samoyeddogs

Close enough.  Jon Guy packed it April 16. Long time islander first came to these shores in 1978.  Didn’t know him but saw him around and knew who he was.  He was a central figure in the island community.  He was 66 which ain’t near old enough for a tour of this planet.  It is.  It’s sad.  Obit in “Island Tides” http://www.islandtides.com/ out of Pender Island by his wife/partner Priscilla Ewbank who has also been writing “Saturna Notes” in the paper for years.  Didn’t know they were connected.  Never met her or even know what she looks like but it must be terribly sad to lose your other half like that, before his time.  May the Lord bless her.  And him.  Jon had gone into a partnership with the Schaeffers on the lower store and pub by the ferry back around 2006 or 2007.  The Schaeffers died in that plane crash on take-off out of Saturna in November 2009.  They were our immediate neigbours to the west.  So no one in that partnership is around anymore.  John Giorno was right.  Life is a killer.  The planet stumbles on but the contestants come and go.  And it is.  It is.  A stranger’s sojourn.  Marcus Aurelius nailed it.

Death is a strange thing.  It effects you.  I never met the man but I knew who he was.  I was thinking about him.  I was sitting in the rec centre with a lot of other people Saturday afternoon for the Orca Tour 2014, Saturna Island date, and I was still thinking about Jon Guy.  How can you just up and die like that?  Words are inadequate and you can’t do a thing about it.  I was sitting there listening to Richard Blagborne doing the introductions for the presentations by Erich Hoyt and Paul Spong and I was thinking, yes, this is a community.  I’ve always wondered about this concept of a “community” because it’s something I’d never really felt myself, never felt part of any community.  But here, without a doubt, was a community.  A community of people interested in Orcas and what those Orcas represent.  And interested in preserving what they represent.  You remember Erich Hoyt.  He wrote a standard work, “Orca. The Whale Called Killer.”

The island had taken a hit with Jon Guy’s passing.  I could feel the sense of loss at the main store, in whose operations he had played an integral role.  How could he just disappear like that?  I think people were still a little bewildered.  He was still working two weeks before he died.  But for the living life goes on.  I forget who said that.

We met an islander whose work we’d seen in the cafe gallery.  It’s always interesting to put a face to a name.  States bought me a linoprint by Karen Muntean and we went to pick it up at her place on East Point Road opposite Russell Beach.  We’d driven by the house a thousand times so it was interesting to be in the house and looking down at the road, the beach or “Banks” beyond, and the Strait of Georgia and the mainland beyond that.

Back at the place some serious weirdness was going on in the San Juans.  A tongue of rainbow was sticking out of Skipjack Island.  Our timing was perfect because the phenomena lasted about 30 seconds.

You can’t make this stuff up.  I forget who said that.  There’s that echo again.

We’ve made it to The Tyee Blogroll http://thetyee.ca/BCBlogs/ so I guess it’s time to ‘straighten up and fly right’.  So keep the cards and letters, cheques, comments and recommendations flowing, y’hear?  Thank you.

That’s right.  If you can say it you can do it. Everything’s a mystery now.  You just don’t know what’s coming next but at least you’ve realized that’s how it should be, instead of fighting it.  It just flows.  You don’t want to die.  You try to be on time.  It takes guts to do anything after all you’ve learned, but punctuality is the main thing when you come up here.  Your girlfriend may not be on time but you have to be.  If you aren’t she’ll beat your head in.  Word of caution.  Never, ever have an 80 year old girlfriend.  It’s terribly difficult to explain.

I’ve figured something out.  There comes a time in everyone’s life when you need it.  You need it but more importantly it needs you, and even if you didn’t need it, you’d want to be around for your girlfriend.  He always has whatever you need.

Get out the ‘writing helper.’  Because it’s too late, and you can’t do this anymore.  You’re not ‘getting and spending’ and that quote from Dr Johnson haunts you.  ‘Nobody but a low-down, filthy con-artist ever wrote for anything but money.’  So what’s going on here?

Fact is I like it here because nobody bothers me.  I get very few mentions and there’s something else.  I’m powerless, really, to effect change.  Have no illusions.  You can do everything right and no one will notice.  Why should they?  Who are they, anyway?  It’s not about content, it’s about the triumph of ephemerality.  It’s about mastery of the inconsequential.

Allen Wrenches.  What do you know about this guy?  He’s a tool.  He’s a pistol.  I figure my girlfriend’ll know about this clown and we’ll have our solution.  My girlfriend has tools that have tools.  Incredibly well connected.  And I need something so here I go.  I despise tools.  I won’t have one in the house.

What?

It’s a nice drive up to the old sod in slumbering Point Grey.  Everything’s been planted here long ago.  A lot of houses are disappearing in the face of thundering new houses.  The sod went up in 1913 but will be staying on as long as my girlfriend’s around.  We down a kilt-lifter to kick things off then move on to Señor Wrenches.  He’s got a lot of friends in an old salad dressing jar.  I remember this line of salad dressings.  They used to locate in the produce section, not in the salad dressing aisle, so they were special.  The jar is brim with the tool in all its many sizes.  I don’t know what I’m doing so take the whole jar.  There’s a problem at home with a tap and before we send in the plumbers we’re pledged to try a fix ourselves.

We talk irrelevancies, my girlfriend and I, then I drive away.  Down the hill I try everything in the bottle but the fishhook circa 1937, but nothing works.  We just can’t do it.  A part’s coming from Barrie, Ontario and if it don’t get here soon even Russell Crowe won’t help.  To rinse a glass is to take a bath.  I forget the rest.  What’s a fish hook doing in a jar of wrenches?  Thought about that one too.  It’s about as sensible as anything else around here.

The thing is you try.  You try and fail and you try again and fail again.  Then you try again and fail again.  So what’s it about?  It’s about failure.  I think it was C. States, in  a slightly different context, who uncovered that gem.  Failure will admit of no solution but success will.  Let’s drop some big likes on that idea.  I’m ready.

 

 

March 31, 2014.  Strange, new, unfamiliar year (SNUY).  I call an old friend, culmination of a plan more than a year in the making.  I call him Sunday thinking there’ll be a better chance of reaching him and I’m right.  Here he is.  He’d been working on that really expensive bridge out there in Burnaby or Coquitlam or wherever it is for a really long time, but I knew that was over.  I remember the last time I’d talked to him calling him at eight o’clock on a Saturday night.  He was at work, which surprised me.  We had to hang up. Normally Clanbrassil will talk your ear off.  He seems to live on the phone.

“I gotta go, Steve.  I’m at work.”

“Well, why don’t you get to work then?  Why are you talking to me?”

I met Adrian Clanbrassil in the 20th century in a bizarre place called Wakeman Sound.  He was a hard working, hard playing veteran and I was “green”.  The business was timber extraction and the only way to get to it was by air.  It was a remote site.  I’d gotten into the business because I needed money and wanted to do something different.  Clanbrassil was here for some of the same reasons.  He’d spent several seasons in another company camp on the Nekite River north of here that was logged out now, which was why he was at Wakeman.  He was pulling rigging on a side I was assigned to one summer Saturday.

I learned the first day I met Clanbrassil that I was connected to him in an odd way.  We were both from town and most of these clowns in the logging show were from Vancouver Island.  When I found out he’d grown up in Point Grey I told him my girlfriend had too.  He asked me her name.  “I was their paperboy,” he said.  When he was a kid he’d delivered the paper to States’ parent’s house.  I definitely never thought I’d meet anyone who could say that in this place.

Adrian and I became friends and stayed friends long after our careers in the woods were over.  How often do you have the opportunity of making a new friend?  We had a lot in common.  We were both white, both male and both enjoyed a good time.  We didn’t see each other a lot but stayed in touch.  He used to call out of the blue, or I’d call him.  He did building technology at BCIT and made good money in construction.  I took a vow of poverty and started working in the book business.

Before hanging up that last time I asked him how his partner was.  I’d never met her but knew Anne and he had been together a long time, going back to when he went into rehab.  I was surprised and a little shocked to hear him say, “We’re not living together anymore.  We broke up.”  My cliché thought was,  “I hope he hasn’t started drinking again.”  I’d been thinking about it on and off ever since.  Was my friend all right?

I remembered when he quit drinking.  I’d called him and he was in Crescent Beach, living at a recovery house.  I  knew how difficult it must have been for him.  He always prided himself on his work ethic and was very solid at what he did, but there’d been a mystery developing the last few years.  His marriage had ended.  I knew he’d bought a small condo and walked away from it.  Then he left the country to work on a construction project in Taipei.  I didn’t know, but doing that might have been as much about avoiding debt collectors as any cold, hard desire to work in Taipei.  When he came back it was like he was on the lam.  He’d even importuned my mother-in-law and invited himself to stay in an upstairs bedroom of her house, a strange situation that lasted about a month and led to a bit of a falling out between us.  “Why, actually, are you here?”  I already knew the answer.  Adrian Clanbrassil’s life had run off the rails.

I think I didn’t want to hear my friend’s life was messed up again.  But you think like that and then you think, it’s your friend, right?  Does it matter what’s happened?  He’s your friend.  He’s an adult.  He’s a strong guy.  You were a team in the glory days and you want to know what’s become of your friend.  A friend doesn’t say “forget it” about a friend.

And here he is.  He sounds fine.  He sounds the same.  He says he’s at his girlfriend’s.  So he’s got a “girlfriend”.  That’s good.  He tells me he’s living in a trailer park near Boundary Bay.  Clanbrassil living in a trailer park.  Why does that not sound ridiculous?  There’s almost something right about it.  We don’t talk about the past.  I don’t ask him if he’s drinking.  It’s not my business.  This is a quick social call to verify we’re both still out here.  We’ve done it.  We’ve kept in touch, like old friends.  I can’t help him with his problems anymore than he can help me with mine.  Doesn’t matter.  Friendship’s not about problems.  Professionals deal with problems.  We’re just friends.  Let’s keep it that way.