Wednesday 30 May 2012

coyotes and ravens

I've just been watching the video of the female coyote running around the schoolyard at Marlborough Elementary in Burnaby, trying to find a way back under a portable where she had denned up with her four pups (Jennifer Moreau's blog at blogscanada.com/2012/05/30/coyote-pups-trapped-under-portable-at -burnaby-school/). The place had been boarded up earlier that day, on the mistaken belief the pups and mother were out. It took her a long time, until after dark, to work up the nerve to go back under, where someone had peeled back a board to give her access. Then the pups came out (or she brought them out) and started to play, before she hurried them all off to a safer place. But you sort of have to wonder how on earth she ever picked that spot in the first place--with kids stomping around overhead all day, and yelling and running about in the schoolyard. Maybe the strange indifference of the people walking by the coyote all day as she prowled about, waiting for the pups or trying to find a way back to them, has something to do with it.

We see and hear a lot of coyotes in our neighborhood, a block away from the research farm at the U of A South Campus. Not as many as a few years go, when we could sometimes watch six or more come out in the evening from a dense thicket of poplar and other scrubby bush at the corner of 115 St. and 51 Ave, now largely turned into a deep dug-out park that doubles as a dry pond. But, still, most nights in summer, when we have the windows open, we hear them in the middle of the night. We see them on our street, too, once even sitting under the streetlamp outside our bedroom window. We have seen them in the Community Centre park area in  broad daylight, and in winter trotting along by the community hall. Sometimes we hear puppies squabbling.

Last October, in Terwillegar off-leash park, we heard and then saw one disconsolate young coyote sitting across one of the borrow ponds, on the bank, in mid-afternoon, barking and howling and otherwise protesting being alone. It is that time of year that the mothers leave their pups to fend for themselves, and this one was pretty disappointed or disgusted with the whole process. We kept George, our German Wired-haired pointer, away from that area that day, though it is a lovely area to walk in.

Next day, it was quiet and empty, so we went back along that trail. George wears a bell, since he likes to explore, and we like to keep tabs on his exploration. He went along behind a thick growth of shrubs, and his bell started a bouncy rhythm, like he was trotting, so I went around to see what was going on, and there he was, jogging along behind the young coyote, who seemed to enjoy having another canine to play with. Of course, the coyote was also jogging along over the crest of a hump, into some more shrubs. I hollered "George! Come here now!" And for a change he did. The coyote kept on going. It might have been alone. It might also have been bait for a pack over the hump.

Coyote, of course, is one of the creative/re-creative force figures of many First Nations cultural stories. With Raven, Crow, Hare, Iktomi the Spider, and others, Coyote falls into that misnamed category of "trickster." And, in the words of a song by Ian Tyson, "Coyote is a survivor." Our department Chair is not so enamored of Coyote these days, however. Her family dog, or what was left of it, and its collar, was found at the mouth of a coyote den along the edge of Mill Creek Ravine a month or so ago.

Ravens, technically the largest  songbird in North America as well as the prototype for another important trick-playing force figure, are also very common in our neighborhood, and on the U. of A. main campus. Noisy, large, gregarious ravens. Not so obviously threatening as coyotes, and more entertaining. Mostly to themselves.

Leanna from my writing class a few years ago spent five years in the north, and gathered a number of raven stories, first hand. Her favorite, for a while, was of the day she tricked a raven. She told us how she had been walking home one evening from Arctic College, and a large clump of snow shook loose from an overhead branch, down her neck. She looked up and saw a raven on the limb over the sidewalk. The raven casually flew off down the street to the next tree, and landed gently on another snow-laden limb over the sidewalk. "Couldn't be deliberate" Leanna told herself, but kept a lookout, and sure enough, just as she got under the limb, the raven shook it, and down came a clump of snow, just missing her. And off to the next tree went the raven. Leanna got to just before the tree, then took a detour, into the ditch beside the sidewalk. It meant going up to her thigh tops in snow, but she avoided the avalanche. She bragged about how she had fooled the raven.

 I kind of spoiled the moment: "Let me get this straight. You're up to your thighs in a snow-filled ditch. And you fooled the raven?"  Leanna got this look. And then she groaned and then she laughed. That was a game the bird could not lose.




Wednesday 23 May 2012

Getting distracted, Del Mastro style

On Facebook, I get a link to a message from Mike Rilstone, Friend of a Friend, under the title

WAKE UP CANADA!
-----------------------
At what point in time does a party duct tape a buffoon's mouth?
Isn't a used car salesman taking a medical doctor to task in her own field, (albeit something a bright Grade One kid would probably know), a bit much?


What he's talking about is the comment PC MP Dean Del Mastro made on radio to Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett that biology was not science. Bennett is a medical doctor. Apparently she burst out laughing. On blog spots, and comment sites all over the internet, Del Mastro has been pilloried as a bozo, a clown, and, as above, a buffoon. Maybe so. But don't expect him to get the duct tape treatment any time soon, because in making these kinds of comments, he is doing pretty much the job assigned to him. He is not supposed to be an expert; he is supposed to be a distraction. 

Need proof?  Ask yourself, what was the occasion for this comment? Why were these two MPs being interviewed in the first place? About what? What was the outcome for the issue they were debating? 

Discussion of the "Sex: A Tell-All Exhibit" at the museum of Science and Technology and of criticism of the government's  negative response to it, has pretty much disappeared, as amused and irate commentators shift focus to the nonsense spewing from the mouth of Del Mastro. He has become the issue. He has succeeded. And because he has succeeded, he will be rewarded with  more opportunities to be a stand-up distraction in the future.

Del Mastro is not a newby to parliament. He is in his third term, so the Prime Minister knew what he was getting when he promoted Del Mastro to positions of increasing responsibility and visibility. 

That's right: his third term. Somebody in Peterborough likes what he is doing for his constituency--a lot of somebodies.

That reminds me of the third verse of Tom Paxton's satirical song, "What did You Learn In School Today?":

What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned our government must be strong.
It's always right and never wrong.
Our leaders are the finest men.
And we elect them again and again.
That's what I learned in school today.
That's what I learned in school.

Within the parliamentary connotations of the word, Dean Del Mastro is doing a "fine job."  Even if a lot of commentators are wondering if he went to school, and if he studied or passed any science courses while he was there.

Another angle he pursued in his analysis of the Exhibit was that if people wanted that kind of information, they should go to an adult video store for it, prompting a few to wonder if he has spent much time in adult video stores, because he seems to need to learn a lot about them, their services and products, too. 

See--a distraction.




Thursday 10 May 2012

Bear Stories


And speaking of monsters: have I told any bear stories lately?

in the late 60s and early 1970s, I worked on the edge of the Chilcotin Plateau for a couple of summers and farther north, along the eastern edge of the Alaska panhandle for three, as a surveyor for the BC Department of Highways. The crews had a core of full-timers ranging from 19 to around 57 years old, augmented in May by university students, and sometimes in July by a few high-schoolers.  We July veterans of two months of not shaving and rarely showering—it was a great summer job in many ways—were not allowed actually to harm the high-schoolers. But we were allowed to have some fun with them—the same kind of fun the regulars occasionally tried to have with us.

The Chilcotin years, we were working in grizzly bear country, right across territory on which Connie King, a retired pro hockey player, had been badly chewed up by a grizzly on his ranch. The first year we drove in to the hopping-off point for our job, we had met King in a cafĂ©, admiring the scar where half his face had been.  So, we did carry rifles with us on some parts of the job, as grizzlies were a genuine threat, if not the commonplace we let the high-schoolers believe.In fact, I don't recall ever actually seeing a bear while on the job, in all five summers. Once in the north, in the evening, out for a drive along the project, we passed a small grizzly on the edge of an old landing strip. That's it. We saw more wolves than bears. By one. Still, bears were the big worry.

The second summer, I had two of the not-ready-to-shave set working with me doing cross-sections of line. They were not exactly quick or productive workers, to put it generously.  But they were willing to listen to wild stories about bear attacks and wonder aloud how to handle a grizzly (it was always a grizzly) if one happened by.

“Well, you know,” I told them, from my several months of non-experience with bears, and a bit of theory gleaned from unreliable sources, “grizzlies cannot climb trees, so if a bear comes after us, we have to get about twelve feet up a solid tree within a few seconds.”

“How many seconds?”

“Oh, depends. Ten or twelve, I would think. That’s why you always have to have a tree picked out as we work ahead. So if I yell, `Grizzly,’ you can get up the tree without thinking too hard.”

Did I mention we were working on a mountain side? One with trees that tapered very quickly from a foot across to a few inches?  Rooted in thin mountain soil?

So I offered to put them through a grizzly bear drill.  I would suddenly yell, “Grizzly,” and then time them to see how long it took them to get out of claw range.  And as we worked along a steep slope one afternoon, that’s what I yelled.

The more agile of the two leaped to a handy fir, and began to claw his way desperately up the trunk. When he was about 7 or 8 feet up, clinging with arms and legs to the rapidly narrowing tree, it came loose from the shallow litter it was rooted in, and rolled off down the slope, with a seventeen year old firmly clinging for dear life.

“You’re dead,” I called after him.


Later that week, we were dropped off along the line by the rest of the crew who went on ahead.  The basic equipment we needed for the day was a hand level, a rod, a tape, and a pogey stick to rest the hand-level on.  And our lunches.  The teens had their lunches, just fine. But as the truck pulled out of earshot, there was this casual,” Do you have the hand-level?” from the sixteen-year-old whose job it was to bring it. “No.”  “So now what,” he asked, looking for a cozy spot to curl up for the next seven or eight hours.

“Now,” I replied, pointing into the bush, along a row of survey stakes, “you walk about two miles that way up the cut line, till you get to our camp, you go to your tent, you get the hand level, and you come back here and start to work.” 

“I can’t go alone.”

“Dave can go with you, since you both screwed up. I’ll just wait right here.” 

“What about bears?” 

“I’m not worried about bears,” I replied.

“No, us?”

“Well, bears don’t like noise,” I reminded them. “So take a stick and beat it against your hard hat as you go along.” 

And that’s what he did. Two miles to camp, and two miles back to our worksite. Without first taking off the hard hat. I was sorry I hadn't told them to bang their two hard-hats together.


Tuesday 8 May 2012

Where the Wild Things Went

The sad news today is that Maurice Sendak has died. Back in the mid 1970s--1975 I guess--I took a job as a branch library supervisor at the Regent Park Branch of Regina Public Library. I knew just about zip about children's literature, and hadn't looked at a picture book in who knows how long. So I had to find out from the staff who the kids liked, as I prepared for my first pre-school story and craft hours, and for my first Saturday morning story hours. They showed me a lot--Curious George was a sure winner, if any were in. Among the newer books that came along (ordered by my precessor) was Leo the Late Bloomer. Story of my life.


But one they all loved was Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are. We had many copies. We had to replace worn out copies every couple of years.

The first time I read it, I was tickled at the story of Max, a bad boy punished for being too unruly, sent off to bed where he works out his attitude on a dream island full of monsters who have to learn to live and play by his rules. The monsters were the funniest things I could imagine in a picture book. And the fact that Max was pretty unapologetic didn't hurt, either.

So one afternoon, in came a father with several children. They took off into the children's book section while he sat by the entrance to see what they would pick. And to tell them what they were not allowed to have. A parent's prerogative, I suppose. But I was only maybe 26, covered in hair, beard and attitude, and full of righteous indignation at anything that looked like censorship to me. I was, after all, on the executive of the Saskatchewan Library Association. And one day would chair its (one-person) Intellectual Freedom Committee, and write to local newspapers and speak to regional library boards (well, one of them) on matters of censorship. But my training not to interfere with parents showing an interest in their children's reading held cool until one little boy trotted up with a huge smile and Where the Wild Things Are. Without even looking inside to see what it was about, the dad said a firm "No." Surprised, I asked him why, since the book was a major award winner and truly popular with kids the boy's age.

"Too scary. It'll give him nightmares."

The kid had not looked too frightened when he brought the book up to his dad. And there's a monster on the cover. So I honestly do not think, to this day, that was the issue. But the man had not even looked into the book, so it wasn't the story, either.

I tried. I reaffirmed that the book was hugely popular. That it had won major awards. That it was a story of a little boy learning to control his monsters, to make them his playmates. That had surprisingly little impact on the father in question. Well, none.

I hope the kid got to read the book one day. Maybe he had already heard it at school or at a library story hour. Maybe he took a children's literature course at university, where an older, balding and beardless instructor read it to him and gave him permission to study it for credit.

Then again, maybe the dad had also heard about it, about a boy who gets away with being disobedient and who learns to control the monsters in his mind and life. Maybe it was even on some "books to keep your kids away from" list he had been supplied with. There are such things. Lots of them. Maurice Sendak was on lots of them. Still is. He was on them even before In the Night Kitchen, with its full frontal diaperless male toddler nudity.

Shocking. To some parents out to purify the world. Shocking like Robert Munsch with his illustrated great big fart in Good Families Don't.Which also got onto some "do not let your kids see this book" lists.

Kids, even very little ones, sometimes just have too much maturity for their parents to handle. That's one thing I learned, once I became a dad myself. Physical maturity of the kind that takes your breath away as your watch him climb a shaky chain and log ladder and pull himself up onto a platform a foot or two over his height, to take his turn at the slide--when you were wondering how he got there last time while you were talking to another dad for just a few seconds. Then wish you hadn't found out.

Physical maturity of the kind that takes your breath away as you make his supper in the kitchen under your bedroom, and wonder what is that noise coming from the second floor, thirteen steps straight up over a concrete landing where just two seconds ago he was playing with some toys. And he's not yet two.

And mental maturity (or daring precociousness) of the kind that makes you double take when you see that he is still watching the same song on the Muppet Show tape, a good five minutes after you are sure it had to be over. "Wow, that song's going on a long time," you say. "I pushed it," he explains, prodding the replay button. And he's not yet two.

Good thing there's a long training period before they hit adolescence, and really begin to work on you. Too bad it's not ever long enough.

Tonight, I'm wishing my copy of Where The Wild Things Are were here at home for a sentimental send-off read.  Maybe I'll have to listen to The Troggs instead. Wonder if they're on YouTube? Silly question, really.