A walk in the woods (3)

Some of the things I saw on my walk...

British soldier lichen on a log


Reindeer moss, when it is dry it is crispy brittle, but when it is wet it is very soft


Red maple leaf and rotting birch


Black mushroom


Amazing variety of mushrooms abound


"The three amigos"


Little sombreros in the moss


Shelf fungus


Little neon yellow spikes


A root elbow sticking up from the ground


A branch elbow hanging over the vault

A walk in the woods (2)

I turned off the road onto a trail by the Yellow Rope Road. So named for the huge yellow rope hanging on the tree by the entrance to the trail. It was there when the land was first bought, back in the '70s, and when it finally rotted away it was replaced with a new yellow rope. I don't know how many times it has been replaced, and I am sure no one knows why there was a rope on that tree in the first place...


The trail goes deep into the woods


It widens into an avenue...


A fork in the trail, filled with bracken. I took the left fork...


The woods get denser, the trail narrows


...and narrower


Trail along the edge of the vault. If you step a foot to one side you can't see the trail at all, it just disappears in the trees.


Tiny red berries


Step moss


Moss on a tree stump


More moss!

A walk in the woods (1)

All these photos are from a walk in the Hundred Acre Woods at the end of September. I was armed with my camera because I wanted to find caterpillars and photograph them for my blog post, Caterpillars. I ended up photographing a whole lot of other stuff too...


This is looking up into the tree at the bend in the road in the first photo.



Mudpuddles...


I think this flower is Eyebright


More mudpuddles...


Clover!


Yes, I like mudpuddles...


One of the two main brooks in this woods.


Brook heading into culvert under the road.


This is the turn-off for the Yellow Rope Road, brilliantly marked by yellow poplars.

CAPS OFF

truck in the garage undergoing major repairs. all my friends are urging me to get rid of it and i am coming round to that conclusion but i spent last night going thru all my photos of the truck and realize i am now in serious mourning. since yohan is gone sadly the truck is my biggest relationship going and giving that up is not easy. i really must get a life...

i bought this truck in 1994, it is a 1991 4-cyl automatic chevy s10 with an extended cab and bench seat in the front. in 1996 i added a canopy, a cover for the truck bed so that i could turn it into a camper for long trips.

my first long trip was in 1997, i travelled in october from vancouver to toronto and back for my eldest son's wedding. i remember that i spent my first night in the back of the truck in the crows nest pass in the rockies, the temperature went below freezing and my water had ice on it in the morning but i survived nicely in my sleeping bag under the canopy in the back of my truck. i still had yohan then, he survived nicely too. breakfast was a cold affair, cold cereal eaten with gloved hands on the side of the highway.

my next big trip was a four month odyssey travelling from vancouver to inuvik to newfoundland and red bay labrador, and back to vancouver in the summer of '98. i managed to visit every province and territory except nunavut, i'm not sure there is or was a road to nunavut. yohan accompanied me on that trip too but met with a serious accident in dawson city (of yukon gold rush fame) in which he was run over by a camperized van. he survived but i very nearly didn't, it was a very traumatic episode. when he was in the dog hospital i spent a night contemplating his death and wondering what to do next. by morning i knew the whole trip was cancelled if he wasn't coming. he survived and we continued our trip, but the writing was on the wall and i had the grim task of putting him down a couple of months after we got home. i still miss him.

1986, yohan in his prime:


1997, yohan in the news (if you click on it you might be able to read the text):


1997, somewhere in saskatchewan, our first road trip:


since then i've done a few more trips on my own without yohan, including a trip to atlin bc in 2000, the furthest north town in bc. you have to go up the alaska highway into the yukon and then turn back into bc to get there. i went to tennessee in 2006 to spend the summer at the farm.

i wish i had been keeping a blog all that time because i have rather lost track of all the trips i made, i know i went to toronto and nova scotia once or twice during that time and probably about half my trips were made through canada or the us. the first time i travelled in the us i was afraid, i had heard so many horror stories about travelling the us that i thought it was unsafe. but after the first trip i put most of those fears to rest and very much enjoyed the change of scenery and many different routes you could take. in canada there is only one route, the trans-canada, and after you've done that a few times it gets old.

so i've had the truck for fifteen years, it's a part of my life, a part of me. turning that page is really really hard and i am not sure i can do it. the mechanic who is working on my truck disapproves, he believes it is a solid truck, he calls it an iron workhorse, and it could be kept going forever. my friends say that is not true, it will just get more and more expensive and unreliable, and with the kind of long distance driving i like to do, it is just not up to the task anymore. i have no expertise in the matter, i don't know who is right, i just know that it really hurts to give it up.

1997, fall in the kawarthas (ontario):


2000, heading north to the yukon:


2004, on the enchanted highway in north dakota:


2006, at the farm in tennessee:


2006, visiting toronto:


2008, winter in toronto:


2009, summer in nova scotia:

Letting go

My truck is in the garage getting major repairs. I took it in a few days ago to get an inspection prior to driving back to Toronto, and I was fully expecting the garage to tell me the truck was fine, or that it needed minor repairs. I certainly hadn't noticed anything other than the gas leak from the filler hose. However Albert at the garage told me I was looking at $1300 worth of work. Thirteen hundred! Yuk.

After consulting various friends and family members (Hi Peter!) I negotiated with Albert to reduce the repairs to those absolutely necessary, and to use cheap parts (he wanted to put in top quality parts to keep the truck going forever), bringing the price down to just under a thousand. Still a hefty bill but he said it was unsafe to drive as is all the way to Toronto, I don't have time to find another vehicle now and Albert was unwilling to back off from what he considered safety-related necessary repairs. So there you are.

I do however have an offer from a former car salesman to help me find a new vehicle next year. He seems pretty knowledgeable and apparently he loves doing that sort of thing, especially the part where you negotiate a really good price. Hey, sounds like a plan!

The big step for me was foregoing undercoating the truck. I've always tried to keep up with proper maintenance of the truck, and in this climate undercoating is critical. Saying no to the undercoat means I am letting the truck go. We are about to part ways. I've had this truck for fifteen years and it is hard to do. Albert put up a strong argument for keeping it going, he believes it is a solid truck and worth the effort, but I've reluctantly come 'round to saying that may be so but not for me. It's hard.

If you love this planet

Today is Blog Action Day, and the theme this year is Climate Change.

The other day I listened to Anne Marie Tremonte interviewing Tim Flannery on her CBC radio show about his new book, Now or Never, an interview that I was looking forward to hearing because I have read another of his books, The Weather Makers, and was quite impressed. However, preoccupied with more immediate issues in my life, I only caught maybe an eighth of the interview. I did manage to catch the last thing he said which I thought was very cool. He was talking about why we need to act on climate change immediately and decisively. He said that ours is a very rare planet, the only intelligent planet that we know of. There may be others out there, but so far ours is the only one we know of. He said an intelligent planet is rare, unique and Worth It. We need to do whatever it takes to save it for that reason alone.

So then later I was on the internet and found a link to an interesting article about ritual. The article is quite long and I did not read it all---I'll read more later---but at one point the author, Charles Eisenstein, talks about falling in love with our planet.

He says, "I believe that everyone knows in his or her heart that we are indeed connected, interdependent for our very being, and that we are coming into co-creative partnership with a planet we are falling madly in love with."

That rings true for me. Sometimes I think I am so lucky to be alive, to be witnessing what is going here, on this planet, with all these people and all these living things and all this beauty. We are so lucky. And I think it relates to what Tim Flannery is saying, that this is an intelligent planet and worth any effort to save. You have to be madly in love to say something like that.

I think there's been a tipping point, more and more people are waking up to what we stand to lose if we don't do something pretty darn soon. Unfortunately politicians and corporate direction setters are a little slow, a little more concerned about the financial cost of doing something. However I do believe that both are concerned about public image, and therefore subject to the influence of mounting protest by The People waking up.

It's important. It's worth it. We stand to lose not just a few endangered species or a way of life, we stand to lose a whole planet. And that will be a very shameful thing to lose. The more people fall madly in love with this planet, the more chance we have to save it.

Thirteen hundred

I took my truck into the garage on Tuesday to get the brakes and front end inspected; I fully expected to get some kind of seal of approval and be sent merrily on my way.

Boy was I naive!

Right now I am looking at sinking $1300 into my beloved little truck. Albert assures me that it is all absolutely necessary, and---AND---

My Truck Is Worth It.
Yup, he said that. Yuck, where did that come from?

So I drove home to sit in front of the fire and reel. Omigod, thirteen hundred bucks. THIRTEEN HUNDRED bucks.

OK. Moving on.

It's only money, right? And I love my little truck. But having to make major vehicular decisions always leaves me feeling inadequate and insecure. It absolutely scares the heck out of me. So, I did what I do under those circumstances, I asked everybody I could think of what I should do. Needless to say I got lots of conflicting advice. Everything from just do what the man says to get rid of the truck now, this only ends badly. So I got to spend a sleepless night mulling it all over.

In the morning I had pretty much come to some kind of conclusion, but still feeling totally inadequate and insecure I went around trying to get all those advice givers to agree with and approve of my conclusion. I know, it's silly and useless, but that's what I do. I called Albert and he argued with me. One opinionated mechanic, is our Albert. But he came back with a revised estimate and a deadline, tell him by 3.00pm what I wanted to do. And I did. We agreed on slightly less work and slightly cheaper parts for a slightly lower estimate (eleven hundred). And having had twenty-four hours to wrestle with this issue I am content with it. On Thursday morning the truck goes into the garage and it doesn't come out till end of Friday. It gets a whole bunch of new parts and an undercoat.

The conclusion I came to was that, while looking for a new vehicle is probably in order, I don't want to do that right now under these circumstances. I need time. But I also need to get back to Toronto with my kayak and all my stuff, and that means I need the truck, and I need it to be safe. A thousand bucks seems like a lot of money to put into a vehicle you plan to get rid of, but I don't see a way around it that is less stressful.

And I like Albert. His main argument was, this is a good truck, it is worth it. He said they call this particular model The Iron Work Horse, because it just keeps going and going. I feel that if I am going to live here for any length of time then I want Albert to be my mechanic of first choice; I need him to pay attention to what I want, but I also don't want to tick him off.

The tractor

Hard labour

I heard an interesting thing on the radio the other day, it was on a CBC show called Spark, which is about high tech stuff. This CEO of a high tech company was talking about renovations they recently did to the building his company is in, only instead of hiring people to do the work, they did it themselves. So this CEO was out there doing carpentry and roofing and whatever else needed to be done. He said it was an enlightening experience, not to mention very enjoyable.

The CEO said that in high tech work, you're working with intangibles, a kind of virtual world that involves a lot of problem solving and creative "lateral thinking". But the building trades involve working with tangibles, real world stuff. They also involve a lot of problem-solving, but you have to think logically, tasks need to be sequenced in the correct chronological order to accomplish the work. And the end result is a real product, something you can see and touch, and has real weight.

This CEO said it was very satisfying work and he felt it brought something new and fresh to his regular work. He said he was probably the world's slowest roofer because of his extreme attention to detail, he would line up each shingle absolutely precisely to leave no gaps, and in the course of the work he examined every shingle in close-up detail.

I was listening to this and nodding my head in agreement, there is something very satisfying in working with one's hands and real materials, creating a finished product you can feel proud of at the end. And the actual process of doing the work is satisfying too. There's a certain assumption that trades that involve physical labour don't require brainwork but that is absolutely false, there is a constant problem-solving process going on.

Several years ago I lived in a leaky condo in a complex that was undergoing rehabilitation; my ground-level patio ended up being one of the lunchbreak sites for some of the workers on this project. I was literally living in the middle of a construction site. All day I would hear these guys chattering away while they worked or took breaks, and some of the conversation was quite interesting. They would talk about personal matters, political events and about the work itself. They discussed each step of the work process, all the little issues that came up along the way, and proposed and argued solutions. It was clear that this work was not a simple matter, there were always things that needed to be worked through mentally before they could be worked on physically. I found their discussions quite fascinating.

My own experience with building projects is the same, there is a constant problem-solving process going on, and constant little satisfactions in figuring out and implementing the solutions. There is a further satisfaction in using one's body to do work, it just feels good. At the end you're physically tired, but it is a good feeling.

I hear on the news that there is a growing lack of tradespeople, there are fewer and fewer plumbers, electricians and carpenters, fewer and fewer young people being encouraged to go into these kinds of careers. It seems that our culture glorifies "brainwork" and the kind of work that requires a university degree, at the expense of the trades.

When I was living in that construction site there was a bit of work that had to be done inside my condo, a drywaller was fixing some of the holes made by the work being done outside. He was in his mid-40s and talking about retiring. He said this would be his last project, he had bought a little place in the interior of BC and intended to retire there. At age 45.

He said that he used to have several apprentices working with him at any one time, but now he hardly ever had apprentices; young people were flocking to the computer careers and simply were not interested in learning drywalling anymore.

Where you earn so much money you get to retire at 45.

Fall full on

The woods are all colours now, red, yellow, green, brown. We've had a lot of wind and rain so the leaves are falling, the view into the woods is opening up. You can see much further now. The lay of the land is more visible, the little hills and valleys in the woods. And of course the two brooks are flowing full. At night the brook in the vault below this house is very loud, it just roars. I look down there and see it in full flood between the trees.

Tonight I was down in the Harbour and the waterfall at the end of the brook was huge. The tide was in, the waves covered the entire beach in the Harbour, and a little red motor boat rocked crazily by the rocks that used to be the wharf. The stars were just starting to come out.

The yellow and red of the trees colour the air, when the sun shines the air is golden, everything glows. When it rains the gold drips into the green and brown.






Lots of orange and brown caterpillars now, they are all headed somewhere, I don't know where. Sheila and I shuffle them off the road so the dogs don't trample them.

The waiting room blues

It's getting colder all the time now, Sheila says the long range forecast is for snow flurries next Friday. I'd pack up and leave now, but...

It seems like every time I plan to leave, whether from Toronto to Nova Scotia, vice versa or anywhere else for that matter, all hell breaks loose. All of a sudden I have emergencies that must be taken care of right now and even involve postponing departure dates. Right now I have both medical and vehicular urgent matters---or so it seems---to take care of and I can't leave until I do.

As far as the vehicle goes, apparently I have a gas leak, but it is most likely not the gas tank but the hose from the gas lid to the tank. However they no longer make that hose, but the local gas tank repair guy has obtained one from the "after-market" (now, would that be the junk yard?) and can install it Wednesday. I also am taking the truck in to another garage on Tuesday to get the front end and brakes inspected. I think they're fine but don't want surprises on the road. Both garages are in small towns so there's not a lot to do while waiting, and usually they want a few hours at least, so it's a bit of a pain but what can you do.

The medical matter is more of a mystery, I suspect it is nothing but the doctor---a young guy---has taken the ball and run off with it, ordering up all kinds of tests and X-rays and CT scans and whatnot. He's at a walk-in clinic so I can't make an appointment, I have to show up and wait for at least an hour before I get to see him. I'm getting the immersion course in waiting room life (that would be a whole other blog posting!).

So far he has proposed several theories, each one necessitating yet another test, and I am on my second course of antibiotics even though there is very little evidence of any kind of infection. A kind of ruling-things-out-by-treatment: if the antibiotic doesn't fix it then it must not be an infection. And apparently each antibiotic is only good for certain things, so if the first one doesn't work then maybe it's another kind of infection.

I just looked up from my laptop to see a blue jay sitting on my windowsill, a few feet away. Cool!

The X-ray was supposed to be definitive, but it only raised yet more questions and more theories, so now he wants a CT scan. That is sure to be definitive! I went home Friday night quite discouraged, I am "sick and tired" of all this fuss over a relatively minor complaint that as near as I can tell does not indicate anything serious. So I went on the internet yesterday to look up CT scans, and while there are lots of benefits there are also some risks, it involves considerably more radiation than just an X-ray. The descriptions all say that the benefits far outweigh the risks, because the CT scan allows early diagnosis and prompt treatment.

My problem with that is that we're not talking cancer or any other life-threatening issues here, and the doctor's current theories either have no treatment or a "wait and see" treatment. So why run the risk for such little benefit? He says it could take as long as 3 weeks to get the CT scan, or I could get in as early as one week from making the appointment. And since I only saw him on Friday night after the clinic staff had left for the long weekend, that appointment won't get made until Tuesday, so we are talking at least a week and a half. Hence the discouragement.

So, I am thinking that I will get the truck taken care of and then see how I feel about taking a miss on the CT scan. I am pretty sure it will be even harder to get the CT scan in Toronto, and my current plan does not involve staying in Toronto for very long. I just bought myself a round-trip Westjet ticket to Vancouver for Christmas, leaving Toronto the end of November and returning early January. December has got to be one of the worst months weather-wise to be in Vancouver, and of course the same can be said for January to March in Toronto. I'm just a glutton for punishment!

I dislike flying in big airplanes to and from big airports, but Westjet is one of the better ones so I am kind of looking forward to that. Haven't flown with them in a while so they may not be as good as they used to be---we shall see---but I have good memories of them. If ever an airline believed in customer service, it would be Westjet.

One of my favourite memories is of an ill-fated flight during the winter from Toronto to Vancouver, with a stopover in Calgary. Departures were delayed by several hours, in both Toronto and Calgary, due to weather. Connections were missed. When we finally boarded the plane in Calgary it was clear that we would be arriving in Vancouver after closing time and we would be damn lucky to find taxis or buses there. But, when we were all seated and belted in, the pilot came on the intercom singing, "Six days on the road and we're gonna get you home tonight!" They've got the nicest people working on their airplanes!

They have no first class seating, it's all one class. They didn't used to serve meals so there were no food carts in the aisles and as soon as the seatbelt sign went off they encouraged you to get up and wander around. The flight attendants told jokes and played games. One game they used to play involved throwing rolls of toilet paper down the aisles! People brought their own food and shared with their neighbours, I had some really great meals on some of those flights. We used to compare flight jokes, to see who had the funniest flight. Unfortunately the airline now serves food so they do have the food carts in the aisles, and they have TV screens in the seatbacks so the flight attendants don't tell jokes or play games anymore. Too bad, it used to be a lot of fun.

One thing I discovered with Westjet though is that flights with stopovers are actually better than non-stop flights, they give you a chance to get out and stretch your legs and breathe real air. Westjet used to stop at some out-of-the-way places, so you ended up in tiny airports in parts of the country you never expected to see. Small airports are way better than the big ones.

Oh, one more thing. I got email from Lisa, the Festival Committee Chair of Deep Roots Music. She found my blog post on this year's festival and liked it, she was writing to ask permission to link to it from the Deep Roots website. I feel honoured!

And that's my rant for the day.

Here and there in the hundred acre woods...

Strange Empire

Right now I am reading The Strange Empire of Louis Riel by Joseph Howard.

Strange Empire is a very interesting book. The topic is an episode in Canadian history but it is written by an American. Howard grew up in western Canada but he lived most of his adult life in western America. He died in Montana at the age of 45, just before Strange Empire was published in the 1950s. A friend discussed the manuscript with him in the last weeks before his death and edited it for publishing.

The book is about Louis Riel who led the Metis rebellion in what is now Manitoba back in the 1870s. He was eventually arrested, tried and executed by hanging. According to Howard, this event not only changed Canadian history but American as well, he contends that the American Indian Wars may very well have had a very different outcome had Riel succeeded in establishing the Metis nation west of Ontario. Native Americans would have had great political and military support from their neighbours to the north, the Metis. Briefly Riel did succeed.

It is a very sad story and the author has a very interesting perspective on it. For starters, he has absolutely no use for Sir John A, considering him a slimeball of the worst kind in his dealings with the Metis. Equally he has almost no use for Ontarians, who clamoured for the death of Riel and his cohorts. It is his contention that the Canadian government might have dealt fairly with the Metis if Ontarians had not been so insanely set against them and Sir John A not quite so concerned about earning their votes. But given the racism of the time, it is unlikely that they would have gotten fair treatment from anyone. Louis Riel, ironically, did have the support of the Catholic Church (for a while), and certain senior churchmen did try to intervene on his behalf. In Quebec he is of course considered a hero of the highest level, and his execution is just one more bone of contention between French and English Canadians.

Aside from the politics involved, it is a fascinating story of the Canadian West, before it was the Canadian West. Riel was a somewhat reluctant leader who did his best for and was much loved and admired by his people. It is a very unpleasant chapter of Canadian history, and this book portrays a rather different story from that which I learned in school history class. I generally had an image of Riel as a bit of a madman; he may have had a just cause but he was crazy. This book sets out to show that he was not crazy, he was an educated and somewhat introverted and religious gentleman thrust into the role of leadership more out of a sense of justice than any desire to lead. When he was brought to trial his defense lawyers used a defense of insanity as a last resort since they were unable to procure the witnesses who could have exonerated Riel. Riel objected strenuously to this defense and was silenced by the court for his trouble. And then convicted and hanged.

What comes across in this book is the loss of a way of life and a human culture adapted to the prairie wilderness. In history books this is described as a necessary prelude to national progress, but the huge loss is minimized. It strikes a chord in me, I feel that loss profoundly.

Howard describes an interesting thing about the plague of smallpox among the prairie Indian tribes. There is a story that white people deliberately infected Indians with "smallpox blankets", blankets that had been impregnated with smallpox germs. I don't know if that is true or not, but Howard describes how Indians died and attempted to retaliate against the whites that they were certain had infected them. Dying men would go crazy, among other things attacking white posts in their last moments and if they could not actually get into those posts then they would rub up against them in hopes of leaving smallpox germs for the whites. They died terrible terrible deaths, and so many died that any resistance they might have mounted against the white invasion of their land was utterly short-circuited.

Red and yellow

The berries above are from the rowan tree (mountain ash). They start out orange and deepen to red.

The red leaf is from the red maple.

The yellow flowers are jerusalem artichokes, I see them everywhere now. They used to be cultivated, now they proliferate as "weeds". Eventually the field these flowers grow in will be filled with them. Ruth and Nancy say that when all civilization collapses (an event considered imminent here) we will all be out in that field foraging for the roots of these lovely flowers...

Squirrel tales

The female who gnaws the antlers and her mate (I'm assuming "mate", but who knows?) have moved into my porch, behind the stacked firewood. There is no way I can shoo them out of there. I see them coming in with great mouthfuls of nesting material, and I hear them chattering behind the firewood. Little buggers.

I made one last attempt to get them out yesterday and I do believe the verdict is in, it failed.

I could trap them but...

What I did yesterday morning was nail cedar shingles over the two major holes in the porch that they use regularly. They were quite upset by all the hammering, I threw in some extra hammering on the wall next to their nest, yelling, Get out! Get out! I don't want you here, get out! I could hear one or more of them indoors squeaking and scurrying about in what I believe was consternation, and another one of them sat in a tree watching me hammer, squeaking her dismay loudly.

Later, I caught the female gnawing on the antlers and shooed her away; she attempted to exit by her usual route and discovered the way blocked, went on to the second exit and found it also blocked. Then she looked a little panicked. She actually ran straight at me in a last desperate search for another hole, found one, and was gone. If there is one thing this porch has, it's holes, lots of 'em.

Still later in the day I heard two of them knocking around over by the shed (literally knocking around, I could hear things falling off shelves) and thought, Oh good, they are scouting out a new nest location. They can have the shed, I don't care about that.

I went away for a couple of hours and came back. I needed to pee and was crouching on the ground behind the house, when two squirrels approached me. They came down a tree trunk, one at a time, watching me the entire time. They stopped a few feet away from me and just stood there. It was very clear to me that they were begging for their old place back. They were promising to behave. They seemed very sincere but I don't know how much you can trust a squirrel, sincere or otherwise.

But at any rate they're back. And they do seem better behaved. They used to quarrel a lot and generally carry on noisily behind the stacked fire wood, now they are very quiet. They don't come near my stuff, but they do occasionally come out from behind the firewood and look at me. There's been no gnawing on the antlers.

Of course the trap is always an option. The trouble is that I will soon be gone and with all the holes in the porch, there is nothing preventing a return, or a new set of squirrels moving in. So what's the point.

And I counted three of them; I just don't even want to know what kind of arrangement they have going on back there.