Familiar Ground
East Sooke Regional Park, B.C. November 2021.
Away and back again. I have been west, to the island where I was raised. How beautiful it was to be in that green and silver place, with my mother and my adult son, in familiar territory.
It was so wet, and varied, as it is there in November. Such dynamic skies! The rain and wind and mist, the drama — things I know, deeply, but after such a long time away, my embodied perspective has shifted. I saw anew the scale of hills and mountains, and the hovering, dawn-coloured light that hugs the horizon’s mist for most of each day. Cedar and salt. A northern, maritime, rainforest place.
Near Cattle Point, Victoria, B.C. November 2021.
I found, unexpectedly, on a morning wander, a beach that I had last visited with friends as a teen. It was their neighbourhood, not mine, and I had wondered forever after where it was. The beach was familiar in shape, in the scent of kelp and the slow, quiet water. I spotted a shredded “Private Property” sign below a small stucco bungalow that sat above this cove, a type of house that was typical still in my childhood — quaint, well-tended, pretty gardens. The vast majority have since been renovated into monster homes, particularly on the waterfront. This one was abandoned, shreds of material hanging from the eaves troughs, months’ worth of papers and mail overflowing the mailbox. A creepy neglect, like the repossessed and too quickly purchased sailboat, poorly moored at a windy point near my mother’s home — blown off it’s anchor and washed aground in the shallow bay, where it promptly sank. It sits, as it has for a month or more, further damaged with every storm. This kind of neglect I have not witnessed before, here in a place of extraordinary property values and showy wealth.
On another day, my son and I discovered a beautiful point in East Sooke, while looking for a favourite haunt in that regional park. We watched the rain move across the Strait, and sunlight glance through the clouds. On the grounds of an old farm, bequeathed to the province and grown up again with rainforest, we found abundant mushrooms and the ever present lichen, great trees, spongy ground and black, bony rock. To my heart and mind, a quintessential west coast place.
To get there, we drove through an area in the western communities that I have known for more than 45 years. The scale of accelerated development was shocking. I have been away only two years, yet the earth-moving, monster-road, monster-house and suburb-building, rendered the area unrecognizable. This I did not photograph — the act of destruction. What is lost is rendered invisible, blasted and scraped away to be reshaped into a new, phoney, anthropomorphosed landscape.
The tension is painful, and persists, between love for this familiar ground, and appalled horror at the scope of unceasing violence against it. As long as the bulldozing habit of ecocide continues, which appears to be the modus operandi of the culture I live in, I will struggle with this. I do not know how to reconcile such love and shame. But I will continue to ask that question.
All photographs by Rami Schandall, © 2021.
