I'll never again believe Facebook (April 30)

Some observations about the recent near-flood

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            As I write, its looks as if Perth-Andover has escaped The Flood of 2014 which looked pretty certain for a while, as if 2012 and 2014 were destined to become bookends in the village’s history.

            I can only think of the word ‘miracle’ (and possibly, so far, the phrase ‘dodged a bullet’) when trying to come up with a name for this year’s event that turned out not to be as much an EVENT as it had been almost 25 months earlier. The thickness of the St. John River ice, the huge snow pack from those 3,823 winter storms – it could have been a disaster for sure, but there must have been an intervention from Somewhere, if you know what I mean.

            Nevertheless, there was a great deal of inconvenience to area residents and a few cases of “Who woulda ever thunk it?”.

            The Beech Glen Road (Jawbone Mountain) washouts were quite bizarre. One story I heard – and I refuse to actually do research on this – is that a garbage barrel found its way to one end of a culvert and then Murphy’s Law took over. Because the rushing water couldn’t get through the culvert, it chose the next easier route – across the road. Of course it took out the road, and, as if preparing for a flood wasn’t enough, D.O.T. had to haul dozens of loads of gravel to fix up that road so vehicles could get by.

            This is the odd part: after the road was fixed up enough for travel, they left the ‘road closed’ signs up for many days. True, the road wasn’t pretty, but it was certainly driveable. Whoever left up those signs didn’t seem to realize that people from Lower Kintore and Kincardine – even Muniac if their road was closed – had to travel via Kintore Road to the Tobique River and Highway 109 just to get to Perth. From my house this journey was 35 km, although going over an admittedly rough Beech Glen Road was only about 14 km.

            One of the first roads to be covered with a foot or so of water was, as always,  Highway 105 north of Perth, where the late Abner Paul used to have his Tobique Wigwam shop, and the second was Muniac Road. After the 2012 flood I spoke to Provincial Cabinet Minister Bruce Fitch and explained carefully that, if Muniac Road were closed and the P-A bridge were closed, the only way to get downriver – including White Elephant Hospital – was to drive via Arthurette and Grand Falls, unless Brooks Bridge happened to be open – not likely.

            This time Muniac Road was closed yet again, because no road-raising had been done. Possibly the money spent for government officials to attend Nelson Mandela’s funeral was the money destined for Muniac.

            One of the most important lessons we should all have learned this time though, was that Facebook is not to be trusted.

            We should all have learned this by now, but I for one evidently needed a jackhammer to pound it in. I don’t know how many times I read that Perth-Andover bridge had been closed (It hadn’t been closed at all), but I am certain it was more than five. After the flood danger seemed past, I read that Highway 105 below Perth was now open. Even though ‘road closed’ signs were still up on that road, just below Kilburn, I assumed it was a Beech Glen Road deal and ignored them.

            A kilometre or so below the P-A lagoon, the road was blocked D.O.T. vehicles and a large load of gravel. They politely told me that there was still water over the road at the lagoon and that I was an idiot for believing Facebook. No, they didn’t say that last part out loud, but I did. So I had to drive back down to Muniac Road, over to Kintore Road, and then pretend that Beech Glen Road was open in spite of the ‘road closed’ signs. Good thing; I don’t think the Toyota could have taken another trip across those Upper Kintore ‘yes-ma’ams’. At one spot I drove right over the top of an Austin Mini.

            All in all – except for that business of leaving ‘road closed’ signs on Beech Glen Road that was clearly driveable, things went quite well. All the emergency workers were ready for action. Unlike 2012, EMO seemed to be watching, and Beechwood Dam operators were drinking coffee instead of warm milk this time. However, there is the little matter of raising vital roads and having up-to-date phone lines (with live persons  answering) and a website to tell people what roads are open. I, and most people I know,  are fed up with getting voicemail when we want to find out whether this road or that road is now open. Facebook ain’t it. We’ll talk more later.

                                                    -END- 

The story of a bull - no politics involved (April 23)

I’m not a party animal myself

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            The April 12 Liberal riding nomination convention held in Perth-Andover told me two things: (1) Many persons want the present government out, and (2) If the present government were tossed out in September, many persons would be happy.

            “Bob, you said the same thing twice,” said my former friend Flug, reading over my shoulder as I typed. A quick scan of the page confirmed that he was, surprisingly, correct.

            Not a supporter of any organized political party (I’ve always been a Lib-Tory-NDP guy) I was really quite surprised at the number of delegates who showed up to vote for the man who would be the Liberal candidate in September’s provincial election. A total of 875 were eligible to vote, and this was just a RIDING nomination convention, not a provincial one. Carleton-Victoria is a new riding created after one of those endless committee studies determined that the present riding of Victoria-Tobique, roughly the size of Saskatchewan, was not quite big enough.

            I was at the event, not as one of the 875, but as a member of Canada’s media. Apparently I am a ‘medium’ (the singular of ‘media’) although the last time I bought a pair of trousers I was clearly not.

            The point in bringing up this subject is that I rather enjoy attending those political conventions. I see and chat with people I haven’t seen in months and years, and find out what’s going on in the suburbs of Kincardine – Perth-Andover, etc.

                                             *****************************

            “A writer is working even when he’s staring out the window.” – Burton Rascoe. Thanks Burt, old pal. I might add: “Or enjoying himself at a political convention.”

                                             *****************************

            As a history nut – often so called without the word ‘history’ – I enjoy hearing  about the old days (not to be confused with The Good Old Days of imagination). My 95-year-old mother-in-law, Kathleen Morton, and I were talking recently about the early 1940s, and rationing at home during the war.

            “I was living right here,” she said, referring to the house she still occupies near our estate. I asked her what had been rationed during the war. “Oh, a lot of things,” she gave tires as an example: “But we didn’t have a car anyway, so it didn’t matter.

            “We had horses and we used them,” she explained, “for going to the store (in nearby Kilburn) and so on. Wherever you wanted to go, you took the horse. We had two horses at a time. We always had pigs. We ‘did’ one of them in the late fall. We’d cut it up and put it outside to freeze. After it froze we’d put it in seed bags and bury it in the oat-bin so it wouldn’t thaw out. They were strong bags, cotton stuff. Stronger than flour bags.”

            She and her late husband (and my father-in-law) Lloyd would take their eggs, butter and other produce to the store and trade it in for groceries – tea, salt, sugar and other items. “People bought some butter here and I used to pack jars of butter in the fall for people. I always packed butter for Charlie Willett (Perth businessman). He would get 20 or 30 pounds of it. Butter was rationed up there.

            “We grew wheat and had our own flour though,” she said, “and made maple syrup, just what we’d use ourselves. We grew oats and buckwheat, wheat, potatoes. We took the wheat to River de Chute to have it ground,” she explained. “We usually did that in the winter time, crossing (the St. John River) on the ice.”

            As to spices, they were not rationed, but most rural New Brunswick families in the 1940s didn’t use a lot of them. “Meat was rationed. We had a lot of ration cards ourselves. There were stamps in them; we’d use them every once in a while. When you bought something you had to have your ration book stamped or you didn’t get it. When you wanted a new tube of toothpaste, you had to take the empty tube or you didn’t get a new tube from the drugstore. Paper was not officially rationed, but we didn’t have much,” my mother-in-law said.

            Referring back to the late 1800s, after her ancestors had come from Scotland in 1873 and had worked long hours to clear the heavily wooded ground, she talked about the  keeping of livestock: “They didn’t have any fences. The little kids had to herd them, keep them from going where they were not supposed to go, send them back again. They had a bull that they put a harness on and used him as a horse. He (the bull) decided one time he didn’t want to do that and chased Dad (John Ellis 1869-1935) up on a rockpile. He knocked him down and trampled on his legs which were quite a mess for a long time. Dad was eight or nine years old maybe. Mr. Davidson was going along on the road and saw him, then scared the bull away or he would have killed Dad.

            “They didn’t harness that bull any more.”

                                                      -end-

The 'unsinkable' Titanic sank (April 16)

Can’t anybody here play this game?

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            A sentence that has stuck in my alleged mind over the years was uttered by Casey Stengel, manager of the almost totally incompetent New York Mets baseball team during that squad’s first season in 1962. The word ‘hapless’ didn’t even begin to describe them.

            “Can’t anybody here play this game?” He asked that question of sportswriter Jimmy Breslin as the Mets were about to complete their first season in existence with a record of 40 wins and 120 losses.

            The reason this train of thought passed my level crossing this morning was that I was thinking about all the incompetence I see around me, notably in government of course.

The NB liquor corporation saw its beer sales’ profits drop last fiscal year, and Canada Post ditto. What were the solutions arrived at by the geniuses who run those companies?

            Why, you raise the price of the product of course. Any MBA (Master of Business Administration) can tell you that. Well, maybe not. An MBA might say: “Hey, dude, if your product is not selling, lower the price and lay some advertising in there.”

            As to the 33% raise in postage stamp prices, it seems that Canada Post has just discovered that a lot of people are using email now. Quite a shock to the Tyrannosaurus Rex types in Ottawa. “What’s that? He-mail?”

            In the same vein, how many years have we heard that eating saturated fats is just about the same thing as putting cyanide into the old body? Now we hear that saturated fats aren’t so bad after all.

            How many thousand hours of TV programming, magazine advertising, and pronouncements by food scientists have been devoted over the years to warning us not to eat saturated fats? I added it all up: the answer is 27.3 zillion.

            Same goes with eating eggs. For how many decades did we hear that eating eggs, especially the yolks, was pretty much the same thing as shooting oneself right between the eyes with a .12 gauge? Then a year or two ago somebody must have looked at the original calculations and said: “Ooops! I guess eggs aren’t all that bad after all. Ever since then we’ve been gradually hearing that, rather than being cyanide, eggs aren’t so bad after all.

            Another thing is light bulbs. We’re told that incandescent light bulbs are the devil, so we all have to use those curly fluorescent ones. They last 900 years, we are told, and they use far less energy.

            Male cow manure, on both counts! We started using the fluorescent ones a couple of years ago and I am sure we have had to replace at least four or five, and, although a 13-watt bulbs is supposed to give off the same light as a 60-watt incandescent one, it doesn’t. Anyone who says it does is a ring-tailed earlobe-lipped aardvark with tooth decay. We replaced 60-watt bulbs with what they said were 23-watt ones, and they STILL aren’t as bright. I had to duct-tape trouble-lights to the ceilings all over the house, just so I can muddle around with hitting hall trees and doors with my face.

            Remember how Al Capone and his colleagues came to riches in the U.S. back in the 1930s? It was because the federal government had passed a law called Prohibition and made all the bootleggers rich. Because our government has now banned the sale of incandescent bulbs, we are seeing bulb bootleggers emerging as the new business elite. Just yesterday a tractor-trailer stopped here and the driver offered to sell me 1000 incandescent light bulbs for a mere $800. Of course I jumped at the chance.

            People ask me why I’m so cynical, why I rarely believe anything unless three Rhodes Scholars and my Aunt Maud vouch for it. We have governments that seem to act only when they are forced to, scientists (the ones that Harper hasn’t fired) who tell us weird things about the food we eat, and Global Warming causing all sorts of severe weather because nobody believes the obvious truth – that the climate is changing faster than we can believe. Maybe if they were more careful about warning us about saturated fats, we’d be more likely to believe there is such as thing as climate change.

            My final subject today is television news coverage. For weeks leading up to the Quebec election, we heard a lot on that subject. Then, after the separatists got turfed out, punished for not noticing that most Quebeckers want to continue ‘accepting’ far more than their share out federal tax dollars, the subject all but disappeared from the news.

            Contrast that with the continuing over-coverage (five weeks later) of the plane missing in the Indian Ocean. It must be the Titanic Syndrome, still active 102 years after that ‘unsinkable’ ship sank.

                                                          -end-

Insurance company monopoly (April 9)

Weather, Facebook, Insurance and Murray Paris

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            With all the snowstorms and other bad weather we’ve had since about last August (it seems), this column should probably be discussing the weather, so I’ll be talking about everything but.

            The lost flight 370, probably in the Indian Ocean: While we all care about the 239 people on board, it’s not helping them that an hour of every television news day is devoted to the search for the plane. Each headline notes that the search area has either been expanded or moved or both. CBC-TV sent a reporter – and crew of course – to Perth, Australia to report each day that nothing has been found. Surely they could have phoned BBC or CBS or CNN and left it at that, spent the money on covering events in Canada. I am hoping that the plane will be found intact on the ground somewhere, with the passengers partying, but it doesn’t help them that 3,922 reporters are on TV and radio each day to say they’ve found nothing.

            I miss my late cousin and friend Murray Paris, who was a good guy and an entertaining singer. Last week I was at an event where I had to line up for a supper plate and quickly remembered Murray, who was over 90 when he died last year. At potluck suppers and suchlike, he and I always competed to see who would get his food first. Overall, it probably was about even. At the supper last week I turned around to see where Murray was, and my wife sneaked by on my left. I felt like kicking her, but didn’t dare to (hint: rolling pin); it reminded me of one of Murray’s favourite jokes. He couldn’t kick very well with one foot after he had it half cut off in a trucking accident. After that he used to say: “I’m the only man in Tilley with a foot and a half.”

            If you don’t connect to Facebook occasionally you don’t know what you’re missing. In some cases you do know what you’re missing and don’t miss it, but in others you are not hearing much information. I’m not referring to hearing about Shirley or Dawn washing their hair before they go to bed, but to real information. For example, Joe Gee of Carlingford posted a photo of the ‘weed’ called Lamb’s Quarter and noted that, cooked, it was a dandy and nutritious green. “The added bonus is the GMO-free (not genetically modified) vegetable green you're left with. Just wash them, throw them in a pot and steam them for a few minutes or sauté them with a little olive oil and garlic. A lot less work and something to enjoy for dinner!” I must say, Joe is a lot smarter than he looks.

            It’s garden seed time, and also time for another crop that just keeps on coming. I’m talking about emails from gardening companies. A couple of years ago I emailed several seed companies to receive their paper and online catalogues, but they weren’t satisfied at that level of service. On the average, I get one email letter a week from each company, which totals about 35 emails a month. Each of these companies’ letters has a line that says something like this: “If you want to stop receiving these email letters, just go to www.gardennuisance.com to let us know.” Of course I wrote to each of them and called the phone numbers in their catalogues, but that just seemed to encourage them. Some even started telemarketing phonecalls after our personal contact. Did I need any more proof that computers now run all our lives? But don’t get me started on insurance companies.

            Okay, now you’ve got me started on insurance companies. Why is it that an insurance company is the only entity that can decide on how much insurance you must have on your house? My friend Flug, figuring that $2000 a year was too much of an annual insurance payment on his bungalow, called his company to get it reduced – in other words to insure his house for less. He was told that his house was insured for $180,000 and that was that because of the building’s area. He said that $90,000 was plenty – more than enough to rebuild – and would like to halve his payments. Not a chance, said the individual on the phone; it goes by area, period. Does the term ‘price-fixing’ come to mind? Since all the companies said the same thing, does the term ‘collusion’ also seem to fit?

                                                       -end-

The 1987 P-A flood and Aunt Ella (April 2)

A date that tends to chill the blood

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            Each of us has one or more dates that are, to tell it like it is, scary.

            Of course not everyone has the same scary and blood-chilling dates. Many Americans cringe when September 11 approaches, or December 7, and people from all over the world try to avoid doing anything on Friday the 13^th.

            One of the dates that really frost my psyche is April 2. That was the date in 1987 when the Perth-Andover flood and ice jam took out the railroad bridge and nearly drowned several people. I was uptown when it became clear there was a slight problem, so my first wife and I picked up my Aunt Ella, 82, who lived in an apartment in Perth, and brought her down to our estate high on a hill in Kincardine. If it flooded here the waters would have been high indeed.

            (NOTE: The same wife is still here, but I like to keep her on her toes by referring to her as my ‘first wife’.)

            That 1987 flood, little did we know at the time, was not a 100-year event. There had been a flood in 1976, but a lot of people didn’t count that. However, when you look out your window and see a railway bridge tumbling into the St. John River, you know it’s serious.

            On that subject, just as a side note, I have heard many times that the reason NB Power doesn’t want to take any responsibility for any flooding is that CP Rail still has an open lawsuit against them because of that lost bridge and others, and the minute NB Power admits any responsibility, that’s BINGO for CP Rail! I don’t know if any of that is true, but I do know that companies and governments often seem willing to spend $50 million (in lawyers’’ and tame consultants’ fees) to avoid paying out $10 million. Sort of a guy thing perhaps.

            Back to the fun of having Aunt Ella staying with us: we had one child at the time, and my wife was almost ready to go the hospital and have our second daughter. (She was born May 6.) Aunt Ella explained to us that we were doing everything all wrong, and kept explaining. Finally I told her that there was good news about her apartment; she could move back if only we could find a small boat to get her there. Once I pointedly explained this to her, she settled down to watching Sesame Street with our daughter Kate.

            Three years earlier, before we had moved here, we had had a house in Birch Ridge. Since we didn’t have any children at the time we sometimes actually got to spend a weekend away from home and asked Aunt Ella to stay at our house and look after my dog Belvedere. And the house of course.

            One weekend, just after we bought this house in Kincardine and planned to move during the next week, we went to Fredericton. When we returned Sunday evening, Aunt Ella, being helpful, had packed ALL of our dishes and dry goods into boxes. The main problem with that was that we wouldn’t be moving for five days. We thanked her profusely for looking after the house and Belvedere and also for doing our packing for us. “And we didn’t even ask!” we marvelled.

            It was an interesting five days. If we wanted a bowl of Sugar Pop Honey Nut Flakey Bomb breakfast cereal, we had to (1) find the box, (2) find a spoon, (3) find a bowl, (4) find a place to sit and eat since every flat surface was covered with boxes, and (5) find the spiritual and psychological strength to carry on when our house was jammed with boxes, and (I should add) unlabelled boxes since she evidently didn’t have a pen to indicate their contents. Example: we found many cans of this and that, but couldn’t find a can opener.

            As in the April 1987 flood, we did prevail and got all our stuff moved to this estate on Manse Hill, Kincardine. I had a 1976 Chev half-ton at the time and my brother Lawrence borrowed a halfton; we only had to make two trips each. There was a slight hitch; it was raining – hard. Oh yes, and another slight hitch; I had a flat tire in Lower Kintore. My wife and I had that changed in no time, if ‘no time’ can be defined as an hour. You see, there was another slight hitch; the spare was underneath everything on the back of that truck.

            Although Aunt Ella is gone now, we remember her fondly; she was only trying to help. We are hoping that in 2014 nobody else’s Aunt Ella has to be evacuated and that the ice goes out without a jam and flood. 

                                                       -end-

The fantasy world of Herbert B (March 26)

Some people really do live in a fantasy world

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            Back in the day, as they say, there were two television programs that affected some people’s cranial faculties. One of them was called ‘Fantasy Island’ and the other was called ‘Marcus Welby, MD’.

            Both of these shows were fantasies, each in its own way. ‘Fantasy Island’, starring Ricardo Montalban and Hervé Villechaize, was the story of an island where a person’s every fantasy could be satisfied. A seaplane would whisk people there and Hervé would hear it and report to Ricardo: “The plane, boss, the plane!”

            That was one of the fantasies. Now we come to another. Marcus Welby was a physician who made house calls.

            This was in the 1970s, when house calls had been a part of history for some time, for obvious reasons. Now that several people among us have cars, it’s much easier and quicker for sick people to be taken to the doctor rather than the other way around.

            But that was only part of the second fantasy.

            One day in the late 1970s I was down visiting the late Herb Brayall, who lived near me in the former Block X schoolhouse in Tilley. He was complaining that he had been feeling poorly for several weeks. He “couldn’t get the lay of the ground”, he said. He was “off his feed”.

            I noticed he had a small suitcase on a chair; in it some pants and shirts were folded neatly. Herb was always a clean and neat housekeeper. “Where are you heading?” I asked.

            “I’m going to take the train to Los Angeles,” he said. “I saw on the television that Marcus Welby, MD, helps people and finds what’s wrong with them. I am going to go to Los Angeles and see him. I’ll get a train ticket in Presque Isle and a couple of days later I’ll be in his office. These doctors around here don’t know a thing.”

            He was referring to a certain surgeon who, three months before, had operated on Herb for a hernia he had picked up from lifting and tugging on stovewood cut on his own land near Block X. The surgeon had told Herb (I was there at the time) that he was “not to lift an axe or chainsaw for five or six weeks”.

            Three days later I was walking by Herb’s place and heard a chainsaw that was definitely on his land. Whom could he have hired to cut wood? As I walked down into his woods, I saw him with his old McCullough. He put down the saw. “It’s broke open,” he said, referring to the hernia incision. So I dashed up home, got my old 1961 Falcon and took Herb to the surgeon, who knew right away what had happened.

            This same thing occurred twice more, until the surgeon ordered Herb to Perth  hospital – which had 50+ beds at the time by the way – where he stayed five days. At that time the surgeon told Herb he wouldn’t operate on him any more unless it was to cut off his arms so he couldn’t operate his chainsaw. And that’s why Herb had nothing good to say about the local physicians.

            Back to Herb’s trip to Los Angeles: He asked me to drive him to the train station in Presque Isle and I said sure, why not. So late that afternoon we crossed the border and headed for the Presque Isle train station.

We never arrived. Somewhere around Parkhurst Siding, Herb spied a country tavern and decided he wanted to have a beer. I sipped on one for three hours while Herb downed half a dozen Pabst Blue Ribbons. By that time he had reconsidered his trip to see Marcus Welby, MD.

            “Let’s go back home to Tilley,” he said. “I feel a lot better now. Maybe that’s all I needed, beer.” By this time he was on the ninth can of his self-prescribed medicine and I was still on number one. I poured him into the Falcon and we headed for the border, stopping at Fort Fairfield for a 6-pack of Colt 45 which Herb said he’d need in the morning. We got back to the former Block X School a few minutes before 9:00 pm. He sat on his bed and turned on his battery-powered TV. You’ll never guess what show was just coming on.

            ‘Gunsmoke’. You thought I was going to say ‘Marcus Welby, MD’. In truth, I had seen and heard enough of both Marcus Welby and Herb who had fallen asleep in minutes. He didn’t even see Marshall Matt Dillon, gun smoking, cleaning up Dodge City. I took my leave, wondering if Marcus Welby, MD, knew anything about pains in the neck and other, lower, areas.  

                                                         -end-