Wednesday. ‘Community’ day. That’s the day we seem to choose for ‘doing stuff’ together. The mail plane comes in on Wednesday, the school is in session, yoga is held in the gym or the bunkhouse and any volunteer projects usually get scheduled for that day as well. And, in the summer, the ad hoc café operates from the Freight Shed. It’s a loose system but it seems to work.

This Wednesday, for instance, the public nurses came in and gave us flu shots.

Saturday, however, is the AGM for the community association, SNACA, the epicentre of all things not-supposed-to-be-political. You see, SNACAs main purpose is to care for and manage the community buildings of which there are three. They initiate maintenance and schedule events for those three buildings. That’s supposed to be it. Basically simple and minimal administration of not-so-much.

But SNACA has history, longevity, stature. And SNACA is also the biggest organization out here so other issues of concern to the community were often ‘run through’ the auspices of SNACA and, of course, a building maintenance organization became the teapot in which to hold the latest tempest. SNACA became political. In the past, anyway.

This group of officers changed all that. They re-declared their mandate as ‘buildings-only oriented’ and deferred or referred ‘tempest’ issues to some other ‘cauldron’. And, of course, other ‘cauldrons’ sprang up to fill the void as required. No tempest went unhoused.

Typically, of course, the latest issue gets resolved to the point that nothing more is being done so the ‘cauldrons of current interest’ come and go. But SNACA remains.

It is a good system but for one thing. The ‘cauldrons’ are mostly for issues of concern and conflict. They tend to be a bit negatively oriented. There aren’t too many ‘teapots’ for constructive issues. So, we have a minor vacuum on positive issues.

Which is OK.

Positively speaking, most people are happy as they are and don’t really need some constructive, positive, do-good initiatives like meals-on-wheels or walkathons or bake sales. Generally, the good just happens and no ongoing organization is required.

And where there is a strong positive initiative just bursting to come forth, SNACA has stepped up to be the ‘umbrella’ for such an effort. SNACA was and is the ‘mother’ of the Q-hut, the bunkhouse, the newsletter and, even to a large extent, the Freight Shed Café, just to name a few. The ‘kids’ did the work but SNACA was the parent to it all.

So, for the most part, we are pretty well covered out here, in the way of government. An excellent regional representative, SNACA and a few other groups for all things constructive and splinter groups and cauldrons for everything else. It’s a pretty good system. But weird, when you think about it:

We are mostly governed, such as we are, by the Building Maintenance Department.