Man, the weather changed like a politician’s promises. One day it was sunny and warm, the next few felt like winter had already set in. Sheesh.

I am OK with that, as a rule. Being a bit on the portly side, I am disinclined to hot weather and prefer a cool breeze at all times. Keeps the sweat down. Sitting in a cool breeze is even better. Spring and Fall are my favourite times of the year and reclining is my favourite position. It is hard to beat the combination of the two. Add a mint julep and I am there!

But such a weather change as we have just experienced prompts thoughts of a change in winter whereabouts. Are we going somewhere this winter? And ‘do I have to get up?’

Sally and I travel. Not a lot. Mostly in the winter. But a bit more than average, I think. And we don’t really care where we go so long as it is inexpensive, warm-ish (for Sally) and interesting. I require only a breeze and a low bug count. I won’t go to Australia or the far north in the summer for that very reason. Bugs. I am a natural, green, outdoorsy-kinda-guy but I don’t think a lot of bugs is natural so, if the bug count is high, I am not there.

We usually go to some place for 6 weeks or two months after Christmas. Give or take. Every once in awhile, we stay home and ‘enjoy’ the winter season here but, to be frank, it is an experience that should not be repeated two years in a row. In fact, as much as I like our place, I think 3 winters out of four should be spent elsewhere. It is not that it is too cold, too wet, or even too much of the same setting. It is the lack of light. By mid winter, it seems, the sun barely makes a showing. It isn’t really bright ever and it is dark by 4:00.

By the way, can anyone explain to me how it is that a mosquito can show up in the Canadian winter? They are rare, to be sure, but I would estimate that I encounter and kill at least a half dozen mosquitoes in the dead of winter. How is this possible? Is this a species that is evolving to year-around presence? Is this what global warming really means?

Sorry. I have a bug fixation and I am obsessed with mosquitoes. If there is one in the house, I am tracking it.

I am pretty sane otherwise.

So, this blog is not so much about me………….well, of course it is.………..but, what I mean is this: anyone got a recommendation for a cheap two months in an interesting place?

Been all over Mexico. Know Europe pretty well. Got a good sense of the Far East but there is some room to explore still. Know the US like I know Vancouver except for the Southeast.

I am thinking Portugal. Sally is thinking Turkey. Greece comes to mind even though we’ve been there. Any country going bankrupt has some appeal. We can relate.

Thought about Cuba. Thinking about Argentina…………..

Anyone got strong opinions on the Bahamas or Bermuda?

Waddya got?

September 13. Overcast. Chilly. Feels like Fall is approaching. It was a short but hectic summer. All in all, I give it a 6.5 out of ten.

For me to give a higher rating requires more projects and chores to be ‘done’. And they weren’t. “I’m sorry, but production was down, folks. No bonuses this year!” Of course, the Catch 22 in all this is that, for the most part, I am the single largest variable in the project schedule so I am really just grading myself. And I am not completely happy. “I see a lot of wine being drunk. I see a lot of food being eaten. I don’t see much in the way of progress, Mr. Cox!”

I stopped grading Sal after forty straight years of 10’s out of ten. In fact, most years she scored in the low to mid twenties despite 10 being the scale. Production counts!

But I still called her in for her annual review.

“Well, Sally, I note from your record that you’ve been with us for quite a long time now. I am glad to see you are fitting in so well.”

“Good. That’s it then for another year. Keep up the good work.”

That conversation was confirmation that this year was not one of my most productive ones. I blame the back-stop! If that damn backstop hadn’t gotten in my way, I would have had an extra month to further procrastinate on some of the issues on my plate.

I confess that the lower funicular – tho not dead – has not progressed as much as I would have liked. The log sort is 3/4 done but I still have some fine tuning to do. And the woodshed, tho for all intents and purposes full, is not. We still have 3/4 of a row to chop and stack.

And I am really going to have to address my winch problem. Hey! A plethora of winches is still an inventory problem if nothing else.

A Woofer, however, is coming in a week. She will be here for as long as ten days. I am gonna work her like a rented mule!

Ever heard of Bute Grease?

Me neither. Not til yesterday. Yesterday was our end-of-project construction crew get-together billed as a ‘beer and burgers’ affair. RSVP, don’t you know? It was a perfect day, sunny, windy and warm. Everyone (approximately 15) gathered on the covered portion of our deck and began to make an impression on the gallon or so of Sally’s Sangria and the assorted beers and hors douvres as I fired up the BBQ. Chit chat ensued.

You have to understand that our chit chat is not like most chit chat. We don’t usually do sex, religion and/or politics.

Religion is universally panned and there is no one to take the other side in the give and take of it. No practicing Muslims, Seventh day Adventists or Catholics here. So religion is not a hot topic. It is way below sex and sex is largely discussed only in a historical context if at all these days.

Sex, I gather, was a raging hormone of a subject at one time but not so much anymore.

We – out here – have, for the most part eschewed the political as well. Sometime exceptions: micro-political and macro-political. Everyday political is just not very high on the conversational top ten. Some people don’t even know who the current premier is or care (mind you, she is laying low and trying very hard to put time and distance between her and Campbell, don’t you think?).

BC politics is, for us, either largely uninteresting or unworthy or both. If we ‘do’ politics out here it is at the micro/local level in the extreme (bunkhouse, Steamboat trail, Q-hut, etc.) or very macro (Gaia, climate change, conspiracy theories and the like).

I’m cool with that. Anyway, I was worrying burgers so couldn’t really participate in the conversation anyway.

All that above was to introduce you to the ‘usual’ topics of conversation out here. Number one is construction. Of any kind. Construction is king out here. We can talk old-time log and pole construction to new ‘composites’ and carbon fiber. We can talk plastics, steels, bronzes and wood in every sense of the word (except sexually, of course). We can talk logs, rocks, cement and even the more basic building influences of water, earth, sun and wind. People out here know construction.

Honest to God – take the worst builder out here….ME!…..and take me to a room full of architects and contractors in the city and I will undoubtedly make a complete fool of myself but at least it will be in on a myriad of topics. I will cover it all. I can get embarrassed with the plumbers, the architects, the engineers and the carpenters. I have just enough knowledge for that. Our best people out here could teach the city professionals something.

So building is big.

But second is weather and, because we were having such a delightful time in the breeze and the sunshine, the topic turned to our weather. Amongst a lot of aspects of wind, weather, temperature and, of course, geology, I learned that the waters between Haida Gwai and the mainland are extremely shallow. I should have known that. I also learned all about how and when the glaciers altered our coastline and how the earthquakes added to it.

One of the most interesting subjects shared was the water spouts we used to get.

“Yeah. I was heading to work one day and it was windy and the weather was ominous. I looked ahead and saw well over ten or so waterspouts just a-zippin’ about and all of them on my intended route. I decided to head back home”.

“What’s Bute Grease?”

“Well, the Bute can blow pretty hard. When it gets over 100 miles an hour it whips the surface of the water and the little plankton-like creatures caught up get churned and boiled into a frothy mass. The frothy mass will get blown and tossed until hard balls of Bute grease end up on the beach. The stuff is a fabulous lubricant and the old guys used to prize Bute grease as the best grease there was!”

My jaw was open. Bute Grease! Wadda concept! Waterspouts 300 feet tall! And lots of ’em. And we were just scratching the surface of weird stuff out here.

Just when you start to think you know a neighbourhood, eh?

We were at Save-on (aisle 7) when the ‘little one’ hit. There was an old guy in front of me trying to figure out his credit card while trying to answer the cashier’s question about his Save-on ‘points’. Nothing was happening too quickly.

“Hey! Did you feel that?” the cashier asked.

That was way too much stimulus for our guy. The wallet, the credit card machine, his PIN number, the Save-on ‘points’. Then a question? He was simply stunned. He looked up at her, “Huh!?”

“We just had an earthquake! Wow! Just now! Did you feel it?”

“Huh?”

I was somewhat amused by this bumbling old fool and was justly condescending towards him when I realized that we had just experienced an earthquake and that I hadn’t noticed it either.

Well I did. Kinda.

I felt a bit of a shift in the time-space continuum but, of course, at 64 and not doing my yoga regularly, I just wrote the feeling off as another ‘woozy’ moment. I get those now and then. Feels a bit like an earthquake now that I think about it……

I rose to his defense.

“Hey! At our age, the earth moves all the time. It’s called gettin’ old’.”

Anyway, the poor ol’ git finally managed to enter his PIN and get his cans of dogfood into his ‘green’ satchel. He left in a confused state. Our turn to face the cashier was at hand.

“Wow! Did you guys feel it?”

“Yes!” I said. I left out the part that explained that I was simply confused as to what was happening – vertigo, wooziness, balance, sugar deficit or, as a distant possibility, earthquake. I was still processing.

And she was on a need-to-know basis. ‘Yes’ was good enough.

Sally, who suffers from intermittent vertigo asked innocently, “What are you two talking about?” She hadn’t noticed a 6.4 on the Richter scale either.

“We just had an earthquake! The whole building moved. It was incredible. Didn’t you feel it?”

Sal looked at her blankly. Then she looked at me………….

“Hey!”, I said, “You should be pretty familiar by now with what the earth moving feels like sweetie-pie”. I leaned forward and offered up a slight leer and twisted smile.

Sal and the cashier looked at me, assessed the possibility and…………burst out laughing.

OK. I am no San Andreas fault. I admit it. So, sue me!

I can’t help but think that the world is going to hell in a hand basket but I know that such feelings have been the stock-in-talk of all older generations since the dawn of time. It can’t be that this time the old worrywarts (us, this time) will be proven right, can it?

I’ve never been right before.

I won’t bore you by citing all the reasons I feel this way. I am sure that you have a sense of it on your own. The main one, as I just confessed, is my age. Hormones must be part of it, eh?

But I am thinking that it is not so much my age that is important, rather it is the age of the society in which we are living. Our systems are old. Our institutions are on life-support. Our governments are dinosaurs. Even the infrastructure is decaying. The problem isn’t me getting old – it is that everything we rely on is getting way-too-long-in-the-tooth.

Especially for this uber-fast-changing world.

Our generation’s ideas are now too old to work as well as they once did. The institutions we spawned are boring, unimaginative and too concerned with self-preservation. They are too arthritic to move with the fast times.

The programs we rely on are inefficient and ‘in-the-way’. They are not part of the solution but part of the problem (germ ridden hospitals, for example, DFO for another). And they resist change (the RCMP for example). They are corrupt (our political/corporate/financial institutions for example). Our industries are so old they died collectively as the Sunset Group. Those that survived moved offshore (patriotism is not built into the corporate DNA). The generations that energized the world in the fifties, sixties and seventies, are too old to keep it up without Viagra. And the societal structures we created and supported are hoary and decrepit.

Face it, we just can’t ‘do the job’ anymore.

So, I look to the younger generation. And I see Christy Clark, our very own Sarah Palin. I see Stephen ‘Suckhole‘ Harper, our ambassador to the corporate world. And, sadly, I see an increasingly weakened Obama fighting an extremely uphill battle and not gaining much ground.

I am not encouraged.

To be fair, the next generation has been ‘on hold’ for awhile. The ‘turnover’ of conventional jobs just wasn’t there for them. We baby-boomers not only kept all those jobs but we held on tightly to what we could as the ‘old-time’ jobs went offshore. It is hard to get your father’s job at the mill when he was let go himself at 50 and has been unemployed ever since.

That generation ‘on-hold’ is starting to make inroads, however. Our Federal Public Service hasn’t had as young a ‘profile’ since the second world war. Same for Worksafe BC and the Provincial government sector. Sadly, those are the three areas that young people should avoid like the plague. But, I digress…..

In theory, that new blood should help invigorate. But I am not so sure it will. You can put a younger jockey on an older horse but it is not going to run any faster because of that. Some kind of revolution is long overdue. We need more than young blood, we need fundamental changes.

Could the world really be going to hell in a handbasket after all? Or will we revolt in time?

Wednesday. Yoga. Market. People. Sunny day. Nice lunch served at the dock. Sal’s right now on her way up there with three other women from the neighbourhod. Lots of socializing, smiling, chit-chatting. Oh, what fun!

I am here. Alone. Gonna work on the log path. Alone. No one around ‘cept dogs……….and, if they are smart, they’ll be scarce……

(Alone!!! Thank God!)

Poor Sal.

I am not really anti-social. I like people just fine. Especially from a distance and/or if they read my blog. Readers are loved. Commentators are adored. It is just that we have had enough already with people in our ‘personal’ space. Which, as I write this, now extends out to the 200 mile off-shore International boundary. It’s been a busy summer, ya know?

But, I’ll get better. Have to. Twenty or so are dropping by for burgers and beer on Saturday. Lots of smiling, chit-chat and socializing in store. WooHoo!

Local folks. Good eggs. The group involved in our community work. Builders, mostly. And partners. Of course, the timing couldn’t possibly be worse. I am just cobbling my log run together and tinkering and adjusting as I go. I can hear the guys already,

“Oh! I see you are building a log run. Something like ol’ Jack’s, ‘cept he used old-growth 12 x 12 Cedar timbers with one-inch galvanized bolts on cement columns. Ya think those scrap boards of yours will last?”

Should be good.

I am not 100% sure all 20 or so will show up. They’ve had a busy summer, too. We all did. Our island is like a leper colony after November and until March first and then; ‘we are remembered’. People start calling in April for a possible visit in August.

“Hey, Dave! Long time no see. We gotta get together, man! Hey! I am getting my relatives from Uganda again this summer. Grandma and all the cousins! It would be such fun to show them your cabin. Can you fit us in sometime in August?”

“Who is this?”

“Dave, it’s me. Charlie! Howzit goin’? Got room at the inn?”

Quickly adopting a Russian accent, “I am very sorry but you have the wrong phone number. Had a few such calls over the last few weeks. Your guy must have changed phone numbers, da?”

Truth is – it’s all left in Sal’s court mostly. Oh, I occassionally suggest a visit or an invitation (once every five years or so) but she has the calendar and the pen, ya know? It’s better that I just refer such matters to her and then go along with it – whatever it is.

Grumbling the whole time, of course.

Tuesday. Sunny and hot. Most of the wasps are dead. Corpses float in orange pop bottles like confetti in the rain. No one cares. Life is brutal on Read Island and you have to be lucky to have even that. Those unlucky enough to be drawn into the bottle have been released from their pain by their own desires and weaknesses. We are all weak and nature always wins.

That is one of the reasons I claim for not listening. I am trying to survive out here and I can only safely do one thing at a time now. I can’t listen to Sal natter on while I am rolling a log or I’ll crush my fingers. Well, that is what I tell her, anyway.

“Are you listening?”

“No. What did you say? No! Wait! I am rolling a log and need to concentrate. Tell me whatever later!”

You think I am kidding? Well, I am. Kinda. But I have noticed that as I age, my ability to multi-task has been reduced somewhat. In fact, I can’t do it. For me to do anything these days requires me to focus on the task-at-hand. It was never thus. I used to juggle the world while driving and eating a burger at the same time but not anymore. I am now limited. Handicapped. First Nations people would call me ‘Mr. Challenged-by-two-things’.

To be fair, I think I can do two things at once if I concentrate and care about it. I think, actually, that I could do three things at once if I was concentrating, cared and was curious. But, honestly, at 64 how often are you gonna find something that you are interested in and that you care about? At the same time?

Except for things like your own fingers.

Survival still gets my undivided attention.

Oh, wait! ‘So does dinner’…………and that is what Sally was on about……gotta go……

We pull the logs up the hill using a pull-line running on the highline. The highline is anchored to a rock at the bottom of the hill and to a steel tripod I mocked up fixed at the top. The highline is about 150 feet long. The pull-line is 125 feet.

For pulling-angle reasons, the tripod is right at the top – not set back. For the same pulling-angle reasons applied to the winch, the logs can only get pulled up to within ten or fifteen feet of the top and so that is where I ‘drop’ them when they have come up.

The logs I have pulled up sit on a 20 degree sloped ledge just in front of the winch and tripod but, ideally, they would end up about 50 feet to the south where I buck and chop them into firewood. That 50 feet, the first few feet of which are at a steep angle, is the hardest part of the log hauling business for us.

Until recently, Sally and I have used a log carrier (like giant ice tongs) to grab the log, scramble for footing, dodge the tripod and various cables and anchors to drag the heavy pig of a log (each log weighs between 400 and 450 pounds) to the working area. We are both strong and healthy and we could do it. .

But it is getting harder. And I am starting to whine.

I needed to figure out a way to drag the log 50 feet south without breaking a sweat or a disc in my back.

For once, Sally agreed with me right away.

So, while Peter was here to give valuable aid and advice, I set about to lay my own skid road. It is not as easy as it seems.

I jammed some support beams between some trees and affixed some heavy, rough cut 2×6’s to them making a two foot wide wooden ‘slide’ for the inclined portion of the haul. Think of a small narrow ‘deck’ laying on the ground but not able to move around. That 16 foot long narrow wooden slide dealt with the worst of the ‘drag’.

But the rest of it is no piece o’cake. Once the log is ‘winched’ along and up the skid row/deck it is then teetering at the top. Still aiming up at the same 20 degrees as the inclined ramp it is on. At the top of the hill the ground slopes away at about 15 degrees so the log now has to ‘head down-hill’ with a 35 degree change in direction. The first one just tipped and proceeded to bury it’s nose in the dirt.

That is not good.

So now I am planning on extending the ‘skid deck’ to allow an easier slide for the next 35 or so feet. All this is being done, of course, with scrap wood, log ends, big spikes and an engineering plan drawn up from watching it fail a few times before going on.

Peter was here for the fun part. But, once all the frivolity and fun had passed, he and Sarah set sail for points south and I am left alone with the ‘failure-method’ of getting on with things. Sal will deign to join me when we test-pull another log. She isn’t as keen on the ‘scraps-and-cobble-method’ of engineering as I am so she is baking muffins.

And I am not as keen on it as you might think. Oh, it’s all fun and all. No denying the enjoyment in winching logs through dirt. But all this stuff weighs a ton. I am constantly moving heavy things in and out of the way. And that is the point of this off-the-grid vignette: irony. Irony in spades! You always have to work like a pig to make something work so that you don’t have to work like a pig.

There doesn’t seem to be another way.

I’m almost 64. I have noticed that the median age of those I hang out with is close to that. Give or take. I know a few older. I know a few younger but ‘talking ’bout my generation’, they are all past the post (60) for the most part.

We are all hoping it is not the last post.

We invite the Chinese students to come visit, interview for ESL teachers overseas, see our own kids and their friends now and then….and then there are the Woofers. They are all in the early to late twenties. Median age say, 24 give or take. When we have guests, they are likely in their sixties or in their twenties.

Where have all the 45 years-olds gone?

We know a few 45 year-olds of course. Can’t miss ’em. They are the ones that vibrate from stress and are stooped in the back from their debt load. Their faces are creased with premature aging as they try to cope with rising and falling economies, children, downsizing, parents and a world gone mad. They burst into tears every time the price of gas goes up and they try harder every month to make it all make sense.

Like they can do something about it, eh?

You don’t see the 45 year-olds out here. Too bad. They could use a few weeks off.

What I find really interesting is the number of 20-somethings who relate to what we are doing. Indeed, the ones I am encountering are aspiring to it. There seems to be a contingent, anyway, of young people who would prefer a small homestead somewhere to membership in the rat race. That surprises me.

I recall the first ‘real, measurable, positive’ steps I took to living remote. It was pathetic, of course, but the first one was to research and then purchase the equipment required to make my cell phone work from an ‘iffy’ location where the coverage was poor. Obviously, I was missing the whole concept of getting away from it all but that is what I did.

The young fella that convinced me to buy a Yagi antenna and marry it up with a booster-pack was your classic ‘mumbling’ techie-who-does-not-speak until he found out that my purpose was to live feral.

“Oh man, oh, man! That is so cool. Man, like, that is what I want to do, man!”

“Kids. Wife. Bills. You know.”

Seems I was wrong about him cruising the gene pool but I did understand the trap that he had gotten into. In fact, it was visibly manifest by the little ‘techie’ room that was covered in equipment and had no windows. It was a cell. I saw him more clearly from then on in. He was like an animal in a zoo. Trapped. I left the establishment vowing to return someday to see if he was still there. I haven’t gotten back yet but I haven’t forgotten.

And Sarah reminded me of this last night. She is our niece and she had come up with her grandfather, Sally’s father, to visit with us these past few days. She hiked, climbed, kayaked and explored the garden. And she did it all with enthusiasm. She liked it. A lot. When we talked about our little homestead, she said that it was her dream to do the same thing (perhaps a bit more emphasis on gardening, tho. She is a vegan, mostly).

Is this a subtle sign of a civilization shift? Are young people ‘disengaging’ from the rat race without having even done a few warm up laps? Or am I seeing what I want to see?

I know that when I was frequenting some homesteading forums years ago, there were people of all ages who were either living off the grid or desiring to. But, that was a self-selected crowd. I know that W’fers, as a rule, express the same sentiments and they also come from all walks of life and many different countries. But, again, self-selection to some degree.

Maybe it is just a natural segment of all societies and eras that some people prefer the country life.

I don’t know.

The Chinese kids have made it home safely. The Banff bears didn’t get ’em. Too skinny, I guess. Probably not considered worth the trouble compared to northern Europeans. Germans are the full-meal deal (flavour packed and chock full o’chocolate!) and the favoured menu items for the bears so the kids were fine.

(The running German bear joke is for my one European reader, Corinna.)

Travel advice: when in Banff, go where the German tour bus has just been – the animals are full and much safer to be near.

We get follow up e-mails from the kids for a while after their visit to Canada. Usually one or two will write for about a year and then their lives move on. But, now and then, one or two ‘pop up’ again on the e-mail and we find out what is happening in their lives. It’s fun, actually.

Well, not always. Christine is a nice kid. Graduated and is now an accountant. Works like a machine for ridiculous hours in terrible conditions. And she is not really ‘fit’ enough for that. She writes: “Guess where I am? I am in Mongolia now, a totally new country for me. I am doing audit for a Mongolian company. Here is super super cold, minus thirty something. I got a cold here…life here is quite difficult, different languages, different cultures and the weather is driving me crazy…I have a very special new year here, that is staying in the apartment and eating cup noodles”.

Some just slip into ‘mainstream Hong Kong/China life’, others embark on something more adventurous and some even ‘break out’ and become free radicals of a sort maybe continuing their travels or changing career paths. Trust me: changing career paths is ‘breaking out’ in Hong Kong culture. Jin joined Greenpeace! Dong went from being shy and practically invisible to a confident, outgoing young man.

Ya just never know with kids, do ya?

It’s been a funny summer so far. Sunshine was late in coming. Temperatures nowhere near normal. Everything’s been a little ‘off’. We had a weird summer, weather wise. But, by comparison to the rest of the world, we had the best. Much of the NA continent was assaulted by 100F degree temperatures for long periods of time and all sorts of things were going on around the world including Tsunamis, Hurricanes, radiation poisoning and earthquakes – just to name a few of the headliners.

We got a bit less sunshine. Wahh!

And things got worse in a lot of places. I doubt that Haiti is much better than it was and the horn of Africa is being ravaged again. I’d hate to be an Iraqi. Tough place, this Gaia-ball.

We have nothing to complain about.

Well, there were the wasps! We couldn’t find the nest and so every happy hour had unwanted guests. So, I guess we have had our share of the pain. Woe is us.

But don’t worry about us. We’ll be fine. Resilient is our middle name. We’ll switch to gin and tonics – the wine attracts the little bastards too much. “We will not be driven out of the neighbourhood by those damn wasps!” I believe it was ‘Wheezie’ Jefferson who first said that.

If they can deal with them, so can we.