From Mary To My Dad

ThisHardLandByTheSea
TheRealBritishColumbia

This came in from our friend Mary tonight in the comment threads to the last post....

RossK,

I've been looking forward to another re-telling of your Dad's story.

It's nice the way e., E. and C work you into the picture (I mean, very nice indeed) ... but I really look forward to each new visit with your Dad. Stories past and present ... log booms to speaker phones.

It's kinda like when I run one of those YouTube videos showing BC Rail and I know I'm seeing something that speaks of the spirit of British Columbia.

B.C. isn't about the Olympics, the casinos, the deals, the Golden Era.

B.C. is a hard, lonely land where a train's horn (or a ship's whistle) can echo off the mountainsides like voices from history, telling us that it's tough to do real work here, that it's always been tough, and worth doing, to work in British Columbia.

Best wishes to your Dad.

Thanks Mary.

And you don't know how right you are.

Two things....

First, when I was a kid my Dad started making these long trips to and from Prince Rupert and beyond. As a result, he brought home many stories (and about a billion pictures of boats, booms and barges) that told us what a wild, hard land next to a roiling sea B.C.'s coast really is. Only later did I learn how close we came to moving to the North Coast. By then I was the callow youth in the story and there was no way I would have gone without a fuss. Of course, my Dad never forced any of that on us. Instead, to help keep us in Victoria, he ended up doing a heckuva lot of extra travelling to get to and from wherever his boat, which was sometimes this one, was. Truth be told, by the time he retired a few years ago my Dad hated riding the goddamned ferries.

Second, my Dad's Dad was a towboat man too. Only, unlike my Dad who worked for one of the Coast's two big companies, my Dad's Dad he owned his own boat, a little one, that he kept tied up in Sooke. And let me tell you that was one tough haul, both from a business point of view and a seagoing one as well.

As for my Dad's Dad's Dad?

Well, he worked the boats too.

Go figure.


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