The Lushness I Love

     For us, June has traditionally been a month of showers, as the winds from the Pacific carry moisture to our mountains.  That didn’t really happen much over the last two years, which left the Robson Valley with draught conditions, but fortunately this year we have been back to normal.  All of the many rain showers have cause an explosion of growth in the plants.

    I took the photo above of our garden from our balcony.  I prefer garden photos from a distance, that way you can’t really see all of the weeds, that also benefitted from all of the showers.  This afternoon I will have to go over to the Milne’s where we grow our garlic and weed the bed.  David said the weeds there are now taller than the garlic.

    The long parade of showers have also caused our lawn to grow like crazy, but they have also kept the lawn wet, which has hampered my ability to mow it.  

    My lupine have also had a good year.   Having flowered, they are now on their decline, but the photo below shows that they still have some color and look good.

    Take look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

A Haircut For Kona And A Quick Trip To Jasper

     We had a busy day yesterday.  We had made an appointment to get a grooming session for Kona in Valemount (a hour east of McBride).  After we dropped Kona off at Critter Care, we had a lot of time to kill before she would be done, so we drove east for another hour and go to Jasper.  There we visited with our friends John and Di, who had generously picked up some of Kona’s medicine for us at the Jasper Vet’s on Friday (The vet clinic wasn’t open on the weekend).

    Jasper is still recovering from the massive and destructive wildfire that swept through the townsite last summer.  We were curious about how it was doing.  While the mountains that surround Jasper were denuded of its tree cover and looked pretty dismal last winter, at least now they were starting to show a bit of green as plants and small trees start to establish themselves on the burnt slopes. 

    We found a surprisingly large number of tourists in Jasper, milling around and visiting the shops and restaurants that weren’t destroyed by the fire.  It was good to see so many tourists because they will help Jasper recover economically.  Jasper was left with only two gas stations that weren’t destroyed and they were both very busy with cars lined up on the street waiting to buy gas.  

    After a bit of shopping in Jasper, we headed back to Valemount to pick up Kona, who always looks like a totally different dog after a haircut.

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Eventide by Kent Haruf

 Eventide by Kent Haruf

           Eventide is the second novel in Haruf’s trilogy.   It continues with the lives of some of Plainsong’s most beloved characters, and adds some interesting new characters to the mix.  The story is both very touching and very disturbing, as the reader becomes engulfed in the realistic situations that occur.  It is very emotionally gripping and at one point as I read, I had tears streaming down my face.  

           The elderly McPheron brothers, who have become one of my favorite characters of any novel I have read, continue their lives with both heartbreaking and touching events.  We are introduced to welfare-dependent, and mentally challenged parents who are doing the best they can for their children, but are unable to deal with an abusive relative who, after moving in, is beating and brutalizing the already traumatized kids.  

           Haruf is a wonderful writer who has beautifully and realistically, captured the residents living around small town Holt, Colorado.  I love the way he has shown the humanity of their lives.  

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

Plainsong by Kent Haruf

         It is always wonderful to discover an author whose novels really make a connection to you.  I was fortunate to come upon Plainsong by Kent Haruf, and immediately became captivated by the engaging characters he created in small rural town of Holt, in the high plains of Colorado.  Since that discovery I have eagerly read three more of his other novels, and enjoyed and was touched by each of them.  Here is a review of Plainsong:

Plainsong by Kent Haruf

    This was one of the best novels I have ever read.  Even before I got halfway through it, I began to dread that it was soon going to end, and I wanted more.  Fortunately, I later discovered that it was the first novel of a trilogy (Plainsong, Eventide, and Benediction) which I am pretty sure it will take up the few of the unresolved events that took place in Plainsong.

    Why did I like this novel so much?  Certainly it was the realness of the small town characters of Holt, Colorado:  The ordinary lives they lived, and the everyday problems they were faced with.  What I really loved was the humanity of those main characters and how they tried to help one another out.  Everything about the novel seemed realistic and genuine, the dialogues, the locations, and the lives that were being lived.  Believability has always been one of the main characteristics that I look for when I read.

    The characters all seem like people you would find in a small rural town; this one in the windswept high plains near Denver.  The main characters include a  high school teacher with a strong moral compass, raising his two young sons after his wife, who was going through an emotional crisis, gave up on her marriage and rural life, to move away to Denver and live with her sister.  

          There is a woman high school teacher who shows compassion to a seventeen year old student, after the girl’s mother kicked her out of the house, when she discovered that her daughter was pregnant.  

           There are are also the two elderly McPheron batchlor brothers, who grew up on their own, when as teens they lost their parents in an automobile accident and then lived together working the family ranch, where they never developed many social skills with women.  They lived narrow, joyless, work-oriented, lives on their cattle ranch which changed suddenly, when faced with a situation that ended up giving meaning and purpose to the drab and isolated lives that they lived.  The McPherons became one of my all time favorite memorable characters from a novel (the other being Augustus in Lonesome Dove).

    Kent Haruf did a wonderful job or knitting the lives of these realistic rural characters together to construct a touching and engaging story of life in a small, contemporary  western town.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

My Forty-Five Year War With The Canadian Thistle

     Let me start out by saying that the name “Canadian Thistle” is a misnomer.  The hateful plant is really native to Europe and Asia, not Canada, but it somehow got introduced here and seemed to liked what it found, and has happily spread across the Canada (and elsewhere).  I have thistles growing on our property and I have been whacking them down every year before they seed, to no avail.  

    One of the things that makes the Canadian thistle such a curse-worthy plant is that it is covered with nasty spines.  Its stem, its leaves, the spines are everywhere.  It always seems that the spines the line the edge of its flimsy leaves wouldn’t cause much problems, but they are just as painful as those on its stout stem.  They easily poke through your skin, and even light gloves.  The other day I was pulling thistles growing beside my greenhouse and had to use very thick leather gloves to protect my hands.

    I was always amazed when I had a herd of Angora goats.  When the thistles matured, the goats would eat the leaves.  I would stand there gobsmacked to see them roll the spiny leaves around in their mouths, seemingly without pain.

    One of the reasons that thistles are such an invasive plant is that they spread underground through its extensive root system (thus the cartoon).  You can cut them down or pull them up, but the vigorous roots still remain in the ground to grow another day.  

    When I first encountered thistles on our property I used my grandfather’s heavy wooden swinging scythe to cut them down.  Later, tired of the work, I bought a motorized lawn trimmer with a blade to do the job, but like I said, although I cut the plant, preventing it from flowering, its roots soon sprouted another plant, and kept growing, year after year after year.  I have some thistles in my garden, and they always come up in the same spots to greet me in the summer, despite my pulling them up every year.

    When I cut the long grass in my field with my lawn trimmer to use for hay, even when the hay was deteriorated and I would use it as mulch for the garden, I often ended up with thistle spines in my hand from the old thistles in the hay.  Thistles are just an all around nasty plant.  

    I know some of you out there would just tell me to use a pesticide to kill the thistles, but I am hard-headed and just won’t use biocide poisons on my property.  I would rather just keep cutting and pulling them, and then cursing them when they come back up.

    Below is a photo of one of the thistles I pulled up by my greenhouse.  All of that dark area beneath my hand is root, more than a foot (30cm) long.  More of that root is still in the ground.  The bottom photo shows one of my goats eating a thistle leaf.

    

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

That Wasn't Very Helpful

     McBride has a community garden.  It has planting boxes available for those that want to do some gardening.  We always like to support efforts like that, so every year my wife rents two boxes; one for ourselves, and one to grow carrots and beets for the Community Garden organization to sell to raise money.

    She did that again this year.  I helped her plant the hundreds of tiny carrot seeds and beet seeds in the box to for the Community Garden.  She planted other vegetable seeds in our second box.  We left the garden happy to have done the planting and could sit back to watch them grow.

    A couple of weeks later when we visited the garden to check if anything was sprouted, we were dismayed at what we found.  Some good-natured person had noticed that the soil in our boxes was low, and since there was still a lot of additional top-up soil available in the pile, and thinking they would be doing us a favor, wheelbarrowed loads of soil to our boxes and filled them to the rim with new soil.  This of course, smothered all the carrot and beets we had planted and destroyed any chance of them coming up.  

    Discouraged (and miffed) at what had happened, over the weekend we once again planted more carrot and beet seeds in the bed.  Hopefully, this time they will be left undisturbed to grow.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Michelle and Stephane: Great Musician in the Barn

     I haven’t been to a sit-down music concert for years, but one of our jam members arranged to have some musician friends who were passing through, to do a performance in a spectacular local “barn” (the most beautiful “barn” I have ever seen).  Having never heard of Michelle and Stephane, I wasn’t expecting a whole lot, but from the duo’s very first song, I was blown away.

      Their vocal harmonies were solid, crisp, and tight, taking some unexpected turns in their amazing vocal range.  When Stephane’s fingers started streaking up and down the neck of his guitar, I sat in my chair with my mouth open, considering hanging up my guitar for good.  He was an amazing guitarist.  Michelle on her stand-up bass gave a solid floor to the rapid guitar runs.  

    Their music was more Country-oriented than I was used to, but they did the songs so professionally and with so much energy, I was quickly converted.  They did do one song I was familiar with:  “Seven Bridges Road” (also known as “Southern Sky) a song where the Eagles’s show off their amazing vocal harmonies, ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U61bPI8K04s )  Michelle and Stephane nailed the song with just two voices. 

    The two live in a small town in Alberta and I don’t know how much time they spend touring, but I was sure happy they had come to McBride and that I got to see and hear them.

    The other great thing about the concert was being in Froese’s spectacular barn.  It was wonderful to sit there, listening to the toe-tapping music while looking out of the big barn open-air window beside the duo, onto the blue slopes of the Rocky Mountains.   It was a great way to spend a gentle spring evening.

    Below is a photo of Froese’s beautiful barn.  The concert was held on the second floor, with the top two windows open.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Turtle Stories

         I read a dramatic and tragic story concerning a turtle the other day.  A pilot and the passenger in a small plane were killed in North Carolina when, as the landed, the pilot lifted a wheel of the plane off of the runway to avoid hitting a turtle.  The action caused the plane go out of control and crash, killing the occupants.  Just the mention of turtles put me in mind of the experiences I had with turtles.

    Turtles aren’t native to the Robson Valley, but in August of 1993 I was quite amazed to come upon  a turtle crossing Mountain View Road as I biked to work.  I picked the creature up, put it in my backpack and later took it to the news paper so they could report the unusual visitor to the Valley and take a photo of it.  I kept the turtle confined in a box throughout the day and after work, biked it home and put in the tiny little fish pond we had beside our deck (This was before I had built my pond.)

        The turtle was still at the fish pond the next morning, but during my absence during the day when I was back at work, it took off.   It was an a Eastern Painted Turtle, but I had no idea how it had gotten to the Robson Valley.

Of course there are very few secrets in the Robson Valley, and during one of our coffee breaks at work, I learned that Rex Hatchard had gotten four turtles down at the Okanagan, brought them to the Robson Valley and released them at Horseshoe Lake.  I guess the one I saw made it from Horseshoe Lake to the Fraser River, swam a bit, then climbed up the steep bank up to Mountain View Road.

A year later in mid-July of 1994, I had my second encounter with a turtle.  Elaine a friend and one of my Forestry co-workers, was just just driving back to our office after checking some recreation sites.   She flagged me down as I was just starting to head out to the highway for my bike home.  She had a surprise for me.  She had found another painted turtle, she had spotted this one as it was crossing Highway 16 by Bircher’s field (beside the Fraser River).  She had watched in panic as three cars passed over it, but luckily avoided hitting it.  

When I finally got home, Elaine came by and delivered the turtle to our house and we carried it down to the pond and set it free in the water.  It seemed happy to be free in the water again and we watched as it swam around exploring its new surroundings.  Hours later when my wife and I went in for a swim and we could see the turtle periodically poking its head out of the water watching us.  It was fun to watch the turtle watching us every afternoon as we took a swim.

        The turtle spent the rest of the summer at the pond and even over wintered, and it was back the following year when things warmed up.

You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

A Chaotic Fire Camp in 1994

         (The photo above has nothing to do with this story, but it does show a helicopter and a hotshot fire fighter.)

    Smoke from forest fires burning across BC had been filling the Robson Valley air and obscuring the mountains, and that next day after biking home from the Forestry Office,  I took another swim in the new pond and ate supper.   I then got a call from Dale Cinnamon, who looked after Fire Fighting in our district.   He wanted me to drive to Camp Creek south of Valemount to monitor all the helicopter traffic  working a nearby fire.

    I ended up spending my nights in a nearby Bed and Breakfast.  Every day I had to get up at 5:00 to drive to the nearby fire camp.  There were 50-60 fire fighters that were helicoptered to the fire from the camp every morning, and returned to the camp in the evening. During the day I had to monitor several radio channels to keep track of all of the helicopters that were taking off and landing.  I oversaw all of the requested equipment and supplies for the crews fighting the fire, making sure they were sent off to the right place, and I had to coordinate the helicopters when they flew in to fuel up .  It was quite chaotic at first, but eventually I got the hang of it.  

    That first day there, the Camp Creek Fire which was being fought was pretty much damped down, but then the Swift Creek Fire which was on the other side of Valemount blew up, and two of the three helicopters we had, got reassigned to ferry crews from our camp to fight that fire.

    That evening, very strong gusts of winds came up which blew down the fire fighters tents.  The exhausted fire fighters had to then scramble to put their tents back up in the furious winds.  The winds gave way to lightning strikes and rain.  After a long and stressful day I finally got back to the Bed and Breakfast, it 8:00, but I then had to spend time making up, and updating the lists of fire fighters on each fire for the next day.

    Even though I was half asleep at 5:00 AM the next morning, I got out of bed quickly, and climbed into my clothes, to begin my usual morning routine.  I went to brush my teeth and as soon as I got the toothbrush in my mouth I realized something was wrong.  It didn’t take me long to realize I had mistakenly put the white cream from a Ben Gay tube (my back pain lotion) on my tooth brush instead of toothpaste, not a pleasant experience, but an effective wake-up call.  

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Hanging On The Edge

     The Fraser River keeps flowing and as it does, it eats away the soil on its bank.  This is the view of a well house now sitting in a precarious position on the Fraser’s eroding bank.  It can be seen from the Highway 16 Fraser River Bridge just east of McBride.  

    There used to be a grove of birch trees neighboring the well house, but after being undercut by the Fraser, the last of them fell into the river a month ago, leaving the doomed well house alone to ponder its dubious fate.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Our Two Big Dead Cedars

     We have two big dead cedars in our yard.  The biggest of the two was already dead in 1977 when we bought the property.  We could see its dead naked top from the road and it helped us locate our driveway at the very beginning, before we became more familiar with our neighborhood.  I was so happy that the smaller of the two cedars was still alive and I built a fence around it to prevent it from being damaged when I had goats.

    We live in a temperate rain forest which is characterized by huge cedar trees.  I love those dark cedar forests with the ancient cedars, and I was proud to have the big living cedar growing in our yard.  Unfortunately about four years ago it died, and I was heart broken.  I have left the two giants standing.

    A few days ago I walked out from the carport and looked over toward the dead cedars and noticed that from that angle, you can’t really tell that they are dead.  When you walk through an ancient cedar forest all that you can see of the trees are their big gray trunks, and that is all you can see from our house, so from that angle, the two dead trees still give the impression that they are alive.  Of course I would love it if they were alive, but at least their dead trunks still give me a bit of that cedar forest feeling.

    Below is a photo.  The foliage that you see is from a nearby willow tree.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

The Last Days Of Night by Graham Moore

      I have always been intrigued by that time period when electricity was being developed for us and those inventors like Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, so I thought this historical fiction would be interesting, but it was way above my expectations, and I didn’t expect it to be such a page turner.

    The novel’s characters were real people and the author did a lot of research to get their personalities right.  The events that happen in the novel are also accurate, however the author did have to use his imagination to fill out some of them to fit the plot.  He did do some playing with the timeline to help the storyline.

    The novel follows the life of Paul Cravath, a newly graduated lawyer , who was hired by the Westinghouse Company, who was being sued by Thomas Edison over their lightbulbs, who Edison claimed was an infringement of his patent.  This was a huge lawsuit, whose outcome would determine the future of electrification in the US.  Edison was extremely wealthy, powerful, and domineering, and no one believed that Westinghouse had a chance of winning.  Edison is shown as he really was, not the kindly inventor most people imagine, but a conniving and devious narcissist, who would stop at nothing to win.  

    One of the most interesting characters in the story was Nikola Tesla, the bizarre, yet genius, electrical prodigy. Tesla had a strange, abrasive, and obstinate personality, and bizarre habits (he seemed to live on saltine crackers.)  He developed alternating electrical current, which jeopardized the future monopoly of Edison’s company, who used direct electrical current.  Westinghouse saw the advantages of alternating current which, unlike direct current, could travel great distances down the wires. Westinghouse’s young lawyer, Paul Cravath, had to fight to stay above water in all of the chaos Edison created to stay the dominant company.

    Besides the struggle with the electrical giants, Paul also struggles with his love interest, a famous singer of the time, and also a real person, who Paul later married.

While I generally enjoy most of the historical fiction I read, The Last Days of Night was a standout, both in describing what was going on in the 1890’s, but also in putting it all together into  a really interesting read.

You can look at my  paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

"Volunteers" In The Garden

     Our garden always looks rather chaotic.  I generally plant things in rows, but plants and seeds left over from the previous year always come up, not in the rows, making things look pretty haphazard.  In the photo above, there is a row of potatoes on the right side and a row of lettuce on the left side.  In between the rows are a couple of “volunteer” potato plants that came up unexpectedly.  Obviously, last fall when I dug my potatoes, I missed some and they remained in the ground all winter and then when the weather warmed, up they came.  

    When I see volunteers, I usually just leave them to grow, thus the chaos.  Actually that row of lettuce was all volunteers that came up in another section of the garden.   I spotted them when they were still small and transplanted them into a row.

    The poppies in the garden always spread a lot of seeds, so poppy plants come up all over the garden.  I usually don’t weed them out, because I like the color their blooms add to the garden.  The photo just below shows a couple of very healthy poppy plants that came up in the middle of my potato row. 

    The photo at the very bottom is my prized volunteer.  It is a foxglove.  A decade ago we had lots of foxgloves in our garden, and then we had a very wet summer that wiped them out and we hadn’t had any foxgloves since.  Last fall when I was putting the garden to sleep, I noticed that a couple of small foxglove volunteers had come up, so I transplanted them where they wouldn’t be wiped by tilling.  This year, one of them is flowering.  The pale yellow flower is not as spectacularly beautiful as some of the ones we used to have, but I was happy just to see any foxglove flowers at all.  

    While volunteer plants do cause some chaos in the garden, to me they always seem like free gifts, so I generally let them grow.

You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Amphibians in the Pond

     In 1994 on that first year of my pond, I was anxious to see wildlife establish itself in that new environment.  It was exciting for me to discover the new creatures that were suddenly making an appearance on and around the pond.  I was constantly walking around it trying to spot new critters.

    One day and then the days following it, I began to see what looked like small minnow-sized fish in the water.  They would quickly dart away when they noticed me.  This left me very confused, because I hadn’t put any fish in the pond, and there was no way they could get there naturally.  

    One hot day after biking home from work and ready for a swim in the cold water, I decided to take my mask and snorkel with me to see what I could see underwater, and I happened to come upon one of those “fish” that had left me so confused.  I quickly saw that it wasn’t fish I was seeing, but salamanders.  I saw two salamanders who were fully developed.  They had long lizard-like bodies with small legs and light patterns on their backs.  I had seen salamanders around our property before, and I was happy they had discovered the pond.

    I also had toads on our property, but I was still amazed in the spring to see so many of them gather in the pond, make their chirping sounds to call a mate.  I had never had any frogs on my property, but was able to catch a few in other lake in the Valley, and establish them in my pond.

    I was happy yesterday to see my first frog of the year.  There never seem to be very many of them, but I occasionally while walking around the pond, I hear a splash as a frog escapes into the water.  Below is a photo I was able to take with my iPhone of the frog I saw.  I was surprised it let me get so close to take the picture.

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Waiting For Something To Happen

     Here is a bored Kona with her head resting on the seat of the couch, waiting for us to do something.  Kona is an extremely high-maintenance dog, and is totally dependent upon us for her entertainment.  If we put her outside, she is only out there for about three minutes, then she comes back in.  If we are outside with her she will pick up one of her sticks and chew it and be satisfied, but that only lasts as long as we are outside with her.  We get tired of constantly being her social directors.

    Kona is sure an unusual dog.  Most dogs like to be outside and can entertain themselves for hours, or just take a snooze in the sun, but not Kona.  She requires one of us to be out there with her, if she is to stay.

    I’m not sure why Kona always likes the position you see her in; sitting up with her head resting on something, but she does it a lot.  I would have thought that just lying down would be more comfortable.

    Kona, Kona, Kona, why can’t you be more normal?

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Unplanned Hoarding

     We had dental appointments yesterday up in Prince George.  Because we live in a small isolated village, every time we go up to the “Big City” we always make a point of stocking up on the things we need.  Unfortunately, we often don’t remember what it is we need, and what it is we don’t need.  

    After we got home from our trip last night and started to unload all of those supplies out of the car, I discovered we were really mistaken about what things we needed, and as a result we now have to deal with the problem of where to store it all.

    As you can see in the photo above, it will now be a while before we run out of toilet paper.  I was surprised while at Costco, when my wife said we needed toilet paper, because I thought we still had a lot, but toilet paper is something we don’t want to run out of, so I bought a big package.

    We also doubled the number of jars of peanut butter we had on hand.  That was my fault, but I thought we were down to the last jar.  We bought a whole chicken, when we already had several frozen ones in the freezer.   The same can be said for a pack of chicken breasts.  

    Like my wife says, “We’ll eventually use it all.” but given our track record, I imagine by that time we will have already purchased more of that item, which we will have to store.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Breathing Smoke

     Well, it’s that time of year again, when Canada burns.  This year the huge forest fires began in May and continue.  They started in Manitoba, then more began in Saskatchewan.  Alberta lit up, and now we have them in BC.  Fortunately at present, we have none close to the Robson Valley, but we have no guarantees for the rest of the summer.  However we are experiencing remnants of their existence.

    Forest fire smoke from far away fires moved into the Robson Valley yesterday and settled in.  We can still make out the mountains, but just barely.  It is 8:00 in the morning as I write this, but my eyes are already feeling the smoke.  They feel very tired.  Although I can’t feel my lungs, I know I am breathing in fine smoke particles with every breath I take.  

    Breathing in smoke has now become an annual summer occurrence and I expect it will continue to be the case in the future.  Fortunately what we are presently experiencing is not as bad as some of those previous infestations of smoke.  Some of the past “smokes” reduced the Sun to a dim orange dot in the ominous grey or dirty orange sky. 

    It is sad to witness the deterioration of the climate we depend upon.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca