Back on the Trail

 I got a pleasant surprise yesterday, when I did my walk on the trail.  I saw a pair of moose, a mother and adolescent.  They were resting and the young one saw me first and got up from its rest.  The mother watched me for a while, then they both moved off as I started to get closer to get a better picture.  

    This is always a bad time for moose, because all the yahoos with guns start shooting them in the fall.  In recent years there has been a sharp decline in the moose population in the central interior of BC.

Take a look at my paintings:  www.davidmarchant.ca

An Unexpected Vancouver Adventure

    Traveling seems to always be an adventure.  Our trip back to BC seemed to be very uneventful.  We had the periods of inactivity waiting at the terminals, (Evansville, Dallas, San Francisco, and Vancouver) and we had the tension of rushing from one terminal to another at opposite ends of each airport.  We made it all the way to Vancouver without too much trauma, and when, at midnight, we boarded our flight to Prince George, we felt as though we had pretty much completed the game, but  the game was far from over.

    We sat on the plane for 1.5 hours and the plane didn’t move.  Then we were told that there was problems with the de-icing mechanism and watched as several technician came and went from the cockpit.  Finally we were told that the flight was cancelled.

    A collective moan rose from the passengers, as well as lots of negative comments about Air Canada.  We all streamed back into the terminal to see what our futures would be.  That is our bleary eyed group you see in the photo.

    After about 20 minutes, Joan and I finally made it to the front of the line to talk to the airline representative.  She gave us vouchers for a taxi and a room at the River Rock Hotel/Casino.  I had never heard of the place, but when we got there, even in my exhausted condition, I couldn’t help but be impressed.

    We walked into the glass doors and there in front of us were two huge curving staircases like you would see in a southern plantation mansion.  They arched in opposite directions, symmetrically up to the next floor, one on each side in front of us.  On closer observation I saw that they weren’t staircases at all, but escalators.  Being the country bumpkin that I am, I didn’t even know they made curving escalators.  We rode up the escalators to the hotel lobby and registered.  It was 3:00 A.M.

    My country bumpkin persona was reinforced as we travelled up the elevator to our room.  We had to wave our room’s entrance card in front of a card reader on the wall of the elevator before it would  move.  Then wave it again at the door knob to unlock the door.  Once inside the room, we had to insert it into a slot in the wall to make the lights go on.  This was all way too high tech for me.

    Of course, the beds each had five pillows stacked on top of them (I only need one to sleep, and never know where to put the other ones.  On the floor?)  I was again made to feel like a techno-peasant when I tried to use the telephone, none of the many buttons seemed to do what I expected.  It took us a while to figure out how to make the shower flow.  I was exhausted, frustrated, and in spite of all the luxury, I would have much rather been at home in my own bed.

    In the morning, I again found myself way out of my element as we used our breakfast vouchers to dine at the elegant resort’s breakfast buffet.  I stacked my plate with salmon, fresh pineapple, oatmeal, turkey slices, cantaloupe, honeydew mellon, small crispy chicken nuggets, and a thick fried potato wafer, and we ate overlooking the boat-filled Fraser RIver.  There were of course everything else you might want for breakfast, but I tried to be restrained in my eating.

    After eating and packing, we left the fancy hotel and spent a couple of hours sitting around at the Vancouver airport, waiting for our noon flight to Prince George.  Once there we paid for our 2 weeks of parking ($110) and had to rearrange the back of our car, which was full of 4 tires (we had bought 4 new snow tires in Prince George before we got to the airport in the middle of September when we began our trip to Indiana).  We had to make room in the back of our car for a new toilet that we needed to buy before traveling back to McBride.

    We scrambled around Prince George checking several stores for a new toilet, (we needed one that was less than 28 inches from tip to wall and a high flush capacity).  We failed to find one, so in the end, we drove home empty handed, facing at least another week of using the outhouse.  It rained off and on the whole two and a half hours back to McBride.  

    Our house was cold, Lucy our cat, seemed both happy and confused to see us again.  Frost had hit our garden and there were willow branches all over the yard and driveway from a windstorm, but it was nice to finally be in our own space again.

You can now read my blog and view my paintings back at my website:  

www.davidmarchant.ca

Down By The River

     I am on my way home to Canada.  I don't have a lot of time to do a blog as I sit here at the Dallas Airport, but I did take this photo of Evansville, Indiana, my home town the other day, so I thought I would let you see what it looks like.  Evansville is situated at the very bottom of the state, on a curve of the Ohio River.  What you can see in the photo is the Evansville river front.  It has lots of places for people to sit to watch the fireworks display that takes place over the river on the 4th of July.

     The Ohio is very wide at Evansville.  People used to say it was a mile wide.  I can't really confirm that, but it looks quite the distance across.

     Being wily politicians, the state legislature of Indiana wanted to allow gambling, but didn't want to incur the wrath of the god-fearing voters, so what they did was to allow a casino "riverboat" that sat on the river, docked at Evansville, but "not on Indiana soil."  It sits just off the photo on the left hand side. 

    The Ohio River is the boundary of Indiana and Kentucky.  It always seemed unfair to me, but the Ohio River legally belongs to the state of Kentucky.  It seemed like it should be shared between the two states.

     

Tree On Tree

     Right beside my mother's driveway there is a big maple tree.  Like most of the maples that are growing there in a row, it is hollow.  Growing from the crotch of the maple, where the tree forks into two, there is a young cedar that has taken root.  The cedar is currently about 20 inches (50cm) tall.

     It seems that it has chosen a fairly limiting place to grow.  The seed from a cedar on the opposite side of the drive, probably landed in the fork, which had a layer of decayed leaves and moisture, a perfect place for germination, and started growing.  I thought I might be able to free its roots and transplant it into the ground, because I don't think it has much of a future where it is now, but when I felt around at its base, I discovered that its roots go down into some of the solid dead wood of the maple, so I wouldn't be able to get it out without mangling its roots and killing it.

     In BC there is what are called "nursery logs".   In the deep forest, tree seeds often fall onto the moss covered logs of fallen trees and take root and grow.  As they develop, the roots eventually grow around the log and into the soil, so as the log decays, it doesn't really effect the growth of the seedling except to provide nutrients.  These trees often look peculiar because when the log has decayed they are left with their roots forming an arch above the ground.

     On Mom's maple this really isn't going to work that way.  The fork where the cedar is growing is 65 inches (1.7 m) above the ground, which is a long way for the roots to go before they hit soil.  By that time, the maple will be well on its way to deterioration and when it falls it will take the cedar with it.  

     I sure wish I could figure out a way to get the small cedar out of its doomed situation and into the ground.

The Banging of Shoes

 

     My mother lives right beside a golf course.  In many ways it is like living beside a park.  The grounds are well kept, there are a lot of activity to watch as we sit on her back porch.  Golfer's getting their golf bags out of their car, golfers zipping from hole to hole on their golf carts, golfers standing in the parking lot chewing the fat and drinking after playing their game, and then there are the shoes.

     I don't play golf myself, so I have no personal knowledge of this, but it seems that second to playing golf, their favorite activity is standing around banging their golf shoes together.  All afternoon there is a constant concussion of noise as hundreds of golf shoes get clapped together.  Playing on such finely manicure lawns, and spending most of their time driving around in golf carts, you wouldn't expect that their shoes would pick up so much debris that it would be necessary to slam them together.

     Some golfers can't even wait until after they play their round of golf, they drive into the parking lot, get out of their cars, open their trunks to retrieve their golf equipment, then grab their golf shoes and start banging them together.  Some budding entrepreneur could probably make a killing by setting up Golf Shoe Banging Centers were duffers could come, pay their money, then pound their shoes, and leave without having  to spend so much time swinging a club or driving around in a golf cart.

     When we visit my mom, a great deal of time sitting on the porch.  When visitors join us there and hear the banging of shoes coming from the golf course, they turn their heads, scanning the golf course trying to figure out what caused the noise.  When it is explained that it was just a golfer banging their shoes, they seem disappointed, expecting a more exciting explanation for the loud and echoing report, but no, it was just some golfer clapping his shoes together.

On & In the Web

    In my daily excursions around my mother's house, I have been noticing a lot of spiders busily making webs and gathering the fruits if their labors.  I don't possess a lot of knowledge about spiders so I can't tell you what kind they are, but here are some photos of what I have been seeing.

     The one you see above has made a pretty extensive web over the myrtle vines.  In the center of the web it has constructed this tunnel where it hides.  I assume when something lands on its web it quickly scrambles out to kill it.

     This is a fairly large spider that was devouring something that was tangled in its web.  When it saw me approach it scrambled up to safety near a beam on the carport.  When I walked away it came back down to do more eating.  I approached more slowly the next time and got the shot.  With its legs extended this spider was probably an inch (30cm) long.

The Sassafras Tree

     I am always sorry to witness the loss of a tree and in my lifetime there has been plenty to witness.  I didn't really have any relationship to most of those trees, they were just trees I was used to seeing, then suddenly they were gone.  The old sassafras tree that grew on the edge of the woods by the field was different.

     At one point in my adolescence, way back in the early 1960's, I saw a gymnast on TV performing

on the rings.  I decided that I wanted to do that, so I in a typical  adolescent fashion of rigging things up and thinking they would work, I found a very thin set of rings from a child's swing set, wrapped them with electrical tape to make them thicker, and then looked around for someplace to hang them.

     The only place I found that might work was a horizontal limb from the sassafras tree.  It was extremely difficult to tie the rings on two pieces of rope and get them to hang at exactly the same height.  

     Once I got them sort of at the same height, I was ready to try them out.  The branch of the tree held,  the ropes didn't break, but there was one problem:  Even with the rings wrapped with the tape, they really cut in and hurt my hands when I was hanging on them and trying to hold myself on the rings with my arms outstretched.  The pain in my hands quickly dampened and killed my dream of becoming a gymnast on the rings.

     Despite the career killing experience, I always felt some special kinship to the sassafras tree.  I knew that they are not really long living trees, but during the past 40 years, during my yearly visits to Indiana, it seemed to be still holding on.  This trip, I was saddened to see that it was dead.  In the photo you can see its naked branches sticking out above a cluster of grapevine leaves that are still green and healthy.

     For those of you who are not familiar with sassafras trees, it is an unusual tree because each tree displays three differently shaped leaves.  There is a wide blade-shaped leaf, a mitten-shaped leaf, and a mitten-with-two-thumbs-(one on each side)-shaped leaf.  The roots were used to make root beer (and they smell like the root beer tastes,) but then scientist discovered they were carcinogenic, and banned their use in the drink.