Aqua Chautauqua Journal Entry #1 Squitty Bay, Lasqueiti Island, British Colombia, Canada The Eau Canada Tour
Aqua Chautauqua Journal
Entry #1
Squitty Bay, Lasqueiti Island, British Colombia, Canada
The Eau Canada Tour
The first sentence is important.
Standing in the wide doorway next to the bricked-in corner that connects the huge dragon-breathing
wood-stove to the central hall of the Lasqueiti Community Center, Ward Andrew Serrill, poet, accountant,
documentary film-maker and aging do-gooder is telling me the story of how he came to live in the remote
cabin he called The Shangralashack a good way outside Ketchikan, Alaska in the late 1960’s.
Good so far.
He won ‘t tell me his age, but from his toothy smile, short grey hair, and the fact that he doesn’t accept a
handful of Cost-Co cheese-puffs when I offer him some, I calculate that he is several years older than me,
though you wouldn’t tell it from that way he dances around.
“Cheeze-puffs,” I tell him, “They will make you live forever.”
“It only seems like forever,” he replies.
There is a sardonic smile on his face.
“Keep working on that first sentence,” he tells me later.
* * * * * * * *
Millions of years ago, before there were humans, there were probably, I think, dinosaur writers squatting
at their desks trying to figure out how to describe the New Old-Time Chautauqua.
The best that comes to mind, all cynicism left behind: A group of cast-off circus performers (clowns,
jugglers, aerialists, an occasional spoon-man) looking to kill some off-time in-between more lucrative
work (entertaining bored middle-managers in the corporate meeting halls of internationally successful
software companies) out touring remote and under-served communities with big shows for little money
their only real reward being the certain knowledge that in their good work they are changing the world
(peacefully and for real) one tiny molecule at a time. It’s great work if you can find it.
Or should we say: If it can find you.
We can talk about this later if you are interested.
If changing the world doesn’t interest you, I suggest you keep reading.
I’m only getting started.
* * * * * * * *
Ward is telling me (his name is pronounced “Weird” like some truncullated version of a Welsh or
Scottish forest troller) that at one point he found himself in the airless corporate conference room of an
accounting firm in the boxed-up city of Seattle, Washington and he volunteered to take on new clients in
the semi-remote coastal towns along the Inside Passage of Southeastern Alaska. This move (simply
raising his hand) changed his life. He spent the next 15-plus years living in a hand-built art shack 14
klics north of Ketchikan.
“Nature invaded my mind” he smiles, “It’s never been the same sense.”
Which brings us in some roundabout way to where we are standing today on Lasqeiti Island or Xwe’etay
as the indigenous first responders once called it. Twenty-eight point three square miles (8 km wide, 22
km long) of forest and craggy thin harbors anchored on the southwestern side of Texada Island, in the
Strait of Georgia, about 50 degrees north and 125 west if you are looking at the globe. Slightly more than
104 kilometers (that’s 65 miles) northwest of Vancouver City, British Columbia.
More than halfway to the North Pole depending on where you started. Directly in the brunt of the
Qualicum Winds that can blow 50 knots from the southwest across Vancouver Island and be funneled
through the Alberni Inlet (really more of a fiord) to hit the Strait of Georgia at a minutes notice and
pounce on the anchorage at False Bay. A mariners nightmare. Nature at it’s finest. Making Lasqueiti
Island sometimes unapproachable and not for the faint of heart.
Thus the home of stout-hearted folk. Big nature with a blend of small human residents trying to keep it
unspoiled.
Overall, I think you would have to say, that they have been successful.
Ward is here on Lasqueti with a video camera trying to put the finishing touches on a documentary film he
is making about the Flying Karamazov Brothers. I am here in many ways trying to come to terms with
my own roots regarding the same. Overall this tour is something called the Eau Canada Tour, organized
by a group called the New Old Time Chautauqua. A synchronistic meeting of clever minds, you might
call it. The Aqua Chautauqua.
Or another way to describe? Slightly-organized chaos.
The circus has come to town. Hide your dogs. Release the children.
* * * * * * *
I’m not one for long explanations. What is it like to be on this tour?
Well...
The New Age Old Time Chautauqua came to be born in the minds of progressive hippies in the early to
mid 1980’s. Possibly to bring the idea of service and peaceful co-existence to rural communities where
big shows could meet small towns. Or it may just have been to keep the party going during the long
summers after the Oregon Country Fair (second weekend of every July for the last 54 years or so) when
many performers and their likely entourages met for an orgy of vaudevillian-ism. Anyway it worked for a
long time and then began to fade and then was revived in the mind of one tenacious, never-say-die,
producer/director/performer named Paul David Magid.
The quote I like best about Paul Magid is the one I made up just last week:
“If we were on another planet (and in Magid’s mind we probably are) and the days were 36 hours long,
Paul Magid would book us for 37....”
He is that kind of producer. Dragging along the rest of us with his genius. No one left untouched by his
exuberant kindness. No one left unchanged by his endless energy.
He can be a real pain in the ass.
But, say what you will, he has brought us all (40 or so performers and support crew) to semi-remote
Lasqueti Island which is the very first stop on this three-week long tour.
It will leave none of us unchanged.
But of course, true change can be painful.
Open up and say ahhhhhhhh.
Quiet on set. Action.....
-Mose in Port Alberni, Vancouver Island, BC