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The Paintng

It’s coming, slowly and reluctantly but spring will soon be here in full glory.

I am often told that I must have exotic camera equipment. Nope! These were both taken this cloudy morning with my mobile phone. Any type of camera no more makes a good photograph than a brush makes a painting. It is always the nut who holds the camera.

It is vain. It is frivolous. Yet in the window of a local main street art and framing shop, there is a painting which I covet. It is spectacular in its own way, a limited edition copy, well executed by someone who knows and loves the sea well and intimately. He has captured every fleck of sea foam, every glint of light perfectly. The painter Christopher Walker is a renowned Canadian illustrator and this image has my heart. It is small, 24”x 15”, which makes it more endearing and also possible to mount in a boat. It portrays a man in red storm gear rowing a clinker-built skiff a goodly distance from shore. The title of the work is ‘Devotion.’ “Ya bet yer breasthook!” I think. You’ve got no choice. Pull for your life all the while resolved to the living heaving reality all around. It is often referred to as ‘Storm Ecstasy.’

Behind him, a steep near-breaking swell rises high above but he does not look, hearing its slop and hiss tells him all he needs to know. He has to have confidence that his small craft will rise daintily over it and all the other lumps he must encounter on his way to a sanctuary somewhere near the lighthouse. He is resolved that there is nothing he can do about it anyway. One moment of panic may well spell his doom. “Now lean into it,” he thinks, “but don’t break or lose your oar.” That light, to me, looks a lot like Race Rocks, a few miles from Victoria. It is noted for its turbulent surrounding waters and the image is so true I can smell it. I can taste the brine on my lips, feel the wet air on my face and the slap of the sea against my fragile, thin hull. I’ve been in such situations and can see, hear and feel everything including the pull and spring of the wooden spoon oars. Perhaps there is a nice small halibut in the bottom of the skiff. He isn’t out there just for the exercise.

There it is! Every time I pass the shop window I check to see if it is still there and where it might have been moved. You can see it clearly and wholly online if you look up the artist’s web site without other paintings in front of it.

Designed to warn mariners away from danger, light houses are seldom built to draw them near but onward he rows. This painting expresses tension and peace all at once for the seasoned mariner and a certain terror for the viewer who is a landsperson. I love it. I want it. There is another special nautical painting which, years ago, I did not acquire yet remains indelible in my memory. Now the capitalist craving haunts me again but for the time being this new longing will have to stay in the shop window where it has called to me for the past year. The painting is a metaphor of my life. Read into it what you will. I have a fantasy of my writing desk by a window looking out to sea, my books on shelves at either elbow, that painting on the wall where I can see it along with other art I cherish. Still rowing toward distant marks, tide against wind I yam what I yam. You know the Bob Seger song.

The painting requires only a bit of money but I I have none and there are, of course, debts and bills to be paid first. The job I started a week ago lasted less than four days. I made a simple but grievously stupid error on my first morning. I was easily able to repair it and offered that, but the damage was done. There are no second chances after making a bad first impression. My wagging tail was suddenly tucked where the sun seldom shines. That dark cloud of doubt weighed on both me and my new employer. With a rapidly dwindling trade, due in part to both the global virus dread and the puckered economy in result of regional protests I could clearly see there was not much work for me at the moment. I need the income and I need the affirmation of being able to hold a job. Gone! I must confess my weary body and the incomplete healing from my recent surgery also made it obvious that perhaps my glory days on the job are past. I was able to prove to my younger co-workers that motors can be diagnosed and repaired efficiently without computer diagnosis. Maybe ignoring protocol was what did me in. But then, it would have been something else. So what! Life goes on.

There is no higher art than the wooden boat. Form and function blend to make something beautiful and extremely useful.

An old boat once again becomes the land becomes the earth and maybe will become a boat again one day.

Even a plastic kayak offers an intimacy with the ocean that bigger boats cannot match.

The romance of the sea. This famous boathouse is now gone, strangled by the approach of suburbia, done in with noise bylaws although it was there decades before any newcomer. There’s a waterfront luxury condo there now.

This is a tough week and first things first, I must repair the engine in my truck. Maybe that will restore my confidence. Done. But I feel no better. Suddenly I’ve come down with flu-like symptoms but haven’t coughed up any Corona bottle caps so no worries mate. I was at the doctor’s office last week and everyone with a sniffle is piling in there. I don’t do baa very well. You get old, you get sick, you die. Then the cycle begins again. Old Jack wants to go for his morning outing, which will be a slow and halting procession, for both of us. We each need the air and the exercise and off we go before the drizzle thickens into a steady rain. Spring draws nearer.

“And so in time the rowboat and I became one and the same-like the archer and his bow or the artist and his paint. What I learned wasn’t mastery over the elements; it was mastery over myself, which is what conquest is ultimately all about.”
― Richard Bode , First You Have to Row a Little Boat: Reflections on Life & Living

Ships

A manipulated image, this is an attempt to portray my sense of wonder and magic about these massive icons of international trade.

What sights have been seen from this transom?

I’m not complaining, just explaining. The sheltered waters of our Gulf Islands are filling up with ships at anchor, waiting for cargoes they can’t load. It’s a powerful sight seeing large deep sea vessels anchored from nearby in our harbour to points miles away. Then there are those in bays behind islands which I cannot see. There are now dozens of them. As a man who loves the shape of all vessels, even these behemoths of function before form have an appeal to me that is hard to explain. Perhaps it is because they come from all around the planet to congregate in our local waters. It is exotic to be able to exchange waves with someone from Mungypongi or wherever home is on the other side of the planet.

Right of way? Yep, I’ll take it. This is just a half-knot of tide against the bow of an anchored ship, It is NOT a view you ever want to see from a little boat at sea. The cross-hatching is from the anchor chain chafing on the hull.

At anchor ships swing to tide, boats swing to wind…well usually! This is a summer view taken in English Bay, Vancouver.

This fleet sitting on their hooks is amassing all because a handful of people in Canada have blocked transportation routes across the country in alleged support of the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs who have decided against the democratic vote of their own people in favour of a pipeline upgrade across their hereditary lands. “Shut Canada Down” is a popular protest slogan. How, by pissing everyone off, do these folks expect to win any popular consideration? I have opinions both ways, but most of my information is not first-hand, only as gleaned between the perspectives offered by the media, so it is not reliable and…I am not a first nations person. I cannot grasp the true agenda behind this massive stupidity.

A handful of folks, some not even Canadian, most not first-nations people, have decided to empower themselves at the expense of the rest of the country. It is not their fight, yet they have decided to constipate the entire nation for their own personal ego. Some may be well-intentioned but they are not committed enough to have done even basic research into their cause. And if they so dearly love their cause, why aren’t they up in the deep sub-zero snow banks of the region they say they are trying to protect? We are allowing them to continue their selfishness unchecked. There are token arrests and obscure politicians offering meaningless rhetoric but the beat goes on. A clear lack of decisive will and action of our political leaders is frustrating and embarrassing. Eh?

A moment of beauty despite the ugly reality of its commerce.

Mount Baker, an active volcano, looks down on the Cherry Point Refinery, Washington State as a loaded tanker pulls away into the approaching night. Two huge escort tugs are standing by.

Meanwhile our third-world-style national economy (Sell raw resources wholesale / buy finished products back retail) continues to plummet horrifically. Thousands of people are laid-off indefinitely at the mercy of the protest goons. A friend points out that export petroleum products are transported along major rail arteries. They are built, logically, for very many miles along the banks of our sacred salmon rivers and their tributaries which are also traditional first nation homelands. When, not if, there is a major wreck and those waters are poisoned with black goo, I cannot imagine the anguishing about what the colonial capitalist bastards have done to our prime salmon rivers. Railway OK, pipe line bad. I’m confused.

The wonder of it all. How must it look to the eyes of the crew, day after day? These vessels are built by Asian shipyards probably from Canadian iron ore and scrap metal, smelted by Canadian coal, fueled by Canadian petroleum to ship Canadian grain, lumber or other raw resources. I wonder what these bulk carriers deliver to us in exchange. Notice how these two vessels swinging at anchor to the changing tide, point in opposite direction while only a few cables apart. There is a distinct tide line between them.

The afternoon ebb. In Ladysmith Harbour the ‘Ru Meng Ling’ slips into shadow while almost five miles away other freighters endure the same lonely vigil.

Winter grudgingly yields to spring in fits and spurts. Blue skies produce sudden icy rain squalls, dark storm fronts advance and dissipate. Wait five minutes and it will all repeat itself.

There’s a n ancient anecdote about various body parts having an argument about which was the most important. Although all the organs and other parts laughed, at first, ultimately the rectum proved to be supreme. Simply by seizing up the works until the rest of the body began to fail, this lowly member proved its overwhelming power. So here we sit. And sit. Still more ships are anchoring in anticipation of a very long wait to clear up the back log of loading orders after there is finally a resolve. That may take months. I guess in Canada, where being politically correct in all ways is what we try to do constantly, some folks use our lethargy to get away with an awful lot. Despite my growing mistrust of the media I’ve just read an article from the National Post which is written succinctly and expresses an apparently researched, informed opinion. It is worth your while to read it. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/diane-francis-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-canadas-high-living-standards

Meanwhile here at home a half-year-long labour dispute has been resolved and the local timber industry is back at work. Now we can again hear the busy howl of Detroit diesel engines in the boom boats at work sorting logs. Hopefully the Teredo worms don’t go on strike now and quit holding hands. They’ve had a good long time to munch on the billions of dollars of timber floating far too long in the booms all along the harbour. Soon there will be the squeal of chains in the mill and the all-night-long clunk and bang of fresh sawn lumber on the drop-sorting lines. I never thought that the din of one of our few remaining coastal sawmills might provide a sense of comfort. There was an editorial cartoon in The Vancouver Sun many years ago which is indelible for me. I wished I’d saved it. A man stands in front of a mirror shaving. He exclaims to himself “ Wow. I’m a white male heterosexual trying to make a living in the BC forest industry!” An endangered species perhaps? Indeed!

Crow’s dawn. “I say old chap, is that a log tow approaching? ‘Tis many a fortnight since we’ve seen one of those!”

Well, just for a grim smirk, here’s an example of how popular opinion can be so easily influenced. This Twitter headline just in: “Corona Beer does not cause Coronavirus” but global “purchase intent” of the world’s most popular beer may be down by as much as 38%. Now then everyone, say baa. What if there was something named “Shlitzvirus?”

Dear Mom: While out taking photos I’ve found a new home I think I can afford. It has an ocean view and an easily maintained yard.

Pretty perhaps, but it’s a jungle in there.

And so it goes. It’s March first today, and we’re in like a lamb and out with the dog into the sunrise. For this moment there is not a cloud in the sky.

“A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are for.”

— John A. Shedd

Stairway To Spring

Well there’s not much to say. Spring is flirting with us. Flowers and buds are appearing but the wind can be wild, wet and cold. When the skies clear, snow coats the glistening mountains nearly all the way to the bottom. Certainly, you can smell it in the wind. But there’s not much point in analyzing something we can’t change. This fellow for one, is so weary of all the fear-mongering and perverted information about Global Warming, that I don’t really want to add anything to the babble. It’s what we’ve got, enjoy it or not, that’s up to you.

Slowly grows the fungi. Nature’s way of recycling old wood back to the earth from which it came.

Booger! 100% natural. More winter fungus.

YES AGAIN! Another one sank here about two weeks ago. This time one went down and dragged its buddy boat down with it. The owners will be long gone by now. The price of freedom is responsibility and living off-grid demands avoiding attention. Sadly, this helps build the case against everyone living freely.

Same old view, ever-changing scene. Four deep-seas wait out of ballast ready to take on their cargos.

The evening weather person can’t seem to interpret their scattered bones and pebbles without mumbling some bloody thing about Global Warming or Climate Change. It is just too trendy to avoid. “Wow this is the coldest moment on record….since 1941.” Yes, it is occurring. No we are not helping matters and need to stop talking about it and simply do our best in our own personal patch but… we are not the prime cause of this natural phenomenon. Yes, warming and cooling is a natural occurrence and is part of climatic fluctuations which have been going on for millions of years, up and down, over and over… despite the hard evidence that the paranoia profiteers choose to ignore. We have to learn to adjust and change or we will disappear like the dinosaurs. They could not evolve quickly enough to assimilate a naturally changing environment. Whom will we blame should some asteroid or monster hemorrhoid (Well, I dare say there are plenty of grand assholes out there) slam into the planet and make drastic changes.

Or was it some yuppy SUV back then which brought that change on? And, by the way, why do you actually need a hybrid SUV (Stupid Urban Vanity) at all? Will it ever actually be off-pavement? Most folks still can’t get where they want when there is only an inch of snow. Then, if you do get moving, there is the trick of stopping… something they don’t show you in the TV ads. When I was a kid we all got where were going without SUVs or AWD. Radial tires for any season were unheard of. We filled the back seat with children. They provided the weight for traction and could get out and push if necessary. And of course, many folks knew how to install tire chains. And, often as not, we walked.

A greening beneath the mountain. It’s coming.

I harp on about how there is one life form on this planet which does not fit in anywhere. NIO (Non-indigenous Organism.) We can’t even get along with each other let alone in our adopted environment or with other species. We just don’t fit…although we could. When a parasite begins to overwhelm its host, nature has a way of applying checks. Once, the Bubonic Plague did a great job of culling our numbers. A century ago, The Spanish Flu once again reduced the infection that we had become. There have since been a few viruses which have not really done much to teach us anything or thin our overwhelming presence on this planet.

Now we face the nio-terror of the Coronavirus. In consideration of political correctness, it is being re-named COVID – 19 which will still offend folks, especially if it’s killing them. Frankly, if it is Corona which is the cause of all of this then perhaps we should try drinking another brand of beer. It is NOT a laughing matter. But what is it that we refuse to get? If people are determined to live like a spreading disease then guess what!? For the moment, all trans-continental travel should stop until the pandemic is completely ended. So long as folks can travel anywhere on the planet within a single day, the problem will spread. But, we don’t want to mess with anyone’s commerce. There is no expert intervention which will prevent that. Over-simplification? Nasty cough you’ve got there! Just a bit of snyphlis? OK. When two Boeing Max 8 737s killed far less folks than this virus has already, every one of them was pulled out of service. What happened to that logic?

One final consideration. If the Chinese can build and open a 1000-bed hospital in ten days, what genius maintains housing shortages here or anywhere else?

A mossy peek. Spring is soon to burst out.

We have to consider our lifestyles, population densities, diets, food sources and how all of that is unimportant to someone else’s profits. Last night I tried to cook two salmon fillets which came frozen in a bag marked as wild-caught pink salmon. Only after I opened the bag did I notice the inscription “Product of China.” WOT? That country has never been know as a salmon-producing nation and I can raise several obvious questions. The pieces of mushy, stale-fish-smelling protein came out of the bag appearing to have seen service perhaps as mud flaps on a rickshaw, possibly as far inland as Wuhan. I don’t really want to speculate on where this slop came from but I have seen much better product from fish farms. I am NOT making any Asian slurs here, but damnit! I live in British Columbia, one of the world’s great commercial fishing centres. WAZZUP? Why is finding affordable fresh fish here such a challenge? Is it the paranoia of profits or the profit of paranoia…or both? Why do we live like chicken farmers who go to town to buy eggs?

And here I was determined to provide no more than one paragraph of text and a few spring photos. But some things need to said.

“I marvel how the fishes live in the sea. Why, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones.”
William Shakespeare