When cars had character. I can’t tell them apart anymore.
With technical difficulties behind I’ll try posting another short blog and hope for the best. This is a tribute to all the motorheads out there. These are folks whose passions lay with vehicles and where their particular tastes may take them. I make my living twisting wrenches and care only about travelling safely from A to B. Other people see vehicles as an art form and turn the mundane into the beautiful. Enough said. These photos were taken within an hour on a very hot Saturday afternoon in the parking lot of the Jaffray Pub. So hot in fact that my mobile phone/camera refused to work, displaying a message about being overheated and refusing to take more photos. Really!
PersonalityA two doorThis is more my flavourI doubt that many new trucks this year will make it to this age.It’s hard to believe this truck is sixty-some years old. The green International was old at that time.Another International from the early fiftiesBeautifully restored things like this add-on toolbox look like they belong.This was every schoolboy’s dream. A few of them, geezers now, managed to fulfill that passion.Butt-ugly, boring family transport from the sixties. The appeal of this beast is that it is entirely original, even the faded paint.The interior is in amazing condition, the seatbelts were an optional feature.Whatever floats your boat. It doesn’t suit my tastes but the work on it is amazing.Even the radio antennae sport a hot rod cartoon character. Ratfink stands on a skull.Just paint some flames on the sides.
I’m writing in the cool of dawn before another work day. The air is smoky and dust-filled. It is choking me. Water bombers orbited above us yesterday tending to a blaze a few miles south. It was probably ignited during the previous night’s thunderstorms. There is a weary hush outside. A robin and then a raven call mournfully. The only other sound is the white noise of my neighbour’s incessant air conditioner. There’s another long day ahead.
Nature’s purple flames growing in hot, bone dry dustBeside the path
“Sometimes you just have to jump in a mud puddle because it’s there. Never get so old that you forget about having fun.”
6 PM The sun is over the yardarm and all’s not well.
The sun rose this morning into a cloudless sky. We cannot see anything blue. We are beneath a thick pall of smoke because, it seems, half of British Columbia’s forests are on fire. I don’t know who is to blame, but I reckon that most of the fires are human-caused. South of the border California is in ashes because of the price of Canadian lumber. Thus sayeth the Trump. I know that I may lose subscribers for what I constantly repeat but if you’re not even asking questions, then you like it where you are and nothing is ever going to change. That last sentence became a polemic political rant which I finally deleted. What’s the point? This blog is supposed to be about sailing and freedom and free thinking. People who read my blog understand that in varying degrees and directions. Remember Forest Gump? “Stupid is as stupid does.” Most folks get that and if you don’t, I hope you’re happy in your space.
Banon Creek Falls, Chemainus River.Chemainus River in drought.I like smoked meat!“When I look into your big brown eyes…..” Uh Huh!
To paraphrase the Red Green Theme:
If you can’t be handsome,
if you can’t be rich,
try to be handy,
do something damnit,
fix the sonafabitch.
Bumtown, Nanaimo. Some have set up this camp because they have no place to go and there is a natural instinct to seek safety in numbers. Others are there because they think they are cool and trendy. Millions of the world’s poor and displaced live like this because they have no choice. The people here have order, toilets, clean water. No one bombs or shoots at them. Still, imagine trying to nurture children in any place like this.Immediately behind the camp, in the smoke from our forests, another Asian freighter loads our raw logs for export. It is moored to the wharf of a former sawmill which was closed allegedly due to a lack of available timber. There can be nothing but questions.Nanaimo Harbour at high noon today. There are 555 forest fires burning in the province at the moment.
I’m presently wondering about the wisdom in trying to sell my beloved ‘Seafire.’ She is my earthquake plan and escape pod.It is said that it is better to drown than hang or burn and today, choke! I see people on the street wearing surgical masks which adds to the eeriness. I am not sure the masks filter out much smoke but if they make people feel better…Good!
As the day advances, the smoke settles and the entire world seems subdued, or oppressed, by it. The streets are oddly quiet as a strange lethargy seems to possess those who are out and about. The sensation is rather the same as when overwhelmed by a heavy snowfall except that this is a crushing rather a sheltering feeling. While I write, the smoke catches at the back of my throat and muted orange-brown light filters in over my desk. To think that I used to smoke deliberately, like a fiend! Fool!
Where the best berries grow.Jack on deck…of a friend’s boat. There is shade, a good view of the dock and regular treats.
Now I’m writing in the dull glow of the next morning. The smoke is thicker. Fire and brimstone. It’s the tale of sod ‘em and go for more. Getting a clear breath seems a bit difficult in the thick acrid air I am inhaling. Jack just wants to lay low.Suddenly I realize that I can hear no birds this morning. I drove up to Nanaimo this morning and realized at the airport that most flights are grounded.
Fly me to the sun. Now this Cessna Caravan only has to be able to see the ground well enough to land.Like lemmings row on row into the smoke careening cars deliberately go. When they get there if they do, will they understand anything new?
The visibility is below safe minimums for VFR. There are few aircraft in the sky and so the doomsday sensation lowers a little more. People are driving like road warriors as if there is no tomorrow and I fear, that for some, they will be right. The volunteer fire department in Ladysmith issues a call to arms with a good old-fashioned air raid siren. Its sonorous howl calls all too often, sometimes several times in one day. Within minutes there is a din of warbling, hooting, honking emergency vehicles heading off on yet another mission to yet another wreck on the highway. The dogs in town respond in kind. Summer wears on.
Tristan Jones wrote, “When in fear or in doubt, raise your sails and bugger off out.” This senior couple in their lovely 17′ sloop placidly left the marina and continued on their journey.Perched silently on a limb above passing hikers, this Barred Owl waits for dusk. I had the wrong lense on my SLR for the light, so I made this shot with my mobile phone.
“Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.” Henry David Thoreau
At first light the air was cool, pure and sweet. There was a brown pall over Vancouver. I assumed it was smog. By mid-morning a high, thick overcast covered the sky. One could smell smoke. The gloom was cast out from the forest fires burning in the interior of the province. Late afternoon was airless, the sun’s heat was fantastic and oppressive. I recalled cruel children cremating live insects under a magnifying glass. For a moment I felt a sense of smallness. I recalled when, as a young man working in the woods, I would be summoned to fight forest fires. The incredible heat, the smoke, the ash, the spark-laden dust, the long days, the weariness and thirst, the harsh din of machinery I drove, snatched moments of dreamless sleep during the dark hours and the fatigue in rising at first light to do it all over again. I feel that fatigue now but it is because I’m older and perhaps because I worked too hard when I was younger.
Night after night, the same smokey red sunsets.Comox Glacier. Before the smoke. Somehow the sight of all that snow and ice has a cooling effect.The same view with smoke. The bird is a purple martin.
I’m on my first time-off from my new job. I’ve commuted home for two days from Comox and don’t feel at all like going back to work. I’ll return in a few hours so I’ll be there in the morning. In my younger years I’d just get up earlier and put in a full day once I arrived. My doctor shakes his head at my determination to keep on chasing an income despite his advise otherwise. Poverty is a hard master. You don’t hang up your debts, or dreams, just because you’ve reached a certain age. I drive north squinting into a copper sun. A fire has broken out up-island near Nimpkish Lake and the smoke mixes with the general funk already filling the sky. I can smell and taste it. It is only the first of August and we could have three months of volatile fire season ahead. We were all dismayed at the long wet winter and spring, it seemed that it had been wet and miserable forever. That seems a distant memory now.
The summer wears on. At 0:600 this the morning the thermometer reads 17 degrees. It feels chilly! The forecast temperature will double later today. In Mexico this weather is what a person goes to enjoy. Working in it at home is an entirely different situation. In the afternoon the sound of singing and chanting carried in from the bay. Eventually over two dozen native canoes passed up into the mouth of the Courtenay River. It was part of an annual event called ‘Tribal Journeys’. Canoes from Puget Sound and southern regions are making their way north in an armada that may have up to 2500 participants. It looked like thirsty work, all that paddling and chanting and drumming. I found the sight and sound of it all quite uplifting. I hope the builders and paddlers of the canoes find empowerment and pride in their grand adventure.
A haunting sight and sound of a native canoe filled with chanting paddlers.Coastal cruising the old wayHonest Joe’s Used Canoes Part of the armada lines the shoreline, in the background there was drumming and singing..Team work. Finding the log, building the canoe, paddling it… no place for personal ego.Old Copper Eye Nobody’s average garden gnome
Two days later, before the sun had risen, in the smokey first light, songs and chants carried across the water. Silhouettes of the canoe flotilla appeared and then faded into the blur of dawn as their journey northward continued.
How’d he get that boat up there? An iconic Comox waterfront novelty for decades, the owner, builder, designer and resident of this boat lives a simple lifestyle in the face of modern sensibilities.The Fugitive. Note the name of the boat beneath the questing contrails overhead.Edgar? For a moment it seemed that perhaps the totem eagle from Shearwater had found me.Dog patch dawn. Ladysmith. Smokey sunrises are part of life on the island…for the moment.A dog day dawn. Another hot day ahead on the docks in Comox.The Race. Sailing school on a perfect afternoon before the smoke came.
“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.”
