by Robert LaFrance
My friend Flug is the type of guy who thinks that any food obtained illegally tastes better than the legit stuff, any product he buys ‘under the table’ is superior to that purchased on top of that piece of furniture, a Rolex watch bought in China for $250 works better than the real thing, and driving over the speed limit is just the thing to do.
I am here to tell you about the day that he received his ‘comeuppance’.
He had invited me over for supper and promised that trout would be prominent on the menu. He was whispering when he said the word ‘trout’. That wasn’t a good sign, because it always means Flug is up to something. I remember one time in Dundas, Ontario, when he invited me to help him pick mushrooms…but that’s another story. I’ll always remember that jail cell in Hamilton though.
Back to the trout, I went over to his bungalow to find that he had prepared a repast fit for a king—at least Mackenzie King if not King George V. There were those trout, fiddleheads, carrots, creamed potatoes, baked squash, and my favourite kind of pie. Hint: I have over one hundred apple trees.
“Don’t you find that the fish tastes especially good, Bob?” he asked, as innocently as Flug can ask. I allowed as to how the pan-fried treat was delectable, mouth-watering, scrumptious, tasty, etc. This resulted in what possibly could have been the widest grin since Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat smiled at his tuna lunch.
“I caught them this morning down in Bubie Brook,” he said. “Fishing season closed yesterday. I find that catching fish out of season gives them an extra good flavour. Remember that cod we sneaked onto our dory in Arnold’s Cove? Was that not the best cod in the history of the world, and the fisheries officers in every direction?” That was my first and last foray into Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. Enough said.
Just then Flug’s nephew Stephen came in and slammed the screen door. He came into the kitchen where Flug and I were eating at an arborite counter. Stephen was holding a stringer of trout. “Look, Uncle Flug!” he said. “I just got these in Muniac Stream in Lower Kintore. The last day of the season too. I haven’t had many chances to fish this summer. Do you want them?”
Are you familiar with the word ‘crestfallen’? I watched the crest of Flug’s face as it fell almost to the tile floor. “What do you mean, last day of the season?” he moaned. “I thought it closed yesterday? He indicated the calendar on the wall by his cupboard.
Stephen went over to look. “Why, that’s last year’s calendar, Uncle Flug,” he said.
If you ever saw a man crumble into pieces before your eyes, why, it ain’t a pretty sight. Poor old Flug had thought he was doing something deliciously illegal and here it turned out to be sadly within the law. He grabbed his plate and before I could say “I’ll take it!” he had scraped his meal into the dish owned by his dog Fifi, a Great Dane about the size of an outhouse. Good thing Fifi’s dish was made of steel or he would have eaten that too.
“The blasted government!” complained Flug. “They had to go and spoil the best meal I’ve had all summer.”
He’s right; the government sure curbs one’s style. While on the subject of government perfidy, dumbness, or what have you, as I was writing this column I took a short break and sat down in front of the TV to watch a Parliamentary Channel show called ‘The Fifties’. They were talking about the Diefenbunker at Carp, near Ottawa.
Let us all try and picture the period when it was built: here we are in the late 1950s, John Diefenbaker was Prime Minister of Canada, we are in the midst of the Cold War and expecting to be nuked by the USSR any minute, and every schoolchild (I was one) lived in fear all of our waking days, especially after a school practice drill where we learned to dive under a desk in case the Soviets dropped a big one on Loring Air Force Base near Caribou, Maine. I’m sure an a-bomb wouldn’t bother a school desk; they were maple, you know.
The scene is set; what does the government do? They start work on a massive underground project that some called the Diefenbunker. It was a huge 4-storey network of tunnels where the entire top tier of Canada’s lawmakers (but not their kids and spouses) would go in case the USSR sent some missiles our way. All across Canada were government tunnels like this, each of them with all kinds of communications equipment. The question I asked myself was: with whom would they have communicated? Prairie dogs and space aliens?
So, which one was worse, the government of New Brunswick not closing fishing season a day earlier so Flug could enjoy his meal, or Prime Minister Diefenbaker spending billions of dollars so that top government officials could have survived underground for a month?
I won’t bother asking Flug’s opinion. I already know.
-end-
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