Water

Most of my trips to British Columbia had one thing in common apart from work, and that was rain. Joni must not have been at home in BC when she wrote "Sunny Sunday".

Probably further down the Western seaboard than that.

".....California, California I'm comin' home".

Western Canada is called Nothern Temperate Rain Forest for a reason. It rains!

As I sat in another Starbucks on another wet Sunday in Vancouver, I got to musing about water, that thing that seems to be both a curse and a lifeline.

Too little of it and you die of thirst, too much of it and you drown.

While my distant relatives in Selby and York were mopping up the brown sludge from what was left of their carpets and filling in the forms for the insurance, the cattle herdsmen of the Masai Mara in Kenya watched as the the source of their livelihoods fell, starving and dehydrated in to the dust when the rains failed again.

On that Sunday, the forests of BC, the lungs of Western Canada, dripped with the rain of late November. That same rain at some time in past millennia had deluged the vale of York and singularly avoided the Masai.

The forest browns and greens are more vivid when it rains in BC. Not the brown of the Selby sludge, the red-browns of an Autumn turning to Winter on the lower slopes of Mt Seymour. While further up the mountain, we see water in its other forms. Above 500m, the low cloud, the mist, envelopes your car, leaving you peering ahead in to the gloom. Above 650m you hit the snow line. More water. Just a few patches by the roadside at first where the snowploughs piled it up, then slowly, inexorably the landscape becomes arctic, until eventually you lose the road markings and discretion becomes the better part of valour and you retreat down to water in a less hazardous form.

Humans have a fascination with water. Maybe there's some folk memory that tells us we have to worship it. We swim in it, we sail on it, we hurtle down mountains while sliding over it, and some even give birth in it. Canadians freeze it and use it to play hockey on, while the more sedentary of us just go and stare at it. It's far more interesting if it's under the influence of gravity. BC has lots of examples of water and gravity interacting. It has waterfalls that cascade from dizzying heights, two serious ones at least, just on the road from Vancouver to Whistler. Numerous rushing torrents of rivers, and many examples of water and gravity in uneasy equilibrium. The Capillano dam that holds back a reservoir and provides the drinking water for Vancouver, and the sea defenses that stop Richmond being inundated both testify to man's need to control this vital resource. Water uncontrolled floods houses, and drowns children, water controlled provides drinks and electrical power.

We have an uneasy relationship with this most elemental of elements. Divert it and use to much of it and we get the fishing boats of the Aral sea, 20 miles from the coast. Water is in danger of becoming the oil of the 21st century. As we demand more of it, we will need to protect it from our neighbors. Already, territorial disputes are breaking out over access to water. Unlike oil, absolutely no life is possible without it, so the disputes over it will be much more serious.

BC seems to have more than its fair share so maybe Canadians should be grateful for it.