Clyde is colour-blind (Nov 13)

NOTES FROM THE SCOTCH COLONY

A ‘true’ story of frozen partridge

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            It’s deer hunting season now, which means this quiet community now resembles the 1916 Battle of the Somme when German troops in their trenches and we allies in our trenches kept taking pot shots at each other.

            It took place in the second half of that year and when it was over one million soldiers were killed or wounded for no particular reason except stupidity and lack of empathy by the generals who sent the youngsters on to their deaths.

            I said the 2019 hunting season here in the Scotch Colony resembles the Battle of the Somme, but not quite so many corpses (all deer and partridge so far) have been hauled back to the field hospitals.

            Working out in my orchard a week ago, I was startled by three quick shots that seemed to be VERY close. I left my Cortland, Novamac and 65 other varieties out there on their own and dashed for the safety of my basement. I never did find out – for sure –   the source of those shots, but made a November resolution: stay in the basement until hunting season was over.

            After three or four days, when my basement cupboards were nearly bare, I had to use the bathroom and finally emerged. Going outside, I heard a shot almost right away. Or what sounded like a shot. It turned out to be the owner of the cottage across Manse Hill Road pounding nails – spikes – into his doorstep.

            Then I heard two shots from the woods nearby, but they didn’t sound like shots. They weren’t. It was an ancient Gremlin ‘muscle car’ going by and backfiring whenever the driver let his (her, its) foot off the gas. It was then I decided to stop being afraid of every sound just because it was hunting season.

            Except for this one: “Bob, fill the woodbox and cook my breakfast – NOW!” That’s a scarier sound than any gunshot.

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

            Although I don’t hunt because I’m too lazy, I do find that hunting season has its good points. It’s the only season of the year when anybody calls me bright. Last year, in a counter-intuitive move, my wife increased my life insurance coverage to ninety-nine  thousand dollars and the same day she bought me a new and vivid orange hunting jacket. I have heard of other wives doing a similar insurance thing and then buying their husband a nice warm jacket just the colour of a deer. Husbands were dropping like flies for a while until the ones remaining ones caught on to the ruse.

            Coming to the point, I was saying that hunting season does have its good points. When I wear my orange jacket people often remark that I am “certainly bright today”. It never happens in other seasons.

            Walking along a woods road last week, taking my life in my feet, I met up with Clyde Farthing, who came very close to shooting me. Clyde is colour-blind. I asked him why he was hunting down in these parts although he lives up toward Arthurette. “Your wife phoned me a couple of hours ago,” he said, “and suggested I should try here because people have seen half a dozen deer on this road.” What a coincidence; she told me I would be safe on that road because hunters have given up going there.

            You know, $99,000 is quite a bit of money.

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

            Getting off the subject of hunting for a spell, I have now joined the No Screens Club. No smartphone, no TV, no tablet, no iPod, not even any screens on the windows for a total of 24 hours. I started 22 hours ago.

            “You look a little pale,” my Aunt Maud said to me when I handed her Agatha Christie books to her. “Come on in and sit down, relax with a mint julep while you and I watch The Secret Edge of Tomorrow’s General Hospital Storm, my favourite soap opera.”

            Of course I took to my heels immediately because I could hear her television from the yard where we were talking and I had two hours left to go. That was only a guess because I didn’t even know what time it was; my smartphone was back home and I don’t wear a watch.

            Well, I am here to report that I was screen-less for the full 24 hours – in fact almost 25 hours because I didn’t get back home until the full time plus an hour had elapsed. Now I suppose you want to know why in the world I would do such a crazy thing. I don’t have even a vague idea, can’t remember why I went berserk like that. It could have been because my cousin Vinnie had gone into the ditch along the Gulch Road (Highway 109) while he was texting a clam chowder recipe to his cousin Georgia. I doubt if that was the reason though; I never liked Vinnie.

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

            I will close this column with a wonderful story I heard recently in a certain bake shop and luncheonette in Perth. I can’t remember all the details and won’t give the name, but let’s say that a chap named Arthur was driving along near Two Brooks, above Plaster Rock when he stopped along the road to hunt partridge. Within a few minutes he saw six of them, apparently asleep, sitting on a rock, each of them with claws in cracks. He raised his shotgun and then realized their claws were frozen into the rocks. “I can’t shoot them like that,” he said to himself. “That’s not sporting.”

            So he drove home, picked up a battery powered hair dryer, came back and thawed out their feet whereupon they quickly flew away. I believed every word of that story.
                                    end

Cliff wasn't smoking (Oct 30)

NOTES FROM THE SCOTCH COLONY

No more politics please!

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            Am I glad the federal election campaign is over, you ask?

            In a word: indubitably. I will mention one weird occurrence that took place during those forty days and then leave the subject; there is enough politics taking place in the USA to suffice.

            Here’s that one weird occurrence: In the final week of the campaign I read in a sub-headline of the Telegraph-Journal newspaper that Tory leader Andrew Scheer had made a devastating accusation against Liberal leader Justin Trudeau.

            Refering to some climate change statement, Scheer said: “Mr. Trudeau is just playing politics.”

            What a brute! Let me get this straight: During a federal election campaign one of the candidates accused another of playing politics. Imagine. Next thing we know the Tory leader will be accusing a surgeon of ‘being medical’.

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

            Do we know anyone who has won big on a lottery? Other than Justin Trudeau, I would have to say that only Big Dave Manwell from Lower Kintore has been the only significant lottery winner.

            In mid-October, Dave stopped at the Irving and bought an Atlantic Lottery ticket and also got the previous week’s ticket checked. Although he didn’t win anything on that ticket, he kept it after the clerk reminded him he should check the ‘second chance’ number on the Internet at 2Chance.ca.

            He had checked other tickets for that second chance but never had been able to get the website to recognize anything to do with his ticket. It kept bouncing back. This had happened 56 times, but as I say he kept his ticket and set his determined jaw. He would try again.

            A half hour later he was sitting in front of his computer and looking at “The Interweb” as the TV show Corner Gas called it. And you know what? The website accepted his numbers for the first time and actually sent back a message that he was registered and now had a chance to win a thousand dollars or a free trip to Nigeria where he would be the guest of Prince Zalu of Momdanus.

            It just goes to show you. Show you what? I don’t know, but it goes to show you.

            Changing the subject slightly, let’s talk about cigars. I was standing on the corner near Perth Library when a 1976 Gremlin stopped at the stop sign – a shocking occurrence I know. The driver was a little old lady and she was smoking a cigar that was the size of a Great Dane’s tail.

            For a few seconds I thought she was vaping, but no it was that cigar. She continued on down East Riverside Drive in an atom bomb sized mushroom cloud. It was quite the thing to see that old Gremlin practically disappear in a cloud of cigar smoke.

            It all got me thinking, as unlikely as that may sound. I used to smoke too. After years of telling my smoking friends (so to speak) that it was a filthy habit, I started puffing away on an Export A – to make a bit of poetry out of stupidity – when I was sixteen years old and continued until I was twenty-five and living in Vancouver.

            During those nine years I smoked one cigar, a full-sized Cuban type of cylinder, and dearly wished I had never smoked that. My mouth tasted like a mixture of soot and fermented lamb poop for at least a week, until the Export A’s finally took over again.

            What is it about people who find smoking a cigar is a marvellous treat? I have never figured that one out. Same thing with smoking a pipe. I used to occasionally fill my pipe (a present from my grandfather) with Sail tobacco and always had someone nearby say that it was a wonderful smell, but I was on the other side and found that taste akin to that of snail spit mixed with lemon juice.

            Still on the subject of smoking, I should relate the tale of why I gave up on those Export A’s. I was living in the St. Francis Hotel at the foot of Seymour Street in downtown Vancouver when the inspiration to quit smoking struck me.

            There were three of us smokers who spent a lot of time sitting in the lobby and smoking. Ninety-year-old Oscar Evoy, eighty year old Cliff Gordon and I. The saga began on the morning of February 6, 1973. I came down from my room 215 to see Mr. Gordon sitting on his usual soft chair near the elevator.

            He wasn’t smoking! I had known him about 13 months and I had never come downstairs to find him without a cigarette in his hand. I was alarmed. He was not a young man. Any abrupt change in behaviour could have meant a stroke or some other sort of attack, or he may have been approached by a hooker.

            No, that last one was unlikely; he had never been interested in fishing, he had said.

            “Mr. Gordon,” I said as I hauled an Export A out of my pack and offered him one. He shook his head. “Are you all right? Why aren’t you smoking?”

            “I’ve quit the filthy habit,” he said. “I’m going to live what’s left with clean lungs and a pure heart.” I was dubious about the clean lungs, but all in favour of his pure heart. I threw my full cigarette pack in the waste can and from that day to this I have never smoked a cigarette or any other tobacco product.

            Just to complete this tale: On February 10, 1973, four days later, I came down from my room to find Cliff Gordon puffing away on an Export A. I called him a name and it wasn’t a reference to clean lungs, but ever since then I have thanked him 1000 times. 

                                 -end-   

Never trust a GPS (Oct 16)

NOTES FROM THE SCOTCH COLONY

Giving advice to caterpillars

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we decide to live in Canada year-round rather than be rich and spend the winter in Costa Rica or the sunshine coast of Portugal.

            Of course all coasts of Portugal are sunshine coasts, but you know what I mean. I got up this morning and glanced at the thermometer to see that it read ten degrees. Brrrrrrr! Then I remembered about that metric system thing and realized that ten degrees in this new (since 1975) system represents fifty degrees on the real scale. I felt warmer already.

            Of course shaky feelings about the weather are even more upsetting when I realize we’re in the middle of an election campaign, an event that leads one to remember that it was a Trudeau who drove us into the metric system. It’s hard to separate those two occurrences – taking away our beloved Imperial system of measure, and that name that will soon appear on the federal ballot.

            Moving on to another subject, we in the Scotch Colony are mourning the loss of one of our dearest friends – Gailen Haymaker. We were sitting around the club last evening and remembering Gailen who served on several committees of the club. He was on the Rum Committee, the Vodka Committee, the Red Wine Committee and the Snow Removal Committee. There may have been more; it was hard to pin him down.

            “He was a good old boy,” commented the Perfessor, and the rest of us echoed that thought. Colin Hardesty said that Gailen was “one in ten million”, which overstated the population of the colony, the county and even the province, and Glenn Gannon said that Gailen “would be missed, especially by people whose rifles don’t have telescopic sights”. That was his idea of a joke.

            Here’s what happened to put us all in the position of missing Gailen Haymaker: You may have misled yourself into thinking that Gailen is dead, but no indeed, he is not, although he may as well be; he’s in Flin Flon, Manitoba.

            Blame it all on his GPS, an instrument he has relied on for years to get him from the Colony to far-flung corners of Canada. Twelve days ago we said our goodbyes at the club as he started off toward his Uncle George’s split-level log house in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

            You might ask yourself how Gailen, aiming for Thunder Bay, could possibly end up in Flin Flon, one of the dreariest communities in Manitoba and I can tell you right away – GPS.

            Something happened to that instrument around Aroostook (similar to what might befall newly elected politicians) that threw all its calculations for a tailspin. He first noticed something was out of whack around Elliott Lake, Ontario and then Agawa Bay, where an arrow and a sign told him he was looking at Lake Superior, a name that I’ve often thought was somewhat pretentious.

            A couple of tanks of gas later, his GPS informed him that he was in a place called Winnipeg, Manitoba, which he felt was a little out of his range if he wanted to land his Gremlin at Thunder Bay, Ontario. That’s a different province isn’t it?

            He kept going though, because his GPS was saying “go west young” and Gailen had never been strong of geography. Later – much later - that day he came to a sign that said “41 kilometres to Saskatchewan” and he entered a town called Flin Flon.

            “It should be called ‘pollution’ he muttered, as he looked around the area and found his eyes stinging from the sulfur dioxide and mercury tricentrate – although he didn’t know their names at that point.

            Gailen stopped at a garage. “How far to Thunder Bay?” he asked a woman who was changing a tire on an elderly Gremlin.

            She pointed in the direction he had come from: “About ten or fifteen hours back there,” she said. “Where you from, anyway?”

            “Cargill, Minnesota,” he said, thinking of the embarrassment he was saving all of us back home. “Going to a wedding.”

            “Let me guess,” she said. “You followed the directions of your GPS. You’re the fourth one this week. You’re from Victoria County New Brunswick, aren’t you?” He admitted it, just as, a month before, I had had to make the same admission to a Maine border patrol officer near Fort Kent. I had been heading for Fredericton from the Colony.

            To sum up, let me leave you with this lesson: NEVER trust a GPS unless you like driving.

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

            Now we will go on to a more important topic – road caterpillars.

            I do a lot of walking along the roads – which makes a lot of sense when you think about it – and some things I see a lot of are caterpillars crawling from one side of the road to the other. Usually.

            On Sunday morning I counted them. In a distance of about two kilometres I spied 14 of those fuzzy beasts making their way along the chipsealed Manse Hill Road. Six of them were going from south to north, six of them were crawling from north to south, one of them was going up the road (east) and one was going right down the road (west).

            If I could have handed out some advice to the ones going parallel to the road, I would have said you ain’t never gonna get there, but caterpillars are famous for not paying any attention to humans unless the human is driving an SUV.

            I should mention that in twelve of the cases I picked up the beast and threw it across the road, but in the two east-west cases I let them be. You can’t tell a caterpillar anything because it won’t listen.

Boardwalk ripped up (Oct 2)

NOTES FROM THE SCOTCH COLONY

Maybe a long, long shopping mall for Perth

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            I am all atwitter about the upcoming federal election due to take place in just less than three weeks. I really am. Now let’s move on to other subjects, ones that do not include the Washington, DC, con man.

            We in New Brunswick are finally getting rain, but it seems to have arrived either too early or too late. Too early for the farmers who would like to get their crops out of the ground and too late to provide the rest of us with some great garden crops.

            Getting away from our gardens and farmers’ fields, I will now send my annual ‘best wishes’ to the folks working at Alert, Nunavut, who are about to say goodbye to the sun until March 4^th. I was working there from May 1974 to May 1975 in the weather service and went through that sunless period.

            Being deprived of Vitamin D for all those months brings down the spirits but I do have to admit that I cheated when in early January I hitched a ride over to Thule, Greenland with an RCAF C-130 Hercules fuel run and saw the sun for a couple of hours when we got up to our allotted altitude of 25,000 feet. It wasn’t enough.

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

            Back here in New Brunswick in 2019, I am pleased to say that I have had a wonderful apple crop this year. The bears seem to love the Alexanders. I can tell by the ‘sign’ they leave here and elsewhere in my orchard. To use Grampy’s phrase, some of the piles are so impressive that “two big men couldn’t shake hands” over them. I never asked why two men of any size would want to shake hands over a pile of #2.

            Now that it’s this time of the year – potato harvest – people of my age group (old)  keep saying crazy things like “I enjoyed those days, working in the fields, earning money and not having to go to school”. That last part was referring to what we used to call ‘potato break’, a 3-week hiatus when students of all ages reluctantly took a school holiday. Later it was reduced to two weeks when many potato farmers bought harvesters and later still it was eliminated.

            Here’s the part that continues to baffle me: most of the reasoning for dropping potato break was that it ‘was not educationally sound’. At that time we had what were called Christmas exams; once they were written that was the end of that part of the school year, but later on schools went to ‘semestering’ with exams in January. So then the students had to re-learn everything they had learned before Christmas. As I said I don’t get it, but there are a lot of things I don’t get, like that girl I met in 1973 in Surrey, BC.

            This part of the year is also the time when those of us with wood heat have to do some chainsaw work to keep our houses warm in the months to come. Two days ago I finally decided to saw up a beech tree my neighbour Larry had hauled up into my orchard. My Husqvarna was singing a nice tune and it wasn’t long before I had the tree cut up in 15- and 16-inch pieces for our kitchen cookstove. It was quite a warm day, so I took off my heavy safety pants just before I opened the kitchen door to go in for my lunch.

            The trouble is, before I went into the shed and the house, I didn’t look down by the garage. If I had, I would have seen the tan-coloured 2017 Ford Fiesta driven by Glenda, the older of the two Sagma sisters. Glenda and her sister Diane were in there talking to my wife and sipping on some tea while they solicited a donation for the Heart Fund.

            Picture the scene: two elderly ladies of delicate constitution sitting at the kitchen table when in through the shed doorway comes a certain Robert A. LaFrance attired only in some sweat-soaked boxer shorts. I would say those ladies were, at the least, nonplussed, and at the most, coronary. Good thing they were collecting for the Heart Fund because it looked as if all donations would be necessary – and soon.

            The last time I was in Perth-Andover, I noticed that the boardwalk on the Perth side was being ripped up. I was working for another newspaper when the boardwalk was being installed many years ago and remembered this week that it had cost $300,000 or so, more than I made in a week.

            When I saw this wanton destruction I could have driven across the river – actually across the bridge – to the village office and asked them there what was going on, but I have always been allergic to research. Better, I thought to myself (my favourite way), to speculate as to what is going to take place.

            Were they going to replace those aged board and planks with newer versions, or was the village of Perth-Andover going to put something completely different in that newly excavated space?

            I decided this needed severe thought, assisted by an order of fish and chips from Carolyn’s Takeout whose tables are strategically located across the street from the former boardwalk. With the aid of catsup, vinegar and tartar sauce, I put on my thinking cap.

            Maybe the village will plant grass there and have a LONG lawn bowling course, maybe a LONG miniature golf course, maybe a series of tables and chairs, or long-distance bass fishing seats, or maybe the longest narrowest shopping mall in Canada. Let’s wait and see.

                                  end