Summer of the Spotted Owl Read Free

Itchy and the theft of my inflatable turtle.
    Then Madge, who said she was developing a headache, asked Jack to remove me for a while. Remove me! I liked that . It was not I, Dinah Galloway, who’d kamikazed into the Urstads’ pool.
    I grumbled about the injustice of this while changing in the bedroom Mrs. Urstad had said I could use. Actually, compared to the rooms at our house in East Van, the bedroom was more like a stadium.
    I said loudly, hoping my sister could hear, “Headache schmeadache. Awfully feminine, aren’t we?”
    â€œHuh? Who was that?” said a gruff voice coming from the backyard.
    I peered out the window. A burly man in yellow work overalls, with District of North Vancouver in red on the back, was gathering up the broken hang glider. He spotted me.
    â€œHey, whass the idea?”
    â€œUh, sorry.” I gave him a bared-teeth smile. “I was —er, practicing for a show.”
    The leathery folds of the man’s face relaxed. “Yeah, I know you. You do the tv commercials for Sol’s Salami, no?”
    â€œNo. I mean, yes,” I said, relieved that he wasn’t angry anymore. I was also pleased that he liked the salami commercials. I’d been doing radio ones for several months now, and, delighted with his increased sausage sales, Sol had decided to start putting me on tv.
    Cramming a crumpled hang glider wing under one arm, the man began to conduct with his free hand. I felt I had no choice but to sing along with him.
    You’ll eat till you burst
At Sol’s on West First!
    I stopped after two rounds, though the man seemed ready to continue on indefinitely. “Can I ask you something?” I demanded. “My sister hasn’t even phoned in a complaint yet. She was going to sit down and do that after I left. But here you are already.”
    The man shrugged. “I do like I’m told, kid. Hey — keep up the good singing, okay?” He strode off, dragging the mangled hang glider behind him.
    By the time I climbed into Jack’s jeep, the District of North Vancouver van was whipping round the corner of the Urstads’ street, Marisa Drive. Fragments of the Sol’s Salami song, which the man was roaring out, echoed back to us.
    â€œMaybe a neighbor reported the hang-glider crash,” Jack suggested. “I’ll admit, though, that we don’t get this kind of prompt service in Vancouver.”
    He started the jeep. It bounced us violently for a few seconds, as it always did when it got going. Then it calmed down, its engine letting out satisfied cackles.
    We ended up following the van to the District of North Vancouver’s municipal hall. The van disappeared into a parking lot; we parked on the street. Protesters were marching up and down with signs: Save The Spotted Owl and Ban Planless Development .
    â€œWhat does that mean, ‘Ban Planless Development’?” I asked.
    Jack lifted me out of his car. He had to do this as the passenger door was inoperable. “Planless developers,” he explained, “are the ones who plow down old-growth forests without considering the wildlife that may be living there. In southwest bc, our forests are home to lots of animals besides the few remaining spotted owls: Rocky Mountain tailed frogs, cougars, white-tailed deer, hairy woodpeckers, northern goshawks. They and other species have been reduced by twenty-five percent because of thoughtless industrial logging.”
    I was looking so horrified that he grinned at me. “I’m still an optimist, Di. I think it’s just a matter of getting people to be more aware of what lives in the forest. Most people, including developers, are willing to listen if we’re willing to talk to them.”
    Jack’s arrival brought cheers from the protesters, most of whom appeared to be students. Somebody thrust a megaphone into his hand.
    Jack pulled a wooden crate from the back seat of the jeep. He placed the crate