Sept. 29, 2011

One year ago today the lines that came to me and that remain as true as they were then in relation to my thoughts of Jim were:

                        This shaking keeps me steady, I should know.

                        What falls away is always, and is near.

                        I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.

                        I learn by going where I have to go.

Jim is always in my thoughts, but I’m getting used to living alone and slowly discovering that life without the companionship that being one of a couple provides is not necessarily lonely.  I am helped through every day by the kind words and acts of family, friends and strangers.  Writing this makes me sad for the loss of Jim and brings tears to my eyes.  I know that these sentiments will do nothing for him, but I get a sense of peace after releasing them.  As I rarely have any desire to be anybody other than myself, I spend most of the time living life much as I always have.  Although I think I am more aware now of the reality of suffering in life and hope that this will make me better able to sense when and how I can help others as so many have helped me.

While hiking the other day I had a vague memory of something Yogi Berra said.  I consulted the great god google to see if I could find it.  I think I’ll keep it in mind as I continue to “learn by going where I have to go.”  A slight paraphrase is:

                        Keep trying. Stay humble.  Trust your instincts. Most importantly, act.

                        When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

Bill and I are having a good visit with the aged Ps.  It’s emotionally charged as such reunions are, but we are all trying to control our tendencies to be opinionated and contrary.  As usual the fact that I can withdraw to the sanity of Barbara and Terry’s suite is a great help for all of us.  We had lunch at Barbara and Terry’s today.  The food was delicious and the conversation lively.  I’m off to bed.  Tomorrow will be another busy day with mom and dad’s neighbors coming for coffee at 10 and me driving Bill to the dentist at 1:30.  He’s had a toothache and will probably have a root canal.

All the best to all of you.

Jim preparing one of our many ill-fated barbecues

Dad, Barbara, Terry, Mom and Bill after today's lunch at B and T's B&B.

One year on

It’s a dark and stormy Sunday.  Bill and I are on the ferry heading for Victoria, no thanks to us.  We arrived at the ferry as it pulled out, so we were first in line for the next one.  We ate our lunch and then fell asleep waiting for the ship to come in.  When we woke cars were driving around us and up the ramp.  Nobody even honked.  Paula, Bill and I had got up this morning at 4:55, stumbled around taking turns in the bathroom and were on the road by just after 5:30.  I discovered why women used to use vanity tables.  When 3 people are using one bathroom with only limited time, you just do the water stuff there and all else in your room.  We did that this morning and all went well. Paula and I put on our makeup and did our hair in the bedrooms. In the strange way that things have of coming into your life in pairs or bunches, I had just talked about vanity tables with the carpenter who repaired my rocker.  He told me how he had altered one to make 2 bedside tables because nobody ever uses them any more.   After this morning, I think I might look for one.  I had made banana/walnut muffins and we stopped at Tim Hortons for coffee.  We left Paula at the Kelowna airport to fly back to Thunder Bay at 7:30 and drove on to Hope where I programmed Tom Tom for mom and dad’s in Victoria and then drove off in the wrong direction back to Kelowna.  This sent Richard, the voice, into a correcting fit.  We did what he told us because there was no option and within about 7km were pointing in a westerly direction again and following ‘the voice’ to the ferry.  No wonder we dropped off waiting for it.

The ship’s really rocking.  There’s quite a wind blowing now, and I think its been going for a while.  Even in Hope there was a strong wind and the road was strewn with leaves, boughs and branches.  It was the same in parts of Surry.  I’m getting dizzy at the computer, so I think I’ll stop writing.  This week marks a year since I left Mela and Don’s and started “The West Commences.”  I think I should change its name.

Idaho

I don’t have a ‘bucket list’.  In fact the very expression makes me squirm for some reason, but I’ve just done something I never thought I’d do, spent a week biking almost all the way across the N. Idaho Panhandle with the Vernon Outdoors Club.  It was more fun than I feared it would be.  I’ve discovered that I keep myself moving by telling myself I won’t do things or if I do do them I won’t finish them and then when I find myself with others actually doing them, I do finish, most of the time, and actually like it.  So I’m not a self-starter, but I choose my friends carefully and carry on with them.  It has worked so far.

Priscilla picked me up at 7:00am on Sunday, September 11, 2011, a fateful day to cross the Canada/US border.  But aside from choosing the slowest of the 3 lanes, we had no problems there.  Our GPS, however, was a different story.  Priscilla and I seemed to be on the same wavelength, a somewhat quixotic one perhaps, but compatible. Tom Tommissina, on the contrary, was tuned to a different one.  She kept nagging at us to take routes we didn’t want to follow until we turned down her volume and finally shut her off.  The rest of the trip was fun.  We had a delicious lunch in a Mexican Family Restaurant in Colville, Washington, drove through some lovely scenery and arrived at our ‘villa’ in time for dinner.  Our accommodation was a rabbit warren of places, each with a name, ‘The Backwoods’, ‘The Villa’ and 2 other equally exotically named units all in what had been one lot in the town of Kellogg, Idaho.  We shared our dinners with the 3 women in ‘The Backwoods’, so each only cooked once.  We had great food, cheap good wine and hot tubs every night.  That luxury combined with the fact that the rides were not as hard as I had feared they would be made the whole week a surprising delight.

The Monday ride, however, did begin with something I had not given enough thought to, the 1.7mile long Saint Paul Pass, otherwise known as the Taft Tunnel.  That distance sounds like nothing until you enter with no light except the pathetic glow of a few LED lights on the brim of your bike helmet.  Within seconds, it was pitch dark, wet with water running in gutters on each side and cold.  I became quickly disoriented and almost wobbled off the bike before I fixed my eyes on the red tail light of the person in front of me, clenched the handle bars and my teeth and carried on to the end.  About a week earlier I had laughed at a cartoon about the light at the end of the tunnel being turned off because of cutbacks, but by the time I pedaled out of the Taft, that joke had lost it’s punch.  I was never so happy to see the light and feel the warm dry sun.  The rest of this Route of the Hiawatha; across the Bitteroot Mountains between Idaho and Montana, over 7 high trestles and through 10 much shorter and dryer tunnels; was wonderful and only slightly tainted by the knowledge of the fact that we would be going back through the Taft at the end. 

We biked every day and did the whole of the Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes, from Plummer to Mullen.  That is, some of us did.  Priscilla and I carried on as we began, a bit less than seriously.  There were among us some who wanted to tick off every mile, but we managed to miss a few.  One day, we were the only ones who parked at the right trailhead but we didn’t finish the route.  The next day, we left the car at the wrong place and consequently missed most of the glorious downhill.

Of course we became the butt of jokes, but our skin is tough, unfortunately not quite tough enough on the butt end, however.  Five days of biking took there toll there.

Two of the highlights of the trip were on Tuesday.  We biked until about 2:00pm and then took a tour of an abandoned silver mine near Wallace.  Our guide was a crusty old miner who was full of vitality in spite of a career underground that would have killed me.  Once we were down in the shaft, he turned on some of the machines and turned off the lights and gave us a sense of the dark and the noise and the heavy work.   And we didn’t experience the heat that they have to endure in the deeper parts of the mines.  Silver has made a lot of money for the area, but they have paid.  All along the trails were signs warning of the poisons in the water and ground as a result of the heavy metals in the tailings leaching out of the many high slag hills.  After the tour, we went to a brewpub and drank.  The ale was very hoppsy, as Jim would have said.  We talked to the owner, and he gave us a tour of his huge stainless steel vats.  So there is more to the Vernon Outdoors Club than coffee and ice cream.

On our drive home we ignored Tom Tommissina again and crossed the Grand Coulee Dam.  This time we chose the fastest line at the border and ate in the car, so we arrived in Vernon in record time, even after a stop to shop at Lulu Lemon in Kelowna.  That care package is getting close to complete, Jay.

Outside the Ranch Chico, a family Mexican restaurant in Colville, Washington.

Someone exiting the Taft Tunnel, lucky guy.

Just outside a shorter tunnel

Priscilla and I had this picture taken as proof that we started at the Black Rock Trailhead, in the right place at the right time for once.

A view on the Route of the Hiawatha

Another 

A little bit of Mexico in Wallace, Idaho

Russ, our lively guide, in the silver mine near Wallace.  The canary in the cage never was alive. 

A bridge across Lake Coeur d' Alene.  If you click on the picture, you'll see that it says that jumpers will be prosecuted.  As the water is shallow, it reminded me of lines from "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid":  "Jump."  "I don't swim."  "Are you kidding?  The fall will kill you."

They make big bugs in Idaho

Priscilla and I are reflected in this one's chest.

September 10, 2011

It’s Saturday, September 10, 2011, and tomorrow Priscilla and I will try to cross into the USA on the 10^th anniversary on 9/11.  There has been so much coverage of the event on the CBC this past week that I have started to tune it out .  I remember very clearly what I was doing when Jim called me from Heritage to tell me about the attack and how I watched TV for hours as I rewrote my whole recipe book that day and how I later cut out and saved Lewis Lapham’s articles in ‘Harper’s’ when the Bush mob used it as one of their lame excuses for entering Iraq.  It was a momentous and tragic event that certainly has influenced our time, but it seems to me that CBC is overdoing its coverage of the 10^th anniversary considering all that has happened since and other events that have intervened.  It undoubtedly suits Harper’s agenda to go over the top about the issue and milk it for every ounce of fear possible, but the CBC doesn’t have to be in such lock step.  That’s it for the rant.

The theme for the rest of this blog will be biking on abandoned rail beds over trestles and through tunnels.  This past Thursday I went with the gang on a 50km bike along the Kettle Valley Railroad bed.  It’s part of the Trans Canada Trail.  The biking was easy, and the views that you get as you wind along the Myra Canyon over the 18 trestles are spectacular.  The whole area was burned out in the wildfires of September 2003, which destroyed 12 wooden trestles and damaged 2 steel ones.  They have all been rebuilt and sided for biking and walking over.  The 2 tunnels are short, but one of them was pitch dark for a moment, long enough for me to remember a cartoon I saw recently.  The picture shows the opening to a black tunnel and the caption reads, “ Due to budgetary cutbacks, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off.”  This coming week when we bike on the Hiawatha Trail in Idaho, we will be going through a few long tunnels.  It is also an abandoned railway.  I had to buy a red rear light for my bike and front lights too.  I bought an official rear light, but for the front I bought LED lights that fit on the peak of the visor that I wear under my bike helmet.  I hope they work; they certainly will look a little dorky.  I think I might have started a mini trend in the club.  So far, I have one convert to wearing a visor under the helmet, but I might lose her when she sees me with the LED light ‘add ons.’

A picture Caroline took of me at the Kettle Valley Winery wearing the top Jay and May sent me from the Philippines

A view down the Myra Canyon from one of the KVR trestles.  You can just see Kelowna in the haze from the first forest fire of this year, as well as what remains of the trees burned in 2003

A couple of the KVR trestles

    

End of summer

It’s 9:30 Sat. night and I’ve just driven home from dinner at Bert and Peg’s.  Jules and Carol were there and the evening was warm.  The sky is clear and full of stars, but my appreciation of them was curtailed by the harsh noise of an angry young man screaming obscenities at someone one street over.  This is the last weekend of summer, so the lakes are dotted with boats, the roads lined with cars and people are out doing too much of everything.  Kalamalka Lake was the most gorgeous and various shades of blue this afternoon as I drove to Kelowna.

I’ve been feeling listless this week.  A lot has happened in the last 3 years, and I haven’t had time to do much other than keep my head up and keep moving, but now I’m here and fairly settled and wondering what’s next.  I miss Jim almost more than ever.  It might also be the season.  I’m so used to going back to school in the fall, that as the weather cools I begin to wonder what I’m doing.  Hiking and biking certainly keep me in motion, but …  Anyway, September is planned with biking in Idaho, Bill and Paula’s visit and driving with him to Victoria.  Maybe Immigrant Services will need a teacher in October or this feeling will pass on its own.

Last Sunday’s hike up Mount Beaven was the hardest yet. I now know what a 5 is on the hiking scale.  For the first time my thighs were tight for the following 2 days.  There was a lot of uphill, which is just as hard in a different way coming down.  We saw grizzly digs about which I knew nothing before.  Donna told me that when they’re after something, be it juicy roots or meaty marmots, they dig them up, at times uprooting small trees in the process.  The views were spectacular, even the locals commented because this year there was no fog or fire smoke to get in the way. 

I’ve gone back to studying a bit of Spanish, one of my efforts to fight off ennui.  And just as I did I had two encounters with Spanish speaking people.  The first was a woman from El Salvador who came to the door selling Humane Society tickets.  We talked in Spanish a while as I bought a ticket.  The second was on the phone.  I was on line trying to update the Tom Tom maps.  I saw a phone number, dialed it and ended up talking with a very helpful woman for quite a long time.  In the course of the conversation I asked her where she was.  She was in Guadalajara, Mexico, so we shared a few words in Spanish, but not many as trying to program a GPS in English is enough of a challenge for me.

The big success of the week was putting together the Squirrel Buster bird feeder that I brought from home.  It was only in 5 pieces, but the wrong combinations I came up with were legion.  Now it’s full of black oil sunflower seeds and hanging from a dead tree in the side yard where I can see it as I sit and eat.  The problem is I don’t think the birds will like the location and I’m very eager to attract a pair of Steller’s Jays that have been pecking around the back yard for the last few days.  They mostly hang out in my back neighbor’s blue spruce.  I think I’ll have to hang it higher in the back maple.  And the toilet has flushed almost every time for the last week.  Milagro!

Maybe not the last rose of summer, but close to it

Another beauty from the last bush in my yard to really be in bloom

Donna showing me the grizzly dig.

Almost at the top of Mount Beaven