“And So It Begins….”
June 15, 1998:
I didn’t make a pilgrimage to the ocean yesterday. I drove by it, briefly, through Beacon Hill Park and along Ross Bay, absorbing the salty ocean scent and the sharp freshness of a late Spring shower. After I get off the ferry in two hours in Vancouver (hopefully – it’s busy this morning and I may have to wait for the eight o’clock instead of the seven), I won’t see the ocean for ten weeks. I’ve never been away that long.
My trip is off to an inauspicious start. I left most of my film and my two disposable cameras on my kitchen counter. I was bound to forget something I guess. Good thing it wasn’t anything important like money. Or underwear.
The plan is to stop around Banff or Golden tonight and camp out in the back of the truck. There’s not as much room as I’d like back there. At the last minute I decided to pack my bike and that’s using up more space than I thought it would. Still, I should get some sleep even if I’m curled up in a tight, fetal ball. But it makes me more anxious to arrive in Alberta. Haven’t slept well the last few nights, and in reality I expect to get little sleep tonight. I’ve crammed my life into ten boxes and four of them are my computer.
Currently, I’m stuck midway down row five at the Swartz Bay Ferry Terminal. And I’ve felt stuck midway down row five for years.
We’re boarding now. Will I make it, or miss the boat? (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
*****
Mine was, literally, the last vehicle loaded on board.
In no hurry to join the huge breakfast line-up that snaked through the passenger compartments of the ferry, I was able to snag a good seat near the bow at the windows.
I’ve often thought about living on one of the Gulf Islands. It appeals to me because they are isolated and still reasonably close to the big cities. Living and working in Sooke for six years has made me appreciate the mellow, laid back approach to life, not that I haven’t been a laid back, mellow kind of guy anyway. Can you really imagine me getting any mellower?
Hunger finally breaks me down. $7.97 for three pancakes, a glass of milk, and a cookie I’ll save for later. I wonder how much it would have cost me for warm pancakes.
God bless BC Ferries – no one else will.
*****
I stand at the back of the ship, staring as Vancouver Island, my home, disappears. The ocean is a brilliant blue, like a pair of haunting eyes. The clouds have broken and scattered; the storm that was expected to sit over the coast for a couple of days went through overnight and is moving inland. I’m going to catch up to it. Now, there’s only small white cotton puffs over the receding green forests of the Gulf Islands.
*****
A number of times as I drive through the suburbs of Vancouver as I angle my way up to Highway 1, I feel like bursting into tears. I’m saying goodbye to a lot of things. I’m just not sure what they are yet.
*****
I caught up to the rain west of Abbotsford. A real downpour, great gouts of water washing across the sky and highway. Visibility sucks – cars only metres ahead vanish into clouds of spray. Gray sky hangs low like the depression of a lover scorned. The clouds are so low that they block the tops of the mountains, but not the vast subdivisions of identical houses scarring their sides.
*****
The rain lifted somewhat after Hope (yes, I am beyond Hope), but the clouds and rain returned as I climbed the Coquihalla. Here, as I lunch in beautiful downtown Merritt, the sky is battleship gray, and the sky is crying. I can tell I’m in a different world now: The Paul Harvey News is on the local radio station.
Nice country though. I’ve always loved BC’s topography, especially the coastal rainforest I call home. But I also love the mountains. And the changes in the land as you move through the wide fields of the Fraser Valley into the rolling hills and finally the mountains of the Coast Range has always impressed me.
*****
Today I drove through the towns of Lickman and Popkum. What great place names this country has. And did you ever notice that Come By Chance is right beside Conception Bay? Think about it….
*****
The rain continued even after I hit the big mountains. I am not impressed.
Steady, heavy rain, low clouds, fog. Crappy visibility. I hope it clears tomorrow for my drive up to Jasper. I finish this entry in the back of my truck in a campsite at Lake Louise. It’s pouring rain and there’s no shelter outside, so I’ve climbed into the back and I’m lying on my side using my bicycle wheel for a desk.
*****
June 16
It’s five o’clock in the morning. I’m tired, freezing, cramped up and miserable. At least I’m not wet.
I spent most of the night sleeping like this: L. Sometimes I slept like this: W. Occasionally I was shaped like this: @ or like this: &. In fact, I got no sleep. So I’m saying, “Screw it,” and now I’m heading down the road to Jasper.
My plan was to take a slow drive through the mountains between Banff and Jasper on the second day, but nature is not cooperating. The rain continues to fall, and the mountains are completely socked in. Only briefly can their majesty be glimpsed through the foggy shroud that covers them.
But some of those glimpses are breathtaking. Sharp, angled peaks suddenly slice through the fog ahead of you and tower over you, thousands of feet over you, as you drive your puny little car through the tiniest of mountain passes. One mountain ahead is awesome: its face a sheer study of sedimentary layers. At the edge of the face, the layers are parallel to the ground but as you follow the layers inward toward the centre, they begin turning. In fact, they turn ninety degrees and proceed upwards to the mountain’s peak in a smooth quarter circle. These layers are hundreds of metres thick, thousands and thousands of years old, weigh millions of tonnes, and at some point in the very recent geological past were seemingly twisted as easily as taffy.
But the weather is still not cooperating with my plans. I’m approaching the Columbia Ice Fields, possibly the most scenic point on the whole trip, and the rain returns again. And changes to snow. Wet snow, non-sticking to the ground snow, but snow. And at the Ice Field summit, the fog descends again, denying me a view of the majestic spectacle. Worse yet, as I climb, the fog descends lower and lower until visibility is next to nil and I can’t see more than twenty feet ahead of me. Then I realize it’s not fog – I’ve driven up into the clouds.
Finally, the road starts descending and at last I leave the clouds and the bad weather behind me. I see a moose, and then a herd of deer – big deer, way bigger than Vancouver Island deer. Soon I am past Jasper, out of the mountains, and roaring across the Great Plains.
Towns blur into each other as the long straight flat road stretches on ahead for mile after dull mile. Suddenly I see way off in the distance the skyscrapers of downtown Edmonton. You can see them from miles away across the smooth, even prairie. I dig out Paula’s instructions. And just after lunch, I arrive at Double Joy Farms.
I’m here.
Showing posts with label 1998. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1998. Show all posts
Saturday, June 09, 2007
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Alberta Reports - Number Two
June 26, 1998
Here I am in the Land of the Midnight Twilight. I’m so far north that at this time of year, it never gets dark at night. The sun does set, round about 10:30 or so, but it never gets completely dark – there’s always that bright, sunset glow on the horizon that swings around the northern sky during the night from the west to the east, where the sun comes up at about 4:00. This should change quickly now that Sunday, the longest night of the year, has passed and by August the stars, the Northern Lights and the Persieds meteor shower will be in full glorious bloom.
So I’ve been here over a week now and survived relatively intact so far. Paula and Bernie’s truck hasn’t, though. It lost a front wheel last Friday, and I do mean lost – the ball joint snapped and the wheel broke free. Fortunately, he and Lila were just starting up from a stop sign and only gone a couple feet when it let go. Impressive though, the only thing holding it on was the brake lines.
Monday morning, we finished baling the hay. 170 bales or there abouts. What a job. We have to go out in the field and follow behind a pick up truck and stack bales on the bed. We were out to midnight last night working at it. We can put about 40 bales on the truck, and then we drive back to the stockyard and unload. It’s hard because we’re piling four layers on the truck and pretty much after the first level, you’re throwing the bales over your head. They’re big, bulky, and not light. It doesn’t take much to get a sweat going out here, and soon rivulets are flowing down your face and stinging your eyes, hay is sticking to you everywhere and getting into everything, and the sun burns down mercilessly.
Later, we did some work in the stockyard. Bernie is trying to dig a dugout. So we hooked a shovel on the back of the tractor and dragged it through the mud, filling it with dirt, mud and rocks, and deposited this stuff on a hill composed of the remains of previous dugout building attempts. The shovel weighs a ton and is a bitch to move even when empty. Guiding it through a muddy pond is even tougher. We worked at it for a couple of hours, trading off turns between guiding the shovel and driving the tractor. It hardly looks like we made any progress.
Made friends with Arthur Curray, the goat. He is so named because he has a gimpy right rear foot, and therefore has three left feet. They only have one goat this year, and he is in danger of becoming a family member. As Bernie put it, “Two of the same kind of animal are livestock – one is a pet.” Arthur is so sweet; he comes when you call him, and when you pet him, he wags his stubby tail like a dog,. He just may end up being the family dog before long.
The farm needs rain. It has rained all around us; we’ve watched the gray curtains fall. It has not rained here.
You perspire just by stepping outside. A walk of a hundred feet knocks you out. A couple hours of work feels like it will kill you. Yesterday, I changed my mind about something and I broke into a sweat.
The heat is oppressive. The sun burns down unceasingly, unfailingly. It simply doesn’t stop. You look up at it, carefully, haltingly, like a slave looks to a master for relief from punishment. The Big Sky, at times glorious and stunning, becomes a cursed weight that bears down on you. It robs your strength, your energy, and your will.
It’s easy to see how ancient man created gods. Your life turns on whatever the sky deigns to bring down on you today. You’re constantly looking skyward to see what your fortunes will be. And as you watch the rain clouds that you desperately need split apart and pass by on either side of you, it’s easy to imagine some being in the sky doling out rain as a grandmother passes out candies to favoured children.
Albertans are more bound by their weather than they realize. Everything in their lives depends on the weather gods. The growing season is only 30 days long – if there’s not enough rain, if there’s too much, if it snows, if it’s too cold, if it’s too hot – there is no margin of error, no room for a second chance. God forbid it should hail. The summers are unbearably sizzling, and the winters are unbelievably frigid. There’s no middle ground, just the breadth of extremes and the gloomy massiveness of the sky.
First Nation peoples never lived here – they knew better.
And of course twenty minutes after I wrote the above bit Wednesday evening, the sky opened up with rain and thunder … for about five minutes. Actually, we had three rain bursts Wednesday night, and enough rain so that the ground was still wet Thursday morning. Today, Friday, the weather gods pelted us with rain, thunder and high winds. It was worse up to the northeast – we watched those nasty clouds roll on by. The whole weekend looks to be the same. At least Paula’s and Bernie’s worries about enough water for the crops have, er, evaporated.
Edmonton is a strange city. It shares some similarities with other prairie towns – the obvious one being that it is flat. Edmonton, like Calgary and Winnipeg, has expanded outwards. Coastal or mountain cities like Vancouver have expanded upwards. There are relatively few skyscrapers in Edmonton – the downtown core has few such windowed goliaths. In contrast, Vancouver, which has no more room for horizontal expansion, has erupted vertically with mammoth glass towers reaching for the sky on every corner.
What this means in Edmonton is that ground is cheap and plentiful, and building projects use up surface area in such vast areas that it would leave most Vancouver developers salivating at the revenue it would generate on the coast. The West Edmonton Mall is the ultimate example. The Hard Rock Café at WestEd covers surface area than Vancouver’s GM Place sports arena. (It’s honking big.) Bigger is better is not just a maxim out here, it’s a way of life. Most retail spaces are horizontally huge because it’s easy to be.
And this carries on into residential districts. Edmonton’s suburbs are huge, fenced-in developments surrounded by tall, imposing wooden enclosures. All that is missing are the armed guards. The only question is who’s guarding who? I sometimes felt like I was driving by Auschwitz – what’s going on in there that I’m not allowed to see? What secrets are being served? Why are you locking yourselves away from the world? Every new development is built on a huge section of prime, agricultural land, and comprises row upon row, street upon street of identical, cookie-cutter, look-a-like houses.
I tried to find a corner store for a quick snack, and I couldn’t. Edmonton has no neighborhood stores because it has no neighborhoods – only enclaves.
Here I am in the Land of the Midnight Twilight. I’m so far north that at this time of year, it never gets dark at night. The sun does set, round about 10:30 or so, but it never gets completely dark – there’s always that bright, sunset glow on the horizon that swings around the northern sky during the night from the west to the east, where the sun comes up at about 4:00. This should change quickly now that Sunday, the longest night of the year, has passed and by August the stars, the Northern Lights and the Persieds meteor shower will be in full glorious bloom.
So I’ve been here over a week now and survived relatively intact so far. Paula and Bernie’s truck hasn’t, though. It lost a front wheel last Friday, and I do mean lost – the ball joint snapped and the wheel broke free. Fortunately, he and Lila were just starting up from a stop sign and only gone a couple feet when it let go. Impressive though, the only thing holding it on was the brake lines.
Monday morning, we finished baling the hay. 170 bales or there abouts. What a job. We have to go out in the field and follow behind a pick up truck and stack bales on the bed. We were out to midnight last night working at it. We can put about 40 bales on the truck, and then we drive back to the stockyard and unload. It’s hard because we’re piling four layers on the truck and pretty much after the first level, you’re throwing the bales over your head. They’re big, bulky, and not light. It doesn’t take much to get a sweat going out here, and soon rivulets are flowing down your face and stinging your eyes, hay is sticking to you everywhere and getting into everything, and the sun burns down mercilessly.Later, we did some work in the stockyard. Bernie is trying to dig a dugout. So we hooked a shovel on the back of the tractor and dragged it through the mud, filling it with dirt, mud and rocks, and deposited this stuff on a hill composed of the remains of previous dugout building attempts. The shovel weighs a ton and is a bitch to move even when empty. Guiding it through a muddy pond is even tougher. We worked at it for a couple of hours, trading off turns between guiding the shovel and driving the tractor. It hardly looks like we made any progress.
Made friends with Arthur Curray, the goat. He is so named because he has a gimpy right rear foot, and therefore has three left feet. They only have one goat this year, and he is in danger of becoming a family member. As Bernie put it, “Two of the same kind of animal are livestock – one is a pet.” Arthur is so sweet; he comes when you call him, and when you pet him, he wags his stubby tail like a dog,. He just may end up being the family dog before long.
The farm needs rain. It has rained all around us; we’ve watched the gray curtains fall. It has not rained here.
You perspire just by stepping outside. A walk of a hundred feet knocks you out. A couple hours of work feels like it will kill you. Yesterday, I changed my mind about something and I broke into a sweat.
The heat is oppressive. The sun burns down unceasingly, unfailingly. It simply doesn’t stop. You look up at it, carefully, haltingly, like a slave looks to a master for relief from punishment. The Big Sky, at times glorious and stunning, becomes a cursed weight that bears down on you. It robs your strength, your energy, and your will.
It’s easy to see how ancient man created gods. Your life turns on whatever the sky deigns to bring down on you today. You’re constantly looking skyward to see what your fortunes will be. And as you watch the rain clouds that you desperately need split apart and pass by on either side of you, it’s easy to imagine some being in the sky doling out rain as a grandmother passes out candies to favoured children.
Albertans are more bound by their weather than they realize. Everything in their lives depends on the weather gods. The growing season is only 30 days long – if there’s not enough rain, if there’s too much, if it snows, if it’s too cold, if it’s too hot – there is no margin of error, no room for a second chance. God forbid it should hail. The summers are unbearably sizzling, and the winters are unbelievably frigid. There’s no middle ground, just the breadth of extremes and the gloomy massiveness of the sky.
First Nation peoples never lived here – they knew better.
And of course twenty minutes after I wrote the above bit Wednesday evening, the sky opened up with rain and thunder … for about five minutes. Actually, we had three rain bursts Wednesday night, and enough rain so that the ground was still wet Thursday morning. Today, Friday, the weather gods pelted us with rain, thunder and high winds. It was worse up to the northeast – we watched those nasty clouds roll on by. The whole weekend looks to be the same. At least Paula’s and Bernie’s worries about enough water for the crops have, er, evaporated.
Edmonton is a strange city. It shares some similarities with other prairie towns – the obvious one being that it is flat. Edmonton, like Calgary and Winnipeg, has expanded outwards. Coastal or mountain cities like Vancouver have expanded upwards. There are relatively few skyscrapers in Edmonton – the downtown core has few such windowed goliaths. In contrast, Vancouver, which has no more room for horizontal expansion, has erupted vertically with mammoth glass towers reaching for the sky on every corner.
What this means in Edmonton is that ground is cheap and plentiful, and building projects use up surface area in such vast areas that it would leave most Vancouver developers salivating at the revenue it would generate on the coast. The West Edmonton Mall is the ultimate example. The Hard Rock Café at WestEd covers surface area than Vancouver’s GM Place sports arena. (It’s honking big.) Bigger is better is not just a maxim out here, it’s a way of life. Most retail spaces are horizontally huge because it’s easy to be.
And this carries on into residential districts. Edmonton’s suburbs are huge, fenced-in developments surrounded by tall, imposing wooden enclosures. All that is missing are the armed guards. The only question is who’s guarding who? I sometimes felt like I was driving by Auschwitz – what’s going on in there that I’m not allowed to see? What secrets are being served? Why are you locking yourselves away from the world? Every new development is built on a huge section of prime, agricultural land, and comprises row upon row, street upon street of identical, cookie-cutter, look-a-like houses.
I tried to find a corner store for a quick snack, and I couldn’t. Edmonton has no neighborhood stores because it has no neighborhoods – only enclaves.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Alberta Reports - Number Three
July 2, 1998
The rain seems to have stopped for now. There’s some flooding in southern parts of the province but everything’s fine up here. In fact, the gullies, sloughs and ditches have no run-off in them, even though it rained for about 48 hours straight. The ground is so dry that it has just sucked the fallen precipitation right in. Bernie was saying that this was the first really good rainfall in about 18 months.
This week the markets start up, so the work really begins. The Saturday Market in Prince Albert is the big one, but they have other markets on Wednesday (in Sherwood Park) and Thursday (I’m not sure where). Monday and Tuesday are the sort of days off around here, so I’m going to rest up for the big week ahead. Friday is “pick till you drop” day. You start as early as you can and go until you pass out. Can’t wait. Hee haw.
And now a report on an on-going scientific experiment. Last Sunday, I went to my friend Michelle’s place in Edmonton. She had a few friends over, one of whom brought along her seven year-old son Michael. Now Michael had met most everyone at the home before, but immediately gravitated to me and his first words to me were (I swear this is true), “Can you tell me a joke, John?” Before long, Michael and I were exchanging jokes back and forth like crazy (although his always had a punch line that involved “boogers”: “Why did the chicken cross the road?” “’Cause it had too many boogers!”) He insisted on sitting beside me on the couch. As his mother was leaving, he grabbed my arm as if he didn’t want to leave. He did, reluctantly. And on Tuesday, a friend visited Paula and brought her five year-old son. When he declared he needed to go to the bathroom, Paula asked him if he knew where it was. “Sure,” he replied, “it’s right next to this guy!” and he poked me in the back. So Stephanie’s hypothesis continues to hold true: kids find me both irresistible and harmless.
The weather is still being goofy. Tuesday afternoon saw our first tornado watch of the season. Severe thunderstorms were in the area, although we only got one good crack overhead. A small tornado did touch down just south of Edmonton, but no harm done.
On Wednesday, we went to a nearby farm for grain. Their barn cat had recently had a litter of kittens and there were four or five little ones running around the place. There was one kitten who was that mottled black and orange colour, but had an amazing face. It was black, save for a perfect stripe of orange running down the middle of its face, from the top of its head, right down the nose and down its chin. IT’S GORGEROUS. I wonder how my cat Linus will react if I bring it home.
They also had a big, bloated dead cow lying around. It wasn’t nearly as much fun as the kittens.
Wednesday afternoon, the weather turned ugly. Working in the fields, we watched a nasty and dark storm front bear down on us from the north. It looked like it was going to pass us to the west, but it suddenly swerved and came down right over top of us. We scrambled back to the houses, helpless witnesses to Mother Nature in one of her really foul moods.
As the thunder rumbled overhead, we realized that we were standing dead centre at the meeting place of two weather fronts. The nasty, dark clouds from the north were slamming into a front coming in from the east. Cold, moist air was mixing violently with warm air. And swirling.
Bernie saw it first. Above the field across the road, maybe a couple of hundred yards away, the air was turning. A small group of clouds had broken off and you could watch them spin. Paula quickly ran back to the house to call the Severe Storm Hotline. Bernie, who had never seen the sky look like this before, shouted to everyone that if we had to, we drop everything and run to the small house. I ran to the small house to grab my camera. “Might as well make some money in case I die,” I shouted. As I returned outside with my camera, I looked up. There was another swirl directly over our heads. We were standing at ground zero of a tornado birth.
The clouds above were swirling, whirling and twisting. They weren’t puffy, fluffy clouds; they were malevolent smears and hellish shadows. Whorls, eddies and backwash argued and fought. The clouds were living demons. This wasn’t a storm, it was a maelstrom. Suddenly the wind simply stopped. Dead calm.
Bernie and I looked at each other, each sharing the same feeling. Twenty per cent of us was going, “Wow! This is neat! Something really cool might happen!”, while the other eighty per cent was going “Oh, shit, we might be in major trouble….”
The wind swiftly returned, and the clouds continued roiling. The twisters never developed, but we all felt it was a close thing – too close a thing. The storm continued south and smashed into the north side of Edmonton, dropping a ton of rain, flooding underpasses, stopping the LRT, and causing havoc. By the time it reached the southern side of town, the rains had stopped and the clouds had dissipated. The storm was gone.
The rain seems to have stopped for now. There’s some flooding in southern parts of the province but everything’s fine up here. In fact, the gullies, sloughs and ditches have no run-off in them, even though it rained for about 48 hours straight. The ground is so dry that it has just sucked the fallen precipitation right in. Bernie was saying that this was the first really good rainfall in about 18 months.
This week the markets start up, so the work really begins. The Saturday Market in Prince Albert is the big one, but they have other markets on Wednesday (in Sherwood Park) and Thursday (I’m not sure where). Monday and Tuesday are the sort of days off around here, so I’m going to rest up for the big week ahead. Friday is “pick till you drop” day. You start as early as you can and go until you pass out. Can’t wait. Hee haw.
And now a report on an on-going scientific experiment. Last Sunday, I went to my friend Michelle’s place in Edmonton. She had a few friends over, one of whom brought along her seven year-old son Michael. Now Michael had met most everyone at the home before, but immediately gravitated to me and his first words to me were (I swear this is true), “Can you tell me a joke, John?” Before long, Michael and I were exchanging jokes back and forth like crazy (although his always had a punch line that involved “boogers”: “Why did the chicken cross the road?” “’Cause it had too many boogers!”) He insisted on sitting beside me on the couch. As his mother was leaving, he grabbed my arm as if he didn’t want to leave. He did, reluctantly. And on Tuesday, a friend visited Paula and brought her five year-old son. When he declared he needed to go to the bathroom, Paula asked him if he knew where it was. “Sure,” he replied, “it’s right next to this guy!” and he poked me in the back. So Stephanie’s hypothesis continues to hold true: kids find me both irresistible and harmless.
The weather is still being goofy. Tuesday afternoon saw our first tornado watch of the season. Severe thunderstorms were in the area, although we only got one good crack overhead. A small tornado did touch down just south of Edmonton, but no harm done.
On Wednesday, we went to a nearby farm for grain. Their barn cat had recently had a litter of kittens and there were four or five little ones running around the place. There was one kitten who was that mottled black and orange colour, but had an amazing face. It was black, save for a perfect stripe of orange running down the middle of its face, from the top of its head, right down the nose and down its chin. IT’S GORGEROUS. I wonder how my cat Linus will react if I bring it home.
They also had a big, bloated dead cow lying around. It wasn’t nearly as much fun as the kittens.
Wednesday afternoon, the weather turned ugly. Working in the fields, we watched a nasty and dark storm front bear down on us from the north. It looked like it was going to pass us to the west, but it suddenly swerved and came down right over top of us. We scrambled back to the houses, helpless witnesses to Mother Nature in one of her really foul moods. As the thunder rumbled overhead, we realized that we were standing dead centre at the meeting place of two weather fronts. The nasty, dark clouds from the north were slamming into a front coming in from the east. Cold, moist air was mixing violently with warm air. And swirling.
Bernie saw it first. Above the field across the road, maybe a couple of hundred yards away, the air was turning. A small group of clouds had broken off and you could watch them spin. Paula quickly ran back to the house to call the Severe Storm Hotline. Bernie, who had never seen the sky look like this before, shouted to everyone that if we had to, we drop everything and run to the small house. I ran to the small house to grab my camera. “Might as well make some money in case I die,” I shouted. As I returned outside with my camera, I looked up. There was another swirl directly over our heads. We were standing at ground zero of a tornado birth.
The clouds above were swirling, whirling and twisting. They weren’t puffy, fluffy clouds; they were malevolent smears and hellish shadows. Whorls, eddies and backwash argued and fought. The clouds were living demons. This wasn’t a storm, it was a maelstrom. Suddenly the wind simply stopped. Dead calm.
Bernie and I looked at each other, each sharing the same feeling. Twenty per cent of us was going, “Wow! This is neat! Something really cool might happen!”, while the other eighty per cent was going “Oh, shit, we might be in major trouble….”
The wind swiftly returned, and the clouds continued roiling. The twisters never developed, but we all felt it was a close thing – too close a thing. The storm continued south and smashed into the north side of Edmonton, dropping a ton of rain, flooding underpasses, stopping the LRT, and causing havoc. By the time it reached the southern side of town, the rains had stopped and the clouds had dissipated. The storm was gone.
Monday, June 04, 2007
Alberta Reports - Number Four
July 12, 1998
Friday the 3rd was the first big picking day, and my back was killing me afterwards. I couldn’t keep up with Paula. She picks about 50% faster than me, but I feel I’m catching up. Either that or she’s slowing down so as to not to embarrass me.
Saturday was the first St. Albert Market. This is the largest Market in Western Canada, with well over 200 hundred vendors. This year, the starting gun was replaced with a cannon shot. Unfortunately, no one told the vendors and at precisely 10:00 AM, the blast sent people scurrying for cover. The market is a five hour-long affair, but we were sold out just after eleven. Bernie and I went for a coffee, while Paula put copies of her book on the table and started flogging (she sold eight copies).
Bernie usually hawks in front of the table, offering free samples of the sugar snap peas. He treats the markets as street theatre, and will do anything to push the product. Juggling is a favorite trick. He targets families and gives samples to the kids, who love them and then pester Mom for more. It works. What can I say? “Did you have a coffee today? Well, now you need a pea!” He jokes, he banters, he flirts – anything for a sale. Bernie and I will even sing “Super Freak” if it helps make the close.
On Sunday, we embarked on “Kitsch Tour ’98,” a voyage of discovery to see all the weird things hiding in Central Alberta. All the small towns of the area have a “world’s biggest” something. Glendon, for instance, is home to the world’s biggest pyrogy. Andrew has the world’s biggest mallard duck. You get the idea. Our voyage took us as far as Lloydminster, Saskatchewan. The last time I was in Saskatchewan was 27 years ago, and I was unconscious the whole time.
Monday and Tuesday it was back to the salt mines, er, I mean the pea fields, for weeding. The back field needs a lot of weeding. Those peas won’t be ready for harvesting until August, but unless we get the weeds knocked down, they’ll never be ready. Wednesday, I picked for a bit, then it was off to Edgefest ’98. Thursday was more picking, then off to the Fort Saskatchewan market (which is not in Saskatchewan – in fact, it’s the closet of the three markets, about half an hour or so away). This market is in total contrast to the big St. Albert market; perhaps 25 vendors, tops, and only two hours long.
Which brings us up to Friday the 10th, and the cycle repeats itself with another long day of picking. My back held up pretty well today, but the heat was oppressive. We started at 6:45 AM. We had thought of starting at about six, or even earlier, but there was no way our bodies were going to function. Paula’s parents have been visiting from Victoria this week, and we sure need any extra hands we can find on picking days. Her father, Joe, joined me in the pea fields to start and by 7:15, Paula, both her parents and I were madly picking peas. (Bernie has been working in town all week.) Every forty-five minutes or so, Ben or Lila (whom have I dubbed Drinkboy or Drinkgirl respectively) bring liquid sustenance to refresh us. Sometimes we don’t really need a drink, but I always drink anyway. I will need it later. Besides, as Paula says on picking days, if you’re not peeing a lot, you’re not drinking enough. The four of us picked until about ten o’clock and gathered about forty gallons of peas. Now a real break was in order, and we adjourned to the house for forty-five minutes or so. Bernie’s cousin Barry, sometime part-time help around the farm, arrives just in time for the break.
We return to the fields. We’ve been picking on the first pea field, now we’re checking out the second pea field. A pea field will give you about three weeks worth of picking. The first field is petering out and we’re checking the second field to see if it’s ready. Paula is surprised – it’s a lot more readier than she was expecting. We set to work and pick lightly – we’ve already got lots of peas, so there’s no need to go nuts. We’ll save a lot for next week. We get another fifteen gallons off this field, but if we’d gone at it we could have doubled our pea total. Another quick break, and Paula’s parents depart for Victoria. It’s down to the three of us. The strawberries await.
Another drink break, and away we go to the strawberries. Our first assault lasts about an hour, and then we need to stop. It’s high noon and we’re hot, hungry and thirsty. Lunch break lasts well over an hour, including the nap.
The picking isn’t hard work, but it’s repetitive, back-breaking, dull, repetitive, boring, tedious, and repetitive work. And when you’re picking on days like this one, it’s hot, muggy and tiring work. The speed and enthusiasm of our first hours in the field have long passed. The early morning cloud has long broken, leaving only the deep cerulean sky and the blazing hot sun. This will be the hottest day since I arrived. By mid-afternoon, it will be hot enough to fry an egg on your back. Sweat will pour off us in torrents. We will get progressively slower and dopier. Drinking breaks will become longer and longer. We will use any excuse we can find to get out of the sun.
We get back to the strawberries, but we know the weather has finished us. We plod along slowly and eventually get close to 20 gallons, but we’re beat. Barry has to leave at three, but Paula and I hang in until four. Paula says it was a good thing it was a short picking day and I look at her incredulously. When the beans start maturing, she explains, we will pick from sunrise to after sunset. We will not leave the field, except to go the bathroom. Food and drink will be supplied to us in the fields by Drinkboy and Drinkgirl, and we simply will not stop until all the ripe beans are picked. We will do this in whatever weather condition exists: rain, sun, or snow. The only thing that will pull us off the fields will be lightning. And even then, it will have to be a direct hit.
A little voice in the back of my head starts going, “Working vacation? What the hell were you thinking?”
Livestock update:
The sheep are a lot of extra work (and money for feed) and Bernie seems no longer convinced they are worth the effort or the expense. I can tell this because every time he walks past the two slated for butchering next week he says, “On Tuesday, you’re lamp chops, motherfuckers.”
Arthur the Goat is surprisingly spry these days. Since he was a baby goat, he walked with a limp, walking on his hind right ankle and sort of dragging his foot along the ground. He didn’t seem to be in any pain, but it sure made all of us wince. But a few days ago, he suddenly started walking properly, putting all the weight on the foot, instead of twisting his ankle. He’s still limping, but now he’s started running and jumping and bounding about, full of energy and life. He still thinks he’s the family dog though, and tries to climb into the trucks when we go away, or he tries to get into the house at night when we turn in.
The turkeys, which looked like strange gray crows when I arrived, are now starting to actually resemble turkeys. Paula is already taking orders for Thanksgiving.
So back to the big St. Albert market on the 11th. We leave the house in both trucks around eight-ish for the drive to St. Albert. We arrive around nine. Set up is pretty simple. First, we grab a table off of Bernie’s brother’s Frank’s truck. Frank is a serious farmer – he has the three stalls beside us at the market, and three times as much farmland. He has greenhouses, tons of heavy machinery and is in this to make money. And he’ll do that – he will do five to six times the business that we will. He sells the same produce we do (plus a whole lot more), but ours are organically grown always look better and taste better.
After setting up the table, we erect the canopy over it. The canopy is an ingenious green contraption that unfolds like an accordion and literally takes two minutes to set up. Paula starts arranging the produce on the table, while Bernie, the kids and I start bagging the peas in one-pound bags. I will be bagging peas on this day for close to four hours until they’re all sold. Paula thinks that thanks to our efforts in the fields the day before, this is the most strawberries she has ever brought to market. And we will sell them all. Bernie stands in front of the table and begins his performance, while Paula and I close the sales.
It’s a slow day. Most of the produce is usually gone by eleven-thirty (even though the market lasts until three), but today it takes until one. Bernie’s voice is nearly gone and he’s beat. We look at each other and both know how the day went: yeah, we sold out, but it took forever. A slow but steady stream of customers make for a successful, yet hard selling day. Everyone’s beat. We’re going to enjoy our day off tomorrow. Bernie and I do a walk around of the market and buy some wild boar pepperoni. (It’s hot!) We can’t wait until three so we can get out of here and go home.
July 15th
Bernie went up north for a couple of days for work. He’s been working almost fulltime since I got here, which leaves less time to do his farm chores, but on the other hand it’s a regular pay cheque coming in for the family. Unfortunately he took his computer in for repairs before he left. The fan wasn’t working and the CPU was overheating to the point when the computer would just seize up. Even more unfortunate is the fact that his computer is the one hooked up to the phone line to access email, so we’ve all been offline now for six days. I can still write stuff on my computer in my little house, but there’s no phone line in the house so I had been using his computer to send my email. Now that his computer’s back, there’ll be a whole lot of email going out over the next few hours.
Last night Paula and the kids and I went to see the Free Will Players’ excellent production of Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors.” They performed at an outdoor venue, and the thunder and clouds overhead prompted numerous ad libs concerning the inclement weather. “The Comedy of Errors” concerns the usual subjects of British farce: mistaken identity involving twins separated at birth (two sets in this case), money, and sex. It was quite well done and typically British, and it makes me wonder if Shakespeare was the first to really popularize this form and turn it into a staple of British entertainment. You can almost see the Carry On gang doing this production.
We took two lambs in on Tuesday. They’ll be lamb chops on Friday. We cornered them one at a time in the yard and walked/pushed/dragged them out to the truck. The geese seemed quite upset at the whole affair and when I began intoning, “Dead lamb walking,” they really got aggravated, and began squawking and honking and flapping. They seemed to be the only animals who knew what was going on. It wasn’t very hard to load the sheep into Bernie’s pick-up, but it makes for an unusual sight, two lambs in a pick-up driving through the city. This is the first time I’ve been involved in slaughtering animals (even if it was only in the most tangential sense), but it was easier than I thought it would be. But now Paula’s saying Arthur the Goat may get shipped in September, and I don’t want to hear about that at all.
So far the farming life is still fun and interesting. But ask me again in ten days or so. The last couple of weeks of July and the first two weeks of August are the prime picking and selling times. We are going to be working our asses off the next few weeks. We’ve basically given up on weeding, and are saving ourselves to concentrate on straight picking. The first pea crop is just about all done, so now we’re concentrating on the second. The strawberries are almost over, too, although there may be a second crack at them come late August. The normal peas are ripening and we’ve been working them, along with the broccoli and cauliflower. Tomatoes and beans are still a ways off, but will be ready before long.
I like living out in the country. It’s quiet and peaceful and I really like that. And here, it’s also close enough to the big city that you have all the attraction and benefits of the city (culture, entertainment, mass-market consumables), and yet can quickly escape to the country and avoid all the downers and perils of the city (culture, entertainment, mass-market consumables). Someday, this is where I’m going to live (not in Alberta per se, but in the country).
Friday the 3rd was the first big picking day, and my back was killing me afterwards. I couldn’t keep up with Paula. She picks about 50% faster than me, but I feel I’m catching up. Either that or she’s slowing down so as to not to embarrass me.
Saturday was the first St. Albert Market. This is the largest Market in Western Canada, with well over 200 hundred vendors. This year, the starting gun was replaced with a cannon shot. Unfortunately, no one told the vendors and at precisely 10:00 AM, the blast sent people scurrying for cover. The market is a five hour-long affair, but we were sold out just after eleven. Bernie and I went for a coffee, while Paula put copies of her book on the table and started flogging (she sold eight copies).
Bernie usually hawks in front of the table, offering free samples of the sugar snap peas. He treats the markets as street theatre, and will do anything to push the product. Juggling is a favorite trick. He targets families and gives samples to the kids, who love them and then pester Mom for more. It works. What can I say? “Did you have a coffee today? Well, now you need a pea!” He jokes, he banters, he flirts – anything for a sale. Bernie and I will even sing “Super Freak” if it helps make the close.
On Sunday, we embarked on “Kitsch Tour ’98,” a voyage of discovery to see all the weird things hiding in Central Alberta. All the small towns of the area have a “world’s biggest” something. Glendon, for instance, is home to the world’s biggest pyrogy. Andrew has the world’s biggest mallard duck. You get the idea. Our voyage took us as far as Lloydminster, Saskatchewan. The last time I was in Saskatchewan was 27 years ago, and I was unconscious the whole time.
Monday and Tuesday it was back to the salt mines, er, I mean the pea fields, for weeding. The back field needs a lot of weeding. Those peas won’t be ready for harvesting until August, but unless we get the weeds knocked down, they’ll never be ready. Wednesday, I picked for a bit, then it was off to Edgefest ’98. Thursday was more picking, then off to the Fort Saskatchewan market (which is not in Saskatchewan – in fact, it’s the closet of the three markets, about half an hour or so away). This market is in total contrast to the big St. Albert market; perhaps 25 vendors, tops, and only two hours long.
Which brings us up to Friday the 10th, and the cycle repeats itself with another long day of picking. My back held up pretty well today, but the heat was oppressive. We started at 6:45 AM. We had thought of starting at about six, or even earlier, but there was no way our bodies were going to function. Paula’s parents have been visiting from Victoria this week, and we sure need any extra hands we can find on picking days. Her father, Joe, joined me in the pea fields to start and by 7:15, Paula, both her parents and I were madly picking peas. (Bernie has been working in town all week.) Every forty-five minutes or so, Ben or Lila (whom have I dubbed Drinkboy or Drinkgirl respectively) bring liquid sustenance to refresh us. Sometimes we don’t really need a drink, but I always drink anyway. I will need it later. Besides, as Paula says on picking days, if you’re not peeing a lot, you’re not drinking enough. The four of us picked until about ten o’clock and gathered about forty gallons of peas. Now a real break was in order, and we adjourned to the house for forty-five minutes or so. Bernie’s cousin Barry, sometime part-time help around the farm, arrives just in time for the break.
We return to the fields. We’ve been picking on the first pea field, now we’re checking out the second pea field. A pea field will give you about three weeks worth of picking. The first field is petering out and we’re checking the second field to see if it’s ready. Paula is surprised – it’s a lot more readier than she was expecting. We set to work and pick lightly – we’ve already got lots of peas, so there’s no need to go nuts. We’ll save a lot for next week. We get another fifteen gallons off this field, but if we’d gone at it we could have doubled our pea total. Another quick break, and Paula’s parents depart for Victoria. It’s down to the three of us. The strawberries await.
Another drink break, and away we go to the strawberries. Our first assault lasts about an hour, and then we need to stop. It’s high noon and we’re hot, hungry and thirsty. Lunch break lasts well over an hour, including the nap.
The picking isn’t hard work, but it’s repetitive, back-breaking, dull, repetitive, boring, tedious, and repetitive work. And when you’re picking on days like this one, it’s hot, muggy and tiring work. The speed and enthusiasm of our first hours in the field have long passed. The early morning cloud has long broken, leaving only the deep cerulean sky and the blazing hot sun. This will be the hottest day since I arrived. By mid-afternoon, it will be hot enough to fry an egg on your back. Sweat will pour off us in torrents. We will get progressively slower and dopier. Drinking breaks will become longer and longer. We will use any excuse we can find to get out of the sun.
We get back to the strawberries, but we know the weather has finished us. We plod along slowly and eventually get close to 20 gallons, but we’re beat. Barry has to leave at three, but Paula and I hang in until four. Paula says it was a good thing it was a short picking day and I look at her incredulously. When the beans start maturing, she explains, we will pick from sunrise to after sunset. We will not leave the field, except to go the bathroom. Food and drink will be supplied to us in the fields by Drinkboy and Drinkgirl, and we simply will not stop until all the ripe beans are picked. We will do this in whatever weather condition exists: rain, sun, or snow. The only thing that will pull us off the fields will be lightning. And even then, it will have to be a direct hit.
A little voice in the back of my head starts going, “Working vacation? What the hell were you thinking?”
Livestock update:
The sheep are a lot of extra work (and money for feed) and Bernie seems no longer convinced they are worth the effort or the expense. I can tell this because every time he walks past the two slated for butchering next week he says, “On Tuesday, you’re lamp chops, motherfuckers.”
Arthur the Goat is surprisingly spry these days. Since he was a baby goat, he walked with a limp, walking on his hind right ankle and sort of dragging his foot along the ground. He didn’t seem to be in any pain, but it sure made all of us wince. But a few days ago, he suddenly started walking properly, putting all the weight on the foot, instead of twisting his ankle. He’s still limping, but now he’s started running and jumping and bounding about, full of energy and life. He still thinks he’s the family dog though, and tries to climb into the trucks when we go away, or he tries to get into the house at night when we turn in.
The turkeys, which looked like strange gray crows when I arrived, are now starting to actually resemble turkeys. Paula is already taking orders for Thanksgiving.
So back to the big St. Albert market on the 11th. We leave the house in both trucks around eight-ish for the drive to St. Albert. We arrive around nine. Set up is pretty simple. First, we grab a table off of Bernie’s brother’s Frank’s truck. Frank is a serious farmer – he has the three stalls beside us at the market, and three times as much farmland. He has greenhouses, tons of heavy machinery and is in this to make money. And he’ll do that – he will do five to six times the business that we will. He sells the same produce we do (plus a whole lot more), but ours are organically grown always look better and taste better.
After setting up the table, we erect the canopy over it. The canopy is an ingenious green contraption that unfolds like an accordion and literally takes two minutes to set up. Paula starts arranging the produce on the table, while Bernie, the kids and I start bagging the peas in one-pound bags. I will be bagging peas on this day for close to four hours until they’re all sold. Paula thinks that thanks to our efforts in the fields the day before, this is the most strawberries she has ever brought to market. And we will sell them all. Bernie stands in front of the table and begins his performance, while Paula and I close the sales.
It’s a slow day. Most of the produce is usually gone by eleven-thirty (even though the market lasts until three), but today it takes until one. Bernie’s voice is nearly gone and he’s beat. We look at each other and both know how the day went: yeah, we sold out, but it took forever. A slow but steady stream of customers make for a successful, yet hard selling day. Everyone’s beat. We’re going to enjoy our day off tomorrow. Bernie and I do a walk around of the market and buy some wild boar pepperoni. (It’s hot!) We can’t wait until three so we can get out of here and go home.
July 15th
Bernie went up north for a couple of days for work. He’s been working almost fulltime since I got here, which leaves less time to do his farm chores, but on the other hand it’s a regular pay cheque coming in for the family. Unfortunately he took his computer in for repairs before he left. The fan wasn’t working and the CPU was overheating to the point when the computer would just seize up. Even more unfortunate is the fact that his computer is the one hooked up to the phone line to access email, so we’ve all been offline now for six days. I can still write stuff on my computer in my little house, but there’s no phone line in the house so I had been using his computer to send my email. Now that his computer’s back, there’ll be a whole lot of email going out over the next few hours.
Last night Paula and the kids and I went to see the Free Will Players’ excellent production of Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors.” They performed at an outdoor venue, and the thunder and clouds overhead prompted numerous ad libs concerning the inclement weather. “The Comedy of Errors” concerns the usual subjects of British farce: mistaken identity involving twins separated at birth (two sets in this case), money, and sex. It was quite well done and typically British, and it makes me wonder if Shakespeare was the first to really popularize this form and turn it into a staple of British entertainment. You can almost see the Carry On gang doing this production.
We took two lambs in on Tuesday. They’ll be lamb chops on Friday. We cornered them one at a time in the yard and walked/pushed/dragged them out to the truck. The geese seemed quite upset at the whole affair and when I began intoning, “Dead lamb walking,” they really got aggravated, and began squawking and honking and flapping. They seemed to be the only animals who knew what was going on. It wasn’t very hard to load the sheep into Bernie’s pick-up, but it makes for an unusual sight, two lambs in a pick-up driving through the city. This is the first time I’ve been involved in slaughtering animals (even if it was only in the most tangential sense), but it was easier than I thought it would be. But now Paula’s saying Arthur the Goat may get shipped in September, and I don’t want to hear about that at all.
So far the farming life is still fun and interesting. But ask me again in ten days or so. The last couple of weeks of July and the first two weeks of August are the prime picking and selling times. We are going to be working our asses off the next few weeks. We’ve basically given up on weeding, and are saving ourselves to concentrate on straight picking. The first pea crop is just about all done, so now we’re concentrating on the second. The strawberries are almost over, too, although there may be a second crack at them come late August. The normal peas are ripening and we’ve been working them, along with the broccoli and cauliflower. Tomatoes and beans are still a ways off, but will be ready before long.
I like living out in the country. It’s quiet and peaceful and I really like that. And here, it’s also close enough to the big city that you have all the attraction and benefits of the city (culture, entertainment, mass-market consumables), and yet can quickly escape to the country and avoid all the downers and perils of the city (culture, entertainment, mass-market consumables). Someday, this is where I’m going to live (not in Alberta per se, but in the country).
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Alberta Reports - Number Five
July 28, 1998
Paula and I went to Calgary for Conversion 15 last weekend. She said driving to Calgary with me was like spending three hours with Roger Rabbit….
JMS was the GoH at Conversion, and he is extremely funny and had great stories to tell.
We saw five minutes of footage from the new Babylon 5 movie “River of Souls” (to air in October?), seven (that’s right, seven) minutes of footage from the B5 movie “A Call to Arms” (airs in January – the set up for “Crusade”), and some SFX tests for “Crusade.” We also saw the B5 blooper reel, which was very well put together.
The bloopers could be billed as an alternate universe episode: see Delenn say, “Oh, go fuck yourselves!”; see Sheridan call himself Sinclair; see one poor actor mispronounce “Ivanova” fourteen times in a row; see Centauri with Jewish accents; and see Sheridan give an inspiring speech from a balcony to a crowd of a hundred extras who are so overcome that they suddenly start doing the Macarena.
One of the funnier bloopers occurred when Robert Foxworth (who played General Hague on B5) found himself double-booked and scheduled to guest on B5 and another show during the same week. He elected to forgo B5. So when the actor playing the replacement character on B5 (he played D-Day in Animal House and the Sheriff in My Cousin Vinny) was asked, “Where’s General Hague?”, he replies, “He’s on Deep Space Nine, sir. His agent double-booked him. We were left with no other choice but to kill him off.”
But even the blooper reel managed to capture the dark soul of the series. It ended with Londo dancing with one of those life-size cardboard replicas of him you can buy. He broke into song, a song which the convention audience picked up on, and they immediately joined him singing: “Me and my shadow….”
We’re now picking the Royal Burgundy beans, which (as you can imagine) are purple. They are also quite long and every so often I forget what I am doing and mistake one for a “SNAKE!!!”
The weather cycle continues. Sunday, the clear weather starts breaking down. Monday and Tuesday (our slow days) are generally cool and rainy. Wednesdays, the skies clear up and the heat returns as we return to the fields for serious picking. By Friday, our busy day when we’re spending ten or eleven hours out there, it’s blistering hot here and we’re all pretty much wrecked by the end of the day. The weather holds for Saturday market, which is good for bringing out customers, but is no fun for us as we spend six hours standing in the sun. Still, this week Bernie and I worked out a two-person juggling routine which brought large crowds to our table.
Bernie, the kids and I went to the Klondike Days Exhibition (Edmonton’s answer to the PNE). It was a lot of fun. We saw a live radio broadcast by the Arrogant Worms, a band we all enjoy. The announcer introduced the Worms' final song by saying it was in honour of the two gentlemen who were pumping their fists and cheering. Paula, listening to the show at home, thought she probably knew who those two gentlemen were....
And as we were leaving Klondike days, we all filled out entry forms for some contest a local radio station was having. Guess what? I won a gas barbecue.
Out in the fields this week, we stopped work for a few minutes and watched a big passenger jet fly overhead, trailing a long, puffy contrail. Strangely, there seemed to be another jet flying parallel to and ahead of it and leaving a similar contrail. Then I realized there we were looking at a temperature inversion – a reflection of the contrail in the atmosphere. When I looked more carefully, I found I could even see the inversion: a thick but faint black line in between the contrails.
But the sky wasn’t finished showing off yet. That night around midnight, Paula knocked quietly on my door. “John? You wanted to see this.” Still asleep, I pulled on some clothes and stumbled outside. Paula and Bernie were standing in the field between the houses. And looking up at the Northern Lights. Faint, luminous curtains of light were dancing slowly across the sky. Paula said she’s rarely seen them this far south – they stretched down from the north and over our heads until they were washed out by Edmonton’s glow in the south. Sometimes, you can hear them crackle as they dance, but we didn’t this night. Bernie was whistling. He said if you whistle at the Lights, they’ll come down lower and dance. His whistling wasn’t working, so I tried whistling “Super Freak” (yeah, still have that song running around in my head). We watched for twenty minutes, until the mosquitoes overcame our awe.
Paula and I went to Calgary for Conversion 15 last weekend. She said driving to Calgary with me was like spending three hours with Roger Rabbit….
JMS was the GoH at Conversion, and he is extremely funny and had great stories to tell.
We saw five minutes of footage from the new Babylon 5 movie “River of Souls” (to air in October?), seven (that’s right, seven) minutes of footage from the B5 movie “A Call to Arms” (airs in January – the set up for “Crusade”), and some SFX tests for “Crusade.” We also saw the B5 blooper reel, which was very well put together.
The bloopers could be billed as an alternate universe episode: see Delenn say, “Oh, go fuck yourselves!”; see Sheridan call himself Sinclair; see one poor actor mispronounce “Ivanova” fourteen times in a row; see Centauri with Jewish accents; and see Sheridan give an inspiring speech from a balcony to a crowd of a hundred extras who are so overcome that they suddenly start doing the Macarena.
One of the funnier bloopers occurred when Robert Foxworth (who played General Hague on B5) found himself double-booked and scheduled to guest on B5 and another show during the same week. He elected to forgo B5. So when the actor playing the replacement character on B5 (he played D-Day in Animal House and the Sheriff in My Cousin Vinny) was asked, “Where’s General Hague?”, he replies, “He’s on Deep Space Nine, sir. His agent double-booked him. We were left with no other choice but to kill him off.”
But even the blooper reel managed to capture the dark soul of the series. It ended with Londo dancing with one of those life-size cardboard replicas of him you can buy. He broke into song, a song which the convention audience picked up on, and they immediately joined him singing: “Me and my shadow….”
We’re now picking the Royal Burgundy beans, which (as you can imagine) are purple. They are also quite long and every so often I forget what I am doing and mistake one for a “SNAKE!!!”
The weather cycle continues. Sunday, the clear weather starts breaking down. Monday and Tuesday (our slow days) are generally cool and rainy. Wednesdays, the skies clear up and the heat returns as we return to the fields for serious picking. By Friday, our busy day when we’re spending ten or eleven hours out there, it’s blistering hot here and we’re all pretty much wrecked by the end of the day. The weather holds for Saturday market, which is good for bringing out customers, but is no fun for us as we spend six hours standing in the sun. Still, this week Bernie and I worked out a two-person juggling routine which brought large crowds to our table.
Bernie, the kids and I went to the Klondike Days Exhibition (Edmonton’s answer to the PNE). It was a lot of fun. We saw a live radio broadcast by the Arrogant Worms, a band we all enjoy. The announcer introduced the Worms' final song by saying it was in honour of the two gentlemen who were pumping their fists and cheering. Paula, listening to the show at home, thought she probably knew who those two gentlemen were....
And as we were leaving Klondike days, we all filled out entry forms for some contest a local radio station was having. Guess what? I won a gas barbecue.
Out in the fields this week, we stopped work for a few minutes and watched a big passenger jet fly overhead, trailing a long, puffy contrail. Strangely, there seemed to be another jet flying parallel to and ahead of it and leaving a similar contrail. Then I realized there we were looking at a temperature inversion – a reflection of the contrail in the atmosphere. When I looked more carefully, I found I could even see the inversion: a thick but faint black line in between the contrails.
But the sky wasn’t finished showing off yet. That night around midnight, Paula knocked quietly on my door. “John? You wanted to see this.” Still asleep, I pulled on some clothes and stumbled outside. Paula and Bernie were standing in the field between the houses. And looking up at the Northern Lights. Faint, luminous curtains of light were dancing slowly across the sky. Paula said she’s rarely seen them this far south – they stretched down from the north and over our heads until they were washed out by Edmonton’s glow in the south. Sometimes, you can hear them crackle as they dance, but we didn’t this night. Bernie was whistling. He said if you whistle at the Lights, they’ll come down lower and dance. His whistling wasn’t working, so I tried whistling “Super Freak” (yeah, still have that song running around in my head). We watched for twenty minutes, until the mosquitoes overcame our awe.
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Alberta Reports - Number Six
August 3, 1998
The sun goes up and the sun goes down, and days and weeks and months and years and centuries are rolling by…. hold on a minute….
We celebrated the end of July by attending a show by the Arrogant Worms. The Worms are a sort of folky/comedy act – and they are so funny that by the end of the show my cheeks cramped up from laughing. It was a pain that started in the middle my cheek and spread forward toward to my mouth. Of course, the sudden realization that this pain is caused by laughing only makes it worse because you start laughing even more. (My other cheeks cramped up from the chair I was in, but that’s another story.) They played many of their classic songs, like “Last Saskatchewan Pirate,” “Carrot Juice is Murder,” “Canada’s Really Big,” and “Big Fat Road Manager.” They did some new songs, including a love song about Celine Dion, with some very biting lyrics: Every time I see her, I really want to feed her.
Driving home after the show, the sky was a show unto itself. Overhead, the northern lights had returned, a blazing curtain across the sky. But the sky was partly cloudy, and the lights were shining through the holes, casting spectacular lights and carving amazing shadows. Ahead along the northern horizon, a line of thunderheads were flashing and crashing. As I arrived home to this special effect show in the sky, the coyotes were howling and a shooting star blazed overhead.
The We(s)t Coast is still heaven on earth, but on some nights it’s pretty amazing out here, too.
Very early the next morning, my auxiliary power supply for my computer woke me up with its beeping: the electricity was surging and flickering. And it was easy to see why; we were in the midst of a spectacular thunderstorm. As I looked over at the trailer, I could see bright, blinding bolts of lightning behind it. And I mean blinding – after each white flash I couldn’t see as it took a moment for my eyes to readjust. (I thought the storm was just behind the trailer to the east, but in the trailer Ben was watching it rage behind my house, so we were surrounded.) A couple of times, the sky lit up bright blue and you know when the sky turns blue when lightning is around, that’s bad.
The crops are all early, not just the crops here on the farm, but all crops all through the Prairies and ripening early and fast. Bernie and Paula’s neighbours are already cutting alfalfa and the canola is just about ready. This is about three weeks ahead of normal. Bernie was noting a wheat field that was already cut, and he said, “That guy is done. Summer’s over for him. He’s finished. Vacation time.”
For us, the problem is that we just don’t enough hands to pick everything that’s ripe to take to market. The other down side is that if we could pick everything, we’d have to drop the price in order to sell it all. The typical farmer’s dilemma: do I pay some pickers to pick my crop and sell it for less than it’s value, or just let perfectly good food go to waste on the vine because it’s not economically viable to harvest it? The good news is that they’re way ahead of last year’s sales totals at the markets, but I’m worried that if everything is coming in early, there might not be much left by the end of August. We’re going into the third of three sugar pea plantings and the second of two bean plantings this week. These will only last until the middle of August – then what?
The markets continue. This week, the weather did not cooperate. It rained heavily Thursday morning, and cut down on our picking time before Thursday market. Fortunately, the Thursday market is the smallest one of the three, and this wasn’t a big disaster. But Saturday dawned cloudy, and it rained on and off during the market (including a couple of really heavy downpours), and it was a slow day. We came back with a lot of stuff.
Our act at the market grows, however. We have four shticks:
1) The Magic Beans Rap, wherein Bernie describes how the purple beans are magic because they change colour when you cook them (and if you know someone named Jack, he’s got a handful put aside for him to trade for a cow….);
2) Trick Peas, wherein the sugar peas perform tricks (lie down, stay, roll over and disappear);
3) Magnetic Potatoes, which starts as a riff about magnetic potatoes and ends with Bernie and I juggling four of them;
4) Riverdance, wherein Bernie and I actually Riverdance.
We’re thinking of adding a musical number to our repertoire, maybe “Give Peas a Chance....”
The sun goes up and the sun goes down, and days and weeks and months and years and centuries are rolling by…. hold on a minute….
We celebrated the end of July by attending a show by the Arrogant Worms. The Worms are a sort of folky/comedy act – and they are so funny that by the end of the show my cheeks cramped up from laughing. It was a pain that started in the middle my cheek and spread forward toward to my mouth. Of course, the sudden realization that this pain is caused by laughing only makes it worse because you start laughing even more. (My other cheeks cramped up from the chair I was in, but that’s another story.) They played many of their classic songs, like “Last Saskatchewan Pirate,” “Carrot Juice is Murder,” “Canada’s Really Big,” and “Big Fat Road Manager.” They did some new songs, including a love song about Celine Dion, with some very biting lyrics: Every time I see her, I really want to feed her.
Driving home after the show, the sky was a show unto itself. Overhead, the northern lights had returned, a blazing curtain across the sky. But the sky was partly cloudy, and the lights were shining through the holes, casting spectacular lights and carving amazing shadows. Ahead along the northern horizon, a line of thunderheads were flashing and crashing. As I arrived home to this special effect show in the sky, the coyotes were howling and a shooting star blazed overhead.
The We(s)t Coast is still heaven on earth, but on some nights it’s pretty amazing out here, too.
Very early the next morning, my auxiliary power supply for my computer woke me up with its beeping: the electricity was surging and flickering. And it was easy to see why; we were in the midst of a spectacular thunderstorm. As I looked over at the trailer, I could see bright, blinding bolts of lightning behind it. And I mean blinding – after each white flash I couldn’t see as it took a moment for my eyes to readjust. (I thought the storm was just behind the trailer to the east, but in the trailer Ben was watching it rage behind my house, so we were surrounded.) A couple of times, the sky lit up bright blue and you know when the sky turns blue when lightning is around, that’s bad.
The crops are all early, not just the crops here on the farm, but all crops all through the Prairies and ripening early and fast. Bernie and Paula’s neighbours are already cutting alfalfa and the canola is just about ready. This is about three weeks ahead of normal. Bernie was noting a wheat field that was already cut, and he said, “That guy is done. Summer’s over for him. He’s finished. Vacation time.”
For us, the problem is that we just don’t enough hands to pick everything that’s ripe to take to market. The other down side is that if we could pick everything, we’d have to drop the price in order to sell it all. The typical farmer’s dilemma: do I pay some pickers to pick my crop and sell it for less than it’s value, or just let perfectly good food go to waste on the vine because it’s not economically viable to harvest it? The good news is that they’re way ahead of last year’s sales totals at the markets, but I’m worried that if everything is coming in early, there might not be much left by the end of August. We’re going into the third of three sugar pea plantings and the second of two bean plantings this week. These will only last until the middle of August – then what?
The markets continue. This week, the weather did not cooperate. It rained heavily Thursday morning, and cut down on our picking time before Thursday market. Fortunately, the Thursday market is the smallest one of the three, and this wasn’t a big disaster. But Saturday dawned cloudy, and it rained on and off during the market (including a couple of really heavy downpours), and it was a slow day. We came back with a lot of stuff.
Our act at the market grows, however. We have four shticks: 1) The Magic Beans Rap, wherein Bernie describes how the purple beans are magic because they change colour when you cook them (and if you know someone named Jack, he’s got a handful put aside for him to trade for a cow….);
2) Trick Peas, wherein the sugar peas perform tricks (lie down, stay, roll over and disappear);
3) Magnetic Potatoes, which starts as a riff about magnetic potatoes and ends with Bernie and I juggling four of them;
4) Riverdance, wherein Bernie and I actually Riverdance.
We’re thinking of adding a musical number to our repertoire, maybe “Give Peas a Chance....”
Friday, June 01, 2007
Alberta Reports - Number Seven
August 10, 1998
Listen, let’s have some hot talk, just between the two of us, okay? This is just for you – sizzling, steamy, sweaty talk meant for your ears only, and by the time I’m done, your ears will be burning.
Wednesday the 5th, and the heat wave continues. Last night, I finally had to break out the fan I brought from home. I put it on the night table beside my bed and aimed it at my head. It worked, and cooled me down enough so that I could sleep. The little house is usually pretty cool, or at least the bedroom is. The kitchen area can get very hot, but a series of precautions has kept the bedroom cool. First, there’s a fan in the attic that vents the hot air outside. Second, the furnace fan blows cool basement air up into the bedroom. (These fans have been going non-stop since I arrived in mid-June.) I’ve separated the bedroom from the kitchen by a curtain in the doorway, so the hot air in the kitchen doesn’t get into the bedroom. I’ve also kept the bedroom windows closed to prevent hot outside air getting in, and letting the furnace and the fan provide circulation. They’ve all done a fine job up until now.
We head back into the fields today and no one is looking forward to it at all. The oppressive heat has lasted close to a week and shows no sign of breaking. It is hot. Today’s forecast calls for highs of 34c, and only an idiot would be out picking in a field on a day like today. I guess that’s why I’m here.
We start at 7:30, and it’s not too bad for a few hours, but by 11:00, it’s scorching out. The pace is slow on days like this, and it slows dramatically as the day progresses. Worse yet, Paula has discovered that the second planting of shelling peas is a washout; they look brown, feel squishy, and taste horrible. Paula believes this is a seed problem, much like the time Frank planted 20,000 broccoli and ended up with 20,000 kohlrabi.
Now we won’t have shelling peas for much longer as the first planting is just about done, and the third planting of sugar snaps didn’t produce as much as hoped. The purple beans are just about done, too, and the yellow beans and green beans, which we’ve just started, aren’t of high quality. The good news is I may not have to pick for much longer; the bad news is I may not have to pick for much longer. This only adds to the drudgery of picking vegetables in the world’s largest outdoor sauna.
We break for lunch just after noon. As we slowly nibble at food we’re really too sunstroked to be eating, I watch the gauge on the outdoor thermometer rise sluggishly but undeniably. In the forty-five minutes we take for lunch, the temperature climbed nearly three degrees and was just under 29c (in the shade) when we headed back out for more punishment. By the time we were finished picking for the day, it was 34c in the shade. I don’t want to know how hot it was in the sun.
At market, we put up the portable canopies so that at least now we’re working under some shade. And make no mistake, on a hot day like this, finding a little shade somewhere or having a stray cloud block the sun for a moment is a cherished, if brief, respite. But after an hour of working at market, I felt cooked. Even though the canopy was sheltering us, it was still bloody hot. I looked at Paula as the sudden realization of our predicament dawned. “Paula, it’s the hottest day of the year, we’ve just spent seven hours out in the fields, and now we’re gonna stand for four hours on a concrete parking lot! Are we nuts?!?” Paula, normally fairly quick with a comeback, just looked at me with the far away gaze of a person whose brain has melted from the heat and turned to pistachio ice cream.
Still, there are some advantages to working in this heat. Paula was noting that I was keeping track of the many seasonably-attired, scantily clad ladies perusing the market.
“See? The heat’s not so bad, after all,” she said. “It’s sort of like a smorgasbord buffet, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I said dreamily, “but too bad it’s not all you can eat….”
I added a new wrinkle to our juggle routine: virtual juggling. I put on my baseball cap backwards, put on Bernie’s welding-style sunglasses, and wear a glove on my right hand. Then I mime that I’m hooked up to a VR simulator. Not everyone gets it.
The weather finally breaks in the evening as a big storm front finally moves in. The wind picks up and again there’s plenty of lightning up to the north. But the wind is a hot, dry wind, and it’s not the big break we were hoping for. In fact, it’s bad news all around as the lightning causes nearly a hundred forest fires in Alberta. By the weekend, they’re all still burning. The good news is, the full moon rising on Saturday night was exquisite. And hopefully Bernie and I have the pictures to prove it.
Livestock update:
The turkeys continue to evolve from the goofy, wacky little gray birds they looked like when I arrived, and into actual turkey-like fowl. Sometimes I feed them some of the overripe veggies that we’ve picked. I toss them over the fence and watch the turkeys run like crazy to scoop up this manna from turkey heaven. And as I watch them run – necks craning, heads weaving, bodies bouncing from one leg to the other – the idea that birds and dinosaurs are related seems so intuitively obvious. Look at them – they’re miniature T-Rexes! Or velociraptors. It’s so obvious, how could we have missed the connection for so many years? Then again, we’re not exactly a species noted for seeing the obvious.
Listen, let’s have some hot talk, just between the two of us, okay? This is just for you – sizzling, steamy, sweaty talk meant for your ears only, and by the time I’m done, your ears will be burning.
Wednesday the 5th, and the heat wave continues. Last night, I finally had to break out the fan I brought from home. I put it on the night table beside my bed and aimed it at my head. It worked, and cooled me down enough so that I could sleep. The little house is usually pretty cool, or at least the bedroom is. The kitchen area can get very hot, but a series of precautions has kept the bedroom cool. First, there’s a fan in the attic that vents the hot air outside. Second, the furnace fan blows cool basement air up into the bedroom. (These fans have been going non-stop since I arrived in mid-June.) I’ve separated the bedroom from the kitchen by a curtain in the doorway, so the hot air in the kitchen doesn’t get into the bedroom. I’ve also kept the bedroom windows closed to prevent hot outside air getting in, and letting the furnace and the fan provide circulation. They’ve all done a fine job up until now.
We head back into the fields today and no one is looking forward to it at all. The oppressive heat has lasted close to a week and shows no sign of breaking. It is hot. Today’s forecast calls for highs of 34c, and only an idiot would be out picking in a field on a day like today. I guess that’s why I’m here.
We start at 7:30, and it’s not too bad for a few hours, but by 11:00, it’s scorching out. The pace is slow on days like this, and it slows dramatically as the day progresses. Worse yet, Paula has discovered that the second planting of shelling peas is a washout; they look brown, feel squishy, and taste horrible. Paula believes this is a seed problem, much like the time Frank planted 20,000 broccoli and ended up with 20,000 kohlrabi.
Now we won’t have shelling peas for much longer as the first planting is just about done, and the third planting of sugar snaps didn’t produce as much as hoped. The purple beans are just about done, too, and the yellow beans and green beans, which we’ve just started, aren’t of high quality. The good news is I may not have to pick for much longer; the bad news is I may not have to pick for much longer. This only adds to the drudgery of picking vegetables in the world’s largest outdoor sauna.
We break for lunch just after noon. As we slowly nibble at food we’re really too sunstroked to be eating, I watch the gauge on the outdoor thermometer rise sluggishly but undeniably. In the forty-five minutes we take for lunch, the temperature climbed nearly three degrees and was just under 29c (in the shade) when we headed back out for more punishment. By the time we were finished picking for the day, it was 34c in the shade. I don’t want to know how hot it was in the sun.
At market, we put up the portable canopies so that at least now we’re working under some shade. And make no mistake, on a hot day like this, finding a little shade somewhere or having a stray cloud block the sun for a moment is a cherished, if brief, respite. But after an hour of working at market, I felt cooked. Even though the canopy was sheltering us, it was still bloody hot. I looked at Paula as the sudden realization of our predicament dawned. “Paula, it’s the hottest day of the year, we’ve just spent seven hours out in the fields, and now we’re gonna stand for four hours on a concrete parking lot! Are we nuts?!?” Paula, normally fairly quick with a comeback, just looked at me with the far away gaze of a person whose brain has melted from the heat and turned to pistachio ice cream.
Still, there are some advantages to working in this heat. Paula was noting that I was keeping track of the many seasonably-attired, scantily clad ladies perusing the market.
“See? The heat’s not so bad, after all,” she said. “It’s sort of like a smorgasbord buffet, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I said dreamily, “but too bad it’s not all you can eat….”
I added a new wrinkle to our juggle routine: virtual juggling. I put on my baseball cap backwards, put on Bernie’s welding-style sunglasses, and wear a glove on my right hand. Then I mime that I’m hooked up to a VR simulator. Not everyone gets it.
The weather finally breaks in the evening as a big storm front finally moves in. The wind picks up and again there’s plenty of lightning up to the north. But the wind is a hot, dry wind, and it’s not the big break we were hoping for. In fact, it’s bad news all around as the lightning causes nearly a hundred forest fires in Alberta. By the weekend, they’re all still burning. The good news is, the full moon rising on Saturday night was exquisite. And hopefully Bernie and I have the pictures to prove it.
Livestock update:
The turkeys continue to evolve from the goofy, wacky little gray birds they looked like when I arrived, and into actual turkey-like fowl. Sometimes I feed them some of the overripe veggies that we’ve picked. I toss them over the fence and watch the turkeys run like crazy to scoop up this manna from turkey heaven. And as I watch them run – necks craning, heads weaving, bodies bouncing from one leg to the other – the idea that birds and dinosaurs are related seems so intuitively obvious. Look at them – they’re miniature T-Rexes! Or velociraptors. It’s so obvious, how could we have missed the connection for so many years? Then again, we’re not exactly a species noted for seeing the obvious.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Alberta Reports - Number Eight
August 13, 1998
“Of Disasters, Ecological and Otherwise....”
For an instant, my eyes and throat burned. I couldn’t breath. Ahead of us, dusky shapes and shadows appeared and disappeared into the sickly yellow vapour that clung to the ground. It was otherworldly, like driving on another planet where objects and animals seemed to be tantalizingly familiar, yet clearly alien.
In reality, it was St. Albert early last Monday afternoon. And while some might say that central Alberta is otherworldly at the best of times, as far as air quality was concerned, this was not the best of times.
Almost one hundred forest fires were started in northern Alberta by lightning strikes over last weekend. Two-thirds are still out of control. A large number of them are in the Great Slave Lake area, 300 km to the north of us. On Monday, the smoke rolled down the prairie and over top of us.
Bernie and I went into town on some errands Monday morning. We could see the smoke in the sky. The sun was getting duller and fainter, as if someone had turned its power down to save on the electric bill. The horizon crept closer and closer still. Billowing clouds of yellow smoke screen were slowly entrapping us.
I felt for a moment like I was in a Stephen King novel, as if the haze were alive and tracking me, hungry to devour me in some horrific, bloodcurdling and no doubt painful manner. Or maybe it was an acid rain cloud, one that would slowly melt all the flesh from my bones as it released its poison precipitation, a single excruciating drop at a time. Or maybe it was a biological weapons experiment gone horribly wrong, and I would undergo a terrible mutation into a strange, half-witted, man-beast, with a bad haircut, a double-vested tweed jacket, and an insatiable and insane desire to vote Reform. I quickly realized this was a foolish notion, as a quick sniff of the air revealed the unmistakable bouquet of burning wood. It was forest fire smoke – the worst it could do would be suffocate me, that’s all.
As we headed back to the farm in the early afternoon, the smoke thickened noticeably, and by the time we reached St. Albert, we couldn’t see more than 30 metres ahead of us. Visibility is normally anywhere from 8 to 12 km in this country, but the shroud of haze that descended from the north made us almost blind. It really was as if we were in an alien landscape. Landmarks you relied upon were either no longer visible or no longer recognizable. Pedestrians became phantoms, slipping in and out of the smog as easily as ghosts might trade dimensions.
As we left St. Albert behind us, the smoke thinned out somewhat. By the time we reached the farm, visibility was up to three or four km. (It took another 48 hours for the smoke to clear – pun intended.) The only upside was that the temperature remained relatively cool, around 25c. If it had been the 32c – 34c we were getting the previous week, we really would have been in a nightmare.
As it is, the heat has done enough damage. The garden has just about run its course and given up nearly its last produce – about five weeks early, says Bernie. The heat wave caused the vegetables that had been nurtured for months to go from nearly ready to over ripe and spoiled, seemingly in an instant while we were having a lunch break.
And it’s not just me complaining about the heat. Last month, July 1998, was the second hottest July on record here in the Edmonton area, with an average temperature of 24.5c. (The record was set in 1930 in the middle of the Depression: 27.9c.) Since July 16, nearly a month ago, the daily high temperature has dropped below 25c on only three days.
And this is not a local phenomenon. France and England are suffering through their hottest summers ever at 37c. In Cyprus temperatures have hit 43c, in Palestine they’ve climbed to 42c. Jordan is sweltering under a blazing 48c (that’s 118 using the old Fahrenheit scale). Worldwide, this past month was the hottest month ever recorded. Period. Since man has taken its temperature, the earth’s never been hotter. The earth’s average temperature was 16.5c, or 0.7c above normal. And a single degree rise in temperature on a global scale is not something to be taken lightly. A permanent temperature increase even on this scale is a disaster of mammoth proportions.
As the earth’s temperature rises, the summers will cook us alive. The greenhouse effect will keep smog and pollutants fixed to the ground, and the air will become thick and dirty and unbearable.
Is this further evidence of global warming, or just the fluke of a La Niña summer? It makes one pause about the future. Bernie, for instance, is seriously reconsidering what crops to sow next year. He’s musing about watermelons. They normally don’t grow here because it’s not warm enough, but maybe in a year or two, it will be.
For us unlucky folks here around Edmonton the last two weeks, it may have been a sulfurous taste of the future.
For us, the future is now.
“Of Disasters, Ecological and Otherwise....”
For an instant, my eyes and throat burned. I couldn’t breath. Ahead of us, dusky shapes and shadows appeared and disappeared into the sickly yellow vapour that clung to the ground. It was otherworldly, like driving on another planet where objects and animals seemed to be tantalizingly familiar, yet clearly alien.In reality, it was St. Albert early last Monday afternoon. And while some might say that central Alberta is otherworldly at the best of times, as far as air quality was concerned, this was not the best of times.
Almost one hundred forest fires were started in northern Alberta by lightning strikes over last weekend. Two-thirds are still out of control. A large number of them are in the Great Slave Lake area, 300 km to the north of us. On Monday, the smoke rolled down the prairie and over top of us.
Bernie and I went into town on some errands Monday morning. We could see the smoke in the sky. The sun was getting duller and fainter, as if someone had turned its power down to save on the electric bill. The horizon crept closer and closer still. Billowing clouds of yellow smoke screen were slowly entrapping us.
I felt for a moment like I was in a Stephen King novel, as if the haze were alive and tracking me, hungry to devour me in some horrific, bloodcurdling and no doubt painful manner. Or maybe it was an acid rain cloud, one that would slowly melt all the flesh from my bones as it released its poison precipitation, a single excruciating drop at a time. Or maybe it was a biological weapons experiment gone horribly wrong, and I would undergo a terrible mutation into a strange, half-witted, man-beast, with a bad haircut, a double-vested tweed jacket, and an insatiable and insane desire to vote Reform. I quickly realized this was a foolish notion, as a quick sniff of the air revealed the unmistakable bouquet of burning wood. It was forest fire smoke – the worst it could do would be suffocate me, that’s all.
As we headed back to the farm in the early afternoon, the smoke thickened noticeably, and by the time we reached St. Albert, we couldn’t see more than 30 metres ahead of us. Visibility is normally anywhere from 8 to 12 km in this country, but the shroud of haze that descended from the north made us almost blind. It really was as if we were in an alien landscape. Landmarks you relied upon were either no longer visible or no longer recognizable. Pedestrians became phantoms, slipping in and out of the smog as easily as ghosts might trade dimensions.
As we left St. Albert behind us, the smoke thinned out somewhat. By the time we reached the farm, visibility was up to three or four km. (It took another 48 hours for the smoke to clear – pun intended.) The only upside was that the temperature remained relatively cool, around 25c. If it had been the 32c – 34c we were getting the previous week, we really would have been in a nightmare.
As it is, the heat has done enough damage. The garden has just about run its course and given up nearly its last produce – about five weeks early, says Bernie. The heat wave caused the vegetables that had been nurtured for months to go from nearly ready to over ripe and spoiled, seemingly in an instant while we were having a lunch break.
And it’s not just me complaining about the heat. Last month, July 1998, was the second hottest July on record here in the Edmonton area, with an average temperature of 24.5c. (The record was set in 1930 in the middle of the Depression: 27.9c.) Since July 16, nearly a month ago, the daily high temperature has dropped below 25c on only three days.
And this is not a local phenomenon. France and England are suffering through their hottest summers ever at 37c. In Cyprus temperatures have hit 43c, in Palestine they’ve climbed to 42c. Jordan is sweltering under a blazing 48c (that’s 118 using the old Fahrenheit scale). Worldwide, this past month was the hottest month ever recorded. Period. Since man has taken its temperature, the earth’s never been hotter. The earth’s average temperature was 16.5c, or 0.7c above normal. And a single degree rise in temperature on a global scale is not something to be taken lightly. A permanent temperature increase even on this scale is a disaster of mammoth proportions.
As the earth’s temperature rises, the summers will cook us alive. The greenhouse effect will keep smog and pollutants fixed to the ground, and the air will become thick and dirty and unbearable.
Is this further evidence of global warming, or just the fluke of a La Niña summer? It makes one pause about the future. Bernie, for instance, is seriously reconsidering what crops to sow next year. He’s musing about watermelons. They normally don’t grow here because it’s not warm enough, but maybe in a year or two, it will be.
For us unlucky folks here around Edmonton the last two weeks, it may have been a sulfurous taste of the future.
For us, the future is now.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Alberta Reports - Number Nine
August 16, 1998
"Of Disasters, Livestock and Otherwise...."
He found the duck cowering in the mud of the dug out where it had tried to bury itself. At first glance, it resembled the victim of an oil spill; it was covered from head to webbed toes in gray muck. Bernie couldn't figure out what was wrong with it.
He brought it out on to the lawn where, with Lila's help, we hosed it down. We couldn't completely clean it because the mud had dried and had become caked on by the heat of the sun, but at least now it was a dirty white duck, not just a mud-encrusted lump of feathers with a bill.
The duck was still not a happy duck. It cried out as we handled it. Then Bernie brought his hand away and it was covered in blood.
"What the…?"
"There," I said. "See?" Down the right side of the duck's breast were puncture holes. Across its back were other smaller punctures. Something had grabbed this duck with the intention of making it its dinner.
We cleaned it up as best we could and Bernie put it into "solitary confinement," a small enclosure on the side of the lean-to he has set aside for sick or injured birds. Then we went back to the chicken yard and counted feathered heads.
Four ducks were gone. A goose was gone, too. And we had an injured duck that probably wasn’t going to survive.
Coyotes.
No one had heard a thing. Lila did say she thought she heard the coyotes howling nearby last night, but no one had heard a struggle or a fight. The geese should have made a hell of a racket at the intrusion.
The coyotes had done their work quickly, silently, efficiently. But they slipped up – they left a witness, a witness that might just be able to identify them if he recovered. It was a long shot at best, but I owed it to Marlowe.
The doc let me in to see the witness. "Only a few minutes," the sawbones said, "he's still weak."
"Sure, mac," I said, slowly undoing the buttons on my old trench coat. "A few minutes is all I ever need."
"And you'll have to get rid of that cigar."
"Sure, mac." I took one big drag, then blew blue smoke in the doc's face. I pulled open the chest pocket on the doc's lab coat and butted out my Cuban in it.
The nurse, Candy, tried to muffle a snicker. She must like the old geezer as little as I did. I wonder how she keeps her stethoscope warm.
I turned the handle, opened the heavy, wooden door and entered the room. The doc tried to follow me in, but I shut the door behind me. I pressed my ear to the inside of the door and waited until I heard his Gucci shoes squeak away down the hall. I didn't trust the doc, and he didn't trust me. The only person I trusted was my partner, Marlowe.
The light was off and I couldn't see him, but I knew the witness was here. His breathing was rushed and shallow. I could hear his ribs rattling and fluid bubbling in his lungs. He kept making this strange, animalistic sound, almost like a cough. Maybe the doc was right, maybe this guy didn't have much time left.
I turned on the light.
He didn't flinch, but I did. What had the bastards done to him? He was the ugliest bird I'd ever seen. All I could see was his head and neck, but it was enough to tell me that some rough customers had done him over good.
His neck had been stretched long and thin. His head had been crushed almost flat, so flat that each of his eyes was on the side of the head instead of the front. His nose was gone, like it had never even been there. His mouth had been elongated and pulled forward and flattened out, sort of like what those weird African tribes do in those issues of National Geographic that Jimmy the barber keeps piled up in the corner of his stinky little shop which he has the gall to call a “salon.”
His skin was snow white, like an albino's, and covered in some strange stuff, like scales. The only good part about it was that he wasn't going to be any competition for me when it came to Candy.
I lit up another Cuban, hesitated, then offered it. This guy just made like I wasn't even there. Either he was far gone, or he was playing me cool.
I told him who I was, and how I needed the info so I could get the dogs that roughed him up. I figured they were the same dogs who did Marlowe, but I didn't need to tell that to this guy. A bird in the hand, as my momma used to say.
He wasn't talking. He kept looking around the room like a crazy, like someone who'd escaped the demons of hell barking at his heels. After a few questions, it seemed all I was going to get for my effort was a merry-go-round to nowhere. I was starting to think there was more to this strange duck than met the eye. And I was getting pissed.
I grabbed him by his scrawny, little neck. I didn't care, I didn't think. Marlowe was gone and this little stool pigeon was the only clue I had left. "You think you can just give me the runaround?"
He froze. I could see the fear in his eyes and smell it on his breath like bad gin with a Big Mac chaser. I was beginning to think that maybe he was never gonna talk, that there was a force at work here that was even more frightening than me. That was hard to believe. It was time to lean, and lean hard.
"You think I'm just a two-bit barnyard dick fresh in from the farm? I know your game. I know how it went down. You think those stupid sons of bitches could just raid the hen house without knowing where the holes in the fence were, or when the guards wouldn't be around? I know it was an inside job, and the cops know it, too. You'd better not play chicken with me now, 'cause all the cops will do is put away for twenty-five. I'm going to roast you on a skillet. What did they offer you to join their flock? How did you become birds of a feather? Did they deal you a little nest egg in Switzerland? Some little chickadee? How much scratch did they give you? And what was your angle? Did you feel fenced in? Did you want the run of the roost? With the competition out of the way, you could've been cock of the walk. Was that it? Did you sell 'em out so they could be butchered? And what about Marlowe? He fingered you, didn't he? You were crowing because you’d thought you’d gotten away with it, the perfect scheme. You thought it was over easy, didn’t you? Well, forget it, shorty, your goose is cooked. You know what happens to the best laid plans of mice and hens. He caught you poaching. He got your number, but you called in your hounds and had him tarred and feathered. That’s where the chick came in. He could never resist an easy lay. What a turkey I've been! All along I figured you were set up too, just another chickenshit patsy, but it was you, yes, you behind this fowl plan. I come in here on a wing and prayer, hoping to find out who scrambled my partner before you flew the coop, and it was you all along. Boy, do I have egg on my face…!"
But I digress.
There seemed little doubt the coyotes would be back. "Right now," said Paula, "they're reporting back in to their buddies. 'Hey, have you tried that new take-out duck place?'"
The coyote defense system swung into action. First, Paula made plans to sleep out in the chicken yard all night. Paula believed her presence would keep the coyotes away, or at least frighten them away when she started yelling. But what do you say to a coyote that’s feasting on one of your ducks? “Freeze! Drop the duck!” “Put the duckie back on its nest and no one’s going to get hurt.” “Step away from the duck. Put your paws on top of your head.” I have my doubts about this part of the operation, and doubts about Paula staying awake. And since we didn’t hear a thing last night, or any night for that matter, I fear that we might be dealing with some sort of hi-tech stealth coyotes that are impervious to Paula’s radar.
Second, Bernie went into town to buy shotgun shells. Bernie hopes that if he doesn't wing a couple of them, at least he can scare them off. Over the course of the evening, he’s fired off a few .22 rounds hoping to do just that. It’s not working. As night falls, there are at least four groups in the area, all of them howling up a storm. “Listen,” said Bernie, “if you see me running around naked, screaming my head off and firing the shotgun at two in the morning, it’s nothing to worry about. It’s nothing unusual or out of the ordinary. I’m just going after the coyotes.”
“Sure,” I said, “if that’s the story you want me to give to the arresting officer, that’s fine. I’ll tell him you run around naked, screaming and firing weapons all the time. Just don’t shoot out my windows, okay?”
Third, I took a pee along the chicken yard's perimeter. Bernie believes that when you're dealing with wild animals, you must communicate like wild animals. In effect, we're marking our territory and declaring the chicken yard off limits. By marking the chicken yard, hopefully they'll think twice. Bernie's only advice to me on placement was, "If you hit a fence post, make sure you hit at least two feet off the ground. Make them think you're a big coyote!” I'm giving everything I have for this job.
Later, Bernie and I brought the animals in for the night. There’s a sheep house and a hen house that seldom get used, but tonight as many animals as possible were going to be locked up tight. Arthur the Goat was little help. He was trying in his own goatish way to herd the ducks, but he was only scaring them away from the hen house. Except for one duck, who decided enough was enough. In fact, this duck resolved that it wasn’t a duck at all, but a bull, and started running Arthur, lowering his bill and head butting the goat. Arthur enjoyed this immensely – someone was finally playing with him! The animal comedy act continued well past the point that Bernie found amusing. I could tell this by Bernie’s continual stream of newly invented invectives.
The sheep took even longer to lock up because they're even stupider than the ducks. They're so stupid that they ignored us and followed Arthur around. This scenario resulted in one happy goat, seven confused sheep, and one frustrated Bernie. Eventually, Arthur managed to disorient himself and accidentally lead the flock into the sheep house.
By now Bernie was seriously giving thought to the idea of leaving Arthur outside and changing the goat’s name to “Bait.”
And later, as I turned off the light and crawled into bed, a coyote howled nearby. My spine shivered. I wasn’t sure how far away it was, but it was the closest that I’d heard one since I had arrived here. I guess it wasn’t close enough, because Bernie did not appear firing a shotgun, naked or otherwise.
But the still of the night was shattered at about 1:30, and later at 3:00, as Bernie did indeed run from the house as naked as the day he was born, cursing all the gods ever created, and blasting away at the coyotes with the shotgun.
Or so I was told. I slept through the whole thing.
"Of Disasters, Livestock and Otherwise...."
He found the duck cowering in the mud of the dug out where it had tried to bury itself. At first glance, it resembled the victim of an oil spill; it was covered from head to webbed toes in gray muck. Bernie couldn't figure out what was wrong with it.
He brought it out on to the lawn where, with Lila's help, we hosed it down. We couldn't completely clean it because the mud had dried and had become caked on by the heat of the sun, but at least now it was a dirty white duck, not just a mud-encrusted lump of feathers with a bill.
The duck was still not a happy duck. It cried out as we handled it. Then Bernie brought his hand away and it was covered in blood.
"What the…?"
"There," I said. "See?" Down the right side of the duck's breast were puncture holes. Across its back were other smaller punctures. Something had grabbed this duck with the intention of making it its dinner.
We cleaned it up as best we could and Bernie put it into "solitary confinement," a small enclosure on the side of the lean-to he has set aside for sick or injured birds. Then we went back to the chicken yard and counted feathered heads.
Four ducks were gone. A goose was gone, too. And we had an injured duck that probably wasn’t going to survive.
Coyotes.
No one had heard a thing. Lila did say she thought she heard the coyotes howling nearby last night, but no one had heard a struggle or a fight. The geese should have made a hell of a racket at the intrusion.
The coyotes had done their work quickly, silently, efficiently. But they slipped up – they left a witness, a witness that might just be able to identify them if he recovered. It was a long shot at best, but I owed it to Marlowe.
The doc let me in to see the witness. "Only a few minutes," the sawbones said, "he's still weak."
"Sure, mac," I said, slowly undoing the buttons on my old trench coat. "A few minutes is all I ever need."
"And you'll have to get rid of that cigar."
"Sure, mac." I took one big drag, then blew blue smoke in the doc's face. I pulled open the chest pocket on the doc's lab coat and butted out my Cuban in it.
The nurse, Candy, tried to muffle a snicker. She must like the old geezer as little as I did. I wonder how she keeps her stethoscope warm.
I turned the handle, opened the heavy, wooden door and entered the room. The doc tried to follow me in, but I shut the door behind me. I pressed my ear to the inside of the door and waited until I heard his Gucci shoes squeak away down the hall. I didn't trust the doc, and he didn't trust me. The only person I trusted was my partner, Marlowe.
The light was off and I couldn't see him, but I knew the witness was here. His breathing was rushed and shallow. I could hear his ribs rattling and fluid bubbling in his lungs. He kept making this strange, animalistic sound, almost like a cough. Maybe the doc was right, maybe this guy didn't have much time left.
I turned on the light.
He didn't flinch, but I did. What had the bastards done to him? He was the ugliest bird I'd ever seen. All I could see was his head and neck, but it was enough to tell me that some rough customers had done him over good.
His neck had been stretched long and thin. His head had been crushed almost flat, so flat that each of his eyes was on the side of the head instead of the front. His nose was gone, like it had never even been there. His mouth had been elongated and pulled forward and flattened out, sort of like what those weird African tribes do in those issues of National Geographic that Jimmy the barber keeps piled up in the corner of his stinky little shop which he has the gall to call a “salon.”
His skin was snow white, like an albino's, and covered in some strange stuff, like scales. The only good part about it was that he wasn't going to be any competition for me when it came to Candy.
I lit up another Cuban, hesitated, then offered it. This guy just made like I wasn't even there. Either he was far gone, or he was playing me cool.
I told him who I was, and how I needed the info so I could get the dogs that roughed him up. I figured they were the same dogs who did Marlowe, but I didn't need to tell that to this guy. A bird in the hand, as my momma used to say.
He wasn't talking. He kept looking around the room like a crazy, like someone who'd escaped the demons of hell barking at his heels. After a few questions, it seemed all I was going to get for my effort was a merry-go-round to nowhere. I was starting to think there was more to this strange duck than met the eye. And I was getting pissed.
I grabbed him by his scrawny, little neck. I didn't care, I didn't think. Marlowe was gone and this little stool pigeon was the only clue I had left. "You think you can just give me the runaround?"
He froze. I could see the fear in his eyes and smell it on his breath like bad gin with a Big Mac chaser. I was beginning to think that maybe he was never gonna talk, that there was a force at work here that was even more frightening than me. That was hard to believe. It was time to lean, and lean hard.
"You think I'm just a two-bit barnyard dick fresh in from the farm? I know your game. I know how it went down. You think those stupid sons of bitches could just raid the hen house without knowing where the holes in the fence were, or when the guards wouldn't be around? I know it was an inside job, and the cops know it, too. You'd better not play chicken with me now, 'cause all the cops will do is put away for twenty-five. I'm going to roast you on a skillet. What did they offer you to join their flock? How did you become birds of a feather? Did they deal you a little nest egg in Switzerland? Some little chickadee? How much scratch did they give you? And what was your angle? Did you feel fenced in? Did you want the run of the roost? With the competition out of the way, you could've been cock of the walk. Was that it? Did you sell 'em out so they could be butchered? And what about Marlowe? He fingered you, didn't he? You were crowing because you’d thought you’d gotten away with it, the perfect scheme. You thought it was over easy, didn’t you? Well, forget it, shorty, your goose is cooked. You know what happens to the best laid plans of mice and hens. He caught you poaching. He got your number, but you called in your hounds and had him tarred and feathered. That’s where the chick came in. He could never resist an easy lay. What a turkey I've been! All along I figured you were set up too, just another chickenshit patsy, but it was you, yes, you behind this fowl plan. I come in here on a wing and prayer, hoping to find out who scrambled my partner before you flew the coop, and it was you all along. Boy, do I have egg on my face…!"
But I digress.
There seemed little doubt the coyotes would be back. "Right now," said Paula, "they're reporting back in to their buddies. 'Hey, have you tried that new take-out duck place?'"
The coyote defense system swung into action. First, Paula made plans to sleep out in the chicken yard all night. Paula believed her presence would keep the coyotes away, or at least frighten them away when she started yelling. But what do you say to a coyote that’s feasting on one of your ducks? “Freeze! Drop the duck!” “Put the duckie back on its nest and no one’s going to get hurt.” “Step away from the duck. Put your paws on top of your head.” I have my doubts about this part of the operation, and doubts about Paula staying awake. And since we didn’t hear a thing last night, or any night for that matter, I fear that we might be dealing with some sort of hi-tech stealth coyotes that are impervious to Paula’s radar.
Second, Bernie went into town to buy shotgun shells. Bernie hopes that if he doesn't wing a couple of them, at least he can scare them off. Over the course of the evening, he’s fired off a few .22 rounds hoping to do just that. It’s not working. As night falls, there are at least four groups in the area, all of them howling up a storm. “Listen,” said Bernie, “if you see me running around naked, screaming my head off and firing the shotgun at two in the morning, it’s nothing to worry about. It’s nothing unusual or out of the ordinary. I’m just going after the coyotes.”
“Sure,” I said, “if that’s the story you want me to give to the arresting officer, that’s fine. I’ll tell him you run around naked, screaming and firing weapons all the time. Just don’t shoot out my windows, okay?”
Third, I took a pee along the chicken yard's perimeter. Bernie believes that when you're dealing with wild animals, you must communicate like wild animals. In effect, we're marking our territory and declaring the chicken yard off limits. By marking the chicken yard, hopefully they'll think twice. Bernie's only advice to me on placement was, "If you hit a fence post, make sure you hit at least two feet off the ground. Make them think you're a big coyote!” I'm giving everything I have for this job.
Later, Bernie and I brought the animals in for the night. There’s a sheep house and a hen house that seldom get used, but tonight as many animals as possible were going to be locked up tight. Arthur the Goat was little help. He was trying in his own goatish way to herd the ducks, but he was only scaring them away from the hen house. Except for one duck, who decided enough was enough. In fact, this duck resolved that it wasn’t a duck at all, but a bull, and started running Arthur, lowering his bill and head butting the goat. Arthur enjoyed this immensely – someone was finally playing with him! The animal comedy act continued well past the point that Bernie found amusing. I could tell this by Bernie’s continual stream of newly invented invectives.
The sheep took even longer to lock up because they're even stupider than the ducks. They're so stupid that they ignored us and followed Arthur around. This scenario resulted in one happy goat, seven confused sheep, and one frustrated Bernie. Eventually, Arthur managed to disorient himself and accidentally lead the flock into the sheep house.
By now Bernie was seriously giving thought to the idea of leaving Arthur outside and changing the goat’s name to “Bait.”
And later, as I turned off the light and crawled into bed, a coyote howled nearby. My spine shivered. I wasn’t sure how far away it was, but it was the closest that I’d heard one since I had arrived here. I guess it wasn’t close enough, because Bernie did not appear firing a shotgun, naked or otherwise.
But the still of the night was shattered at about 1:30, and later at 3:00, as Bernie did indeed run from the house as naked as the day he was born, cursing all the gods ever created, and blasting away at the coyotes with the shotgun.
Or so I was told. I slept through the whole thing.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Alberta Reports - Number Ten
August 31, 1998
Since my time here is just about done, it’s time for some final updates.
Computer Update:
Bernie’s computer went out again last week. This time, his computer no longer recognized the CDRom. It wasn’t a question of not having the proper drivers installed, the computer simply couldn’t find it. He brought it back Saturday evening, after the CDRom had been repaired, and the keyboard cleaned and serviced. No sooner had he fired it up did he begin pulling out what little is left of his hair. The newly-serviced keyboard’s “A” key wasn’t functioning.
Just in the twelve weeks I’ve been here, the computer has been in the shop three times. Everything on the computer except the case (and I expect that to fail any day now) has been replaced at one time or another, and many items have been replaced twice or more. It’s on its third CPU, second motherboard, third cache RAM, second keyboard, second CDRom drive, second hard drive, second fan, etc. You get the idea.
The latest trouble started when Bernie recently purchased a drawing tablet. It took a little work to install, but eventually he got it working. The only trouble was during the installation procedure, the computer lost track of all the other device drivers, and everything else stopped working.
Bernie spent an evening re-installing Windows and drivers. Been there, done that. Not fun. If Bernie ever has an ulcer attack, I’ll know why.
But at least the mouse works. Most of the time.
Livestock Update:
The duck wounded by the coyotes died later the same day. Since then we haven’t lost any other animals, but the coyotes still come around most nights. Every few nights they come close enough that Bernie runs outside and fires off a few warning blasts from the shotgun. He also swears, yells, flaps his arms like a giant chicken and curses them; the yelling doesn’t chase the coyotes away, but it helps him feel better.
One of the chickens surprised everyone by hatching five baby chicks. They are so cute! We found them when they were just a couple of days old, and you could have put all of them into your hand. Now they’re bigger and one chick is quite a handful. Unfortunately, two of the chicks died about a week ago, but the survivors are strong and healthy. (And so darn cute!)
Some more lambs are going off to slaughter soon, maybe even this week. It looks like Paula and Bernie have decided to get rid of most of the animals before winter, keeping only a few chickens. This means Arthur the Goat is not long for this world, either. I’m going to miss him.
Stardom Update:
Last week, Paula and I went to a recording studio to record some of our essays. We plan to try and sell them as commentaries to the new Victoria CBC radio station this fall. Paula’s an old hand at this and did her job quickly and smoothly. This was a new experience for me, however, and I was a little nervous. Out of the three pieces I recorded, I felt only one was really good. I talked too fast and my pitch was too high (sometimes I sounded like Woody Woodpecker on helium). I also hadn’t had a chance to practice the pieces and change words that were going to cause spittle storms (“exists” for example), or phrases I knew I was going to stumble over, like “mindless drone-toadies of the corporate thought-cults” Sure, that’s a great line, but when you’re nervous and speaking way too fast, it becomes a landmine just waiting to go off. Still, it was a good experience, and at least now I have something on tape.
Season Update:
Winter is on the way: the Canada geese are flocking up and heading south, all the fields around us have been harvested, Bernie has spotted ravens, we all feel the ice in the wind at night, and mice are getting into the house and looking for places to winter (and now Shadow is earning her keep). The really hot days are gone now, the 30s and 35s replaced on the thermometer by mostly 20s and 22s. There have been the occasionally days when the mercury has barely clawed into the teens. Nights are cooler now too, and although there hasn’t been any frost yet, most of us think it’s just a matter of days away.
Here on the farm, all the crops are done except tomatoes, which are still producing but are on their last legs, and, surprisingly, some of the strawberries, which have given a good second crop. Otherwise, all the fields here are already mowed and will get plowed under not long after I leave.
This means our produce supply at markets for the last couple of weeks have been pretty skimpy, and this has been reflected in lackluster sales. (Bernie figures total sales this year were a little more than last year – but it was all sold three weeks quicker than last year.) But Lila and I did last Saturday’s big St. Albert market (and my last market of the summer) by ourselves, and we did pretty well, bringing in the best sales total of any market for the last half of August. But Lila wouldn’t Riverdance with me.…
Undiscovered Jewels Update:
Last week, we all made an amazing discovery, the original “Little Shop of Horrors” (1960). Legend has it the script was written over a weekend because Roger Corman had unexpectedly found himself with a store-front set that was going to be empty for two days before it needed to be struck. Not one to waste an empty set, or any money, the script was written over a weekend and Corman shot the film in two days. Despite being very obviously a low budget film, the script is funny and sharp and the performances are terrific, especially Jack Nicholson making his screen debut in a brief but wonderful scene as a masochistic dental patient. This is a very funny film and well worth seeking out.
Our discovery this week was “The X-Files” episode entitled, “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space.’” The episode is a flat-out comedy that turns the entire “X-Files” format right on its little gray head. See David Duchovney go, “Eeek!” Discover the truth about those alien autopsy specials on TV. Learn the secret of the men in black. Find out exactly what kind of videos Mulder watches late at night. This episode manages to play off and satirize the usual “X-Files” riffs, yet still remain true to the series’ dark, brooding nature and conspiracy-tinged story line. It’s a well-written, smart piece of storytelling that also manages to be quite touching on occasion. The laughs are out there. Trust me.
Special Effects Update:
We missed the Persieds meteor shower of mid-August thanks to all the forest-fire smoke. It was so thick that we didn’t even bother to try. But now that the sky has cleared, the Northern Lights continue to dazzle. Bernie still claims this year is the best for the lights he has ever seen. Last night we were trying to figure out why they have been so spectacular. Ozone layer depletion? Increase sunspot activity? We finally decided to blame El Niño. And why not? It’s been blamed for everything else. I even blamed El Niño for how badly the Canucks did last season.
Travel Update:
The plan is to leave early Thursday morning. Paula and Bernie have decided to send Ben to school in Victoria this fall, so I’m playing delivery boy. I’m hoping to make the 5:00 PM ferry to the island, so I’ll be getting up on Thursday at 3:00 AM The truck will be full with my stuff, my new barbecue, some frozen lamb I’m shipping for Paula, and Ben’s stuff. There will also be plenty of loud music to keep me awake. I should hit the mountains around seven or so in the morning, and hopefully they won’t be fogged in as when I came out in mid-June (where does all the time go?).
So now I’m in pre-packing mode, trying to visualize how I’m going to fit all this stuff back into my truck. I’m saying goodbye to new friends I’ve met, and old friends I didn’t see enough of. I’m thinking of this adventure as it ends, and new adventures just around the corner.
I miss my cats.
I’m surprised at how little I miss Victoria. I miss my people there, my friends and family, but I don’t miss the city as much as I thought I would. I guess what that great scientist Emilo Lazardo once said is true: “Home is where you hang your hat.”
So for the next little while, my hat is hanging in my truck so I can take it wherever I go.
Since my time here is just about done, it’s time for some final updates.
Computer Update:
Bernie’s computer went out again last week. This time, his computer no longer recognized the CDRom. It wasn’t a question of not having the proper drivers installed, the computer simply couldn’t find it. He brought it back Saturday evening, after the CDRom had been repaired, and the keyboard cleaned and serviced. No sooner had he fired it up did he begin pulling out what little is left of his hair. The newly-serviced keyboard’s “A” key wasn’t functioning.
Just in the twelve weeks I’ve been here, the computer has been in the shop three times. Everything on the computer except the case (and I expect that to fail any day now) has been replaced at one time or another, and many items have been replaced twice or more. It’s on its third CPU, second motherboard, third cache RAM, second keyboard, second CDRom drive, second hard drive, second fan, etc. You get the idea.
The latest trouble started when Bernie recently purchased a drawing tablet. It took a little work to install, but eventually he got it working. The only trouble was during the installation procedure, the computer lost track of all the other device drivers, and everything else stopped working.
Bernie spent an evening re-installing Windows and drivers. Been there, done that. Not fun. If Bernie ever has an ulcer attack, I’ll know why.
But at least the mouse works. Most of the time.
Livestock Update:
The duck wounded by the coyotes died later the same day. Since then we haven’t lost any other animals, but the coyotes still come around most nights. Every few nights they come close enough that Bernie runs outside and fires off a few warning blasts from the shotgun. He also swears, yells, flaps his arms like a giant chicken and curses them; the yelling doesn’t chase the coyotes away, but it helps him feel better.
One of the chickens surprised everyone by hatching five baby chicks. They are so cute! We found them when they were just a couple of days old, and you could have put all of them into your hand. Now they’re bigger and one chick is quite a handful. Unfortunately, two of the chicks died about a week ago, but the survivors are strong and healthy. (And so darn cute!)
Some more lambs are going off to slaughter soon, maybe even this week. It looks like Paula and Bernie have decided to get rid of most of the animals before winter, keeping only a few chickens. This means Arthur the Goat is not long for this world, either. I’m going to miss him.
Stardom Update:
Last week, Paula and I went to a recording studio to record some of our essays. We plan to try and sell them as commentaries to the new Victoria CBC radio station this fall. Paula’s an old hand at this and did her job quickly and smoothly. This was a new experience for me, however, and I was a little nervous. Out of the three pieces I recorded, I felt only one was really good. I talked too fast and my pitch was too high (sometimes I sounded like Woody Woodpecker on helium). I also hadn’t had a chance to practice the pieces and change words that were going to cause spittle storms (“exists” for example), or phrases I knew I was going to stumble over, like “mindless drone-toadies of the corporate thought-cults” Sure, that’s a great line, but when you’re nervous and speaking way too fast, it becomes a landmine just waiting to go off. Still, it was a good experience, and at least now I have something on tape.
Season Update:
Winter is on the way: the Canada geese are flocking up and heading south, all the fields around us have been harvested, Bernie has spotted ravens, we all feel the ice in the wind at night, and mice are getting into the house and looking for places to winter (and now Shadow is earning her keep). The really hot days are gone now, the 30s and 35s replaced on the thermometer by mostly 20s and 22s. There have been the occasionally days when the mercury has barely clawed into the teens. Nights are cooler now too, and although there hasn’t been any frost yet, most of us think it’s just a matter of days away.
Here on the farm, all the crops are done except tomatoes, which are still producing but are on their last legs, and, surprisingly, some of the strawberries, which have given a good second crop. Otherwise, all the fields here are already mowed and will get plowed under not long after I leave.
This means our produce supply at markets for the last couple of weeks have been pretty skimpy, and this has been reflected in lackluster sales. (Bernie figures total sales this year were a little more than last year – but it was all sold three weeks quicker than last year.) But Lila and I did last Saturday’s big St. Albert market (and my last market of the summer) by ourselves, and we did pretty well, bringing in the best sales total of any market for the last half of August. But Lila wouldn’t Riverdance with me.…
Undiscovered Jewels Update:
Last week, we all made an amazing discovery, the original “Little Shop of Horrors” (1960). Legend has it the script was written over a weekend because Roger Corman had unexpectedly found himself with a store-front set that was going to be empty for two days before it needed to be struck. Not one to waste an empty set, or any money, the script was written over a weekend and Corman shot the film in two days. Despite being very obviously a low budget film, the script is funny and sharp and the performances are terrific, especially Jack Nicholson making his screen debut in a brief but wonderful scene as a masochistic dental patient. This is a very funny film and well worth seeking out.
Our discovery this week was “The X-Files” episode entitled, “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space.’” The episode is a flat-out comedy that turns the entire “X-Files” format right on its little gray head. See David Duchovney go, “Eeek!” Discover the truth about those alien autopsy specials on TV. Learn the secret of the men in black. Find out exactly what kind of videos Mulder watches late at night. This episode manages to play off and satirize the usual “X-Files” riffs, yet still remain true to the series’ dark, brooding nature and conspiracy-tinged story line. It’s a well-written, smart piece of storytelling that also manages to be quite touching on occasion. The laughs are out there. Trust me.
Special Effects Update:
We missed the Persieds meteor shower of mid-August thanks to all the forest-fire smoke. It was so thick that we didn’t even bother to try. But now that the sky has cleared, the Northern Lights continue to dazzle. Bernie still claims this year is the best for the lights he has ever seen. Last night we were trying to figure out why they have been so spectacular. Ozone layer depletion? Increase sunspot activity? We finally decided to blame El Niño. And why not? It’s been blamed for everything else. I even blamed El Niño for how badly the Canucks did last season.
Travel Update:
The plan is to leave early Thursday morning. Paula and Bernie have decided to send Ben to school in Victoria this fall, so I’m playing delivery boy. I’m hoping to make the 5:00 PM ferry to the island, so I’ll be getting up on Thursday at 3:00 AM The truck will be full with my stuff, my new barbecue, some frozen lamb I’m shipping for Paula, and Ben’s stuff. There will also be plenty of loud music to keep me awake. I should hit the mountains around seven or so in the morning, and hopefully they won’t be fogged in as when I came out in mid-June (where does all the time go?).
So now I’m in pre-packing mode, trying to visualize how I’m going to fit all this stuff back into my truck. I’m saying goodbye to new friends I’ve met, and old friends I didn’t see enough of. I’m thinking of this adventure as it ends, and new adventures just around the corner.
I miss my cats.
I’m surprised at how little I miss Victoria. I miss my people there, my friends and family, but I don’t miss the city as much as I thought I would. I guess what that great scientist Emilo Lazardo once said is true: “Home is where you hang your hat.”
So for the next little while, my hat is hanging in my truck so I can take it wherever I go.
Monday, May 21, 2007
Alberta Reports - Edgefest Supplement
July 9, 1998
The job was easy: baby sit Ben at the Edmonton stop of Edgefest ’98. Bernie supplied me with a ticket and little else. But how hard could this be? I accompany a 13 year-old metal-head wannabe to the biggest rock festival of the summer. Easy as cake.
Held at Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium, Edgefest had two stages, the main stage and the smaller Bear stage, to supply nearly nine hours of continual music. The show started on time at one, a rare thing at rock concerts, under sunny skies. A woman offered me beer, weed, and eye drops. Ben ate too much candy.
Copyright was the sacrificial opening act on the small Bear stage. Bad songs, bad sound, bad band.
Bif Naked started the festivities on the main stage. A high energy, rocking act that pounded out fifty minutes of her hits, including “Spaceman,” and “Daddy’s Getting Married.” I almost bought her CDs. During her set, however, the rain started, and soon the enthusiastic crowd was a soggy, enthusiastic crowd.
Local Rabbits took the small stage and were eminently forgettable. The rain continued, and moved from drizzle into a full-blown rainstorm. There was one advantage – it turned Commonwealth Stadium into the world’s largest wet T-shirt contest.
Holly McNarland played a ragged, but enjoyable set on the big stage. She abandoned one song half-way through and promptly forgot the words to the next song, but she shrugged off the mistakes and carried on, much to the delight of the good-natured and thoroughly drenched crowd.
The Killjoys sounded okay, but I was eating pizza on the concourse. As the rain continued, the grounds, which were covered with tarps to protect the fields, allowed no run-off and huge puddles were forming. Even after the rains eventually stopped, the puddles plagued the popular pig skin palladium play field.
Econoline Crush stormed onto the big stage as the rain worsened. Crush, whose sound owes as much to U2 as to Nine Inch Nails, played a tight, grooving, energetic set. The first band to really get the joint rocking, Crush delivered the goods, including “All That You Are,” and “The Devil You Know.” The mosh pit was in full swing, and the rain ended as Crush took their bows. (I bought two of their CDs.)
Back on the Bear stage, the Matthew Good Band took over. Arguably the best band of the show, their set was criminally limited to a mere 20 minutes, but they made the most of their time, and the sunshine.
With the sun now blazing, Sloan wondered onto the main stage and played a loose set of power-pop nuggets. The between song patter was hysterical, and the band’s four-part harmony soaring. Quirky and off the wall, and well worth catching again.
Creed took control on the Bear stage, and I wish I had gone for more pizza. Instead I made a tally of mosh pit injuries: two broken arms, numerous bruises, cuts and bloody noses.
Next, the Foo Fighters commandeered the big stage. Wasting no time, they plowed into “Monkey Wrench,” and continued a great set that alternated between hard-edged grunge, cowboy song parodies, and the occasional ballad. Dave Grohl must have had an upset stomach as he kept belching into the microphone. (A good belch at 120 db is an impressive sound.) The highlight of the set was when Grohl dedicated a slow song to Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, because “I love his ass.” Billie Joe then sauntered on stage and dropped his drawers so we could all admire his ass, too. Grohl, not to be outdone, changed the words of his song on the fly, and turned it into a love song about Billie Joe’s butt. Rock and roll is a vicious game....
The Watchmen, in the unenviable position of playing between Foo Fighters and Green Day, played a competent, if uninspiring set. The only memorable song was their current single, a great tune called, “My Life is a Stereo.”
Then came Green Day. The masters of post-modern neo-punk anthems did not disappoint. Billie Joe Armstrong strutted the stage like he owned it; cavorting wildly, yelling profanely, and dropping his pants again for good measure. The audience ate up his crazy antics like candy, and rocked, jumped and moshed its collective head off as Green Day crunched its way through its three-chord catalogue. A highlight was Billie Joe declaring himself, “the best fucking heavy fucking metal fucking guitarist in the fucking world,” and slipping into Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” then Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” and even Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” before slashing out the opening riff of his own “Brain Stew.” To close the show, the drummer set his drum kit on fire, the bass player tossed his bass onto the pyre before knocking over a speaker tower as Green Day’s horn section (dressed up as a bee and a yellow pepper) played “Taps,” while all the while Billie Joe was crouched in front of his amps, calling on the gods of feedback to make us all deaf. Amazingly, he redeemed all this excess by sliding into the final song, the somber and reflective “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).” If the name of the game was to entertain, then Green Day did just that, fully and completely.
Neither Ben nor I give a damn about The Tea Party, so we left.
We emerged unscathed, uninjured and with most of our hearing still intact. You can’t ask more than that, eh?
The job was easy: baby sit Ben at the Edmonton stop of Edgefest ’98. Bernie supplied me with a ticket and little else. But how hard could this be? I accompany a 13 year-old metal-head wannabe to the biggest rock festival of the summer. Easy as cake.
Held at Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium, Edgefest had two stages, the main stage and the smaller Bear stage, to supply nearly nine hours of continual music. The show started on time at one, a rare thing at rock concerts, under sunny skies. A woman offered me beer, weed, and eye drops. Ben ate too much candy.
Copyright was the sacrificial opening act on the small Bear stage. Bad songs, bad sound, bad band.
Bif Naked started the festivities on the main stage. A high energy, rocking act that pounded out fifty minutes of her hits, including “Spaceman,” and “Daddy’s Getting Married.” I almost bought her CDs. During her set, however, the rain started, and soon the enthusiastic crowd was a soggy, enthusiastic crowd.
Local Rabbits took the small stage and were eminently forgettable. The rain continued, and moved from drizzle into a full-blown rainstorm. There was one advantage – it turned Commonwealth Stadium into the world’s largest wet T-shirt contest.
Holly McNarland played a ragged, but enjoyable set on the big stage. She abandoned one song half-way through and promptly forgot the words to the next song, but she shrugged off the mistakes and carried on, much to the delight of the good-natured and thoroughly drenched crowd.
The Killjoys sounded okay, but I was eating pizza on the concourse. As the rain continued, the grounds, which were covered with tarps to protect the fields, allowed no run-off and huge puddles were forming. Even after the rains eventually stopped, the puddles plagued the popular pig skin palladium play field.
Econoline Crush stormed onto the big stage as the rain worsened. Crush, whose sound owes as much to U2 as to Nine Inch Nails, played a tight, grooving, energetic set. The first band to really get the joint rocking, Crush delivered the goods, including “All That You Are,” and “The Devil You Know.” The mosh pit was in full swing, and the rain ended as Crush took their bows. (I bought two of their CDs.)
Back on the Bear stage, the Matthew Good Band took over. Arguably the best band of the show, their set was criminally limited to a mere 20 minutes, but they made the most of their time, and the sunshine.
With the sun now blazing, Sloan wondered onto the main stage and played a loose set of power-pop nuggets. The between song patter was hysterical, and the band’s four-part harmony soaring. Quirky and off the wall, and well worth catching again.
Creed took control on the Bear stage, and I wish I had gone for more pizza. Instead I made a tally of mosh pit injuries: two broken arms, numerous bruises, cuts and bloody noses.
Next, the Foo Fighters commandeered the big stage. Wasting no time, they plowed into “Monkey Wrench,” and continued a great set that alternated between hard-edged grunge, cowboy song parodies, and the occasional ballad. Dave Grohl must have had an upset stomach as he kept belching into the microphone. (A good belch at 120 db is an impressive sound.) The highlight of the set was when Grohl dedicated a slow song to Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, because “I love his ass.” Billie Joe then sauntered on stage and dropped his drawers so we could all admire his ass, too. Grohl, not to be outdone, changed the words of his song on the fly, and turned it into a love song about Billie Joe’s butt. Rock and roll is a vicious game....
The Watchmen, in the unenviable position of playing between Foo Fighters and Green Day, played a competent, if uninspiring set. The only memorable song was their current single, a great tune called, “My Life is a Stereo.”
Then came Green Day. The masters of post-modern neo-punk anthems did not disappoint. Billie Joe Armstrong strutted the stage like he owned it; cavorting wildly, yelling profanely, and dropping his pants again for good measure. The audience ate up his crazy antics like candy, and rocked, jumped and moshed its collective head off as Green Day crunched its way through its three-chord catalogue. A highlight was Billie Joe declaring himself, “the best fucking heavy fucking metal fucking guitarist in the fucking world,” and slipping into Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” then Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” and even Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” before slashing out the opening riff of his own “Brain Stew.” To close the show, the drummer set his drum kit on fire, the bass player tossed his bass onto the pyre before knocking over a speaker tower as Green Day’s horn section (dressed up as a bee and a yellow pepper) played “Taps,” while all the while Billie Joe was crouched in front of his amps, calling on the gods of feedback to make us all deaf. Amazingly, he redeemed all this excess by sliding into the final song, the somber and reflective “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).” If the name of the game was to entertain, then Green Day did just that, fully and completely.
Neither Ben nor I give a damn about The Tea Party, so we left.
We emerged unscathed, uninjured and with most of our hearing still intact. You can’t ask more than that, eh?
Sunday, May 06, 2007
Alberta Reports - Kitch Tour '98
Me in front of the world's biggest pysanka, Vegreville, Alberta.
Me in front of the world's biggest concrete mushrooms, Vilna, Alberta.
Me in front of the world's biggest pyrogy in Glendon, Alberta.
Me standing on the world's largest UFO landing pad at St. Paul, Alberta.
(your tax dollars at work.)
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