Heather Conn Blogs

Where does “Chica in the Creek” come from? My friend George Smith called me that when a group of us travelled together in Cuba years ago to celebrate our friend Evi’s 50th birthday. (“Chica” is an informal Spanish way to address a friend like saying: “Hi buddy.” “The Creek” refers to Roberts Creek, where I live.) I liked the rhythm of the term, so I use it here where I post fun stuff on events and thoughts related to life in the Creek.

 Welcome to “Gumboot Nation”

I love where I live, in Roberts Creek, BC, on the west coast of Canada. We’re an unincorporated town of about 3,000 on the mainland northwest of Vancouver, yet most people think that we live on an island. You can only get here by plane or boat — there is no road access to or from the city. We’re part of what’s called the Sunshine Coast, roughly 75 miles of towns, coves, and communities. We’re a great mix of folks from retirees and summer cottagers to artists, teachers, and people who love the outdoors, from kayakers to back-country skiers.

Sometimes living here feels like a magic bubble of friendly warmth and natural beauty. Many residents fear overpopulation and pollution and don’t want others to know how great it is here. Yet it’s not all idyllic: we’ve had logging in our watershed and of old-growth forest plus air-quality concerns from so much wood-stove smoke and from backyard burnings.

Thankfully, in Roberts Creek, development is limited. But elsewhere on the Sunshine Coast, especially northwards in the Sechelt and Pender Harbour regions, more and more new developments, including time-shares, are catering to wealthy outsiders.  Some follks, who have lived here since the 1970s, think that the area has already changed too much.

I’ve been “in the Creek” for almost a decade and still cherish the community. It retains values planted here from the sixties and early seventies, including a strong conservation drive, seed-sharing, sustainable living, and maintaining a small ecological footprint. Roberts Creek is home to Canada’s first rural co-housing community.  Informally, Roberts Creek is dubbed “Gumboot Nation” and gumboots remain a popular sentimental symbol for we “Creekers.”

Each year, our annual Higgledy Piggledy Parade features someone striding at the front in gumboots, holding high the Roberts Creek flag that bears a gumboot image. We have the Gumboot Cafe and Restaurant, gumboot earrings . . .you get the drift. This makes me think of the symbolic union “The Conch Republic” that people in Key West, Florida created to define themselves. Or the term “Cascadia” used to represent the Pacific Northwest region in Canada and the U.S. I like it when residents in a single region create their own group meanings and associations for where they live beyond political and geographical boundaries.  People, of course, can take this to the extreme, resulting in elitist isolationism, border spats, and ultimately, war.

“You must be the change you want to see in the world”: Mahatma Gandhi

November 11, 2009

This morning, I attended the Remembrance Day ceremonies at my local Royal Canadian Legion, branch 219, in Roberts Creek, BC. The Legion’s 40-year-old president, Rob Marion, shared a touching tale of how the impact of war first affected him. At age 12, he had his first full-time job mowing the lawn at the local cemetery in Thunder Bay, Ont. For the first time, he was assigned to work in the section with Second World War graves. He said it astounded him to see about eight acres of identical white crosses, row after row, stretching before him. On a visceral level, this showed him how many thousands of lives, just from this one area, had been lost. It made me think of the lines from the poem In Flanders Fields: “In Flanders Fields the poppies grow/between the crosses row on row/ . . .”

During his talk, Rob said that when he spoke to any veterans of the First and Second World Wars, their common message was: Never again. They did not want to have the horrors of the battlefield repeated anywhere in the world. And yet Canada still fights in Afghanistan . . .

The night before, I had watched the excellent documentary Into the Arms of Strangers, made in 2000 through the National Holocaust Museum and narrated by Judi Dench. It’s about the massive kindertransport program, which sent about 300,000 Jewish child refugees from Europe into Great Britain in 1938-39. They ended up in homes all across England, most siblings separated from each other, living in different parts of the country. They could barely speak English, felt homesick, and worried about the safety of their parents back home.

The interviews with adults who had been child refugees, now in their seventies, were poignant and heart-wrenching. One man described how, at about age seven, he had knocked on the doors of  many British estates, hoping that he could find a wealthy family who would agree to bring his parents over and give them a work permit. After countless refusals, he ended up at the home of Baron Rothschild, who without hesitation, wrote out a form to create a work permit. Unfortunately, the Second World War broke out soon after and all such immigration plans ended.

One ship full of refugee children left England destined for Canada but was torpedoed by the Germans. It didn’t sink and continued southwards to Australia. (I can’t remember its name.) What the documentary didn’t say was that then-Canadian-prime-minister William Lyon Mackenzie King refused to accept that ship load of Jewish children because of prevailing anti-Semitic attitudes.  What a disgraceful historic record for Canada. (You can find out more about this record in the book None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933-1948 by Irving Abella and Harold Troper.)

Once the war had ended, many of these children returned to Europe, hoping to reunite with their parents, only to learn that they had died in death camps like Auschwitz. This made their photos and letters shared in the film all the more powerful and evocative.

I highly recommend Into the Arms of Strangers for anyone who wants to see the human impact of war and hatred. Ironically, one of the British foster parents mentioned in the documentary hated red hair. The Jewish child staying with him lobbied to have him bring over her sister from Europe. When he asked her what color of hair her sister had, she lied and said: “Like mine.” In fact, the sister was a redhead. Once she arrived in England, he was apparently livid at the deception, but subsequently agreed to “keep” her. As a redhead myself, I found this detail horrifying.

Peace lives in Roberts Creek, BC, Canada

I feel proud to be a resident of Roberts Creek, British Columbia, a Pacific coastal town of about 3, 000 people northwest of Vancouver. Home to many Vietnam war resisters, this activist and eco-minded community recently shared its messages for peace in Iraq and Afghanistan during an annual local parade. Amidst the many homegrown floats, colorful bohemian dancers, stilt walkers, and costumed hoola hoopers, members of local peace groups drove a pick-up truck bearing signs Bring Our Troops Home [from Afghanistan]. Someone left this figure, pictured below, propped up against the bridge that crosses the mouth of Roberts Creek, which empties into the Pacific Ocean.  Small dove placards , made by the Sunshine Coast Peace Group, were displayed on individual sticks; each one represented the life of a Canadian lost in the war in Afghanistan.  How many lives are we willing to lose for the price of oil?

                                                      — Heather Conn photo