O Canada

Over the border, they sing O Canada, not Oh, Canada. Well, you know – them Canucks -- don’tcha know, eh? And they say we talk funny!

Last week. Ann and I crossed that border, with fresh test results in hand, left US craziness behind, and nested in Victoria, on Vancouver Island. It was nice.

Looking for whales
in Active Pass 

First was a BC Ferry out of Tsawwassen through Active Pass – no whales to be seen – and into Schwartz Bay ninety minutes later. BC Ferries is twice the size of our Washington State Ferry system, but after all, BC’s coastline and islands are way more than twice the size of Washington State’s. We were parked right on the bow. Those BC ferries are nice. 

   

 It’s a cliché but like so many clichés it’s a cliché because it’s true – Canadians really are nice. They are.

And Victoria is very nice, especially right now with tourism off. But even in normal season, Victoria manages to be nice to, and in spite of, the tourist crowds. Now, a cynical BLM radical like my daughter would say, sure they act nice to you, Pop, because it’s a white enclave you’ve fled to. The charge is fair, though it’s getting less white and more diverse year-by-year. Greater Victoria’s third of a million are still dominantly Euro-Canadian; 13% are East Asian-Canadian, a bit over 1% Afro-Canadian, plus another few percentage of Pacific Islanders, Indigenous First Nationers, and South Asians. But believe me, they’re nice to everybody. It should also be noted that BC is 10% pts ahead of Washington in getting their population vaccinated. The homeless have not reached the tent city proportions of Vancouver or Seattle.

We spent the week in a small, corner condo on the top floor of Mermaid Wharf, harbor-side. Beautifully appointed by its film-maker and interior designer owners, we lived in style and quiet comfort: floor to ceiling windows, fireplace, a small deck, access to private roof-top patio, views of the waterfront with Washington’s Olympic mountains in the background across the Straits of Juan de Fuca. (Yes, it was nice.)  

Johnson St. Bridge,
right next door

Harbor taxis, right down below

      Delusions of Grandeur        

                          (click on a picture to see them in larger format)

Victorians are out-of-doors folk. I know of no other city in the Americas so bike-oriented. The garage ceiling was hung with bikes and racks of kayaks, canoes and shells. The town and nearby Vancouver Island towns and harbors are peppered with marinas. Parks and hiking trails abound. We walked Galloping Goose trail along the outer harbor from downtown to Esquimalt (pronounce the “t”; you’re in BC.) And within easy reach is the Salish Seashore and the Straits; we hiked along the shingle of Ella Beach, in Sooke, and lunched in French Provincial Park, further to the west on the Strait. 

French Provincial Park

Honey mead!

A further reach north on Vancouver Island (nearly ten times the size of Long Island) and you’re into truly wild country with some of the best fishing, fresh and salt, to be found south of Alaska and the Bering Sea. But we didn’t venture far, just to Sidney Harbor for lunch and out to Butchart Gardens. 

These century-old gardens are the tops: fifty-five acres of verdant, stunning colors, beautifully cared for and rotated to fit the seasons. Things really grow here. We saw huge though quite young sequoias planted, like I, in 1934. I’m growing smaller; they, larger. 

We dined well, both in and out. Great Saltspring Island mussels, fat and luscious. A wonderful evening on the patio of Il Terrazzo with a good bottle of Brunello and perfect service from attentive, friendly Adrian. On the way home, we stopped at Taylors Shellfish, state-side on Chuckanut Drive, to buy oysters and fresh-out-of-the-sea black cod. 

But the highlight of the trip was a gracious lunch at the home of Seattle friends Pam and Ron T, Canadians who have just returned to Canada after living 40-plus years in the States. Pam and Ron returned to be near family, not necessarily to leave disfunction behind.  They can watch our mud-wrestling with more dispassion now, though, like most Canadians, they care very much about what happens to us: like a younger brother who is more level-headed and reasonable than we. Their most recent election was just last week. Glamour-boy Justin Trudeau called the early election hoping to gain a clear majority in Parliament, but Canadians are too wary to give anyone that power in these troublesome days, preferring to force on their leaders the collaboration and compromise necessary to a coalition government. His Liberals lost the popular vote but still held a plurality in Parliament. Election campaigning is no less than 36 days and no more than fifty. And electioneering is civil. (Nice.)

O Canada, indeed.  A  granddaughter was graduated by Quest University, in Squamish, BC. Her brother is a sophomore at the University of Toronto. This next summer, I look forward to once again fishing for trout on BC’s Taweel lake in care of Karin and Guido. And Ann and I have beautiful British Columbia just an hour or so north into which to escape and leave US troubles behind for a bit. So nice. 

Government House

Idiot County Award

I am a resident of Washington State; only WA State counties are qualified to contest for my Idiot County Award.

The finalists which meet the cut-off of less-than-40% of over-12 vaccinated:

    Asotin    34.0%

    Columbia     36.4

    Ferry     35.1

    Franklin     39.8

    Garfield     32.3

    Pend Oreille     32.0

    Skamania     32.6

    Whitman     36.4

And the winner is . . .

    Stevens @ 28.7%

    In other words: 71.3% of Stevens County residents >12 are certifiable idiots! 

Giv'em a hand folks!  On second thought, maybe only an elbow bump, and be sure to wear your N-95. 

In case you might suspect that Steven's win is skewed by an ethnic or racial minority, know that whites make up 89.2% of the county. They are a responsible citizenry: the 2020 election turnout was a high 84.3%. Trump/Pence took 69.7% of the Presidential vote; Culp scored 73.7% of the Gubernatorial.

Assassins

For over a week now, I have been haunted by feelings stirred up by two front-page articles in the Sunday Times of the 19th: the admission of our mistaken assassinations of Afghani Zemari Ahmadi and nine of his extended family, including seven children, and the account of our complicity in Mossad’s assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, chief of Iran’s nuclear program. Both murders were carried out with intent – our mistake was in mis-identifying the victim, not in our eagerness to murder – and both relied on elaborate, technological prowess -- the Afghan murders via a drone-launched Hellfire missile triggered from thousands of miles away, the Iranian murder via an AI-controlled automatic machine gun smuggled into and set up in Iran to intercept Mr. Fakhrizadeh and his family.

Two days prior to those NYT stories, a fellow member of the Olympic Club, Rick H, gave a talk on just wars and examined Afghanistan and Iraq in that context. While we were at war in Afghanistan, we were not at war with Afghanistan nor, thankfully, Iran. Rick’s conclusion? Iraq never was and Afghanistan had long ceased to be “just wars.”

 A few days after the Afghan tragedy, in Syria, a country with whom we also are not at war, we assassinated two more men, a Tunisian and a Saudi. It goes on. 

Under Barak Obama, a President I greatly admire for being reflective, smart, and cool, the CIA and Special Ops carried out with his sanction 563 drone assassinations, usually but not always killing their targets, plus hundreds of innocent bystanders. Most of these strikes were in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia – countries with which we are not at war.

The feelings that drag at me? Disgust and Despair: what have we become?

What has war become? In our last declared war, we firebombed Dresden (some 35,000 perished), Nagasaki (39,000), Hiroshima (66,000), and Tokyo (100,000) -- mass murder of nameless citizens. Had a loser done that, they would have hung among the war criminals at Nuremburg or Tokyo. A generation later our fruitless, oxy-moronic “strategic” bombing of the Viet Nams and Cambodia proved mass murder does not work (and that war-criminals can go free.)

Now war, no longer declared and, thus, extra-legal, has shifted to tactics borrowed from the Nizari Isma’ili of the 12thC : targeted assassination. The assassin knows the victim for whom he hunts. Back then he used poison or the garrote but his preferred weapon was the knife, close and silent. Today, he uses poison (Navalny) or the pistol (Nemtsov) or Hellfire missiles or a two-ton, AI-controlled, truck-mounted, automatic 50 caliber machine gun. Assassination none-the-less.

And, like our wars, our assassins are also extra-legal – in fact, illegal. Part 2.11 of Executive Order 12333, signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981: No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination. What the hell is going on!?!

What have we become?

What have we become, sentencing to death and intentionally murdering Yemenis, Syrians, Somalis, Pakistanis? And even, in the case of Imam Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen and his son. Where does it stop? Yes, disgusted and despairing . . .

. . .what have we become?    

PS That same week, I was somewhat uplifted by Sam Sperry’s Post Alley encomium to Kay Bullitt. She fought for what was right, expressed her disgust, and did not give in to despair. We need an army of Kay Bullitts.

 https://www.postalley.org/2021/09/19/making-waves-remembering-kay-bullitt/

When Your Limits Come Down to Meet You

Tomorrow, the 20th anniversary of 9/11, is also the end of my 87^th lap around the sun; Sunday, I'll start the 88^th.  It doesn’t get old, just older.

Last Tuesday, Ann, Roger W, and I took a “’moderate” seven-mile hike in the north Cascades to fish Lake Valhalla on the Pacific Crest Trail.  Total elevation gain 1,500’. We met several PCT’ers, most of whom had started at the Mexican border last April and were now nearing the finish. Their energy and speed are awesome. 

And mine? I was shocked by how tuckered out I was after but 2.5 miles and 1,200’ or so.  The leaden legs begged to stop every 20 yards.  My A-fib kicked in, providing a handy excuse – except that before it did, I had been struggling with what would have been a nice workout just a couple of years ago. 

My chums suggested turning back but I didn’t want to disappoint them nor miss throwing a line in a pristine lake on a stunning fall day. They were genuinely concerned for me (and probably for themselves, envisioning having to schlepp him back up from lakeside to Union Gap from where it was all downhill back to the trailhead.) 

Up we went, over the Gap at 5,050' and down to the lake. A bite to eat, rig up, cast to rising trout.

 

My hiking partners were concerned; I was shaken. Sure, I’ve been aware of that malady called AGE. It’s been harder getting out of the shell now that we are back to crewing. I'm more wobbly; I don’t have the upper body strength of before; I tire in the stone yard after three hours, And I’m a bit whifty at times. I’ve always believed in willing my way through anything, but Tuesday’s drama has shown me that my limits are shrinking, coming down to meet a diminished me. 

How much faster and further to go? What will give out next? So far, I have been undeservedly blessed. Many of my classmates are gone. Some have lost beloved companions; others are struggling with progressive disease or cruel injury. I have so much to be grateful for.

Since Tuesday, though, sobering thoughts have haunted my days and nights. Will I have to give up our annual Sun Valley ski trip? Are things in order for Ann and family? Get going on cleaning out those office files and closets full of hobbies and junk! And -- no more cases of wine futures; start drinking your inventory.

I’m still willful: don’t get old; get older. The challenge is how to enjoy older, how to stay interested and interesting, to care. My only answer is to keep working Fletch Waller’s Three-part Mission Statement: 

Though still shaken, I’m thankful for Tuesday’s wake-up call on the Pacific Crest Trail. Come Sunday morning, what do I intend? What will I make of this 88^th lap? How many strikes do I have left?