Rock Paper Lizard

Lunch Fairy

2012-01-27T21:21:00.000-08:00

1. Despite the ample, easily understood signage, there were four teenage males out on the ice, throwing each others' backpacks out to the thin spots. What fun. I remember what fun that was, when my brain was less complete.

I was riding my bike around the pond slowly, listening for birds. A man about my age walking past said, "What they're doing is really stupid." He pointed at the boys.

"Yes," I said. I squeezed the brakes.

"Someone should tell them to get off the ice," and then he continued walking. I think he was implying that I should tell them to get off the ice. I didn't do that. I didn't see why I should be the one to yell helpful advice at reckless teenagers. When has that ever worked?

The man continued walking to the far side of the pond, and from there he yelled at them. "Hey, get off the ice! That's really dangerous!"

The teenagers laughed at him, and yelled things back that at their nicest were sarcastic.

They started playing hockey with fallen birch branches and a knot of wood. The game didn't last long because the equipment kept failing. I watched them give up and shimmy back to shore. All the while my hand was on my phone in my pocket. When they were back on solid ground, on the path to the high school, I pedalled away. I didn't believe that there was a magical way to convince them not to fall through the ice. That choice was up to them. I was willing to wait and watch and call for help if they did. Modern communications allow you to be seemingly uncaring and potentially useful at the same time.

2. Today my kids were home from school with mild fevers. A virus is going around, Angry Bird I-Pad flu. Thus I was stuck at home, dumping a can of chicken soup into a saucepan when the phone rang. It was about twenty minutes past noon.

"Hello?"

A unknown child's pleading voice: "I don't have my lunch and I'm really really hungry." A young girl, I guessed six to eight years old. Why did she phone me?

Me: "Where are you?"

Her: "At Such & Such School. I'm a student at Such & Such School."

I know where Such & Such School is. It's in the local district.

Me: "Okay, now why did you call me?"

Her: "Because my daddy didn't bring my lunch."

I'm kind of getting the picture. Someone at the school tried to call her home, but dialled the wrong number. They handed her the phone without telling her who they were calling. She didn't know that the person answering was supposed to be her dad. To her, the person answering was the Lunch Fairy.

Me: "What's your name?"

Her: "Amy."

Me: "Amy, could you please give the phone to a grown-up?"

Her: "There aren't any grown-ups." Then she hung up.

Me: "Ahh." No grown-ups? My children raised their febrile heads from sofa cushions to look at me. I went upstairs to the find the school district website and the number for Such & Such School, to call and check if Amy had been connected with her lunch. I dialled.

Voice: "Such & Such School." This voice sounded like another young girl, scarcely older than Amy. Oh, right. It started to make more sense. Lunch hour. At many schools grade 6 and 7 students are in charge of monitoring the office at lunch hour, no grown-ups around.

Me: "Hi. A little girl named Amy just called me from your school to tell me she doesn't have any lunch."

Voice: "Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry we bothered you. We called the wrong number."

Me: "That's okay. I just want to make sure that someone is making sure that Amy is getting her lunch."

Voice: "We're just so sorry to bother you. I'm sorry..." She sounded mortified, very upset with herself.

Me: "It's okay, don't worry about that..."

She hung up.

I went downstairs to find both kids staring goggle-eyed at the television as the soup boiled over on the stove top.

Summation. Even in a world populated mostly by strangers, we are pretty much hard-wired to help. We're not always very good at it, but we try.

Whilst there was snow.

2012-01-22T13:09:00.000-08:00

Walking through the forest, looking for mammal tracks. Suddenly, a cribbage game broke out.

Precip.

2012-01-21T13:53:00.000-08:00

Morning sky, after the rain.

Last night a hefty rain event--also known as a storm-- went through, and did what rain events here do to recent snowfalls. Everything turned to water and went down the drains.

The drains drain to the ditches, which are filling up.

Here is some serious influx. Imagine if both pipes were open, how serious that would be.

A hint of peaty brown.

Fun with shutter speeds. A slow shutter makes the water go faster.

Another winter bird (an especially handsome one).

2012-01-20T12:12:00.000-08:00

Unlike wanderers like redpolls, the Varied Thrush is a reliable find when it snows. They come down to the lowlands and skulk around in parks and gardens. When flushed, they fly up about 10-15 feet, and then nervously glance at you over their shoulders. You quietly approach, hoping to get a twig-free shot...

whoops, he's gone.

Winter, with birds.

2012-01-18T16:03:00.000-08:00

I went for a wander in cental Richmond to get a snow-fix (as much as is possible when not even an inch fell). Near the corner of Gilbert and Lucas Roads, I saw a flock of 15-20 Common Redpolls picking at catkins in a birch tree. What joy. It's been at least five years since I've seen one of these little beauties in this city. By the time I had fished Mr. Hesitation from my pack, and Mr. H. found the tree, two crows had arrived to scare the redpolls away. No joy.

But even Mr. H. couldn't mess up with a flock of robins (above), who were apparently frozen to their twigs.

Farther along, someone had a Weather Lion (two, actually), which corroborated the recent data from Weather Frog.

Weather Frog detects snow.

2012-01-15T11:32:00.000-08:00

Here is Weather Frog at first light this morning. WF has detected a thin layer of granular snow, which is crunchy to walk on, and hopeless for snowball construction.

Funn-wha?

2012-01-14T17:50:00.000-08:00

I have been checking the weather every few hours, because after an incredibly boring early winter, things are becoming tantalizingly interesting. And then this from Environment Canada:

Funnel cloud? In Vancouver? I ran to the window. After a meagre overnight snowfall there are but a few late-day puffy clouds turning purple over the north shore mountains. My guess is that someone at Environment Canada mis-iconed, or is drunk, or both.

On the other hand, look at what's pending for the rest of the week. Neato winter stuff, unless EC is totally hammered and is making up everything.

Update, an hour or so later: Apparently somewhat true. At least one other weather site has reported that a funnel cloud formed off west Richmond, which is Vancouver's southern neighbour. Lots of meteorological instability today. Sorry, EC, for doubting your sobriety, but you better come through with some snow this week. Vancouver Weather Page (same link as above) is much less certain about that.

Further Update: Someone has uploaded a short video of the funnel to YouTube.

Gruiform mugging averted.

2012-01-06T16:55:00.000-08:00

I believe this to be the Reifel Bird Sanctuary's resident Sandhill Crane couple with their latest tot. Note how Mom and Dad are giving us the eye. That's because some in our party are carrying little brown paper bags full of grain, which were purchased at the gate. If you want to meet a Sandhill Crane up close and threatening, tote a little brown paper bag at the Reifel Bird Sanctuary. They know what's within, and will come for it. They might even hunt you down.

This time, however, they hesitated. Perhaps they didn't feel like flying the fifty or so feet to get to our side of the slough. Or perhaps they weren't hungry, having recently pirated numerous other small brown paper bags. Or perhaps they have short attention spans and forgot what had piqued their interest a second or two after I said to out party, "Now's when we hide the small brown paper bags."
In any case, they trumpeted in unison, and then turned away.

And then I noticed something interesting: A crane's reflection is sharper than the crane itself. I don't know what that means, but it sounds profound.

Drowsy Night-heron amid sleeping catkins.

2012-01-05T13:32:00.000-08:00

Here's one of the overwintering Black-crowned Night-herons at the Reifel Bird Sanctuary, showing a little more of itself than they usually do. Typically, they are somnolent blobs obscured by numerous layers of branches. Look. The eye is even open. Edit: Sort of. Okay, the bird is drowsy. I'm changing the first word of the title from Awake to Drowsy.

Red flags.

2012-01-04T16:00:00.000-08:00

Ho. Nothing perks up a gloomy day like not one, but TWO Pileated Woodpeckers. They were flighty and noisy, clowning through the forest.

This is about the best picture of the set, certainly not the best pileated shot I've ever taken, but also by far not the worst. This is one of those birds that I can't refrain from clicking madly at, no matter how unpromising the view in the frame. This is why digital cameras are magical.

2012 so far: eagly, and more.

2012-01-02T16:23:00.000-08:00

A quick drive to the Reifel Bird sanctuary revealed that much of the Lower Mainland, certainly all of it between here and there, is covered in eagles. Ladner in particular is beset by the feathered beasts, which perch on trees outside suburban homes, and even on light posts, displacing the smaller Red-tails, who are flapping around feeling bullied and lost.

Artistic pair.

But the raptor of the day was this one, on the east dyke of the sanctuary. I think it's a juvenile Northern Goshawk, a bird I've only seen a few times. The shape, spilled-gravy splotchiness of the streaking, and the faint eyebrow are what I'm going on.

Here's another shot with the brightness blasted. It was one of those bright but grey days that challenge an unskilled photographer.

Garden City Geese

2011-12-27T13:20:00.000-08:00

The sports fields of Garden City Elementary are the place to be if you are a Lesser Snow Goose.

The turf is soggy and delicious.

Handsome beasts.

The school yard is also a peaceful place to snooze.

Fun for the entire family.

Click on the "snow geese" label below to read more about snow geese in Richmond.

Miss-dial

2011-12-24T11:23:00.000-08:00

The interpreter was laid off at beginning of December, as usual. By Christmas he would be receiving a second automatically generated pay slip informing him he had earned nothing during the previous two weeks. Season’s Greetings!

Not all of the interpreters were laid off. Two or three were kept on for promotional reasons, mall displays and school outreach, but these typically were the younger, more engaging ones. An unspoken truth was that they were the cute ones. Stacey had been one before she was promoted to Park Planning.

Despite being canned, at least temporarily, perhaps permanently—there was no guarantee a laid-off interpreter would be rehired in the spring despite the continuation of empty pay slips—the interpreter and the others were invited to the Parks Department Christmas party, where they would be expected to show up all cheery and pretend to be part of the team. Presence provided no guarantee of rehiring, but absence would ensure an abrupt termination of the empty pay slips.

The party was at Head Office, fourteen floors up in an office tower in one of the suburbs. Stacey dragged him along, and he endured, speaking as cheerfully as possible to those he ought to have spoken to and refraining from clustering with the other laid off interpreters in sullen clumps in the corners. He would have drank, but there was no booze, although the bigwigs seemed well lubricated and kept ducking out to relubricate . Following Stacey’s advice he stayed an hour and a half, bade hearty yet regretful farewells to his supervisor and a few others, and departed before the stupid Santa stuff that Stacey as a rising star the bigwigs wanted to drunkenly flirt with would be unable to escape, and went to hide in her car in the area office parking garage, scrunched low in case one of the bigwigs wobbled past prematurely.

It was cold. He should have thought ahead, brought a blanket. He should have brought two. Wintertime parking garages were always inexplicably colder than the world outside. He opened the glove box, hoping for a diversion. Stacey was a woman who left few careless clues. He liked that about her, except that it meant that in addition to being cold, her car was also boring.

He reached to stick his key into the ignition and twisted it to wake up the dashboard. He fiddled with the radio to find CBC. The current events program As it Happens was on, a story about a flock of sheep in Wales that had adopted seal pup washed inland by a storm, and would charge at anyone who tried to approach the seal. The most interesting part of the story was the lilty accent of the Welsh person. My ancestors talked like that? he wondered. The sheep were obdurately stupid and wanted to claim the seal as their own, as it lay starving. “Stupid sheep,” he said. He turned off the radio, fearing running down the car’s battery, and under the thin light of the garage’s fluorescent bulbs perused the car’s owner’s manual, which was physically as difficult to flip through as one of Stacey’s fashion magazines. He worked at it for a while, then gave up. It contained nothing the least bit interesting or even comprehensible. He contemplated doing Stacey a favour by tossing it out the window.

He fished his phone from his pocket and asked it to ring. It was the phone Stacey had given him for his birthday. Over the months since, he had become accustomed to receiving the occasional accidental phone call from someone in rural Mississippi. He was puzzled at first, but after a while he figured out that the area code was the issue. The screen on his phone told him they were dialling from area code 601. He googled his own phone number, but with area code 601. Shazzam. They were meaning to phone a department store in Jackson, Mississippi, but were reaching his breast pocket in wherever he happened to be. He didn’t want the callers to run up their phone bills, so would quickly tell them that they had accidentally phoned Canada, would wish them a nice day, and would disconnect. He felt bad about maybe seeming brusque with them, because they seemed nice. They spoke slowly with gentle voices and were invariably apologetic for their mistake. He half-wished one of them would phone now, a person to speak with, if only for a few seconds. He had no inkling of the deluge to come.

The instant he stuffed the manual back into the glove box the locks popped. The door swung open and Stacey dropped into the driver’s seat.

“You behaved better than I expected,” she said. “You almost pulled it off, as if you were actually enjoying yourself, but I could tell you were faking it.”

He said. “I’ve been waiting so long I’ve become hypothermic. I was nearing the legendary point where you just give up and blissfully drift away.”

“Don’t let me stop you.”

As they exited the garage, he asked, “Have you been changing your oil on a regular basis? If you haven’t, you may be in for a massive bill to have your engine de-sludged.”

A week later he had sunk into a classic pre-Christmas interpreter’s funk. He was on the balcony, leaning against the railing, searching for perched eagles, surveying the forest and its fingers that wove into the university. Low fog hugged the ground in the gaps, including the ugly tennis courts. Stacey was bustling around, getting ready for work. She yanked open the sliding door. “Get in here,” she said.

He stepped inside, and was lectured. "You're depressed. You need to leave the apartment, get out. Out-out, not just out on the balcony. I’d rather listen to you complain endlessly about intertidal programs with Surrey school groups than have to deal with your increasing listlessness. You have SAD. You need to go outside, walk around. Every day you have to put your shoes on, go outside and get some natural light.”

He reacted. “Get some what? Where do we live? This is a Kingdom of Gloom.”

“Yesterday was somewhat sunny.”

“I must have blinked.”

“Look. You need to interact with other people. Go birding. Isn’t it about time for the Christmas Bird Count?”

“Like I want to interact with birders. That’s like agreeing to ride on a float in a demented hobbiests’ parade.”

She stared, hard. “You are a birder. You are a god-damned birder.” She rarely swore. She was angry.

“No. I’m a biologist who knows birds okay. There’s a big difference.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I’m crappy on subadult gulls and fall shorebirds. And hopeless on pelagics!”

“Well do something else then. Get back to running, or get a membership at the pool. You have to cheer up one way or another. And as a favour to me, stay off the balcony until you do.”

The Mississippi deluge came the day after that, shortly after Stacey left for work and he was debating with himself whether or not to fry the last two slices of bacon in the package. Was it worth dirtying a pan for two pieces? His phone rang on the coffee table and he dropped the bacon back into the deli drawer and closed the fridge. He picked up his phone. Nice. Another fumble-fingered Mississippian. “Hello,” he said, in a friendly way.

“Are you the Canadian fellow?” a woman asked.

“Uh, yes, I’m a Canadian,” he said. “You’ve phoned a home in Canada. This is Area Code 604.”

“That was my intention,” she said. “I’m calling to say hello to you, and to wish you a very nice day, and a Merry Christmas.” She had a soft voice, and spoke in the slow way they all did.

He stood in the kitchen, puzzled.

“Hello?” she said.

“Yes, hi,” he replied. “Um, I hope you have a very nice day too. And Merry Christmas.”

“That’s all. I don’t want to bother you,” she said. “God bless you, and your beautiful country too.”

“The same to you,” he said. And then she was gone. He scowled at his reflection on the face of the phone. It scowled back, so he placed it onto the table. That’s when it rang again. Again, Mississippi.

“Uh, hello?”

“Hello, Canadian friend,” said another woman. This one had a smokier voice.

“Hello person from Mississippi,” he said. He didn’t know what else to say.

“You don’t know me, but I heard about you, and I wanted to take a minute or two to call and say hello, and wish you the blessings of the season.”

“Well, thanks,” he said. “I wish you good wishes too.” He was famously inept at salutations and other basically meaningless pleasantries.

The woman said, “This is a hard time to be alone, and I make it my practice, regardless of town or county, or country, to reach out to others to let them know that they are truly not alone, that someone cares.”

“That’s very kind of you,” he said.

“Not at all. God bless you.” And then she too was gone. He held the phone at arm’s length. It was at least three minutes before it rang again.

After the initial friendly exchange of greetings, a little smoother this time, he got a bit more out of this one. He said, “I feel very lucky today, because you are the third kind person from Mississippi to phone and wish me well.” He told her, “I get the occasional misdialled call from your state because my number is similar to a department store down there, but that is the extent of my interactions with people from Mississippi." He hastened to add, “Not that I mind. Your call and the other two have certainly made my day, and it’s not even 9AM yet.”

“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t think about the time difference. You’re on California time.”

“That’s not a problem. I’m just puzzled to know why I’m receiving this... attention.”

“Well that’s because of Jo Nell Cobb’s column,” she said. “It’s in today’s Barton News-Outlook.”

“The Barton News-Outlook?” He reached for a pen to jot this down.

“Uh-huh. She wrote a story about you. You and your fellow Canadians are dear to us here, because of your help after the tornado.”

“The tornado?”

“May 5^th, this past year,” she said. “We’re a small town, and the larger towns got all the response from FEMA and from the Red Cross. And then, about a week later, the Canadians showed up.”

“I remember the tornados,” he said. “There was a record number of them, all in one night.” Among his other science-related interests, he was a weather geek. “I saw it on the news, but I’m sorry, I don’t remember hearing about your town. It’s called Barton?”

“Barton, yes. You didn’t hear about us because we’re too small to matter, except to those Canadians who came and helped us clean up and get a start on the rebuilding.”

“What did they do?”

There was a pause. “Well, it wasn’t that they could do a lot that we couldn’t do ourselves. We can fix stuff fine, given a little time. It was that they came without anyone asking. That’s why it mattered.”

“Were they from our armed forces?”

“Who’s that?"

“Were they soldiers?”

“They were Mounties,” she said, “and they had accents just like yours.”

“We never heard about that up here,” he said.

“Well you should know. You should be proud of them.”

“Thank you for telling me about this.”

“Uh-hmm. Now, I want to tell you to cheer up. I’m sure you will find new work soon, once the economy gets better. It’s a hard time for many.”

“Yes,” he said.

After she hung up he did something he had not done since Stacey had given him the phone. He turned it off. He went online and quickly found the latest version of the Barton News-Outlook. Even extremely small-market papers had their own websites. It had a search box. He found Jo Nell Cobb’s latest column. Her mugshot was at the top. She had big hair and big glasses and a big smile. The picture didn’t look recent. He figured she could be anything between 50 and 80 years old. Jo Nell wrote,

The idea for this column came to me this morning, a few days after I had a telephone conversation with a person I don’t know. I don’t know his name, what he looks like, or how old he is—although I don’t think he is either young or elderly, somewhere in between. I don’t know exactly what he does for a living, although I know he is an educator of some sort, and that he has recently lost his job, just before Christmas, and we all know someone who has been in a similar situation, and how trying that can be. The reason I was speaking to him was because I dialled the wrong number.

He knew I had called the wrong number, pointing out that I had dialled area code 604 instead of 601, and he wished me a nice day and was about to hang up, but those of you who know me know how I love to gab, and a stranger on the phone is as good a chance as any. So I said, “I don’t want to bother you, but what’s the hurry, hon?” That set him back in his tracks a bit. He said, “No, it’s not a bother, but it will be a pretty big phone bill if we keep talking. You’ve phoned Vancouver, Canada.” So I told him I was happy with that, seeing as how much we love Canadians down here. We talked a little more, a minute or two, and I learned that our stranger at the end of the phone is not only out of work, he’s also separated from his family who live at the other end of his country, and to put it plainly, he’s lonely. I was the one to end the call, didn’t string it out too long, which would seem to be an imposition. Besides he is probably too polite to tell me if there was a reason he really had to hang up, even if his house was on fire or something. We know how those folks are, since our tragedy last spring when we got to meet other strangers from Canada who came to help us. Those ones are no longer strangers. We know their names and even the names of their spouses and their children.

I thought that now maybe it’s our turn to be a helpful stranger, in a small way. Help a lonely Canadian who has lost his job at this stressful time of year. If you’re in the mood to spread a little Christmas cheer to one of our northern friends, do as I did and mis-dial Schnell’s in Jackson. Change the 1 to a 4, and there you go.

“Oh God,” he said. He remembered the phone call.

After he told her that she had phoned Canada, she had made a little gasp, and surprised him by saying, “In this county, we love Canadians,” but she didn’t say why. She instead asked if she could take a bit of his time to chat a little more, a friendly chat between neighbours.

He had happily said, “No, I don’t mind talking.” He had always wanted to. He added, “I’m kind of lonely anyway.” He meant on an hour to hour basis. It wasn’t a chronic condition.

Then she asked, “Why are you lonely, Hon?”

It was the “Hons” that got to him, southern charm against which he had no learned defence. He told her he has just gotten laid off from his job as an environmental educator. She asked him if he had family around to make Christmas more cheery. He should have said he did, but again told the truth, that his family was more than 2000 miles way. She must have been taking notes. She was clearly a pro.

He searched through the archives of several online versions of southern newspapers to read about the tornados, and learned more of the devastation and loss of life in central Mississippi on May 5th. He dug deeper through the archives of Jo Nell’s paper to find out about the Canadians who went to help. It turned out they weren’t Mounties, but close enough.

Having forgotten about the bacon, he dressed to go outside, turned his phone back on and slipped it into his pocket. It rang before the elevator reached the lobby.

He was in a good mood when Stacey got home.

She asked, "Did you go out?”

He pointed at a poinsettia on the kitchen table. “To add some Christmas cheer,” he said. “Since the strata tyrants won’t allow us to have a tree.”

His phone rang in the living room. “Who could that be?” He scampered to get it. As he picked it up, he heard her close the bathroom door. She was in there a while, enough time for two more Mississippians. She turned the water on.

He was wrapping up the latest call when she came from the bathroom in a robe, with wet hair and a showerful of thoughts. She opened her mouth to speak, but had to wait. He was saying, slowly and warmly,

“Thank you. You have a Merry Christmas too.” He hung up, placed the phone on the coffee table, smiling to himself.

“Who was that?”

He looked up. “Someone named Sam from Mississippi.”

“Mississippi? You know someone in Mississippi?”

“Not really.”

“You were very pleasant to Sam. Was it a boy-Sam or a girl-Sam?”

“Girl,” he said.

“You often get calls from women in Mississippi? What do you do on the Internet?”

“No no.” He waved his hand. “Ever since you gave me this phone, I’ve been getting occasional misdials meant for a store with the same number, but Area Code 601. However, since this morning I’ve been getting a slew of intentional calls from a town called Barton, wishing me a Merry Christmas, because of a newspaper story about me down there. It’s mostly women, but a few men too.”

“Have you been drinking? You shouldn’t drink when you’re depressed. It makes it worse.”

“Come, sit,” he said. He patted the adjacent cushion. He told her the story. He showed her a printout of Jo Nell’s column. He told her more about Barton, what he had learned from reading the Barton New-Outlook website and talking to the town’s citizens. He said, “Much of it was obliterated by an F4 tornado in May. Six people were killed, including two children.”

She frowned, because this was terrible information, but she didn’t seem to fully believe him.

“They have a lot of churches there. Or they did. In a town of 2700, they had seventeen churches. Now they have eight. That must be hard. They’re very churchy people.”

“Churchy? You mean religious.”

“Well aren’t they?”

“Do you realize that if you actually went there and met them, you would find that you have almost nothing in common with them, at any level?”

“That’s not the point,” he said. “Or perhaps that’s exactly the point.”

He said of the Mississippians, “The way they speak is slow and elegant.” He searched for a word... “It's courtly...and gracious. They are a voice of calm in a hyper, hostile world. During the first few calls I always wanted to talk longer because they were mistaken strangers from far away, and I wanted to make sure they understood their mistake, and I really enjoyed the way they talked, but I didn’t want to run up their phone bills for no good reason. Now they’re phoning on purpose to speak to me because they think I’m lonely, and they want to help Canadians. I’m their designated hard-luck Canuck.”

“This is weird. It’s happened because you spend too much time home alone. Like I said.”

“No, it’s innocent. It’s payback. After the tornado disaster, several groups of firefighters from Ontario, from St. Catharines and Welland, went down there on their own funds and helped clean up the streets and repair some of the houses. The people assumed they were Mounties, which they associate with the entire country. Out of a sense of gratitude and fairness they are aching to pay Canada back. If you’re Canadian and want a free lunch, go down to Barton.”

“How many have phoned?”

“Fourteen and counting.”

“They should be phoning the Ontario guys who helped them.”

“No doubt they do. They’re branching out.”

She sighed. “I suppose this is a nice, Christmassy story. As long as it doesn’t get out of hand.” She shifted, and reached into the pocket of her robe. “And now here’s this.” She placed a short white plastic wand on the coffee table, next to his phone.

He leaned close, but didn’t touch it. It looked to be a mysterious woman-thing.

She said, “I quadruple-checked using three other brands. All gave the same result.”

He didn’t get it.

“It means we’re ahead of schedule.”

“What schedule?”

“I’ve had a schedule in mind. This is pushing things ahead by at least a year.”

He hadn’t known anything about a schedule.

“It means you're finally done as an interpreter. You have to find different work, a job that lasts all year long, preferably that has a pension plan. And we should sell our condo, buy a house, with a yard, which means we’ll have to move out into the valley because you have to be a millionaire to buy a house in this city.”

He dared pick up the portentous wand and he squinted at it. There were two tiny recessed windows. One had a blue line through it. There was a blue cross in the other. He couldn’t read the words on the narrow stem. Recently he had started needing reading glasses for text smaller than ten-point. He extended his arm and strained. The wand’s meaning eluded him.

The phone rang. He glanced at it. Big bright numbers, Area Code 601. “It’s Mississippi calling. You answer. They’re nice people. You’ll see.”

“No way. Then they’ll know you aren’t really lonely. Think of the disappointment.”

The meaning hit him like a bolt of lighting the instant Stacey slid her finger across the face of the phone. He was starting to blurt, “Oh f...” as she lifted it to his ear and with her other hand pried the wand away. She calmly placed it on the coffee table. Catching himself he said, “Uh, hello? Oh hi. Yes, hi. Pretty good, how are you?” There was a long pause. “Oh wow. Oh really. How many of you? Really, wow, okay, yup, ready all right.” He looked to Stacey, apprehensively.

She raised her eyebrows.

He held the phone away. “It’s Jo Nell, the one who wrote the story. She’s at her church carol service. Her church choir is going to sing a song for me. She says it’s a Canadian song.” He pressed the speaker icon and gently placed the phone on the table, back beside the wand. Then, slowly, clumsily, almost guiltily, he reached to put his arm around her. She settled against him.

The singing started. It wasn’t a Christmas carol. It was Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah, a powerful song easily sung, performed often, perhaps too often, and too often overwrought, usually as a solo, never before this way, by a southern church choir thousands of miles away, a chorus of nice, sweet strangers, tornado survivors, their blended voices emanating from a smart phone on a coffee table next to a pregnancy test wand.

He didn’t question how it had happened, for there was really no mystery in that. He didn’t wonder when it had happened, which time, because that didn’t make a difference. He also didn’t try to decide whose fault it was that it had happened, because if fault were involved, it belonged to them equally.

After the second verse he said, softly, distractedly, “I’ve never understood what this song is about. Is it celebratory, or is it angry? Isn’t it kind of dark and sexual for a church?”

She said, “They can really sing.”

The volume increased. The folks in Barton were raising the bar, and the roof. There seemed to be more verses than he remembered. Maybe you were allowed to add your own, he thought as he stared at the phone and at the plastic wand beside it that was now practically glowing positive. Yes, it was time to start running again, or join the pool, and find a new job, make himself as strong and long-lived and useful as possible. He watched his free hand, which seemed to have obtained a mind of its own. It floated up in an arc, wafted over to Stacey and settled on her belly.

She said, adding her hand to his during what hopefully was the song's final verse, “Something life-changing and unexpected happened to them and they’re working together, dealing with it.”

He looked at her.

“It’s the right song. They phoned the wrong number but they picked the right song.”

Complete list of Interpreter Stories

Waiting for real snow.

2011-12-14T18:43:00.000-08:00

A few days ago it appeared we might have some snow by now, but it didn't get as cold or wet as predicted (although it is cold and wet, enough to be wintry but not wintry enough to be fun).

So our only snow is the feathered kind, working its way through the city, eating parks and playgrounds and getting in the way on bike paths. Shoo! I ring my bell vigorously, to little effect.

This was a relatively small subset of the snow goose population, somewhere between 250 and 300 birds--although more were arriving as I pedalled away. This day they were eating the soccer field at Blundell Elementary.

Photos taken using the venerable Mr. Hesitation, slowest digital camera in the Pacific Northwest.

Anna's Hummingbird in Richmond.

2011-12-12T13:20:00.000-08:00

Please turn and look into the light. We wish to see your magical gorget in all its wonderfulness.

No?

Okay. See you later.

Today there was a male Anna's Hummingbird singing his tiny lungs out in Paulik Park. In 2008-09 and 2009-2010 one or more of these feisty fellows spent the winter in the same area (among the birches and in the large hazelnut tree behind the blueberry field). In those years a feeder was maintained within the park. Eventually it was stolen and hasn't been replaced. Perhaps one of the nearby houses has a feeder up, hoping to hear the mighty scritchy-scritchy call of the male Anna's all winter long.

Cross-pollination.

2011-12-02T21:28:00.000-08:00

Because I'm unsure how (or why) to continue this blog now that the Golden Age of Blogging has passed and we are bumping our way down the enteron of endlessly morphing and remorphing social media--and because no one has read this story lately, I'm tossing its beginning in here. (The links at the end lead back to its home site, where you may read on for hours of suspense and glee.) If you have enjoyed my Interpreter Stories and already know what a skink is (Blogger spell-checker apparently doesn't), you might want to give it a try. It'll make for joyful holiday reading while surrounded by extended family and other yuletide nonsense because it has nothing to do with any of that.

Apologies and gratitude to those who have already read it. You kind people please feel free to click elsewhere.

* * *

One

Derek Coulter was lying face-up on a weathered limestone wall, envisioning his leap. In high school he had not been good at gymnastics, but had mastered one vault, the simple one in which you placed your hands smack in the middle of the horse and threw your legs to one side. If you landed upright on the smelly blue mat you threw your arms smartly in the air. This was what he hoped for, except for the jubilant ending, a leap smooth and dignified — please, not klutzy, a misplaced hand leading to a face-plant on the International Orange rail, followed by an uncontrolled bloody-nosed descent.

He had been drinking beer and was drowsy. He closed his eyes. Subtropical sea air flowed over and around him. Well this was nice, a relatively quiet moment. The ringing in his ears was almost imperceptible.

Then an impulse caused him to open his eyes at exactly the instant another airplane a telephone-pole or so overhead glided past with its landing-gear dangling. He rolled left to watch, which hurt because he was naked, and rolling naked on weathered limestone hurts. Because he had been drinking, it didn’t hurt as much as it otherwise would have. The plane traveled the gap between Tea Kettle Island and the airport, going down, down, down, until blue smoke squirted from its tires, followed by the punching rumble of the reverse thrusters, which caused Derek’s ears to squawk.

Inside the jet people were feeling the tug of deceleration against their seatbelts.
Two weeks earlier, Derek had experienced that same sensation, staring out the window at the pretty pastel houses with their stepped, whitewashed roofs. No doubt a large number of those on board were honeymooners, holding hands, beaming, mouthing, “We’re here!” It was a white plane with a red maple leaf on the tail.

“Piss off,” Derek said, and rolled back, adding to the dents in his skin. “There are too many damn people in Bermuda already.”

"Cheerio," the Admiral called. He was old, but the kind of old referred to as “spry.” He had strange facial hair, a broad moustache that tapered sideways to connect with his sideburns so that the bottom half of his face seemed left behind. He was standing spraddle-legged at the stern of his motorized, forty-two-foot sloop. It was an extraordinary boat, constructed from genuine Bermuda cedar, with decks thickly lacquered and buffed to brilliance. All instruments and fittings were authentic brass pieces from the early 20th Century. A sharp-edged Union Jack fluttered behind from a diagonal pole. Miriam Villanueva, who had just disembarked, thought the sloop pretty, but that a speedboat with large outboard engines would have been more practical.

Adrian was the tall man standing next to her. He said, "Right, now let's get this show on the road, shall we?" He strode across the beach to the path that disappeared into the trees. He had taken the hurricane lantern, leaving Mimi to choose from the big pack, the cooler, and the tent. She rubbed her eyebrows, and then squatted to wrench her arms through the straps of the pack. She stood and centered the load without flipping over like a ladybug, but her first two steps sank her feet deep into the soft sand and she needed quickly to splay her legs to keep from pitching forward.

"Adrian!" she called, into his torn footprints, "Where are you going?" He was already out of earshot, making a beeline for the old house up by the rampart.

Derek’s first reaction to being prodded in the small of the back with a stick was to incorporate his pet cat, Roy, into his dream, in which he was lying on a grassy hillside, watching himself walk down into the grove of towering eucalyptus next to the biology building. Roy was trying to settle down on top of him, what he always tried to do.

He swatted at the stick without waking up. "Get lost, Roy," he said.

Roy clawed him again, this time at the base of his neck.

"Speak to me. Who are you?"

Well this was wrong. Roy was in many of his dreams, but never talked because that would have been cheating. Roy was not clever enough to cheat.

"You, wake up!”

Derek was jarred awake in purple light by his nemesis, the Berkeley eye-gouger, the bastard who had ruined his life, who had arrived on the island as he slept and now was brandishing a stick, trying to gouge the other eye. Fortunately, this time he was wearing wrap-around sunglasses. His mind cleared partially, enough for him to reach for the only weapon in sight, the last unopened can of beer. In high school he had been a pitcher on the baseball team. He had been pretty good at that.

The beer can, after caroming off the stick-man’s head, went skittering across the rocks. It had sprung a leak and was spiraling out foam as it headed downhill. Derek froze. This person was not his nemesis. He had no clue who this person was. In addition, a short, dark-skinned young woman was lurching forward, yelling something. Inexplicably, she toppled backward. Something had grabbed her from behind.

Mimi freed one arm and then the other from the backpack. Ready to run, she shouted, "Adrian, what's going on?"

The stick-man was back upright, but had dropped his stick. Derek’s mind was ineffectively abuzz, the combined effects of adrenalin and alcohol and a sudden realization of pantslessness. He heard the beer can roll to a stop somewhere.

The stick-man ran to the young woman, held her arm and demanded of Derek, "Who the hell are you, and what are you doing on this island?" He was rubbing the side of his head.

Derek had leapt back atop the rampart and was doubled over against the darkening sky. He had his t-shirt, but the shorts were missing. "Where the hell are my pants? Where the hell are my pants?" he said. He yelled, "Would you please just back off till I find my pants?"

They backed off a little. "You're an American," said the stick-man.

Derek jumped down and approached, holding his t-shirt like a bull-fighter's cape. He felt the young woman's stare and stopped to hastily tie it around his waist. He said, "You are not allowed to be here. This is a nature preserve."

This information seemed briefly to confuse the newcomers and had the effect of calming things down. The stick-man and the young woman looked to each other and the woman shrugged. The stick-man said, "It's also an important historical site. I'm here to take charge of an archeological dig."

This claim held an unwelcome ring of believability. Crap. Derek asked, "On whose authority?"

"Look," said the stick-man. "I'm Dr. Adrian Lyon, Curator of New World Archeology at the Royal Ontario Museum."

Derek thought, These people are from Toronto. They were on that plane. He said, “You don’t sound Canadian. You sound British.”

“It doesn’t matter what I sound like. People like me work all over the world.”

“Yeah I know,” said Derek. “But you felt it necessary to point out that I was American. Did I hurt you? You seem upset.”

“You threw a can of beer at my head!”

“You came out of nowhere and jabbed me with a cedar branch. What was I supposed to do?”

“For one, you’re supposed to be wearing clothing.”

“I wasn’t expecting company.”

The young woman asked, "Ah--have you guys stopped fighting? Is this situation more-or-less okay now? ”

The men looked at her and said nothing.

“Good,” she said. She turned to leave.

Derek said, "Watch out for the Spanish bayonets, the yucca-plants with the spiky leaves."

She said, "I already know." She rubbed her arm and headed down the path. Her accent was partly, not entirely, Canadian.

Derek asked, "And she would be your assistant?"

"My doctoral student. She'll be the teaching assistant for our course."

"What course?"

"In addition to carrying out a dig on this island, we’re teaching a course on field archeology."

"No way. This is a nature preserve. You folks have landed on the wrong island.”

Adrian said, "We have not, but you seem to have. You’ll need to go back to your campsite, if you have one, and gather up your belongings, if you have any, and be prepared to be removed in the morning. This island is off limits to everyone except us."

Derek resumed the search for pants, walking along the shadow of the wall. They must have fallen off the other side. He looked at Adrian and said, "I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to be here. I have authority, from the Bermudian Fisheries Division. I’m a biologist, here to study an endangered species, the Bermuda rock lizard."

Adrian said, “There’s no such thing.”

“It’s a skink,” said Derek.

“A what?”

“A large family of lizards. Bermuda’s only endemic terrestrial species is the Bermuda rock lizard. This island is one of their last remaining habitats.” It was difficult to sound or feel convincing while not wearing pants .

“I’ve never seen them. I camped out on this island as a boy. There are no lizards.”

“There sure are. Anoles too.”

“Where are you from?” Adrian asked.

“University of California.”

“Which campus?”

Ha. He had fallen into the trap. “Berkeley.” This was a heavyweight answer. No Canadian institution could match that clout.

Adrian tilted his head and squinted at Derek. He said, "I'll consult with the Bermudian authorities first thing tomorrow to have them find you another island to do whatever it is you think you need to do here."

Derek said, “Wrong. Tomorrow I'll show you the lizards, and then I’ll get the Bermuda Fisheries Warden to take you and your students to another island. This archipelago is packed with crumbling old forts."

Adrian seemed about to say something, but then waved his hand. "We’re working here. We're losing light." He wheeled around and disappeared down the hill, into the palmettos.

“You owe me a beer,” Derek said. He walked to where the can had bled out and popped the top to drain whatever might be left. He then walked back to the rampart to toss it in with the others in his backpack. He found his flip-flops, and climbed onto the wall for one last look. It seemed his shorts had fallen into the sea and drowned.

The archeologist had been given a sufficient head start. Derek now followed down the darkening path. He almost tripped over a nylon bag, which had been discarded by the young woman, who was seated on the limestone slab a little farther along and seemed to be fiddling with her sandal strap. He was mistaken. She was pulling at the spine of a prickly pear stuck in her ankle. He had suffered similar injuries from the ground-hugging cactus. Once the spines penetrated the skin, any motion anchored them deeper. Like porcupine quills, they possessed recurved barbs, but were even more difficult to remove because the exposed shafts were short and smooth, providing almost nothing to grip. They hurt like hell. She glanced at him. Derek wordlessly strode past, but then felt ashamed. He backtracked and knelt in front of her, mindful of the hang of his shirt. "Let me help," he said.

"It’s a thorn. It won’t come out. I can't pull it hard enough." Her voice was taut.

"Hold your leg still, okay?" He clamped her ankle with his left hand and slid his sunglasses up into his hair. He pinched the shaft. "You have to rotate them.” A twist of his wrist and it was out.

"Ow!" she cried and pulled her leg away, which sent him tumbling. The apex of his tailbone bounced off a limestone cobble.

She drew her knee up and across herself to examine the wound. He hurriedly flipped his sunglasses back down. "That really hurt!" She poked at the minuscule bloodspot.

Derek stood to go.

She said, “Thank you.”

He said nothing and sidled away from her, mostly backwards. His left butt-cheek was in open air.

“I'm Mimi Villanueva. I'm a graduate student in archeology at the University of Toronto. Adrian is my supervisor." She extended her hand.

He stepped forward and shook her fingertips. Their softness made him aware of his own hand’s roughness. He said, "I'm Dr. Derek Coulter." He rarely referred to himself as "doctor" non-facetiously, but the archeologist had set the rule for this island. "I'm a biologist, a herpetologist, from California, here to study the endangered Bermuda rock lizard."

"Oh." She smiled. “That’s very interesting. You’re an academic too.” Her teeth were bright, even through sunglasses in what little twilight penetrated the canopy. She said, "You pulled a thorn out of me. Some day I'll have to pay you back." The teeth flashed again. She was hugging her knees.

"Some day, like maybe tomorrow, you could push your supervisor off a cliff."

The teeth disappeared. She said, hushed, "That’s just him. He's not always all that great with people. Forget about it."

Derek dearly wished for his pants. He said, "I want you to know I’m not generally a crazy naked person. Usually there’s nobody here, and it is hot, and so…” He continued, “I was asleep and he poked me in the neck with a stick. I was dreaming and I thought he was someone else, someone dangerous. I wasn’t even fully awake." He tugged modestly at the edge of his t-shirt, adjusting its hang.

She said, "Don't worry. It will make for a funny story some day." She added, "You shouldn’t be embarrassed, you have a nice body."

His face became hot. He was thankful it was almost dark.

“I probably shouldn’t have said that.”

"Well, goodnight," he said.

They heard footsteps. Derek stepped back from Mimi as Adrian came upon them, carrying the cooler. He looked at Derek, then at Mimi.

"I had a thorn stuck in my ankle," she said.

Adrian gave Derek a dirty look. Mimi gathered the tent and Adrian let her step past, and then gave Derek another dirty look before following her up the slope to the rampart.

The herpetologist reached down and his fingers found the ragged cobble that had injured his tailbone. He could see the pitch, high heater, but didn’t throw. He squeezed the stone hard until he had made a moonscape of the heel of his hand.

Adrian and Mimi weren't having much success erecting their new tent. There weren't enough poles, or pieces of rope were missing, or something. It didn't seem to have corners.

"Can there possibly be such a thing as a spherical tent?" asked Adrian.

She let him carry on fruitlessly for a while, and said, finally, "We can sleep under the stars tonight. It's nice out." She couldn't remember ever having seen so many stars. She spread her arms skyward and spun in a circle, causing the universe to spin the opposite way. She inflated the air mattress with a foot-pump while Adrian continued battling the tent half-heartedly, flipping it over and back slowly and staring at it and repeating this in the chance that its secrets might leak out. Mimi zipped the sleeping bags together, took off her clothes and burrowed into the fluffy, cool lining. "Oh Adriannn, Oh Professor Lyonnn..," she called, to lure him from the uncooperative Nylon and Gore-Tex blob.

He grudgingly gave up. He balled up the tent and hurled it into a clump of buttonwoods, and then looked down at her, in response to which she pulled the edge of the sleeping bag to her eyes and fluttered her lashes coyly. He removed his shoes and shorts and crawled into the sleeping bag.

She rolled astride him. “Hi there,” she said.

“No, not tonight,” he said.

“C’mon.”

“No, not tonight.”

She rocked on him, but got nothing. She sighed and rolled off. “What’s wrong? Show me where the beer can hit you on the head.” She attacked his scalp with both hands.

“Stop that.”

"Don't be mad." She tickled him.

"I want to sleep, Mimi." And then she was staring at his back.

"Adrian..."

He didn’t answer.

"You are not helping," she muttered in her first language.

"English," he said.

She waited until she was sure he was asleep before saying her prayers, which were not in English until she got to the end. "Good night," she said. She opened her eyes. A satellite was creeping across the sky. It winked at her, and it was gone.

At his camp at the other end of the little island, Derek plucked a pair of shorts from the clothesline he had strung between two ghost cedars and pulled them on. His hammock, slung between one of the old dead trees and a spike embedded in a mortared seam on the side of the redoubt, the most substantial stone defensive structure on the island, was swaying gently, beckoning. He rolled in. The sharp stick of the archeologist and the soft fingers of his student briefly fought each other in his head, but their argument dulled to irrelevance with the recollection that the big man would be here in the morning. The big man would make the intruders go away.

Then, as happened every night, Derek thought of what he feared was his future, of the place where he would be employed within half a year if something significantly more promising didn’t come along. His empty stomach hurt and he wished he had eaten a proper meal. He didn't want that job, but with his wife and her income gone, Derek couldn't wait around for something less like absolute hell. "Please God, no," he said to no one in particular.

Continued…
Map of Tea Kettle Island

Heavens to mergatroyd.

2011-11-30T18:47:00.000-08:00

The relatively small, absolutely shallow, man-made pond at Garden City Park has for several days (at least), been a stopover for rafts of mergansers, both Common,

and Hooded. Today I counted 18 Common, 14 Hooded Mergansers, twice what I've ever seen of either species at the park.

What does it mean? Why so mergy, why now?

I don't know.

Needless to say, sticklebacks and feral goldfish are nervous.

Watch and learn.

2011-11-28T17:20:00.000-08:00

How it's done.

Winter birds are now here in the back yard, including a loose flock of Dark-eyed Juncos (10-12 birds), who, in the inelegant way of ground-foragers, have a hard time feeding from the suet cage. Basically one lands on top and pokes around inefficiently as others loiter below, waiting for crumbs to fall.

That's when Downy shows up to school them. Downy- rocks a tuxedo, and a suet cage.

Topper.

2011-11-20T20:06:00.000-08:00

Like an angel on a Christmas tree.

A place to warm one's talons on a cold November day.

Divided pond.

2011-11-18T16:11:00.000-08:00

I like when pretty waterfowl swim through wavery water. Click!

There was a small flock of Hooded Mergansers in the partially-drained pond at Garden City Park. Above are a male and female together, but overall the two sexes showed very little togetherness.

Shyness. Break out the mistletoe and egg nog.

Air moving briskly.

2011-11-12T10:01:00.000-08:00

They warned us about the wind. They didn't tell us it would start like a puncture in a pressurized fuselage. In a matter of seconds it went from ENE 15 K/hr to Due West a Hundred. The power struggled, failed, raised its head above water for one last gasp, and then went out. Hours out.

The basketball net has been outgrown by all family members, and serves no purpose other than to inform that it's windy.

Klonk!

"Oh, it must be windy."

What was left of fall colour is now mulching the garden or packed into brown bags awaiting curbside pickup. Where leaves were, newspaper pages and flyers roost.

Dendrochronology

2011-11-05T13:24:00.000-07:00

The interpreter was placing Cheezies in a flimsy plastic box. Three twisty day-glo fingers, that was about right. He struggled to align the fussy lid and gently lowered the box next to the boardwalk, being careful to prevent the Cheezies from falling out the rat-sized round holes at either end. There. Four traps, evenly spaced. He wiped the greasy orange powder from his fingers using a tissue and tossed the balled tissue toward a trash can. He missed by a mile and had to step down onto spongy ground to retrieve it. Back at the boardwalk he paused to shift the last trap with his foot, pushing it further beneath.

A woman spoke. “Rats?”

He looked up.

The woman was slim and outdoorsy and was holding yellow-jawed tree calipers in one hand and a blue metal tube in the other. He had spoken with her once before but didn’t know her name. She was an assistant professor from a nearby college, a dendrochronologist. Today she was accompanied by a pair of students, one male, one female.

The interpreter said, “Oh sure. We’ve got rats a-plenty thanks to the bird feeders. A city politician and his kid had a major freak-out a few days ago when one crossed the path in front of them. As of this morning I’ve been assigned the role of exterminator.”

The professor extended her hand and surprised the interpreter by hauling him back up onto the boardwalk. She said, “This is Dustin, and this is Sharon. They’ve chosen to do their honours independent projects in dendrochronology.” Dustin was roundish with red-framed glasses and short spiky hair. Sharon was pale and thin with long sandy blond hair parted in the middle.

“Good choice,” said the interpreter. He waved his arm at hundreds of acres of forest. “Have at it.”

They didn’t move. The professor pointed at the trap. “What do you use? Warfarin?”

“Uh, something else, orange stuff.” The interpreter had purchased the Cheezies at a convenience store a few doors down from the hardware store after failing to purchase rat poison.

“An anti-coagulant?”

“And more.”

“It’s a nasty way for a creature to die.”

“That it is.” He changed the subject. “Where are you planning on working?”

“There’s a relatively recent burn area somewhere along the middle loop trail." Sharon held forth a clipboard with a photocopied map. The burned area was an irregular polygon shaded grey.

He knew of the burn, although it wasn’t very recent. “That fire was twenty-five or thirty years ago. It’s all grown back.”

“That’s why we’re studying it. It’s bound to be different than the surrounding areas in unexpected ways. Care to come along?”

He had nothing pressing to do. He could lie to his supervisor later.

As they left the boardwalk and stepped onto the bark-mulch loop trail, the professor asked, “How long have rats been a problem?”

He was tempted to say, “Since the dawn of time...” but replied, “On and off. If we got rid of the feeders, they would disappear. The Great-horned Owls and coyotes eat them though, so there is a balance. It isn’t really much of an issue in my opinion, not worth the bother.” He was more than ambivalent about poisoning rats. He had a soft spot for Rattus norvegicus. His first real pet, after predictably short-lived goldfish and dime-store red-eared sliders, had been a hooded rat named Daisy.

He was given Daisy when she was a few weeks old, as much head as body. When he was home from school she lived in his shirt pocket. When she grew too big for his pocket she learned to ride on his shoulder, nestled beneath his collar. She came when he called her and would strain to cling to him if another tried to pluck her away. She loved Cheezies. She died when he was eleven, his first death of a loved one. He cried for half a day.

Thus he wasn’t altogether disappointed in failing in the day’s primary objective as specified by his supervisor, go to HomeMart and purchase rat poison, which was to be placed in the box traps kept in the storage shed and distributed in likely places along the boardwalk. Apart from the unpleasantness of killing rats, he worried that the poison might work its way up the food chain. Cheezies had seemed a reasonable stopgap compromise, the only flaw being the lack of a receipt for rat poison to hand in to his supervisor. She was a stickler for paperwork.

“Here’s the place,” said the interpreter. They had arrived at the grey-shaded polygon.

“Pick a tree, a big one,” said the professor.

Sharon patted a tall, gently leaning pine. “Is this one okay?”

First they used a GPS to find its UTM coordinates. Then they used the calipers to measure the DBH, the diameter. They needed to bore half that distance to the center. The professor unscrewed an end of the blue aluminum tube and hardware fell out. One piece was the core drill, which screwed into a threaded hole halfway along the tube, which became the handle of the drill. A second was the spatula, which had a flattened end curled side-to-side to cup the core sample. The professor showed them how to center and level the drill using the calipers as a square and they screwed the core drill into the tree, palming the blue tube hand over hand. Eventually the radius was reached and the professor inserted the spatula into the core drill as far as it would go. She back-turned the drill and pulled out the spatula. Voila. The life of a tree in quarter-inch stripes.

“Cool,” said Dustin.

The professor said, “Now we nail an id onto the tree.” She reached around and unzipped a fannie pack, took out a flat-topped two-inch nail and asked, “Who has the hammer?”

Sharon dug in her backpack. “Here.”

The professor returned to her fanny pack. She said, “Uh-oh, we forgot the flagging tape.”

The students looked at each other, and then at the professor.

She smiled. “It’s a good thing you’re the driver today Dustin. Do you think you could go to HomeMart and buy two rolls of flagging tape, one green, one orange? Or any two colours, it doesn’t really matter.”

“Okay,” said Dustin.

“You’ll be reimbursed for mileage.”

Dustin shrugged. Mileage was a subtlety beyond his years.

“You go with him Sharon, you have a phone, right?

“Uh-huh.”

“You have my number.”

“I do,” she said.

Before they could bolt, the interpreter asked, “Uh, would you guys mind also buying a box of rat poison for me? I’ve run out.” He pulled a twenty from his wallet and handed it to Dustin.

The student asked, “Is there a particular brand?”

“I forget the name. It’s in the garden pesticide section next to the bug sprays, about the third shelf up. It’s a green box with a bad drawing of a psychotic rat.”

“Green box, psychotic rat,” said Dustin.

“Thanks,” said the interpreter. He added, “When you get to the cashier, make sure you remain straight-faced when they make a big deal about telling you it contains poison. Whatever you do, don’t snicker or roll your eyes or say ‘duh’ when they tell you rat poison contains poison. No smiling.”

They stared at him.

“Please pay for it separately and keep the receipt.”

The interpreter and the professor watched the students disappear around a bend.

“They seem like nice kids,” said the interpreter.

“They’re hopelessly in love,” said the professor.

“What?”

“We don’t really need flagging tape. Dustin and Sharon are in love, but too shy to do anything about it. I thought they needed some time alone.”

“Really.” He cocked his head to study her.

“I try to make a love-match at least once a year. I met my honey in undergrad. We were introduced by a prof. I want to pay it forward.”

“Isn’t that risky? What if it doesn’t work out? College is a hard time to deal with heartache.”

“That’s negative thinking, not my style. You’ve helped out too, sending them to search for rat poison. More chance for them to bond, although perhaps not the most romantic of quests.”

“You never know.”

“What was that about not smiling at the cashier?”

“I didn’t want them to make the same mistake I did.” He told her what had happened that morning.

He had gone to HomeMart and quickly found a box of rat poison. He carried it to the cashier, a young man in a blue vest. His nametag said “Fred.”

Fred scanned the box and a window popped up on the POS screen. Fred went bug-eyed and said, “Whups.” He moved the box of poison out of the interpreter’s reach.

“What is it?” asked the interpreter.

“The poison control officer has to advise you.” Fred picked up a wall-mounted phone and pushed a three-button code. Someone answered. “Poison consult on four,” he said. He turned to the interpreter and smiled uncomfortably. “It’ll just be a minute.”

Several minutes later a gray-haired woman in a billowy skirt pushed into the check-out. She eyed the interpreter suspiciously. “You want to buy a box of rat poison.”

The interpreter nodded.

The woman said, “By law, before you are allowed to purchase rat poison, I have to inform you that rat poison contains poison.”

Few unprepared people have a facile reply for a statement so stupidly obvious. After a few seconds the interpreter asked, “Isn’t that the point?”

“Do you understand? This is poison.”

“I understand,” said the interpreter. “It says so on the box in both languages. I accidentally read the French side first, then read the English side to make sure I had understood the French side. It checked out. It’s poison all right.”

She was unimpressed. “Do you understand that this poison is poisonous to humans too?”

“Yes,” said the interpreter. He should have shut up at this point, but instead asked, “When someone buys a bag of lawn fertilizer, do you have to tell them it contains fertilizer?”

“Lawn fertilizer is not a poison.”

“It could be if you ate enough. Probably not even a lot.”

The woman said, “Sir. You wish to purchase a poisonous product. It is my duty to make sure that you understand the possible consequences of your purchase.”

The interpreter sighed and said, “Oh for godssakes. I’m buying this crap for my boss.” In retrospect, it may have seemed an admission of intent to murder. He was denied.

The woman snatched the box away, saying, “I cannot permit you to acquire this product because I cannot be sure that you are not a risk to yourself or to others.” And then she vanished among the checkout counters and rows of shelving of HomeMart.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” said the interpreter.

“Sorry,” said Fred, looking at his hands. “There is no appeal until the next poison control officer comes on duty at 2 PM.”

The professor gaped in disbelief. “That really happened?”

The interpreter shrugged. “Sarcasm seldom helps.”

“So what were you using? What was the orange stuff?”

From his pocket he pulled the crinkled plastic bag. “Cheezie?”

She took one, laughing. “That’ll get ‘em.”

“They’re highly addictive, and probably more toxic than Warfarin.”

She took the bag, ate the last two, and handed it back to him. She said, “Now guess which is the oldest tree here.” With her arms she encompassed the forest.

“That one is thickest.” He pointed at a towering hemlock, the tallest of a group of six.

“Not always a sure indicator, but we’ll give it a try.” They pushed through thigh-high salal to get to the trunk.

He took the GPS reading, helped with the DBH and the positioning of the core, but let her drill into the tree. It didn’t take long. She inserted the spatula and pulled out the core, 24 centimetres long. She lay it on the ground, in the triangle between stout roots.

“Count the rings,” she said.

He counted. He said a number, surprised. It seemed low. A tree this big had to be older than that.

“Almost, but you missed the first year.” She stated the actual age.

“Really? Do you know what month it, uh, started?”

“Year is as close as we can get.”

He peered up through the spokes of branches. “I would have guessed a lot older. It looks older. Look at the bark.”

“Hemlocks grow pretty fast,” she said. “Hey, look here, this black smudge.” Her finger was poised on the core sample. “That’s the fire. We lucked out and hit a fire scar. That year the tree would have been...about eleven. We can count backwards to find out what year that was.”

The interpreter already knew what year that was.

Eventually Dustin and Sharon came bustling up the trail. The professor called to them and they bounded through the salal, arriving abruptly. They were flush-faced, beaming, obviously in love. There was a confusion of movements as Dustin held forth a plastic bag containing a green box at the instant the professor signalled a high-five. The bag dropped to the ground and coins rolled out.

“That’s your change,” said Dustin. “Receipt’s in there too.”

They recorded the data from the tree, and then the professor and the young lovers, trailing two colours of flagging tape, ventured deeper into the forest, out of sight. When he could no longer hear their voices the interpreter stepped to the tree of his birth year and wrapped his arms around it. Straining, he walked his unseen hands toward each other with no sense of the distance between opposite fingertips. He hugged the tree hard until the bark's sharp ridges bit into his face. He let go and stepped away, his eye snaking up along the ridges, across sapsucker pocks. “You’ve still got a lot of good years left,” he said.

On the way back to the nature house he detoured to the storage shed. He hid the rat poison on a top shelf behind a weighty ice cream bucket splayed oval by salvaged door hinges that would never be reused.

A few years earlier he had been given a gift certificate to a drugstore chain whose stores featured full-service photography departments. He had worked through a shoe box of ancient Kodachrome slides and selected about twenty-five, which he took to one of the stores to have converted to digital files saved onto a CD-ROM. He copied those files onto a multi-purpose memory stick that he kept in an envelope in a filing cabinet next to his desk in the nature house. He was a stickler for backing up files.

He plugged the stick into his computer. Among the folders, “Birds, Mammals, Inverts, Plants, Weather,” was “Family.” He found the image, a skinny, pink-cheeked boy, his hair summer-bleached. On his shoulder was a hooded rat, leaning out myopically, sniffing the air.

There was a coffee ring on his desk beside the mouse pad. It was the diameter the tree would have been the day his mother had taken that picture, before the fire, when the bark of the tree was smooth and paper-thin. He was fitting the curl of his hand to the ring when his supervisor walked in. He grabbed the mouse to close the window.

Next story...

Full list of Interpreter Stories

Halloween Hemlock

2011-10-31T16:59:00.000-07:00

Witch's Broom.

Update: November 1 means Festival of the Trees #65.

This year's selection.

2011-10-23T13:02:00.000-07:00

It's pumpkin time. New this year is our first "ghost pumpkin," and down in front, cute as a button, is our first home-grown.

Pumpkins past:

2010
2009 Hm. Seem to have forgotten to make a record. We certainly had pumpkins though. It would have been impossible not to have had pumpkins.
2008
2007

Hiatus interrupted: autumn.

2011-10-16T18:31:00.000-07:00

It was a nice day, so I de-chaired and went for a ride. Look what I found. A hill! There is almost no natural relief in this pancake city. Richmond children swarm onto hills, laughing like tiny maniacs. For flatlanders, even modest, man-made hills are magical. I glide down the far side. Weee!

An ash-leaf carpet rises.

And look! Northwestern Crows are leaf-flipping, searching for what I'm not sure. They are usually suspicious and quick to flee, but whatever they were seeking was so compelling that they ignored me as I rode on by.

Gleaners among long shadows.