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The Pink Ladies refers to the show, Grease, where the lady gang members wore pink jackets. They remind me of the pink salmon who migrate, yearly, past the shores of Campbell River to reach their spawning grounds in the rivers along the coast of Vancouver Island.
Once the salmon were abundant, but in recent years they have decreased in number due to overfishing, climate change, and other factors. While still a food source both commercially and recreationally, the salmon are a shadow of what they used to be.
I was born in Campbell River, and I grew up with stories of fishing with the likes of Roderick Haig Brown, a fisherman, a judge, a writer, and an environmentalist. I own books he wrote about life and fishing in the area. Haig Brown’s place by the Campbell River allowed him to be near one of the most productive salmon rivers in the province. From childhood I dreamed of fly-fishing the Campbell river-a dream I fulfilled one summer. Using a googly-eyed fly, I caught and released a beautiful salmon in the Campbell River.

Like Haig Brown, Emily Carr loved the environment around British Columbia. Much of her art was influenced by the old villages with their long houses and totem poles on Haida Gwaii. She travelled by boat and canoe to the southern islands of the Queen Charlotte Islands, as they were known back then, where she created drawings and paintings to record the village life and history of the Haida people. She was an artist, a writer, and a historian. She studied art with Lawren Harris of the Group of Seven. The Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver commemorates her. The Vancouver Art Gallery has many of her works in their collection.
Emily Carr has become a voice for this province.

Emily Carr