Modern Commerce

We are not big restaurant goers; it’s a generational thing, I’d guess. But, I do tend to feel—as my parents felt about Chinese restaurants—that having a local Thai restaurant is another one of life’s inalienable rights: as in, ‘life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and a good, local Thai restaurant.’ Canadians may not feel that way so much because they may have had fewer Thais come to Canada after the Vietnam experience than came to the U.S. Or maybe Canadians just don’t feel they have an inalienable right to Thai food, given their more moderate national self-concept.

In any case, here on the southern end of the Sunshine Coast, we had no Thai restaurant until relatively recently. We had been meaning to go there for several months, but just didn’t get around to it. But the other night, after a long day of gardening and wall building, we decided to eat Thai. The restaurant is billed as ‘eat-in/take-out,’ and I thought a Thursday night shouldn’t be too busy, so off we went about 7 p.m. for a little Pad Thai. (Part of my relationship with Thai food is to try everybody’s Pad Thai; I eat other things, too, but that’s the starter for a Thai restaurant. If they can’t make great Pad Thai, they aren’t a Thai restaurant, in my view. I have eaten in Thailand, and it was the best food I’ve ever had while traveling, for day-in, day-out, indoor/street stall food. Which is to say, I really like Thai food, and I’m not much at cooking it myself.)

We pull up to a large parking lot with 3 cars that I thought might belong to the staff. Very slow night? Or a very bad sign about the Pad Thai? We enter though a door that has a big OPEN sign, only to find that the ‘eat-in’ option is actually a hallway with three tiny tables overlooking the parking lot. Each table is decorated with three chairs, and nobody is sitting at any of them. At the counter, a 20-something dude—the only person in sight other than us--looked at us as if we were going to ask him to help us change a tire.

‘Uh, uh….take out?’ he finally offered.
‘No, we'll eat-in,’ I said.
‘Well, the thing is,’ his turn, ‘we’re actually kind of busy tonight.’
‘Really?’ my turn, ‘You actually don’t look very busy.’
‘Well, yeah, but we’re busy with the take out. We have to make a lot of take-out tonight. The thing is, because of the take-out we couldn’t get any food for you until, oh, maybe 8:15’ (an hour from that moment).
‘The sign says OPEN, but you are actually not open, is that right?’
‘No, we’re open, but we’re really busy, so we can’t get food served.’
‘You’re a restaurant that can’t serve food, right?’
‘No, we’re just really busy, but yeah, we can’t serve any food right now.’
‘Is it like this all the time?’ inquired Ed.
‘Not usually, not usually, no, no’ stuttered the counter guy.
‘Look,’ I began a whole new topic for this guy. ‘We’re not going to stay and look at your parking lot for an hour so we can eat Thai food, OK?’
‘Right,’ said the counter guy.

So we drove off for some ordinary fish and chips plus a portabello burger (this is the Sunshine Coast, after all). I doubt that the Pad Thai was worth eating. I even doubt that they were cooking take-out back in the kitchen. But I really don’t want to know what they were actually doing.

Enhancing Canadian Healthcare

When you come to a second country late in life, there’s always more to learn and everything you think you know is probably not quite right. Canadian healthcare, for example. I spent a couple of decades working in U.S. healthcare (as an academic, not as a clinician), and the comparison point was often Canadian healthcare, so I came to Canada thinking I understood it pretty well. And the irony of the fact that I couldn’t actually emigrate to Canada was because of Canadian healthcare was definitely not lost on me. But I’ve used Canadian health services and I know a few doctors and nurses who are Canadian practitioners so I thought I sort of understood it as well as a foreigner is likely to.

Nevertheless, I was surprised to receive a brochure in my Canadian mailbox the other day urging me to buy a healthcare insurance policy from something called Pacific Blue Cross. It pointed out that ‘the time to obtain health coverage is before unexpected medical expenses occur,’ and further inquired: ‘Shouldn’t we be more concerned with our health?’ I have no easy answer for that latter question, but I was surprised to think that Canadians needed to buy health insurance, other than for travel to other countries, which the Canadians I know routinely do buy. In fact, other than travel medical insurance, I was surprised to find that anybody was even selling healthcare insurance to Canadians.

But they are because, although Canadians all receive healthcare through their provincial medical plans, the provincial program (as Pacific Blue Cross points out on its web site) covers only basic things like physician visits and hospital care. Only? Basic? Aha, I said to myself. That’s what happens when you have national health insurance. People start longing for other kinds of things to be paid for by the unknown someone elses that constitute insurance pools.

What Pacific Blue Cross is offering is coverage for those ‘other ‘ things, including ‘essential and enhanced dental care.’ Enhanced dental care would be what? Apparently non-essential dental care. Including ‘vision care, physiotherapy and massage therapy, chiropractor, accidental death or dismemberment, hearing aids, hospital daily cash, emergency ambulance, prescription drugs, and out of country travel insurance.'’ Now, the standard healthcare system covers some of those things in the course of ‘medical necessity.’ For example, annual vision exams are covered for older people, but not for everybody else because there is no evidence that doing so would improve healthcare outcomes and thus they are not medically necessary.

Other things, I wasn’t so clear about, so I inquired of Canadians. It turns out that one problem they see in their healthcare is that the provincial plans actually differ as to what is covered beyond those basic doctor visits and hospital stays. Thus, I am told, an emergency ambulance might cost $50 in one province and $100 in another, but if you are in a province other than your own residence when you need an ambulance, it might cost you instead $500 (the solution to this, of course is either enhanced insurance or staying home). Some provinces may cover some kinds of physiotherapy, others may not. Prescription drugs are cheaper than in the U.S., but Canadians still pay for them, whatever their cost, and they can be very expensive in some cases. (In fact, around 2/3 of Pacific Blue Cross’ payout is for prescription drugs.) Dental care is not part of national health care at all. Further, if you are covered at one level by one province and you move to another province, your coverage changes. Finally, people whose participation in national healthcare is ensured through their employer may have different levels of coverage beyond the basic program, depending upon what the employer is offering as the enhancement package from an insurer like Pacific Blue Cross. By contrast, people who obtain their participation in national healthcare individually because they are not employed receive only the ‘basic level,’ for which they pay a relatively small quarterly payment. One person I asked who received care in this way couldn’t remember how much she paid quarterly, so it can’t be too much.

So that’s today’s education for me on Canadian healthcare. The ‘hospital daily cash’ I’m still not clear on (although Ed refers to it as ‘hospital walking around money,’ in tribute to the U.S. political season), and the ‘accidental death or dismemberment’ as a function of healthcare services entirely escapes me. At least I am pretty certain that if one is accidentally dead or dismembered, it is definitely too late to ‘be more concerned with [one’s] health.’

Get a Yurt!

Today, I went up the Sunshine Coast to visit an acquaintance who has set up a new business venture that involves half a dozen yurts and the hopes of a lot of people moving in and out of her establishment. I heard her describe the project a year or so ago when it was very much in the planning stage, but this is the first time I have seen it actually in the flesh, so to speak. I’d heard of yurts before she told me what she was planning, but I hadn’t heard of (or seen) them in the sense she was speaking of them. Yurts with Mongolian residents in various desert areas of Mongolia is what I would have had in mind. Obviously, she had some other idea.

What she and her husband have created are the housing and plans for a fibre arts studio that also provides workshops and gallery exhibitions. The next job is to get the people to come for both and they have made a very impressive start with gallery shows and workshops of many sorts planned for many months ahead. The yurts are stunning. Well, from the outside, they look kind of like what you’d see in Mongolia, I suppose, but on the inside, the space is quite lovely. Three of the yurts are 28-feet in diameter (615 square feet each): one a studio where she does her own work, one a gallery-exhibition space, and one a workshop space. All have electricity, radiantly-heated floors, light domes and windows, beautiful curved walls that feel good. The workshop has water. Two smaller bathroom-yurts are included, plus a 20-foot office and maybe another yurt whose purpose I’ve lost track of. All very nicely carried off. I can only wish them well.

This seems to be one of the things some people can do in this world in which one career finishes before retirement and old age actually start. People have these dreams of becoming vintners, or running a bed-and-breakfast or an art gallery or whatever it is that can help them, I think, to believe once again that work is not only an honest activity but one that can be fully and personally rewarding beyond issues of money, but only if one is largely independent of bosses, bureaucracies, corporations, and the like.

We live in the age of globalization, they’re always telling us, but I think we live more and more in the age of unknown forces that create conditions that drive us all at least a little crazy. Think of Jessica Yellin in the news today saying that the executives in the news media made it clear that the reporters were not to challenge the Bush administration’s war in Iraq back in 2002 and 2003. No, she says, in her second assay at this story. They didn’t say it directly; it was just obvious from their attitude, from their behavior.

We are all of us way too much controlled by these odd forces from above and without who want something of us without saying it exactly: want us to go shopping, want us to go on vacation, want us to just let them do whatever they are doing—in essence, want us to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Point Roberts and the Sunshine Coast are both, to varying degrees, replete with people who are hoping for a different kind of life than the one they had before they got here. Putting up a yurt is a very nice start.

Fixing Fixable Things

This could be an installment of ‘How to Fix Things,’ except somebody else would have to write it. I don’t know how to fix much of anything that isn’t made either of edible things or of some kind of fiber/fabric. When I was growing up, the fix-it department was manned by the guys in the family, and the dad taught the sons what to do, and the sons grew up and worked construction in the summers, and then after high school went to work building or fixing things or maybe went to engineering school to learn how to fix more complex things.

Nowadays, however, that kind of education seems to have gone by the way. You might have had the foresight to have married an engineer or a dad-educated fixer, but more and more, nobody seems to know how to fix anything. (If you have access to a recently educated engineer, of course, they’re good with computers.) Fortunately, our household has a resident fixing person (both things and computers) and today he has been working on replacing the log retaining wall, which has as a matter of course in the wet Northwest pretty much rotted out over the past two decades. What interested me most about this is that, after he dug a trench and laid a carefully-leveled gravel base for the new cement blocks, he disappeared to the local equipment rental place to rent a gravel compactor. Who even knew there was such a thing as a gravel compactor to be rented? Or that gravel couldn’t pretty much compact itself. It’s a small, vacuum cleaner-like (in looks--bur probably only to me) device that vibrates a lot to move itself along and makes a lot of noise and, presumably, compacts a storm up underneath itself.

The next thing you know, there’ll be a new wall there. But what are we going to do in this world where that kind of knowledge is rapidly disappearing in many households? Point Roberts was noticeably filled with people who knew how to fix and build things around the house when we first moved there, but the many new and younger people who have recently moved in may be less handy in that respect as a matter of generational change.

A friend who lives in a real town told me about her roofer’s story: business was going so well that he had a whole crew of roofers, rather than just him and a couple of guys; then he got a second crew of roofers, and a third; and then, after that, he expanded again by getting a crew of handymen. People who need their roofs fixed also need a lot of other things fixed, it turns out. Imagine that: a business that sends out all-purpose, household handymen to respond to household needs. Awhile back, Point Roberts got its first house cleaning company, and now the person who began that is starting an elder home-care service. Maybe next she could organize roving crews of handymen with gravel compactors at their beck and call!

Volunteer Rules

My daughter is a volunteer Girl Scout Troop leader. She says that the G.S. Council doesn’t have a lot of rules for the volunteers, but the one they really impress upon them is that they are NEVER to talk to the press. If something happens, let the Girl Scout Council’s media person talk to the press. Seems like an interesting rule, but its importance was made apparent to me last night when I was alerted to the fact that there was an article about the Point Roberts Community Council in the Bellingham Herald.

The Herald is the daily paper in Bellingham, the seat of Whatcom County, the county that houses Point Roberts and administers most of such governance as we get. Well, a little publicity never hurt anybody, right? Except, the front-page (on the Net, anyway) article focused on the idea that Point Roberts is very distressed by the nature of its relationship to the county and the residents are talking about seceding from the county, the state, the world, maybe, and that the Community Council is a venue for discussing this, maybe making it happen. The article was accompanied, at the time I read it, by 26 comments, most of which felt that selling us to Canada would be the best thing that could happen to Whatcom County and that we were a community of whiners and foreigners, so who cared what we thought or what happened to us.

Ah, I thought, that article is definitely not accurate and certainly not helpful. And it was even more not helpful that the only two people from Point Roberts who had been interviewed for the story were people involved in the formation of the Community Council, with the vague implication that they were speaking on behalf of the Council and endorsing secession. If only the Point Roberts Community Council were as smart as the Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Girl Scouts Council we’d have had a rule that prohibited any of us from talking to the press.

Perhaps we should tell the Herald that the only act the P.R. Community Council has so far set in motion is to redesign, rebuild, and landscape the Community Events sign. Surely not the act of a lot of secessionist hotheads? Or maybe that’s where hotheads do start if they don’t have Fort Sumter to work with? I’m invoking the rule for myself: no volunteers speaking to the press on behalf of the Community Council. But there's a lot of talking among ourselves about the article: unhappily, it was, last night, the #1 'most emailed article' in the Herald.

Connecting Threads

The picture is of 1600 yards of hand-dyed Tencel embroidery thread, work that has occupied me for the past couple of days. Absolutely shimmery! Now, to other work.

The radio is filled today with talk of war and peace, of dead soldiers and remembrance, it being Memorial Day and all that. Memorial Day belongs first of all to the Civil War, a war in which the state of Washington definitely did not participate as a state. It was organized as a territory in the 1850’s, but was not admitted to the United States until 1889. I think, because that is typical of most of the western states, the Civil War has very little purchase here. I know that in the South, for many people, it’s not forgotten because it’s not over. But for many of us out here, it never exactly even started, at least once they and we got here.

My maternal great-grandfather left his Illinois home as a 14-year-old in 1862 and joined the Union Army. He ended up with little glory, I suspect, in Andersonville Prison which, obviously, he managed to survive, a testament to the strength of youth. After the war, he moved west, to Utah, where he found a happier career as a copper miner and, eventually as the mayor of Park City, Utah. My great- grandmother’s Virginia-born father fought for the South and at the end of the war, he and his family moved to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, where he worked as a freighter. One of the grandchildren of this Southern soldier and this Northern soldier was my mother, and I guess the Civil War ended for them there, if it hadn’t actually ended a lot sooner by their decision to move West.

The West is where you went to get away from the problems of the East and the problems of farming in the Mid-West. The West is where you went to get away, period. So here we all are, out here, away, but with no further West to go to now, and back in the middle of some new Civil War, although we might perhaps better think of it as the Uncivil War. The Internet permits and even encourages a lot of incivility. It’s better than guns, though. Nevertheless, it’s hard to be generous in a period in which the coin of the realm seems to be who is patriotic enough, who stands in the right position for the national anthem, whose hands are where for the Pledge of Allegiance with its deist demand, whose lapel sports which pin. In a time when we cannot seem to find little discussion of or even a modicum of agreement about what constitutes the national interest, it’s hard to think well of the country, or at least of the country’s people. Nobody argues that earmarks, or farm subsidies for wealthy farmers who aren’t farming anymore are in the national interest, at least.

Oh, well, better to think today of all the war dead in all those endless wars, and of the thousands (some 300+ thousand already) of injured military men and women in our current wars. Sorry for their (and our) troubles, as my Irish-born great-grandfather’s family (the parents of the Andersonville survivor) would have said, and sorry for a lot else besides.

Barely There

This morning, Ed set out to dismantle the decaying logs that make up the retaining wall in our front yard in order to replace them with a more permanent kind of retaining wall (that would be concrete blocks), while I took to the dye pots to turn hundreds of yards of tencel thread into variegated embroidery thread. Tencel is made from wood, like rayon, and has a wonderful sheen that really shows up beautifully on fabric, but I’ve never found a commercial source for it so am obliged to dye it myself, a fairly labor intensive activity. By three, we were ready for a coffee break with fresh cheese bread stuffed with ham. Sitting on our front porch on a day that had all the markings of early summer, I could not but think, ‘This Is the Life!’

Then, out of the corner of my eye, about 10 feet away but behind a bush, I saw a black dog coming out from under the carport. Once it got past the bush, I realized I was looking not at a dog but at a mid-sized bear, not as tall as me but outweighing me significantly. He was ambling along at a casual pace coming out to the driveway. He had the teeny eyes, that long bear-jaw grin, and a ratty patch on his left hind quarters reminiscent of a moulting buffalo. Clearly, this was last year’s abandoned young bear, now grown to late adolescent size.

‘Ed, there’s a bear.”
‘Where’s a bear?’
‘Just to your right.’

At about that moment, both Ed and the bear became acutely aware of one another. My first thought was, ‘Oh, dear; I am eating a ham sandwich, a sandwich that the bear is going to want.’ The bear’s first thought was apparently not about the ham sandwich but more about his sudden realization that two people lurking on their front porch were watching him, and he altered his pace from the shambling walk I had first seen to a much more sprightly trot as he turned left and proceeded to head for the open fields, but directly in front of us: maybe 15 feet away. Then he moved into a full bear run as he got past us and into and past the open field, and thence to the woods. Ed went after him but saw him no more.

We don’t see them very often, but when we do, I am always afraid first thing. I know that more people are injured by deer than by black bears, but I’m never afraid of the deer that pass by me as closely as did the bear. I know that the bear are more afraid of me than I am of them. But still, reason takes a back seat to the fear of bears. If Walt Disney had made a movie in the 1940’s about bears that was as heart-wrenching as Bambi was, maybe I’d feel differently. Instead, I grew up near Yellowstone National Park and each spring heard both my father’s and the park rangers’ endless lectures about how dangerous bears are. The head has a tough job when the heart has been reached, I guess.

This bear’s mother was killed a year or so ago, and he has been raising himself. I’m glad to see that he has learned to be afraid of us, as other neighbors had been concerned that we was too easy around people, spending too much time on house decks. Too easy around people, for a bear, means capture and removal or, more likely, death. He was at least getting out of our way once he heard us, even if he just walked past our kitchen door first. Good Bear!