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.

On the Road Again 2013 #9

I stayed on Salt Spring just for a day or so. My two travelling companions got a job for the day while I spent much of my time trolling the net looking for information as to where the World Gathering was going to be. It was frustrating reading on Facebook  conflicting information about where the Gathering was going to be and even more frustrating to read the resulting comments. There are some real dangers in information being circulated on social media such as Facebook. The primary danger is that anyone can say any thing and it is virtually impossible to validate that information. On the the BC Rainbow Facebook page there were conflicting reports as to where the Gathering was going to be - some said it was going to be somewhere in the mountains or others said it was on the north west coast of Vancouver Island. Even more disturbing some of the comments were, quite frankly, less than kind.

At one point I was quite convinced that they had found a site in the mountains and I spent some energy trying to find a way there. I was tempted to go back to the mountains in part because there was a sense that having a Gathering in the Kootaneys might draw attention to the fact that the Sinski First Nation, who had been declared extinct and who were clearly not (they still had their own distinct language) needed some help to prevent a mine from being developed on their traditional territory. On the other hand, I had wanted to go to the north west part of the Vancouver Island. As one person said, the camping there would be epic.

Other writers, who perhaps know more than I, have written much about the World Gathering in BC and all of the issues that arose. It was a flawed process from the very beginning in Brazil when people who had never been to BC decided to have a World Gathering in August - a month in which,  for most the past decade, there has been an almost total fire ban. The fact that the world family offered little assistance if any in terms of scouting, financial assistance or even useful advice only confounded the problems. In addition the local scouts who recommended the two sites that were suggested, while there is no doubt that they were sincere, were perhaps a bit too driven by their convictions that they had found the best site. Neither of the scouts did their homework properly -they forgot to check things out and as a consequence both sites became untenable when the local residents made it clear that they did not want the Gathering.

I did not know what I wanted to do. So I went back to Duncan and played with my grand kids. For anyone else who has a complicated issue to think about - I highly recommend playing with ones grandchildren. It really helps to sort out the priorities.

On the Road Again 2013 #8

Normally I don't use the real names of those who drive me. I almost never remember to ask for permission to use their names and so I feel as if I shouldn't.  I suspect that most of my drivers never read what I write and neither do any of their friends and so it perhaps would not matter what I say or if I use their name - but still it feels wrong. However in the case of those who drove me to the coast and later from Port Hardy to Duncan I think I will break my rule about using real names.

Rosie was from Britain and Ignacio was from Basque (northern Spain). They were travelling around the world visiting places that were interesting to them. I was never too sure why they came to Canada but certainly one of the reasons was to attend the World Rainbow Gathering. I also never asked how they had met, but they were definitely a couple. Which is to say there were brief moments of friction surrounded by long, long periods of being a great team.

Rosie was charming. She was interesting to talk to, she was funny, really smart, had a beautiful smile and a way that made it seem that she was completely focused on the speaker. She was also a conservative driver who showed flashes of what I suspect were illusions of having been a rally driver in another life. It is not that she drove too slowly but rather she was highly conscious that their car was old and not in the greatest of shape. I suspect that Rosie was naturally a nurturer and that tendency extended to her car.

Ignacio on the other hand was, perhaps in another life, a race car driver. He pushed the car harder than I might have and he was not nearly as worried about strange clunking noises coming from the transmission or various warning lights coming on when we exceeded 120 KM an hour. I felt very comfortable when either of them driving - it was fun to watch their different driving skills . Ignacio and I had a relationship based on arguing ( is any one who knows me surprised?). When we first met we had this whole shtick routine worked out before we really knew each other where he assumed that colonist such as myself were far inferior to those from Europe. Someone over hearing us assumed that we were really angry at each other. We were just goofing around. We had a number of such "arguments" later in out relationship. We also had some great discussions...... about music and about travelling and about people that we knew  or at least observed. Ignacio had an almost insatiable need for information and was always asking questions. He was a thinking and a forward looking planner. He loved to make plans but never seemed to care if those plans were changed. He also loved music and he never seemed more alive than when he was playing his guitar around a campfire.

They were a fun couple to travel with which was a good thing as we spent a lot of time in that car of theirs. the drive from Winlaw to the West Coast was long and tiring. For much of that time there were 2 of us in the back seat plus some other stuff. The seat was quite low and the leg room was limited. There were hours and hours ( or at least that is how it felt) of being numb in the rear end and stiff in the knees. It felt as if we made a lot of stops - to get some fresh water at a road side spring, to get gas and something to eat, to get coffee at Tim Hortons etc. Every stop seemed to take too long. We were not efficient or in-a-hurry  travellers. It spite of the fact that we wanted to make the last ferry to Salt Spring Island we just couldn't keep the momentum up.

 We took highway #3. It might not have been the best engineered road in the world, nor the smoothest but t was the most direct route and we got to see some interesting scenes along the way. In fact it was a great choice of road until we hit Kelowna at around 5:00 on a Friday night. It took us well over an hour to get get through that city. Really tiring.

We finally got to the Tsawwassen Ferry Terminal. We had had the hope that there was a direct ferry to Salt Spring Island at 9:00. We were wrong. It left at 8:30. We had missed it by 20 minutes or so. Our best options was to take the ferry to Victoria, spend the night at the terminal and then catch the first ferry to Salt Spring the next morning.

It was the second time this summer that I have slept at a ferry terminal. While this time I had the tacit approval of the terminal, the lights in the parking lot were so bright that it was hard to sleep.

We got on the ferry the next morning and we were in Salt Spring in time for breakfast. Another trip that was successful in terms of getting there and back again but still it felt unfulfilling in terms of actually have accomplished very much.