“The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—-not fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.”
                                                                                                Henry Thoreau, "Walden"

I’ve spent years hiking, mostly by myself. Because I love being alone in the forest. Sitting on a rock, a log, or any piece of natural furniture is more comfortable for me than reclining on expensive furniture in places where I have to be careful about what I say, how I say it, or what I might knock over or spill. However, some couches are more pleasant than others as butt resters.

And lately, the folks up here have decided, and have spread the word around, that I’m a trail guide. Even though I’m not as familiar with this area as I could be. And I’ve met some interesting people on the rugged Cape Breton trails.

Also, I’ve never stopped being amazed at how helpful and friendly the folks up here are. They accept us for who we are and last Sunday we even received an email from a fella who said that Cape Breton was a better place because Sue and I had made it our home. Well, that nearly knocked my socks off. Both of them.

As many of you know, Sue struggles with some chronic diseases, one of which can impede her ability to walk far. But, she gave it the old college try and actually joined our group on a hike to the Uisgeban Falls. It’s a magical place and she didn’t think she would be able to make it all the way. But she did and that’s a feather in her emotional cap. The big surprise was that her post-hike pain was no different than it was before she hiked the trail.  I’m sure many of you are happy to hear that.

Which  brings me to the mentioning of a new book that was recently published: the second edition of  “Guide to Cape Breton Highlands National Park”. The author is Clarence Barrett, a retired Highland Park warden. His first edition was very popular. To write this updated edition, he once again hiked all 26 official park trails and then rewrote his descriptions.

If you’re travelling to Cape Breton this is certainly a book to add to your library. Here’s a link to Parks Canada’s information about the book: http://www.capebretonpost.com/News/Local/2014-08-24/article-3845394/New-park-guide-edition-being-launched-this-week/1

 I got a new computer for my birthday. Happy birthday to me… and that’s one of the reasons that this blog is late. Excuses, excuses, excuses. But, I have been tearing my ^*%&^%$ hair out trying to get up to speed so I can just plain sit down on my asteroid and write this blog and other things that I tap out on a computer keyboard.

However, I do try to get a blog out every two weeks or so. I know folks who have a blog out almost every day. Which I’ve heard is an excellent way to keep your readership up. It might also be an excellent way to empty your idea coffers, or at least mine.

One thing I try to do is respond to comments made on my blog. If you don’t get one from me then it’s because my comments didn’t get through or my website machine wouldn’t let me. You see, I’m relatively new to the blog world and sometimes I try to respond but I can’t get it to work. I think it’s because I don’t have all the blog ins and outs down pat. So, I apologize now for any comments I haven’t been able to respond to. I tried. Really.

Oh, and if you write a response please make sure you add your email address if you think I don’t have it. It’s supposed to come to me through the website, but doesn’t always seem to make it.

Anyway, back to the new computer. Cripes, I got so used to my old Mac. It’s twenty years plus old. It’s been everywhere, man. Had lots of sticky fingers tapping and thunking on its keyboard. Had plenty of little kids playing computer games on it and it has been dropped once or twice.

Oh woe is me, though. It’s not easy trying to master this new computer and I will give you an example.

I am, if you haven’t already suspected, a person who uses more of the creative side of my brain than my not creative side. Surprise, surprise.

Now as you might have read in an earlier blog, I bought myself a new camera. Only a little over a month ago, I think. It’s digital with all the funny-pictures-on the-screen stuff and with  knobs,  buttons or cranks spotted all over its smooth, black body.

And I have, as mentioned earlier, become known as a trail guide. So this means that I get to guide hikers into the forest. And, during the hike, I take pictures so that the fella who runs the recreational activities in Victoria County, (that’s the county I live in), gets to see pictures of the hikers and the beautiful places we walk in. He often posts them or pins them to his ‘wall of shame’.

So, I go home after a hike and hook my camera up to my new computer. Sue used to do this but now this technologic fledgling, who is me, has jumped off the tree and has ever since been wildly flapping his wings, bouncing off pixels and leafy start buttons and repeatedly crash-landing into digital bushes. Over and over again.

(*&^@%#$%&!!!! I mean, Sue used to be able to take my articles from my twenty-something-year-old computer and put them into her computer and her computer would translate the ones and zeros into an understandable language and then send it out over the internet or print it out for me. Now her computer looks at my new computer’s efforts, shrugs its shoulders and spits out these nasty, impossible to understand, bits and pieces of bits.

Yesterday Sue, whose computer acumen and expertise I trust, looked at one of my attempts and its pathetic appearance on her computer screen and said, “This is scary.”

Does one have to be a mind reader to understand some of the computer jargon?

I’ll give you a specific example.

To get the pics to my computer I have to hook my new K50 camera up to Mac. I use a thin black cord called a USB cable. The next thing I do is turn on my camera. Why do I turn on my camera now instead of before? I don’t know. Because it’s says in the Bible somewhere?

Then there’s a little box that pops up on my computer which I have to click on to IMPORT my photos. I was told this was the button I had to click on using my mouse. And that’s another story. The mouse, that is.

The pix are then supposed to slide along the inside of the cord and pour into some empty picture station where a tiny zit gets them to line up and stand at attention in order of entry .

This IMPORT box did not make sense to me.  So I asked Sue where the EXPORT box was.

You must use your imagination to see a vision of the expression on Sue’s face when I asked this question. But come on. I took economics in high school.  I was taught that if you live in Canada and you ship products to other countries you are exporting them. If you are receiving products from other countries then you are importing them. Do you understand?

You see, my photographs are coming from my camera. My camera was here first. I figured that I was therefore from the Camera Country. Oh Camerada, we stand on guard for thee, and I was sending out pictures to the strange place called MacBook Pro. So therefore, am I not exporting pictures?

So, how the hell am I supposed to know which place is my country and which place is not my country? How can I sort out import and export if I don’t know this? For poop sake, I’m dyslexic and this doesn’t even begin to make sense to me.

Oh god, I have so much to learn about the camera, let alone the computer. Have you noticed a change in mood in this blog? A little more hesitation in the sentence structure? Words that don’t sound so appropriate?

Where the hell is the thesaurus in this new computer? Maybe it dropped out when I took Mac out of the box. I mean when I buy a hammer, I don’t want to have to spend a long time learning how to use it before I can bang nails into wood. I just want to bang nails into wood.

Then there is my stacked-to-the-throat-with-new-gizmos camera. I’ll tell you how much I have to learn about this wonderful toy.

A friend from Australia was visiting. She has a good quality tiny camera. A quick shot thing which you can carry in your pocket like a pet Chihuahua.  Anyway, we were talking about our individual cameras. I think we got to talking about the flash. This is where I pulled out the manual for my camera.  It’s thick.

She asked me, “How many different languages is your manual written in?”

I said, “One *&^% LANGUAGE. English.”

 It’s a friggen Stephen King novel full of Cujo mumbo jumbo. Like import, export, four way controller, JPEG, RAW, Button Customization.

I have been told that I should take up writing manuals for people like me. Ha.

         Let’s stop and think; Let’s know and feel

         That things like these are truly real,

         Yes, think how very rich are we

          When all the best of things are free.


                                                                John Martin, “These Things Are Free”

I do think the virtual world is amazing, but sometimes I think it’s too enchanting and addictive. For example, there have been many times when I’ve been sitting outside on the patio of a local coffee shop. I’ve sat and watched the tourists and the locals bustling about or sitting at the little metal tables, drinking their drinks and eating their treats. Many of them, and I mean many of them, (sometimes even including me),  are staring at their little prissy machines. Using their fingers to punch or rub commands into the magical virtual world that is hypnotizing so many of us.

Sometimes I’ve seen young couples at tables under romantic lighting, texting.  And I’m sure they’re sometimes texting to each other. Whatever happened to the touching of hands? Leaning over for a little kiss? Rubbing your footsie up your lover’s leg? Now it’s being done with pixels.

“Oh honey, ooxx.”

“Yes, baby, XXXXXOO.”

“More, more.”

“XOXOXOXOXOXOIIIIIooooxx”

And while  this human interaction in all its forms are going on, I’ve watched the crows, sitting on the power lines above the street, or on the post office roof or the steeple on the church, cawing their asses off. I can tell there’s some form of drama going on up nearer the sky.

They’re making different sounds or are buzzing each other and generally making a racket. I then take a look around at the flocks of pristine viewers and non-pristine viewers and nary a one is paying any attention. Not one. All caught up in their people or virtual world. Maybe some are even looking at the crows through their virtuals or are gazing at pixel crows on Google.

Which makes me think.  Gets me wondering what would happen if this natural world, to which we don’t pay much attention, just vanished?  How lonely this world would be if everyone was totally focused on the virtual world and on the human world and paid no mind to the real time world of wild others.

And what would happen if it got to the point where everybody was almost exclusively hooked up? Got to the point where we would all, for example, be checking the weather on our machines or on something imbedded inside our eye balls. Swirling our fingers down the little doo-dad screens, or poking ourselves in the eyeballs to find out whether we are going to get snow today, while outside our window there is a hell of a snow storm dumping all over our yards.

Just wondering.

“What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone,  men would die from great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to man. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth.”

                                                                                                                                      Chief Seattle

“It is springtime. The zen master and his pupil work in the garden. There, a flock of birds in the sky!
The pupil says to the master, ”Now it will turn warm, the birds are coming back.”
The master answers:”The birds have been here from the beginning.”

Mondo Zen

I think my blogs are evolving into a novel, or a book of some sort. A story about how two ‘nearly young people’ live in the forest. In a trailer on a flood plain.

The book’s main plot dealing with one big question. When will the friggen river burst its banks? The book ending with the river’s final onslaught. Where she washes these two overly optimistic protagonists, down to the wide open sea? Where the squid live and love and the trailer people row like hell? See: Oceantrip.com.

You see, the Middle River holds our mortgage and some day she might arrive at our door, dripping wet and with a plan. She’ll enter our place, without a please or a thank-you. Turn our legal mortgage documents into lumps of soggy pulp, drywall and chipboard. Row, row, row your trailer. In 4/4 time.

I think we both have gamblers’ blood in us. “You’ve got to know when to hold them and you’ve got to know when to show them”... or something like that. Accurate or not, we’re playing poker with the river. And I don’t even know how to play poker. Not even strip poker, having had to resort to strip euchre and strip crazy eights at certain times in my life.

But why do people gamble? One reason is they like the thrill. And it’s hardly ever boring around here. And both of us hate boredom.

We have a tool shed at the back of the lot. Huddled in the corner. A fair-sized one and a good place to store our surplus stuff.

An old fella down the road told us that the tool shed used to be in the front part of our property. Ha! Our property. Did I just make a funny?

Anyway, in the great rainstorm of 2010, the rains did fall and the waters did flow and the road became impassible and our lot became a river. The said tool shed floated free of its place, and migrated to the other end of the property.

Sue and I took up the river’s poker challenge, looked at our cards and said to the river, “We’ll raise you one.”

So we had a new shed built in the same place the old tool shed had been located. We also had skirting put around the trailer. So there! But we were careful. We told them to stake the shed down.

Then one night, not long after these jobs were completed, it began to rain and the rain continued and continued until the river burst her banks. And the waters got close to our trailer. And in the morning, when we awakened after a sleepless night of listening to the river gnawing on our scant lawn, we found all kinds of rocks, stones, branches and other debris laid out on our table. Close to a royal flush.

We were also excited to find a beautiful skeleton of a tree. Its bark fully stripped away. It looked like it could make a shiny sculpture for our property, like a totem pole.

So we said to our river. “We’ll up the ante and enjoy the fact that you put this beautiful tree on our property to use as a sculpture of some sort. Thank you.”

After a week of being left alone by the river, we put up a wee gazebo. A little six-by-six closet that popped right out of the bag. Like popcorn heated up in a micro-wave. We set it up within a few feet of the river.

“Up yours, river.” Of course we didn’t put up the gazebo to antagonize the river, but to stop the mosquitoes and black flies from bothering us.

Because there’s nothing a black fly likes better than running water. And this water never stops running. It’s in superb shape.

Then one sunny day I was sitting in the little gazebo closet. Reading a book and drinking a diet drink. The gazebo all zippered up.

At one point I stopped reading and studied the mesh wall. Watched a tiny black fly land, then struggle with its own Rubik’s Cube. Which was, in his case, the gazebo’s mesh. I observed the wee insect twist his head this way and that way until he had it at just the right angle. And then, victory! Black Fly Houdini pushed himself through the hole and was free as a bird. Inside my protected place, and I’m sure I heard a whole host of rivulets snickering and chuckling.

So we ordered in our fix-it guy and we purposely installed, “in your face, river”, a brand new expensive front door and screen door.

And the river, within hours, laid a host of mosquitoes down on our card table and just for a laugh sent us, a few days later, Hurricane Arthur.  The winds did blow and the rains did pour down but nothing much really happened here.

Ha!  We raise you two. We’re talking of a pitched roof on our little mobile home. And a new stove. How much would that raise the ante?

However, you can tell we’re attached to the place and the river. The birds, the trees, the plants, the animals, the mountains, the people, the scents, the sounds and the seclusion.

It’s a yin-yang thing. Not only is the river a threat, she also offers us solace and is as powerful as any therapist in any office in any city, town or village. A therapist who offers us therapy twenty-four seven. Her office just outside our window.

“Oh Dr. River, I just can’t get myself up in the morning. I drag myself to my coffee cup. I drag myself to my job. Everything is so organized. I need a challenge.”

“I’ll give you a zest for life. I’ll put some adrenalin into your veins.”

She slaps down a flood.

But she teaches us more than that. As we watch the river flow by we realize the water comes from somewhere and the water goes somewhere. In a continuous cycle of rain and evaporation. Patiently flowing by with a no-sweat attitude.

“What! Would you wish that there be no dried trees in the woods and no dead branches on a tree growing old?”

                                  A seventy-year-old Huron

   Like everything in life, we all pass through a complete life cycle. We are born. We die and our bodies become something else. Maybe, when you slap that mosquito, you’ve just sent Julius Caesar back into the after-life. Et tu Brutus?

“Am not I
 A fly like thee?
 Or art not thou
 A man like me?”

          William  Blake


“When the finite enters in the Infinite, it becomes the Infinite, all at once. When a tiny drop enters into the ocean, we cannot trace the drop. It becomes the mighty ocean.”

                                      Sri Chinmoy 


The river has other lessons. Its eternal flowing into the ocean teaches us not to believe in the nonsensical logic that our society swallows hook, line and news clip. That not accepting the worldly wisdom would reduce the chaos in our cities, temper our crazed belief in unlimited growth, and slow down our lemming-like intrinsic disrespect for our environment. Teach us that we are not in control. Never were and never will be. That’s just one of our myths that will be told by a future ancient.

And our river is music. The music that comes from the stars. The music that is us. Our river dances and sings and growls and calls our bluff. Our river plays a mean game of poker.

“See how I’m sitting
Like a punt pulled up on land.
Here I am happy.”

          Tomas Transtromer