You want the Ranger to what?

“Drive us around in the Westport Santa Claus Parade.”  Liberal candidate Marjory Loveys was online.

“O.K.  I’ll have it at St. Ed’s School by 12:30 and you will have until 2:00 to decorate it.”

I’m always looking for an excuse to take my utility vehicle on another adventure, and this would give me a look at the inside of a revered institution, the Westport Santa Claus Parade.  I was also mildly curious to see how two engineers, Marjory and her husband, Tony Capel, would deal with a challenge like fastening a bunch of magnetic signs to the plastic body of a UTV.

I never thought I’d see anyone try to tape snow in place, but that’s exactly what Tony did.  They arrived with their car chock-full of boxes decorated to look like Christmas gifts.  I had told them the dimensions of the cargo area and they were prepared to fill it to overflowing.  Then they unrolled the cotton batting, and they taped it and it worked.  Keeping the very light boxes in place in Saturday afternoon’s strong breeze involved threading some strap clamps I found in my truck through the hinges of the tailgate to intersect with a spare seat belt at the front and back to the clamp.  What can I say?  It worked.

Marjory decided that the metal grate behind the seats and the front bumper both had enough metal to hold the signs, so on they went.  Large red bows and a wreath went on to the roll bar with cable ties.  Another bow discreetly clothed the trailer hitch.

We lined up behind David Blair’s stately 1970 Cadillac, a splendid ‘34 Ford hot rod, and a very nice vintage Mustang.  To my right the tractor guys were getting ready.  Dale Lyons had a volunteer in charge of his recently-acquired Massey Harris 30.

“Why did you buy a Massey 30, Dale?”

“The guy wanted to sell it.”

A beautifully restored Oliver Row Crop Model required a push start, then a tow, and finally a parking space because it couldn’t be persuaded to run smoothly. That’s everybody’s nightmare in a parade.

Behind us two smiling ladies carried a banner advertising Artemisia, a Westport sign shop.  Marching in front of them was a small human in a dinosaur suit.  As the parade wore on, it was obvious that lugging that huge tail was a strain upon the small person, but he/she was not about to give up.

Finally, on the home stretch, I asked Tony to take the wheel and I dropped back to play columnist.  Sharbot Lake resident Elizabeth Larocque, aged seven, was the figure in the T-Rex suit.  Her mother had made it for her because the T-Rex is her favourite animal, but in keeping with the Christmas theme Elizabeth had requested and gained a set of reindeer horns to clip on over the top of the headpiece.  So we were followed throughout the parade by a baby T-Rex disguised as a reindeer.  I wish I’d had time to meet Elizabeth:  she showed by her actions on that long stretch of street that she’s a trooper.

Driving Marjory Loveys around wasn’t at all what I expected.  Forget about sight lines and Queen Elizabeth waves.  Marjory wanted to meet everybody, so she was off on foot for the entire parade.  Box after box of candy canes went out.  It looked as though our would-be M.P. would soon be in a deficit because of the candy outlay, so she dispatched her finance minister, Sylvia Herlehy, to Kudrinko’s during a lull in the traffic.  In an amazingly short time Sylvia returned with supplies to replenish the cargo box, and Marjory’s campaign continued.  Photographer Moe Lavigne kept snapping away, but the high point of mischief in the parade no doubt occurred when Margaret Brand showed up and we decided to stage a shot with Marjory driving the unfamiliar Ranger.  She hadn’t prepared for this, and her reactions had us in stitches.

As the floats returned to St. Ed’s we got a chance to look at some of the other participants.  I burst out in laughter as a genuine dog-and-pony show worked its way down the street.  What else would you call a lovely young golden retriever soldiering along next to a cranky, bucking Shetland pony on a cart?  My dad would have loved the team of Belgians on a carriage which followed.

How was a Santa Claus parade different than a three-tractor procession down Hwy 15?  The Ranger is much better behaved than an antique tractor.  The V8’s ahead of us had to speed up or die, so we were soon left in their ozone.  Marjory’s need to meet everybody sometimes left her a half-block behind and out of candy, but Tony, whose job it was to control traffic flow, just told me to go ahead, she would catch up.  It turns out she can move remarkably quickly when she sets her mind to it.

It was a lot of fun participating in this parade.  Westport certainly presents itself as a friendly and welcoming community.  Maybe I’ll bring a tractor next year.

Fall madness

The trouble with fall is that one is pulled in a dozen directions at once as the calendar ticks down to freeze-up.  That’s what fall is:  a mixed metaphor.  It is also the season which defines us as Canadians.  Our smug claims to winter hardiness are just the result of a fall of anticipation and hard work.

Despite the balmy weather of the last two weeks, snow is coming, and everything has to be covered up.  Six months of moving to a smaller house underlines a basic principle of physics:  everything has to be somewhere.  We are now moved in and the old house is sold, but three utility trailers still sit in the yard loaded with stuff, and I can’t think of what to do with it.

We dubbed the new greenhouse the Crystal Palace the first evening Charlie turned floodlights on inside it.  White plastic glows rather well when illuminated from within.  Now that the wiring is complete, maybe I can just screw in green and red light bulbs and write off the Christmas-decorations chore.

But all of the space is committed to boats and cars.  There is no place for surplus chairs, an extra laundry hamper, the remains of twenty-five years of socket sets, even the half-finished lapstrake dinghy Charlie and I planked as soon as he grew big enough to do his side of the rivets.  It has spent the last twenty years hanging on the wall in the garage in Smiths Falls.

Before I surrendered the pram to the pigeons in the haymow I took some photos and put them up in a scrapbook on the Net.  Yesterday produced a flurry of messages from a guy in Boston.  He wants the hull as a project to complete with his ten-year old son who wants to be a boat builder when he grows up.  The only problem is getting a nine-foot boat to Boston.

Advertisers have convinced us that we can’t drive a car past the first of December without new-fangled tires with bits of walnut shell in the rubber and lots of slits to enhance wear.  But that means new rims as well, and that’s expensive, so I consulted Kijiji ads for a week and then set off on one of my wild-goose chases.   In the pouring rain I explored a Kingston suburb – do you know they count by fours when assigning lot numbers nowadays? I finally broke down and knocked on a door.  The occupants directed me two houses down the street, laughing about the numbering system but apparently on good terms with their neighbours.

Now in the correct driveway at the appointed time, I discovered nobody home.

Princess Auto was only a couple of blocks away, so I drowned my sorrows in Friday-evening retail therapy for an hour or so, and arrived back at the tire place just as the young couple returned.

The tires and wheels were as advertised, and the owners recovered just over half what they had paid to equip their leased Camry for three months of winter driving last year. The moment of truth will come this week when I bolt them onto Bet’s car and take it out onto the highway.

But that doesn’t help the three trailers in the yard.  What’s more, I no sooner get the fishing boats tucked neatly away in the Palace than Tony comes along to take his out for one more fishing trip.

At least the fall plowing’s done.  But Bet wants her garlic planted before freeze-up…

The thing you should never say to your mother

I’ve made many mistakes in conversations over a long career of heating with wood, but none matched my goof last week.

The Dutch elm blight in the seventies made it fashionable to heat with wood, or at least to talk about it endlessly in one’s workplace. Status went to the biggest, the fastest, the hottest.

We borrowed my dad’s old box stove for the house we had built the previous summer. Large basement windows meant that I could back a trailer up and drop the firewood to the floor below. Burning wood promised to be quick and easy.

My new pickup truck soon discovered the hazards of broken branches in the woods, so I pressed Dad’s old Massey into service with a disused manure spreader as my trailer. Aware of the huge elms on Young’s Hill, Bud Merriman sold me the largest chain saw he had ever stocked, a McCullough ProMac 850. With its 30” bar I was able to power through some massive tree trunks, though I recall two which were too big for the saw.

The remainder fell quickly to my frenetic actions with saw and spreader, and the pile of green blocks accumulated in the basement.

The odd night spent pouring buckets of water over the coals of an overheated box stove convinced me that a more controllable heating unit was in order, so I replaced it with an new airtight stove. It offered the additional benefit of a huge top opening, greatly reducing splitting chores.

Somewhere in my young mind was the idea that the green blocks would dry from proximity to the fire over the course of the winter, and that the lost moisture would provide needed humidity in the house.

My system did not take into account what happens in an elm block as it thaws. There are forty species of elm in this area, and at least one of those strains smells really, really bad as it dries in a basement.

But the weird smell could be explained away or cleared with open windows when guests arrived. The ants were another matter entirely. Apparently every elm block has a population of large black ants living just under the bark. When their nest warms up, the ants think it’s spring and emerge, all energetic, to hunt down whatever it is they eat. Most of them found their way to our kitchen.

Bet waged war at first but as the influx continued she gradually gave up on the ants, accepting them as part of the rural experience.

But the cost of wood heat kept going up. The unfinished basement needed a concrete floor. The woodpile was taking up a lot of space. It was impossible to keep the house clean. I had learned to sleep scared, automatically waking up a few times per night to check and replenish the fire.

A few minor blazes in the chimney shocked us with their violence. When our son arrived, I announced to the world: “Electricity is cheap!” and that was the end of the indoor woodpile.

Our house in town had a fine Edwardian fireplace. When lit, it proved an extraordinarily effective air conditioner. If a smoker came to the house, all we had to do was light the fireplace and a strong stream of air flowed quickly up the chimney. It was great for parties, but hardly a viable heat source. As smoking fell from favour and heating costs rose, I eventually blocked off the chimney to save fuel.

But this all leads up to our current situation: a huge old house heated by two oil furnaces, with no way to burn wood. Notwithstanding Bet’s objections, the time has come once again to look to the woodlot as an energy source.

The new system has to be efficient in both labour and energy. That means a boiler, and heat pumped to the basement. It must burn clean. That disqualifies the outdoor furnace. The search has narrowed down, then, to a boiler inside a purpose-built building with a serious chimney. The only question is where to locate it.

Mom had been after me all fall to replace her burn barrel, so I brought her one this week, and then I discovered the thing a man should never, absolutely never, say to his mother. After some discussion we placed the barrel to the north-east of the house with a view to observing smoke currents and examining the feasibility of locating the boiler at that location.

All went well until, half in jest, I suggested she drop a couple of chicken bones into the fire to create the worst-case scenario for smoke. I was pretty sure she didn’t have any chicken bones at her disposal.

Turns out she did have a number of old feather pillows.

The wind was steady from the east and blew the smoke right at the garage which was my work site of the day. For much of the afternoon I alternated between retching and running for cover.

I learned my lesson. You never dare your mother to make a bad smell with an incinerator. Mothers have way too much experience and imagination for that.

A visit to Lostwithiel Farm

When agronomist Neil Thomas is not on assignment in Africa for CIDA or helping his wife manage a vineyard and winery in southern Pennsylvania, he works on the family property near Lansdowne where they tend to acres of grapes and the area’s largest black walnut orchard.

Everyone agrees that the black walnut is the gourmet nut of choice: it has a smooth, rich flavour, complex and nuanced. Nutritionally it scores off the charts on all indicators of desirability. The only problem is getting the kernel away from the shell.

The lack of affordable processing machinery has prevented the growth of a market for black walnuts in Canada, but over the last two decades Neil has used his contacts and reputation to arrange for the development of technology to fill this need.
The latest machine to emerge from a collaboration with the Engineering Technology Department at Algonquin College is a continuous-flow nut washer.

“This invention replaces a set of five hand operations based around a cement mixer, a large screen and a pair of rubber gloves which gave me an extremely sore back last year. When Brad Thompson and a team of fellow students confronted the problem, they designed a big, shiny, three-quarter-ton beast which looks a bit like a jet engine on a test bed. So far it has not thrust me out of the barn, but we haven’t used it yet.”

Today was to be the day for the test.

First up was a trailer load of nuts from Westport. Planted in 1937, Dr. Goodfellow’s black walnut trees have proven a reliable and abundant source of fruit, and current owners John and Delcy Marchand sought Neil out as the only processor in the area.

My job was to dump the bags and tubs of walnuts onto the conveyor and regulate the feed up a stepped belt adapted from the potato industry. At the top the nuts drop into a huller, a noisy machine consisting of a large cylinder with a series of rubber pads inside set up to remove the gooey outer hull of the nuts. The hulls are forced down through a grate at the bottom as the cleaned nuts make their way out the end, down a funnel, and into a flotation trough which tests each nut’s quality. If it floats, it is discarded.

Eager to try his new toy, Neil waited impatiently as I ran the nuts through and into the trough. With a large plastic shovel he scooped the hulled nuts out of the long trough and into the hopper of the washer. He turned it on and away they went, without fuss.

The washer consists of a large, perforated, rotating drum with a slowly counter-rotating auger inside to feed the nuts along through the machine. An electronic control panel provides infinite adjustment to the rate of feed.

In five minutes John’s crop of walnuts had been washed and deposited in the rack for moving to the dryer. I commented to Neil, “Your guys certainly did a good job. That thing runs as smoothly as a Honda.”

Personally, I fancy tools that keep me on my toes, demanding all my alertness and ingenuity just to keep them working. The new washer seemed discouragingly competent to me, but Neil and his sore back just beamed.

While he prepared lunch I subjected my host to the third degree on the walnut business:

What does the black walnut tree offer to Canadian food shoppers?

Black walnut is the truffle of the tree-nut world. The nut meat is rich, with a creamy texture and often pungent flavours. This means that far less can be used in cooking and you get a lot of taste for a few calories. There is less fat and more protein in black walnuts than in other nuts. Pastry chefs cherish them for their outstanding contribution to fine cuisine.

People are prepared to pay far more for black walnut products than for other nut types.

Why don’t more people plant black walnut trees?

Farmers in this area have spent two hundred years removing trees from their fields, and don’t want to put them back. There’s also the long product cycle. In fact, though, ordinary black walnut trees should produce nuts by the time they are twelve years old, a far shorter interval than growing trees for timber.

Can you make money from black walnuts?

I believe you can, because we have test-marketed kernel at $1.00 per ounce, far more than consumers are willing to pay for other nut types. We couldn’t keep up with the demand.

What will it take to make black walnut production a successful industry in this area?

It will take a critical mass of rural landowners establishing plantations so that we can sustain production with locally-produced nuts.

Separating out the edible kernel is really the challenge. Nobody wants chunks of shell in their muffins or their ice cream, so most of our technology development emphasis is on the machinery to crack and separate. In Missouri the Hammond Company uses a very expensive optical sorting operation which nobody can afford at the farm scale. So we need to find the trick of separating kernel and shell by a cheaper mechanical means and this is where most of our emphasis goes.

For more information check www.blackwalnuts.ca

http://www.completehealthmag.com/files/walnuts.pdf

Photos are at http://picasaweb.google.ca/rodcros/LostwitheilWalnuts#

The First Annual Tired Iron Tour

There we were, cruising along the shoulder of Highway 15, weekend traffic buzzing by, when the Massey’s engine faded and died. Burt managed to get his McCormick stopped before punting me into the traffic, but there we were, stalled. I could already hear the comments at lunch: “Nobody but Rod can foul up a three-tractor parade!”

I bailed off the tractor, seized the offending battery cable and twisted it to within an inch of its life. A touch to the starter and the thing was running again, so I gratefully remounted and rushed to catch up with Peter’s Deere.

Our leader, Peter Myers, seemed unaware of my nerve-jangling delay. Two minutes of full-throttle vibration and the Massey was back in position in the convoy and I cut back the throttle before the engine grenaded.

Burt and his grandson Rick followed in my dust, a bit slack-jawed at the burst of speed from the antique. Of course I guess in this crowd a 1947 isn’t all that old. Burt Mattice’s ride, a 1939 McCormick-Deering W30, and Peter’s 1951 Model B Deere are both so carefully groomed as to make my Masssey Harris 30 look like what it is, a trailer-puller invited to a tractor show to make the others look good.

What’s more, the Massey’s a cranky beast. A loud growl from the starter is its trademark scare tactic. Another favourite is to throw off a spark plug wire just when you need full power.

The Tired Iron Tour began when Peter finished work on Lloyd and Grant Stone’s massive old Minneapolis-Moline. Someone suggested a road trip around the township would be a fine way to introduce the western tractor to the hills of the Rideau Lakes. Word went out and various passers-by were drawn into the plan, but a family reunion took the Stones out of the tour. In the end Burt and his grandson Rick joined Peter and me on this first attempt. Grant showed up to see us off, and my pal Tony Izatt took charge of photography, deftly working his way through weekend traffic as he documented our passage.

I read somewhere that you can’t enjoy scenery while trail riding on a mountain bike because almost all of your attention is needed to control the bike. “But a tractor is plodding along down the shoulder of the highway,” you say. “There should be plenty of time to relax and enjoy the splendid autumn scenery.”

You haven’t driven between Peter Myers and Burt Mattice. Without instructions, I tried to position my tractor properly in the parade. Burt lagged way back. O.K., we leave long intervals along the highway. I did my best to fit in. But then Burt would come racing up behind me, setting off a concertina effect (not easy with a three-tractor convoy). I would speed up and then slow down to avoid collision with Peter, but then he would forge on ahead, and I had a hard time predicting where he would drive. I would check back, see Burt in the driving lane of the highway, look back ahead and there Peter would be on the shoulder. I would adjust and then Peter would be out on the lane as well, adhering to some system which made sense to the experienced, but was Greek to me.

Then they began to speed up. As illogical as it may seem, the tractors were surprisingly difficult to keep at a constant speed. My throttle boasts the “Dual Power” feature. That’s a hand throttle set up so that the cogs end at ¾ power in favour of a flat area on the throttle plate, and only provides full revolutions if I push it through this “gate” and onto the upper set of cogs, at which point the whole machine begins to feel rather like a seat on a jackhammer. Peter’s preferred speed nestled my throttle firmly on top of the gate where it was loathe to stay. The engine would run smoothly there for a couple of minutes, and then cut the power without warning. All I could do was hold the throttle in place. That left one hand for steering. The Massey is no Porsche in the steering department. It handles pretty well if I have one hand on either side of the wheel to pull in the direction I want it to go. Controlling the Massey’s directional urges with one-hand steering is less precise and a lot more tiring.

And this was all in the first half-hour. We made our way to the Gananoque turnoff by way of Jones’ Falls, joining our pit crew for lunch. On the return trip we toured Lyndhurst and enjoyed the golden maples of the Beverley hills.

It was a beautiful fall day. A pair of eagles courted high above our heads. Drivers were quite tolerant of our presence on Hwy 15, though more inclined to risky passes on the Lyndhurst road.

Next year we’ll have to invite more tractors along on the tour, design a set of instructions for driving in convoy, and perhaps reduce the cruising speed a little so that my poor Massey doesn’t have to give 110% to keep up.

http://picasaweb.google.com/rodcros/TiredIronTour#

Roz and Charlie discover real food

All summer when Roz came to the farm she would spend just enough time with us to be polite, and then she would disappear. Occasional searches would turn her up in the garden, sitting or lying in a row, plucking weeds from around her cherished plants. Roz had never been around a garden until she discovered Forfar.

So this year I involved her in the seed purchases and even put up with her desire to have green beans (too much work), peas (blow over in a good breeze), and beets (yuck!). Kohlrabi and butternut squash made it into the basket as well. Roz is very fit and relentless when it comes to work. Bet and I didn’t resist when Roz read the instructions on the seed packs and methodically planted the seeds in the rows I had laid out in the garden.

This task requires more than my personal capacity for patience and bending. Other years I would stuff a package of seeds into a seeding wheel, take aim down a row and walk until the seed gave out. This could occur anywhere from three feet in to halfway to the stake at the other end. So I’d start with another packet of something from the other end. The large gaps in the middle of the rows were ideal areas for melons to spread, so it usually worked out fairly well in my tangle. I also discovered that volunteer tomatoes look much less weedy than other weeds.

This year Roz showed up each week to check on the progress of her seeds. The rain wiped out the cucumbers, tomatoes and melons, but she lovingly tended the surviving root vegetables, communing for hours with her charges, plucking the weeds from their midst with a delicate, two-fingered grip.

And then came the harvests. The girl was so delighted with her first bowl of peas that I couldn’t rain on her parade. And she didn’t mind the work of picking the string beans. But the beets! Oh man, the beets! The rest of the folks at the table were raving about these bleeding red things, and Bet had shrewdly added some feta and garlic to the mix, so I ate a few slices. The horrible-taste memory of my childhood fell away in an instant and I very much enjoyed this new food.

After losing a war with the raccoons I vowed never again to grow sweet corn. But Roz had never had a corn patch, so we put in five rows. The raccoons struck on schedule, but Tony helped me build an electric fence around the patch. It worked. We saved the rest of the crop.

Roz remembered her garden: “I enjoyed it all far more than was reasonable. I don’t know why. I love picking raspberries. Maybe it has to do with pride in something you think you have created. Even though I know it’s cheaper to buy any of those foods than my time is worth, there’s something that makes me incredibly proud when I make a dish from ingredients that I’ve grown. I confess more than once I ate beets and raspberries until I made myself sick on them, especially the raspberries. But it’s because I enjoy collecting them so much.

“At Thanksgiving dinner in Ancaster when I told Papou* about my vegetables, my grandfather immediately insisted that we make the trip to his house to see his garden before the sun went down. He does so much. He gave us eggs, figs, pears, oregano. With the language barrier when I was a little kid I never really paid attention to him, but now I wonder if there is something hereditary in the pride he takes in his self-sufficiency, because I really enjoyed the garden and I have no idea why.”

Charlie and Martin’s syrup-making exploits last March continue to reverberate in the family as we work our way through their product. I asked Charlie what possessed him to take on such a project.

“The trees were there, and the stuff costs fifteen dollars a bottle. Roz makes me pancakes on Saturday morning and she kept sending me to buy the syrup.”

Of course Charlie and Martin had many commitments during the day so they did all of the work at night. Charlie didn’t see anything particularly unusual about that. “If you only have a two week season, odds are pretty good you’ll work most of the day on it.”

I asked him to explain the essential difference between maple syrup and corn syrup, the current nutritional public enemy #1. “Syrup is a lot more expensive and dangerous. You create it by boiling something over open flames. And inherently less is produced, so it’s less fattening. There’s also something exciting about making it.”

Roz is already making plans for next year. “I found myself thinking that the peas were more work than they’re worth, so I’ll plant more beans next year. Yesterday my grandmother dismissed rutabagas as cattle feed, but I found that you can make a rutabaga pie, and even a carrot pie. You cannot, however, make kohlrabi pie, so I think we can do with fewer of them next year and more carrots.”

*This is the simplest of five or six different spellings of the Greek term of endearment for grandfather, each of which someone on the Internet claims is correct.

Hunting Season

For most Canadian boys the great coming of age occurs with the driver’s permit, but for me it came a year early with my first hunting license. I remember George Curry, the licensing instructor, and his conversation with my father while he skinned three pounds of bullheads for him. “I’ll bet he’s been out around these hills with a gun ever since he could walk.” My dad nodded. “I guess he’ll be all right, then. I’ll write him a license without an exam. That’ll be $1.50 for the bullheads.”

And so I became an adult member of my clan, entitled to join Grandpa Charlie, cousin Jim, and my dad on duck hunts and legally provide meat for the table. That summer I worked at Genge’s Red and White and Drury set aside a large portion of my wages to pay for a brand new Remington 870 Wingmaster.

I don’t recall if I actually hit anything that first opening day, but over the years my success increased as I gained experience at the unique style of shooting beaver-pond hunting in Bedford Township required.

Trees hang over the ponds. The ducks drop over the trees from behind you and then glide away. Your only shot is a hurried stab at the bird before it disappears behind a dead soft maple a second or so later. You hear a little whistle of wings, and there it is! Pick it off or it’s gone!

Shooting from this position is anything but easy, but it can be done, and with practice, done well. All you need are lots of ducks, lots of shells, and a good retriever. I had Sam, a demented Chesapeake. When Sam found a duck he would retrieve it eagerly, but then he would keep going with his prize until he found an island where he could pluck it with great enjoyment.

I remember Frank Green telling Jack Dier about Sam: “The dog goes and gets the duck and then Rod has to go and get the dog.” Of course when I missed a duck, Sam would search anyway, and eventually come back to me with the look on his face of a man who had just lost his religion. If I put him on a leash he was even worse. Sam would suddenly get a chill and start to shiver. His teeth clacked when he shivered, and he could flare a flock of ducks a half mile away with his chills. Sam was a good deal worse than no dog at all, but he was my faithful hunting companion for my first nine years.

Then there was the sunny afternoon in the sugar bush of the old homestead when Bet volunteered to retrieve the ducks. A mallard soon flew by and I dumped it on the shore of the pond. Bet brought it back. A little miffed that I wasn’t paying as much attention to her as she expected, she consoled herself by petting the poor, dead duck. Then she started to scratch. I confess I had forgotten to tell her about the lice. I assured her they were harmless and would die within the hour, but I must admit it was a funny hour. That was it for Bet’s career as a retriever, but she had won my heart with her antics and we married a few years later.

Then came Jasper. Marge and Ken Bedore had given us his father, a black cocker spaniel named Smokey. Smokey wasn’t much of a hunter, largely because he had no sense of direction and kept getting lost in the woods. Jasper, on the other hand, was a natural. Once while shooting teal below Edmunds Lock, I downed two and went home with five. He had spotted two swimming cripples and brought them back, and finished the evening by tracking one I had winged into a twenty-acre corn field and bringing it back after a long search.

But Jasper was at his best flushing grouse. He was the only dog I had known who had enough sense to get on the other side of the bird and flush it back to the hunter. Mind you he only did this in the winter, after the season had ended, but it was fun to hunt with him. With Jasper I had my best season ever as a grouse hunter. I got eight. Mind you, four of those were road kills and two hit windows, but two I actually downed with birdshot. One was a hunting accident, though.

Behind Peter Myers’s shop there are some old apple trees and one afternoon Jasper put a pair of grouse up. I aimed at the one on the right, but the stock snagged in my vest and the gun went off, knocking the grouse on the left out of the air. So that left one legitimate hit for a year of grouse hunting, you ask? Yeah.

But you guys who have to realize how hard ruffed grouse are to hunt early in the season. They’re genetically programmed to avoid hawks, so a grouse never flushes except when it has a tree between itself and you. The leaves make them impossible to see. The one I actually shot somehow got confused and flew up above the canopy. I spotted it through a gap in the leaves and dumped it, the first clear shot I had had at a grouse that year.

My most memorable grouse? I was driving home from school in Carleton Place and the Honda ahead of me hit one with the tip of its antenna. The bird exploded into a cloud of feathers and dropped on the centre line of Highway 15. The driver behind him in a Mazda jammed on his brakes and started a u-turn, as did the Dodge mini-van next in line. My SUV had rear wheel drive and I could do a tighter u-turn than the other two, so I got there first, leaned out my door and picked up the bird. The other two waved and grinned, turned around again and went on their way. The grouse was delicious and I had won it with a neat bootlegger turn.

A disquieting view from Chaffey’s Locks

This evening we continued a 40-year ritual when I took my bride to The Opinicon for her birthday dinner.  The grounds were as exquisite as ever.  The oaks on this lot must be some of the largest in Ontario, and as well kept as those in Cataraqui Cemetery, another favourite tree-hugging destination.

But it was way too quiet around the Opinicon for August.  It looks like a carefully-tended ghost town.  That’s an oxymoron, I guess.  Most cottages had no cars around them.  Only a few spaces in the parking lot were taken.  The dock was a quarter full.  The dining room echoed.  I’d think ten percent of the spaces were occupied.  Yet the food and service were good.  That’s not the cause.

At the store we asked.  “Where have all of the Americans gone?”  The answer lies in the exchange rate.  At the moment the premium on the U.S. dollar is only 3 cents.  The counter lady told me that when it drops below fifteen cents on the dollar they start canceling.  But this time some cancellations were because of lost jobs.  There are a lot of desperate people out there who simply can’t come to Canada on vacation this year.

Sheltered by our trees and pensions, we’ve been cut off from the desperation of those around us so that we only notice when they are no longer there.

So another historic eating place is in danger.  I wonder if local diners could help out?  The fillet mignon was great, and prices are more than reasonable.  Go have a meal in Chaffey’s Locks!  We can’t let The Opinicon sink because of a bad year.  Otherwise where would I take Bet for next year’s birthday dinner?

Notes from the other side of 60

They streamed in from Toronto, Lakefield, and Westport.  The Kingston contingent had just gained a new granddaughter and couldn’t make it this year, but the rest of   my classmates from Westport Public School, The Old Eights, sat down to a Saturday lunch featuring some of Newboro Lake’s finest bass fillets and abundant conversation.  This was the year when we (all but me) turned sixty, so before we broke for an all-aboard tour of the property on the Ranger, we put together a few observations and yarns for the benefit of readers who have yet to reach that august plateau.

On Aging:

Ice cream is its own reward.  Eat it while you can.  Don’t go to a fortieth high school reunion without a large-print nametag or no one will recognize you.  Accept the fact that gravity rules.  What will fall will fall, be it body parts, kidney stones, hair, jowls, eyelids.  So.  We are still well and enjoying each other’s company, despite the failing parts.  After all, in the book of one’s life, what really counts is the story, not the pictures.  Buy your toys while you can still afford the insurance to use them.  Don’t use your motorcycle to hunt with.

On our collective memory:

Date your pictures.  Write down who is in them and what year it was. Newboro Lake writer Charlotte Gray said in a speech recently that we should date and label all of our photographs.  Also print off all of your important emails so that there is a hard copy and our memories won’t just disappear.

No Old Eights lunch would be complete without a yarn about another local writer, Orville Forrester.  His son Jim offered this one:  “The only time I’ve ever been around explosives was when Dad dropped a stick of dynamite into the spring above our cottage to blow it out.  There was a big white explosion — a fountain of quartz crystals and water mixed together.  Then in typical fashion he dug a trench through the North Shore Road, ran a little plastic hose down the hill to the cottage, and we had running water.”

On change:

Somebody at IBM once said, “We’ll only need about two of these things.”  Learn to type if you haven’t already done so.  Don’t resist technology.  It will keep you connected to the world and allow you to communicate in a pervasive way.  Older people do well with Google.  It’s good for the mind to use search engines.  It re-ignites one’s innate sense of curiosity and provides new ways to find interesting things.

The publishing industry is in trouble, not from the recession, but from the spread of digital media.  Universities are cutting costs by eliminating textbooks, offering course materials online.   Newspapers find themselves competing with their own online editions.  Are journalists a dying breed?  One of the biggest worries publishers have with digital media is that if someone censors something, a single copy can be deleted and it’s as if the item had never existed.  Our memory is lost, replaced by whatever the Winston Smith of the day has decided we should remember in its place.

Stuff is one of the worst afflictions:

“You are probably wondering how we survived the Toronto garbage strike.  The pyramids they built were very convenient.  You’d just go with any number of bags and hand them to someone else and they would end up in one of these mountains of garbage.  You could give them everything, as long as it was double bagged, no questions asked. We had put an old washing machine out for pickup just before the strike, though.  It’s still there. They sprayed the pyramids of garbage to reduce the smell and the rodents.  The first day of garbage pickup was a bit ripe.  The trucks smelled horrible.”

“But the Portland dump is a lovely site.  Robert Redford (a red Ford pickup) and I drove to the dump with the stuff left over from my Westport yard sale.  It all had to go.  The staff were very nice to me and even helped unload my junk.”

Then there was the time Jim and Stephanie had to get rid of an old, 1940’s house trailer abandoned on their property after use as a goat shed and chicken coop.  Their neighbour was in charge of the operation in their absence, and he enlisted the help of a backhoe and a crane to lift the thing onto a flatbed trailer for disposal.  The only suitable landing bed among the hills was the township road.  As the crane swung the hulk onto the trailer, the slings pulled up through the rotten floor and out tumbled dozens upon dozens of large, shiny milk snakes.  Bedlam ensued.  Heavy machinery operators and farmers are as jumpy as anyone else when the road is alive with angry snakes.

How to blow up a tree

The huge elm had been full of health when we built the house, but the blight took it and left a huge and rotting cadaver.  I was afraid to cut it.  As elms often do, three trunks had grown from a common stump, then together, and apart again.  The disease had shorn the heavier limbs off it by the time I had worked up enough nerve to do something about it.

Over the previous years I had cut up and burned a number of large elms, so I wasn’t exactly a babe-in-the-woods when it came to felling large trees.  Still, this one gave me the willies.  Most trees lean, and can be tipped in that general direction with a large notch, some careful cutting, and a steel wedge.   But I couldn’t tell where, if anywhere, this one wanted to fall.

A colleague, Pat Quinn, got wind of my problem.  Pat is legendary for his explosive solutions to problems.  “Rod, why don’t you just blow the thing up?  I’ve got some dynamite the County let me have to clear beaver dams out of culverts, and it’s getting pretty old.  I should use it up because it’s starting to sweat.  Want me to come up on Saturday and take care of the tree?”  I nodded, a little nervously.  Like most of the rookies and all of the kids at Smiths Falls Collegiate, I was a bit scared of Pat.  I told him I’d be ready for him on Saturday morning, though.

That afternoon I tried to cut the tree.  Even with a huge notch and deep cuts all around, the tree would not tip.

Pat drove in Saturday morning.  “I was a little nervous over some of the bumps on Hwy. 15 with that dynamite in the trunk.  It’s sweating, and those drops on the outside of it are nitroglycerine.  Be sure when you’re handling it you wear heavy gloves.  Otherwise your heart will start to race like crazy from just a touch.  It absorbs through the skin.”

I didn’t know if he was doing a number on me or not, so I tried to appear relaxed. Pat looked the tree over and decided to tie three sticks to the side of the trunk just to see what happened.  He sent me to put in the electric cap fastened to the 200’ of wire.  We would set it off by shorting the contacts across the poles of a 12v car battery.

Dutifully I carried the cap and the wire over to the tree where Pat had made a show of tying the dynamite on with his hands encased in heavy gloves.  I looked back to ask him something.  No Pat.  That’s strange.  I followed the yellow wires over a rise and found him lying behind a boulder with eyes shut and fingers in his ears.

“All right, Pat, quit foolin’ around!  I’m going to hook them up now!”  Feeling none too eager to bring cap to nitro, I nevertheless stuffed the cap into the end of one of the sticks.  Then I did not run.  I walked back to Pat’s boulder, but he made me find my own.

He fired the shot.  It went “bang”.  A bit of bark fell off the trunk, but that was it.  A couple of Holsteins looked up, but soon lost interest.

Pat got serious.  This time he jammed three sticks into a crevasse between two of the trunks and shot that.  More bark flew, but the tree barely moved.

My turn.  “Okay, this is what we’ll do.  Over there on the other side of the house is a pile of clay.  Bring over a pail-full of it while I cut a mortise into the trunk to hold the next shot.”

I fired up the saw and made a plunge cut straight into the back of the trunk.  It went in all 30” of the bar’s length.  I pulled it out and made three more cuts into the punky wood, until I had created a 4” mortise straight into the heart of the tree, just at the level where I had cut the wedge before.  Then I hit it with the axe and wonder of all, the square plug of rotten elm popped right out.

Pat looked really apprehensive at this, but I pushed in three sticks of dynamite and a blasting cap.  Then I used half a pail of clay to seal the hole.

The shot wasn’t particularly loud.  It was more of a roar, but the hundred-foot tree seemed to lift slowly above the stump about four feet.  Then it stopped and turned horizontal in mid-air before it did a spectacular belly flop into the neighbour’s quarry.  It hit so hard most of the trunk broke up into chips.

When the dust had settled and the last few branches had found their way to earth, there really wasn’t anything to cut up and move, so Pat and I celebrated a job neatly done and he left with new respect for the power of dynamite sealed in a tree.