The Quest for the Preserved Lemon

This week I've been feeling tired and listless: either the days of wintry cloud cover (which gave way to golden sunlight today) or perhaps the cancellation of two of my early morning classes might be to blame.

That said, cycling to university for my other classes has been invigorating.

Today I practiced a little for the choir concert, which will be next weekend with a dress rehearsal early in the week.

*

Then I went grocery-shopping because of a Yemeni recipe with lentils, zhoug paste, beetroot and preserved lemons.

After buying other groceries like flour and coffee beans at the zero-waste store, I found coriander and parsley at a nearby Turkish supermarket, and picked up a carton of mazafati dates from Iran while I was at it. (These dates are very soft and melting on the inside, totally different from the tough, pale fruits that I grew up eating.) What the supermarket didn't have are the lemons.

The excursion to the zero-waste store was livelier thanks to the police van and a BVG (Berlin transit authority) vehicle nearby. It turns out that a water pipe burst underneath a street and flooded the area nearby. Based on my experience, the BVG official(s) was/were there to report back to the authorities when buses will be able to drive along the street once more. Usually I've seen them when a larger protest march is blocking a thoroughfare.

Next I tried a specialty grocery store with Middle Eastern imports in the neighbourhood. There I looked for the lemons in vain, and instead picked up strawberry-flavoured wafers. At home, these wafers turned out to be from Syria. I hadn't expected to wonder if I was propping up a dictatorship after grocery-shopping, and am crossing my fingers that I'm supporting peaceful commerce instead.

Lastly I popped into an African import store nearby, and they didn't have the lemons either. But I glimpsed boxes of fufu, fresh arrowroot?, and what looked like green plantains and large yellow cooking bananas. Maybe I should finally cook recipes from West Africa.

As I vaguely remembered, Yotam Ottolenghi's cookbook Jerusalem has a recipe for preserved lemons. Unfortunately it's impractical for my purposes, as the lemons must pickle for four weeks.

Aside from that, I bought more yarn from a sewing shop, because I've darned enough socks lately to run out of material. And I went to the bank. All in all, a productive day, and I tried to 'treat myself' after the hard work for university.

*

I've been messaging with a classmate with whom I'll be doing a presentation in Spanish class, and finalizing the bullet points for my part of it. It's a little nervewracking, because I worry whether I'm micromanaging the presentation, whether she'll find her part of the presentation interesting and enjoyable enough, and whether I should have finished my part sooner so that she has an easier time of it, ... Also that my spoken Spanish won't meet the needs of the presentation. We are only allowed to write down keywords and not a full script... Terrifying!

But I feel smug for having started the reading for my Monday afternoon class. The book chapter we were assigned was written by the type of academic who thinks that his peers won't respect him if he doesn't use decasyllabic words derived from Latin or Ancient Greek often enough to totally confuse his meaning. After posting two of the silliest sentences to a family chat, I felt better.

Shakespeare's Complete Works Reading Challenge: Third Day of Henry VI

WHAT IS THIS ABOUT? I've had a hankering to read and half-liveblog all of Shakespeare's plays (again)... in chronological order, starting with Henry VI, Part 1: written by Shakespeare (b. 1564) in 1591. I'm using an old Complete Works of Shakespeare edition from the Clarendon Press.

See also: Previous Henry VI blog posts, Act I Scene 1, and Act I Scene 2, 3 & 4.

***

12:45 p.m.
ACT I. Scene V.

We near the end of Act I with two brief, bustling scenes set again in the French town of Orléans.

Joan of Arc chases a group of English soldiers across the stage, and Lord Talbot appears and tells the audience of his despair at his troops' rout.

Ever the feminist, he calls her "devil's dam," "witch," and "strumpet" as Joan reappears and he engages her in combat.

He does not win. But fortunately Joan is more interested in relieving the besieged French in Orléans than in fencing with the English lord. She breaks off the fight:

Talbot, farewell; thy hour is not yet come:
I must go to victual Orleans forthwith.

Mixing metaphors again, Shakespeare leaves Talbot to soliloquize sadly, "My thoughts whirl like a potter's wheel"

A witch, by fear, not force, like Hannibal,
Drives back our troops and conquers as she lists:
So bees with smoke, and doves with noisome stench,
Are from their hives and houses driven away

He feels as if the soldiers, who should represent the lion of England, have the souls of sheep on the battlefield...

***

1:05 p.m.
ACT I. Scene VI.

King Charles VII gushingly praises Joan of Arc for her role in the victory at Orléans and adds,

Recover'd is the town of Orleans:
More blessed hap did ne'er befall our state.

Reignier, Duke of Anjou:

Dauphin, command the citizens make bonfires
And feast and banquet in the open streets,
To celebrate the joy that God hath given us.

Duke of Alençon:

All France will be replete with mirth and joy,
When they shall hear how we have play'd the men.

'Played' is a backhanded compliment, to my modern ears, although I think it's clear the Duke was praising himself without irony. But Charles instantly deflates the Duke's pretensions:

'Tis Joan, not we, by whom the day is won;
For which I will divide my crown with her;
And all the priests and friars in my realm
Shall in procession sing her endless praise.

[Given the multiplicity of female monarchs on the British Isles starting in the ten years before Shakespeare was born – 'Bloody' Mary (regnant 1553-1558, predating Shakespeare's play much as Margaret Thatcher would predate a drama written in 2024), Elizabeth I (1558-1603), and Mary, Queen of Scots – I am tempted to see a broader historical insight into how men were(n't) able to deal with women in traditionally male positions of power.

We haven't entirely lost this mindset that powerful women must be subdued into a domestic position if we agree with them, or demonized and destroyed if we disagree with them. Nor was this mindset absent in earlier times than Shakespeare's: in a Byzantinian literature seminar, my class once read the 12th-century epic Digenís Akrítas (Διγενῆς Ἀκρίτας), where the Amazon fighter Μαξιμώ isn't treated very kindly. 

In 2024, for example, American voters had reservations about Kamala Harris's candidacy for the presidency, not due to her policy but due to gender roles. Secretary of Defense nominee Peter Hegseth insists that female soldiers should not take on combat roles. Perhaps the world hasn't changed much 433 years after the Bard wrote Henry VI, except that (I think) it's no longer trendy to accuse women of witchcraft.]

Despite — or because of — Shakespeare's over-the-top writing style in Henry VI, the descriptions of celebrations, and his heavy use of fight scenes, are picturesque and entertaining: miles more readable, perhaps, than works by his contemporaries. I know too little of Elizabethan drama and of theatre technique to draw comparisons of stageworthiness.

Returning to the text, I'm not sure if Shakespeare's writerly judgment was dominant, however, when he closes Act I by making the Dauphin anticipate Joan of Arc's funeral as they're celebrating their military victory:

In memory of her when she is dead,
Her ashes, in an urn more precious
Than the rich-jewell'd coffer of Darius,
Transported shall be at high festivals
Before the kings and queens of France.

Imagine President Biden greeting a military general who has served with distinction by telling the officer that he, she, or they will have a beautiful tomb in Arlington National Cemetery.

But it can also be a 'rapprochement' to Shakespeare's Elizabethan, English audience. They would have known that what the Dauphin predicts is true:

No longer on Saint Denis will we cry,
But Joan la Pucelle shall be France's saint.

End of ACT I.

Shakespeare's Complete Works Reading Challenge: More of Henry VI

WHAT IS THIS ABOUT? I have a hankering to read all of Shakespeare's plays (again)... starting in chronological order with Henry VI, Part 1: written by Shakespeare (b. 1564) in 1591. I'm using an old Complete Works of Shakespeare edition from the Clarendon Press. I'm half-liveblogging, half just writing traditional posts.

See also: Previous Henry VI blog post, Act I Scene 1.

***

Charles VII of France, 20 years older than in Act I. (1444)
Painting by Jean Fouquet,
from the Louvre.
Source: Wikipedia

ACT I. Scene II.

We are now in France.

The Dauphin, known in modern French historiography as Charles VII the Victorious, is addressing his army and his allies. Maybe he originally wanted to tell them, 'You win some, you lose some,' but we will never truly know! Instead he chooses this wording:

Mars his true moving, even as in the heavens
So in the earth, to this day is not known.
Late did he shine upon the English side;
Now we are victors; upon us he smiles.

In Scene I an English duke had accused the French rather flatteringly of 'subtle wit' and, less flatteringly, of sorcery. Now, the French call the English 1. pale, and 2. obsessed with porridge and beef. (I think that attempting to insult a British person with porridge references might still work in 2024, whereas the pallor stereotype wouldn't as it is now used for the Irish?)

Insults aside, the Dauphin is cautiously optimistic. The Earl of Salisbury's weakened troops are the main remnant of England's military, and he is confident about defeating them.

But France's army has a rough awakening.

The stage directions say Exeunt. The Dauphin and his allies walk out, prepared to fight and defeat the Earl.

But shortly everyone is back on stage:

It turns out that the Earl of Salisbury made up in determination, for what he lacked in manpower.

As the French leaders lament their military defeat, the 'Bastard of Orleans' joins them.

"Bastard of Orleans, thrice welcome to us," exclaims the Dauphin. It is a greeting that would, I think, seem rude in most other contexts.

The Bastard of Orleans tells His Majesty that he has found Joan of Arc. He wants the Dauphin to meet her because she might be the solution to all their problems.

The Dauphin is fine with the meeting. But to test Joan of Arc, he asks the Duke of Anjou to impersonate the king.

Joan La Pucelle ('Joan The Maid') enters, spots the trick, and turns to the real Dauphin instead, demanding to speak with him alone.

Dauphin, I am by birth a shepherd's daughter,
My wit untrain'd in any kind of art.

she begins. Then she literally tells the Dauphin her life story, including how she was visited by the Virgin Mary. After that heavenly vision, Joan of Arc says immodestly, explaining why she isn't tanned like anyone living and working outdoors would otherwise be, "That beauty am I bless'd with which you see."

She asks the Dauphin to test her in single combat.

In a striking contrast to modern heads of government, the Dauphin is happy to interact with an armed stranger. (Perhaps it was reassuring that Joan of Arc had accessorized her sword with "five flower-de-luces on each side.")

But he is overconfident: Joan of Arc overpowers him.

He doesn't dislike her for it, but praises her as an Amazon. It's the same odd mixture of Greek and Roman mythology with Christian theology that we see elsewhere in the play. She quickly disclaims any great skill, and attributes her victory to the Virgin Mary.

The Dauphin is lovestruck. [In the TV adaptations that the BBC produced in the 1960s, however, he is portrayed as less lovestruck than as a handsy lecher, which is also plausible.] Joan of Arc tells him that there's plenty of time for that ... after the war.

Persuaded, he only asks,

Meanwhile look gracious on thy prostrate thrall.

Meanwhile, the Dukes are not very impressed.

But Joan promises to repel the English for them:

Glory is like a circle in the water,
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,
Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought.

Tragically she doesn't leave that metaphor to stand for itself. She adds: "Now I am like that proud insulting ship / Which Caesar and his fortune bare at once." ... I think that a shepherd's daughter steeped in medieval Catholicism and warfare would probably not be mentioning thousand-year-old Roman history. The phrase "insulting ship" sounds even sillier; but perhaps the choice of adjective and noun is better than the alternatives ... let's say, like 'foul-mouthed dinghy'.

Charles, mangling both the Roman and Christian religions (wouldn't at least a few medieval and classical authorities have murdered him 'to encourage the others'?), replies

Bright star of Venus, fall'n down on the earth,
How may I reverently worship thee enough?

The Duke of Alençon, perhaps wishing to spare the audience, interrupts:

Leave off delays and let us raise the siege.

***

7:30 p.m.
ACT I. Scene III.

We are now at the Tower of London. Within its walls somewhere, Henry VI is probably napping in his medieval crib. The Duke of Gloucester has arrived at the door, eager to begin serving Henry VI as his Lord Protector. But the Tower's guards (like the bouncers of Berghain) refuse to let him in.

Beautiful British Columbia: Our September 2024 Holiday, Part Three

[Disclaimer: There's always a risk of ludicrous error when, after passing through a place where other people live their whole lives, for 2 days, you make confident statements about that place. I apologize for any inaccurate characterizations of the locations in these blog posts!]

I woke up at 5:15 a.m., and ambled out into the parking lot in the dim morning light. A trace of sulphur (I won't say brimstone) hung in the air.

When my brothers were ready, we strolled off into Lumby's centre. On a triangular lawn beside the thoroughfare, children had coloured fish shapes, and the fish were arranged to cavort in waves along the fence.

An ambulance service building is located beside the park. Behind it we found a public library. Beyond that, a village museum.

A teenage Lumbyite stepped out of one of the family homes to walk the dog.

He looked over at us, keeping a grip on his pet, and started up a conversation, hollering across the street in a friendly fashion. 'I have a little bit of German in me too,' he said when my brothers explained our European provenance, 'but I only speak a few words.'

He recommended, after a moment's thought, that we visit the co-op in town. We were amused that he seemed to be trying to drive in business for the owner (maybe a relative or a family friend?) with an air that was half guilty and wholly devious.

Lumby museum, September 12, 2024.
All rights reserved.

The village museum was not yet open, but we wandered through the yard.

The weatherboarded buildings were decorated with hanging pink, white, and purple petunias, like the rest of the village. Murals on the outer walls depicted the local history of forestry and agriculture. A John Deere tractor from the 1940s stood in the yard, as well as more enigmatic machinery (a combine?). It intrigued me to think that my paternal grandfather may have driven that exact model of tractor when he farmed in the 1950s and 60s.

In a trim, peak-roofed shed, a bright red fire engine appeared to be from the 1950s. It now had a vintage vehicle license plate.

Then we walked along the empty streets. There were more murals, like a tribute to World War I veterans on the Royal Canadian Legion building. A blue plastic cupboard at the sidewalk held free newspapers, likely The Vernon Morning Star.

While Lumby doesn't look like a hippie commune, it is not immune to another sea change that has also occurred since we visited Canada in 2018 (the year of federal cannabis legalization): it had at least one marijuana shop.

*

In general the impression in Lumby was of a pleasant, hearty civic culture. Public art, community information boards full of up-to-date events, and people who knew each other well when they crossed paths in the streets and shops.

The Salmon Trail complex is ideal for walking a dog, for example, and it winds along industrial territory at the edge of the village. In a cedar wood gazebo near the co-op shop, signs explained the First Nations history of present-day Lumby, as well as the French-Canadian fur trappers who had settled here in the 1800s and the subsequent lumber industry that dominated the town into the 1990s. The different trail sections borrow names from salmon species: Chinook, for example, or Kokanee.

We loved the Salmon Trail. We walked along a creek half-buried in large old willows, other leafy trees, and saskatoon berry bushes, which one could imagine looking the same in the late 1800s. It was like a scene from a Laura Ingalls Wilder book. A few trees less close to the creek were apparently recovering from the droughts of the summer, berries half-drooping.

A wall of felled tree trunks was piled beside the trail at a bend, glowing red as fresh wood does after rain or dew. Looking at the trunks' cross-sections, however, I thought they were often so small that I couldn't imagine that the trees had been felled for profit. Passing by again later, we saw the clue: black scorch marks. The logs must have been salvage from a forest fire. I wondered if they'd be used for pulp, or mulch, or left to disintegrate entirely.

Eventually we emerged back out on the highway, returning to our motel.

We hadn't seen any salmon per se. Although they had been fished near Lumby since time immemorial, also by First Nations (specifically, Chinook salmon, by the Secwépemc). Or, for that matter, coyotes, which are still celebrated by the Splatsin band.

After Uncle Pu was up, we walked to the dollar store in search of tour guidebooks for our Sugar Mountain hike. They didn't have any guidebooks. But I bought half a litre of water and the lady there kindly gave me two free newspapers from behind her counter: one from nearby Vernon and one from Lumby itself.

We ate breakfast at a café across the street. A group of plaid-shirted regulars in their late forties or fifties sat at the entrance, and one of them made a joke that we'd best avoid the café's food ... which didn't seem to land 100% well with the waitress/co-owner. In a plaid shirt herself, she greeted us in an ANZAC accent. We sat down at a table near the shelves of pie and other baked goods, and soon the menus were before us.

I ordered a Denver omelette with green bell peppers, ham, Monterey Jack cheese, and spring onions. It came with toast and hash browns, which were cubed instead of grated. The others ordered pancakes and hamburgers. We finished it all, and when the brothers were done they ordered a second round. The waitress's eyebrows may have lifted slightly! But since we were going to go hiking we wanted to eat heartily, and we finished it all. She was cook as well as waitress, and did the cooking, chopping and frying on the other side of a long counter as people passed in and out the café door.

Like the last day's breakfast in Princeton, the food was enjoyable, and neither tasted or looked like an industrial product. I put jam on my toast, as well as cream in my coffee: so soon we gathered an army of little plastic tubs in the centre of the table. I thought the waitress listened in on our witty(?) banter about bears and hiking. At any rate I felt that she thawed toward us in the course of our breakfast, even before we ordered the second round of food.

I was getting nervous about the late time. But there wasn't much help for it, because the Tourism Information Centre opened at 11 a.m. While we waited, Uncle Pu and Gi. also roamed the grocery chain store ("Open 7 Days A Week", "Back To School Sale! All Stationery 15% Off", "Free Coffee 8-5 In Bakery/Deli Area") to look for bear spray, but bear spray wasn't in stock. That said, a local man had a tale to tell about having met an elderly bear ambling around Saddle Mountain recently: it was a good anecdote of course, but a little unsettling.

The co-op had opened, too. Community leaflets were hung up outside the door, and locals were shopping within. The brothers stocked up on organic fruit juice boxes, candied ginger, and other provisions. In the meantime I stared at yerba mate (which seems popular in British Columbia these days; I've never had it even though it's also common in Berlin) and bread, and felt impressed that 454g bags of regional apples were on sale at a mere $1.69. The cashier smiled as she checked out our groceries, asked if we were passing through, then advised us to watch out for elk.

Finally we had a map of the Sugar Mountain Lookout, and we drove off toward Cherryville again.

*

We left the fork in the road we'd seen the day before, ascending the Kate Creek Forest Service Road. The road had a kilometre number and strip of pink tape at regular distances attached to trees along the road. I'd say it was narrow. Travelling along it became fraught by the 5th kilometre.

At first, our car's white paint and the increasingly dire need for a car wash were our main concerns: like gardening in white leather riding boots that had looked pretty in a KaDeWe window. But the road also had potholes and ridges and dips. Besides our minivan was low-slung. Secondly, it had a lovely bouncy suspension: the car did not just fly up far, but it also dropped down far, especially when we hit an obstacle. After the first handful of kilometres, we flew down onto a rock embedded in the road, and it grated against our minivan's undercarriage.

Envisioning metal car entrails and transmission fluid scattered on the path behind us, we braked the car. Two of the brothers and Uncle Pu got out and stooped to take a look at the undercarriage. Fortunately all was well.

Uncle Pu wisely adjusted our speed to a slow crawl after that, and watched for other rocks. It was a little boring, but better than roadside repairs in the wilderness. We didn't meet any other car for a long time, just rolled past a pick-up truck parked in a roadside niche.

Instead we saw the wreckage left from a wildfire, I think the Sitkum Creek fire that was reported as largely under control by a Vernon website in late July: slender cedar trees that couldn't have been more than 15 years old, with blackened trunks and dead red needles, sometimes toppled into the road. Scorched undergrowth, just rock and soil instead of weeds and bushes and moss. Forest swathes looking red with black streaks, instead of dark green. More debris, like fresh wood chips, testified to the crews of workers who had diligently laboured to clear the road afterward.

I'd read a Nora Roberts novel about forest fires and smokejumpers (Chasing Fire?) a month or so before this holiday, which unfortunately supercharged my imagination now. So I was better informed than I wanted to be, and was pondering survival strategies if a wildfire broke out while we were driving along here. (Later it looked like the trees that had survived generally grew in the valleys of watercourses, especially in forks where several watercourses met. So our best bet might have been to look for the nearest ditch.)

We went up 23 kilometres or thereabouts. There was a large clearing, part forest fire and part salvage; bleached tree trunks that looked like another atmospheric Pacific Northwest Coast painting, fireweed and other weeds blanketing the destruction, black spiders crawling over rough, fading pebbles and decomposing wood. A kind of cleared dump was beside the road, leftover dead trees and charred wood littering the ground. The view over wooded slopes to the horizon was magnificent.

Another minivan, also mildly unsuited for the terrain, rolled down the hillside. The drivers were tourists looking for Rainbow Falls. If I recall my uncle's and brothers' reports correctly, the husband and wife had given up, and now their aim was to get home before their baby woke up.

We rolled back to around the 17th kilometre of the Forest Service Road, where we concluded the hiking trail was likely to be. Then we got out and started walking up the feeder road.

It was informally paved with loose rubble, pressed into topsoil by the weight of vehicles, stones perhaps at most the size of a fist. Going up was safe enough and none of us twisted an ankle. And of course it was impressive that someone had gone to the trouble to haul up the gravel so that nobody would get mired in mud. The stones were a dizzying array, and I lamented never going deeper into geology studies; I could barely tell apart sedimentary from igneous and metamorphic.

The wildlife was wonderful: the birds in the area seemed outright inquisitive, chirping away and hopping around the side of the trail to watch us. A creek rushed away, hidden, to our right. A slender ditch to the left, drained downslope occasionally by culverts hidden beneath the road, had a few flowers and greenery along it, and butterflies fluttered across the path. Young poplar trees were emerging. Chipmunks even ran along the forest floor and up the trees nearby. I won't say it was a scene out of a Disney film, but it was quite cheering.

While I also kept an eye out for paw prints and animal droppings on the path, and any scent of ripe bear in the air, I thought that the insouciant birdsong was a safe sign that there was no large predator nearby. Uncle Pu did spot what he thought were elk droppings: like a cow patty, but smaller.

J. was our travel guide, looking at his map, and rather maddeningly reporting that even when we reached large post-forest fire clearings, we were at best only 1/3rd of the way there. Our estimate was that the hike was 7 kilometres, but it turned out that this was 'as the crow flies': on this steep terrain, reaching our destination in an hour and a half was impossible.

We saw big boulders that had split apart in the heat, or as forest fire fighting water had been dumped on them, surrounded by large tree trunks. They looked like a giant's campsite in The Hobbit.

Finally we reached the end of the clearings, taking switchback turns and reaching a point where we no longer saw many all-terrain vehicle treadmarks. But we were nowhere near the summit of Sugar Mountain Lookout.

We decided to keep hiking until 4 p.m., then turn back. As always, the steep mountains around us meant that sunset would be earlier than it would be in the plains. We needed ample daylight to get back to our car and down the mountain.

At the opening to the forest, a plain bridge of four or five logs was embedded in the mud of a little creek, which we walked over. I ate a few red thimbleberries from the well-laden bushes that grew nearby. Given that bears have a reputation for loving banquets at berry patches, I figured it was unlikely a bear had been here recently.

I meditated about the forest's recent past, apart from the wildfires. Seeing a ribbon of the Tonka forestry company along part of the terrain, I wondered if this was just a property boundary or a warning that more of the forest would be logged. I also wasn't sure if the trees were just spindly due to the Monashee Mountains altitude, or most of the trees on Sugar Mountain Lookout were in fact a young generation, growing in an area that had been clearcut (once or twice?) between the 1880s and 1960s.

Eventually we heard a revving motor up the mountain. As it neared, we stepped politely back from the path at the trailside. Two young women, laughing and enjoying themselves, slowly tumbled down the rocky slope in an open-topped, four-wheel ATV. They paused their motor to chat with us. 'On Fridays,' they explained, 'the men of the area come around here in their pick-up trucks. But mostly it's pretty quiet.'

Further up the path a black t-shirt had been tossed over a tree limb: a practical joke during one of those Friday parties? Or perhaps it was an ad hoc lost-and-found.

Anyway, our time was up. The brothers and Uncle Pu posed for a photograph, pretty cheerful, preparing to turn back. Meanwhile I was grumpy because I'd wanted to reach the top of something.

The climb back down was more dangerous than the way up. I did slip once, dropping into a Cossack split like the ones in the women's gymnastics floor routines at the Paris Summer Olympics. But I carefully stretched out my leg muscles, and in a minute the limb felt fine again.

It was too late in the day to drive to New Denver afterward.

Instead, we returned to Lumby – I'd say, a bit crestfallen. We didn't even bother to eat any dinner, just went to sleep to the sounds of a baseball or softball game beside the motel. My notes say that the guest in the room next door was watching TV again; but it was quieter and I wouldn't have remembered it without the written evidence.

The next day we'd already begin referring to Sugar Mountain as 'Bitter Mountain'...

Shakespeare's Complete Works Reading Challenge: Henry VI

I have a hankering to try to read all of Shakespeare's plays again, taking a certain U.S. vice-presidential candidate's completist approach to newspapers and applying it to Elizabethan drama. (Disclaimer: But I've never read King John.) Let's start in chronological order with Henry VI, Part 1: Shakespeare (b. 1564) wrote it in 1591. I'm using a vintage, turn-of-the-century clothbound Complete Works of Shakespeare edition from the Clarendon Press.

Disclaimer: Not all of these plays may be from Shakespeare. Maybe some of them were co-written. Maybe there are more plays by Shakespeare that are as yet undiscovered. And the chronological order is disputed as well.

***

The History

We are in England before, then during, the Wars of the Roses: York and Lancaster battling to seize or keep the throne, as French peers look on with a beady, warlike eye. Henry VI ascended the throne as a baby, in 1422. The Wars began in 1455. In terms of historical distance, I guess that Shakespeare writing about Henry VI's early life is like a contemporary dramatist writing about the Crimean War.

7 p.m.

ACT I. Scene I.

King Henry V has just ascended to the throne in the sky. Shakespeare transports us to Westminster Abbey, where dukes have gathered for the King's funeral.

Duke of Bedford:

Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!

Comets, importing change of times and states,

Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky,

And with them scourge the bad revolting stars,

That have consented unto Henry's death!

Maybe I personally wouldn't say that a comet wields crystal hair; but who am I to judge?

But when the Duke of Gloucester, praising Henry V's reign as a warrior king during the Hundred Years' War, says, "His arms spread wider than a dragon's wings," I agree with the verdict that the Bard can do better than his writing in Henry VI. It sounds like a laboured metaphor; to me it recalls mental images of Fantastic Four superheroes .... But perhaps an Elizabethan would only have found it elegant.

[The Wikipedia article reports that there doesn't seem to have been any full performance of Henry VI, Part 1, between 1592 and 1738 – and after 1738, until 1906, even though Edmund Kean put on an adapted version of Henry VI in 1817, for example. I'm too ignorant of theatre to understand if this is coincidence, or logistics; or if this is evidence that for the past four centuries not just critics, but many other readers, have considered this play as a bit of a stinker by Shakespeare's standards.]

Upon a wooden coffin we attend,

And death's dishonourable victory

We with our stately presence glorify,

Like captives bound to a triumphant car.

One Month In: The Fall-Winter Semester of 2024

The flu of last week has subsided. On Thursday and Friday I'd felt like a malingerer, although it was clear I might still be contagious and I did feel mildly weak. On Tuesday my conscience eased: during choir practice it was clear that in fact the respiratory illness had put my lungs through the wringer.

University is exhausting but engrossing as ever. On Monday morning at the ungodly hour of 8:11 a.m. I walked into the Spanish classroom, pleased at being early. But I was only the second person there, because in fact the class had been cancelled. (My fault for not checking the university email account after 9 p.m. the day before.)

Spanish did take place on Wednesday as scheduled. We were asked to do an assignment in pairs, and I still haven't arranged that due to feeling too shy to ask anyone; more homework is looming like the sword of Damocles.

Tuesday was Greek, Wednesday was also Greek with an instructor I'd never had before... the professor ran out of the room with a runny nose due to allergies and came back in with a rolled-up piece of paper towel in one nostril. It was quite distracting. In any case I was in a bit of a brain fog and felt rather overwhelmed.

It was also the U.S. election day. I found out after the Spanish class due to chatter in the university hallways that Kamala Harris had lost.

My legs went a little bit wobbly, if I'm honest, while I looked up the home page of the Guardian on my smartphone. The reports of world leaders congratulating the 47th president on his victory put the proverbial nail into the coffin of my optimism.

But I consoled myself with reading Michelle Obama's memoir before the next class, picturing an alternative reality. It was a nice surprise to meet my mother outside the cafeteria, and she gave me a hug before continuing to her seminar. I had a slice of apple cake as comfort food. And later, while I was sitting in the hallway reading, my regular Greek professor passed by and happily greeted me when she saw me; that was also comforting.

Anyway, after a feeble walk to make sure I got some exercise, I got home and soon had such a bad migraine that I slept for most of the rest of the afternoon, and then all night. In the morning it was cured, but...

I hadn't done my homework for Thursday, and that was also pretty obvious when we went over the exercises in my Greek class...

That morning, I'd had another political shock when, in a chat with friends, I saw that the Chancellor of Germany had fired the finance minister, thus alienating the FDP coalition allies and essentially precipitating a new round of federal elections.

The actual Firing Ceremony at the presidential palace did make me cringe with sympathy for the finance minister. But other than that one would need to be a massive fan of FDP policies, I think, to feel sad about his departure. Hypothetically speaking, anyone else might be quite willing to wish that the door would not hit him where the good Lord split him, on his way out...

But I'm not eager to see xenophobia, short-sighted economics that don't take into account the financial risks of climate change, or swivel-eyed distrust of the federal government due to what some blithering idiot recently said on a 9-minute YouTube video, become the defining characteristics of federal policy. Thus I am not eager for new elections.

My theory, oft aired to family, is that Chancellor Scholz saw that the 45th President of the US had won the election again, and decided that there was no way he wanted to deal with that mess.

In general the world political situation feels so bizarre and unstable that the morbid metaphor has come to mind that I have to do my part for humanity along the lines of the musicians on the Titanic: keep playing the instrument to keep people calm as we sink beneath the waves of the Atlantic.

Anyway, Thursday (yesterday) evening wasn't spent just talking German politics or watching the Tagesschau. I reviewed my Spanish linguistics professor's slides from last week and read the first paragraph or two from the prescribed reading, which was about phonetics. I only glanced at a worksheet that was assigned as homework but would, I thought, also be done on-the-spot in class...

But when I entered the linguistics classroom this morning, the others were reviewing their finished worksheets in groups of 2 or 3 to compare their answers...

The last class of the week was about classical Latin transforming into vulgar Latin into, for example, Old French and Medieval French, into Modern French. I liked the subject matter, along with the examples of words that had changed over time. It was also nostalgic, because at a Canadian university I'd been taught the medieval French work Lai de Lanval, in a bilingual text where we were allowed to stick to the modern French transcription.

Afterward I had enough energy to get small presents for a friend's birthday, before reaching home in the very November weather.

Since then I've admittedly been pretty useless.

It looks like the years that I spent worrying about my workplace are now wreaking their vengeance: every time I come across the smallest stressor at university, like a test or a bit of forced socialization that I don't immediately feel comfortable with, I go off like a rocket. And I don't have much time to climb down again. (I need to do homework in that slot, for example, or sleep before class the next day instead of lying awake, or take care of other obligations. Admittedly sometimes the feeling of getting a piece of work done does cure anxiety.)

Either way, homework needs to wait for tomorrow.

Beautiful British Columbia: Our September 2024 Holiday, Part Two

A motel and a Seventh Day Adventist church in Hope,
British Columbia. All rights reserved.

On the second day of the holiday, I woke up at around 5:30 a.m. Mist was creeping through the Hope Lookout mountain above the motel, and it reminded me of First Nations legends of bears and witches; it wasn't hard to imagine supernatural beings.

A faint rain was tapping at the windows. A few of the fellow motel guests were already up and about early, lights in their rooms if they hadn't already set off.

We walked up to the church, discovered a stencilled cut-out parking lot gate with the design of a family of deer behind it. From the Private Property forest beside it, a woman in a beanie came out of the sea of fallen maple leaves with her dog. The fragrance of woodsmoke hung in the air.

At the foot of the hill, on the other side of the highway, we investigated the Mile Zero post, and a sign that Emil Anderson Construction had put up to commemorate the building of the Hope-Princeton Highway in the 1940s. Interned Japanese-Canadian labourers had also had to help construct the highway.

I wasn't sure what "rip rap" meant, on the sign, so I asked an orange-vested technician who was just lowering a wire into a rectangular pit in the lawn nearby. He took a moment to reflect, then answered that "rip rap" are large boulders, adding that they are used to strengthen river banks, for example. On the other side of the historical information, a sculpted relief artwork showed two workers using old-fashioned methods of hand-drilling granite.

When we reported our findings to Uncle Pu afterward, he remarked dryly that in his day, nobody would have thought of considering the Highway as a historic site. It had just been built!

WE DROVE OFF soon afterward, along the Coquihalla River Highway. Warning signs told us of avalanches and dangerous winter conditions, and we also ended up behind a logging truck or two: long strips of bark flagging behind the tree trunks in the wind rather like the hair of a corpse in a horror movie, and blue squiggles of paint that marked the trunks' ends. Speed limits went up to 110 km/h, but we had to slow down for construction zones.

It was remote enough that we saw the first signs that any drivers who run out of gasoline are in for a rough time: "Check fuel. No station ahead for 110 km." But it was also populated enough that groups of children were gathered at random points, presumably waiting for their school bus.

Pictograms showed that bicycles were meant to ride along designated portions of the highway. But, as these portions looked identical to the usual, narrow, unshielded highway margin to me, I wrote in my notes that the 'trails' were "not terribly enticing." The other wildlife, besides cyclists and logging trucks, to which highway signage alerted us were mule deer. But we were also warned of a forest fire danger.

We crossed "19 MILE CREEK" and then the "SKAGIT RIVER," the latter of which the family had met in 1998 when we started a road trip across the United States; and the Similkameen River kept us company on our journey as well.

A few highway signs (e.g. "CHECK YOUR SPEED") might be designed purely to keep long-haul truck drivers awake and stimulated. 

TRUCK DRIVING is a dangerous job. Many trucks passed along the highways and many signs explained varying dangers unique to large vehicles, so I learned to appreciate the profession, and the challenges of keeping grocery, lumber, etc. stores in remote parts of Canada well stocked, a bit more.

We saw one or two accident sites during our road trip. Not far from Hope, there was an "OIL SPILL" sign at a bend in the highway. Behind it, truck wheels were lying upside down behind the triangular concrete barriers of the roadside. A few metres on I remember seeing twisted wreckage of the truck's white cab.

Right after, in my notes: "brake check for trucks; runaway lane; truck trailer flipped on side beside highway."

The brake checks are side lanes; truck drivers pull into them to pause and test their brakes. The runaway lanes are roads that split off of the highway. According to the Wikipedia entry "Runaway truck ramp," the problem is that trucks can accelerate too much if going downhill, and brakes can fail through overheating or through wear & tear. So truck drivers are permitted to divert onto the runaway lanes, gradually letting their vehicle run out of (metaphorical) steam.

As far as I saw, even 6% slopes cause problems for trucks: evidently, mammoth vehicles are sensitive machines in their own way.

THE FURTHER AWAY from the coast we sped, the more Texas-style terrain, typical of British Columbia's Interior, we met. Instead of the Douglas fir and cedar forests of the rain-soaked Coastal areas, we began to see livestock fences (I sketched one; it looks like barbed wire) in ranch land, sun-bleached golden grass, sagebrush, and dark green pine trees. It's rattlesnake country, too. Fortunately we didn't meet any.

WE LANDED in Princeton (no, not that Princeton) around 9:45 a.m.. Uncle Pu remembered having eaten fried chicken beside the highway in the 1970s. Being a bad niece, I privately thought this was no reason to expect a nice breakfast in the same spot 50 years later. But I was wrong.

We parked near a pick-up truck on the other side of the fence from a roadside inn, and walked in to the family restaurant near the former chicken spot. It had a splendid cowboy-style breakfast menu.

It looked like six table nooks were already occupied, one of them by an invisible baby that occasionally raised a ruckus. It was nice to listen to the conversations. It seemed as if a lot of diners were regulars. One or two of them wore plaid shirts, and a man wore a black cowboy hat. Two motorcyclists came in later, laying aside their helmets. On the TV beside us, sportscasters were discussing an ice hockey game: a Canadian touch. The cook was rattling away somewhere in the kitchen, out of sight.

We ordered coffee. We put in creamer from the little plastic tubs on the table. And I ordered a cheddar omelette, opting for brown toast over sourdough or white.

The three-egg omelette arrived with two slices of toast (buttered and cut into triangles), grated potato hash browns, and an orange slice with a sprig of parsley as garnish. Uncle Pu ate hotcakes, and my brothers ordered sausages and bacon with eggs (over easy) as well.

J. thought that he was duty-bound to finish the glass jar of maple syrup that was handed to him with his pancakes (I think it was a litre) that the waitress brought. But in retrospect, I'm not sure.

Our waitress came around and topped up everyone's coffee, two or three times. In general I thought she was tremendously hardworking and efficient.

I was agog. Last time I went to Canada I still thought that I'd die if I needed to live in the countryside for more than a few months at a time. But this time it was not hard to picture myself living out on a farm, coming in to town once or twice per week to eat breakfast at the restaurant....

I'd probably still make a poor country dweller. But the main realization of the Canadian journey was that I don't like my life in Berlin as much as I'd thought. It might not only be the restricted lifestyle while the anaemia was in force that disenchanted me. I think that the city feels like more of a wasteland since many friends have moved away, and I don't have many routines that bring me into regular contact with the friends who do still live here.

Regardless of cause, small signs had been nagging at me before that all is not well, for example that my houseplants have almost all died even though I was at home to take care of them; in retrospect I was right to worry. I'm hoping that being enrolled as a proper student will be the change that I need, but I guess that daydreams are also fun to have.

AFTER BREAKFAST we drove onward to fruit orchard country. It wasn't growing any lusher, old wooden mining shacks were dug into desiccated slopes, and a sign warned us "CAUTION BIGHORN SHEEP," a species I'd never have bumped into on the Coast. But at Keremeos we disembarked from the car as Uncle Pu pulled us to the roadside, and we ambled through a fruit stand. We found plums, Concord grapes, pears, apples, and even cherries. The stand also sold gourd vegetables and corn cobs and chili peppers, tourist items like maple syrup bottles and Ogopogo sauce, and bags in woven fabrics made by Indigenous artists. (Other markets advertised peaches and nectarines.)

I walked behind the fruit stand to look at the apple trees, which were all relatively short and so densely packed with fruit that it was clear that they were specially bred and pruned for commercial use. Big, dusty wood tubs, stacked nearby, were used to gather the fruit. There was also a long vegetable patch. On the other side of the highway, a moisture-less slope of what looked like fine, dark grey volcanic silt rose above the asphalt.

We passed wineries as well as fruit stands after that, as we neared Kelowna.

I've never been to Kelowna except to the airport, but my grandfather worked there for a few years as a professor of German literature at Okanagan College, his new doctorate from UBC in hand. At first he lived in a rental apartment, but then he bought a plot of land on a pine forest slope at the southern periphery of Kelowna. On that land my father (with help) built a two-story wooden house that unfortunately burned down decades later, in a forest fire around 2003.

Its main bridge was replaced around 2008, and I wrote in my notes "a ton of urban development, new high-rises, subdivisions." What's there now seems, architecturally speaking, rather at war with whatever vestiges of nature, landscape, or 20th-century architecture remain.

Road construction work at Okanagan Lake

At any rate we drove the car back down toward Okanagan Lake and then stopped by the beach at Cache Creek. It seemed to be a fishing spot, and back in the 70s and 80s had been a favourite haunt of my grandparents. I read the warning signs to see if there were any problems with water quality, but they mentioned nothing. A film of brown organic debris or growth on the smooth stones in the water, which was lukewarm even in September, suggested that maybe I was right to be wary. But the temperature was pleasant. A few little fish visited me in the shallows, while a larger fish hopped further out. Ge. even went swimming.

AFTERWARD WE DROVE to the Orchard Park shopping mall.

Wild geese were migrating and flew behind the trees near the parking lot. The brothers sorted out a Canadian telephone contract, as I walked back and forth along the tarmac and the two drought-nipped plane trees that were out of their element in a roadside planting. Ambulance sirens went up and down the street and I felt rather anxious, unhappy about being in a city again and being exposed to daily symptoms of the miseries of others.

Then we went over to the mall proper.

My uncle and I walked around, seeing Roots and Old Navy and Aritzia and other clothing retailers, Purdy's Chocolates, a Shoppers Drug Mart, and a man who looked bored as he waited for someone to buy pierogis from his Ukrainian stand. I made eye contact. (Ever since working in a Christmas market, I try to smile at salespeople now and then.) And I think we both half-smiled; not sure if he also had the sense that here were two transplanted Europeans adrift abroad, as he had no way of knowing where I was from.

The mall wasn't busy, or it was too large to tell that it was busy. The brothers went to Tim Hortons, and we met them there as they were just finishing their doughnuts and drinks.

IN THE AFTERNOON we drove out of Kelowna, along the Shuswap River, toward Cherryville, which is small and unpopulated enough to be unincorporated.

We drove through Lumby first. As the biggest settlement near Cherryville, Uncle Pu thought it was likeliest we'd find a place to stay overnight there. Having driven through and gotten an idea, we proceeded to our adventure.

My grandfather had lived in Cherryville, in a remote wood house amongst the hippies in a forested, farmed area. It was a green and pleasant territory, with pale blue chicory flowers at the roadside, and a sign "Watch for Livestock." Looking at the rural plots of land, rattling along fine gravel roads, as we struggled to see any sign of our grandfather's house and only Gi. managed to see a glimpse of the roof, J. remarked ironically, "Can't argue it's been gentrified."

In fact, the gravel roads were wreaking havoc on the formerly gleaming white expanse of our minivan, and I was worried that the windshield would crack or the paint be irrevocably scratched.

Adding to the natural idyll, however, my uncle and brothers sighted an owl.

WE THEN ROAMED the forest service roads to find the trail to a hiking path that my uncle remembered walking along in the 1970s ... once. The charm of it, he said, was that the hiking path leads you to the top of the tree line, where the forest ends and the bald rock begins.

I was a skeptical niece again, thinking privately that vague recollections of 70s wilderness aren't a reliable basis for 2020s walking tours. This time I will say it was justified.

We found out that the Kate Creek Forest Service Road was out of commission, past a certain number of kilometres, and that some bridges were out, based on a sign. That road looked like it was the likeliest to bring us near the hiking path, so that was a bad precondition for our plan.

At any rate we found Sugar Lake, which is the reservoir for a hydroelectric dam.

Being the reservoir of a dam brings with it dangers to life and limb: sudden changes in water levels, hazardous debris, etc.

What we saw was a jewel-green, placid body of water that might have sprung from a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. A motel/RV park at one side transplanted it into the modern age, but otherwise it was embedded in forest. Ripples flowed across the water where fish released bubbles, hinting at a paradise for fishermen.

We'd hoped to stay at the motel, but it became clear that wasn't happening. The individual houses were being put up for sale; it looked like the owners were giving up the old business. Besides, the motel's rules were that we'd need to book a week at a time.

SO WE DROVE back to Lumby. It was bliss when our wheels hit an asphalted road once more.

We turned in at a motel at one end of town. A pair of deer antlers were nailed to a long building beside a restaurant, at the entrance to the highway. Then, further in: a two-level brown motel with dark wood siding, and hanging planter baskets of petunias in keeping with the floral decorations on the old-fashioned lamp-posts in the village proper. Beside it, a creek trickled away in the underbrush to one side, as another watercourse roared through a rocky channel on the other.

The motel seemed popular: trucks and motorcycles and cars etc. filled the parking lot. There was a freewheeling, beer-swilling Friday evening mood. In retrospect there might have been a sports game on the adjoining field.

WHEN WE'D SETTLED IN, we walked over to a nearby Chinese restaurant. A waitress, so young that I felt like I was complicit in child labour, was tending to the two or three tables of guests including us. She was handing over paper take-out bags to men (at least one of them wearing the ubiquitous plaid flannel shirt, as far as I recall) who came in to pick up their telephone or online orders, too. Sometimes a woman drifted in from the kitchen. I vaguely remember colourful patterned vases and artificial cherry tree branches as the decor over the bar counter.

We ordered a Dinner for Five. It came with egg rolls, deep fried prawns, breaded almond chicken, chop suey, ginger beef, fried rice, and chicken chow mein, as far as I recall. So it was Chinese-North American fusion food. We also had pots of green tea.

Besides I saw Shirley Temples on the menu, and ordered the drink for the first time since I was five or six years old: This Shirley Temple was dense red cherry syrup at the bottom, golden pineapple juice at the top, served in an ice cream sundae-style glass. It also had two maraschino cherries with stems in it (I know these cherries are not everyone's cup of tea, but I like them); and it was everything I wanted. 

As we left the parking lot I took a photo of a vintage pick-up truck from the 1940s or 50s, and then we walked back to the motel.

GE. AND I were sharing a room with two queen-size beds: microwave, TV, refrigerator, a bathroom with a tub that had a thick ring of green oxidization around the drain. When I used the shower, the wet orange-hued floor tiles became so slippery that I wondered if they were made of soapstone.

It was awkward when we first dropped off our bags in the room, as we heard loud panting sounds coming from a TV on the other side of the wall. We froze and stared at each other in Munch-esque horror. At first Ge. offered that I could switch rooms with J. But it soon turned out that it was a violent action movie, instead of the boudoir alternative. (I wrote "extremely loud" and "could feel rumbling in the ground" in my notes.) It stopped before 10 p.m., at which point the fellow motel guest switched to listening to anodyne pop oldies. The experience still reinforced for me that I would not like to travel alone.

[Note added Nov. 16, 2024: After checking my notes, it turns out that I remembered this day as being more eventful than it was; this adventure actually happened the following night:] Between 2 and 3 a.m. I woke up to feel an insect scuttling up my leg. I flung aside the bedclothes, stuck out my leg, and gave a kick that launched the bug into the atmosphere, then went back to sleep. I didn't think the insect was a scorpion or a venomous spider, but I didn't know for sure. Fortunately I saw a tiny ant wandering around a vinyl floor in another motel room the next day, and figured that one of its buddies had been the culprit.

Beautiful British Columbia: Our September 2024 Holiday, Part One

It's been a long time since I did a post that is indulgent to read, so while I am recovering from the flu, I will try to describe the family holiday to Canada.

First I should explain that my mother did not come along, in line with her long-held conviction that she's done enough trans-Atlantic travel.

***

THE FLIGHT from Berlin to Frankfurt was not so exciting, except insofar as a police escort led black diplomatic vehicles (one of which bore the flag of India) onto the tarmac before we boarded the airplane.

Flying from Frankfurt to Vancouver, I watched the 2011 German film Der ganz große Traum over the shoulder of a pixie-haired woman, Gi.'s seat mate, who seemed to be a Canadian schoolteacher. And I received my vegetarian dinner with great ceremony, before everyone else's lunches rolled down the aisles.

I was happy with the dinner. But I began to feel nauseated soon afterward, which I hypothesized might be the consequence of eating the whole mini-tub of vegan margarine with my bread roll instead of just taking half. So I could not face the tempting-looking vegetarian breakfast when it landed on my tray a few hours later, with a vegetarian moussaka and a mango-flavored fruit bar. J. kindly ate it for me.

The film was a rather ham handed critique of early 20th century educational philosophy and Prussianism. Daniel Brühl plays the hero: an independent-minded, idealistic young teacher who liberates his pupils by teaching them soccer. 

I was convinced the film was scripted by a man: one of the scenes has the mother of a pupil accidentally walking in on Brühl's character naked; besides the implausibility of the scene as written, I'd argue that the filmmakers frame this as a 'God's gift to women' serendipity, rather than as an awkward-for-everyone thing as it would be in real life. (Maybe I was reading the film too subjectively; besides I was reading the subtitles instead of listening to the original audio. But I'd argue it doesn't matter if someone is conventionally good-looking or not – it's sexiest to respect other people's boundaries.)

I also enjoy the irony of soccer being celebrated as a vehicle of social progress, since of course it's often linked to reactionary politics now.

It was a longish flight at 9 hours 51 minutes, 10+ kilometres in altitude.

It was a sunny day and I wrote in my notes that over Greenland there was "some clear visibility." But since I had a middle seat, it didn't make that much of a difference.

*

WE LANDED in Vancouver in the early afternoon. Canadian customs were not as gruelling as expected, but like everything else it's highly automated now and required finding and operating the correct stripped-down analogue of a telephone booth.

We found our luggage too, as advertisements for American voter registration and Canadian for-profit universities played on the screens above the conveyor belts.

Then we headed out of the Arrivals terminal, across the familiar interior drop-off lane where taxis etc. throng past and a security-vested crossing guard wrangles traffic, to find our rental car. It was a bright white, spacious, four-door minivan. And it was parked at the back of a parkade on the airport grounds, right below a small lot with Royal Canadian Mounted Police cars, flagpoles, and nearby a Japanese hot dog stand. (We would come to regret the 'bright white' part.)

Exit tollbooths at Vancouver International Airport's parking lots. Behind it,
the dark blue banners show Indigenous art.
All rights reserved (as for all other photos).

Inside the airport itself, it is much as it ever was, indoor waterfall at the passport controls and all. But at the exit, a new building was being put up, and signs acknowledged that the airport partly stands on Musqueam territory.

The banners were the first sign I saw that many Canadians are reconsidering the history of colonialism since the Kamloops Residential School graveyard news broke in 2021.

Taxi cab and skyscrapers, somewhere around Vancouver.

As we entered dense Vancouver traffic, new real estate loomed everywhere without rhyme or reason.

Greyish? bluish? in the hazy, moist Vancouver air, skyscrapers and white bridges rose at diverse parts of the metropolis (I couldn't tell apart Delta, Surrey, Richmond, ...) north of the highway.

Even at the highway: Our minivan pulled alongside a plot or two of undeveloped land with dense forest and perhaps a white bindweed flower tumbling alongside the asphalt; then, at the next street intersection, we saw rezoning and land development posters on its fence.

It was clear that, like in Berlin, the pressure on the housing market is intense.

Long freight trains, wagons patterned in Gauguin colours, and industrial yards with neatly stacked shipping containers for rebuilding, testified to the economic power of British Columbia's Lower Mainland.

It was frankly a relief to turn off those highways, landing in a remoter, more agricultural stretch as we left Vancouver to the west.

We began to approach Hope along river floodplains funneled by the dark mountains: their crests formed the dramatic curved shape of a roller coaster track.

WE REACHED THE FRINGE OF MOTELS, a weatherboarded white church steeple, and fast food restaurants on the south side of Hope, and turned into the specific Inn where we'd be staying. It was straight out of a rural American film, and I was delighted:

A two-level, wrap-around, white-and-blue painted pair of buildings, a narrow ridge of roof protecting the balcony. An office with a fluorescent OPEN sign. Red geraniums, a few garbage bins, surrounding a parking lot. In the parking lot, amongst other vehicles, there was a dusty white pick-up truck with a buggy whip. Hydrangeas, boulders, and gravel decorated the parking lot where it met the Old Hope-Princeton Highway.

A lawn chair plus white plastic tub was placed beside each motel room door, for the cigarette smokers, whose ashes wouldn't do harm dropping into the sand at the bottoms of the tubs. A mountain rose steeply behind the motel.

It was warm enough to sit outdoors. A lady in her forties or fifties was alternately observing the scene, smoking, and bowing over her smartphone in her chair.

She helped us figure out how to use the electronic room keys, when we had trouble slotting them in the key readers. 'Don't keep them in your pocket with your smart phone,' she suggested. 'It'll demagnetize them.' She also asked me later if I was 'taking care of the boys,' and confided that she was on her way back home to Vancouver Island.

LATER my brother Gi. and I went shopping at the Save On Foods across the highway. – It's a grocery chain owned by one of Canada's billionaires. More to the point, it's open later than some other shops.

There I got ginger ale, orange juice boxes for my morning iron pill routine, mandarin oranges, a Ritter Sport hazelnut chocolate square, and a four-pack of blueberry muffins. The bakery section had closed already, but there was still plenty to look at, starting with the Halloween/Thanksgiving-themed floral arrangements with chrysanthemums etc. outside the entrance.

It was fun to 'get the lay of the land': the organization of the aisles, which brands were in stock, and what the prices were. Much like Roman military camps, British Columbia grocery chain stores seem to have pretty much the same layout, regardless of which chain they are.

THE SUNSET was abrupt, because of the mountains' "tall slopes blotting out evening sunlight" (my notes).

After dark, the brothers and I walked over to the A&W. We ordered burgers, onion rings, fries, and soft drinks, and ate them outdoors on the wire tables beside the hallway. It was quiet, only the occasional passerby drifting quietly along the sidewalk. Even the trucks on the highway came by rarely. 

I WAS RELIEVED to have been given a cozy room (queen-size bed, widescreen TV, desk, nightstand, and rectangular window plus lacy curtain) that connected at the back of a larger room where my uncle and one of my brothers each had a bed.

The thought of sleeping alone in a motel room, alongside a highway with lots of strangers passing by, was not terribly appealing once I saw what it would be like. I was pretty safe; but many women and girls have gone missing along B.C.'s highways. Given the remoteness and lack of surveillance, I could understand how.