Dear Editor,
I have been coming to Bowen through my entire life, since babyhood. My family has had a cabin here since the 1950s, and my husband, children and I now have our own place in Bluewater. This is my second home, yes, but it’s where I feel most alive and happy, and it’s a direct result of being surrounded by the beauty of this magical place.
When I take visitors through the trails above our home, or around Killarney lake, or anywhere else on the island I point out to them the nurse stumps and the signs of the logging of the past - we marvel at how enormous the trees were when they were felled, and at nature’s reclamation project as new trees clamber over the old stumps and grow, looking as though they are set to walk off any day, lumbering on long legs.
I imagine what the island must have looked like before, what it must have looked like after, and I see photos of other islands, more recently logged. I look out across the strait to the Sunshine Coast beyond Keats, and see the scars on their hillsides, and imagine a scalped Bowen, which could be our future.
The Bowen of today is not the Bowen of the past; it is occupied all over, loved, revered; there are treasures and secret paths and places all over. It is an oasis of calm, of community, of peaceful rural life. It is also a great big rock with no groundwater, with delicate water reserves that struggle to provide enough water in the summer, and that from time to time give us dirty looking water.
Our roads are rural, our speeds are slow. There are handmade signs up: Slow - Fawns! There are deer all over, making their living where they can. There is a family of 5 that sleep on our lawn and in our rhododendrons. We took down our deer fence to accommodate them.
Hearing that logging could be going on here, over such a large portion of the island, in each of our watershed areas, above every neighbourhood, in areas where all our trails and paths go, facing the north shore, the ferry routes, our neighbors on the Sunshine Coast and Keats and Gambier, the Sea to Sky highway, it just turns my stomach. The thought of the impact on our water, our recreation, our tourism, our appearance to the world driving and sailing by, the impact to our way of life here, the roads, the overburdened ferry, the displaced wildlife, our health and safety, I wonder what BC Timber Sales must be thinking. It must just be about money because the impact on our community would be devastating.
Virginia Keyton
