® strictly personal ®

WHAT DOES a retired sea captain do?

It’s no simple matter, swallow-
ing the anchor, as the salts put it.

My favorite seadog happens to
be a gentleman named John C.
Cormack, who skippered many a
vessel during half a century ply-
ing the coast.

{ had the pleasure several times
of travelling on Cap'n John’s old
halibut seiner, the Phyllis Cor-
mack, named after his in-
domitable wife.

A couple of years ago, Cap’n
John suddenly retired. Sold the
boat and moved home to the
large suburban house Phyllis had
been tending all those years while
John was at sea. In the driveway
stood probably the world's larg-
est-model motorhome, a bus, re-
ally.

The plan was to spend the
winters in Palm Springs and
summers at home, taking care of
his flowers. Being himself, he
adapted to life on the shore with
a vengeance, you might say.

There are close to 100 plants
inside the house and on the
balcony and hoisted on to trollies
on the driveway beside the big
rig.

He has devised an elaborate
assembly-line for dollying the
various pots and pails and vast
Chinese porcelain jugs from one
place to the other to take advan-
tage of favorable light.

An equally elaborate network
of hoses and sprinklers keeps
them all enjoying a truly fux-
urious flower existence.

We are not talking wimpy
plan.s, either.

The captain concocted some
secret growth serum that makes
his plants grow madly, which is a
factor in their size and number,
but the truth is, the old seadog
actually had a grcen thumb all
along.

The back of the house faces
the sea. Located in Richmond,
well south of the airport, it

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1034 Marine Drive, North Van.

across from the Avalon
iS SS CE Ps

980-3595

overlooks the widest part of the
Strait of Georgia.

It is a tremendous panorama,
of course. And while the captain
gets to grub about in the soil, he
is always looking out across the
vast tract of the sea. He was
retired, but only retired one step
back from the saltchuck.

Normally, there is a wide
swath of reeds between the
municipal dike behind John and
Phyllis’s house and the open
water. But during the winter high
tides, driftwood the size of
beached whales is driven right
across the estuary, and lodged
against the dike.

Richmond, of course, is the
Holland of Canada. No wonder
Bill Vander Zalm lives out that
way. It is only the elaborate net-
work of dikes, which also serve

as roads, that prevents the mouth
of the Fraser from yawning open
and engulfing the entire delta, as
it did for geological ages.

Cap’n John might just have
chosen Richmond as the place io
settle because, after all, he is re-
ally still surrounded by. ocean.
His house is more like a boat run
aground on a sand bar. in that
sense, his basement is the hull of
his ship.

When the tide is up, his prop-
erty is some three feet below
water level.

What does a retired sea captain
do? Well, it turns out John is
building an eight-foot high ce-
ment sea wall of his own.

Seems he found a large crack
in the hull of his basement a
while ago. Also, some of the
eternally-soggy delta soil under

the basement Moor had shifted,
leaving a gap, a bit like a trough
between waves.

Had he been reading about the
Greenhouse Effect? Did he know
that in places like New Zealand,
planners are already at work
figuring out where to relocate
low-lying communities as the
melting of the Antarctic ice cap
accelerates?

Well, John wasn’t all that sure
about monkey business like that,
but he did know one thing. The
last earthquake in California had
driven the point home. When the
Big One comes, it’s not just go-
ing to splinter California, it's go-
ing to set off a fantastic tidal
wave.

Cap’n John’s eight-foot wall
isn’t going to bend at right angles
and continue along the sides of
his property and around to the
front, in the hope of keeping out
the water.

Nope. It's just a straight line,
like a traffic barrier, between his
house and plants and Phyllis and
the big mountain of a killer wave
that he figures will come slopping
around Vancouver Island, foam-
ing between the Gulf Islands, and
wiping Richmond off the map.

But not John’s house.

And that’s what a retired sea
captain does. Builds walls against
the sea, naturally.

9 NORBURN
ALIGHTING

#600 East Hastings Burnaby Tel. 299-0666