POSTING #93

Eating and Sleeping in the Dog River Bush Camp

A representative of Frontier College  sent me an email recently noting that since I had been a labourer-teacher with the College for three summers---while I was going to university---he wondered whether I would like to join the College's alumni association.

I said I would be pleased to join.

That exchange made me think of my first assignment with the College, in the summer of 1956, at Dog River, a pulp and paper bush camp north of what is now Thunder Bay.

I have written about Dog River before in this blog but usually about the work we were doing----about guiding the logs down the Dog River in a river drive, and then loading them onto trucks via something called a jack ladder.

I thought it might be interesting to tell some stories about living conditions in a bush camp half a century ago.

Let's start with the cookhouse, and eating.

Napoleon is supposed to have said that armies march on their stomachs. The same could have been said of workers in a bush camp. The work was heavy and hard and the workers had to have lots of plain but tasty food.

The first essential was a skilled cook.

At Dog River, we had a Finnish woman in her mid 50s. As was common at that time, her husband also worked at the camp, as what was called a 'bull cook'. He looked after  a whole host of jobs around the camp, including cleaning and maintaining the bunkhouses, the wash house, the outhouses and the sauna.

Working with the cook were several 'cookees', young women, also Finnish, who helped in the kitchen and brought plates and bowls of food to the tables.

It was a tough life for the cook and the cookees. They had to get up in the wee hours of the morning to bake bread, pies and buns, and to prepare vegetables and cuts of meat for the day's meals.

At mealtime, one of the cookees vigorously rattled a steel rod around the inside of a cast iron triangle that was hanging outside the cookhouse.

Men rushed in, found a seat on a bench at one of the tables, loaded up their plates and began to eat.

I committed a faux pas at my first meal in the cookhouse. I asked a co-worker a question about what we were going to be doing that day. He frowned at me and motioned with his head to the door, meaning that we should talk about that later on.

I learned that conversation was not permitted in the cookhouse. You could perhaps get away with asking for, 'salt', or 'pepper', but it was better to point.

A large sign in the cookhouse in another camp up the road from us made the point succinctly: "You came here to eat, eat."

The cook and the cookees wanted us out of the cookhouse as quickly as possible so they could clean up, and have a rest before the next meal.

After eating for 8 months in a university cafeteria with skimpy portions of bland food kept warm in a steam-table, I was overwhelmed by the amount and freshness of the food. It was 'all-you-can-eat'---so long as you could eat quickly!

When I talked with the men about the food (back in the bunkhouse, after the meal of course!) they agreed that it was pretty good at Dog River, better than in many camps they had worked in.

They said that it was tough, and expensive, to find a cook who knew how to cook and could stand the hours and hard work.

One old timer said that if he were running a camp, he would hire a so-so cook and spend some of the money he was saving to bring in attractive cookees. He would tell them to make sure they brushed their chests against the men as they leaned over the table to put plates of food on the table (I have sanitized his language somewhat).

"No one in the camp would ever complain about the food!"

The others disagreed, with one of them saying, "That would work for about a week!"

In the bush, apparently, stomachs trumped sex.

When we were working outside the camp, for example driving logs down the river, we would make our own lunches after breakfast (breakfast was usually fried eggs, bacon or ham, toast and coffee). We made sandwiches with thick slices of freshly-baked bread, sliced meat, or cheese, and shoved those into our backpacks with a few pieces of hard tack (especially popular with the Swedish and Finnish workers), and two or three slices of pie. With enough food for lunch plus the usual morning and afternoon snacks and a large Thermos of coffee, we were set for the day.

Let's move on to sleeping arrangements.

The bunkhouse I lived in had about 40 single beds, steel frame cots, twenty down each side of a long, narrow room. Each bed had a thin mattress, sheets, and gray, army-style blankets. At each end of the room, there was a stove made from a cut down 45 gallon barrel on its side that the bull cook kept fueled with hardwood logs.

Behind the bunkhouse there was a washhouse with barrels of hot water into which we dipped white enamel basins for daily washing and shaving. Behind that was a 6-hole privy at the end of a long path. For  a weekly 'all-over clean' we would use the sauna---on the bank of the river---sitting in the hot room until we were lobster-red, and then soaping and rinsing off in an outer room.

Discussions in the bunkhouse were usually friendly with younger workers sometimes teasing  older fellows who still cut trees in the old way with a two-person crosscut saw, and then trimmed them with a Swede saw and an axe. The young bucks praised the speed and ease of chainsaws while the older workers complained about the noise and smell of them. 

However, one evening there was a tense argument--- about the living conditions in the camp. The younger workers wanted to press the union to fight in the next contract for bedrooms with not more than 2 workers per room, and with indoor toilets and showers. They argued that the union should be prepared to strike on the issue.

Some older workers argued that the young were demanding too much, they were too impatient. The young people didn't realize how much better conditions were than those that the older workers had faced in the 1920s and 30s.

One of the older workers said that when he started in the bush in the 1920s, they had rough, two-tier wooden bunk beds. There were no mattresses so the workers had to go into the bush and cut pine and spruce boughs. The workers also had to supply their own blankets, one on top of the boughs and several more to go over them while they slept. Apparently, most men didn't bother with sheets, they slept in their long-john underwear, between the blankets.

As the discussion ran on, there was increasing bitterness. The younger workers wanted change while the older ones were afraid of a long strike and the loss of income it would mean.

Finally, the young fellows went off for a walk to cool down.

I don't know what happened in the next union negotiations with management, but within a decade mechanization totally changed life and work in the bush, and made the issue moot.

The cutting of trees had always taken place in the winter so that logs could be skidded by horses onto the ice of a lake, to be carried down stream in the spring to a jack ladder that would  pull them out of the river and load them onto trucks.

A number of the logs, on each of which the company had to pay a royalty to the provincial government, always ended up on the bottom of rivers and lakes.

For that and other reasons, the company decided to abandon the river drive and to truck the logs right from the bush to the pulp and paper mill. This meant that there was no need to cut the trees in the winter, they could be cut anytime when machines could get to them.

Machines were introduced that could fell, de-limb and cut trees into logs, clear access roads and load logs onto trucks.

A few skilled forestry 'harvesters'---some of them women---could operate the machines. They didn't have to stay in camps---they could commute from home just like workers going to a factory.

Having machines harvest trees had many obvious economic benefits, for example, in keeping Canada competitive with other pulp and paper producing nations.

But there were social costs.

Many of the workers I met had their lives 'together'. They could have found other jobs but they chose to work in the bush, and that work gave them a good income that let them marry, buy a house, raise children and live a comfortable life.

But a good number of the workers had personal problems that made it tough for them to deal with the 'outside world'.

For example, there were men who couldn't cope with alcohol. There was an absolute ban on alcohol  in the camp---to have booze of any kind was a firing offense--- so they were not tempted to drink.

When they left the camp they usually went on a binge.

I have already told the story about a man like this who slept in the bed next to me. He left the camp for a holiday in the city, and came back two weeks later with the DTs. He woke me out of a deep sleep one night, shouting, "There's a bear!"

He pointed at the window, but there was, of course, no bear.

After he had dried out, he was fine.

Then there was a friendly man in his early 40s who had been a policeman in Port Arthur, now part of Thunder Bay. Something had happened, I don't know what, and he had left or been pushed out of the police force---you never asked co-workers personal questions. Whatever the problem was, it was serious enough to prevent him from finding a job in the city, and he ended up working in the bush.

He was a good worker and that earned him the respect of the other men.

As an aside, one weekend he took a few of us on a car tour of Port Arthur's red light district, which he used to patrol as a policeman. As we drove slowly down narrow back alleys, women sitting on porches would recognize him and wave. (I have to emphasize that it was a CAR tour---we did not stop.)

The citizens and police of Port Arthur and Fort William apparently tolerated prostitution at that time, recognizing that single men who had been cooped up in bush camps for weeks had needs.

And there were other workers in the camp with an array of psychological issues who needed the order, support and direction that a bush camp environment gave.

In the camp, these workers pulled their weight---or they would have been fired.

Today, as I walk along the downtown streets of Hamilton or Toronto I see 'street people', many of whom I think could have found satisfying employment in the bush camps of yesterday.

I feel badly that we, as a society, haven't been able to come up with some better, more humane alternatives for them---instead of just the street, jail or a hospital.

Frontier College, which in the beginning, more than a century ago, focused on helping workers in bush, mining and railway construction camps, is now one of the organizations that is trying to find some alternatives---through, for example, literacy camps and various other learning programs.

Norman Bethune, Dr. Benjamin Spock and Peter Gzowski, who were all labourer-teachers, would I am sure be very supportive of their College's new focus.

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On a personal note, I feel very fortunate that I was able to experience the centuries-old bush camp, with its river drive, before it slipped into history.

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See you on November 7th for Posting #94 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@gmail.com.

POSTING #92

A Tribute to Yuri

After a talk I gave recently to a Niagara-on-the-Lake club about the 1995-97 Russian project in which we created 21 model employment offices from Moscow to the Pacific, a woman came up to me with a story.

A family friend who had worked in Russia as a consultant found the experience very frustrating. He claimed that he couldn't get anything done because of a lack of cooperation on the part of the Russians.

That reminded me of a question I was asked as I was getting ready to leave Russia for the last time. I had had an ear infection and was concerned about possible problems on the flight home.

 I went to an American-run medical clinic in Moscow. After examining my ears---which were fine---the nurse, from somewhere in the US mid-west, asked whether I thought I had accomplished anything in Russia.

It struck me as a strange question and I had to ponder for a moment or two.

I thought of some of the remarkable changes our Canadian teams had made in the operation of the employment offices we had worked in.

I replied that yes, I thought we had accomplished something.

Surprised, she said, "You know, you're the first western consultant I've talked to that feels that way. They all complain about not being able to get anything done."

Why were we able to get things done?

The literature on how to run a successful technical assistance project contains a number of sensible recommendations including the importance of setting clear goals, of making sure that both sides have similar expectations, of having a senior contact in the host organization who is committed to the project and has credibility within the organization, and so on.

Those are all important, but there is another factor about which the literature is mainly silent.

It is the absolute importance of finding skilled and loyal local persons to look after office management and interpreting duties.

I was lucky to find Yuri (not his real name) who played both roles---superbly. Much of whatever success we had was due to Yuri.

Let me tell a few stories about Yuri---first in the role of office manager.

It is important to realize that matters that would have been straightforward in Canada, such a phone call to make plane reservations, involved convoluted and lengthy contacts and discussions.

I soon learned that if I tried to ask for something myself I would be met with a stolid look and the phrase, ``Problema, problema``, which I found is Russian for `this is very, very difficult, it may even be impossible---and regardless, it is going to take a long time to do`.

One of our visiting Canadian consultants threw up his hands at one point and said, ``There are no straight lines in Russia!``

Russia wasn't Canada, and one had to understand how to make the system work.

Yuri knew how.

He would pull out his well-worn, hard-covered notebook which served as his data base of names, phone numbers, and notes---I called it The Book.  He would make a phone call to someone, who knew someone, who knew someone at the office we needed to do business with.

If the task involved persuading a Russian official to do something---something that he or she was being paid to do---Yuri would gaze at the ceiling of our office and then come up with a strategy about how to win the compliance of the official. The strategy usually involved convincing the official that there was something in it for him if he worked with us, or something to fear if he didn't.

In Posting 12, March 22, 2009, I described how Yuri persuaded a technician to repair our fax machine by promising that I would bring him a pair of Canadian toe rubbers, which were not available in Russia at the time.

I am afraid that many of the foreign consultants who felt they didn't accomplish anything were acting as though they were back in the US, England or Germany.

They acted as though there were---or should have been---straight lines in Russia.

They needed a Yuri!

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In addition to running the office well, Yuri was a great help in my personal life.

For example, on one occasion, my back went into spasm, and I was in a lot of pain.

Several long flights to Siberia were coming up.

What to do?

Yuri consulted The Book, made a phone call, left a message and told me that he was trying to arrange for a former trainer with the Russian national hockey team to give me a few massages.

That evening I was having dinner with Yuri and his family and I mentioned that the former trainer was going to give me a massage.

Yuri's wife's face clouded over, and she and Yuri  had a discussion in Russian.

Later, Yuri said that his wife was worried because the trainer had been fired from his job with the hockey team due to a drinking problem.

But Yuri had thought of that. He told his wife that he had arranged for the trainer to come to my apartment at 6 AM, well before he had a chance to get drunk.

The trainer arrived for our first session promptly at 6, stone sober---but perhaps a bit hung-over.

As I lay on the bed, he worked up and down my back, loosening the muscles and then probing and pummeling. It was a no-nonsense treatment, designed to get me back in the game.

And it worked. After three or four visits, my back was much better and I was able to make the trips to Siberia.

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Let's turn to Yuri's work as an interpreter.

On one of our first trips together (before I had started Russian lessons---with a tutor found by Yuri), I had to make a toast to our hosts after a visit full of generous hospitality.

Russians love and are very good at elaborate toasts, and I was wracking my brain trying to think of something a little special to say.

I decided to tell them how much I had enjoyed being with them and that when we left I wasn't going to say 'Das vi danya' (which my guide book translated as 'Goodbye') but I was going to say 'Au revoir'. I explained that this meant 'until we see each other again'.

After I had finished speaking, Yuri interpreted what I had said to the group. They nodded at me approvingly. They liked my comments.

I was pleased with myself.

Later, in the train, on our way home Yuri said, "Oh, by the way, 'Das vi danya' means exactly the same as 'au revoir'."

Horrified, I asked, "Well, what did you say?"

"Oh, I made something up."

Now, that's a great interpreter for you!

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Yuri has a very placid personality, he is not easily ruffled or upset. This is useful in dealing with foreign consultants who can get frustrated and feel the need to let off steam from time-to-time. (That's my hand up, pleading guilty.)

On one occasion, I saw him get a bit testy. One of our Canadian consultants, who was from Quebec, was commenting on how many Russian words had been borrowed from French.

She was rubbing it in a bit.

Yuri took it for a while and then responded that that was indeed true but that it was not a one-way street. There were French words that came from the Russian language. For example, he said, the French word  'bistro' came from the Russian 'bistra' (pronounced 'BEE-stra). He explained that 'bistra' means 'hurry'.

When Napoleon's troops were in Russia they often heard patrons in Russian restaurants shouting at waiters, 'bistra, bistra'.

Some of the soldiers, when they returned to France, started small restaurants that specialized in quick meals, and they called them bistros.

So, he said, with some satisfaction, the bistro---that most French of institutions---owes its name to a Russian word

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Interpreting can be tough, frustrating work and  a sense of humour is essential if one is to keep some degree of sanity.

Yuri said that when interpreters get together, they love to tell each other the latest 'interpreter jokes'.

Yuri shared some of the jokes with me. Here are a couple of my favourites.

Khrushchev was going to China for a conference and his normal Chinese-Russian interpreter was ill so it was decided that the Chinese would provide an interpreter for him.

The head of the USSR made a long speech and then the interpreter took over. He only spoke for a couple of minutes. Khrushchev was impressed that the interpreter could condense his remarks so well, and asked for a tape of the speech and the translation.

When he was back in Moscow, he called in his Chinese-Russian interpreter, who had recovered, and told him he was going to play a tape. The interpreter should listen carefully and learn how the Chinese interpreter had been able to condense his remarks so well.

They listened to the tape of the long speech and the short translation.

"See", said Khrushchev," how brief the translation was. Tell me, what did he say."

The interpreter said, "He started off with your comments about being happy to be in China, and then he said, 'All the rest is horse sh-t', and stopped interpreting".

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Then there was the story about a foreigner in Russia who stole a great deal of gold. The police caught him but the gold was missing.

When the police tried to question him it became clear that he didn't understand Russian so an interpreter was called in.

In response to questions translated by the interpreter, the man maintained that he didn't know what had happened to the gold.

Finally, the senior police officer told the interpreter to tell the thief that if he didn't tell them where the gold was he would be killed.

The policeman cocked his gun and pointed it at the thief who, realizing that the policeman was serious, told the interpreter where he had hidden the gold.

The policeman looked at the interpreter, "What did he say?"

The interpreter said, "He says he won't tell you."

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Yuri's birthday is coming up---one of those decade-changing birthdays---and it is a good opportunity for me to thank him for his help and friendship.

He has been able to come to Canada fairly frequently in the years since our project ended---in his work as an interpreter for different organizations.

Pat says that when we meet it is just as though one of us has gone out of the room for a moment and then returned. We seem to pick up conversations and stories where we left off.

Please join me in a toast to Yuri, and to his wonderful family!

 

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See you on October 31st for Posting #93 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@gmail.com.

Tags: Yuri, interpreter, Russian project

POSTING #91

"The Place Next Door" and One of Life's Embarrassing Moments

Dave and Mary Bullock, friends from Ottawa, recently brought us the news that Dave Smith's Rideau Street restaurants, Nate's Deli, and its offspring, The Place Next Door, are no more.

The restaurants have been demolished and the land they occupied is going to be used for yet another Lower Town condominium.

The sad news brought back many memories.

Soon after Dave Smith opened Nate's Deli, in 1959, Immigration headquarters was moved to the Bourque Building, just across the street. Nate's became the semi-official purveyor of deli food to Immigration.

We could slip across the street for a lunch of juicy, red brisket piled high on a piece of fresh rye bread from the Rideau Bakery---just up the street---slathered with French's mustard, and topped with another slice of rye. The brisket usually had a layer of  succulent fat---this was before those kill-joy scientists discovered cholesterol. That sandwich, with a large, crisp dill pickle and a few fries, made the perfect lunch.

All of the 1960 food groups were covered.

Nate's was a great success and in 1969 Dave took over a neighboring  store and opened The Place Next Door, which served steaks ---oh, I think they offered a few other choices, perhaps some salmon and ribs, but everyone came for the steaks.

International stars who performed at the National Arts Centre or at Lansdowne Park discovered Nate's and the Place Next Door. They took back to Hollywood tales of the great deli food and steaks at this city in Canada with the funny name, Ottawa.

I remember hearing a story that a Tinsel Town star who had dined at The Place Next Door asked Dave to cater a steak dinner for him in Los Angeles. Dave arrived at the star's home with a few hundred pounds of great steak to find that no one had thought to order barbeque grills.

Responding with what natives in my home town would have called 'haywire and binder twine' initiative, Dave sent his helpers off to a home improvement store for a few sheets of plywood and a lot of propane torches.

Dave seasoned the steaks, laid them on the plywood and then he and his helpers 'grilled' them by playing the torch flames back and forth across them. When one side was cooked, they flipped the streaks and did the other side.

When one of the guests wandered over to see what was going on, Dave blandly told him that this was how Canadians cooked their steaks.

The steaks were delicious and Dave's fame spread.

 He opened  Nate's' Deli restaurants in Santa Monica California (1984) and in West Palm Beach, Florida (1990), and The North Pole Restaurant in Hollywood, Florida (2003).

While he was prospering, Dave was also 'giving back'. The list of charitable organizations that he has supported is far too long to include in this posting---click here for a complete list of organizations in Canada and abroad that have benefited from Dave's financial support and his enormous energy, as well as a photo of Dave.  

Now 77, Dave is one of the best-known people in Ottawa but is not well-known in the rest of Canada. He doesn't even seem to have a Wikipedia listing.

I've gone on at some length about Dave Smith because I think he needs to be better known outside of Ottawa (and Los Angeles, and Palm Beach!)

But to be honest,  I may also have been trying to delay the telling of an embarrassing tale that happened in the parking lot outside The Place Next Door.

In the 1990s, Pat and I were invited to attend a dinner for current and retired Immigration staff held--- where else---at The Place Next Door. Hearing that Viggi Ring, a senior member of the Immigration family was feeling a bit frail, we agreed to give her a lift to the restaurant.

Now, the Immigration family is full of people with fascinating stories but Viggi's were really remarkable.

Born in Denmark, she lived through the German occupation of her country, and after the war attended and graduated from the prestigious Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA. After getting her degree, she visited some friends in Montreal and ended up working, illegally, with the CBC's International Service.

Caught by Canadian Immigration, she was deported.

Later on, Viggi applied to immigrate to Canada, and despite the deportation, which would normally have been an absolute bar to acceptance, was granted immigrant status, and she returned to Montreal.

And then she was hired by Canadian Immigration to assist with newly arrived migrants.

No one I ever talked to could recall anyone who, having been deported, was then hired by Immigration!

After working in Montreal for a few years, she joined the foreign service and served in a number of Immigration offices abroad, and was officer-in-charge of several.

Hardworking, outgoing and enthusiastic, she was popular with her colleagues.

She never married.  (It wasn't until relatively recently that female foreign service officers were able to combine marriage with a foreign service career.)

After a fine dinner and lots of laughs with our Immigration friends, Pat, Viggi and I went out to the parking lot. Because Viggi had trouble getting in and out of cars, Pat and I agreed that she should sit up front and Pat would sit in the back.

I helped Viggi into the passenger seat, and opened the back door for Pat so she could sit in the seat behind Viggi.

I went around the car, got in and started the car. Hearing Pat's door close, I assumed she was safely inside.

We set off up Rideau Street, as Viggi told a story about her service abroad.

I laughed at the story and said something to Pat, something like, 'Wasn't that a good story?'

No reply.

That was curious. She usually has something to say.

I turned my head---and no Pat, so far as I could see.

I pulled over, and turned around fully.

No Pat.

"Oh my god, I've left Pat behind!", I said to Viggi.

"That's not the worst thing you could have done", Viggi replied.

"Oh, yes it is!"

There was little traffic on Rideau Street, so I made a speedy U-tour and headed back to The Place Next Door.

Here, I think I should turn the pen over to Pat, to describe what happened from her point of view.

Pat's Account:

As I was going to get into the back seat, I realized there wasn't much leg room behind Viggi because we had pushed the seat back to make it easier for her to get in.

 So I shut the door and started to walk around the back of the car to get in behind John.

Just then John took off at high speed and I watched as the tail lights of our Honda disappeared up Rideau Street with John and Viggi going off into the future.

One of the other wives from our dinner asked me what I was doing standing in the parking lot.

I told her that John had just driven off with Viggi.

"Oh", she said, "You'll never see him again. That Viggi really likes the married men."

"He better come back pretty quickly, if he knows what's good for him."

After a very long time, I finally saw the Honda speeding down the road.

When I got back in the car, John was a bit shaken (he should have been a lot shaken!), but Viggi was just chuckling about the whole thing.

I was not too impressed by all this!

Now, I'll turn the pen back to John.

We drove Viggi home. I helped her out of the car, and held the door while Pat got into the passenger seat. I made sure that she was safely buckled in before I got into the driver's seat.

I've said before, in another posting, that there should be a sunset clause on the telling of embarrassing stories about things we have done---it should be illegal after say 5, or 10 years,  to resurrect our gaffes.

I don't think that's going to happen.

More than 10 years have passed, and I am still being reminded of the evening I drove off with Viggi Ring.

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A postscript.

A few years later, a large group of Viggi's Immigration colleagues held a memorial service for her at the Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship building in the west end of Ottawa. People told their favourite stories about her, warm, funny stories about a remarkable person. She  would have enjoyed the send off.

By the way, there was absolutely no truth to the remark about Viggi liking married men---that was just a joke to tease Pat, or as the British would say, 'to put the wind up her'.

Our friends, the Bullocks, acted as executors for Viggi's estate, and gave Pat and me a Danish landscape that Viggi's father had painted.

It now hangs in our house, here in Virgil.

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See you on October 24th for Posting #92 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@gmail.com.

Tags: Dave Smith, Nate's, The Place Next Door, Viggi Ring.

POSTING #90

"Remember Smoking"

When I find myself getting depressed about the slow response to the climate crisis, I tell myself:

"Self, remember smoking."

For decades, health providers and scientists tried to convince us---and our politicians---that tobacco smoke, first or second hand, was bad for our health.

The tobacco industry found a few 'experts' who argued that there was no conclusive proof that smoking caused emphysema, heart disease, cancer or other diseases.

And the industry pointed to the jobs that would be lost if the sale and use of tobacco was curtailed. Farmers in south-western Ontario would be bankrupted, and workers in cigarette factories would be laid off.

And there was the question of rights. Surely, the argument went, smokers had the right to light up and enjoy a legal product.

(Kind of reminds you of arguments being made against tighter pollution laws, doesn't it?)

As the pressure rose from anti-smoking groups, and as the scientific evidence against smoking mounted, governments compromised and passed laws requiring public places to have smoking and non-smoking areas.

Just 12 years ago, I remember going into a restaurant in a town in south-western Ontario close to many tobacco farms and asking if we could sit in the non-smoking area.

The server was clearly puzzled. This wasn't a question she had encountered before. She looked around the room---as I did---at all the tables with ash trays.

Then her face brightened up. "It's that table by the door to the kitchen."

We were hungry, had our soup and sandwich and left---smelling of tobacco smoke.

About the same time, a Grimsby family restaurant decided to ban smoking. The owner a pleasant, hard-working woman, in her 60s had been told by her doctor that her breathing problems would continue to worsen if she spent 12 hours a day in a smoke-filled restaurant.

I was thrilled that at least one restaurant would be smoke-free but apprehensive about the impact the smoking ban would have on her business.

We visited the restaurant a month or so after the ban had taken effect. I asked the owner how things had been.

She said that there had some angry customers who had said they would never be back. But some of them had returned, because the food was good and the prices were reasonable.

The thing was, she said, the smokers who did return didn't stay so long---they didn't linger for a smoke over their coffee. They ate and left.

Tables were turning over faster and she was able to serve more people.

And, she added, new customers were coming in, people who had stopped eating out because of cigarette smoke.

For her personally, the change had been wonderful. Her lungs were better and her dry cleaning bills were smaller.

Not too long after that, our politicians worked up the courage to ban smoking.

 I credit part of the willingness of governments to put an end to the policy of smoking and non-smoking areas to a powerful analogy that became popular in an underground kind of way.

You remember, it went something like this:

"Having a restaurant with smoking and non-smoking areas is like having a swimming pool with peeing and non-peeing areas."

Never underestimate the power of an apt and witty analogy!

Although the fight to ban smoking was long, the end came very quickly. Our experience in that tobacco-country restaurant was only 12 years ago, just a blink of an eye in the measurement of social change.

And what about the claim that the tobacco farmers would be bankrupted?

A 40s-something friend who grew up in Simcoe, Ontario was telling me the other day that he worked in the tobacco fields when he was a teenager.

He goes back regularly to see his family and is astounded at the transformation in the farms.

They no longer grow tobacco, they grow peanuts, ginseng and lavender!

The speed of change has been amazing.

Unfortunately, the tobacco industry has now switched its attention to the developing world and is busy recruiting new addicts by offering cheap cigarettes. (I don't know how those executives sleep at night.)

But there are some encouraging signs. Some of the developing countries are moving to control smoking, having learned from our negative example---that smoking today, means health problems tomorrow.

There are so many parallels between the smoking and climate change issues.

I sense, perhaps naively, that we are reaching the point in the climate debate that we reached 12 or so years ago about smoking.

We are approaching critical mass.

Anyway, when I find myself getting down in the dumps about those oil and coal industry 'experts' denying climate change, I tell myself.

"Remember smoking!"

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See you on October 17th for Posting #91 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@gmail.com.

POSTING #89

Memories of 9/11

It is a commonplace that the first news we hear of a history-making event gets imprinted in our brains, along with the sights, sounds and even smells that were occurring then.

For example, the shooting of President Kennedy.

All of us of a certain age remember what we were doing when we first heard the news.

For my part, I was sitting with Pat in our living room in Harrogate, Yorkshire in November 1963 watching the early evening BBC television news. In the midst of a story about some mundane event, the news reader suddenly stopped. He looked down at a note that had been slipped to him and then looked at the camera. The calm, emotionless facade that BBC news readers always adopted had slipped. His expression was a mix of shock, and incredulity.

"I have just been told that President Kennedy has been shot. We have no further information. When we have more news we will bring it to you."

The BBC announcer carried on with the news but he never recovered that calm news-reader look. His eyes kept darting off-camera, watching for more information.

 Like people around the world, we spent the next few hours watching the horrible events unfold.

The anniversary of 9/11 a few weeks ago brought back memories of what we were doing when we first heard of the attacks.

I had spent the first half of 2001 working in Amman, Jordan helping create employment programs under a CIDA contract. After a summer at home I was booked to fly back to Amman on September 21.

Pat and I decided to take a holiday before I left. We would go to Larchmont, just north of New York City, for a visit with our friends Tammy and Peter Greeman, and on Tuesday,  September 11th, we would leave for a few days at a peaceful resort in Manchester, Vermont.

On the morning of the 11th, we had a leisurely breakfast with our friends and then said goodbye to Peter who was off to play golf. Tammy was waiting for a home alarm technician who was due to come at 9 AM to fix a problem, and then she was going out to do some errands.

Pat and I had just finished loading suitcases into our car, and had  gone back into the house to say goodbye to Tammy when we heard the phone ring. Tammy answered it,  listened for a time, asked a question, and then hung up.

She said that the technician had told her that he wouldn't be coming, that he had been called into the city to deal with the plane crash. When she had asked , 'what crash?', he had told her to turn on the TV, and had hung up.

We went into the Greeman's den, switched on the television and watched replays of the 8.46 AM crash into the World Trade Center's North Tower and the 9.03 AM crash into the South Tower. For nearly two hours the three of sat close together in the den---saying hardly anything---as we  watched the horrifying collapse of the towers, and  the reports of the crashes into the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

In the midst of this, Peter called to say that someone had come onto the course and given them the news. He and his golf mates were in the clubhouse watching television. He and Tammy chatted worriedly about people they knew who worked in the World Trade Center.

Around 11 AM, Pat and I decided we had to get on the road for the long drive to Vermont. We hugged Tammy and set off.

The normal route to Vermont meant crossing to the west side of the Hudson on the Tappan Zee Bridge. As we got closer to the bridge, we could see that the roads going north out of New York were jammed, while the only vehicles going into the city were fire trucks, ambulances and police cars.

Radio reports were confused and frightening. There were rumours that more attacks could be coming.

We had just finished agreeing that the bridge was going to be a parking lot, when a horrible thought struck. What if the terrorists had arranged to blow up the bridge when it was loaded with fleeing people?

We decided to exit the road to the Tappan Zee and to go north along the east side of the Hudson, using secondary roads until we found another crossing.

The traffic was light and we made good time. Getting hungry, we pulled over for lunch at a small diner.

The owner, who looked Middle Eastern, perhaps from Lebanon, was watching a small television up high in the corner of the diner. He kept repeating, "Crazy people, crazy people.'

After serving us some sandwiches and coffee,  he went back to his chair and resumed his muttering about 'those crazy people'.

Looking back, I think that while he was of course angry at the horrific acts, he was also angry at the profoundly negative impact the attacks were going to have on the relationship between people from the Middle East and other Americans.

Life was going to be much more difficult for people like himself.

We finally crossed the Hudson near West Point and arrived late but safely in Manchester.

I spent the next few days talking with colleagues in Ottawa trying to learn when I would  be returning to Amman. The ban imposed on all air travel was complicating everything.

One day, I was told that my travel would be delayed by a few days.

Then by a few weeks.

Later on, it was decided that work on the project would be suspended until the Government was sure that it was safe for Canadians to return to the Middle East.

It wasn't until 2004 that I resumed work on the project.

When I hear the term '9/11', I think of those hours in front of the television in the Greeman's den, and of the anger of the diner owner.

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When I did return to Amman, I was shocked to hear some well-educated people say that the 9/11 attacks had not been carried out by Arabs.

One of them told me, "You know us. We Arabs couldn't plan and carry out  anything as complicated as 9/11."

According to them, the 'real' perpetrators were (take your pick) the Israelis, the CIA, the Catholic church, or even the mafia.

At first, I tried to reason with them by asking what motive a particular group would have had to carry out the attacks. What would they gain?

The reasons were so transparently silly that I stopped responding to all the conspiracy talk.

I think many people in the Middle East have now accepted that the attacks were indeed planned and carried out by people from their region, but I suppose Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran,  speaks for those who still haven't accepted that.

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See you on October 10th for Posting #90 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@gmail.com.