Aqua Chautauqua Journal
Episode Six
Galiano Island, BC, Canada
The Slug Queen wants to show us her new house.
It has been a very long day. I have made multiple ferry crossings to drive here from Salt Spring Island and Our British Friend has been on a 7 hour sailing passage weaving through the Sun Coast Islands aboard the schooner Vagrant. She is sun kissed and water wobbled. I smell like the road. We look at each other and nod in tired agreement.
“Certainly, we’d love to see your place.” I tell the Slug Queen.
The Slug Queen’s true name is “Accoriania” and she was voted Slug Queen by former Slug Queens in 2000, the year of her reign. The very first Slug Queen of the New Millennium.
It is a thing you would only understand if you came from our home town (Eugene, Oregon) where the Slug Queen is far more popular than the Mayor or the City Councilors, or anyone else in the city who is not tied to the football team (The Fighting Ducks). It is an honor that lasts one’s lifetime. Once voted in you will always be a Slug Queen until you die. And, I can assure you, Accoriania is a long way from that.
She pedals her bicycle as we walk. Slowly spinning up the hill while keeping the conversation flowing, pointing out her neighbors who are decedents of the Coastal Salish having lived on these islands for hundreds or even thousands of generations. Nobody really knows. But it has been a very long time.
Her Majesty, the Slug Queen, has been living here about 15 years. That is, once she stepped off her sailboat.
The house is beautiful. Built on the site of a former homestead cabin, it looks out on the narrows of Active Pass. This is where a summer-time succession of BC Ferry Boats steams though toward Vancouver City. A ship motors by every few hours or so. You can hear the ferries from the rumble of their engines and the deep boom of their fog horns as they enter the rocky channel. They are close enough so that you can see individual passengers on the sun decks. Passengers who are staring back at your luck and no doubt thinking:”Wow, I wish I lived in THAT house.”
It took many years and lots of money-scrounging to design and build her house (where she lives along with her partner the Princely Slug Consort) and the Slug Queen is justly proud of it.
It also happens that she is our main sponsor, publicist, producer, arranger, performer and accordionist on Galiano Island.
So, my protesting knee not withstanding, we follow her home.
Galiano Island is long and thin and faces out into the west side of Georgia Straight. East across the shipping channel is Vancouver. A few hundred meters across Active Pass is Mayne Island. South a few miles is the international border to the less-civilized country we are now calling South Canada.
It’s just a name. What difference could that make?
Turns out it makes all the difference in the world. Canada is Canada. You cannot mistake it for the United States. The attitude here is different. In some ways more polite and provincial and in other ways more sophisticated and European. More British in British Columbia and more colonial. Not in the meaning of subservient but in the sense of independence. Fierce independence. A blend of the French Revolution and the British stiff upper lip. It is wild and un-spoiled. The second largest nation in the world.
And Galiano is unique beyond even that. A blend of forest and ocean, long and thin, a barrier island between the roiling waters of the Straight of Georgia and the midden beaches and rocky inlets along Trincomali Channel. It is diverse in both habitat and culture. Salish Indian descendants all the way to newly arrive (within ten years) peoples of the Pride Culture. Getting along pretty well as mostly Canadians do.
And helpful to a fault.
Demonstrated to our little traveling community after mis-directions by the ferry crew drove one of our vehicles into an I-beam post supporting the upper decks of the BC Ferry arriving from Swartz Bay. The top of our cargo trailer ground its way into the steel of the vertical post, shaved a good three feet off its starboard roof structure and stuck there like it was welded to the side of the ship.
This, I thought at the time, was maybe the low point of the Chautauqua roller coaster ride.
Because, I have to say, without blaming anyone, that the ferry crew did not take responsibility and were not equipped to get the vehicle free from its complete stuckedness.
We would still be there, living on that ferry, performing juggling acts and passing the hat to live off micro-wave meals from the ship’s commissary if it hadn’t been for our Galiano neighbors who pitched in and saved the day.
I think we still owe them for that. They got us out of the fine kettle of fish we had slipped into. Our gooses were cooked. Our clams baked. Our rudder twisted with three sheets to the wind.
And how did we pay them back?
With a magnificent show of course!. It was, to quote Paul Magid, “Fantastico”
Artist the Spoonman returned (by Coast Guard helicopter, it seemed) from self-imposed Covid exile. Professor Noodilini was back for his brilliant comic relief. Slug Queen Accordiana sang “Gilligan's Island” and the band played on.
Only two and a half hours long and it was getting perfectly dark for the big finale where all the virus-free newbie Karamazov Brothers juggled and dropped “Jazz” with those high-tech juggling clubs that magically light themselves and change color at the push of a button from the Stage Manager!
All surviving members of the audience were happy. At least to see it end.
But did they go home to a cup of hot chocolate and their nice warm beds?
Not really.
Many of them drove (along with a contingent of Chautauquans) up a very long and steep gravel road to the very interior of the island where a 50-year-anniversary party was happening on a 250 acre homestead.
Fifty years of what, I’m not sure. Maybe owning the land.
It was crowded with Galileans. Conversation was limited by the vast volume of the Reggae Band which might have been called “Zombie Jamboree.” (It might have been “Dread and Dead,” the sound system was turned to 11 and it was hard to hear anything)
What a scene.
The next morning, our day off, I woke up wondering if I had dreamed it all or maybe perhaps it was just a story told to me by an idiot signifying nothing.
Hard to say. So I went back to sleep.