Commentary
Lonesome Lake fire: Putting the emotion back into it. Pat Burkette talks to Trudy Turner
Posted at Wednesday, August 04, 2004 - 09:57 AM, by: Jim Scott
The Lonesome Lake fire is still burning having so-far consumed about 200 square kilometres of forest, and is now threatening homes and cabins at Charlotte Lake, near the southern end of Tweedsmuir Park. Pat Burkette, a Salt Spring Island writer, sees the larger issues in the small as her work consistently proves. She is dismayed and felt moved to learn more. Here is the note that accompanies her story.

Below you'll find a story I've written about the loss of Fogswamp in the Lonesome Lake fire. I was interested in what happened, perhaps dismayed by would be a better phrase and got Trudy Turner's number and gave her a call. Perhaps the moment is passed for this story, but I thought maybe you might like it for your site--just wrote it because I wanted to--so if if passes muster, and you want it, go for it.

The moment is not passed. It remains, in our opinion, we should be choking on more than the smoke spreading southward above our province. The condition accompanying this fire offers an essential concomitant--the sum of all factors in our present social situation. The handling of the Lonesome Lake fire is a damning indictment of the fundamental lack of caring within the inner circle of the Campbell coalition and within their ideological ilk worldwide. That is one reason we think this regional circumstance has become an international story.

Pat is not a polemicist. She is a skilled writer who lets the story tell itself. Thanks, Pat, for adding an important dimension to a story that has consumed more than forests, animals, homesteads, and ideas of how we live in this world. Click on full story for Pat's submission.
Fogswamp - a story

By Pat Burkette

Once, in the forested kingdom that is known as British Columbia, there was a place called Fogswamp. A woman lived there, not a princess, although she was skilled with swans. No, this was one real live Canadian woman, who could build a log house, ride a horse, and fly a plane.

Now, Fogswamp is no more. But the woman, whose name is Trudy Turner, is still alive and kicking. Fogswamp was vapourized in the flames of the Lonesome Lake fire, along with The Birches, the Ralph Edwards Lonesome Lake homestead. In the nineteen thirties, Edwards brought the plight of the trumpeter swans, nearing extinction, to public attention. Edwards suggested that since many swans starved to death in harsh winters when their feeding areas stayed frozen, feeding the swans might make the difference to their survival. In 1932/33, The Canadian Wildlife Service appointed Edwards Migratory Bird Warden , with the task of feeding and protecting the flock of trumpeter swans which had wintered at Stillwater and the mudflats of Big Lagoon, Lonesome Lake for as long as people could remember.

Trudy Turner is Ralph Edwards' daughter. She became keeper of the trumpeter swans, carrying on her father's work. Fogswamp was the farm she built up in the wilderness, about a mile and a half away by trail from The Birches, with her husband Jack, and later, her daughter Susan. Trudy built her own log cabin on the property when she pre-empted it in 1951. She completed a second log home following her marriage to Jack in 1957. Trudy wrote a book in 1977 about her experiences, co-authored by Ruth McVeigh, called Fogswamp, Living with Swans in the Wilderness, which is out of print. Fogswamp might sound like a strange name for a farm, but it has nothing to do with the place being foggy or swampy. When Trudy was felling trees, her first dog got caught under an alder and died instantly. In memory of the dog, she named the farm with the dreariest name she could think of at the time, and never changed it.

Nowadays, Trudy Turner lives near Hagensborg, outside Bella Coola. But she went back to Lonesome Lake a week ago, flown in by helicopter, along with her brother John Edwards, who'd continued to live at The Birches, to see what was left of both homesteads. "There's nothing left, not even a charred bit of log left," she said over the phone, her voice strong. And angry.

The smoke was thick as brother and sister tried to view their properties. "What I saw, was a wall of fog, a wall of smoke in front of me. We had to creep along from fir branch to fir branch. You could make out the white line the water leaves along the shore," said Turner. "It needn't have happened," she maintains.

She says that when the fire started on June 21st, the argument that the terrain was too steep for firefighters didn't apply. "It started on relatively flat land. It started on the ridge between Turner Lake and Lonesome Lake. There was no danger when it started. The problem is they didn't want to fight it. They fiddled while Rome burned."

She added emphatically "I hate waste. I hate anything being destroyed. I've had sixty years of living in that valley- that's my home." Turner questions the decision to not fight the fire, reasoning that what was to come was obvious. "That early in the summer, with that magnitude of fuel available and all the heat left to come? It's going to take a thousand years to grow that forest again." Turner says action against the fire was too little too late. "They put retardant on it finally, after it had been burning for a month and a week."

"I've been shocked by the devastation and the lack of caring." Turner is quick to add she doesn't mean caring by the people of the community who have poured out their sympathy to her and her brother. She means the powers that be in government.

What will her brother John do now that his home is gone? "I don't think he knows," says Turner. " All his animals and his tools are gone. He's got 160 acres at Stillwater- he's got that place, but its' right under the fire. Right now, he's in shock. It's just my opinion, but as long as you're in shock, you can cope. He seems quite optimistic to see if he can attract some more furry creatures somewhere."

Trudy sold Fogswamp to the province in 1989, when she and husband Jack were going their separate ways and Trudy was sixty and feeling that if she had to rebuild somewhere, she better do it while she was still able. The trumpeter swans have moved to more coastal areas, like Comox and, they no longer come to Lonesome Lake, where they haven't been winter fed since 1989. Turner says it took from the early thirties to the bottom of the nineteen-fifties to recover any numbers, but even then a group of 30 swans only increased to 45.

Her book tells many stories about her take-over of feeding duties from her father, sometimes in minus thirty degree F temperatures when ice had to be repeatedly broken to keep holes of open water available for the swans to feed. Husband Jack and daughter Susan were a big part of the swan-feeding team. But Turner cautions that the book provides the facts and statistics, but only tells part of the tale. "My book has been castrated. They took my emotions out of it."

She tries to explain those emotions, the family's closeness to nature and animals, recently illustrated by the pictures of John and his fox on tv, during coveage of the Lonesome Lake fire, a closeness that is just part of them, but perhaps unfathomable to city slickers. " City people don't consider a cow a sensitive creature, but cows are quite intelligent," says Turner. If you think about looking out your window and seeing huge, beautiful, white , long-necked birds flying in to where you'll soon be standing on a frozen lake instead of cars and trucks and people, maybe you'll understand how Turner's life has been different than yours.

That life has been led near water, first beside Lonesome Lake and now by the Saloompt River outside Hagensborg. She's been flooded out a couple of times in-between when she tried to build a home on low lying areas. When I say it seems both sad and odd that such a water person has been hit so hard by fire, Trudy says "It must be something about me." Fire has hit the Edwards family before.

"Six months after I was born, the house burned. John was about three years old and he was sick. He wanted to watch our mother work while he was lying down, so she pulled a curtain back from his sleeping area, and then went down to the cellar to get something. When she came back, the room was on fire, the curtain must have touched a lamp. She got us out of there. She crossed the creek with us. This was in November, and the fire didn't go anywhere. All our food was gone. All we had for a house was an eight- by- ten trapper's cabin that was there when Daddy got his pre-emption. We got through the winter."

Trudy still lives close to nature. She has to use a cane, and she packs in her water in buckets. She has a cow, a calf, a horse and an aged dog. She built her current 4800 sq. ft. home herself from logs.

And Trudy quickly demonstrates that the pioneering spirit of the Edwards family, that intangible tough stuff that kept them going in the wilderness, didn't go up in flames along with The Birches and Fogswamp. She says the Lonesome Lake fire has been a wake-up call.

She's looking at pushing nature back a bit around her place. with an eye to fire safety. She's removed all the coniferous trees from near the house. "It was demonstrated on John's trail (into The Birches), where grass grew," she says, "Most of that trail stayed green, yet the fire took away all the fields of dead grass and brush around the place. If you maintain green grass, you might stop your fire."