the Walnut Diary

We moved back to Forfar after graduation, and Bet and I soon decided to build a house.  Dad severed the orchard on the top of the hill for our use, and banker Greg MacNamee agreed to finance the project on no more than a signature until I could arrange a mortgage in the fall.  It was an exciting summer for a couple in their very early twenties, but by October 15^th we had the building up and were ready to move in to meet a deadline for the grant the province offered that year to new home buyers.

The only problem was the tile bed.  Young’s Hill is a drumlin.  That’s a pile of very coarse gravel, so coarse, in fact, that I could never get a machine operator to return to the site for a second day.  Mixed in with the boulders is a layer of clay.  My dad’s tractor had a good loader, but it lacked the traction to do any meaningful work among the rocks in the clay.

Our neighbour Ross Stone got wind of this, and before long a brand new, four wheel drive Fiat tractor turned up on the site.  Ross didn’t say much beyond a few encouraging words, but that Fiat made all of the difference.  The thing was just wonderful with its four driving wheels, differential lock, power steering and large bucket.  Over the three or four days that I hogged the Stone Family’s best tractor, I carried several truckloads of weeping stone into an impossible location and built a perfect substrate for the tile.  Then I laid the pipes and carefully straddled them with the tractor as I put the covering stone on to complete the aggregate work.

When the inspector looked at the job he complimented me on the accuracy of the grades, if not the site’s neatness.

Ross seemed a bit embarrassed by my gratitude when I returned the Fiat, but he made it clear that if we needed help in any other way, we should just let him know.  Over the years when we met occasionally Ross was always friendly, but what struck me was how carefully he listened when others talked to him.  From what I could see Ross never interfered or offered unsolicited advice, but he proved quick to help, if needed.

Ross passed away this year, but in the community his wife Marion and sons Lloyd, Grant and David carry on the gentle tradition of the Stone Family.

A little while after we built the house on Young’s Hill, Johnny Chant gave me permission to hunt grouse in his woodlot which adjoined Myles Young’s gravel pit.  At the time I was an ardent collector of lumber for furniture, and I discovered this outstanding cherry tree in the northwest corner of John’s property.   At 24″ in diameter at the stump, tall and straight, it was easily the largest black cherry I had ever seen, and I wanted it.

I ran into John at an event in Forfar Hall and began negotiations with an offer of $100 for the tree.  John responded, “Get permission from Mylie to take the log out across his property, then cut the tree and let the fence down where you can.  We’ll talk later about how much the log is worth.”

Myles and my dad were agreeable, so one hot August day I dropped the tree  and then faced the task of pulling a 20′  log up a very steep slope to the top of the hill.  Dad’s draught horses had plenty of power for the task, but the harness wasn’t as strong as they were.  Several whiffle trees shattered, an evener, even a tug needed repairs before the sweating Belgians made it up over the summit and out to the flat land in Young’s pit.  Four smaller logs came easily.  It hadn’t crossed my mind to cut the large one up into shorter pieces.

I worked a day repairing the fence and loading the logs onto the hay wagon with Dad’s tractor.  Then off I went to Lyndhurst and Don McGregor’s mill with my load.  The tree produced four hundred board feet of fine, wide boards.  I was ecstatic.

I went to see John, prepared to double my offer for the log.  “I’ll take twenty dollars,” he said.

I gaped, “But that tree gave me 400 board feet of choice lumber.  When it’s dry it will be worth a small fortune!”

John smiled knowingly.  “That cherry was dying.  If it wasn’t cut it wouldn’t be worth anything in a year.  What’s more, it was growing on the steepest hill in this country.  How much harness did your dad’s horses break pulling the logs up that slope?  Then you had to cut and mend the fence, load the logs, haul them down to Don’s, pay for the sawing and haul them home.  That took time and fuel, as well.  Those boards will be worth some money, but they won’t be ready to use for five years, so until then they’re just an expense to you for storage and piling.  Now if you do the arithmetic, you’ll realize that my price of twenty dollars is exactly what that tree was worth.”

I handed him the twenty and shook his hand.  I’d been bested by an expert in the art of neighbouring.

Forfar is the less for the loss this year of these two excellent men.

Bet’s in full elf-mode.  The back of the pickup was full for the morning run to the farm.  Last I saw of her she had commandeered my bench and was decorating a little fir tree which has been struggling along in a window as a house plant.  I noticed a few problems of hue and scale in the project, but she continues undaunted.

The snow is due for a coating of rain, which may make for interesting navigation up this way, but the big story is the refugee situation.  According to the T.V. news, airports are full of the poor lost souls, each pining to join relatives on the other side of the continent.  I guess swaps are out of the question.

Two-day delays in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal have piled up the feeder flights and produced a new definition of hell, airline style.  Forget firey crashes:  hell is a slow death of hard chairs, interminable waits, lineups to nowhere, and confusion — with no real prospect of a solution, at least in the short time frame which passes for historical context among Christmas travelers.

Hope things are going well down your way.

Rod

Over the past few years my friends have sent me many video attachments by email.  At first they caused me no end of trouble, as my dial-up Internet connection was too slow to download them and nothing else could come through until the huge lump of signal had worked its way through the narrow tube.  Students needing help and chatting friends had to cue up until somebody’s funny film about monkeys made its way to my screen, where it often would not run.  Polite requests eventually turned into snarling warnings not to send any more bandwith hogs my way.

Everyone quite reasonably asked why I didn’t get rid of my dial-up connection and get fast Internet like the rest of the world.  But I like my slow Internet connection.  It served me very well during my teaching career:  students enjoyed the benefit of rapid turn-around on assignments and requests for help.  Email allowed me to think about and edit my comments before sending them.  My computer’s inability to handle the hotter film meant that I had to focus on the cooler print medium, and I enjoyed my Internet as a refuge from the frantic world of television.

Then Charlie brought a Mac to the farm and it was time to install wireless Internet.  The usual teething pains occurred, but once the Westport Telephone Company had set the system up it proved astoundingly good.  All of a sudden we could see what our son does for a living at Insidermedicine.com, a medical news service operating out of the Hotel Dieu in Kingston.

My introduction to YouTube was a film which showed flying carp.  Silver carp in the Illinois River leap frantically into the air whenever they hear an outboard motor.  It makes for a hysterically funny vacation film when ten pound fish launch themselves into the air in front of your boat in a totally random fashion.

I moved on to a classic of viral marketing, Bride Has Massive Hair Wig Out, a YouTube film about a nervous bride who, distraught because she can’t get her hair just right, shears the whole mop off with scissors while her friends watch in dismay.  (Where do you think Britney Spears got the idea a year later?)  Like many YouTube films, Bride turned out to be a little less spontaneous than we thought.  The “bride” is a young Toronto actress who made the film for a cosmetics company to plant the phrase “wig out” in the language prior to a major advertising campaign for a hair product.

A couple of months later Alanis Morrissette announced to the world that she was back in the studio by quietly releasing a YouTube parody of a particularly mindless Fergie video.  The Internet buzz guaranteed millions of hits overnight, and the media-savy Alanis made her point.

The most astounding piece of film I have seen is thebestever.wmv.  It’s short, and it may or may not be fake, but I guarantee you won’t regret watching this one involving a stunt pilot.

When I bought a Polaris Ranger I wondered what its limits were, so I called up the many YouTube films of UTVs in extreme environments and was treated to an afternoon of drunken young men driving the things through ponds, down rivers, over logs, and somewhat less successfully, through snowbanks.  I also saw many Rangers, Rhinos and similar vehicles rolling over backwards when asked to climb steep banks.  Apparently a lot of people out there consider it high art to drive a fifteen thousand dollar vehicle down a creek with the water up to the seats in order to make a film to post on the Internet.

But some YouTube films truly inform.  I remember watching with interest as a nice old guy explained a flaw in the design of his front-loading washer which doomed it to early failure.  He had the whole thing apart in his living room, and he showed us how the conflict between dissimilar metals had led to premature corrosion and failure.

Today Bet found a film showing a guy with an angle grinder cutting a granite counter top in his driveway.  He did an excellent job of explaining how to rough out and finish the sink cavity.  We both agreed that this operation was within my skill level, so that puts marble back on the list of possible covers for the new bathroom vanity.

While on her roll, Bet further found a set of films from the Kohler company in Toronto which explain the basics of bathroom sinks to the uninformed.  The woman describing the products does an outstanding job of entertaining and informing her audience.  High-quality commercials to self-targeted audiences may be the new direction in advertising with the rise of streaming video.

Many articles trumpet that senior citizens are the newest Internet experts.  What are they doing online?  Getting medical information, that’s what.  Check out Insidermedicine.com if you want to look at a leader in the field.

At the farm I love my high speed Internet on a Macintosh.  I still write these columns, though, on an old PC and send them in by dial-up. Text remains king on PCs, and I’ll stick with mine as long as people take the time to read.

Dear Andrew:

About ten years ago we sat down for an interview at Carleton Place
High School to work out a topic for your OAC English independent
study project. I asked you the standard, slightly joking question:
“What do you want to do when you grow up?”

You told me then that you planned to paddle in the Olympic Games, and
were already training for the task. I knew better than to smile at
this lofty ambition, because a few years before you a young man named
Gerry Townend answered the same question by telling me that he planned to become an athletic therapist for a professional sports team. Gerry went on to a distinguished career with the Toronto Argonauts and now with the Ottawa Senators.

As you may recall, your independent study project involved preparing a
written report on the training schedule of an athlete, and delivering
a seminar to the class based upon this material. I’m not very good at
graphs and calendars, so the written portion of the report was too technical for me to understand, but the oral presentation was very well received by everyone. Hey, the purpose of the independent study was to get a chunk of what you needed to know over the next few years. Your presentation and your personality convinced everyone in the room that it’s hard work to be an elite athlete, but that you were maintaining the commitment to succeed at it.

Last winter I found the series of articles you wrote for the Gananoque Reporter, and now I have happened upon your blog, Bound for BEIJING. http://blog.canoe.ca/willows/

Your account of last month’s visit to Delta Fair amused me. Judging a calf show wouldn’t have been that big a stretch for a good Leeds County boy, though I would have enjoyed watching you in that role. Celebrity contestant Catherine Beuthe had quite a gleam in her eye in the photo which appeared on the cover of the Review Mirror on July 31. But you still picked Kevin Grimes as the winner — all because he knew how to lead a calf? Ah, duty.

I’m particularly touched by your grandma’s letter and Kim’s enthusiastic notes. I won’t try to quote them here, but I encourage everyone to read the blog to understand the depth of the Olympic experience. Its roots go back three generations and affect every community, little or big, where the athlete has lived and grown.

My computer still has a directory titled “Andrew” from your winter in Florida where you trained with Graham Barton and attended my English class by email and audio tape. We were glad to get you back after your two months in the sun.

I seem to recall reading a quote from you describing your time at the Athens Olympics as an apprenticeship for the real job, the Beijing Games in 2008.

And now you’re there.

Andrew, I really hope you and Richard win gold. If anybody can be a role model for young Canadians and aspiring paddlers around the world, it’s you.

Mr. C.

It’s been three years since I’ve traveled any distance on the Rideau, so I jumped at the chance when my pal Tony needed crew to take his boat from Chaffey’s to Merrickville for an engine replacement.

Running on one engine in a twin-engined cruiser is never easy. Tony and Anne’s Sea Ray, The Big Chill, is 13 feet across at the transom with the propellers spread wide, so controlling the monster in a lock with the only power in the right rear corner is definitely an acquired taste. Further, the control station is nine feet up a narrow ladder to the upper deck, so about all the captain can do is drive the boat and occasionally shout encouragement to others below.

On the other hand we had a good crew consisting of fifteen-year-old Sean, who had grown up on the boat, veteran skipper Tony, and your scribe, who has spent many a summer day on the waterway.

The old adage holds that the amount of paint the vessel’s hull loses in the first lock is in direct proportion to the number of captains aboard, so I worked hard to play the role of crewman only, and the lockages at Newboro and the Narrows went well, aided by very helpful lock crews aware of our plight.

At the Narrows a group of young teenagers packing up after an overnight stay used an innovative method to cram their equipment into the large carry-all sacks for the canoes. The two tallest girls stood on either side of each bag and another added kit. The smallest girl in the group balanced on top of the inflow of tents, sleeping bags and such, tamping everything down with vigorous jumps, while relying on the shoulders of her stanchions for support. I may be telling this badly, but it was one of the funniest things I have seen in some time.

The owner of the large yacht beside us confided that one year he and his wife ran the entire triangle – Montreal to Kingston, Kingston to Ottawa, Ottawa to Montreal – on a single engine rather than retreat home after an early failure.

The Big Rideau offered 2 ½ hours of leisurely sight-seeing. We cruised close to the north shore to enjoy the architecture and landscape.

I called ahead to Poonamalee and the crew assured me that the way was clear, so we glided down the narrow channel into one of the prettiest, most welcoming locks on the system. Then it was down the river to the Detached Lock in Smiths Falls, where they let us through the gates and lowered the water, but told us there’d be a delay until the electrican fixed the swing bridge. We had no sooner started lunch than the lock guys let us know that the gates and the bridge were open: would we care to move ahead?

I’ve always claimed the most fun in boating is to wave to the line of motorists waiting at swing bridges on a holiday weekend, and this was no exception. It’s a cruel pleasure, but still fun.

At the Combined Lock I shook hands with my former student Tony Gunn. The seasonal staff gaped at me when I told them this. I guess we both looked older than Methuselah to them.

Old Sly’s is often the trickiest lockage on the system. This year things went very well until we were leaving the bottom lock. Confused by a large patch of weeds, this crewman didn’t fend off the wall firmly enough, and that left Tony no alternative but to brush the lock gate on the way out. Then we encountered a boat broadside in the channel, forcing Tony to stop. With no water flowing over the rudder, the stop left him with little control of the vessel, so much confusion ensued until we got past the three oncoming boats in the confined area and Tony was able to regain steerageway.

Then the engine overheated. It had picked up something from that floating mass in the lock, so we had to idle most of the way to Edmund’s while they held the lock for us.

We docked outside a lock for the first time on the trip at Kilmarnok while an upward-bound vessel came through, then we were on the home stretch, all eyes on the temperature gauge, for the long run to Merrickville.

The engine held, and a call ahead again had the lock gates open and waiting, though in this case Tony had to squeeze us in behind The Rideau King, a tour boat operating out of Ayling’s. It was a tight fit.

The upper lock was warm, but with a nice breeze. The lower locks were an inferno of dead air and oppressive heat. The three staff down there seemed in the later stages of heat prostration after a hard day. Two weren’t wearing hats. I felt for them, but with a sudden crosswind and the crowded lock, they still had to be very much on the ball. Things went well, increasingly because of the alert crewing of Sean at the stern, and we pulled into Ayling’s to greet old friends and deliver the boat for a replacement engine.

The Rideau’s an exquisitely beautiful waterway. Each lock is a unique community and the Parks Canada crew couldn’t have been more helpful to us on this difficult voyage.

I need your help in preparing next week’s column for The Review Mirror on books for dockside reading. Please pick a good one from your summer stack and let me know in a comment below. Feel free to add other titles which fit the bill, as well.

Thanks,

Rod

BTW: I guess I should mention that I have just finished Single and Single, the 1999 John Le Carre novel I had somehow missed when it came out, and am currently halfway through Ernest Langford’s Chombuk. Printed posthumously in 2007, it seems to be a Canadianized rewrite of Swift’s The Voyage to Lilliput. Its humour is as gross as the original’s, and the satire is fairly light and gentle, as well. Stealing a page from Lolita, another voice offers comments in the persona of the main character’s aggrieved ex-wife, who sounds very much like Mary Walsh’s Marge Delahunte. I predict that Chombok will be banned from school libraries with great fanfare as soon as it catches on.

On November 22, 1963, Principal Beulah Knapp signed six documents which created the Old Eights. Others will no doubt recall the date as that of the Kennedy assassination, but for Jackalyn Brady, Rod Croskery, James Forrester, Nancy Jane Genge, Donald Goodfellow and David Roberts, receipt of that Westport Public School graduation diploma granted admission to a most exclusive club, and we members have grown to appreciate its distinction.

Jackalyn and your scribe retired from teaching careers with the Upper Canada Board of Education. Jackie then joined the Westport Town Council, while I contented myself with the renovation of a stone house, acres of little trees, and miscellaneous scribbles.

Don retired from the Lupin Mine in Northwest Territories where he had worked as a maintenance planner for Echo Bay Mines – would you believe he commuted from Westport throughout his career? He told me once their schedule involved two weeks on, two weeks off, and workers were flown to Edmonton for their leave. Don found that for a bit more per trip he could switch for a ticket to Ottawa, so he came home instead. Apparently his co-workers used to commute from as far away as Newfoundland and Cape Breton.

Following the publication of the carefully-researched In the Shadow of Detroit: Gordon M. McGregor, Ford of Canada, and Motoropolis, David retired two years ago from his position as an editor of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography at the University of Toronto.

Jim’s currently Head of Library Systems & Technical Services at the Ontario College of Art. Nancy Jane is a veteran operating room nurse at Hotel Dieu and the Kingston General Hospital. Both admit that they are on the glide path to retirement, hoping for a smooth landing when they touch down. I don’t know if our comments at Saturday’s dinner will be of much help in this regard. The concept of the glide path seemed to bring out the black humour in everyone, but they can count on our support: we’ve been through it.

Jim, Stephanie, and elder daughter Corin hosted this year’s annual lunch at the family home on the shore of the Otonabee River in Lakefield. In this sumptuous location we gathered to exercise our digital cameras, accost passers-by from our chairs on the lawn, swap yarns, look at albums, and generally renew acquaintances.

Once we got past the inevitable animal stories, banter moved on to the Forrester family’s propensity to save everything in albums. An old photo of Chick Garvin’s service station reminded me of the time Johnny Bennett touched off some fumes in the tank of my dad’s pickup truck and blew himself out of the grease pit and through the doors of the garage. As I recall (Don confirmed it) Johnny wasn’t seriously hurt in the blast, though the truck needed a new gas tank and the garage doors never recovered.

In a group rant we discovered that automated phone messages have reached a new level of aggravation. Dave reported that a Rexall pharmacy in Scarborough has set up an automatic system which calls clients each day to remind them to take their pills. This produced no end of variations: “Good evening, Mr. Croskery. You have five days to live unless you renew your prescription. Please press (1) if you would like to order more pills, or press (2) to speak to a funeral director for alternate arrangements.”

Jackie and David swapped gambling stories on cruises. Apparently both succumbed to peer pressure and made a bet or two. Jackie turned her winnings into a bottle of champagne, and on another cruise David took his $112 in Bingo profits and ran back to the railing to watch the islands rise from the sea as they cruised the Patagonian coast line.

Jim and Stephanie wheeled out some fresh photos of Newfoundland fjords. Just back from visits to New Zealand and Alberta, Corin’s passionate concern about pollution in the Alberta Tar Sands project bumped up against local concerns about uranium mining and the current environmental initiative in New Zealand to reduce greenhouse gas production from flatulent sheep. The fun of retirement is that none of us, except possibly Corin, has any need to resolve such problems over dinner.

Now that she and her dad are at the cottage while her kids renovate the house in Kingston, Nancy Jane is free to enjoy her long daily swims in the pleasant waters of the Little Rideau instead of Lake Ontario.

As an enthusiastic member of the Westport Arts Council, Jackie made sure I warned readers to set aside time for Music Westport, on August 16^th. Stages at Foley House, The Cove, and the lawn of Doctor Stevens’s house will feature a variety of blues, jazz and folk artists, with The Abrams Family headlining.

Stephanie and Corin Ford Forrester have a busy summer ahead with a variety of shows of their artwork. You may catch up with their schedules at http://www.stephaniefordforrester.ca (art quilts) and www.corinfordforrester.com (photos).

Amid all of this erudite conversation, this year we actually produced a resolution:

We, the above-named, hereby claim to be the largest “Old Eight” group in existence. We’re happy to make this claim if it brings forth any other graduating classes who have kept in touch.

If you are out there, intact and in contact, please post a comment below this article at https://rodcroskery.wordpress.com

As this is the forty-fifth anniversary of our graduation, we feel quite smug in our assurance that we’re the oldest and/or the largest intact grade-eight-graduation group around, but we look forward to hearing from other interesting associations which have stood the test of time.

I remember the day in 1961 when the truck inched past my grandparent’s house on Concession Street in Westport with this enormous concrete arch straddled between two trailers behind it. I watched in awe. Without a connecting tongue, how can you control that back trailer? Won’t it twist and run the arch into the ditch?

Then came the corner of Concession and Spring Streets, where they had to turn the rig about 130 degrees in order to get to the lake. I remember that they spent a long time on that corner, and I believe they had to turn the trailers to get around it. Perhaps they used the crane to help with the turn. For some reason that’s as far as I get in my memory of the bridge’s installation. Perhaps my parents decided I’d be better off elsewhere.

That summer and for the next several years The Bridge became the focal point of our lives. It was the meeting place for swims, the trysting place of young love, the place where we challenged our demons with death-defying leaps from the top.

We delighted in spooking boaters in runabouts. Hey, we were kids, and we had developed our cannonball techniques to a fine pitch while routinely sinking the Reverend Ross’s green cedar strip canoe.

Many of us discovered the ultimate in low-cost personal mobility on the water, the inner tube. With flippers we could putter around the harbour and even down to Jake’s Bay in fine style, regardless of our various levels of swimming skill.

The boaters who congregated on the new Goat Island docks enjoyed a way of life which looked pretty good: spend the summer loafing on a dock much like us on the tubes, only with more expensive toys. Boaters were by and large without other transportation, so kids on bicycles often went off to run errands for them in return for tips.

I often wonder if those boaters understood the influence their generosity and good humour had upon the urchins hanging around the docks?

Years later Bet and I bought an old wooden cruiser on Toronto Island, and after a harrowing trip down Lake Ontario, fetched up in Westport. Captain Jack Hearn was most hospitable to novice boaters and we spent a lot of time on the docks before a permanent slip at Indian Lake Marina opened up. Needless to say a pair of jumbo inner tubes rode on the roof. The improvised floats made for pleasant afternoons with three-year-old Charlie and a spaniel puppy named Grover, who learned how to ride the tube with me. Clad in life jacket and hat, Charlie rode with Bet.

Our antics with the tubes produced some amusement for the other boaters, such as the time Charlie and I proudly hauled a substantial chunk of rose quartz by tube out to the anchored boat, but it wasn’t until I mentioned in conversation that we used to jump off the bridge into our tubes that Tony, a rather aloof sort up to that point, showed an interest.

“You mean to tell me you used to jump off that bridge into an inner tube?”

“Yeah, we did it all the time,” I answered.

“I don’t believe it.”

“Want me to show you?”

“This I have to see!”

Quite a crowd lined the bridge as I climbed up onto the railing, oversized inner tube in hand. I explained to my challenger: “The idea is to toss the tube down cleanly onto the water, and then jump so as to brush the forward edge of the tube with your heels, then reach down, grab the sides, and pull yourself down into it before you hit the water. Then you just hang on. Oh yeah, and make sure the valve is pointed down.” Privately I wondered if this would work. I had put on about a hundred pounds since the last time I had tried this, but my wife, son and friends were watching, so I had to make good on my brag.

I dropped the tube correctly, so I waited until the valve had rotated to 9:00, then followed it into the water. My heels brushed the far side of the tube just right; I grabbed on and splashed down without mishap. Applause erupted from the rather surprised crew in the gallery.

“Give me that.” Before I could even get up the ladder Tony had the tube from me and was marching up the bridge.

“Be sure to toss it flat, so that it doesn’t roll!” He sailed a beauty down to the water, then climbed up and jumped. That’s when things went a bit wrong. I don’t know if he missed with his heels or he had forgotten the instructions, but he jumped right through the tube. He came up scraped and bleeding.

That’s when I remembered the valve stem, a long, vicious brass thing.

That valve stem left Tony with some spectacular vertical scratches, but in the twenty-four years since he has emerged as about as good a friend as a guy could have.