by Robert LaFrance
Those who love smoked salmon know just how important that material—smoke I mean, not salmon—is to our very survival as a nation, indeed to the survival of the free world while the stock markets are crashing down around us.
Don’t be alarmed by this, but the other day I got to thinking, and this time it wasn’t about philosophy, garden tools, or open-pit mining—deep subjects like that—but about smoke and how it’s something we don’t think about much, but something that is housed in the very vitals of our persona or personas.
The main thing to make sure of is that it doesn’t occur in the wrong place, such as on one’s living room rug, but that it stays put where it’s supposed to be and helps instead of hinders.
Now where was I going with this? I remember now; Saturday afternoon I happened to be napping to rest up for a full night’s sleep after supper (but my wife kept waking me up by taking the lawn mower past my window), when I got up to see a big smoke across the river. It looked as if half of that area were aflame. As a conscientious reporter, I phoned over to see what was going on and found that it was merely ‘an old barn’, which I took to mean it had been torched to get rid of it.
Not half an hour later my wife came inside and said the lawn mower was smoking. Again she woke me up, though she knew I needed my rest for sleeping. I trundled downstairs and looked out onto the lawn to see that the lawn mower wasn’t smoking at all—it was smoked. Apparently a squirrel had shorted out a sparkplug wire and the whole thing exploded. Curious that would happen while SHE was using the lawn mower.
If you have lived in the Sudbury, Ontario area—Copper Cliff and over that way—you may remember the pollution (smoke) that the nickel plant there used to lay down until INCO built a 1200-foot smokestack to take the offending material away. I was living in Ontario at the time and was quite amused and bemused that the company’s way to deal with all that pollution was to merely put it farther up into the air so that it spread over a wider area and made fewer Sudburyites cough, retch and be mad at them. Toronto trucks its garbage up to the Timmins area, does it not? Maybe the same genius took care of the Sudbury smoke problem.
“Who hasn’t heard of the song “Smoke gets in Your Eyes”? Well, my great-nephew Clyde, but that doesn’t count. He’s a little vague on which continent Canada is located, although he’s quite certain it’s not Antarctica. The point is that the word ‘smoke’ is there again, as in the tune ‘Smoke on the Water’, and of course there are many more, less famous tunes.
London, England, although it started dealing with its massive pollution problems in the 1950s, is still called ‘The Smoke’ by people who don’t live there. I was recently listening to a soccer game from Sunderland, which is near Newcastle, and heard the announcer say that Sunderland’s next game was ‘down in the smoke’ against Chelsea FC. Now, anybody who knows anything about Newcastle and area and the Industrial Revolution, knows that anybody from there shouldn’t be calling somewhere else ‘the smoke’. Newcastle, like Birmingham, Manchester and other cities, was an asthma sufferer’s nightmare until governments cleaned them up. (Translation: The factories all closed.)
Wine conna-sewers refer to some wines as ‘smoky’ and apparently that’s a good thing; there a mountain range called The Smokies in the southeastern U.S.; although ‘having a smoke’ is less common today, it is still done.
Which reminds me: Last February I motored to ‘the capital’ of our province (Note to Clyde: that’s Fredericton) on business and when I emerged from the main post office there I could see a whole whack of people standing out by the side entrance of the building. There was a huge cloud of smoke over their heads. At first I thought of grabbing the fire extinguisher from the van, but then, when a quick gust cleared out some smoke, I could see that the people were apparently workers from the building as they stood in the bracing air to grab a hit of nicotine.
This was February, as I said, and it was c-c-cold, but those stalwart souls were out there for their smokes. One guy wasn’t smoking with his confreres and I asked him why. “Oh, I have a patch,” he said, pulling up a sleeve. “I’m trying to quit, but I’m out here supporting my friends who aren’t.”
-end-
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