Another Big Tree Down, Another Coincidence

     On October 23rd I showed a photo of a big spruce tree that had once blown down on my barn and blogged about the very strong winds that the Robson Valley gets in the Fall.  Well guess what.

    This morning while I was painting, the “train winds” of fall were again blowing furiously.  I heard a rather loud strange noise which I couldn’t identify, but I kept on painting.  Like the story I told about when the big spruce blew down on the barn, we hadn’t realized what had happened until later, when we went outside to go to town.

    The big dead cedar tree had blown down was rather close to the corner of our house.  Fortunately, it fell in exactly the opposite direction, not to damage our house, our garden shed, our satellite dish, or the power line along the road.  When it fell, it just angled toward the corner of our paddock, not hitting anything.

    Even though the cedar was dead, I loved that big old tree.  It was already dead 45 years ago when we bought the house, but it’s dead top stuck out above the other trees, and we had to use the top of the tree to identify where our property was in those early days, when we drove down the road.

    

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Old Songs Referencing Trump

     I always listen to music when I am painting my square every day.  The other day my computer shuffled to the John Gorka song, “Where Bottles Break.”  Gorka wrote this song about greed way back in 1991.  Surprisingly (big surprise) there is a reference to Trump in the lyrics:

    “The buyers come from out of state and they raise the rent.

    Buy low, sell high

    You get rich and you still die.

    Money talks and people jump

    ask how high low-life Donald what’s-his-name

    and who cares

    I don’t want to know what his girlfriend doesn’t wear

    It’s a shame that the people at work

    Wanna hear about this kind of jerk.”

    Here is John Gorka singing the song:  “Where Bottles Break”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb2d4YzUK-0

    Another song that sometimes shuffles to me is the Don Henley song,  “Gimme What You’ve Got.”  It also is a song about greed and was written in 1989.  Here are some of its lyrics:

   “Now it’s take, and take, and takeover, takeover.

    It’s all take and never give.

    All these trumped up towers

    They’re just golden showers

    Where are people supposed to live?

    Are you starting to notice a theme in these songs about Donald Trump and wealth and greed?   It was even obvious many decades ago.    I think the “golden showers” reference in this 35 year old song is interesting in light of current revelations of Trump and his obsession with gold.

    I also know of another Trump reference in an old song.  It is a Woody Guthrie song that we sometimes play at our jam.  In this song the reference is to Fred Trump (Donald’s father) in the 1950 Guthrie song “I Ain’t Got No Home.”  It was written after Woody’s experience living in Beach Haven, a Trump-owned apartment that discriminated against Blacks.

    “Beach Haven ain’t my home

    I just can’t pay the rent,

    my money’s down the drain,

    my soul is badly bent.

    Beach Haven is a haven where only White folks roam,

    No, No, Old Man Trump, Beach Haven ain’t my home.”

    Here is a link to the song:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jANuVKeYezs

    Donald, who always demands to be at the center of attention, should be happy knowing there are  decade-old songs about him (or his father).

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Bird Brain

     The term “Bird Brain” popped into my mind yesterday.  When it is used in conversation it is generally meant to be derogatory, not very smart, but certainly, that is a misnomer, because while their brains are small in size, birds are amazingly intelligent.

    I usually take my bird feeders down in the spring, because if I don’t they are ransacked by bears trying to get at the sunflower seeds inside.  You can see by my misshapen condition of my bird feeder that it has experienced hungry bears in the past.  After taking the bird feeder down the birds have to fend for themselves for half a year.  

    Yesterday I thought I would gamble that the bears will not be around, and I put the bird feeder back up.  Despite its absence for six months, with fifteen minutes of the feeder being put back up, chickadees were flying around it and picking up sunflower seeds from the feeder.  Yes, it only took fifteen minutes for them to find it.

    I will always remember looking out of the window one day in April, and noticing a lone hummingbird hovering around the place where my hummingbird feeder usually hung.  The hummer had just migrated back to the Robson Valley from wintering in the US Southwest, and it remembered where the feeder usually hung.  I hadn’t yet put the feeder out for the summer, and had to scramble around, hurriedly, making some sugar water for the hungry hummingbird to slurp.

    Despite the small size of their brains, birds have a tremendous skill to remember.  Think about that the next time you hear the term “bird brain” used.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Food Insecurity

You hear a lot of stories on the news about the rising cost of food and how some people are starting to be severely impacted by the high prices.    Many are forced to do without a lot of items at the grocery store and many others are having to depend upon food banks to get by.

    Luckily, we have never been threatened by food insecurity, but nevertheless, it always makes me feel better after harvest in the fall, to have a bulk of potatoes stored in the crawl space under our house, “just in case”.  It is, I realize a false security, because one would have to be pretty desperate to eat nothing but potatoes day after day.  That said, I will still cling to any security I can muster.

    I have often thought about how vulnerable McBride is because of its remoteness and isolation.  The food in our two grocery stores has to be shipped hundreds of miles to get to us, and as a result it is already more expensive than food in large urban centers.

    There is also another vulnerability about food that we face.  There is only one highway that comes to McBride.  That highway goes through mountains and across deep river canyons.  If something were to happen to bridges either east or west of us, we would be totally shut off from the supply of food we depend upon, as well as all other manufactured items.  Fortunately the Robson Valley does have an agricultural base, so I guess in a pinch, local farmers could supply us for a while, and like I said, we do have that supply of potatoes under the house.

Take a look at my paintings :  davidmarchant2.ca

A Memorable Moose Encounter

     One of the things I have always enjoyed about living in the Robson Valley, is seeing the wildlife.   While moose live in the Valley, we don’t often see them.  It is usually while driving that we catch a glimpse of a moose, but once when I was just walking through the bush I came upon, not one moose but two.

    For years we had a loop trail through the neighbor’s woods which we often walked twice a day.  The trail went through the forest, then down through some fields beside the Fraser River, then back up into the woods again, until it got to our pasture.  One day I set out to walk the trail alone.  I certainly had no expectations of seeing any wildlife.  I had just gotten to the top of a hill when, not twenty feet (6 meters) from the edge of trail, I saw an antlered male moose peaking through the brush at me.  

    I stopped.  It didn’t seem threatened by me at all, so I slowly got out my camera and took some photos of it.  (Photo above)  Then I happened to notice that standing some feet off to the side of the male moose, there was a female moose, also watching me.  (Photo below).  It was then that I realized the two were probably both there to mate.  

    Because neither of the moose seemed at all threatened by me, I calmly just proceeded on the trail, leaving them to do whatever they were up to.  However, I must say coming upon them sure was an exciting treat.  As I look back, I do wonder if I was in any danger, coming up on them as I did, but like I said, while they were wary of me and cautious, they didn’t  appear at all antagonistic.  I had just remained calm, slow in my movements, and just acted as if I hadn’t seen them.

View my paintings  at davidmarchant2.ca

Sadly, There Is Always A Pecking Order

      The photo above shows a very young kid goat.  The young goat in this story was older and bigger.

      Back in the 1980’s when I started to develop my herd of Angora goats, I was shocked when I first began to notice that they were violently butting each other.  I naively expected that the seemingly gentle creatures would continue on as a happy herd.  I had forgotten that, like all animals that live together, they had to establish a pecking order, figuring out who would boss over who. 

        The goats would sometimes brutally butt each other with their horns, which seemed very cruel, but it was part of a deeply established instinct in them.   They had to create a hierarchy, and sometimes there were individuals that were ostracized. 

    All animals can be cruel, and my Angora goats were no exception.  In my herd there was a young goat that was constantly being picked on by the rest of the herd.  They must have identified some weakness or flaw in the young goat that led them to pick on it. 

            To prevent the victimization from happening at night when they were in the barn, I put the picked-on goat in a separate pen by itself under the stairs.   I really had no control of what happened during the day when the whole herd was outside in the paddock.

    The goat was a little devil, really independent from the herd.  In the evening when I opened the barn door, the young goat always waited until last, before it ventured back into the barn where the other goats were.

    Its mother was always loyal to him, and waited for him to come out from the barn in the morning.  I had noticed that in the morning when I opened the big barn doors to let the goats outside, the rest of the herd would rush to the crates of hay I had put out.   There they bumped and butted each other for access to the hay.   Instead, the young goat would rush to the bucket of water and rapidly  drink, before the rest of the goats came over to drink.  

            One afternoon when I came home from work, I discovered the lifeless body of the young goat laying in the snow.  It had been butted-over and once down, couldn’t get back up.  It may have been wounded by the butting,   Eventually it quit breathing and died.  The previous week a similar thing had happened, but I had found it in time.

    I was very saddened by the death of the small goat.  It had never been accepted by the herd, and its whole short life had been a struggle.

    

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

The Cost of Insurance is Impacting Everything

     Over the last month, I have been noticing how insurance is more and more starting to impact our lives.   When we first moved to the Valley in the late 1970’s, community groups were able to use the facilities at the high school, by asking.  When a group of us wanted to play volley ball in the evenings  through the winter, all we had to do was ask the principal and we were allowed to do so.  

    Our jam plays weekly in the Train Station Lobby, but because of some upcoming construction, we will soon not be able to do so or a while.  I was scrambling around to find another place for us to play.

    I tried first at the McBride Library, where we used to play when we first formed.  I immediately got the impression that that was not going to happen.  The reason given was the cost of insurance.  I was encouraged to try at the high school.  There I was treated more welcomely, I was told I would have to fill out a form, and then I told I would have to get liability insurance coverage for $5 million.  Yeah, right.

    The McBride Community Forest does have a broad insurance plan, and will often umbrella community organizations to cover activities at the schools, but the facilities at the high school were not very suitable for our jam, so I didn’t pursue getting insurance coverage through the Community Forest.  Fortunately the local pub saved the day by offering us the use there building on Tuesdays, when they were not open.

    We have been buying house insurance for decades.  Having a wood stove had not been a problem.  However in 2021, we were required to get our wood stove inspected, which we did.  As a result I had to put a metal buffer on the ceiling above the stove to pass the inspection.  It seemed pretty useless to put  up the buffer, since we had been using the stove for 35 years and there was no evidence that heat on the ceiling above the stove had been hot enough have any visual effect.  To get the insurance, I jumped through that hoop, and put up the metal buffer.

    Now this year, the house insurance again required me to get another inspection on the stove.  I ended up paying $340 to have it inspected, and the results of the inspection was depressing.  I was told I now had to have fire proof panels on the sections of any wall or ceiling beyond the brick wall and floor, within 5 feet (1.5 meters)  of the stove.  I was even supposed to attach a metal buffer on the bottom of the stove even though the floor below it is brick.

    The Norwegian stove itself which is made of heavy cast iron and fire brick and was top of the line when I bought it and is still in pristine condition, however, it was made before Canada rated such things, and so it is not “certified,” which causes other problems.  I honestly don’t know what to do. 

    Our house is heated with electric baseboards and the wood stove is used as a back up.  We could possibly buy more electric space heaters and put them all around and not use the stove, but because of the remoteness, power outages are common in the Robson Valley, (we had one last night for a couple of hours).  During the winter, we must have the wood stove for heat, if the electricity goes off.  Electric heaters are useless during a power outage.

    Fortunately in Canada we have government universal health care.  Yesterday I was talking to my brother, who lives in the States.  He had recently lost his job.  He is one year away from retiring and could survive a year with savings until his pension kicks in, however, his former employer paid for his family’s medical insurance, and with that soon to be gone, he would have to pay something like $2,000/ month to cover his family’s medical expenses, so he will have to find another job that pays for medical insurance.

    I know that because of the massive number of forest fires and floods cause by climate change, for many people who live in threatened areas, the cost of house insurance has become so expensive, it is totally out of reach.  In other areas, getting house insurance is now not even available, even if you could afford it.

    It is pretty obvious to me that the cost of all kinds of insurance will continue to increase, and there will be more and more requirements created to even get it.  One begins to wonder if it will even continue to exist, as more and more people find they can no longer afford it.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

The Strong Winds of Fall

         One of the characteristics of fall weather in the Robson Valley are the strong winds that we get.  Big storm systems form in the Pacific west of British Columbia, and pummel the coast of the Province.  Those of us that live in the Robson Valley, which is 400 miles (650 kms) from the coast as the crow flies, are far away from those storms, but we still often receive strong winds that are generated by them.    The winds we get roar through the trees causing a friend of mine to start dubbing them the “Train Winds” because of their loud roar.

        One morning during one of those strong winds storms in November of 2010, I heard a “whoosh” outside, but I put it down to another strong gust of wind, so didn’t give it a second thought.  That  afternoon, we decided to drive into town for some supplies.  We walked across the driveway to the lanai, and got into the truck.  I then got out and walked to the rear of the truck to clean the back window of the canopy.  It was then that I noticed something awry out of the corner of my eye, and looked over toward the barn.

            I was gobsmacked by what I saw.  The huge spruce tree that stood beside the barn, was standing no more; instead, it was laying across the top of the barn.   Obviously, the strong winds had blown the tree over, but I was surprised, because despite my years of experience working as a timber cruiser, inspecting standing trees looking for indications of rot; I had never noticed any such indicators of rot on the big spruce.  It always looked very healthy to me, but after its fall, I saw that the inside of its trunk was full of rot.

        The damage done by the fallen tree, and later the further collapse of the barn roof which was  caused by the heavy accumulation of snow that winter, took me two years to rebuild.

            It was an extraordinary event that I think about each fall when I hear the loud roar of the “Train Winds” buffeting everything outside. 

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

My Short Stint As A Fashion Photographer

          My sister Nancy, is a well-known and a published author of many knitting books.  She had struggled with publishers over the content and design of some of those books.

    In 2012, she had the items and ideas for another book, and this time, she decided she would try to do the publishing herself.  That would give her more control and freedom over the final product.  In our family we did have a nephew and niece who had done modeling, in fact our nephew Jacy was a professional model at the time.

         So Nancy, who lives in Holland, traveled back to Indiana to have Jacy and his sister Sadia model her knitted pieces, and use our uncle’s farm as a background.  Nancy asked me if I would take the photos, which seemed like it might be fun.  She hired a third model, Rachel (the blonde) and I traveled to Indiana to do “the shoot”. 

    We tried to impress Rachel, who had never done any modeling, with the fact that she was working with professional models, a photographer from Canada, and an art director from Amsterdam.  We did the shooting at my uncle’s farm, which had a wonderful photo backgrounds around every turn.  The project became a real family endeavor.

    We shot photos for a couple of hours on three different days.  I found it difficult to focus my attention on the scarves, with such beautiful faces in the viewfinder, but Nancy kept reminding me that the knitted pieces were why we were taking the pictures.  It was also frustrating working with my camera (actually its a Sony camcorder), every time I thought I had a good shot and pressed the shutter button, like most digital cameras, there was bit of a delay, so I had a number of shots with closed eyes, and strange facial expressions, but once we got to look at all the results, I was very happy with most of the photos and I thought  Nancy would have a difficult time picking out the photos she would to use from the 500 or so shots that I had taken.

    The actual shooting was great fun, and luckily it provided Nancy with some great results.  (I was very proud that the purple shirt Jacy wore was one of mine.  I hadn’t realized that I was such a trendy dresser) 

    Anyway in the end, all the fun we had and fine photos we had produced, came to nothing.  Nancy became so bogged down with trying to do all the work required to do the book herself, that she finally relented and had the publisher do it.  Sadly, the publisher used his own models and photographer.

    It was of course a disappointment that the “family” project wasn’t used, but I think we all had an enjoyable time pursuing the dream of the family fashion endeavor, and I was certainly left with some wonderful memories and photos.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Zed. Zed?

  The other day when someone mentioned the last letter of the alphabet, “Zee” to Americans, but “Zed” to Canadians, my memory flashed back to my first day of teaching in a one-room school deep in the Interior of British Columbia.  I had taken the teaching job as someone who had grown up and was educated in the US, without ever having been in a Canadian School, so I had a lot to learn.

    There had never been a school in this logging camp on Takla Lake, where I had taken on the job.  I was to set one up a one-room school and run it.  It was a daunting task, considering my lack of knowledge of Canadian schools and having absolutely no experience or knowledge of how to manage a one-room school.

    Fortunately, on that first day, I didn’t have but four students, just the children of a local First Nation’s family.  

    I had no experience being around First Nation children.  They meekly entered the room which was in the logging camp’s Recreation Hall (there was no school building that first year) and I welcomed them and motioned them over to sit around a table which I had set up.  Once I had them seated, I began to talk to them in an attempt to find out their names and ages, so that I could get a sense of where they were academically. 

    To my dismay, all I got was bowed heads and silence.  I couldn’t get them to even look at me, let alone speak.  It was a horrible and inadequate feeling that overtook me.  (I found out later that First Nations people consider it rude to look people straight in the eye, so they probably thought negative things about me on this first introduction.)

Luckily, after a time, I gained the confidence of Ralph, who I later determined was about at the  third grade level, and he began to open up a bit.  Soon, the others began to timidly join the conversation.

      I got another surprise, when I urged Ralph to recite the alphabet for me. 

“A,B,C,D,E,F,G…”

“That’s great, Ralph, go on.”

“H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,

I was beaming.  “Keep going Ralph”

“Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,”

“Great, finish up,” I encouraged, and nodding my head to indicate that he was doing great.

“X, Y, ZED.”

“ZED?”, My head jerked back in surprise, I had never heard of “ZED”,  “What’s ‘ZED?, you mean “ZEE”.  

“No,” Ralph replied confidently, and all his siblings confirmed and chimed in, “ZED!!!”

This was the first lesson in the school and it was a lesson for me.  I had just discovered that Canadian English and American English was not the same.  Canadians didn’t have a “ZEE” at the end of their alphabet, they had a “ZED”.  

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Actual Stories of Corporations Caring For Their Customers

          I am not sure if these two stories reflect corporate consideration or just the helpfulness of northern corporate employees who live and understand the difficulties of living in the rural north and wanting to help people who depend upon them.      

    Near the middle of January 1996, a really remarkable (and rather unbelievable) thing happened.  I was at work at the Forestry Office when a Greyhound Bus pulled into our parking lot.  It let a young lady and her mother out, closed the door, and drove away.  People in our office didn’t know what was going on, but when the two came into the office we found out.  

    The pair had come from Surrey, down in the Lower Mainland, near Vancouver.  They had come to McBride so the young lady could take a job interview.  They had traveled up to Prince George on a Greyhound bus, and had been told that there would be another bus taking passengers to McBride at 7:00 AM the next morning.  When they got to the Prince George bus depot that next morning, they were informed that they had been mistakenly informed, and there was no bus leaving from Prince George to McBride that morning.

    When Prince George Greyhound management was told what had happened and it was Greyhound’s mistake, he phoned and got a bus driver out of bed, and had him drive the two passengers in an empty bus the 230 kms (135 miles) down to McBride, so the job interview could take place.  Amazing, but true, that is certainly something I am sure would never happen today.

 Another story in the same vein which happened in 1992.  Here it is:

          Once after throwing out my back I drove up to Prince George to get it manipulated back in place by my chiropractor.  While he was working on me, he told me an amazing story.  It seemed that he had booked flights for a vacation down in Los Vegas.  The first leg of the trip was from Prince George to Vancouver on Canadian Airlines.

        Months before the trip, Canadian had canceled that flight, but they had failed to inform him.  When he arrived at the Prince George airport, packed and ready to go, the ticket agent gave him the news, which was quite a blow; his vacation seemed doomed.

        Canadian Airlines, admitted it was their mistake, and to help salvage my chiropractor’s vacation, the airline hired a taxi which drove him all the way from the Prince George Airport down to Vancouver International Airport, where he could catch a flight to Los Vegas.  The length of that taxi ride was over 600 miles (970 km) and he had to sit in the taxi for eight and a half hours.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

1975: A Day of Junk Food

     From 1973 to 1977, I taught in a one-room school that was located in an isolated logging camp (had to fly in, no roads) on Takla Lake in BC.  Over the last couple of days, I have been reading through some of the diaries that I kept during those years to refresh my memories of those times.  I came across the entry below that I though was interesting:

Jan. 27, 1975

    “School went okay, munched on some cake at lunch, then after school, finished off the cake, walked to the cookhouse and had some of Adrian’s cream puffs, then home for a bowl of popcorn and iced tea.  Went to school to prepare until 8:00, back to the cookhouse for some of Adrian’s cheesecake.  Then my wife and I made ourselves go ice skating for an half an hour to counteract all of the sugar we had consumed.  The camp is putting a microwave pay phone near the office--this place is getting pretty civilized!.”

    Obviously, that wasn’t a typical day, or I would now weigh 400 pounds.  The photo shows the camp skating rink and the tan building was our school.  There was no TV reception and only occasional radio reception at night.  The pay phone was a big deal, because previously we just had to rely on the mail for  all of our news and communications with the outside world.

View my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

No Kings Day

     Having no king ruling a country seems like a no brainer to me, but watching the slow, constant, slide into autocracy that is happening down in the United States, makes me realize that a lot of US citizens don’t really care.  There are some that do, and they will be out on the streets today showing their support for democracy and the principles of the US Constitution.

    It has been fascinating to watch Trump’s monarchial tendencies.  Just the news clips of his meetings in the White House, show more and more gold decorations showing up in the background making the White House look more like a palace.  The military parade on his birthday, and the way he is enriching himself and the members of his family while he holds the Office of President is unprecedented.  Then there is his Cabinet meetings where his sycophant cabinet heads go around the table and praise him.  It all looks like something you would see in a third world dictator-led country.

    Just look at the criminals that Trump has pardoned.  Not innocent, reformed, human beings, but crooks and creeps who support him.  Just yesterday Trump pardoned George Santos, a man who lied his way into Congress, who had been convicted of fraud and identify theft, but also a man that praises Trump.  Trump’s sycophants in the Justice Department have moved of Jeffery Epstein’s partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted sex offender and child sex trafficker from a regular prison cell into a cushier prison.  One wonders how long it will be until Trump gives her a pardon.  

    Of course it isn’t entirely the fault of Donald Trump, it is the fault of the Republican members of Congress, who without ethics or backbone, have given up their Constitutional responsibilities to put a check on Executive Power, letting Trump have his way.  And of course there are the conservative members of the Supreme Court, all choices of the billionaire funded Federalist Society, who loftily speak about the Constitution, then totally ignore what it says about the checks and balances and the limits of the Executive Branch that is set up in the US Constitution.

    I often think things have already gone beyond correction in the US.  I honestly hope that the citizens of the US soon wake up and look objectively at what Trump and his Administration are doing, then use the elective powers they have been given in the Constitution to save Democracy while they still can.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Cartoons: Preparing For Winter

    I have mentioned before how living in the interior of British Columbia really magnifies the importance of the changing of the seasons, and certainly it is the approach of winter that is the most important change that one has to deal with.  All of those things that we used during the summer have to be put away, and replaced by all of the things that we need to use during the four or so months of cold weather and snow.

    Fall is the time all of those things have to be done, and I have been scrambling around trying to get everything done.  I was relieved to have finally dug all of my potatoes and picked everything worth picking in the garden and greenhouse.  I have had the summer tires on the car replaced with the winter tires.  I have converted our lanai where we would sit during the summer, back into a carport where I will park my truck during the winter.  

    Yesterday, I was able to get one of the most worrying jobs done.  We have a heavy metal screen over the culvert that collects the water for our waterline.  The screen prevents rocks and other debris from going into our culvert.  We have to remove the screen from the culvert for the winter, or else ice would form on it and we would loose our water, something we certainly don’t want to happen during the winter.

    I now have most of those pre-winter chores done, except for planting the garlic.  Garlic cloves are planted in the fall where they stay in the ground overwinter, then sprout and develop into bulbs during the spring and summer.  Hopefully, I will be able to get that job done next week.

    While the approach of winter is something that can create dread, when it actually does arrive, for me at least, it is a season that allows for a lot of free time.  Usually the most pressing tasks of winter is the clearing of snow off of the driveway.  Most of my other hours I can spend in pursuit of my other interests.   For me, the most problematic things about winter include the lack of sun because of the short days, the lack of color with all of winter’s whites, grays, blacks, and browns, and just how long winter lasts.  It always seems to take forever for spring to finally arrive.  

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca