intermission - world finances

I know next to nothing about finances. I usually figure if I have enough money in the bank to pay my bills - I am doing OK. Anything more than that is usually beyond me. But I have made a special attempt to understand what in heaven’s name is happening in Europe. This is the best I can come up with.

If I want to buy something but don’t have the cash on hand – I go to the bank and borrow some money (well actually I don’t do that – but I know lots of folks who do). The bank tells me how much it will cost me to borrow the money, I agree and we all sign a pile of forms. If I lose my job or for some other reason I can’t pay what I owe, then either I can declare bankruptcy or perhaps the bank and I negotiate a different payment scheme.  But what the bank does not do is raise the cost of borrowing the money!

But that is what I think is happening in Greece and Italy. They need to borrow money to run their country. You can’t build a hospital or repair the roads without borrowing money. Because of the economic downturn many countries are having a difficult time raising funds through taxes. The people are earning less and therefore there is less money in the system. But banks, rather than negotiating with the countries to reduce their payments, are raising the interest rates and thereby making it harder for the countries to do business. When, because of the rising interest payments, the countries can no longer manage their economy, then there is a major crisis.

In other words while there is a small financial crisis in terms of the various lending institutions not getting their money (and of course their huge profits) back as soon as they had planned, the crisis is made far worse by those same financial institutions raising the cost of borrowing the money. In other words they are creating the crisis.

Please someone – tell me this is not true!!!

On the Road Again 2011 #38

It was now getting close to 7:00 pm. I had been on the road since 6:00 that morning. I was cold and damp. My shoes still squished when I walked.  I felt as if I needed to eat something. Hitchhiking while shivering appears to burn a lot more calories than hitching in the sun. As I walked though the rest of the rest of Hope (which is a charming little town) I passed a Greek restaurant attached to a little motel. It looked very tempting. It had been grey all day and now it was starting to get dark. Not that darkness that gently comes after a pleasant day, but the darkness that comes  after a miserable day, the kind of darkness that reminds one that fall is coming and that it is time to find a place to burrow in for the winter. I wanted to stop. But in some silly tribute to my supposed toughness I didn’t check into that motel or the next one. I kept on walking and every time I heard a car I turned around and stuck out my thumb. I walked slowly, trying to keep those motels in sight for as long as possible. I knew that I would not be sleeping on the ground tonight. I saw no reason to get too far away from my warm bed.

However a car did stop and offer me a ride to Kamloops. I would have been a fool to turn down the offer so I got in. Kamloops is only a two hour drive from Hope, but psychologically it is more than that. Hope in my mind is still attached to Vancouver. One can, as proven by my last driver, commute back and forth. People in Hope shop in Vancouver for the big items. Kamloops, while it is not my favourite town because it is so spread out, it is hard to walk though and still illegal to hitchhike along the highway, is far enough away from Vancouver that the traveler knows they are well on their way.

My driver was driving his wife’s Subaru after dropping some friends off in Vancouver. He was a miner which for some reason surprised me. Perhaps because I had never been picked up by a miner before I some how assumed that mining only happens in the far north or somewhere equally as remote.  While it is not a job I had ever considered for myself, I could see why it was an attractive option. My driver was happy in his job. It allowed him to live in a beautiful part of the country and offered good prospects for the future as long as the price of gold remained high.  

We spent most of the two hours or so talking about his family, most particularly his mother who had raised her family on what used to be called the Queen Charlotte islands ( but is more rightly now called Haida Quai).  She still lived on the 3,000 acre piece of property, living a life that sounded as if she was homesteading. His dad had been a logger and had been gone for part of each year as he was growing up. His mom had had to do all of the work required to support and maintain the family. There weren’t and it sounded as if there still weren’t a lot of stores to buy food. So she grew her own and then she preserved it for the long winter months. My driver worried about his mom but he was also so proud of her toughness and her resiliency.  He knew that she had raised him well. He had good values. He knew who and what he was and how he wanted to live his life. He had tried the city life for a while but clearly he was happiest in an area where the wilderness was not too far away. I suspect he was also more comfortable working with men who needed to, and could trust each other with their lives. I think he was happy living a life where things were quite black and white. There are times when I envy such people.

My driver, thankfully, was going to the far end of town. That meant that I did not have to walk a long the highway for another hour to get to a good spot to hitch from the next morning. There also happened to be a few motels just a few 100 feet back from where he let me off.

I was done for the day. In spite of the lousy weather and the difficult hitchhiking conditions, I had got three rides and was now well on my way. It was time to eat, to make sure my stuff inside my pack was dry, and to sleep.

on the Road Again 2011 #37

While it is sometimes a bit humiliating or embarrassing to stand on the road while cars are zooming by without stopping or even slowing down, I quickly found out that it was even more uncomfortable to be standing there with cars going by at a crawl and still not stopping. In the former situation I can always rationalize that drivers do not want to stop due to their being in a rush or going too fast to slow down or being in the wrong lane. But this time, because of the slow down on the highway, the cars on the entrance ramp were barely moving. It would have been easy for any of them to wave me over and invite me in. For at least fifteen or twenty minutes nobody did. That could only mean that they had looked me over and decided they didn't like the way I looked. I didn’t blame them, but it was still uncomfortable.  One bright light was a trucker opening his side window, telling me that he wasn’t allowed to offer a ride, but offering me a cigarette for my comfort while I was waiting. I don’t smoke cigarettes but that was a very kind thing to do. It also suggests how miserable I must have looked.

Eventually a driver of an older model car took pity on me and invited me. He immediately started into a rant of how he never picked up hitchhikers because we were not very careful and how he hope that I knew how to be safe when getting out of a car. It took a few minutes for him to get to the point of his story. He had once picked up a hitchhiker who, when he had gotten out of his car, had been hit by a passing vehicle as he crossed the road. I can understand while he was cautious about picking up folks. I assured him that I was very careful about such things and that he needn’t need to worry about me. It was a strange start to what turned out to be a rather pleasant and interesting ride.

My driver was a drywaller. He was a private contractor who worked in Vancouver but who lived in the town of Hope. He made the long commute every day because he wanted his kids to grow up in a small town where it was safe for them to ride their bikes and to walk home from school. Quite a remarkable commitment as it was at least 150 kilometers between the two the two places. The distance could equate into an up to two hour drive each way depending where he was working and the traffic. He seemed very comfortable with his decision. I found it admirable that he would be so committed to giving his kids the kind of life that he thought would benefit them. Although I suppose one could argue that it might be better for them if their dad was around for an additional three hours a day. But it is never easy to make the right decision or to at least find the right compromise. He loved his kids and he was proud of them. Those kids were lucky.

But things had not been easy for him. He had gone bankrupt a year or so ago when the economy crashed and at least one of his customers could not pay him for the work that he had done. He seemed to have lost everything and was now living in a rented house trying to get his credit rating back.

He was also very angry at contractors who hired unskilled East Asians for minimum wage to do drywall. In fact he was initially very angry at the East Asians for working for so little money and for doing what he said was not a very good job. This discussion consumed much of trip. He vented at the unfairness of immigrants underbidding him while I gently tried to nudge him into the opinion that perhaps it was the contractors who were abusing the workers; and that perhaps even the purchasers of the services who allowed people to be paid a wage that was only barely above subsistence level had some responsibility. I think I was successful and by the time we got into Hope, he didn’t seem as angry at the workers. He wasn’t happy. It didn’t matter why someone was undercutting his bids, but perhaps his anger was directed at the right people. I hope so.

Not too far outside of Hope he looked down at the heat gauge, swore and immediately slowed down. The gauge was well into the red zone. Fortunately, if he went slow, the dial stayed just below the danger point. We got off at the first exit that had a gas station, filled up the radiator with water and got on our way. I was glad when the gauge remained in the normal range. However for him the leaking radiator meant another few hours added on to his work day as he would need to find the leak.

He let me out out of his car about halfway through Hope. He was going home to a nice supper, some time with his three kids and then back out to fix the radiator. I was off down the road, still damp cold and more than a bit tired.

On the Road Again 2011 # 36

While I am always glad to get a ride - the first ride I got after spending the day in the rain was especially sweet. It was not a glorious vehicle nor did I get very far, but it was a ride, the driver didn't care if I got the seat wet and the truck had a heater. It felt like heaven to me.

It was a one ton flat bed work truck that looked and sounded as if might be, if not falling apart, well on its way to that status. There was junk in the back and lots of bits and pieces in the front seat. There was room for me and my pack, but not a lot of leg room left by the time I got all of me in and the door shut. My driver was a hairy fellow, with a beard as shaggy as mine. He had on old greasy work clothes and if he had been on the sidewalk somewhere along Hastings Street in Vancouver, well he would not have looked out of place. But then I suspect I would have fitted right in too.

In our short ride together I didn’t quite grasp what he did, I think it was something to do with hauling construction machinery around. He seemed to have it pretty well organized and was happy with his life. Every December he went to Australia for a month or so to celebrate Christmas with a construction crew he had met while they were building a bridge somewhere in the lower mainland of BC. What are the odds of that? But that is what he did every year. It sounded like a great plan to me. 

We didn’t get chance to talk for very long, but I really like him. Not just because he had offered me a drive, but because I like his gentle nature and good humoured way of looking at the world and the little problems than can pop up. Given where he had picked me up and my minor rant about my great spot being ruined by construction and the general advancement of all things new, it is perhaps not surprising that we started off our brief chat talking about roads, road repair and the need for even more lanes. Somehow we then drifted into talking about the state of the Vancouver docks. It was strange in a way that my last conversation with Jesse as we headed into Vancouver had been about road repair and the ever constant need for the more lanes, and here on my first ride out of Vancouver, I was having the same conversation.

I was let off somewhere outside of Greater Vancouver. My driver said that it was a better spot. It didn’t look a lot better, but at least it was safer and I could see a gas station down the road a bit. Now if I needed some water (which seemed highly unlikely) or something to eat, there was somewhere to buy it. It had stopped raining but because I was in a more open spot I was exposed to a nasty little breeze that was rapidly sucking away what little body hear I had left. I took off my rain jacked, pulled my heavy fleece out of my bad and put my jacket back on. The top part of my body was warmer but my thin, quick dry pants that had been so nice a comfortable in the hot days of July were now offering very little protection or warmth.

There was a fair amount of traffic along the entrance ramp and it was going slow. So people had lots of opportunity to see me and make a decision. I suspect however that most of the vehicles were not going very far and so most of the drivers avoided eye contact. I then noticed that cars were starting to do u-turns and head back the way they had come, away from the highway.  The traffic on the highway was slowing down to a slow crawl with all lanes blocked. It looked as if there was an accident. What this meant for me was that what had looked like a promising spot with a reasonable flow of traffic had become a parking lot.

However with traffic going by me at a crawl, an older car did stop and wave me over. It looked like I was going to get out of the city.

intermission - Shark Fin Soup

As someone who has not eaten red or white meat for well over 35 years and has not eaten fish for close to ten - I am always glad when I hear about people deciding not to kill animals for food.

I am just not too sure about the right of Toronto City councilors to make a municipal law banning shark fin soup. Really people - you are OK with people living on the streets in winter or when it is mind numbing hot - facing death by freezing or heat exposure; it is OK when children do not have enough to eat and it appears to be just fine to cut services when people need those supports just to stay alive and perhaps to stay sane, but it is not OK to kill a shark. 

I have to wonder how many of the councilors  who voted for that bill actually have eaten shark fin soup. Are they themselves giving anything up? Or was it just an easy vote that made them look like they cared about the world?  I also wonder how many of those same people have eaten veal, or perhaps beef or chicken or pork from a factory farm? How do they get to decide what is moral behavior or not? The word  “sanctimonious” pops into my mind.

 Perhaps one day someone will ban the eating of all animal matter (including sharks) for the simple reason that there is no "humane" method of killing an animal. But until then, can you please get off your collective high horses and deal with what is happening to people outside your office doors.

On the Road Again 2011 #35

There are a number of ways of getting from Vancouver Island to the interior of BC and further east. I know of three ways to do it but I am sure there are more. None of them are particularly smooth or easy. All require the use of public transit in some fashion or another. The first route is to go to Victoria, take a long bus ride to the ferry terminal, catch the ferry to Vancouver, and then take a couple of buses and the Sky Train and then another bus to get to start my off point just outside of Langley. To the best of my knowledge this spot is the only place where the city buses cross over Highway #1.  It is a great spot with good sightlines and lots of room for cars to pull over. The traffic volume is reasonable and consistent. At the very least, I usually can get a ride from this spot to Chilliwack which gets me well out of Vancouver. Unfortunately  it can take four or five hours to travel this route.

The second way is to take the ferry from Nanaimo (which gets one to a different ferry terminal on the mainland), and then take fewer buses etc. to get to the same great spot to hitch out of Vancouver. The advantage of this route is that one can be on the road with your thumb out and hour or so earlier that the former method. Both ways require staying in a hostel overnight and getting up really early in the morning.

The third method is to leave from Nanaimo take the ferry to Horseshoe Bay and then the Greyhound bus to Whistler. This route works well except one can't get to Whistler until after 12:00 and then one either needs to get through town - which means it is quite late to start travelling or stay in a hostel in Whistler so that you can get an early start the next day. The method is the most expensive option and feels as if it is the slowest to get going.

I chose this time to take the second option. It worked out great. I took a taxi to the terminal - I could have walked the 40 minute walk, but it was too early, it was still dark and it was starting to rain. The ferry ride was fine if a bit stormy, the bus connections were perfect and I was at my spot by 11:00. Except my spot was not there! It was totally destroyed. They were creating a new on-ramp and it was absolute chaos. Half the cars were going the new way and the other half were going the old way. It was muddy, there were lots of construction vehicles buzzing around and it was raining. It was raining hard. I had my pack covered with its special bright orange poncho type thing and I had on my even brighter orange rain jacket. But I got wet. The rain was dripping off my Australian drizabone hat in a constant stream; my quick dry pants had no chance to dry quickly or any other way and every step I took squeezed water out of my socks. I walked to a number of spots, dodging cars and back hoes and dump trucks. None of them felt safe for me or the drivers. It was depressing.

I have been lucky in my travels. I have been caught in a number a downpours and storms over the past year. But either I have been able to find a place to get shelter or the rain has not lasted very long. This time there was to where to hide from the constant day long rain. It may of stopped or at least slowed down for the occasional minute, but if so I don’t remember. I was so wet that the money in my wallet was soaking wet. I don't think I have ever been so wet in my life except when swimming and even then I don't think I had been any wetter than I was that afternoon. It was not just that I minded being wet, but I knew that the wetter I looked, the less likely it would be that I would get a ride. No one wants a wet passenger in their car. I could not blame them.

On the Road Again 2011 #34

I had, perhaps somewhat foolishly, planned to go to Salt Spring the next day (the wedding was on a Friday). I wanted to have my daughter and two grandkids see the island that I have called my home for these past few summers, to experience the Saturday Market and most importantly to meet Sally. My daughter has heard so much about Sally and Sally has heard so much about my daughter and the kids. I wanted all of my family to get to know each other, and to see why they were all so important to me. It was of course a silly wish. Not only did the hall need to get cleaned up before noon but I was just too tired to think about doing any travelling or visiting. It would have been nice but I just did not have the energy.

None-the-less it was a nice day with the families working together to do the cleanup at the hall. In the afternoon after I returned the rental car my brother and sister-in-law dropped by for a visit and brought some food. It was a nice relaxing day - exactly what we all needed. Later the whole family had supper together and the happy couple opened their presents. It was a nice gentle end to the wedding.

However there was a sense of sadness with me all that day. I knew I needed to be heading east. I had been gone for over nine weeks. I needed to get back to the apartment and get ready for school, the fall and my weaving.  It was time to go home. But I did not want to go. It would have taken very little to convince me to stay.  Every year it feels as if it gets harder and harder to pack my stuff and leave.

On Sunday I did a laundry, packed up my unneeded clothes and took the box down to the Greyhound Station. Greyhound appears to be cheaper than Canada Post in terms of shipping stuff back and forth. They seem to be just as reliable and certainly it is not any slower. I packed and repacked my pack (with the help of my grandson who delights in playing with my stuff, although he does occasionally forget where he has put it) trying to make it as small and as functional as possible. For awhile it looked as if I was going to get a ride to Kamloops but that didn’t work out, so late Sunday afternoon I got my son to drive me to Nanaimo where I had booked a room at the hostel. I needed to be in Nanaimo so I could catch the ferry out first thing Monday morning.

My son and I do not say goodbye easily or well. I am not too sure why. We have lots of time to talk and we do talk about all kinds of things. We even have talked about that fact that we don’t say goodbye very well. But we just don’t seem to get any better at saying it. Maybe it is the distance or the length of time between visits, or maybe it is because we are both men and are therefore not really in touch with our feelings. But I think it might be because we are in touch with our feeling. We know that we will miss each other and there is not a damn thing that we can do about it. So all there was was a quick hug outside of the hostel and then I was on my own. Once again I was alone, the single traveler ready the next day to start looking for a ride. To once again “hit the road” with that inherent feeling of excitement, anticipation and apprehension.