Nurtured by Love

Category: Community

  • Active Transportation Advocacy

    Active Transportation Advocacy

    I’ve been a member of the local trails Society for years, and have volunteered at a lot of trail-work days, but I’ve always resisted invitations to become part of the board. Three years ago, though, I learned that they had become the keeper of the legacy of another Society, one that had tried unsuccessfully to create a trail between our neighbouring twin villages.

    I got interested.

    I didn’t join the board but I did ask to be appointed the head of a committee charged with this initiative. I have ignored it for months at a time, but I have hamstered away at various aspects of it on and off. Now happens to be an on time, so I’ve put a lot of energy into it over the past month or two.

    Our two villages are, largely speaking, two neighbourhoods comprising one community. Although they have separate village councils, the businesses and services that comprise a functional community are shared between them. There is one post office, one ER, one credit union, one grocery store (located in New Denver). There is one dental clinic, one health food store, one laundromat, one hardware & building supply store, one performance hall (located in Silverton). Between the village is a single two-lane highway. This stretch of road is just over 3 km long, and has an 80 km/h speed limit, negligible to entirely absent shoulders, poor sight-lines and steep drop-offs. There is no sidewalk, no adjacent pathway, no back road or gravel track to offer an alternative. And of course there is no public transit: a bus runs through three times a week but depending on the schedule and direction of travel you will wait between 8 hours and several days for a return trip

    I bike it, but I don’t feel entirely safe doing so, and I’m one of only about 10% of the area population who feel even passably okay walking or biking the highway. So most people feel like they have no choice but to use a private motor vehicle for their daily commutes or errands.

    While I am willing to accept — as the previous Society decided — that a scenic lakefront trail is a no-go due to private property interests along the foreshore, I am not willing to accept that there is no active transportation solution whatsoever for connecting two interdependent neighbourhoods. In the late 1800s people living in this area were able to push railroads through mountain passes in the space of a few months with little more than hand tools and dynamite. A rock face or scree slope here or there was not a deal-breaker.

    With some governmental money floating around to support the development of Active Transportation projects, I decided the time was right to resurrect the pathway idea and try to push it forward with less of a scenic/recreational spin and more of a eco-conscious/active transportation spin. I had a co-conspirator early on, but he stepped back for personal reasons, and so I’ve been carrying the torch mostly on my own.

    The inter-Community Active Transportation (i-CAT) Link now has its own webpage (because I maintain the Trails Society website). I have done a large community engagement survey, put together a twenty-page white paper laying out the case for the link, explored land title issues, done an informal survey of the existing road bed, and have learned more than I ever expected to need to know about historical public roadway statutes, Ministry of Transportation construction and maintenance standards.

    The i-CAT Link has now been picked up by a regional Citizens’ Advisory Group on Rural Mobility as a supported project, which gives me a foot in the door with the regional district government and the Ministry of the Transportation. Queue lots of meetings.

    I also applied for a small community grant under the Trails Society umbrella, so later this year I should be able to hire a planning consultant to start a bit of a scoping plan. I’m not kidding myself: this three-kilometre stretch contains within it almost every geotechnical and jurisdictional challenge possible. Ultimately big grant money, likely to the tune of several million dollars, will be required to build a separated shared mobility pathway. But even if I can smooth the way a little bit, I think it will be worth the work. Until motor vehicles are banned, we need an alternative, and this project makes so much sense. I am convinced it is inexorably moving towards fruition, albeit on a geologic time-scale, and I am happy to play whatever role I can.

  • Fireweed Hub

    Fireweed Hub

    Four years ago I joined the board of the Silverton Co-work Society. They were a group working towards the creation of a co-work space in the area, and had just married that idea to another long-term community goal: of a food hub. It was a long, twisty road we trod, but the result is that we are now the Fireweed Hub Society and successfully managed a million dollars in grant money to renovate a heritage building on Main Street, transforming it into and absolutely amazing community resource.

    We opened in May 2024 and two months later the area was hit with a massive wildfire event. Our still-wet-behind-the-ears facility became the de facto community hub. Amidst all the evacuations and business closures, we were able to accept donated food, purchase what we could from businesses with excess produce to help feed people in need, rally dozens and dozens of volunteers to do useful things, employ laid-off food workers, feed firefighter and structure protection crews, welcome evacuees and those on alert to hang out, to connect, to eat, to destress, and act as the information hub and meeting space.

    It was the ultimate proof of concept: we manage a multi-purpose community space that can quickly adapt to serve almost any need. The emergency situation demonstrated to community members the breadth needs that we can serve: we are not just a pop-up restaurant venue! And we enjoyed a lot of positive press coverage and a huge boost to our reputation throughout the region.

    Thank goodness things settled down by mid-August, giving us the chance to better find our feet. The remainder of our inaugural year has included pop-up restaurant and café offerings provided by chefs who rent our space, weekly social / recreational / educational gatherings for community elders, a lot of use by non-profit and other groups for in-person, remote and hybrid meetings, meal preparation for the local food bank, occasional use by value-added food producers, and a steady rota of food-related workshops and cooking bees.

    Our Society is comprised a great “working board” of directors and some great staffers; we have fun and enjoy and trust each other. My role is as the lead on the co-working operations, I sit on the fund-raising committee, I manage the website and the technology solutions within the space, and am the communications and publicity person. I also do a lot of volunteer dishwashing and food prep for the programming our society offers.

    I probably do 5-10 hours of Fireweed work in a typical week, but some weeks are just an hour or two while others more like half-time or even full-time. It’s gratifying, because we have created a community-informed tangible facility that is unique, and is already serving a range of important roles.

  • The orange pill

    The orange pill

    During the summer of 2021, Fiona was offered a job working as a veterinary assistant at a clinic 50 km away. It was a super opportunity, so I told her she should take it, and she could use my car for the commute. I would use the e-bike. We had bought a Rad Mini in 2018 to help Sophie and Fiona get around for work, school and groceries in Nelson while they were living semi-independently. They mostly walked but the bike was occasionally a huge help.

    Once Fiona moved away to university in the fall of 2020, the e-bike came home to live in the garage in New Denver and only occasionally got used. But the following spring, with my car leaving town 5 days a week, the e-bike became my primary vehicle for errands. It was suprisingly enjoyable. It could pack a fair bit of payload, and I felt much less guilty making my little runs up and down the hill to the post office or grocery store most days. So when she went back to Toronto for her second year of university, I decided to see if I could keep using the bike for local trips, at least until the cold rain started in October.

    I decided that for every tank of gas I didn’t have to buy, I would flesh out my cycle-commuter kit. I got myself some rain pants and I made it through October. I figured I’d keep going until the snow was flying. I was surprised to discover that the tire tread was pretty good in the first skiff of snow. I added an under-helmet balaclava, a set of warm waterproof gloves, some goggles, and a hi-vis jacket.

    Suddenly it was April. I had ridden through the whole winter.

    And so I kept going. I lent my car out to people who needed a car. I used it myself for trips of over 100 km (for orchestra gigs, to retrieve various children from airports to bring them home or to dispatch them, for appointments in Nelson) but for everything local, meaning everything within 15-20 kilometres, I used the bike.

    It was addictive! I was thrilled with how fun and easy it was. And then I discovered NotJustBikes and swallowed the orange pill for once and for all.

    NJB is a YouTube channel by a Canadian guy who grew up in the same general area of the country that I did, and who now lives in Amsterdam. His dryly sarcastic video essays talk about the differences in transportation norms and urban design between North American cities and those in the area he now lives.

    Spoiler: we don’t come out looking very good.

    I fell down the rabbit hole of his YouTube channel and found myself alternately inspired and frustrated by the contrasts. It was a sort of “I never thought about it, but the way we live really sucks, and there is no good reason we can’t radically change things” experience. And a lot of “omg, why do we still insist on doing things so stupidly, when so much of the rest of the world has been doing them so much better?” And repeated sentiments of “why do we just accept this shit?” This is the orange (Dutch) pill.

    I don’t know what the magic sauce is that makes the orange pill go down so smoothly, but I cannot recommend his channel highly enough. It is definitely a gateway drug.

    So here I am another winter later, still only using the bike for local transportation. I now have a cargo trailer, made out of the old kids’ Burley D-Lite trailer, which I can hook on for bulky loads. I have pogies (bar mitts) and a better high-visibility winter jacket. I have the bike tricked out with a go-mug holder, tire chains for the icy days, slick tires for the summer, a phone mount and rear blinkies that function as turn signals. It’s getting close to the 4000-kilometre point on the odometer, which isn’t all that much compared to the mileage I put on my road bike, but it is a ton of riding when you take into account that it is made up almost entirely of 3.5-kilometre trips up and down the hill between our property and town.

    And I am now a passionate advocate for active transportation options. I organized an e-bike event at the local market last summer to encourage other people to look to e-bikes as a transportation option. (Several have since done so!)

    I have also taken on the challenge of trying to develop a shared-use active transportation trail between our village and the next one over, something that has been tried repeatedly over the years. They’re only 4 km apart but the highway is so dangerous for anything but motor vehicles that everyone is car dependent as a result. I’ve waded into the worlds of municipal politics, public advocacy and grant applications as a result, places I would ordinarily avoid like the plague, but the orange pill is making me do it.

  • Sufferfest Weekend

    It’s Kootenay Sufferfest weekend. Chuck is away but the girls and I got involved in volunteering the first day. Fiona and Sophie volunteered as marshalling assistants. Fiona was marshalling up-mountain at the halfway First Aid and Marshalling station. She and I sat right at the snow line with slush falling for 7 hours. Plus it took us almost an hour each way to drive the logging roads to get there. So a very long day. But she was awesome: she saved the day a couple of times when the adults had got too distracted by communications issues to note a bib number on a racer.

    The experience played right into her wilderness skills homeschooling project what with the various pre-race first aid and marshalling planning meetings, the communications relaying (we’re way out of cellphone range, and sat-phones were unreliable in places because of terrain) and keeping an eye on runners and riders for signs of hypothermia, and watching and helping them avoid succumbing to the elements. We had a market tent, which helped keep us from getting soaked the skin, and also took our Biolite stove and made hot chocolate for runners and volunteers alike. I was working first-aid, and thankfully there was nothing more than minor stuff; a few of the bikers who looked in danger of getting hypothermic during the first loop judiciously dropped out of the race before attempting the second pass, and none of the die-hards got into difficulty. Not that there weren’t some serious worries by the organizers. It was so cold, and there was a lot of snow up high. The Idaho Peak Run came off just fine: 14 runners finished. But the early snow made for a lot more challenge and hazard than had been expected. I’m glad this hadn’t turned out to be the year for me to attempt that run.

    Sophie helped marshal the first and last runner aid stations. She and her marshalling buddy were on foot, carrying water and food since there was no road access. The race director and I had used backpacks and bike trailers to haul in some of the gear the day before, but they still had to carry some. They also had almost no radio or satellite phone contact, so were very isolated. They had a really long day. Sophie had left home by 7 am, and hadn’t surfaced again by 4 pm. I made a thermos of hot mochas, and took to the trail to run out and meet them. I met them at the halfway point of their hike out. I was very glad to see them still upright and coherent!

    Me (#493) and some of my running buddies, keeping warm in the rain and mud pre-race.

    Today I went over to Kaslo and ran the 10k Sufferfest trail race. I did surprisingly well: I got 1st place in my age-group (40th place overall). It wasn’t a big race — under 200 participants — but I was really pleased by how strong I felt. I haven’t run much the past few months, but I have done a bit of strength training, which is new for me.

    I haven’t run a race shorter than a half-marathon in more than 3 years and I really enjoyed the shorter distance. It was rainy, mucky and slippery, with lots of little steep hills, so the times weren’t that fast, but I got in in under an hour. The push up the hill for the finish left me feeling spent, but within ten minutes felt pretty much fully recovered and felt like I could have run a lot farther. Maybe next year I’ll go back to running the 25k. Or maybe not. At this point I find that a 10k doesn’t really require any training more than my haphazard recreational running, and that’s nice.