February 22, 2020
"Back in Time for Winter, the 90s" is the last decade described by the CBC series my friend Tony recommended. The tv parents grew up in the 90s, decades after I grew up, so they remember teen activities from then to show their teen daughters now: road hockey with a tennis ball, rather than the sponge pucks I used in the70s; hair scrunchies, a sort of curling using paper strips, it seems; riding inner tubes to slide down snowy hills, whereas I used toboggans, cardboard, and when my daughter was a 90s child, crazy carpets; hand-held electronic game gadgets; and low-fat foods such as omelets using egg whites from a carton, and veggie burgers from scratch.
Raw garlic as a cholesterol and general health aid was a 90s fad, the narrator says, and each tv family member eats a clove, reminded me of old Dolly in the Edson nursing home eating a clove per day from before I met her in the 80s. She danced a little jig as she explained this habit. I ate raw garlic regularly for months a couple years ago, but now I eat a daily anti-cholesterol statin pill.
Food is becoming more familiar as the tv family lives decades closer to now: bagels were a 90s item and remain one for the family. I saw my first bagel at Edmonton's Heritage Festival in the early-80s, and ate plenty of them in the Carleton University cafeteria in 1981-82. I even made them once, in the late-80s, I think. In 1990, I found famous bagels in Montreal's St. Viateur Bagel and Fairmont Bagel. Every Saturday I'd walk or bike to one or the other place near the St. Urbain Street, 1920s-era first floor apartment Ira, Mikhael, and I shared in one of those famous Montreal buildings with the iron stairs up its front. The smell of steam, yeast, and sesame seeds pervaded the bakery as the bakers took seas of bagels from the oven and slid them down the sloped steel table toward the front counter. Bring them home in the paper bag while they're warm. Put them on top of the fridge. Put them in the plastic bag that came in the paper bag once they cooled. Ira brought bagels when he and Mikhael visited us here in Williams Lake later in the nineties, and I got some when I visited them in 1999, the last year of the decade.
The Y2K frenzy ends this episode. That's already 20 years ago!
They seem to enjoy the 90s more than earlier decades, but still they whine about things they do from that era. One hopeful item is the tv dad in the kitchen, once solo. Families were busy and kids were latch-key, the narrator says, so instant food is common, homemade veggie burgers notwithstanding. There's a frozen chocolate cake, such as the 60s Rolling Stones song "Mother's Little Helper" mentions. Pushing 60, I disagree that it's a drag getting old, a lyric from the song, and no doubt a motive for the producers of this series, who might have made it to recapture their youthful experiences. One can never go home again, whether or not one puts one's foot in the river twice: different home, different river. Remember the good times and notice more as they come.
There's a last episode, in which the tv family members reflect on their experiences.
Saturday, February 22, 2020
Tuesday, February 11, 2020
Back in Time for Winter 60s to 80s
February 12, 2020
I watched the next three episodes of Back in Time for Winter and although I didn't remember as many details of each episode as I did of the first two episodes, I say a few things below.
The 1960s episode had mod clothing and hair and weaving and painting and knitting crafts. Mom knit, including pairs of mittens for us and Dad. She tried to teach me but my four-stitch line widened to several stitches a few rows down. I could knit funnels? The tv dad plays outdoor ice hockey on a homemade rink. Mom's still mired in the kitchen but there's much canned food, easing cooking.
The 1970s episode, during a time of economic slump, features pork hocks, sauerkraut, and other budget eats, as well as cross-country skiing. From the sixties on, the tv family had synthetic outerwear, having left wool behind in the fifties. In the seventies, I learned to ski. I skied in heavy fleece, not the lightweight clothing they use for skiing. I remember standing over a heat register in the floor in our kitchen to warm my feet, after skiing or road hockey. The tv family by the sixties had a portable electric heater. The tv daughters disco danced in the house. My Grade 12 chemistry and biology teacher taught us Grade 12s various dances, including disco and waltzing, before our 1979 graduation ceremony and dance. There was television, as in the sixties episode. The daughters said they liked the human interaction in the living room, a relief from their current cell-phone lives. I'm glad my 1992-born daughter can socialize in person, unlike many of her generation, and indeed of my generation, enslaved by personal digital screens.
The 1980s episode, of the era in which the tv parents grew up, after the 60s and 70s when I grew up, was more prosperous than the 70s era, and thus food was fancier, including foreign fruit and vegetables, shrimp in the shell, and escargots. That the tv mom mixed and rolled out spinach pasta as one would a pie crust, then cut it in strips and dried it hanging on dowels. It reminded me of home made egg noodle pasta from our family friend Marie Lingitz. My younger sister and I made pasta from scratch that decade, and I still have a pasta maker, but it's fiddly work and the contraption is hard to clean. It pines in one of the two lazy Susans in my kitchen. Better times brought lusher sports, including downhill skiing for the tv parents, and apre-ski drinks.
The 1990s episode's yet to come. I hope to watch it alone and thus remember more of it than of these past three episodes.
I watched the next three episodes of Back in Time for Winter and although I didn't remember as many details of each episode as I did of the first two episodes, I say a few things below.
The 1960s episode had mod clothing and hair and weaving and painting and knitting crafts. Mom knit, including pairs of mittens for us and Dad. She tried to teach me but my four-stitch line widened to several stitches a few rows down. I could knit funnels? The tv dad plays outdoor ice hockey on a homemade rink. Mom's still mired in the kitchen but there's much canned food, easing cooking.
The 1970s episode, during a time of economic slump, features pork hocks, sauerkraut, and other budget eats, as well as cross-country skiing. From the sixties on, the tv family had synthetic outerwear, having left wool behind in the fifties. In the seventies, I learned to ski. I skied in heavy fleece, not the lightweight clothing they use for skiing. I remember standing over a heat register in the floor in our kitchen to warm my feet, after skiing or road hockey. The tv family by the sixties had a portable electric heater. The tv daughters disco danced in the house. My Grade 12 chemistry and biology teacher taught us Grade 12s various dances, including disco and waltzing, before our 1979 graduation ceremony and dance. There was television, as in the sixties episode. The daughters said they liked the human interaction in the living room, a relief from their current cell-phone lives. I'm glad my 1992-born daughter can socialize in person, unlike many of her generation, and indeed of my generation, enslaved by personal digital screens.
The 1980s episode, of the era in which the tv parents grew up, after the 60s and 70s when I grew up, was more prosperous than the 70s era, and thus food was fancier, including foreign fruit and vegetables, shrimp in the shell, and escargots. That the tv mom mixed and rolled out spinach pasta as one would a pie crust, then cut it in strips and dried it hanging on dowels. It reminded me of home made egg noodle pasta from our family friend Marie Lingitz. My younger sister and I made pasta from scratch that decade, and I still have a pasta maker, but it's fiddly work and the contraption is hard to clean. It pines in one of the two lazy Susans in my kitchen. Better times brought lusher sports, including downhill skiing for the tv parents, and apre-ski drinks.
The 1990s episode's yet to come. I hope to watch it alone and thus remember more of it than of these past three episodes.
Back in Time for Winter the 1950s Was Less Irritating
February 10, 2020
CBC Gem's "Back in Time for Winter the 1950s" reminded me of much, and irritated me less than the 1940s show did. Perhaps I'm merely in a better mood than when I watched that first episode of this series. Perhaps the producers of the series pine for a past that was better than their present, although the present is pretty good, I think. Also, there's much from the past worth keeping.
The tv dad "eats anything, like all dads," like my dad, smiling eating over-salty macaroni that Mom made when they were newlyweds in 1950. He tries and fails to assemble a model car from a kit, a hobby I briefly had, in which I assembled two cars, a 1950s-era one I painted purple and a 1920s-era one I painted red and yellow. Other boys I new made more models, including airplanes. I kept those model cars for years. The tv dad also sharpens his daughters' skates using a manual sharpener, a stone inlaid into a handle he rubs along the skate blade. I had one such sharpener. The episode mentions the 1955 Richard Riot in Montreal, which Dad remembered and told me about: National Hockey League President Clarence Campbell suspended Richard just before the playoffs for accidentally hitting a referee during a fight. Montreal's St. Catherine Street became a battleground strewn with broken glass, after people tried to attack Campbell in the hockey arena during a game after the suspension.
The tv mom nervously uses a pressure cooker, which Mom thought too dangerous, so we didn't have one. My 1981-82 Ottawa landlord Richard Abbott, a Harvard-trained judge and law professor who rented me a 6 x 8-foot room, "the size of a Kingston Penitentiary cell," for $68 per month, had a pressure cooker. He told me that he was so poor at Harvard that he ate every second day. This bachelor cooked beets in his pressure cooker while he grumbled and swore at his cat, named Stupid. Abbott cousin was Stephen Leacock. On April 17, 1982, just before I finished my Bachelor of Arts in English at Carleton University, I bicycled downtown to parliament hill to watch the queen and prime minister sign the patriated Canadian constitution. Back at Richard's house, his patriation party included back bacon and whale meat, which I found chewier, greyer, and saltier than beef.
The tv eldest daughter clumsily peels apples for an apple-cheese crisp, new to me, who does know about apple crisp and just last week made apple sauce from scratch. The tv family sneers at spam. I like spam. I have a can in the cupboard. They eat corned beef and cabbage, which I don't remember eating.
The narrator says that post-1956 immigrants from "The Hungarian Revolution," actually a counter-revolution, brought spicier food, including paprikash, which my friend from Sarajevo makes here in Williams Lake; but I remember goulash as our token Hungarian dish, also made of noodles and ground beef. The principal of the rural, coastal Quebec school where I practice taught a Grade 1-2 class in May, 1991 during McGill University teacher training came from Hungary after the 1956 uprising. The other 1956 Hungarian I met was in the Mayerthorpe, Alberta old folks' home when I was a newspaper reporter there and in nearby Whitecourt in 1982-83. Kmill Kvak could be half drunk and still beat me at chess: "Very interesting, but not fun," he would say at this or that move of mine, before he took advantage of it. The hockey game playing on the common room tv near us elicited the odd, drawling, "The great Gretzky" from this retired Red Deer tailor for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
I remember portable record players such as the tv family dance to: we had them at home and at the bunkhouse of our farmer cousins 400 km to the southeast. Their farm, and their house without a flush toilet until a 1969 house replaced it, was in the region where our cousin's mom and our mom were born in time for the 1930s drought. That event drove their family to the northwest, where I was born and raised. My family had a flush toilet by the late-50s, in time for my early-60s birth. We'd play records in the late-60s in our cousins' bunkhouse, and I don't remember any hired hands living there; perhaps they lived there at other times of the year. I remember listening to songs by 1910 Fruitgum ("Snoopy Versus the Red Baron"), The Stampeders ("Sweet City Woman," whatever one of those was to my rural child mind), Neil Diamond ("Cherry Cherry"), and other musicians. When my older sister left for university, her portable record player stayed behind, under my bed. Before I went to sleep, I sometimes pulled out the machine and played records, including a three-record set of 1950s songs I got for $8 by mail in 1973. The record player was probably a late-50s or early-60s machine, and it had a green bottom half, a white top half, and a heavy brown plastic arm housing the needle.
The tv mom has a fur coat. Mom had a fur coat, fake fur. Both moms put on makeup before going out; Dad called Mom's makeup "war paint." The tv mom is taking her middle and youngest daughters to a figure skating lesson, but must look her best in public, a rare escape from kitchen bondage. Unlike the tv dad, my dad washed dishes, and even cooked a bit, most memorably French toast on Saturday mornings. I and my cousin came home from school many days to find a pile of dishes drying in the sink for us to dry and put in the cupboards that my mom's younger brother built into her 17 x 17-foot kitchen when the house expanded from two to five bedrooms in the late-50s. One of the two sons of the man who helped expand the house told me about that, and about hauling the shack from Edson to our acreage for Dad's mom a few years earlier, when I met the son, by then 85, at the free pancake breakfast my younger sister organized for September 29, 2019, in the Edson Legion, which since 1989 had been named after Dad. The hundredth anniversary of his birth was the next day. Two tv daughters skate. Dad put on and tightened my skates during my first couple years of ice hockey. I remember the smell of the rink: frozen cigarette smoke and hot chocolate, especially in the lobby.
While the eldest tv daughter is mired in the kitchen, the dad and two younger daughters have fun in the snow, riding circular plastic saucers sliding down hills, saucers I don't remember seeing until the early-1970s, but we had an aluminum toboggan big enough for three, as the 1940s episode has, and there was always cardboard around Willmore Park near the McLeod River, the best tobogganing place, about ten kilometres south of our house. Dad didn't toboggan; he said that years earlier he'd tobogganed into a prickly bush that stripped the skin from one of his legs. I thought of that years later, when I jumped through a fire that had moved from the grass around my Hudson's Bay staff house in Fort Providence and started burning a wall of the house. I jumped through the rising fire and ran around the front of the house for a pail of water from the kitchen. I put out the fire, leaving only a black singe a couple feet up the wall: I was in short pants and the fire burned the hair off at least one leg. Many years later, I would lose every hair on my body to cancer treatment.
The episode narrator said that there was public encouragement to play outside in all weather. In Grade 11 physical education, running outside was optional if it was colder than -30. I ran my best two miles, 11:10, that year, outside, in -37. In my Grade 4-6 school, we went into the bush near the school and shake or kick evergreen trees, then try to jump out of the way before their snow fell on us. We'd also start rolling snowballs for snowmen, but more often merely combine the muscles of many children to make one snowball very big. The tv dad gets indoor as well as outdoor exercise, using a Canadian air force exercise pamphlet I recognized because ten or so years ago I acquired one just like it at a used book sale.
Perhaps I like the 1950s episode more than the 1940s one because I'm used to the sniffy British accent of the narrator and the characters' sneers at the old-style food and gadgets.
I like spam and I can make pancakes from scratch, two novelties for the tv mom, but not for my mom, or for me, or for my daughter. This cute show bursts with reminders of yesteryear, and of this now, for those of us who see history as a force making us what we are, not as an irrelevant curiosity.
CBC Gem's "Back in Time for Winter the 1950s" reminded me of much, and irritated me less than the 1940s show did. Perhaps I'm merely in a better mood than when I watched that first episode of this series. Perhaps the producers of the series pine for a past that was better than their present, although the present is pretty good, I think. Also, there's much from the past worth keeping.
The tv dad "eats anything, like all dads," like my dad, smiling eating over-salty macaroni that Mom made when they were newlyweds in 1950. He tries and fails to assemble a model car from a kit, a hobby I briefly had, in which I assembled two cars, a 1950s-era one I painted purple and a 1920s-era one I painted red and yellow. Other boys I new made more models, including airplanes. I kept those model cars for years. The tv dad also sharpens his daughters' skates using a manual sharpener, a stone inlaid into a handle he rubs along the skate blade. I had one such sharpener. The episode mentions the 1955 Richard Riot in Montreal, which Dad remembered and told me about: National Hockey League President Clarence Campbell suspended Richard just before the playoffs for accidentally hitting a referee during a fight. Montreal's St. Catherine Street became a battleground strewn with broken glass, after people tried to attack Campbell in the hockey arena during a game after the suspension.
The tv mom nervously uses a pressure cooker, which Mom thought too dangerous, so we didn't have one. My 1981-82 Ottawa landlord Richard Abbott, a Harvard-trained judge and law professor who rented me a 6 x 8-foot room, "the size of a Kingston Penitentiary cell," for $68 per month, had a pressure cooker. He told me that he was so poor at Harvard that he ate every second day. This bachelor cooked beets in his pressure cooker while he grumbled and swore at his cat, named Stupid. Abbott cousin was Stephen Leacock. On April 17, 1982, just before I finished my Bachelor of Arts in English at Carleton University, I bicycled downtown to parliament hill to watch the queen and prime minister sign the patriated Canadian constitution. Back at Richard's house, his patriation party included back bacon and whale meat, which I found chewier, greyer, and saltier than beef.
The tv eldest daughter clumsily peels apples for an apple-cheese crisp, new to me, who does know about apple crisp and just last week made apple sauce from scratch. The tv family sneers at spam. I like spam. I have a can in the cupboard. They eat corned beef and cabbage, which I don't remember eating.
The narrator says that post-1956 immigrants from "The Hungarian Revolution," actually a counter-revolution, brought spicier food, including paprikash, which my friend from Sarajevo makes here in Williams Lake; but I remember goulash as our token Hungarian dish, also made of noodles and ground beef. The principal of the rural, coastal Quebec school where I practice taught a Grade 1-2 class in May, 1991 during McGill University teacher training came from Hungary after the 1956 uprising. The other 1956 Hungarian I met was in the Mayerthorpe, Alberta old folks' home when I was a newspaper reporter there and in nearby Whitecourt in 1982-83. Kmill Kvak could be half drunk and still beat me at chess: "Very interesting, but not fun," he would say at this or that move of mine, before he took advantage of it. The hockey game playing on the common room tv near us elicited the odd, drawling, "The great Gretzky" from this retired Red Deer tailor for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
I remember portable record players such as the tv family dance to: we had them at home and at the bunkhouse of our farmer cousins 400 km to the southeast. Their farm, and their house without a flush toilet until a 1969 house replaced it, was in the region where our cousin's mom and our mom were born in time for the 1930s drought. That event drove their family to the northwest, where I was born and raised. My family had a flush toilet by the late-50s, in time for my early-60s birth. We'd play records in the late-60s in our cousins' bunkhouse, and I don't remember any hired hands living there; perhaps they lived there at other times of the year. I remember listening to songs by 1910 Fruitgum ("Snoopy Versus the Red Baron"), The Stampeders ("Sweet City Woman," whatever one of those was to my rural child mind), Neil Diamond ("Cherry Cherry"), and other musicians. When my older sister left for university, her portable record player stayed behind, under my bed. Before I went to sleep, I sometimes pulled out the machine and played records, including a three-record set of 1950s songs I got for $8 by mail in 1973. The record player was probably a late-50s or early-60s machine, and it had a green bottom half, a white top half, and a heavy brown plastic arm housing the needle.
The tv mom has a fur coat. Mom had a fur coat, fake fur. Both moms put on makeup before going out; Dad called Mom's makeup "war paint." The tv mom is taking her middle and youngest daughters to a figure skating lesson, but must look her best in public, a rare escape from kitchen bondage. Unlike the tv dad, my dad washed dishes, and even cooked a bit, most memorably French toast on Saturday mornings. I and my cousin came home from school many days to find a pile of dishes drying in the sink for us to dry and put in the cupboards that my mom's younger brother built into her 17 x 17-foot kitchen when the house expanded from two to five bedrooms in the late-50s. One of the two sons of the man who helped expand the house told me about that, and about hauling the shack from Edson to our acreage for Dad's mom a few years earlier, when I met the son, by then 85, at the free pancake breakfast my younger sister organized for September 29, 2019, in the Edson Legion, which since 1989 had been named after Dad. The hundredth anniversary of his birth was the next day. Two tv daughters skate. Dad put on and tightened my skates during my first couple years of ice hockey. I remember the smell of the rink: frozen cigarette smoke and hot chocolate, especially in the lobby.
While the eldest tv daughter is mired in the kitchen, the dad and two younger daughters have fun in the snow, riding circular plastic saucers sliding down hills, saucers I don't remember seeing until the early-1970s, but we had an aluminum toboggan big enough for three, as the 1940s episode has, and there was always cardboard around Willmore Park near the McLeod River, the best tobogganing place, about ten kilometres south of our house. Dad didn't toboggan; he said that years earlier he'd tobogganed into a prickly bush that stripped the skin from one of his legs. I thought of that years later, when I jumped through a fire that had moved from the grass around my Hudson's Bay staff house in Fort Providence and started burning a wall of the house. I jumped through the rising fire and ran around the front of the house for a pail of water from the kitchen. I put out the fire, leaving only a black singe a couple feet up the wall: I was in short pants and the fire burned the hair off at least one leg. Many years later, I would lose every hair on my body to cancer treatment.
The episode narrator said that there was public encouragement to play outside in all weather. In Grade 11 physical education, running outside was optional if it was colder than -30. I ran my best two miles, 11:10, that year, outside, in -37. In my Grade 4-6 school, we went into the bush near the school and shake or kick evergreen trees, then try to jump out of the way before their snow fell on us. We'd also start rolling snowballs for snowmen, but more often merely combine the muscles of many children to make one snowball very big. The tv dad gets indoor as well as outdoor exercise, using a Canadian air force exercise pamphlet I recognized because ten or so years ago I acquired one just like it at a used book sale.
Perhaps I like the 1950s episode more than the 1940s one because I'm used to the sniffy British accent of the narrator and the characters' sneers at the old-style food and gadgets.
I like spam and I can make pancakes from scratch, two novelties for the tv mom, but not for my mom, or for me, or for my daughter. This cute show bursts with reminders of yesteryear, and of this now, for those of us who see history as a force making us what we are, not as an irrelevant curiosity.
Monday, February 10, 2020
Back in Time for Winter 1940s Makes Me Nostalgic and Cranky
Sunday, February 9, 2020
The CBC TV series "Back in Time for Winter," narrated by a man with a British accent, for no apparent reason, puts a modern family back in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. I watched my first episode of this a "golly gee" sneer-fest against 1940s domestic habits. I wasn't born in the forties but these things from the episode were in my life, too.
The tv mom didn't recognize the beef heart she was to stuff with bread pieces and fry in lard, but I remember eating beef heart, other organs, and moose organs when wild meat came from someone, sometimes one of my mother's two brothers. They all grew up in the forties, and during the war the meat rationing sent good meat to the military and left many people with organ meat.
The flip-up toaster is new to the family too, and although my younger sister for awhile used such a toaster a couple decades ago, when pop-up toasters dominated, she and I both remember the flip-up toaster that Ernie and Berta Fowler had on their farm a few kilometres north of our place north of Edson, Alberta. As I child, I thought it was magic, and that was the only place I ever saw lemon spread. My siblings, cousins, and I would usually fall asleep sitting against one another on the couch, or on a chair, or on the floor in the living room, near the pot-bellied stove. It was so warm, making the blast of cold air seem colder on our drowsy faces when we walked out of the house to drive home with Mom and Dad.
The tv dad rubs a cake of wax on a toboggan for the family to use on a hill. We painted tar on our wooden cross-country skis, heated it on the ski over a burner of the gas stove in the house which neighbors hauled from Edson for my granny in 1953, and rubbed the tar in with a cloth. Then we rubbed wax on the skis, which we rubbed in with cork, in the 1970s. Like the dad and daughters in the episode, we dressed in layers, and I still dress in layers on cold winter days.
The tv mom makes bran muffins with prunes, which I made in Whitecourt in 1982-83, using prunes from the Mayerthorpe Co-Op which I bought on Wednesdays, the day I delivered Whitecourt newspapers to the town's post office 45 km from Whitecourt. Dad had been a 1930s Mayerthorpe teenager. I covered Mayerthorpe and Whitecourt news for the paper all those decades later. A old woman who wrote a column for the paper told me she remembered Dad from the 1930s, and I mentioned that link in the paper. I'd cut the flesh off the prunes and suck on the pits while I made the muffins. The day the paper hired me, my 21st birthday, the editor fed me lunch at the Whitecourt Motor Inn. I had liver and onions.
The tv family had a wringer washer, a mystery to all family members, but more luxurious than the one I had in my Fort Providence, Northwest Territories Hudson's Bay Northern Stores staff house in 1986-87. Both machines filled from hoses attached to the kitchen sink tap, but they emptied theirs into pails which they poured down the sink; I emptied mine into a square plastic bin about a foot by a foot by three feet tall, and dragged it outside to dump in front of my house, which was about 100 metres from the Mackenzie River. The episode didn't show them hanging the clothes, they having no dryer. I had no dryer, so I attached a clothesline to a a corner of my house and a corner of the covered porch of my house, which was the old Bay store from the 1920s.
An Indigenous man teaches the tv dad how to ice fish. Dad catches nothing but the man gives him a trout. I didn't and I don't like to fish, but my in-laws ice fish. My spouse's dad's cousin gave me a fresh trout when I lived and taught in her community of Kluskus for six weeks from February-March, 2004, while the regular teacher was in Fairview, Alberta recovering from pneumonia. My spouse taught me how to clean a salmon, including cutting off the fins and removing the entrails. The tv mom makes a potato-trout cassarole, and the narrator, with his British accent as sneering as the whiny tv family, notes that cassaroles helped stretch meat. My mom made cassaroles, especially with that rarest of fish, salmon, which we got in a can once or twice per year, usually during Lent. The tv mom fed five. My mom fed 10 for a couple years. Mom liked modern conveniences, having grown up, rural not urban as in the tv show, in the thirties and forties, no cutesy era of playing poor for fun and condescension, but an era of eking out a hard living. Dad grew up poor, too. Film that, CBC, with a narrator who sounds like a Canadian, not like a British overlord among the colonials. Film how Indigenous people lived, when they weren't allowed off their reserves without Indian Agent permission, weren't allowed in bars, and were in brutalizing schools while people, including me, made fun of them. How about an APTN series to reply to CBC's white whitewash? Instead, as more than one Indigenous person has told me, "Why bother?"
The "mom in the kitchen, dad outside" division of labor might have been true of middle class families of the forties, but my parents weren't raised middle class. I suppose I was, but I've many of their habits, as the above rant suggests. Mom worked in an Edson restaurant when she and Dad met in the late-40s. Dad helped in the kitchen, especially with dishes, while I grew up in the sixties and seventies. There's a revisionist anti-feminist tone in the show, as if to say that none were feminist then and all are now: two falsehoods.
I suppose the show is aimed at people younger than I, who are full of the prejudice that the current era of screens and texting proves the young now are better than those radio-listening, letter-writing primitives of the 1940s. I like screens and email, but I also like radio and letters. This show's as stereotyped as the futuristic shows of my youth, in which people ride flying cars and wear spacesuits, but those shows were guesswork, while this one could represent history honestly and respectfully, if it chose. I suppose each era promotes its vision of the future, and of the past.
I wonder how Antonio Gramsci or Howard Zinn would see "Back in Time for Winter."
What more vituperation will pour from me if I watch another episode of this series? Stay tuned, or don't.
The CBC TV series "Back in Time for Winter," narrated by a man with a British accent, for no apparent reason, puts a modern family back in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. I watched my first episode of this a "golly gee" sneer-fest against 1940s domestic habits. I wasn't born in the forties but these things from the episode were in my life, too.
The tv mom didn't recognize the beef heart she was to stuff with bread pieces and fry in lard, but I remember eating beef heart, other organs, and moose organs when wild meat came from someone, sometimes one of my mother's two brothers. They all grew up in the forties, and during the war the meat rationing sent good meat to the military and left many people with organ meat.
The flip-up toaster is new to the family too, and although my younger sister for awhile used such a toaster a couple decades ago, when pop-up toasters dominated, she and I both remember the flip-up toaster that Ernie and Berta Fowler had on their farm a few kilometres north of our place north of Edson, Alberta. As I child, I thought it was magic, and that was the only place I ever saw lemon spread. My siblings, cousins, and I would usually fall asleep sitting against one another on the couch, or on a chair, or on the floor in the living room, near the pot-bellied stove. It was so warm, making the blast of cold air seem colder on our drowsy faces when we walked out of the house to drive home with Mom and Dad.
The tv dad rubs a cake of wax on a toboggan for the family to use on a hill. We painted tar on our wooden cross-country skis, heated it on the ski over a burner of the gas stove in the house which neighbors hauled from Edson for my granny in 1953, and rubbed the tar in with a cloth. Then we rubbed wax on the skis, which we rubbed in with cork, in the 1970s. Like the dad and daughters in the episode, we dressed in layers, and I still dress in layers on cold winter days.
The tv mom makes bran muffins with prunes, which I made in Whitecourt in 1982-83, using prunes from the Mayerthorpe Co-Op which I bought on Wednesdays, the day I delivered Whitecourt newspapers to the town's post office 45 km from Whitecourt. Dad had been a 1930s Mayerthorpe teenager. I covered Mayerthorpe and Whitecourt news for the paper all those decades later. A old woman who wrote a column for the paper told me she remembered Dad from the 1930s, and I mentioned that link in the paper. I'd cut the flesh off the prunes and suck on the pits while I made the muffins. The day the paper hired me, my 21st birthday, the editor fed me lunch at the Whitecourt Motor Inn. I had liver and onions.
The tv family had a wringer washer, a mystery to all family members, but more luxurious than the one I had in my Fort Providence, Northwest Territories Hudson's Bay Northern Stores staff house in 1986-87. Both machines filled from hoses attached to the kitchen sink tap, but they emptied theirs into pails which they poured down the sink; I emptied mine into a square plastic bin about a foot by a foot by three feet tall, and dragged it outside to dump in front of my house, which was about 100 metres from the Mackenzie River. The episode didn't show them hanging the clothes, they having no dryer. I had no dryer, so I attached a clothesline to a a corner of my house and a corner of the covered porch of my house, which was the old Bay store from the 1920s.
An Indigenous man teaches the tv dad how to ice fish. Dad catches nothing but the man gives him a trout. I didn't and I don't like to fish, but my in-laws ice fish. My spouse's dad's cousin gave me a fresh trout when I lived and taught in her community of Kluskus for six weeks from February-March, 2004, while the regular teacher was in Fairview, Alberta recovering from pneumonia. My spouse taught me how to clean a salmon, including cutting off the fins and removing the entrails. The tv mom makes a potato-trout cassarole, and the narrator, with his British accent as sneering as the whiny tv family, notes that cassaroles helped stretch meat. My mom made cassaroles, especially with that rarest of fish, salmon, which we got in a can once or twice per year, usually during Lent. The tv mom fed five. My mom fed 10 for a couple years. Mom liked modern conveniences, having grown up, rural not urban as in the tv show, in the thirties and forties, no cutesy era of playing poor for fun and condescension, but an era of eking out a hard living. Dad grew up poor, too. Film that, CBC, with a narrator who sounds like a Canadian, not like a British overlord among the colonials. Film how Indigenous people lived, when they weren't allowed off their reserves without Indian Agent permission, weren't allowed in bars, and were in brutalizing schools while people, including me, made fun of them. How about an APTN series to reply to CBC's white whitewash? Instead, as more than one Indigenous person has told me, "Why bother?"
The "mom in the kitchen, dad outside" division of labor might have been true of middle class families of the forties, but my parents weren't raised middle class. I suppose I was, but I've many of their habits, as the above rant suggests. Mom worked in an Edson restaurant when she and Dad met in the late-40s. Dad helped in the kitchen, especially with dishes, while I grew up in the sixties and seventies. There's a revisionist anti-feminist tone in the show, as if to say that none were feminist then and all are now: two falsehoods.
I suppose the show is aimed at people younger than I, who are full of the prejudice that the current era of screens and texting proves the young now are better than those radio-listening, letter-writing primitives of the 1940s. I like screens and email, but I also like radio and letters. This show's as stereotyped as the futuristic shows of my youth, in which people ride flying cars and wear spacesuits, but those shows were guesswork, while this one could represent history honestly and respectfully, if it chose. I suppose each era promotes its vision of the future, and of the past.
I wonder how Antonio Gramsci or Howard Zinn would see "Back in Time for Winter."
What more vituperation will pour from me if I watch another episode of this series? Stay tuned, or don't.
Wednesday, May 8, 2019
Abraham, Isaac, Fear, Social Media, and Hitchhiking
Wednesday, May 8, 2019
A Bible story says that Abraham heard a voice that told him to sacrifice his boy Isaac. Up the mountain marched the pair. As father held knife to son's throat, another voice said Abraham had proven his faith and need not sacrifice Isaac. A goat tangled in a nearby bush would suffice. Father and son returned home unharmed, unlike the goat.
This morning I tried and failed to hitchhike to Prince George, 240 kilometres north of our Williams Lake home. I walked to the junction of Highway 97 and Mackenzie Avenue, an intersection with a traffic light, at the edge of town, five kilometres from our apartment building. I stood on the highway for an hour but got no ride, including from the driver of the half ton truck sporting the logo of my spouse's tribal council.
My spouse's Prince George niece offered her a Honda Accord at a good price, but the niece is too busy to drive the car to us. Our Toyota Echo engine died in February and we sold the car for $500 to a mechanic.
Yesterday's effort to reach Prince George also failed. Another niece found on social media a man driving from Kamloops to Prince George, a route that passes through Williams Lake. He said he'd stop in Williams Lake and pick me up on the way. I waited for two hours after the appointed time. He never came.
These social media and hitchhiking mishaps brought Abraham and Isaac to mind as I walked home under a sunny spring sky today.
Crime is down but its reporting is up, a Los Angeles social science academic told filmmaker Michael Moore in the late-1990s film Bowling for Columbine. Such reporting, now much worsened by the hate, fear, and bad news people exchange on social media, makes a mass culture of fear and paranoia. It's a small wonder that nobody picked me up today. A few drivers waved. A few shrugged. Mostly brazenly passed by, including those who could see me when they stopped at the nearby traffic light.
I'm glad I'm me, not them.
Such an experience would make a cynical person doubt the goodness of human nature. I think people are good, but misled and stampeded toward bad behavior, or at least indifference. I was going to give to anyone who picked me up money, and something rarer, a tote bag from the Centre for European Nuclear Research (CERN) on the Swiss-French border. My sister, who retains her good human nature, mailed me several such tote bags after she visited CERN.
Enter Abraham and Isaac, and grace. For picking me up, some driver would have gotten a CERN tote bag, and perhaps money. I would be acting like the voice that rewarded Abraham's faith by letting him keep the gift that was his son. Now I veer toward acting like Abraham, by planning to sacrifice a good thing, hitchhiking, as he planned to sacrifice Isaac.
I think someone would eventually have picked me up; not everyone has been brainwashed into paranoia by social and other media. As well as Abraham and Isaac, I thought of expectancy theory as I walked home from the highway today. That branch of probabilistic mathematics I studied in a university statistics course uses equations to predict when a given event will occur. I found such mathematics elegant and useful.
I find you elegant and useful for reading this.
My retirement from hitchhiking is a time to recall past hitchhikes. I'll describe one notable hitchhike from each of the four provinces where I have hitchhiked.
In January, 1983 west of Mayerthorpe, Alberta, my car broke down in -25 weather. I hitched a 25-kilometre ride to Whitecourt, where I then lived and was a newspaper reporter. I was quitting that job the next month. My car quit earlier than I. I borrowed a vehicle from my dad to finish my job. The day in late March that I called to say I was moving back to his Edson acreage, my six-month apartment lease having ended, he told me that my older sister Jeannette had died. I was 21 and she was 26. She hitchhiked to Vancouver as a teenager.
My Whitecourt car was not great, a noisy, cranky 1972 Toyota Corona five-speed I'd gotten from the Whitecourt distributor of the Edmonton Journal. He needed something bigger, the 1975 Dodge Monaco station wagon, the first car I ever owned. He gave me his car and $800 for my car. The Dodge guzzled gas but it was powerful. I proved that one day by driving as fast as safely possible from Whitecourt to Mayerthorpe, my Wednesday news newspaper distribution and news gathering trip. The papers had come late from the Leduc printing plant 200 km to the southeast. We collated sections and flyers with demonic speed in the shed behind the newspaper office, to get me on the road to Mayerthorpe, fellow reporter Joe on the road to Fox Creek, 80 km in the other direction, and Shelagh on the road around Whitecourt to places that retailed the paper (circulation 3 700).
Stella McDougall, an then an old woman and columnist in Mayerthorpe, told me she remembered Dad, who lived with his family there in the 1930s when he was a teenager. I don't know if I kept my consequent interview with Stella. You who know Alberta geography might know the places I reported from near Mayerthorpe: Blue Ridge, Sangudo, and Rochfort Bridge.
In May, 1985, I hitchhiked from Riviere-du-Loup, Quebec to Halifax, Nova Scotia, several hundred kilometres, with one ride. I'd finished my university business degree in Edmonton and found in the local paper's classified ads a plane ticket to Toronto for $100. It was the return leg of a round-trip Toronto-Edmonton ticket. I bought it, flew, to Toronto, bought a one-month VIA Rail Pass for $350 or so, and rode the train east through Montreal to Riviere-du-Loup.
I had a long enough Montreal stop to meet my Montreal friend Tony, and my Edson high school friend Jennifer, in Montreal for university. Tony challenged me to eat a Svenson's Ice Cream Parlor Earthquake, a massive confection of ice cream, bananas, berries, nuts, whipped cream, and syrup. I did, and I wasn't hungry until the train pulled into Riviere-du-Loup the next morning.
Another English-speaking passenger and I decided to hitchhike directly east rather than take the train northeast along the Gaspe Peninsula and into New Brunswick near Campbellton, or wait for the train through Fredericton, which by then I don't think went through Maine to New Brunswick anymore anyway. He and I ate at a roadside diner on the hill going west out of town, and walked to the junction with the highway that went through Cabano into New Brunswick and Fredericton. He suggested we hitchhike separately. He walked a couple hundred metres ahead of me on the highway. The last I saw him was when I waved as the car that had picked me up drove past him.
The driver, a bread wholesaler, had left Thunder Bay, Ontario the day before and spent the night in Quebec City. As his car got closer to his and my destination, Halifax, we turned up the music to keep him awake. He dropped me and my yellow backpack off after we paid the 25-cent toll on the bridge that connects Dartmouth and Halifax. Born and raised in Halifax, he told me that when the city torn down the old piers years earlier, there were rats as long as his compact car's dashboard living under them.
In May, 1989, I hitchhiked from Port Hawkesbury to Sydney, Nova Scotia, with that same yellow backpack, which my sister Maryanne bought years earlier, gave to me, and which I still have. Again traveling on a train pass, I promised our friend Tim, who lived in Ottawa, that I would stop in Port Hawkesbury to visit his mother on my way to Sydney and the ferry to Newfoundland. I'd paid $12 or so the night before for a room in the residence of St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, where I found others watching something other than the National Hockey League playoffs on the lounge television. Nova Scotia bars being closed on Sundays then, I found a taxi stand with a tiny tv on which to watch a game of the final series between the Calgary Flames and Montreal Canadiens, the last time two Canadian teams played for the Stanley Cup.
The short train ride from Antigonish to Canso and across the causeway from Port Hawkesbury gave me time to get to Tim's mother by day, but the next train was the next day. After I visited her and her cat, I therefore hitchhiked from Port Hawkesbury to through Baddeck and the Bras d'Or Lakes, two places where people teach and speak Gaelic, to Sydney. The older woman alone in her car who gave me a ride was going to see her sister in New Waterford, I think. For being trusting enough to pick up a backpack-carrying longhair, I gave her a hat with the logo of the Edson Red Brick Arts Centre on it.
Alas, it's a 15-km walk from Sydney to the ferry dock at North Sydney, I discovered. I started walking, hoping to reach the ferry scheduled to leave for Newfoundland that evening. A police car stopped alongside during my walk. The cop asked where I was going and I told him. He doubted I'd walk there in time for the ferry. He said if he came by again and found me walking still, he'd give me a ride. As I type that, I realize that this cop knew and accepted hitchhiking, technically illegal. Indeed, when he found me walking the next time he passed, he gave me a ride to the ferry. I wondered then, and I sometimes wonder since, if anyone in the crowd of passengers and ferry workers who saw me get out of a police car thought I was a dangerous person being deported from Nova Scotia.
Not only did I get to the ferry on time, and see everyone bed down on benches and the floor for the overnight trip to Port-aux-Basques, Newfoundland. I also found a television in the boat's bar on which to watch the Flames-Canadiens game, live from Calgary, and therefore at a late hour in the Newfoundland time zone. The only hindrance was two young men Bible thumpers, apparent insomniacs, trying to sell me their religion during the game.
I got to Newfoundland, rode a bus to St. John's, stayed a couple nights in the Seaport Inn, rooms above a bar on a waterside street with tattoo parlors, bused back to Deer Lake, rented a car and drove up the west coast to Windy Point, where I couldn't understand the old timers talking in the Bonne Bay Legion, and returned to the mainland. Newfoundland has no more trains or tracks.
I ran the wheels of the rail system with that 30-day pass, boldface places being where the train was cut that summer forever, despite anti-cut petitions in many stations ("Save VIA Rail, Ax Mulroney" the sign said by the table with the Vancouver station petition): Toronto, Montreal, Riviere-du-Loup, Halifax, Yarmouth, Digby, St. John, Sudbury, North Bay, Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Dauphin, Churchill, Regina, Calgary, Revelstoke, Kamloops, Vancouver, Victoria, Courtenay, Comox, Prince Rupert, Prince George, Jasper, Edson.
In May, 1998, I hitchhiked from Wildwood, a few km north of Williams Lake, to Chetwynd. Usually I rode Greyhound buses from Williams Lake to Chetwynd every month from February to June of that year, then hitchhiked 25 km out of Chetwynd to Saulteau, where I taught adult education after the teacher quit to return to university. This time I hitchhiked because our daughter's spring concert was that night, too late for me to ride the usual bus north. My spouse us to Wildwood after the concert, wished me luck, and went back to our Williams Lake apartment, in the same building where I type this. I got a few short rides, and south of Quesnel one long one, finally, which took me to the Prince George bus station. I arrived 10 minutes after it closed after sending the midnight bus north to Chetwynd. There was a 3:30 stopover in Prince George, not a 3:40 one.
It was a long walk through Prince George, across the Nechako River, and along the Hart Highway to the city limits. I stood on the highway for a couple wee hours, then got one ride 300 km to Chetwynd, which I reached around six in the morning. Another ride got me to Saulteau by 7:00. I changed in the house where I boarded and walked the two km to the school.
Thanks for reading this. Send any comments to cmcwynne@yahoo.ca.
A Bible story says that Abraham heard a voice that told him to sacrifice his boy Isaac. Up the mountain marched the pair. As father held knife to son's throat, another voice said Abraham had proven his faith and need not sacrifice Isaac. A goat tangled in a nearby bush would suffice. Father and son returned home unharmed, unlike the goat.
This morning I tried and failed to hitchhike to Prince George, 240 kilometres north of our Williams Lake home. I walked to the junction of Highway 97 and Mackenzie Avenue, an intersection with a traffic light, at the edge of town, five kilometres from our apartment building. I stood on the highway for an hour but got no ride, including from the driver of the half ton truck sporting the logo of my spouse's tribal council.
My spouse's Prince George niece offered her a Honda Accord at a good price, but the niece is too busy to drive the car to us. Our Toyota Echo engine died in February and we sold the car for $500 to a mechanic.
Yesterday's effort to reach Prince George also failed. Another niece found on social media a man driving from Kamloops to Prince George, a route that passes through Williams Lake. He said he'd stop in Williams Lake and pick me up on the way. I waited for two hours after the appointed time. He never came.
These social media and hitchhiking mishaps brought Abraham and Isaac to mind as I walked home under a sunny spring sky today.
Crime is down but its reporting is up, a Los Angeles social science academic told filmmaker Michael Moore in the late-1990s film Bowling for Columbine. Such reporting, now much worsened by the hate, fear, and bad news people exchange on social media, makes a mass culture of fear and paranoia. It's a small wonder that nobody picked me up today. A few drivers waved. A few shrugged. Mostly brazenly passed by, including those who could see me when they stopped at the nearby traffic light.
I'm glad I'm me, not them.
Such an experience would make a cynical person doubt the goodness of human nature. I think people are good, but misled and stampeded toward bad behavior, or at least indifference. I was going to give to anyone who picked me up money, and something rarer, a tote bag from the Centre for European Nuclear Research (CERN) on the Swiss-French border. My sister, who retains her good human nature, mailed me several such tote bags after she visited CERN.
Enter Abraham and Isaac, and grace. For picking me up, some driver would have gotten a CERN tote bag, and perhaps money. I would be acting like the voice that rewarded Abraham's faith by letting him keep the gift that was his son. Now I veer toward acting like Abraham, by planning to sacrifice a good thing, hitchhiking, as he planned to sacrifice Isaac.
I think someone would eventually have picked me up; not everyone has been brainwashed into paranoia by social and other media. As well as Abraham and Isaac, I thought of expectancy theory as I walked home from the highway today. That branch of probabilistic mathematics I studied in a university statistics course uses equations to predict when a given event will occur. I found such mathematics elegant and useful.
I find you elegant and useful for reading this.
My retirement from hitchhiking is a time to recall past hitchhikes. I'll describe one notable hitchhike from each of the four provinces where I have hitchhiked.
In January, 1983 west of Mayerthorpe, Alberta, my car broke down in -25 weather. I hitched a 25-kilometre ride to Whitecourt, where I then lived and was a newspaper reporter. I was quitting that job the next month. My car quit earlier than I. I borrowed a vehicle from my dad to finish my job. The day in late March that I called to say I was moving back to his Edson acreage, my six-month apartment lease having ended, he told me that my older sister Jeannette had died. I was 21 and she was 26. She hitchhiked to Vancouver as a teenager.
My Whitecourt car was not great, a noisy, cranky 1972 Toyota Corona five-speed I'd gotten from the Whitecourt distributor of the Edmonton Journal. He needed something bigger, the 1975 Dodge Monaco station wagon, the first car I ever owned. He gave me his car and $800 for my car. The Dodge guzzled gas but it was powerful. I proved that one day by driving as fast as safely possible from Whitecourt to Mayerthorpe, my Wednesday news newspaper distribution and news gathering trip. The papers had come late from the Leduc printing plant 200 km to the southeast. We collated sections and flyers with demonic speed in the shed behind the newspaper office, to get me on the road to Mayerthorpe, fellow reporter Joe on the road to Fox Creek, 80 km in the other direction, and Shelagh on the road around Whitecourt to places that retailed the paper (circulation 3 700).
Stella McDougall, an then an old woman and columnist in Mayerthorpe, told me she remembered Dad, who lived with his family there in the 1930s when he was a teenager. I don't know if I kept my consequent interview with Stella. You who know Alberta geography might know the places I reported from near Mayerthorpe: Blue Ridge, Sangudo, and Rochfort Bridge.
In May, 1985, I hitchhiked from Riviere-du-Loup, Quebec to Halifax, Nova Scotia, several hundred kilometres, with one ride. I'd finished my university business degree in Edmonton and found in the local paper's classified ads a plane ticket to Toronto for $100. It was the return leg of a round-trip Toronto-Edmonton ticket. I bought it, flew, to Toronto, bought a one-month VIA Rail Pass for $350 or so, and rode the train east through Montreal to Riviere-du-Loup.
I had a long enough Montreal stop to meet my Montreal friend Tony, and my Edson high school friend Jennifer, in Montreal for university. Tony challenged me to eat a Svenson's Ice Cream Parlor Earthquake, a massive confection of ice cream, bananas, berries, nuts, whipped cream, and syrup. I did, and I wasn't hungry until the train pulled into Riviere-du-Loup the next morning.
Another English-speaking passenger and I decided to hitchhike directly east rather than take the train northeast along the Gaspe Peninsula and into New Brunswick near Campbellton, or wait for the train through Fredericton, which by then I don't think went through Maine to New Brunswick anymore anyway. He and I ate at a roadside diner on the hill going west out of town, and walked to the junction with the highway that went through Cabano into New Brunswick and Fredericton. He suggested we hitchhike separately. He walked a couple hundred metres ahead of me on the highway. The last I saw him was when I waved as the car that had picked me up drove past him.
The driver, a bread wholesaler, had left Thunder Bay, Ontario the day before and spent the night in Quebec City. As his car got closer to his and my destination, Halifax, we turned up the music to keep him awake. He dropped me and my yellow backpack off after we paid the 25-cent toll on the bridge that connects Dartmouth and Halifax. Born and raised in Halifax, he told me that when the city torn down the old piers years earlier, there were rats as long as his compact car's dashboard living under them.
In May, 1989, I hitchhiked from Port Hawkesbury to Sydney, Nova Scotia, with that same yellow backpack, which my sister Maryanne bought years earlier, gave to me, and which I still have. Again traveling on a train pass, I promised our friend Tim, who lived in Ottawa, that I would stop in Port Hawkesbury to visit his mother on my way to Sydney and the ferry to Newfoundland. I'd paid $12 or so the night before for a room in the residence of St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, where I found others watching something other than the National Hockey League playoffs on the lounge television. Nova Scotia bars being closed on Sundays then, I found a taxi stand with a tiny tv on which to watch a game of the final series between the Calgary Flames and Montreal Canadiens, the last time two Canadian teams played for the Stanley Cup.
The short train ride from Antigonish to Canso and across the causeway from Port Hawkesbury gave me time to get to Tim's mother by day, but the next train was the next day. After I visited her and her cat, I therefore hitchhiked from Port Hawkesbury to through Baddeck and the Bras d'Or Lakes, two places where people teach and speak Gaelic, to Sydney. The older woman alone in her car who gave me a ride was going to see her sister in New Waterford, I think. For being trusting enough to pick up a backpack-carrying longhair, I gave her a hat with the logo of the Edson Red Brick Arts Centre on it.
Alas, it's a 15-km walk from Sydney to the ferry dock at North Sydney, I discovered. I started walking, hoping to reach the ferry scheduled to leave for Newfoundland that evening. A police car stopped alongside during my walk. The cop asked where I was going and I told him. He doubted I'd walk there in time for the ferry. He said if he came by again and found me walking still, he'd give me a ride. As I type that, I realize that this cop knew and accepted hitchhiking, technically illegal. Indeed, when he found me walking the next time he passed, he gave me a ride to the ferry. I wondered then, and I sometimes wonder since, if anyone in the crowd of passengers and ferry workers who saw me get out of a police car thought I was a dangerous person being deported from Nova Scotia.
Not only did I get to the ferry on time, and see everyone bed down on benches and the floor for the overnight trip to Port-aux-Basques, Newfoundland. I also found a television in the boat's bar on which to watch the Flames-Canadiens game, live from Calgary, and therefore at a late hour in the Newfoundland time zone. The only hindrance was two young men Bible thumpers, apparent insomniacs, trying to sell me their religion during the game.
I got to Newfoundland, rode a bus to St. John's, stayed a couple nights in the Seaport Inn, rooms above a bar on a waterside street with tattoo parlors, bused back to Deer Lake, rented a car and drove up the west coast to Windy Point, where I couldn't understand the old timers talking in the Bonne Bay Legion, and returned to the mainland. Newfoundland has no more trains or tracks.
I ran the wheels of the rail system with that 30-day pass, boldface places being where the train was cut that summer forever, despite anti-cut petitions in many stations ("Save VIA Rail, Ax Mulroney" the sign said by the table with the Vancouver station petition): Toronto, Montreal, Riviere-du-Loup, Halifax, Yarmouth, Digby, St. John, Sudbury, North Bay, Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Dauphin, Churchill, Regina, Calgary, Revelstoke, Kamloops, Vancouver, Victoria, Courtenay, Comox, Prince Rupert, Prince George, Jasper, Edson.
In May, 1998, I hitchhiked from Wildwood, a few km north of Williams Lake, to Chetwynd. Usually I rode Greyhound buses from Williams Lake to Chetwynd every month from February to June of that year, then hitchhiked 25 km out of Chetwynd to Saulteau, where I taught adult education after the teacher quit to return to university. This time I hitchhiked because our daughter's spring concert was that night, too late for me to ride the usual bus north. My spouse us to Wildwood after the concert, wished me luck, and went back to our Williams Lake apartment, in the same building where I type this. I got a few short rides, and south of Quesnel one long one, finally, which took me to the Prince George bus station. I arrived 10 minutes after it closed after sending the midnight bus north to Chetwynd. There was a 3:30 stopover in Prince George, not a 3:40 one.
It was a long walk through Prince George, across the Nechako River, and along the Hart Highway to the city limits. I stood on the highway for a couple wee hours, then got one ride 300 km to Chetwynd, which I reached around six in the morning. Another ride got me to Saulteau by 7:00. I changed in the house where I boarded and walked the two km to the school.
Thanks for reading this. Send any comments to cmcwynne@yahoo.ca.
Thursday, March 21, 2019
First Bicycle Ride of 2019
March 21, 2019
Spring is here, the snow is almost gone, it's not Easter yet, and I rode my bicycle for the first time this year. Oh what a feeling, the wind blowing through the hair I no longer have, my legs trying to be 20 again, and a summer of bipedal possibilities beckoning. Mom didn't let us take out our bicycles until Easter, easy when that holiday was early, hard when it was late. This year Easter is late but I couldn't wait. I hope the Easter Bunny doesn't pull me over for a ticket.
Spring is here, the snow is almost gone, it's not Easter yet, and I rode my bicycle for the first time this year. Oh what a feeling, the wind blowing through the hair I no longer have, my legs trying to be 20 again, and a summer of bipedal possibilities beckoning. Mom didn't let us take out our bicycles until Easter, easy when that holiday was early, hard when it was late. This year Easter is late but I couldn't wait. I hope the Easter Bunny doesn't pull me over for a ticket.
Friday, February 15, 2019
Bournemouth Trip Highlights
Friday, February 15, 2019
Five highlights come to mind from my January 22-February 8 trip to Bournemouth, England to visit my sister, who was house sitting there.
First, the huge house had three floors, six bathrooms, a sun room, stone countertops, a sunken lawn in the backyard frequented by a red fox, and a thin bush separating it from a local golf course in this city on the English south coast west of Southampton.
Second, midway through my visit, snow fell. We made a snowman on the golf course. We then found several groups, mostly adults and children, doing likewise. The snow melted within a few days.
Third, we saw many sights as we strolled along the beach of the English Channel, the sound of the waves a rhythmic washing of the shoreline. There were small boats, a couple tankers, a platform for drilling for gas and oil beneath the ocean floor, and many people walking many, mostly small dogs along the water. A day trip by train to Winchester brought us to its famous cathedral, and to St. Peter's, a church with a display noting various Roman Catholics executed during England's suppression of Catholicism from the 16-19th centuries.
Fourth, we ate well. My sister is an inventive cook: moussaka, stews, Yorkshire pudding, spicy Indian food with homemade naan bread, homemade buns with seeds, and haggis twice, once with meat, once without. The home Yorkshire pudding followed a Yorkshire pudding full of chicken and vegetables and dressing and gravy in a local cafe called Norwegian Wood, its walls boasting Beatles memorabilia. The home haggis was because my visit coincided with Robbie Burns Day, January 25. Pub French fries here, nachos at a 1950s-themed beach cafe there, and fish and chips soon after my plane reached London helped make my holiday delicious.
Fifth, I was amazed that I could fly a third of the way around the world, eight time zones, in less than ten hours, from Vancouver to London. Rows of three seats on each side and four seats down the middle of the plane, more than 60 rows from front to back, and all the baggage, people, and food and drink, got up in the air, across Canada, and across the Atlantic Ocean. Wow.
Our ancestors came by boat from Europe to North America. Our dad went to Europe with the Royal Canadian Navy during World War Two in the early-1940s. Our parents flew from Canada to England in 1977. A few years ago I never thought I would see Europe. I have now been five times, amazing.
Five highlights come to mind from my January 22-February 8 trip to Bournemouth, England to visit my sister, who was house sitting there.
First, the huge house had three floors, six bathrooms, a sun room, stone countertops, a sunken lawn in the backyard frequented by a red fox, and a thin bush separating it from a local golf course in this city on the English south coast west of Southampton.
Second, midway through my visit, snow fell. We made a snowman on the golf course. We then found several groups, mostly adults and children, doing likewise. The snow melted within a few days.
Third, we saw many sights as we strolled along the beach of the English Channel, the sound of the waves a rhythmic washing of the shoreline. There were small boats, a couple tankers, a platform for drilling for gas and oil beneath the ocean floor, and many people walking many, mostly small dogs along the water. A day trip by train to Winchester brought us to its famous cathedral, and to St. Peter's, a church with a display noting various Roman Catholics executed during England's suppression of Catholicism from the 16-19th centuries.
Fourth, we ate well. My sister is an inventive cook: moussaka, stews, Yorkshire pudding, spicy Indian food with homemade naan bread, homemade buns with seeds, and haggis twice, once with meat, once without. The home Yorkshire pudding followed a Yorkshire pudding full of chicken and vegetables and dressing and gravy in a local cafe called Norwegian Wood, its walls boasting Beatles memorabilia. The home haggis was because my visit coincided with Robbie Burns Day, January 25. Pub French fries here, nachos at a 1950s-themed beach cafe there, and fish and chips soon after my plane reached London helped make my holiday delicious.
Fifth, I was amazed that I could fly a third of the way around the world, eight time zones, in less than ten hours, from Vancouver to London. Rows of three seats on each side and four seats down the middle of the plane, more than 60 rows from front to back, and all the baggage, people, and food and drink, got up in the air, across Canada, and across the Atlantic Ocean. Wow.
Our ancestors came by boat from Europe to North America. Our dad went to Europe with the Royal Canadian Navy during World War Two in the early-1940s. Our parents flew from Canada to England in 1977. A few years ago I never thought I would see Europe. I have now been five times, amazing.
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