It's a Hop Picking Morning!

It was chilly when the old man got out of bed at 5:45 this morning. It took me back to the same August morning in 1938, though it was then nearly an hour earlier and on a weekday, rather than on a Sunday. It was hop picking time in the Fraser Valley and I had clung to my bed covers too long. Mom finally roused me and shoved me out the back door. I ran down the path along the dewy back yard grass for my early morning meeting with last year’s Eaton’s catalogue in the outhouse. Though the sun had not yet appeared over the Cheam Range skyline in the east, the sheen of dawn indicated another hot and humid day in the hop field coming up.
There was no time to dilly or dally with the scantily clad Eaton’s models. Mom, my sister and me had to finish porridge, bread toasted on the oven top and hot cocoa, clean up, get ready and walk to the main road half a mile away to catch the hop yard truck by six! So I quickly washed up at the kitchen sink beside the pump and sat at the table. Dad, already finished with milking and other chores, was ready to eat and soon after prayers and porridge climbed on his bike, lunch box behind the seat, for the long ride along the mountain road to start his eight hour day at the cut-off saw in the sawmill.
We had no time to waste, so after cleaning up a bit we packed up lunches and any other gear we might need through the long day in the field, and hurried to the truck stop on the main road. A knot of villagers had already gathered at the corner and the social networking of the hop picking season began for the day. Someone saw the truck heading our way from its stop for pickers further west and after the usual jostling among both elders and kids to be first up the ladder, we climbed to the stake truck platform for the best seat on the benches, standing room, or floor seating still available.
The driver, also a musical director at the village church, made sure everyone was secure and followed that rough gravel road to the Vedder River crossing, there to follow the main road to Sardis for the remaining miles to the hop field. The field was only half harvested, so he bumped across the field of already stripped vines, where everyone climbed down and headed for the family row to pick as much of the still dew-heavy hop clusters as possible before the first weigh-up.
Our village contingent took up only a few limited rows of the many in the forty acre field that had to be picked while still at its optimum ripeness. Pickers came from all over. We were surrounded by as diverse a group of racial origins, languages, religions and colours as you can imagine. Many came from the big city and lived in the row cabins at the office yard for the season, as we had done earlier in the Depression years. We did it again in 1939, as I remember being in the main yard camp cabin when the war started. For the most part everyone got along, at least for hop picking season, though “the company” separated the Japanese contingent from the rest in a separate cabin camp.
I was an early teen in 1938, still inclined to goof off as I had earlier in the thirties if I could. Still, by then I knew if I wanted proper clothes and supplies for school in September I needed to join the competition to see how many pounds I could pick in a day. The penny a pound paid by the company added up to about the only cash families would have all year for such extras.
They were good times, those long, hot August days in the hop fields. And they are good memories for the old man! I remember the competition for the “best” row when an un-harvested field of clusters was started. I remember the jostling and shoving to get near the front of the weigh-up line, when it paid me to be a little pushy; the buzz of dozens of conversations to be listened to, the calls for straying children (W-i-l-l-e-e-e-e-e! in my case), and the sudden and surprising beauty of a Swiss melody yodelled by a picker at the far side of the field, followed by the haunting summons for Wire-Down! from another direction.
For the old man, that was the romance of the hop harvest in the thirties after the quiet beauty of a hop picking morning.

- 30 –

A Death in Canadian Politics

This morning when the old man switched his breakfast news dollops from the local channel to CBC Newsworld, he found himself immediately in the midst of a special Politics program revealing the sad and serious voice and visage of its host. I found out then about the death, in the early hours of this Monday morning, of John Gilbert Layton, Ph.D.
Dr. Layton was the brilliant scion of a well-to-do Anglophone Quebec family long steeped in Quebec and Canadian politics since Confederation in 1867, generally on the centre right side of the spectrum. His father, Robert Layton, was a cabinet minister in Brian Mulroney’s government. After studying political science at McGill in Montreal, he moved his young family to Toronto in 1970 when he was only 20, went to York University there for his Ph.D., took employment as a professor at Ryerson University and became a prominent activist for various causes. He became popularly known as Jack Layton, likely from the time he went to York, a place sometimes in the news in the 1960’s as the haven of hippy radicals who became professional “protesters” of that era. From activism to city politics to federal politics was his determined course. He persisted and became leader of the New Democratic Party in 2003. Through several elections he kept improving the party’s standing until he became official Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons at last spring’s election. I think he was himself surprised by his success in Quebec.
When I heard the many tributes from political friends and foes alike, I shed a few tears myself, saddened that he died so young. Like the biblical Moses he led his people to the Promised Land, briefly climbed his Mount Nebo to see it with his eyes but would not “cross over into it.”
I was not a fan of Jack Layton. He was young enough to have been my son. I never met him or even saw him in person, but I never warmed to him as I had to Tommy Douglas, though just as opposed to that prairie preacher’s politics. In spite of Jack’s stalwart appearance and smooth leadership style, my age and background led me to dislike his lifestyle and his political opportunism. Jack inevitably reminded me, both in appearance and in his youthful “activism” of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who was equally brilliant and even more politically active as a young teenager. The image posted above shows Lenin circa 1910 at the age of about 40 adjacent to Jack Layton, likely in his fifties in this picture.
I was very impressed with Layton’s letter to Canadians, composed within days of his death, which has already been declared a historic document by the CBC. Likely his followers will follow the recommendations for the NDP he outlined, but I see trouble ahead. I expect changes in his party and others happening sooner rather than later as a consequence of his departure. An earlier Liberal-Democratic union perhaps? With my usual cynicism, I felt at last spring’s election, that the NDP’s virtual sweep in Quebec, was thrust upon Layton, rather than achieved by his party’s efforts alone. I speculated (Why not? The TV pundits do it all the time!) that a group of left wing nationalist Quebecers had given up on the Bloc Quebecois and decided that the NDP would be a better way to exercise clout for Quebec in Ottawa. I expect the NDP split between the Quebecers on one hand and the rest on the other hand will become evident at next year’s proposed leadership convention if not before.
Notwithstanding my likely wrong assessment of Jack Layton and his politics, I grieve with the rest of you, over the loss of one man’s promise, and sorrow with you for his family and his friends.

- 30 –

One Old Man's Night

It was 10:30 PM, Masterpiece Mystery was over and the old man was exhausted. He made the usual wayside stops and fell into bed for the sleep of the virtuous. It was not to be. After I closed my eyes in a sleep inducing position I did my best to release the flickering images that usually beset my consciousness even at rest. Very soon, though, the pressures of the weakening infrastructure of an aging and poorly designed disposal system demanded attention. Reluctantly I pivoted through the usual dizziness and vertigo to bedside seating, reached for my cane, turned on the lamp, struggled to my feet and wended my way carefully along the path to the little house in the backyard, disguised as the bathroom in the hall. The usual old man’s complicated procedures and frustrations followed.

Fortunately my wife in an adjacent bed managed to sleep through all that, for the same procedure repeated itself four times within the first three hours after retiring. With frayed nerves by 1:30 AM, I rolled into bed again, soon followed once more by the same pressures. Determined that this time I would not budge, I somehow shifted into another dimension. There I found myself struggling with my cane’s support and leverage up a steep mountain trail through dense forest until I reached the tree line. I rested and gazed across the expanse of my beautiful coastal valley and felt at peace.

Somehow I found myself elevated beside my mountain top, gazing at the hillside below me. With no sense of my aging weakness, dizziness or fear of falling I saw individual trees near the upper limits of the tree line budding out into startling white blossoms. As I slowly drifted beside the occurring phenomenon I changed my position at will to focus my digital SLR camera, which I found hanging around my neck, on each tree and clicked the shutter on its various aspects as the budding white of the blossoms burst into bloom.

I continued down towards the valley still in my elevated position at an increasing velocity as I reached the densely forested part of the mountain side. Tree after tree appeared in my sight so rapidly that I could not keep up with the changing scene of nothing but white blossoms until I found myself in the midst of a virtual blizzard of blossoms shining a brilliant white all around me as I pressed the camera’s exposure button and held it down.

I decided it was time to get up again. I sat up on the side of my bed without stress, dizziness or vertigo of any kind, reached for my cane propped at the bedside as usual and turned on the light. It was 3:30 AM and time for my fifth trip to that little house in the backyard—one trip in two hours!

Was it a dream? A nightmare? Or was it one of those near death experiences sometimes cited by believers in some version of a happy hunting ground awaiting them after death? They find themselves going down a long dark tunnel until they see a brilliant white light at its end. They absolutely know that if they proceed into that brilliance they will there be embraced by the Great Hunter himself and greeted by all his previously arrived friends and relations of every generation to live in peace and harmony into eternity.

Well, that was one night. Nothing much has changed in the few days since then. I did think, though, that it was one way to get myself back to The Old Man’s Post, which has been sorely neglected since last March due largely to serious health and aging problems of both my wife and me. In determining to start the Internet publication with that name some forty odd issues ago, I supposed it would be a way of tracking an old man’s changing capacities as he moves through Shakespeare’s seven ages of man as described in the All the World’s a Stage speech from As You Like It.

As for me, I would like to think of myself at 84 plus as still in Shakespeare’s sixth age of “justice” in fair round belly with good capon line, with eyes severe and beard of formal cut, full of wise saws and modern instances; but am now beginning to realize that I have likely entered the sixth age, which shifts into the lean and slippered pantaloon with spectacles on nose and pouch on side; his youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide for his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice turning again toward childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sound.

The old man refuses to speculate about the seventh age, for then he will definitely be beyond any tracking capability for this or any other publication. May he not be around for that mere oblivion and all those withouts!

The End