The Tie That Binds by Kent Haruf

 The Tie That Binds by Kent Haruf

    Kent Haruf has become my favorite writer.  All of his novels that I have read take place in or around the small Colorado town of Holt, in the high plains outside of Denver.  He writes about the ordinary rural lives and struggles those people are faced with.  

          The Tie that Binds is about two neighbors, one is the Goodnough family with a domineering and cruel father, and the other family the Roscoes, made up of a generous aboriginal mother and her son, who strive to help Edith and her brother Lyman, the unfortunate children of that cruel father, throughout their lives.  

          As you might expect, the novel is not a light-hearted one, but a dramatic one that shows the struggles of rural farmers, and the sometimes wasted lives they live.  It does also show the genuine kindness and humanity of others.   I found it to very memorable and thought provoking.  

         The story begins in the 1890’s with a young newly married couple in Ohio.  Roy, the husband works on a farm and hates being bossed around.  After discovering that cheap land in Colorado might give him a chance to be his own boss and own his own farmland, he moves Ada his wife to the barren planes outside Holt to start from scratch, to make a farm.  

           It is there that Edith and Lyman are born.  It is unforgiving country, and while Roy is focused only on his farm building, Ada slowly loses hope in her life, gives up and dies.  The children Edith and Lyman, are then forced to live under their taskmaster father, and basically have no childhood at all.

    As they mature, Edith and Lyman’s only chance at normalcy is provided by John Roscoe, the neighboring boy who provides small hours of escape from their father’s  domineering.  John and Edith start to connect romantically, but then Roy the father, loses all of his fingers in a horrific farm accident and becomes entirely dependent on the kids, and the accident makes him even more cruel.  Roy totally destroys any hope of happiness in the future, for his children, especially Edith, who becomes his caregiver.  Nevertheless, the neighboring Roscoe family continues to provide whatever comfort they can to her.

    While the novel isn’t really uplifting, but the story does give the reader a realistic glimpse into the lives in the rural west, and does show both the wasted of lives of some and the kindness and humanity of others.  Its storyline makes it one of the most memorable stories I have ever read.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Nature Never Sleeps

     Back in the late 1970’s when we moved into our place in McBride, everything you see in the foreground, all the way back to the tall tree you see in the background of the photo, used to be our neighbor’s field and garden.  None of the trees you see in the mid-area of the photo were there.  Mrs Nail, our lanky elderly neighbor, used to carry water down to the garden to water her vegetables.  She stopped gardening later in the 1980’s, and once the land was left alone, Nature moved in.

    There is now a thick grove of spruce trees that established themselves at one end, a variety of willows, and cottonwood trees at the other, with tall grasses squeezed in between them.  Nature has slowly encroached into, and taken over what used to be her garden.  When given a chance to spread, Nature will take advantage of it.

    So far this summer we have been getting a lot of showers, and I have been very busy keeping Nature from encroaching and trying to take over our lawn and garden,.  I have mowed down numerous tiny aspen trees that have sprouted up from the spread of tree roots, beneath the lawn.  I can’t help but think, if I, or future owners of our property, stopped maintaining our lawn and pasture, in a few decades, it too would look like the photo above.

    

View my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Back to the Office After the Fire Camp

      Fortunately the whole fire flap had ended on a Friday, so that gave me the weekend to unwind.  After all of the long hours and days of being away from home and working on the fire, when I did finally get back home, I found myself wandering around blitzed, without direction.  After days on a fire, it always took a while to return to normal.

    Back at work on Monday, I found myself faced with all of work that had continued to flow onto my desk while I was away at the fire.   There was a long list of maps that were waiting for me to create and of course, there was the usual flow of memos and other office generated paper that had to be shuffled through and dealt with.

    Gregor, one of my co-workers had been very keen on some diamond stock, telling everyone at work it had potential to make a lot of money.  Being very fiscal conservative, I was very skeptical, but a few of the people in the office bought in.  On that first day back at work after the fire, news broke that the diamond stock had crashed.  Poor Gregor lost $6,000 and a couple of my other friends at work were scrambling around looking to quickly sell off their diamond stock.

      On the positive side of being sent away to work on the fire, I had worked a lot of overtime and had earned an extra forty hours that I could take either in pay or in time off.  

    That first day back at work, I also learned the vacation ban put on all Forest Service personnel in the Province had been lifted.  That was good news because we had been all set to go on a camping trip to some of the Canadian prairie parks for a vacation, but the provincial vacation ban had been decreed on the day before we had planned to head off.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

I Can Hardly Wait to See the Ear of Corn

     Having grown up in Indiana, I know what a corn plant is supposed to look like (Knee high by the forth of July).  Obviously, this corn plant is way shy of that.  In fact, this whole variety of fast growing corn that I planted is extremely puny-looking.  I started them in the house, then transplanted them outside, but outside was still too cold for them, but I guess they tried.

    What surprised me was that despite the hardships they endured, this plant has sent out tassels and a small ear is ready to be pollenated.  I can’t wait to see what happens.  Maybe I will get one of those miniature ears of corn you sometimes see in a salad.

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

A Bird In The Hand

     A couple of times each summer, I find a panicking bird in my greenhouse.  Usually it is a hummingbird, terrified and banging against the glass trying to get out.  I have a small butterfly net that I use to trap the hummers against the glass, then gently grab the tiny fragile creature and let it loose outside. 

    Yesterday when I was watering my chili pepper plants I kept hearing a fluttering sound, but I couldn’t see anything or locate where the sound was coming from.  

    The sound kept repeating, and eventually I was able to find the source.  It was, I think, a vireo (the species I couldn’t determine.)   It was down in the narrow space in between the glass wall of the greenhouse and the wooden wall of the pepper plant bed.  As I tried to grab it, it kept trying to flee from my hand, fluttering from one end of the space to the other.  There wasn’t a whole lot of space for my hand to wrap around the bird and several time it escaped from my grasp.

    I was finally able to grab the terrified bird.  I took it outside the greenhouse and let it lose into the fresh air and freedom of the wilderness, but not before I took a couple of photos with my iPhone.  It was amazing that the photos turned out.  I couldn’t steady or operate the camera very well with my shaky left hand, and the poor bird wasn’t staying very still for its photo.

You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

1994: Chaos in the Fire Camp Continues

         On June 21st, I started telling you this story about a 1994 fire camp south of Valemount,.  If you remember, I had to get up at 5:00 but was soon wide awake after mistakenly brushing my teeth with Ben Gay, the ointment I used for a sore back.  Here is the rest of the day:

    I got to the fire camp an hour later.  It was dark and damp after the overnight rain and wind storm.  I found the Fire Camp chaotic and in disarray.  No one knew what was going on.  There was no Camp Boss or Fire Boss, and my job was not to run the camp, but to coordinate helicopter traffic.  I made a call to Valemount and they sent out both a Camp Boss and a Fire Boss. 

        While we were waiting, I had the fire fighters work to put camp back together after all of the wind and rain.  Grant, the Fire Boss arrived, but didn’t stay long because one of the fire fighters had a bleeding ulcer, so Grant had to drive him to Valemount.  He was gone for longer than I expected so I was the one who send out the crew to the fire.  

    The Fire Camp was not located in a very good spot.  It was in a field right beside a railroad track and trains seemed to be always parked on the track for a very long time, continually blocking our access to the highway and inhibiting a lot of what we needed to do.   This caused no end to snafus and a lot of ill feelings.

        That afternoon I had to run one of the First Nation’s fire fighters to the dentist in Valemount, because he had lost a filling.  That evening, another lightning storm blew through and we watched as lightning struck a tree which flamed up on the mountain slope across the highway, but fortunately the fire didn’t spread into the surrounding trees.  

    The next day I got to sleep in until 6:00 because of a heavy overnight rain.  I got to the staging area at 7:00, but Grant the Fire Boss again arrived late.  The heavy rain had extinguished the fire, so as soon as the fog lifted and the helicopter could take off, I sent the Kalum First Nation’s crew back to the fire to pick up the pumps, hoses, and other equipment.  It was decided to demobilize the camp and send the Kalum crew back home as soon as they returned to camp and all of the fire fighting equipment was off of the mountain.

    Once they and the equipment had been helicoptered back to the camp, I had the crew gather up all of their possessions, and boarded them onto a bus that would take them to Blue River, where they could be flown home on a plane.  However another glitch arose.  After they had all boarded the bus and were ready to head down Highway 5, the bus’s engine blew, which then sent us scrambling to find another bus to drive them to Blue River.

    We all had to hang around for hours before a new bus arrived, but eventually the fire fighters were on their way home.   I was then released from my duties and also headed home.  I had to make a stop at the Valemount dump to empty all the trash from the camp, that had been loaded onto the back of the Forestry pickup.   I also had to make a stop at the Valemount Fire Cache, where f the big shot “O Team” members (the big bosses) stood around chewing the fat. 

        I finally got back home at 7:00 in the evening.  I was tired and very happy to be back home, away from all of the chaos.  My wife and I took a refreshing dip in the pond to help renew me to my everyday life.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Dale Stephens: A Creative Talent In Everything

     Despite its small population, the Robson Valley sure possesses a disproportionate number of really creative people.   Last night we went to the opening of Dale Stephen’s work at McBride’s Valley Museum and I was blown away at what I saw. 

    I have known Dale for decades.  I knew he was a skilled woodworker, (he made the windows in my house), I knew he was an architectural designer (he designed many of the beautiful newer buildings in McBride), and I knew he was a talented musician (playing in several local bands), but his show at the museum opened my eyes to the many other creative skills that Dale possesses.  

    I discovered he is a skilled painter, sculptor, wood carver, and guitar maker.  Even the wooden frames that he made for his paintings and prints are beautiful.  Certainly, I knew Dale was a creative guy, but I was surprised at the vast range of his creativity, most of which he had kept hidden.

    That is Dale in the photo above in front of some of his architectural design illustrations.  Below are photos of a few of Dale’s creations that are on display at the Valley Museum for the next few months.  You should catch it if you can, it is a wonderful show of creativity. 

  View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca