Stories, Excerpts, Backroads
Plenty of honking today as flocks of Swans made their way south. The cold is coming, the weather report says -19°c tomorrow.
Pulled a few more turnips. Walked the tracks to get closer to the Swans. They are difficult to sneak up on, especially with the Willow dog.
A few took off into the wind and made the turn directly overhead. Deep voices and large wingspan, mocking us bound to the ground.
It feels good to walk those tracks, hear the birds, squinting loosing the ruck.
It’s damn near winter, the snow could fly anytime in the valley bottom, it’s wetter than a river otter’s pocket. The garden still has kale, cabbage, carrots, turnips, fennel, beets and cannabis (since it was legalized you can’t give it away).
***
We had fourteen kids came to our door for Halloween. I bought full size chocolate bars to give away. A group of what looked like 10 or 12 year old girls yelled trick or treat. One was dressed in a fur jacket, miniskirt, fishnet stockings and high leather boots. I can’t imagine the conversation with her parents who let her go out in that costume.
***
I made soup on the weekend from a few bones picked up at the store. I browned them in the oven and then made a beef stock. I added grilled, cabbage, leeks, turnip, beets and carrots. All from the garden.
The soup was exceptionally gaseous. I tried to work alone. Warned Lisa. Even Willow seemed disgusted.
When I make soup I like it to last for a few days. I had it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. This was the soup that kept giving.
Last night Lisa made Chili. It was a welcome reprieve from the explosive beef vegetable bisque. Not nearly as combustable, Lisa bringing me down gently. I have to get the dog to start trusting me again.
***
Had to deal with a miserable couple today. He was an ugly little cuss, he looked like Danny Devito, except fatter, shorter, uglier and not funny.
He looked at me only as someone who should serve him. That isn’t a problem with me as long as you treat me with respect.
Some people feel entitled. Sure enough, I checked his plates, he was from Alberta, they were vanity plates. With a Fuck Trudeau sticker. These guys are a dime-a-dozen out here. We get the worst of the worst from our neighbours to the east. They’re not all like that.
I took his plate down like I used to take a number of a hockey player that cheap shoted me. You never know when you might run into these arseholes again.
***
After work I chopped wood, tended the pile and filled the woodbox. About as good a job a man can do. Calming the mind. Chopping, assessing, figuring the mix of wood to make a perfect fire.
Spent the morning in the studio cutting cards and booklets.
Our paper cutter was made by Westman and Baker, a Canadian Company. They went out of business around 1923.
Perhaps their equipment was too good and they hadn’t built in obsolescence like companies like, Apple, Ford, Facebook and just about any successful company. It is never about making things that last anymore. It’s always about selling more stuff.
I’ve used plenty of high tech cutters. They are easier to use, but don’t do as good of job and they break down, until you relent and buy a new one.
This cutter has been around. My father used to sit me on it in the back shop of The Lake Windermere Valley Echo newspaper and job printing building.
Even then I used to ask he put the blade down.
Later we used it in our printing business. It was the only cutter we ever had and served us well.
Now it sits in our studio. It doesn’t get used like it once did.
This cutter depends on feel. The pressure on the paper and the way the blade feels as you draw it down over the surface of job work. I can tell instantly if I am creating a burr on the spine of a booklet or cube of business cards.
To work with this reliable tool is very satisfying.
The wind picked up today, stripping the trees of leaves. We still haven’t had hard frosts. I clear my windows with windshield fluid, the lazy fucker I am. Scraping is coming soon.
There is two cabbages, an entire row of rutabagas, three kale plants and a few weed plants drying on the vine. It seems like every fall is getting later.
The sunflowers are down. No sense keeping them up. The starlings got the seeds the beginning of September, those rabid raptors. The chickadees are shit out of luck.
Watched a three point buck run by, skittish, with a string of Christmas lights tangled in its antlers. My young companion said, if we could tell it we are trying to help we could untangle the antlers. I told him I don’t speak deer and the deer don’t speak our language.
***
That wind is going to turn on us soon. I used to be comfortable with a tarp, now I’m thinking a dugout, cave, lined with moss, where the roots of the trees, can be depended on, storing the heat, I could cozy up to it like a heating grate in the city. Just like the city, if you followed that advice, you’d be frozen stiff.
***
The best wager is to watch those wagging trees in the southern wind, consider yourself lucky, remember the year before, and hope the leaves end up in your neighbours yard.
The garden is still kicking, turnips harder than algebra, cabbage holding on despite the hounds taking a bite, leeks and sunflowers.
It’s been a sunny fall. Now things are changing. The leaves are being blown off the trees in bushelfuls.
***
CBC reported the Civil Service has bloated by another 35,000 government jobs since Covid. More defined pensions to pay out. Everyone is happy, especially if you work for the government. These employees had three paid statutory holidays in September. Nice work if you can get it.
***
Until I was forty I worked for myself. Since then I’ve worked shoulder to shoulder with a supervisor who was a white supremacist, a lazy cuss, who would take his following, mostly from Alberta, up Findlay Creek to shoot their guns while praying for a breakdown in society so they could shoot the mud people. He was a Nazi supporter and holocaust denier and Pentecostal Minister. None of that hampered him from succeeding in the shit hole town he landed in.
***
Another guy I worked with, at the School District, beat his wife and kids. He told me they deserved it and he had to sleep in his van, during the day, because it took it out of him.
***
Even another guy at the School District, a manager, had a crush on a custodian with fake tits. He was useless in every way, so was she, even the boob job was bad. They deserved each other. His claim to fame was collecting generous government severance packages when it was determined he wasn’t fit for government. This is very difficult to do. Once let go another branch of government rehired him. Nice work if you can get it.
***
I remember those three fuckers whenever I get frustrated with my job.
If you are Canadian and keep an eye on the news you have, more than likely, heard about Hockey Canada and the fallout after a women filed a $3.5 million lawsuit alleging eight hockey players, some members of the 2018 World Junior hockey team, sexually assaulted her.
It has also come to light that this is not an isolated incident and gang rape may be prevalent in junior hockey.
I have read in many news articles questioning how could this happen and for how long does this behaviour go back. It goes back a long way and it is very prevalent.
This story has brought up many memories for me when I played on the local junior hockey club. I was a local player playing on a team made up of mostly players imported from other areas of Canada and the United States.
The players were billeted to families in the area, many who were executives for the hockey team or associated with with the junior hockey team.
Many of the import players were decent young men. However many were not.
Most of the import players received special treatment from the teachers, community members and, especially, the team executive, managers and coaches.
Hockey was important to the community in the 1980’s. If you want young men to play their best you have to build their confidence. To say they got away with a lot is an understatement.
Because I was local I had friends I grew up with who were not involved in hockey. These were the people I hung around with most often. I didn’t get along with most players on the team. It was said, the only players that disliked me more than the opposition were my own teammates. Which was fine by me.
Hockey parties were arranged regularly, usually at a ‘safe’ house. They were often at a billets or executives house. Non hockey players were not invited. Every now and again one or two would show up and they usually got the shit kicked out of them. There was no shortage of alcohol and drugs and plenty of girls, mostly underage.
I went to enough hockey parties to know what went on. Most of my friends didn’t play hockey so our partying was done in the bush or beside the Columbia River.
***
This is the way group sex or assault happens:
Two of my good friends in high school; he was a good looking guy, smart in every way, good athlete, but not a hockey player, she was also a great student, pretty and athletic. They were an ideal couple, but, on again off again, like most couples at 16 or 17. She had a crush on one of the hockey players, he was a good looking guy, but a complete asshole. He was scouted and came here with another two of his buddies from another part of Canada. They were decent hockey players, full of confidence and yappy.
On one of this couple’s ‘off again’ moments, she went to a hockey party and hooked up with her crush, got drunk, went to a room to spend time with him, before the door closed he invited his two buddies to come in with him.
She was the talk of the dressing room at the next practice.
That is how it happens. And it happened all the time.
My friends, the couple, withdrew, become close, once graduated they moved away, married and started a life together. They distanced themselves from their hometown and old friends.
This was the 1980’s. There was no laws covering consent of intoxicated individuals.
***
A couple years after I finished playing junior hockey an incident occurred. Three players of the hockey club, players who were my teammates years earlier, and still played for the team, raped a teenage girl.
They were charged and went to court. One after another, the hockey executive got up, and said what upstanding young men they were. As for the girl, she was drunk, she couldn’t remember everything. Although she had bite marks on her back and was torn up internally, the young men got off. The male judge ruled that she liked rough sex. My mother, who accompanied the young women to court along with the doctor who examined her were outraged. The young men were exonerated, went on to become respected members of the community, while the girl was labeled a slut.
This happens in Canada because we put these young men on a pedestal. Hockey is our national game. We revere the players and they know it. It excuses some of them from being decent human beings. They get a pass from morality and education from an early age providing they can dangle with the puck or dish it out physically on the ice.
***
What has to happen?
The executive of Hockey Canada has resigned. This is good. Instead of a group who’s job it is to protect or apologize, they should be required to make moral choices regarding all players enrolled in Hockey Canada.
In the past Hockey Canada executive used minor hockey enrolment income to settle sexual abuse claims. They did this because these funds, and use, was unlikely to be questioned, unlike an insurance claim or sponsor donations. The people who made these decisions were rightfully let go.
The next thing that has to happen, and this is a big one, the eight players involved in the alleged rape have to step up, admit that it was them that has given Canadian Hockey a bad name. At least some of these players would be newly minted millionaires playing in the NHL, so this is very unlikely to happen. If they are innocent of any wrong doing they should be chomping at the bit to be exonerated.
Finally, the police or RCMP have to pursue the sexual assault case. Even if the young women was paid $3.5 million for her silence, if a crime was committed it must be investigated.
***
I took my young grandchildren to the rink this morning to play hockey. It is a wonderful game, one you can play from the time you can walk to the time you can’t walk. It is special, filled with emotion, thrills and letdowns. My son, when he was small, used to sleep in his hockey equipment after his practices. The game means a great deal to our family.
But if you didn’t know the game, like many parents, or like newly immigrated parents why would you ever want your children to become involved in hockey?
If we want to continue to be proud of our national game. If we want it to be inclusive to all Canadians, new and old, male and female, It is essential we rebuild its reputation.
Lisa and I headed up the creek with Lola and Willow. It was chilly with frost on the windows. It would have suited me to go towards the sun on the west side, instead we went east where the mountains get bigger, taking the sun longer to rise.
Not much water in the creek up high, plenty of rose hips and cones on the spruce, the winter birds will take advantage.
Lola stayed on leash because she is a puppy and we haven’t quite have her figured. If she went after something I don’t trust my ability to chase her down.
We watched the sun rise through the low spots in the mountains, lighting the shadows and turning the trees colour.
All the up and down, older its harder to keep track. Been told things are good and bad. Haven’t been able to tell the difference. Now older, I don’t care as much. It’s hell on the writing and photo taking, also making love suffers. Is it age, no longer have the want to fight like in the old days. Lovemaking and fighting, nobody can tell me they aren’t connected.
Still, if truth be known, it’s good not to be a slave to fighting and sex. Cripes, before long I’ll be sitting to pee. Drinking lite beer. Less calories and low alcohol. I’ll start birdwatching, not unusual, but will go out with the group. Start wearing a sweater in the fall regardless that it’s still goddamn hot. Start limping to let everyone know my advanced age. Swear off whisky. Refuse spicy stuff because, ‘it will keep me up at night’. Take my boots off every time I enter the house. Keep the slippers beside the door. Wash my dentures every night. Religiously, brush my remaining teeth. Teach the hounds English instead of learning dog. Pull out the flowers before they go to seed, saying, ‘I’ll never smoke all that shit.’
It doesn’t sound good but old age does have its advantages.
Hunter organized a fantastic fall hike up Pedley Pass. We started out early and were on the trail by 8:30. Bree, Hunter, Tiara, Bree’s Dad Dave, Mike, Dave and me cut through the bush to Bumpy Meadows and then higher to the crossroads. We were accompanied by the good dogs Willow, Ash and Pedley damned and determined to explore her namesake.
We choose to cut across to the small lake instead of the ridge. Our pace was good and the sun was still down at 11:00 at the lake. After a bite to eat we had some time to explore and take some photos.
Dad Dave and Mike shot the shit at the lake. Bree walked Pedley around the lake, Hunter and Tiara headed for higher ground through the rocks and Dave and I looked for fossils.
We all gave thanks for family, good friends, health and the wonderful natural vistas that met us at every bend on the trail. I can think of no better way to spend a weekend.
Very fine day.
Absolutely brilliant weather. Blue skies; warm temperatures in the day, around freezing at night. The garden is still waiting for some hard frosts to sweeten the turnips and cabbage.
Knowing it can’t last I booked a day off for a hike. The idea was to take a coworker from the United Kingdom out, so he could see some Canadian high country. I always feel a little sorry for the kids who come and work at the resort from other parts of Canada or overseas. The area is sold to them as scenic, but unless they have a vehicle they are not able to leave the valley bottom.
Accompanied by good friends Dave and Matt, we picked up UK Jack at 6:30 am and we were off for Forster Creek. A leisurely drive and we were at the trailhead and hiking by daylight.
Jack is a tremendous worker at the resort. He works hard and never complains. He is very personable, in my experience, like all the workers we have had from the UK.
The hike up was great through the forest, along Welsh Creek, picking through the moraine to the first lake. The entire area at one time covered by glaciers. I always imagine what it looked like back in time. Now the remaining glaciers are on the highest points of the mountains.
This is the latest I’ve hiked Welsh. The mountains which show snow in summer is completely gone revealing how small the remaining glaciers have become. The wonderful day we were enjoying, even blessed with, is partially responsible. If the length of warm weather swapped with the cold those glaciers would grow back in no time. Perhaps it will happen sometime filling those empty basins above and below the lakes, keeping ice on the lakes year round, until their blue water freezes straight to the bottom.
Once at the first lake it was decided before I barely had my camera out that we would head up to the highest lake. Matt quickly found a route and we were off. Another hour, after a scramble, we were having lunch at Aberystwyth Lake. Jack was able to tell us the proper Welsh pronunciation, although, he didn’t know the meaning saying, he didn’t speak Welsh.
The way back down was trying as we took another route through the talus that required me to carry Willow. I cradle her in my outside arm allowing me to fall into the mountain if I lost my footing. Willow is an amazing little dog but has trouble with big loose boulders that move. By the time I was down to the first lake I was sucking hind tit and my arm was aching. We did it right with our spacing, however, not rolling boulders onto each other.
The sun was directly above, lighting the turning tamaracks. It’s a perfect world when the gold is opposite the blue green mountain lakes. That was the last I had my camera out as we were heading down. I thought we must be late for something.
I’m getting old and hiking with three men, in shape, with a combined body fat percentage about 10% of mine can be trying. Still I did my best. Matt kept me company, knowing you never leave the weakest behind. Cripes that pissed me off.
There aren’t many days like this. Very fine walk.
Palliser Pass 