Making It Up As I Go Along #672

Broke out the snowshoes this week.  It was nice to get out on them again.  They haven’t been needed to go walking in the woods, as there’s a well beaten trail of hard packed snow.  But they’ve been good for letting me go where I please.  And I went to the furthest trails that bring you fairly close to Innes Road and the businesses there (within a five to ten minute walk to those parking lots).

It was nice to get out in the winter stillness.  To see tracks of coyotes, fox, turkeys and rabbits.  You realize how much is out here that you simply never see.  In two snowshoes and dozens of winter walks, I haven’t seen any of these animals… but the tracks don’t lie.  And, in fact, the turkeys have been following me.  In the time between my first and second snowshoe (a day), I notice many turkey tracks using my snowshoe trail as a means to get around.

Something I think I’m starting to learn from the internet.  When you are constantly taking issue/ complaining/shouting foul, your shouts become internet white noise.  Even people who may agree with your point of view may simply stop listening.

The internet is a great place to spout off… I’m not sure how good a place it is for actual conversation on a matter.

Something else I’m learning from the internet and from simple life experience… it’s often alright to not agree with someone.  As long as the points of view are shared with respect and civility, there’s no reason to get angry with someone who doesn’t see the world the way you do.

In this day and age of instant access via social media, it seems like our greatest desire isn’t to understand… but to become angry.  The social media generation is a generation that strives to be pissed off.

That all said, it hasn’t been a good week of happy news in the world.  And what Trump is doing disturbs me greatly.  But I’m just getting to a point where I don’t think I need to share every twitch of anger that stirs within me.  I don’t want to make my passions and convictions into somebody else’s white noise.

So… with that… it’s snowshoe time…

Scuba Snowshoes
If a winter hike is as a swim
Then snowshoes add scuba
Allowing you the freedom
From the surface trails
Where you can dive deep
Through the powdered surface
Into the wooded reefs.

Replace the scuba bubbles
With the swoosh-chunk of snowshoed steps
Snowbound saplings are winter kelp
Snowy downed trees in place of corals
Schools of Chickadees scatter as you near
You keep an eye out for sharkish coyotes
While Clownfish woodpeckers chatter to each other
Wondering why you’re drifting through their sea

And when your underwoods exploration ends
You burst out to the surface of hard packed trail
And breaststroke home
Until you reach your driveway beach
And wearily pull off your fins and tank
Before climbing into the boat of home
Tired, but energized
By the freedom snowshoes bring.

Making It Up As I Go Along #671

Had perfect hiking/snowshoeing weather for much of these days off… but instead, spent hours tackling the ice in my driveway.  Looking out longingly at the forest on mild winter days before slagging through the pounding and chipping of ice.  It was a weekend of prison, tending to the rock quarry.

The Trump stuff is just too much to wrap a brain around.  The man speaks like a spoiled ten year old but is the most powerful person in the world.  One moment he thanks past presidents for being there and speaks of how gracious Obama was… and then he switches to what an utter failure has occurred in the United States for the past twenty plus years.  So he basically threw all those past presidents under the bus.  And then to be wasting time trying to convince people that the press mislead the public into believing his inauguration was not as well attended as others?!?! It just solidifies the spoiled ten year old example.

And even the woman’s march stuff.  I believe it was done with just cause… and I think the numbers who attended and how there was no arrests at all were both great things.  But the hats?  Really?  Just being present isn’t enough?  Rosa Parks simply refused to move to the back of the bus.  Ghandi fasted.  Even Kaepernick just took a knee.

Everybody knows what Trump said about women.  But lets say Sarah Palin was the new president (shudder) and she had spoken about grabbing men by the crotch.  Hundreds of thousands of men marching with Big Bird hats… or peacock hats… or some other such thing… would simply come off as silly.

It takes a serious matter and makes the people who were insulted look juvenile.  I mean I just keep imagining what future historians will think of this generation.  A hundred years from now they’ll look at news footage of our time and wonder what on earth we were doing.  Just in the last few years… we have millions of video clips of people dumping water over their heads for ALS (and future historians will ask “was water not more valuable than that? Weren’t there droughts in that time?”)… We have hundreds of thousands of those memes going around where people throw random quotes on top of an image of Meryl Streep or Gene Wilder (and future historians will ask “Did that one person say all those things? Actually, upon further research, it looks like they didn’t say any of them.  Did people know this when they shared these images?”). And now we have the pink hats (and historians will ask “Why were they all wearing the same hat?”  And one wise old historian will start the story… “well you see, President Trump spoke of grabbing women by the…” and they’ll be interrupted by the younger historians “Ok, never mind I asked, moving on.”)

I sort of feel about the pink hats the same way as I feel about the footage of the Nazi getting punched as he’s interviewed.  Nobody likes the nazi.  That goes without saying.  But do we need to make it glorious to run in and sock a guy?  I guess I wish the good people in the world were more up on the idea of being better than that.  Trump speaks like a crude moron and we use that as an excuse to become moronic in return.  A nazi stands for all that is horrible in this world and we use it as an excuse to get violent.  I miss class.

Plus, in the case of the nazi, it’s dangerous.  How many more people will now feel emboldened by that footage and want to rush in and attack other nazis… or KKK members?  And how many of those groups will now want to take the fight to the regular people?

It’s kind of like having been cut off by a real aggressive jerk while driving, being behind them at a red light, and deciding to get out and take a baseball bat to the hood of their car.  Yes, it may feel good and may put that jerk in their place.  But what if the jerk has a gun in the glove compartment?

So when we should be saying “just walk away”, we’re instead setting the clip of that punch to all kinds of different songs and sharing it with hashtags and enjoying ourselves just a little too much.

Really, it shouldn’t be so surprising that Donald Trump is the American president.  The western world has been steering clear of class and sophistication for quite a while now.  It’s become a society of spectacle.  And Donald plays right into the times.

On a lighter side, nostalgia can make the heart go soft.  Cause it was kind of nice to see George Bush at the inauguration, fumbling with a rain poncho, and laughing at himself as he did it.  George was a pretty bad president… but after eight years of being largely out of the spotlight, and seeing the ridiculousness that is Trump, you sort of want to go running up to Bush, give him a playful slap on the back, and say “hey, how’ve you been, man!”

Maybe if Kevin O’Leary becomes Prime Minister of Canada, I’ll feel that way about Stephen Harper?  Ummm, probably not.

Onto a completely different subject, the third annual Florida March trip is taking shape.  It will basically mean I’ll go into April (the month when they replenish our vacation time at work) with absolutely no time left to carry over.

But that’s what vacation time is there for, and two weeks visiting mom, dad, Ruby and Lee in the sunny south will be a welcome change to the tail end of winter.

So the flights are booked, and yesterday I bought the baseball game tickets for a few games.  And like each of the last two years, it’ll be one game in Lakeland and another in Dunedin.

It’s funny how I see preseason hockey as a complete waste of time and have no desire to actually watch any of it… but the idea of a March Florida trip with some preseason baseball is one of the highlights of the year.  In fact, I enjoy the idea of going to Florida to watch preseason ball more than the thought of going to Toronto for regular season action.

It’s the combination of things that does it.  A small, minor league, ball park is always a treat.  It’s much more intimate than the big Major League stadiums.  Then you have the warm, sunny weather when you know that your home is currently cold and still snowbound.  So you sit with a hotdog and beer, in t-shirt and shorts, watching big league ball players for a fraction of the cost while palm trees sway and ospreys tend to nests in the light stands.

The only worry about the preseason baseball games is the possibility of a rain out.  First two years of these trips have been fine on that front, but fingers crossed… cause in Florida in March, a rainout is always a possibility.  

Making It Up As I Go Along #670

So a bit more than three weeks since I last posted.  Busy times.

On the 27th of December, I got off work in the morning… went home tired and wanting bed… but showered instead and got my bags ready, called the cab, and headed to the airport for home.

Flight to Toronto was fine but Toronto airport was a zoo where you could barely even find a place to sit.  And if you decided to actually sit down, you were either near someone who was hacking up a lung or next to a family of six where the kids ran that section of the airport.

My flight to St. John’s got delayed an hour without any given reason.  This was a mild irritation the time, but would become bigger as the day went.

The flight to St. John’s was going pretty smoothly.  I usually keep the seat screen tuned to the flight map.  And noticed we began to slow and descend for St. John’s just before the plane reaches Marystown.  But then I notice, the plane on our map is also turning.

First I hope it’s us banking around the Avalon Peninsula in order to land on the right runway… but the turn keeps going until the plane is facing west.

At this moment, the pilot comes on to say the wind and snow in St. John’s is too much for landing, and we’d circle the city a bit in hopes of finding a break but fuel is getting low and we’re going back to Halifax.

I’m figuring fuel was very low, actually, as the flight from Marystown to Halifax is done with no acceleration or climb back to a higher altitude.  It feels like a giant, hour and a half long descent.

Anyway, I’ve told the entire story of this day enough.  So to wrap it here, I’m at Halifax airport for two or three hours before getting a hotel room for the night.  A 10:00 supper alone and off for a night’s sleep after being awake approximately 30 hours.  The flight the next day goes well enough but we were lied to by Air Canada.  Our attendant tells us other flights tried for St. John’s after ours was cancelled last night… but none made it in.  A few days later, I hear from a friend that his brother (who I actually spotted in Halifax airport that night) got in at 1:00 AM.

Still, I was too tired to care anymore and accepted a free night in Halifax as part of my winter travel.

When I hit town, dad was sick.  Within a day or two, mom would join him.  And one of my friends was also sick… and an uncle was just getting over being sick.  Added to the airport coughing and recycled airplane air, and I was waking each morning expecting to feel it.

For a day or two, it felt like I was fighting something.  But it may have just been the exhaustion of the travel and lack of sleep.  In the end, I never caught anything.

And Christmas came for me with my parents.  The late afternoon of December 28th became our Christmas morning.  Stockings and gifts are opened and the full turkey dinner is had that night.  I can’t say I don’t have good parents, that is to be sure.

We had a snowy day while I was home.  With 15 cm falling.  The rest of the time, the weather was pretty good.  I got some downtown shopping in.  Had a late supper at Mallard Cottage.  A night at the movies and a nice walk of a nearby trail through the woods.  A supper and stroll with a buddy on one of my last days in town and a lunch meeting up at the house of the sick buddy.  Help mom and dad take down their Christmas stuff and head on back again.

The flight back to Ottawa was probably worse than the flight to Newfoundland.  Yes the Newfoundland trip took two days to accomplish… but I got a couple of free meals and a comfortable bed on that one.

The flight back starts well enough.  I have an empty seat between me and the guy on the isle.  But it’s all downhill from there.  Strong headwinds do two things.  First, each leg of our trip (to Halifax and then on to Ottawa) was almost doubled in flying time.  What should have taken close to an hour and a half, each flight, took more than two hours.

The other issue was turbulence.  I’ve had worse turbulence on flights before, but on both of these flights, it was long bouts of it.  To Halifax, the seat belt didn’t turn off until Cape Breton Island.  At that point, there was only time for a quick glass of water before landing.

In Halifax, we’re delayed again… with a storm on the way.  By the time I’m sitting on the plane, I’m looking out the window to see the snow start to fall.  By the time we push back for de-icing, 5 cms has already come down and the wind is gusting it around the runway.  I have already heard that the flights for the next day are cancelled because of the forecast storm so I’m thinking if we don’t get out now, I’ll be stuck here again for at least two days.

We finally take off in the snow as if it’s a scene out of a disaster movie where you see planes or space ships shooting out of the fireball of an explosion.  Had we taken off only a few seconds later, we’d have been swallowed up by the white disaster.

Climbing out of the blizzard, we’re bouncing pretty good.  It’s a smaller plane… so small that my main carry on bag can’t fit in the overhead bin and barely made it under the seat in front of me.  Had I stumps for legs, this would have been fine.  But needing to find a place for my feet became an exercise in discomfort.  Finally I am able to maneuver my feet beneath my bag.  Either way it was a day I was glad to not be a six footer.

The constant bump of this flight takes on a casualty in the seats behind me.  The girl back there is petrified.  Between Halifax and Montreal, we are constantly bumping along.  And when the bumps become more dip like, she’s hitting the flight attendant button for guidance.  Four times the flight attendants come.  Four times assuring her we shall night crash.  That this is normal turbulence.  And that maybe she could distract herself with a movie or some music.

By the time the attendants would walk away, a fresh round of dips and bumps would occur… and the girl behind me whimpered and sobbed.  It’s the most terrified a flyer that I’ve seen.  And this girl was in her mid twenties… with a boyfriend sitting right next to her.

My guess is they are no longer a couple today.  Perhaps she decided he wasn’t there for her enough in her moment of terror.  Maybe he decided she was too much of a baby to be taken seriously.  Either way, I’m sure neither viewed the other the same way again… and I sat, foot buried in front of their moment of relationship clarity… bumping along for two hours.

Back in Ottawa, there is another moment of truth to be discovered.  From my perch, in Halifax, as the snow blasted the world outside… I had a perfect view of the baggage handlers.  And they were pulling bags off the plane rather than loading it up.

I thought back to being at the gate where the attendants there were urging people to check their wheeled carry on at no charge.

When I first tried wedging my feet in under my bag, I thought I had made a mistake.  But when I saw several smaller, carry on sized bags among the ones being pulled out of the hold, I figured there’ll be several angry people waiting days for the basics that we think we’re keeping close to us in our travels.  Tooth brush… wallet… house keys… ipad… how many people made it home to Ottawa without a way into their own house?

But at the baggage carrousel I’m left wondering if my checked bag has made it with me or if it’s left back in some snowdrift, not to be seen again until Spring.

I see across the way, the hysterical girl and her boyfriend.  Occasional hugs… and a whisper or two… but they both seem broken… and uninterested in being there.

Shortly after that… my bag slides down from the belt.  Any thoughts I have of the couple drift away from my tired head and waft up to the rafters of the airport like a discarded helium balloon.  I slide open handles, put the wheels down… and get myself out of that place.

Cabbing home my brain is fried.  The hum of the day (approximately nine hours from the time I entered St. John’s airport to now) drifts around my skull in lava lamp speed.  All my memories and thoughts for that day are nothing more than that glowing red goo.

I decide I’m not working the next day.  It takes time for red goo to dissipate.

So after a day and two nights working, I’m here again… on my fourth day off.  Taking the previous three days to decompress from the rush back to work after such a journey.  It’s full on winter and my time away, without a supply of salt for my friend to use when she checked on the house, means my driveway is likely ice covered until Spring.  A few days ago I tried to hack into the rink and poured a load of recently bought salt down… but the ice will not give up its asphalt prize.  The possibility of future broken bones and lawsuits being another risk of winter travel.

But the sun shines bright… the arctic winds have given way to a boreal calm… and I’ll head out to walk the woods… with memories of sketchy flights… and peaceful TV moments with parents and the subtly salty smell of the sea air of a successful late Christmas time home.