A Night Trip on the Greyhound Bus, 2013

  Here is a description of a bus trip I took from Prince George, back home to McBride:

       If I was a writer in search of interesting characters, I think I would spend nights at the bus station in some a city.  Yesterday in my trip home, the last leg of my journey was a bus ride from Prince George to McBride.  After I de-boarded the plane in Prince George, I took the airport shuttle downtown to the Greyhound Bus station.  When I got there around 7:00 PM, I found the doors locked.  There was a young unshaven guy wearing a hoody, and an older aboriginal woman with a terrible bruise covering the right side of her face, who were standing by the door who told me that it didn’t open until 8:00.  

        With an hour to kill, there was only one thing for me to do: eat.  I dragged my suitcase over to the nearby Red Robin restaurant, and had myself a barbecue turkey wrap.  Then as it approached 8:00, I meandered back to the bus station.  As I waited the 6 minutes for the doors to open, several other people joined me.  There was a young woman, who also had facial bruising, and enough bags to fill a Subaru, who told me she was heading to Calgary, and standing nearby her was a stout old man, who was keeping himself busy doing something on his smart phone.

        Finally a Greyhound employee opened the door and I followed him to the ticket booth, where shortly he opened the sliding barrier in the ticket window and I bought my ticket for the 9:15 Edmonton bus that stopped at McBride.  Then I settled down in one of the plastic chairs to watch, as the bus station slowly filled with people. 

        A bus from northern BC arrived and the lobby filled with zombie-like passengers, dragging their bundles and suitcases, already exhausted from their daylong bus journey.  Many of them sat down waiting for the same bus I was waiting for.  I overheard couple sitting next to me, say that they had just finished working the night shift, then boarded the bus up north and rode on it all day to Prince Gerge.  They were headed for the Kelowna, which meant probably another 12 hour bus ride.  They could hardly keep their eyes open.

      I noticed a woman in her late 20’s, wearing what looked like a long black evening gown made of cheap polyester, generously cut low in the front, and wearing running shoes.  Her 12 year old daughter wore a cheap lacy dress, like what used to be worn with petticoats.  The mother was carrying on a conversation with a goateed horseshoer who could hardly carry his heavy-ladened backpack, complete with a coil of 1 inch rope on the top.  They were all waiting for the doors to open so we could get on the east bound bus.

        I could hardly keep my eyes open, waiting for 9:15 to arrive.  When it finally did, nothing happened.  No announcement was made, everyone just continued to sit there.  I noticed an older man carrying a big bag of cheezies and Orange Crush for the trip.  I tried to read some more of the novel I had downloaded onto my iPad.  I was a bit surprised, seeing all of these people most of who appeared to be rather poor, but all had smart phones, and they were busy doing things on them.

        A few people wandered up to the ticket booth and came back with the information that the bus we were to take was going to be an hour late in arriving in Prince George.  There was never any announcement made over the PA system.  I thought I should give my wife a call, since she was going to pick me up in McBride.  I called, but could only tell her we would be late, but I didn’t know how late.

        Our bus finally came and we loaded at 10:00.  It’s hard to get on a night bus without thinking about the incident that happened in Canada about 5 years ago.  On a Greyhound bus traveling late at night, a man with serious mental problems, cut off the head of another passenger sleeping on the bus.  Remembering that, I chose a seat right up close to the bus driver, instead of entering the dark bowels of the back of the bus.

        I arrived in McBride at 12:25 AM, and was happy to see my wife waiting for me.  It was nice to finally be home after a long day of flying from Indiana, then finishing up with the long bus ride from Prince George.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

McBride: A Community of Salvagers

 

    Here is one of my blogs from 2013:

    I have sometimes read about isolated communities located along dangerous rocky ocean shorelines, that benefited from the ships that occasionally crashed into those rocks.  Word quickly scattered through the community, and the residents rushed to the shore to salvage the items from the ship, that were washed ashore by the waves.  I have often thought that McBride is similar to those sea coast communities.

    The Robson Valley is not located beside a dangerous seacoast, but McBride does sometimes benefit from the dangerous highway that winds through our mountainous terrain.  During the time I have lived here, I have often heard of wrecked transport trucks or freight trains that have lost their loads, and those loads were often salvaged by local people.

    Living, as we do, away from town and the quick communication network of local gossip, we rarely benefit from the accidents.  Around here those salvage events happen fast.  I do still have a couple pieces of thick watercolor-like paper that had been salvaged from some overturned truck, but it was so long ago, I have forgotten the details.  I have had it for decades now, and still haven’t figured out what I could do with it.

    When I was building my house, I was very sorry in failing to hear sooner about an overturned truck carrying building lumber.  I don’t remember if that was a legitimate “salvage” or not; quite often the spills end up scattered, down mountain slopes at the edge of the highway, and are not really worth the effort of insurance companies to collect, so they are just left for local people to pick up.

    Last night, as I was trying to get to the end of a pretty bad movie that I had recorded, my wife returned from her knitting group.  She was carrying a plastic bag, and was all excited to tell its story to me.

    Apparently, a truck carrying frozen bun dough for a Subway restaurant had an accident and overturned on Hwy. 16, and as a result of the accident, the frozen unbaked bread dough, could not be safely used by the restaurant, so it was open to salvage.  

    I don’t know, how much of this frozen bread dough ended up in McBride, but there must have been a lot.  Some friends had opened their freezer to to my wife, eager to give her some of the Subway dough. They wanted her to take more than she did.  We now have about 40 sticks of the frozen whole wheat bun dough in our freezer.

    Like everybody else, I like to receive free stuff, and I am very anxious to bake and try out some of our newly acquired subway buns.

    

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Cartoons: Price of Gas

    Trump’s War in Iran has caused the price of a barrel of oil to double, immediately spiking the price of gasoline at the pumps.  Here are some cartoons about it.  (Note:  Alberta, Canada possesses one of the world’s largest sources of oil.)

 

Mud Man

     On the last two blogs I have been telling you about how mud plays a prominent role in our life in the Robson Valley.  Today I am showing you a couple of photos of myself when I have had to deal with the mud.  For the most part, the soil on our property is made up of a heavy clay, and it becomes very sticky when it is wet.  In that state, it is very difficult to deal with.  It sticks to the shovel, so after you get a scoop of it, you have to bang the shovel on the ground to get the scoop of clay off, making the any digging very slow, burdensome, and frustrating.

    The photo above was taken after doing some work correcting a leak on our waterline.  Below, shows me digging up my sewage line, so I can get to a clog.  That was a particularly hard day.  The job was awful because of the wet sticky clay I had to deal with, and the fact I was wet and cold, and it was snowing while I was doing it.  Making the day more memorable was the fact that hours later I got the word that my father had died.  I remember the date because it was also my birthday.

You can take a look at my paintings by going to:  davidmarchant2.ca

MuckBride

     Yesterday I blogged about how mud has often played a major part of springtime in McBride.  It might interest you to know that there is a subset season at the beginning of spring, that is called “Breakup.”   Breakup begins when the logging roads become so messy with mud that trucks are banned from using them.  Restrictions on weight also come into effect on our secondary roads, because heavy truck loads can damage their surface . 

    Above is  a photo of what our road often looked like in the spring, before it was paved.  Below are some photos of places inside the “city” limits of the Village of McBride.  The photo immediately below shows the roadway beside the arena, leading to the Community Hall.  The below that is the area going up to the garbage bins where we deposit our trash.  The photo at the very bottom shows the logging road at the end of our road.

    I should say that all of these photos were taken in years past and most of the problematic muddy places shown have been improved.

Take a look at my paintings:   davidmarchant2.ca

Thinking About Our Muddy Past

    The Robson Valley seems to be approaching Spring, and around here, that means mud.  Before we can enjoy the joys of Spring (blooming flowers, warmer weather, and beautiful views) we have to go through a long period of dealing with mud.  This was especially true during the time when we first moved to McBride in the late 1970’s.  At that time our road was a gravel one (more accurately, a dusty road or a muddy road).  After a couple of decades, our road was seal-coated (sort of a low class pavement), while  that did eliminate one source of mud, there still remained a lot of other sources of muck.

    I thought it might be timely to share some of my photos that featured mud.  I got that idea when I remembered some old photos I had taken while walking on our old trail.

    Our neighbor allowed us to make a loop trail through her property.  The trail took us through some nice wooded areas that led to some fields beside the Fraser River, then it turned to take us through another forested area, and back to our land, beside our pond.

    We used to walk the trail several times a day with our sheepdog, Macintosh.  The trail was always difficult to maintain, with constant falling branches and trees, prickly waist-high thistles in the old fields, and in some areas, muddy spots.  Here are a couple of photos I had taken of some muddy spots along the trail:

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Painting A Square

     I  paint every morning.  I divide the image (on the computer) and also on the canvas into a grid, with each square being 2 inches.  On my computer I zoom in to the square I am going to paint that day, so that is all I see on the screen.

    The left side of the photo above shows the square on my computer that I was going to paint today  The straight white lines are guide lines that I also draw on the square on the canvas.  They help me put all the colors in the right place on the 2 inch canvas square I am going to paint.

    On the right side of the photo above, you see the square I actually painted on the canvas today.  

    I have been having problems with this image, because I don’t really have the right greens to match the colors I see on the screen.  As a result I have to do a lot of mixing with the colors I do have.   The two-inch square I painted today took me an hour to paint, because of all of the mixing of colors I had to do to try to come up suitable greens.

     The colors are not exactly the same, but they also have to match the squares I have already painted on the canvas.  Hopefully the whole painting will still turn out alright.

    In the photo below, you can see all of the paints I used today just to paint the two-inch square.  At the very bottom you can see what my painting looks like so far.  It is an image of some hosta leaves.  

You can see my other paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca