Summer of the Spotted Owl

by Melanie Jackson

  “Three guesses what’s in the Urstads’ swimming pool,” Madge said.

  “Water?” Jack’s gray eyes twinkled at her.

  “Think more along the lines of the Loch Ness monster,” Madge advised. She and I marched him into the Urstads’ round, white, marble-floored foyer.

  Jack whistled. “Would ya look at this place!” He gazed up the curving stairs to the blue and white stained glass dome on the roof. “Gosh, Dorothy, I have a feeling we aren’t in Kansas anymore.”

  “The Urstads inherited tons of money,” I informed him. I knew because I’d overheard Mrs. Urstad telling Mother about it when they put their East Van house — like ours, old and rambling, with pipes that bee-bopped — up for sale.

  “It’s vulgar to gossip, Dinah,” Madge reproved. We bustled Jack through the long living room, with its row of French doors that gave an imax view of Capilano Canyon.

  “Vulgar but satisfying,” I shot back. Curiosity, I believed, was a healthy thing.

  “Whoa.” Jack gaped at the broken hang glider. “Does nasa know about this?”

  I explained at some length, complete with sound effects, about Itchy and the theft of my inflatable turtle.

  Then Madge, who said she was developing a headache, asked Jack to remove me for a while. Remove me! I liked that. It was not I, Dinah Galloway, who’d kamikazed into the Urstads’ pool.

  I grumbled about the injustice of this while changing in the bedroom Mrs. Urstad had said I could use. Actually, compared to the rooms at our house in East Van, the bedroom was more like a stadium.

  I said loudly, hoping my sister could hear, “Headache schmeadache. Awfully feminine, aren’t we?”

  “Huh? Who was that?” said a gruff voice coming from the backyard.

  I peered out the window. A burly man in yellow work overalls, with District of North Vancouver in red on the back, was gathering up the broken hang glider. He spotted me.

  “Hey, whass the idea?”

  “Uh, sorry.” I gave him a bared-teeth smile. “I was —er, practicing for a show.”

  The leathery folds of the man’s face relaxed. “Yeah, I know you. You do the tv commercials for Sol’s Salami, no?”

  “No. I mean, yes,” I said, relieved that he wasn’t angry anymore. I was also pleased that he liked the salami commercials. I’d been doing radio ones for several months now, and, delighted with his increased sausage sales, Sol had decided to start putting me on tv.

  Cramming a crumpled hang glider wing under one arm, the man began to conduct with his free hand. I felt I had no choice but to sing along with him.

  You’ll eat till you burst

  At Sol’s on West First!

  I stopped after two rounds, though the man seemed ready to continue on indefinitely. “Can I ask you something?” I demanded. “My sister hasn’t even phoned in a complaint yet. She was going to sit down and do that after I left. But here you are already.”

  The man shrugged. “I do like I’m told, kid. Hey — keep up the good singing, okay?” He strode off, dragging the mangled hang glider behind him.

  By the time I climbed into Jack’s jeep, the District of North Vancouver van was whipping round the corner of the Urstads’ street, Marisa Drive. Fragments of the Sol’s Salami song, which the man was roaring out, echoed back to us.

  “Maybe a neighbor reported the hang-glider crash,” Jack suggested. “I’ll admit, though, that we don’t get this kind of prompt service in Vancouver.”

  He started the jeep. It bounced us violently for a few seconds, as it always did when it got going. Then it calmed down, its engine letting out satisfied cackles.

  We ended up following the van to the District of North Vancouver’s municipal hall. The van disappeared into a parking lot; we parked on the street. Protesters were marching up and down with signs: Save The Spotted Owl and Ban Planless Development.

  “What does that mean, ‘Ban Planless Development’?” I asked.

  Jack lifted me out of his car. He had to do this as the passenger door was inoperable. “Planless developers,” he explained, “are the ones who plow down old-growth forests without considering the wildlife that may be living there. In southwest bc, our forests are home to lots of animals besides the few remaining spotted owls: Rocky Mountain tailed frogs, cougars, white-tailed deer, hairy woodpeckers, northern goshawks. They and other species have been reduced by twenty-five percent because of thoughtless industrial logging.”

  I was looking so horrified that he grinned at me. “I’m still an optimist, Di. I think it’s just a matter of getting people to be more aware of what lives in the forest. Most people, including developers, are willing to listen if we’re willing to talk to them.”

  Jack’s arrival brought cheers from the protesters, most of whom appeared to be students. Somebody thrust a megaphone into his hand.

  Jack pulled a wooden crate from the back seat of the jeep. He placed the crate upside down on the sidewalk and stood on it. He winked at me. “Are we state-of-the-art, or what?”

  “Anyhow,” he explained, “what we’re protesting is a current district bylaw that allows logging and development into the section of canyon bordered by Marisa Drive. We’ve had reports of a spotted owl family living in that part of the canyon, and we want the bylaw changed. We think we’ve got a strong case, since the whole neighborhood is supporting us.”

  “That’s cool of them.”

  Jack’s grin became wry. “Some of them are cool. Some are just plain self-interested. See, if that section of canyon is built up, their views disappear and their property values go down.

  “But, know what?” He chucked me under the chin. “You find your allies where you can.”

  Jack raised the megaphone. “Hi, everyone! Thanks for coming. I’m Jack French, and I —”

  Whistles and applause. Jack was the naturally popular type thanks to his honest, up-front personality—and also, in my view, because he gave short speeches.

  “—and I thought I’d start off by telling you about a grouchy but lovable great-aunt of mine. Whenever something happened that she didn’t like — sloppy newspaper delivery, not enough sunshine for her begonias — Great-Aunt Hilda would snap, ‘There oughtta be a law against this. There just oughtta.’ ”

  Appreciative laughter from the crowd about Great-Aunt Hilda.

  “Well,” and Jack rubbed his chin ruefully, “in the case of the spotted owl, there is a law. Just not a very good one. The federal Species At Risk Act, or sara. Now, the common belief is sara protects all species at risk. Wrong-oh. sara only applies to the very limited areas of Canada under federal government control. In British Columbia, that adds up to an unimpressive one percent of our land base. Like, whoop-dee-doo.

  “Meanwhile, with no endangered species law of its own, British Columbia has now logged over half the sites where small numbers of spotted owls still live.”

  “That sucks big-time!”

  Right on, I thought, and cheered.

  Wait a minute. I’d shouted that. I tend to get a bit carried away when I’m feeling emotional. And emotion, for me, generally translates into volume.

  One reason I’d been feeling kind of choked was that some of the students were holding photos of baby spotted owls, little and fluffy white before their spots grew. Jack had told me how the wee owls have a tough enough time making it to adulthood, even without being killed by logging. Up to seventy-eight percent of them are attacked and gobbled up by ravens, hawks and even great horned owls (talk about disagreeable relatives!).

  There’d been reports of one male spotted owl calling for a female mate— and hearing only his echo in return from the forest. There was no mate left for him.

  Jack was saying, “All we’re asking for is a chance to discuss—”

  “Just a minute, young Mr. French!”

  A round, pink, middle-aged man with wisps of carrot-colored hair fluttering atop his head bowled through the protesters. He was waving a large white hanky. At first I thought it was a flag of surrender
, but then I realized he was using it to keep mopping at his face.

  Jack smiled dangerously. “We have every right to protest.”

  “Of course you do,” the round man said jovially. Sticking out a flabby pink hand, he shoved Jack off the crate and clambered up on it himself.

  “Hi, everyone! I’m Councillor Rock Cordes!”

  Boos. Some of the other councillors had been sympathetic to the protests, but in interviews Councillor Cordes had sneered at what he called “Young Mr. French and his feathered friends.”

  But now the councillor beamed. “I’m here with good news! At our next council meeting, on the nineteenth, I’m putting forward a motion to ban all future development off Marisa Drive. And trust me,” he barked out a laugh, “when Rock speaks, the other councillors don’t chip away at him!”

  Under his sandy hair, Jack’s brow furrowed. “You mean, you’re backing us? No kidding?”

  “I never kid, kid,” Councillor Cordes chuckled —though without humor in his beady eyes. “So?” he challenged the crowd. “Are you pleased with the Rock, or what?”

  Jack glanced round. Being short, I couldn’t tell what at, but he muttered to me, “tv news cameras are being set up. Cordes wouldn’t dare make this up, no matter how badly he wants to get rid of us.”

  Into the megaphone Jack said, “Yeah, that is great, Councillor. Let’s hear it for what a small but caring group of people can do — and let’s hear it even louder for the spotted owl!”

  Afterward, to Councillor Cordes’s annoyance, the reporters mostly rammed microphones in Jack’s face. On the evening news, the perky, helmet-hair-sprayed anchorwoman, Mary Lou Burke, would coo about “this cute up-and-coming activist, Jack French.”

  “You’re not even a fellow resident of the area,” Councillor Cordes pointed out to Jack, through a gritted-teeth smile, as the cameras whirred.

  “I’m a fellow resident of the planet, though,” Jack responded pleasantly.

  I ducked a corner of a protest sign. “What’s next for you guys?” I asked the dark-haired girl holding it.

  “Soak,” she said.

  “Ah,” I nodded, thinking of the Urstads’ pool. “Me too. Unfortunately my inflatable turtle got stolen —something I’m going to have to investigate.”

  The girl regarded me strangely. “Not soak. soac. As in, us. The Spotted Owl Advocacy Committee. We’ll continue with our protests elsewhere. There’s still so much work to be done on behalf of the spotted owl. I myself volunteer at the soac office as a receptionist. I certainly don’t take time off to swim.”

  She gave a righteous sniff, which would’ve had a dramatic effect except for a sudden, eardrum-cracking splinter. Then an equally deafening yowl from Councillor Cordes.

  The crate he’d been standing on had buckled and broken under his weight.

  “Let’s just say, the event then bottomed out for Councillor Cordes,” Mary Lou Burke would twinkle later, on the evening news.

  Chapter Three

  Rowena Pickles

  and One Very Disappointed Reporter

  “SOAC wants to work with developers, not against them,” Jack explained.

  Sprawled in one of the Urstads’ deck chairs, Jack was discussing with Madge, who of course was sitting daintily in her deck chair, ways to plan neighborhoods without threatening wildlife.

  A worthwhile idea, I thought. Therefore, I decided not to aim a large splash! at them, as I usually did when I jumped in the pool.

  “Every kind of life in the forest, whether it’s a spotted owl, an ant or a pine needle, is part of the whole,” Jack was saying. “If you destroy one, you start diminishing the health of the whole forest.”

  This was getting theoretical, which I wasn’t really into. Madge, however, regarded Jack with solemn intensity. “More logging companies just have to listen to groups like yours, Jack. You certainly forced that horrid Councillor Cordes to pay attention!”

  Jack managed a crooked grin. “I don’t want it to seem that way — that soac forced itself on anyone. It sounds too confrontational. I just want environmentalists to work together with loggers and developers. As for Cordes, yeah, that was something. He caved in to us almost too easily.”

  Madge gave him one of the adoring looks that the two of them were so fond of exchanging. If I hadn’t been blowing bubbles and pretending I was a manta ray, I’d have made barfing noises.

  She said, “Councillor Cordes had no choice. He saw how much you and your friends care about wildlife.”

  Then she passed a slim hand over her forehead in resignation. “I care about wildlife too— yet for the life of me I can’t paint any that I’m satisfied with for this mural. This morning I wiped out an entire family of happy-faced deer,” she added melodramatically.

  Now it was Jack’s turn to look adoring. “Don’t worry,” he assured her. “All artists struggle with ideas. You’ll find inspiration.”

  Having finished being a manta ray, I called across the pool helpfully, “Hey, Madge, maybe you could get inspired if you cut off your ear, like Van Gogh. That’s a slice of art history I’ve always enjoyed.”

  I laughed at this witticism until noticing the disapproving frowns Jack and Madge were directing my way. Uh-oh, a lecture in the works, for sure. I grabbed the Urstads’ mask and snorkel from the side of the pool and spent the next while below surface, pretending I was an electric eel.

  When I finally came up at poolside, a pair of slanting green eyes stared into my mask. A pair of green eyes belonging to a marmalade-colored cat.

  I reached out to pet him. I missed my own cat, Wilfred, who’d stayed at home with Mother in East Van.

  But the marmalade cat withdrew with a scornful look that my cowardly Wilfred would never have been able to muster.

  I got it. My hand was wet and therefore unacceptable.

  The marmalade cat then yawned at me, the ultimate insult. He trotted off to the edge of the Urstads’ garden, where privet hedge met canyon. Was he going to plunge down the canyon, as Itchy had?

  But this guy had more sense than Itchy. He whipped round the end of the privet hedge.

  Huh. I hadn’t realized there was an edge to be whipped round. I glanced at Jack and Madge, too involved in conversation to have noticed our visitor. I hoisted myself from the pool, pulled off the snorkel gear and padded over to the spot where the orange cat had disappeared.

  Sure enough, there was a well-worn dirt ledge leading from the Urstads’ yard into the neighbors’. I followed it. As I say, I’m curious about things.

  The next yard was even bigger than the Urstads’. More like a field. A messy field. Broken lawn furniture stuck up from the unmown grass, clover and dandelions like pieces of wreckage.

  That wasn’t all that stuck out, though. A half-dozen little pink noses were busy sniffing over the blades of grass. Every once in a while a paw would lift to swat at a butterfly or bee.

  “Relatives of yours?” I asked the orange cat. He’d settled on a broken chair to clean his right paw.

  A shriek of laughter startled all of us. Paws halted in their swatting. The half-dozen cats and I stared at the rambling, paint-challenged house.

  A lean woman with long, flyaway gray hair flew out of the house, flapping a much-patched apron toward the unkempt garden. “You see?” she proclaimed to a reedy young man carrying a steno pad. “No hang glider! You’ll have to find some other scandal for your readers today, I’m afraid. It’s just me, the cats and—” she peered across the long grass at me—“a visitor with glorious red hair.”

  This was such a surprising compliment that I just gaped at the woman for a moment. My hair was often pointed out to me as being unwashed or uncombed—but never glorious. “Hi,” I gulped out at last. “I’m Dinah Galloway.”

  The woman waded through the grass to me for a firm handshake. “Rowena Pickles. And that,” Rowena added, grimacing, with a toss of her long hair toward the young man, “is Sylvester Sloan of the North Vancouver Bugle. The Bugle is very fond of doing stories ab
out what an undesirable citizen I am.”

  Sylvester’s prominent Adam’s apple bobbed unhappily. “Not undesirable, Rowena. Just — er, eccentric.”

  “Because I take in stray kitties that people dump in the canyon when they don’t want them anymore,” Rowena retorted. “Because I heal them — I used to be a vet, once upon a time — and let them live with me, rather than dumping them on the already overcrowded public animal shelters.”

  “Um,” said Sylvester, looking more miserable than ever, “actually today it wasn’t about your increasing number of cats, Rowena. Somebody left a tip on my voice mail yesterday morning about a hang glider crashing in your backyard. I would’ve headed over here then, but I was busy visiting my mother. I always visit her on Tuesdays,” he explained sadly.

  Rowena stared at him. “There’s no hang glider here.”

  Sylvester sighed. “I can see that, but what was I supposed to do? If my editor sends me out for a story, I’m supposed to find one. As it is, she says I’m the poorest story finder on the Bugle staff.”

  Rowena responded to this with a loud snort. “You have your problems, I have mine. Do you know, Dinah, that I’ve woken up to find signs posted on my lawn, saying I’m a disgrace to the ’hood? Somebody wants me away from Marisa Drive.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said and made my mind up not to tell Sylvester where the hang glider had really landed. I wouldn’t help him out one bit, no matter how much he needed to impress his editor. “Don’t let them force you to move, Rowena.”

  “Never fear,” Rowena smiled. “This is the house where I raised my beloved son, Sean. I won’t leave my house, not for all the money in the world. And I’ve been offered a lot: Realtors keep coming by. No,” she sighed, her eyes growing misty, “there are too many wonderful memories here. Why, my late husband Chester and I built this place.”

  “No hang glider, no story,” Sylvester said sadly, closing his steno pad. “See you another time, Rowena.”