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What was supposed to be a quick drink and a picture of the pyramid turned into three drinks and another tour -- this time led by the woman from the bar. She said she knew of more sandbags, and maybe after we could have dinner at her place, watch her laserdisc of Chinatown.

The most impressive stop on the tour was off Benvoulin Road near Mission Creek. There, on the other side of a decorative cattle fence, stood a cairn of 24 sandbags (six layers of four). Most of the field was a burned-out yellow, except for a square area surrounding the cairn, which was emerald.

“Hard to imagine this grass as anything but healthy,” I said.

“Would you eat it?” the woman asked.

“If I was a cow, probably.”

I reached for my phone, to take its picture, but it was dead.

Like Heaven’s Gate (1980) and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) is a great film that, like certain wines, only gets better with age. For me it is not just the film’s layers and how its composition reorients them as such (allows them to operate diagonally, for example), but the force of one layer in particular -- water politics -- and how these politics are lost on the film’s protagonist, who is in love with someone whose life is complicated beyond his comprehension.

“Is that what you think Chinatown’s about?” the woman asked after I went on a jag about how the subtext of the film is more interesting than its love story.

“No,” I said, "it’s about a lot of things.”

“Well, if it’s about its relationship with itself, like you said, then that’s what it's about, right?”

Her pad thai was sitting poorly in my stomach. I told her she was right -- that I was right, too -- before driving back to Benvoulin to take a picture of those sandbags.

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The first sandbags I saw upon my return to Kelowna this June were in the Mission: a pyramid of a hundred or so piled high in the parking lot of my winter time watering hole, the Eldorado Hotel. With the threat of flood abated, and the parking lot a madhouse of minute-by-minute boat launches and landings, I asked the bartender why the hotel had not disposed of its sandbags.

“Infection,” he said scooting past. “They’re infected.”

“With what?” I asked.

“Poorly-built septic fields,” said the woman sitting next me.

The woman has a friend who works for the City. It was her friend who said that the initial notification sent out by staffers was a ruse, that those with sandbags on their property were told not to take them to the beach and empty them because the sand was not beach sand, when the real reason was that many of these bags were now “equal parts sand and fecal matter.”

“It’s God’s will!” I thought, in honour of an earlier declaration.

“There’s a lot of crap this City passes off as truth,” said the woman.

“It’s a conspiracy!” declared the bartender scooting back.

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Last summer, while residing at the UBCO campus, I accepted an invitation from a reader I sometimes correspond with to join her and her girlfriend on a driving tour. As with most Okanagan driving tours, wine is involved. But because this was billed as a “tour of my youth” -- “in honour,” she added, of a book I once wrote that functioned as a tour of Vancouver in the 1970s -- we visited spaces only teenagers know about.

One such space was atop the bluffs of the Upper Mission, where between stops at Summerhill Pyramid Winery and St. Hubertus I was shown a Quilchena Park quite different from the Quilchena Park of my youth, as well as a stretch of road affected by the Kelowna fire of 2003. Most curious about this stretch was a situation that featured two alternating phases of mansion housing, with many of these houses appearing in an “order” out-of-phase with the usual pattern of property development -- an order so random as to suggest an otherworldliness that some might associate with Surrealism.

“The most unsettling part of this fire,” the Reader began, “was not the incineration of my aunt’s house, but that the houses on either side of it were untouched.”

 It was then explained to me by the Reader’s girlfriend (a volunteer at a West Kootenay fire station) that the presence of wind and fire together allows for a condition where within seconds a canvas patio umbrella can be lifted from the ground, set ablaze and propelled through a dormer up to two miles away. (Another explanation might have it that these houses are spaced so far apart from each other -- on lots upwards of three times the size of those found in the city -- that the likelihood of one house setting fire to the one beside is almost nil.)

“It’s God’s will!” proclaimed the Reader as we pulled into St. Hubertus.

“Only if you believe in Her,” said her friend.

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During my twelve months living in and out of Kelowna I learned that the city has two exclusive residences: along the lake and in the hills overlooking it. As I began to explore my Mission district neighbourhood last September I found myself gravitating towards the lake. My first lakeside visit was to Boyce-Gyro Beach Park, a 100 metre stretch of sod and sand named after a man named Boyce and a service group founded in 1912 who chose the name Gyro International based on the gyroscope, which is said to “maintain a desired course and attitude regardless of outside influences.”

As an “outside influence” I found it difficult to “maintain a desired course” beyond the northern and southern edges of the park, given that those who owned lakefront properties did everything they could to complicate public access. Although I have experienced similar measures taken by property owners along Malibu Beach in Southern California, nothing compares to the prohibitive sculpture and text works installed by some of Kelowna’s lakefront owners, some of whom have gone to extraordinary lengths to keep the public at bay.

Because lakefront property owners are permitted to moor their boats outside their homes, the public is often confronted with boardwalks whose design is closer to the anti-tank devices of Normandy Beach than a path from sundeck to pier. As for signage, every third house has some variant of Please respect the privacy of those living along the lake hammered into its lawn. One sign read: PLEASE DON’T LOOK AT OUR PICTURE WINDOW (of course I did). Another sign was even more invasive: DON’T EVEN THINK OF LOOKING AT OUR HOUSE!!! At which point I turned back in disgust.

With such attitudes in place, it is no wonder that the lake responded. Last April saw an unprecedented rise in water levels, erasing that thin ribbon of public beach separating the lake from its catastrophe of private homes. Suddenly those boardwalk and signpost barricades were no match for a lake that was, quite literally, rising above the public/private binary. In an effort to protect themselves, many of these homeowners constructed sandbanks.

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My project for CRWR 520 focuses on collaboration both in form and in content. Originally my intention was to write on that necessarily collaborative form of sculpture known as sandbagging or, as Austen chimed-in during class, “sandbanks.” However, with the recent wildfires I am tempted to extend my project to include another collaborative action -- that social sculptural form known as the water brigade -- where people form a line and pass from one person to the next a bucket of water.

A version of the water brigade can be found in Robert Altman’s film McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971), the story of a self-centred entrepreneur who comes to a small mining town in search of opportunity only to find himself caring less about profits than protecting the town (known as Presbyterian Church) from corporate interests. This conversion, as it were, is played out at the conclusion of the film, when the entrepreneur’s confrontation of the corporation’s hired guns is juxtaposed with an attempt by townsfolk to extinguish a church fire.

Although the church fire was caused by human action (the hired guns), the rising water levels that flooded parts of the Okanagan Valley this spring were the result of natural causes (heavy snowfalls coupled with a sudden jump in temperature), events that drew attention to sandbaggers and sandbanks, but also to property relations.

A small room inside a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.

At a garage sale yesterday I found a full-length mirror. A couple blocks away at a Home Hardware I found the right kind of clips to attach it. I thought the mirror would look good on the back of my door.

Turns out the mirror looks excellent on the back of my door, but only when viewed from the side.

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