Fugitive

Posted on October 24, 2013 by dperras56

The word ‘fugitive’ conjures up all kinds of images. What brought this to mind was a documentary I saw last week on Bobby Ryan, the newest Ottawa Senator, and his childhood spent on the lam from the law with his mother and father. They travelled from Cherry Hill, New Jersey to California, always with the police on their tail. Bobby’s father had badly beaten up his wife (Bobby’s mother), putting her in the hospital. The father then fled, but curiously the couple reunited. They changed the family name from Stevenson to Ryan and led a fugitive lifestyle, always just a nervous step ahead of the authorities. Eventually, as is usually the case, the law caught up with the fleeing family, and now, having served his time, Mr. Ryan Sr. is back with his wife. Of course such an incident could never be forgotten, but to his wife’s credit, it is forgiven. The human soul is remarkable.

Some of us have our own personal stories with those who ran on the other side of the law. It was the 1989-90 school year and my wife was enrolled  at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec’s Eastern Townships to do her Master’s in French Literature. Yours’ truly was  also working on my Master’s in Education. Finding myself with a lot of time on my hands, I was fortunate enough to secure a part-time  teaching job at Alexander Galt Regional High School, just outside of Lennoxville. So not quite  a full-time anything, I submitted a brief first draft of my thesis to my advising prof. He promptly rejected it as too journalistic in style and not suitably academic. Insulted at not having my considerable gifts instantly recognized, I cast about to fill my time with another diversion, preferably a paying one.

There was an opening at the juvenile detention centre, named Le Relais, in Sherbrooke. For $35.00/hr. I would tutor a seventeen year old delinquent through his high school English matriculation, helping him to his diploma and a new life on a more straight-and-narrow path.

Kevin and I hit it off instantly. Maybe it helped that if his homework wasn’t done or he mouthed off I could lock him up and still be paid. Sweet deal. Over the next few weeks, between lessons in short stories and iambic pentameter, his story came out.

Kevin and his English teacher had trouble seeing eye-to-eye and the problem was made worse by the fact that the principal was said English teacher’s husband. One day in the middle of a bad afternoon Kevin threw a computer out of a second floor window and then followed it down to the parking lot where he slashed his teacher’s tires. “I hitch-hiked home that afternoon,” he recalled to me. “The next day I was helping my father re-shingle our barn’s roof when a SWAT team surrounded our property, complete with megaphones, telling me that if I gave myself up then no one would get hurt. And so here I am.”

Despite Kevin’s brief  lapse in judgement he was a bright student and we  had no problems racing through the English curriculum together.  He received his high school diploma that June. His time at the correctional institute also coincided with the ending of my stay in Sherbrooke and Lennoxville. Smug in what I considered to be a job well done, and content that I had rescued a psychopath-in-waiting from a wasted life behind prison bars, I was ready to give Kevin the address of my Ontario residence. After all, he might need a new pied-a-terre to get established away from Sherbrooke, where his reputation preceded him. However, distractions abounded and said invitation, for whatever reasons, was never proferred.

It was a year later, visiting friends after our cherished year in the Townships, that I asked Kevin’s former principal about my protégé’s new law-abiding lifestyle after a year under my mentorship. “No one knows where Kevin is,” I was told. “Shortly after being released from Le Relais he robbed a pizza delivery man, slit his throat and left him to die. Thankfully, the guy recovered, but there’s been no trace of Kevin for three months.” I gulped, chastened by my lack of success in Kevin’s rehabilitation and also relieved that my own procrastination had possibly kept Kevin from my Ontario door.

Finally, weeks later, I received word that Kevin had been caught and was serving his time in Sherbrooke’s maximum security institution. He was over eighteen years of age and so there would be no more high school classes at the Relais juvenile detention centre.

Successful as he was as a fugitive in those brief months of freedom between crimes it will be difficult for Kevin to practise his skills ever again. While in prison he killed another convict and is now serving a life sentence for first degree murder.

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Camino

Posted on October 21, 2013 by dperras56

It’s known as the Camino de Santiago. Or sometimes as the Compostela de Santiago. Good on you if you’ve heard of it.

“What the hell is a Camino,” was the reaction of most of my friend when the subject came up.

It’s been around for more than a thousand years. Shortly into our trek my feet were so blistered I feared it would take me at least that long to finish it. But a new pair of sandals, Neutrogena foot cream and my daughter’s e-mails pulled me through. That, and the fear of being called a wussy by my friends. And of course there was an abundant flow of Riojan red wine.

Tens of thousands now walk the Way every year. It sees all types. Bryan was a portly priest from England who dropped an astounding twenty five pounds in his first three weeks of walking. “It’s a Catholic fat farm,” he told me. And he was only one in a cast of, well, not thousands, but dozens, who kept my wife Brenda and me company, encouraged and entertained us as we trekked the 800 kilometres in 37 days. Chaucer himself could not have invented a more delightful snatch of characters than those with whom we walked, broke bread, drank wine and ministered to not so much our souls, but at least to our feet. From France to the endpoint in Santiago in northwestern Spain. Brenda and I will always remember Sarah and Sofia, two twenty-somethings from Copenhagen, Peter the English professor teaching at a university in Qatar and Sven the German who I always called Fritz. I told him that Sven was a Swedish name and that his parents must have been confused. Then there was the real Swede named Anders who was a military- reservist and a cousin to Johan Frantzen of the Detroit Red Wings, Helene the French nurse, Martin the Estonian Interpol agent, Jorge the Spaniard and Linda the Quebecoise nurse. All with their own reasons for walking, and everyone of them there when we needed them the most: angels on our shoulders.

It would be impossible in a short article to trace the trek. What follows can only be a few telling vignettes.

The starting point for the original and most-used  route is the French Basque town of St. Jean-Pied-de-Port, nestled in the French Pyrennees within a good day’s walking of Spain. It is here that one can pick up the ‘Credential del Peregrino’, the Camino passport that should be stamped at the end of every day’s walking at your albergue (hostel) or hotel of choice. Miss a day or two and all is forgiven; miss a week and the official Camino-granting bureaucrats in Santiago will accuse you of being a bus-riding poseur. A map is handed out in Santiago, which for the most part is unnecessary. If all Dorothy had to do to find the Wizard in Emerald City was to follow the Yellow Brick Road, then our route was not much more difficult; just follow the yellow arrow. Of course even this well-marked route was sometimes too much for your hero, who can occasionally get lost on the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Several times I lost sight of my guide and leader (my wife) through tarrying too long at a bar or café, and then promptly took a wrong turn. Several extra kilometres were added before my pidgin Spanish and the kindly locals set me again on the straight-and-narrow. Speaking of Spanish, it is recommended to arrive with at least a smattering of El-Cid’s mother tongue when walking across the Iberian Peninsula. Brenda arranged for us to complete both Spanish I and II, from January through to June, sessions given through the Ottawa-Carleton Board at night and taken at Glebe Collegiate. Course content and instructors were both of a high calibre; it’s just too bad that yours’ truly was not. I often fell asleep in class, much to Brenda’s embarrassment, and only awoke when called upon to read out loud, which I imagined myself  to do with suave aplomb. And of course these days failure is not an option in Ontario education, so I was handed a certificate at the end, probably for attendance. It was only after at least a couple of weeks on the road that I felt comfortable with asking for directions and ordering in restaurants. Thank goodness that most Europeans are better able than I to stay awake during foreign language instruction.

The first day is arguably the most difficult, a 25 kilometre (32 kms when adjusted for climb) mostly-uphill trek through the Pyrenees to the Spanish town of Roncesvalles, ending with a steep 4 km. descent. The alpine vistas and architecture are both wonderful and you will probably be held up at least once while farmers guide their sheep across the road. A little taste of home is provided  after 10 kms. of the uphill climb when we encountered a fleur-de-lis flag waving in the wind at the first albergue one encounters en  route. (The albergues are the hostels of the Camino, usually-municipally-owned and often costing only 5 Euros a night. A three-course meal including a bottle of wine is provided on premises for usually 9 Euros, or a restaurant with the same prices is always nearby. On the Camino the hiking can be hard, but the eating and drinking are always easy.)

I wondered what Quebec separatists were doing in Spain and besides, I needed a break.

“What’s up with that flag,” I inquired of the waitress as she served up my café-con-leche.

“The owner of this place always takes off the month of March and goes skiing in Quebec,” she explained. “And so he became a lover of all things Quebecois.” She wasn’t that busy and so had some time to chat. “And did you know that Martin Sheen stayed here a couple of nights while he was filming  ‘The Way?

”

I had never heard of The Way, but noted that Martin’s son Charlie had had rather a rough time of it lately and could probably use a spirit-cleansing pilgrimage himself. I picked up my sandwich and made my way to the sunny balcony, where Brenda was in conversation with an Irish lass named Fiona. She was the first of many Irish we would meet in the next five weeks. It was later explained to  us by another Irishman named Paddy (I’m not making this up !) that hardly anyone in Ireland had a job right now, and that hiking the Camino was as worthwhile and as cheap a holiday as any good Catholic could dream of.

The first day we opted for the the arduous ‘Route de Napoleon’ which travels up and over the Pyrenees. I thought that it might be so-named because Bonaparte had done a spiritual pilgrimage during which he concluded that God wanted him to conquer all of Europe, but Bryan the priest and Ph.D historian from Oxford informed me that Napoleon had used the exact same route on his way to conquering Spain.

Napoleon’s name is not the only celebrity moniker that one encounters. Ernest Hemingway’s favourite haunt was waiting for us in Burguete, a traditional Navarese village that he favoured for the beautiful countryside and the trout-fishing. And just a few days hence would be Pamplona, renowned of course for the Running of the Bulls. Highlights of the Pamplona event would be served up every morning on t.v., in cafes where we would take a break every morning accompanied with croissants and café-con-leche. Casualties one particular morning had been particularly numerous, with more than a few of the unfortunates trampled and a good half-dozen more gored by horns as the frightened bulls charged by. I had just finished  remarking to my Irish table-mate that there had been a lot of Spanish peregrinos (pilgrims) that we had encountered earlier on, but for the past couple of days their ranks had seemed to be depleted. “Where have all the Spanish Camino walkers gone,” I wondered aloud. Rory the Irishman had the answer. “They’re all in the hospital,” he concluded.

Our mates came and went throughout, some tarrying more than one night in a particularly interesting town, or else tending to strains and blisters. Most of us met for a final time in Santiago, where we made our way to the famous cathedral and lined up to receive our certificate. Brenda and I decided to rent a car for four days and make our way out to the coastal towns of Muxia and Finisterre, so-named because it was once thought to be the end of the world. Bryan the now-svelte priest had had the same idea, but after almost six weeks of the medieval method of self-locomotion, driving a car seemed almost too-daunting a task. As he backed up the rented vehicle he was nearly obliterated by a tour bus. “How will I ever get used to these damn horseless carriages ?,” he shouted as he waved goodbye.

I had to wonder as well. Life is satisfying when the goals are simple. One step-at-a-time. Eat. Drink. Sleep well. (I sound like Hemingway here !) The best trips are always the simplest ones. Man (or Woman) vs. The Way.  Adventures guaranteed.

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Modern Family

Posted on October 17, 2013 by dperras56

It started soon after Glen and I sat down for a beer after the game at the R.A. Some might call it a rant. Never would that word cross my lips, but others have used it to describe my point of view.

“The guy hardly ever comes out of his room,” Glen said in a description of his stepson’s lifestyle.” He’s twenty-four years old and I don’t think he has a life other than what he’s got going online. He’s taking some course at Algonquin… I don’t know, heating and air conditioning, but who knows if he’s going to finish that or even if he goes to most of his classes. I can’t get a straight answer out of him, or even barely a word.” Glen took a long sip of his beer and glanced down at the hockey game taking place on the level below. “He doesn’t say shit to me.”

Stop me if you’ve heard all this before. Life can be frustrating enough dealing with your own progeny, but then let’s look at all  the blended families of today. So many confused innocents find themselves living under the same roof, linked not by any nature or nurture, but only through a newly-linked couple’s latest passion. And even that relationship, started of course with firm resolve and I’m-going-to-do-better-this-time best of intentions, can be as permanent as an adolescent’s New Year Resolutions.

“He gets $400.00 a month from his father,” Glen continued, “because of his father’s psychiatric condition, but even that’s cut off when he reaches twenty-five.”  I’ve yet to talk to a guy whose marriage breakdown wasn’t caused by his wife’s noisy descent into irrationality but in a curious twist of logic, the ex-husband of his new squeeze is usually either a boozer or at least a low-level psychopath.

“Yeah, I know…,” I let the words drift off into the bar. But I don’t really have a clue. I can’t figure out why two people walking down the street would each  be texting someone miles away rather than just conversing with the flesh-and-blood and supposedly interested human being right beside them. But then I didn’t grow up in a time when my parents arranged ‘play-dates’ over a cellphone and I had to be driven to-and-from a park and watched over while I played there, lest I be kidnapped by some pervert in a white Chevy van. Lord knows the world’s full of them. Just look at the Internet.

It may take awhile for this millennial generation to sort all this out. But there  certainly will be enough experts to advise them as they go.

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Famous Neighbour

Posted on October 16, 2013 by dperras56

It was interesting to watch Brent Burns of the San Jose Sharks, my former neighbour, during the Sens game the other night. He looked like something the cat dragged in, as my mother used to say. And that’s without being able to see the tattoos that he’s covered himself with.

He used to live around the corner from us in Lindsay, Ontario and he and his father  would sometimes call on me to go roller-blading around the neighbourhood with them. This was back before the turn of the millennium when my own kids were still too young to accompany us. In his first few years of hockey Brent played goaltender, the same as his dad Rob.

Rob and Gabby (Gabriela) were his parents. They were from Ajax and he was a butcher and she drove a school bus. As well, Brent’s grandparents, Karlheinz and Trudy lived behind us and used to help me with our landscaping. Karlheinz was very European in his direct manner of speaking and would tell me right after I finished staining our deck that he didn’t like the colour that I had chosen. Another time when we were out of the country for an extended period he threw our kids’ swing set in the garbage, explaining to me when I wondered what had happened that it was an eyesore. On the plus side, however, he did have a very impressive collection of tools which he would very generously bring over whenever there was work to be done, and we would always have (a lot) of beer when we were finished. I would get a big kick out of the clean-up because when we were finished Karlheinz would always signal to his wife Trudy to pick up all the empties and she never seemed to mind. I found that very impressive and tried it out with my own wife Brenda, but my own hand signals, despite given with the most determined expressions, never had any effect at all.

It was when Brent was about ten years old that Rob informed me that they had decided to move to Barrie, Ontario where Brent would receive better coaching, competition and scouting closer to Toronto, in order to advance his hockey career. I didn’t say much, except maybe that Brent would be lucky to make a Junior B team and I was disappointed to see them leave. I suspected that the move was as much to escape Karlheinz’s domination as it was to advance Brent’s hockey career, but the move worked out famously on both counts. It also humbled me somewhat as to my own ability to predict future hockey talent.

But it never stopped me from offering my opinion.

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The Montreal Diaspora

Posted on October 10, 2013 by dperras56

When people find out that I grew up in Montreal and spent  lot of my childhood time in Quebec’s Eastern Townships they invariably ask, “Well, are you a separatist, then?”

Hardly. The Parti Quebecois and their separatist ideology severely damaged Quebec and almost ruined Montreal for a generation. That city had been the financial centre of Canada, the first Canadian metropolis with a subway system, Expo 67 and a major league baseball team. It seems as if hundreds of thousands of us have left since November,1976, and la Belle Province will never be the same again. It’s the Canadian diaspora. No, we were never brutalized as the Jewish people have been in their two thousand years of wandering in search of a home. This is Canada after all. Mistreatment and prejudice probably don’t amount to much more than having the cashier first say ‘Bonjour’ instead of ‘Hello’ at any McDonald’s on Montreal’s West Island.

But we form a tribe nonetheless. We recognize each other in our dialect, like Basques coming together outside of their small corner of Spain. The old guy who sharpens my skates at B.K. Sports on Bantree Road picked me out as soon as I opened my mouth. I call him Bob, I don’t know if that’s really his name, but he’s never corrected me.

“Can you sew up these hockey gauntlets for me,” I asked him, my glance around the old shop taking in all the  photos of the old Montreal Canadiens’ teams from the 1960s.

“You must be an anglo from Montreal,” he smirked in a friendly manner.

I was aghast. “How can you tell,” I stammered.

“Because we’re the only ones who called hockey gloves ‘gauntlets’. The rest of the world calls them, well, hockey gloves.”

He has a customer for life. We always have something to talk about. A hockey guy to his core, he used to play in the nets in pick-up summer hockey games at the Pointe Claire arena with the likes of  Yvan Cournoyer and Jacques Lemaire. Bob also played in the first Old-Timers Tournament ever, in the same arena, back in 1967 or 68, I think it was. Old -Timer then meant you were over twenty-five. The world was a lot younger then. I remember wondering what  old boys like that were doing still playing amateur hockey at that advanced age.

I’m fifty-seven years old now and play seven times a week.

Now my trips east of Gatineau are limited to visiting my one remaining Townships’  relative who lives on my grandfather’s old farm. That and playing in the Pointe Claire Old-Timers Tournament in April every year. Yeah, I’m still on the ice a lot but when I watch video tapes of our games I wish there was some way to flick them on to fast-forward.

No, our warring factions don’t kill each other here in Canada the way they do in some other parts of the world. But we needn’t feel overly-smug. I remember my father coming back from an educational conference somewhere overseas and recounting a conversation that he had with an eloquent and distinguished female representative from a Commonwealth country in Africa.

“From Canada, I see,” she greeted him, noting his lapel badge. When he nodded in acknowledgement she continued with “Having tribal difficulties, are we ?”

Touche !

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An Old-Fashioned Rant

Posted on October 8, 2013 by dperras56

Maybe it’s time we all take a deep breath and calm down. Look who’s talking, those of you that know me are thinking. But the thing is, the mood and commentary out there just seems to be a little over the top.

Andy Warhol had it only partially correct. When he said back in the seventies that in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes, he didn’t know that everyone would also have a blog and a Twitter account. And that includes old guys like me who never even learned to type in high school, because only girls took that class.

Let’s look at the world I follow most closely; the one comprised of sticks and pucks and very passionate, opinionated fans. One coach, Peter Laviolette of the Philadelphia Flyers, has been fired already after only three regular season games, for pity sakes. Here in Ottawa the media is all over newly-arrived winger Bobby Ryan because he hasn’t scored in two games. With such a hyper-intense, impatient perspective, no wonder pharmaceutical company executives are all hiding their money in the Cayman Islands.

But don’t become too smug, you non-hockey fans out there. How many of you hang the letters of the alphabet over your babies’ cribs, or play Bach to our embryos in the womb, hoping to give our spawn a head-start over all the other little gaffers in the all-day kindergarten ? And let’s over-structure their time in that environment, while we’re at it. How’s a kid going to make it in the ultra-competitive future unless their time is as programmed as a psychiatrist’s daily calendar ?

Perhaps I’m wrong to just blame all this hand-wringing and paranoia on the Twitterverse and the Blog Kingdom. We can’t wait to toilet-train our kids, we can’t wait for Junior to start talking, and once he starts talking we’re only wishing that he’d shut up for awhile. And then we can’t wait until they move out of the house.

Is it all because we don’t have enough real work to do anymore ? After all, how many farmers do you know ? And we’ve farmed out all our manufacturing to south-east Asia and Mexico. With no old-fashioned jobs anymore, we’ve all got make our way in pursuits such as counselling each other, becoming life-coaches, consultants and therapists. And our customers don’t want to wait for results because the world moves much too quickly and we’ve got a vacation in Bali coming up next week. So we cope with all our new-found afflictions such as ADD, ADHD, psychoses and neuroses with one new pill after another. Even shyness is now being diagnosed as a disorder, I read recently.

But hey, that’s enough for one day. I’m already late and my psychologist’s receptionist is a stickler for punctuality.

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Experiencing Burma

Posted on October 7, 2013 by dperras56

A snake was resting comfortably in its hole when an elephant wandered up and needing rest, unknowingly sat on the serpent. Just before having  the life completely crushed out of it, the angry and poisonous snake bit the offending pachyderm, causing its death as well. A hungry fox, passing by this scene of death, feasted greedily on the elephant’s carcass, thereby gorging himself to death.

This sad tale of three unfortunate characters concisely summarizes the cause of mankind’s suffering. The parable was recounted to my family by a Buddhist monk showing us the sites of the Burmese pagodas, or shrines, in Bagan, Myanmar, the country also known as Burma. The cause of the demise of the three characters in the proverb were the elephant’s ignorance, the snake’s anger and the fox’s greed; character traits that of course are not limited to the animal kingdom. This gem of insight into the cause of suffering of the human condition was one of our first encounters with the Buddhist philosophy which seemed to so govern the life, much more so than its oppressive government, of the peaceful people of Myanmar.

My wife is an inveterate and indefatigable traveller, although she had never before been to southeast Asia. She is also an unabashed feminist and admirer of Aung Sun Su Kyi, the fearless and steadfast face of democracy in Myanmar against the stifling oppression of military dictatorship. A viewing of the movie ‘The Lady’ made it inevitable that this heretofore rarely-touristed and isolated land would become our next destination. First stop: Bangkok. It has been sung that one night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble, but that wasn’t our experience. It can, however, make a naïve man wary, even though the deals that can be had, from men’s suits to chicken satay, can brighten the day of any man, hard or humble.

Bangkok, of course, is modern and western-friendly compared to Burma. One incident in particular stands out from four weeks of experiences in south-east Asia.

The Burmese train ride had been cramped, bumpy and hot. The only diversion that had added any interest to watching the dry landscape pass by was our encounter with pink-robed, head-shaven female Buddhist monks. Our pidgin conversation about making peace with our souls stopped abruptly when the train noisily slowed and lurched to a dead stop. From the coach behind us came a stream of prisoners,  garbed in blue prison suits, shuffling in their ankle chains and manacles, before dropping to the ground in total submission, their foreheads pressed against the earth..  Shouting guards waved sawed-off shotguns over their heads.

It was riveting, and totally unexpected, but like a twelve year old boy with ADHD my attention couldn’t help but be diverted for an instant. What was the reaction of my fellow passengers ? Most sat stock-still, gazing straight ahead. Not so my wife, however. Her camera clicked constantly. I was aghast, but my hissing instructions to put that freaking thing away were no more obeyed in that Burmese coach than  any other previous directions  given anytime else  throughout our blissful time together. One of the female monks caught her eye, and drew her index finger across her throat.  A guard, outside the window but just inches away, tapped his rifle butt harshly against the glass. The train lurched, and slowly chugged into motion.

No Burmese we met throughout the rest of our trip knew what might have eventually happened to those submissive souls, nor seemed particularly surprised by the incident.

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Kids’ Sports

Posted on October 4, 2013 by dperras56

Maybe I’m the only out there who feel that kids’ sports have lost their way. Oh brother, I can hear you saying; another Boomer starting off a conversation with a “I remember this one time back in’66…”

But hear me out here. Isn’t it ironic that as youth sports become more and more organized and there is now everything on the agenda from the classic Little League baseball to the (of course) non-contact Ultimate Frisbee, that the under-19 crowd is fatter than ever, with soaring rates of Type 2 diabetes, for crying out loud !

Maybe we really should blame it on the Boomers.  If you’re 50 plus then you probably remember the advent of youth organized sports. You couldn’t join up to play ‘Mosquito’ hockey as we called it in Montreal until you were eight years old. By that time you had figured out what end of the hockey stick to hold after playing probably hundreds of hours of road hockey in between building snowforts and pelting any passing motorists with snowballs. Your parents would give you $30 to sign up for the season; it seemed to be an extra $20 for the rest of your brothers to join. Don’t quote me on that; the old man provided the cash and all I know is that I better not spend any of it on jawbreakers and hockey cards.

The season started after Christmas when the city put in the outdoor ice and so we didn’t waste any time doing complex drills designed by professionals with degrees in combined physics and sports physiology.  Any parent who wanted to watch the action on Saturday morning was free to stand on the snowbanks at rinkside. Tim Hortons had not yet started providing double-doubles and timbits to adoring parents and the netting which protects fans from errant pucks was yet to be installed at the local rink.

Nowadays ? Hell, organized sports, especially hockey, is out of the price range of too-many Canadians. Already-stressed-out parents have to get their kids to the rink an hour early dressed in either ties and jackets or else the team’s specialized warmup suit. Then the team trainer runs them through a workout which was probably borrowed from Usain Bolt’s pre-Olympic rigamarole before settling down for some meditative quiet time in order to get ‘up’ for the game.

Don’t wind me up- I’m barely getting started here. I could go on and on, and I probably will in the upcoming days. It just seems as if our kids want to play a sport, we as parents have to make an investment of time and money equivalent to starting up a small business.

Anyone up for a game of kick-the-can in the streets after supper ?

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Traffic Jam

Posted on October 4, 2013 by dperras56

We were stuck in summer afternoon Quebec City traffic, my wife Brenda, my daughter Rachelle and I. Yours’ truly was at the wheel, in my usual state of blissed-out non-action. Brenda, patient as a hummingbird, was getting restless.

“Why don’t you switch lanes,” she inquired. “The one to the right is moving.” She gestured with her finger.

As usual, any instruction gets me as riled-up as Larry David having a bad day. “Listen,” I replied. “Remember my best friend from Bishop’s, Mike Dunn, the guy from New Jersey. He did a scientific study on lane-jumpers in heavy traffic and concluded that you’re better-off staying where you are.”

“A scientific study ? One of your friends?” Brenda was incredulous. “I don’t think so ! Isn’t Dunn the one who ended up in rehab after smashing his car into the median on the New Jersey turnpike?”

“Well, uh, Dunn had a few issues, but he was a trained researcher until he developed a slight drinking problem.” I decided to put my foot down. “Anyway, I’m the one driving.” My voice was getting louder.

Brenda is nothing if not tenacious. “That bus lane is open. In Ottawa, I heard that we can use bus lanes as long as we have three or more people in the car.”

Breathing deeply, as I had been taught, I eased into the bus lane and cruised up to a red light, where we encountered a police officer signalling for us to pull over. I looked over at Brenda, not masking my thoughts of homicide. No court in the land would convict me.

It’s amazing what three bilingual travellers in a car with Ontario plates in Quebec City can get away with. A mea culpa, along with sincere promises to follow the rules of the Quebec road and we were , well, not-so-merrily on our way again. I looked over at Brenda and exhaled loudly, something I had learned from my father in order to show extreme exasperation.

“You’re lucky to be  married to me,” was all she said.

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Colca Canyon

Posted on October 1, 2013 by dperras56

Most people go on holidays to lie on the beach in, say, Jamaica, and totally relax. They usually try to avoid coming home sick, or injured, or both. The following is an edited version of an e-mail that I wrote to my parents and siblings recounting the events of an arduous, but fascinating experience.

Five years ago we decided to visit Peru and Bolivia for a month, with the three kids in tow, of course. We would do the Macchu Picchu hike, but before that we were talked into doing a four day hike in the Colca Canyon, twice as deep as the Grand Canyon and which reaches an elevation of 17 000 ft. After arising at 2:30 a.m. in the city of Arequippa we rode a bus for five hours, continually ascending and only stopping for such things as viewing the condors and to give release to our steadily-increasing nausea. Finally the bus made its final stop and we were met by our guide Marcel. I had been fortunate so far, and I was convinced that altitude sickness was something that only happened to wimps.

Hours later we completed our last ascent of the day, an intensely steep climb that my pounding head allowed me to finish only because I knew that we would soon be flopping down. The village we had reached was Marcel’s birthplace, a small cluster of huts, some places being only a kitchen and woodstove, and a few others that contained beds and slits in the  walls that passed for windows. There was another hut that was a small toilet, site of a future disaster, whose flush didn’t seem to be totally working. I thought that I’d lie down for awhile to see if my headache would subside while Marcel and his mother prepared supper. Neither event materialized. The pounding in my head and the queasiness in my stomach only upped their ante, and apparently Marcel’s mother was nowhere to be found. “She’s a little late and she locked the door to the kitchen,” Marcel informed us as time dragged on and not even the mush we had been served for lunch was appearing . My wife Brenda wasn’t buying any of it. “What – they lock their doors during the day in this tiny mountain hamlet of three families and we don’t even do that in downtown Ottawa?” she wondered incredulously. “He’s just saying that as an excuse so he doesn’t have to make supper and we’ll just go to bed.” I had given up on supper anyway; I was way too miserable to even think of eating. Meanwhile, I heard voices coming from the outdoor table a few metres from our hut; we had been joined by one other hiking group comprised of a young Swiss couple and an American exchange student who had spent the past semester in a school in Chile. I wished that they would all shut up. We had of course forgotten our Ibuprofen in our hotel room back in Arequippa and our guide’s antidote of sniffing dried mountain herbs wasn’t having rapid enough results by my impatient North American standards. Brenda suddenly appeared by my bed with a cup of coca tea. I was unimpressed. “I can’t sit up and drink that crap,” I complained. “See if that Swiss couple has any headache tablets. I heard the woman say that she’s a doctor.” Luckily, as it turned out, she did, and I eventually fell into a fitful sleep.

I had to make a couple of trips to the malfunctioning outhouse during the night, and the next morning at early light I emerged out of the hut and barely missed stepping into a pile of shit.

“Who crapped out here?” I demanded of my family, not really caring if they were still sleeping or not.

“That was Rachelle,” volunteered my son Adam. “I saw her doing it in the middle of the night.”

Much to my surprise, Rachelle didn’t even go through the motions of denying it. “I had diarrhea and I was afraid of walking too far in the dark,” was her defense. I just sighed and made my way to the outhouse, where I found a new case of crap all over the floor. Diarrhea, we had discovered, was a particularly hazardous by-product of altitude sickness. I beat it back to the hut, indignant as only one who had been stepping in it all morning could be.

“What happened in the outhouse?” I was a little angrier this time. “It probably wasn’t that Swiss doctor.”

This time Liam fessed up. “I had diarrhea and I couldn’t make it all the way in,” he admitted. It would be a problem for Liam all through this particular mountain trek, as the altitude wreaked havoc on his bowels, leading his brother Adam to ask him, “Why are you always crapping yourself ?” I returned to the outhouse to do the clean-up myself, only to find Marcel the guide’s mother already cheerfully at the job. Perhaps she faced this problem routinely. At any rate, I was feeling better, thanked her profusely and then headed up to the table where pancakes were already being served. But first I washed my hands thoroughly at the cold water tap. I only hoped that she would do the same.

This diarrhea seems to be very contagious.

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