And the River Still Sings crosses the sea

30 ferry 1And The River Still Sings is now crossing the ferry to Vancouver Island.  Fog slabs lay across the sea and gave some interesting effects.

31 ferry 2

The photograph cannot catch the movement of the swirling fog.

32 ferry 3It is 2 years since I have travelled on the ferries (when I was promoting my previous book, Ginty’s Ghost) and I was surprised to see this sign in the washroom.

33 ferry signI was to speak at the Courtenay library, and was able to stay with Corry Lunn and Darrel Nygaard at their studio, Sea Change, in Union Bay. Corry first became renowned for her raku and burnished sculptures.  She and Darrel have now branched into amazing creations of clay, glass, wood and stone.  For the month of October their studio is closed while they recuperate after preparing a fantastic show at the McMillan Gallery in Parksville. Sea Change will reopen for November 1st.

If you look at their website, you will see wonderful pictures of their gardens.  My photos cannot do them justice.

34 corry tables(How amazing to see all these flowers booming.  Regular readers will remember that my kale, which is extremely hardy, was zapped by frost over a month ago!)

34a samphyr

35 Darrel sculptureAcross the road from the studio are the Union Bay Coal Hills.  They are not really hills, just slightly rolling lumps of barren slag that was created to support a railway terminus that took coal from the nearby Cumberland Mines to a dock.  The rail lines and dock no longer exist, but the slag has very little growth on it.  The beach around it is com[psed of ground up slag and is black.  However, the river at the edge has managed to recover somewhat.

xxx 1 union bay riverI like to get there at sunrise

xxx 2 estuaryOut on the spit, the sealions were honking.

xxx 3 sealionsThe tidewrack is always interesting.

xxx 4 tidewrackThe fog thickened.  This little fishboat looks suspended in space.

xxx 5 fishboatAnd there are always herons…

xxx 6 heron on pilingI was able to stay with Corry and Darrel for 3 days, and we went mushroom hunting in the forest.

35a forest 136 forest 1We were hunting for various edibles, but the main focus was chantrelles.

37  chantrellesI was too distracted by the other denizens of the forest to find many.  We visited 3 different locations and there were lots of interesting things to see.

37a stump

38 stump mushrooms

40 slug

All good things come to an end, but I had to get back to work.  I gave a slide show in Nanaimo on Friday night and afterwards caught the little ferry to Gabriola Island where I spent Thanksgiving weekend.  But I will have to tell you about that next time!

 

One thought on “And the River Still Sings crosses the sea”

  1. Thank you for taking the time to give us a glimpse into the very wet side of BC and for you comments about the book tour. We wish you safe travels until you return to Ginty Creek and hope the book sales are successful!

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