Red Heart by James Alexander Thom

      This is a novel I have been wanting to read for years.  I had enjoyed reading several of the other novels written by James Alexander Thom, based on historical figures who had existed in the early settlement of the midwest.  I had become aware of Red Heart years ago, but hadn’t been able to find it, until I discovered it as an ebook in Apple Books.  

    The novel is based on the life of Fanny Slocum.  The novel begins In 1778 with five year old red-haired Fanny living with her pioneering Quaker family in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania.  During an Indian attack, Fanny was kidnapped by the three Indians, who killed and scalped one of her older brothers.  The Indians gagged Fanny and carried her off on horseback, traveling quickly for days, before they eventually getting her to an Indian village.  There she was given to an Indian woman who had had her daughter killed by Whites when they had earlier attacked the tribe.  

    As time went by, Fanny slowly learned the tribe’s language and she slowly adapted to her new life with the tribe.  Her red hair was was always an attraction with the other Indians in the tribe.  While initially missing her birth family, she soon found love with her new mother, and began to really enjoy the freedom she found living with the Indians, which was not as restrictive or structured as her life had been with her Quaker family.  She began to see that the Indian culture was similar to that of her Quaker family, with their values of peace, kindness, and honesty.  Fanny loved being part of the religious ceremonies for planting and harvesting, even though they were so different from the religious traditions she had known as a very young child.

    Although Fanny was accepted and became a member of the village, the Indians in her village hated Whites, and it didn’t take Fanny long to see why.  The Indians worked hard to grow the garden crops needed to get them through the hard winters, but time after time, White armies would attack the villages in the fall, before they could harvest, burning their gardens and their wigwams.  This forced the tribe to retreat further and further away from the Whites, and having to start all over establishing a new village.  This destruction occurred, year after year, as the white settlers, took over more and more of the Indian’s land.

    With another white army about to attack the village, Neepah, her Indian mother who Fanny had come to love, arranged to have Fanny sent away to live with Neepah’s elderly parents who lived in a village near Niagara Falls.  Neepah, who had stayed behind to help protect their village was killed by the Whites.  Neepah’s death was very traumatic, for Fanny, but she soon found love and became the adopted daughter of Tuck Horse and Flicker, Neepah’s elderly parents.

           The attacks of the whites continued year after year, destroying the wigwams, crops, and Indian villages wherever the Indians tried to establish them.   White traders sold the liquor that destroyed Fanny’s first husband, and later one of her children, who was killed by a young drunken Indian.   Fanny soon learned to hate whites too and never trusted  them.  She hid herself from them, fearing they would take her sell her back to the Quaker family she could hardly remember.   

            Red Heart covers a fascinating and untold story, full of the history, the struggles, and the culture of the Native people of the time.  I found it immensely interesting and enlightening.  I was very touched toward the end when Fanny an old woman in her seventies, finally got to meet her two brothers and a sister who were still alive.   Fanny Slocum  lived an amazing life, and I happy that James Alexander Thom, had presented it in such a readable and gripping novel.

You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Kona, Waiting for her Food

     With her terrible hip dysplasia, Kona’s life has become very restricted.  She can’t do much on her own now, and needs my help to carry her from place to place.  What she still can do is eat, and even though eating has always played an important part in her life, now it has really become her most central focus.

    Yesterday, when I was in the kitchen preparing her dinner, I happened to glance into the living room, and there was Kona on the couch, her head resting on the arm of the couch, watching me with great intensity, anxiously waiting for me to get done fixing her food, so she could e\\\

You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

The First Sprouts of Spring

     With all of the craziness of the weather, I find it reassuring to find that Nature responds the way that it should.  This morning I was happy to discover that the first green sprouts of spring have dared to show themselves.  Their buried bulbs are planted in the narrow strip which lays between our sidewalk and our house.  That face of the house gets direct sunlight in the morning and the heat radiating from the house’s sunlit wall warms the area, giving the bulbs an incentive to get growing.  

    I am never quite sure what these initial sprouts are until they develop a bit further, but I am just happy to see a tiny bit of the newly discovered bright green color of the buried flower bulbs.

view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Springtime in the Rockies

     Welcome to Spring.  Up here in the Canadian Rockies, today’s official start of Spring does not really mean anything as far as the weather is concerned.   Spring is a season of weather changes as part of Spring’s transition, and we are certainly experiencing that.  After many days of rain, this morning we woke up with snow covering the ground.  At present, it is raining again.

    The cartoon is one of my early ones, probably drawn in the first part of the 1980’s.  No doubt it was inspired by a more extreme weather transition, than we are getting today.

    I took the photo below this morning on my walk around the pond.  The pond ice is melting around the edges, and this shows the open water on its way to the pond’s outflow.  The remains of the old fence is part of the fence that existed in the 1970’s when we bought our property.  I didn’t take it down when I had the pond built.

Take a look at my paintings :  davidmarchant2.ca

Population

        Back in 1970, I remember reading a book called “The Population Bomb”, which discussed the fact that the human population was growing faster than the food supply, and that meant big trouble ahead.  The book got quite a bit of buzz, and so did the phrase, “Stop at Two” that encouraged people to not have any more than two offspring.  Both the book and the phrase are long forgotten, and in the 50 years since then the population has doubled in size.

        Population is at the root of so many of the world’s problems today...hunger, poverty, wars, and environmental degradation, but it is rarely discussed, because it might upset people’s religious, and cultural beliefs.  Religions and cultures that give all the power to men are one of the basic causes, since birth control can be available throughout the world.

        Everyone alive deserves the same high standard of living that is available in the developed world, but statistics tell us that presently the US alone uses up 25% of the worlds resources.  There are just not enough resources in the world for everyone to live the way North Americans do.  It spells mega problems ahead for everyone, except the ultra-wealthy.

       I have  read that the number of people living today, is greater than the total number of people who have ever lived, and died, on this planet.  That scares me, because there seems to be no apparent concern or solutions.

        Tragically, there are prominent and powerful people today who are actually pushing for increases in population (preferably for them: the White population).  Men, like Elon Musk and JD Vance are two proponents of more people.  Today’s world, with all of its increasing limitations, brought on by climate change, leaves our earth struggling and unable, to provide for all of its current population.  The last thing the only planet we can survive on needs, is more people.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Where Do The Cartoons Come From?

         n the little Robson Valley community where I live, I am usually introduced as “the guy that draws the cartoons in the paper.”  That seems to be my claim to fame.  One of the most common questions I am always asked is, “How do you come up with all those ideas?”

        It is a complicated question to answer, because there is no single answer to the question.  The ideas come from everywhere.  Things I see, things I hear, sometimes, things just pop into my head, and I have even gotten ideas in my dreams.   Most commonly, the ideas result from something that happens to me in my life.

        In the cartoon above, you might be able to figure out where the idea for the cartoon came from.  Basically, what happened was that our cat Lucifer was so eager to get into her fresh litter box, that she jumped into it when I laid it down to take my boots off after cleaning it.  She did not even give me a chance to put it in its spot.  Usually, I just take a humorous situation like that, and make it more extreme.  That is what I did in this cartoon.

        I used to do a cartoon every week for the local paper, in 2013 a second local paper asked me if I would do cartoons for them also, so I was doing two cartoons every week.  The second paper disappeared, and last year the local weekly paper went down to just publishing every two weeks, so there is a lot less pressure to come up with a cartoon for me. 

        If I can’t come up with a cartoon, I can always redo one of the many old cartoons I have drawn.  I have discovered that after three years, people don’t remember the cartoons anyway.

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

Wind, Then of course, a Power Outage

     Yesterday, was day of strong winds and blowing snow.  Eventually the snow petered out, but the wind kept blowing.   Because we live in a rural area with a lot of trees, when we get strong winds, that often causes a tree, somewhere along the long power line that feeds our house, to blow over onto the line, resulting in an outage.  So I wasn’t entirely surprised late yesterday afternoon when our power went off.

    Initially, our power went off, then came back on, then off, then on, in a rapid repeat.  I knew that sort of thing can play havoc on electrical equipment, so I went to our electrical box and just flipped the breaker for the whole house off.  I figured I would leave it off for about twenty minutes, hoping that by that time, things would have settled back down.

    Twenty minutes later, I flipped the house breaker back on and was surprised when nothing happened.  At first I wondered if something had happened to the breaker, but then realized that more than likely, we were experincing a power outage.

    I got my cell phone and went to the BC Hydro (our electricity provider) website to see information I could glean.  It took what seemed like forever for the website to load, because McBride just has G3 phone connectivity.   Once the site loaded, I found out that yes indeed, a tree had blown down across a power line.    The power outage had begun shortly after 4:00, and the website said a crew was on its way (they have to come from one hour away) and it was expected that our power would be back on by 6:00.

    Six o’clock came and went, but the outage continued.  By 7:00 the temperature inside out house was starting to get cold (17°C, 63°F) because our electric baseboards weren’t working, so I built a fire in the wood stove to warm things up.

    Every time we have a long outage,I become aware of just how dependent we are on the internet to pass the time.  We can use our phones, but as I mentioned, with just G3, everything takes forever to load.  Fortunately, I had a downloaded eBook on my iPad, so I was able to read about 4 chapters, while we sat in front the fire in our wood stove waiting for the power to come back on.

    Finally, at 8:00, we heard the beeps of our electrical equipment, alerting us that they again had electricity.  It is always such a treat to finally get things back to normal.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Snow Now, Lots of Rain Later

     Last night we were pounded by strong winds and blowing snow.  The strong wind even blew my snow shovels that were hanging on hooks in the carport off, and onto the ground.   At present, it is still snowing and we are living under a snow warning, but that is to change later in the day when the temperature rises, and the snow turns to rain.  I would rather it just kept falling as snow, since that is easier to deal with, than slush.  

    There is an “atmospheric river” moving into BC from the Pacific.  Vancouver and the Lower Mainland will be hard hit, and are in for a real drenching for days.  Even up here in the middle of the province, our forecast calls for rain and showers until the weekend, when some flurries, are forecast.

    March is generally characterized with a lot of changeable weather, but I wish a little more sunshine was mixed in to those changes.

You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Evening Sun on Beaver Mountain

     We go visit our friends, the Milnes, every Saturday night.  Last night when we headed to their house, we sure noticed the recent time change.  Instead of making the trip at dusk, last night the sun was still above the Cariboo Range of mountains on one side of the valley, illuminating Beaver Mountain, a prominent peak just east of McBride, on the opposite side. 

    Of course seeing the snow-capped mountain glowing in the direct sunlight, delayed our trip to the Milnes because I just had to stop several times to take photos.  Here are two of them:

You can see my paintings at davidmarchant2.ca

Wild Looking Kona

     Although poor Kona is looking pretty wild in this photo, she is no longer able to be the wild dog she used to be.  Now crippled with hip dysplasia, she can no longer even move herself from room to room, and she has to depend on me to pick her up and carry her from place to place.  She is on a lot of pain-killer pills, and although I know she is often hurting, she doesn’t complain.

    Despite her drugs and pain, her instincts are still very active.  The other day when I carried her outside to pee.  When she was sitting in the yard, a deer who was not paying much attention, came meandering out of the woods heading for the bird feeder.  Although the deer didn’t see Kona sitting in the snow, Kona sure saw the deer, and began barking in a fit of outrage, hobbling in the deer’s  direction, scaring it back into the woods.

    Kona didn’t really get very far, and quickly just sat down and waited for me to pick her up and carry her into the house, but kept barking even though the deer by this time was deep in the woods. 

    Kona still has spirit and craves our affection, something we are happy to provide.

Tae  look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

The Forgotten Mannheim Water Tower

     I am so happy that for most of my adult life I had taken the time to write a diary or when I was traveling, a journal.  During that time, I would often think, “I will always remember that,” but now, in my 70’s and reading through my diary, I keep coming upon things that I had totally forgotten.  Most of those things I had forgotten were not all that important, but once I read about them, some of my dozing brain cells where jarred causing additional memories to come back. 

    While recently going through my 1996 European travel journal, I read about our travel through Germany, where we went to see the Mannheim Water Tower.  While I did remember being in Mannheim, their water tower was a complete blank to me.  Below is what I learned about being in Mannheim from my journal:

    After seeing the Dom Cathedral in Klon, we took a train to Koblenz, Germany, then traveled on to Mannheim, a city we knew nothing about, but the map in our guide book showed it to be sort of a transportation hub, a place that offered a lot of train destinations.  

              Once we arrived in Mannheim we searched around for a hotel we could afford, and finally settled on a very nice one that was only 95 DM (Deutsche Marks)( $142.50 US) which was still expensive, but cheaper than all of the other hotels we had checked out.  (It should be remembered that a dollar in 1996 bought a whole lot more than it does today, so the prices I quote might not seem all that expensive these days, but back then they were very expensive)

    Eating was also expensive in Mannheim.  I had a salad with chicken strips ($22.50 US), my wife who grew up in Germany, went for one of her childhood favorites:  Rouladen ($37.50 US).  Rouladen is a German dish made of long trips of meat slathered with mustard, rolled and filled with bacon, onions and pickles.   Our two Cokes cost us $9.00 US.  We were not very wealthy people and the mealwhile very tasty, seemed really pricy to us.

    After our expensive meal we walked down to the Mannheim Water Tower, which our guide book had mentioned as a local landmark.  It was a  massive old stone water tower was built of stone in 1889, to solve Mannheim’s water problems.  The water table in the Rhine Valley was very close to the surface, but during the summer, the quality of the water was very poor and often caused sickness.  The municipality, created a construction project to pipe cleaner and safer water from the mountains and stored it in the huge stone water tower.

    The water tower was an impressive structure that was 60m (200 ft) in height and 19m (60 ft) in diameter.  It situated close to a spraying fountain.  Unfortunately, the impressiveness of the monuments were somewhat spoiled with a lot of sprayed on graffiti, something that I had always disgusted me.  

View my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Squirrel Gymnastics

     Squirrels are not the favorite animals of people who feed birds.  They always make sure they get more of their share of the food people put out for the birds.  They are amazing in the extent they will go to, to get the bird food.

    The black vertical cylinder with the holes in it, is a bird feeder that I filled with chopped peanuts.  The determined squirrel visits it daily.  Usually it gets on the cylinder and hangs, either right side up or upside down, as he works the chunks of peanuts out of the holes.  

    On this particular day the squirrel decided to try a totally new technique.  It awkwardly positioned himself astride the two feeders, and was getting the peanuts that way.

    It seems like no matter how I hang my bird feeders to prevent the squirrels from getting to them, they always negate my attempts at prevention, and successfully manage to get to get their share of the bird food.

You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

A Night Trip on the Greyhound Bus, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

McBride: A Community of Salvagers

 

    Here is one of my blogs from 2013:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Cartoons: Price of Gas

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

 

Mud Man

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

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

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

MuckBride

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

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

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

Take a look at my paintings:   davidmarchant2.ca

Thinking About Our Muddy Past

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

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

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

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

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca