POSTING # 18

The Shaw Festival’s ‘In Good King Charles's Golden Days’; Mike’s Dream of Flying a Bush Plane; Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)


The Shaw Festival’s ‘In Good King Charles's Golden Days’

On Thursday, April 23, Pat and I and a friend who was visiting us went to see the Shaw Festival production of George Bernard Shaw’s ‘In Good King Charles’s Golden Days’.

The play is not produced often because---I suspect---of its themes of politics, religion and philosophy in 17th century England, and its length (nearly 2 hours and 45 minutes including two intermissions). Only a brave, or foolhardy, director would take it on.

The director, Eda Holmes, has responded superbly to the challenges of the play with a great cast, imaginative sets, and wonderful pacing.

We were enthralled and highly recommend it.


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At university, the courses I took covered the political and constitutional impact of the reign of King Charles II but there was not much about the King as a human being.

And, as Shaw shows, he was very human.

He had no children from his marriage but had a number of children with various women (he acknowledged at least 12).

Apparently the two wives of Prince Charles, Diana and Camilla, are both descended from those children. This means that when Prince William becomes king, he will be the first descendent of King Charles II to be monarch.

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For me, one of the joys of a live performance is to see how a cast responds to the unexpected.

At our performance, there was a small boo-boo. A book fell from a sofa onto the floor.

I looked at the book and wondered what the actress who was sitting near the sofa would do.

Would she ignore the book and continue to follow the dialogue---so she would be ready for her next cue?

Or would she bend down and pick it up?

If this had been a movie, the director would have shouted, ‘Cut’, along with some choice Anglo-Saxon oaths.

But this was live.

In a nanosecond, the actress made her decision. Bending down, she gracefully picked up the book and put it on an end table.

In the car on the way home, I mentioned the book incident. Pat and our friend picked up on my comment immediately. They said that they too had watched the actress and were wondering what she would do.

This was a trivial incident, but it was a human moment.

Being human means having to deal with the unexpected. The calm and perfect response of the actress to a sudden problem enhanced our enjoyment of the play.


Mike’s Dream of Flying a Bush Plane

In the last posting, Posting #17, April 26, I told some stories about my 1957 summer at the mining camp in Tulsequah, B.C.

I had been driving a truck carrying ore down a mountain to a mill in the valley but there was no longer any ore to move--- mining inside the mountain had stopped in line with the Company’s decision to close the mine in September.

The foreman shifted me to other driving duties. The mill still had a stockpile of ore to process and I sometimes drove a truck loaded with concentrated ore, from the mill to a kind of harbour some 10 miles down the Tulsequah River, where the River was deep and wide.

And sometimes, I drove a van carrying people and goods to meet the bush plane that arrived at the harbour three or four times a week.

After the pontooned airplane had landed on the river, the pilot would taxi to the dock. As he got close, he would cut the engine, jump onto one of the pontoons and throw a rope to one of the dock workers. After the plane was secured, the pilot would help any passengers climb down, and unload any supplies.

I liked the pilot, Mike (not his real name), who was in his early 30s, with dark, curly hair. He had a lively sense of humour and we would joke as I helped unload the plane.

I also liked the story of how he had become a pilot---part of which I picked up from him and part from the workers at Tulsequah. Mike had been hired by the mining company as a labourer and while working on the Tulsequah dock had met different bush pilots. Mike talked with them about flying and one of them encouraged him to take flying lessons.
Mike saved his money---not hard to do in a mining camp where the pay was good and there was not much to spend it on. When his contract as a labourer was up, he flew to Vancouver and found a flight school. He got his pilot’s license and thanks to contacts with the pilots he had met in Tulsequah, got a job with their firm.

The miners in the camp were proud of Mike---he was seen as ‘a good guy’ and they were pleased that things had worked out so well for him.

And Mike just loved flying---he kept saying that it was far and away the best job he had ever had.

And then as the summer was drawing to an end, we got word that Mike’s plane with Tulsequah’s chief mining engineer aboard had crashed in the mountains.

Both men were killed.

I never heard the official cause of the crash but the old timers said that there had probably been a sudden downdraft, a terrible hazard in the mountains.

Miners are tough people, used to accidents and death, but there was an almost church-like hush in the cookhouse and the bunk houses that day as the news spread.

Mike’s many friends were mourning.

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A couple of days later, I was asked to drive the engineer’s widow and her children to the bush plane for the start of her trip back to her family in the South. The mine manager and the doctor came along to comfort her.

The widow’s head was down and her shoulders were sagging---her life had suddenly been ripped apart. She responded quietly to the mine manager and the doctor when they spoke to her but she spent most of the time hugging and whispering to her children.
At the dock, we guided her and the children onto the same type of plane in which her husband had perished. Once they were strapped in, the pilot gunned the engine. The plane pulled free of the water and headed for Juneau, and the start of the long trip home.
On the way back to the camp, the mine manager who had been a Canadian army officer during some of the bloodiest battles in Sicily and up the spine of Italy chatted quietly with the doctor. The manager’s normally confident, take-charge demeanour had disappeared, replaced by a look of deep grief.

I heard scraps of the conversation. The manager was telling the doctor about how much he was going to miss his friend.

Canada is fortunate to have a cornucopia of natural resources. It is also fortunate to have people who are prepared to accept the risks involved in extracting those resources. We need to remember the sacrifices that they and their families sometimes have to make on our behalf.


Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)

Not long after the deaths of the Mike and the engineer, I was driving a truck loaded with concentrate through the bush to the barge. I saw some motion off to my right, and swiveling my head saw a moose running alongside the truck, on the shoulder of the road. Although I was sitting high up in the truck cab, the moose and I were almost at eye level.

And just a few feet apart.

The bush was dense at that point in the road and it was not unusual to see a deer on the road, trying to get away from the deer flies. But, I had never seen a moose.

The moose ran alongside me for two hundred yards or so, until we came to a clearing, and then he veered off to the right.

I remember his large, brown left eye---the only one I could see---and thinking that there didn’t seem to be any fear in it. We were just two large critters, sharing the road for a few moments.

As I watched him run into the clearing, I wondered how something so huge could grow up in the wild, without veterinarians or medicines.

It doesn’t bother me when I hear friends say they are going ‘up North’ to hunt moose. I just think that after my ‘close encounter’ with the Tulsequah moose I wouldn’t be able to pull the trigger and bring down something as large, wild and wonderful as a moose.

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See you next Sunday for Posting #19 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting, or you can email me at johnpathunter@cs.com.