Jim Poling Sr.'s Blog, page 38

Mr. Mercedes

(This week's Minden Times column)
Mr. Mercedes would wear a smile wide as a western horizon if he travelled Haliburton County roads this summer.
So many potential victims to choose from. Joggers, walkers, cyclists. All poised to be smacked down and become hood ornaments because of their own stupidity. Some walking with backs to the traffic. Others with their noses into their cell phones as cars and trucks roar toward them.
Mr. Mercedes is the villain from the Stephen King novel of the same name. He steals a 12-cyclinder Mercedes and drives it into a crowd of unemployed folks at an employment opportunity fair, filling the car’s grille with a variety of body parts.
Mr. Mercedes, thankfully, is fictional. The carnage of pedestrians and cyclists on our roads, however, is real. The numbers of people being smacked down and killed or maimed for life continue to grow.
Inattention is the main cause of these tragedies. Inattention by the victims, or the drivers. Sometimes both. A mere second of inattention can turn someone out for a pleasant morning walk into just another piece of road kill.
The number of pedestrians you see travelling the roads with backs to traffic is shocking. So are the number checking their phones as they walk or jog. Or, walking two or three abreast with buddies.
And, distracted drivers are everywhere. You see their vehicles drifting over the centre line or the right edge of the pavement as they check their cell phones.
Stephen King likely got the idea for Mr. Mercedes after being whacked during an afternoon walk back in 1999. A minivan hit him when its driver became distracted by his dog acting up in the back of the van.
King spent almost one month in hospital, had five operations and almost quit writing because he could not sit for more than 40 minutes at a time.
Accidents similar to King’s happen all the time in Ontario. Ninety-four pedestrians were killed on Ontario roads in 2014. That’s almost 20 per cent of all road fatalities in the province that year. The totals that year saw 3,617 pedestrians and 1,722 bicyclists injured or killed on Ontario’s roads.
Earlier this month Toronto police reported collisions involving 20 pedestrians or cyclists in less than 24 hours. Most did not involve serious injuries, but one man did die. Another died the following day when his bike ran into a vehicle.
Toronto, where driving, walking or cycling has become a madhouse experience, has seen roughly two dozen pedestrian and cyclist deaths in the first six months of this year. By year-end the city likely will have broken the record 40 pedestrian deaths set in 2013.
Walking, jogging or cycling our roads is wonderful exercise and a wonderful way to experience the outdoors. But it is dangerous if you simply step out onto the highway without thinking about how to ensure your safety.
Leave the cell phone or iPod at home. The wind in the trees and the birds singing are all the music that you need.
Wear light-coloured, high-visibility clothing, especially on those dull, cloudy days.
And walk facing the traffic. Why anyone would walk any road not being able to keep on an eye on the two- to three-ton mass speeding toward them is beyond my comprehension.
Pay attention to the oncoming traffic because there is a good chance that one or more of those drivers is not paying attention to you.
Also, some people might think that impaired walking is much preferable to impaired driving. They are of course right. However, drinking and walking or drinking and jogging are not the safest things to do.
Centres for Disease Control statistics show that 34 per cent of all pedestrians killed in U.S. traffic in 2013 had blood alcohol levels greater than 0.08 grams per decilitre. That’s the level considered for impaired driving in most jurisdictions.
Tipsy pedestrians apparently are a significant problem in parts of Europe. A year or so ago Spain was considering legislation forcing pedestrians to submit to breathalyser tests.
At any rate, it’s summer in cottage country and walking, jogging, cycling are all part of the enjoyment. Let’s just keep it safe.

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The Cabin at Ghostly Point - Part 3

(This is the third and final instalment of a summer campfire ghost story. All three parts can be found at: http://www.mindentimes.ca/columns)
The open door revealed a scene like nothing Shainie had ever seen. Shafts of sunlight entering the broken windows and cracks in the walls sliced the smoky dimness of the interior, highlighting once normal cottage contents now succumbing to years of neglect and decay. She could taste on the tip of her tongue the sour-sweet smell of damp rot.
Puffs of dust rose around her feet as she moved in slow motion through the cabin. A couch along one wall looked like a cartoon sketch, springs protruding through a faded floral fabric that had been scratched, chewed and soiled by mice and other forest creatures seeking protection from winter storms. A kitchen table and chairs stood beside the side window, plates, knives and forks set out in the dust and animal droppings as if waiting for a family of ghosts to arrive for an evening meal.
As she backed away from the table, Shainie’s boot tripped against an object, sending a scrapping noise echoing through the room, and in turn setting off scurrying noises in the cabin’s dark corners. She looked down and was horrified to see the object was a doll with its face chewed off.
A shadow with glowing eyes hissed and squealed from a corner. Shainie screamed and bolted to the rear door. Sunlight blinded her as she crashed through the rotting plank door.
The rear entrance top step was missing and her boot smashed through the next one, sending her tumbling onto debris scattered below.
When her eyes opened a few seconds later, Shainie wondered where she was and why her forehead was wet and throbbing. She touched the blood seeping from a gash that extended from her right eyebrow to her right temple. The fear that had seized her inside the cabin took hold of her again as she got to her feet unsteadily. She staggered, panicky and disoriented, towards the cliffs overlooking the lake.
She stumbled along not knowing where she was going or why, confused by alternating dizziness and blackness. The lake shimmered seemingly miles below her feet, which had difficulty rooting her firmly to the ground. Suddenly they were not rooted at all, and she sensed a rushing all around her, and the sky getting farther and farther away as she fell through the air above the lake.
The wildness and wetness of a storm tore at her face. The lake tossed and roared. The wind screamed like a tormented animal. A smashed canoe and a girl calling like a loon drifted by in her unconsciousness. 
Then a light, a brilliant light steady and safe drawing her closer and closer to Ghostly Point. The light softened and through it came the blurred outline of a face, her mother’s face, followed by her mother’s voice, then the pine ceiling and other familiar surroundings of her cottage bedroom.
That evening, after the gash on Shainie’s head had been cleansed and bandaged, and after her shock had been soothed by a few hours’ sleep under a down comforter, Shainie sat with her family on the deck overlooking Shkendang Lake. A thunderstorm had just swept the lake, leaving behind a gentle grey mist and a tranquility that deepened with the advancing twilight.
Shainie’s parents had told her about waking that morning to a noise at the dock. They had looked out to see their daughter lying wet and unconscious on the dock while the stern of a birch bark canoe disappeared in the distance.
They all were lost in their reflections about this strange day, staring into the greyness when a breeze parted the mist on the lake, revealing the dark outline of Ghostly Point. Then through the dimness appeared a light, faint but clearly visible to everyone sitting on the deck across the bay. Before anyone could speak, the breeze carried to them a low moan, almost a sobbing that crept across the glassy waters and along shoreline before becoming lost in the thickness of the trees.
“Moong. Wenesh aa-zhwebak?  Moooohhhng. G’giigoonke na gamiigoong? Loon. What happened? Loo...oon. Are you fishing on the lake?”
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The Cabin at Ghostly Point - Part 2

This is the second instalment of a campfire ghost story. See the first part here.

A local legend told that on nights when the grey mist following a big storm settled over Ghostly Point on Shkendang Lake, a moaning could be heard in the trees. A moan that pricked the skin and pulled at the heart. The Ojibwa said it was their leader crying for his only daughter - Laughing Loon, Moong in Ojibwa.
“Moong. Wenesh aa-zhwebak?  Moooohhhng. G’giigoonke na gamiigoong? Loon. What happened? Loo...oon. Are you fishing on the lake?”
The legend said he never stopped calling for Moong, who went onto the lake to fish one morning and never returned.
Moong was having such a productive fishing morning she did not notice an angry sky building in the northwest. Sickly green clouds with the texture of wet campfire ash loomed over the end of the lake.
A vicious wind suddenly spun out of the green-grey wall of cloud, shaping itself into a black funnel. Before Moong could reach for her paddle the funnel slammed her canoe sideways, chewing it to pieces and sucking everything around it into its horrible screaming mouth. Minutes later calm returned to the lake but there was not a trace of Moong, her fish catch or her canoe.
The legend of Shkendang Lake intensified many years later when the family who summered at the cabin on Ghostly Point stopped coming. No one knew what happened to them but it was rumoured their young daughter drowned while canoeing in the lake.
For Shainie Garrison, the most important story was the light at the abandoned cabin and why no one else ever saw it. She was determined to solve the mystery.
The cabin was off limits to the cottage children of Shkendang Lake. Its dilapidated condition made it a dangerous place. And, the  tales of the Ojibwa princess, and the family that mysteriously abandoned the cabin, floated in the area’s sub-consciousness.
The mystery of the light at the cabin had become so much more powerful than her parent’s prohibitions that Shainie knew she must go to Ghostly Point. The next morning while everyone slept she would creep out, paddle her canoe across the bay to investigate why she kept seeing a light that no one else saw.
Ghostly Point, when seen through the evening mist was appropriately named. But at dawn, streaks of yellow-red sunlight struck the pink and grey tumble of shoreline rocks, mixing with the morning blue sparkle of the lake and the leafy greens of the woods to create a rainbow of warm color.
Shainie beached her canoe on a strip of sand between the rocks and cautiously climbed the little hill on which the cabin sat. Where the hill started to flatten out, the rocky ground disappeared, replaced by a thick, soft blanket of long, brown pine needles shed by majestic white pines. These elegant sentinels stood rooted around the rock at all sides of the cabin, thinning out only at the back where another hill rose steeply to become the high, sheer cliffs that were a feature of the east side of Shkendang Lake.
The point was very still and quiet. Shainie imagined she could hear the trees breathe and the pine needles sigh as they compressed beneath her hiking boots. The only real sounds were unnerving snaps and creaks coming from the cabin, presumably caused by the breeze moving through the gaps in the log walls and breaks in the window panes.
She took a deep breath and swallowed hard through a dry mouth and tight throat as she approached the front porch. The steps leading to it had rotted and fallen away and the porch deck itself was a patchwork of rotting boards. The front door, once a beautiful work of hand tooled white pine, was battered, hanging off kilter on one hinge.
Shainie climbed the porch, stepping gingerly on the firmest-looking spots. Her fingers touched the door latch just as a lake breeze found its way through a window crack and rattled something inside the cabin. She jumped back, one foot falling through the porch with a crash. She caught her balance and her breath and pulled herself back up, pushing the door open to get a grip on the door frame.
Next week: Inside the cabin.            Email: shaman@vianet.ca
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The Cabin at Ghostly Point

Summer without campfire stories? No way! Here’s one of mine that we will publish in three parts over the next three weeks.
Grey twilight fell across the far shore of Shkendang Lake, obscuring bit by bit the brooding shoreline, the thick-waisted white pines, and the old cabin standing alone on the rocky point. The cabin’s washed out red tin roof, and the rough hewn log porch below it, were barely visible now from the Garrison family cottage directly across the bay. 
Shainie Garrison leaned forward and squinted fiercely. Her slender 13-year-old fingers squeezed the chair armrests with a force that threatened to snap them. Lights and shadows from the campfire danced in her intense brown eyes while the faint band of freckles below them coloured with excitement.
“There it is!” she cried, propelling herself from the chair and pointing over the fire and across the lake. “It’s there again. The light.”
Shainie’s father Paul dropped an armload of split firewood and bent low to peer out over the water. Nothing. Nothing but a dark far shore and more darkness spreading across the half-kilometre of water separating them from Ghostly Point.
“Shainie,” her father sighed with exasperation. “We’ve been through this before. There is nothing there.”
“But dad there was. There was! I saw it! A light was on. Then it went out. Just like the other times.”
Paul Garrison stepped into the campfire circle and placed his hands gently on his daughter’s slim shoulders, which trembled from excitement. “Honey, no one has stayed at the cabin in decades. It’s probably the last rays of the sun glinting off a window or the roof.”
Shainie looked into the gentleness of her father’s grey eyes. Oh, how she wanted to believe him. But he was wrong. It wasn’t sunlight. It was a campfire or  lantern light. She just knew it.
Her parents were becoming concerned at her insistence that she had seen the light at Ghostly Point several times. It seemed to possess her, drawing her to sit by the campfire every evening waiting for it to reappear.
Marcella Garrison understood that her daughter was a creative child with a vivid imagination, but worried that the phantom light story was becoming more than a young girl’s fantasy. She wondered if tall tale story swapping between Shainie and her grandfather, a renowned storyteller, had anything to do with her daughter’s fantasizing.
“Maybe you shouldn’t tell her all those stories, Dad,” Marcella told her father one morning. “She needs to stop with these stories about a light at the cabin.”
“The girl has a wonderful imagination,” said Ira Desilets, a tall sun-toughened outdoorsman who had built Shainie a small cedar-strip canoe that she could take out by herself, on the strict understanding that she wear her life jacket.
“And who knows. . . maybe the girl is seeing something.”
He had encountered some genuine mysteries in his many years in bush country. Every tale of the woods, no matter how outrageous, was based on some truth. Even the story of how the lake got its name.
Shkendang is ‘grieving’ in the Ojibwe language and the Ojibwe who had lived in the area named it after a tragedy a century before.
Every spring before the Europeans arrived, the Ojibwe came to the lake to catch the lake trout that were plentiful just after the ice melted. They camped at Ghostly Point and at night their campfires illuminated the waters surrounding the rocky point. Their chants joined the wood smoke drifting skyward to Gzhemnidoo, the great spirit, in respect and thanks for the nourishment they took from Mother Earth.
Their Gimaa, or leader, had one daughter who he affectionately called Moong, meaning Loon Who Brings Happiness. She was beautiful, happy, and skilled in the woods as a hunter, fisher and gatherer of food, much like the loons with whom they shared the lake.
Early one morning Moong canoed out to fish alone. She planned to fill her canoe bottom with trout to impress and please her father, ignoring the warning of an old man who cautioned about dark skies building on the western horizon.
Next week: Part 2 - The tragedy

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The Art of Splitting Wood

It was a long ago scene, from a time before invention of smart phones that take video. That’s unfortunate because what I saw then would have made a cool  video on the art of splitting wood.
I was at a friend’s newly-acquired bush property, helping him clean up after a wild wind storm. We had cut a downed birch tree into rounds and were exhausting ourselves splitting it for firewood.
A neighbour from up the road stopped by to introduce himself. He was a local, born and raised in the area, and you knew it from his Ottawa Valley twang. A  country lad who knew more about living with the land than we would learn in a lifetime.
We stood there and talked, just getting to know each other.  As the conversation moved along, he casually pulled my axe from a stump and swung it one handed, with little apparent force, into a birch round held firm under one foot. An imperceptible twist of the wrist and the round split into two.
He split another round the same way and continued with others as we talked. He would pause in what he was saying, glance down briefly, position a log beneath his foot and swing the axe, with little more effort than someone swinging a riding crop against their leg as they talked.
By the time conversation stopped and he had left, there was a sizeable pile of split birch at our feet. He hadn’t said anything about splitting wood, but he had left us a lesson: Splitting wood is not an act of brute force. It is more of a mental exercise.
First of all, you don’t cut or chop firewood. You split it, pushing the fibres apart until the piece becomes two pieces. It is not important to have a sharp axe. A sharp blade sticks in the wood, doing little to push the fibres apart.
Some avid wood splitters say that firewood rounds wish to be split and give you helpful hints that you should listen to. For instance, most firewood rounds have small cracks, or checks, that indicate lines for best splitting.
One expert says he always stands a round on its head to split it in the direction that it grew. Trees obviously are thicker on the bottom than at the top, so you stand a round “on its head” by putting the smaller end of the round facing down.
I don’t know if I believe that, but I do believe some other advice from expert wood splitters. Stand straight with your feet apart. Swing with straight arms. Let the axe do the work. Aim a bit closer to the edge nearest you. That way if you miss you hit the ground. Going too far to the other side and you hit the handle.   
Most avid splitters prefer a maul, which is heavier, has a fatter blade and is blunter than an axe. All the better for pushing the wood apart. Also, the thick rounded backside of the maul is ideal for hammering wedges into those tough, knotty pieces sent to frustrate and exhaust us.
Splitting firewood is an effective physical workout, reportedly burning up to 400 or 500 calories a hour. It is especially healthy for the mind. Riding the rhythm of a wood splitting session allows the mind to take a vacation.
And, few accomplishments provide more satisfaction than a well-stacked woodpile.
Bruce Hutchison, the West Coast newspaperman wrote in his 1988 book A Life in the Country that a well-stacked woodpile is as good as money in the bank. It is there waiting to help you when the weather gets frigid.
Interestingly, the word splitting is a psychological term. It is a common ego defence mechanism by which people reinforce their sense of good by demonizing others who do not share their opinions or values.
Politicians tend to suffer from splitting and it often is a sign of a personality disorder. If you have ever watched Donald Trump on television or the Internet, you get the idea.
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The Joys of Gardening

It has been excellent weather for the vegetable garden, thank you Ms. Weatherwoman. The peas, beans, carrots and corn are jumping so it looks like we’ll have veggies galore later this summer, and into the fall.
This is truly good fortune because a well stocked veggie pantry means I won’t have to drive down to Shoot’em Up City to turn in my guns for food vouchers. I want to  keep my guns for when Premier Pinocchio announces a guns-for-electricity-vouchers program.
At any rate, the weather gods have been generous in my patch of the world. There have been bright stretches of sunshine interrupted by brief showers of light to moderate rain.
I have watered only twice this season, more good fortune because our only water source is rain barrels. When the barrels go empty, the garden goes dry.
The barrels ran dry two or three years ago and I had to refill them by trucking water from a pond. Hauling water, then doling it out to individual veggie plants is not my idea of fun, but it did give me a new appreciation of the importance of water.
Like most Canadians my appreciation of water was not as intense as it should be. Many of us live surrounded by lakes and rivers so we believe we are water wealthy, much water wealthier than other nations.
In fact, Brazil and Russia are the world’s water wealthiest nations. Canada basically is tied for third place with Indonesia, the U.S. and China.
Surveys have shown that more than 50 per cent of Canadians consider freshwater our country’s most important natural resource. Eighty per cent of us are concerned that a water shortage will develop if we do not take steps toward conservation.
Despite this we are among the world’s leading water wasters. We rank only behind the U.S. in per capita water consumption among developed nations. Europeans use one half the water that we do.
A Canadian Water Attitudes Study some years back found that Canadians believe they use an average of only 66 litres of water a day for showering, laundry, washing dishes, in toilets and, of course, for drinking. Actual use per person is far beyond what we believe: each of us uses on average 329 litres of water a day.Experts on water usage say that has to change because the warming of earth’s atmosphere is dramatically altering the world’s hydrological cycle.  Rainfall and snow patterns around the world, once fairly predictable, have become erratic and likely will become even more so.The result already is being seen: more severe droughts in some places, more severe floods in others. Both have high impacts on the water we all need for life.As the climate changes the politics of water will intensify. An example of the fighting over water that can be expected is seen in the current plan of Waukesha, Wisconsin to divert 8.4 millions of gallons of water a day from the Lake Michigan.Waukesha, a city of 70,000, now gets its water from groundwater wells, which now are found to contain high levels of radium. A court has ordered the city to find other sources of water by 2018.Canada and the U.S. have an agreement forbidding the diverting of Great Lakes water to any area outside the Great Lakes basin. Waukesha, a Milwaukee suburb, is working a loophole to get an exception to this rule. The city itself is outside the Great Lakes basin, but the county in which it resides is within the basin. So Waukesha believes it should be granted an exception to  take the water it needs.We can expect to see more of these water fights as climate change continues to upset precipitation patterns.Hopefully the rainfall patterns will remain stable for my vegetable garden. If so, the veggies will flourish and my only worry will be the animals. Last year my scarecrow fell asleep on the job and the raccoons snuck in and feasted on the corn. They left us one small cob.A couple of nights later the deer, obviously upset that the raccoons beat them to the corn, ate our prized sunflowers. 
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Night in the Forest

Evening shadows arrive like cloaked ninjas descending silently into the treetops. Soon all light dims into non-existence, consumed by the night.
The forest is a different world in the dark. Anything living or travelling in it must tune the senses to night-time frequencies. Sight, the primary human sense in daylight, gives way to hearing, smell, and even touch. 
There is an increased awareness that things you cannot see are seeing you. You hear them move and you wonder. What is moving and where is it going? A forest fact of life is that anything moving is looking for something to grab and eat. Or, trying to avoid being the something grabbed and eaten.
A research group now tells us that movement in the forest does not come from just from animals. They say their research has shown that trees move as they go to sleep at night and as they awaken in the morning.
The researchers used terrestrial laser scanning to measure the night movements of silver birch trees in Finland and Austria. The laser equipment scanned tree canopies and branches from sunset to sunrise, making intricate measurements of movement undetectable by the human eye.
Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) is a method of collecting complex geometric data from buildings, machines and other objects, including trees. It has become an important modern tool in surveying.
TLS data collected in both Finland and Austria showed that branches hung as much as 10 centimetres lower at sunset than at sunrise. The sagging was measured over several hours, ruling out the possibility that wind moved the branches.
Some researchers believe that tree branches relax and droop at night because of a decrease in a tree’s internal water pressure. During daylight hours photosynthesis converts sunshine into energy. With no photosynthesis after sunset, water pressure decreases inside the tree and the branches relax.
The TLS studies are being used to help determine whether this is true or whether trees are simply following their own body clocks in the same way we humans do.
This kind of research sounds esoteric. However, it could be useful in understanding how trees adapt to changing environmental conditions, especially those resulting from climate change.For anyone interested, the Finland-Austria TLS studies were reported in Frontiers in Plant Science, which can be found at http://journal.frontiersin.org/articl....
My interest in when trees sleep is much less esoteric. I wonder if I should tiptoe when walking through the woods at dawn.
--- 
A friend in Edmonton texted me Sunday afternoon with the news that Canadian singer Bobby Curtola had died. I was saddened but shocked later when I watched the evening CTV National News, which carried not a word about Curtola. Much about Mohammed Ali, shark attacks in Australia etc. but nothing about the Canadian kid who was an international sensation in the 1960s, and continued to entertain and to help others long after his star began to fade.
I don’t watch the CBC National anymore because of its pathetically poor news lineup. I am told, however, that it had an extensive segment on the singer and his life.
I found snippets about him on Twitter and other Internet sites but generally I thought national news media coverage was skimpy.
He deserved better. He had 25 Canadian gold singles and 12 Canadian gold albums. More importantly, as noted in the Canadian Encyclopaedia, he  established the first coast-to-coast music touring circuit in Canada. He also was the first to prove that it was possible to be an international pop music star living in Canada.
He did much work for charities, hosting telethons to raise money for groups scattered around the world.
Best of all, Bobby Curtola was a genuine person. I know that because we were classmates throughout high school. (He got better marks than I did despite the rising pressure and demands as a newly-discovered teen idol).
I saw him a few times over the years and fame changed him little from the nice guy who pumped gas at his dad’s gas station in Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay).
He was a natural person and a natural singer who lived a natural life. And, I imagine that unlike many entertainment stars, he died a natural death.

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A Forest Fable

This week's Minden Times column
It was the beavers, those clever, industrious engineers, who had the idea: Turn house building into an industry that would create jobs and build a strong economy benefitting all forest creatures.
The industry boomed. Prefab modified beaver houses were sold to forest communities around the world. Profits flowed like the creeks in spring.
There were jobs for all. Beaver were employed as tree cutters. Moose and deer hauled sticks and mud. Foxes took charge of administration and the birds flew the marketing initiatives.
Prosperity grew throughout the forest. Every forest critter had his or her own new home and all the conveniences that make for a happy life.
Industrialization brought the financial resources to build a flourishing modern society. A council, called Parliament, was created from animals elected across the forest. There was a  justice system, managed by the owls, and police services staffed by the wolves. The rabbits set up health care and other social services.
Banks, operated by the raccoons, offered mortgages for bigger houses and loans for televisions, computer tablets and to pay monthly electricity bills.
Life in the forest, once a miserable paw-to-mouth and claw-to-beak existence, was good. Until the grumbling began.
The bears complained they were working too much to enjoy their usual winter vacations. They demanded more paid hibernation time.
The nervous squirrels called for shorter work weeks to ease the stress of modern living. Still others said they must have higher wages to offset the taxes jacked up by their new government to pay for a burgeoning bureaucracy.
The forest echoed with howls and squawks about high prices and high taxes. Wages rose steadily to quell the workers demands. So did the prices of beaver houses and other products because businesses needed more revenue to cover rising costs. The businesses also needed to satisfy the stock market lust for higher returns.
In another land far away beyond the lake, workers toiled in wet fields just to fill their bellies and did what their government ordered them to do. They learned of the industrialization success in the forest and began producing modified beaver houses and other goods at much cheaper prices.
Soon the forest animals were importing cheaper goods, and even some of their services, from the lands beyond the lake.
The forest industries could not compete with the prices from abroad. Their factories slowed production, soon gathering moss and rust. Workers were laid off and those who could not find other work spent their days playing video games and watching streamed reality shows.
Forest jobs continued to shrink as more business shifted to the lands across the lake. The only jobs available were in the fast food industry but many of the animals found they were gaining weight and becoming depressed.
Parliament decided the government should get into the casino business to create jobs. Casinos also would provide entertainment, ease the animals’ worries and bring more money into the government coffers.
Depression, suicide and violent crime became common. The rabbits operating the health service began prescribing cannabis leaves, which they said would ease the forest society’s pain. Costs soared beyond control, so the Parliament got into the cannabis business to raise more revenue.
It was the skunks, nosing the damp forest floor, who discovered the magic mushrooms. They learned that chewing the mushrooms relaxed the body and sent the mind off into other worlds. They created underground networks for distributing the mushrooms and sold them to stressed out buyers at secret rendezvous points.
The wolves soon ran out of spaces in which to confine loopy animals they found acting crazy or passed out along the forest trails. Their patrolling packs became exhausted trying to keep up with increasing crime.
The rabbits opened more mental health clinics and rehab centres. The costs became overwhelming so they cut back the services provided for traditional illnesses.
The forest society suffered a complete breakdown for which even the loon songs on the lake did not provide comfort or relief.
Eventually the happy loon songs stopped and the only loon call heard from the lake was the ‘tremolo’, that shrill and insane loon laugh signalling danger and despair.
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The Age of Information 'Lite'

You might recall from school days the story of the young Greek guy who sat beside a pool, saw his image reflected in the water and fell in love with himself. He couldn’t drag himself away and sat moonstruck, staring at his reflection until he died.
His name was Narcissus and psychologists named a mental condition after him. They called it Narcissistic Personality Disorder, or narcissism, a grandiose view of oneself and a craving for the attention and admiration of others.
Medical libraries bulge with studies on narcissism, some of the most recent examining whether social media and the selfies phenomena are fertilizing the growth of narcissism.
You don’t have to visit a medical library to find evidence that narcissism is growing. Television, hijacked by reality shows, is all narcissism now. More and more, so is politics.
Two of the more obvious North American narcissists among us are Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump. Look around and you’ll see others.
I don’t know if social media is contributing to what the experts say is a frightening growth in narcissism. Certainly new media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram  and others, and omnipresent smartphones and tablets, has increased the craving for self gratification. We are a society becoming obsessed with wanting to know who is paying attention to us.
A victim of all this is informed thinking. Too much of the information needed to build sound judgment and make good decisions now comes to us in low-cal snippets. New media snippets in which clicks and views are more important than well–researched facts.
Never in world history has the need for informed thinking been so important. Our shrinking world is cluttered with issues requiring critical thinking based on information that is as solid as Haliburton rock. Yet the Age of Information contains too much information that is soft as sand, as trustworthy as shadows.
Reading is the most effective way of getting informed, but for many of us reading has become simply glancing. We glance at information ‘lite’ and make our opinions instantly.
Research shows that while our visual skills are improving significantly, our critical thinking and analytical skills are declining. This trend will continue as we play more screen games and puzzles, and allow our kids to spend more time with shoot’em up games than with books, either paper or digital.
There are plenty of statistics on our electronic game habits but too many are collected by the gaming industry to be taken as fact. However, it’s probably safe to say that more than half of adults and at least one-third of kids under 18 play personal computer games on laptops, desktops, phones and tablets. Many school teachers use video games as a classroom teaching tool.
Anyone can confirm this by spending time with today’s kids. They process visual information quickly because of time spend with television and screen games. Everything is real time.
Meanwhile, reading skills have declined. Fewer kids actually read for pleasure these days. Too little time is spent reading that develops imagination, vocabulary, critical thinking and seeing the perspectives taught by history.
Reading, whether the words are laid down in print or digitally, sets us on the road to informed, critical thinking. Informed thinking helps us to understand change – why it is often necessary and how to handle it. It also helps us develop better values, and generally become a better society.
And, it allows us to rise above rumours, superstitions and political hyperbole and speak intelligently and forcefully against dumb political decisions.
Speaking of dumb political decisions, Newfoundland, which has Canada’s lowest literacy rate, will tax books starting in July. Its provincial sales tax will rise from eight to 10 per cent and be applied to books. That will be on top of the five per cent federal GST already charged on books.
It also has announced it will close 54 of the province’s 95 libraries.
You kind of wonder how all that is going to work out for them.
I also wonder if things would have worked out better for Narcissus if, instead of just staring at his reflection, he had brought a book to the pool.

Coming from America

The Canadian customs officer feeds my passport into the scanner, then looks up and asks: “What are you bringing back with you?”
I suppress the urge to say what I always want to say after crossing the U.S.-Canada border: “Nostalgia. Just a lot of nostalgia.”
Each time I return from the U.S. I am loaded with nostalgia. I have so many good feelings about America – so many good memories – and find myself yearning for the way things used to be. Way back, when the border was barely noticeable.
There is a sense of lost freedom when crossing the border these days. Security has diluted much of the welcoming you used to feel both coming and going. The world is smaller and much too dangerous for anyone to drop their guard.
Few would argue that increased border security is not a necessity, but it has reduced the pleasure of going south.
Besides security, other factors also lessen the joy of cross border travel. Exploding health care costs make the possibility of getting injured or sick in the U.S. a serious concern.  
A slip, a fall and a broken arm can cost a visitor to the U.S. hundreds of dollars. A heart attack that leads to stents or more serious surgery can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Ontario’s health insurance pays roughly $400 a day for U.S. hospital costs but U.S. hospitals charge far beyond that. Ontario also reimburses U.S. physician costs, but only at rates it pays Ontario doctors – rates far below what U.S. physicians charge.
Supplementary is a must for most of us travelling into the U.S., even for a day or two. Then there is the worry about your insurance company trying to avoid paying your claim. Insurance is a business and the fewer payouts, the better the profit.
Anyone buying travel insurance should spend considerable time and effort learning  eligibility requirements, terms and conditions, pre-existing condition limitations, restrictions and exclusions of the policy.
On top of security and health insurance worries there also is the concern about the money exchange rate, which was relatively stable until recent times. In times long past the exchange rate was really not a factor with the Canadian dollar running at par, or even above par for long periods like in the 1950s.
Changes to security, health care costs and exchange rates are what they are and we can’t go back to the way things were. Still, it is nice to slip into nostalgia.
Years ago we never gave much thought to the border. We used to walk across the bridge at Pigeon River into Minnesota to buy ice cream with barely a wave to customs officials. Visits to Duluth to buy clothes for the new school year or to visit relatives and friends were regular with no thought of health insurance or counting days outside the country.
My grandfather used to run the Lake Superior shoreline in his small boat from Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay) to Minnesota lakeshore taverns to drink beer with friends.
Little thought was given to the border, or to specific citizenship. Rules were not nearly as rigid and many families had a history of mixed citizenship. It was sometimes hard to remember who was Canadian and who was American.
My maternal grandmother was born Canadian in Alberta but died an American in Nevada. My paternal grandmother was a Canadian from the Kenora area, and lived a chunk of her life in Minnesota before moving the family to Sault Ste. Marie, then Port Arthur. I can’t even recall if she died a Canadian or an American.
My dad’s dad was born an American who became Canadianized but never changed his citizenship. My dad was an American who eventually took Canadian citizenship.
It was like that back then. Less concern about borders and citizenship. Less involvement by government.
Back then we considered ourselves North Americans with more freedom to come and go where and when we wanted. We found little need for nationalistic labels.
I would love to see a return of those days, but that will never happen. However, a little nostalgia once in while never hurt anyone.

Email: shaman@vianet.ca
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