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November/December 2003 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Arctic Grizzlies In-depth: Arctic Grizzlies The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations À la carte Mosaic

View from the vineyard
I plucked a succulent peach one morning from a tree outside the door of the house I was staying in this summer in Naramata, B.C., and sliced it up for breakfast. I remember marvelling at its tender ripeness and at how rested I felt. The moon was full that week in mid-August, and I was sleeping under the stars on a second-storey deck. By day, it delivered a panoramic view of orderly rows of vineyards and orchards marching down dun-coloured hillsides to the banks of Okanagan Lake.

The low-lying lake and its surrounding valley lie in the rain shadow of the Coast and Cascade mountains, which give it the hottest and driest climate in British Columbia. It is a popular myth that the Okanagan is Canada’s only true desert. But deserts don’t generally feature 128-kilometre-long lakes. The climate — and the wizardry of irrigation — has blanketed the valley with fruit growers. And the award-winning wines produced there have long refuted the Okanagan’s former reputation as the home of plonk. A group of relatives and I had rented the house for a vacation. Early in the week, we watched relays of water bombers pick clear spots among the sailboats, motorboats and kayakers to skim the surface of the lake, fill their bellies and streak off over the hills. The B.C. interior was ablaze. Back at the magazine, we had just ushered to press a cover story on Canada’s elite forest firefighters before I slipped away on holiday, and so all week, I was cornering various family members to bore them with a confident recital of the skills of our daring blaze busters.

On our last morning, I awoke just after six and saw a pillar of smoke rising from a stand of ponderosa pines about 20 kilometres down the lake. It looked close enough to the water that with a pump dropped on the shore, firefighters might run a hose right up the hillside and soak it down at leisure. As I stood there on the deck watching, a helicopter, with water bucket dangling, rose from Penticton and beelined down the lake to the rising smoke. They’ll make short work of it, I thought, as my daughter and I packed our bags for the drive back to Vancouver and the flight home to Ontario.

That column of smoke exploded, of course, into the ferocious wildfire which raced into the outskirts of Kelowna, causing the evacuation of more than 30,000 people and consuming 238 houses. Having lived through a devastating fire in our own house and neighbourhood in Ottawa two years ago, I know what it feels like to step gingerly through a part of your life that has been burned to blackened ruins. News stories on television and radio and in the newspapers featured many good Samaritans in Kelowna and other communities across the province who opened their doors to those in distress. I can say, too, that the disaster on our street brought out the very best in all our neighbours. Once the shock wore off, we realized no one had been injured and counted that as the first of our blessings. So to all of those who suffered losses throughout British Columbia, hang on to those memories of the friends, neighbours and fellow Canadians who offered a helping hand. Fire, we eventually discovered, is about renewal.

— Rick Boychuk

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