THE CHANGING TIDE
It was relatively early in the “social distancing” realities of the Covid19 pandemic scare of 2020 when Joy and I and our friends Richard and Pat Watt took a drive and a hike into the Skookumchuk Rapids. Exercising very strictly the prescribed distancing, we picked the perfect sunny day, hiked in to the point overlooking the fabled pinch point of these famous rapids, and we enjoyed our lunches away from all the heavy burdens of the news of the day. We got there just at mid tide, not when the huge standing waves are a manifest of the volumes of water squeezing through the tight, restricted area that is Skookumchuk Rapids.
I’ve been in to this point many times over the past 35 years, and I’ve paddled through the rapids area at least 5 times, always of course at slack tide; the short amount of time between an incoming and outgoing tide. Never have I found a painting. And for all I knew, today would be the same. I took several photographs, not ever expecting a painting to come out of it.
We made our way home that day, in separate vehicles, and I continued to search for a painting I knew was calling to me. I went through photographs of the past 20 years, I drove to beaches, walked the sea wall, alone. I could hear my painting calling, but I just couldn’t find it.
It was a day or two later that I looked at the photographs I’d taken from the point at Skookumchuk. The image that had been calling to me was right there. It hit me with an undeniable force. It wasn’t so much the image as it was the story that I knew would be a part of it.
Unwittingly, as we’d sat purposely diverting our attentions from the issues of the day, I’d taken the photograph just as the tide had begun to change. A few currents and swirls were just becoming visible. I’d not even noticed it at the time. This painting, that I’d found while escaping the oppression of a pandemic, had some sort of significance to our present situation. Surely, we are all experiencing “The Changing Tide” as we endure our lonely cloister, in an attempt to avoid this apparently deadly virus. The “tides” of our lives, indeed of society as we know it, have begun to change forever. None of us living through these trying times will ever be quite the same when the doors of personal freedom open again. What was normal yesterday, may never return to us in quite the same way. Just like the waters at Skookumchuk Narrows, we’re finding ourselves being pushed however reluctantly into the unknown, swirling waters of “The Changing Tide”.
