The Tragically Hip

I saw the Tragically Hip playing in Halifax last night at the Metro Centre. It was packed, not surprisingly. And since my blog is read by a lot of music fans who live outside of Canada, I need to do a bit of promotion here. If you’re Canadian, you can pretty much stop reading now, because you’ll already know a lot about this band. But if you want to learn more, carry on.





First, you need to know that “The Hip” are Canada’s greatest rock band. The drummer, Johnny Fay, was once interviewed by Billboard, and when the subject of being in Canada’s best band came up, he said it was, “kind of like being the world’s tallest midget.” In 1989, the band apparently did a show where they opened for Nirvana, and less than a hundred people showed up.

The group has ten studio albums to their credit at the moment (disregarding their first self-titled album, which was only an EP). If I had to pick my favorites, I would recommend their first five albums, starting with “Up To Here,” and with “Fully Completely” probably being my top choice. Unfortunately, I haven’t spent a lot of time listening to any of the albums that came after “Trouble At The Henhouse.” I need to go out and buy the others though, because I know a few of the songs on them, and I know that I'm missing out on other gems.

I’ve seen the Hip perform dozens of times. The first times were in Banff in 1990. I had a few weeks off from my summer job planting trees, so I decided to hitchhike to Banff to wash dishes in a restaurant (The Magie & Stump) to pass the time for a week. During that week, I went with a couple friends to the Silver City nightclub every single evening. There was a band playing, and I thought that they were pretty good. Nobody else seemed to agree, because except for Friday and Saturday night, there were only about ten people in the bar each night. Anyway, after seeing them the first night, I was hooked. I kept coming back, and I watched them from about ten feet away, five or six nights that week. It wasn’t until about four or five years later, when they were starting to get famous and I saw them play at Mount Allison University, that I recognized them and realized that it was the same band. Since then, I’ve seen them in quite a few full concerts, and I also saw them in a small venue in Edmonton when they did their album release for “In Between Evolution,” with just a couple hundred people invited. I have photos from that night online here:
http://www.djbolivia.ca/photos_hip.html

An interesting thing about the Hip is that if I had to pick my favorite five songs, I couldn’t. Not a chance. I might be able to get away with my favorite thirty, but even that would be hard to narrow down. Their music and sound are solid, and even though I’m not usually one to pay a lot of attention to lyrics, Gord Downie is brilliant. The funny thing is that I don’t even know if he writes all the lyrics. I’ve always assumed so, because he is their lead singer, but that’s not necessarily true. His improvisational abilities in live shows though, are legendary.

“New Orleans Is Sinking” was one of their earliest songs, written a decade and a half ago, and it’s one of their best-known songs. However, after Katrina, many radio stations stopped playing it in deference to the residents of New Orleans. The Hip are actually playing a show in New Orleans on October 20th of this year.

Anyway, so if you like rock music, and haven’t listened to this band before, take a Canadian’s advice and check them out. If this is the first you’ve heard about them, you’re missing out on one of Canada’s best-kept secrets.

Talking To A Crow

An hour ago, I thought I was losing my mind. I’m sure that hundreds of other people have already come to that conclusion, but today I was even questioning it myself.

You see, I was sitting out on the back lawn, doing some research. Well, to be more exact, I was laying in the sun, but also trying to finish some reading. Anyway, as I was reading, I thought I heard the neighbour saying hello. But it sounded like her voice was in that funny sort of tone and cadence you hear when an adult is talking to a pet or a small child. Then I heard a crow cawing back. There are a lot of crows living around my house, so I didn’t really think much of it – my neighbour must be sitting on her back porch, talking to a crow.

Anyway, after I heard this conversation back and forth five or six times between the neighbour and the crow, I started to think, “This is a little odd.” So I sat up and turned around to get a better point of view. I was quite surprised to see a crow sitting in the tree about thirty feet away, staring at me. No neighbour. I was even more surprised when it opened its mouth and said “hello” to me. And this wasn’t any random squack that could possibly be interpreted as a similar sound. No, this was a perfectly clearly enunciated greeting. And then the same crow screeched at me with a loud caw a few seconds afterwards, when I didn’t answer back. It then waited for a moment then said hello to me again, so I spoke back to it (feeling kind of foolish). After that, it was quiet and just stared at me for a while.

Now I was pretty wide awake, so this wasn’t a daydream. And although this is Frosh Week at the university, which means that the alcohol is flowing pretty freely, I myself haven’t had a drop since April (although that’s going to change tonight because I’m DJ’ing at a house party down in Halifax). So in other words, I wasn’t under the influence, and this crow really did seem to be talking to me.

Crows are extremely intelligent birds. I’ve observed them (and lots of other wildlife) for years as a tree planter. I’ve seen crows go from cache to cache on a block, dragging tree planters’ backpacks from out under the corner of tarps, unzipping them to get inside, and dragging out their plastic lunch bags. The Firefly Encyclopedia of Birds says that some crows in Japan, when trying to crack walnuts, will allegedly wait by intersections until traffic lights turn red, then fly down and place walnuts on the road in front of waiting cars’ tires, then get out of the way, then fly back down to recover the meat of the walnut after the lights change and the cars have driven over the walnuts. Crows have frequently been observed mastering the art of making and using simple tools, such as bending materials into hooks to retrieve food that they cannot reach themselves.

Researchers have said that American crows have a rudimentary language of about twenty or so “words” that are used to communicate with each other, and that the crows understand the concept of numbers and basic counting. Apparently, it is fairly easy to teach them to mimic simple human speech, and they also sometimes learn to mimic the noise of other animals. If parrots can be taught to talk, it’s not surprising that crows can too. The only thing that puzzles me right now is trying to figure out whether this particular crow learned this trick from watching humans, or if someone in the area has actually tried to teach it to talk.

Alright, to finish this post off, here's a pretty funny pun:

Q: Why was the detective so interested in a small group of crows?
A: He thought it was an attempted murder.

My apologies to the non-ornithologists - that one will go over the heads of SO many people reading this.

The Tequila Wave of 2001

I was just going through some old data files, and I found an amusing video. It's from the Mount Allison University Pub, where in 2001, Drew Dudley decided that he would try to set a world record for the most consecutive people taking shots of tequila. The whole point of the exercise was to be a fun & unique way to raise money for Shinerama. Everyone who participated paid $10 to join, and all that money went as a donation to the Shinerama campaign. The folks who distribute Jose Cuervo tequila made arrangements so that someone could cover the costs of the tequila consumed. Here is the video, filmed in the Pub one afternoon just before supper:



YouTube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v8g02iREBo

There's also a page on the Pub website that has more details:
http://www.mta.ca/pub/tequila.html

Looking back, it's neat seeing a ton of my old friends and staff members on the video. And strangely enough, even though it was about six years ago now that this event took place, several of those people are still working at or near Mount Allison. Also notable: as much as Drew was able to set a lot of records during his years as a Shinerama Director, both at Mount Allison and in other parts of Canada, I think this is probably the fastest time (four minutes) that he was ever able to raise $2000.

I'm going to try to tag a bunch of the people I recognize when this feeds out to my Facebook Notes - so far, I can see about fifty people that participated and who are in my Facebook friends list. It's pretty entertaining, at least for any of us that were there when it happened, and it's making me look forward to Homecoming Weekend at the university in just another three weeks or so. I'm going to have to keep digging around and see what other old videos I can find to share around.

That's What Friends Are For

I don't usually re-hash articles that were in the news, but this one really caught my attention this morning:

TOKYO, Japan (Reuters) -- A Japanese biker failed to notice that his leg had been severed below the knee when he hit a safety barrier, and rode on for 2 km, leaving a friend to pick up the missing limb.

The 54-year-old office worker was out on his motorcycle with a group of friends on Monday, west of Tokyo, when he was unable to negotiate a curve in the road and bumped into the central barrier.

He felt excruciating pain, but did not notice that his right leg was missing until he stopped at the next junction, the paper quoted local police as saying.

I don't know, but you'd think the missing leg would throw him a little bit off-balance.

You Can Do It, Put Your Back Into It

I have a motto in life. It goes, “Anything is possible. Sometimes it just takes a little while to figure out how to do it.” I would describe myself as more of a realist than an optimist, but others would disagree. I’ve developed that mindset after a number of seasons of tree planting. It’s a pretty tough job, so obviously a person has to be fairly stubborn and have a great deal of perseverance to do the job well. Running a crew is even harder. I am working in an outdoor environment, in rugged conditions, with equipment that frequently breaks down, while babysitting about sixty people for three months.

After a couple summers of being a foreman/supervisor, I thought to myself one spring day, “I’ve seen it all. I know how to do this job as well as anybody could. I am ready for anything. I’m not going to see anything new this summer that I don’t already know how to deal with.” However, I couldn’t have been more wrong. That was over a decade ago, and I still deal with new challenges and learn new things every single week that I’m out here. And I don’t mind that – I always did like puzzles and challenges when I was young.

[Note, August 12th: I wrote the rest of this post a couple weeks ago, but I'm only getting around to posting it to my blog today].

I’ve mentioned before that I keep daily diaries of my planting adventures on my www.Replant.ca website. However, most of those are just “quick summaries” of what happened on a particular day. For example, the other day I wrote, “I got stung a couple times in the corner of the eye and eyelid by a wasp today.” You might think to yourself, “That’s crazy!” But a planter wouldn’t find it to be very out-of-the-ordinary. If I mentioned that in camp at supper, people around me would nod their heads, and maybe say, “yeah, lots of wasps on the block today,” and go back to eating their dinner. I might get some sympathy and attention for all of about four seconds. However, I get a lot of emails from people (non-planters) who think I make up most of the stuff in the diaries, because so much of it seems ridiculous. Not so – I just describe “normal” everyday events.

Anyway, today was an interesting day. I was supervising three employees who were planting a fairly unique block. Most cut-blocks are big chunks of land that were harvested in some sort of square or rectangular or amoeba-like pattern, depending on where the good timber was. However, this particular block was an old road, so it was about eight trees wide and several kilometers long. In other words, it was a very unconventional and awkward shape. The block had been “furrowed” once with some sort of skidder or tractor, to try to loosen up the soil, but it didn’t do a very good job, so it was really hard to drive our shovels into the ground in many places. We didn’t think we could get the block done by ourselves, but we worked pretty hard and we finished at around 6pm despite the temperature hovering around thirty degrees Celcius all day.

Supper was at 6:30pm, but we realized that we’d be a bit late. First, we had to walk out to the front of the block, since we finished off the day near the back. Then we had to walk back out to the truck; a bridge had been removed from our access road, so we had to park about four kilometers from the beginning of the block this morning. I had a quad to move trees around today, but it wasn’t very healthy. In fact, during the day, it burned five litres of oil and two litres of gasoline (it needed a ring job). If you know anything about motors/engines, you know that’s a big problem. Anyway, the quad died as I was about to drive it out to the truck, so Kristin and I ended up having to push it several kilometers back to the truck, while Colleen steered it. And before we got there, we had to push the quad through a river (which the bridge no longer crossed) to actually get to the truck.

When we got to the truck, I had a new challenge. I didn’t have quad ramps, and even if I did, I couldn’t exactly drive the quad up into the back of the truck since the motor had seized. At first, I considered lifting the quad into the truck by myself. I’ve done it before, but it isn’t easy (actually, that’s a huge understatement – I’ve had an easier time flipping full fuel barrels into a truck, and they weigh 460 pounds each). The last time that I had to put a quad into a truck by myself, it took me a while to stand it up vertically (using rocks to brace the tires), then I backed the truck up “under” the front wheels, pushed the front wheels over onto the tailgate, and then lifted the back end of the quad into the truck. However, I did that with a Honda 350, and this quad was a 450, which was considerably heavier (over 500 pounds). Besides, Joanne and the other two girls would be there waiting to see how I’d deal with the problem, and I didn’t want to embarass myself by saying that I could lift it into the truck by myself, and then be the brunt of a bunch of “so you can’t get it up” jokes if it turned out to be too heavy. So I tried to think of a new plan. I figured that I could find a four-foot-high bank somewhere within a kilometer or so, then push the quad up onto the bank, then back the truck up to the bank, then push the quad into the truck. But before I got to that point, I miraculously found a pair of long planks, and I was able to use them as ramps so I could push the quad up into the truck, while the girls kept the quad steering straight. Problem solved.

Then, as I was fastening the quad into the truck, I discovered a new problem – a flat tire on the rear of the truck. I figured that it was a slow leak, and I could probably just pump the tire back up and make it back to camp. I smiled to myself and pulled out the brand new electric tire pump that I had bought from Canadian Tire a week ago, still in the package. The girls were impressed. I tried to inflate the tire and discovered that the cord on the pump wasn’t long enough to reach the back wheels. The girls were no longer impressed. Neither was I. If anyone from Canadian Tire is reading this right now, please tell either your engineers or your purchasing managers that they are morons (and yes, I’m also a moron for not having taken it out of the package and testing it before I assumed that I could rely on it).

So, I needed to change the tire. The spare was pretty muddy, so I had to chip off a bunch of mud then wash the lug nuts so I didn’t strip the posts while taking the nuts off. The axle-jack wouldn’t raise the truck high enough to let me “spin” the wheel wrench, so I got smart and dug a hole beside the tire so I could do that and get the nuts off more quickly. Then, when I tried to put the spare tire on, I had a similar problem because the jack would not go high enough to give it enough clearance to go onto the hub, so I dug another hole under the tire. Eventually I got the tire changed and all the gear loaded. Of course, that was another story, considering that we also had a dozen boxes of trees left over, plus the gear, plus the quad, plus the garbage, all to be fit into the back of just one open-back pickup. But with some creative packing, we got it all into one load, and we even brought home the two large planks that I had used as ramps, for no apparent reason.

I considered this to be a typical day.

You can see the kind of challenges that we have to deal with pretty much every day. None of the girls were the slightest bit surprised that “so much” could go wrong, nor were they surprised that we managed to successfully deal with all the problems in the space of not much over an hour. That’s just the mindset you need to have if you’re going to mentally survive as a planter. It doesn’t help to sit on a rock and wish that someone would come along to make your problems disappear. You have to rely on your own ability/creativity, and try to be prepared or at least try to anticipate possible problems in advance. Getting mad doesn’t help. Having a breakdown doesn’t solve your problem. Having a positive attitude is your biggest asset.

We made it home for supper by 8:30pm, so it wasn’t that big of a deal – just another day in the life. We had enough problems to be a bit annoying, but nothing that I wouldn’t have expected. Earlier though, when we were pushing the quad through the river, Kristin had taken her boots off so they’d stay dry, and waded through in her bare feet. The bottom of the river had some nice round stones which were comfortable on her feet, and she suddenly stopped and looked at me. Despite the hard day we’d had and the problems we were trying to deal with, she seemed to have faith that everything would work out well in the end, and she didn’t seem the slightest bit concerned or impatient. She smiled at me and said, “You know, tree planting really makes you appreciate the little things in life.”

That’s the kind of attitude you need if you’re going to be happy as a tree planter. And that kind of attitude will probably make you a lot happier about life in general. God bless that girl.

CN Rail Derailment

This past Saturday, we had a bit of local excitement, as CN Rail had yet another train derailment which made the national news. The accident happened just a couple kilometers from our office (which is located in the railway industrial site in Prince George). The track that was involved in the accident actually passes about ten feet behind our company’s garage before it swings out and along the Fraser River.

I’ve got a friend who works as an engineer at CN, so I got the whole story that evening, but the simple version is that a train was unable to stop in time and hit another train that was crossing that truck, and the engine and a couple cars derailed. The engine caught on fire, and a load of lumber and a diesel tanker also burned. Since the accident was right across the river from the center of the city, pretty much everybody in Prince George was able to get a good view of it. And of course, there was a lot of anger and concern because this was just another in a long string of recent railway accidents in western Canada, and because the diesel may or may not have spilled into the Fraser (endangering the Sockeye salmon, which are just starting to spawn). Here’s a photo:





They also had water bombers circling for several hours, so it was pretty good entertainment for a Saturday afternoon of a holiday long weekend. I was working through the day, so I didn’t manage to go down to the park across the river from the accident to get a better photo. But you can probably find a decent photo at this link:

http://www.opinion250.com/blog/view/6667/3/cn+derailment+debriefing

Anyway, the thing that struck me as being kind of ironic about this was listening to everybody talk about the accident. People seemed pretty angry about this being such a huge environmental problem (especially because a body of water was involved). But really, it wasn’t very big compared to other environmental problems that we cause. The government probably introduces far more oil into the environment every year just by putting used motor oil on forestry roads around here for dust control. And there are lots of other much larger (global-scale) environmental problems happening around us every day that nobody gets worked up about, which I think is rather frustrating. Take the case of all the plastic accumulating in our oceans as a prime example.

In the center of the Pacific Ocean, there is apparently an area that is approximately the size of Texas, literally (litter-ly?) covered with plastic trash. Due to the specific currents and wind patterns, this area is sort of like an oceanic desert with very little marine life or biodiversity – it is just a large featureless geographic area of little interest to humans. The winds are very minimal in this area, so the entire area just sort of swirls around extremely slowly, without much happening for excitement. The water is deep, and no plants are able to grow on the bottom of the sea since sunlight doesn’t penetrate that far. The bottom of the ocean is nutrient-rich from millions of years of organics sinking through the water, but the fish and aquatic life generally can’t get down to this nutrient layer, and there are no winds or strong currents to stir it up and get it near enough the surface to be used as a source of food for marine life. The only real food supply in the area is the development of plankton (based on photosynthesis) but there isn’t much in the way of traditional fish, just lots of jellyfish and similar species, which have no commercial interest to humans.

Anyway, plastics don’t really biodegrade. Most other trash does, but the only thing that plastics do is break down (after a number of years) into smaller pieces of plastic. Eventually, these plastics will break down into individual molecules of plastic, so they are out of sight, but not out of mind. Many scientists figure that these individual molecules of plastic may remain intact for centuries before they are finally naturally torn apart (in a chemical sense). Unfortunately, these molecules of plastic enter the food chain in smaller organisms, and eventually many of them make their way up into the bodies of larger marine or avian organisms (or even into peoples’ bodies), where they become toxic in significant quantities.

Studies of the large oceanic accumulation of plastic, the area known as the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, have shown that the volume of plastics floating around is about six times the volume of naturally occuring zooplankton. For every square kilometer of surface area, there are many kilograms of discarded plastic items of every type imaginable. Now this isn’t something that is completely covering the surface of the water, but there is enough material there to make the ocean’s surface look like a McDonald's parking lot at 1:30am on a Saturday night.

Hundreds of thousands of marine birds and mammals are dying from the plastics in our oceans every year. No national governments seem to care about the trash accumulating in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, because it is not in any nation’s territorial waters. Since it isn’t a rich aquatic zone, no nations rely on it for commercial fisheries. I wish there was a way that some nation could provide funding for some ships to go out into that area with large surface trawl nets of some sort to collect the plastics (without somehow snaring the marine life) and then incinerate the trash. In the coming decades and centuries, even though this area is not a major source of food for people, it would still be nice to clean it up. I’m not a big fan of leaving garbage everywhere, as you can probably guess.

Here’s a photo of a dead seabird, which has decayed somewhat so you can see the stomach contents:





Basically, untold numbers of animals are dying of starvation, while their stomachs are actually quite full. It’s a shame that they are full of the trash that humans are producing, but it’s just one more example of how we’re destroying our planet.

And for all the people who complain about how global warming is causing the ice caps to melt, which is raising the levels of the Earth's ocean by a couple millimeters per year, maybe it isn't global warming? Maybe the levels are rising because we're filling our oceans up with garbage.

On The Road Again

I wish I could get a Death Ray mounted on the roof of my truck.

Have you ever been driving at night, with your headlights on low beams, and someone flashes their lights at you because they think you have your high-beams on? It happens to me a lot. My car and my truck both have halogen headlights, which are quite bright. Actually, most vehicles today have those same headlights, so maybe mine are just cleaner (which I doubt). Anyway, I was driving from Kamloops to Prince George the other night when we were moving our planting camp, and I got flashed quite a few times on the trip, which prompted this post.

Let’s talk about halogens for a minute. The halogens are from Group VII of the periodic table, which includes flourine, chlorine, bromine, iodine, and astitine. At room temperature and standard pressure, flourine and chlorine are gases, bromine is a liquid, and iodine and astitine are solids. This makes the halogens the only group in the periodic table which exhibits all three states of behaviour. Halogen headlights took over from the previous generic sealed-beam headlights in the 1980’s, and produce a whiter glare than the typical old yellowish sealed-beams did. But since practically everybody is using them, why am I getting flashed all the time? Perhaps it is because I always drive with my low-beams on. My eyesight is pretty good at night, so being lazy, I feel no need to turn the high-beams on when I’m on a deserted stretch of road – I’d just have to turn them back off when a car is coming at me. So maybe the drivers assume that since I haven’t “switched” my lights when they come in sight, I must still be on high beam. I don’t really mind the people who do a quick flash and then don’t do it again, because they probably realize that my headlights WERE on low-beam after all, and they feel silly. But when I get a second, last-minute flash from someone who thinks they should “punish” me for not dimming, that’s when I feel the need to slam into them head-first (although I can’t do that, because it would ruin my perfectly clean driving record). This headlight problem should get even worse soon with the new HID headlights that are starting to become more popular. Those lights are even brighter than halogens, and since they tend towards the blue end of the visible spectrum (due to the xenon gas), they are even more annoying to oncoming drivers. But enough about headlights.

The next afternoon, I drove from Prince George to Alberta, and luckily, since it was during the daytime, I was able to keep my road rage to a minimum. I also got to drive by Mount Robson, which wasn’t surrounded by clouds when I drove by, so I could see the summit pretty clearly. That happens about once in a blue moon (I think that saying just popped into my head since tomorrow night is a blue moon). Anyway, Mount Robson, at 12,972 feet (for the American readers) or 3,954 meters (for the rest of the logical world), is the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies. It isn’t the highest peak in British Columbia – that’s Mount Waddington in the Coast Mountain Range. It isn’t the highest peak in Canada – that’s Mount Logan in the Yukon. And it isn’t the highest peak in North America – that’s Mount McKinley in Alaska. But Mount Robson is a nice little mountain to drive by. Here’s a photo that I took of it:



Not much else of interest happened on the trip. I stopped in Jasper and pretended to be a tourist, and ooh’d and ahh’d over the elk running around downtown, and asked some other tourists nearby if they’d ever seen horses that big. Then I stopped and filmed some wild mountain sheep a bit further down the road. Finally, I pulled over and went to bed on the side of the road, because I had meetings starting shortly after 7am. The trip took far longer than planned, but then again, camp moves always do, because something always goes wrong. In fact, one of the girls in our camp hitch-hiked from Kamloops to Alberta with her dog, and arrived before we did, because one of our trucks broke down as we were about to leave Kamloops.

Switching topics abruptly to something with a musical connection (how much does a seg weigh?), you’ll probably eventually notice that I slip a lot of lines from classic rock & country songs into my blog posts, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes just out of reflex. “On The Road Again” is the title of a song by Willie Nelson (country), and also the title of another song by Canned Heat (rock). Maybe I should make a little trivia contest so the first person who correctly identifies a song title or a line from a well-known song in any of my blog posts gets a free CD in the mail (that is, if you figure out the specific song that I pulled the line from).

And back to the whole point of this, if anyone knows where I can get a Death Ray kit, please let me know ...

Billy Bob's Jerky

Have you ever driven past a particular store and wondered how it managed to stay in business? Being a business owner myself, and knowing a fair amount about the behind-the-scenes costs that can be involved, I often find myself thinking about that sort of thing when I look at certain businesses. Sometimes it is high costs that drive someone out of business, other times it might be insufficient customers, and sometimes it is just a "bad business concept" to start with. Sometimes I even feel sorry for the owner, because I just can’t help but think that the business was doomed from the start.

The other day, I was waiting for Alice (one of my crew bosses) to finish writing her First Aid exams at St. John Ambulance. It’s a pretty involved course that she was taking, so the exams lasted from 10am until 6:30pm. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that at the time, and I figured she would be done around 4pm, so I sat in my truck in downtown Kamloops from about 3:30pm until she was done. It wasn’t entirely a waste of time – I had lots of paperwork with me that I managed to finish, but I also spent a lot of time staring out the window at a store across the street: Billy Bob’s Jerky. And now, you probably see where this is going.





Billy Bob’s was closed when I first noticed it. I studied it for a few minutes, and decided that it must be out of business already. But then, at around 3:40pm, someone opened the doors and lit up the “open” sign. I was curious to see why a business would not open until 3:40pm on a Monday afternoon, but then I started thinking, “maybe they’re targeting the after-school crowd.” However, that was pretty doubtful, considering their product line. Among other things, they featured products such as King Crab legs and claws (10 lbs. for $99.95), hot sauces, and Ostrich Jerky.

I paid close attention to this store for the couple hours that it was open. Billy Bob’s closed at 5:30pm that afternoon, but unfortunately, they didn’t have any customers that “day.” Hopefully for the owner, it was just an off-day. I will admit though, that by the end of that afternoon, I had a burning curiosity to see what Ostrich Jerky tastes like. You see, I just can't think of a lot of other stores that I've run across which specialize in Ostrich Jerky. I may have to go visit Billy Bob the next time I’m in that part of town, looking for a quick snack.

On the drive home, we saw someone driving a shopping cart down the highway. Literally. Kamloops has a four-lane highway that has a three or four kilometer section that goes downhill at a fairly sharp slope. Someone was riding a shopping cart down one lane, at around 50-60 km/h, with cars in front and behind and beside him. I don't know whether I was more amazed that he was keeping pace with traffic without crashing, or the fact that the cars around him didn't seem that surprised by his presence.

Stoner, British Columbia

When driving from Prince George to Kamloops last week, we drove through a small town called Stoner. I'm sure that hundreds of thousands of people have been amused by this name over the years, and I can't imagine what their road signage budget is, because I bet the "Stoner" signs have been stolen repeatedly over the years.

British Columbia is a very pot-friendly province, in fact, it is probably the most tolerant Canadian province when it comes to the use of marijuana. I have no doubt that the anti-drug population in Washington State must just hate having BC as their northern neighbour.

According to Stats Canada (info provided by the RCMP), in 2005, the value of the five highest ranked industries in British Columbia by financial value was as follows:

Forestry = $10 billion
Construction = $7.9 billion
Marijuana = $7.5 billion
Hotels, restaurants = $3.8 billion
Mining, oil and gas = $3.5 billion

That's pretty impressive. Cultivation of pot is estimated to contribute more to the province's GDP than hotels, restaurants, mining, and oil & gas put together. That's not small "pot"atoes.

I'm not a pot smoker at all. However, I don't think there is anything wrong with other people smoking it. I just have absolutely no interest for the same reasons that I don't smoke cigarettes - because I don't want to abuse my lungs with the smoke. But although I am convinced that there are some negative health repercussions to smoking marijuana, I still think that pot is probably quite a bit less harmful to the general population than my own drug of choice - alcohol. Canada appears to be slowly moving towards decriminalization of marijuana, which I think is a smart idea.

Anyway, I know that people from around the world have a lot of different views regarding the consumpation of "soft" drugs, and since I'm not a smoker myself, I don't really pay a whole lot of attention to debating the pros and cons of marijuana use. However, I am always amused to see the business value of this underground industry, and I always have to smile when I drive down Highway 97 and see that sign.

So the big question is, if you actually live in that famous small town, how do you describe yourself? I guess you would just have to stand straight up and proudly say, "Yes, I'm a Stoner."

Back to Work in British Columbia

I’m back at work on Canada’s west coast. I run a camp of tree planters every summer, which is a rather strange and adventurous career path. What does this mean for me? Well, I supervise a camp with about sixty-some employees, including two cooks, five foremen, a couple of quality control people, and fifty-odd tree planters. During the next three and a half months, my camp will plant between five and six million trees.

Although the planters usually work a rotating six-day schedule all summer (five days on, one day off), I don’t get that luxury, nor do most of my foremen. I work about 110 days straight, getting up between 5am and 6am, and working until midnight or 1am. I’m responsible for pretty much everything imaginable, from hiring and firing, to overseeing the cooks and making sure that everyone is fed, to scheduling deliveries of food and water, to maintaining a group of up to a dozen trucks, to picking up propane and fuel for the camp, and most importantly, I oversee the safety program to try to make sure everyone stays alive for the summer. Here are some interesting facts:

- My cooks will use about 15,000 eggs this summer. It is not uncommon for some planters to consume six to eight thousand calories per day, and still lose weight. Most of us walk at least twenty kilometers in a typical day, going up and down hills and through swamps and over slash and other obstacles.
- We work in conditions ranging from light snow to temperatures over 35 degrees Celsius. Over the years, I have learned not only to tolerate, but to actually enjoy working in the rain (well, most of the time).
- On a typical spread-out contract, my crews may be planting throughout a region that covers well over twenty-five hundred square kilometers. I have to know exactly where every single person is working at any given time.
- We typically work in central and northern BC and Alberta, although I have worked in Alaska, the Northwest Territories, and Saskatchewan on rare occasions.
- The trucks in my camp will drive a combined total of nearly a quarter million kilometers this summer. I often drive an average of well over four hundred kilometers per day, a significant portion of which is on dirt logging roads.
- Our vehicles will probably burn well over thirty thousand liters of fuel in three months. I have to bring a lot of that fuel into our camp from town, a couple barrels or tidy-tanks at a time. I’ve come to love the smell of diesel in the morning.
- It is common to run into bears, deer, and moose on a daily basis. Occasionally, I’ve run into elk, caribou, lynx, bobcats, and wolves. I don’t mind the wildlife – humans cause more problems than most animals.
- I do not expect to touch another drop of alcohol until mid-August. My responsibilities as a camp supervisor are intense, and I am literally on-call 24 hours per day. I have to be in suitable condition to deal with any kind of problem, no matter how minor or major, at any time of day. I like to say that my job description could be summed up as “putting out fires.”
- I expect to lose about twenty pounds in my first twenty days of work. And if you know me, you’ll realize that I don’t have much to spare. Some of my employees, who plant full-time and don’t spend as much time driving around as I do, will lose much more than that.

I mentioned that overseeing our safety program is one of my main responsibilities. I actually think of it as my most important responsibility, by far. Thankfully, the entire industry has become much more safety-conscious in the past decade. Unfortunately, I have had several planters in my camp who have been killed in the past, which was a really tough experience for everyone in the camp. I’ve had a 23-year-old girl die in my arms. I’ve had planters who have been stabbed and/or thrown in jail, and once I had to take a knife away from a very angry (and very large) man who wanted to stab one of my other planters. I’ve been attacked by an enormous dog on the Alaska highway. I’ve had someone try to steal my truck at night, despite the fact that I was sleeping in the back seat. I’ve tried to “hide” from the police in Fort Nelson (a town with four streets), while driving around in a bright pink hearse. I’ve slept with a rifle under the stars. I’ve ridden to work in helicopters hundreds of times, sometimes in machines without doors or seats. I’ve had employees who have been doctors, lawyers and engineers, and I’ve had employees who have been hippies, convicts, and practicing witches. The former are more manageable, but the latter are more fun to work with. I’ve seen people have mental breakdowns that would make Ken Kesey proud, and I’ve had employees who thought that clothing was optional in the workplace. In short, I’ve seen a lot of crazy things over the years, and I really need to sit down and write a book about it all someday.

I have a tree planting website, www.replant.ca, which sometimes gets as many as a thousand visitors per day from all over Canada and the world. Go to the “Diaries” section on that site, and you’ll see some pretty detailed stories of things that have happened to me and my employees in the past six years or so, since I started keeping regular records. Here’s the link: http://www.replant.ca/diaries.html

Tree planting is one of the strangest, most difficult, and yet most rewarding jobs in the world. I have seen varsity football players sitting on a stump crying, because the job was so much harder than they expected. I’ve also seen 105 pound girls, eating supper with a tired smile, laughing because the job is so much easier than they expected. New planters worry about being able to handle the physical aspects of the job. What they don’t realize is that the mental hardships are what makes most people quit.

Lots of people ask me why I keep doing it, so I tell them that it’s for the money. The job IS incredibly lucrative, but that’s not the real reason. I do it because it gets me into amazing physical shape. I do it because I love working with nature. I do it because I like to be the best at everything I do. And I do it just because I can, while so many other people can’t handle it. I hate my job in a hundred different ways, and I want to quit at least once a week, but as soon as the summer is over, I can’t wait for the next season to begin. And sadly, if you never work as a tree planter, you will never truly be able to understand why.