Camp and Canoe

Loon call echoes across the lake. Crackling campfires sound from the fire I've just started. The water has boiled and my coffee is brewing.

"No. No. No Gilbert. Don't bite." The sweet voice tumbles from inside the tent. I've left the flap open so Gilbert the cockapoo puppy has returned to 'play' with Laura. I rescue her and distracted Gilbert returns to digging through to China. At his age I thought the same and see that modern geological fare cannot compete with the world according to child or puppy mind. There are treats through the core of the earth and out the other side. Perhaps the geologists are just big kids and puppies after all.

There are 2 fishermen fly fishing from boats on the water. Some trout are jumping. They jumped yesterday when I paddled over them in my new Clipper McKenzie Kevlar canoe from Western Canoe and Kayak in Abbotsford http://www.westerncanoekayak.com/ It's a beauty. I suspect the trout were so in awe of this wonderful new craft in their midst that they gave up eating while I moved among them. Gilbert slept on the floor in his yellow too big puppy lifejacket.

Horses walked back and forth along the beach. The owners bringing them down to drink. They are corralled with the camps on the hill. Each day riders go out reminiscent of another era. A rifle in the scabbard of the guide. A couple of yellow Yamaha offroad motorcycles left from here in the afternoon returning late even. I saw them rocketing along the logging road and over the green hills beyond the lake. Bumblebees in motion.

Yesterday I cooked Laura and myself bacon and eggs on the Coleman stove. It reminded me of my Dad up early mornings camping, cooking for Mom and us kids. Last night we had smokies roasted on the grill over the fire. Everything tastes better camping.

Gilbert has begun earning his keep by cleaning the pots and pans.

After trout fishing in the morning I took the Ford Ranger 4x4 and headed 40 km north to a fine forestry road through this ponderosa territory. After a while driving with Gilbert and myself we stopped and shot some bottles with the Ruger bolt action 30:06. I hit all but one with the first shots. I'm better with a scope than the open sites on the Mossberg 30:30 lever action. Scopes just don't go well on the 30:30 though. More of a rapid fire bush gun anyway.

Gilbert and I hiked the hills with the 30:06 certain that if I saw a big black bear I'd bring it down. Gilbert was running circles about me. I was really just enjoying the hot sun and the beautiful northern countryside.

Now other fishermen are rising in the camp next to ours. Gilbert is chewing on sticks. I'm going to throw another log on the fire and have another cup of coffee. I have to think about going fishing a little more. Right now I'm enjoying the sitting in the morning quiet by the lake.

Up Merritt way, British Columbia

Daniel Kalla

www.danielkalla.com

Dr. Daniel Kalla is a doctors doctor. Third generation in a remarkable medical and surgical family ,he himself has been a highly respected emergency medicine doctor for over a decade at the highly controversial St. Paul's Hospital. St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver's Inner City, serves a multicultural community with a diversity of patients from the celebrated, richest and most educated to the saddest and most severely addicted of street people. Dr. Khalla has seen it all from trauma, to the most frighteningly deadly infections and the severest of mental illness.

In addition to being an inspired physician he's a truly brilliant writer. His first novel, Pandemic, gained him instant literary acclaim as a best seller. Pandemic and his later novel Resistance have both been optioned for movies. They are chalk filled with suspense and intrigue.Rage Therapy , a nail biting read-all-night- by-flashlight book is simply the best of psychological drama. Then there's his fast paced Blood Lies, the perfect medical thriller in the classic Michael Creighton tradition. Cold Plague is a horribly believable twisting futuristic environmental thriller that reads like William Gibson and Dan Brown. Now Daniel Kalla's latest book , Of Flesh and Blood has arrived. It is the only Khalla I have not read. It will be this weekends fare as I've learned already that picking up a Khalla novel can mean I don't sleep until it's finished.

As a physician and psychiatrist I'm thankful to Dr. Khalla for his truly insider portrayal of the real life struggles that both doctors, patients, nurses and the community at large face in what are increasingly desperate medical times. His writing speaks the truth that comes from the trenches and transcends the board rooms. The depth of his messages and breadth of his concern is no doubt coupled to the love of his family. His 2 daughters will inherit this world we now live in and Dr. Khalla's amazing technical skills are doing all that can be done to telling truths we all need to hear before it's too late.

Fortunately Dr. Khalla is not only a doctor and author but now a much sought after speaker. We all suspect that St. Paul's Hospital encouraged Dr. Khalla to make public appearances after an unprecedented rise in emergencies followed every new Khalla book release Today those who wish to meet the author of Of Flesh and Blood no longer have to throw themselves in front of fast moving cars hoping he will be on duty in St. Paul's Emergency . They can hear him speak at the Canadian Author's Association meeting 7 pm May 12,2010 at Howe Street Allied Arts Centre.

 

Canadian Automobile Association

I've been a member of the Canadian Automobile Association for years. It's truly one of the very best investments I've ever made. The annual rate is less than one of the calls I've needed to make would have cost were I to have had to depend on a tow truck alone.

Tonight I had a flat tire. I've a Ford Ranger Truck. I've changed a lot of tires in my day but never on this truck. So I called the British Columbia CAA and car 17 came tonight to North Vancouver off Marine Drive by the Walmart where I'd pulled over to investigate the awful sound I'd initially thought was shifting luggage in the box. It was the end of a long drive into town from Pemberton. Naturally at night. Naturally the inflatable goop that I sometimes successfully inflate my flats with to get me to a garage simply leaked out on the road.

This incredibly pleasant and competent young man arrived in about 20 minutes and had the tire changed in minutes. First I'd not have known where the jack was. Secondly I'd not have known how to release the spare tire. Each of these were tricks or secrets which I suspect are somewhere in the 'manual'. I don't know where the manual is.

Only last year I called CAA and found out that for God knows what reason Ford has put a switch in the front under the passenger glove compartment box that shuts off the vehicles electronics if the truck hits a bump or this switch is bumped. Not something one wants in a 4x4 in the backwoods without knowing about it. Were it not for CAA this wet horrible Vancouver night in the middle of a move with a couple of friends helping me I'd have been quite literally lost.

Thanks to the CAA. These guys rock! Gilbert the dog, Laura and I got home tonight safely thanks again to the British Columbia CAA.

http://www.bcaa.com/

Happy Mother’s Day

My earliest memory of my mother is her holding me. There was safety and warmth and love. When the world was too much and I was too small I could come to her and be with her and talk to her. My brother was older and he and my father were often fixing cars and building things, big and dangerous things. So I would be with my mother. We'd hang out together.

She taught me to cook and garden and sew. I was a cub scout and she helped me get all those achievement badges. I remember her teaching me to pray too. Kneeling with me beside my bed. Showing me how to hold my hands. Teaching me my first prayer. Telling me Jesus loves me. She took me to church. Dad and my brother came along but church was her special place.

I remember when my aunt her sister came to Winnipeg from Toronto the two sisters would laugh and laugh. She'd poke fun at Dad and he'd blush. My grandmother lived with us when we were small. She was gnarled with arthritis and liked to sit in the sun. We'd take trips to the glassed in tropical garden in the winter when the snow lay all over the prairies in great blankets and the sky was clear and blue for miles. Mom loved to garden and in spring would be with her plants. Dad was fixing his machines and repairing the house but Mom was in the garden any time she could get.

She liked bird feeders too and fed the birds which came from all over to eat the grain. That brought the squirrels and the cats and dad and Ron, my brother, had to devise all manner of protective contraptions so the birds could be fed safely without the cats getting them or the squirrels stealing all the seed.

When I was little she took me to school. It was such a frightening place. I was glad my brother had been there before me and in time I could go alone. I made friends and Mom was friends of the mothers of my friends. I liked the birthday parties she held for me. She was the one who remembered all the occasions. Christmas wouldn't have happened without her.

Dad liked to fish and first we camped in tents with mom cooking breakfast on a campstove by the lake. As we grew the tents got bigger and more elaborate. She especially liked the big one with the screened in front where we could all sit at a table. We boys would be out fishing and swimming and chopping wood and she'd been at the table inside the netting reading or cooking. She'd always have errands for me to do so I learned never to tell her I was bored. From a very young age I learned that being down or bored meant I wasn't doing enough for others so she always had chores for us to do and things that needed cleaning. She'd suggest things too. Like sending me out bicycling to see if there were shrimp in the country ditches. When I told her I didn't know what to do on a Saturday she'd often tell me that my friends Garth and Kirkie probably wanted to play with me so I should go over and see if they didn't know what to do either.

We were all afraid together during the nuclear war crisis. She and dad would drink tea and listen to the radio. Later they'd watch tv. When we were older she gave my brother and me a little dash of tea with lots of milk and sugar. She had a sweet tooth and liked to make pies. Her rhubarb pie was the best.

When I was older she taught me to type. She liked that I told stories and wrote long letters to my aunt. When I wanted to join the YMCA she and dad paid for that. There wasn't a lot of money in our home. There certainly wasn't any waste. I wore some of my brothers hand me down clothes but so did my friend Kirk and we got their baseball gloves too. But we got a lot of our own stuff.

I remember she walked my brother and I at night to the Fort Garry Community Club and stood outside when it was 40 below zero. Often there was only the two hockey teams, the coaches and Boris Tyzek's father and my mother cheering. Boris Tyzek went on to be a Rhodes Scholar. Neither of us ended up as hockey players. I think our parents knew hockey for us kids was about a whole lot more. My brother still plays soccer with his kids and they're all grown men.

Dad took us hunting when we got older. Mom was part of the game and fish clubs where we'd all get together for shared feasts of wild game. She'd wait for me to finish target practicing at the rifle range. Those were good times. Like the church dinner's in the basement and the church picnics. We all especially loved the Harvest feast the small towns put on in the country. We'd drive out as a family and us kids would eat all we could of the fresh potatoes, hams and turkeys. It was a good time. The sunsetting in yellows and oranges outside while we were stuffing ourselves and hardly able to walk after all that wholesome food.

I remember the freezer with one year the moose, another the deer, and always a quarter of beef that Dad brought in from the country. Sometimes Mom and Dad would butcher the game right there on the kitchen table. Usually I'd have to pluck the ducks and when I complained Mom would help me finish.

Grandad had a ranch up north and sometimes he and my father's brothers would come to town. The little red brick house we lived in on North Drive in Fort Garry would suddenly be filled with all these big cowboys. My uncle even played country and western songs on guitar late at night. They all liked Hank Williams. My brother and I would go to bed and stay up late listening to the men talk. My mother was everyone's favourite. When we went up north and joined all the wives and the other children with grand ma and all the cows and horses and dogs and chickens Mom was treated like the lady she was.

The women were funny that way. When my Aunt Sally came from Toronto, in Winnipeg the women would all gush about her clothing and when my mother went to Swan River the same thing would happen with the Swan River women and my mothers Winnipeg clothing. Sometimes one of my nieces or cousins would come to stay with us and Mom would go shopping with them for new clothes and they'd all be so happy.

Personally I wasn't that particularly excited about clothes as a kid and hated getting new pyjamas on my birthday or for Christmas. I much preferred toys. Mom always seemed to know what I wanted and told Santa or the tooth fairy.

When I had the troubles at school with the teachers hitting me Mom went to the school and told them it wasn't right. Mom and Dad were already pretty stiff with discipline freely hitting us kids if we got into any trouble. I think she may have even liked it but didn't think other people should have the pleasure of punishing us kids if they weren't paying for our food and clothing. She'd say this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you but it never seemed like that.

I loved coming home from school and eating lunch with her. I especially loved her grilled cheese sandwiches.

Later in high school Dad and I got into a lot of arguments. He was in the RCAF during the war and didn't like my Beetles hair cut or my Bob Dylan records. He liked Gordon Lightfoot but a lot of the time Mom had to get between us. Ron was a better kid and we were fighting too. Mom got me my guitar and Dad tolerated it because his older cousin played guitar. He just didn't like the music of the day. His favourite song he'd sing to mom when we would go on a road trip to either the Pacific or Atlantic Ocean was "give me a home where the buffalo roam."

Mom loved dad. That was a no brainer. When I complained he wasn't home. She'd say. "Your father is working so that you can go to school and have skates and hockey sticks. Don't you ever criticize your father. He's a good man and I love him."

She loved her sons too. Ron and I knew that more than anything else.

Oh well, I remember Mom . I could go on but the tears make typing kind of sketchy.

Happy mother's day to all you moms.

Stinking Thinking and Dry Drunk

There's a peculiar type of thinking that is called 'stinking thinking' in Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12 step programs. It's characterized by self pity, resentments and a weird whining sound.
Locally an AA men's group was started especially to address those who develop this malady. It's called the "Whine and Snivel Group". Teddy bears are situated on all the tables and when men share other men will begin to throw teddy bears at them if they notice that typical 'dry drunk' quality.
It's been characterized as having a psychotic lawyer in one's head which will make a case for one's own special misery and make a case against anyone who gets between them and their nursing their self pity.
In AA the characteristic of being a 'legend in one's mind' was recognised as evidence of close mindedness and isolation and not attending enough face to face AA meetings. When one goes to enough meetings, sometimes to break out of the insaneity of 'dry drunkeness' one needs to do meetings daily or more, or whatever it takes to recognise that others have problems too, that one isn't terminally unique and that no one, especially drunks, have a monopoly on suffering. Specifically drunks learn that they are more likely themselves to have been victimizers than victims and that they need to make amends routinely because they are by nature of their disease very angry people who carry resentments to people, institutions and especially to principles.
Further, the strange malady of alcoholics is that they rarely can see or hear themselves but must see and hear another alcoholic's emotional drama before they can identify, empathize and realize that they too are in that state again.
Stinking thinking can arise any time, no matter how long sober we are, and it's often thought of as a 'craving equivalent' because ultimately 'poor me, poor me, poor me" leads to "pour me another drink". This may reflect the organic scarring of chronic alcohol abuse/ and or drug abuse and one day perhaps a fMRI or PET series would allow us to image a person in the midst of this brain fart.
In the meantime I personally sometimes need a teddy bear to hit me in the head before I get off my ass and do something about my situation, like helping another alcoholic, getting a sponsee, doing another set of steps, speaking to a sponsor, getting a sponsor if one doesn't have one, re reading the Big Book , joining a related 12 step program such as Al Anon, Co Dependents Anonymous, or involving oneself in other spiritual and related exercises that help get oneself out of oneself.
There's a terminal uniqueness about the alcoholic that shows up as either 'one downmanship" or "one upmanship' with the idea of emotional sobriety being 'right sizedness" ie insignificantly significant or significantly insignificant. The Teddy Bear works for me.
Alternatively an 'attitude of gratitude' leads to 'emotional sobriety' because God's grace is all. Again the Teddy Bear works for me.

Hiking Pemberton

Laura and I stayed two idyllic nights at the Pemberton Valley Lodge. I had the idea that I'd wake at the break of dawn and head out black bear hunting. The bed was so comfortable that I slept in. Laura took Gilbert out for his constitutional.

When I finally got up it was only to do some heavy exercise about 5 length of the pool, not olympic size, but formidable first thing in the morning. I settled in for an executive work out in the hot tub whirl pool. After that I picked up a couple of Starbuck Lattes from the machine in the lobby and returned to the room.

Laura was basking in the hot sun on the deck. Blue sky and snow capped mountains with lots of evergreens beyond. Gilbert was throwing his toys off the balcony and thereby lost squeeky toy rooster. Squeaky toy squirrel rapidly replaced rooster but somehow it sounded different..

The Pemberton Valley Lodge is luxurious and it was just really hard to leave the room. Somewhere in the early afternoon I actually convinced Laura that we should visit the Spud Valley Sporting Goods store so I could buy some hiking boots.

With Laura and I both in Hi Tec hiking boots from Spud Valley we headed with Gilbert up to the mountains in my Ford Ranger 4x4 ing up an old logging road. I stopped for some target practice with the Norinco 223 and the Mossberg 30:30 until I was happy with my groupings. Gilbert slept between my feet while I enjoyed shooting then checking my shot with the Bushmill spotting scope. He;s only 9 weeks and well on his way to being a fine hunting dog.

After that we left the truck and began hiking up into the hills. It was a pristine day. Breathing the fresh mountain air was extreme. The sights were incredible. Gilbert's love of the outdoors and joy in prancing was infectious. We had a great day.

On the way down we saw a young black bear , maybe 3 years old. I suppose I could have shot it but instead I thought I'd rather wait for a bigger and older bear. It stared at me for a while and ran away up the hill. A ruffed grouse crossed the road shortly after and strutted like he knew that hunting season for grouse only opened in the fall. Coming up to Pemberton last night we'd seen a herd of deer and big black bear.

Now Laura has just cooked us a magnificent meal of prawn and scallops I caught with my wallet at the Fish Bus. The Pemberton Valley Supermarket provided all the rest of the meal. We're about to have Hagen Daz Ice Cream and watch a dvd in our room. Life doesn't get much better. Gilbert who must have run a hundred times more than we did with his little legs and frequent detours simply crashed when we got in the room. There's been squeaky toy silence for some time now.

http://www.pemberton-valley-lodge.com/?gclid=CPPd6bumxKECFRmjagodtHfAAg

http://spudvalley.com/

http://www.pembertonsupermarket.com/

Spud Valley Sporting Goods, Pemberton

http://spudvalley.com/

Last year I bought some winter hiking boots at Spud Valley Sporting Goods. I brought them up this weekend as they'd proved the best thing for hunting and hiking in heavy terrain. Laura however bought a pair of Hi Tec Hiking Boots that Sheraton had recommended last week. She'd loved them when Gilbert, I and her were up in the backwoods. So back we went to visit with Brad and Sheraton. I told them how I wanted a lighter weight summer hiking boot and sure enough Sheraton had just what I needed.

"They're light weight, great for summer but waterproof and you could use them all year round. Vibram Soles too."said Sheraton. Brad and Sheraton aren't really salesmen. They just do all the stuff that they sell so know what is really good. That's what they stock. And they're country boys so know we all like a deal so their great stuff is always at a great price.

I put them on and wore them out. They're Hi Tec too. Laura and Gilbert and I spent the day hiking with Gilbert climbing in the back country they turned out to be about the best books for hiking I've found.

Brad's wife was at the store. She's petite and beautiful and certainly not catch and release. She's such a trophy that she's lucky Brad didn't mount her on the wall beside one of the fish he's caught. http://pembertonfishfinder.com/

Laura was glad to find a country cammo halter top. Gilbert liked meeting the boys again but really wanted to get on with the hiking. With his 4 paw drive traction he can't understand why we're so interested in the best footwear.