On the Road Again 201# 10

After being home for a couple days I read on Facebook that the produce from the Rainbow Garden was going up to Raft Cove on the north west coast of Vancouver Island. I had seen the garden when I attended the Vision Council a few weeks earlier. It was truly a magnificent garden. The brother who had created ( created is the only word I can think of to describe the work involved in the garden) had on his own initiative with almost no help from anyone produced enough food to feed 100 people for at least a couple of weeks. If he was going to Raft Cove, so was I. It seemed to me that if the food and all of the kitchen equipment was heading north, then that was where I wanted to be.

I took the Greyhound bus to north of Campbell River in part because I have always had some difficulty hitching through and around Nanaimo. In spite of the fact the BC has a reputation of being an easy province to hitch in, there are a few spots where that is not true. Nanaimo is one of those spots. The by-pass around the city is a divided highway where the the speed limit is 110 km an hour. There are signs posted stating that "picking up  hitchhikers is illegal". It just seemed to make sense to use Greyhound to get a bit further north.

It was a slow but pleasant ride taking the coastal highway. The bus was fairly crowded but once again my appearance scared of anyone who might think of seating beside me. Of course the down side of this is that I had no one to talk to on the trip. Of course few people talk to each other on a inter-city bus so I suspect that even if I was clean-shaven I would have had no one to talk to.

Buses are such passive means of transportation.... they are boring - the seats are made for shorter people than I who have a lot more padding on their rear ends then I would ever normally want, the conversation is less then stimulating and I find it difficult to read on a bus. I can never achieve that state of relaxation that I find so easily on a train. I was glad to get off of that bus.

I had to wait an hour or so before my first and only ride of the day (a pick up truck) stopped and picked me up. Bob lived down island a bit and was off to Port Hardy to put in a ten day shift hauling logs off of the clear cuts. While I have had lots of drives from people who worked in the periphery of clear cutting (e.g. tree planting) I have never been offered a ride by someone who was so directly involved. It was sort of like being picked up by a transport truck hauling pigs to the abattoir. That driver might not actually slaughter the animals but he surely has some responsibility. Similarly the log truck driver neither cuts down the trees nor does he use the lumber but he is part of the process. On the other hand I use all kinds of paper product and lumber - so therefore I am part of the process too and share some of the responsibility.

Once we had that part of the conversation out of the way, we spent most of the time talking about our kids. Or rather Bob talked about his kids. He and his wife had been foster parents for the past 20 plus years and he said that they had fostered over a 100 kids. Pretty impressive by any one's standards. When one gets to know more than one side of an individual it is virtually  impossible to see them just as being all bad. Bob was just a guy doing a job so that he could support his family. I may wish that there were no tree being clear cut, but just because he delivered those tree somewhere did not make him a bad person. In fact I think Bob was a really nice guy who contributed to his community in a meaningful way.

As we got closer to Port Hardy, Bob asked me where I was going to sleep. When I said - by the side of the road, he suggested that I sleep at the trailer park when he stayed while working. I thought he was offering me a spot beside his trailer so I said yes. It turned out that he was suggesting that I rent a campsite. However it was a nice spot and quite close to where I would need to turn off so I paid my $25 and put up my bivy sack. It was a quiet spot with some nature trails and really clean bathrooms.  I was glad that I had decided to stay the night.