Brian Scott, Sherman Barker & Isabella LePlante: the Cortez island experience

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Around 40 people turned out to the Cortes Island Museum on November 10 for the launch of a series of community speakers. The host, Brian Scott traced the idea for ‘Finding Home: The Cortes Island Experience’  to a conversation he had with Sherman Barker. 

“Sherman and I have known each other for a few years, it's long other story, but he was up on Easter Bluff one day when Jane and I went up for a hike.  We're chatting, and he started telling us his arrival story. It actually goes even further back to when he came as a kid.  He said, there's lots of stories on the island here and if we don't somehow capture them, we're going to lose them.” 

“I thought it would be an interesting thing for the museum to do because the museum has artifacts that it's saving and preserving and sharing with the public. Stories are artifacts as well. How do we capture those? Then it occurred to me, well, why don't we do a speaker series? I approached Sherman and said, ‘Hey, what do you think? You want to be the first?’ And he's like, 'yep, It's awesome.'”  

“So essentially it's: how did you discover the island? What made you decide this is going to be my home? And what keeps you here?” 

Sherman described his interest in the project:

“In my mind, I pictured a book with a leather cover, front and back, maybe made from one of the goats you tanned. It has parchment pages, like you may have discovered it in a hobbit library. It could be in our library. When people come here in the summer, or people who have been here a long time, they can write down why they came to Cortes and the things that happened when they came here. Everybody's got funny stories, sad stories, like what was your first ferry ride like? What was the reason you came to Cortes? It could be really cool book just to keep the past, present, and future all intertwined."

"The first time that I  came here I just finished grade 6 in a little town up in the north Shuswap called Celista, which I think is pretty much burnt to the ground right now.  My dad was a teacher  and he had an elementary school that he was transforming into an outdoor educational school without the school board knowing about it.  I'm going back into the seventies, and public school.  He wanted to come to Strathcona Lodge, to take an edible plant and wilderness survival course so he could go back and teach his kids at the school. We packed up our old truck in the Shuswap and to the coast we came. We camped in the truck at Stanley Park. We ended up on Cortes because he was friends with the writer here, Gilean Douglas, and he wanted me to meet Gilean Douglas. We came to Cortes from Quadra. We camped at Rebecca Spit, because you could camp at the Spit at that time. I caught my first salmon there. We came across, and camped at the Gorge. And at that time, I think the Gorge would have been in the hands of  Tammy Allwork's parents. It was just a big field. No hot tub, you could go outside, dig a hole, and have a fire. It's summer. I remember picking up some apples, they’re kind of started but not fully ripe, and walking out to an apple tree.  A black tailed deer looked at me and I looked at the deer and it walked up and ate the apple out of my hand. That's a pretty impressionable thing at 12 because where I grew up, white tailed deer do not walk up to you and eat apples out of your hands for a good reason, right?  That was my first sort of emphatic whoa!”