Hitchin' a ride

I never pick up hitchhikers so where the hell did I get off, on this splendid autumn morning, suddenly deciding to become one?

No problem. Cause I didn't expect anyone to pick me up. I'd agree with them if they didn't. And if anyone did decide to offer me a ride, I'd be happy for them that the chamber came up empty. Cause I'm a good guy. Oh, and Tammy's a good girl. Nobody's gonna get hurt.

We hit Trinity Valley Road a long way from our temporary home on the ski hill. Grubby folk, reeking of campfire smoke.

So. We'd thumb the majority of the 90-K loop.

The guy coming back from fishing let us hop in the back of his truck. The dogs that had been there were moved into the cab. Can't remember why he didn't just put us in the cab, but it wasn't weird at the time. Some practical consideration. He was going all the way to Vernon but had to drop us at the outskirts of Lumby cause now there's cops about and it's illegal to ride in the backs of trucks.

Not so, back in the day. My earliest associations with hitchhiking are from a time when everybody rode in the back, and picking up hitchhikers was mandatory. Mandatory, at least, in the hippy ethos within which I grew up. You didn't leave your brother on the side of the road if it was in your power to take him where he needed to go.

Nope. You jammed him into your crappy old vehicle with your unkempt kids and you journeyed down the road together. Maybe got into a heavy rap. Far out.

Our second ride was a short one. Lumby to Coldstream Ranch.. Not much further than we'd waded through the snow the night before. It was early afternoon by now and downright summerlike for the first of November. The German fellow in the spotless, air-conditioned SUV didn't seem to notice that we smelled like a couple of charred logs. He was full of enthusiastic questions about our route, lighting fires in the snow and wet, coyotes, bears, etc., when he wasn't yakking into the ether in hands-free German.

Then back out in the full sun. Crossing the tracks and pulling the little hill.

I used to pick up hitchhikers cause I thought it was my duty. Stopped doing it when I had kids. And had spent a few years covering court for newspapers.

That's where I learned useful things like what a voir dire was and that there are a lot of violent, psycho hitchhikers out there. To dispute that is simple ignorance. Yes I know most aren't but I'm not talking about those ones, am I?

Kids? Well, they can be hostages to more than fortune. And when you're driving you've kind of got your hands full.

This would certainly be seen as the worst kind of paranoid bad vibes by the dude in the little green pickup who passed us going the other way and actually fucking TURNED AROUND to give us our third ride of the day. Partly because we're all brothers and sisters, I think, and partly because he could see how much we'd love to hear all about his environmentalism.

Which was presented as being of the extremely active variety. He enjoyed dropping lines like: "As I explained to Elisabeth May...". Leaving the impression that they hung out, although I suspect he just tends to be that inevitable annoying guy at those $20-a-plate fundraising luncheons.

He got us out the other side of town, dropped us at the bottom of Silver Star Road and headed back about his business. Having lost about an hour and driven 30 kilometres out of his way.

What is amiss with my gratitude gland that I remember him only with irritation? Nothing, actually. He was really fucking irritating.

Ambling up the gentle slope on the bottom end of Silver Star Road, sweating in the glorious, late-fall afternoon.

Everyone was whipping by us without a glance. Just like I would. The rich yuppies who live in the foothills and the richer ones who have places up top. I applaud them. There is indeed a decent chance I might be the murderous lunatic they think there's a decent chance I might be.

Less so, I think, when I was a young lad scootching over for every shaggy fellow traveller littered along the roadside. There really was a brief time when, corny as it sounds, the way a person looked and dressed could tell you something pretty reliable about his values. And whether or not he was capable of violence. Within the brief heyday of the often imitated, never duplicated authentic hippy culture, that is.

Me, I grew up and realized I'm not a hippy. Indeed, If I may briefly quote good ol' Buck 65: "I ain't got no culture, nothin'/dirty words but that don't count." From his best song no less. Blood of a Young Wolf. Check it out.

Anyway, I like myself like this. Hippies were colorful and weird but, I was there and I can tell you that they were also all pretty similar. No less so than bankers or Rotarians or fundamentalist Christians.

Me I'm just Dennis. Similar to no one I've met. And I don't owe any of them a fucking thing.

Okay, I probably owe some of them money. But I sure don't owe them a ride. Or a heavy rap.

Which is good. Cause I generally have the universe inside my vehicle adjusted about where I want it before I round a bend and see someone standing there with his thumb out.

Still, I wasn't disappointed that the young feller in the little import on his way back from some sort of ski patrol course in Banff was a mellower dude than me. He hauled it over and hauled us up the hill in an agreeable fashion and dropped us at our borrowed door. Grand circle complete.

Now the bathtub, the fireplace and the wine.

long walk in the snow

It was on an odd whim that we set out on an unlikely walk in the snow. Tammy's idea. Let's dump a few things in the daypack and walk to Trinity Valley. Not a hot bath and lounge in front of the fireplace with a large glass of red wine.

We were spending a few months in a luxury condo at Silver Star Resort. One of the occasional weird perks of working on rich people's homes. It was Halloween and we'd just arrived back at the castle after a search and rescue training exercise. Weary and a little chilled.

Trinity Valley is our real home. A spottily inhabited gravel road through rolling, forested hills. Cut by creeks and rivers. Spotted with lakes. Typical B.C. paradise.

By road it's about 80 kilometres from Silver Star Village to the point on Trinity Valley Road where we hoped to stumble out of the bush. In a straight line through the trackless jungle it's about 12.

Not the evening I'd planned. Or the following day, for that matter. Better, though. In a less comfortable kind of way.

Tent, fire startin' kits, some extra clothes, bit o' food, sleeping bags. Compasses slung around our necks.

It took a while to get clear of the resort, cutting down and across the ski runs, stubble sticking through the start of snow.

From a few points on the Star you get a clear view of Bobbie Burns Mountain, the highest point of our home stomping grounds and, for the moment, a reliable beacon. So we took a compass bearing on the mountain, 72 degrees as I recall, and took note of it's position relative to the monster moon that was glowing brighter as the sky grew dark.

We'd follow these two moving targets through the black woods till we were too tired to take another step. And sleep wherever that was.

I say moving targets because moons orbit and because compass bearings only mean much if you keep yourself coming from the same direction. Between the two strategies, with a bit of seat o' pants calibrating, we managed to wade through ass-deep snow, over logs, up and down steep slopes for about eight dark hours that night in a remarkably straight line.

We hit a snowed-over trace of road early on, and it followed our route for a while. We continued following it for a while after it wandered astray. Finally facing facts, and plunging into the thick, black bush and ever-deepening snow.

And that was it for many hours through a perfect Halloween night. Which is to say bare branches against a cloud-whipped, moon-strobed sky were a perfect visual and as good if you closed your eyes. Moaning, creaking and the flapping, tall-ship wind. Fireworks in case we forgot. Just the distant popping. Lumby, Lavington, Coldstream? Just because you're heading in roughly the right direction doesn't mean you know where you are.

We stopped for the night at the bottom of yet another steep ravine. Slid and stumbled to a stop too exhausted to try to battle back up the other side. All the elbow room of the bottom of a V and that choked with snow and, of course, a creek.

Sought out a bit of flattish ground big enough for a two-person tent. And a fire, cause now that we're stopped, we're soaked and cold. Everything useful was numb and everything else was shivering. Tammy found a flat plank from the side of a hollow cedar stump and we built a fire on that or there would have been no fire. It would have sunk into the snow forever.

Everything was soaked. Hard hunt for wood that was close to dry. Try Vaseline-saturated cotton balls, shredded bits of inner tube and one of those dirt-cheap, bombproof Bic lighters. You will make shit burn.

So we warmed hands, feet and faces, made tea and rolled into the tent. Recently trained in wilderness survival, we had the comfort of knowing it was heat loss by conduction that kept us semi-conscious and shivering all night on the crunching snow.

We woke up as cold as we went to bed. Broke camp with the same fucked-up fingers with which we'd built it. And got climbin'. We got way too hot in no time. Way too steep and slippery, grasping at brambles and branches for a boost up the slippery slope or to keep from tumbling back. Finally topped out, expecting just more of the same. Expecting that scene from Alive.

Instead, a broad, white cutblock under a blue sky, seedlings poking through the snow. And the sun gleaming off the rock faces of Bobbie Burns Mountain. Dead ahead.

We're from here so we know something about cutblocks. Which would be that they have roads to 'em. Roads to towns with mills.

It was that infuriating kind of snow crust that holds you up just enough to keep you trying to stay there before it dumps your every footstep in up to your ass. That's slow, exhausting snow.

But this was a new day, the sun was shining and not much could piss us off. Very cool, to be up here.

We found the road pretty quick, and it wasn't buried. The local bubbas had already been up this far. The sun on their efforts had their wheel ruts down to gravel. Roads from cutblocks almost always go downhill, and we know what elevation loss does to gravelly ruts through deep snow. Turns 'em into gravelly roads without a lotta snow.

The morning moved along and it was a bright, blue day and only November 1, after all. So pretty soon it couldn't have been better. So we stopped where the wood was good and built a real fire and made huge hamburgers and coffee. Lazed in the sun.

Later we passed some firewood guys, expressed appreciation for some fine-looking camping spots, looked out over some magnificent views and generally experienced that quickening that attends the approach of an ending. Then one more downhill corner like so many and, boom, across the lower treetops. Power lines.

Trinity Valley Road.

Red dirt christmas

So tell me about Christmas, 2005. I know, remembering Christmas is easy. Any given year is hard. Cause they're all pretty much identical.

We tired of putting on the Christmas concert every year about the time the kids were old enough to start noticing we thought it was all bullshit anyway. I don't just mean Santa Claus, commercialism and all those more recent inventions. We're atheists, y'see, and think the jolly old elf is just as likely as any of that other mythological crap.

Not that I'm saying there's no god. Or no Santa Claus. As long as you get it. Like Francis Pharcellus Church. Just don't go literal on my ass or I'll go medieval on yours. Yes, Virginia, there is a Quentin Tarantino.

So for a few years, starting when the van o' kids ranged in age from prob'ly nine to 14 we made a better plan. Took all the money we would have spent on shipping containers of plastic-shrink-wrapped plastic and the same old cooking, eating, giving, receiving scenario that we'd always had a hard time taking seriously anyway and hit the road instead.

So let me tell you about Christmas, 2005.

Cause it ain't like all the others. It's as unique as one of them snowflakes we didn't see for damn near a month.

Actually Christmas Eve stands out. Cause the downpour was getting monotonous in the tents, with the safe zones centred more and more around the centre. And we were too ready for something other than the van to even consider that refuge, available electronic diversions or no.

We were in a campground just outside the same Meridian, Mississippi that Emmy Lou Harris made a touch famous in the title song of her 2000 album Red Dirt Girl. Y'know, just across the line and a little southeast of Meridian, you got it, sittin' on the front porch coolin' in the shade/singin' every song that the radio played, good stuff.

No need for coolin' that night though, stayin' warm and dry. Sitting on the dryer and laughing with the kids. Catching up on clumps of slept-on dirty road clothes. Pretty much owning this massive campground - amazed it's even open. While the machines hum and spin and a hard Mississippi rain does the dark drum all over this cozy cinder-block shack.

Big Day morning and we want to be Christmas tourists cause we're here, not there, and because we get it and we like a good old story. So we set about looking for a church, with some vague, probably objectionable in any number of inconsequential ways, notion of clapping, grooving choirs and general rootsy joy. Where people bring the magic and pass all the glory on to god.

Of course, we went looking for this as Canadian tourists with a timeline drifting about in our heads that started vaguely with the first slave ship and ended approximately now. Maybe with Cliff Huxtable. History being, of course, the story of how fucked up everything used to be before it all got fixed like now.

Course that's a lame joke even in squeaky little Canada. Let me tell you, it's an out-loud howl in Mississippi.

That was made clear to us that holy morning in church parking lots and fast food joints.

We went to churches first, a whole whack of them. Right about on time. As cars were emptying; buildings filling. Looking for a place where we could blend in just a bit and get a little culture - born in old pain and all fixed up just in time. 'Cept nothing's been fixed.

In the Mississippi we visited on Christmas morning there were black churches and there were white churches. And I'm talking unanimity here. Our attention to detail increased along with our slack-jawed disbelief and I can assure you we saw no exceptions. However urgently we looked.

So we didn't settle our condescending asses into pews in any Mississippi Christmas church. Not a black church where we would have felt like we should have brought a search warrant. Not a white church where the welcome would have made us need a shower.

We drove around till the cars were all empty and the buildings were all full. There was no snow in Meridian but there were a lot of inflatable snowmen. And santas. And reindeer. And religious iconography. Half inflated, actually. Maybe it was the rain. Toppled trashily on sodden lawns. Ready for roll-up in a day or two anyway. It was quite a tour though. And yes, here comes another song quote.

Pretenders: I went back to Ohio/But my city was gone/There was no train station/There was no downtown.

This one was downright eerie even though we were a long way from Ohio. Cause downtown Meridian is a blitzed-out grey mass of silent concrete and broken glass. All but abandoned. And the train station has found a way to outdo nonexistence. It's been turned into a museum. Commemorating the days when Meridian merited a train station. And right in the middle of it all is a cemetery. Overgrown and ignored. Where you can find barely legible wooden grave markers for soldiers who fell in the Civil War.

The Meridian of today is a plastic ring around the outside of this haunted shambles. Gas stations and Piggly Wigglys and fast food drive throughs and big box stores are alive and well. Bustling now with the after-church crowds looking for Whoppers to hold them over until Christmas dinner.

We join them briefly and discover a place where blacks and whites actually mingle in the same room. If you can call that mingling. All the employees are black. And they and their white customers don't even look at each other. We all notice this and comment as soon as we're back outside. It's nobody's imagination. There are black customers too, and that's a different story. But the tension in the restaurant is unnerving. 'Specially since it obviously isn't ending at the door.

We drove out of Meridian that night after breaking camp. Still in the pouring rain.

Crossed into Alabama and stopped for gas, unsure of where we were headed next. The gas station experience was just like the burger joint in Meridian. All black employees. This time us the only whiteys in the room. That slave ship was a long while back, but us and our string of pasty kids were apparently responsible for it and for everything since.

Next destination? West. Drive all night. Sunshine on the cacti by the time it rises. Palm trees dead ahead. We'll come back here some summer when everyone's in a better mood.

The code for a trailer ball

There's a line out there, a line that matters and I'd like to know for sure where it is. Because I've developed a powerful suspicion it isn't anywhere near where it should be.

I'm talking about the line that's crossed when cops stop treating a citizen like one of the people they work for, the people they protect, and start treating him or her like part of the fucking problem.

Yesterday evening on my way home from work I found myself on the side of the road because some silly bitch in a uniform and the little weiner beside her took exception to the trailer hitch ball on the back bumper of my truck.

These wee laws are arbitrary things, apparently, as I've been pulled over in the same truck at least half a dozen times with no mention of the offending ball.

This time it was all about the ball. Which, on this special occasion, was such a menace to the motoring public that the silly bitch wanted me to remove it on the spot. While she ran my licence to see what else I was guilty of.

What? Oh. Because it made it a little hard to read my rear licence plate.

I didn't actually catch her directive at first and when I realized what she'd asked me to do I hopped out to tell her that it wasn't possible without tools. And almost got myself TASERed for my pains. Her sidekick erupted from the passenger side of the cruiser to deal with this new crisis. She'd failed to mention that I'd been given permission, ordered in fact, to wander freely about outside.

"Sir, I'm going to ask you to please remain in your vehicle."

The formal language was in blatant, frankly disgusting, contrast to his bearing, which was: Now or fucking else.

So she explained to him that these were special circumstances, while I explained to her that de-balling did not, in fact, simply involve "a little pin" as she'd suggested it might. And all the while the part of my brain that governs the uneasy relationship between how things should be and how things are was screaming an angry what the fuck.

Because I'm allowed to get out of my vehicle. It's a little item on the very long list of things I'm allowed to do. Just about anything, in fact, other than some really fucking obvious things. Unless there's a very compelling reason for that to change. The fact that it's a little hard to peek by my trailer ball and take in my licence plate does not qualify.

(Okay, there are a few minor things that I'm ridiculously not allowed to do but I'll take my own chances and pay my own dues to quote Kris on those, and it's a different discussion.)

In this post-Dziekanski, post-Ian Bush, post-APEC, post-Frank Paul, post G-20, post-fucking et cetera Canada of ours I hope someone is seriously giving a shit about why we've lost so much respect for those who enforce our laws. I had it. And I'm not an especially respectful guy. And a lot of mine is gone.

And after yesterday I have some beside-the-headlines thoughts on why. Just some small observations. I'll leave the big shit to the big shits and I seriously hope they're on it. Because it matters.

So I feel another song quote coming on. Bruce Cockburn: young man marching, helmet shining in the sun, polished and precise like the brain behind the gun.

It's a nice comparison of a young feller who's been honed into just another piece of equipment with a specific task to perfom and, well, just another piece of equipment with a specific task to perform. Up there on his highly specialized and presumably not terribly imaginative head.

I think it's being implied, and I'm gonna agree, that what's been done to him is a really bad idea. And just the sort of thing I thought we didn't do. Up here.

But after yesterday I'm really curious about the training these folks are given. And if it includes any discussion of a concept called context.

My ferverent hope is that I've just met the two dumbest cops on the planet, cause if not, something is amiss.

Back to the side of the road for a minute, a little further back than previously. To when this dim twit, who could have been my daughter except that neither of my daughters is a dim twit, presented herself at my window and explained about my ball.

"Oh," I responded, tired, a touch impatient, and babbly as ever, "what an unfortunate way to build a vehicle."

Cause it came like that. I didn't do it.

Her face went completely blank. From mostly. Then it got suspicous. And alert for the sort of danger that lurks when some small thing is unexpected or a little out of the ordinary. Cause this wasn't two humans talking. It wasn't an exchange. It was processing a... dammit, I've forgotten the code for a tired, sweaty guy with a trailer ball.

Whatever the code is it sits many miles to the west of the line where cops in my country start treating a citizen of it like anything other than a citizen of it with a trailer hitch blocking a little chunk of his fucking licence plate.

And if the training of these poor people is so defficient that the minute your situation has a code, it is instantly laden with all the sinister potential of every other situation with a code, then they shouldn't be allowed to talk to us until their training gets fixed.

My hunch is that their training is kinda like that. That it is actually pretty bad. But I've dealt with and worked with enough impressive cops to know that if I'm right, the smart ones can get right past it and put a few simple things into perspective when circumstances call on them to do it it.

So another hunch is that recruitment criteria are also a pretty big problem. I'm left to wonder if those impressive individuals somehow sneak in in spite of themselves. And have to figure out for themselves that only a fucking idiot treats a 10-trailer ball guy exactly the same as a 10-rampaging fucking murderer guy.

I'm left wondering, then, if that academy of theirs is not actively seeking those sorts of complex, unpredictable philosophers.

She apologized when she came back with my licence, which had apparently checked out as clean. I never feel confident of this outcome, and, as always, was a touch relieved. It's just such a question of who cared how much about what.

She got the apology wrong, too, though. Didn't apologize for mistaking her silly-ass self for my new boss/god/queen for a few minutes along Kalamalka road. Nope. For forgetting to tell my other little master that she'd decided I was allowed, this time, to get out of my truck and stand on my own two feet.

And for almost almost getting me fucked up in the process.

My trailer hitch ball? Still there. Even though I promised. It'll give me something to think about the next time they're running my licence.

Shit happens fast

"Uh-oh."

She was talking about the deer, not the bike.

I was monitoring the motorcycle in the mirror as he prepared to pass. Didn't see the deer coming out of the underbrush and onto the road. Just like she didn't see the bike. Until a fraction of a second before they met. Bike and deer. Spectacularly. About 30 feet past us, right about on the the centre line.

A quick explosion and then disaster or not cause I had no time or room to avoid anything.

No disaster, except for the deer. Somehow the guy kept his bike going down the road. Momentum, mostly. I'd been poking along at 100 km/h, enjoying the morning sun over Arrow Lake, between Burton and Nakusp. He went most of the way by like I wasn't moving at all. The deer slowed him down.

It was all about legs for both of them. The deer lost one at the main joint. Spinning through the space between me and the impact like a lost baton. The biker kept shaking his left one out. He'd taken a whack, but it looked more like shaking his head. It looked like what the fuck.

That was through the windshield, and the deer in the mirror now. Talk about what the fuck.

One dead deer that doesn't know it yet or anything else anymore. Getting off the road for the last time ever and for the very first time on three legs.

We follow the biker, though, cause he's one of us and cause I'm secretly relieved I don't have to hit the ditch with the camping hatchet and try to put a quick stop to this.

We pull over a few kilometres up the road and talk while he pisses about distractedly with his bike, which looks completely undamaged. He asks if we know if there's cell service that way. Gestures toward Nakusp. The way he was headed. Nope. Guess I'm going that way then. Gestures back.

Rembember pay phones?

We forget to tell him there's no cell service that way either till you're fucking near in Lumby. One ferry, one mountain range and a little over a hundred kilometres away.

Well thanks for stopping. Cause there's really not much more to chat about.

Back on the road.

Could have gone back, I guess. Still wonder how long it took the deer to die.

Might have to get the weasel piss

Nakusp or nothing in the short doomed search for used tire. No luck here and we hit the gravel with four round tires and a can of foam. Spare tire in a can. And optimism. Mostly that.

The temptation was powerful to just get the can and go. Like we're gonna find a used tire in Nakusp. Tammy said zero. The chance of that. I lobbied for a little more positivity and she upped it to two per cent.

We had a fine breakfast on a rough wooden patio where you order inside and they pass your food through a window if you want to sit in the morning sun. Wandered the main street, the local take on a farmers market off one side, through a couple stores. We forgot about the tire for an hour and a half. Completely forgot about the bookstore. The other reason we came to town.

So, the search began at Kal Tire - where we assumed it would also end - confirming what we'd already taken for granted. Nakusp is a shitty place to find a used tire. For a decent price. Cause they had one, actually. Eighty bucks. Nearly new. Plus mounting and balancing, of course. No thanks.

But. "There's another guy. just up the road on the right."

Thanks. So this can't be over quite yet? Got motions to go through. Or it won't be a legitimate foam can. So we drove up the road to Excel Tire Centres.

235 R75 15? Memorized that a long time ago.

"Nope. But check out O'Brien's next door. He should be able to help you out."

Auto wrecker. Follow him out back and we dig through a pile of tires. There's one that's close. Close enough, O'Brien figures.

"Best if you put it on the front."

How much is that worth? Twenty bucks. Things are looking up.

But wait. This is going to be a thorough search, including tires still holding up bashed-in vehicles.

"There's some, but they're bald and they're all flat. Wonder why he wiped out."

We move on.

The last vehicle is a Nissan Pathfinder with four nice-looking 235 R75 15s. All round but one. The one that's flat on the bottom is also the tire that's easiest to access in the crowded little compound though, and for this excellent reason, O'Brien, if that is in fact who I'm hanging out with, isn't prepared to give up on it quite so easily. A man after my own heart.

O'Brien doesn't mount tires of course. I'm expecting this (I've bought a lot of used tires). Auto wreckers never do.

"It's just a bead leak. Take it back over to Excel and have him check it out. If it's no good, come back and we'll get another one off."

This tire is exactly the right size, not just close. And it's a better tire than the last one. And O'Brien is going to have to take it off the Nissan. And I'm here in the first place cause I'm cheap. How much is this one worth?

"Oh, I guess that'd be 20 bucks too."

Cool. I help him take it off. Help with the last lug nut, that is. It won't turn, O'Brien says, because it's not "capsulated." Or maybe because it is capsulated, I can't remember. So I bounce my weight on the other end of the wheel wrench, accomplishes nothing for a while.

"Might have to get get the weasel piss," O'Brien observes.

WD40, I guess. I bounce harder. It goes.

It's late morning now. Sun hot on my back. We should be hiking but right now we're buyin' tires.

There's a back door from O'Brien's yard into the Excel shop.

"Just go around the front of the tent." One of those tarp-and-pole portable carport things.

I pack the crumpled, muddy tire in through the the back and the tire guy sets to busting it off the rim while I move the truck back around from O'Brien's. By the time I return he's identified that the tire does indeed have a hole in it. He's fixed it in fact. I can hear the cash register racking up. Once it's pressured up, though, he decides he can't, in good concscience, let me take the tire. Too cracked. Actually, he doesn't write it off immediately but asks if I'm planning on only using it as a spare. Nope. That's one of my tires. No good then. Back I go.

O'Brien responds to the bad news with two words. "Of course." I'm not sure what that means but he still seems to be in a good mood.

No capsulation issues this time and he jacks the Pathfinder back up with the homemade forklift. Good tire for sure this time. Thanks again. I can roll this one over to Excel. It's round.

"Do you want that balanced?"

Yep. I want to spend more money. But tires are supposed to be balanced. And finally. Do I want him to throw that on for me. What the hell. I'd planned to do it myself, but now I just want to get going.

It's on in minutes and I'm in the tiny office waiting for the final damage. Installed, balanced, changed out for the spare. Oh, and don't forget fixing the hole in the first crap tire. Somebody's gonna have to pay for that.

Very faux formal. Jolly guy.

"That will be 13 dollars and 37 cents, sir."

We're driving toward the Arrow Park Ferry and the Saddle Mountain trailhead beyond. All balanced and mounted and just generally fucking equipped. For 33 dollars and 37 cents.

Among it's many other charms, never doubt that Nakusp is one damn fine place to pick up a used tire.

Does a bear give a shit?

Does a bear give a shit if you're in the woods when there's a herd of cattle going by?

If a crap fell in the forest, would you ever have known the bear was there to hear?

Why didn't the bear cross the road? Because the truck, the people, the dog and the herd of cattle were betwen him and the creek on the other side.

Yep. It was the place to be that morning. A forest service road on the side of Highway 6 at the point where it wanders down out of the Monashees and makes for the Needles ferry terminal.

First it was just us and the dog. Me making coffee on the tailgate of the truck. We were in our seats, having those glory first sips when the cattle started showing up. Drifting up the road in the dusty sunshine of a summer morning. A few at first, gradually thickening into a herd. I jumped out and tied the dog in the back, hopped back in the cab just before we were surrounded.

Cows are actually kinda cool. Philosophical faces even when forced into an early morning walk. If there are enough of them stepping rythmicaly by, they actually take on a kind of a migrational cachet. Part of the great order of things. seasonal. Tidal. Pushed along, ultimately, by an old cowboy guy in a battered Ford Explorer. With two bored-looking teenagers in the back.

The cows kept looking over their left shoulders at us, rather more skittishly, I thought, than our presence justified. Hesitant to pass, then going by in a fully committed little rush before sinking back into their funky amble on the other side.

We'd parked for the night right across a mossed over, defunct old road where it joined the main gravel track. I'd almost backed into it to get completely clear of the main road but I was tired and the wide spot created by the obsolete intersection was deemed pullout enough.

Something about the overreaction of the cattle, though, now got me shoulder checking away from them, down the old road. As the cowboy in the Explorer just about brought the rear up abreast of us. And sure enough, none of us were alone.

A huge, healthy, beautiful black bear was standing calmly in the middle of the old road. Watching it all go down between him and his morning drink of water on the other side of the main route.

We pointed him out, eyebrows went up, the cattle went by, the bear ran away cause if you're gonna, like, notice. The cowdude told us some bear stories that his kids were too cool for. A quick chat and they were on their way.

"You know what's funny?" Tammy said.

Just before the cows came along she'd been about to hit the bush to answer a serious natural call. Right about where the bear appeared.

Which, after a moment or two, she did.

The bear didn't give a shit whether she knew about his presence. He went the other way and got a drink somewhere else.

Driving (almost) up to Granby

Camping shit spread all over the carpet. Tammy stretched out on the couch asleep. If this one's happening it'll be because I make it so. One motherin' long, hard week at work. And, oh, P90X. If that catchy little bit of code means nothing to you, well, it means we've been working out lately. Hard.

We got started packing late, what with work and hunting for a new spare tire. But that's okay. Just gotta get to the trailhead, tip back the seats and sleep like babies. Like we've done at rest stops all over the continent. Some of the best sleeps of my life. Hit the trail first thing in the morning.

The search for a spare was a failure by the way. Cause I'm cheap and will only buy used tires unless it's my annual-ish set of new snow tires for the great Canadian winter. Nobody had a used one in our size in the time we could spare for the search. Fuck it. Buy a can. The magic foamy shit that blows up your flat and fixes it at the same time.

I only get flat tires when I'm prepared for them anyway. Drove from Vernon to Lethbridge over the Rocky Mountains cold on one of those temporary-use-only, do-not-exceed-80 km/h little fake donut spares once. Without incident. Incidents weren't in the plan. Turns out I made it so it was a fucking good plan. There will always be a triumphant angle if your angled that way.

Packing for the trail is always a process of hauling out the GSAR (ground search and rescue, we're both certified volunteers) ready packs and swapping out what's gonna go - compasses, fire kits, first aid, bear spray, etc. - into the big backpacks, then throwing in all the other stuff. One day we'll have doubles of everything and this will be a much tidier process.

I got it done amid much Heineken and classic rock from the cable radio station of the same name.

I got the driving done in a similar fashion while she slept on the seat beside me. Out through Lumby and the ever wilder hills of Cherryville and up into the mysterious Monashee mountains. Dodging deer and willing away the unlikely interference of cops.

Finally turn off on Bench Creek forest service road, which immediately commences the dual processes of climbing and deteriorating. After 20 or so kilometres we take a right turn onto Scaia Road and the processes accelerate alarmingly.

Especially since we never did get around to picking up the can of foam. Saying fuck it is way easier the second time and once we abandoned the search for a real tire, well, damning the torpedoes had become a theme. A late, tired theme, Heineken enhanced. And not such an unfamiliar one.

But now, in the dark, flogging our old truck up a road that resembles nothing as much as a dried up creek bed, one where the water ran fast, the torpedoes themselves seem to be acquiring an increasing power to damn.

We're both awake now, and by the time the the question "should we turn around?" has made it out loud it's really more a question of whether we're going to be able to find a spot to do so on this seriously vertical line of bombed out rubble. Before the ever more inevitable exploded tire leaves us suddenly sitting silently in the chilly darkness a long fucking way from anywhere.

We do. On the way down we realize the road was even worse than it looked going up.

We're sorry. Okay? We're fucking sorry. Let us make it out and we promise we won't do it again till next time.

We triumph. Tip back the seats just before the highway. Fine. We'll bring a spare next time. Two maybe. Whatever were we thinking?

We're just a few kilometres from the Needles ferry. There's a lot of Kootenay on the other side of that fake lake.

Tomorrow calls for a fine new plan.

You just go

"Are you working this weekend?"
I asked James.
"Yeah."
Yeah, he is.
"Good. I'm not."
He gives me the Igor look.

Have you ever watched Restaurant Makeover? My oldest kid looks a lot like the long-suffering head carpenter in charge of the renovations. Thinks a lot like him, too. Which is to say he's often thinking things like: "What the fuck are you thinking and how did you ever get stupid enough to think like that?"

I know what else he's thinking. That Doug's house is only half done, the first phase of Jon's renovation is done and could be starting up again any day, there's a house for Constructive starting within a few weeks way the hell out at La Casa, one for Richard in Armstrong and three, count 'em, three houses for Devco in the Foothills starting within the next couple weeks. Not to mention Matt's windows, the trim job in Stepping Stones and any odds and ends that have been forgotten until the phone rings.

"Why not?" The face still classic Igor. Like when the custom-ordered granite bar arrives and it's a foot longer than the room it's supposed to be installed in. Or whatever. Like he'd like to believe in me. Like to be believe there's an answer I could give that would adequately explain an unexplainable situation. But like he doubts it.

"Cause we're going hiking in Granby this weekend."

The Igor deepens.Various distasteful suspicions are confirmed. Like that he was born more responsible than I'll ever be. That at 18 years to my 45 he's now really left me in the dust.

But that's his problem.

Cause here's the thing. If you waited to do everything you want to do until there was nothing else you should probably be doing instead, you'd never do anything. Me, that is. Maybe you're different. Good for you.

I've so far done and seen a tiny fraction of what I want to in my life. Did I mention that, somehow, I'm already 45? The travels and trails that I have managed to embark on have all happened in spite of a lot of good solid reasons why they shouldn't. And they've all cost me because of it. In obligations unmet and in the approval of the sort of people who have their shit together. The massive list of things I haven't done is massive because goodness and solidity win out way too often.

Not this weekend, though. Never yet hiked in Granby. Ridiculous. It's in our backyard. To hell with the list.

Sometimes, at least, you just fucking go.