Mr. Vancouver seeks help to finish his magnum opus

Chuck Davis made a dramatic announcement at a salon organized by former Vancouver mayor Sam Sullivan.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
September 30, 2010

VICTORIA

Chuck Davis has been told it is time to write his final chapter.

The 74-year-old author met last week with an oncologist who delivered a grim verdict. His cancer was incurable. Radiation and chemotherapy were out. Nature was to take its unforgiving course.

In the dizzying aftermath, Mr. Davis realized he had not fully absorbed the prognosis. His wife and daughter, who had accompanied him, filled him in on the unhappy details.

These he shared just two days later with an audience at a public salon at the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre.

The longtime radio announcer asked to be the final speaker on the program.

He stepped on stage in his usual wardrobe of a rumpled shirt and well-worn sweater, a style that contributes to his avuncular presence.

Speaking in familiar dulcet tones, apologizing that his illness has made him less stentorian than his days as a CBC staff announcer, he related his recent meeting with the doctor.

“I naturally asked, ‘How long do I have?’

“While she couldn’t be specific, the words ‘weeks’ and ‘months’ were in there somewhere.”

He paused.

“I don’t recall hearing the word years,” he added.

He was sharing the “embarrassing and intimate details” of his health for one desperate reason — he needs help in finishing a massive history of the city he has chronicled all his adult life.

He announced that he was seeking $30,000 to pay a writer to complete the project.

A man of boyish curiosity, Mr. Davis has been a radio host and a quizmaster, an author and a newspaper columnist.

He has 17 book titles to his credit, including histories of Port Coquitlam, North Vancouver, and radio station CKNW. He is best known as editor of “The Vancouver Book,” an urban almanac published in 1976, and “The Greater Vancouver Book,” an omnibus that won two major prizes but proved to be an expensive self-publishing fiasco. (“Memo to self,” Mr. Davis once wrote, “never publish, only write.”)

Along the way, he earned a deserved reputation as Mr. Vancouver.

It has long been his ultimate ambition to complete a massive, popular history of the city.

Some years ago, Mr. Davis told one of his many admirers about the project, promising the book would be “fun, fat, and filled with facts.”

“Just like you,” the man replied.

That Mr. Davis repeats the story shows his good humour.

He has an insatiable appetite for facts and a storyteller’s gift for finding the ironic, the interesting, and, especially, the humorous in even the must ordinary of details.

Typical of his style is a tidbit about the city getting the first mechanized ambulance in the land in 1909. The crew proudly took the ambulance on a tour, which ended when they accidentally struck and killed a pedestrian.

He has posted thousands of such facts, from the mundane to the macabre, at his website, The History of Metropolitan Vancouver.

When not haunting the library or the archives, Mr. Davis works from a cluttered office at his Surrey home, a four-fingered typist immersed in what has been described as “the world’s largest gerbil nest.” Flat surfaces are covered by stacks of paper. Hundreds of files fill four cabinets.

In the coming months, he needs to complete a commissioned history for the Association for Mineral Exploration British Columbia (“formerly the B.C./Yukon Chamber of Mines,” he added helpfully). With a centennial in 2012, the book has a fixed deadline. So, too, does its author.

As for the Vancouver history that was to be his magnum opus, Mr. Davis seeks a writer to complete a manuscript for delivery to Harbour Publishing of Madeira Park, B.C. The publisher patiently awaits a long overdue book.

At the conclusion of his address to the salon, Mr. Davis’s voice cracked and he choked up. As he exited, the crowd rose in salute, a tribute that went unseen by him.

It is also his cruel fate that he will likely not see the publication of a book that will tell the people of Vancouver more about themselves than they ever knew.

Ted Bowles knows what it's like to tempt fate

Ted Bowles flew aboard a CP Air flight that held in its cargo bay a bomb that exploded shortly after landing in Tokyo. The former RCAF bombardier has had his share of close calls. Deddeda Stemler photograph for The Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
September 27, 2010

VICTORIA

On June 22, 1985, Ted Bowles checked his bags at the CP Air counter at Vancouver International Airport, a mundane and forgettable experience for a seasoned traveller.

The mining executive faced a long journey — a flight to Japan with a connection to Hong Kong. He was then to continue to a mine north of Guangzhou, formerly Canton, to negotiate the sale of graphite.

Among the hundreds of passengers checked in by clerk Jeanne Bakermans that morning was a man booked on the same flight. L. Singh, as his ticket read, had his bag tagged to be transferred in Tokyo to Bangkok. The connecting flight was operated by Air India.

A terrible plot unleashed that day caused the deadliest mass murder in Canadian history. Two bombs were planted aboard airplanes departing from Vancouver.

One blew up while a plane was over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 329 aboard.

The other blew up in Tokyo, killing two airport workers.

Inderjit Singh Reyat, of Duncan, remains the only man convicted in the bloody conspiracy, having been found guilty of manslaughter in both attacks.

Last week, he was convicted of perjury in B.C. Supreme Court. He had been accused of lying 19 times in his testimony seven years ago in the trial of two suspects who were acquitted.

The perjury trial is seen as the end of a long and unsatisfactory legal odyssey.

Justice has been in short supply for the grieving relatives of the passengers aboard Air India flight 182.

The components of the bombs were assembled on Vancouver Island. Mr. Reyat, who lived in Duncan, got blasting caps and dynamite sticks from a well driller, as well as a 400-page explosives manual from a contractor, neither of the acquaintances suspecting a deadly plot.

Mr. Reyat bought gunpowder at a local sports shop, electrical relays at Radio Shack, and a stereo tuner at Woolworth’s. Charred fragments of the latter item led police to him.

A quarter-century has passed since Mr. Bowles stepped aboard CP Air 003, a flight that crossed the Pacific Ocean with a bomb in its cargo bay.

Mr. Bowles was in the terminal at sprawling Narita International Airport when the bomb exploded, killing baggage handlers Hideo Asano and Hideharu Koda. Four others were seriously injured.

It is not known whether the bag with the bomb was dropped. It could have exploded prematurely. Or, in what gives Mr. Bowles chills, it was timed to explode while his plane was in the air.

His fight arrived in Tokyo 14 minutes ahead of schedule.

“Lady luck,” he said. “We would have been a statistic also.”

Mr. Bowles knows what it is like to tempt fate.

He enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force as a young man, survived 33 raids over Germany in the Second World War.

A flying officer with No. 429 Squadron, he served as bombardier aboard a Halifax bomber on attacks against industrial targets at Essen, Hamburg and Cologne.

Once, the bomber was attacked by German night fighters, survival depending on the nerves of the mid-upper and rear gunners. The bombardier watched with relief as two of the German aircraft were sent down in flames.

There was one other close call.

“We ditched in the ocean once,” he said. “North Sea. Off Aberdeen. We were rescued by a Scottish trawler.”

He returned to Canada with a war bride named Joan.

Now retired and living in Victoria, Mr. Bowles recently wrote a letter to the editor to correct an error in a newspaper account of what happened that summer day 25 years ago. The bomb in Narita had not been planted there, he wrote. It was intended to kill passengers in the air, either on his flight, or on a connecting one.

He continued on his journey after sniffer dogs examined the remaining luggage, which was spread out in the shadow of a 747 jumbo jet.

Only on his arrival did he learn of the fate of the Air India flight in the waters off Ireland.

The knowledge of having ferried a bomb across an ocean left him feeling “kind of queasy, kind of funny.”

“It could have been a double disaster. It could have been our plane, as well.”

Mr. Bowles thinks often of the dead passengers and of the brave vigil observed by their grieving families. He knows he and his wife narrowly escaped such a fate.

Year of the tiger to the power of three

The men of Inspection Tiger return from the taiga with their prey.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
September 23, 2010

VICTORIA

The book has been written and edited, the folios have rolled off presses to be cut and folded, the bindings have been glued and the dust jackets wrapped around boards pressing together 352 pages of adventure.

Pallets of the product have been shipped around the world, boxes making their way to stores, where clerks place them on shelves to capture the attention of a buying public with no shortage of reading options.

With each purchase, a pie chart established by legal contract divides the proceeds among publisher, retailer, and author. No need to guess who gets the thinnest slice.

Trailing the book around the continent is its creator, John Vaillant, a 48-year-old Vancouver author who has crafted the remarkable, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival (Knopf, $34.95).

Now, it is time for the public to pass judgment.

How much does he have riding on the book?


“Everything,” he said.

“You spend three years on a project and everything’s on the line. Financially. Professionally. Domestically. Everything’s riding on it.”

For him, it has been the year of the tiger followed by the year of the tiger followed by the year of the tiger.

His wife, Nora, has handled the home front as he has travelled afield for research and, now, publicity. He has sold only a handful of magazine pieces since winning the Governor-General’s Literary Award five years ago for The Golden Spruce, a superb retelling of the destruction of a tree in Haida Gwaii by a man gone mad. He has had the good fortune of spotting another terrific tale, though it, too, has demanded he stake a lot on its outcome.

“If this book crashes and burns,” he said, “the chances of getting another good project, of getting the ear of publishers and getting their financial backing is compromised.”

As if that was not pressure enough on a writer, he also hopes “The Tiger” will promote conservation efforts for a creature as magnificent as it is endangered.

He seeks not just want another book contract, but he’s also out to save the tiger.

Perhaps that’s the attitude inherited when your family name is pronounced like valiant (val-yehnt), a word whose Middle English roots stem from the Old French vailant, from the Latin valere. It means to be strong, heroic, courageous.

Like the ancestors of football player Brett Favre, his people maintained the integrity of the original spelling while compromising on the pronunciation.

Born and raised at Cambridge, Mass., where his father became a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School, Mr. Vaillant first tried his hand at professional writing at age 35. Earlier, he laboured in Alaska as a commercial salmon fisherman and as a boat builder. He worked with learning disabled children at a special education school and with juvenile delinquents on a remote island off the Massachusetts coast. For a time, he led workshops on race and gender issues for corporations seeking to diversify.

He hopped from job to job, “dodging my destiny.”

He moved to Vancouver in 1998 so his wife, a potter and anthropologist, could do graduate work at the University of British Columbia.

He sold pieces to Sports Afield, Men’s Journal, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker.

For his latest book, Mr. Vaillant trudged through frozen Siberian forests. He studied the literature on the endangered Amur tiger. He befriended the unforgettable Yuri Trush, a Russian whose hands look like “knuckled mallets,” a squad leader of a local Inspection Tiger unit, a tracker whose responsibility it was to investigate forest crimes, usually involving poachers.

Of the three main characters in The Tiger, the only one still alive by the time of the author’s arrival in the taiga is Mr. Trush. The other human character has been eaten, and tigers don’t do interviews.

Happily, extensive videotapes combined with a tracker’s ability to see evidence in the displacement and melting of snow — a crouching 400-pound tiger leaves a distinct imprint — allow the author to recreate in riveting fashion such terrifying scenes as the poacher’s final moments.

So far this month, he has appeared at readings and signings, done interviews for print and television, engrossed radio audiences of NPR’s “Morning Edition” and CBC Radio’s “The Current” with his true-life tale.

The life of a writer is more slog than glamour.

He left his home in Kitsilano by car earlier this week for an event at the public library in a forestry town in Washington state.

Actors go to Los Angeles. Authors go to Port Angeles.

He is scheduled to be in Seattle today followed by Bellingham, Wash.; a California swing to Palo Alto, Corte Madera, and Berkeley; Portland, Ore.; Colorado stops at Boulder and Denver; a New England circuit; before returning home for an event on Oct. 21.

So far, the reception for the book has been solid, the reviews rapturous. The Tiger is No. 2 on the Globe’s bestsellers list, as it is on the Maclean’s list, up from No. 7. It appeared briefly on the New York Times’ list, then slipped off. He hopes it returns as he crisscrosses the continent.

“The people you find yourself in company with, especially on the non-fiction list, is so weird. It’s surreal, frankly, to be between Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang and Shit My Dad Says and Going Rogue. Strange bedfellows."

The movie rights have been optioned by Brad Pitt, who is preparing a treatment with the producer of The Wrestler and the screenwriter of Babel.

A movie, especially a successful one, cannot help but move books. The more books sold, likely the more money to be raised to preserve the Asian forests in which live the tigers.

How ironic. The success of a book of significant literary merit may depend on Hollywood.

Rock 'n' rolling off the mother tongue

Art Napoleon addresses a rally opposed to the building of the Site C dam on the Peace River, which would flood is ancestral home. Geoff Howe photo for The Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
September 20, 2010

VICTORIA

Art Napoleon tells a story about himself. He is aged six or so when his teacher conducts a talent show.

Not wanting to be left out, the boy borrows a classmate’s harmonica, an instrument which he has never held before.

He squeaks and honks and fakes it, knowing enough to repeat his own phrasing, making the improvised tune sound like a real song.

He remains a performer at age 49, a man who, in his own words, straddles “two worlds” — his ancestral home in the Peace River Country and his current address in the capital city; one, a milieu where moose is a staple and the other, where Staples is a chain store. His mother tongue is Cree and his second language is English.

He acts and performs standup comedy and makes music. His latest release is a remarkable collection featuring covers of familiar songs by the likes of Smokey Robinson and Hank Williams. The tunes are familiar, though, for most, the lyrics are indecipherable. On the disc, titled “Creeland Covers,” he sings almost exclusively in Cree.

The melding of a half-century of popular music with an ancient language has never been done before, as far as anyone knows, not even by the great Buffy Sainte-Marie, for whom he has been an opening act.

The result is a refreshing take on songs so familiar as to have become aural wallpaper. Sung in Mr. Napoleon’s haunting Nehiyawewin, the dialect of the northern woodlands Cree, one discovers new-found appreciation for the original power of the numbers.

“I started with a whole bucket of songs, a whole canon of artists that I respect and admire,” he said. “Artists that are well received on the Rez scene. They like Nazareth, CCR (Creedence Clearwater Revival), that kind of rock. They like Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, the rootsy country. Merle Haggard. George Jones.”

As a boy, little Arthur grew up on those classics, though his introduction to music came from a grandfather telling ancient stories while accompanying himself on a traditional handheld drum.

Born at the hospital in Pouce Coupe, B.C., the boy was raised by his mother’s parents after her death during his first year of life. His uncles competed in local rodeos, inspiring in the boy not so much a desire to ride horses as to emulate the rodeo clowns. More than once, he inadvertently set afire some props found around the house as he tried to emulate pyrotechnics he had seen.

“Got into mischief,” he said with a chuckle.

Shy away from the stage, a showman came forth when handed a microphone.

A television host and a folk festival stalwart, Mr. Napoleon is also an award-winning children’s entertainer. You can find a hilarious comedy routine on YouTube in which Mr. Napoleon echoes the “I Am Canadian” television-commercial monologue with an “I Am Indigenous” monologue. “I believe in round dances,” he says, “no square dances.”

While Cree can be heard on his earlier albums such as “Siskabush Tales” and “Mocikan: Songs for Learning Cree,” the new release forced him to shoehorn his native tongue into rock and country constructs.

“Certain words are not translatable,” he said. “Certain words in English take a whole sentence in Cree. The other way there are certain words in Cree for which you have to say a sentence, or phrase to describe that.”

For example, the Cree word moskomaw means singing in so powerful a fashion as to bring a listener to tears.

Some concepts simply don’t exist.

“We don’t have a word for 'resource.' We don’t have a word for ‘management.’ We don’t have a word for ‘time.’ ”

Over time he eased his frustrations by taking artistic license with his Cree.

“At first I found it difficult as I was trying to be a perfectionist. Once I relaxed, it got easier and then got better as the process rolled along.

“This is a first crack at it. Next time we’ll satisfy the linguists.”

He sings in Cree Tom Petty’s Wildflowers, John Fogerty’s Long As I Can See the Light, and Neil Young’s Pocahontas, an ironic selection. His cover of the the Beatles’ Rain, originally released by the Fab Four on a single with Paperback Writer, is a killer, while two Hank Williams’ standards — Jambalaya and Weary Blues from Waiting — sound like Cree classics.

The most powerful number on the disc is a stirring folk rendition of Redemption Song. He opens in Cree before switching to English, reworking Bob Marley’s lyrics to express the anguish of his own people: “Oh, pirates took our lands, they saw dollar signs in trees, they drank the creeks and dig their coal, passed around their disease...”

The song then segues into Tracy Chapman’s Talkin’ Bout a Revolution, a medley he was to have performed on Sunday as the emcee during a protest at the Legislature against the construction of a massive hydroelectric dam.

He is no newcomer to politics, having served as an elected councillor and, briefly, as chief of the Salteau First Nation.

The proposed Site C dam on the Peace River would flood some of the lands on which he had trapped squirrels and weasels as a boy growing up on the East Moberly Lake reserve. “Arboreal. Subarctic. Very beautiful,” he said.

It is on those same lands that he hunts the moose that fills his freezer in the city, from which he makes such delicacies as the moose-tongue soup he served on the weekend.

She saved Americans from the horrors of thalidomide

In 1962, U.S. president John F. Kennedy presented a medal to Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey for her courageous role in keeping thalidomide from American medicine cabinets. The doctor was honoured again this week by the Food and Drug Administration, her former employer. She was born in 1914 at Cobble Hill, B.C. BELOW: Dr. Kelsey at her home at Chevy Chase, Md.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
September 17, 2010

VICTORIA

Fifty years ago, Dr. Frances Kelsey saved untold babies from deformity and mothers from heartache.

A single line in a medical journal made her suspicious of a new sedative, as users reported minor numbness in toes and fingers. In a fetus, such effects on developing nerve tissue could be catastrophic. As a medical officer for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, she demanded further testing, sparking a two-year battle with the manufacturer, the William S. Merrell Company of Cincinnati.

In an age of wonder drugs and a trust in science, when advertising agency Mad Men made pill-popping as American as apple pie, a mother of two working from a cubbyhole office resisted pressure from a major pharmaceutical firm.

The drug she kept from American medicine chests was to be marketed as Kevadon. The world remembers it by its generic name — thalidomide, today a byword for science and marketing gone astray. Thousands of babies around the world were born without limbs, or with flipper-like appendages, a terrible toll for mothers seeking simple relief from the rigors of pregnancy.

A grateful nation thanked Dr. Kelsey, who was hailed as a heroine in headlines and who received a medal from President John F. Kennedy. Her stand led to tougher regulations in food and drug use.

This week, Dr. Kelsey, only five years retired at age 96, is being celebrated again for her perseverance. In a ceremony in Washington, DC, she received on Wednesday from her former employer the inaugural Kelsey Award for “excellence and courage in protecting public health.”

Gone unremarked was her idyllic childhood on Vancouver Island, where she tried to satisfy a restless curiosity about the natural world by exploring the forests surrounding the family home.

“We had 32 acres, most of it in woods, a little stream running through it,” she said Thursday by telephone from her home at Chevy Chase, Md. “I was born right in our home in Cobble Hill. The doctor rode over on horseback.”

Her father, Frank Oldham, a retired British artillery officer, and her Scottish mother, Katherine Stuart, settled in the farming village in the Cowichan Valley about 50 kilometres north of Victoria. Within a fortnight of the birth of their second child, named Frances Kathleen Oldham, Europe was embroiled in war.

Her father rejoined the armed forces that fall and did not return home from the Great War for four years.

“I remember my brother and I were having supper when he walked in,” she said. “We stopped eating long enough to shove some little presents we had for him and then went back to eating. My mother said it was the most pathetic thing she’d ever seen.”

It was her mother who promoted the education of a daughter who counted among her maternal aunts a lawyer and a doctor.

“I enjoyed learning. I wasn’t brilliant, but I was a smart kid. I grew up being encouraged with thoughts of going on to college.”

She boarded at the all-girl Saint Margaret’s School in Victoria before graduating to Victoria College, where classes were held at Craigdarroch Castle, a mansion high on a hill in the capital city. She recalls scandalizing classmates by choosing a male student as a partner for the dissection of a cat in biology class, which was seen to be a too-intimate process to have been conducted with a member of the opposite sex.

She then enrolled at McGill University in Montreal, earning a science degree in 1934 and a masters the following year.

With the encouragement of a McGill professor, she sought a position with the noted researcher E.M.K. Geiling at the University of Chicago.

“I wrote him a letter, signed my name, Frances Oldham. To my surprise, I got a letter back, airmail special delivery, saying if I could be there before the week ended I could take an assistantship and qualify for a fellowship. The only thing was the American doctor addressed me as Mr. Oldham.

“I said to my McGill professor, ‘I really should tell him and give him a chance to back out.’ He said, ‘Don’t be stupid. Accept the job. Say you’ll be there when he wants you. Just sign your name with Miss in brackets.’ ”

She got the position, though she later learned “Dr. Geiling was appalled when he got my (acceptance) letter.”

While completing a doctorate in pharmacology, she helped conduct animal studies that led to the discovery of the toxic ingredient in a medicine blamed for the deaths of 107 children.

In 1943, she married fellow faculty member J. Ellis Kelsey. She gave birth to two daughters while in medical school. She later edited a journal of the American Medical Association and taught pharmacology in South Dakota, where she also offered medical services to remote hamlets.

She became a naturalized American citizen in 1955, fulfilling a pact made with her husband.

“If became an American, he’d become an Episcopalian,” she said. “He did, and I did.”

She still has connections to Canada. In 1994, the doctor attended the groundbreaking ceremony for Frances Kelsey Secondary School at Mill Bay, north of Victoria. As well, a daughter lives at London, Ont., while her sister, Monica, lives in Victoria.

After her husband took a job in Washington, she found work with the FDA. Examining thalidomide was one of her first assignments.

In 1962, President Kennedy presented her with the highest award for the federal civil service, becoming only the second woman to be so honoured. She bought a new dress for the occasion.

“Shook my hand. Put a medal around my neck.”

Later that year, on the tenth day of a month the world remembers for the October Missile Crisis, she was invited to the White House as the president signed into law tough new regulations. When he completed his signature, he reached across the desk to hand her the pen. She has it still.

New Zealand earthquake provides some tough lessons for B.C.

Liquefaction during the recent New Zealand earthquake has turned the verdant lawns of Elwood Bowling Club in Christchurch into a mud pit. BELOW: Natural hazards expert John Clague, a professor at Simon Fraser University.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
September 15, 2010

VICTORIA

When the ground stopped shaking at 4:30 a.m., the residents of Christchurch poked out of their homes to survey the damage.

Chimneys toppled. Facades fell onto sidewalks. Across the New Zealand countryside, once-straight railroad tracks curved like slithering snakes.

In the city, brick walls collapsed, exposing the interiors like an open dollhouse.

In the eerily silent aftermath, many reported the sound of rushing water, as though water pipes had burst.

The 7.1-magnitude earthquake caused widespread damage. Happily, few residents were physically hurt.

No deaths. Only a handful of serious injuries, including a man injured in a taxitwo serious injuries, both to middle-aged men, one cut badly by falling glass, another trapped by a collapsed chimney. A lemur named Gidro drowned in a moat at a wildlife park.

The world has moved on even as the cleanup continues.

The New Zealand earthquake already has the feel of ancient news, superseded by boorish football players (shocking!) and Lady Gaga wearing a dress made of red meat (horrors!), thus raising the steaks on outrageousness.

In university offices around the world, however, professors whose expertise fall in this area are keenly following developments.

John Clague, a natural hazards specialist at Simon Fraser University, says the antipodean temblor provides lessons for British Columbia.

“It’s the type of earthquake we’ve got to worry about here,” he said. “Shallow, crustal earthquakes.”

Christchurch’s building stock includes many older buildings made of brick. It is a low-rise city with few skyscrapers. It is known as the Garden City,

Sounds a lot like Victoria to professor Clague.

A surprise to many New Zealanders was a process known as liquefaction, or, as Television NZ describes it, “when solid ground turns to sludge.”

Liquefaction sounds like “liquid fiction” for a disaster movie.

The ground shakes and certain soils — silty, sandy, even gravelly material — can be transformed into a liquid the “consistency of heavy jelly,” as one report described it. A muddy slurry of a mess.

Terra turns out to be not so firma.

“It’s a hard concept to get your head around,” Prof. Clague said. “You take seemingly solid earth material and you transform it into a liquid.”

Loose, water-saturated silts and sands lose their strength in the shaking, turning into a liquid. Sometimes, this happens below the surface, causing the land atop to glide laterally. Gravity can then lead this capping layer, as it is known, to slide downhill.

On Courtney Drive in Kaiapoi, about 20 kilometres north of Christchurch, two women were swept away in a river of sludge that materialized in front of their homes. They were rescued.

Puns seem hard to avoid — liquefaction is an issue below the surface, waiting to bubble up.

“It’s starting to sink in about liquefaction,” Lewis Joyce, husband of one of the women, told TVNZ.

Sometimes, the sludge is expelled from cracks in the ground at great pressure, creating geysers. These later form into cone-shaped sand volcanoes, many of which now dot backyards in the Christchurch area.

“An amazing phenomena,” Prof. Clague acknowledged.

For many hours after the quake, residents assumed water mains had broken, as muddy liquid continued to bubble through cracks in concrete. This upward thrusting has damaged many homes and roads.

Now, as well, the drying soil is a health hazard, as the sludge mixed with waste from broken sewer lines.

As television showed residents wrestling with wheelbarrows filled with the heavy muck, it also interviewed professors from the University of Canterbury, the University of Arkansas, and Virginia Polytechnic Institute examining the damage caused by the muddy ejecta.

Christchurch’s mayor said about half the city is susceptible to liquefaction.

In British Columbia, a Geological Survey of Canada map shows extensive areas in the Lower Mainland with loose, saturated lowland sediments.

These include all of Lulu Island (the city of Richmond); most of Delta except for Tsawwassen; along the Nicomekl River in Surrey; along the waterfront in Port Coquitlam and Pitt Meadows; as well as the extensive floodplain along the Fraser River farther up the Valley.

In the Greater Victoria area, the liquefaction hazard areas include a few spots along the low-lying parts of the Inner Harbour and at Cadboro Bay.

In Haiti, where the January earthquake measured 7.1, liquefaction knocked out the port area, delaying the delivery of aid.

Prof. Clague noted that the sludge is not usually a killer, though it creates tremendous damage. Like most earthquake experts, he tempers his knowledge with a desire to lead a normal life. He personally would not purchase property in Richmond, even with the precautions demanded on new buildings, yet is at some risk as he lives in a home on the North Shore. He used his expertise in quake threats and geological hazards in judging the soil surrounding the foundation.

“That would be my worst fear as a professional — having my house taken out by a landslide,” he said. “It’s funny what drives you.”

Suffice to say he teaches atop a mountain.