A bit of gentle lawbreaking

Does illegal food REALLY taste better? 

                    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-

Adam in the uncritical Garden of Eden

No one criticized Adam

                    by Robert LaFrance

          Adam, there in the Garden of Eden, must have found life easy. He may have been lonely, but there was nobody—at least at first—to criticize him. One day last week, I had three people tell me that one reference I had made in a recent column was one they’d heard before. I was a plagiarist. I looked that up, and it wasn’t what I had thought all these years (one who gets up close and personal with farm animals). A plagiarist is one who copies other people’s writing.

I had stated clearly in the column that what I was saying wasn’t original with me. Referring to New Brunswick weather, I had said: “If you don’t like it, wait a minute.” We’ve all heard that for decades, so it was clear that I was quoting an unknown someone.

When I referred to Adam, I was thinking this: Whatever he said was original, since he was the only one there, and if there had been anyone to read his newsletter from the Garden of Eden, it would have been clearly the first time anyone had ever said those words.

That is, there was no one else there until one day Eve came along and started ribbing him about his column. “You’re plagiarizing yourself,” she snarled. “You said the same thing in your July 17 newsletter. And by the way, when are you going to fix the bathroom cabinet? It’s been like that for months.”

The good times never last, do they?

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

On another topic altogether, I feel that I should announce that the next time people at a supper table go on and on about disease, pestilence, death, sickness and their downright grubby lives, I am going to do a Moose Thompson and throw the table, people and all out through a window.

          It is an amazing phenomenon. When a crowd of people—in-laws, outlaws and the totally lawless—get together around a table groaning with roast beast (See ‘The Grinch Who Stole Christmas’) the topic inevitably goes to injury, death, disease, etc. It can’t seem to go anywhere else. People compete to come up with the goriest stories.

          My usual method of dealing with this, after my patience is exhausted, is to say: “Hey, how about those Leafs?” Or: “Pass the pomegranate-rosehip salad, willya?” Of course we won’t have pomegranate-rosehip salad so that will shut them up for a while, and what are Leafs anyway? Don’t they mean Leaves? That’s not original, by the way.

          Like any antidote, this only works for a while, until the immune systems kick in. The first time I ever did it was at an Arbor Day supper at the Kilburn Church of the Intrepid Traveller. People were talking nicely about the coming baseball season, the spring weather, planting their mussel crop, and all of a sudden Aunt Freda said: “Poor Misty McHayla. She’s still in the hospital you know after her attack of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.”

          Fifteen minutes later almost everyone around the table had added their own example of a dread disease and, worst of all, seemed to revel in other people’s misfortunes. I believe the Germans call this ‘schadenfreude’. I had made a couple of feeble attempts to change the subject to something pleasant, like taxes or the 1958 Edsel, but everyone pretty much ignored me and continued on their tales of woe.

          Finally, I had had enough. In a loud voice I said: “Hey, how about those Leafs?”

          The shock was enough to halt Aunt Fannie’s recitation of her dog’s lingering death from Sickle Cell Anemia, which he had caught from her neighbour’s mutt. It even rendered Old Man Rivulet speechless. Other faces around the table registered some consternation as well.

          They tried; I’ll say that for them. Aunt Fannie mentioned crocheting, but soon drifted on to her niece’s accident with a crochet hook, the infection, etc. and Aunt Freda started talking about the nice spring weather, but that soon evolved into a story about her pet cat being drowned in last December’s freshet. The fact that Uncle Henry had also drowned trying to rescue that flea-bitten feline didn’t come up. Collateral damage.

          Finally I grabbed a case of Alpine lemonade and went out onto the porch to talk to my dog Kezman. I asked him how he was doing and I swear he answered: “I’m recovering now, but I was sick for quite a while. My brother Rover had it even worse…” I went inside and looked for the dog pound’s phone number. One of us had to go. Too bad I couldn’t do that with the human purveyors of doom.

                                            -end-

Odourless at Alert except on chili night

It was completely odour-free at Alert – outdoors anyway

                                     by Robert LaFrance

          This time of year—I just can’t help it—I start thinking about those poor wretches who are stationed in the far north of Canada, especially those on the military base and weather station at Alert, NWT (450 nautical miles from the North Pole).

          Yes, I know it is now located in Nunavut, but it was the Northwest Territories when I lived there from May 2, 1974 to May 20, 1975, and I am going to always think of it as NWT. The reason I think of Alert this time of year is that on every October 9^th, the sun goes to bed for the winter and doesn’t return until March 4^th.

          That’s a long, long time, folks, and during much of that time, especially December and January, the temperature hovers around –40º (either Celsius or Fahrenheit—they’re both the same at that point) and it’s not unusual for the wind-chill to be around –85ºF. The barracks I lived in were exactly 441 steps from the building where I worked at a top-secret government project called ‘reporting the weather’.

          Thank goodness for the armed forces base that was a quarter-mile away, and when I say thank goodness for the base I mean thank goodness for the Junior Ranks Club where I sometimes found myself ensconced. Those army guys’ tours were six months while ours were a year, but they spent more time in the club than we did because most of them had families. The army TOLD them to go there, but we had been asked. We were all in the club trying to forget. We weather guys tried to forget about our salaries that were mounting up in bank accounts in Toronto, and the army guys were trying to forget that they wouldn’t see their wives and kids for months.

          (To tell the truth, after a month there, we all forgot what we were trying to forget.)

          Some of the far north weather stations, like Eureka, 600 miles south, only saw a human from the outside world once a month when a supply plane came in, and some, like Isachsen, only got supplies in every two months or so. We at Alert were very lucky, because every Thursday morning, and sometimes more often, a military Hercules C-130 airplane came in, jammed to the gunwales with supplies for the soldiers, and some for us. Labatt was a popular name for supplies and a lot of Moose ran around after the plane landed.

          Why was there an armed forces base there? For two reasons: to proclaim Canada’s sovereignty over the area, and to listen to radio broadcasts from the USSR. One large double trailer at Alert was devoted to electronic surveillance and those guys meant business. One of our weather chaps was ‘overserved’ one night at the Junior Ranks Club and knocked on the door of the top-secret trailer. He was met at the door by a gent holding a machine gun.

          Of course all around that building were signs absolutely forbidding the taking of photographs. Some of our favourite pictures to send home were those of the signs and of the trailer itself, bristling with antennae pointed toward downtown Moscow. (This was during the Cold War, remember.)

          In early May of 1974, after seven months of training in Ottawa and Toronto, I boarded one of those C-130 freighters in Trenton, Ontario, and for the next eight hours my rear echelons were numb because the only place for humans on those planes was along the sides. In the middle was equipment and supplies. I sat on some webbed material that covered metal rods and looked at a jeep for eight hours. When Champlain landed in Acadia he couldn’t have been any happier than I was when we landed in Thule, Greenland. Overnight there, and on to Alert, another 90-minutes of butt-numbing vibration.

          The pilot made a low pass over the runway to persuade soldiers to get out of the way, and we were on the ground. We had interrupted a softball game that resumed as soon as the props stopped turning. It was 33ºF and they were wearing T-shirts and shorts.

          Although we got $1500 a year ‘isolation pay’, at Alert we had a full gymnasium (at the military base), a radio station, three bars, good food, and taped movies every night of the week. Indeed, we didn’t even have to go the whole six months without seeing the sun because during the fuel airlifts (Operation Boxtop) from Greenland we often hitched a ride,  and flying at 20,000 feet we saw the sun the whole way there and back.

          I was scheduled to go back to Ontario after 53 weeks, but due to a government glitch my name wasn’t on the passenger list that week. I had been written off the work schedule so I had no choice but to drink 'lemonade' for a week. Finally, a week past my sanity date, my Hercules C-130 landed in Trenton and when I got off the plane I was almost knocked over by the smell of flowers and grass.

         It was then I realized there had been no smell in Alert, at least outdoors. We don't need to mention chili night when the fragrance must had floated as far as Greenland, thirty miles away.
                                                   -end-

But don't smoke that cigarette!

Smoke is vital to our existence 

                    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.”

          A final comment: as any election nears, we can see the politicians turning greener and greener, as in eco-sensitive. Their intent is to fool us into thinking they are going to clean up the atmosphere. Don’t listen folks; it’s all smoke and mirrors.
                                          -end-