When we lived in L we had problems with ne’er do wells hanging around the unlit pathway beside our house. The pathway was the shortest route between the local pub and the 7-11. It was also the path used to the local elementary and high school. Sometimes the kids would be smoking or drinking or fighting late at night in the pathway… or sometimes, all three.Quite often our shed was decorated by their spray paint. One summer a group of boys decided to light our hedge on fire in the middle of the night. They tried it two weekends in a row…

The second weekend that it happened I went out on the Monday morning with my camera at the time when kids head to school …I just stood there casually pretending to take pictures of my trailing honeysuckle. They didn’t notice me until they were well down the path and no return possible… They noticed me just as one of them laughingly remarked “Did you see all the smoke!!!”…. I figured I had my guys… There  were four of them, about thirteen years old ….. I took lots of pictures of them…. We never had another problem… We aren’t really violent people. We tend to shoot pictures, not guns.

It was 2004.. I am sure there are more 13 year olds in L causing the new owners grief.. Our daughter tells us when she walked by last week someone had kicked in our old fence…. I don’t miss that part of living in our L house.

When we park our car at the local marina to come across by boat we have no options for parking.. There is only one lot. It is unlit, unsupervised and remote. In December there was a rash of gas thefts. When the thieves couldn’t get into our gas tank they went beneath the car and cut the line… It cost us 300.00 for the insurance deductible.

When E went to town today he discovered similar vandalism to our car.. The line to the gas has been cut… Our friends discovered the same problem with their car yesterday.. I would suggest it happened on the weekend…. We haven’t heard yet how much it is going to cost us this time to fix… Honestly we don’t really know how to handle it… We have no other place we can park. We can’t afford three hundred dollars a week…..  The owners of the Marina said there is nothing they could do but suggested we not lock valuables in our cars… (very helpful advice, which they probably read in an ICBC brochure)

RCMP say there is nothing they can do if people don’t make a report.. The RCMP need to be able to track the incidents.. It just takes a phone call. You don’t need to go into the detachment. They don’t need to come to the marina….

I don’t know that the RCMP can do much about a situation like this. Our only solution is if the Marina operators buck up and build a fenced lit parking lot. In the meantime, I am thinking I am going to keep a bag of our plentiful dog poopage and place it in a nice big pile under our gas line when we park our car now….Does that sound like a reasonable

non violent solution