An Unexpected Frost

     This year I decided to start my corn inside the house to give them a head start instead of planting the kernels outside in the garden like I usually did.  I figured that would increase my chances of actually getting some ears of corn this summer.  I must have started the corn too soon, because they grew too quickly in the house, and I felt pressured to plant them in the ground before they got too big.  

    Transplanting the corn in the ground didn’t really work out very well for me.  The spring weather remained cooler than the corn preferred and then on Wednesday night we got a frost.  I saw that the nighttime  temperature was due to dip below freezing, so I did cover my corn plants with a plastic sheet to protect them from the cold, but they still suffered.  Above you can see how forlorn my corn plants now look.

    On the positive side, that cold temperature did give me some the nice photos of mist on the pond that I showed you yesterday, and below is a shot of a frosted Lupine that I also took.  It got so cold that the drops of water that were nestled in the center of the Lupine foliage even froze.

    

You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Mist on the Pond

     While I take my camera with me just about every time I take my morning walk around the pond, usually I don’t find anything to take a photo of.  However on Wednesday morning there had been a frost overnight and the warmer water in the pond created a mist that I found very photogenic.  Here are a couple of pictures that I took of the mist hanging over the pond.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

A Walk Home From Town

     I like normal days when I can just stick to my regular routine, but yesterday wasn’t one of them.  I had made an appointment in McBride to get the winter tires taken off of the car and my summer tires put on.  Usually my wife will drive in with the car and I will follow with the pickup truck, we drop off the car, and we drive home in the truck, but yesterday, my wife could hardly walk because of a fall, so I decided I would just drive the car into town, drop it off, and then walk the five miles back to our house.

    It had been a beautiful morning with the sun shining, some fluffy clouds, and what looked like a good day for my walk, however by the time I got the car dropped off at the garage, the clouds had pretty much taken over the sky, and their was an unpleasant strong cold wind blowing.  Nevertheless, I was committed (or should have been) and I set off for home.

    I had biked the trip many many times, but I don’t remember ever walking it.  I had my camera along to take some photos along the way, and was disappointed at having a gray sky, but it was, what it was.      

    Here are some of the photos I took on my walk home.  Above you see Hwy. 16 east of McBride.  Below that is the old Koeneman log house at Koeneman Park, surrounded by dandelions.   The photo at the very bottom shows the white teepee on the opposite side of the Fraser River.

 I didn’t really have to walk all the way home, fortunately just as I got the the bottom of the steep Mennonite Hill, my neighbor Nick came along in his car, offering me a ride the rest of the way home, which I was happy to accept.n Park, surrounded by dandelions.  The photo at the bottom is a view across the Fraser River showing the white teepee.  I actually saw a few white caps on the river, proving that the wind was blowing pretty strong.

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Forget Me Nots

     This time of year, whenever I look out onto our yard I think of our long ago neighbor Mrs. Nail.  Back in 1977 when we moved to McBride, Virginia McKibben Nail was a tall, lanky, elderly woman, who had worked at the Harvard College Observatory for twenty years, and had written many published many papers on astronomy, but that was not why I think of her every spring.

    Mrs. Nail had been a member of the Alpine Club of Canada, and had gotten some Forget Me Not seeds from them which she planted in her yard.  Those Forget Me Nots have spread to our yard and because I always mow around them, instead of mowing them down, they proliferate.  I now have big patches of them growing in various places in my lawn, which I really enjoy seeing.  They give a flowery-meadow look to the yard.  That is them growing on the beside of our sidewalk in the photo below.

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A Vegas Back Story

      Two weeks after going to the Prince George chiropractor, we began our Spring Break by driving to Edmonton, then flying to Los Vegas.  I was still half crippled because of my painful back.  The pain continued in Los Vegas, and I even went to a Vegas chiropractor to try to get some relief.  The chiropractor made some “adjustments” on my back and remarked at how tight my back muscles were.  The relief I felt was temporary and a few hours later, I was in pain again.

    One night during our visit the family played Trivial Pursuit, (we had bought the game for $2.50 at a Vegas secondhand store).  I sat too long during the game which caused my back to really begin hurting again.  I couldn’t help but laugh at some of the questions in the game, and each time I did, streaks of pain shot through my back, but I couldn’t help myself.  At one point during the game, I leaned forward and laughed and the pain nearly knocked me out.  That night I opted to sleep on the floor instead of a bed, because of my back pain.

    That next morning I made the mistake of going back to the chiropractor again.  He tried to adjust my back but the muscles were too tight and he made it worse.  He hooked me up to an electric muscle stimulator on my buttocks.  Later he had me lay on my stomach and he pushed down hard on the small of my back, which was one of the most painful things I have experienced in my life.  After that chiropractor visit, I could hardly walk.  I spent the remainder of the day on my brother Rob’s couch.  

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

1994: Throwing Out My Back

     If I was smart, I would never touch a shovel, however living a rural lifestyle has always prevented me from being smart; there are just too many jobs that I needed to do using a shovel.  Quite often when I had to do those shoveling jobs, I threw out my back, and then had to live for days, or weeks, with a very painful back.  Sometimes if I was lucky, we could make the two and a half hour drive up to Prince George so the chiropractor would “adjust” my back, and I would be miraculously cured of pain, but that didn’t always work.

    Today I will start telling you about the throwing-out-my-back episode in 1994, when I had to deal with excruciating pain during our Spring Break after we flew to Las Vegas to visit some of my family.  The cartoon shows me shoveling snow, which was often the trigger to my back pain, but in 1994, it wasn’t shoveling snow that was the cause, it was shoveling a winter’s worth of goat manure and bedding out of my barn. 

    If you remember when I blogged about our 1992 trip to Costa Rica; before we left on the trip, I also shoveled out the barn, threw out my back, then suffered back pain, during most of our exploration of Costa Rica.  In 1994, two week before we started on our trip to Vegas, I again spent a day shoveling manure out of the barn, and again, I threw threw my back out.  Five days later, as my back pain intensified, I took a day off of work, and we drove up to the chiropractor in Prince George, seeking  relief.  

    Here is the re-write account from my diary:

    I had to shovel the massive amounts of the winter’s accumulation of manure out of the barn, and as was usually the case when I did that job, I threw out my back.  The pain wasn’t too bad, so I just made myself live with it.  But then days later, when I bent down in front of the VCR to insert a movie video, my back really went out.  It was very painful, so my wife had to drive me up to Prince George to the chiropractor.  

        He restored me, and while we were up in the “Big City” we walked around and did some shopping before we headed home.  But after the long hours of driving back to McBride, all the sitting in the car and bumping around on the highway, my chiropractic “cure” was totally erased, and my back was just as bad as it was when we left McBride that morning.

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A Couple of Stories About Mom

     Today being Mother’s Day, I will relate a couple of memories I have of my mother.

      My mom was a real trooper; no matter what the ordeal, she accepted it, and faced it without grumbling.  Both she, and my father sacrificed and dedicated their lives to me, and my sisters and brothers.  

    Mom loved to quilt and knit.  I remember once when the family was about to head off for a camping vacation, we found Mom in the living room, unraveling the sweater she had been knitting.  When asked if she had made a mistake, she replied, “No, I was going to take it along, and I just wanted to have some knitting that I could work on while we were on our vacation.’

    I don’t remember exactly how old she was when this next incident happened, but she must have been in her mid-eighties or so, but she was still mowing the lawn on my sister’s riding lawn mower.  I was surprised to hear she was still doing that. 

    The edge of Mom’s lawn dropped off in a steep four foot slope down to a lane.  When she was mowing, she got too close to the edge, and the mower tipped, threw Mom off, and both she and the mower, rolled down the short slope to the lane.

    Mom lay there dazed for a while, then hoped that someone would come driving down the lane, see her, and help her get up.  She waited and waited, but no one came, eventually she gave up waiting, managed to get herself upright, and then she walked slowly back to the house to recuperate from the accident.   Mom was always very self-reliant.

    Mom lived to the ripe old age of 102.

    I am thinking of you today, Mom.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Spring Clouds

     When Spring finally arrives in the Robson Valley, most of our attention is focused on the plants that are starting to display the green of their foliage, but the skies also have something to show off.  We get big white billowy clouds shaded with hints of gray turbulence.  They build over the mountains and are in constant movement, periodically breaking apart to show the intense blue sky behind them.  Watching the clouds is one of the joys of springtime.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

A Visiting Bear

     We drove into town yesterday to plant some carrots in the Community Garden.  When we came home we drove down our driveway and were surprised to see a black bear there, looking up at us and just as surprised as we were.  It then scrambled over to the side of the yard and climbed a few feet up the trunk of a cottonwood tree and stopped there, watching us, as it decided what to do.

    I took a photo with my iPhone, then got out of the car, shouted and waved my hands at the bear, but it just continued to cling to the tree.  I then walked to the house to get my camcorder so I could take some better photos of the bear, but of course, by the time I had my camera and was back outside, the bear had disappeared into the bush.

    While we had been in town, the black bear had dragged the container of tin cans that we had saved for recycling out from the carport and onto the edge of the driveway, where he dumped it over.  Even though we had washed all the cans, I guess some of them still had the scent of food on them.

    The bear had also turned over our barbecue grill and left it sprawled on our back deck.

    This morning, as I walked by the tree the bear had been on, I spotted a tin can in the woods.  It was dented and had a hole in its side, where the bear had bitten into it.  Bears have pretty strong jaws.

    While a lot of people are terrified of bears, the ones we have around our house are not at all threatening.  They just want to quietly find some food, and not encounter any humans.  I worry at lot about the survival of wildlife in this deteriorating world, so I was happy to see that this bear, who seemed very healthy, had made it through the winter.

    

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Wild Boys at the Jam

     I don’t have a recent photo of our jam in the Train Station Lobby, so you will have to live with this older one that I have shown you before.  When this story I am about to tell you took place, we were in the same place, but there were about an audience of 10 sitting at the far end, and not all of our normal players were present.

    This happened two weeks ago:   Our jam was playing as normal, with about a half an hour left to play when two young guys, probably under twenty years old, came in to watch and listen.  They were not our usual type of clientele, but they were very enthusiastic and sat down on the floor.   Monika our fiddler, usually brings along some small percussion instruments, and in between the songs, she handed a couple rhythm instruments to the two guys.

    During the next songs, the two “wild boys” really got into the music, and were really putting their whole hearts into playing along.  Their enthusiasm and energy was infectious and it soon spread to all of us players, driving us, and causing us to put much more vigor into our playing and singing.

    We always just go around to circle and let everyone choose a song.  The choice soon came to one of the wild boys and I was really surprised at what song he choose.  Being so young, I figured he would choose some rock-oriented song, but he chose Woody Guthrie’s “Hobo’s Lullaby.”  I was amazed that it was a song he even knew.  It is a slow song about a hobo riding a boxcar thinking about whether there would be any policemen in heaven.

    After the jam, Ace, one of the boys came up to me, all happy about discovering our jam playing.  I asked him where he was from and he said they had just come in on a boxcar (the Train Station is right beside the railroad tracks of course.)  I wasn’t totally sure that was the truth, but he sure looked and acted like it might be.

    Anyway, everyone at the jam was sure effected by the enthusiasm those two wild boys brought to the evening, and everyone left, still buzzing with the infectious energy they had transmitted.  It was a very fun and memorable jam.

    Last week at our jam, two of McBride’s uniformed ambulance responders who were on standby, came in to listen.  They sat in chairs just inside the door.  As we were playing, I noticed two guys look through the window in the door, but they didn’t come in.  I wondered if they were the wild boys again.  I also wondered if, when they saw the two uniformed first aid attendants, they thought they might be police, and so they didn’t want to come inside.  I don’t know if that was the case or not, but if it was the two wild boys, I was sorry they didn’t come in to share their infectious enthusiasm and energy again.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Sacrificing Principles for Protection

     Ever since we were evacuated because of a forest fire a couple of years ago, I have spent hours cutting down and pruning back bushes in my yard to help lessen fire danger to our house.  Most people, liking bare, mono-cultured lawns, would have never allowed those native bushes to grow in their yards in the first place, but I have always felt strongly about preserving natural habitat for our wildlife, so I was very tolerant about preserving them when I could.  

    This was especially true of Red Osier Dogwoods, a bush that produced white berries.  I had several of those that grew close to our house.  I was always happy to watch the birds and even bears eating those berries in the Fall.

    But having all those bushes close to the house and shop created possible fuel for falling ash, if a wildfire came, so with much sadness, I have cut them down and tried to clear them away from my buildings.   Of course, bushes want to live, so in the spring, the bushes I have cut down, send out new shoots, and even though I feel torn about doing it, I have to cut them off.  The photo above shows the new shoots one bush sent out this year.

    I also have been having mixed feelings about mowing.  In Canada there is a movement called “No Mow May”.  that encourages people not to mow their lawns in May, especially if you have things like dandelions and other small flowering plants among the grass, because many insects and bees depend upon those flowers in the early spring.  At the same time, letting the “grass” grow tall can create fast fuel for fires if it is very dry.  So what to do, what to do?

    Fortunately for me, our property includes fields and forests that also provide habitat for wildlife and birds, so I guess, what I do in my yard won’t effect them too much.

    Yesterday I also put up five water sprayers on the roof of my house and shop to help prevent forest fires from destroying them.  I used to look forward to the arrival of summer, but now its arrival also triggers fear of forest fires.

    The old photo below shows a black bear on the edge of our yard, checking things out in our yard.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Magic Hour in the Robson Valley

     In photography, the golden hour is the period of daytime shortly after sunrise or before sunset, during which daylight is redder and softer than when the sun is higher in the sky. The golden hour is also sometimes called the magic hour, especially by cinematographers and photographers.

    While this photo doesn’t feature the redness of the sky mentioned in the definition, the sun is low on the horizon, backlighting the tops of the newly-leaved trees, giving them a magical glow.  

    During Robson Valley winter, the sun is very far to left of this photo and sets at the east end of our Valley.  Only briefly in the Spring and Fall, does it set directly behind these mountains.  Already it is setting and in the far to the right of this photo, and as summer approaches, it will be setting at the far  west end of the Valley, and not behind the Cariboo Mountain Range.

    While we miss the brilliant colors of the sunsets from our house this time of year, during the summer, I do enjoy experiencing the backlit trees when the sun is low on the horizon.  

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Logging Slash Burnpile, A Painting

         For Earth Day our local museum had a show of art relevant to that theme.  I contributed an older painting I had done entitled “Slash Burnpile”.   Below is what I wrote about the painting:

    I worked for the BC Forest Service for 23 years.  I was always appalled by the incredible amount of waste generated by industrial logging.  This is an image of the burning inferno of one of the “slash” piles of wood that was left behind after logging. 

    The slash is burned just to get rid of it.  We heat our house with a wood stove, and every time I see all of the smoke from a  “slash burn” or a burn pile, I can't help but shake my head in dismay at the waste of wood that could otherwise be used for something of benefit.

    All of the burning of unused trees is not only prevents the organic nutrients in the trees from returning to the forest soil, but it also puts the large amount of carbon which was locked inside the trees, up into the atmosphere.  It is that ever-increasing carbon in the atmosphere, that is changing our climate and causing the destructive droughts, ever-increasing heat, and massive floods that we now see almost daily on the news.

View my other paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Welcome Back, Hummingbirds

     In the Spring, residents in the Robson Valley always look forward to the return of the hummingbirds.  We have two species that nest here:  The rust-colored Rufus (shown in the photos) and the smaller, green, Calliope Hummingbird.  I had put up my hummingbird feeder a few days ago, and was happy to see a few hummers come for a sugary drink.  

    Because hummingbirds are so unusual and distinct looking, they are quite noticeable, and we would certainly be aware if they didn’t return, but a study released on May 1st by Cornel University, has shown that there are three billion birds of various North American species that have disappeared since 1970’s.  There are a few species that I used to notice around here, that I haven’t seen for years.   Their disappearance is largely due to the loss of their habitat.  

    I was happy to see the hummers are back from wintering in the US South and Southwest.  It is truly remarkable that these tiny and fragile-looking creatures can make such a long trips back and forth every year, and hopefully they will have a successful breeding and nesting season this summer in the Robson Valley.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Suddenly There Are Leaves

     I was surprised when I walked around the pond this morning.  When I was at the far end and looked back toward the house, I could see huge swatches of green.  It seemed like overnight, the trees grew leaves.  It happened so quickly.

    There is an old farmer’s saying that when the Aspen leaves are as big as a mouses ear, it is time to plant your garden.  Most of the green you see in the photo are leaves of Aspen trees, so I guess it’s time for gardening.  The saying inspired the cartoon below.

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But Before I Do That

     Often in the early morning when I am still half asleep and lying in bed, I think about the upcoming day and decide what I am going to do.  Yesterday in bed, I decided I was going to spend the morning planting the potatoes.

     I store my potatoes in the crawlspace under the house, and while that works well during the cold winter, by the time early spring rolls around, the temperature in our crawlspace becomes a bit too warm and the potatoes start to sprout.  I figured, if they are starting to sprout, they might as well be sprouting outside in the garden, rather than in the crawlspace.

    When I got outside ready to start the potato planting, I saw that the garden area where I was going to plant them had not been totally tilled, so before I could actually plant the potatoes, I had to do some tilling.  I walked over to my rototiller, then remembered that it was broken.  The cable that controls the clutch that makes it move had snapped,the last time I had used it.  So before I could till the garden, I had to fix the rototiller.

    Since I didn’t have a new cable and there would be no such thing in our tiny village, I had to jerry-rig something up, so I could use the tiller.  That meant walking up to my shop several times to get all of the different the tools I needed for my jerry-rigging job, but eventually I was able to rig up a way to use the clutch, so I was all set to till area in the garden for the potatoes.

    I started tilling and when I got to the last small strip left to till, I noticed that growing there among the weeds, were some tiny lettuce plants that had come up from the seeds of last year’s lettuce.  I couldn’t let those infant lettuce plants go to waste, so I turned off the rototiller, went to the greenhouse to get a small shovel, and began to dig up the small lettuce plants so I could transplant them somewhere else, away from where I was going to plant the potatoes.

    I got out the string guide to make a straight row, and then spent fifteen minutes planting a row of lettuce. 

    Once that was done, I restarted the rototiller, and tilled final section of the potato area.  By the time I finished, it was time for lunch, so it wasn’t until the afternoon that I was actually able to dig some trenches for rows, put my sprouting potatoes into the ground, and cover them with soil.  

    My plan of planting the potatoes, had seemed so straight forward and simple in the morning when I was lying in bed.  By this time in my life, I should have learned that around here, jobs are always more complicated than they seem at first.

View my Paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca