Fall on the Lake

Fall colours reflected in a small lake outside of Whistler. Click on the photo to go to my online photo portfolio.

Two birthdays, two lives

Lidia with her book of poems and memories.

Alcoholism, addiction and homelessness the only road she knew

LIDIA LAGARDE ENTERED the world underweight and drunk.
Born with fetal alcohol syndrome, the doctors and nurses on the maternity ward had never heard such a mournful cry. And it came from this skinny, weak and premature baby.
With her tussle of jet black hair and a cry her grandmother thought sounded like a crow, her Ojibwe First Nations name became Little Crow.
Alcoholic and drug-addicted parents, 16 other brothers and sisters and an impoverished home where food was in short supply were other things she was born into.
But like many things to come in her life, that wouldn’t last.
Child welfare officials in Northern Ontario removed her and the other siblings and placed them in a foster homes.
But that too wouldn’t last.

Sexual abuse and identity confusion

SHE WAS MOVED to another foster home. And then another. And another—too many to count.
Sexual abuse and confusion about her identity—the result of being shuffled around like lost airline baggage—was the result.
“I lived with Africans, I lived with Chinese, I’ve lived with every nationality under the sun,” says Lagarde, whose long black hair and coppery skin give away her Ojibwe ancestry.
“I grew up very confused. I didn’t know who I was, what I was.”
Dreading the thought of moving to another foster home, she hit the streets of Toronto at the age of eight.
By 13 she had made her way west hitching rides, eventually finding herself on Hastings Street in Vancouver.
There Lagarde lived the high-risk life of a chronic alcoholic, drug addict and homeless woman.
Violence and a strong streak of self-preservation kept her alive on the streets for 29 years. Even the most street hardened characters feared her.
Crow—a name of her choosing—was what she was called.
Her life followed a path taken by her parents—alcoholism, addiction and homelessness. It was the only road she knew.

Turning her life around

AND CROW WOULD still be out on the streets if she didn’t keep bumping into “angels.”
Those angels were workers at the Union Gospel Mission in New Westminster who stubbornly believed Lagarde could turn her life around, even though she didn’t.
When she came for a free meal at the UGM, she was offered more than soup and sandwiches by her angels.
Eventually they helped her realize her spirit was starving. Drugs and alcohol were her way of numbing the pain she secretly felt.
“Most alcoholic-addicts are spiritually starving because of the trauma they suffered in their lives. Most of us escape that trauma through alcohol and drugs so we don’t have to feel, we don’t have to remember, we don’t have to do anything,” she said, surveying the crowded New Westminster mission following a pancake breakfast.
As she speaks, there’s a violent outburst from a man who’s come to eat, perhaps because he’s missed the meal.
“That used to be me,” said Lagarde, who describes herself as an animal when she lived on the streets.
And although she was a handful for the UGM staff, and often came here drunk or high, they didn’t turn her away.
Today, at the age of 48, she has learned to accept herself as they did.

Words to live by

SHE CARRIES TWO reminders of that acceptance wherever she goes.
One is a scrapbook with her poems, photos and other memories from her changed life. The other is her Narcotics Anonymous handbook. On the cover she’s glued a copy of the serenity prayer:

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.”

These are the words that helped her accept herself and move on.
“I was running, running from my feelings with drugs and alcohol until I was 42. And then I started to allow myself to feel in life,” she said. “And I still feel like running, not to drugs and alcohol, but just running from the feelings.”
Born into adversity, living a life of destruction, having her own children seized because she set a poor example and steering her daughter Sophia into drugs, alcohol and the street life are all things she accepts today.
Now she’s five years clean, lives in Surrey and goes by the name Lidia Lagarde, dropping the name Crow.
“A lot of people don’t know me as Lidia Lagarde. They know me as Crow when I was on the street. The only people who knew me as Lidia Lagarde were police, court rooms, judges, lawyers, social workers and those who apprehended my children.
“That name Crow has a lot of connection to all the stuff I drank and drugged over.”

A mentor for others

TODAY SHE OFTEN visits the New West mission to serve soup, chat with her angels and help those who want to talk. Her home phone rings regularly from people needing advice.
Lagarde is now a role model for many wanting to escape the streets, including her daughter Sophia who is five months clean and expecting her second child.
And Lagarde now celebrates two birthdays. The first on the day she came into the world drunk and crying like a baby whose future had been foretold.
The second birthday is June 11, the day she walked into the mission weighing 82 pounds—underweight, but sober enough to realize she needed help.
“That was the date I decided to turn things around,” said Lagarde.
As she heads out the door of the mission, exchanging greetings with others, she considers how others here have come to accept her.
And it warms Lagarde’s heart.
“A lot of people come up to me now that I’ve cleaned up and say the most beautiful thing. They say they’re no longer afraid of me.
“Now they run to me.”
And she’s stopped running from herself.
• For more information on Union Gospel Mission go to www.ugm.com.

Brunette River coming back to life

WALTER WALKER, a mentor for many in the Sapperton Fish and Game Club, spent most of his 85-year life living beside the Brunette River. Now deceased, Walker told other members about the thousands of salmon that once filled the creek each fall.

“He told me when he was a boy his mother would tell him to go down to the river and get a fish for dinner. That’s how plentiful they were,” said Elmer Rudolph, a long-time member of the club.

Elmer Rudolph with the Sapperton Fish and Game Club surveys the Brunette River canopy.

Rudolph knows the stories about when the Brunette was pristine and fish plentiful. He can also tell you about when it became a dead waterway.

It was 1955.

No spawning salmon made it that year to the Cariboo Dam where the river enters Burnaby Lake. Polluting industry in the Braid area killed off the spawning runs. Chemicals leached from a plywood plant, a slaughterhouse flushed its refuse in the river and a distillery piped hot liquid into it 24 hours a day, said Rudolph.

The same was happening along Still Creek, which flows through Vancouver and Burnaby and feeds Burnaby Lake and the Brunette. Industry also used the river as a dumping ground.

“The fish were getting it at the bottom and the top,” he said.

And everywhere in between too. Sewer outflows from businesses and homes along its course would empty in the Brunette.

“Complaints of nuisance created in Brunette Creek by it being used as a sewer by the Distillery, Frye’s Stock Feeding Yards and Swift’s Abattoir. Laminated Materials operates a dam in area and both the Provincial Health Officer and Provincial Chief Sanitary Officer suggest several solutions including filling the swampy area with Fraser River silt, a covered surface drain coupling the distillery, Stock Yards and Abattoir and running to the Fraser and flushing the Brunette regularly with the tide.”     - Minutes from the City of New Westminster council, June 10, 1929

While industry is no longer allowed to pump effluent into the urban waterway, there is still pressure on it.

An estimated 200,000 people now live in the Brunette River watershed. It covers 73 square kilometres of highly urbanized area. Portions of Vancouver, Burnaby, New Westminster, Coquitlam and Port Moody lie within the watershed.

It flows from extinct creeks near Central Park, now entombed in underground culverts. The water then makes its way through the Still Creek corridor, Burnaby Lake and the Brunette River, eventually emptying into the Fraser River. Its waters also come off Burnaby Mountain and from numerous parks, neighbourhoods, industrial areas via creeks and storm water drains.

Two major highways criss-cross the watershed. At least eight bridges cross over the river, including Highway #1. Large shopping malls and acres and acres of asphalt roadway and parking lots have been built within it.

There are more than 200 kilometres of waterways in the watershed. Some streams have been lost, such as Lost Creek. While others have been paved over, culverted, diverted or used as sanitary and drainage ditches during the last hundred years of development.

Despite all of this, fish live in the Brunette and the many tributaries within the watershed, such as Stoney, Eagle and Silver creeks. Patient streamkeepers, who measure their success over five and 10 year spans, say the watershed is improving.

They’ll also tell you the next few years for the river, especially in its lower reach, are critical. Restoration work done by streamkeepers, local government and others in the most polluted portion of the river during the next two years would make the urban waterway’s comeback one to marvel at.

Children may no longer be able to go down to the river to net dinner for their mothers but each fall they can watch salmon spawn.

That, says Rudolph, is making the Brunette a success story.

“We travelled against the current of the Fraser for about a mile to discover the entrance of Brunette Creek, as the brunette River mouth was effectively blocked by logs. We saw much local game and were paced by sea otters.

“We passed into the mouth of the creek and followed the right hand channel into Brunette River proper. It was very brown and very meandering.”                                                                          - Lieut. G.L Blake, Royal Marines, who canoed up the Brunette April 27, 1859.

Despite the historical and current abuse of the river, it still supports an abundance of life. Cutthroat and steelhead trout and Coho, pink, chum and chinook salmon spawn and live in it.

Canoe the length of it and you could spot great blue herons, kingfisher, osprey, a few eagles, beavers, mink, deer and other wildlife.

Mark Angelo and Bob Gunn have paddled the Brunette twice. Angelo, an international river conservationist and head of B.C. Institute of Technology’s Fish, Wildlife and Recreation Program, and co-worker Gunn see great potential in the urban waterway.

“You travel along the stream and you can see a lot of the history of New West and Burnaby in it – the industrial development that has taken place along side it over the last 100 years,” said Angelo, eyeing the leftover industrial remnants found at the edge of the river.

“You paddle down this river and I think it’s a source of encouragement. You think back to what it was 100 years ago, you look at what happened to it in the ’50s and ’60s. And now we’re seeing a rebirth.”

On a recent trip down the Brunette, they talked about how cities, industry, streamkeepers and the public must work together to make the river friendlier to fish and people.

“In the past we saw lots of this where the development took place right up to the banks of the river. I would like to think in the future we would do things differently,” said Angelo as the canoe floats past a warehouse that looms over the river. “In the future there may be ways to reclaim some of this riparian habitat. Under certain circumstances we could turn this back into natural riparian area.”

“We took enough provisions for four days and started with a lovely day before us. It was hard work getting up the stream which was very strong against us, deep brown coloured water rushing along as usual between banks most beautifully wooded. The debris of whole woods lying scattered across and on each bank. I suggested the name of the “Brunette” for the river which was instantly adopted.”                                                                        - Robert Burnaby, part of the first European expedition to travel up the Brunette to Burnaby Lake. March 20, 1859.

The Brunette gets its name from its colour. Water entering the Brunette from Burnaby Lake has a light tea-coloured tint. That’s because the lake is part of an ancient peat bog. Brown algae on the river’s bottom gives the water its dark brown colour.

As Angelo and Gunn paddle around a bend they disturb a blue heron fishing for its next meal. In stark contrast, they also have to maneuver the canoe around a steel cable and large concrete block – left behind by industry.

The river is very much a river of contrasts, says Angelo.

“You have areas in the upper section that are quite natural and quiet, then you have areas like this where you hear sounds of an industrial nature,” he said. “You’ll go through sections where there’s a lot of streamside habitat and its green and natural. But then you go through other stretches down river where it’s very industrial.

“It is very much a river of contrasts.”

Despite having industrial development surrounding the lower reaches, volunteer streamkeepers continue to battle for the river’s environmental survival. Often, said Rudolph, “It’s two steps forward and one step back.”

For example, there was good news and bad news when streamkeepers compiled last fall’s spawning counts. Just 56 adult coho returned to spawn, a decline seen throughout lower Fraser River tributaries.

Sea run cutthroat trout were also down from previous years with just six recorded by streamkeepers. The Brunette’s steelhead population continues to drop and is estimated at 50.

The good news was the number of returning chum and pink salmon. They counted 240 chum and 61 pink in the Brunette and its tributaries. The pink run is especially encouraging for streamkeepers, after trying to establish the salmon species for a number of years.

“We were getting the odd one one year, the odd few another year,” said Rudolph.

For more than 35 years, streamkeepers have carried out various projects, such as, building a salmon hatchery and creating a fishway over Cariboo Dam, allowing salmon to get from the Brunette River to Burnaby Lake. Other early work done has included stopping outflow pipes from discharging raw sewage into the river.

Most recently, the emphasis has been on creating fish-friendly habitat. Features such as weirs provide pools for returning spawners to rest in. Woody debris, such as stumps, are anchored to the river’s edge so fish can shelter underneath them in high water events. They also reduce stream erosion and increase the organic material.

Streamkeepers find themselves battling nature sometimes. An overpopulation of beavers in Burnaby Lake resulted in the rodents migrating down the river and destroying vital trees that provide shade and organic material. The river stewards protected trees against the marauding beavers by wrapping them with chicken wire.

“A cold clear starlight night, over us the dark foliage with a young moon silvering the whole, the Great Bear quite overhead, and every star clear as crystal. Nothing to break the stillness of the forest but the rippling of the river below us, the rustling of the breeze in the pine tops above, and the occasional note of a lonely owl somewhere near us.”                                         - Robert Burnaby, March 29, 1859, from the book Land of Promise.

A few hundred metres from where it enters the mighty Fraser River, the Brunette forks. The channel to the east, known as Brunette Creek, is a man-made diversion and a straight shot to the Fraser. The other fork is the historical channel, which takes the scenic, meandering route to the Fraser.

If you’re on a canoe or a raft, the diversion channel is your only choice. The Fraser River entrance to the historical channel is blocked by old log booms.

Angelo would like the booms removed so that more people can safely canoe it.

“The Brunette is a wonderful waterway in our community and these booms at the outlet degrades it,” he said. “The more people who spend time on a waterway, the more advocates are developed for the river. It engages more people, gets more people interested in the health of the waterway, and that can only be positive.”

There is great potential for the southern reach of the Brunette, said Gunn. The day may come when industrial operations move on and that’s when revitalization can occur. New provincial streamside protection legislation will create greater setback, allowing trees to once again grow alongside the river. There’s also the possibility land along the banks could become off-channel habitat – important areas for young salmon.

“We have to do a better job of integrating sustainable development down here. Maybe it’s time to consider that some of the industry around here is not appropriate,” said Gunn, referring to the Braid industrial area. “There’s a lot of potential here for restoration work.”

But a plan is required for that to happen.

“When a river has been damaged or impacted for decades, you can’t turn it around overnight,” said Angelo. “But the progress that’s been made in the last 20 years by stewardship groups, local government and regional government has been remarkable.

“My hope is, my belief is, that will continue. It’s certainly worth the effort because we’re very lucky to have a river like this that runs through our communities.”

“Over the last two decades, fish passage and habitat improvements by community groups and government agencies have brought back small numbers of spawning salmon to the Brunette watershed. However, for many possible reasons (including poor water quality), numbers of returning salmon remain disappointingly low.”                                                              - Brunette Basin Watershed Plan, prepared by the Brunette Basin Task Group. February, 2001.

Before future restoration is done on the lower Brunette, it needs to be assessed. That will be carried out this year when core samples of the river’s sediment are taken as part of a Greater Vancouver Regional District study. Those samples may contain heavy metals such as lead, copper, zinc and manganese, left over from past polluters.

The study will also look at benthic invertebrates, bugs that live on the river’s bottom. The number and types of these bugs they find will tell scientists much about the water quality.

Once complete, streamkeepers want to see more water flowing through the historical channel and less through the diversion. Increased water flow will clean out the spawning beds in the historical channel.

The recent encouraging returns of chum and pink are prompting streamkeepers to now focus on the lower portion of the river. Chum and pink prefer to spawn in tidal areas of the river.

“We need to find out the conditions of the lower Brunette soon and do something about it,” said Rudolph. “We’ve been putting this off but it’s important we do something about it over the next two to three years.”

It’s not just streamkeepers and their partners that bring about the river’s revival, said Rudolph. The public also plays a crucial role. People living in the watershed are becoming aware of how their activities affect the river and its aquatic life.

“We’ve proven the only way you can bring an urban river back is public education. You can work your brains out, but unless you educate the public not to wash their cars on the streets and have soap suds go down the drain and not to pour paint down the storm drain, this watershed would not survive.

“The public, to a large degree, has bought in over the last 20 years. The only way they’re going to be able to bring their kids down here and see fish, is if they do their part.”

In the future, the comeback of the Brunette may be used as a blueprint for other streamkeepers and conservationists looking to do the same.

“We’ve proven that if you can do it here, with this river, you can do it anywhere.”

We are the Qayqayt

For the first 24 years of her life, she didn’t even know she was First Nations

 

Rhonda Larabee is the chief of the New Westminster band, which now has about 50 members. They hope to get back some of their ancestoral lands which were taken almost 100 years ago.

Rhonda Larrabee was researching at the New Westminster Public Library when she came across a book describing the history of New Westminster.
Published early in the 19th Century, it showed its age—not just the dusty old cover but the words inside.
“Dirty heathen cur dogs” read a passage describing New Westminster’s native population.
Larrabee was furious as she read the words.
She slammed the book down then flung it across the room. A librarian, hearing the outburst, threatened to throw her out of the library.
“I’m not leaving,” Larrabee replied.
Larrabee had been exploring her roots, trying to understand where she came from.
For the first 24 years of her life, she didn’t even know she was First Nations.
But once she found out, it became her quest to put together the past and assemble the pieces for a better future for herself—and for her people.
She was in the library researching the history of New Westminster’s native band, the Qayqayt (KEE-Kite). She discovered few details, because little information is available—it’s almost as if they never existed.
Much of the history, written by British and American newcomers, paid little notice to a people that had lived on the shores of the Fraser thousands of years before non-natives arrived. And when the Qayqayt were mentioned, it was usually derogatory.
The British Columbian newspaper editorialized in 1864 that Indian camps in and around the city “subjected decent people… to the intolerance nuisance of having filthy, degraded, debauched Indians as next door neighbours… compelling them to sleepless nights on account of their drunken orgies.”
In another example, census reports from 1869 and 1870 tallied “whites” and “Chinese” but no Indians—although hundreds lived within the city’s borders.
But if you dig deeper, as Larrabee has, you learn natives helped the first Europeans survive in the wilds of British Columbia. Later, the Qayqayt were decimated by smallpox, forced to live on reserves and eventually had the land they called Skaiametl taken away.
In one particularly dark historical chapter, the city wouldn’t allow Christianized natives dying of smallpox to be buried in the local cemetery. Instead they were laid to rest on Poplar Island, the small, marshy piece of land in the middle of the Fraser River.
For Larrabee, learning these stories was important, but also angered her.
“There is little left of our history. If you go to Irving House and the New Westminster Museum there’s a few arrowheads and a picture of an Indian in a canoe,” she said.
Source of pride
Despite their treatment and decline from approximately 400 to numbers so low they were widely thought to be extinct, the Qayqayt First Nation is now officially recognized. Larrabee, who grew up not knowing she was native, got the band recognized by the federal and provincial governments when she applied for Indian status in 1994.
Governments had thought the band extinct until Larrabee proved, through the research she had gathered, she was Qayqayt.
“The toughest job was getting recognition from all levels of government. For the City of New Westminster to recognize me as the chief in their community was something when they had denied there being any Indians in their city for so long,” she said.
And her work isn’t done.
Larrabee—now the chief of the Qayqayt—has her sights set on righting a historical wrong.
“We want a land base of our own. As a legacy to our children.”
But it’s not just about having a land base for the band as the end goal. It’s the pride that comes with it.
She wants all members of the Qayqayt—which now count 48—to be proud of their heritage, and proud to be native.
Learning the truth
Her mother didn’t feel that pride. Like the three high school grads, she wanted to hide where she came from.
Her mother was Qayqayt and her father Chinese.
But her mother always told Larrabee and her brothers their origin was Chinese and French.
It wasn’t until she was a young woman that her mother finally told the truth.
In one emotional evening, Larrabee’s mother explained how she was brought up in a Kamloops residential school after her parents died. She witnessed native students beaten by teachers for speaking their native tongue and was taught that native culture was inferior.
So when the Larrabee’s mother started a new life in Vancouver, married and had children, she lied about her heritage—not wanting to revisit a sad chapter in her life.
“My mom was so ashamed, she was so embarrassed that she would never say that she was a native woman because of the treatment she received,” said Larrabee.
“But we finally knew who we were,” she said of herself and her three brothers.
After the shock of finding out who they were, Larrabee and her brothers started uncovering more about their heritage—through interviews and historical research.
One of the best sources of information was other bands.
That’s because many of them, like the Kwantlen, Kwikwetlem, Katzie and Musqueam, had seasonal villages beside the Qayqayt so they could catch salmon during the once-great Fraser River spawning runs (Today some of these bands also have land claims for parts of New Westminster).
The early days when all the bands were neighbours on the banks of the Fraser are not so different from today.
Now, there are about 1,500 First Nations people living in New Westminster and they come from bands like the Squamish, Burrard, Stó:lō and others.
Some may be Qayqayt, but no one knows—that heritage has mostly disappeared.
That’s why the Qayqayt will welcome other First Nations people if they ever succeed in their future land claim.
After all, they shared that land before the Europeans arrived—back “when the salmon were so plentiful you could walk on their backs across the river.”
“That is the Qayqayt mandate to all other urban Indians living in New Westminster,” said Larrabee. “No matter what band they have come from.”
“They also need a place to belong to. This is for them as well.”

Lost creeks seeing the light

The old waterways are still there. You just have to listen for them

A picture of the waterway historically known as Glen Creek in New Westminster. The location has been identified by the donor of the picture, believed to be the woman in the photo, Elsie Baber, to be the Sixth Avenue Bridge. Taken in the 1920s, in today’s terms, this is on the river side of Sixth Avenue (between McBride and Cumberland) looking toward where the Justice Institute is located with the No. 1 Fire Hall to the left and the Canada Games Pool to the right.

Even in 1936 the oldtimers recall Guichon Creek being culverted.
The Burnaby waterway was diverted beneath new roads and homes, but popped out near where Moscrop secondary school stands today.
From there, as it made its way to Burnaby Lake it was an open watercourse.
It was a great place for young boys to play.
Neighbourhood boys—former Burnaby Mayor Bill Copeland among them—would explore the creek and if someone had a string, safety pin and a stick, they could catch a 10-inch long trout.
In the fall, large salmon would spawn in the creek and, if you were wading in it, they would bump against your legs.
But by the late 1950s, Guichon Creek was all but gone beneath the streets as Burnaby rapidly became urbanized. It’s a common tale in the growth of cities in that era, burying rivers and streams to make way for growth. But in the last 20 years or so, there’s a new trend afoot. More and more, creeks and streams seeing the light of day as activists and new development aims to bring them back to life, reviving fish stocks, creating wildlife habitat and providing sanctuary for residents.

•••••

Around the same time as Guichon Creek was vanishing beneath concrete, in New Westminster, Glen Creek was also disappearing in the name of progress.
Historical photos show the creek was the city’s largest and also a fish-bearing stream.
Along its banks, First Nations people had established the Skaiametl fishing village, located downstream from the former B.C. Penitentiary grounds.
When European settlers arrived they built bridges over the deep ravine it traveled through. It was a place for picnics and for anglers to hook trout.
Glen Creek wasn’t the only waterway in the Royal City. Like tentacles, creeks spread across the city, flowing downhill until they reached the Fraser River. Streets like Carnarvon, Columbia and Clarkson were once patched together with bridges crossing the many streams.
Glen Creek, also called Glenbrook Creek, still exists today—but you can’t see it. You can only hear it.
It flows through large drainage pipes underground until it reaches the river. Even though the creek runs through the forested green space of Glenbrook Ravine Park, it still travels in a pipe.
And good luck finding its headwaters, near 10th Avenue at New Westminster secondary school; it has been completely lost as the ravine was infilled.
New Westminster’s creeks were viewed as a nuisance, causing flooding and taking up land that could be used for homes or streets. So as much as possible they were covered over, said historian Archie Miller.
You also can’t find the headwaters for Guichon Creek, believed to have started near Willingdon Avenue, several blocks south of Kingsway.
Guichon was also “undergrounded,” with much of that occurring when BCIT was built around 1960. But before that, it had been “channelized” (straightened) and used as a drainage ditch, the vegetation around it stripped.

•••••

Guichon and Glen are by no means unique in the Lower Mainland.
A similar fate has fallen on many other streams in the lower Fraser River region, which once boasted more than 750 streams. Of those, 117 have vanished, according to the Outdoor Recreation Council of B.C.
And only 106 are considered healthy, fish-bearing streams while 530 are classified as endangered or threatened.
The lifeblood of the Fraser River, creeks must be revived where possible and kept healthy, said Mark Angelo, head of BCIT’s Fish, Wildlife and Recreation program.
“When you talk about sustainability pertaining to rivers, that means not only protecting rivers and streams but trying to restore those that have been damaged or lost,” said Angelo.
“That’s a way of trying to correct some of the environmental abuses that have taken place in the past.”

•••••

To that end, Angelo is helping lead the charge as BCIT works to “daylight” Guichon Creek.
The development of BCIT resulted in the creek disappearing and now, in an interesting twist, redevelopment of the campus is resulting in Guichon being brought back.
When several buildings and parking lots were rebuilt, the post-secondary institution used that opportunity to uncover the waterway.
In addition to bringing back the main stem of the creek, they’ve also added some off-channel habitat and streamside vegetation, brought in boulders and other in-stream habitat and introduced cutthroat trout, which are now surviving as a resident population.
And BCIT isn’t alone.
The City of Burnaby also uses redevelopment as a catalyst to bring back lost creeks.
Developers are encouraged to daylight creeks when feasible. The city also has an open watercourse policy, stopping creeks from being culverted or covered.
“It’s a no net loss policy where there has to be compensation for any loss,” said Robyn McLean, Burnaby’s ecosystem planner.
In New Westminster there is little chance of creeks being daylighted because the city is so compact—only Vancouver more densely populated.
“To do that you’d have to have a fairly large property,” said Jim Lowrie, New Westminster’s head of engineering. “It’s pretty unlikely.”
But the creeks still exist, says Archie Miller, despite being buried and forgotten.
Miller was recently in the underground parking lot of a highrise and heard water from an ancient creek running through a pipe deep beneath the concrete.
“There is a lot of water still flowing in those underground streams,” said Miller. “It gives you a good idea of what it was like.”

• Burnaby will celebrate World Rivers Day Sept. 28 on the banks of Guichon Creek. The public can take part in a tour of the creek plant native species of shrubs and trees and release cutthroat trout fry into the creek.
For more information please call 604-294-7530.

Share the earth

Janet Moore’s backyard once revealed that an active gardener lived in the south Burnaby home.
Beautiful mature perennial plants made the yard into a sanctuary while the packed vegetable garden produced a bounty for the dinner table with the surplus going to thankful friends and family.

Eight year-old Sasha gets a drink from the hose during his family's visit to their garden plot behind a privately-owned Burnaby home.

But priorities changed for the now single mother of two. In the past two years, the hours once spent in the garden are now devoted to her job and children.
“I don’t have the time anymore, working full time, single mom, two kids and all that,” she said. “It’s a shame to see the garden go.”
Brenda Ceaser and her husband Greg Felton had the opposite problem—an interest in gardening but no land.
“I’ve become interested in growing my own food because I’m concerned about food security in the future,” said Ceaser, who lives in a New Westminster townhouse.
For people living in apartments and townhouses, the waiting lists are long to get a garden plot at one of the community gardens in New Westminster and Burnaby.
But there is another solution for those with land but no time and others who are “dirt poor” but garden envious, as Moore and Ceaser discovered.
It’s called Sharing Backyards (www.sharingbackyards.com) and that’s how the two women met.
Ceaser and her family now garden in Moore’s under-utilized backyard. Ceaser is learning how to garden and growing her own organic vegetables while Moore is happy the land is being used and will share in the harvest.
“I thought it was a good idea because I have a half acre of land and no time to garden,” said Moore. “So why not give someone who likes to garden an area to garden?”
And for Ceaser, “What I’m doing is teaching myself to be self-sufficient.”

 

SIMPLE RATIONALE

The rationale for the program is simple, said Patrick Hayes, who helped the program get rooted in Canada.
Everyone should have access to healthy, local, organic food. But one of the biggest barriers is access to land—especially in cities.
That’s even true in Canada, where an estimated 43 per cent of Canadians live in multi-family housing without yard space. That leaves another 57 per cent who might have garden space to spare.
Hayes, a green economist working with LifeCycles Project (www.lifecyclesproject.ca) in Victoria, says the idea of sharing gardens came from community gardeners.
Someone pinned an ad on a community garden bulletin board stating they had backyard garden space they were willing to share. Others, both land owners and land wanters, followed with their own ads and people started connecting with each other.
Gardeners in Portland, Ore. and Victoria were among the early trendsetters. Hayes took the idea and put it online three years ago.
And now, in the last year, Shared Backyard cities have sprouted up like lettuce heads all over North America.
Vancouver and Washington D.C. soon followed while Nanaimo, Maple Ridge, Nelson, Vernon, Winnipeg and Brandon in Manitoba, Ontario cities of Thunder Bay and Kingston, Boise, Idaho and Cleveland, Ohio are others recently started.
Seeds have been sewn all across North America, said Hayes.
Many of those taking part are worried about food security, the concern that the high price of fuel will make fresh vegetables and fruits expensive and scarce.
Another motivation is eating healthy organic food.

GROW YOUR OWN

Burnaby condo owner Beth Rogers can relate.
“My parents always had a small garden in their backyard but I was never really involved with it. It’s really only been in the last year or so that I’ve started to eat more organically and really focus on eating locally. A big part of accomplishing that is growing your own food,” said Rogers, who found a New Westminster landowner willing to share his backyard.
“It’s important to think about things like the 100-mile diet, eating healthy and reducing transportation costs of my food. So whatever I can grow is great,” she said.
And for property owners like Janet Moore, it’s a program that just makes sense.
“I’m pretty glad to share it because I feel pretty guilty having so much land,” she said.
Moore had no idea there were so many people looking for garden space.
“I didn’t know if I’d get any response or not. I got quite a few calls as it turned out, five or six responses from different people.”
She’s happy she chose Ceaser and her family.
“I gave them an area to use but they’ve widened it quite a bit,” she said, laughing at the eager gardeners she hosts. “They even put in raised beds, so they’re improving my garden.”
“I’ll continue with it next year because I know I’m not going to have any more time than I have this year. At least it’s getting used.”

Seed (bombs) of subversion

To anyone observing, it’s just a woman and a man out for a walk with a dog.
But secretly, one of them is a terrorist and the other a reporter tagging along for a story.
The dog, a feisty black Labrador puppy, is just there for the exercise.
Obviously she doesn’t want her name used. But she does want people to understand why she willingly breaks the law.
“I walk around this neighbourhood and would much rather see pretty, green, inviting parts of my neighbourhood, as opposed to broken bottles, garbage, gravel and bark mulch,” she says.
The weapons she wields are seed bombs.
They’re crafty, insidious devices that explode on contact, if the bomb maker knows his or her craft.
But the aftermath of these bombs isn’t felt for several months—so long as there’s the right amount of rainfall and sunshine.
The truth is there’s nothing explosive about these bombs, unless you consider a colourful show of wildflowers to be destructive.
Still, what this eco-terrorist is doing is against the law.
“I’m not trying to hurt anyone’s property and I’d rather not do anything illegal, but I have to trespass and theoretically I am vandalizing,” she says.
“But there will always be that one person who disagrees with what I’m doing, that thinks it’s wrong.”
Cells of guerrilla gardeners are everywhere, from London, England, to Toronto, to Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, to Moscow, Russia. They stay loosely connected through websites like guerrillagardening.org, sharing tips and swapping stories of their latest triumphs, like beautifying a neglected street planter in Paris, enlivening a desolate boulevard with winter flowers in Gothenberg, Sweden, or sowing sunflowers in front of a barren office building in Raleigh, N.C.
Some of these seeding insurgents are so bold they post videos of their clandestine cultivations on youtube.
This night New Westminster’s guerrilla gardener is skulking around the streets of the city’s west side. She’s identified her targets during previous scouting missions.
One is a boulevard covered in gravel and littered with an empty pop can, paper and a condom wrapper. It’s not a pretty sight.
She looks around for potential witnesses and, seeing none, tosses a bomb at the space where it bursts apart.
Another is a vacant lot overgrown with dandelions, a thicket of blackberries and grass that’s gone to seed.
The guerilla gardener hurls two bombs at this urban waste land.
There are other targets this night and she lets off 15 bombs in total.
“A lot of people come down here for work and they leave at the end of the day. I live here and it looks like crap. There’s litter all over the place and scrubby grass and nobody is cleaning it up,” she says.
“If it were covered in pretty flowers, suddenly people would feel obligated to clean it up. People take ownership over places that look good. So if I’m the catalyst that starts that, cool.”
Her bombs are an ingenious design and can be found on the Internet.
You take a small amount of clay—found in kids or craft stores—and roll it out thinly. Sprinkle some compost over top of the clay, followed by a handful of wildflower seeds, available at most gardening stores. Then add some water to the seed-soil mix to get those seeds to start germinating. Finally wrap the clay around the mixture and crunch it into a ball, a little bit smaller than a tennis ball is good.
“Bombs away,” she says as she tosses a bomb overhand at a lot beside a house known for drug activity.
Her hope is that others will pick up her cause. That and she doesn’t get arrested for her acts. The law sees it as vandalism but she believes it’s beautification.
“I don’t want my name used because I don’t want to be the person leading this. It’s better if people take this on on their own. Because these are things that don’t have to be organized. It’s just an individual act to beautify the city.”