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.