Sunday, September 11, 2016

Forest Walk



Yesterday afternoon I set out to explore the immediate area around my apartment. As mentioned in an earlier post, my apartment is located at Woodhaven, a 3.5 hectare nature conservancy that includes a "heritage house" administered by UBC Okanagan's Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, where I am an MFA Interdisciplinary Studies candidate.

My research at UBCO will include a project set at Woodhaven featuring the artists Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, whose work I have contributed to both as a writer and as an actor, and who live up the valley in a town so small that to name it would be like shining a flashlight in their bedroom window. The purpose of yesterday's walk was towards such a project.

At the bottom of the stairs that lead to and from my apartment is a deer-proof garden. If one did not know there are deer here, and that they eat gardens, one might think of it as a caged garden. Beyond that are a variety of evergreen and deciduous trees, a run-off stream that I am told will "turn on" this spring, and a larger stream that, like the narcissistic actor, is always on.


From there heading south-east is a structure halfway between a shelter (for firewood) and a shack. I was intrigued by the structure and spent quite a bit of time with it. After that, some underbrush, and then a fence between me and a soft green pasture where there stood four of the most magnificent horses -- two adults and two foals. The horses belong to a pair of horse breeders who, I was told, do not want their horses touched, fed, or even looked at. Judging from the looks these horses gave me, it appears they are in agreement.

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