POSTING # 36

Ontario Field Tomatoes; a Trip to Sochi; Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)

Ontario Field Tomatoes

When I’m scraping ice off the windshield or snuggling down into my parka trying to find some warm air to breathe, I think of Ontario field tomatoes.

I think of the way my mother liked to serve them. Large glistening slices overlapped on a plate, sprinkled with sugar, vinegar and a little salt and pepper, and served with warm, home-made bread (preferably a crust---we called them ‘heels’).

Or, I think of how we ate tomatoes, warm from the garden. First, we licked a place on the skin so that salt would stick, then bit in, leaning over so the juices didn’t run down our fronts. Then a little salt with each bite. Heaven!

Those memories help me survive our winters. I tell myself that in seven or eight months, I will be feasting on Ontario field tomatoes.

Just hang in there.

I was worried about this year’s tomatoes back in June. A local grower told us that her tomato plants had been in the ground for 6 weeks but they hadn’t grown at all. They hadn’t died but they hadn’t grown. The weather was just too cool and damp.

And the weather hasn’t improved much.

In the last week or so, I’ve tried to find some real Ontario field tomatoes at local markets and in the supermarkets. The signs say, ‘Ontario field tomatoes’ and perhaps they were grown in Ontario fields but they are not the real thing.

Some remind me of the tomatoes we get in the winter; bright red but small with a waxy sheen. I take them home hoping they will taste right.

They don’t!

They remind me of a seed catalogue that described one tomato variety this way, “Popular with growers. Turns red early and ships well.”

Nothing about flavour.

I have seen some large tomatoes that look like the real thing but they are greenish-yellow with a few hints of pink, as though the growers decided to pick them before they rotted or got hit by the frost.

Pat has become used to hearing me moan about this summer’s tomatoes. I think she has just put it down to yet another of my loony obsessions.

But, she was at a meeting this week where a woman was complaining about the poor quality of tomatoes. Several other women immediately joined in and the agenda had to give way while these tomato lovers lamented the lack of real Ontario field tomatoes this year.

“You’re as bad as my husband!”, Pat finally told them.

What a cruel thing to say to perfectly respectable women.

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I don’t know how I can face another winter without having had my tomato fix.

Amman has wonderful tomatoes, grown in the lush Jordan valley. Since decent tomatoes don’t ship well, perhaps we will have to ship ourselves to Amman this fall.


A Trip to Sochi

A news item about the 2014 Winter Games being held in Sochi, a Southern Russia resort on the Black Sea, brought back memories of a trip Pat and I took to the city in 1996.

The Russian officials I was working with on a World Bank aid project had selected Sochi as a site for a model employment office. I had to verify that it would make a good model office and, if so, to decide what kind of technical help Canadian consultants would have to provide.

As I had travelled across Russia checking out potential model offices, I kept trying to coordinate things so that Pat could come with me on one of the trips. Sochi fitted the bill perfectly.

As always, my interpreter, Yuri, would accompany us. Nadia (not her real name), my Russian liaison officer would also come. A British official with the World Bank office in Moscow decided to join us. So, we were five in all.

Under Stalin, Sochi became ‘the unofficial summer capital of Russia’. He and senior members of the Communist Party had dachas along the coast. State industries established sanatoriums to treat sick workers and to provide vacation facilities. Click here for an article about Sochi.

We were told that although Sochi had suffered from the economic problems in the early 1990s, it was weathering the storm better than most parts of Russia, especially Siberia. The hotels and restaurants were tired and rundown but one could sense that entrepreneurs were starting to emerge---something that the Western economists who were advising the Russian government had been hoping for.

The Sochi employment office was one of the best I had seen in Russia. The premises were large, bright and airy and the manager seemed unusually competent. He was also an entrepreneur. In addition to managing the employment office, he had started a company to retrain unemployed workers.

I felt sure that with some tweaking by Canadian experts the employment office could be a very useful model for other Russian employment centres. (As it turned out, Sochi did indeed become a very good model office.)

After we had finished at the office, the manager invited us to have a Black Sea sunset cruise on a boat owned by a friend. Sochi, according to the manager, had the most beautiful sunsets in Russia and there was no better place to watch them than from out on the water.

The five in our party plus the employment office manager boarded the boat, which wasn’t as I had expected a small pleasure craft but a three-deck, somewhat rusted freighter.

We met the captain on the bridge and watched as he steered the ship out into the Black Sea.

I should explain here that Pat has always had a fascination with all kinds of motorized vehicles ever since her father taught her to drive, at the age of 13, on the back rounds near Lake Simcoe. Her experience on our rented cruiser on the Thames (see Posting #13, March 29, 2009) had extended her interest from land-based vehicles to marine-based craft.

As we moved into the Black Sea, she had been studying the freighter’s gauges, compasses and levers. The captain, seeing her interest, was explaining with a lot of gesticulation how he controlled the ship.

Once we were about half a mile off shore, the employment office manager invited us to go down on deck so he could point out some of the famous dachas and other buildings along the shore.

Pat said she would join us down on the deck once the captain had finished his lesson.

After 15 minutes or so and no Pat, I began to worry. I went up to the bridge to see how she was doing.

There was Pat---alone on the bridge---steering the ship!

She recalls that I said, “Oh my god!”

Now that’s possible but as I remember my shock, I think I may have used something a little stronger.

She said that after the captain had shown her how the ship was steered and how the speed was controlled, he had let her take the wheel. He told her to steer straight into the reflection of the setting sun in the water and to keep the speed at a certain point on one of the guages.

And he had disappeared.

When I found her, she was happy as could be, turning slightly this way and that to keep the ship in the centre of the sunset path.

After the sun had set, the captain came back to the bridge and with gestures told Pat he wanted her to turn the ship around and head back to Sochi.

She worked the direction and speed controls and the ship gradually came around.

The captain took over as we approached the Sochi harbour.

Pat asked Yuri to ask the captain how long the ship was and what it was used for.

The length came quickly--- just over 33 metres, or about 110 feet.

What the ship was used for took longer and Yuri told us he would tell us later, back at the hotel.

At the hotel, Yuri said that the captain was evasive. Yuri said it was well known that there was a good deal of smuggling---of both goods and illegal immigrants---among the countries bordering the Black Sea,. Times were tough and the captain was probably taking part in some of those activities.

From Pat’s point of view, the fact that she may have been steering a smuggler’s vessel just added spice to the whole episode.


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After the ship docked, we all walked through a gate to the parking lot. As we passed through the gate, I noticed a guard in a small hut. He just looked at us, but didn’t say anything.

When we got to our car, I looked for Yuri. He wasn’t with us.

We waited for 10 or 15 minutes and then Yuri came through the gate.

“Is everything OK?”, I asked.

He shrugged, “When a drunken guard, with a machine gun, wants to talk, you better stop and listen.”

It turned out that the guard---to the extent he could focus on anything---was just curious about who the ‘Westerners’ were, and wanted to talk about how westerners were destroying Russia.


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Years later, back in Canada, we were at a party and one of the guests went on and on about his new cruiser and his trips in it on Lake Ontario, all in boring detail. Sensing after a while that he had been monopolizing the conversation, he turned to Pat and me and asked if we had ever skippered a boat.

“Well,” Pat said, with a sweet smile, “the last boat I skippered was a 110 foot freighter on the Black Sea.”

“Oh’, the man said.

Then a pause.

“I think I need another drink”.

He fled to the bar.

Once or twice I caught him staring at us with a look that said, ‘who-in-hell-are-those-people’.

Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)

In last week’s posting, I told about our camping experiences with raccoons. Here is another story.

One of our teenage sons and a pal went camping in the Gatineau Park outside Ottawa. They pitched their tent in one of the popular, ‘civilized’ camp sites. The camp site had working washrooms and even a small Laundromat---but also had raccoons that were even bolder than the ones I described last week.

The boys cooked their dinner and put the food containers in the tent. Late at night, they woke up to find a couple of huge raccoons in the tent rooting through their food.

The boys got the raccoons out of the tent by banging pans and shouting but the raccoons settled down at the edge of the campsite and refused to move further away.

The threat was there. “You go back to sleep and we’ll be back in your tent.”

The boys developed a plan that worked but it is most definitely NOT recommended.

They crumpled up sheets of toilet paper, set fire to them and threw them at the raccoons.

The raccoons must have decided, “These kids are really crazy. They could burn down the whole park, including us”.

They waddled off and weren’t seen again.
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See you next Sunday for Posting #37 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 email me at johnpathunter@cs.com.