December 2021 - bc-bog-trotter.com

God’s On Our side. Right?

Dancing Crow. The tracks describe the year we’ve had.

A few evenings ago, I flopped in front of the tely to watch a “60 Minutes” program. The first story was about the disastrous consequences following the US abandonment of Afghanistan. The battered nation is ruled fully as a military state by the Taliban. They have now shed their traditional gear to sport about in abandoned US army uniforms while brandishing US weapons. There is dark speculation about how many in that country will starve to death in this winter. I’m sure none of the Taliban forces will go hungry. Things are so dire in Afghanistan, one hears no mention of Covid. Allah is on their side so the Taliban can pass the buck onto his will as it suits them. Then again, “In God We Trust” is the banner declaration of the US which manages to leave a wake of despair and destruction in every country where it has intruded.

The gift, and what a wonderful one. It’s sprouting up.

The very next story on “60 Minutes” was about the latest NASA project which will launch the James Webb Space Telescope into the nether regions of our known universe. Of course the question why arose. The response was to see if we can understand where we came from and to see if there is intelligent life elsewhere. The first question is answered by the second. With millions of inhabitable planets scattered through the infinity of stars, of course there is wisdom equal to and beyond ours. That is, if we have capacity for true wisdom at all. This project has so far cost $10 billion US! Image if those funds were been used to improve situations in places for example like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Syria and at home on the ground in the US. Apparently horrific wind events have since delayed the launch.

The Christmas moon after another rain squall. The brilliance woke me up. No flying reindeer though. I love skylights.

The smile says it all. We stumbled on a lost ball and suddenly Jack was younger again. His eyes lit up and he was actually hopping around after the ball. He yelps for me to come throw it for him and there is a lovely tugging game complete with happy growls and his little dance.

Business as usual. Environmentally unfriendly, ugly, dangerous, cold, tired, wet, I miss it!

Last night I watched another edition of “60 Minutes”. (Yes, my life is very dull at the moment.) I love their random selection of stories and their style of presentation. They still employ the good old 5 Ws. I watch the program as a study of apparently good journalism. One article this week was about a massive problem in the US with residential sewage and how legislators refuse to address this horrific problem. Even portable plastic outhouses would be a huge improvement over homes surrounded in their own reeking septic raw waste. I wonder how many porta-poopers $10 billion would buy. (I should mention that my opinions in this blog are based entirely on what I’ve seen on television and then researched for confirmation)

Geez Louise! Think about it. Our little lifeboat drifts aimlessly in a vast sea. We call it the “universe.” The boat is sinking. We’ve been pissing in it for a very long time. Instead of using what we have on hand to bail ourselves out of this predicament we’ve built brand new shiny toys to impress some being we have not yet met. The way we’re going about things we won’t live long enough to ever meet those neighbours. All our environmental declarations, political and social rants are all about what someone else should be doing. Nobody feels personally responsible.

Yes, I’ll put money on life out there, all over the place. Maybe it keeps itself hidden from us for good reason. And perhaps we were put here for a good reason. The universe will be there to explore for a while yet. It will wait. Let us first of all make this planet safe for everyone to live on, and worth coming home to when we do go out there. Perhaps by then, we’ll be able to understand what we see.

Nanoo, nanoo! Shazbot!

The Old Duncan Train Station. Homeless folks shelter from the brisk wind while shoppers prowl the mainline.

Steam Vane. Crowning the train station, a masterpiece of tin work.

I try to tell myself to just think Christmas, this season of brotherhood and generosity. We have perverted it to a celebration of excess and garish overindulgence. Go with the flow, pretend to be part of the rollicking orgy of numbness and stupidity. But my night time dreams are clouded with images of starving children, skeletal parents and mass graves. I press my soft belly against my desk while typing this and know that we each need to do some small thing to make a difference. Am I cursed or blessed to still have a conscience? My tiny effort is to try and raise awareness and to prod folks to look beyond the rim of their rut, to ask questions. A good way to describe the perversion of Christmas is to mention a short video I just received. A fellow, proudly proclaiming himself to be All-American is out in the snowy woods with his children cutting down a Christmas tree, with a machine gun! That puts a new meaning on Holy Night!

Enough said. Enjoy the season, remember its original meaning and count your blessings.

The maple sleeps, soon the days will warm.

Happy Christmas.

“God never gives someone a gift they are not capable of receiving. If he gives us the gift of Christmas, it is because we all have the ability to understand and receive it.” Pope Francis

See The Light

In my previous blog I once again admonished readers to never go anywhere without something which takes photos. If you want to get good photos, you need to have a camera to capture the moment. Timing is everything, technical skill is a distant second. My six best photo opportunities, ever, are filed only in the back of my skull because I did not have a camera. I usually carry my mobile phone which I acquired because of its photographic capability. It does not replace a shelf full of professional equipment, and often offers a stubborn attitude at critical moments, but it does produce some superb images. I’ll say no more. The photos in this blog were all taken with that mobile phone within an hour during a recent morning amble with Jack. Here is some light and cheer in a very dark season.

Happy Christmas.

The mystery of sunrise and buoyancy , dark metal ships that reflect the light.

“Fog: Air slowly becoming sea, sea slowly becoming air”….Ray Griggs

Jack and Beau savour the warmth while chasing frosty sticks

Islands in the stream. Dunsmuir Island, a favourite anchorage

Slowly yet rapidly, the scene changes. Ships vanish then reappear.

Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth. Buddha

When You Don’t Have A Camera

One of the reasons I carry a camera is to make myself find the beauty we so often overlook. This appeared on a rock face in an area where Jack loves to go. I don’t like seeing something natural defaced but this is beautiful.

The day begins black as inside a bear’s belly. Dawn crawls out of bed one toe at a time. It’s like that a few days before winter solstice when there’s a forecast of another imminent “atmospheric river” which will bring an increasing deluge through the weekend. The forecast contains a “Special Weather Statement” warning of extreme wind and rain. I have the engine partially apart in the ‘Hemoth at the moment and will not work in a winter storm. I’ve done that all too often for a living and this job may have to sit and wait. There has been an exhaust leak and now a fuel leak. That demands I disassemble the fuel system and the turbo charger and finally a part of the exhaust system.

It is like doing brain surgery through the rectum. Assembly A’s removal requires the extraction of unit B which needs A to be out of the way first. Then item “F” appears. Add 25 years of exhaust heating and cooling it becomes a Rubic’s cube with dark squares. That used to be called “Catch 22.” I can’t find my magic wrench so I buy a few others, cut them up and modify them. Often, only another quarter-inch of space would make the job so easy! Meanwhile everything is covered in a thick frost which will dissolve once it begins to rain. Christmas cheer? Bumhug!

This old mechanic offers up timeless curses about the engineers who design this shit and have, apparently, never held a wrench. Then I curse my hands. They’re arthritic and clumsy from doing this sort of work over a lifetime. I spread a tarp beneath the project to catch the things I drop.

The heart of the matter. That much-abused nut behind the turbo charger was actually self-welded to the iron base beneath it and also to the stud on which it was threaded. I had to chisel it off, one molecule at a time. Then I had to drill out the heat-hardened stud, tap fresh thread into the metal beneath, then manufacture and install a new stud. Once the turbo was removed I could finally repair the gap in the manifold flange visible beneath the turbo base. There is a small bolt on the lower side which had to be removed then re-installed. I talked to God a wee bit. Note the soot on the firewall from the diesel exhaust leak.

Finally I can see the vague silhouette of a tree against the sky. It’s time to let old Jack take me for a shuffle before I crawl back under the truck’s hood. I’ll go back to work like a three-legged dog trying to make love to a greasy football. Retirement! One of my subtle pleasures is to sit with my morning coffee and do something for my next blog. It gives me a sense of accomplishment early in the day and thus fulfilled I go on to other endeavours. Then I’ll see how long I last under the hood until that cold winter rain soaks me from the arse down and eventually sends me packing off for a hot shower and dry clean clothes.

Frere Jacques, dormez vous? His rabbit days are behind him except in his dreams.

We shuffled our way around the dog park. Jack left some splendour in the leaves which I promptly collected in the ubiquitous plastic dog bag, grateful for the hand warmer. Mornings like this remind me of the North Sea in this season. Brrr bloody brrr! To my wondering eyes old ladies began to arrive in a lower parking lot. They were clad in blankets and housecoats, bare-legged in wading shoes. I was stunned to see that they were hobbling briskly toward the beach. In moments these senior girls were frolicking in the water. I learn later that they do this every morning! You wouldn’t get me in there to my ankles…wearing boots! I’d go in a boy and come out a girl. Whoooo! I can only admire them. Of course, I’d left my mobile phone/ camera at home. (That underscores my enduring admonishment to always have some sort of camera along.) Well, while those Viking daughters now sit by someone’s crackling fireplace, or perhaps in a sauna, sipping fish eggnog and laughing raucously at their own bravado, I’m going up the hill and under the hood. Hand me that wrench please.

Christmas colour complete with real ice drops.

“If the road is easy, you’re likely going the wrong way.”
― Terry Goodkind

Away

Every pole tells a story. This is some native art along the way in Port Alberni.

Beautiful whale totems tucked discreetly away.

Nothing! No light in the overcast sky, none anywhere around. Without illumination from the Hemoth there would only be blackness. No sound, no wind. There is only a damp, penetrating cold. It is just past five pm. A long night lays ahead, daylight won’t begin to appear for another fourteen hours. How did the indigenous people survive winter? Were they simply tougher than we are? They had no wool underwear, no hi-tech winter clothing, no heat pumps, or anything else that came at the turn of a switch. Their homes had no insulation and their roofs probably leaked.

Bark whale. A perfectly proportioned effigy of an Orca made apparently, from bits of beach flotsam.

It’s hard to imagine. Jack and I are in the camper tonight somewhere between the beaches of the open Pacific and the shore of Kennedy Lake. We’re at an intersection of logging roads deep in the boggy desolate second-growth woodlands near the extreme Western edge of Canada. Being a tight old sod, I did not want to pay a ridiculous nightly rate for a spot in a campground. It now costs more than twice what I once paid for a decent motel room. And what sort of nutter goes off rambling with his dog in December? I am supposed to be at home absorbing global gloom and consuming my bottom off; or on as the case may be. Truly, I prefer the deep silent darkness of the swampy black forest. I know being here would probably terrify the average urbanite. Jaded as I be, Consumermass holds little appeal.

“Ya want me to eat that bowel of yuk?” Roughing it, camper style.

“Mind the gap” Jack sniffs out the jeep that awoke him.

Deep in the boggy backwoods. The stumps are all that remains of the old growth forest. The re-gen timber, or second-growth , desperately needs to be thinned if it is ever going to become anything like the ancient forest was. Even these small trees can be turned into valuable forest products.

Looking into Kennedy Lake from the back side where it drains into Staghorn Creek.

Staghorn Creek becomes a small lake becomes the short Kennedy River. It has a stark beauty and is not hospital country.

‘Round about midnight, snugly cuddled and deeply asleep in our comfy bed, there was a sudden blaze of light. I thought I was dreaming. Someone in a Jeep needed to pass on the road I was partially blocking. I recognized that particular engine sound as it crept by within inches of the camper. Being an old farm boy I know to always latch the gate behind me and never block a road, any road. I’d parked in the most level spot I could find while leaving passage space and out here in the back of beyond… who’da thunk? What the hell was anyone doing out here at that time? I spent the rest of the night waiting for the next vehicle.

Morning arrives with a tatter of blue visible beyond the blanket of fog overhead. The day turned out to be perfect. After touring neo-Tofino I realized that the camp ground prices were a bargain by local standards. They’ve jammed paved cycling paths through the rain forest jungle leaving heaps of shattered vegetation and stumps along the sides of the asphalt. A center line has been painted. It’s quite contrary to the surfer spirit which helped advance Tofino to it’s present gaudy self. The old school, when loggers and fishermen and hippies were the mainstay, has been driven out of town. Nevertheless, Jack loved the beach and for a short while the sunny sands helped him forget his old bones. But oh lawdy, the cold wind sure clutched at mine. I’ll let my photos tell the story.

What we came for! It may be weeks until anyone sees a sunset again.

Surfers. They now populate the surf, in all weather, like flocks of seabirds. In my passion for the sea, unfortunately I can only wish I were young again and will never know that particular intimacy of dancing with the waves.

It’s called progress but it is certainly not the flavour of the Tofino I remember.

Yes really! There are now miles of paved paths with centerlines carved into the rainforest. It completely destroys the feeling of the place. There are at, least, no fast food outlets. Kudos on that.

The V Dub van museum. Struth! It is in immaculate condition, completely unlike any that the first wave of surfers drove. Perhaps next door they’ll put up a tree museum.

Roughing it. I could see why the fee was up there. Their map shows over 600 spots, each with dead-level graveled parking, a steel fire pit, picnic table, drinking water, electrical supply and sewage hookup. Yes, there’s internet. The beach is a short walk away and there is even a dog shower. There was not one sign about dogs…what a treat!

The central washroom facility. It IS very impressive. There are others around the perimeter. Someone has made a huge investment.

The only highway in and out of the Tofino-Ucluelet peninsula is experiencing a massive upgrade. It is long overdue and will be ongoing for a good while yet. The drive to Port Alberni is breathtakingly beautiful.

“To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.” – Isaac Newton