Fifty Shades of Black (11 page)

 

 

No Shirt, No Shoes, No Cell Service

Y
ou know what I think is the very best thing about living on Salt Spring? Cellphone reception. It's terrible on the island—well, on big chunks of the island anyway. A lot of first-time visitors arriving by ferry at the south end are mystified by what I call the Fulford Fandango. It's not uncommon at the ferry dock in Fulford Harbour to see some citizens whirling around in circles holding their hands to their heads as if they've got intense headaches. They aren't members of some bizarre Sufi cult and they're not in pain. They are real estate agents who've suddenly lost their cell connection to a client. If you get close enough you'll hear their telltale, plaintive cry: CAN'T HEAR YOU, YOU'RE BREAKING UP! CAN'T HEAR YOU, YOU'RE BREAKING UP!

Much of Salt Spring Island is enveloped in a black hole, or, as I prefer to think of it, a Cathedral of Quiet that deflects wireless transmissions and renders most cellphones utterly useless or at least unreliable.

Unfortunately this blessed cell-free zone disappears just a few hundred yards off shore of Salt Spring Island. If you're on a BC Ferry coming to or leaving the island, reception is just fine. Which means you can be sure your ferry nap will be interrupted by a one-sided conversation that will go something like this:

HI, HONEY. IT'S ME, FRED. Everybody in the lounge, whether they're reading or relaxing or just trying to nap, glares at Fred. He doesn't notice. YEAH. JUST COMING IN TO TSAWWASSEN NOW. YEAH, I KNOW I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE ON THE 3:30 BUT I WORKED LATE. NO, I DIDN'T GO TO THE OFFICE PARTY. I AM NOT SLURRING. I AM NOT CALLING FROM SOME MOTEL LOBBY I'M ON THE SPIRIT OF BRITISH COLUMBIA FERRY! OF COURSE I LOVE YOU. OF COURSE THERE'S NO ONE ELSE.

Personally I've never known what to do about guys like Fred on their cellphones. My crocodile brain says to grab him by his tie and the seat of his pants and throw him into the Salish Sea, but that would mean complications. And possible jail time. I've considered telling Fred to shut the hell up, but sometimes Fred is larger and younger than me and that would mean complications. And possible hospital time.

I like the way the lady who was sitting right next to Fred handled it. Fred was just explaining over the phone that BABY BELIEVE ME THERE'S NO ONE ELSE. YOU'RE MY ITTY BITTY SNUGGLE BUNNY BABY when the lady sitting next to him leaned over toward Fred and his cell and said in her sexiest voice. “Come on, Fred, stop talking on the phone and come back to bed.”

Sure hope Fred's reception died before Snuggle Bunny heard that.

 

 

The Daily Grind

Y
ou know why most people never move to the Gulf Islands? The economy. Sure. Once you've made the decision, quit your Mainland job, hopped the ferry with all your worldly goods crammed into the trunk and strapped onto the roof of your Chevy Nova—once you're on the island, what are you going to do? To support yourself, I mean?

Oh, it's no problem for the dot-com gazillionaires, the semi-retired rock stars and the superannuated Calgary oil executives—but that's about .0014 percent of the population. What about the rest of us?

The Gulf Islands are not Silicon Valley. There are no auto plants or pulp mills on Texada or Denman. No Wall or Bay or Howe Street financial districts. We don't even have big box stores or McDonald's.

So what does an average Gulf Islander do to put in his or her time? I can answer that. We drink coffee.

Drinking coffee is unquestionably the prime Gulf Island pastime, certainly on Salt Spring, where I live.

Mind you, I'm using the term “coffee” loosely here. Individual Salt Springers may drink cappuccinos, soy lattes, Americanos or powdered Nescafé in a Dixie cup. They may also opt for jasmine tea, Walla Walla blend organic betel chai, steamed Mango Essence Surprise or Mother Parkers instant . . . but one way or another, Gulf Islanders spend an inordinate amount of time sitting around sucking hot-ish caffeinated liquids out of cups.

Which makes the Slurp industry about as close to a Big Business as the Gulf Islands get. Not long after I landed here, I heard that some acquaintances were planning to open a new coffee shop downtown. Now, my name's Arthur, not Conrad. I don't pretend to have a lot of business sense. But even I, financial nincompoop that I am, recognize a doomed flight of kamikaze commerce when I trip over it. These folks were about to commit economic suicide.

They planned to open a coffee house about fifty feet from Barb's Buns, a very popular watering hole, and, from fifty feet in the other direction, a place called Moka House—also a major hangout for island caffeine freaks. Plus the new establishment would be less than a sugar cube toss from at least a half-dozen other cafés, bistros, diners and beaneries—all of which already served a more than decent cuppa java.

Were they nuts? No question. Did they listen to my warnings? No. They went right ahead and opened a place called Roasters. And today? Well, today, if you go in real early you might get a seat at Roasters. If you leave it too late you'll join the tail of the takeout line coming out the front door.

Roasters fared so poorly that pretty soon they opened another Roasters at the far end of the island. Which gave them the same number of Salt Spring outlets as Canada Post. And twice as many as the local constabulary.

So coffee houses are big business on the islands—but the fact is most of us are not cut out to be coffee shop owners. We don't fly that high. Our job is to hold up the other end of the caffeine equation—namely to drink the product.

And I'm not pretending that it's an easy or lucrative way to spend your life. This is no nine-to-five, union-padded gig we're talking about here. Coffee drinkers don't get covered under any special dental plan or extended health benefit scheme. The hours are brutal and we don't get six-week vacations or a chance to buy shares in the company. The lowliest sales peon in the backwardest used car lot in the province gets a desk, a phone, a computer and all the paper clips he or she can lift. In my line of work, you're lucky if you get a coffee card.

I'm not complaining. I'm merely pointing out that caffeine is to the Gulf Islands what crude oil is to Alberta. It's the lifeblood that makes this economy work.

And we coffee drinkers, we're the spud men and the roughnecks that get that caffeine out of the espresso machines and into the public bloodstream where it belongs.

So, no fanfare—we don't expect that. But a little respect would be nice. Next time you see a professional coffee drinker hunched over his or her double soy macchiato . . . a little smile . . . perhaps even a casual salute. They're ruining their kidneys for you. In the immortal words of Churchill (that would be Randolph, not Winston): “They also serve who only slouch and slurp.”

 

 

Geese: Not for the Faint-Hearted

T
ravis says he knows exactly what we oughtta do with them. (Travis hasn't been on Salt Spring long but he's from Toronto so he always knows what we oughtta do about things.)

“Just pop 'em,” says Travis. “Shoot 'em, pluck 'em, cook 'em and eat 'em.

“Shoot one of those big boys, feed a family of six. Hell—shoot a couple dozen and feed the island's homeless.”

It's geese Travis is talking about.
Branta canadensis
. The Canada goose. They are a nuisance here, for sure. They gatecrash our meadows, party loud in our bays and lagoons, take over our school yards and parks, pluck our soccer fields bare . . . but most of all, they poop. Man, do they poop. Scientists report—and I don't want to know how they found this out—that the average adult Canada goose poops up to ninety-two times a day. Multiply that by the hundreds upon hundreds of geese that call Salt Spring home and . . . well, point made.

It would be dreary enough if this was just a domestic problem, but these poop machines are our goodwill ambassadors to the rest of the world. Years ago, before the fecal fecundity of these birds was fully appreciated, our diplomats gave mating pairs to Argentina, to Russia and to Great Britain.

They still haven't forgiven us. “The Canada goose,” sniffed a recent editorial in the
Daily Mail
, “is one of Britain's most hated birds.”

They also, of course, fly south annually by the millions. And they don't give a fig for Homeland Security. The Americans have noticed. Last year they gunned down two million of them. In New York City and Nassau County alone, authorities culled two thousand.

Which kind of underlines Travis's point of, um, culling two birds with one stone by shooting them and cooking up the carcasses to feed the homeless.

There's just one small problem: Salt Spring's Canada geese should never be confused with the grain-fed butterballs that mainland Canada knows. Our Canada geese are seabirds. They breed and nest and feed in the waters of the Pacific Ocean. And they taste like it.

I know a guy who tried to cook an island goose. He put it in the oven for the better part of a day. Showered it with herbs and spices, massaged it with tasty oils and gastronomic unguents. Served it up to his family. The verdict: stringy, dry and tasting like the inside of an otter's armpit.

Oscar Wilde once dismissed the British tradition of the fox hunt by calling it “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.”

I can't imagine what he'd have to say about a drumstick from an island Canada goose.

 

Remembering Names? I'm a Bust

T
he man had a weathered, prairie gruffness about him. The lines on his face were carved into a permanent frown and the coals of his eyes blazed out from under a wiry tangle of iron-grey, bushy brow.

He looked—formidable. But he possessed a gift that endeared him to almost everyone he met.

He remembered you.

Not just you, but your spouse's name, how many kids you had, where you lived and how much land you owned.

“Jake Winters, how are you?” he would say, with a handshake and a searchlight glare that swept the dark corners of your soul. “How's Eunice? Did she have that knee fixed? Got your crop in?”

A chap could parlay a talent like that into a profitable career in sales, the ministry, the media. Or politics.

This particular chap chose the latter. His name was John George Diefenbaker.

No matter how you felt about his politics, you had to admire the man who became our thirteenth prime minister. He had mastered the fundamental rule of civilized behaviour: really, really care about your neighbours. Your neighbours will get it, and they will never forget you.

Other cultures get it. The Japanese bow to strangers; the Hawaiians welcome you ashore with a sultry song and dance. On Salt Spring Island, the natives greet you with a bear hug, doesn't matter if you're Matt Damon or the local dogcatcher.

We could all use a hug—or at the very least, we could acknow­ledge each other more with smiles than with studied indifference. As a country mouse kind of guy I'm always struck when I venture to the big city by the lack of eye contact. Urban types usually look away if you try to catch their eye, and I understand that, I guess. Where I live, I'm lucky to run into twenty people a day. If I took the Toronto subway to just one Maple Leafs hockey game I'd see thousands and thousands of faces in a single evening.

And that's for a Leafs game—just imagine if Toronto had an actual hockey team.

Dolly Parton, I am told, frequently has to deal with male fans who become utterly tongue-tied and speechless when confronted by Dolly's twin Icebreakers. She's found a way to break the ice, as it were. Dolly smiles, puts her arms around the flustered fan's neck and mashes his bashful mug deep into her cleavage.

Not such a good tactic for me, of course. If I mashed somebody into my cleavage I'd probably break their nose.

What's a guy to do? I'd like to make my encounters more memor­able, but it's not as if I look like Ryan Gosling, dress like Don Cherry, sing like Michael Bublé or write like Leonard Cohen.

The Diefenbaker option is out. My memory's too porous to remember the names of the people I meet, much less their families, their acreage and their medical history—at least that's what my Life Partner, old what's-her-name, says.

But I am finally doing something about it. I've signed up for a correspondence course on how to remember names and faces. In fact, it's number two on my bucket list.

Number one is getting invited to meet Dolly Parton.

 

 

Hookers on Salt Spring

A
lot of writers have written a lot of articles about Salt Spring Island. They write about our artists and our craftspeople; they write about our hippies and our yuppies; our friendly open market and our vicious Taliban-style politics.

Nobody ever writes about our Salt Spring hookers.

Oh yeah. Salt Spring is not some rustic puritanical, Bible-belt backwater, you know. We've got our hookers, all right. There's Janet and June and Mary and Yvette, Irene and Sandy and Barb and Mary, Anne and Gladys and Marlene and Marilyn, Donna and Lynne and Lori and the other Mary.

Those are just the ones I know personally. Heck one of them—Lynne—I've been sleeping with her regularly for the past thirty-odd years.

Oh I know the Salt Spring hookers all right. And I know they're all pretty tired of all the lame jokes (like this extended one) about their chosen pastime.

It's rug hooking we're talking about. A craft that's at least two hundred years old, going back to the early nineteenth century in Yorkshire, England, where workers in the weaving mills were allowed to collect thrums, or scraps of yarn left over after the weaving process.

The workers took the thrums home and figured out a way to push them through a backing material, which produced primitive rugs to warm the floors of their hovels.

The basics of rug hooking haven't changed a whole lot since those early days. Hookers still take scraps of material cut into various widths and drag them through a piece of burlap using a thick needle with a barb or hook on the end of it to catch and pull the cloth through. But the artistic component has blossomed.

Rug hooking is not easy; it's not quick—and it's not that common. Especially in these times when you can go to a big box store and order your factory-made carpet by the yard.

But that's one of the attractions of rug hooking. The end product is everything a factory-made rug is not. It's personal and it's handmade with love. Good hookers can render spectacular landscapes, seascapes, floral arrays, abstract patterns, geometric panoramas and astonishingly evocative portraits of loved ones, two- and four-legged. And they do it with a patient artistry that can make you catch your breath.

They don't do it for the money and they don't do it for fame. They do it for the camaraderie, the fellowship and the history . . . because hooked rugs tell stories and they endure, even when—some say especially when—they're walked on.

Modern technology and the Industrial Revolution almost sent rug hooking the way of calligraphy and spittoon making but there's a resurgence going on. Rug hooking groups are springing up in Australia and Europe, in Mexico and Central America; and in places like the Canadian Maritimes, Newfoundland and Labrador and the US eastern seaboard they never really went away.

I know of active hooker enclaves in Victoria, Nanaimo and Parksville—and that's just in my neck of the BC woods.

Personally, I like the slogan of a group of practitioners in the town of Agustin Gonzalez, Mexico. Its slogan? “Have you kissed a hooker today?”

I know I've done my part.