Logging ops interrupted for the day. It’s Book Club! All the women down tools, up aprons and grab bottles of wine for the latest gathering of rural bibliophiles. Up to Maurelle Island this time, by way of Surge Narrows, various docks and pick-up points – all in small boats. The flotilla is accumulating as I write and soon a babbling gaggle of 15+ will be hiking up the hosts trail for a good time in the afternoon sun.

‘Course the book will be some kind of bleak misery depicting the slow death of a crippled child born in Calcutta during the First World war and having to live in a culvert all their life. Or, perhaps, a 400 page exposé on the death of the Whistler sled dogs as experienced by Elsi, the only dog to not die (she just knew something was amiss and hid under the porch). Author: Margaret Atwood, of course. These gals thrive on that stuff!

“Ooh, I heard of this great book! Blind Inuit children stricken with leprosy are sexually abused by the Post office but they struggle to lead an ordinary life by bonding with the seals and whales like their ancestors!”

“I heard of this other great book where some woman lived thirty years disguised as a man working in a steel mill in Philadelphia as their union leader. She had two children she had to raise in secret so that no one knew while still practicing Tibetan Buddhism and teaching Yoga.”

In an odd sort of way, these books share similar themes: Men are stupid, bad, really bad, evil, violent, addicted, absent or gay. Sometimes all of the above. If only the latter (gay), they become the heroine’s best friend even though they die of AIDs half way through the book. If the men fall into any of the other categories, they go to prison, sit in a state of addled stupor, die or leave.

Women, of course, are the victims of outrageous misfortune, evil men and Residential Schools. But they are essentially unvanquishable, outliving the pedophiles, rapists, supervisors, landlords and boyfriends that made their lives miserable. Then they write a book. I am pretty sure we spell them, W-O-M-A-N.

Slight exception: it seems father’s can be all of the above and still be loved at the end. Stipulation: they can be loved only at the end and only if the end is mercifully short (this exception is primarily for literary purposes) – it is a common enough theme that I am encouraged about my own future family relations with Sally improving with age.)

The guys out here will soon have ‘Woodworking Shop’. We’ll probably gather on book club Sundays, hopefully with some lunch prepared by our wives and stand around looking at our feet and mumbling about ‘building boats someday. Maybe’. There might be as many as three of us. A crowd. Bert might succumb to the social pressure and start talking politics. If so, then, and if it is not raining, we’ll go home early and wonder what the hell all that was about?

It’s a great life, isn’t it?