Yesterday morning I got a phone call from a friend asking if I’d like to go find the recently named “Avatar Grove,” slated for demolition, somewhere near Port Renfrew. Of course! I dropped my afternoon plans, resigned myself to missing my beloved yoga class, and ventured off.
(can you see the face in the rocks?)
We got a late start, because we dilly-dallied at the University admiring the newly planted student gardens while waiting for an email with directions to the grove. Along the way I learned much about the natural history of the region, and the current plans to destroy or preserve what little remains. The old Toyota had some bad gas (I knew Shell wasn’t a good choice) so we decided, about 30k from Port Renfrew, to check out the Sooke Potholes instead. We turned the car around, drove past Yuen’s Folly, parked, and hiked a rather treacherous path along the rocks on the side of the very high flowing river. Then we walked the galloping goose trail to the old building structure, Yuen’s Folly (Albert Yuen was a land developer with a rather grandiose vision that didn’t quite pan out), and back to the car parked near Bonsai Bob’s most incredible homestead.
On the way back to Victoria we talked about activism, and the Nanaimo jail where attempting to stop ancient forest destruction, and refusing to apologize for it, can land you in a cell with no mattress, a toilet with no seat, and a blanket that’s not quite big enough so if you try to put it over your head your feet are exposed and if you cover your feet for warmth the perpetual artificial lights refuse to allow you sleep.
We stopped at the abandoned Bridge to Nowhere – the death zone that is part of the court hearings concerning Bear Mountain and the Municipality of Langford currently being ruminated by BC judges. Ingmar showed us the approximate area, under the pile of rubble, where the actual tree sit was constructed and occupied for a full year before many RCMP and local police with tasers and dogs surrounded and infiltrated the area and chased out the devoted tree climbers. (Their charges were later dropped.) Walking through the area, with heavy heart, I remembered the diversity of life that abounded there, the happy forest defenders and the community they had created before the bulldozers and their agents turned it into just another piece of infrastructure. Progress, eh.
We found one remaining entry to what was once a vast system of underground, or karst, caves, and climbed to the camas meadows resplendent with trillium and lilies, awaiting the purple flowers of the camas that was so integrally important to the indigenous people who, Ingmar is certain, designed the hill top gardens. We contemplated their pre-contact existence, certain that this was, likely for many centuries, a special sacred place visited for rest and relaxation in the mineral pools.
Check the photos.
