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.

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?