Earth Day 4:20 PM 7'C Looking for Spring

Well, I wandered around this afternoon looking for spring again. The signs are subtle but coming. I found more fuzzy crocus, but they are all being careful about coming out. About noon I let two flies out the window, if the house was were Noah's Ark they would've been back if they didn't find summer. Didn't see them again. There are lots of busy ants on the hillside and there are boats, lots of boats waiting for water.

Earth Day, 8:20 AM -2'C Looking for Spring

I went to look for spring. The last traces of winter are fast disappearing but this morning the mud track, clacking hard under my rubber boots, held yesterday's footprints like fossils in stone. Ice still covers the Takhini River. On the way back though I noticed the dirt starting to shine with wetness under the sun and I found the signs I was looking for.

This afternoon I'll check and see what's happened.

Going to the Cemetery - Mourning and Remembering

Last Friday my step-mother, Nettie, passed away. I flew to Winnipeg to be with Dad and step-siblings. Nettie and Dad, both widowed, married in their retirement, well after my brothers and I had left home and started families far from Winnipeg. And while we rejoiced in my Dad's happiness with his second wife, we had limited connections to our three step-sisters and step-brother. This changed over the next fifteen years as Nettie contracted Alzheimer's disease and the network of family drew tighter to support Dad in his diligent (a favourite word of mine, Latin for “twice loved”) and complete attention to Nettie. Gradually I've come to realize not only how much my step-siblings in Winnipeg have cared for my Dad, but also that he is grandfather to their children. He has extended the family that loves and cares for him like we do. But these things only become obvious when the web of relations are weighted by need.

Amidst the bright sunshine of a windy prairie spring and chorused by honking Canada geese, we had a brief ceremony on Thursday afternoon. Dad, and my step-brother, Nettie's eldest, gently lowered Nettie's remains alongside her first husband. Final words - a silence - and photos of the gathered family brought closure to the funeral and interment. Dad was quiet as we headed back to the car.

We agreed it was a good time to visit Mum's grave across town. Brookside is a large venerable cemetery in Winnipeg. When established it was a long way out on the prairie. Now. although bracketed by airport, Red River Community College and an anonymous landscape of warehouses and asphalt, it retains its charm. The open vista over the runways looking west and the size and forested nature of Brookside preserves a tranquil atmosphere. The afternoon light of the spring sun on last year's grass adds a golden aura broken up by trunks of prairie oak, elm and cedar, reflected by the polished black and red grave markers.

Dad drives by memory (almost) to Mum's grave site. We walk between the rows of stone reading off the names. It takes awhile before we see the large NEUFELD scribed beneath a sunset on a prairie farm landscape. I don't remember the stone so large. In the lower right is “Helen” with a some musical notes accenting her continuing presence. Dad stops, thinks a moment, and then says, “I'd like a hockey stick or a baseball bat.” I promise to pound in a hockey stick next to the gravestone so we can find it easier next time. He seemed satisfied things would be done correctly.

Then we headed off to find Oma and Opa's graves. Dad remembered them between two cedar shrubs but after sometime we gave up and visited Grozsma's grave beside Uncle John with his two wives. His first wife, Helen, was Grozsma's cousin. Grozsma lived with us for many years. The death of her husband and the subsequent challenges of raising four children through the darkest years of the Great Depression broke her spirit. Consequently Mum was raised by Aunt Helen, her namesake. Just after I was born Grozsma moved in and I had the privilege of growing up in a tri-generational household, learning my mother tongue of German and hearing incredible stories about life in Czarist Russia and the horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution visited upon the Mennonites in the Ukraine.

The cemetery office provided a map to Oma and Opa. We'd been close, no longer between two shrubs, the stone was enclosed by the branches into a private niche. Aunt Betty's remains were added to the grave last year and, as with the other grave side visits, the memories of Christmas dinners, my aunt's love for painting, the clean soprano of my mother's singing, the times as a small boy I was brought to tend the grave of her brother Henry, my namesake, and a host of other experiences growing out of the relationships invested in the landscape of Winnipeg came flooding back. Perhaps a little bittersweet, but how poor would be our lives without these memories of challenges overcome, lives lived and the bonds of live tieing us together across geography and through time.

Katsuura Onsen and Tuna

From Shingu we moved to an onsen (hot spring spa) at Katsuura. The highlight is a hot spring in a cave overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Sitting in the steaming water we could feel the ocean spray as waves crashed upon the rugged coast immediately below us. Across the bay a high rugged cliff, pierced, had a tree artfully reaching into onshore winds. Japanese artists have a powerful muse in their landscape.



I returned at 5 am to watch the sunrise. It was dark, the sea was just noise, the rip of a wave breaking on rocks. The deep red band of the horizon interrupted by eight dark shapes, the craggy islands of the archipelago. Sitting to my shoulders in warm water, I watch the sky brighten through violet, pink and finally blue. On the sea the fleet of fishing boats is on the move. Finally the sun hits the cliff opposite and the sound of the waves diminishes in my consciousness as their sparkling droplets shine in the air before me.











Later we head back to the mainland and visit the commercial fish market. The fishing boats take turns emptying their catch, heeling over to ease the unloading. The floor of a large open warehouse is covered with tuna. Each one is weighed and registered. The tail is cut off, perhaps to let buyers, now apparently circulating, see the colour of the flesh. Boxes are loaded with fish, usually just one or two each, and packed with ice. The its off to the truck for delivery. Later we see the crews cleaning out their boats, repairing equipment and getting ready for tomorrow.





This week, at the UNESCO Committee on the International Trade in Endangered Species meetings in Doha, Monaco, with strong support from several other countries proposed strict new limits on the harvesting of tuna. These were defeated, much to the relief of Japan - especially in the fishing communities like Katsuura. However, there is recognition in Japan that there is a problem with tuna, catches are half of only a few years ago, and, if they are like Yukon River salmon, the fish are much smaller than they used to be. Hopefully we can curb our appetites to ensure these creatures are not lost forever.

Return to Kumano “Road of Sanctuary”

Our arrival in Shingu, Japan, was like old home week. Within fifteen minutes we had dinner invitations, offers of tours and a hearty welcome from the people we'd met five years ago. Shingu is about the same size as Whitehorse so we appreciated the sense of community.

During our stay we enjoyed catching up on our young friend Takaya who visited us in Whitehorse (and subsequently invented, tested and was rescued from his boat made of plastic pop bottles) and meeting again the interpreters for the Kumano Koda heritage site and the friendly staff of the city tourist information office. We also met the long time English teacher who uses his classes to translate heritage information into English.

Kyoko Fukutsuji took us for a day trip to onsen (hotsprings) up in the mountains. At Yonomine onsen the water bubbles up beside the creek almost boiling. Villagers cook their vegetables and eggs in the upwelling water. Two women offered to share some of their cooking with us and we sampled broccoli, winter greens, podded peas and boiled eggs. A great treat as we sat on the stones beside the spring in the sunshine. It took me a few minutes to realize my buttocks were getting cooked at the same temperature as the broccoli.

Later we walked the last stretch from the mountains down to the important Hongo Taishu Shrine. On our way we met a group of Japanese men with an ambitious weekend of pilgrimage travel before them. Learning we were from Canada got us the by now familiar response, "Ahh, Vancouver Olympics." Together we saw the first view of the largest tori gate in Japan which marks the entrance to the shrine.

This morning we met a priest from the Asuka-jinja Shinto shrine on his day off. We sat together in the spring showers under the sheltering roof of a shrine at the base of the divine mountain of Gongenyama. The rock at the top of the mountain is the landing spot on earth for a pair of the gods. The priest accompanied the bubbling and splashing of the rock runnel by the Tori gate, playing traditional melodies on his wooden flute. The pink petals of the cherry blossoms floated gently to the stones before us.

Banks Peninsula Walk - New Zealand

One of the charms of New Zealand hiking is the notion of a walk. Back in the Yukon a hike follows a route, sometimes there's a good trail, sometimes there's a rough track and sometimes there's just a thrash through the bush. In New Zealand you can probably do all of these, but everyone goes on a walk. A walk includes a cabin or shelter every night, no need to carry a tent, and then there are options; a shop or even prepared meals and carriage of your pack to the next camp. It's not hard core physical demands, but it sure broadens the audience for hiking.

The Banks Peninsula Walk near Christchurch is a four day experience established by a group of sheep farmers looking to supplement their income with tourism. A beautiful tramp along some of the most dramatic sea coast in New Zealand, each day ends at a well maintained and fully equipped rustic house beside the ocean. The walk reflects the past two hundred years of human interaction with the ecology of Aotearoa.

The hike begins with a steep climb amongst sheep paddocks. All the trees were cut down by the pioneering white settlers. The stumps of the monstrous rimu trees - the hardy durable wood whoch once covered large areas of the island - are still fixed in the land some 160 years later, and even tree trunks, too big to be moved, remain slowly wasting away on the hillside. Further up we pass the grown over concrete foundations and scattered wooden fragments of Paradise, a family operated creamery and cheese factory last working before the First World War. Now there are sheep, pasture and rugged stone outcrops.

At Flea Bay we meet Francis Helps, who, with his wife Shireen, have turned a large portion of their land and family energies to the preservation of the largest little penguin colony in New Zealand. In the evening, as the penguins raft out in the cove, we tour through steep slopes containing hundreds of burrows (used during the moulting period), many built and placed by the family and volunteers. To learn more about their work visit http://www.pohatu.co.nz/penguin-tours.wse

The little museum at Stony Bay has photos of the stone crusher that spent a summer in the 1950s chewing up the beach cobbles to make gravel for the road finally connecting the farm to the outside world. Until this time these remote bays shipped out their produce, wool and mutton, and brought in groceries, school work and farm supplies with row boats slipping through the breakers on the beach. The hiker accommodation here is a delight of rusticity, the shower is set in the trunk of an old tree, the cabins nestled into the woods, our own included an apartment for a moulting penguin.

At Parakákáriki we eat our lunch on the high cliff top location of a Maori Pá, a fortress overrun and destroyed by a North Island group in the seventeenth century. On our last day we left behind the magnificent paradise beach of Otānerto Bay and walked up through the Hinewai Reserve, a private foundation which has purchased some 1300 hectares in the valley and is dedicated to the protection and restoration of native flora and fauna. Through the entire hike we saw the traps and poison baits to limit the introduced predators that have devastated New Zealand's endemic species.

The Banks Peninsula Track offers a terrific view of New Zealand. The land traversed speaks clearly about the people, forests and animals that have lived there over the past 500 years.

Banks Peninsula Track website: http://bankstrack.co.nz/index.html