Water water everywhere

Tofino’s water crisis last summer played out like a Britney Spears meltdown, with more than a whiff of schadenfreude as the country watched the poor little rich town that for years had lectured them on going green run out of the stuff that makes it so. But the story is more than one of a rural comeuppance. It’s a cautionary tale for the entire West Coast economy.

Having spent most of my adult life in Tofino, I know the town’s water problems are nothing new. When I ran for mayor back in 1992, the marquee issue was water. Or, to be precise: storage. And this is a problem that affects more than just water.

Consider the standard Tofino business model. First you hunker down all winter waiting for the four yards of rain to taper off. Come spring the bills roll in like breakers while vast sums of money hover on the horizon. You survive on plastic. By August, barring misfortune, the bills are finally paid, and you have a shot at turning a profit. But this late-summer bounty is so great that even a couple of good weeks can push you solidly into the black.

It was tales of such bounty, in the form of herring, that first lured me to Tofino. My father-in-law told of me of Japanese factory ships that hovered off the coast and hung giant numbers over their gunnels showing the price they paid per pound.

Herring-laden skiffs zigzagged between these behemoths as the bidding war raged. Some skippers made an extra 10 grand just going back and forth. Deckhands might rake in $50,000 in a six-week season. I thought, “It’s not just a job – it’s an adventure!”

So in 1983, I showed up in the Clayoquot. But the herring didn’t. With my best friend Al Anderson, I ended up working at the local pub, which was run by a crab fisherman named John Fraser. For adventure I began blockading loggers with the Friends of Clayoquot Sound.

The Friends had a master plan to replace logging dollars with tourist ones, figuring such bounty would last forever. My faith in the new economy was bolstered when I opened an art gallery above the Schooner Restaurant. All summer I set out buckets while it rained loonies. I couldn’t even keep track. One day I found $600 stuffed inside a book. Then October hit and the tourists vanished.

That winter I learned why the Nuu-Chah-Nulth have a single word for January and February: wiyaquam – “no food-getting for a long time.” Come wiyaquam I had to shut down my gallery and take a job in the fish plant with Jim Schwartz, who would talk all day about the

After that summer of bounty, I couldn’t believe I was broke. But the problem was storage. I had spent the season blowing cash instead of socking it away to weather wiyaquam.

This boom and bust is why Clayoquot’s original economy was based on the potlatch. Today that word conjures images of longhouses packed with button blankets, fish oil and carved bentwood boxes all going up in flames as part of some incomprehensible Kwakiutl ceremony.

In fact, that scene never happened. The potlatch was an early victim of bad press, the exaggerations of early traders and missionaries bent on replacing local custom with white sugar and the white God. What actually happened was that smallpox decimation left many hereditary positions open to dubious claims and, in the frenzy to establish these hegemonies, the potlatch became a hyperbolic caricature of itself.

But for millennia before contact, the potlatch was the economic model of choice because it worked. Salmon were once so plentiful here that the original fishery involved hanging a triangular cedar-bark net over the side of a dugout canoe so that the critters could jump right in. The problem was storage. A clan who fell into great bounty stood to lose much of it unless they divested quickly.

That’s where the potlatch comes in. You throw a huge party and invite other tribes from miles around. The guests are then obliged to throw an even bigger party, with you as beneficiary. Or, as the Old Guard in Tofino put it, “What goes around comes around.” Hence the disaster when the potlatch was outlawed in 1884. The bonds of obligation slackened like sails, and Nuu-Chah-Nulth culture lay becalmed for years, with nothing going around except the pox.

Despite European law, the new economy developed along potlatch lines. For three generations, Tofino’s economic dynamo was Wingen’s shipyard. Henry Nola, whose carved totems stand at the front of the new Wickaninnish Inn, told me that if he ran out of cash in the winter, Bobby Wingen would spot him whatever he needed. Come spring, he worked at the boat yard every waking hour because what goes around comes around.

Paper economies have no provision for this concept. By my day, Wingen had been shut down by a bank that demanded payments on a regular basis. But there was still a sense that the town pulled together when the bounty hit. For example, there was a hydrographic meter at the fire hall that measured the level in the water tower up on Barr Mountain. If the level dipped too low, Jim Schwartz, then the village foreman, simply went around at night and shut off everyone’s water. That wasn’t a problem because everyone knew everyone else. The problem was storage because all the rain fell in January and all the tourists came in August.

I remember that old meter because, when the Clayoquot blockades shut down for the winter, I got my adventure hit by joining the fire department. The chief, Jim McBride, was a cool customer. He never shouted at me, even when Kathy Lapeyrouse’s living room was bursting into flames around us or when my tree-hugging ways helped bring about a 1985 injunction on cutting Meares Island’s old-growth trees, which eventually shut down Clayoquot’s MacMillan Bloedel division and exiled McBride from the town he loved.

But certain things did worry him. He figured the 380,000-litre water tank up on Barr Mountain couldn’t keep up with the demands of the new tourist economy. One night, as we sat around the fire hall drinking the free Luckies the Schooner Restaurant provided by the flat, McBride said, “One August that tank’ll run dry, and we’ll have nothing to fight fires with. When that day comes, we can only hope that cooler heads prevail.”

To forestall that day, the town hired Motherwell Contracting from Victoria to build a million-gallon water tower at the top of Industrial Way. But Motherwell allegedly made a mistake during construction, and one afternoon the tank ruptured. Those million gallons gushed from the tower’s base, leaving a hole so big the burgeoning hippie population was able to crawl through it and set up shop with their bongos and banjos in the cavernous interior. The town sued Motherwell for $745,000, of which the lawyers took $720,000 in fees. Damn.

By the next election, a massive influx of hippies from the War in the Woods had the Old Guard up in arms. I ran for mayor on the basis that we should stop fighting each other and get to work on infrastructure, but I lost by five votes.

Two elections later, my friend Al Anderson became mayor and pitched a plan to build an aquifer out at the airport that would eventually tap into the billion gallons of fresh water in Kennedy Lake, enough for limitless expansion. The cost was estimated at $5 million, most of which the feds agreed to pay because the aquifer would also feed Esowista, the native reserve on Long Beach, and Ucluelet, our ugly stepsister to the south.

The Old Guard was skeptical about the aquifer. After the war, untold gallons of diesel had been buried in drums out there, so much that Ike Tybo ran a pipe into the cache and was selling the stuff to fishers for years, like some West Coast sheik. Wouldn’t the water table be contaminated?

Scientific tests showed the water was, in fact, top drawer. But by the time the town was ready to build, the Chinese economy had boomed and China was buying up all the scrap iron on the planet. The estimate for the miles of rebar needed at the aquifer doubled, which pushed the total over the limit Anderson could green-light without going to referendum.

The 2004 vote wasn’t even close: 269 against, 109 for. Anderson blames an unexpected alliance between the town’s pro-development and no-development factions. The greens wanted to bud-nip the endless growth Kennedy Lake water would make possible. The Old Guard wanted endless growth but, still smarting from the water-tower debacle, didn’t want another out-of-town contractor lining his pockets with their cash.

The next and present mayor, my old boss at the pub, John Fraser, had a new plan. Bulson Creek, out behind Meares Island, held water both pristine and plentiful. It also lay closer and higher than Kennedy, so, instead of expensive pumps, the system would run on gravity.

But there was no federal money for such a system because it would feed only the municipality, rather than the regional district. Fraser finally got a promise of help from the provincial government, but, by last spring, the town’s water infrastructure was still stuck where it had been 15 years ago.

Still, the crisis might never have happened were it not for the unusual weather. In Tofino we call the end of summer Soggy August because the heat boils the sea into a heavy mist, which condenses against the wall of trees on the south face of Meares and fills the reservoirs. Even the dew is bountiful here. But for the first time in living memory, there was no fog. That’s climate change for you.

Fraser began with the usual water warnings on May 1. Water use continued unabated. Mid-August, he ratcheted up the dialogue by going to stage two, then three, then four. Still no change. Tuesday before the long weekend, he went to stage five. Consumption spiked.

Why? Perhaps because Tofino attracts a certain type, like myself. I don’t like anyone telling me what to do. When I see a sign that says “Subvert the dominant paradigm,” I want to smash the sign.

And so the town administrator’s wife blithely watered her flower garden in plain sight of the populace, hippies gave their gardens a last soak before the crackdown and tourists enjoyed the ocean view from their soaker tubs and luxuriated in the six-headed showers at the Wickaninnish Inn. When public works foreman and deputy fire chief George Hubert checked the levels at 10 p.m. on Tuesday night, an extra 150,000 litres were gone. He called Fraser to say they were down to the line. If they had a fire, they might not be able to handle it, and the town would be liable. Fraser shut everything down.

And still, our global black eye might have been avoided were it not for the media itself. There’s a bitter debate in town over who caused what, but everyone agrees on one thing: the sudden influx of vans with satellite feeds didn’t help. The problem, again, was bounty – this time in the form of excess beauty. When people see that wall of uncut trees on Meares, their hearts explode. Tofino is like the prettiest girl at a party: everyone has a plan to get close.

A similar water shortage at French Creek a few months earlier went unreported, but, as soon as the Tofino story hit the wires, every wordsmith and VJ with a company credit card winged their way to the Left Coast. And as the town learned during the War in the Woods, when those Klieg lights click on, everyone’s shadow gets a little darker. Hence the ugly Hollywood ending where the villagers ringed city hall. All that was missing were the pitchforks.

Following the story from Victoria, where I now live, I watched with horror as everyone in town, from Fraser to the laconic Hubert was misrepresented. I knew something funny was going on when developer Chris LeFevre saved the day by plopping down $50,000 of his own money and trucking water in from Ucluelet, which was suddenly the belle of the eco-ball.

But just like the potlatch, that scene never happened. No pile of slightly worn bills was decanted; only 10 truckloads of water came down the highway; and Ucluelet couldn’t sell LeFevre water anyway because he’s an individual, and that’s illegal.

Also lost on the cutting-room floor was a less dramatic scene where local hoteliers established a self-imposed 60-per-cent occupancy rate, and a few went even further. Janine Wood, who runs the new-age Solwood Healing Arts Retreat and Spa on Chesterman Beach, cancelled all her reservations at a cost of $10,000 and enrolled in a flamenco dance class. Mare Dewer shut down the Schooner Restaurant because she’s part of the Old Guard and that’s how people would have done it back in the day. What goes around comes around. Sadly there’s nothing going around these days except the blame.

Last week I phoned town to find out how things looked for the summer. The new director of public works, Rob Melander, waxed lyrical about the 38-million-litre reservoir they’re about to build on Meares Island. Fraser took the uniquely cheerful position that the water crisis might even help tourism in the long run because now people won’t immediately associate Tofino with endless rain.

“This winter it rained non-stop. It was the first winter I felt discouraged. And now I’m worried it’s gonna stop, and… nothing.” Also, the Clayoquot Band office had just sent him a letter about clearing land for the new reservoir on Meares. Remember that 1985 injunction on cutting trees? Damn.

I almost laughed. Such small-town shenanigans do lend themselves to humour. But Tofino is the canary in the coal mine. Potlatch mentality, unsustainable levels of development, climate change, the Chinese economy, media hyperbole – these issues define almost every other business in B.C. these days. So instead of chuckling, we should be taking notes.