He took me out of a deep reverie of contemplation in the process of writing up an opinion piece I meant to publish on one of my blog sites. Whenever my attention is taken elsewhere while I'm composing, it is by a prodigious effort required on my part to wrest my mind away from the matter at hand, and it takes a few seconds before I am able to give my full attention to the distraction.

In this instance, he had been struck a short while earlier, by an impulse-not-to-be-discarded, because it strikes so infrequently, to clear out some of his files. He had been rummaging through one such file when he came across two sheets of paper on which had been copied something that had years ago been published in the local newspaper. And it was those two sheets that he now thrust before me, a grin on his face. Of course that grin is not unusual; he usually does smile, when he's confronting me with his presence, a kind of distant hug, always comforting.

So I looked. At a picture of a woman I judged to be about in her late 50s, hair going grey, a pleasant smile on her face. I thought she looked familiar. But then, I also thought she looked somewhat like so many other people I'd seen in my life. Who she was I couldn't determine, and wasn't very interested in doing so, though I must have looked quizzically at my husband. His smile became broader. He urged me to look again.

Nothing clicked until he finally relented and said, 'It's you!', and I recalled many years ago, likely at least fifteen years back, having written an opinion piece and forwarded it to the newspaper. It was about my experiences over the years embarking on annual door-to-door canvasses to elicit donations from neighbours on my street for various charities. A piece that was published after the paper had sent a photographer along to our house to take a picture of the writer.

It was hot and humid, but we were grateful for a slight, cooling breeze as we began to descend the first long slope into the ravine. On the way down we heard a long shout and assumed there were some boys down below playing war games, but soon an out-of-shape older man chugged up the hill, asking if we'd seen a young boy. We'd never seen him before, and said we'd just entered and had as yet seen no one. His grandson, he explained, had run ahead of him and he had no idea where he was. We said we'd be on the lookout for him.

I was taking photographs of maturing wildflowers in season at the side of the trail, and we'd at that point gone somewhat beyond the halfway mark of our usual circuit, when suddenly we heard Riley bark, and turned to look behind us. Surprisingly, quite a way behind us, beyond a curve in the trail. Riley has developed a habit of ambling along behind us. We usually are alert to his presence there, urging him to come forward, but he rarely agrees with us that we'd prefer him to be where we can see him constantly, arguing that his preference is to view us in front of him.

My husband turned back to see what was going on, and what was going on was that a very slight, little girl with long blond hair damp from the humidity, wearing a light summer frock, was frozen to the side of the path, fear of our small barking dog evident on the fine features of her face. My husband reassured her, picked Riley up and the little girl smiled and began immediately walking alongside my husband. And continued walking with us as we asked her where her parents were, and where she had entered the ravine. It was, in fact, clear where she had entered; when Riley became aware of her she wasn't too far from a ravine entrance point.

She and her parents were visiting her grandparents. And evidently she had become upset at some disagreement that had turned disturbingly loud between the adults. She had, she said, told her grandmother to advise her mother that she was slipping into the ravine for a walk. And then off she went, which was when and where we discovered her presence. She was eight years old, preparing to enter grade 3 and excited about the prospect. She had an older brother, an older sister and they were interested in sports. She was sometimes bullied at school and that wasn't pleasant. And other details.

She chattered brightly away, fully confident and at ease in the presence of two absolute strangers, her voice lifting regularly in a high-pitched lilt with every sentence. What were we thinking? How odd it is and how potentially dangerous to see such a young child unaccompanied in such a place where large dogs often ran about unhindered from the attention of their owners, far from the scene. Where a misstep could hurtle her down a slope onto large pieces of gravel or sharp stumps; anything could happen. Let alone coming across a stranger whose purpose might be far less benign that our own.

We walked along as usual, fully expecting the little girl to turn back, to return to the opening to the ravine through which she had come, but no, nothing seemed to deter her from our company, even though my husband repeatedly pointed out to her other trails leading to exits close to where she had entered. Until finally, we were quite far from her entry point, prepared to mount a few steep ascents that would take us far indeed from her grandparents' home.

My husband asked by chance whether her grandfather walked a large white German shepherd named Lily, and the child perked up, yes he did. We thought about taking her home with us and telephoning her grandfather's house; surely she knew the number? It would take too long to reach home with her. Then we thought: turn around, return, walk her over to the place where she had entered, and that is just what we did, aborting our usual route and retracing our steps until finally we achieved that goal.

And that's when the child heard something our ears did not; a piercing whistle, and she responded immediately, explaining, her voice growing fainter as she ran ahead: "My mother's whistling for me!"

Charlie was too hot and focused to stop on her way down the hill for her usual greet-and-pet session. She was intent on reaching the cool comfort of Bilberry Creek and that was that. She needed to soothe her overheated paws in the wet clay bottom, and let the water run beneath her body to stop that incessant panting panic of overwhelming heat.

As we climbed past her whizzing by us on our afternoon ravine ramble, we could see at the top of the hill, her companion seated in the shade of a large old pine awaiting either her return, or more likely, our completed ascension. He's an enormously talkative man. Wind him up and away he goes. Fact is, he needs no winding, no encouragement to embark on his endless not-to-be-interrupted soliloquies to which we have often felt prisoner as he regaled us with his memorable (to him) adventures.

But he's a nice person and it's worth while the time spent trying to inject a few comments of our own, in a futile manner, not to offend him. He obviously needs to vent, and often, and anyone he comes across represents a suitable wall on which to bounce his thoughts off. And so we heard about his breathless account of how his morning had gone. It started earlier than he had anticipated, his garage crowded with cast-off objects he was preparing to set out for a garage sale, when he discovered someone had arrived at almost the crack of dawn to prowl through his garage.

Not much offends him, but this certainly did, and he disliked the entitled air of the person who had entered without anyone being present, the commotion of his moving things about alerting the inmates of the house to an unanticipated early-morning presence. That's what signs alert people to: the excitement of an upcoming garage sale. When our friend emerged from the house into his garage the man's aggressive bargaining offended him further and a man not ordinarily given to be disagreeable, he found himself informing the intruder that his presence wasn't appreciated.

He had all manner of tools that he wanted to be rid of, including a router he had bought but never used. A ping-pong table, you name it, he just wanted to have them taken off his hands. Whenever anyone tells us about garage sales, the thought immediately surfaces simultaneously for both of us that instead of a garage sale those items could have been driven over to the Sally Ann for them to sell, and in the process contribute to their always-urgent need to raise operating funds to help the unfortunates in society. Because it might appear unseemly to outright state such things to others, and that we prefer to manage our affairs in this way reflective of our own philosophy, we abstain from actually saying anything, because people will always take it as a criticism. Which it most certainly is.

So on and on he went, effusive in his comments about peoples' greed in trying to impress upon him the need to lower prices he had originally kept to a mere fraction of the value of the items he was selling, but in the end triumphant because when all was said and done 75% of what he'd put out was sold and he was $105 the richer for his efforts.

That Canada's is an increasingly diverse, or "pluralistic" society as is now the preferred description is undeniable. From a time when I was young when the appearance of Caucasians vastly predominated to the present, there has been as they say, a 'seachange' of vast proportions. Now, the prevalence of readily identifiable ethnics has soared in the population. I don't refer here to people of Asian and African heritage, but people whose cultures are newly introduced and whose social and religious mores mark them as quite different in tone and depth from people who have long lived in the country and who have assimilated over the generations.

It's been a remarkable transformation as Canada has absorbed people from different continents, particularly marked by the fact that previously those admitted to the country were mostly from European backgrounds whose values and substantive cultural underpinnings were similar to that of Canada's. Unsurprisingly, since most of the original settlers to Canada came from those very backgrounds.

Now, when I shop at my supermarket close to my home, the shelves, both fresh produce and canned staples of every variety and commodity, are geared to people from the Indian sub-continent, from across Asia, east and west, from the Middle East and the Caribbean and all points between. Oddly enough, just a few months back when I was shopping at a large rural supermarket in the United States there was shelf space devoted to kosher products; but not here in this nation's capital in a large urban setting.

Yesterday, I viewed in the most cursory manner because I have become accustomed to their presence, and why not? a melange of people faithful to the ethnic garb of the countries from which they hailed, shopping alongside me. Courtesy prevails.

I also saw a youngish man presumably in his 30s, entirely garbed in a long white robe, feet in sandals, his face hirsute and darkly sharp-featured, seemingly intent on never making eye contact with anyone, going about his business. He had taken a shopping cart meant for a mother with a baby, since it came complete with a baby-bed carrier on top, and within that bed he had carefully placed some produce. Two watermelons, large ones, rolled about in the bed of the cart itself, alongside other vegetables. I had taken note because I was lined up behind him at the cash counter awaiting my turn.

He left his cart repeatedly while waiting for the line-up to shorten as those before us took their place at the cash, and each time came back with trifling items like bags of potato chips to augment the more ascetic vegetable-and-fruit selections he had previously made. From the basics to the frivolous consumables, it seems he has made the transition to familiarization with his new environment in part steered by his gustatory appetite, not yet by the fainter allure to assimilate otherwise into the prevailing culture.

My little brother is preparing to retire from academia. He has, in a sense, withdrawn partially, in that he no longer teaches many classes, preferring instead to devote more of his time to on-site research which has taken him to Labrador repeatedly and to spend time revising, updating his textbooks on environmental biology.

He's in fairly good shape, though for a not-very-tall man he expanded quite generously in the last few decades. He looks a little like a combination of Mark Twain and Groucho Marx; Albert Einstein thrown in for good measure; a genial man given to incessant bouts of rollicking humour. And he's a passionate bird-watcher, an avocation that has taken him on bird-sighting journeys across the world.

As a botanist and a home-owner he has taken pride in growing gardens around his home completely given over to native species of flora, and in that sense one might say he has an environmentally sustainable xerographic garden. One that more or less looks after itself. My brother likes things to be simple, unadorned and maintenance-free.

Competitively, my brother boasts that his garden Jack-in-the-Pulpits are more robust than mine. He's wrong, of course.

I remember his excitement years ago when he carefully unwrapped containers he had specially designed for the purpose and revealed minuscule plant species he had brought back with him from Canada's frozen North, scraped from the barren tundra. Excited too about the Narwhal tusk he had bought from an Inuit woman far from 'civilization'. It adorns a wall in his living room, along with other exotic specimens.

When he called yesterday, he was brimming with enthusiasm over his latest adventures, signing on as resident naturalist for three Alaskan cruises. He enjoys being with people, and is happy to share his experiences and professional knowledge to further their own curiosity and interest about our natural surroundings.

He might consider using a month annually of his retirement years at the very least, to that kind of travel instruction-guidance. He had met, he said, so many interesting people. No doubt those interesting people felt some measure of gratification at having met him through the course of their Alaska adventure.

It is unusually cool and damp at a time when summer in this region is generally dry and hot. We've had incessant rain events, from sprinkles, to day-long downpours, to ongoing thunderstorms. We don't really mind the rain at all, since it is liberally interspersed with days of full sunshine and dry atmospheres. It seems wind has accompanied both types of weather systems, alleviating the heat when it's hot, lashing the landscape with rain when it's not.

Insect pests appear to hugely appreciate this weather, as well. Mosquitoes and blackflies have been luxuriating in it, and they're fairly widespread, we found them here and in New Hampshire in great abundance, so that's a wide radius. No doubt California, mired in a long succession of droughts would be grateful for some of the moisture we've been enjoying. The rainfall in copious amounts in short periods of time has been anything but a bonus for Canada's western provinces, though. There, large scale flooding has been costly in afflicting people's lives with misery, ruining crops and buildings.

For us, it has become routine this summer to embark on our daily forested ravine jaunts in preparation for downpours to 'surprise' us while hiking. The landscape really hasn't had an opportunity to dry out; ponds and puddles appear a constant now wherever we walk, breeding mosquito larvae endlessly.

There are, consequently, fewer people out walking in the ravine, as part of their daily recreation/exercise regimen in full enjoyment of life and the seasons. We did come across an older couple we haven't seen in quite awhile. We most often see people whom we're acquainted with through our daily ravine rambles far more frequently. This couple, obviously far less so.

They asked where our second companion was, having been accustomed throughout the years to see us walking the trails with two little dogs. It has been well over two years since we lost our-then 19-year-old miniature poodle, Button.

He loaded up the smaller of his two kayaks, the one he had constructed himself from a kit two years ago; packed equipment for a few days of camping out, took the ferry to Vancouver Island, met up with a friend who lives in Nanaimo who made similar kayak-camping preparations and they set off for Pacific Rim National Park together.



They decided not to take the Lady Rose in to the archipelago, to paddle the ocean there instead to reach the Broken Island Group where they stopped finally and set up camp for their stay, setting off from there to trip over to other beaches than the one where they camped for some variety in environmental view and viewing sea creatures.



There's always plenty of eagles there, he told us.



They came across seals curious about their presence. And this time they saw in the near distance a few whales, likely, our biologist-son said, grey or sperm whales. The largest living creatures he had ever seen, apart from an Alaska trip he had taken years ago.



They heard them before they actually saw them. Sound carries well over the water. The whales dived, surfaced, spouted and wheezed, sounding closer than they actually were. They took to the water in their kayaks, paddling as close as they thought was useful to observe the whales. And suddenly, there was an eruption in the water roughly 40 yards from where they sat in their kayaks, and one of the whales surfaced, noisily and complacently, allowing them to observe it from closer range.



They saw colourful starfish and other sea creatures on the shore when the water washed out, close to their camping spot.

 

A foggy mist settled wraithlike around islands they paddled close to. The ocean, blue as blue can be, seemed to swell beneath them at times.

 
Photographs courtesy of J.S. Rosenfeld