Last Sunday, I went to a picnic with about 150 of my fellow Galiano Islanders, ranging from babes-in-arms to wobblies like me. We were there to celebrate summer. We also celebrated the corn harvest by eating large quantities of fresh-shucked cobs and celebrated the apple and blackberry harvests in the form of artisanal pies - some of them prize-winners. We celebrated the zucchini harvest by challenging our children to transform the usual seasonal surplus into racing vehicles, propelled by pollution-free gravity. And we also celebrated a beginning - ground-breaking for the island's first purposedesigned library building. The picnic took place on the grounds of the Galiano Community School, which is a lot more than a school. Over the years, community needs have been met by adding an activity centre, a fitness centre and a community garden and greenhouse. The particular need met by the annual picnic was the need to sit down to a good lunch.
There were also contests. The first organized activity I saw when I arrived was a frenzy of children shucking their way through a pile of corn cobs, which were carried off to the kitchen as fast as they were stripped. This was the Great Corn Shucking Contest, in which everybody won. Every child received a prize, and the rest of us enjoyed the sweetest of fresh-cooked corn at the buffet tables.
Catering was by the Galiano Pot Luck Process. Notices for the picnic announced "The third annual Galiano Old Fashioned Pot Luck Picnic" and the process took care of the rest. People arrived carrying just the right things - salads, casseroles and frittatas; cookies, cakes and pies. Some of the pies were entered in the Great Pie Bake Off. I know three prizes were awarded because they were announced, but who got to eat the winners I don't know. I had heard of zucchini races but had never attended a contest. It turned out to be a huge amount of fun. Just looking at the preposterous vehicles that had been created out of zucchinis by the addition of skateboard parts, Lego people, wheels off old toys and, in one case, a stuffed platypus was a reassurance of the future creativity of the human race, as represented on Galiano. The contest involved sending the vehicles, three at a time, down a long wooden ramp onto a patch of asphalt. Umpires stood at the far end declaring which vehicle, or which part of which vehicle (many disintegrated on the way down) went the furthest. Scoring was complicated. I think there were three winners - one in the adult category, made from one of those stools with wheels used by arthritic gardeners; one in the modified category, which had the advantage of propulsion by water jet; and one in the creativity category featuring a yellow zucchini carved into the semblance of a school bus. It left a trail of little people behind it wherever it went. Next year - seatbelts mandatory.
Then there was the ground-breaking for the library building. Like most such ceremonies, this was in a large part symbolic because construction was already underway.
The official party stood among formwork awaiting the pouring of concrete. Speeches around the theme of "partnership" were made by representatives of the school board, the library society, the CRD, and a pupil at the school. An elder from the Penalakut Band was there to perform a traditional ceremony, using a small drum, a feather and soothing words to assure the Earth on which we are building that we mean no harm. Each member of the official party was then given a long-handled shovel that had been transformed by one of five Island artists into something rich and strange. They seized their shovels, admired them, then attacked a heap of dirt and flung it, shovelful by shovelful, into a hole. The ground was well and truly broken.
We were told that the artistic shovels will be preserved in the new library building when it is complete. Good. I'd like to take a closer look at them.
