urbpan | On Vancouver Island (Reply)

We were driving down island and found a town with the same name as my nephew ("Duncan") so we had to stop. Besides having his grandson's name, my dad was also excited that the town was chockablock full of totem poles. Too bad my dad doesn't have a blog, because he took way more pictures than me. Mine make for a very strange sampling of vacation experiences.

I know next to nothing about Northwest Coast Peoples' folklore and beliefs, but I did take an art history course that included some stuff. All I can do is tell you what animals these are. Hopefully someone else can tell me what they mean (and where I'm wrong). That's a beaver on the bottom, then a human (probably a specific person, possibly--seeing the tool in his right hand--the sculptor), then an eagle, then a raven on top (a lot of the toppers are given ears/horns even if they are animals that don't have them in real life), with salmon within its wings. I like the colors of this one.

We happened to be there on farmer's market day, which had more craftspeople than farmers, but was pretty interesting nonetheless. I came across a mushroom forager who had this whole big basket of a mushroom I had never seen in person before (and still haven't seen in nature).

This is the lobster mushroom. Actually the mushrooms themselves are some other species, but to become lobster mushrooms they must be infected with the parasitic fungus Hypomyces lactifluorum. This guy also had a huge ziplock bag full morels. I don't really eat these things, but it was cool to see them all, and to talk to this fellow for a long time. I clearly wasn't going to buy anything, but he was very friendly, and let me photograph his wares.

One of the big draws for the area for me is the tremendous amount and biobiversity of lichen. Some of the upcoming posts are going to be all lichen, I promise. Until then, here's a groovy patch of lichen growing in a limbing scar, found in Duncan: