When Lawn Chairs Attack!

Dad had a long-standing, near-legendary problem with folding lawn chairs.

Wait, What? Lawn Chairs?

Yep.

Looks innocuous enough, doesn't it? Woven polyester/plastic slats, 1mm thick rolled aluminum molded into 2.5 cm diameter formed piping, riveted together in a fashion ostensibly designed to provide hours - years - of support as you are entertained in the Great-Out-of-Doors.

But there's one thing the packing label won't tell you. It hints at it nowadays - but doesn't come out and say it directly.

Turns out Dad started to expand a bit once he hit 30. He always, in his own writing, would refer to himself as Slim Hunter - as, in his late teens and early 20s, he was certainly beanpole-esque at a long 193 cm and barely scratching 97 kilos.

For those of you for whom Metric is so much gobbledygook,  that works out to 6'4" and just a touch over 210 pounds.

And by 30 - getting larger. Interestingly, his limbs remained lean and very strong. Unfortunately that meant that all his weight gain for the next 30 years was in his chest and gut. He managed it by remaining active, Hiking, Running, Hunting, and eventually Cycling. I think he probably got back down to 105 kilos from cycling by the time he was 55 - but still had the legs and arms of a leaner man... so still seemed bulky.

Yes, I know Dad always swore he was 6'5". He also always wore cowboy boots. It's easy to add an inch to your height when nobody can see the top of  your head.

At any rate, I was looking Dad in the eye by the time I was 20 years old - and I've never made it past 193cm.

Let's just say that Dad was pretty freakin' large and leave it there.

I don't remember where we were the first time it happened - but I wasn't very old. Probably around 8. That would make Dad 38, and in the worst of his paunch development. He was in a lawn chair, as shown above.

On Grass. On the tiniest slope backward, and to the right. The conditions, as they say, were perfect.

The lawn chair, sensing that Dad was at ease, and therefore vulnerable, suddenly, maliciously and without warning threw him to the ground and clamped its ravenous jaws upon his buttock in an effort to eat him whole.

Dad, never one to be ignominiously eaten by mere furniture, fought back.

This did not appear to be the case from the vantage of the casual viewer, of course. The scene was more reminiscent of an upside-down turtle trying to get clear of a set of bagpipes - and it sounded imaginably similar, too.

After a few minutes of flailing around and some mildish cursing, Dad rolled to his feet, victorious, the mangled carcass of the lawn chair laying in crushed defeat before him. He escaped with only scratches, amidst much tittering from various onlookers.

I said that was the First Time. There were a few others; details mostly the same until the last one which actually drew blood in an attempt to relieve Dad of his kidneys. He liked to show people the scar.

But that was that. Mom found a different brand of lawn chair in Better Homes for Ogres and went shopping, coming back from the Outdoor Shop in the next town... which was in the next province... with four sturdy, thick-rolled, thin tube, very, very sturdily (and therefore, tame) framed chairs.

Which had canvas seats. Nice striped ones.

The canvas on the chairs suffered Dad and weather for a single season, and then promptly split on the first trip the next spring. Dad,  his backside on the ground, arms akimbo and feet dangling, sputtering and cursing somewhat less mildly, fought his way loose form the Very Very Sturdy Frame, and left it where it fell in its disgrace, laying on its side.

Mom looked at the chair. Then back to her spring edition of Ogre Living. Then back at the chair. This went on for some time as Dad, still sputtering, used his chainsaw to cut a stump to sit on.

Well - I presume it was him sputtering... it may have been the chainsaw. The pitch was similar.

Mom eventually put down the magazine with a shrug, picked up the now-denuded lawn chair frame, her bag of macramé cord, and a fresh glass of Sangria from her Camping wine box, and went to work.

Mom macraméd. And Knitted. Pretty much if it had to do with knotting up fibers, she built stuff out of it. We all had really warm sweaters. Nice ones. We had furniture, planters and wall hangings littering our house in The Sticks.

Speaking of knotting things - she also used to cut our hair. But that's, as I like to say, a story for another time.

She also liked to take a box or two of Sangria on camping trips. She says it helped drown out all the sputtering.

At any rate, over several days she built a seat and back out of the macramé cord, weaving and knotting and creating pleasant patterns in tan, cream and green. I suspect it was of her own design, I can't be sure and she can't recall. Eventually, over that summer, she had re-upholstered all four of those chairs.

And they were brilliant. They lasted forever. And superbly comfortable. But there was a drawback... and it was why they were superbly comfortable.

Macramé cord tends to stretch. A few seasons of Dad sitting on them, and the chairs were like little hammocks slung in an upright frame. You get in, and if you're under a certain height... your feet no longer touch the ground.

But you're comfortable. Especially when the backs got bent a little further back from use so your chin wasn't crammed into your chest. It's impossible to get out of the chair without help, but it's okay... you're comfortable.

Just don't decide you need to pee.

One thing though - you couldn't manage a plate in them. Your knees were usually about chest high. Balancing a plate on that was not going to happen.

I haven't sat in one of those chairs in 15 years. Now lawn chairs are geodesic arrangements of piping covered in ballistic nylon - no way you're getting through that. But I said they come with a warning.

Maximum weight 225 lbs.

Dad would love that.

As such, I'm very careful sitting in them. I'm pretty sure that tag means that if you're less than that, you aren't a worthy meal.

The other day when I was thinking about this, I thought, "no way..." and then Googled Macramé Lawn Chairs. Yep, They exist. She could have made a fortune. But probably not.

I'm pretty sure I saw a Macramé Lawn Chair peeking around from a dark corner in the basement of Mom's house when we packed it up last June.

Wouldn't surprise me. It was probably pretty hungry.

Rum Junction

I recently recounted certain events surrounding the development of a hunting cabin called the Rum Junction Hotel. About a klick south of Highway three, barely five minutes out of the little town I grew up in - The Sticks - there is a bottle in a tree.

Okay, seriously. In that neck of the woods, there are very likely a number of bottles in a variety of trees - but none that I know of that are a named landmark for a very select group.

Couple things.  I grew up in the 80s.  It wasn't exactly the wild west, but... well, okay, it was actually the West, technically. My point is you've all very likely seen the posts on facebook how we should never have survived our childhoods... well a lot of this story would probably - nowadays...

Whatever. This story has elements that are not gonna be politically correct. I'm probably gonna offend PETA, MADD, and possibly the BCTF and a bunch of other acronyms, but that's the way things went down. Get over yourselves.

But then, my old friend Zon tells me I'm not exactly hindered in my commentary by an enormous audience, so I guess we're good.

Right. Into the abyss.

Dad and I were out hunting. It occurs to me that this is usually the way these things start.

The unusual part is that he actually saw something. An Elk.

And he saw it long enough to get a shot off.

When I was 15 years old, Dad was a pretty good shot. Having said that - a bottlecap in a tree is almost exactly unlike a 500 kilo Elk ripping up turf and trees around it as you can, realistically, get.

But I wasn't there - I was in the valley. I started moving in his direction when I heard the shot.

I found a man in befuddlement. He was certain he'd aimed true - but we could find absolutley no evidence.

Eventually, Dad found a tiny shred of bloodied flesh on a bush in the vicinity, that might indicate a bullet wound on a large animal. So now we had to track it down.

Six hours later, it was getting on to dusk, and we had not managed to find even one more trace of an animal that was injured, and we very nearly tore that valley apart. But Dad, being a Conservation Instructor and Environmentalist in his way, had an idea that seemed like a good idea at the time.

Heh.  There's an acronym I use as a matter of routine... SLAGIATT. Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time. It's a great catch-all for when things go unpredictably, horribly sideways. This seems to happen a lot in My World.

We were coming back the next day - and we were bringing The Dog.

I grew up with dogs. There were usually two. And they were generally large - as in over 40 kilos, and 30 cm tall at the shoulder, and very often both. This Dog was both. He was the unregistered offspring of a purebred Shepard and an Alsatian Police Dog, and a couple years later would be diagnosed with genetic Retinitis Pigmentosis, and then develop cataracts.

That's a story for another day, of course.

He was in no way intended or trained to hunt or track... but there was nothing wrong with his nose.

The next day, we were back in the draw at Roberts Creek.

Dad handled the Dog. The Dog was somewhere over 50 kilos, and still otherwise prime, and Dad, rightly, was concerned that he'd yard me off my feet running a blood trail.

Four grueling hours up and down 45-degree slopes with nothing to show for it, the Dog pulls Dad off his feet. In landing, Dad came down beside a bush and one of the twigs slid under his glasses, and gouged the cornea of his right eye.

Never done that, but I wear contact lenses sometimes. I'm pretty sure that it HURT. I seem to recall him mentioning that once or twice.

Dad was on a mission, though, and gamely carried on through excruciating pain, his eye tearing to the point of useless.

And for several more hours, we continued to find absolutely no trace of this evidently phantom Elk. Dad, finally, had had enough, and sat down beside the old snag in the center of the draw up the valley. He pulled a bottle of  overproof Demerara rum out of his pack. It was a 750 ml bottle; back then we'd have called it a 26er. It was about a third full.

"I brought this to toast with in case we found that Elk," Dad said. "Don't imagine you can drive us home." I thought about it for a second or two, and, having never touched a steering wheel in a moving vehicle to that point, knew my limitations.

"Thought not. Well, I can't see a damn thing, and this is the only painkiller we have. Pass me one of them cokes."

So we sat under that tree, and killed the sixpack of coke we had in my bag, splitting the remains of the bottle between us. When it was empty, Dad decided to hang it in the Snag we sat under, in the bottom of that draw. there was a perfect broken-off branch pointing straight up about 10 feet high.

I rode Dad's shoulders and mounted the bottle on the branch... and we hiked down the 20 minutes to the truck and drove home - very fortunately without incident. It took years for dad's eye to heal all the way. And now - we have cellphones so such events would never happen.

That bottle sat upside down in that tree - hell, as far as I know, it still is. Eight years after we placed it there Dad expressed amazement no one had shot it out yet. I have not been through that draw in 22 years, though, so I can't even tell you the snag is still standing, let alone the bottle.

That Snag in that Draw lives forever as Rum Junction. Welcome to the Group.

Ghost Stories

I learned a lot from my last camping trip with Mum and two of the boys. Mostly that campfire Ghost stories are just as tough as I thought they would be. I have a new appreciation for the Imaginations of my predecessors.

The best part about camping with Dad and Uncle Crazy Legs had to be the Ghost stories. They had a vast repertoire; from the Humorous to the Benign; all the way into tales that could make the blood of the most worldly seventeen-year-old run to ice.

And you always knew when it was time; the fire was brightening against the chill of the mountain summer's eve, and Dad or Uncle Crazy Legs would start like a distant howl on the wind...

"WhoooooHoooooooooooo..."

It was campy, but it always worked. Every kid, any age sat with rapt attention until the story was done. Very often one or two had eyes squeezed shut, or left in fright all together. It was glorious.

Naturally the mark of success for a ghost story was how hard it was for which kids to fall asleep. You'd be amazed at how much spookier the bush is at night after one of their better tellings. I hope you went to the bathroom before it got dark, because, believe me... you aren't interested in leaving the camper now.

A little taste of moonlight plays through the trees and throws faint shadows that move with the boughs in the breeze... really - just stay in your sleeping bag. The terror is delicious.

We actually tried, as kids, to record some of these stories for posterity, with varying success. I must admit though, that success has diminished given that those recordings, to my knowledge, have passed into legend along with the stories themselves.

Dad did start writing a manuscript about 20 years ago. He never finished it; there was always one more hill to hike up, one more trail to ride down, and that's really the way it should have been. I have that manuscript now, and the technology to convert it back to a usable form... and the collected memory of a dozen now-adult cousins to flesh out the stories. And, it turns out, I have something else.

I was sweating bullets, and I had researched the history of the area for three days... but on our last camping trip, I told my boys a ghost story of my own devise.

Kid Two didn't admit to much, but it kept Youngest Kid up that night.

Thanks, Dad.

Red in the Ledger

I don't remember when Dad taught me to fish.

There are a couple ways to take that statement. SomePeople might take it to mean that the actual event was so traumatic that I've put it out of my mind. That may be true; as stated, I don't remember. I prefer to think it the more benign of the possibilities, of course... that I had been fishing with Dad since I could stand up.

So we're clear, my memory is shockingly good for someone of my evidently advanced age; I can name all of my teachers and most of my classmates all the way back to grade one, nearly 40 years ago.

My lovely wife, of course, would disagree, given my propensity to misplace things. But - this is about Fishing, not Recall.

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I went fishing alone - or, better said - "without Dad."

I have stories. Lots of them: the time I hooked the gigantic cutthroat trout and fought him at long hole for 40 minutes before we pulled him in; jumping in to the Elk River in February (hey, it was only 8 inches of water, relax) to scoop Dad's even-bigger-than-my-cutthroat Dolly Varden on to the bank; Dogs chasing down wildlife, trying to eat porcupines, and stirring up hornets, and long, lazy summer afternoons thigh-deep in a mountain stream, fly fishing.

I even fished a hundred-pound kid out of the Elk River one October... but that's his story to tell, not mine.

I feel like I've done my boys a disservice in that I have not yet passed along the knowledge and pure joy of spending a day on the river, and leaving your prized Schrade Old-Timer on a rock somewhere about five meanders back...

Well, okay, that part sucks, but it's all part of the experience.

The biggest thrill I ever got fishing was seeing the one skirt around the shore under the rocks above the Rock Creek rest area - and then i just dropped my bobber where he was, and Bang! I was eight - and caught the only fish that day.


Truth be told, I haven't cast a fly in fifteen years. The last trip I went on was with Dad... up the Bull River headwaters, fly fishing for Labour Day in 1997. It was an annual thing for us.

I just haven't really had the desire to go since.

I think it's time though; It's been more than long enough. I have knowledge, lore, and a love for the pastime - I know some boys who need that passed along, and I certainly Owe that to Dad. All things considered, I better get cracking.

Hm. I better start collecting some gear.

Pancakes

"Uh, isn't it a little early to be drinking a beer?"

Kid Two asked me that one on our last camping trip. It probably had something to do with the fact it was 9 am Saturday Morning.

It occurred to me then and there that that wasn't the first time I'd heard that particular question.

But not the way you're thinking.

I had heard it last uttered from my own lips, in the dim, distant past during a camping trip, querying my Dad. I would probably have been nine or ten at the time. Probably younger.

The fact that it took Kid Two until nearly sixteen to ask that of me - well, that just means I've been embarrassingly slack in the camping department.

Dad was in charge of breakfast on the family camping trips - and on most hunting camps. One of the most memorable Breakfast dishes he whipped up was "Ranch Style Eggs - " a concoction of stewed tomatoes and bacon with eggs poached in it - best served to hangover sufferers. But that, mercifully, is a story for another time, and I digress.

Dad made Pancakes.

Looking back, I realize that this was a skill he acquired throughout the historical course of our outings. I recall the first few batches weren't all that great. Tasty, sure, but commonly a mangled lump, occasionally scorched.

This is not to say I have not scorched more than my share of pancakes. It does turn out, however, that I'm much more efficient at scorching Ribs. Into Frustrating Charcoal. But we're talking about breakfast.

To be fair, Dad didn't have the excellently engineered tools I have; Teflon-coated aluminium skillets, carbon-vinyl flippers, and the like. He used an old stainless steel flipper on a cast iron fry pan, with a little butter to keep things from sticking. It's amazing any of his creations came out one-piece, and golden fluffy brown. And they usually did.

The fluffiness was key. And dad discovered the secret to light-fluffy pancakes. No matter what scratch recipe or brand of mix you use, use Beer.

The foam lightens the mix. Dad liked Coyote Pancake flour and... well, honestly I don't recall that he was fixed on a particular brand of Beer. He liked Lethbridge Pil, Black Label, and Kokanee, But it was a crap shoot what you'd find in his Fridge. He even went on an MGD kick for a while.

But always Coyote Pancake Flour.

I'm not so much the purist - I don't really care what brand of Mix I use, and have found it doesn't really matter. I've also found that Coors Lite provides the desired effect for my flapjacks without all that telltale, hoppy taste that one finds in Beers with... Flavour.

Now, I've been cooking experimentally for some time, and recognise that Freshness and aroma are desirable qualities in the ingredients I use in my culinary creations. I'm not above a little preparatory sampling.

So when I asked my dad that fateful question, so long ago, His answer was "I'm not Drinking Beer. I'm making Pancakes."

I, in my foolish youth, took that to mean it was the cook's prerogative to finish off the beer that he obviously didn't use up in the Mix.

Time and experience have taught me otherwise - It's the cook's duty to ensure the freshness and flavourfullness of every ingredient that goes into the dish. To not do so would be a disservice.

"I'm not Drinking Beer," I told Kid Two. "I'm making Pancakes."

One Match

My training in bushcraft started when I was 7 years old.

That was when Dad had me join my brother, sister, and assorted cousins scouring the brush in the area of our summer campsites in search of kindling to start the campfire with.

Pitch was the best. It was also pretty tough to harvest when you wouldn't own a penknife for another two years. Coincidentally, that's also when you permanently crease the print on your left index finger, but never mind that.

The best pitch was found on knots of branches that had broken off a live tree a couple years ago. The pitch - especially on Pine trees - was thick, hard, and had bubbled into a mass that could be conveniently carved away from the bark without seriously damaging a tree. And boy, does it burn.

Dad would take all the sundry fire starting matériel from us kids, and collect it together in a lump at the center of the fire pit, build a campfire in a cross-hatch structure from twigs and kindling around said lump, and light the whole mess up.

With a single match.

Of course, as none of the collected second generation had reached puberty by then, we all thought this was marvelous, especially since the skill came with it's own title - "One-Match Phil."

One-Match Phil was legendary, and made appearances at all camping functions from fishing on the Elk in February, all the extended family camping in summer, right through to elk hunting in 4 feet of snow in November.

And then - he bought a chainsaw.

It took me a long time to discover this was the watershed moment. As it turned out, Grandad passed away when I was about 12, and Dad bought the chainsaw about the same time. It made sense, as I was suddenly occupied with Dad in late summer and early fall from my early teens in the collection of firewood for Grandma.

Grandma had a wood-burning stove in the kitchen in Kimberley that supplemented her central heat. That and she just liked a fire.

What I hadn't noticed at the time - but recognize now - is that whole second generation had aged, and, as a result, had become less interested in combing the underbrush for fire-lighting supplies.

But One-Match persevered. For a long time, He collected his own pitch.

One November, he just gave up the subterfuge. At this point, the Chainsaw had become a fixture in our camping gear - probably because we had denuded the breadth of the Kootenays of fallen scrub kindling by that point.

It had been raining for days, a wet, cold, half sleet soak that permeated everything. Dad calmly cut the top off a pop (beer) can and filled the bottom with chainsaw gasoline from the small jerry can that accompanied the chainsaw everywhere.

He set that in the center of the pit where the ball of kindling would go, and built up the wood frame around it - and lit it.

With a single match.

Good Judgement

I may have mentioned that I traveled with Dad a lot in my youth.

Day trips at any time of year, camping... also at any time of year in random sets of accommodations from tents to pop-up trailers to Grandma's place in Kimberley on any sort of errand or intent you can think of.

We even slept in the back of a '59 Land Rover in October in the mountains. And believe me, that isn't even possible. The last straw for Dad was the night we spent in a tent on opening day of Elk season. We'd packed the tent in - but he'd figured our hunting clothes were such that we didn't actually need sleeping bags.

At that point Dad had about 35 years experience in the bush. Nevertheless it turns out he could still have Very Bad Ideas. That was the longest, coldest night I've ever spent - including working midnights as a security guard over Christmas Holidays some years later.

But, that pretty much killed the tenting in winter for Dad, too. His solution?

Build a Cabin.

He even had the perfect spot picked out - just up the hill a little from where we froze ourselves the prior autumn in the tent with no sleeping bags. We called the little draw up that valley Rum Junction - how that name came about is a story for another time.

He'd decided on a simple A-frame wood construction at about 14 X 10, with the 10 foot axis on the downslope. We would use heavy-grade plastic sheeting to roof it with; and plywood for the walls. Eventually the first 6 feet of the roof slope would sport spiked plywood too - to keep out the porcupines.

All of this stuff would have to be packed in; the road you see on that link wasn't there yet. It wasn't really all that far from the Highway - but the SomePeople that have been there will tell you it's a 20 minute hike... mostly Up.

Yes, it was on Crown land, and yes, technically that made it an illegal structure, but Dad liked to say "No Sweat for a Big Operation (like this)." the Like This was optional, of course. Dad was really good at pressing on through adversity and good judgement.

He did, however, let the guy who had the trap line up there know what we were up to - just so he'd know we weren't up there trapping. The Trapper was cool with that - it actually worked to his advantage to have an extra shelter in the neighbourhood in winter - just in case.

Speaking of good judgement - that was the same year Dad and the fellas from the Old Country decided to go in on a bunch of used oak barrels from a Rum Distillery. The principle was you partially fill a used rum barrel with water, then you set it back on its side - sealed - and rotate it periodically. After some months of this you would have soaked all the residual alcohol out of the barrel into the water, which you could then bottle.

The product was called Swish - and it was actually a lot more potent that you'd think. But it didn't taste as good as you'd think. It was okay with Coke, though.

Right. Building a cabin.

The worst part of building the cabin above Rum Junction on Robert's Creek was not having to pack in what amounted to an awful lot of lumber, nails, plastic, and other hardware. That we did over several trips across a month or so in Mid Summer.

The worst part was that we built it in Mid Summer, in the bush at about 30 degrees Centigrade (that's 85ish F)... and had to cut in to the side of the mountain location with shovels - digging down about 6 feet on the high side due to the slope.

I did most of that, working with Dad's oldest, closest friend. It was exhausting and horrid due to the temperature, terrain, and bugs.

It was nearly 30 years ago, but the memory is as fresh as yesterday. I was roasting, and had probably lost five pounds to sweat. I reached into a backpack and grabbed an ice-cold 2 liter Sprite bottle, and took a long pull off it.

Did I mention Dad liked to bottle his Swish in old 2 liter Sprite bottles?

Let's Rethink That...

I have a tendency to over-complicate things. I'm pretty sure it's genetic.

It's not like I try, of course. Usually the first solution I see to a given problem is elegant, and takes into account most, if not all possible contingencies. And that's the problem. My initial stab at a resolution tends to be overly contingified, and bogs down disastrously in implementation.

Having learned from this, I do try to set aside the first response thought, and try to find the easy way. I was better at this in my youth. The mind clutters with experience.

By the same token, I don't know why I'm what They call "mechanically inclined." I don't exactly come by it honestly; I've watched Dad plan brilliant household projects only to have them fail in a titanic series of compounding disasters - usually culminating in more damage than the original project would have repaired.

Different sort of disaster, but disaster nonetheless.

I suspect my inclination can be sourced to the bicycle my grandparents gave me for my seventh birthday. It disappeared within a month; right after we moved to the town I would grow up in. Welcome to the sticks.

I spent the rest of my youth putting bikes together out of spare parts, and maintaining them myself. If I couldn't fix it, I was walking. As it happens, I've never owned a new bicycle to this day. But as usual, I digress.

Late in the summer one year, just after I'd first started the Learning To Drive process, Dad packed me and my brother into his Pontiac Catalina, and we headed west across B.C. to take my brother back to school. We were loaded down with art supplies, his gear, a tent trailer and everything else 3 guys need for a 700 km trip.

The tent trailer was merely for storage. We were going to be staying at Uncle Bug's in Burnaby, or Surrey, or whereverthehell he lived.

In a little town called Princeton on Highway 3, the car lost power. Completely. All it would do was idle.

And off the highway we pulled. A short inspection under the hood, and dad determined that the accelerator cable had broken.

Yes, you read that right. Perhaps one day I'll discuss how things that are never supposed to happen, happen a matter of routine. It's kinda like operating in an infinite improbability field like Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic - without the whole instant total existence failure part.

The next few hours produced an absolute flurry of activity from Dad - whilst my brother and I sat in the car, windows down, he reading in the back and I... well... honestly I don't remember what I did. It can't have been much, and obviously it was a mindnumbing couple hours.

Dad shows up with several bags and a harried look. He starts telling us about his last several hours on the phone, dumping the contents of the bags on the driver's seat of the Catalina.

"Turns out these things never break. I had one mechanic phone all over the country and he found one in Canada ~ in Quebec City, but if they ship it it'll take a week. So I called Uncle Bug and he's gonna make some calls so I need to phone him back in a few..."

I had by then perused the contents of the bags. Brass wire, one large C clamp, a couple smaller c clamps, some assorted nuts and bolts, electrical tape, and a microscopic crescent wrench that looked like it should be on a keychain. "Dad."

"... huh?" turns out I'd cut him off in mid-frustrated-prattle.

"What's all this for," I asked with my newly-minted "calm" voice. I knew that it was probably going to be interesting.

Not good - but interesting.

"Well, I went to the hardware store. I figured maybe we could rig up a hand-throttle."

Admittedly, my first thought was that the brass wire was too soft, and lacked the tensile strength to...

My second thought caused my Calm Voice to request a short leave of absence. I declined that request, politely, if perhaps firmly. "Okay, you want to drive the Hope-Princeton Highway one-handed while the other one controls your speed. And then try to do this in Vancouver in rush hour. Pulling a trailer."

He looked at me for a second. The funny thing is, when your Dad looks at you like that for a second, it's the longest second in recorded history. You kinda get a little chilled in the pit of your guts, wondering which way it's gonna go. It wasn't my first time. We had an unusual relationship, my Dad and me. Occasionally, I was his senate - his House of Sober Second Thought.

Like I said. The mind, evidently, clutters with experience.

"Yeah," he said, finally, looking over the hardware again. "I guess I'd have to relearn how to drive, wouldn't I." He looked a little rueful about having bought it all for nothing. But he hadn't. I had just then figured it out.

"Do you have any Picture Hanging wire in your stuff," I asked my brother - who was still sitting in the back seat, trying to will himself safely to his apartment in Vancouver... or really anywhere else.

You might think that's a mildly unusual request, asking for something so unlikely in a situation that... odd. It was the first time I had attempted to use my personal Improbability Field to my advantage. He reached into a bag and handed over a roll of thin, braided wire. "Of course," he said.

I did say Art Supplies.

"Perfect. Dad, you wanna find out how Uncle Bug is doing? I'm gonna use this, and these clamps and stuff and re-run the cable. Right through the old cable housing. I've restrung gears and brake lines enough, I should have thought of it. Great Idea!" I said to his back as he headed off with a strange little half-smile.

And I did. Took a little tape, patience and blood like everything else I've since done with cars; but I managed to restring the pedal so we could drive normally to Uncle Bug's.

Well, Almost normally. Never occurred to me to have the pedal blocked "up" when I connected it, so all we could do was 95 kmh - but the speed limit was 90, so no worries there. It broke the next morning the second I started the car to pull it in to Uncle Bug's driveway to be fixed properly. Right where I'd clamped it to the throttle. Figures.

Uncle Bug was a helicopter mechanic by trade, and liked to restore cars. He had made a few phone calls and had a new cable in his hands in about 90 minutes.

I suspect that gene is a recessive.

The Force

...Red Five - you switched off your targeting computer...

According to Wikipedia, I'm nearly blind without my glasses.

I'd like to blame genetics for this as every single member of my immediate family... and most of my extended family ~ at least on Dad's side ~ also need to wear glasses.

Thick ones, mostly.

So reasonably, it's Dad's fault. Probably had very little to do with being both bookish and lazy in my youth, reading with my head actually resting on the page ~ in crappy lighting.

I got my first pair of glasses in the spring, after I'd turned 11 years old. That's a great age to get glasses; allows for all kinds of abuse from your fellow inmates in grade 6; but i decided on the ride home from the optometrist's the next town over that that paled in comparison to being able to see that the mountains weren't just covered in a green carpet - that there were individual trees out there.

And, to be honest, actually catching a ball before it hit me in the face was pretty good too. That took some practice, though.

In fact - the frisbee I caught with my upper lip the other day is proof of that.

So, that summer, now that I could see and all, Dad decided it was time I learned to shoot. He took me out to the local rifle range out in the bush off the highway, set up some beer cans, and taught me on an open-site, bolt action .22 rifle that he had. I think it was the same one Granddad had taught him with. Uncle Crazy Legs would know.

Eventually, that .22 became the board for one of our favorite camping games.

Please note when I say "camping," I mean that, in my youth, camping in no way involved anything so civilized as reservations, serviced sites, overnight fees, outhouses or paved roads. I have since found most of those places on maps, but the cars I drive would never get there.

Dad was a School Principal, and had 8 weeks of down time in the summer. He was also an avid Outdoorsman, and would decompress more easily if the only suggestion of civilization was the occasional contrail in the sky - if that.

So, we'd sit off to one end of our camp, set up like a proper range - Dad was an accredited B.C. Conservation and Outdoor Recreation Instructor - and stick Calgary Export Bottlecaps in a tree some 20 yards out and sit in lawn chairs and try to knock them out of the tree with .22 longs.

A couple summers of this and I started to give him a little run for his money. We had a point system worked out using the concentric coloured circles on the caps - we used that brand as they looked like little targets.

We were in the Flathead valley the summer I finally bested him. He laughed and told me I was becoming a hell of a good shot. "It's not really fair, though," he admitted.

Well, obviously I had to ask.

He said that he noticed as he progressed through his 40s that he now needed to get new glasses - probably bifocals - as the ball of the open site would disappear as he aimed.

I was incredulous. "Then how is it you scored better than last year?"

He just smiled and said "The Force."

That year for Hallowe'en he dressed like Obi-Wan Kenobi for his elementary school. He looked brilliantly like Alec Guiness in the role - even though he was much more Darth Vader shaped.

Oxidizing

Back when I first joined the herd, we were quite interested in cottaging. We, as a group, had been camping a few times and had purchased a pair of Sea-Doos for summer entertainment, and a place to dock them on our own stretch of shore on one of the myriad of small lakes in Central Alberta had a certain appeal. As a result, we tried out a couple of cottages one summer before we settled on one we liked.



During one of these try-out weekends - as it turns out, in a cottage we chose not to purchase - we were all - me and my wife, her sister and husband, the girls' dad, and the three older boys - sitting around the campfire s'moring it up.


Kid 2, then about 8, is looking a the campfire and asks "how does wood burn?"


Now, that's a pretty good question. Unfortunately, I have enough background in chemistry to know exactly what the answer is. So, in a roundabout way, I figure I just have to tailor that for an eight-year-old kid.


As it turns out, I appear to have a propensity to explain into minutiae. Not only that, but my delving into a subject apparently has an effect on local space-time, in which it appears to tear a rift in the fabric of reality such that the only person who does not experience the passage of time is me.


So in a moment or two I look around to a sea of glazed expressions, and the chirping of crickets.


To this day, I don't remember what the hell I said. I do know I started with an analogy regarding rust. But the end result is if I can't dial down an explanation into one or two sentences, my lovely wife tells me "Honey, you're Oxidizing."


I have learned from this. Now when faced with a complex answer for a kid - I say "It's complicated. I can tell you but it will take a few minutes." and let them decide it they have the attention span. They buy in to the time more often than you'd think.


For grown ups, I say "You want the Reader's Digest version?" to which I invariably get a yes... and then get grilled in to the minutiae I tried to avoid anyway.


We sure enjoyed those Sea Doos.

The Grizzly-Moose

Over the course of a recently-completed Very Long Drive, I had the occasion to pass along a little bit of Kootenay lore to a friend of mine.

We were moving my RV through deepest, darkest Western Ontario and I was driving. Chris was Shotgun, and my lovely wife was lounging in the back. It was twilight, and we were hoping to make Thunder Bay before calling it a 17-hours-travelled day.

Ontarioans will tell you that that part of the province is lousy with wildlife. Wildlife that appears to find leaping across a busy highway - like the Trans-Canada - the most sublime sort of sport.

So I was driving at twilight in something as sporty and maneuverable as a school bus, but not nearly so solid, constantly scanning the sides of the road ahead.

"Grizzly-Moose" I grumbled.

Chris looked at me ~ a look that indicated my sanity may be in question. "What?"

I've noted for some time that my casual common expressions tend to be somewhat... obscure... to MostPeople. I attribute this to rather a backwoods upbringing in the sticks of the Kootenays in British Columbia - and formal education in English, which evidently only High School teachers get.

I'm not a High School Teacher.

So I, naturally, launched into a dissertation on my personal cryptozoological experience.

"My Dad used to tell me stories about the Web-footed, Beaver-tailed, Grizzly-Moose.

It's a fascinating creature, native to the Kootenay region of B.C. It has the head, shoulder hunch, and body like a Grizzly bear, palmated antlers and a bell like a Moose, webbed feet like a duck - but obviously larger, and a broad, flat tail reminiscent of a Beaver.

This, of course, is not the interesting part. What makes it interesting is that it innately, instinctively knows when it is being looked at directly, and then instantly turns into a rock, or a bush, or a stump or some other inanimate thing in order to escape detection. So, naturally, you only see them from the corner of your eye, when you aren`t quite paying attention."

Oddly enough, Chris seemed skeptical. I attributed that to his youth and city upbringing.

"Dad actually saw a pelt for one in the early 80's," I went on. "Evidently there was one mounted in a pub somewhere in Montana, just south of Wardiner in the east Kootenays."

Now, to be honest, I had always been a little suspicious of the veracity of Dad's story about that. Everybody knows that a creature that can instinctively change into an inanimate object to avoid detection will almost certainly do so as its dying act. So what did He see? a pile of bark?

The truth is lost to history. I do know, however, that in (I think... it's been 30 years) 1981 a story ran in the Fernie Free Press on this very subject, penned by the most venerable and sage PipeDreamer himself, the late Bruce Ramsey - and it features my Dad telling the story of the discovery of a stuffed Grizzly Moose.

But you travelers are at least now aware. You swear you saw that stump move a second ago, right? That dark spot in the copse of trees up ahead - it looked at you, didn't it?

It's not your imagination. And I thought they were native to B.C. ~ turns out they've expanded their range.

"What's that?" Chris says suddenly, alarm in his voice as he points to a tan deer shape in the deepening twilight. As we approached, it resolved itself into a rock.

"Grizzly-Moose" I shrugged.

of Cabbages and Kings

Back in the day, in University, I wrote a weekly opinion piece for the Students' Newspaper.

Wow.

Ya Know, "back in the day" is a little bit of an eye-opener when it actually means "some time before your adult child was born."

At any rate, I wrote a weekly opinion column at my alma mater. The hardest thing about that was coming up with something to say every week. I'm pretty sure Cinette can attest to that.


(i wrote the above lines 7 days ago. obviously, I promise nothing with this blog.)