I've seen gray whales feed in the bay out along the shelf where the water drops off. Resident geese have grown accustomed to me, and head to shore for handouts. On sunny days sea lions bask on spits of rock out past the point. There's a dozen ramshackle cottages on stilts at the edge of Shack Island, from when squatters were allowed to take up residence. I've paddled that far. But now it's the rainy season, and my canoe is suspended from the garage wall.

Gordon lives in the small house one door west. I'm feeding his cat because he's two weeks into a 42 day drug detox program and only sneaks home for an hour on Fridays. Petey lives with his wife Storm and two boys, next door to the north. He's six months off methadone and frighteningly fragile. Gordon asked Petey to feed the cat, but Petey said he couldn't get involved.

Svend lives across the street, a 77 year old ex-seaman from Scandinavia who once canoed the Nile. "I should have died lots of times ," he told me. "I watched men drown in a storm on the North Sea. Trying to grab huge rolls of newsprint that spun around and around in the waves and carried them under. I was twenty feet away, clinging to a railing. There was nothing I could do." Yesterday, coming home from feeding Gordon's cat, I saw Petey across the street talking to Svend. I know there's something contained in that moment, but I can't seem to nail it down.

My friend Cindy smuggled a baby possum out of Mexico by bribing a cabbie, hid the animal under her skirt. "Stashed in my panties," she said. Cindy called last week from the hospital where she works in a psyche ward. "The possum split for two weeks. Just disappeared. But he's returned. I got home yesterday and all my cats were backed up against the wall in the kitchen." I told her she was nuts, but she said, "Hey, I know nuts. And I ain't even close." She cut the call short because it was her turn to take the patients jogging. There's a parallel between Cindy's possum and what she does for a living, but I can't find the words to articulate it.

I sat on a park bench watching people stroll along the seawall. A blind man and his wife walked past, arm in arm. She smiled and he craned his neck as if he'd heard something. But that happened six months ago, and I forget why it meant so much. Most every day contains some defining moment — my pockets are crammed with pieces of paper. I've got a file of notes dating back thirty years. Swallows flit among the fall-bare caraganas. Pigeons balance at the edge of an old restaurant. Rosie wears a white hat and bangles and only serves desert. Plump tourists with skin like sour milk. Last ditch directions: turn left at the summer fallow. I know these sentences have no place in the same paragraph, but I keep looking for connections.

I wanted to write about the millennium, but it's already got away on me. I think it would be good for Petey to feed Gordon's cat. And it would be therapeutic for both of them to hear Svend talk about the drowning sailors: spun to their deaths by the very things they grasped at for refuge. Some days I wish I were crazy like Cindy. Then I could get birds to perch on Rosie's hat, or give plump tourists different directions.

My neighbors have been screaming obscenities for weeks now, voices stripped of thought: fuck this and fuck that, fuck off and die. Storm cracks her first beer at dawn and by ten she's already spitting like a lit fuse.

"We had it all," Petey told me. "Nice house, two car garage, we even had three wheelbarrows." He's just returned from working in Alberta, where he split after a fight with one of their boys. Back only two days and he has a stroke, then another one Sunday night. "Fuck you," Storm screams at her oldest boy (head in the fridge, naked to the waist). "You're the reason my Petey nearly died."

Svend almost missed this terrible circus. He's been in the hospital waiting for his bowels to vacate. "Doubt he'll come home," said his son. "Looks real bad." Yet Svend survived and is now sleeping on his own sofa. The cancer is spreading to his brain, but his son hasn't told him that yet.

On the bright side, Jessica is visiting — my stepson Joshua's half-sister. She's eight and cute as a button. They play in the ocean less than a block from our door. Sometimes Jessica scratches at Joshua and he shoves her to the sand. Five minutes later they're laughing.

I'm sitting on the back porch in my easy chair reading about about a volcano on the Greek island of Thera. It blew a hole seven miles wide and created an ash cloud hotter than iron from a furnace, sent it spewing across the Mediterranean at 200 miles per hour, causing destruction of Biblical proportions. Next door, Storm is still screaming, and I can't help but wonder: how puny is our anger?

But it doesn't matter. I'm still angry at God for killing Svend in such a slow, painful fashion. For allowing so much hate to fester next door. I'm angry at Joshua for shoving his sister. Yesterday I read that a pipeline burst and spilled a million barrels of oil into the Amazon, last year it was cyanide in the Danube. There's enough good reasons to be angry, to feel like a hostage. Maybe anger and violence are unavoidable in this expanding universe, every hard thought careening out from our millions of selves. Beyond survival: to own and defend, to name everything along this long road, century after century.

I want to stick my head out the window and scream at Storm, "Take a fucking valium, for chrissakes, you live on a fault line." But it would serve no purpose. Anyway, the kids are returning from the beach. Joshua is holding his sister's hand and she's crying. Lord knows what's happened now? I lay my book open over the arm of the chair and watch through the open window, waiting to offer what comfort I can.

Petey had his veins cleaned and things have pretty much calmed down next door, though Storm was still on the porch at noon having a smoke and a can of beer. I saw their oldest boy at his bedroom window staring up as if trying to lose himself in the gray sky. Last spring he bought an old cherry-red Celica and talked about restoring it. But the car's been resting on blocks since June. Sometime near the beginning of September he replaced the weather-stripping on the sunroof. At least it won't leak when the rains set in.

Gordon, the recovering addict who lived in the small house at the back of this property, left his cat with the SPCA and moved to the mainland. His last job here was as a bouncer at the door of a crack house. He traded his car for two 8-balls. I can't imagine him staying clear for long, not broke on the streets of Vancouver. I keep expecting him to call and ask for a loan, but he's probably lost my number.

Svend didn't last long and no surprise. Last week his ashes were spread over the side of a boat in Departure Bay. I imagine bits of his bone already washed ashore and settling amid the driftwood strewn below his house. He had a winch rigged to drag the best logs up to his yard, where he sawed and chopped them into firewood. "If it floats," he said. "It burns." I'll miss mornings after sea squalls, the smells of sawdust and chain oil.

It's autumn here and patches of gold liven the trees. Odd how this riot of color marks the passing of balmy days. There's a family on the beach. A young boy with a slingshot wings a pebble over the mud flats into the water. A baby squats by a heap of salt-bleached logs, licks her fingers and makes a face, surprised at the graininess of sand.