Star gazing

Seahorse was a hundred and fifty when I met him.

I think it was 1978; it's a little hazy because all I have to go on is how old I think I was and I'm pretty sure I was around 11 because I don't remember having glasses at the time. Could be wrong.

Seahorse  was called that, as the story goes, because he'd attached a little Johnson Seahorse outboard engine to a canoe once to troll a river. Sounds like him.

By the way, I don't recommend that.

His last name, ironically, was also Johnson. His daughter married Uncle Crazy Legs, and the irony is doubled from what my audience has no doubt noted in that she had no need to change her surname as a result.

I think that made him my Great-Uncle-in-Law, but the protocol, as protocol commonly does, escapes me... and, as is my custom, I have digressed.

He drove a little Mustang sports car, usually, he admitted, drafting at 135km/h (that's 85 mph for my southern friends) behind Greyhound buses as the cops never stopped them, and at the time, at least, his grandkids - my cousins - thought he was the Coolest Granddad on Earth.

They probably weren't wrong.

He owned a 1957 Dodge Crusader that was both Salmon Pink, and available for use in at least one of my cousins' High school graduations. I recall waxing it for one such occasion. Beautiful car. Push button clutch.

He was one of those guys that built the Canadian West with his bare hands, and left the blood and sweat of his toil with a shrug as he moved to his next  job. I met him to look at some history.

Dad was interested in BC's Flathead Valley. In the very early 20th century, there was Oil exploration there, and, as it turns out, Seahorse was on the crew that built the oil derricks that tapped wells in the region. Obviously, they didn't find much. Turns out that's good.

Nearly a hundred years later, these sorts of derrick are portable steel rigs on the backs of very large trucks, travelling in convoy, quick to set up and dismantle, leaving  - you hope - only a clearing and a capped pipe surrounded by a bit of fence in their wake. Not so then.

The derrick Seahorse helped Dad find was in the bottom of a draw down off the forestry cut road in a large clearing, made for the camp. Some of the remains of the camp structures were still evident, and the Derrick itself was in the middle of the clearing, towering timbers intact. It was HUGE.

That particular location became, for me in my youth, Flathead. We camped under that derrick for most summers for years to come, dragging that silly little tent trailer, building smokehouses in the riverbank, storing Pop Shoppe pop in river-rock cooler I built in the stream, fly fishing for hours, hours and hours, having shooting competitions, and playing Soccer-baseball with a dozen kids when we all met up.

And sitting in macramé lawn chairs, looking at the stars.

There is very little in the way of light pollution in that particular location. As a result, you can see the mass and sweep of the entire Milky Way Galaxy during a new moon. It's really something I'll never forget.

Dad was as good a guide to the sky as one could reasonably expect. He was better at bushcraft, of course, but at least he could name a few constellations for a pack of awed kids, having just survived a truly phenomenal Ghost Story.

My only real regret is that we never had a telescope to bring. We did have binoculars, of course, and pretty good ones. So there you are.

My friend the Angry Scientist had a telescope, and a pretty good place to use it in his youth. His parents had an acreage just out of the Sticks on Matevic Road - that was my real introduction to astronomy... and archery, as it turns out.

He would have loved to see that sky. We did see sky like that later, he and I, on a trip to Fish Lakes... but that's one of those stories for another time.

I have a telescope now. It's just a little one - but it's a start.

There is a hydro lease behind my house. The light pollution is pretty bad, given where I live, but you can still see a few things. Youngest Boy, at the tender age of eight, has already seen the craters of the moon as defined by its terminator, the rings of Saturn, and three of Jupiter's Moons.

And he's Interested.

We'll be taking it north with us on whatever trip we get to muster the Land Yacht toward. I can only hope to find a sky like Flathead... but probably not.

It doesn't really matter. Every time I look up now, I think of Flathead, that derrick, Dad, the Angry Scientist, and Seahorse Himself.

Thanks, guys.