Matilda Chantyman, Carla's Words

November 6, Monday, 2017

Family and friends,

I heard about Matilda's (102) passing before lunch. We use to visit her at Kluskus. She had a small house dog that she called 'Dlig'. The dog was a bit bigger a squirrel. Hence the name of her dog.

She was a busy and tuff ol' bird: she attended family funerals at Anaham, other Chilcotin communities for funerals and celebrations. I have even seen her at a diabetes conference at Penticton. When she was mobile, I use to see her at the casino and asking for five dollars. She use to sit at one of my favorite machines.

There was a time that I saw her at the Quesnel rodeo activities at the park and listening to the bands playing rock and roll tunes. She must have had the love of music and dancing in her genes as did her nephews: late Patrick, late Raymond, late Raphael, and late Norman. Music was in their family as her nieces Celina and late Clara were good at belting out a good tune. Family resemblance was visible in looks, taste of traveling, meeting 'new' people, making friends, and attending rodeos, dances, and pow-wows.

With the passing of this fine elder, is a lost of knowledge, culture, from Tl'etinqox and Kluskus sides. Just imagine that she lived and traveled The Grease Trial on foot, with horse and wagon. I am sure that she lived with the seasons, cattle roundup and feeding, haying time, and moving from Anaham, Anaham Meadows and Rocky Point.

Not to mention that she provided for her family with traditional ways of living. She spoke fluently in Chilcotin and Carrier language. In her day, school was not a priority but living of the land was the way of life. The way to survive was to hunt wildlife, big and small, fish, deer and moose were packaged and dried, berries, wild tea, wild potatoes, soapberries were picked and stored for winter food. There was none of shopping and buying of food at Safeway for this grand Tsilhqot'in.

This elder has many great-nieces and great-nephews at Tl'etinqox Government, Tl'etinqox School, Tsilhqot'in National Government, Negotiations & External Affairs Office, Punky Lake Wilderness Camp Society,  Stone Band and Alkali Lake Band office: Sharmon Alphonse, Lorna Elkins, Bella Alphonse, Jodie Jim, Paul Grinder, Randy Billyboy, Carla Alphonse, Karen Jim, Samantha Jo Dick, Chief Joe Alphonse, Cecil Grinder, Pamela Alphonse, Janel Alphonse, Justin Bambrick, Dorothy Alphonse, Darlene Alphonse, Wanda Petal-Dick, Rhoda Petal, Janet Petal, Erika Petal, and Faye Chelsea, I am sorry if I missed anyone. It is important to know our family connections. We come from a strong and remarkable deni.  

Matilda Alphonse Chantyman may you greet the good Lord with a smile and open arms. RIP.

Carla Alphonse, CSSC, HSD

Chief's Assistant, Tl'etinqox

Tsilhqot'in National Government

250-394-4212 Extension 206

888-224-3322 Extension 206

250-302-1109 (Cell)

Matilda Chantyman

Hello,

Matilda Chantyman (b June 3, 1916), Carla's dad's aunt on his dad's side, died.   Matilda was living in Quesnel, where Dad was born in 1919, three years after Matilda, who I think was born in Anaham. 

In 2004 and 2006, when I taught in her village of Kluskus, off the road in the bush about 100 km west of Quesnel, Matilda still lived there, with her daughter Bella, over 60 then. During winter trips, in a high-clearance truck for the bush trail, toand from Quesnel, Matilda got to sit in the front with the little children, but Bella, I, and the bigger children rumbled along snuggled under blankets in the box.  One winter night, stuck in the bush, Bella had a fire going fast.  We gathered round, waiting for morning and someone to bring a U-joint to fix the truck.   The temperature was only about -10.

"When I was younger, we used to walk to Ulkatcho," Bella told me.  That's about 140 km west of Kluskus, along the Dakelh-Nuxalt Grease Trail, the route that Alexander Mackenzie followed westward to Pacific Ocean tidewater at Bella Coola in 1793.  A Bella Coola monument says so.  At Kluskus, I saw little metal signs on trees along the trail, a protected historic route sometimes traveled still, by foot or horse.    "An Indian is pointing a white man in the wrong direction," Kluskus resident George Jimmie, one of the high-clearance truck drivers, quipped.

I met Matilda and Bella in February, 2004 in Bella's house at Kluskus, which had a 3 x 8-foot table covered in dried moose meat. 

In 2016, Carla, Chelsea, and I attended Matilda's 100th birthday party in the Quesnel friendship centre.  I shook a 100-year-old hand.  Matilda asked one of Carla's sisters for a chew of tobacco.  Prime Minister Trudeau's letter to Matilda for turning 100 was on he hall wall.  Perhaps her land, stolen by colonialism, is in the mail.      

Michael Wynne
Williams Lake, The Land Called Canada

Hockey Helmet Pony Tails

Monday, November 6, 2017 

     Saturday, November 4, skating for the first time this winter season, I liked watching pony tails flying from under hockey helmets worn by several girls, age 9-12, skating in pairs or trios, wearing their hockey sweaters, 
     No girls played minor hockey when I did, in the 1970s.  Girls figure skated.  When our coach invited one to show us power skating techniques when I was 12 or so, nobody on my team could catch her.
     The activism against fighting in hockey might yet civilize the sport among men and older boys, amateur and professional.  "I was watching the fight, when a hockey game broke out."
     Poetry in motion, that's what I thought when I watched a couple university women's hockey games in Edmonton a few years ago:  finesse, not goonery.
      Everybody skate, to "The Skaters' Waltz!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV4BxDcWus8

    

Ireland, by Leon and Jill Uris

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

     Ireland:  A Terrible Beauty, its subtitle from the W.B. Yeats poem "Easter, 1916," which I read in my first year English course at the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 1979, is a 1978 edition of a 1975 book by Leon and Jill Uris.  They wrote and published during the British Army occupation of Northern Ireland, and they like neither the army nor the province.
     The Hill of Tara, ancient burial mounds, pre-Celtic migrants from Scandinavia and Scotland, perhaps via a land bridge 6000 years ago, Vikings, Normans, the Reformation, the government-induced famine of the 1840s, while cattle were exported, the 1916 events, Partition, Ulster "fascism" in the authors' words, and 1970s despair that peace will never come are in this book from this fall's used book sale in the mall in Williams Lake.  Today, when I volunteer again at the sale, I'll return the book, so someone else can have it.
     Here I'll write about the book, for my blog readers, especially my sister Maryanne, my 2015 and 2017 Ireland travel partner.
     From "Ulster," the title of the last third of the book, here is the authors' view of one section of the police set up in Northern Ireland when Britain granted it province status around 1920:

   "Of the auxiliaries, the B-specials, a civil militia of mostly Orangemen, were to gain a
     well-deserved infamy for their brutal tactics."
       "From the beginning, no protest ever failed to bring on a reaction of overkill.  It was a
     blunt instrument of totalitarianism.  To back up those massive forces, a Special Powers
     Act was legislated at the very start to enable this one-party government to arrest anyone
     without warrant or reason and to hold him behind bars indefinitely without charges or
     rights.  It is small wonder this act would become a model law for later fascist regimes
     in Europe."  (176)

     Later, describing Bloody Sunday, the January 30, 1972 British Army murder of 13 peaceful demonstrators among an unarmed crowd in Derry, and its aftermath British inquiry that condemned the army's behavior, the authors write, "if the British had given justice to Ulster's Catholics and had not invoked fascism through Internment, no protest would have been required."  (220)

     Here is the authors' third and last mention of fascism in Northern Ireland:

   "[The British] know that the Ulster love of the Crown had the biggest Catch 22 of them all:
     the proposition that Britain was going to be used to allow their quasi-fascist regime to
     exist."  (277)

Strong words.

     Martin McGuinness is young in the book, whose authors would probably not "piss on his grave," unlike an old English man Maryanne met decades later said he would, upon hearing of McGuinness' peaceful death.  "After the Battle of Bogside [1969], the I.R.A. Provos came under command of Martin McGuinness, a twenty-two-year-old butcher's apprentice." (215)

     On the other side of the barricades, have one of several Orange chants the book quotes:

     "A rope, a rope,
      Tae hang the Pope!
      A pennyworth o' cheese
      Tae choke him!
      A pint o' lamp oil
      Tae wrench it down!
      And a big hot give
      Tae roast him!
      When I was sick,
      And very very sick,
      And very near a-dying,
      The only thing that raised me up
      Was to see
      The old whore frying!" (180-181)

A few paragraphs later, there's this amusing announcement from a pilot about to land at Belfast airport:  "We are about the land in Ulster.  Set your watches back 300 years."  (181)
     Page 214 is about  John Hume, "A Voice in the Wilderness."  Hume is "the best political brain on the island"and his Social Democratic Labor Party "the most illuminating lights in Ulster politics."  The page ends, "it will fall to the John Humes to bring sanity" to Ulster.  This later happened.  I wonder if he's related to David Hume, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher from the 1700s.
     A week before Bloody Sunday, in "COs Want Paras Restrained," Simon Hoggart writes in the January 25, 1972 Guardian of British Army units asking that the Parachute Regiment not enter Derry.  One unit captain, unnamed, whose commander did not oppose the Paras in Derry, said the paras "seem to think they can get away with whatever they like." (221)
     After Bloody Sunday, "the British Embassy was burned down by a Dublin mob." (278)
     Father Edward Daly, whose statue we saw in 2017 in Derry, and I wonder if he's related to Sister Daly who taught me Catechism during my First Communion year, when I was 7, is in this book.  On Bloody Sunday, he dodged British Army bullets to rescue shot teenagers. He told the authors, "it doesn't matter whether you have a Roman collar or a dog collar."  Daly regularly evacuated old people before demonstrations and consequent army attacks.  Daly's story, pages 222-24, ends by noting that a year after Bloody Sunday, the paratrooper commander was knighted.
     Bloody Sunday gets much attention from the authors, writing only a couple years after it.  The event still weighs on Ireland.  We saw a demonstration about it outside Belfast City Hall in 2015.
     Here are a couple pithy quotes:

    "The British Army has performed with total consistency in Ireland since the
      Reformation as an anti-Catholic force of conquest, occupation, and suppression."    
      (232)

     "[Belfast] is the mongoloid child of British imperialism." (247)

     Innocent Protestants in Ulster suffered, too.  Stephan Parker, 14, whose Belfast liberal pastor father "sought Christian answers to the crushing events," died when a July, 1972 I.R.A. bomb blasted the grocery store where he worked.  "There is something Godlike about Joe Parker and his wife [Dorothy] that keeps them from being consumed with bitterness."  (262-263)
     Belfast Protestant Malcolm Orr, 19, engaged to a Belfast Catholic woman, was shot dead for it.  At his wake, "She was there with her family and many other Catholic families.  Protestants were there and many many strangers and they prayed together." Malcolm's mother told the authors, "Revenge is empty." (265)
     The authors conclude the book by saying that the I.R.A. can't win by force and lacks the support to win by votes, but "will never be able to leave its people to the 'tender mercy' of the  jackals." (277)
     The timeline in the Appendix says that Henry VIII's Catholic daughter Queen Mary, whose heritage centre we saw in 2015 in Ireland, started the first plantation, in 1556, "confiscating Counties Leix and Offaly."  (281)
     The Catholic-Protestant division is therefore newer, politically grafted onto the earlier English-Irish, colonial-independent conflicts.  Perhaps unity won't come, Northern Ireland's colonial history conjoined to Scottish Presbyterianism being too different from the history of the rest of the island.  Still, Ulster was the strongest anti-English part of Ireland before the Reformation and Plantations.
     The authors note that the Republic of Ireland, which I have called Southern Ireland since Paul McGlinchey so named it in his I.R.A.  memoir Truth Will Out, whose signing we attended in the Greyhound Pub in Duleek on September 23, does not want to welcome a million Protestants from Northern Ireland into a unified Ireland and island.  "One island.  One Ireland," McGlinchey's co-author Philomena Gallagher ended her McGlinchey introduction in the pub that night.
     A personal ancestry note occurred to me as I read about the consequences of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, whose site we saw in 2017, in which Williams of Orange's Protestant army defeated James II's Catholic army and ensured that only Protestants would sit on the English throne.  After the battle, Anglican English oppression of other religions in Ireland was hardest on Catholics, but also hurt Presbyterians.
     Our mom's mom's mom was a Mahurin. Several generations earlier, Hugh Mahurin left Scotland or Ireland around 1690, the Hugh Mahurin website says.  I put this lineage, which includes links to a Mayflower passenger, on my blog:

http://michaeljosephwynne.blogspot.ca/2017/07/ancestry-of-wynnes-going-back-to.html

If you can't open that link, then search the blog using the keywords "Mayflower" or "Mahurin."   The link mentions the Mahurin ancestry after the Mayflower ancestry.
     Was Hugh Mahurin a Scottish Presbyterian oppressed by English colonial laws against Presbyterians, Catholics, and other non-Anglicans?  Does it matter now?  One could crack up obsessing about history.  I just wanted to write about this interesting book because I was recently in Ireland, North and South.  

2017 Ireland Ancient

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

     I wrote the first five blog entries about my September, 2017 Ireland trip in five successive days, but this sixth entry I write several days later.  The topic is 2017 Ireland Ancient, which got only a few days more ancient during my dawdling.
     It's about the land.  It has always been about the land, as the Irish, and other people, colonized or not, always knew.  The fifth blog entry, 2017 Ireland Modern, started with mention of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, the start of Modern Ireland, I argued.  Protestants defeated Catholics.  Catholics continue to outnumber Protestants in Ireland, but the incipient capitalism that Protestantism strengthened eventually supplanted the feudalism that had buttressed Catholic rule for centuries. Feudalism ties peasants and lords to one another and to the land.  I choose to start with ancient geography we found in Ireland, then describe pre-Christian and Medieval religious sites, and finally note evidence we found of vain Protestant attempts to erase Catholicism from Ireland.
     Land is old, but rock is older.  On the Antrim Coast on the northeast part of the island, we found The Giant's Causeway:

http://www.giantscausewayofficialguide.com/

Undersea volcanic eruptions eons ago made these hundreds of tall, skinny, hexagonal rocks, "but the people don't believe that," I've heard or read more than once.  Finn MacCool, or Fionn mac Cumhaill in Irish, was a mythical giant warrior who accepted a challenge from Benandonner, a giant who lived  in what would become Scotland, across the sea from what would become Ireland.  Finn built The Giant's Causeway to bridge the gap, but learning that Benandonner was bigger, Finn returned to Ireland.  Benandonner pursued Finn, whom Finn's wife Oonagh dressed as a baby and put in a large cradle.  When she told Benandonner not to wake the baby, lest the father be mad, Benandonner feared that the father was too big a match for him.  Benandonner therefore fled back across the sea and destroyed most the the causeway behind him.
     I wonder what the Scots think of this myth.  Have they a myth to battle the Irish myth?  Could a mythical causeway exist?
     Moving ahead in time and south in direction, we found the Hill of Tara

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_of_Tara

The ancient people crowned kings here, and the rolling hills and round pits show where dwellings were.  I have seen similar "pit house" features west of my home city of Williams Lake, in the land of the Tsilhqot'in, one of the area's Indigenous peoples.  Pit houses are in many places:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit-house

     Tara is one of many places Saint Patrick came much later, in the 400s, preaching Christianity to the people.  Tara has a statue of Saint Patrick.  Here and elsewhere, he explained the Trinity by using the shamrock, an iconic plant.  As in the New World a  millenia later, Christianity found receptive spiritual soil in Ireland.  Pit houses abounded in the world.  So did beliefs in supernatural explanations for natural objects and processes whose origins people did not understand.  Where people once venerated Druidic kings, they would venerate Catholic bishops.  Kings and bishops erected explanations of worlds seen and unseen, and gave the people their places in both.
     Christian Ireland erected buildings as well as statues, and we saw plenty of both, sometimes by chance.
     For example, we drove past a sign that said "Bective Abbey," and a couple kilometres away we found the ruins of an abbey dating from the 1500s, the original stonework from the 1100s gone:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bective_Abbey

This was one film site for Braveheart., the film about William Wallace, who led Scots against English in the late-1100s.  By then, the Anglo-Normans had built the first abbey here, centuries after Saint Patrick lived and died.  Christianity therefore came to Ireland at least twice:  once from England with Saint Patrick, and once from France via England after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066.  I remember thinking how soon this abbey went up after the Anglo-Normans came.  I also liked how many arches, rooms, and levels were in this abbey.  A centuries-old stone house was preserved nearby.  What did dwellers in stone houses think of the incoming Anglo-Normans? 
     Another film site for Braveheart was Trim Castle, near where we had a picnic that included the last of the birthday cake my sister Maryanne made for me that week.  Again, the Anglo-Normans built this impressive structure in the 1200-1300s, I recall from the nearby tourist centre.  Indeed, the tourist centre had a copy of the coffin of Edward Longshanks, Edward II I think, and a stone casting of his body on top, in a back room.  Edward was the English king who ringed Wales with forts, and similarly built structures to watch and control the Irish.  The king gave a local lord taxing power, and the taxes built Trim Castle.
     One might object that peasant labor and blood and the theft of peasant land built this and other monuments, to church and state.  True.  "But they are beautiful," the mid-1600s Republican English poet John Milton answered a Puritan who so objected.  Is any Trump tower so beautiful, or lasting?   When I asked the tourism centre man how the locals saw this castle project, he said, "They probably were happy to get the work." I suppose the man knows the Monty Python sketch against feudalism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2c-X8HiBng

Today on CBC Radio One I heard an English author muse that King Arthur might have been a Briton rebelling against the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England.  There were feudal battles for England before the winners ventured to bring English feudalism to Ireland, only to see industrialism replace it in each land.
     Still, feudalism hung on longer in Ireland than in Britain, whose Industrial Revolution touched Belfast and other urban areas long before gathering the starving remnants of Irish peasantry into wage work by the late-1800s.  This process had been nigh finished for a century in Britain by then.  The Irish faced the Enclosure Movement via starvation and exile, not expropriation, unlike earlier in England, Scotland, and Wales.
     A notable word about the building of the walled city of (London)Derry was that the city, like many British incursions into Ireland, was to be a "defensible" one.  Circling oneself by a wall, like circling the wagons in the Old West of America, proves that one is in hostile territory, in a place where one is unwanted.  Going to a place with an eye to defending oneself there proves that one suspects the locals are hostile to one's presence.
     In 1613, King James I granted a charter to build Derry into a city archly loyal to the crown of England.  This King James did more than authorize a new Bible, but even that book was an attempted improvement over the Catholic Bible, as Londonderry was an attempt to show the local Catholics an improved, Anglo-Protestant, way of life.  There was other mention of this king in a Coleraine historic building which displayed the history of the Plantations, that is, land taken from Irish peasants and Catholic lords by gentry, mostly English, all Protestant.  Oliver Cromwell deposed and decapitated James' son Charles I, but Cromwell continued with military force this plantation movement.  In an Enniskillen public library book in 2015, I found mention of a police constable named Wynne who came from Wales to Ireland in 1642 with Cromwell's army.
     Wynnes I know are more pro-Irish than pro-English, which fits a historical trend of incoming people adopting local ways.  Thus the Anglo-Normans of the 1200s spawned generations who, by Cromwell's time in the 1600s, were pro-Irish, not pro-English, and therefore Cromwell battled them.  Cromwell, was Republican, but he was pro-English, not pro-Irish.  By 1798, the Protestant-begun Plantation System had spawned Protestants who were pro-Irish, not pro-English, such as the lawyer Wolf Tone, who that year helped in a rebellion against English rule of Ireland.  Even Jonathan Swift of the early-1700s was an Irish person jaded by English rule.  Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw openly opposed English rule of their Ireland.  Swift, Wilde, and Shaw were Protestant.  The struggle started Irish-English, not Catholic-Protestant, the latter hitched on much later.  The Catholic Emancipation of 1829 conferred legal but not economic equality on Catholics,leading to generations of sectarian feuding that only calmed down since the late-1990s.  "All You Need is Love:"

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csyHN3LoRJ4

     Dad, a Wynne, said that his mother, an Irish-born Irvine, the Protestant name of a family probably assimilated generations earlier to Catholicism, would not have liked The Troubles that began in the 1960s, had she lived past 1960 to see them.  He also said he liked the British sense of justice and fair play.  They then, like I now, no doubt saw Ireland through the filter of acquired experiences, views, and knowledge of this or that scrap of history.
     Granny (Irvine) Wynne came to Canada in 1916, generations after Granny (Bender) Nasby's Mahurin ancestors left Scotland and soon after that Ireland, around 1690, the Battle of the Boyne year.  Dad said that Granny Wynne had a brother who was a cop, in what would have been Colonial Ireland.  Granny Nasby might have had an ancestor who was a Plantation whipman.  All these ancestors, and my two grannies, were economic migrants first, moving to make a living.  We who condemn their choices of employment have the luxuries of time, geography, material security, and most of all ignorance.
     Traveling in Ireland in 2015 and 2017 made me less ignorant, and therefore less arrogant.           
     
          

2017 Ireland Modern

Wednesday, October 4, 2017

     This fifth blog entry about my September, 2017 trip to Ireland describes modern history there, contrary to the traditional expectation that a person writes first of ancient history.  Later, I will write of ancient history elements I saw in Ireland.  I agree with the view that the present is largely a product of the past, but describing the modern first might entice readers to infer the ancient.  When I describe the ancient, they can see if they inferred correctly.  Indeed, some ancient aspects of Ireland had little or no modern consequences.
     How about 1690 as the start of modern Irish history?  That year, The Battle of the Boyne strengthened Protestant ascendancy for generations to come.  The Protestant Reformation in England, more than 150 years old, finally ensured that only Protestants would be monarchs.  The 1688 forcing off the throne of King James II, the last reigning Catholic, his failure to recapture the throne via the Battle of the Boyne, and the strengthening of the Plantation system begun centuries earlier and enforced bloodily by Oliver Cromwell's armies in the 1650s, set in motion modern Ireland, in war and peace, in colonialism and liberation.
     I walked around the remaining stone buildings of the Village of Oldbridge, the site of an important engagement of the Battle of the Boyne.  Landscapers and gardeners trimmed and coiffed the foliage that now stands on the couple square kilometres of ground whose 1690 battle shaped modern Irish history.
     The manor house, now the interpretive centre, built a half-century after 1690 the Coddington family, was in that family's possession until the descendants emigrated to Canada in the mid-1900s, one guide said.
     The site is in Southern Ireland, the Republic, and one display says that the government only recently gives due attention to the Battle of the Boyne.  I don't recall the exact words, but the sense seemed to be that the Battle was not all negative.  Beside the words was a large 2006 photo of Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern shaking hands with Ian Paisley, who spent decades undermining Irish unity and finally reconciled with Ireland late in life.
     Between 1690 and 2006, Ireland thrived, starved, found peace and war, and in only the last couple decades began to reconcile with its past and many factions.
     Many Catholic churches went up after the 1829 British revocation of laws oppressing Catholics, Baptists, and other non-Anglicans.  Still, echoes of earlier days exist in many modern churches.  St. Peter's Church in Drogheda, for example, built in 1884, contains the head of Oliver Plunkett, the Catholic Archbishop executed in 1681 "for promoting the Roman faith."
Wikipedia goes on to say that Plunkett's head went to a Benedictine monastery in Germany in 1683, and by 1921 the head was in Rome.  Then it returned to Ireland, and it has been in St. Peter's Church in Drogheda ever since.
     The 1916 Easter Uprising centenary was in 2016.  I wonder if there will be a Plunkett head centenary in 2021.
   The 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic surely graces other places besides the General Post Office in Dublin, whose shrine to the failed Easter uprising I saw in 2015.  The British execution of 15 leaders outraged the Irish enough to overturn British rule in 26 of 32 counties by 1922.  The Proclamation was in a store window in Slane, for example.  A shelf of biographies of the 15 executed leaders is at eye level near the entrance to Connolly's Bookshop in Dublin.  James Connolly was one of the executed leaders.  Their bodies went to a mass, unmarked grave, increasing Irish outrage.  Would the General Post Office display Connolly's head if it had it?  Here is "Irish Rebel," about Connolly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEmy8nif7J8

  I noticed little 1916 commemoration in Northern Ireland, a predictable lack, given its continuing colony status.  One thing I read in the Portrush public library, in a book of Catholic Irish history, or a book of Royal Irish Constabulary history, was a strong phrase in a passage describing negotiations for peace leading to the 1922 partition of Ireland.  Britain had already created Northern Ireland in 1920, and Prime Minister David Lloyd George "put his gun on the table" during negotiations about the rest of the island.  The British seemed ready and able to fight to retain the rest of the island, but thought better of it.
     I saw little 1916 history in "Ireland's Ancient East," that is, the Boyne River Valley and Irish Sea coast north of Dublin.
     Plunkett's well-traveled head rolled around Europe for a few centuries.  I found movements arguably lasting millenia, such as the devotions tree at the Hill of Tara site.  Tara is a site of many mounds, where the Irish crowned kings before Christianity came in the 400s.  A spreading, leafy tree at the site sported hundreds of pieces of paper with written prayers and pleas, memory articles, and other items to gain supernatural help for those in need, alive or dead.  The ancient people of Ireland, before there was such a name, were not like the middle-aged Catholic woman who assured me that the tree we beheld was powerful, or were they?  Granny said that Catholicism was a hard faith to live by, but an easy faith to die by.  Granny is in one piece in a graveyard in Edmonton, Canada; I think.
      In Dublin, I read on an O'Connell Street plinth a clever quotation from Sean O'Casey, about people and dignity and freedom.  There was a Famine Museum and a Leprechaun Museum we did not visit, but one of the first photo opportunities was me standing beside a statue of James Joyce.  I suppose someone has counted the number of public sites that mention this early-1900s writer.   
     Somewhere I saw mention that Daniel O'Connell, the mid-1800s Catholic lawyer activist for Irish home, spoke to audiences of more than 300 000 in the fields outside Dublin in the early-1840s.
     Then the late-1840s Hunger intervened, made worse by a British change of government to one opposing the distribution of food and encouraging emigration.  I'd read this in an Irish history book since my 2015 trip there.  Sinead O'Connor's "Famine" explains the contemporary consequences of this 1840s disaster:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZIB6MslCAo

     The British parliament had a home rule law ready in 1912, before World War One intervened, and Northern Irish Protestants demanded their own "statelet," in the words of their critics.  The 1920 creation of Northern Ireland, like the 1947 creation of India and Pakistan, ensured decades of discord and violence.  "Where you see two birds fighting, look for an Englishman, who probably started the fight," a Balkan friend once quoted a quip from his region.  Angry birds indeed.
     Somewhere else I read about revolutionary sentiments spreading to Ireland after the 1789 French Revolution.  I saw mention of the 1798 uprising under Protestant lawyer Wolf Tone, and I knew about that; but the 1800 British Act of Union welding Ireland to Britain was news to me.  I knew that a similar 1707 law joined Scotland to Britain.
     The modern sentiment I noticed the most was that Irish people are Europeans, despite having had to vote two times to join the European Union.  "People didn't understand what they were voting for the first time," an arch-Republican woman told me while she, her husband, and I walked the Boyne battle grounds.  "The second time, they understood, and voted to join Europe."  Everyone I asked saw the recent British vote to leave Europe as a mistake that will reduce diversity and therefore the quality of life. The U.S. group Chicago advises against breakup, in "If You Leave Me Now:"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJNVc6CZGBQ

     I found in modern Ireland a sense of the long as well as of the short term.  People know much about the past, but they live in the present.  It is always the present, for everyone; but the past helps make us who we are.  "The Who" asks "Who Are You," as I conclude this fifth blog entry about my  September, 2017 Ireland trip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5modnIBpqTQ 
          
      

2017 Ireland Travel

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

     This fourth blog entry about my September, 2017 trip to Ireland is about travel to, from, and on that island off the British coast.  British Columbia, the Canadian province where I live, passed a law in 1922 ordering everyone to drive on the right side of the road.  I think this province was among the last North American places to so decree.  A couple decades ago, a playful political party called the Rhinoceros Party mused in public about strengthening Canada's British link by moving vehicles back to the left side of the road.  Rather than shock everyone with an abrupt change, the party suggested only buses and trucks drive on the left side of the road for the first year.
     Back in Britain and Ireland, people continue to drive on the left side of the road.  Europeans drive on the right side of the road.  This forces traffic to switch sides upon entering, or exiting, I don't know which, the tunnel that links Britain to the rest of Europe.  Britain's recent vote to leave the European Union might complicate driving as it complicates farming, trade, education, and many other areas.  A British Rhinoceros Party might suggest a gradual exit:  potatoes, cheese, and philosophy professors during the first year, carrots, crackers, and physics professors the second year, and so on.  Have the Mo;nty Python crew, good Brits all, singing "The Philosopher Song, which Europe and the world hope to retain:"
   
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPFClJGqjBQ

     Most of Ireland severed the British link in 1922, the year British Columbia stopped British driving, but all Ireland continued to drive on the left side of the road during my visit.  Should I feel outraged as a tourist whose habits they ignored?  Given that I have a hard enough time driving on the right side of some Canadian roads, especially in winter, I think the Irish should be grateful that I neither complained about driving nor drove while in Ireland.  I left that to my vehicularly-ambidextrous sister.
     Clutch under her left foot and therefore closer to the clutch plate in the transmission, Maryanne smoothly shifted all five forward and one reverse gear as she drove a rented car 851 kilometres in one week.  After she drove a couple thousand in two weeks during a 2016 visit from our brother Harold, wowed by her driving, and perhaps as happy as I was not to be behind the wheel, I thought the Irish car rental agencies might combine to blacklist her from future rentals; but they again rented her a car.
     "Hey, that Canadian-Irish dual citizen is renting a car here," the 2017 agency might have said to a central registry.  The registry could then take bets on how far she would drive this time; the Irish love betting.  The winner could get a week's holiday in Canada, and see people drive on the wrong side of the road.  What side of the road is correct is relative, and I'm glad a relative found the relatively-correct side of the road during our travels.  See on this Irish road trip instructional video a road sign for Slane.  We wuz there:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbvWT1PXrSM

     Soon after my plane from Toronto landed at the Dublin airport, I found a bus for Belfast.  It was a double-decker with about seven people on it and I sat on the top deck, behind the people who took the front seats, over the driver.  The bus rolled into the breaking day and reached Belfast in a couple hours.  Unlike other buses, this one had no stairs down to a bathroom midway along the bus on the right side, at least not on the top deck.   Irish people older than 65 ride buses for free.  Is Weird Al  Yankovic over 65?  Could the Irish adopt him?  Sing along to "Another One Rides the Bus:"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SFEgu3KsGk

     The bus stopped at Great Victoria Station in Belfast, where I boarded a train for Coleraine, a couple hours west along the north coast.  The train made a couple stops within Belfast and a few more outside it, on its way to Derry.  I got off at Coleraine, where Maryanne  met me after she rode a few kilometres on a train from Portrush.  We rode a train back to Portrush and after a brief walk around town, I stayed awake until 8:30 PM and slept off most of my jet lag that night.
     I'm still amazed that I flew through eight time zone changes in one day.  The planes fly about 800 kilometres per hour, higher than 10 000 metres.  The Aer Lingus middle row was four seats wide and each side row was two seats wide.  When I saw the mass of baggage cascading down the carousel, I was even more amazed that all that weight of people and bags got into the air.
      A New Zealand man we met on the ferry across the Foyle River from County Derry to County Donegal foresaw a long trip back, by air:  Dublin to London to Dubai to Auckland.  That's 12 time zones, he told me, halfway around the Earth.  
     Have "Learning to Fly," by Tom Petty, who died on October 3, 2017 of heart failure at age 66:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbvWT1PXrSM

     Trains were my favorite form of transportation to, in, and from Ireland:  smooth, quiet, not crowded.  People can get up and walk around.  During our Derry-Belfast train ride, we sat in facing double seats with a table between us.  What a nice way to travel, and picnic.  The Derry train station retains serious ironwork fortifications from the 30 years of British Army occupation of Northern Ireland, where Derry is, due to a jag in the border which follows the Foyle River then turns south around the city to swallow it before resuming its run along the river.
     Perhaps I liked trains because the tracks are as wide and far apart as Canadian tracks.  For the Irish roads are narrower than Canadian roadds.  Big trucks, buses, and our little red rented Ford Fiesta  pass one another by mere centimetres.  Maryanne was an excellent, organized, reassuring driver and I was not a nervous passenger.  This helped make a happier holiday.
     Back in Canada now, I end this fourth blog entry about my 2017 trip to Ireland thinking of "Traveling Man," which I remember from Tommy Hunter's 1970s musical variety show on Canadian television:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtXvznfMWAw




     
                

2017 Ireland Staff

Monday, October 2, 2017

     This third blog entry about my September, 2017 trip to Ireland focuses on the staff I met in various places we were.  This entry, which I hope is shorter but no less entertaining than the first two entries, about expert guide Maryanne and various Irish people we met, says something about the places as well as the people.  I learn lots about a place by listening to people who are familiar with it.
     Take Slane, for example.
     "There's nothing we can tell you.  You've seen everything," one of two women in the village's travel information centre said, the day before I flew back to Canada.
     "I had a good guide," I replied, pointing to Maryanne.
     The two women proceeded to offer Maryanne various tourism pamphlets, including one of Francis Ledwidge, a local poet killed in World War One in  1917.  A 10-metre portrait of him graces the side of a local building.  We saw his poetry posted on store windows, including the laundromat.  Perhaps this publicity was due to the centenary of his death.  Or perhaps Irish people like poets and poetry in public places.  Should I ask to post poetry at my local laundromat in Williams Lake?
     "His poetry is light, not heavy," one tourism woman explained.  Light or heavy, there are only two kinds of poetry:  good poetry and bad poetry.  United States composer and jazz band leader and pianist Duke Ellington said the same about music.  "It Don't Mean a Thing if You Ain't Got that Swing:"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDQpZT3GhDg

Music, like poetry, need not "mean" anything, and it certainly can mean something different to the audience than to the author, however much the audience should seek and respect the author's meaning; but this story is about Irish people on the job, not an tract on aesthetics.
     The town of Trim and its castle mean much to the volunteer running a local travel information centre like no other I ever saw.  His centre had pamphlets about this Medieval castle, and about area history and culture, as well as souvenirs including compact discs of Irish music.  I bought one.
     This tall, boney, blue-eyed, dark-haired Irishman also had a replica of a Medieval English king's sarcophagus, King Edward II, "Edward Longshanks" I believe, and Medieval armor in a room off the main room.  This 1200s king gave a local feudal lord rule over the area, and the lord taxed the people enough to build and defend the castle.  This area of Ireland saw much war for centuries, before and after the 1690 Battle of the Boyne nearby.  See the 2017 Ireland People blog post about that decisive event.
     I decided that this enthusiastic history buff loved his volunteer work, and he agreed.  As well as the cd, I bought two copies of a children's version of Irish history, subtitled "A Long Story in a Short Book."  That's a subtitle for our busy times, but Medieval Ireland was busy, by the reckoning of many people then and since.
     At the nearby Battle of the Boyne interpretive centre a day or two after the Trim tour, tourism centre man, and castle grounds picnic that included the last of my birthday cake, two men at the front desk told me much about the battle, and Ireland, and history in general.
     One man pointed out the window to the hill down which the army of King James II rode to engage King William III.  I could almost see the clods of earth flying from the horses' hooves, by his telling.  He explained kings from Scotland and the Netherlands driven by king from France to fight in Ireland for the crown of England.  Can you say "entangling alliances?"  The Netherlands king won, outlawed Catholics on the English throne, and strengthened the plantation system in Ireland.  English plantations in Ireland fed on peasant labor.  English plantations in North America fed on slave labor.
     The Protestant army led by a Dutch king and peopled by soldiers from Netherlands, Prussia, Poland, Scandinavia, and the British Isles won that battle, but little Protestant power or heritage remains in that part of Ireland, the other tourism centre man said.  The 1795 start of the Orange Order finds no marching resonance around there, unlike in Belfast and other Protestant strongholds losing marching and general cultural strength by the year.  Have some Orange history:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXNf91unZgo

      Farther north, at the northern tip of Ireland, Malin Head, a woman in a mobile trailer on a windy hilltop in County Donegal had been glad for the sunny day of our encounter, after rainy days.
     "There was nobody selling souvenirs up here, only in the village below, so my brother set up this trailer.  I'm running it for him today," she explained.  "Many things we sell are made around here," she continued.  She gestured to knitting, ceramics, woodwork and other items that stuffed her trailer, behind whose open side she stood, inside, out of the rain, and today the sun. 
     "Try this," she said, squirting a transparent liquid on my hand.  "It's from local seaweed.  It's a great moisturizer."  I rubbed it in and said it had a nice feel and smell.  I wouldn't wash my hand the rest of the day, I said, before I bought, not her bottle, but a fridge magnet.
     She said that some days very few people bought things . I asked if she and her brother made enough to get by.
    "We do all right.  People around here do all kinds of things to get by," she said, before we wished each other well and parted.
     Back across the Foyle River by ferry, we had found a County Antrim beach with an English family sitting by their camper van under sunny skies a day or two earlier.  The historic sign behind their van interested me more than they did, but I stopped to introduce myself and explain the importance of the plaque to Canadians such as I.
     We were at Torr Head, the closest Ireland comes to Scotland, a mere 12 miles away.  We were in Northern Ireland, measured and valued in miles and Pounds, not kilometres and Euros as in Southern Ireland.  I started calling the Republic of Ireland "Southern Ireland" after I read Paul McGlinchey's memoir calling it that.  See 2017 Ireland People for more on the brave Paul.
     The sign above the sandy and rocky beach was about, who was in the Young Ireland movement when he fled from that beach, pursued by agents of the British occupation of Ireland, in 1848.  In 1848, many in Ireland starved to death or emigrated, and many in France, Italy, Hungary, Poland, and Prussia rose against tyranny.
     McGee went to the United States a Fenian, that is, a person who wanted Irish, not British rule in Ireland.  He left the U.S. and the Fenians a few years later for Canada, where he helped bring home rule, that is, Canadian Confederation, in 1867.  Reducing British influence in Canada was not Fenian enough for Patrick Whelan, the Fenian who shot McGee dead outside his Ottawa house in 1869.  I told the camped English family this.
     U.S.-based Fenians raided Canada in the 1860s.  I suppose that the U.S. retains more sympathy for Fenians than Canada does, especially after a Fenian killed a Father of Confederation.  The internet tells me that "Danny Boy" is a Fenian song.  Have the U.S. singer Deanna Durbin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j32Fnb_8Bv4

     The traditional Canadian belief is that McGee's is Canada's only assassination of a Canadian political leader.  An Armenian shot dead the Turkish ambassador to Canada in the 1980s.  Another tradition gives Louis Riel status at least equal to that of McGee.  The Metis leader Riel's 1869-70 efforts to secure Indigenous and French and Catholic rights in land ruled by the Hudson's Bay Company, including land that would by 1870 become the province of Manitoba, whose first leader he was, qualifies Riel as a political leader, arguably a Father of Confederation, and even a provincial premier.  McGee was not a premier. 
     McGee and Riel were both elected to the Canadian parliament.  McGee was shot dead and Riel fled to the U.S. in 1870 when the Canadian government militarily opposed his work for Indigenous, French, and Catholic rights in Western Canada.  In 1885, after he led armed resistance to the imposition of rule that undervalued Indigenous, French, and Catholic rights in a region to the northwest of Manitoba, Riel was convicted of treason by a Regina court and hanged.
     Prime Minister John A. Macdonald vowed to "hang Riel though all the dogs in Quebec bark."  Riel's strongest support was in that French Catholic part of Canada.  Some argue that Quebec is an internal colony.  Some argue that the Indian Act rules and land reserves for Indigenous people are internal colonies.  The Indian Act is not subject to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  The Indian Act was a model for the racist apartheid system that ruled South Africa for decades, until the 1990s.  
     "My people will sleep for a hundred years, then awake," Riel said.  The Canadian government pardoned Riel more than a hundred years after its court hanged him.  Indigenous people in "this land called Canada" are awakening lately, which is good for them, and for all who live here.
     Colonialism that convinces the colonized that it is the best possible system for them is very hard to undo, but the Irish largely undid it.  May Canada one day do likewise.  Have Sinead O'Connor and the Chieftains' "Foggy Dew" and Willie Dunn's "Louis Riel:"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaS3vaNUYgs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwPjB8TfmLI

Dunn's song is from the album Akwesasne Notes.  Akwesasne was a place of armed resistance to colonialism in 1990, when I was a student at McGill University in nearby Montreal.
     Near Derry, the city whose Bogside Tour I noted in 2017 Ireland People, the tour guide perhaps belonging in this entry about people on the job, not that entry on people not on the job, we rented a car for a week.  An England-born man worked in the agency.  An Irish-born woman worked there.  The woman who rented the car to us was from Orlando, Florida.
     "This job came up and the company said I could apply for it," she told us.  What a brave young woman, to move across an ocean to a job.  You only live once, so go where you can and experience what you can, my Indigenous spouse's late father used to say.
     I hope you liked this word trip to Ireland.  I wonder if my next, fourth blog entry should be about transportation there, and feature the expert driving of my host and sister Maryanne. She also sings.  A carload of women, with Maryanne at the wheel, on the right side, as in this SketchSHE video, can be noisy harmonic fun on wheels:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMpQUsQcJFg

Noisily harmonic, I sign off.

                

             
      
    
    

2017 Ireland People

Sunday, October 1, 2017   Anaham

     This second of blog entry from my September, 2017 trip to Ireland revels in the fascinating people I met on the way there, in Ireland, and on the way back to Canada.
     My Vancouver-Toronto Westjet flight seat was beside a Canadian couple over 60 who were going to Newfoundland for the first time, while I was going to Ireland for the second time.  During my May, 1989 month rail pass, I went by ferry from North Sidney, Nova Scotia to Port-aux-Basques, Newfoundland.  A day's bus ride brought me to St. John's, where I stayed two nights.  Getting off the bus and walking dockward to find a cheap place to stay, I got an enthusiastic welcome from quite friendly women outside the tattoo parlor beside the Seaport Inn, where I spent two nights, alone, saving money and virtue.   I slept well, alone, despite the bar music below my second floor room.  
     Returning west, I rented a car in Deer Lake and drove to Bonne Bay, midway up the Northern Peninsula.   A man born years after Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, whom I met at the desk of a Woody Point inn, told me he did not see himself as part of Canada, a distant mystery.  I barely understood the speech of old timers I met in the Bonne Bay Legion.  Newfoundland, part of Canada?  You and Shanneyganock decide:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7ybrr_g4Ck

    Two springs later, in May, 1991, I got closer to but still not to the tip of the Northern Peninsula, when I practice taught in Blanc Sablon, Quebec, on the Labrador border across the Strait of Belle Isle from St. Barbe, Newfoundland.  Icebergs as big as buildings clogged the strait until two days before I left at the end of May, so the ferry did not operate.  One noisy, ice-grinding night sent almost all the ice southwest into the Gulf of St. Lawrence.  I only saw the Northern Peninsula across about 15 km of the Strait of Belle Isle.
     I did not regale my seat mates with my Newfoundland tales, but a couple weeks later, a woman working in a Dublin thrift shop assured me that Newfoundland books I read during my trip and gave to her would find an interested reader she knew.  Instead, I listened to the older couple explain how happy they were finally to go to Newfoundland.  Newfoundland is closer to Dublin than to Vancouver, geographically and culturally.  The Dublin accent sounds close Newfoundland to me.
     My Toronto-Dublin flight sat me in the last row of the first section, aisle seat, beside a woman of about 30 who had just graduated from theology training in Kentucky.  I would meet two Kentucky women during my trip.  I have ancestors on my mom's mom's side who lived in Kentucky in the 1700s.  Attach Neil Diamond to which character you please:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-YpI-eJgDc

     Sister Kentucky was going to her new job as a chaplain at Queen's University in Belfast.  Her minister fiancee, a Northern Irish Presbyterian minister too inclusive for the older and more reactionary members of his rural flock south of Belfast, later met her at Dublin airport.
     The second Kentucky woman I met, about ten days later, was going to her tour bus in the Tara historic site parking lot.  Earthen mounds that predate Christianity in Ireland speckle this place for crowning ancient Druid kings.  She told me that a DNA test showed her 98% Irish but without any Cherokee, despite her belief she was part Cherokee.   Could one or both of us be part Druid?  I think I'm 98% storyteller, but you can decide as you read.  Stay awake.  There might be whisky.

     On my return flight from Dublin to Toronto, I sat beside a Drogheda woman joining her Irish-born husband in their Ontario home.  He helped bring ice hockey to Ireland, don't ya know.  She, like every Irish person I met, were happy that Ireland was at peace, unlike the decades before a 1998 peace agreement ended most hostilities in Northern Ireland, between those who want to remain part of Britain and those who want the North to join the rest of Ireland.
     The other Drogheda person I met was a man walking his dog at the nearby Battle of the Boyne historic site.  He, like the Dublin couple I met earlier there, liked Ireland staying in Europe, unlike the British, who by a slim majority recently voted to leave Europe.  Check the map, John Bull.  The woman of that couple was arch-Republican.  The man's father wrote books about Oliver Cromwell, whose troops did not skewer babies, contrary to propaganda against the English Commonwealth leader and scourge of Ireland.  Two deer ran across our path as we talked.  "That's unusual," the  woman said.
     It was not Cromwell but his successor Edmund Ludlow who said that Ireland had not enough water to drown a man, nor trees enough to hang him, nor dirt enough to bury him.  Still, Oliver, later hanged, buried, dug up, and burned, strengthened English rule in Ireland.  In 2015 in the Enniskillen library, I found a passage about a Welsh cop named Wynne who came to Ireland with Cromwells army in the 1640s.  "Perhaps you don't want to know your ancestors," my dad Joe Wynne more than once replied to my questions about them.   May my ancestors be closer to Ned Hill than to Oliver Cromwell in philosophy. Have The Pogues on that contrast:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-y2ox2HPnc

     The Boyne battle of 1690 is long over but only in the past generation has Ireland begun reconciling with the consequences of this biggest-ever one-day battle on British soil.  The Boyne River Valley was part of Colonial Ireland when King James II of Scotland, the last Catholic on the English throne, backed by King Louis XIV of France, deposed by King William III of Orange, Netherlands, Protestant, in this battle fought on  Irish soil.   The Orange order sprang from this July victory, and annual marches celebrate it, sometimes provocatively in Catholic neighborhoods.
     A large photo in the interpretive centre features former arch-Orangeman Ian Paisley shaking hands with Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern when they signed the 1998 agreement to end "The Troubles."
Invading to occupy Northern Ireland for decades starting in the late-1960s, the British Army worsened the extant colonialism into "The Troubles."  Words near the Paisley-Ahern photo explain that Ireland is trying to reconcile with those who oppressed Northern Irish people, mostly Catholics, for working for equal rights and a united island.  Paul McCartney and Wings offer a musical view.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaO4XeHhwo8

     The "Blanket Men" in the above video remind me of Paul McGlinchey, whom my sister and I fortuitously met in Duleek's Greyhound Pub.  In the lobby of the pub, where we stopped to pee during our drive around the Boyne River Valley area, we saw a poster advertising Paul's book signing that night.  That day, there had been a commemorative march to honor Thomas Ashe, whom prison guards killed on September 25, 1917 while he was on a hunger strike.
     Paul, arrested in his suburban Derry home at 17 in 1976 for being in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and having weapons, served more than 12 years during two terms in Belfast's Long Kesh Prison, later renamed the H-Block, and later The Maze.  The occupying British called him a criminal and wanted to clothe him as one.  He called himself a political prisoner and wanted civilian clothes.  To get political prisoner status, Paul and several comrades wore nothing but blankets, hence "Blanket Men."  Beaten, starved, abandoned by church hierarchy, called grandstanding masochists rather than politicals by Amnesty International, whose headquarters are in London, the Blanket Men eventually got to wear civilian clothes.
     Truth Will Out is McGlinchey's memoir of growing up, living in prison conditions worse than international law accepts, and writing this book before the serious cancer he suffers kills him.  Poet Philomena Gallagher wrote to McGlinchey during his mid-1990s imprisonment, helped him write the book, and ended her introduction in that pub that night by saying, "One island, one Ireland."  Philomena is from Newry, just across the border in Northern Ireland, and a place of much tension during "The Troubles."  Have a review of the book.

http://www.organizedrage.com/2017/08/book-revue-truth-will-out-by-paul.html

     As I drank a Guinness and my sister and Irish host and guide Maryanne drank pop, I photographed the quiet Paul from across the room, and recorded some of the band's playing after the book signing.  Old men around the pub, perhaps IRA, might have mused at my motives, but years earlier they might have manhandled my camera from my hands, asked me my business, and roughed me up some.  That night they probably saw a foreigner more ignorant than dangerous.  Ignorance can be bliss, but sometimes also safe.
     One song the band sang to honor Paul McGlinchey from Derry was"I Wish I Was Back Home In Derry."  Have a version by Christy Moore:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCch_W2Ro38

     We stood by that "Free Derry" sign a few days before the book event.  We were on a Bogside Tour by a local guide, who was 9 in 1969 when police and army bullets flew past his nearby front door  during a peaceful march for better working and living conditions for the Derry poor, mostly Catholic.  He grew up pretty quick, away from his house and backyard outhouse, and went to university, while others joined the IRA to resist the police and army and paramilitaries and others who supported the unjust situation, which colonialism always is.
     Not all, perhaps not even a majority of the Northern Irish support colonialism.  Keith, a Derry-born Catholic whose spouse Angela is Catholic from closer to the Portrush house which Maryanne watched for its vacationing owners, said that there would be Irish unity, but not in his lifetime.  Coleraine is near Portrush.  Blanket Man Paul was held at the Coleraine interrogation centre decades before Keith, Angela, two of their friends, Maryanne, and I formed a team and came second in the weekly Quiz Night in a Portrush pub.  We faced more peaceful questioning than Paul faced.
     Rita, at 70 or so, a few years older than Keith and Angela, met us a week later in Connolly's Bookstore in Dublin on my birthday.  Born in Yorkshire, fluent in Irish, Rita supports the socialism that James Connolly promoted until the British executed him for his part in the 1916 Easter Uprising to end British rule over Ireland.  By 1921, British rule ended in 26 of 32 counties on the island. Have an Irish language song I have long known to hear but cannot sing (yet?):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n730FWycrTY

     By 2021, who knows?  By my next blog entry, whose theme I have not decided on yet, be as fun to write as this one was, and as fun to read as I hope this one was.
         
 

       

      
 

   

Ireland 2017 Maryanne the Guide

Saturday, September 30, 2017

     Get a good guide, navigator, driver, cook, animal keeper, and conversationalist, and any place will be paradise.  Ireland this month was paradise for me, thanks to my sister Maryanne, an Irish citizen because our dad's mom was born in Ireland.  Today is 98 years after Granny bore Dad in Quesnel, after immigrating from Ireland during a world war and a war of national liberation.  I don't know why Granny left Ireland.  She died before I was born.  Did Dad know why she left Ireland?  I don't remember hearing any reason.  Her brother was in Canada and invited her, probably a woman looking for a better life.  In Canada, Granny met her husband, born in Canada to parents born in Ireland.  Dad, who died 28 years ago yesterday, went to see some of his mom's friends in Ireland during his wartime leave from the Royal Canadian Navy.  I got to Ireland in 2015 and 2017.  Each trip showed me more sights and gave me more memories than any package tour, thanks to Maryanne, better than any packaged tour guide.
     This first of several posts I plan about this trip has as its theme Maryanne's thrifty, comprehensive, thoughtful company.  From our meeting in the Coleraine train station upon my arrival from Canada, to our parting in the Dublin airport before I flew back to Canada, I saw more of Ireland, learned more about Ireland, and had better company than I would have had during the best packaged tour.  Maryanne is unpackageable and I am grateful.

     First topic:  thrift.  Maryanne has house sat in Europe for most of the past three years, since getting Irish citizenship in the early-2010s.  More than three quarters of her time has been rent-free:  hired rooms and European  friends' places between house sits.   Her friends are lucky to know Maryanne.
     She bought me a $740 Vancouver-Dublin return plane ticket, which I happily repaid her for; in 2015 and 2016 she bought my tickets to Europe.  One can scarcely fly from Vancouver to Toronto return for $740.  I rode a Greyhound bus from Williams Lake 550 kilometres to Vancouver, flew from Vancouver to Toronto, and flew from Toronto to Dublin.  I came home to Williams Lake by the same route, in reverse.
     Before I left, Maryanne advised me to bus from Dublin to Belfast, and ride a train from Belfast to Coleraine, a train ride of a few kilometres from the Portrush house and two small dogs she was watching for a few weeks, during the owners' vacation in France.  Thrift meets comprehensiveness meets thoughtfulness.
     We ate sometimes in the house, for example Irish stew as good as what we ate in Belfast City Hall in 2015, or marvelous vegetable dishes, or fish as good as swim in the rivers near where I live.  We ate sometimes in restaurants, such as the local Indian resturant with friends of the Portrush homeowners.  We ate picnics sometimes, such as on a bench under the sun beside Trim Castle a few days before I returned to Canada.  I had the odd beer and even a glass of whisky,here and there.  I think it was as good here as there.  In the Dublin airport, someone was handing out whisky samples, and my Canadian politeness made me drink one, diplomat that I am; but I declined her offer of a sale bottle.  Maryanne didn't touch a drop during our time together.
     Second topic:  comprehensiveness.  Ireland is a small but intricate country, best seen by car, such as Maryanne rented for a week from a Derry place.  She at the wheel, on the right side of the car, me in the passenger seat, we rolled that car 851 kilometres and saw things no bus or train would have taken me to, even if I knew where to go.  We rumbled rural Donegal after crossing the Foyle River ferry from McGilligan to Greencastle, where the Irish football final made for a noisy pub, outside of which we had a picnic under the sun.
     One day, Maryanne got a sunburn in Ireland, a pretty good trick.
     She booked train tickets for us to get to Derry to fetch the car, a bright red, five-speed, four-door Ford Fiesta hatchback.  She made sure we reached Derry in enough time to see that historic city, and even take a Bogside Tour.  Our guide was 9 in 1969, when British Army bullets flew past his front door:  the occupying soldiers resented peaceful activism for better living and working conditions by the Derry poor, mostly Catholic.  When we returned the car a week later, Maryanne planned enough time for the rental people to drive us to the station for our train from Derry to Drougheda, near her second house sit during my time with her.
     I forgot my umbrella in the Derry station that day, but most of the days had been without rain, as would most remaining days be.  Maryanne's no Prospero from Shakespeare's Tempest, perhaps; but we sure had nice weather during my visit.  "You and Harold bring nice weather," she said more than once, including in pouring rain in Dublin the day I flew back to Canada.  When Maryanne next visits Canada, perhaps she could pack a rain cloud or two, to prove she was in Ireland; or just bring her sunny self.
     She comprehends Ireland enough that she advised me to bring a tuque rather than a hat, which the wind and rain would assail to the level of discomfort.  She leveled no discomfort during my trip.  I brought a balaclava, which I fittingly lost in the parking lot of a Coleraine grocery store before we left Northern for Southern Ireland.  For decades, Coleraine had a British Army interrogation centre for interning and inconveniencing and even torturing Irish people who want one country on one island.  What's one more balaclava for a colonized people?  Perhaps someone will use it to help finish the job of unifying Ireland.
     Third topic:  thoughtfulness.  Maryanne knows I like to walk.  We walked.  She knows I like to sleep.  She let me sleep when and for how long I wanted.  This was a holiday, not a military campaign.  Ireland lately has a welcome rest from military campaigns. 
     Ireland has a long and ongoing military history, though.  She knows I like history.  She read an Irish Republic Army memoir in the tea shop while I wandered around the grounds and interpretive centre of the Battle of the Boyne site near Slane, the village near her second house sit during my time inn Ireland.
     The book was not from the tea shop.  It was from a book signing in the Greyhound Pub in nearby Duleek.  Author Paul McGlinchey, imprisoned for more than 12 years by the occupying Britishm, wrote a memoir.  A couple days before, we had seen a poster in the pub, and we stayed for the event it advertised.  One island, one Ireland.
      The standout thoughtful item was Maryanne's efforts regarding my birthday during our time together.  She bought a cake mix, which included cupcake papers and icing, unlike Canadian mixes I know.  She had not made a cake in years, but this red velvet cake was perfect, and what we did not eat that day was portable for subsequent picnics.  She even bought candles spelling my name, and she bought candles that will spell the names of my spouse Carla and our daughter Chelsea on future cakes.  How thoughtful.
      How urban was that birthday, in Dublin, precious, historic, bustling Dublin, where we went by bus from Slane.  She knew where the bus stop was on the highway near the rural house, she found out where the stop was in Dublin for coming back, and in between we walked around Stephen's Green, had lunch in a Persian cafe, got to the National Art Gallery, and meandered across and along the Liffey River.
     Maryanne's birthday is in October.  Today I mailed her a present, which will land in Potsdam, Germany, where she will house sit from October to February.  In 2016, she welcomed me to a house sit in a Hamburg suburb.  Search this blog using the keywords Neugraben, Hamburg, Lubeck, Luneberg, Rostock, Elbe River, and many other German places, and some English and Welsh places we saw during those 2016 travels:  London, Brighton, Conwy, Llandudno, and Manchester among them.  You will see that Maryanne is a guide like no other:  thrifty, comprehensive, and thoughtful.

            
         
     

    
     
 

Forest Fires and a Reunion, July, 2017

  Sunday, July 30, 2017

     This July's forest fire evacuation to Prince George coincided with the Stettler reunion of my mom's family.  This tale ends with emails about this busy month. 

     More than 40 000 people left their homes in the Cariboo; the largest group was all residents of Williams Lake.  Most went to Kamloops or Prince George.  More than 70 of my relatives, including one from Austin, Texas, met near Stettler.  I knew fewer than half of them; Chelsea knew fewer than 10 of them.  Some Cariboo fire smoke reached the gathering.

     On Wednesday, July 12, Carla, evacuated a couple days earlier from Anaham (800) to Williams Lake (8 000), 100 kilometres east, Chelsea, and I drove from Williams Lake to Prince George (80 000), 240 kilometres north.  Williams Lake was getting pretty smoky, and we heard that it might evacuate if fires threatened to close highways around it.  During the fire crisis, Highway 97 from 65 km south to 45 km north of Williams Lake would close for more than a week, as would Highway 20, west of Williams Lake.  These are the only highways to and from Williams Lake.  We slept that night in the travel trailer of Carla's sister Karen and her husband Harley. Eevacuated from Anaham to the Williams Lake rodeo grounds when Carla left Anaham, they had parked their trailer on the Prince George area acreage of the in-laws of their daughter Jodie.

     On Thursday, July 13, Chelsea and I drove from Prince George to Edson (9 000), 525 km east.  On the way, we stopped at McBride (2 000), 210 km east of Prince George and 150 km west of Jasper.     
     We stopped at McBride because of a CBC Radio One story I had heard a few days earlier.  Local people had gotten regional district permission to set up a rest station in a local hall, for people driving the 800-kilometre route from 100 Mile House through Kamloops and Valemount to Prince George, the 350-kilometre route from 100 Mile House north through Williams Lake to Prince George being closed around Williams Lake due to forest fires.  McBride people in the hall offered showers, places to sleep, and food.  When the 100 Mile House evacuation ended a couple weeks later, the highway was still closed from 65 km south to 45 km north of Williams Lake.  People returning from Prince George evacuation refuges to 100 Mile House therefore went that same long route back, through McBride.  The people interviewed by CBC Radio One in Prince George thought it only broadcast in Northern BC, but I heard it on CBC Radio One Kamloops, which Williams Lake gets.  "You're famous from Fort Nelson to Cranbrook," I told them. 
     Chelsea and I offered toiletries and plastic cutlery to the McBride rest hall people.  People there gave us homemade sandwiches and soup.  As we left, more locals were bringing more food.  On our way back from Stettler to Prince George a few days later, we stopped at McBride.  By then, Williams Lake had evacuated, some to Kamloops, some to Prince George.  Those who went to Prince George, Kamloops being pretty crowded by then, passed through McBride.  "It was pretty busy here that day," a McBride volunteer told us.
     In Edson, we stayed in a motel.  We visited the Royal Canadian Legion Joe Wynne Branch 51, named in 1989 after my dad, a World War Two Royal Canadian Navy veteran and Legion supporter.  The Legion displays Dad's photo and an Edmonton Journal article about his war experiences.  In the Edson tourist information centre, we met staffer Miriam, born near Cobh, Ireland.  My sister Maryanne house-sat in Crosshaven, near Cobh; hence the emails about that below.  Miriam plans to honor my dad on Remembrance Day, 2017 and said she will later ask me for details about his life.  

     That day, Carla and most others on the overcrowded Prince George acreage found other lodging, Carla in the city, Karen's family south of or in the city.  Carla and her sister Bella relocated to the apartment of their sister Florence's sister-in-law Jane, away in Vancouver for a kidney transplant.  Including our evacuated Williams Lake friend Donna and her grandson Alexander, there were now six people in that two bedroom  Prince George apartment.

     On Friday, July 14, Chelsea and I drove from Edson to Stettler (7 000), 350 kilometres southeast.  We stayed in a motel that night and Saturday, July 15.  We attended the reunion on Friday night, all day Saturday, and on Sunday morning, at the farm of one of the children of my first cousin, Judy.  The farm is about 13 km north of Stettler.

     On Saturday, July 15, Williams Lake was evacuated, some to Kamloops, some to Prince George. 

     One reunion highlight was a 1 x 2m piece of cardboard stuck to the outside wall of the garage.  Family members wrote their lines of descent from Norwegian-born Sever Nasbo (with an umlaut, and anglicized to Nasby upon immigration to the United States midwest), and his spouse Margaret (Phipps), my mom's dad Marvel Nasby's parents.  I knew all of Marvel's descendants, who are my uncles, aunts, and first cousins; but I knew few of the younger generations.   My brother Harold and his spouse Joan attended.

     Some first cousins I had not seen for decades attended:  Carol, Diane, Randy, and Buffy.  Others I had seen within the past five years attended:  Terry, Judy, Wayne, Roger, Betty, and Bobby. 

    After the reunion, Chelsea and I drove to Edmonton (1 000 000), 180 km northwest, and stayed in a motel Sunday night, July 16.  Williams Lake was still evacuated; Carla was still in a Prince George apartment without enough room for me and Chelsea.

     Enter Peter Ewart of Prince George.  On Sunday night, he emailed me me, one of the people who gets news from his forestry and economic activism group Stand Up for the North.  His group offered help to fire evacuees.  Chelsea and I sure needed that the next night in Prince George.  Peter and his spouse Dawn Hemingway offered us their basement suite.   

     On Monday, July 17, Chelsea and I drove from Edmonton to Prince George, 800 km west.  Knowing we had somewhere to stay that night in Prince George made this long drive easier.  People without private home billets were staying in the College of New Caledonia or the University of Northern British Columbia, on cots in gyms.

     Chelsea and I would stay in Peter and Dawn's house from Monday night, July 17 until Friday morning, July 28.  Provincial and federal disaster relief money would pay them $30 per night for each of us.  It also entitled us to $22.50 per day each for groceries, $600 each for being away from home, and $300 each resettlement money upon return home.  We also got Red Cross gift credit cards, $140 for Chelsea, $290 for me, given that I have a car to operate.  These generous payments leave us with more money than we had when we left, on July 12, which seems long ago.

     On Thursday, July 27, Williams Lake people were allowed home, but advised to be ready to leave again.  Fires continue to burn near the city, and the smoke in the city irritates the eyes and throat.  On Friday, July 28, there was ash in the air, as there was before our July 12 departure.

     The Canadian military has been in the Cariboo for more than a week:  watching road blocks, helping with transport and supply, and helping emergency and police services generally.  Army trucks crowd the arena parking lot a block from our home.  On Saturday, July 29 here in Williams Lake, I saw emergency vehicles from Fort St. John (18 000), 650 km to the north, and Vancouver, 550 km to the south.

      Saturday, July 29, I checked my employer Loomis' local warehouse.  No freight had come lately, given area highway closures.  The warehouse brimmed with freight that had come that morning:  about 24, rather than the usual 6 or so pallets and cages.  What usually took me about two hours to sort for Monday delivery, about 300 pieces, took me 6.5 hours, about 1 100 pieces.  That was quite a workout.  Williams Lake Loomis courier Jackson, whom I met in a Prince George laundromat where I drove Bella to wash her clothes, said that a whole transport trailer of freight bound for Williams Lake was in Prince George, until the Williams Lake warehouse could hold it.  I suspect freight from the south is also held back until the warehouse has room for it.  What I sorted is therefore not all there is.  Jackson and the other driver John, and perhaps their relief drivers, will be some busy delivering on Monday.  I barely had room to put their freight in its many usual places on Saturday.              

     Emails reach far and wide.  Have 24 sets of emails, a couple or a few per set, that I wrote or received during what became a 17-day absence, 13 of those days in Prince George.  I drove more than 3 300 kilometres.  Driving smoky Highway 20 100 km to Anaham today to help Carla resettle there will be a relief, except for the charred forest along the way.

1.

July ?, Saturday, 2017

Michael,

The fires are still going at Anaham and areas. The winds that were expected previously are coming today. Anaham was having a meeting last night, concerning the expected winds. Everyone is having their emotional melt downs. Karen had one yesterday morning. All want to return home but the roads are open for food and fire fighters only.

Karen wants to head out tomorrow. Leave the fifth wheel for Jodie and crew. She's worried about the horses. I suspect Carl will head out too. I was thinking of jumping out in town. We leave for Vancouver on Wednesday. Time will tell.

The city here has been so awesome to us. The local church had clothing and items to use dropped off for people to take and use. Carl, Harley, Blair and Florine got some great stuff. Flossy picked up some stuff too. Flossy got her $600.00 deposited into her account yesterday. She didn't offer Carl or i any. Bella figured that she should split in three ways. I don't see that happening and told my twin the same. Sad.

I called the Redcross number for Carl and I. They will look at it and email me. It's suppose to be one per household. I disagree, nenqani homes are different. Karen was talking to someone downtown and they want to address these issues on tv. The woman said that Redcross will change their minds once media get the word out. As aboriginals we live in proverb, three generations living together and up to three or more families under the same roof. Karen wants me to be interviewed. She's not sure that she can do it with her job title. It can be done but she has to get a go ahead from the department head. She's telling me to use my  job title. We will see how it unfolds.

Florine is homesick and wants to go home. It's a hard situation. I have to go, go to the washroom and have my coffee. I need it.

I hope you and Chelsea are having great visits. Be well, l love you.

Carla

2. 

Michael

http://www.100milefreepress.net/news/anaham-residents-find-strength-in-fighting-fires/

This a great read.
Carla

3.

To:  Williams Lake and 100 Mile House area evacuees on the Stand Up for the North listserve

As you are aware, you are on the Stand Up for the North Committee’s listserve as a result of signing up at forestry meetings that were held in Williams Lake (hosted by the Conservation Society and the Council of Canadians) as recently as this spring, as well as meetings on Bill C-51 in Williams Lake and 100 Mile House a couple of years ago.

Our hearts are with you during this very difficult and stressful time.  If you have evacuated to Prince George from the Williams Lake and 100 Mile House region as a result of the forest fire situation, please feel free to contact us as we would very much like to welcome you to town. 

If you need accommodation or would like to change existing accommodation, we may be able to help.  Furthermore, we are thinking to organize a dinner or two for you at the house of one of our Committee member’s, as well as perhaps show you around Prince George or whatever else you might like to do or need to do. 

We look forward to hearing from you (feel free to phone or email).

All the best.

Peter Ewart

Stand Up for the North Committee

Prince George, BC

(250) 562-0015

peter.ewart@shaw.ca

   

4.

To

• Peter Ewart
• Carla Alphonse
• Marie Wynne

Peter,

You angel.   We three evacuees need your help.   In Vancouver, you met my spouse Carla and our daughter at Charles' hospice the day before he died.  Carla evacuated to PG, and stayed there while Chelsea and I attended a long- planned Alberta family reunion.  We are in Edmonton, bound for PG Monday.  Where Carla is lacks room for us.  Have you room Monday and Tuesday nights?  We plan a Wednesday-Saturday trip for Carla's work.  Chelsea's cell is 250 267 2227.  We will be in PG Monday by 8 PM.

Michael

 5.

Hi Michael:

 

Welcome to PG.  We have lots of room in our basement and are happy to help out.  It will be great to see you guys. When you get to PG, if you need directions, just give us a phone call.  We'll have some food ready for you.  See you tomorrow night.

 

All the best.

Peter

916 Inez Crescent

Prince George, BC

(250) 562-0015

Peter,

Thank you so much.  You will get 1 to 3 people.  Carla is already in PG, but crowded.  Chelsea and  I hope to call you from the CNC evacuation registration line up by 7 pm Monday. Our Wednesday to Saturday Vancouver trip for Carla's work will take some climate refugee pressure from you and PG.

-Michael, Edmonton Travelodge

Peter,

6.

To

• cmcwynne@yahoo.ca

Hi Michael: Just thought we'd provide an alternate phone/cell number - 250-612-7997.

...just in case you can't get through on our home number...‎Calls come regularly :) Hope the line at CNC is not too long! See you soon...

Best Dawn and Peter

7.

To

• Fred Douglas

Hello from Prince George,

Thanks again for pizza and talk and items to watch or read.  We reached Prince George by 730 pm, registered at the evacuation centre, and emerged with billet claim forms worth $30 per day per each of us until the evacuation ends, payable to our generous hosts, who gave us their two bedroom basement suite.  They fed us spaghetti, and on Tuesday I will wash our clothes in their machine; we ran out of clean clothes.  We also got vouchers for $22.50 per day per person, usable at Superstore.  

The sky is blue here, a surprise.

Michael 

8.

Maryanne,

We reached blue sky Prince George by 730 pm, registered at the evacuation centre at the college, gaining for our hosts a claim for $30 for each night they house each of us, and a voucher for each of us for $22.50, redeemable at Superstore.

They fed us spaghetti and lent us their 2 bdm basement suite.

I do not know when we will be allowed home, but when I know, I will tell you.

Driving the 700 km from Edmonton on Monday, I happily thought of my upcoming Irish trip.

Michael

9.

To

• Tony Horava
• tenders@eastlink.ca
• Erlene
• John Irwin
• lorraine woollard
• and 3 more...

Hello,

We are comfortable evacuees in the 2 bdm basement suite of a Prince George teacher friend.  Registering at the evacuation centre at the local college gave each of us daily vouchers worth $22.50, redeemable at Superstore, and a claim for our host for $30 for each day he houses each of us.  The sky is blue, the air better than in Williams Lake.  We do not know when we will be allowed home, where our Williams Lake place is intact, like Carla's Anaham family house.

Michael

10.

To

• cmcwynne

Dear Michael,

Whew! What this is called is a forced vacation -- PG might not be the ideal place, mind you!

Glad you are all safe + sound + your places are all in tact and very sorry to have missed you at the reunion.

Lorraine

11.

To

• cmcwynne

My thoughts r with you
(& all people affected by the fires)
Ira
PS on have my experience with house fires to go by, but those were bad enough

12.

To

• cmcwynne

Hi, 

Thanks for the update.  How was the reunion?  EW

 

Chelsea,

Have what I sent Erlene.

Dad

Erlene,

The reunion was lots of laughs, more than half the 70 or so people were strangers to me, and our small branch, fewer than 10, of Mom's family, was there in the forms of me, Chelsea, Harold, and his spouse Joan.  I saw two first cousins for the first time since 1989, and their sister for the first time since I was little, in the mid-sixties.  Most of my first cousins are older than I.  I knew few of their attending children or grandchildren, and no attending kin of my mom's dad's siblings.

  I know more now ,and I have emails for kin who came from as far away as Austin, Texas.  The 4 x 6 ft cardboard a couple taped to the garage outside wall became a clan chart.  I attach photos of it and of our branch of it.  Highlighted names show attendees.

We are comfortable in the basement suite of my retired ESL teacher friend and his spouse, the UNBC social work chair.  Carla does not want to go to her booked Thu-Fri Vancouver Coast Comox conference on indigenous languages, because we would drive there via Valemount, a long detour around Hwy 97 closures between PG and Cache Creek.

Had we gone, I would have looked for you and Kevin.  

We shall see what happens, and when we will get home.  I am happy that our generous hosts can later claim $30 per day per each of us from disaster relief.  Carla did not attend the reunion, and still stays  with her sister's local in-laws rather than the roomy place where Chelsea and I settled on Monday night, after we came from Alberta.

Chelsea's cell is 250 267 2227.  Telus promised discounts to its evacuated subscribers.  Her bill will tell.

Thanks for your interest in our ordeal.

Michael

13.

To

• cmcwynne

Evacuee:  Glad youse are safe in PG.  And that you got decent billet and food vouchers there.  Hope that your anxiety/stress level has come way down after AB and far travelling.  CBC says the fire is now "about 5 km" from WL. Thanks for the interesting stuff you gave us, and have a good trip to the coast.   -DW

14.

 To

• CarlaMichaelChelsea Wynne

How is everyone doing. Please keep us up to date. Sooo glad you made it last weekend, now need to know that you are safe. 💕💕

Terry Connor

15.

 To

• Maryanne Wynne

Maryanne,

Below this email is one from the Edson Irishwoman.

Prince George people have been fabulous.  At the Tuesday bbq for their 30th wedding anniversary, that exact day, in the campground 10 km south of town, where they stay in their rv, Carla's sister Karen invited nearby evacuees to cake.  One older couple from WLake had been freezing in a tent until a man drove by the day before and offered his camper, which he then towed from his PG home.  

As we 25 bbqed and ate in and around the picnic shelter under smoky skies, three half tons and a minivan came to the packed campground that reminded me of 1930s hobo jungles.  Their drivers offered food, drink, housewares, toys for children, and listening ears for frazzled evacuees.

On our return to PG, Chelsea and I went to the main evac centre for the wristbands we forgot to ask for before.  A WL friend eating free  lunch in the friendship centre restaurant with us and Carla had given us two stapled sheets of laces offering discounts to evacuees with wristbands.  Donna and her grandson were about to relocate from the crowded apartment housing Carla, two of her sisters, and one's husband, to friends at Telkwa, west of PG.  Their lakeside place will offer the pair ample swimming.  Her sheets tell us that we may use for free the two local pools, several public and private fitness centres, and get free or half priced items at various thrift stores.  I will go to the wave pool on Wednesday.

Our host, UNBC social work chair Dawn Hemingway, whose women's group got a  derelict hotel  as a women's shelter, hurried its renovation in time to shelter evacuees first.  She said Donna's list was of outfits joined in the local homeless movement, where Dawn also volunteers. Her spouse Peter Ewart, whom I met when he spoke in WL against bill C51 a few years back, is a retired ESL teacher now in Stand Up for the North, for better jobs and ecology.  I heard him and a forester and an ecologist in WL more recently.

Dawn and Peter found us at Charles' Vancouver deathbed.  I note them because they, like former Edmonton journalist Ed Struzik on CBC One this week, advise better forest and emergency practices, to prevent such big disasters, which cost more, materially and humanly. This fire might bring such improvements.  When a pair see children struggling in a river, one rescues while the other seeks those who are throwing in the children.  Dawn and Peter each do both.

Now to find that wave pool.....

MJW

 

Hi Michael,

 

I know Crosshaven. My brother-in –law runs a company from there. (loc8ate code)

 

We definitely will keep in touch. We’ll be picking your brains.

 

Good talking to you,

Miriam

 

From: cmcwynne [mailto:cmcwynne@yahoo.ca]
Sent: Sunday, July 16, 2017 12:05 AM
To: info@gallowaystationmuseum.com
Subject: Fwd: Cobh and Crosshaven

Miriam,

My sister house sat in Crosshaven.  Read below.  I will go home from Edmonton to Williams Lake on Monday.  Keep in touch about your plans for my dad, Joe Wynne.

Michael Wynne

-------- Original message --------
From: Maryanne Wynne <maryanne.wynne@gmail.com>
Date: 07-16-2017 10:08 AM (GMT+01:00)
To: cmcwynne <cmcwynne@yahoo.ca>
Cc: info@gallowaystationmuseum.com
Subject: Cobh and Crosshaven

Dear Michael and Miriam,

Thanks for the note, Michael.  Cobh is indeed a gorgeous corner of County Cork, and I visited the town a few times, but the place I housesat was actually the small town of Crosshaven, which is in the lower harbour a bit closer to the sea.  The family's name was Duggan and I think the family have lived in Crosshaven for a long time.

PS Don't be fooled by the spelling of Cobh, Michael: it is pronounced "cove," but the bh makes the v-sound, as in the name Siobhan.  And that's the extent of my Irish language skills :-)

Best regards,

Maryanne

On 14 July 2017 at 23:42, cmcwynne <cmcwynne@yahoo.ca> wrote:

Maryanne,

Miriam (Halley) Kirkham, the Cove-born Edson tourist centre woman, wants the name of the people whose place you watched there, near Cork.  I met her while getting a road map.  Her accent got us talking, about Dad when I told her who I was, and about you when I told her about your Irish citizenship and European house sitting. I email this to you in Leipzig and to Mirian in Edson to give you each other's email addresses.  Miriam said that Edson plans a Remembrance Day honor for Dad and she wants to ask for more details about him.

On Mom's side, the Friday night family reunion barbecue near Stettler brought me and Chelsea to 50 or so kin, including Randy, Diane, Betty, and Buffy.  Harold and Joan will be there on Saturday, our second and last night in the local Super 8.

Michael

Hi Michael,

I know Crosshaven. My brother-in –law runs a company from there. (loc8ate code)

We definitely will keep in touch. We’ll be picking your brains.

Good talking to you,
Miriam

From: cmcwynne [mailto:cmcwynne@yahoo.ca]
Sent: Sunday, July 16, 2017 12:05 AM
To: info@gallowaystationmuseum.com
Subject: Fwd: Cobh and Crosshaven

Miriam,

My sister house sat in Crosshaven.  Read below.  I will go home from Edmonton to Williams Lake on Monday.  Keep in touch about your plans for my dad, Joe Wynne.

Michael Wynne

-------- Original message --------
From: Maryanne Wynne <maryanne.wynne@gmail.com>
Date: 07-16-2017 10:08 AM (GMT+01:00)
To: cmcwynne <cmcwynne@yahoo.ca>
Cc: info@gallowaystationmuseum.com
Subject: Cobh and Crosshaven

Dear Michael and Miriam,

Thanks for the note, Michael.  Cobh is indeed a gorgeous corner of County Cork, and I visited the town a few times, but the place I housesat was actually the small town of Crosshaven, which is in the lower harbour a bit closer to the sea.  The family's name was Duggan and I think the family have lived in Crosshaven for a long time.

PS Don't be fooled by the spelling of Cobh, Michael: it is pronounced "cove," but the bh makes the v-sound, as in the name Siobhan.  And that's the extent of my Irish language skills :-)

Best regards,
Maryanne

On 14 July 2017 at 23:42, cmcwynne <cmcwynne@yahoo.ca> wrote:
Maryanne,

Miriam (Halley) Kirkham, the Cove-born Edson tourist centre woman, wants the name of the people whose place you watched there, near Cork.  I met her while getting a road map.  Her accent got us talking, about Dad when I told her who I was, and about you when I told her about your Irish citizenship and European house sitting. I email this to you in Leipzig and to Mirian in Edson to give you each other's email addresses.  Miriam said that Edson plans a Remembrance Day honor for Dad and she wants to ask for more details about him.

On Mom's side, the Friday night family reunion barbecue near Stettler brought me and Chelsea to 50 or so kin, including Randy, Diane, Betty, and Buffy.  Harold and Joan will be there on Saturday, our second and last night in the local Super 8.

Michael

17.

To

• Fred Douglas
• Terry Connor

Hello,

Thanks for fun and memories during my and Chelsea's Alberta trip.

The couple who lent us their big, bright basement suite and gave us a key and run of their house are UNBC social work chair Dawn Hemingway and retired teacher Peter Ewart.  The are active in the women's shelter, anti-poverty action, and groups for better jobs, ecology, and civil liberties.  I have known Peter for years.

Carla's sister Karen, in her rv at a full campground 10 km south, had her 30th wedding anniversary yesterday.  About 25 of us bbq-ed and ate in and around the picnic shelter.  An older Williams Lake couple, freezing in tents nearby until a PG man drove through, offered them his trailer, and then towed it there, came for cake, as did other campers.  It was like a 1930s hobo camp.  While we ate, 3 trucks and a minivan came to the campground, with food, drink, housewares, and children's toys.

Evacuees may use for free local pools, gyms, and the bowling alley, and get discounts at many local stores.  The friendship centre restaurant feeds for free, once we show our evac registration sheets or wristbands.  We have vouchers for $22.50 per day each, at Superstore, which we chose, or Walmart or Save On.

Now to find the wave pool....

MJW

18.

To

• Tony Horava
• tenders@eastlink.ca
• Maryanne Wynne
• Fred Douglas
• Terry Connor
• Joan Wynne

Hello,

The military is here, to help this city of 70 000 now host to more than 9 000 fire evacuees.

https://news.princegeorge.ca/Modules/News/index.aspx?newsId=8496b3b8-5fc8-4d66-bf08-06d5e47a0872

Our bright basement suite billet's houseowners gave us a key and have been friendly, like almost all people I met in Prince George.  I went to both local pools for free, we eat for free at the friendship centre or college or university campuses, which also offer snacks, toiletries, and dorm rooms, including for hospital evacuees.  We meet many we know.  

The hockey rink is a sea of cots, but most evacuees are in private homes.  Various churches and thrift stores offer clothes.  Fort Mac people laden with supplies make the 1 200 km trip.

A rancher with 7 horses has 52 now.  Horses, and at least one pig, crowd the fair grounds. A school has 11 dogs and 71 cats.  Beauticians give free manicures.  I don't know about free horseshoeing, but my hooves are fine.

Michael

Michael,

In case you haven't been notified, there's a South Cariboo update at UNBC at 2pm today (prior to the 5pm meeting). See story at link below...Best Dawn

http://www.250news.com/2017/07/22/information-session-for-south-cariboo-evacuees/

Dawn Hemingway

Associate Professor & Chair

UNBC School of Social Work

Leadership Team, Northern FIRE:

Centre for Women's Health Research at UNBC

(On sabbatical July 1 2016 to June 30 2017)

(250-960-5694)

19.

To

• Fred Douglas

Doug,

CBC online said Williams Lake people cannot go home quite yet, but I agree with you that the return will be this week.  The highway remains closed from 65 km south to 45 km north of town, Drive BC says online.  We 9 300 get good treatment here in Prince George:  billet homes, free meals and swims and thrift clothes and household things around town, Red Cross evacuation money, and grocery store vouchers.

I read about the Ab right unite vote.  Sigh.  I prefer my leftist hosts.

Sunday night, Chelsea and I saw the new Spiderman film in the local 6-screen Cineplex:  neofascism all round, making me want to read from a 1917 volume of John Keats' poetry I found in this house's fabulous library (Gorky, Tolstoy, Marx, Stalin, art, Classics, great novels...).

Versed Michael

 

On Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 10:34 PM, cmcwynne <cmcwynne@yahoo.ca> wrote:

To

• Tony Horava
• Maryanne Wynne
• Marie Wynne
• Lavonne Schill
• lorraine woollard
• and 3 more...

Hello,

Chelsea and I, still among thousands of fire evacuees in Prince George as of July 26, will see on July 27 The Merchant of Berlin, a play based on The Merchant of Venice, and set in Nazi Germany.  

Tonight's community meeting featuring fire and govt people showed fire maps and concluded that Williams Lake people may not go home for a few more days.  We left Williams Lake two weeks ago.  

Our hosts, UNBC social work chair Dawn Hemingway and retired teacher Peter Ewart, continue graciously giving us the run of their house.  They may later claim disaster benefits of $30 per day per each person sheltered.  

A Ft Mac fire glossy book sells in the local Superstore, where we may have $22.50 each per day in groceries; vouchers cover 3 to 5 days, and one may spend them all at once:  we used a 4-day, $90 voucher on July 26, for example.

This was the first Bard play I read:  English 10.  I remember Dad quotingvPortia's "quality of mercy" speech then, 40 years after studying the play in Edmonton high school.  Have a bard link.

http://www.princegeorgecitizen.com/entertainment/local-a-e/production-takes-shakespeare-to-nazi-germany-1.21344919

Climate Refugee Michael

Hello,

 

To

• cmcwynne

Hi

I was just sitting down to send you a So What's Up Now, Doc? email so this is very timely.  I am especially interested in the play, coincidentally, because this year's Shakespeare in the Park tragedy was The Merchant of Venice + I realized that it is one of my favourites (especially Portia's speech on mercy).

I would be interested in hearing how this might be treated in the PG version.

Enjoy,

Lorraine

To

• Marie Wynne
• Carla Alphonse

Hello,

[At one of the UNBC community meetings held each two days during the evacuation.]    The WL city manager on a phone link said the city is ready for return, but Forestry did not give a date yet.  MP Todd Dougherty, here talking as I type,, says he got sad seeing the charred forest along Hwy 20.  One fire elsewhere moved 8 km in 10 minutes, a fire fighter told him, so return is not yet safe.  The Hanceville fire has not grown, but it remains the biggest fire.  All CNC evacuees, tenters, and rvs are at UNBC now, but CNC remains open.

Now the PG mayor is talking, to this crowd of 50, with a telecast to other places.  He acknowledged this as Indigenous traditional land. 

I will be at Dawn's by 6 or so.  I went to the pool before here, and I got Chelsea a surprise at Sally Ann.

MJW

20.

To

• Fred Douglas
• Maryanne Wynne

Hello,

The Tuesday Prince George paper, and Kamloops has no daily paper, said Williams Lakers should be allowed home "early to mid-week."

Today's editorial cartoon shows dogs labeled Wild Rose and PC sniffing each other's bum.

MJW

 

To

• Marie Wynne

Chelsea,

Williams Lakers may go home, Winston told Bella today, officials seem ready for a noon announcement.  Harley, Karen, and Carl are here at Jane's place.  Jodie and Everleigh flew to their Vancouver medical appointment.  Harley's bunch will therefore stay tonight in PG, as will Faye, who will truck the Anaham stuff from Dawn and Peter's garage.  I think Anaham cannot go home yet.  

Tonight's play keep us from today's Hwy 97 traffic jam.  

Waiting for the noon news,

Dad

 

To

• Maryanne Wynne
• lorraine woollard
• Tony Horava
• Joan Wynne
• Harold
• and 5 more...

Hello,

People may return to Williams Lake but not to Anaham, a news conference broadcast at noon Thursday on CBC One said.  We will return on Friday.

Michael

To

• Harold
• lorraine woollard
• Maryanne Wynne
• Fred Douglas
• John Irwin
• and 2 more...

To

• lorraine woollard

Lorraine,

Token mentions of German places and a courtroom crowd blast at Shylock were rare things that distinguished what we saw from the Bard original in PG Thursday night.  Chelsea marveled at children 9-17 memorizing the original language.  I noticed other precocious talents in moves and faces.  It was pretty good, for a three-week amateur preparation.  But then, Ben Jonson said Shakespeare was not only for his time, but for all time.

Now for a last dunk in a local pool before we pack and leave.

Michael

 

 

To

• Marie Wynne

Chelsea,

You might have the Facebook live news of WL able to go home.  Anaham remains on order.

Dad

21.

Hello,

We will soon leave hospitable Prince George for Williams Lake and home, 240 km south.

We will remain on evacuation alert because fires continue nearby, but I doubt we will be ordered out again.

Michael

 To

• cmcwynne

Hi Michael,

Sounds good, we are happy to hear this.

All the best with your return home,
Take care
John

To

• cmcwynne

MJ:  Good news!  Nothing better than being home at the Manor de Baker, eh.  Youse'll be able to get groceries, the shelves having been stocked recently.  You kept in good spirits.      

The local news showed Sir Walter Cobb welcoming evacuees back to town.  And "Anaham First Nation" made the CBC National very briefly last night.  Shown were women preparing food for grateful firefighters.  -DW    

 To

• 'cmcwynne'

Michael, Carla & Chelsea,

 

Great news!  Keep us posted.

 

Harold & Joan

To

• cmcwynne

Happy return home!  You must be itching to return to home.

We are in Antigonish NS for a large family gathering, for Susan's mother's 80th birthday. Then Susan and I will be camping at Cape Breton Highlands Nat Park next week, then we come back here for a few days, then to Halifax for a few days home. 

Thus our vacation this summer. The super friendly and relaxing Maritimes; away from the rat race of the big city.  

Susan will retire this Christmas, and enjoy life in all its glory. I have a year and a half to go. 

Tony

To

• Peter Ewart

Peter,

You might know that we may go to Williams Lake, but we plan to return Friday, after Carla's niece and her daughter return tonight from a Vancouver medical appointment to which Carrier family services flew them Thursday morning.  Thanks for tonight.  Chelsea and I will be happy to see the Merchant of Berlin tonight at the playhouse, heh heh. Some of Carla's kin will leave today.  They are gathered in a billet deciding who goes where when as I type.

Michael

22.

To

• cmcwynne

FYI....in case you haven't heard...A surprise!

http://www.250news.com/2017/07/27/breaking-news-evacuation-order-lifted-for-city-of-williams-lake/

Dawn Hemingway

 

To

• Dawn Hemingway

Dawn,

I read the 250 story you sent about Williams  Lake area people being allowed home.  The announcement, under a smoky sky in a city park two blocks from our BC Housing building, said to be ready to leave again, but I doubt that will happen.  

You and Peter have been hospitality incarnate, and I will never forget it, and I will remember your city's generosity. 

Now for a last visit to a local pool before we pack up.

Michael

23.

 Dawn Hemingway <Dawn.Hemingway@unbc.ca>

• 
  
• Today at 12:29 PM

To

• cmcwynne

Hi Michael and Chelsey: Just a quick message to say it was good to get to know you and the extended family - at least a little bit! Hope your trip home went well. Must feel good to be there again. Appreciated you leaving the Superstore cards. Wanted you to know that the AWAC/Econo Motel is still open with folks who don't feel able to return home yet - so we contributed ‎the cards to the motel - and they were used for juices and snacks for kids and older folks staying there. Also, and most importantly :) - we found the sock! If you'd like, we could mail it to you - would just need an address.  Was under the waste basket in the laundry room...

Wishing you both, Carla and the entire extended family all the very best...and we hope/expect that our paths will cross again.

Best Dawn and Peter

Dawn,

I am glad that you gave the Superstore cards to the shelter.  I gave the shelter the second of three pairs of new, ill-fitting shoes; the first pair I returned; the third pair I retain; I should have given them, too; I will, somewhere.  My Red Cross prepaid $290 Mastercard paid for the new shoes.  The card is now out about $120; me, nothing.  I so rarely find comfortable shoes for my wide, size 13 feet that I wear shoes until they fall apart, which my current shoes have not yet done.  I'm happily back home, unlike the Williams Lake family of 10 in the shelter.  Cindy told me about them when I brought my shoes, and Carla's and Chelsea's old shoes, which are still in good shape.  "We'll find people for these shoes," Cindy said.  I told Cindy that I had stayed with you.

Every shoe needs a sock, unlike one is like Einstein, who called socks "an unnecessary complication."  Mail the sock to

529 Carson Drive, #301

Williams Lake, B.C.   V2G 1T4

Michael Wynne
Williams Lake, Canada
Blog:  http://michaeljosephwynne.blogspot.ca/
778-412-3500  Williams Lake
250-394-4289  Tl'etinqox

24.

To

• Fred Douglas

Doug,

Exile stresses children especially, local mental health folks have said and written.

We did not go to Vancouver as planned on Wednesday:  the 600 km detour via Valemount, and exile stress dissuaded Carla and Bella.  In the college library, Bella emailed her way out of presenting; her co-presenter did the same.  Carla ensured the tribal council got full refund of conference and hotel costs.

New Premier Horgan started fast, to fix 16 years of Liberal misgovernment.

Michael