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The Snow comes down from the mountains
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 1839
The last couple of weeks, cooler, the threat of rain every day, the abrupt end of summer. The customers, largely disappeared - coming in to say goodbye, the vacationers that stay for the season and have made us their regular hangout are packing up their cottages and returning - to Calgary, to California, Arizona, warmer climes, the winter will be lean indeed...and I want to chastise them, for not renting their cottages to me, for not somehow compromising and accommodating the locals, but it's not my place, and the winter grows darker and colder in the basement...
Wake up, early, no great peaks are visible from the restaurant but on the low-slung saddles of the mountains you can see the snow beginning, the reversal of spring when the snow gradually went up the mountains, the snow is now starting to appear at the tops, gone by noon, gone by 2:00, now staying the entire day and creeping down towards the lake... I am lost in Foon.
Coast to Coast AM
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: WTF
- Hits: 1504
Ha, I'd almost completely forgotten about this, Coast to Coast AM Radio, the late night talk-radio show that captures the paranoia and diversity of middle-America, formerly hosted by Art Bell, now by George Noory, both enormously skilled at the liberalness and patience required to entertain their guests. Their whole "Gosh, really???" attitude sells every guest, and with a call-in hotline that encourages every nut in the country to phone in and contribute, it's a much a part of America as Route 66...
Link: https://www.coasttocoastam.com
Note that to listen to their old programs you need a paid subscription, (the news and articles are generally free) but depending on where you live - you can hear their programming on AM radio stations around Canada and the US. Essential fare for the overnight road trips with children, if you want to ensure lively discussion and the likelihood they won't get a solid nights sleep the entire rest of the vacation...
If you don't have a working car radio you can listen to them via: https://tunein.com/radio/Coast-to-Coast-AM-p35675/ or a bit of searching will turn up other classic episodes (try YouTube).
Crystal Beach
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Images
- Hits: 1226
After Batshit and the Ferry we head off, first to pick up her boyfriend, she shows me the rocks around their house, then grab a 6 pack of beer and we're off...
Everything here, all these local hikers and nature enthusiasts, they need their beer or vodka or brandy or ganja to get them through, only the tourists are sober...
First stop we head to Riondel, up the east shore...
The old mine adit, filled with Debris...
explore around the one adit, then down to another by the old ferry landing...
This one, it's fantastic, a hundred foot cliff, the base of which is filled with debris, climb the small hill (sharp, jagged rocks - careful not to spill your beer!) and you find a lip that drops fifty feet into the entrance, and this entrance, choked as it is with rocks, is not entirely blocked, bats flit about the entrance and you know this mine goes deep, many kilometers, below the level of the lake, and there's the promise of great adventures ahead, when we can return with flashlights (and somehow I'm thinking maybe more sober companions, underground things can get dangerous).
From here back, but I've just missed the ferry, and so they take me to the Crystal Beach, a "local" spot - old smelter and workings, the crushed tailings from the mine strew the beach and if you get down on your hands and knees you can find the bits of quartz crystal that have survived the crushing...
(old smelters)
On hands and knees, by the torchlight of our phones we pass the next hour combing the fine gravel for quartz crystals, the sun has gone down and we're picking them from the slag, my evening's haul:
Fine, delicate, most broken, but some a centimeter long and of excellent clarity, fine raw material for more dexterous and nimble hands than mine...
Another Batshit Birthday
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Stormy
- Hits: 1544
On the way to the East Shore with M**, the waitress at work who's been turning up some very interesting rocks, we're going rockhounding together.
Waiting, in line at the Ferry, and who should saunter up but my good friend Batshit, grizzled, sunglasses, he pops his head through the window to inform us that it's his birthday...
"But you just had your birthday last week" I exclaim, and remind him of the pack of cigarettes and bottle of Fireball, and he smiles slyly, changes the conversation to his art in progress, he's been dropping off random pieces at the restaurant for me, and can he have a couple of cigarettes?...
His got his tales, anecdotes, the time he smuggled Mick Jagger into a Stones concert, tales about his designs for the Black Panthers, how the Cosa Nostra in Palermo funded DeVito's movie "Get Shorty", about how the Birdman of Alcatraz always made sure he had the best India Inks, how Marilyn really died of Graves's disease...
...and he's promised me a wonderful painting of Sophia Loren from when she posed naked for him when she was 38, it'll be dropped off soon, and it's keeping me on the hook...
His art, the latest batches, an page torn from "The Jumpstart Recipes", another frontpiece from an old book, Jane Austin, only he's colored over her and made it into something else, cryptic mirror-writing statements that have to be read in reverse, puzzles - maps, - Kokanee Creek Park - fantastically ornamented with instructions and directions, any piece of paper he finds he turns somehow into something he can give me and pass for art, rocks, wood, even, and there are more references to his personal mythology, "The Man from La Mancha" - he himself as Don Quixote, all of it combines as a personal map of his eccentricity, I say eccentric because I'm not entirely sure he's crazy...
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