Aqua Chautauqua Journal Episode Four

Namaste Farm, Gabriola Island, BC, Canada

Unlike the perceived safety of a roller-coaster-ride there is no real way to tell when the Chautauqua tour hits bottom.

I can promise you dear reader that it is coming, but for now, leaving Port Alberni, we are experiencing a low ebb that only SEEMS like the floor beneath our face-plant.

You know what a face-plant is right? When your skis are in the air and your mouth is in the snow.

Unfortunately there is no soft landing snow this time of year in Port Alberni. In fact it is very hot here. Our show, which should probably be in a nice open-air city park with a ton of ventilation, is actually in the dark little Capital Theatre, seating for about 300, only there is probably a tenth of that number in the actual audience. The back stage is close and dark. The greenroom is narrow and claustrophobic. A perfect hideout for spiked molecules of the Zombie Virus.

But the show must go on. And it does. And it is pretty good, especially for a group of rag-tag vaudevillians at the mercy of the Sasquatch strain. Not a great show, not a great audience, but a good effort, better than on Lasqueti, but still building toward something you would actually WANT to buy a ticket for. Again I’m no theatre critic, we left a few smiles in our wake and hopefully no fatal viruses.

But who is to say?

Covid Zombie Virus. Myself and my companion (whom you may know from past correspondence as Our British Friend) are both still testing negative. So onward we go to Gabriola Island and the beautiful Namaste Farm.

Where push will come to shove for some of the group, but for us: Another seminal experience of the Sun-Coast Islands of British Columbia.

We are both, you and I, dear reader, already getting tired of hearing about the virus and bad tidings, so let’s talk about something else.

Let’s talk about the amazing show we presented at the “Commons”.

The Commons is a 26 acre former goat farm bought collectively (with donations) by the Gabriola community trust and used publicly, privately and collectively as a gathering place on the island. We spend four good hours doing community service there including restoring the signage, repairing broken doors and mending upper deck railings. We do our workshops out of doors. And on Saturday night we produce the BIG SHOW.

Ok, honestly we did a pretty good job performing our usual acts. But the show became absolute magic when the local kids stormed the stage to steal Godfrey Daniels’ balloon and then when a kora-player from West Africa (visiting his grandmother on the island) entranced us with a jaw-dropping world class performance, (he was on an international tour) and then once again when a local Asian-Canadien woman named Scarlett Chen did a politically incorrect and side-splitting routine of Asian-women jokes. Unbelievable. And we had an overflow crowd of over 350 persons gladly attached to the entire scene.

“What a show!” I told producer Magid afterwards.

“What did you expect?” he replied confidently. (Again... you would have to know Paul Magid for many years before you could understand his blend of hubris and self-delusion, with emphasis on delusion if you catch my drift). Somehow he always seems to pull it off.

Anyway it WAS a great show.

The next morning despite our best efforts, Our British Friend and I wake up early to attend a private breakfast with our sponsors. It is an honor to be invited and we really don’t want to miss it, even if I can’t quite remember how to get to their farm. I’m supposed to know this and I’m not supposed to get us lost. Walking down a gravel road with one bum knee (twisted while I loaded hay on a barge going out to Lasqueti Island) I was sure we would never find it, until Our Friend with her cute British accent asked a neighbor for directions.

Everyone seems to know everyone else on this part of Gabriola.

Later we had a delicious waffle breakfast and I suffered my knee to walk silently into the woods, a guided tour to the petroglyphs etched into forest boulders that guarded the ancient burial caves of the First Nation people. The Coastal Salish, as they are now called. It was quiet and wonderful and we had a sense of the smell, and the touch, and the disappeared happiness of the ill-fated first inhabitants of this then-perfect island. An etching called “MouseWoman”. On the face of a leaning rock, dappled by the mid-morning sunshine.

For a moment we leaned against her. Time flowing without us.

As though the turbulence and violence, and gross miscalculations of the modern world were very very far away.

This feeling, however deep and serene, lasts only a few hours.

Then we were back on tour.