Tuesday, June 28, 2011

wolf man

The computer keyboard front has seen some advances and some retreats. I'm at the point with computers and automobiles where I can take it apart and put it back together without breaking anything but I might not fix anything either.







Somewhere in this maze something is preventing the lower row of keys from working. "ZXCVBNM<" all of those keys fail to work. The rest of the keys work.



I plugged it into this public computer in Churchill Falls Library and the same keys didn't work so it isn't my computer. But I can type now at least and try to appease my eager fans. "What is Oggy up to? Where is Oggy?" The fan mail is probably piling up at my door in NH.



Well, this is the big land. Alaska is the western Labrador, not the other way around. No Canadian wants to hear Labrador called the eastern Alaska. The Viking found this place first.











I found so much firewood here that I blazed a fire that almost melted my camper top. Wouldn't that've been funny?



The other day I was picking litter up in the parking lot where I camped, as is my habit, when a reporter dropped by and found my arctic wolf awareness tour worth publishing. This is a big step in the right direction for wolf health. The Aurora is Labrador City's main paper, keeping people up to date on the ore industry.





There's a picture of the front page with my transient wolf costume in full display. I'm under the news about an iron ore shipping president and an environmental assessment for new ore drilling.





Lana, the reporter pictured below awarding me with a paper, will probably lose her job for highlighting a hippie's insane quest to save the arctic wolf when the arctic is exactly where all the big drilling companies have their eyes set. She's probably getting mysterious calls right now saying, "One more 'hippie does good' article and you'll be writing obituaries in Nunavut."



But that's what the whole wolf quest is about, speaking truth to power. And when the news includes a wolf enthusiast traveling through Labrador City to spread the news that the arctic wolf is imperiled then that goes in the paper with the discovery of new oil deposits in the arctic. Thanks to Lana for her integrity! Good luck in Nunavut!







the aurora newspaper. The aurora is not a free paper though you might be able to get a preview subscription. You've all read the goals of my quest before but it's interesting to see them in a newspaper. I stopped to get gas on the way out of town and the boy at the pump said, "You were in the paper." I'm not sure if the response would be positive or reactive. A town based on resources like ore is like a town based on oil. Any suggestion that animals are in fact effected by human occupancy of Earth could be taken as a slight. But I know frontier towns and it's hard living under the best of circumstances so making it even harder by not stepping on a Lemming nest is sort of out of the question. But I moved on.

This big truck was in Fermont, Quebec. I wanted to capture the scale of this monster but ended up creating an optical illusion. It's a big truck. I was in Fermont for the solstice night hike up Mont Severson. Quebec folks love a hike like Mexicans love dancing. So, we went out with headlamps to welcome in the turning of the earth in the celestial orbit with rain in our faces. Sun up at about 3:30am. They had a fire going for our arrival and soup. Merci beaucoup, Fermont!





Lastly, this is a walleyed, landlocked salmon that weighed as much as a small baby. A Labrador fisher gave it to me and I happened to have some butter so I did the best I could with a gigantic fish. How would you prepare this on a wood stove inside a van? I cut the head off, cut the tail off so it fit in the pan, put half a stick of butter in there and grilled it until I could filet the meat off the spine with a knife. Then I grilled the meat for another 30 minutes, slowly roasting it in butter and salt and when it was all done I had the best meal in weeks. A few rib bones were left to spit out but I didn't do bad for a hippie from Los Angeles. That was a secret location on the way to Churchill Falls that I can't give away because it's too ideal.





I do want to add that the van's ignition timing seems slightly off. Either that or a hundred other symptoms could be causing a slight erratic idle and a sluggish shift from first to second gear. It's only after countless miles do I notice every change in performance. This far from a mosquito free garage I take everything into account. Labrador City garages were booked up until August so it makes my choice easy. I either fix everything myself or it doesn't get fixed. I need a timing light and the emissions specs for a 1969 E200, specifically the idle speed and timing details. I think it could be a timing issue or a vacuum leak in the intake manifold or a carb adjustment or even old spark plug wires. This is on my mind like a bad tick.



I drove from Labrador City without problem but if you are a praying person then pray to the transmission gods to safely see me back to the small land.

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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.