This story first appeared in the Tri-City News on Nov. 28, 2018
As the city of Port Moody works to create a strategy to manage beavers that take up residence in its waterways, a group of advocates for the industrious rodents is helping make one furry family feel right at home.
Volunteers from The Fur-Bearers along with local supporters like Jim Atkinson and his partner, Judy Taylor-Atkinson, were immersed in Suter Brook Creek last Friday, installing a device that regulates the level of water in the pond that has been created by a family of beavers between city hall and the public works yard.
The beavers moved there after they were displaced from their previous home in nearby Pigeon Creek when an attempt by the city to evict them from a drainage pipe went awry and a young kit was drowned.
Taylor-Atkinson said the flow device will drain water from the pond — formed when the beavers built a dam — to ease flooding while still maintaining a level high enough for the animals to feel safe.
The device consists of a 40-foot length of double-wall, 12-inch culvert pipe with holes drilled into it so it can be sunk to the bottom of the pond. One end of the pipe is protected by a galvanized steel cage so the beavers can’t get in while the other end is inserted through the dam.
Taylor-Atkinson explained the effect is like punching a hole through the dam but the beavers can’t rebuild the structure or plug the pipe. She said after some initial curiosity, they will get used to the pipe and carry on with their lives.
“They need to have the water at a certain level to protect their home and family,” she said. “They’ll do whatever they have to do.”
The device was installed with the city’s blessing and several employees, including city manager Tim Savoie, stopped by to observe the work.
“This is a big step in the city’s beaver management plan,” Taylor-Atkinson said, adding she hopes interpretive signage can be installed to explain to visitors walking along the path that runs along the creek about what is happening. “I think the beavers will be fine.”
This story first appeared in the Tri-City News on June 7, 2019
A 35 year-old memory still makes the hairs on Brad Robinson’s arm stand up.
So the former Coquitlam Little League baseball player and current coach expects there will be plenty of chills when he and his teammates from the 1984 team that won a Canadian championship and went on to play in the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Penn., are honoured June 15 with a plaque installed at their home ballpark, Mackin Yard.
The passage of time hasn’t diminished the excitement a 12-year-old Robinson felt when the team’s bus pulled up to the famed stadium in Williamsport, aglow with lights in the August night. Or when they received telegrams of encouragement from hockey stars Wayne Gretzky. and Paul Coffey.
“O my god,” he said. “This is unbelievable.”
A teammate, Chad Hanson, said the experience of playing in the world famous tournament that, even back then, was broadcast live on network television, was “the closest I got to playing pro sports.”
In fact, Hanson’s experience even included an interview by one of television’s most famous broadcasters, the late Howard Cosell.
Although the reason he suspects he was singled out for Cosell’s ABC microphone may not have been so illustrious.
Hanson said he caused a bit of a stir in his team’s first game of the tournament, against Belgium, when he fell for the ol’ hidden ball trick in which a baseman feigns throwing the ball back to the pitcher, then secrets it into his glove and waits for the runner to step off the bag so he can be tagged out.
Hanson said, despite his embarrassing gaffe, that magical summer, in which the team from Coquitlam first bested powerhouse teams from Whalley Little League and Windsor, Ont., to win the Canadian championship in Moose Jaw, Sask., then went on to finish fourth in Williamsport, still resonates.
“It gave you confidence to meet new people through sports,” he said.
CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
A team photo of the Coquitlam A’s team that represented Canada at the 1984 Little League World Series in Williamsport, Penn. They are: Front (l-r) Scott Leroux, Ryan Seminoff, Jason Lapierre, Chad Hanson, Brad Purdie, Glenn Wright and Greg mein. Back, Sandy Purdie (coach), Jason Hartshorne, Carl Sheehan, Chad Boyko, John Pollock, Bob McDonald, Brad Robinson, Greg Heximer and Lionel Bilodeau (manager).
A lot of those early connections were forged in barracks where all the kids from the eight teams were bunked through the course of the five-day event, eating their meals together, hanging out and playing between games.
“We were just kids,” Robinson said. “We were lucky enough to win some games and get there.”
While the team’s induction into Coquitlam’s Sports Hall of Fame in 2013 exposed their story to a new generation, Robinson said he tries to inform his approach to coaching his own Little League team with the lessons learned by his 12-year-old self.
“I definitely think it’s given me the experience to share with kids what can happen if you put the work in,” he said. “It just transfers over.”
Hanson said seeing how that team brought so many families together, including his dad who paraded around in a chicken suit as the team’s unofficial mascot, instilled in him a lifelong desire to share and give back through sport, which he still does as equipment manager for the Coquitlam Jr. Adanacs lacrosse team.
“It taught me to be the man I am today,” he said.
Though several players from the 1984 team have moved away, or will be unavailable to attend Saturday’s festivities, Robinson said most stay in contact, checking in through email or the occasional get-together. Their bond will endure, he said, especially as the 1984 team has so far been the only team from Coquitlam to ever get to Williamsport.
A few months into my career, I got a call from the editor of the Burlington Post, where I was pulling weekend photo and relief reporting shifts.
“You wanna go up in a plane?” he asked. “It’s the best assignment of the year.”
The annual Hamilton Air Show was a couple of weeks away and the Canadian Warplane Heritage Foundation was offering a seat in one of its vintage WWII Harvard training aircraft to get photos of some of its other historic planes flying in formation to promote the upcoming event.
When I checked in at the Mount Hope airport, I was escorted to a hanger and introduced to my pilot, who showed me how to strap on my parachute in case anything went wrong and we had to bail out.
He also told me what to expect during our flight, how to communicate my needs to get the photos I required and to hang on very tightly to my film, because if I dropped it, the canisters would roll down into the back of the hollow fuselage.
As I recall, it was a beautiful August afternoon. The flight was smooth, if a little noisy, especially when I slid the canopy back to aim my lens at the neighbouring planes.
On our way back to the airport, I settled in to enjoy the scenery, as I maintained a death grip on the three or four rolls of Ektachrome and B&W film I’d shot.
Passing over the farms that surround the airport, I noticed the vehicles passing on the roads beneath us seemed a little large considering our distance to the runway. A herd of cows, their markings easily distinguishable, barely stirred as we passed overhead.
And still the runway seemed far off.
We cleared the airport’s perimeter fence, barely.
Then, our excursion got really bumpy. Dust billowed up into the cockpit area.
We shuddered to a stop, the runway still a couple of hundred metres distant.
In my headphones, the pilot calmly advised we should probably climb out. Once safely away from the aircraft, he explained the single engine had quick during the return leg of our flight and when it became apparent we couldn’t make it to the runway, he left the landing gear up so the bumpy landing on the field wouldn’t end up flipping us over onto our heads.
The pilot said he hadn’t told me any of this beforehand, so I wouldn’t panic.
A veteran captain for Air Canada, he was a little concerned about the plane’s bent prop and any possible damage to its undercarriage; it was his own aircraft.
I was just relieved I was still in one piece. And that I’d managed to hang onto all my rolls of film.
This story first appeared in the Tri-City News on Oct. 2, 2018
If your idea of a post-workout treat is a high-protein shake or thick fruit smoothie, you’re not Hamid Haji.
He heads for the freezer to scoop himself some ice cream.
In fact, the karate sensei and yoga instructor who runs Pro-Fit Boot Camp in Port Moody with his wife, Kelly Pearce, loves the frozen desert so much he embarked on a mission to make his own.
Fitness and indulgence don’t have to be mutually exclusive, said Haji, who has been part of the city’s fitness scene for 20 years.
“You limit yourself but you don’t have to cut yourself off,” he said. “Limitation makes the rewards sweeter.”
Two years ago, Haji set out to make the best ice cream he could. He and Pearce toured artisanal ice cream shops around the Lower Mainland, sampling their wares, chatting with staff and customers, trying to deconstruct their secrets. Then the couple would put their findings and intuition to work in their kitchen and share the results with clients at their gym.
“They were our guinea pigs,” Pearce said.
Armed with their feedback, they’d head back on the road to source local, natural ingredients and return to the kitchen to experiment with new flavours and conquer new challenges, like concocting a vegan ice cream that doesn’t skimp on creaminess despite its lack of, well, cream.
At some point, Haji’s quest outgrew their counter and freezer space at home, so he and Pearce decided to convert a storage area at the back of their St. Johns Street gym into a white-tiled, stainless steel ice cream factory. Several weeks ago, they christened it Vashti Rose, after their eight-year-old daughter, and started offering the frozen fruits of their labour to the public, one or two scoops at a time.
For now, the ice cream shop is only open on weekends as health regulations don’t allow Haji and Pearce to operate it at the same time people are sweating their workout in the adjoining gym. But kids are free to burn off some of their ice cream-fuelled energy on the matted floor while their parents savour a scoop of salted caramel or cookies and cream at the expansive white countertop.
Haji said he and Pearce have developed more than 100 flavours but they put only 11 of them in rotation at a time. And they’re open to requests, which have already included toasted marshmallow, mint flake and even saffron.
This story first appeared in the Tri-City News on Aug. 2, 2018
Accounting’s loss has been Coquitlam’s gain.
For 50 years.
That’s how long Ted Bordeleau has been cutting hair at Plaza Hairstyling and Barbers in the old Burquitlam Plaza on Clarke Road, an occasion he marked Wednesday with snacks and refreshments for his customers and $2 haircuts — but only if they showed up with an actual $2 bill because that’s what he charged when he first started in the business Aug. 1, 1968.
And if a customer didn’t have a $2 bill, since it’s been out of circulation since 1996, Bordeleau said he’d be happy to sell them one of his — “for $25.”
In Ted’s venerable shop, every story has a punchline.
Even the one about the elderly customer who expired in his chair back when he was learning his trade at Moller’s Barber School on Hastings Street in Vancouver.
After perfecting his straight-edge shaving skills first on a bottle, then a balloon, then other trainee barbers, Ted had finally graduated to giving shaves to real, live customers, many of them elderly or impoverished who put their necks on the line for the young apprentices in exchange for cut-rate haircuts. When one of those customers failed to flinch after Ted nicked him, he called over his instructor, who checked if the client was breathing, then confirmed the worst.
“I cut him three times,” Ted recalled. “No wonder he didn’t bleed.”
Ted almost didn’t become a barber. He loved numbers and was studying accounting when his grandfather urged him to pick up clippers because, he told Ted, “We need barbers.”
Ted trained at Moller’s for six months, then embarked on a two-year apprenticeship, as per the requirements to obtain a provincial barbering license at the time. He said he would have stayed another six months at barber school but he couldn’t afford the bandages.
Again with the punchlines.
Over the years, Ted has cut hair for generations of families as customers whose locks he first tended when they were kids bring in their kids and, eventually, their grandkids. He has trimmed politicians’ pates, CEOs’ sideburns and manes of people who’ve walked out of his shop without paying.
Some of his longtime customers travel hours out of their way to keep getting their hair cut by Ted. And when they walk through his door, there’s no guarantee they’ll be served right away because Ted doesn’t take appointments.
Ted met his wife, Jean, in front of his barbershop. She drove by in a bright pink 1957 Buick with fins, and Ted loves cars, so he ran out the door to ask for the driver’s phone number.
“She wasn’t quick enough to give me the wrong number,” Ted said.
He’s also found love for some of his customers, matching them up with female friends, acquaintances or just regular visitors who passed by as they shopped at the once bustling plaza.
Oh yeah, there’s that.
As the big city caught up to the suburbs, Burquitlam Plaza lost much of its bustle. The butcher shop left, so did the video store. SkyTrain severed part of the sprawling parking lot and the Safeway grocery store moved into the first two stories of a gleaming new condo tower on the corner. Many of the storefronts between the Dollarama and Value Village are dark.
The neighbourhood has changed, too, Ted said. Fewer families can afford to live there as small apartment blocks and modest mid-century bungalows are gobbled up by new development, so he’s not giving as many first haircuts to tentative toddlers.
But Ted perseveres, propelled by stories exchanged, friendships made and the knowledge that, while everyone may not need the services of an accountant, everyone at some point needs their hair cut.
In 2018, happenstance reconnected me with one of my favourite stories of my career. A local historian had acquired a vintage letterpress that had once belonged to a renowned typographer in New Westminster whom I had photographed back when I worked at the NewsLeader. I did two takes on the story; a personal recollection of that reconnection for the New Westminster Record, the paper I once competed against, and this more general feature for the Tri-City News.
These words you’re reading were crafted by the reporter then turned into digital zeros and ones before being printed on paper or uploaded to the internet.
Not so many years ago, the craft of printing words on paper was a much more involved, laborious task that involved dozens of skilled journeymen and tons of heavy machinery.
Each word, paragraph and story committed by the writer to paper had to be assembled into frames with cast lead dies, letter-by-letter, punctation mark-by-punctuation mark.
Those heavy frames, or chases, were then placed into large presses where rollers inked the raised metal letters and then pressed paper to them to create a printed page.
But like so many arduous processes borne of the Industrial Age, manual typesetting and printing is becoming a craft lost to the speed, efficiency and cleanliness offered by computers.
“There is a problem when we go too fast,” said Markus Fahrner a Port Moody graphic artist who’s also the coordinator at the city’s Station Museum.
So, in an effort to slow the process of printing down and reconnect with the skills he first learned as a boy growing up in Germany where his mother was a book designer, Fahrner acquired a Colt Armoury press that was likely built by the gun manufacturer in 1914.
But this is no ordinary old press.
It was once owned and carefully maintained in working order by Jim Rimmer, a world-renowned typographer and letterpress printer who kept the old-world craft alive from a studio behind his New Westminster home until he died in 2010.
MARIO BARTEL/THE TRI-CITY NEWS
The late Jim Rimmer at work on one his vintage typesetters in the studio of his New Westminster home in 2004. Rimmer was a world-renowned typographer who salvaged and restored old printing press machinery and then used them to create fonts and print limited edition posters and books that were coveted by collectors.
The stained glass lit studio and Rimmer’s basement were crammed with old letterpresses, typesetters and spare parts salvaged from print shops that had moved on in technology. He restored the machines and designed dozens of typefaces in metal for printing limited edition books, posters and one-sheets that were coveted by collectors around the world.
Shortly after his death, he was awarded the Robert R. Reid award for lifetime achievement or extraordinary contributions to the book arts in Canada by the Alcuin Society, a volunteer society dedicated to the artistic side of printing books.
Fahrner said he couldn’t believe the good fortune of his find.
While much of Rimmer’s printed works, printers’ dummies, manuscripts and type design work was acquired by the Simon Fraser University library after his passing, the fate of his collection of heavy machinery was less certain.
Fahrner said it’s important to keep the old machines running rather than have them end up as decorative curios in restaurants or antique shops.
“I really admire the craft,” Fahrner said. “I love the way it forces you to slow down.”
In fact, a poster that might take Fahrner a couple of hours to design on a computer can take days to assemble and print on the letterpress.
“It’s slow and precise,” he said. “You suddenly have so much to know about the process, like the way the ambient temperature of the room affects the ink, the type of paper you’re using, how heavy an impression you want to make on the paper.”
The end product, Fahrner said, has a depth and life that can’t be produced digitally.
“There’s an intrinsic love and energy in the things you produce,” he said.
And an eternal connection to a craft whose purpose hasn’t changed since Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 15th century, even as its technology evolves.
This story first appeared in the Tri-City News on Dec. 1, 2017
It may not have the girth and renown of Stanley Park’s Hollow Tree but Dave Menzies and his wife, Nola, think a centuries-old cedar stump on Burke Mountain is worth saving as development encroaches ever closer.
Menzies, 77, found the stump when he was exploring the woods near the couple’s Burke Mountain home, where they’ve lived since the 1970s. The retired firefighter and fire inspector makes frequent forest forays with his metal detector to root out artifacts from the mountain’s logging past, hiking along old, grown-over trails that were once used by shake-splitters for transporting cedar logs.
It was along just such a trail he encountered the big old hollow stump, its interior charred likely decades ago from — Menzies surmises — a forest fire that swept across the mountain in 1914. The trunk of the tree fell over and was absorbed into the forest floor years ago, possibly weakened by the fire, as he can find no evidence that it had been logged.
Menzies recalled his first impression of the stump, which is big enough that up to 10 people could stand in its hollowed interior: “I was in awe.”
Over the years, he and Nola have brought their children and grandchild to visit the stump and marvel at its history.
Menzies estimates the stump could be 500 years old — maybe as old as 1,000 years — and it probably soared 200 or 300 feet into the air at the peak of its health.
“You don’t get to see them this close anymore,” he said. “I can sense it has the history.”
But its days may be numbered.
Developers are moving into the area. Roads have been built, trees have been tagged. The wild mountain is being tamed by subdivisions of expansive homes.
“Everything is just turning into progress,” said Nola Menzies, 75.
She’d like to see the stump saved, protected from the march of bulldozers through the woods or maybe even uprooted and moved to where it can become an educational monument to what the mountain once was.
“It’s real, it’s natural,” she said.
But first, people have to know about it, which is why the Menzies have pulled on their gumboots and stomped across the loamy, rain-saturated forest floor to show it to a reporter.
Said Dave Menzies, peering up through the hollowed stump towards the sky: “This is amazing.”
The story of the COVID-19 pandemic is still being written. While the immediate fear and uncertainty of the public health scare has faded into the background of our memories, its impact on our daily lives endures. The first story, about a pair of local athletes preparing to represent Canada at the World Ultimate Championships, was actually ready to go into the Tri-City News when the pandemic hit. A quick rewrite of the lede accounted for the unknown we were all facing at that time while still sharing their journey. Of course, the pandemic turned out to be more than just a minor speed bump, and three years later I was able to connect with the same athletes to reflect on how it had shaped their lives and aspirations and their own plans to move forward.
A pair of Ultimate players from the Tri-Cities will have to wait a little longer to get to know their teammates on Canada’s national U20 team.
A special four-day training camp that was scheduled to be held at Coquitlam’s Gleneagle secondary school March 19 to 22 has been postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Coquitlam’s Devon Bringeland and Port Coquitlam’s Ricky McLeod are among the 28 Ultimate athletes who will compete for Canada at the 2020 World Junior Ultimate Championships in Malmo, Sweden, July 18 to 25.
Bringeland, who turns 19 this week, said it was Ultimate’s supportive, nurturing spirit that attracted him to the sport when he was in Grade 6 at Stratford Hall, an independent school in Vancouver.
“In Ulitmate, we’re all in it together,” said Bringeland, who’s now studying kinesiology at the University of British Columbia.
McLeod, who’s also 19, said the community vibe of Ultimate is a marked contrast to the negativity he experienced when he was playing competitive soccer.
“Being nice to your opponent is part of this sport,” said McLeod, who finally made the national team after he failed to make in his first attempt a few years ago.
MARIO BARTEL/TRI-CITY NEWS
Ricky McLeod and Devon Bringeland get ready to play for Canada at the World Ultimate Championships in Sweden in 2020.
Not that players’ competitive zeal is diminished by their collegial attitude, that’s been a touchstone of the sport since it was invented at a high school in New Jersey in 1968, said the national team’s head coach, Michael Fung.
To get named to Canada’s roster, athletes first had to catch the eye of coaches responsible for selection camps in each of the sport’s regional hubs in Canada — Vancouver, Winnipeg, Metro Toronto and the Ottawa-Gatineau area. Prospective players were tested for their fitness and then run through various drills and scrimmages to showcase their skills. Those who made the cut then attend two training camps prior to worlds to get to know each other and learn how to work together.
“Chemistry is huge in Ultimate,” Fung said, adding each part of the country approaches the sport and its strategies a little differently.
Turning disparate athletes into a cohesive unit when everyone is mostly apart, doing their own thing on club or school teams is an ongoing challenge, he said. Players stay in touch via a Facebook group, they review game recordings and strategy sessions together online, and they share fitness challenges.
“We have to create a platform for them to get to know each other,” Fung said, adding the training camps, that are often based out of someone’s home, can be especially beneficial to achieve that as players have to live, cook, and eat together in close quarters.
He said routine tasks like navigating meal times, cleaning up and sharing bathrooms, as well as planned bonding activities like ping pong and video game tournaments can help develop the synchronicity and communications skills that are vital to success in actual games. It also helps save money as, aside from some small sponsorship to pay for uniforms, everyone on the team pays their own way.
Bringeland said the sacrifices are worth it, especially as the sport’s popularity grows beyond its power base in the United States and Canada; 30 teams will compete in Sweden.
“It’s the next level,” he said of competing at the worlds, which are contested every two years. “It’s what everyone in the sport is driving for, to represent their country.”
Tri-City Ultimate athletes getting a second chance to represent Canada
MARIO BARTEL/TRI-CITY NEWS
Three years after they were denied their opportunity to compete for Canada at the World Ultimate Championship because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ricky McLeod and Devon Bringeland are getting a second chance.
There’s nothing like having something snatched away to motivate you to want it even more.
Port Coquitlam’s Ricky McLeod and Coquitlam’s Devon Bringeland were about to participate in a special training camp for Canada’s national Ultimate team heading to the U20 world championships in Malmo, Sweden, three years ago when the global COVID-19 pandemic yanked away their dream.
This year, they’re back as members of the U24 national side that will be one of 15 teams competing in the open division at the 2024 championships in Nottingham, England, July 2–8.
In between, McLeod and Bringeland had to soothe the sting of missing their chance to compete at the 2020 worlds and embarked on busy studies at the University of Victoria and the University of British Columbia, respectively, recommitted to their training and stepped up their game playing for Canada’s top men’s club: the Vancouver Furious George.
All with their eyes firmly fixed on the prize of being the best in the world.
MARIO BARTEL/TRI-CITY NEWS
Port Coquitlam’s Ricky McLeod stretches to make a defensive play during a recent training camp in Burnaby for Canada’s national U24 Ultimate team.
Bringeland said getting robbed of the worlds in 2020 was “an emotional roller coaster” that took him a while to ride out.
“It was heartbreaking,” he said. “Making Team Canada was something I’d dreamed about.”
McLeod said the COVID-19 shutdown in the spring and early summer of 2020 put his Ultimate aspirations at a crossroads.
“You could quit, or you could work even harder.”
By late summer, as public health restrictions eased and sporting activities resumed, the fire to compete had reignited in McLeod and Bringeland.
“I was missing it,” McLeod said. “As soon as I got a taste of it, I was hungry for the future.”
Bringeland said the competitive progression from U19 to U24 is significant. Speed, intensity, athleticism, skill and strategy are all kicked up a notch.
“It’s a huge step up from juniors,” added McLeod.
In anticipation of their next opportunity to play for Canada, McLeod and Bringeland hit the gym to develop their strength, power and explosiveness.
They ran 10 X 400 m laps around the track for endurance.
They honed their fitness to prevent injury and to sharpen their competitive instincts, they tried out — and made — the Furious George side that has won 11 Canadian championships.
They also play for their respective university teams that are part of U.S.-based leagues.
Bringeland said at its top level, Ultimate is no longer about the good-time vibes and tie-dye shirts that come from the sport’s hippie roots, although games are still self-refereed that commands a high level of respect and communication between opposing players.
“It’s a pure level of competition,” McLeod said. “But you don’t yell at people.”
Aside from the physical preparation to compete on the world stage, there’s also a playbook of set offensive and defensive strategies to learn — much like football — and money to be raised.
Canada’s national Ultimate program doesn’t receive government funding, so the athletes have to pay their own way to competitions — about $5,000 for the season. That means bunking down en masse at someone’s family home during training camps, carpooling to and from the fields and cooking communal meals.
It also obligates team members to launch personal GoFundMe campaigns and hit up corporate contacts for whatever support they can muster.
All while keeping up with their studies and part-time jobs.
“It’s a lot of late nights,” said Bringeland.
But the payoff will be worth the sacrifices, said McLeod.
“We take it very seriously,” he said. “Our goal is to dominate.”
This story first appeared in the Tri-City News on Feb. 28, 2021
There may be no “I” in team, but a Port Moody teen is learning there’s a whole lot of support and love, especially when the chips are down.
Dec. 13, Hailey Kress and her family were displaced from their Glenayre home in the middle of the night by a fire that destroyed their garage and deck, heavily damaged an adjoining bedroom and inflicted lots of smoke and water on the rest of the structure including the basement.
That’s where Kress, 13, stored her hockey equipment.
Nobody — including the family dog — was hurt in the 3:15 a.m. blaze. But the emotional toll of that night has been especially difficult on Hailey, said her mom, Monica.
As the family moved in with relatives, then to an Airbnb, and finally to a rental home on the opposite side of Burrard Inlet, Hailey struggled in class at Banting middle school. She said she’d have panic attacks, feeling frozen and overwhelmed by the enormity of that night’s events and the impact it was having on her routines and sense of security.
“It was important to get back to normal,” said Monica. “We needed to somehow concentrate on something other than the fire, get her mind off the negative.”
Hockey is Hailey’s other.
The day after the fire, Monica received an email from Heather Fox, the president of the Tri-City Predators female hockey association where Hailey has been playing for three years, reassuring her that efforts were already in motion to ensure her daughter could keep playing.
Back on the ice
Two weeks later, Hailey was back on the ice. All of her equipment was brand new, courtesy of The Hockey Shop, in Surrey. Her new Predators bag, socks, pants and even hockey tape were donated by Rocket Rod’s at Planet Ice in Coquitlam.
n a season that’s been all about disruption because of public health restrictions to temper transmission of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, Hailey said practising with her teammates made her feel normal, that everything was going to be OK.
“It was really fun to be with my friends again,” she said. “It made me forget about everything for an hour.”
Hailey, who’s also played baseball, jiu jitsu and acro-gymnastics, started playing hockey after a sleepover at a cousin’s house meant she also had to attend that cousin’s game the next day.
She said she liked what she saw.
“It looked super fun,” she said, adding she especially enjoyed hockey’s aggressive nature.
Monica said she was initially taken aback when Hailey expressed an interest in playing hockey herself. But the positive benefits of being part of a team and forming new relationships outweighed the downsides of the sport’s expense and sitting on cold arena benches.
“It makes for a really well-rounded kid,” she said.
Values camaraderie
Hailey said she enjoys the challenge and responsibility of playing defence, including learning how to skate backwards. But she most values the camaraderie of her teammates and coaches.
“It’s like always having people around you who care about you,” Hailey said.
That care was delivered even before Hailey returned to the ice, as her teammates put together a package for her family of food and personal items like blankets and skin care products.
Monica Kress said she’s been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support from Hailey’s team and the Predators’ hockey community.
“You always think you pay a lot of money for these sports, you think you’re just a number to them,” she said. “But it’s such a good group of kids and parents.”
Hailey said the experience has given her an appreciation for the importance of having sport and teammates in her life. It’s also made her more determined to keep getting better at her game.
“Everything that they’ve done makes me want to try harder to show I’m grateful.”
This story first appeared in the Tri-City News on Sept. 12, 2021
You can’t call an Uber from the new phone booth installed at Port Moody’s Pioneer Park, but you may be able to chat with your favourite Nana who passed away in 2015.
The Phone of the Wind is an initiative of the Crossroads Hospice Society that gives visitors to the park an opportunity to work through some of their grief at losing a loved one by placing a call to them from the vintage rotary-dial wall phone mounted in a wonderfully stained and lacquered wooden booth.
And while the phone doesn’t have a special line to the afterlife, the act of picking up the handset and talking into the mouthpiece can be comforting in a time of loss and sorrow, said Amelie Lambert, the adult bereavement coordinator at Crossroads’ nearby hospice facility on Noons Creek Drive.
“It helps people not feel crazy all the time when they’re grieving,” she said.
“It helps to normalize grief,” added Brittany Borean, the bereavement service coordinator who helped bring the phone project to life after a volunteer let her know about a similar effort in Washington.
The first Phone of the Wind was erected in 2010 in Otsuchi, Japan when a landscape designer named Itaru Sasaki installed an old phone booth in his garden shortly after a beloved cousin died of cancer. In a 2017 article in Bloomberg, he said the phone offered him a way to maintain a relationship with his departed cousin.
In 2011, Sasaki’s private installation became a kind of public shrine after an earthquake and tsunami destroyed dozens of coastal communities including Otsuchi and people who lost loved ones in the disaster made their way to his garden to seek comfort by placing calls from his booth.
Since then, wind phones have been built in places like: Oakland, Calif., to commemorate the 36 people who perished in a warehouse fire; Dublin, Ireland; Marshall, North Carolina; and Aspen, Colorado.
The concept has also caught the imagination of novelists and filmmakers who’ve incorporated it into stories of love and loss.
To realize Port Moody’s Phone of the Wind, Borean enlisted the help of the city’s superintendent of parks, Robbie Nall, and carpenter Roy Balbino, who took his inspiration to craft the booth from an old-style phone booth he happened to spy one day while driving along St. John’s Street.
MARIO BARTEL/THE TRI-CITY NEWS
Port Moody’s superintendent of parks, Robbie Nall, and carpenter Roy Balbino helped bring the Crossroads Hospice Society’s vision for a phone of the wind to life in Pioneer Park.
Some of the wood is reclaimed from old memorial benches in the adjacent labyrinth healing garden, while the vintage black wall phone was discovered on Facebook Marketplace.
Lambert said having the Phone of the Wind in a public setting helps bring the grieving process out from the shadows where western society has tended to lock it away as a very private process.
“We don’t acknowledge grief,” she said. “We don’t have to hide it.”
In fact, Borean added, accepting grief can help ease some of the pain that comes from losing a loved one.
“It sends a message that it’s okay to grieve,” she said. “It’s not about ‘time will heal all wounds.’”
The phone can also provide a way for families to bridge generations.
Lambert said since the phone was installed in August, families have brought their kids to talk with members who may have passed before they were born or were too young to remember.
“It drives connections,” Borean said. “It creates a sense of community that you’re not alone.”
MARIO BARTEL 