This will be a very visual post – some of the photographs that sparked my first story. As I said last time, I was, and am, a photographer. Like Maddy, the heroine of my first novel, I was a darkroom photographer during the years I lived in Honeymoon Bay on Lake Cowichan on Vancouver Island (basically the 1980’s). It was just before the age of digital photography struck and I took photographs in black and white by choice, considering it an art form.

I studied photography at the local college and first worked in the darkroom there. Later I got my own darkroom and still have the equipment although I rarely use it. It is a very magical process that I liken to alchemy, and is just as mystical to me. I was always the artist, never the chemist. I did, in fact, go on to finally get my B.A. in Fine Art at University of Victoria almost 20 years later.

These are photos I took of the farm around the corner from our Honeymoon Bay home, a place that is one of the sparks of the story. In Summer of Fortune it is the home of the hero, Jake Murphy. I had belonged to his grandfather, West Coast pioneer, Frederic Murdoch.

The real farm is known in the Cowichan Valley as March farm, after Henry March, the pioneer who arrived from England in Cowichan Bay in the 1880’s at the age of nineteen. He walked twenty miles along the ‘Indian paths” up the Cowichan River (there was no road) to the village of Lake Cowichan. A few years later he settled on an area of level ground on a bay down the lake and began the unbelievable job of logging the land to begin a farm.

The property was covered with gigantic, first growth Douglas Firs, often 6 and 8 feet in diameter, that they cut by hand, two men, one on each end of the cross cut saw perched 6” up the tree. These giant butts are still scattered around the forest, remembrances of the original old growth forests and the crosscut event is still part of the local Loggers Sports celebrations every summer.

I have seen photographs of oxen pulling the giant logs along skidways on the March Farm lands. These are roads built of smaller logs laid side by side on the forest floor to allow the logs to be dragged to the lake. They were then sold to get the farm up and running, for the house, the barns and the livestock.

Eventually Henry became lonely and rowed 12 miles down the lake (Cowichan Lake is 18 miles long) to a homestead where Edith, a single lady of good family, lived with her married brother. Apparently he was half dead when he got there and stayed for a few days. Henry did this again, courting her and, so the story goes, eventually rowed her out into the lake and wouldn’t return her to shore until she agreed to marry him. He brought her back to his homestead on the bay, which they called Honeymoon Bay, and together they built the farm which to this day is known as March Farm.

Murdoch Farm in Summer of Fortune is March Farm, although there was never anyone like Jake that I knew living there. These are my black and whites of March Farm that I took in the days I lived around the corner from the old homestead.

Next time I will show you the photos that sparked ‘Aunt Augusta’, the ghost in the story.

What sparks you writing imagination?

Judy Hudson