DIARY
The
‘ancient right’ to drive
by Robert LaFrance
Every year at this time I observe an
anniversary and send a sympathy card to the residents of Alert, Nunavut. I know
you’re sick and tired of my talking about it, but I’m old, so indulge me
please.
When I lived up there in 1974-5 for 54 consecutive
weeks it was in Northwest Territories. Somewhere along the line the government
moved that armed forces base and weather station into Nunavut. They must have
floated it down the Davis Strait.
The anniversary to which I refer occurs every year
on October 9th or thereabouts, not to be too accurate. The sun goes
down for the winter and is not seen again until March 4 – or thereabouts.
On October 9, 1974, after I had been stationed at
Alert for five months, all of us weather guys (there were no women stationed at
Alert in those days) poured glasses of champagne, otherwise known as Labbatt’s
Blue beer, and went outside to pay tribute to that departing sun, as it rose
and set in about ten minutes, just the top edge, and we went back inside to
watch reruns of the detective show ‘Cannon’. The weather service used to send
videotapes of these and other action shows (Mannix, Baretta, etc.) to us. They
arrived every Thursday morning in an armed forces C-130 Hercules.
So there we were, sitting in the lounge and thinking
about the next five months without the sun. Looking at each other, I’m sure we
were all thinking: “This crowd is no replacement for the sun.”
We made it though, but some of us had to cheat to do
it. In January, when it was in the –45ºF range outside all day (I mean night)
the armed forces C-130s began their fuel run from Thule, Greenland, and for a
week the Hercules flew back and forth bringing in fuel oil for us and the army
base. Midway through that week I asked one of the pilots if I could tag along
on one run and he said sure.
The next afternoon I was in the big turboprop plane
and surrounded by black rubber bladders that would be filled with oil in
Greenland. “Brace yourself for this, Bob,” the co-pilot said, just before
takeoff. In a few minutes we were airborne and pointed toward the north pole,
450 nautical miles away, but of course we would turn back south soon. When we
got up a few thousand feet there it was, the best treat of the winter.
Here comes the sun. Hello, old friend.
****************************
Staying with the colour yellow and
now back in Victoria County, NB, yesterday I was driving along uptown and when
I saw a sign at the end of a street. At the top it said “Yard Sale” in fairly
large black letters. Underneath those words was…nothing.
As I got closer, I could see that
there had been some kind of attempt to relay information to the drivers going
by, but it was a stretch. As I got closer I saw that the letters were yellow
and therefore unreadable. Why do people put yellow lettering on a sign they
want other people to read? I may be wrong, but if I were putting out a sign
like that, I would almost certainly step back fifty feet, a hundred feet, or
even more to see if the message was getting out. Yellow’s okay for the sun but
not for signs.
On the subject of Ireland, I know
someone, a resident of the very house in which I live, who just got back from a
week and a half from Dublin and points east, west, south and north. She took
some photos.
When I say she took some photos, I
mean SHE TOOK SOME PHOTOS with her digital camera. A total of 292. Of course
it’s my job as a professional photographer to edit and crop these photos – try
to make sense of the ones that make no sense. Most are good photos (I have to
live here after all) but a few of them border on the bizarre. I thought
Mackenzie King and W. B. Yeats were dead, but there they are, reflected on the
window of a Tim Hortons in Donegal, Ireland.
*************************
Reading a book entitled ‘English
History 1914-1945’ I was interested to find out, on page 302, that that in 1920
there were 200,000 motor vehicles registered in that country and that driving
tests weren’t compulsory until 1934. Even so, people who had been driving for a
long time did so under what was called an ‘ancient right’ and didn’t have to
take a test.
It all reminded me of a story my
late Aunt Ella told me in the 1980s. She was standing near Jimmy Stewart’s
furniture story in Perth where a police officer, who had been following an old
lady, stopped and asked for her driver’s licence. She replied: “Young man, I’ve
been driving since 1928 and never heard of such a thing!”-end-
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