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.

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.