I Forgot About These Potatoes

     I store our potatoes in the crawlspace under our house.  When I dig my potatoes, I always pick out the best ones to set aside and keep as seed potatoes, to plant the following year.  The rest are stored for eating over the winter.  

    This spring when it was time to plant, I got the seed potatoes out from the root cellar to plant, and after planting them, I forgot about what was left of the eating potatoes that were still under the house, and we began to buy some potatoes for eating.

    Yesterday, when I happened to go into the crawlspace, I discovered those left over potatoes.  They had figured it was time to sprout, and went at it with a fury.  They created this enormous mass of sprouts, which are now in my compost pile.

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My Most Memorable Fire Callout

       This happened in 1981:  

       This happened in 1981:  

            When my wife and I got back home there was a thunder storm forming over the Cariboo Mountains.  We could watch from our front window as lightening struck Belle Mountain.  At 11:30 PM, we could see four different spot fires on the slopes.  I knew I had better get to bed because I knew the next day would be a busy one for me at Forestry.

   I had just fallen asleep when my wife woke me to tell me to wake up and look at Bell Mountain.  By this time, a couple of the spot burns had grown and were quite visible in the darkness of night.

   I again went back to bed, but our phone rang at 1:00 AM.  It was Ned, one of my co-workers at Forestry, who was the active “Fire Duty Officer”.  He told me to find two guys, have them meet me at the office, and then go out to fight a fire beside the highway, close to LeGrand. First I called Trevor, but he was already out fighting a fire near his home on Hinkelman Road.  I then thought of Kim and his friend Mike, who were renting Kjell’s house next door over the summer, while Kjell and Celine were vacationing in China. 

   I had Kim and Mike meet me at the Forestry office, I attached a utility trailer with a pump to one of the Forestry pickups, and we headed out into the night, toward LeGrande.  We did find the fire, and luckily it was just one tree, a big hollow cedar that was burning in the center.  We had to work with headlamps to see what we were doing.  

            We tried spraying water through a crack in the trunk to put out the fire burning inside the tree, but it became clear that we would have to fall the tree to put the fire out.  Big hollow cedars are dangerous to fall, because they could unexpectedly collapse, and it didn’t help that we were working in the dark with just some light from our head lamps.   

        I sawed through the tree, but when it began to fall a bit, it hung up and leaned against another tree.  I then had to carefully saw that supporting tree down, again something very dangerous, but fortunately, they both came down without killing me and we were then able to get to the fire burning inside the cedar’s trunk and extinguish it.  

   It was still dark as we headed back to the office.  As we approached McBride, we could see the orange glow of a fire burning on Bell Mountain, so we drove up the bumpy mountain trail to try to find the fire and to check what the situation was.  We did find it and discovered that it was burning in slash (an area left after logging, full of discarded limbs, and unwanted tree trunks).  The fire was too big for the three of us to fight, so at 5:00 AM, I radioed in to the office and told Ned they needed to get a caterpillar tractor up there to fight the fire in the slash, then we slowly made our way down Belle  Mountain and back to the office.

   Kim and Mike went home, but I stayed in the office for the rest of the day, doing fire-related work.  I took several fire fighting crews to their fires, hauled pick-up truck loads of Turbo-B jet fuel (for the helicopters) barrels to the airfield, before finally being able to drag myself back home at 6:00 PM. after putting in a long 18 hour day.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

White Tail / Mule Deer Hybrids

     For years, we have only had mule deer around our property.  That’s a mule deer on the right side of the photo above.  Mule deer are brown in color, bulky, and have a short tail, among other characteristics.  We rarely saw white tail deer around our place, but they are common in other places around the Valley.  White tail deer are more tan in color, longer, with skinnier legs, and have a characteristic long white tail.  Photo on the left above.

    The other day when I showed my friend Ingrid the photo of the mother deer with the three fawns, she immediately said, “She must be a cross between a mule deer and a white tail.“   

    I guess I hadn’t paid much attention to how the mother deer looked.  I just assumed it was a white tail deer, but Ingrid pointed out that it had a very short tail with a black tip.   I hadn’t realized that the two deer varieties interbred, but I guess they sometimes do in areas where the two species both live, and in those areas, seeing hybrid deer are not that unusual.  

    There are two of these hybrids (and the three fawns) that are presently hanging around our house.  They don’t seem that shy around me, but then, I haven’t really chased them away. 

    Below is a photo of the white tail /mule deer-cross that has been frequenting our yard.

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Another Jam, Another Rainbow

     Every Tuesday evening, our Jam meets and plays music on the McBride Train Station porch.  We have experienced a lot of rain showers this summer, and just like on our Tuesday night jam in the middle of June, when we were there playing on the porch, a rainbow formed over McBride.  I guess we shouldn’t be all that surprised given the combination of the rain showers, the low position of the sun at the same time, and being at the same location, that we got to experience another rainbow over the town.

    The rainbow the other night was unique because it lasted for so long, arching over McBride for forty minutes.  

    Below is a photo of the summer’s previous Jam rainbow.  It looks like the pot of gold at the base of the rainbow must have changed locations.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Another Memorable Fire Callout

 Here is an account of another “fire callout” that I had to respond to in 1991:

    Toward the end of July, I was at home after work, but on fire backup.  Our Forestry officer got a report from the observation plane that circled our forest district looking for fires, that a small plume of smoke had been spotted curling up from the middle of a forested area east of the West Twin Creek.   I received a radio call to investigate and so I drove out Highway 16 to try to find it.  

            From an old logging cutblock on the opposite side of the West Twin Bridge that overlooked area on the east side of the creek,  I finally spotted a wimpy plume of smoke.  I figured that the only way I could locate it in the bush was to take a compass reading and hopefully compass my way to it.  I took whipped out my compass and took a reading, then drove back across the bridge and parked,  then with my compass in hand, I headed out through the forest.

    Evening was approaching and finding a small fire in the middle of the large forest by walking through the trees, seemed akin to finding a needle in a haystack, but following the compass I bushwhacked my way through the woods, and after an hour of walking, I was amazed in finding a lone smoking cedar that must have been hit by lightning.  The tree was hollow and smoldering inside.  Having no water or tools, there was really no way for me to put the fire out, and it did seem possible that the fire might spread, so I radioed back to the office and they told me just to hike back out since nightfall was at hand, and deal with the fire the next day.

    Since I knew that the highway was somewhere below me and made a curve around me, instead of hiking the hour in the direction I had come, I decided it would be an easier hike just to “shortcut” through the forest to the highway then walk along the highway back to the truck.  I figured that would be quicker.      

        Unfortunately, I was wrong.  I hadn’t realized that although the highway did make a curve, it was a very side curve that curved away from where I was, so instead of being a quicker route, it ended up being a whole lot longer.  

        It was just about near dark when I finally reached the highway, then it was a 2.5 kilometer hike along the highway, back to where I had parked the truck.  I tried hitchhiking, but no one would pick me up, so I had to walk the whole distance.  By the time I got to the truck, driven back to the office, and then back home, it was 11:00 PM.

    The next day I repeated my hike back to the burning cedar leading a crew of four firefighters.  They sawed down the smoldering cedar and extinguished the fire.  Having learned my lesson about taking a “shortcut”  back to the truck, we hiked out the same way we had hiked in.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Remembering a "Call Out" For A Forest Fire

     I worked for the BC Forest Service for 23 years.  Every spring Fire Protection, drew up a weekly schedule that assigned one staff member as the Protection Officer, and another employee scheduled to be “on call” if smoke was reported.  I was often “on call”.  That meant that I got a small amount of pay for being ready to respond in case I was needed.   I had to stay close to a Forest Service portable radio or to my home phone, in case of a call.  Other than that, I could live my life normally at home.  I also got to take Forestry pickup truck home, so I could respond to a “call out” from home.

    One evening I got a radio call from the Protection Officer, saying that a driver had reported .  I was told to drive out there and investigate.  That was all of the information that was given, so I didn’t really know what to expect when I got out there.

    It took me twenty minutes to drive to the West Twin Bridge and after crossing the bridge and starting the climb up the long hill, I got to an area where I did see a small whiff of white smoke drifting out from the trees on the right side of the highway.  I parked the truck on the side of the highway and made my way into the forest where the smoke was coming from.

    I didn’t have to go very far inside the trees, before I could see the source of the smoke.  It was a small campfire, and hunched beside it was a surprised man cooking his supper.  In talking to him I discovered that he was a bicycler, who had decided to pull over and spend the night camping in the woods.  (During the summer numerous long-range bike riders pedal up and down the hills of Highway 16 traveling from McBride to Prince George.  I always feel sorry for them because it is such a long, hilly, uninteresting endeavor without much rewarding scenery, just trees.  Doing that trip on a bike, always seemed to me like it would be torture.)

    I always hate to play the “Heavy”, but I needed to in this situation, given my job.  I told the biker that he couldn’t have a fire out there in the woods, and I pushed my authority and made him put the fire out, and not be doing it again.  The guy seemed chastened, and extinguished his small fire.  I am sure he was taken by surprise when I interrupted his supper in the middle of nowhere.  

    I radioed back to the Forestry Office to report what I had found and how I dealt with it, then I drove back home to resume my evening.

My paintings can be seen at:  davidmarchant2.ca

My Morning Search For Inspiration

     After I painted a square on my painting this morning, it was time to write my blog, but I didn’t really have anything to blog about, so I decided just to head outside, and walk around the pond, hoping for some kind of inspiration.  There were some nice clouds against a beautiful blue sky, so I took a photo of that.  

    As I walked the path around the pond, I did disturb a small frog, who leaped into the water.  I watched a handful of dragonflies circling and darting above the water, and the neighbor’s cat was walking down the path toward me, until she saw me,then turned, and silently retreated the way she came.

    Once my pond walk was finished I headed up to the garden to see what was happening there.  The pole teepee I had constructed for the scarlet runner beans, was colorful with its orangish blooms, and a couple of deep red poppies that were blooming, added a nice accent to the scene.  The pinkish-red hollyhocks made a nice photo.  The purple clematis climbing on the garden’s fence also made for a colorful sight.

    While my walk didn’t give me one dramatic inspiration, seeing all those various things did make me appreciate the beautiful things that I have around me.  All I needed to do is take the time to notice them.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca