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Ehor Boyanowsky Obituary
Ehor Boyanowsky, Man of Rivers
Ehor Boyanowsky, professor, author, conservationist, correspondent, poet and above all a fly fisherman, died August 20, 2024 in Vancouver, British Columbia, following a brief illness. Friends had hoped that the recent uncharacteristic silence from Ehor meant only that the fishing was good.
A prolific writer, Ehor chronicled his life as an angler and “keeper of rivers” in scores of articles, books, poems, letters and frequent missives to friends and family. In a recent dispatch he wrote of a “transcendental” evening on his home river, the Thompson, with nighthawks swirling in the air around him while heavy-bodied rainbow trout clobbered his fly. “A magical night,” Ehor wrote, “I was already in heaven (on earth).”
Paradise for Ehor was the stretch of the Thompson River where he lived with his wife Cristina, three dogs and a cat, a rolling riparian habitat dotted with fragrant sagebrush and juniper that Ehor dubbed Nighthawk Ranch. Ehor first came to the Thompson River Valley in the 1980s in pursuit of steelhead and rainbow trout and was taken by the stark beauty of the region’s sun-drenched, semi-arid landscapes of hoodoos, mesas and lodgepole pines. Over the years the property became a gathering place for family, friends and fishermen, who Ehor guided to his favorite spots on the river that he named: Rattlesnake Riviera, the Wedding Point, the Beaver Lodge Run, the Home Pool, the Avalanche Run. The landscapes and its inhabitants were the inspiration for many of Ehor’s writings, including two volumes of poetry published in recent years, Life and Death in the Valley of the Sagebrush Mariposa Lily and Living with the Creatures of Light and Darkness.
Ehor began his journey in this world in a very different landscape, born in 1943 in Toronto to Ukrainian immigrants Dmitri Boyanowsky and Katarzyna Choma and raised with his sister, Lesha, in Red Lake, surrounded by the vast boreal forests of northwestern Ontario. As a youth exploring the area’s lakes and rivers, Ehor first nurtured his passion for fishing and for writing, penning numerous columns on local sports for the Red Lake District News. Later in life, Ehor chronicled the place and people of his upbringing in a novel called Blood Moon over Rat Lake, published in 2022.
Ehor graduated from Red Lake District High School in 1962 and went on to study psychology at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, and at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he was awarded a PhD in 1971. A lifelong academic, Ehor taught social psychology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia and at the University of British Colombia before moving to Simon Fraser University, where he helped found the university’s Department of Criminology and taught for the rest of his career. Ehor became a well-known figure in the field who was quoted frequently in print, radio and television media and in 2020, his omnibus, Crime and Criminality, was published by the University of Toronto Press.
Ehor was also active in helping nurture post-secondary education in British Columbia and was twice elected head of the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of British Columbia, which in 2015, inaugurated an award named in his honor, the Ehor Boyanowsky Academic of the Year award.
It was in his adopted home province of British Columbia that Ehor developed his lifelong passion for fly-fishing and for riparian conservation. He was active in sporting and environmental conservation groups and served as President of the Steelhead Society of British Columbia; Director of the Wild Salmon Center in Portland Oregon; and as a President of Totems Flyfishers in 2008. A looming bear of a man with an easy smile and ready wit, Ehor was a recognizable figure on British Colombia’s Rivers and, by his count, fished 87 of them.
It wasn’t trophies Ehor was after but experience and connection, with both the natural world and with those who shared his wonder for it. One of these was the British poet Ted Hughes, with whom Ehor made annual pilgrimages to fish steelhead on the Dean River in Northern British Columbia, a friendship which was the subject of Ehor’s memoir Savage Gods and Silver Ghosts, published by Douglas and McIntyre in 2010.
Ehor lived and wrote of fishing in all its dimensions – aesthetic, spiritual, athletic, political, scientific and technical – and saw the fisherman as a person of and connected to rivers:
As the angler works his way along the river, plumbing the depths with his lure or dropping his fly across the current, in that special time when everything is right, he enters into synchrony with his environment. He experiences the thrill of rhythm sounded out by the rising and dipping of birds, of rustling branches reaching over riverbanks of slowly shifting gravel and earth, and by the myriad life forms under the panoply of moving water. He, himself, is the product of a thousand-year quest. To greater or lesser extent, he is many things in addition to the hunter after his quarry. He is, in the rod he uses deftly, an athlete. If he has built it himself, he is an artisan. If he has created the lure, or tied the flies, or communicated his experience to many others, he is an artist. If he has studied the stream to create these lures or flies, he is a naturalist. If he is thrilled by the wildness that remains, making certain his presence does nothing to diminish the place, he is an environmentalist. If he is outraged by any signs of despoilation he does see and takes any action at all, he begins to repay his debt to nature. He becomes the river’s, and in a small but important way, his brother’s and his son’s keeper. Any one of these alone is worthy of a lifetime’s pursuit.
And Ehor pursued them all.
Ehor is survived by his wife, Cristina Martini, his three children, Jennifer Benyon, Thea Boyanowsky and Alexei Boyanowsky and four grandchildren, Charles, Georgia, Victoria and Dmitri. A Celebration of Ehor’s Life will be held on September 21, 2024, at Nighthawk Ranch in Ashcroft, British Columbia.
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June 9 1943 August 19 2024 81 Years Old
Death notice for the town of: Ashcroft, Province: Colombie britanique
death notice Ehor Orest Boyanowsky June 9 1943 August 19 2024 81 Years Old
obituaries notice Ehor Orest Boyanowsky June 9 1943 August 19 2024 81 Years Old
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