According to the old European story of Demeter and her daughter Persephone, this is the time of the year when the maiden earth descends to spend half a year with her husband […]
Moving Borders
Turtles
North America was renamed Turtle Island by the poet Gary Snyder, as a gesture of respect to the aboriginal cultures of North America. The term originated with the Iroquois tale of the […]
Okanogan Earthquake
Breaking News: Earthquake: 1:09 a.m., November 18, 2011. Okanogan, WA! Perhaps for the first time since Mexican drivers drove cattle through in 1858 to feed the California miners who had trudged north […]
Cider: the Apple’s Soul
Apples are like people. Every apple seed gives a new individual. The only reason there is more than one tree’s worth of Golden Delicious apples is that the original tree has been […]
Telling Time with Apples
It is three hundred kilometres north from the Granny Smith apple orchards at the mouth of the Okanagan at Brewster, Washington, to the valley’s last orchard, above Swan Lake, north of Vernon, […]
Ogopogo: Film Star!
Well, it’s just so much fun to have a lake monster, that pretty much anything goes. Here’s the latest video. A still from that video? Sure: Newest YouTube Star: A Wave on Lake […]
Looking for Intelligent Life in the Universe
The Okanagan is at the cutting edge of scientific research. Even the search for intelligent life and the origins of the universe is actively pursued here, on both sides of the border. […]
The Time of Starting Over
Now that economies are struggling, it’s a good idea to look at some previous collapses. Hundreds of orchards, for one, have disappeared in northern Washington in the last dozen years. At first […]
Metal People in the Rust Belt
I think reality has become a fantasy and the true story of our time is written in science fiction. Here, for example, is a man holding up a salmon in praise, on […]
Waiting for Winter
The Canadian Okanagan is the deep south. At its farthest south, Osoyoos boasts Spanish architecture and is famed for desert sun and vineyards. Grapes are planted here on old orchard land, impossibly […]
