Guzzle Guzzle

Currently, the American George Washington Dollar Bill is worth 42 cents in Canadian currency, so keep that in mind folks. The world has finally realized that America is a debtor's nation and we've been printing money since 1950 like it was toilet paper without any value to it. It's like buying a car on a credit card and then paying the monthly payments with another credit card. And when that CC is due then you get another credit card. Finally, some genius like the loathsome Lou Pai or Kenneth Lay thinks, "Hell, why don't we go into business making credit cards...that way we will always have credit." So, I feel we're all driving around in unowned (not preowned) vehicles that never get paid for and the debt is more than 100 generations could pay off and Obama and his men are all trying to figure out where the credit card business guys went (to jail) because the Chinese are licking their chops and buying drought land at fire sale prices. We've got mailmen in Los Angeles making $65,000/yr. Wonder why the post office is broke? Fucking inflated housing values in cities courtesy of crooked mortgage brokers and financial planners. Teamsters are right to raid the bank while the bank is still open. If you don't have your hand in the piggy jar then you are totally clueless how America is run. It's a land of Pharaohs and slaves. Oggy has been on a debt free economic system since day one. He might be the richest man in North America but don't worry, he won't break his arm patting himself on the back. God, I sound like a right wing talk radio asshole.

...this tank of go juice hurt big time. I'm going to end up pushing the van back to Maine. Or hooking up dogs to the front. I had already put in $20 a day earlier...

The slice of pizza was forgettable and too expensive and, as Woody Allen says, not big enough. "Donairs" is Canuck for "Gyros".

Corner Brook has a few more pizza places to sample and since the tropical storms may have sent the freighter with my vacuum modulator off course into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, I have to wait for its arrival. I don't know when it will get here and the Canadian Tire parts people are clueless 14 days is too long and still no part. I should not have ordered it to the island but should have called a Canadian Tire place in Nova Scotia, where the shipment might've gone over land and also because it would take me longer to get there. Now I am stuck here waiting arrival. Also, the right part might not even come. The parts guy might have ordered the wrong part. The part might be defective to begin with. And if it is the right part and not defective it still might not fix the problem I have with the shifting into higher gear. That's a lot of questions and I regret ordering it at all with inflated Canadian prices and many ways this could go wrong. But what is done is done and I'm tired of driving and I found a nice library here and the girls at the Grenfell College are all wearing skinny jeans and the campus swimming pool locker rooms have free showers and I found a parking lot where I can park at night in quiet anonymity and overlook the Humber River as I play scales and knit hats (I remembered my plan to knit hats to sell on the street!)

I guess I'll wait for a week or until the Royal Mounted Police tell me to get out of town. If I had not already been forced to pay for the part then I would simply leave. But I've paid for it and I need it and it might as well be over and done with here. It was very hard camping in Gros Morne as the locals all make their money selling $30 parking spaces so there was nowhere to park for the night. I understand their situation, but I didn't crimp 500000 pins onto a million wires so I could pay for a place to park and shit. That's what gas stations are for.

Tuckamore

Gros Morne means "Big lonely Mountain" and this was during the day hike to reach the top, stumbling through the stunted forest into the glacially scribed U-valley and then up a side scree of small boulders and across a wind-swept plateau to overlook a glacial valley and pond straight down and then descending the other side through the long valley of unforgiving rocks and roots.

This looks like a view of Yosemite Valley but it is actually Western Brook Pond fjord way off through that break in the mountain range. It felt strange with the ocean a few hundred meters behind my back to be looking at something so related to what I always felt was an inland phenomena. Maybe this will be the new Yosemite Valley park playground in 500 years after the pond is filled in with erosional debris from the brooks and soil takes root and villages sprout up of post-canadian natives wearing plastic clothes. Parks Canada offers a boat tour through the pond but the $60 fee equaled several good meals for the wasting Oggy beltline. Furthermore, my "natural beauty" quotient has been reached on this trip and you could show me Ansel Adams photos all night long and I would prefer to ask the guy in the RV next door what kind of engine is in his truck. I've suddenly become that annoying tourist who takes the tour guide aside and asks him if he has read John McPhee's work (that has nothing to do with Canada) and then tries to sound more worldly than he really is.It's a different rock, not the granodiorite of Yosemite, but a true granite and Gneiss, and lacking are the sheer cliffs of half dome. But Glacier Point is replicated here in Gros Morne Park.

I'm experimenting with the exposure setting on my pathetically old 4 mp camera to get pictures in odd lighting conditions. This was at sunset so I set the exposure to -1.5. It still doesn't do it justice.
Here's a sunset picture you can only get if you are about 2 hours behind schedule when descending Gros Morne Mountain. The rest of the hike would be in pitch blackness. Fortunately no one was around to hear my screams of agony when I tripped and my spine tendons flared in anger.

The golden larches are enjoying their climatically prolonged summer which leaves Oggy looking at rolling hills of green instead of the fall colors he promised himself back in St. Anthony. It's too early for Fall here. I plan to plant a golden larch when I get back to the ranch. They aren't native to NH but they won't do any harm either. Tuckamore is the term for a wind-stunted forest of otherwise mature trees and shrubs. I decided it's not a bad name for a boy since he would be called "Tuck" or "Tucker". But that's the romantic in me naming children I'll never have.

Crisis Mode

Spring flooding turned this boardwalk into a roller coaster...

Here's a trivia question answer...where does the Appalachian Trail end? IF you say Kathadin then you are wrong. The end is in northern New Foundland. So, you through hikers better get busy planning your Canadian Leg.

Due to predatory fees by Citizens Bank I am on high alert spending. For some reason that means buying frivolous cotton yarn to crochet hats.

Set Sail

The Evensong, reentering St. Anthony Harbour.
I have been pondering the universe quite a bit lately because there were three hard days of rain and my rule is to never drive in the rain. And when it is sunny I like to hike or read. So that doesn't leave much time to drive. That's what I'll tell the border police when I get there.

Anyway, I've been reading Annals of the Former World by John Mcphee and it has helped me gain some perspective. You see, the earth is 4.5 billion years old. Now, to put that in perspective I tried to develop a ration I could comprehend. I'll leave it to you to check my math.

There are 250 million seconds in the lifespan of an 80 year old person.
So, in the eyes of the earth an 80 year span is 1/16th of a second.

To put it another way, in the eyes of the earth, one second equals 1280 years.

Or another way, expecting the earth to care about what happens during Post Ice Age mankind is like expecting a person born in 731 A.D. (and is alive today) to remember a single time they blinked their eye.

It's not easy to grasp. Mcphee puts it this way, "IF you stretch your arms out on both sides of you and called that distance TIME, the whole of human history would exist at the last 1/4 of an inch of one fingernail.

So, are we to be nihilists and throw up our hands to the whim of the monkey within us? Or are we to be pragmatists and survive as best we can? OR are we to be capitalists and see others as a resource to make our lives more secure?

I was going to say that I want to "put my tools down, to lock the garage, to wash up" in the sense that these questions have worn on me for 20 years like the sea wears down 200 million old limestone. I want to think I am the sea and the questions are being worn down but it is the other way around. My tools (my brain) needs to be replaced because it can not break the question itself. It is my nature to get to the bottom of things. It irks be that one exhaust gasket failed while the other one was fine. Does that mean the plugs were firing less completely on one side? Or is the extra bend in the exhaust change the draw effect? Or is there another hidden cause within the cylinders? I want to get to the bottom of this, "To sand down the rough edges of the world," as my brother once accused me...and he was right. I want to put these tools down and move on to the book I have imagined myself writing about the calamity in Santa Cruz. But the language I've developed to write that book, the process of developing that language, is hard to stop. The experiment is complete, the language is mine alone, but I can't put the tools down and close up the shop. The larches are turning gold in the Humber valley. Maybe that will be my answer to come in from the waves.

Foxy

I'm sitting there making a leather string guard for the inside of my guitar bag (using the leather of my now defunct boots*) because the string ends keep snagging and tearing the Chinese-made nylon, and this red wolf walks right in front of my van where it is parked way out near Roddickton, near a place where Sir Grenfell had started a vegetable garden to supplement the hospital food (he did everything!). And I fumble with the camera so bad that these are the best pictures I got of it. The lighting was horrible and if I used the flash it made everything too dark because the animal was too far away and if I didn't use the flash then the shutter speed was too slow and it was blurry. If it had been an arctic wolf I'd be so happy.
Roddickton calls itself the Moose Capital of the World and I only saw the remains of a moose way back in the woods.

*I want to say that when I learned $12 million a day is being wasted in Iraq while I reuse the leather from my shoes and recycle cans other people throw on the street and wear 30 year old pants and drive a 42 year old van I feel I have zero (0) obligation to the United States government anymore. We aren't on the same page. Obama, please lose my number.