Competing Vehicular Failings

"[The Nissan Tsuru is a] deathtrap."
"The entire body shell collapsed and the head injury rating of the dummy went off the scale."
"General Motors is among the worst global brands in the region [Mexico]."
"[But the Nissan Tsuru gave] the worst performance I've ever seen."
David Ward, secretary general, Global New Car Assessment Program, London

Mexico is an alluring place, its culture, its history, its geology all represent a fascinating pull for tourism. To be sure, there is much to admire about Mexico, in Mexico, and it represents a holiday magnet for people planning to go no further than the southern tip of North America to find their idea of heaven-on-Earth, as far as climate and scenery, beaches, sun and sumptuous accommodations are concerned.

Mind, this is a country also incidentally beset by violence. There is not only the kind of poverty-driven danger that tourists may face, particularly in some areas of the country, but hectic traffic conditions where drivers are not exemplary models of driving skills. And certainly no one in their right minds can overlook the threats that exist in the country from the presence of drug cartels and the deadly wars that drug dealers inflict on one another for territory.

Putting all that aside, here's another lurking problem that people may not be aware of: the danger of renting a Mexican-produced Nissan Tsuru. Which will not be the same vehicle produced say, in the United States or in Japan where quality control and attention to mandated safety features in vehicles are uppermost in mind. But cutting out safety features considered imperative in more developed countries makes accessibility to ownership in poorer countries more feasible with a cheaper product.

The United Nations issues safety standards for vehicles and they reflect decades-old safety features that are standard throughout Europe and North America. But many of the new vehicle models available in middling-income nations in Africa, Asia and Latin American and other low-income markets don't reflect those safety features. "A double standard" favouring high-income countries, observed Mr. Ward.

Both an American and a Mexican Nissan were involved in a crash test, both speeding toward one another at a combined speed of 130 kilometers per hour, each vehicle conforming to the home country national safety standards. The U.S. 2015 Nissan Versa had considerable front-end damage with the dummy receiving minor knee injuries. In contrast the dummy in the 2015 Nissan Tsuru, popular as rentals and taxis, demonstrated massive injuries sufficient to kill.

There were no airbags in the Tsuru and the main structures failed. Tsurus were involved in over four thousand deaths on Mexican roads between 2007 and 2012, according to the Latin American chapter of the Global New Car Assessment Program. Nissan responds with the statement that its vehicles "meet or exceed safety regulations for the markets which they are sold".

The Tsuru has proven to be one of the most popular subcompact vehicles in the Mexican market "due to its affordability and its proven reliability". Doesn't reflect well on either the Mexican regulatory system or on the manufacturer of the vehicles in question. On the other hand, the Latin American chapter of the Global New Car Assessment Program ranked car manufacturers in the region's market reflecting five years of crash testing of over 60 models.

That safety performance ranking concluded that "General Motors is among the worst global brands in the region".

Survival!

The researchers found that modern humans appear to have been constrained within Africa until around 100,000 years ago when changes in the climate allowed them to spread rapidly into the Middle East and Asia

"Something doesn't quite fit here. We know humans are here, we have their stone tools. What is less clear is how widely distributed or sustained such survival was."
"It doesn't seem to be an enormous leap of faith to envisage them [early human ancestors] exploiting other natural materials to provide a little bit of extra shelter."
Rob Hosfield, paleolithic archaeologist, University of Reading, U.K.

Early man: A third of people in modern Europe show genetic traces of populations from sub-Saharan Africa, leading researchers to conclude that people migrated between the continents as early as 11,000 years ago

So, the puzzle that appears to confound anthropologists is why would creatures whose presence arose in the warmth of Africa where there were plentiful plants to forage and abundant game to hunt to sustain life, make a decision to venture further abroad, eventually ending up in life-contesting environments such as Europe and North America where the climate is inclusive of harsh winters requiring such creatures to learn to wear animal skins for warmth, and manipulate their environment to provide shelter from the onset of cold and snow?

Granted, there is that broadly inheritable questing curiosity that has propelled the human animal over countless millennia to search and discover new frontiers to conquer. But to wrench oneself away from a land of warmth and plenty when the competing population might not have been of such abundance that the other existential imperative of instinct-overwhelming survival of claiming resources to sustain life leading to conflict, seems to those studying pre-homo sapiens behaviour to represent a stunning mystery.

Sebastian Willnow/ AFP, Getty Image

A new research paper on archaeological life among paleolithic humanity on the evolutionary lip leaping between small-brained scavengers and large-brained hunter gatherers purports to have discovered a possible answer. And that answer might be a succession of extinctions where emerging humanity fizzled out repeatedly. Although no evidence has been unearthed of "clever behaviours", such as kindling and the control of fire, producing body coverings and the preservation of food, the researchers feel they have approached a plausible explanation.

Early humans, posits paleolithic archaeologist Rob Hosfield, on the evidence available along with scientific intuition, leads him to believe, they simply blundered into the reality of European winter at the end of their overland migration. Once there, they remained, though heaven only knows why; perhaps the thought of turning about and retracing the long, arduous, death-defying journey convinced them that this was the option of choice. It was, in any event, a journey of incremental advancement, taking countless generations for whom memory of what lay behind them might have been impaired.

Conclusion: No "large scale dispersals into the unknown" occurred. The migrants hadn't been driven from their original habitat. No natural disaster occurred to pressure them to embark on such an epic journey, not even the ice age calamity. Once arrived, they simply set down stakes, learning how best to survive in such inclement situations as winter weather. And goodness gracious, we're still coping -- from pre-history to the modern era.

The researchers modelled human migration 80,000 years ago. The model simulates the arrival in Eastern China and Southern Europe and migration out of Africa along vegetated corridors in Sinai and the Arabian Peninsula

"Certain health and behaviour criteria such as drug use, exposure to foreign blood or body fluids were not adequately assessed as part of the donor screening process", advised a Health Canada spokesperson. She was responding to the alarm raised -- yet again -- to the fact that the largest importer of donor sperm in Canada has time and again imported semen from foreign sperm banks not screened adequately for infectious diseases that include HIV, hetatitis and syphilis.

Such importers are not required to be registered, and as such it appears that Health Canada has no real authority over them. Clearly, legislation requires upgrading to protect people vulnerable to the prospect of future problems relating to their offspring born through IVF with donor sperm.

The fact that this not-fully-screened product is then distributed to fertility clinics and physicians across the country to be used on patients attempting pregnancy through in-vitro fertilization is obviously more than adequate reason for screeching alarm. The company involved is Outreach Health Services, which has failed annual safety inspections with Health Canada resulting from serious violations of legislation and regulations whose purpose is obviously meant to protect Canadians using donor sperm.

The problem here is that it is illegal in Canada to pay donors for their sperm. As such, the growing IV fertilization market screams for donor sperm. It's fine if a friend or someone well known to the recipient steps forward to fill that need in individual instances, not so fine when people are depending on donor sperm that has been inadequately tested to ensure safety. In 2011 and 2009 this company earned "non-compliant" ratings, as it did for the current year.

The company pledged on numerous occasions that it would cease distribution of non-compliant semen to fertility clinics and doctors until such time that foreign sperm banks "re-qualified" donors, but it proceeded to continue distributing that very same donor sperm regardless.

"It's nasty if you break your hip. You may never be mobile again if you're older. With head injuries, some people die of it."
"A lot of elderly people choose not to go out [for fear of falling]. So they get no exercise and they get depressed and isolated."
Geoff Fernie, research director, Toronto Rehabilitation Institute

Experience helps. We learned the necessity of acquiring and using reliable hiking boots capable of meeting the challenges of every kind of terrain when we embarked on wilderness canoe-camping expeditions, as well as alpine climbing forays, of which we did plenty in our younger years. The type of boot worn in the challenge of meeting criteria of efficiency, safety and usefulness taught us to look for certain indices of design and material guaranteeing reliability.

Among which was the critical need for non-slip soles and heels. There is a huge difference between man-made 'rubber' and natural rubber, particularly in certain climates like Canada's. As soon as winter weather arrives the challenge of asserting one's intention to continue life as usual meets nature's elements of a cold atmosphere, blustery winds and frozen precipitation proper footgear is essential. A non-slip boot is critical to guarantee safety of life and limb.

Any boot whose sole is comprised of non-natural material simulating rubber but lacking the flexibility under icy conditions of rubber, can be a death trap. Normally malleable and non-slip under ideal conditions, all that changes as soon as the temperature drops sufficiently and the suppleness and grip relied upon disappears when manufactured 'rubber' hardens and the grip potential disappears in winter weather.

So this makes it all the more remarkable that in a Canadian market the vast majority of winter boots available to the consuming public fail to meet the most basic, minimal standards of winter safety. The Toronto Rehabilitation Institute rated winter boots on the Canadian market by testing the viability under adverse weather conditions of 98 models of safety and casual boots. A full 90 percent failed to meet the minimum standard.

Volunteers were asked to walk across a surface covered with ice. That surface, while beginning at a level condition experiences a slow gradient tilt. The boots are rated on their ability to grip an incline of seven degrees minimum, representing the slope analogous to a wheelchair ramp on a sidewalk. If they succeed they merit a 'snowflake' in recognition. Two snowflakes if 11 degrees is manageable. Fifteen degrees' success rates three snowflakes.

The Toronto Rehabilitation Institute points out that emergency wards in Ontario address 21,000 injuries caused by slipping on ice each winter season. They have posted their ratings online at ratemytreads.com.

Gangs of thugs in brown shirts owned the streets. They drove around in trucks, flashing their guns and their swastika armbands, hooting at the pretty girls. If they wanted to pick you up or beat you up, they did so with impunity. Anybody who resisted was beaten or killed or taken away to Dachau or Buchenwald or some other concentration camp. (You must understand that at that time, the concentration camps were prisons where opponents of the Nazi regime were detained . . . The inmates were made to work at hard labor and lived in dreadful conditions, but the words 'concentration camp' came to stand for monstrous cruelty and almost certain death. Nobody even imagined there would one day be a death camp like Auschwitz.)

Cheering crowds greet Hitler as he enters Vienna. Austria, March 1938.

— Wide World Photo

How can I describe to you our confusion and terror when the Nazis took over? We had lived until yesterday in a rational world. Now everyone around us -- our schoolmates, neighbours, and teachers; our tradesmen, policemen, and bureaucrats -- had all gone mad. They had been harboring a hatred for us which we had grown accustomed to calling 'prejudice'. What a gentle word that was! What a euphemism! In fact they hated us with a hatred as old as their religion; they were born hating us, raised hating us; and now with the Anschluss, the veneer of civilization which had protected us from their hatred was stripped away.

Jews in Vienna forced to scrub Schuschnigg's slogans off the sidewalk --
www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

On the pavements, protesters had written anti-Nazi slogans. The SS grabbed Jews and forced them at gunpoint to scrub off the graffiti while crowds of Austrians stood around jeering and laughing.

The Nazi radio blamed us for every filthy evil thing in this world. The Nazis called us subhuman and, in the next breath, superhuman; accused us of plotting to murder them, to rob them blind; declared that they had to conquer the world to prevent us from conquering the world. The radio said that we must be dispossessed of all we owned; that my father, who had dropped dead while working, had not really worked for our pleasant flat -- the leather chairs in the dining room, the earrings in my mother's ears -- that he had somehow stolen them from Christian Austria, which now had every right to take them back.

Members of the League of German Girls wave Nazi flags in support of the German annexation of Austria. Vienna, Austria, March 1938.   — Dokumentationsarchiv des Oesterreichischen Widerstandes

Did our friends and our neighbors really believe this? Of course they didn't believe it. They were not stupid. But they had suffered depression, inflation, and joblessness. They wanted to be well-to-do again, and the fastest way to accomplish that was to steal. Cultivating a belief in the greed of the Jews gave them an excuse to steal everything the Jews possessed.

We sat in our flats, paralyzed with fear, waiting for the madness to end. Rational, charming, witty, dancing, generous Vienna must surely rebel against such insanity We waited and we waited and it didn't end and it didn't end and still we waited and we waited.

The restrictions against Jews spread into every corner of our lives. We couldn't go to movies or concerts. We couldn't walk on certain streets. The Nazis put up signs on Jewish shop windows warning the population not to buy there. Mimi was fired from her job at the dry cleaners because it had become illegal for Christians to employ Jews. Hansi was no longer allowed to go to school.

SS men supervise the confiscation of goods belonging to Jews deported from Vienna --
www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

Uncle Richard went to the cafe where he had been going for twenty years. It now had a Jewish side and an Aryan side, and he sat on the Jewish side. Because he had fair hair and didn't look Jewish, a waiter, who did not know him, said he had to move to the Aryan side. But on the Aryan side, a waiter who did know him said that he had to go back to the Jewish side. He finally gave up and went home.

Baron Louis de Rothschild, one of the wealthiest Jewish men in Vienna, tried to leave the city. The Nazis stopped him at the airport and put him in prison, and whatever they did to him there convinced him that he ought to sign over everything to the Nazi regime. Then they let him leave. The SS took over the Rothschild Palace on Prinz Eugenstrasse and renamed it the Center for Jewish Emigration.

Right after Grandmother died, the world held a conference at Evian-les-Bains, a luxurious spa in the French Alps near Lake Geneva, at which the fate of the Austrian Jews was up for discussion. Eichmann sent representatives of our community to plead with other countries to pay the Nazi ransom and take us in. "Don't you want to save the urbane, well-educated, fun-loving, cultured Jews of Austria?" they asked. "How about paying $400 a head to the Nazi regime? Too much? How about $200?"

They couldn't get a cent.

No country wanted to pay for our rescue, including the United States. The dictator of the Dominican Republic, Trujillo, took a few Jews, thinking they might help bring some prosperity to the tiny, impoverished country. I have heard that they did.

Transport list of Viennese Jews -- www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

From the NAZI Officer's WIFE -- Edith Hahn Beer, c.1999

It was a year-and-a-half since I last saw the cardiologist who tended to me six years ago when I presented at the Ottawa General Hospital in a state of profound collapse due to a plunging hemoglobin level caused by a bleeding stomach ulcer caused by the daily intake of low-dose aspirin as a prophylactic against stroke or heart disease. This was a long-scheduled appointment. When the cardiologist greeted us in the examining room he took a second look at my husband and asked why he was wearing his jacket, hat and gloves in the warm interior of the hospital.

My husband explained he had undergone open heart surgery two months previously and since then felt continually chilled. Due, we had understood, to a side effect of the Coumadin he was taking to prevent a blot clot from forming post-surgery that also replaced his mitral valve. The doctor said that it was likelier that it was a low hemoglobin count that was the culprit and mentioned that at one time it was common procedure at such surgical undertakings to transfuse blood.

A few days later as it happened, we had an appointment with our family doctor who had ordered a blood test for my husband to determine whether his medication was causing any irregularities; it's a standing joke with him that the Heart Institute only looks after the heart; for them all the peripherals in association with heart surgery are the bailiwick of the patient's family physician. Well, this family physician informed us that my husband's hemoglobin levels are indeed at an alarmingly reduced level.

He is, emphasized the doctor, in such a state of anemia that it's bordering on a need for blood transfusion. So he wrote a prescription for iron supplements and another blood test in a month's time to determine the progress but said that this is the reason for my husband's lack of energy, general inertia and constant need for warmth. I've been beefing up our daily diet with foods high in iron, but presumably it will take some time before  his iron stores become normalized and the state of anemia adequately tackled and solved.

For someone recovering from open heart surgery and feeling particularly vulnerable to the cold and labouring under a condition of low energy and general torpor, it's amazing to me what my husband has been accomplishing, from vigorous exercises, to shovelling out the walkway from accumulated snow in the backyard for our little dogs.

Amazingly, for him, he was agreeable to my shovelling the front walkways and the remainder of the snow, heavily infused with water now that it's gradually melting given a day of milder temperatures, just below the tipping point of freezing. While I feel energized doing things like that, under normal circumstances the labour-intensive work falls to him. And he wouldn't hear of my making such a physical effort under any other circumstances.

Both of us are eager to have his condition normalized so we can resume our daily walks together as is our routine taking our little dogs out for long forested ravine walks. Without him beside me those daily forays lack an ingredient vital to my pleasure and enjoyment, which I am anxious to have fully restored. Perhaps another month or so.

"It had taken months of work persuading the rebels to agree to take me into Ethiopia's arid, mountainous north. All the while, I had monitored the rebels' radio, with its burst of AK-47 fire for a signature tune. There were reports of set-piece battles, with fantastic claims of casualties in the tens of thousands, and now Mengistu Haile Mariam's regime, four months after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, was imploding."
"A convoy formed, and from then on we moved mainly at night. By dawn, we halted and we rested, with the vehicles camouflaged under the spreading flat branches of a grove of acacia trees or among the rocks of a kopje."
"I already believed that the rebels' cause was worthy, and their story romantic. They were fighting to overthrow a tyrant, Mengistu Haile Mariam. A gang of ten students from Addis Ababa University had taken to the bush sixteen years before. They were inspired by Marx, the Black Panthers and Orde Wingate, the British guerrilla-warfare expert who had led the Second World War invasion against the Italian fascists in Abyssinia and restored the emperor to his throne ... Over time, the gang had swelled into a combined army of a hundred thousand, complete with commando and tank units."

"The city was a fragment of what it had been but the atmosphere was electric. The militias had liberated the nation not only from dictatorship but also from modern civilization. A Dionysian orgy of destruction was now taking place across Mogadishu in which everything was smashed within the space of hours:  priceless Muslim artefacts from the museum and the mosques, hospital equipment, factory plants, power cables, computers, libraries, telephone exchanges. The Somalis thoroughly enjoyed themselves and I got a contact high off them. On days like this in the news business I grew to understand how easy it must be for normally ordinary people to want to participate in riots and football match hooliganism."
"A queue of civilians was huddled at a roadblock before a group of rebels. As each person was waved through, another came forward and began uttering a litany of names ... people were reciting their clan family trees. The genealogies tumbled back generation after generation to a founding ancestor. It was like a DNA helix, or a fingerprint, or an encyclopedia of peace treaties and blood debts left to fester down the torrid centuries. I was thinking how poetic this idea was, when bang!, a gunman shot one of the civilians, who fell with blood gushing from his head and was pushed aside onto a heap of corpses. 'Wrong clan', said my flaming-haired friend. 'He should have borrowed the ancestors of friend."

"Serbs trying to argue why they had to murder Muslims would appeal to me as a European. 'We Europeans must defend ourselves against the East', they would say. Or: 'They breed so much faster than we Europeans. Unless we fight we will be overwhelmed'. The idea that I had anything in common with Serbs was frankly preposterous. Yet I identified with their plight on a level that was more profound than I liked. Was it that the job was getting to me? Had I become inured to suffering in Africa? Or was it due to an involuntary impulse, one that caused me great shame, that these were white people? Trapped in my skin, I was a stateless colonial, a freebooting hack. Was the Africa I missed my home, or was this Europe my home, or at least the only one I deserved?"

"We said farewell to our Tutsi escorts and made our way to the football stadium which was under UNAMIR guard. Hundreds of Tutsis were camped on the pitch, huddled beneath plastic sheeting slung over the goal posts. As we watched, mortar bombs rained down into the field, into the body of a Ghanaian UN soldier, into a family of Tutsis. Over at UNAMIR headquarters, it was sheer panic. The Hutu extremists had disarmed and then butchered ten Belgian blue helmets guarding the woman prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a Hutu who was murdered for being too moderate. She was Africa's second ever female prime minister. She was also pregnant. Her killers disembowelled her. UNAMIR headquarters had listened in on the walkie-talkie network as the European soldiers pleaded for help and screamed before they died too. Belgian forces  stayed long enough to evacuate the expatriates along with a French force that flew in for the job."

"Whenever I see a news headline to this day I half feel I should board the next flight into the heart of it. I'd love to get all charged up again and I could write the story with my eyes closed. I'm sure the sense that I'm missing out while others get in on a great story will never completely pass. I can turn on the radio years later and hear voices I knew back then and wonder how they can go on doing it. Are they brave professionals or numbed-out news junkies? The sight of people committing acts of unspeakable brutality against others fills a hole in some of us. The activity is made respectable by being paid a salary to do it, but there is a cost."
"And so several years later I am thirty-five and getting drunk with JC, a veteran  correspondent of the Middle East. JC drains his glass and flings open the lid of a big trunk stuffed with mementos, trophies and files. He rummages about and pulls out a single document. 'Look', he says, jabbing his finger at the page, a pay slip from his Spanish newspaper. It reads:
27 muertas ..............7,000 pesetas
38 muertas .............. 7.000 pesetas
However many dead there were, we still got paid the same. It wasn't about the money, but on the other hand we had sold part of our souls. Forgotten incidents of history become our unforgettable days. Our faraway readers threw out yesterday's papers and a decade later I look at my scrapbooks and understand that all the staccato newsbreaks, the hard news leads, my newsprint words yellowing with age are simply the tear sheets of my own memory."

The Zanzibar Chest, Aidan Hartley

Encircled by trees cutting off the force of the wind, it is a sheltered environment in the forested ravine where wind fails to penetrate as it does out in the open and the cold often seems less intense. And so it was yesterday, although from time to time the wind managed to sneak its way in and drive and fluff up the falling snow to a degree that caused that phenomenon known as a whiteout.

Which rarely, under these circumstances lasts for long. When snow has piled deep upon tree branches and wind whips in intensity, what results is often a long, sparkling-white veil collapsing from the tree branch gracefully through the air, as though the branch has casually shrugged it away, like a woman attending the opera, eventually to fall onto the forest floor. These diaphanous showpieces of natural events help to deliver a mystic quality to the experience of walking through a snowbound woodland.

And so it was yesterday when daylight hours of unrelenting snow brought a thick, soft accumulation of aquatic crystals to encapsulate entirely the forest arras, lending a air of mystery and overwhelming awe at the power of nature to transform her landscapes into luminous places of timeless beauty.

Jackie and Jillie were well insulated against the wind and the chill as they scampered about, re-acquainting themselves with the properties of newfallen snow, excited and happy to be there and obviously making the most of their happy exposure, leaping and bounding and challenging one another to champion-speed runabouts. We had dressed them in their winter gear to allow them to enjoy temperatures which would otherwise limit their exposure time due to the penetration of the cold aided by wind to make them miserable.

The landscape everywhere we looked, was an entrancing vision of a winter wonderland. Even though year after year we have seen this happen, it never fails to amaze us. Our visual memories recall what we've seen true enough, but never to the degree and with the detail eliciting wonder that it does when we are immersed once again in that white landscape, viewing it anew, directly confronted by snow falling on the forest, and becoming overawed by it.

Winter is beginning to close in on us. For those who worry that there will be a dearth of snow this year and that Christmas will arrive green and grey, not sparkling white, finally nature has delivered a signal that informs us otherwise, so they can rest their concerns.

After I'd taken our puppies to the ravine for their usual hour's ramble in the woods yesterday, and my husband and I had enjoyed our own walk on the street, because he has not yet himself arrived at that point where he has amassed sufficient energy, recapturing his pre-surgery strength, I decided to finish up the garden tidying.

I waited until he had fallen into an afternoon nap, reading the book he's currently immersed in, and then out I went, leaving the puppies to watch over him. Out came the wheelbarrow and my relatively short-handled spade and I set to work emptying all the garden pots at the front of the house of their soil. I had long ago taken all the plants growing in them out for composting. These are large, really large pots. I had already emptied the large-sized clay pots at a much earlier time, but they're a mere quarter of the size of the large garden pots.

It took awhile, but the weather was perfect, cool and breezy, no rain predicted until the evening hours. Most of the soil found its place in the garden beds at the front of the house, but I did trundle a few wheelbarrows full over to the garden beds in the backyard as well. This is an annual ritual we've been engaged in for many years; the garden beds seem to handily absorb all that extra soil, which is useful. The past few years or so it's a job my husband had taken over from me.

Post-surgery, I had little option but to silently renegotiate the ritual. And it wasn't bad at all, just removing the soil from the pots, shovel by shovel, filling up the wheelbarrow and shifting the soil around to the gardens. I always found it, and still do, invigorating, really enjoyable being out in cool fall weather doing things like that. My husband did wake from his nap to find me gone, shouting out the front door to ask what I thought I was doing. By then I was almost finished.

This morning we were greeted by mixed precipitation because the temperature has descended to hover around freezing. And the weather prediction for the day is that it would continue to plunge, and we were to expect five to ten centimetres of snow. More tomorrow, much more. My husband hied himself off to fill up the gasoline container he uses for the snow thrower. And when he returned, he informed me he would be busy for a few more minutes outside.

It took him no time at all before he had trundled all those heavy pottery garden pots using his hand truck, for storage alongside the bricked-in area between two garden beds. And he covered them all with an extra-long tarpaulin, so as far as the garden is concerned, we're finally finished winterizing it. Ordinarily, he stores those pots either under the deck, or behind the sheds, snugly covering them with a tarpaulin. Under the circumstances, we considered it more efficient to store them closer to where they stood, since come spring they'll be returned to the same stations they occupy during the summer months.

An hour after my husband came back into the house, his self-assigned task completed, the ground was being thickly covered with snow, the heavy droplets of mixed rain and snow transformed to thick clusters of snow to match the drop in temperature. This was one of those serendipitous 'just-in-time' events that gives one a glow of satisfaction in the wake of a job well done -- under rather compromised circumstances.

Only moderately blustery today but cold and damp in the woods. The trails underfoot are now unfailingly slippery each day with the muck that results from partially frozen earth no longer absorbing all the rain that falls, and they're also the product of mild freeze-and-thaw cycles when night-time temperatures dip to freezing and day-time is moderated by the effect of the sun. They will likely remain that way until frost completely penetrates the forest floor and snow begins to fall.

We're still hovering during the day above freezing and we've been enjoying the relatively mild, mid-November days, a bit out of the ordinary.

The landscape is no longer as colourfully picturesque as it was a few weeks ago. Wild wind days and the rains that sometimes accompanied them finished off the foliage colourfully clinging to trees. It has all dropped from the host branches and the deciduous trees are now appropriately winter-naked. The forest looks far less dense than it always presents, the trails seem wider, the sky more visible, the inevitable effect of a foliage-reduced canopy.

As a natural refuge from the hurry and bustle of urban life our good fortune to have easy access to the forested ravine running through the community in which we live adds monumentally to the quality of the life we lead. Not only our physical exposure to the beauty of a woodland so close by our homes, but the clean quality of the air we breathe, scrubbed clean by the near proximity of the trees, absorbing carbon dioxide, emitting oxygen.

For those wishing to sit awhile and contemplate the scene before them, there remain a few benches that haven't been completely destroyed by neighbourhood teen-age vandals. The godfairy of Bilberry Creek Ravine whose human identity we have not become acquainted with as yet, has put up a map of the ravine in juxtaposition to the various streets and entries surrounding it. He's the altruistic soul who created on his own initiative, set up and manages the pails for the collection of dog excrement.

The local beavers continue day-by-day extracting their due from the poplars closely adjacent the creek in an amazing demonstration of their fabled work ethic. It is somewhat nervous-making to see hard beside the trail, a mature poplar that has been gnawed in a circular manner around a tree, but not yet completely through. One has the urge to speed past its presence, lest a stray gust of wind stimulate it to fall....with unfortunate consequences.

It's an elderly single-shot 22 rifle, with nostalgic properties accounting for the sole reason it is still in our possession. We had gone together when we were 16 or 17 to a sports shop somewhere in Toronto and chosen it. It cannot have cost us more than $25 at the time, as an impulse purchase. My husband was an urbanite, but a country boy, a farmer at heart. He lived in Toronto, was born in Toronto and that's where we met, but he spent his growing years as a young boy and a teen during summer months helping out on his uncle's farm. Fond memories, he has aplenty.

And he used often to take me with him later in his older teen years to visit with his aunt and uncle, long after their own four sons had departed the farm for urban life. He showed me what would happen if you put a penny on the train track that ran through a part of the farm. I watched as he fished occasionally from the bank of the Little Humber river. We were chased once through a pasture by a small, enraged group of cows, unhappy at our presence and clambered over a fence in record time. His uncle scoffed at the very notion that his cows would chase anyone.

The old farmhouse was large, many-roomed, with a handy summer kitchen containing a second cook stove where it was cooler during the summer months to prepare meals for a large family. A large rambling place for two people getting on in years, I thought. We are now far older than they were, back then.

My husband's aunt loved indoor plants and she gave me cuttings to grow myself at a time in my life when I was just beginning to become interested myself.  My husband recalls his uncle with great fondness. His uncle dabbled in a kind of horticulture himself, grafting branches from a pear tree onto an apple tree and finding some success in the process.

The rifle in our possession? Odd, that, other than to say there was nothing, no facet of life or its many objects that didn't attract his attention. So we had this rifle and he taught me how to shoot, and we would indulge, off in one field or another, in target shooting. Inanimate objects. Once, my husband aimed at a bird sitting on a fence post and to his dismay and chagrin, hit it dead on. That dead-on hit resulting in a limp little form ensured we would never again take out that rifle. But it has remained in our possession over the past sixty years and more.

We had a reminder from the RCMP that our license was up for renewal. All firearms had to be registered and licensed as an initiative taken by a previous Liberal-led government after the dreadful mass shooting that took place at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989 when a demented misogynist shot to death 14 women enrolled there, and wounded fourteen other students in a horrific 20-minute rampage of deadly intent.

So this morning, I endured the rigmarole of going on line to renew our registration.

I was paused briefly during my circuit in the ravine with Jackie and Jillie yesterday to speak with a friend we'd come across, discussing a range of things from the progress my husband is making in his post-surgical recovery to the topic that is most on everyone's mind going through the forest, the harvesting in accessible-key areas to where the beavers have located themselves, of poplar trees, now littering the forest floor, their stumps bare white cones appealing to the heavens above.

And then I noticed far down below where we stood on a promontory, someone was struggling with an old discarded car tire, to encase it in a large orange plastic bag whoever it was had obviously brought along for that express purpose. The presence of the tire was a sensibility-irritant and had been for many years, although it was so deep in the ravine I would wonder on occasion whether others trekking the trail high above would ever have noticed it. This person, whoever it was, obviously had and it irritated him sufficiently to energize himself to remove it.

My companion and I watched as the man struggled up the hillside, dragging the bagged tire behind him and as he neared us I recognized him as a man whom we would occasionally come across striding along the trails, wordless, his wife walking dutifully behind him. She was friendly and courteous whereas he seemed to be detached from the presence of anyone he might come across. Over a period of time he relented sufficiently to  acknowledge our presence on passing one another.

On this occasion I lauded him, and thanked him for his efforts to restore that portion of the ravine to its proper, unencumbered state. He isn't the only one who does this kind of thing. There was a giant of a man with a booming voice, middle-aged like this one, who on occasion would arrive with an empty backpack and finally exit the ravine with a bulging backpack, going to extreme lengths to haul himself into difficult-to-access parts of the ravine to retrieve plastic bottles, paper coffee cups, candy wrappers, and even on occasion inappropriately offensively-discarded car tires, bicycle parts, and once a mattress. We haven't seen him in ages.

There was a friendly dog-loving couple whom we'd known for decades to walk through the ravine trails with their beloved dogs. When the dogs died of old age, they never committed themselves to other canine companions, but did for a while walk through the trails, picking up dog offal they'd come across, especially in the spring, to cleanse the trails of the result of dogs not wanting to venture into the deep snowpack to evacuate.

Another man has dedicated himself latterly to encouraging trail walkers with dogs to pick up that detritus, and deposit it into covered pails he thoughtfully nailed onto trees close to the many trail entrances off neighbourhood streets. He empties the pails on a regular basis, replacing the plastic bag that sits within them, as well as providing small bags out of the goodness of his nature-loving heart for people who may have forgotten to bring their own with them. 😇

What a marathon day yesterday turned out to be. And just coincidentally one of the most beautiful days we've yet enjoyed in November, uncharacteristically mild, wide blue sky (only to cloud over in the evening to obscure that super moon), and little wind to speak of. A perfect weather day. So alluring, in fact, that my husband was inspired to get out on the deck with his tools to take apart the glider for storage in the larger of our two garden sheds.

This was not an enterprise I found pleasing, to say the least, since it represents a physical task that requires physical strength and he has to conserve whatever strength he has post-surgery until he has returned to normalcy. Which for him, as an 80-year-old, normally active, energetic man is, I admit, out of the ordinary itself. He's coming along really well, and I don't want him to suffer any set-backs, yet he assures me he is very aware and isn't pushing himself. So I broke off from cleaning the house temporarily so I could partner with him sliding the more heavy, larger parts down the deck stairs and into the shed, and carried the lighter, small parts over to the shed for him to shift into place where he wanted them. As for the very heavy cast-iron table we normally keep on the deck, we rolled it over to and down the stairs (via its round top) and from there shifted it onto a dolly for storage under the deck.

And then he did a few light things outside, enjoying the weather alongside Jackie and Jillie and I resumed cleaning the house which is comprised of dusting furniture and whatever sits on it, dry-mopping the hardwood floors, vacuuming the rugs, then washing all the floors from bathrooms to laundry room, foyer, kitchen and breakfast room, scrubbing down on my knees, which I find the easiest and quickest way.

Then I changed into street clothing, put light coats on the terrible twins and took them out to the ravine for an hour's ramble in the forest. On our return, my husband and I went out for our now-regular circuit on the streets around the block to ensure that he gets the exercise he needs in his recovery phase. It's often a bit of a social occasion as others, out and about, mostly elderly like us, tend to greet us and to stop and talk. It's surprising, really how many people a street over and behind ours, we're familiar with. Then I stayed outside for as long as it would take to finish raking up the leaves on our lawn from our large magnolia tree, our mulberry and our crab trees.

Rajinder stopped by on her way home from work to ask after my husband, as she does so frequently. First, we hug, then we talk, and she does her utmost to communicate her feelings and support, as someone who the year before went through the very same ordeal with her husband. That family is a source of huge reassurance of the sweetness and decency that people can aspire to. They are our especial and trusted friends and neighbours.

Then into the kitchen to prepare a rock Cornish hen for dinner, roasting it good and crisp, and a noodle pudding to go alongside it comprised of fine egg-noodles, eggs, pepper, olive oil and raisins. French-cutting green beans and cutting up plums, adding grapes and clementines did nicely for a fresh fruit dessert. And I was almost finished for the day.

Last fall I was knocked sideways with disbelief when a young, self-obsessed man with great ambitions to achieve power, with a penchant for expressing admiration for the tactics and techniques of world leaders on the right to bring their specific ideas of order and good governance to bear fruit, a man seemingly in arrested juvenile behaviour mode addicted to taking selfies and sharing his beaming countenance with admirers, took office as Prime Minister of Canada.

On taking office his primary focus was to erase most of the signature legislation of the alternate political party of weight in Canada, carried through by the previous government by a man whose intelligence and capability to administer both the internal and external affairs of the country was beyond dispute. Justin Trudeau took office when Liberal-left politics took their turn trumping the efficacy of a thoughtful and principled predecessor and Canada saw no more of Stephen Harper.

My granddaughter, a senior then at a rural high school not far from the nation's capital, was thrilled when Justin Trudeau as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada before becoming prime minister, visited her school and amiably smiled his way through photographs with adoring teen-age girls. She has moved on since then, now a third-year university student, identifying with the ideological program of Hillary Clinton's Democratic nemesis, Bernie Sanders.

A year after my profound disbelief at the ascendancy to the prime ministership of Justin Trudeau, a personality-reverse of Trudeau but sharing that inbred obsessive narcissism, with even grimmer characteristics of outspoken stupidity and ignorance of global affairs, let alone the laws and complex issues of his own country turned politics in America inside out to become the first elected bona-fide ignoramus -- vastly outdistancing Jimmy Carter -- to become president of the United States of America.

My personal incredulity at this circus barker's success in convincing enough disgruntled Americans, mostly white but not entirely, middle-class and blue-collar men and women despite his proudly credentialed misogyny and bigoted racism to vote him into office, is boundless.

We were more than a little surprised to discover, by the time we arrived downtown that there was nowhere to park close to Byward Market. Traffic was dense and slow-moving. We just managed to coup a parking space that someone in an SUV had just vacated. Some jerks in a vehicle that had been behind us weren't thrilled we had taken the only available parking spot, young thugs who shouted something nasty at us as my husband manoeuvred into the spot.

There was a considerable distance to be walked left to us, and yesterday wasn't like today with mild temperatures and a wide open blue sky. So cold you needed winter clothing, exacerbated immeasurably by a stiff wind bellowing down downtown corridors. We were headed to our favourite Market shops, a magazine shop and a cheese shop. Street traffic was dense, people having to turn sideways to make room for others walking in the opposite direction.

Likely some of those we passed were from out-of-town, tourists are always in evidence irrespective of the time of year, and others may have arrived for the weekend early on Friday to be spectators and participants-in-mourning-memory for Remembrance Day. After picking up the art magazines my husband is devoted to, we went around to the cheese shop we most frequently favour. Few street vendors had opened their stalls on this miserable weather day. But there was a scattering; vendors selling maple syrup, fruits and vegetables and in a nod to the upcoming season, holiday wreaths for Christmas decoration.

The drive from our home is always pleasant, along the eastern Parkway, with views of the Ottawa River, Quebec across the river, the Governor General's residence, 24 Sussex Drive, a number of government offshoots like the brutalist-architectured Foreign Affairs and the traditional architecture of the National Research Council, in contrast to the eastern-flavoured Islamic-inspired architecture of Middle East state embassies.

NRC

Foreign Affairs

Embassy of Saudi Arabia

Entrance to Governor General's estate

Jillie left, Jackie right

When I saw that giant shelf fungus growing at the foot of a small tree trunk, a tree that never quite made it to maturity, I must have shouted out to myself, or to Jackie and Jillie, 'Holy Toledo!'. A man walking a middling-sized black retriever whom I'd never before seen in the ravine, stopped to raise an enquiring eyebrow as he saw me bulling my way through the thicket off the trail to get closer to the mass as raspberry canes did their utmost to give me pause. "A tree fungus", I explained. "A mushroom?" he responded, walking on. Likely shaking his head at the silly antics of some people who think a 'mushroom' is something special.

Well, this fungus was special. It was especially large, a double-cone with lovely markings, sitting at the base of a tree that never amounted to much, poor thing, and I felt I wanted to take some photographs. Jackie and Jillie cooperated as they always do, when I stop. They stopped too, patiently waiting for me to finish whatever foolishness I was engaged in, before we could all go on to continue our ravine hike through the forest on a blustery, cold late fall day.

Earlier in the day I had assembled my puppy-grooming equipment and set to with the idea of bringing some tidy order to their habitual scruffy appearance. So I was feeling pretty good about that. Not that, wearing their fall sweaters, you could tell how well turned out they were, this day. I say 'this day' because it seems to me that they only look well groomed on the day of the snipping exercise and perhaps a few days following it, and then they take on their usual raffish appearance.

Jackie

 

The high winds we've been experiencing the last few days have completely banished all the foliage from the deciduous trees. They were colourful for so long and now all one sees of them is forlornly naked trunks and branches, all their foliage descended to the forest floor, and while still bright with colour, already beginning to turn a nondescript muddy colour as they begin to desiccate and form part of the mass of humus that enriches the environment.

As for the harvesting by the local beavers of the poplars, it's quite clear by now that no one single beaver could produce that Herculean effect that we see day-to-day; more poplars down of all sizes, well gnawed through, their slighter branches, twigs and dried foliage hauled off, the trunks either caught semi-horizontally by other trees supporting them, or lying on the forest floor, some of their bark gnawed away, but for the most part, they will be left to rot. Admittedly not throughout the full extent of the forest, but certainly in some areas that are beginning to expand; the beavers are on a roll.

If this isn't raw nature at work, what is it then?

Perhaps it's fitting that nature too seems to be steeped in thought and memory in sad recall of the dreadful world wars when nations succumbed to the anarchy of reason in favour of imposing another world order on populations that suffered immense privation and loss of life. Today is miserably cold, overcast, with a nasty, blustering wind suitable for the recall of grief and disbelief.

By the time the First World War ended it had been declared the war to end all wars. By the time the Second World War came to an end, countless more human life was pointlessly wasted.

One could argue, and correctly that the Allied powers managed to subdue the Axis fascist  plan to dominate the world with the German Third Reich at the pinnacle of that vicious power. There are those few still living who recall the poison gas and trench warfare that wasted innumerable lives when common men were ordered by their political masters to answer the call to 'duty' on behalf of the mother- or fatherland as the case might be.

Now, we set aside a day on the annual calendar so that the sacrifice of so many who never returned from the battlefield can be solemnly recalled. We honour them for their courage and endurance in facing the dreadful hell on Earth that becomes a theatre of war. For their determination despite their fear, to respond to the threat of annihilation of freedom and liberty. In mourning them we declare that the last war would indeed be the last war.

Yet the deadly malevolence that lies deep in the hearts of some will never be stilled, and there will always rise within the ranks of the powerful those with that strange chemical attraction we name social charisma, to broadcast their ideology of hate, distrust, resentment and violence and in the process attract followers sufficient to sweep nations into belligerence and sabre-rattling.

This is the story of humankind throughout the ages. People of good will are present in abundance, but it seems the good will they exude cannot match the strain of ill will that can be attributed to an evil lurking deep within, struggling to escape the bonds of civilization.

There are adequate grounds for pessimism in a world where science has achieved much of value and alternately much that adds to the strength of the threats that humankind musters against itself. With the proliferation of nuclear devices with the capacity to inflict death and destruction beyond imagination, we entered a more lethal phase in human history simply awaiting opportunity.

Opportunity is there in abundance, robbing those whose imaginations run rampant, of peace of mind.