Notes from Ynacy Station

Christmas in Seattle

2011-12-30T09:17:00.000-08:00

I spent this Christmas with my son and daughter-in-law in Seattle and one of the things we did while I was there was to visit an amazing light show put together by volunteers for the Seattle Botanic Garden. (Daughter-in-law is the photographer.) They say it takes 9000 man-hours to prepare, and that is quite believable. This picture is of the Aquarium scene, but there is also a pond with a fountain, ducks and frogs, and a waterfall, and a dragon, and many, many garden plants recreated in light. A whole grape arbour.

The sky was dark (and fortunately, we escaped the rain) which made the lights that much more impressive.

A huge crowd was in attendance, but they were quieter than you expect, and more orderly. Even the traffic noise seemed to fade away.

Later we retired to a pub, and talked politics, which is what Americans do, it seems.

About Road Rage

2008-10-17T11:50:00.001-07:00

I spent a fair amount of time recently driving the interstate highways of New England and I have developed an entirely new view of road rage. It's not something I've thought much about before, except as an anthropological meme occasionally coming up in the news. I had heard experts telling me people too much in a hurry were shooting at one another on the freeways. It seemed bizarre, a California thing, not something I would likely ever encounter, much less participate in.

My daughter was with me in the car on this trip, and my little grandson. We had been visiting friends and were on the way home. We were in no great rush, stopping often in rest areas to let the boy out to run around a bit, get his diaper changed, and so forth. On the road, we were keeping up with traffic, but certainly not pushing it.

We were approaching a small city about the time one would expect rush hour. The highway was busy, three lanes in each direction pretty much bumper to bumper, with the usual assortment of clowns and cowboys, but one could cope with some confidence.

Then up on the left came one of those flat, expensive little cars, weaving in and out of lanes, pushing hard, causing others to brake to avoid hitting it. It got about three hundred yards up, and then I saw brake lights coming on hard up ahead, like a wave rolling toward us. I looked in the rear view mirror to see what was behind, and all I could see was the grill of a humongous truck scarcely two feet back.

I don't know exactly how much room those things need to stop, but I do know it takes a fair bit more than two feet. I had visions of us being crushed between the SUV in front and the 16 wheel monster behind.

A tiny bit of space opened up in the right lane and I pushed into it. Better to be hit by a passenger car than a 100 ton behemoth. Horns went off, understandably. We slipped into the traffic stream successfully, even though I was shaking. I was terrified and also very, very angry.

It's not being in a hurry that causes road rage. It's being threatened by trivial things, carelessness, stupidity, some idiot's need to show off, and being helpless to counter the threat. It's facing the possibility of having one's whole family wiped out in a moment.

I'm Canadian. I don't come from a violent culture. I don't own a gun, and never wanted to. Still don't. But it wasn't hard at the time to imagine the satisfaction could have been had from putting one shotgun blast in the grill of the truck, and one more into the back of the little smartass up ahead.

Woo Hoo

2008-07-11T06:09:00.001-07:00

Please check out Renard's Menagerie, July issue, to see my newest story, "The Summer of the Fox".

A Surprise in Port Dover

2008-06-17T09:17:00.000-07:00

I was visiting in Port Dover, where I had never been before, and which struck me as a rather sleepy little town, mainly populated by grey-haired retirees. It has a few gems--a pretty good restaurant and a community theatre better than one had any right to expect, for example. There's a boating community and a conservation area nearby, and a few of the usual tourist places. Not a place where one would expect a lot of excitement.

However, last Thursday night, I became aware of a growing roar of engines. Motorcycles started arriving in town, a few at a time, then a lot, then hoards. The picture was taken on the main street just before noon on Friday. Friday, the 13th of June. I don't know if these gulls were just waiting to take in the show. :) I didn't know there were that many bikes in the world. And why are they here? There's a tradition, I discovered, of bikers gathering in Port Dover every time there is a Friday the 13th. Why Port Dover? I haven't had a good explanation of the reason for this. It's just something that happens. Apparently, a few guys got together and decided.

I imagine that should a Friday the 13th occur in January, fewer enthusiasts would arrive, but at this particular event, the CBC estimated 25000 bikes, a world record for the most motorcycles coming to one event. I was impressed.

The Garden

2008-06-09T08:01:00.000-07:00

The garden is coming along, except for the raids by varmints. One morning there was lettuce, looking good and about ready for the first harvest. A few hours later it had been chewed to the ground. It's coming up again, but one has to wonder if she's ever going to get any. We put up a motion sensor controlled sprinkler that was advertised to keep away anything that moved. It's pretty good at getting the neighbour mowing his lawn, but the garden raiding critters seem to have found ways to get around it. Mesh over the rows seems to work somewhat, but when the plants get big enough that we have to take it away, boom, varmints are there immediately. I guess a fence will be the next thing to try. All of which makes it difficult for us to get into the garden ourselves. But there must be a way to do this. People do grow gardens.

Black Cat Escape

2008-05-26T11:41:00.001-07:00

This is Spook, my buddy, whose portrait graces many of my enterprises. She's been with me since she was six months old, two and a half years. She's an indoor cat. She's always been an indoor cat. She's always been hostile toward this fact.

So while I was gardening, going in and out of the house a hundred times a day, one time she spotted an opportunity and dashed out behind me before I could close the door. I wasn't aware of her escape until I saw the tip of her tail disappearing under the shed. By the time I got there and got down on my hands and knees to look, no mean feat for one my age, she had slipped under the fence that separates our yard from a bit of waste land. And there she vanished from view.

Well, there's no way I could get under the fence. So I called my daughter, and she kept watch from the second story balcony and guided me while I ran around to the gate in the fence and started searching among the deadfall and the brambles, the thistles and poison ivy, the junk and garbage people always throw anywhere where they think they can get away with it. Some birds yelling their heads off and swooping around clued us in to where the fearless feline was crouching under a bush, utterly unnerved, hair all standing out on end. She looked like a furry football.

She bolted when I approached, ran about a hundred yards, and jumped up an enormous ash tree. About 30 feet up she stopped and finally looked back. Crashing through the brush, I tried to persuade her to remember who her friends were. Eventually, she came down. I picked her up and started for home. Tripped over some of the garbage. Fell and bashed my knee on a broken cement block because I didn't dare let go of the cat. She might not stop under a bush the next time.

Out the gate we went, and along the street. Big mistake. Our intrepid runaway is terrified of cars passing. She struggled to escape, but I hung on to her for dear life. She clawed hunks out of me. She did what all animals do when frightened; she peed. All over me. All over herself. She set up the most unholy yowling.

We met a neighbour, out walking with his baby. I don't know what he thought about the struggling cat, the wet, the stink, the blood, the noise. But I'm pretty sure it wasn't good.

Now you might think that after this adventure, Spook would be very happy to stay indoors. You'd be wrong. Then next time I went out, guess who was trying to slip out behind me.

Reason Is as Reason Does

2008-05-23T09:32:00.000-07:00

I really wanted to like Al Gore's latest book, The Assault on Reason. I wanted to believe that someone with the ability to attract public attention was making sense of why the American dream has degenerated into the American pyschotic episode.
I don't think this is it. Too much of the book is a recitation of the harm George W. Bush has caused America. No argument, but no enlightenment either. Gore's statements are sometimes pretty loose. He talks about America inventing democracy (they didn't, Greeks did), and planting it carefully in the New World (someone else's garden--I don't remember ever hearing that Native Americans were consulted about having their own society replaced by a European transplant). He tends to leave out inconvenient truths. For example, though he says there are none, there are examples of very effective, long-lasting and efficient autocratic societies--the Roman empire, for one. Not that I would have liked to under its rule, which doesn't make it any less real.
Gore says the government of his country, set up by nearly Olympian Founding Fathers (always capitalized) and dependent upon the wisdom of the masses, has been corrupted because the average person no longer is part of the dialogue. I try to imagine at what time the average person was part of the dialogue. Gore says it was pre-TV, when most folk got their view of the world from newspapers. TV is all one-way, he says, so there is no dialogue. The average person doesn't have access. The rich guys that own TV control how the public sees policies and politicians, and they have their own agenda, and therefore make public policy.
Maybe. It seems to me newspapers were, and are, pretty much one way. A person can read the news, but not discuss it with the writers of the news. Newspapers then and now were/are owned by rich people with agendas and a desire to get richer. And many people were disenfranchised in those good old days and many couldn't read back then, even more of them than have that problem now.
The government lied to the people, Gores cries over and over again. Well, yeah. Governments lie. To quote Gregory House and Mark Twain, everybody lies. The pain and wonder of it is, so many people believe. Those masses upon whose wisdom we are urged to rely elected that government. Twice. Fool me once. . .

Waiting for Spring

2008-05-04T18:14:00.000-07:00

What a difference a month makes. The garden that was buried in snow a short time ago is now visible and even has the first plantings in it, onions and leeks and a few early lettuce plants. It's hard to believe how fast the snow goes once it starts to melt. The biggest problem now seems to be keeping the varmints off the veggies. The winter lettuce, seeds sown in the fall to give us the first taste of green in the spring, was taken by starlings as soon as the first leaves appeared. The groundhog has been around, eyeing the spinach and who can blame her. In the urban landscape there's little enough for a ground hog to eat. I try to discourage her, however. As sympathetic as I am, it's my family I'm trying to feed here. I've got a kid's pinwheel, a nice shiny one, that turns in the wind, and the motion and the flashes of light seem to work somewhat to make her and the birds a little nervous about getting too close. I hope they don't get too accustomed to it before I get the netting up.

Children's books and cows and things

2008-04-14T11:39:00.000-07:00

There's a page in a children's book that bothers me. Well, several of them, really, but this one says: "This is a cow. Cows give us milk." Never mind that the picture on the page could be imaged to represent a cow only under the most Daliesque of paradigms, the notion that cows give us milk offends. In what reality could this be so? Do frogs give us legs? Do beavers give us pelts?

In the world I know, cows do not give, we take, and do some considerable violence to the animal in the taking. Sad cog in a huge factory, subjected to a forced mating in the middle of the previous lactation, a cow suffers the ripping away her offspring shortly after birth, a huge dose of antibiotics good for neither man nor beast, and a breeding program that in the fullness of time has produced creature that is a mere caricature of a competent animal. See this link for a radical view of the situation. There are lots of others, equally rabid, and a few with a more reasoned approach. It's not the point I'm working on just now.

What I'm thinking about is the view of the world we are presenting to our children, the pastel coloured one where the sun always shines, everyone is smiling, and happy cows give away the stuff that is meant to nourish their young. One might even imagine, as the Muppets did, legions of frogs on crutches, proud of their sacrifice to the betterment of mankind. Do kids not wonder why sometimes the world they see is a bit grey, that sometimes they don't feel much like smiling, that occasionally mother sounds cross, and some animals won't give up their treasures without a fight? Do they wonder what's wrong? Do they wonder about the dead frogs?

I feel there is some real danger in bringing up children who don't distinguish between teddy bears and grizzly bears, between giving and taking. Life is a struggle always, for all things, and I'm not sure we do our kids a service by pretending it's a picnic. You do not become deserving by being pure of heart. You are not owed. Contrary to what some would have us believe, the world was not put here for our benefit. We must work for our place in it, just like everything else.

I'm not about to suggest that we expose little children to the brutalities of the milk industry. I don't think we need to traumatize kids. All we need to do is be a little more honest. We get milk from cows. That's good enough to start with. We can talk about nature red in tooth and claw a little later.

Water

2008-04-04T12:29:00.000-07:00

Given the floods in the American midwest this spring, one might reasonably suppose there was too much water in the world. But the BBC has said "the world's supply of water is running out. Already one person in five has no access to safe drinking water."

In this part of the world, we don't pay to much attention to what's going on in distant places, but when Los Angeles starts to worry that continued development in the city might be impossible because of insufficient water to support an expanding population, we start to listen.

There have been any number of suggestions about how to fix the problem, including recycling sewage. Not a bad idea at first blush. After all, all the water we use is recycled from somewhere.

But there are some disturbing indications that this might not be the best way to go and one of them involves the drugs we take. Legal pharmaceuticals, but a lot of them. People don't metabolise all the drugs they take, and of those parts that are metabolised, some of the metabolites are biologically active. Sewage treatments do not clean up all of these drug residues, and drug residues have been found in significant quantities all over North America, and in Europe. Drug residues in water, including estrogens, antidepressants and analgesics, have been implicated in a number of wildlife issues--poor health, a blurring of gender in individuals, reduced sperm counts, and general reproductive failure of fish and birds, and smaller, less noticeable but fundamentally more important creatures, like hydra.

The amounts of residues are very small--parts per billion--but they seem to be significant.

So let's suppose we do start using sewage, running it through improved treatment plants that make it nominally potable, and then adding it to a city's water supply. Round and round it goes, collecting a little more drug residue each time through the system. How may cycles before people start showing the effects? Will people who habitually soak in swimming pools and hot tubs be the first to go?

Waiting for Spring

2008-04-02T08:53:00.000-07:00

The picture is my garden, under about eight feet of snow. Well, six feet anyway. It's hard to imagine there will ever be plants growing there. There are some, waiting, living on my windowsills for now, reaching for the light, dreaming as I do, of warmth and sunshine. It's been a long winter. I think it snowed every day for most of it and has been miserably cold. Of course, everyone says this is very unusual. I've never been anywhere where people said, "Oh, yeah, this is what the weather is usually like this time of year."

The arrival of the seed catalogues in January is always hopeful. One can imagine, once they come, that there will be spring, someday. The pictures are bright, the plants perfect in every way, not a broken leaf, not a bug, no sign of stress or disease. The promise is plain--big, round, red tomatoes, perfect pansies, lilacs from the dead land. The garden in real life never quite lives up to the advance publicity, but what ever does. We live on dreams a lot.

They're promising warmer weather tomorrow. "They", the weather guys on TV, have to be right sometimes, don't they?

The Whiner Olympics

2008-02-26T12:24:00.000-08:00

The group that is lavishly paid to oversee the Olympic games, the International Olympic Committee, has decided, for whatever reason, to not allow women's ski jumping on the menu for the next winter Olympics. That's their job, to make this sort of decision. And Lord knows they do it rarely. The women ski-jumpers, unfortunately, don't agree with the decision, and don't agree with the IOC's right to make the decision. Whining like a bunch of kindergarten kids protesting nap time, they've taken to the streets flinging out the buzzwords of the day (women's rights, equality) to try to overturn the ruling.
I have no brief one way or the other on the merits of the sport. What I take issue with is the lack of willingness to accept the authority of the IOC, who are, after all, only doing what they are paid to do. Sort of. Somebody has to be in charge. As soon as there is controversy, of course, politicians, who have no dignity to preserve, and the press, who will promote anything that produces easy copy, get into the act, and the situation deteriorates into a noisy brawl.
It's symptomatic of a larger malaise in our society, the presumed almighty right to have exactly what one wants exactly at the minute one wants it. And, when this doesn't happen, the almighty right to throw tantrums in public places. This everlasting sniveling over every minor setback is unseemly. Aren't these folk supposed to be good sports?

Speaking hopefully

2008-02-03T12:33:00.001-08:00

Well, the discussion was about changes to the English language and whether or not they are Good Things.
Of course, the language changes. I can still remember, back in the day, the first time I heard access used as a verb. It's not a bad thing. It's a useful expression.
Hopefully on the other hand, used at the beginning of an expression to distance the speaker from all responsibility engendered in the phrase "I hope", is an abomination and should be stricken from the book of acceptable phrases. Unfortunately, it has become thoroughly embedded and probably will never go away. It's right up there with momentarily the way the TV announcer uses it. "We will be back momentarily." If only it were true. But he means "in a moment", not "for a moment", as one might expect.
One of my pet peeves is the confusion between quantity and number as illustrated by the folks who say "less" when they mean "fewer", as in "Less people came to the game." Unless we're measuring them by the pound. . .
Someone will surely ask, why do you care? The answer is, because every one of these small confusions makes the language less capable of subtle distinctions and therefore poorer than it was.
Of course, not every one agrees. See http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/

In the beginning

2008-01-24T05:57:00.000-08:00

Well, come in, sit down, make yourself comfortable. We'll have a cup of tea. Glad you stopped by.
I suppose I should at least explain the name of this place to start with. Ynacy Station comes from a book, "Cat's Gambit", which, she says modesty buffing her nails on her lapel, I wrote. It is a place of relatively calm neutrality in an otherwise turbulent part of the galaxy in times to come, a point of solid sanity in which the characters can rest a moment and get some perspective.
I expect the notes to be irregular, but not too rare. I hope you will find them interesting.
I've recently moved from the bald-headed prairies, where I spend a goodly portion of my life, to Quebec, and have found the transition challenging. It's the simple things that get to you. I have practically no French. Well, I thought naively, I'll learn. But it seems to be amazingly hard to find a "French as a second language" course. Surprising, n'est pas?