Smoke has replaced the sky. It is the way of things.
Here are the dry hills. Overgrazing, a reduction to three species, one native and two of which are as flammable as gasoline. Nice.
Water: forestry nursery in the distance, sport fields below, and a royal gala apple orchard. Nicer yet.
Below are the old wetlands that used to store water. Note the recent disperal to high evaporation house plots. Exquisitely well planned.
European culture sits uneasily but orderly upon this smoky land.
Even in the Okanagan Valley, it dawns water, not light.
Rattlesnake Island and Squally Point, looking south.
That’s what these deep troughs are for.
Look at Okanagan Lake project itself into the sky, as a cloudless space. Storm is trying to move in from the west (and from the northeast), with no luck. Terrace Mountain, in the distance, is pushing the energy of the incoming front into a projection of its own shape in the centre of the image, projecting the storm within the cloudless space as a mountain-sized fall of rain.
The pressure driving at the mountain from the west, causes smaller projections to form in the projected lake space between the mountain and the mountain of rain in the sky. One forms every five minutes, and then drifts into the negative space of the lake.
In this climate, in the negative space of the Coast Mountains to the west, negative space makes our weather. Notice as well how as a result of the projections of the earth into the sky when the rain falls it doesn’t fall on Terrace Mountain but at the head of the watershed in the centre of the image below, which then carries it down to the lake.
The forces that made this deep inland fjord through such underground water pressure systems are still at work. This scene is their projection on the sky.
There is an ancient trail that comes in from spaxmən (Douglas Lake), crosses kɬúsx̌nítkw (Okanagan Lake) below, on the lower left …
… and enters a tongue of land called “The Commonage”. The trail then climbs this tongue to root gathering grounds on its rolling crown, including precious springtime bitterroot grounds …
…then descends to sacred chilutsus, “twin lake”, the lake that is two lakes in one, now known as Kalamalka and Wood lakes. There are three possible routes of descent, limited by cliff structures along the chilutsus shore. I indicate these trails by arrows below. The lower one leads to a winter village. The upper one accesses a second winter village at the head of chilutsus.
They all skirt significant landmarks, too many to mention in a short post …
… but one series stands out: turtles. This is turtle country. I indicate a few turtles with yellow circles below:
The one in the centre left of the image is Turtle Point.
A little closer, with less light?
The one in the centre right of the image is, again, Turtle Point. (The turtle’s head is on the right below, white with snow.)
The one just touching the upper edge of the map above is Turtle Mountain, the anchor of a series of turtling lava extrusions stretching along the so-called Bella Vista Hills.
I have no idea what this trail was called before it became a leg of the Hudson’s Bay Company Brigade Trail 200 years ago, but it’s a logical place to cross the lake of the twins to Turtle Point, the seasonal village east of it, and the trail to the salmon grounds beyond, on the Shuswap River, far off the right side of the map below.
Without an ancient name, I suggest that, for now, we keep the trail’s history alive by describing it after its crossings, and its anchor, the marker at its lakeshore terminus…
The snake! I suggest it’s a big-eyed Western Yellow Bellied Racer.
Such as the one above, which I found along the trail on the eastern shore of chilutsus.
I think it’s fitting that the trail follows a snake-like route across a rise of grass, to a cross from snake to turtle, and that this rise of grass is a snake-shaped tongue of land that keeps us alive with salmon-coloured flowers in the spring, on our way across water to the salmon that see us through the winter. My deeper hunch is that this land, called the Commonage, was always held in common between chilutsus and kɬúsx̌nítkw, and has always been a place of crossing, just as chilutsus is: one of the points in which Syilx territory meets on its north-south and east-west axes, in a territory that was always the road between the north and the south, the east and the west. Sure, it’s called The Commonage, after a ploy by White Ranchers to gain the last stretch of indigenous land for their cattle, close to 150 years ago, but it could well be that the idea was accepted partly because it had always been a place held in common.
The land tells us all we need.
I just thought you ought to know.
The sagebrush buttercups are here.
Snow, you scare no one no more. Not the prickly pears.
Not the moss.
Not the grass.
The sun is back.
Clouds are water vapour held up by air, and are named after clods, or lumps of earth.
Ice floes are clods of ice held up by water. But in the world of light, which surely is a world, they are the same. There is a mystery there, as yet unravelled.
Western culture was working at it, until the guns of Verdun. We shouldn’t have given in.
With gulls.
They make speed look silly.
If you’ve ever met a goose, you’ll understand.
If you’ve never met a goose, welcome to the fun.
Coots love the water so much that they only leave for the deep south (100 kilometres away) when things get too rough in January. Then they come up and literally hug the ice, as if it were a floating bed of reeds they could nest on. Soon they will follow the edge of the ice to the high country lakes and ponds where they will raise their young, but for now they float in armadas on the lake. Here they are, from 150 metres up the hill.
And cruising among the gulls.
And cruising.
And looking through the window their reflection makes of the light playing on the surface of the lake, into the depths.
Here, this is one human equivalent of that deep look.
And another. Welcome to your mind. Note the gull flying through it, just larger than a water drop.
It is a time for celebration. The lake is calling.
The water people answer.
Your turn.
Slowly, the cold is leaving Okanagan Lake.
It has much to say on the way.
