quiet dispatches

One of my clearest memories of visiting my Grandfather is from about 17 years ago, on a beach near his Nanaimo home.  While the adults conversed above, I took my kid brother (I’m guessing he’d be about 5, which makes me 14) for a seaside adventure.  Soon we were running along a narrow strip of intertidal shore, between the grey sea and the cliffs.   Our dash ended in a shallow bay, where the sea reached right to the face of the rock, cutting us off ahead.  I glanced up at the cliffs.  The tide had filled a wide ditch in front of the wall, a through these waters lay a great bleached trunk, an old growth log cast loose from the wilds of Vancouver Island.  One end was lodged on the sand in front of me, and like an arrow it pointed across that trough, directly at the cliffs.  My heart began to pound, and I stepped to the log.

“What are you doing?” asked my awesome companion.

“Seeing if I can climb this,” I replied.  Grandpa used to climb things, big things.  Mountains and glaciers.  Harrowing adventure.  The log ended about two feet from the cliff.  I would have to jump over the gap and grab the rock.  If I failed, I’d fall and be drenched — in front of my little brother.

“Do you think I can make it?”

“Yeah.”

I ran lightly along the log.  I couldn’t tarry long on the far side, else it might roll.  The gap was a bit larger than I thought, but I jumped all right.  One foot missed, the other landed and both hands grabbed hold.  The rock was warm in the summer sun, a strange feeling of life-that-is-not-life that has never left me.  Robin cheered and jumped up and down, which was very encouraging.  His voice sounded thin against the waves.  I looked up… waaaaay up… and could see flowers looking down at me from the top of the cliff, some 40 feet away.  The going appeared to be steep.  Perhaps this wasn’t a wise idea.  Turning to the log, I saw that there was no way back.  I’d need my running start to cross that gap again.

“Go back around,” I called to my brother.  I was very responsible and didn’t want to see him swept out to sea.  Actually, all kidding aside, I had enjoyed a rapport with Robin ever since he could walk.  I knew what I could ask of him, and what he could be counted on to do.  I have relied on this trust more than I probably should have, I know.  It’s a brother thing.

Little Robin toddled out of sight, and I began to climb.  The cliff walls were a bit sandy, which added an element of danger but also made for many footholds, pockmarks in the weathered surface.  I only slipped once, it wasn’t my scariest climb.  My hands slowly turned black from the rock dust.  After a while I pulled myself over the lip and onto a grassy clearing.  Grown-up voices sounded nearby, and I hurried up.  My parents and grandparents where there. Robin burst from a side trail at the same moment, full of dignity from his solo quest.  We were united above the sea.

“Grandpa, I climbed them!  I climbed those cliffs!” I wasn’t interested in telling anyone else.  Here was the man, the legend, the Climbing Grandpa.  I believe I interrupted him in mid-sentence.  He looked at me and my blackened hands, bits of grass clinging to my clothes, one knee scuffed where it met with unforgiving rock.  There was an unmistakable twinkle in his eye.

“You did…?  Good for you!”

And then he drew me aside.  “See how dirty your hands are?”  Uh oh. Was the Climbing Grandpa a clean freak, like some of my other relatives?

“Well, uh, yes…”

“That’s from coal dust!  The last mine closed 40 years ago, but the dust around here still runs black.  Isn’t that something?”

And that’s how Grandpa was.  Encouragement and teaching, delivered with a smile.  I didn’t see him often, but every time I did there was something important there, something that cheered me on.  My mom has a picture of me with Grandpa and his wife Rene, back when I was younger than memory.  They flank me on our crazy old red couch.  I’m smiling like I won the lottery, like I’m sitting among heros.  And in a way I am.

My Grandfather passed away on January 22, at the age of 90.  Sitting here typing this, I wonder more than ever if I’m just a new version of him.  Sure, Grandpa Gordon never quite mastered computers, just as I never learned to ride the rails like a crazy hobo.  I’m sure we both wished we did.  Like me he loved mountain climbing, easily naming summits on every horizon.  What I feel when I take each rise, when I look out at the wide world around me, I know he felt. His numerous slides bear witness to exceptional photography skills, an obsession I share.  His empathy for individuals, and his lifelong desire to teach — both are borne in my work, where I use computers not just for the sake of mastering the logic, but to help people understand.

Maybe I am Grandpa Gordon 3.0.  So much of what made him that kind of man is in my blood.  Of course, I know my story is different, and that the differences have his approval.  Thus inspired, we carry on.

“Good for you!”

That was my Grandpa.

The weather has been changing madly over the unfinished plywood of my new deck.  Rainstorms — will the water get through those plastic barriers?  Wind — will the new tar-paper sidings hold?  Hail — are we under attack?  Then suddenly all is still, and venturing out we see countless stars shining brightly from an impossibly black sky.  Through it all, the new deck persists.  The daylight brings showers, fallen leaves, carpenters with hammers and power tools. Yesterday it brought all this and fog; a ghostly marine fog coloured like the sea at dusk.  Flights were cancelled.  A few days earlier, a Pacific Coastal plane flying to (beautiful/legendary) Toba Inlet from Vancouver’s South Terminal crashed into a remote island in thick fog. The plane left a debris trail 400 meters long and exploded just after impact.  Everyone on board was killed instantly.  Except one man, who stumbled out of the burning rubble just moments before.  The explosion rocked him to his knees as the remaining fuel ignited.  Half dazed, covered in burns, he kept going, blinded by the fog.  There would be, I imagine, no sound except for his breathing.  He descended slowly through steep terrain, following a stream towards what he hoped was the sea.  Coast Guard rescuers found him waiting on the beach, the only survivor.  Alive, as the fog rose around him.  Alive.

Pacific Coastal Airlines was founded in Powell River.  One of their normal flight paths - perhaps their primary default - is directly over my house, so that when you fly in or out of the city you won’t see us.  It doesn’t matter if you’re on the right side or left side of the plane, you can’t see us because you are directly overhead.  These planes pass hourly, and yet we rarely heard them, the little engines zipping away some 300 meters above.  Yesterday morning the flights were cancelled, and I biked slowly uphill through a misty dreamworld of white and grey. The air around me as supercharged with light, and I turned off my headlight, donning sunglasses instead.  Vehicles crept cautiously past beside me.  Uphill at Joyce Ave, I crested the fog’s upper ceiling and rolled into an acre of clear sunlight, momentarily disoriented.  The strange, channelled nature of the sun had set the pavement afire, and each polished bit of stone gleamed like glass.  This is a daunting illusion for a cyclist to confront, made worse by the fact that some of it really was glass - an extra challenge provided by Powell River’s very own hooligans. Thanks, boys!  Before me, Joyce Ave ascended a half block into billowing mist, a miniature Everest.  Pickup trucks sidled warily into the void.  I biked on.

There is, in adventuring, a concept of victory through persistence.  Over avalanches and through crevasses, past rivers and across jungles, we place our meagre steps one after the other.  In facing that which confounds us, and going forward, we persist.  The game becomes that of finding what will stop us cold, and having reached that point, to keep going.  When I was a child, I played a game that said I couldn’t get off my bike until the trip was over.  Exploring the back logging roads, with their fantastical grades and dust-choked gravel, my skinny legs would lean hard into the pedals as my trusty 15-speed zigzagged higher and higher.  I’ve never walked my bike up hills since — well, almost never. Sometimes when biking with friends, it’s polite not to be an overbearing jerk.  And there are a few hills (two on Mount Porteous, and one on the Isle of Arran in distant Scotland) which eventually leave me staggering in the dirt, utterly spent.  Laughing in gasps.  Heart like a freight train.

There exists in all of us an ability to push farther than we may be comfortable with. Climbing Everest is less about mountaineering than it is about enduring.  On Thormanby Island last Sunday, Tom Wilson pushed himself out of his upholstered chair and walked out of burning wreckage, then through 2 km of tangled wilderness, to live.

A few blocks above Joyce and the fog was gone completely.  A sky of purest blue opened above, and my horizons expanded towards infinity.  Away to the north, the Rainbow Range of mountains stood out like iron pistons, proudly displaying their first sprinkling of winter snow. Some day I will see this view from the other end.  I’ll take time off from all these useful tiny jobs, hike high into the wilderness.  My steps will be slow but persistent.  I will look back to you from the tops of Rainbows.

For now, I bike on.

The last time I heard of solar sails, they were in an Arthur C. Clarke novel.

Here on earth, we now have different possibilities:

Late last month, the Australian Solar Sailor company announced they’d signed a deal with China’s biggest shipping line, COSCO, to fit some of their jumbo jet sized solar-powered sails to a tanker and bulk carrier. The 30 metre long sails, festooned in photovoltaic panels are expected to catch enough wind to reduce fuel costs by between 20% and 40%, whilst those PV cells will provide the ships with 5% of their electricity. A computer automatically angles the sails for maximum wind and solar efficiency, and if all goes to plan the sails will have recovered their initial cost within four years.

Tip o’ the organic hat to TreeHugger.  Now if only we could get above that tiny 5%…

I remember listening to silence on the radio, unaccustomed, eerie silence, while my mother stood nearby and the rain fell softly against the glass. A long time before, many people had died at war.  I listened through the static, trying to picture myself there, trying to understand a sacrifice we all pay homage to.

I didn’t grow up a pacifist, and I didn’t grow up a patriot.  Like many Canadians, my default war heros are medics, peacekeepers, negotiators.  You know, those guys who negotiate within an established framework and build multilateral consensus.  Us Canadians really like multilateral consensus.  But is that what our countrymen died for, on the beaches of Normandy?

I’ve been to Juno Beach.  I watched little kids swim in the light blue waters where a thousand Canadians died, most of them young men with earnest smiles and uncertain eyes. I know this will sound controversial, but it’s a blog so I’ll just forge ahead: I don’t like WWII Germany.  Those guys really shouldn’t have been building bunkers above those sand cliffs, really shouldn’t have been invading, slaughtering, and whatnot.  I’m proud of the Canadians who fought and died on that day. If they had failed, if we all had failed on different fronts, we would be remembering things very differently.  I haven’t been to many battlegrounds, so when I remember our fallen troops I remember sunny Juno, were we fought against evil.

Or did we?

Throughout our history, did brave men and women really fall “against evil”, and while “defending our freedoms”, or did they fall because they were violently killed by other brave men and women defending a different set of freedoms or at least following a different set of orders?  Probably yes.

Did the lessons of the World Wars lead the way for a wiser Canada, a Canada who will never fight except in the cause of peace?  Apparently no.

Remembrance day commemorates our losses against each other, our sacrifices against violence, discrimination, and organized hatred.   That’s what I wear the poppy for.  Not for glory, or democracy, or national defence (and I’m looking at you PMSH).  I wear the poppy to remember that loss, as I believe all war is, in the end.

Here’s to peace, eh?

There were about 50 000 sites worldwide on the day I made my first homepage.

The year was 1995, and I wasn’t some grubby kid sitting in his parents’ basement.  No sir, my room was on the second floor.  Netscape 1 had just hit the scene, and the Internet was about to explode.  So was my computer - every few hours I had to restart as it ran out of memory.  The future was coming, and out there in the wilderness I could sense a change.

Now it’s 2008.  I’m married.  I have a house.  I own a business.  181 million websites are out there.

There’s been a few changes.  I think it’s time to try something new.