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Beckoned By The Sea: Women at Work on the Cascadia Coast
Beckoned By The Sea: Women at Work on the Cascadia Coast by Sylvia Taylor (Heritage House $19.95)
Aside from saltwater Women at Work (D&M, 1995) by Vickie Jensen, which is no longer in print, there has not been an overview on women of Cascadia (Pacific Northwest coast) with maritime-related occupations. Sylvia Taylor’s anthology about twenty-four strong women fills the gap.
After an elegant foreword from poet Renee Sarojini Saklikar introducing the profiles to come, Beckoned by The Sea: Women at Work on the Cascadia Coast begins with The Harvesters, those women who work hard to provide life-sustaining food.
We meet Captain Laura Rasmussen of Polaris with whom I’ve traded for prawns while I was working as a lightkeeper at Nootka Lightstation, as well as intrepid kelp harvester Rae Hopkins from Bamfield and Comox-based Roberta Stevenson, a shellfish cultivator and executive director of the BC Shellfish Growers’ Association. Plus there is much to learn from Newport, Oregon restaurateur (Local Ocean), conservationist and fair food pricing activist, Laura Anderson.
For young people contemplating marine careers, this book also offers invaluable insights from trailblazing women like Connie Buhl who was the first American woman to earn her chief engineer’s license along with three individual licenses: unlimited chief engineer of steam, motor and gas turbine vessels. Buhl, like Portuguese-born tugboat captain Bela Love and Canadian Coast Guard Captain Rhona Lettau, went for the challenges, adventures and good pay that these traditionally male occupations provide.
In The Travellers category, Gibsons-based Gillie Hutchinson, a veteran sailing instructor with her own company, LadySail, says, “Sailors are kind of a different breed. We’re calmer. We don’t get so uptight… Problems and overcoming them: it just creates this different mindset. Sailing has helped me do that.
“You’re not in control. It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to be. You just have to be safe and be at one with the environment, not fighting it. Not be in control of it.
“And when I come ashore I find I’m just in this zoned-out place where I’m just super-calm. And everybody around me is all twittered up and on their iPhones and doing and rushing.”
In The Creators section, readers encounter the life paths taken by Port Townsend boat builder and shipwright Diana Talley, Vancouver’s Vickie Jensen, a writer and photographer, Qualicum Beach painter Peggy Burkosky, and—in a fascinating niche occupation not found on Canada Employment Centre help wanted lists alongside machinists—a professional mermaid, Lori Pappajohn.
I must now get my hands on a mono-fin to swim like a mermaid—a harp, evidently, is required equipment.
The History Keepers include Vi Mundy, distinguished Ucluelet First Nations councillor, band manager, language and economic development researcher, and treaty negotiator. Japanese-Canadian elder Mary Kimoto of Ucluelet leads a group preserving the history of their fishing heritage, including the disruption of forcible internment and the seizing (aka theft) of their homes and fishboats during World War Two on the west coast. Her account of working in canneries as a teenager is one of the highlights of the book.
Descended from Aleut and Russian seafarers, Vonnie Fry exemplifies those who must wait on shore, raising kids as a single parent while the fishing fleet is out for weeks and months at a time in the high-risk waters off Alaska. Kyuquot’s Nicalena Chidley spent her childhood and youth as the daughter of long-serving lighthouse keepers, Ed and Pat Kidder. Her recollections hark back to an era less dominated by urban bureaucracy, when lighthouse keepers delivered jerry cans of gas to nearby boaters who had run out of it and when keepers had a fully-functioning station boat on site in order to rescue people in trouble. Her parents’ legacy, like her grandparents before them, of keeping a watch on the waters has been passed on to Chidley’s children who head out in a boat upon hearing distress calls.
The Teachers category will attract those who are profoundly smitten by a seal’s eyes or a whale’s gaze at an early age. Sidney-based Lela Sankeralli and Adria Johnstone are naturalists and educators and in Johnstone’s case, a marine mammal trainer at the Vancouver Aquarium. Sonia Frojen is a longboat paddling instructor and school program co-ordinator in Port Townsend, Washington, and Tsimka Martin is a First Nations paddle tour guide based in Tofino.
The book comes full circle to end with The Protectors, a formidable quartet of gifted women who work with diverse groups to better their communities. They are respectful, patient and visionary in their roles as educated analysts, admired as superb communicators.
Profiled here are Katie Beach, marine and river biologist on the Fraser River, and Tofino’s current mayor, Josie Osborne, also a marine biologist with an extensive background as liaison between the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
Portland, Oregon’s trailblazing Megan Mackey found her calling at Ecotrust and works with policies for the fishing fleets of all Cascadia to protect the ocean and sustain livelihoods.
Similar work is carried out by Leesa Cobb executive director of the Port Orford Ocean Resource Team. The last words are hers:
“Could we extract something different from the ocean that is very high value and could support the community? I believe we should think about the ocean as something to protect and something we use, and get the best of all worlds from it.”
978-1-77203-179-9
Caroline Woodward’s book, Light Years: Memoir of a Modern Lighthouse Keeper was nominated for the Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Award in 2016.
Aside from saltwater Women at Work (D&M, 1995) by Vickie Jensen, which is no longer in print, there has not been an overview on women of Cascadia (Pacific Northwest coast) with maritime-related occupations. Sylvia Taylor’s anthology about twenty-four strong women fills the gap.
After an elegant foreword from poet Renee Sarojini Saklikar introducing the profiles to come, Beckoned by The Sea: Women at Work on the Cascadia Coast begins with The Harvesters, those women who work hard to provide life-sustaining food.
We meet Captain Laura Rasmussen of Polaris with whom I’ve traded for prawns while I was working as a lightkeeper at Nootka Lightstation, as well as intrepid kelp harvester Rae Hopkins from Bamfield and Comox-based Roberta Stevenson, a shellfish cultivator and executive director of the BC Shellfish Growers’ Association. Plus there is much to learn from Newport, Oregon restaurateur (Local Ocean), conservationist and fair food pricing activist, Laura Anderson.
For young people contemplating marine careers, this book also offers invaluable insights from trailblazing women like Connie Buhl who was the first American woman to earn her chief engineer’s license along with three individual licenses: unlimited chief engineer of steam, motor and gas turbine vessels. Buhl, like Portuguese-born tugboat captain Bela Love and Canadian Coast Guard Captain Rhona Lettau, went for the challenges, adventures and good pay that these traditionally male occupations provide.
In The Travellers category, Gibsons-based Gillie Hutchinson, a veteran sailing instructor with her own company, LadySail, says, “Sailors are kind of a different breed. We’re calmer. We don’t get so uptight… Problems and overcoming them: it just creates this different mindset. Sailing has helped me do that.
“You’re not in control. It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to be. You just have to be safe and be at one with the environment, not fighting it. Not be in control of it.
“And when I come ashore I find I’m just in this zoned-out place where I’m just super-calm. And everybody around me is all twittered up and on their iPhones and doing and rushing.”
In The Creators section, readers encounter the life paths taken by Port Townsend boat builder and shipwright Diana Talley, Vancouver’s Vickie Jensen, a writer and photographer, Qualicum Beach painter Peggy Burkosky, and—in a fascinating niche occupation not found on Canada Employment Centre help wanted lists alongside machinists—a professional mermaid, Lori Pappajohn.
I must now get my hands on a mono-fin to swim like a mermaid—a harp, evidently, is required equipment.
The History Keepers include Vi Mundy, distinguished Ucluelet First Nations councillor, band manager, language and economic development researcher, and treaty negotiator. Japanese-Canadian elder Mary Kimoto of Ucluelet leads a group preserving the history of their fishing heritage, including the disruption of forcible internment and the seizing (aka theft) of their homes and fishboats during World War Two on the west coast. Her account of working in canneries as a teenager is one of the highlights of the book.
Descended from Aleut and Russian seafarers, Vonnie Fry exemplifies those who must wait on shore, raising kids as a single parent while the fishing fleet is out for weeks and months at a time in the high-risk waters off Alaska. Kyuquot’s Nicalena Chidley spent her childhood and youth as the daughter of long-serving lighthouse keepers, Ed and Pat Kidder. Her recollections hark back to an era less dominated by urban bureaucracy, when lighthouse keepers delivered jerry cans of gas to nearby boaters who had run out of it and when keepers had a fully-functioning station boat on site in order to rescue people in trouble. Her parents’ legacy, like her grandparents before them, of keeping a watch on the waters has been passed on to Chidley’s children who head out in a boat upon hearing distress calls.
The Teachers category will attract those who are profoundly smitten by a seal’s eyes or a whale’s gaze at an early age. Sidney-based Lela Sankeralli and Adria Johnstone are naturalists and educators and in Johnstone’s case, a marine mammal trainer at the Vancouver Aquarium. Sonia Frojen is a longboat paddling instructor and school program co-ordinator in Port Townsend, Washington, and Tsimka Martin is a First Nations paddle tour guide based in Tofino.
The book comes full circle to end with The Protectors, a formidable quartet of gifted women who work with diverse groups to better their communities. They are respectful, patient and visionary in their roles as educated analysts, admired as superb communicators.
Profiled here are Katie Beach, marine and river biologist on the Fraser River, and Tofino’s current mayor, Josie Osborne, also a marine biologist with an extensive background as liaison between the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
Portland, Oregon’s trailblazing Megan Mackey found her calling at Ecotrust and works with policies for the fishing fleets of all Cascadia to protect the ocean and sustain livelihoods.
Similar work is carried out by Leesa Cobb executive director of the Port Orford Ocean Resource Team. The last words are hers:
“Could we extract something different from the ocean that is very high value and could support the community? I believe we should think about the ocean as something to protect and something we use, and get the best of all worlds from it.”
978-1-77203-179-9
Caroline Woodward’s book, Light Years: Memoir of a Modern Lighthouse Keeper was nominated for the Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Award in 2016.
Submitted on August 28, 2017 in By David.
