Month: May 2017

Trip preparation

It’s been a while since I posted anything here. I need to make more of an effort in that regard. So, here is the first step.

In a little less than a month I’ll be embarking on a short, 12,000ish km road trip, from Vancouver to someplace in Quebec, and back again. The route will take me through Alberta (where I’ll meet up with my riding partner), Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Minnesota, Ontario, Quebec, maybe New Brunswick, parts of New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and North Dakota.

And possibly some other places. You never know how weather, and other factors, might affect your route. I’m not too fussed about this. My riding companion will want to spend time with his family in Ontario, who I’m looking forward to seeing again. He’s also keen to stop for a couple of days in Chicago, which I don’t really object to, either. Apparently there’s an old U-boat there you can tour. And if we can get cheap tickets to a Cubs game that would be cool.

Trip preparations have so far been relatively minimal, although I recently picked up some maps (I still don’t use GPS), and I’ve ordered a cooling vest to wear under my motorcycle jacket, so I hopefully won’t suffer as much in the heat as I have on past trips. I’ll buy a small jerrycan, just in case. My BCAA is up to date. My bike has been serviced (at great expense, as you may recall).

The next step will be determining what to bring. I almost always over-pack. You don’t really need much in the way of clothes on a motorcycle trip. Mostly, you’re wearing gear, with jeans and a t-shirt, or something like that, underneath. Most days, it’s just socks and underwear, maybe the t-shirt, that get changed. A couple of extra shirts, a pair of shorts, a bathing suit, a pair of pants, should cover most needs. Even then, some of these things can be washed out and hung to dry overnight. A roadside emergency kit is a good idea. A basic first aid kit. An extra litre of motor oil. Rain gear. A power bank to charge phones. The maps I mentioned earlier.

In the next few weeks, more detailed planning will begin. Each step makes the trip more tangible. Soon it will be in progress, and then just a collection of memories, blog posts and photographs. But first, the planning and preparing will make it real, not just an vague idea of something hasn’t happened yet.

 

Strange bedfellows

That’s what they say about politics, isn’t it? That it makes for strange bedfellows. The provincial election here in British Columbia is a case in point.

I had planned to vote for the Green Party in this election. The most serious (if not the most immediate) issues facing us are, in my opinion, environmental in nature. The climate is only part of it, albeit a big part. But many issues exist regarding water quality, protection of biodiversity, endangered species, disposal of toxic waste. These are all things that I believe are just as important as jobs and the economy. Nature really doesn’t care about our balance sheets.

But the BC Green Party has decided to align itself with the incumbent BC Liberal party. (For those who don’t live in BC, the BC Liberals are conservatives. I know it’s confusing. I’m pretty sure it’s intentional.) At the same time, they have derided the left-wing party here, the BC NDP, as lacking principle.

Again for those who don’t live here, this is why that’s ironic:

  • The BC Liberals have been accused of, and some of their operatives convicted of, breaking election laws.
  • The BC Liberals have profited from a political financing system that is largely without rules. Both the Globe and Mail and the New York Times have written about the ‘wild west’ nature of this system. Donors routinely pay tens of thousands of dollars to dine with the Premier or a collection of cabinet ministers (or both), and are handsomely rewarded. It was reported today that a company who happen to be one of the bigger donors were awarded the contract to oversee a multi-billion dollar project.
  • The BC Liberals have happily raised ‘fees’ and ‘premiums’ and ‘rates’ – while claiming not to have raised taxes – for everything from health care premiums (doubled in their time in office, and worth noting that no other province have these at all), hydro rates, campsite fees, and so on. And on. And on. And on.
  • While the BC Liberals did introduce Canada’s first carbon tax, it has been frozen since 2012, and will remain so until 2020. At this point, it’s been essentially priced in and is having a negligible effect on emissions.
  • Environmentally, the BC Liberals have promoted the development of a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) industry, even while the market is saturated and the price is at record lows, leading to an enormous increase in the fracking of natural gas deposits. They have also promoted BC ports as a conduit for American thermal coal to reach Asian markets, and approved the twinning of the Trans Mountain pipeline, provided it meets their vague-to-the-point-of-meaningless conditions. They are preparing to flood some of the best farmland in BC to build a hydro-electric dam in a geophysically questionable location to generate power for additional resource extraction. They plan to replace a four-lane tunnel with a ten-lane bridge that most local governments oppose, rather than supporting additional public transportation.

I could go on, but it gets tedious to recite this stuff.

So why, you may ask – I did – why would a Green Party leader support this group? Why would he prefer them to a more progressive party? It really doesn’t make a lot of sense. But I hope his bedfellows, strange as they are, don’t fuck him too roughly. 

That kind of hypocrisy is really not my style, though, so I changed my mind and voted for someone else.

 

The last words

are for Sava Welsh
who made the best Spanish coffee in the New World,
who gave the shirt literally off his back to a woman because she said she liked it,
who worked with me in the bookstore on Robson Street for most of the thirteen
months I’ve been there,

who worked there for over twenty years,
who used to disappear every Sunday at quarter to five, as he said, “like a donkey in
the fog,”
who would not let even his dead mother in once the place was locked,

who bought me lunch at Griffins the Friday before he retired (we had duck and smoked salmon and desserts that would make a marxist cringe, and
Sava ordered himself a Spanish coffee, telling the waitress, “this could kill
me”),

who used to call me “my hero” — I don’t know why,
who nursed his lover of over twenty years until he died last November, after more
than two years of sickness,
who thought the card I bought him when Victor died was beautiful (thank you,
Robert Mapplethorpe) and the poem I quoted, too (Langston Hughes),

who retired on a Tuesday in February,
who called me from the back hallway half way through his last shift to show the bag
full of blood he had coughed up,

who smiled when the nurse in the hospital asked me if I was his son,
whose liver had been shot for years,
who kept living, I think, for Victor,

who called me from home on a Tuesday evening in March to say he was feeling
much better and was going to fly to Europe in April and would come to see
me before he went away
who died on the Wednesday of the following week,

who died nearly two months ago now,

who we drank to a month ago in the bar at Griffins, almost without mentioning his name, and I went home thinking Sava, Sava, Sava,
who disappeared like a donkey in the fog, although I still think about him sometimes, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Sundays.

These last words are meant to remember him.
They are not enough.

 

© Mark Milner, Vancouver 1997