free and easy street, tucked between the wild open sea at the bottom and the bustling downtown at the top, a linear rest stop between two opposing forces.
Cook Street is of course named for our hero, Captain James Cook, who charted our coastline in the late 1700s. There’s a statue of him on the Inner Harbour, and he looks quite handsome and also sensitive. It seems odd that a statue can cause me to f
eel for the man because of his looks—I think it’s the neat little curled ponytail tied with a ribbon, and his slim calves, and the elegant way he stands. It makes him seem vulnerable, somehow. I’m sure if he had been given pudgy calves or loose, billowing hair, I wouldn’t feel for him so. His elegance and dignity are extremely attractive.
Cook Street Village is a strolling and unwinding place where you can take your dear dogs into the Pic A Flic video store (it’s SPCA recognized!) and spend hours selecting a film on almost any topic. As you browse for a video on the life of Chagall or a classic like Bette Davis’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? your wet, hairy, exhausted, panting dog can lie on the carpet after a huge run at the nearby beach.
And there’s a butcher shop, Island Meat & Seafood, which sells meat that has been humanely raised and not fed chemicals or growth hormones. People who walk and shop on Cook Street are pleased about this. They are residents with common sense who need to know that the pork they are going to eat didn’t live in a crowded piggery and wasn’t fed antibiotics. Oh, the history of the pig as a mass-consumer item is just too sad to think about!
The side streets are just as peaceful, with charming and quaint wooden two-storeyed houses, attic windows painted in lemons, greys, creams, and soft teals, glassed-in verandas and pretty porches, well-pruned tea roses and espaliered apple trees neatly climbing cedar trellises. But there are enough differences between the houses to make an interesting and varied streetscape. The homeowners around Cook Street have a type of genteel taste, and an appreciation of nature and gardens (many have “taken the pledge” to go pesticide-free) and a knowledge of how fresh laundry smells when it’s hung out in the air to dry.