Iceman delivers his own miracle on ice

Victoria skaters enjoy a rare treat on southern Vancouver Island — a chance to skate outdoors on real ice. BELOW: A worker relies on old-fashioned methods to clean the rink. Chad Hipolito photographs for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
December 12, 2011

VICTORIA

The gear was carefully laid out — T-shirt, flannel shirt, long johns, socks, extra woolen socks, gloves, winter jacket, and hockey sweater.

A thermos filled with hot chocolate was overruled in favour of a flask.

Thus fortified, it was time for that greatest of our pastimes — skating outdoors in Canada in December.

Toronto has 54 outdoor rinks, including the frozen reflecting pool at Nathan Philips Square, an ice surface large enough for games of shinny in the middle while recreational skaters complete loops on the edge.

In Ottawa, temperatures frigid enough to rival those of Ulan Bator freeze waters solid for long winter months. The Rideau Canal Skateway stretches from the Parliament Buildings to Dows Lake, home to an outdoor art gallery. The 7.8-kilometre route offers warmup shacks with snacks and hot drinks along the way. Next month, the NHL’s all-star game festivities will include a nighttime skate along the canal by headlamp-wearing fans.

Not to be outdone, Winnipeg grooms even longer trails along the Red and Assiniboine rivers, dotting the landscape with warming huts. This season, the huts along “the world’s longest skating rink” have been designed by such architectural luminaries as Frank Gehry.

On southern Vancouver Island, the opportunities to indulge so simple a pleasure are few.

It takes ingenuity, science, and a company from Ontario to create what nature neglects to provide. It is easier to find ice in cocktails at Clive’s Classic Lounge than at an outdoor rink. As the sponsoring Downtown Victoria Business Association promises: “Outdoor ice skating on REAL ICE!” It is a commodity so rare in the capital as to deserve capital letters and an exclamation point.

Lacing on a pair of CCM Tacks 670 Pro 3 Lite hockey skates, I stepped onto freshly groomed ice, took five strides, turned left, two strides, turned left, five more strides, turned left, two strides, turned left. One circuit completed.

The seasonal treat of a temporary outdoor skating rink at Centennial Square next to City Hall is tempered a bit by an ice sheet not much bigger than a goalie’s crease.

Still, the sheet has attracted a steady crowd of skaters, including the likes of former Olympic figure skater Gary Beacom. On Friday afternoon, those at the rink admired Martin Newham and Andrea Boyes, who has appeared in such shows as Disney on Ice and Holiday on Ice, as they practiced a few moves. The skaters, with the Juan de Fuca skating club, won a silver medal in the adult nationals competition in April.

“It’s such a beautiful day,” Ms. Boyes said, “and it’s good, high quality ice.”

Looking out on the scene was Emir Ishmael, 51, a visitor from Mississauga, Ont. He had flown in to check out on the ice his company, Center Ice Home Arenas, had constructed in the square.

The weather was sunny, the temperature a warming 6-degrees C. A slight, cheerful man, he wore a toque on his head. He was not worried the above-freezing temperatures would turn his ice to slush. A giant refrigeration unit chills glycol in plastic pipes beneath the surface. The unit is strong enough to keep water frozen even when the outside temperature is as high as 17-degrees C.

“We don’t want to have the rink melting,” he said.

The sheet is 36-by-56 feet (about 11-by-17 metres) with a claimed capacity of 60, which one suspects would look like a crowd scene in one of those penguin movies.

Because the surface is so small, the resurfacing has to be done by hand, a scraper pushed along followed by a tool through which water pours onto the ice, made smooth by a trailing cloth. The hot water for the Victoria rink comes by a garden hose from the lobby bar at the nearby McPherson Playhouse.

Mr. Ishmael spends his winters erecting similar rinks in the backyards of well-to-do families in Greater Toronto.

Next year, he hopes the business association will go for a larger rink, perhaps one even circling the fountain in the centre of the square.

He takes pride in his craft.

“I try to make good ice so I can enjoy other people skating,” he said in a voice in which his native Trinidad can be heard.

He came to Canada 19 years ago, taking over his brother-in-law’s business seven years after that.

He makes good ice, an achievement for someone who does not know how to skate.
“I tried it a couple of times,” he said with a shrug.

The iceman cometh without blades. Like a teetotaler tending bar, he is more interested in the theory than the practice.

Homage for the tree that says Vancouver Island

A conservation worker checks out a Garry oak meadow overlooking the lighthouse at historic Fort Rodd Hill, outside Victoria. Chad Hipolito photograph for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
October 10, 2011

VICTORIA

O gnarly Garry oak, how majestic you stand.

In summer, you offer leafy shade beneath an umbrella canopy, your branches reaching out to offer protection from harsh sunshine.

Alas, the summer warmth is but a memory. The sun hangs lower in the sky. The oaks now prepare to go dormant. Every zephyr causes a cascade of debris. The oaks shed every leaf in a downpour that includes acorns and coarse woody debris. Some fallen branches are as thick as a man’s thigh.

It is advisable to wear a hardhat while raking the yard.

The detritus accumulates in a pile at curbside, a brown pyramid of dead leaves as crunchy as potato chips.

Halloween approaches and bared Garry oaks now look spooky with knobby limbs reaching out as though to grab the slowest of the trick-or-treaters.

Lone Garry oaks dot the local landscape — three are rooted in my yard — but one of the richest ecosystems in the land is also one of the most endangered. Other than two small stands in the Fraser Valley, the tree is found only on the southern Gulf Islands and on Vancouver Island.

Once common in these parts, Garry oak meadows now cover less than five per cent of their former territory.

Happily, a group of botanists, zoologists and vegetation ecologists are coming to the rescue. The Garry Oak Ecosystem Recovery Team, formed 12 years ago, has just released an online guide for preserving and restoring Garry oak meadows.

Conan Webb

One of the lead authors is Conan Webb, who chairs the team’s restoration and management recovery implementation group. By day, he works for Parks Canada as a species-at-risk recovery planner. (Those who are trying to preserve the Garry oak have titles as gothic as the trees.) Mr. Webb, 33, said the tree’s ecosystem is one of the most diverse to be found on the planet.

“It’s so different from the rest of the West Coast rainforest,” he noted.

Some 1,600 species of native plants and animals can be found in the Garry oak ecosystem. About 100 are threatened with extinction.

The meadows are under assault by encroaching land development, as well as by invasive species such as Scotch broom and English ivy. European starlings and eastern grey squirrels displace native birds and eat their eggs. Garry oaks were infested by winter moths in the 1980s, an invasion repulsed over time by the voracious appetites of predatory ground beetles. The moths were followed by the jumping gall wasp and the pesky, sap-sucking phylloxera.

Before the arrival of Europeans, oak meadows blanketed the islands, thriving in the protected rain shadow found behind the Olympic Mountains and the Vancouver Island Ranges. It is a pocket of Mediterranean-like weather.

The meadows are known for their brilliant wildflower displays in spring. The First Nations cultivated camas, whose bulbs are rich in carbohydrates. Early European settlers mistook distant fields of the brilliantly blue flower for lakes, a floral mirage. James Douglas, the first colonial governor, pronounced the land surrounding Victoria’s natural harbour to be “a perfect Eden.”

Much of what is now the city of Victoria was covered by Garry oak meadow. Today, one has to go to Beacon Hill Park, or the grounds of Government House to see a meadow in a natural state.

Elsewhere in the city, small patches of meadow are maintained, with volunteers supervising the well-being of the sites. Near my own house, two small city-owned plots of land, smaller than a residential lot, are home to Quercus garryana, a species named for Nicholas Garry, deputy-governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Fort Garry in Winnipeg is named after him, too, which is how far east you have to go in Western Canada to find another native species of oak.

Mr. Webb, who graduated from the University of Victoria with a biology degree, grew up in Port Hardy, outside the range of the ecosystem that now dominates his working life. As a boy, he played in the surrounding rainforest, building forts and playing hide and seek.

In Victoria, he reminds himself to make an effort to introduce his young son to natural wonders.

“In the city,” he said, “it’s so easy to get disconnected from nature.”

We live amid natural wonders, from the arbutus, whose bark peels like the aftermath of a bad sunburn, to the towering Douglas fir. No tree says Vancouver Island, or the Gulf Islands, quite like the Garry oak, for which we can all give thanks, even as we spend the holiday rake in hand.

Memorial trees
In 1917, as war raged overseas, 14 silver maple saplings were planted on the grounds of Victoria High School to commemorate the fallen. The school lost three teachers and 83 students in the Great War, later to be known as the First World War.

Those 94-year-old trees stood as silent sentinels along the Vining Street entrance until earlier this year when, to the dismay of many, they were cut down because of rot.

On Nov 10, the day before Remembrance Day, a row of 10 red maples will be planted in a ceremony at which the 5th Field Regiment Band will perform, as it did back in 1917.

Blue Shadows' slice of country-rock genius reissued

The Blue Shadows featured the chilling harmonies and brilliant songwriting of Billy Cowsill (far left) and Jeffrey Hatcher (second from right).

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
June 23, 2010

VICTORIA

At the end of a sweaty set, while packing up on stage, Jeffrey Hatcher plucked on his guitar the melody of an unfinished song.

“Don’t finish it on your own,” replied Billy Cowsill. “I want a piece of that puppy.”

When Mr. Hatcher arrived for the next night’s show, he told his bandmate he’d finished the tune. Mr. Cowsill, he remembers, “sagged almost completely onto the stage floor.” He was quickly told it was a joke.

The pair worked on the song, which came to be titled “If It Ain’t Rockin’.” It appeared on the debut album of The Blue Shadows. “On the Floor of Heaven” was hailed as a slice of country-rock genius on its release in 1993.

The recording earned praise for a quartet who described their own sound as “Hank (Williams) goes to the Cavern Club,” as though the honky-tonk master was sitting in with the Beatles in Liverpool. Others suggested Cowsill and Hatcher sounded like the Everly Brothers performing Creedence Clearwater Revival.

The album, released by a major label, received terrific reviews, but little airplay and few sales. The sound was said to be too rock for country radio and too country for rock radio.

The release eventually went out of print, though its reputation grew as time passed. The clever songwriting and the jangly guitars made it an alternative-country masterpiece.

Now, 17 years after its original release and four years after Mr. Cowsill’s death, Bumstead Records has re-issued the album with previously unheard outtakes and cover songs.

“I talked to him before he died, and he said he really wanted it to come out again,” Mr. Hatcher said. “He called it the thing he was proudest of in all his professional career.”

The collaboration of Cowsill and Hatcher is one of the more unlikely pairings in Canadian music. One was a hard-living former child star with a reputation for unpredictable behaviour, the other a hard-working songwriter with a reputation for craftsmanship.

Mr. Cowsill was the lead singer for the eponymous family band that was the inspiration for the television series “The Partridge Family.” The Cowsills had three Top 10 hits on the Billboard charts in their American homeland, hitting No. 1 in Canada in 1967 with “The Rain, The Park and Other Things.” Only the Beatles’ “Get Back” stopped “Hair” from also reaching the top of the charts here.

The Cowsills appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and other variety programs, their every haircut detailed by the likes of “16” and “Tiger Beat” magazines.

Billy left the band after a falling out with his father, launching an unsuccessful solo career. He wound up drinking a bar dry in Texas with his cronies before coming to Canada. For a time, he drove trucks over ice roads in the far north.

He eventually settled in Vancouver, where the cognoscenti sought out one of the most distinct voices in pop music.

By the time Hatcher caught up to him, Mr. Cowsill was fronting a combo whose schtick it was to perform requests. They called it the Dead Man’s Set. If someone shouted out the name of a living performer, he’d say, “Sorry, man we only do dead guys. As soon as he’s on the slab we’ll be all over him like a cheap suit.”

Born in Winnipeg, the son of a jazz trumpeter who became a denturist to support his young family, Mr. Hatcher earned critical praise and flirted with commercial success with such bands as The Six, The Fuse, and Jeffrey Hatcher and the Big Beat. His first two shows paired with Mr. Cowsill ended with the latter clubbing obnoxious drunks over the head with guitars.

The Blue Shadows formed in the early 1990s with Jay Johnson on drums and Elmer Spanier on bass, soon replaced by Barry Muir. Mr. Cowsill himself once described the band as “three vegetarians and a junkie.”

Chronic pain led to his becoming addicted to painkillers, leading to odd eating and sleeping schedules, as well as a certain unpredictability in behaviour.

This odd-couple songwriting duo, who looked the Grinch Who Stole Christmas paired with a choirboy, one straight as a razor the other known for indulgence, cooperated on crafting remarkable songs that can be seen as beginning a new chapter in Americana music.

“People often said we were opposites,” Mr. Hatcher said. “We actually had lots in common. On the outside, it seemed like Billy had a chaotic life and I seemed to be together. I think we had a similar sense of humour. He knew how to laugh at himself, which a lot of troubled people don’t have such an easy time with.”

Oddly enough, they shared an interest in science and psychology, an abhorrence of sports, and encyclopedic knowledge of Depression-era show biz.

“How many people have laughs over George Kaufman and Moss Hart? We were very different but found a lot in common.”

Those of us who had the good fortune to catch a live show of the Blue Shadows back in the day knew we were enjoying something special.

Another album followed, again trailblazing a new sound in country, but a mass audience did not evolve and the band broke up in 1996. Mr. Cowsill later moved to Calgary, where he performed with a group called the Co-Dependents. Suffering from emphysema, osteoporosis, and a hormonal imbalance, he died four years ago. The news of his passing reached his siblings as they gathered in Rhode Island for a memorial service to another brother, Barry, who was killed during Hurricane Katrina.

“When he was at his best he was a beautiful guy,” Mr. Hatcher said. “When he wasn’t at his best, it wasn’t personal necessarily. He just wasn’t doing very well.”

Mr. Hatcher later completed studies at colleges in the Lower Mainland, gaining a master’s degree from Simon Fraser University. He has returned to his hometown, where he is a music therapist who works with young people, some with brain injuries and others with fetal alcohol syndrome, at a former orphanage.

His audience is smaller than ever, but perhaps his music has never been more meaningful.