The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
And so, as your scribbler arrives on his island in the Pacific, the Bambi and babies leap across the twisting road in front of the rent-a-beast. The fat ferries, looking like big white bugs, float serenely by. This has been the locale, 23 summers now, for my annual brain transplant, badly needed. Summer with the brats, with tennis, makes things so serene you can forget Stephen Harper in his Calgary Stampede costume, making him look somewhat like Kate Smith in drag. This is Bowen Island, just 20 minutes by ferry from Horseshoe Bay off West Vancouver, the sylvan wilderness most close to any major city in the world. Which is why we call it God's Country. Take that, both Toronto and Calgary, and stuff it. Where else can you wake in the morning, pull up the blinds and find staring into the window Ð some 10 feet away Ð a six-point buck deer, looking as if it would like to come in to share the orange juice? Where else can businessmen, lawyers, doctors, be able to catch an 8 am. ferry and be their offices in downtown Vancouver at 9 to meet their secretaries? This is bliss though there is a rumour that it rains a bit in the winter, a foul rumour. There are minor traumas, of course. It seems the more sophisticated summer visitors have demanded the building of a real golf course. Which, as we know, is the only sport that allows middle-class, middle-age men to dress up like pimps. It is to be completed by next summer, apparently, and the local lads are not happy since it would destroy their long tradition of 'bush golf.' It seems the locals have been content in taking a golf ball into the tangled bush, whack away and destroy the foliage and have a good time. Tiger Woods wouldn't understand. Then there is the cougar. Every summer I have been coming here for the transplant and the tennis, there have been panicking rumours among the mothers that there has been the spotting of a cougar on this mountainous island of some 10 miles. Since this annual sighting has spotted a single cougar, I have a theory. There in fact is one cougar on Bowen Island. He is now 73 years old and is having a splendid time, eating Bambi and frightening the locals. Then there is the African tycoon who arrived from Kenya Ð must of known this the only wilderness island so close to a major city on the globe Ð and built an $8 million mansion overlooking the trees. And built a house for his groundskeeper that is larger than most all cottages on Bowen. Not to mention the prominent Vancouver lawyer. He built, for his bride, an architectural gem overlooking the whole sea, assuming his neighbours would allow him to build a bridge across the 50 yards of surging tides that separated him from the mainland. Alas, his neighbours thought it would destroy their pristine views. And so, at dinner parties, he arrives in hip waders and tows his 20 guests across, two at a time in a rowboat. You might imagine, after the wine, the chaos at midnight. Perhaps we could return to the cougar.
