Strong winds, Angry sea

So October arrived yesterday very gently. The warm afternoon and a glass calm harbour made for some nice relaxing fishing. It really wasn't my day. I only caught a few small smelt and 2 scrawny mackerel. But they cooked up nicely with island tomato-cucumber salad, farm fresh carrots and potatoes, and quahogs and oysters courtesy of Manny Gallant.

Manny is a soulmate fisherman and friend, perhaps business partner to be of mine. He pines away for his pretty wife. He opines that he is illiterate as he has been in a boat since age 12 to help with the family fishing business, and never went to school. I explain that I find it rather charming. This soulful man is healthy and prosperous. He glows with what I now identify as "Island Health". They have that here. Fishing. Can't read or write much. Oysters. Never been off island. Mackerel. Neat little farm. Artist wife. Never been in a plane. Inbreeding. Fresh quahogs. Big tomatoes. Healthy kids. 4 wheel drive. Divorce. Blizzards. Strong island moonshine. Hurricanes. I am in total complete envy. West Virginia on the Sea.

My soft tired educated body. I will miss this special place. Its rotund incomprehensible females. The shine. The bootleggers. Lobster at 4 bucks a pound. My wife.

I was sure that the last time I caught smelt I smelled something familiar-from a long ago dream-time. Yesterday I caught the scent when I landed the angry smelt-it was the smell of thyme and cucumber, that I had smelled long ago. The arctic grayling I caught in Alaska yarens ago smelled that way. Hence the scientific name of grayling, Thymallus. The arctic grayling is a sport fish somewhat like a trout. It has a huge very beautiful dorsal fin, almost like a sail. They are silvery gray and have tiny black and blue spots, as I recall. The fish used to range into the Northern US, but was extinguished long ago along with most good things during deforestation, pollution, greed, and mortal sin.

I have heard there are grayling stocked in the Arizona rim mountain lakes. To me, since I have spent a lot of the prior 15 years at those lakes fishing (for trout), I am unsure about any Arizona grayling. Maybe Montana or the U.P. of Michigan, but I can't confirm it. But in Alaska, grayling, like eagles are or were then (my last Alaska trip was in 1993), everywhere.

On the Internet I looked up smelt as the odour and even taste of these fish was grayling. Indeed they are closely related fish. The grayling has two distinct memories I will share here. When I took Rhonda to Alaska to go camping before we got married we fished grayling. I think I caught a bunch in a ditch by a culvert along the Denali Highway. It was probably 1985.

I took out our trusty little stove and cooked grayling along the road. Rhonda and I had fish together there, it was great. It is a very fond memory of my first wife before the dark times.

On the first trip to Alaska with Shel, wife 2, I fished grayling again in nearly the same spot. Actually, Shel only went to Alaska with me once. She was truly a child bride-barely 20 at the time of our trip.

I caught a truly impressive grayling, the largest I had seen. I wanted to take a photo of it. I asked Shel to hold the writhing fish up so I could take the shot. She, terrified of live fish to this day, refused. So you will have to take my word that that fish was 25 inches if it was a foot-thats a big grayling. (Alaskans consider grayling trash fish, pronouncing the name with a long A sound, ahhhhh, instead of the vowel-arctic graahhling.)

Here today as October begins the leaves are turning and falling very quickly. Very hard rain and hurricane force winds today made my evening walk difficult. The harbour was a froth of mud-red swells and shiny whitecaps, wind-whipped so salt can be tasted strong in the air in my living room.

I saw Cindy, but I didn't tell her I am moving out yet. The decision came painfully, slowly, but today I started to clean a bit and pack. I really have little to take south-just what I arrived here with 3 1/2 years ago.

Today 2 years ago I had been living on PEI 9 months. Shel asked me on this date back then, in 2006, to move out. It was then that the 6 month imbroglio with EIC and the Gustafson's began in Ottsville. It was really a wonderful experience and I had real quality time with my kids-even on the holidays. I know now that is why all that happened-it had little to do with business.

I will state for the record that both my Child-Centered Assessment and my E-Petz patents are great ideas. But I will have to do it myself or with family, without greed.

My pal Germain is back off to North Lake in search of Donnie Rose and Russian fish plant girls in Souris. I for one am about complete in my unpaid consulting services to Mr. Fougere. In fact, my friend Manny Gallant stopped by today. He has concerns about the business idea.

I told him I was glad to help, but that I am probably leaving, and that like the Gustafson's the chance of our colleagues (Fougere) business being a success were slim. Not because the idea is bad, but because of him.

Tomorrow I look forward to a calmer day and perhaps some fishing, and a call to the kids.

I guess I didn't record here that Shel stopped by Monday. She had said that she wanted to organize things. She still has no place and is living with Kathleen. There is much that both of us will have to leave behind-not the least of which are our hearts.

She was pretty angry at first. The issue of money and what bills are due being paramount. We settled that and she calmed a bit, looking stunning with bright blue-green eyes blaring and an adorable short-curly blond hairstyle-my Shel, my child-wife, who can't bear children. Tragedy within a tragedy.

She ate some of my cucumber salad and muffins. I had made cold coffee for her with creamer and sugar as she likes earlier in the day. I had to substitute honey for sugar, and I don't think she liked it so much. I thought it pretty good.

We actually parted on good terms. The one thing that sticks with me during her tirade was that she "wants her husband back". As if I am so different. so far, so much a distant memory. Oh save but one last chance to be a couple-she feels the loss too, but now moves into a new world.

Her world will not be the blissful days of lounging by our pool under the palms, with the smell of ancho chilies drifting on the wind. It will be 6 days a week of work without me.

It seems as Shel as an immigrant here has ended up a bit like my beautiful Russian fish plant girlfriends in Souris. 6 days a week of work and little money, in shared housing, praying for some escape after buying into the dream to live and work in Canada. To some of the girls, if not all I met, Kaliningrad is sounding better and better-to go home. That's a scary determination.

Maybe someday Shel will miss the palms, the chilies, and a real home too. She is part Russian, after all.

Up West and Real Work

So since I met the "Doctor" of organic landscaping Germain Fougere from the Magdalen Islands, I have been involved in a new and fascinating business venture. Involved originally only to set-up a web site and be a general business and entrepreneurship consultant, I am now actually getting my soft hands dirty.

We take a similar trip in the big Ford Diesel truck of "Fougere Organic Landscaping" about twice a week. Again today we went to the "Old Man's", a very pious anglophone gentleman named Loren near Richmond. Loren has clear bright intelligent blue eyes and is nearly deaf. Fougere has been storing equipment and supplies there. We loaded the trailer with what I imagine was close to a ton of plants, rocks, gardening stuff, shells, and one very heavy ( about 600 pounds) cast iron crusher. It had been a while since I worked that hard and I felt alive again. Loren lives in a homemade hut that is sinking into the boggy soil. It is filled with interesting but valueless things accumulated over his long life. He gave me two religious books, one called"I Need A Miracle" by Pastor Benny Hinn. I think he knew exactly what I needed. He had preached as a young man in Appalachia. I was somewhat envious, perhaps the smallest of my sins to date.

He carves amazing images of geese from huge pieces of wood and carefully paints them as to life. His wood stove is rusting through the floor. He has no insurance as his home is not "insurable". His phone was cut off. The company putting the power lines from Summerside to North Cape's new windfarm is coming across Loren's fallow sad land. He hopes they will pay a fair price for the easement. Maybe 6000 dollars. Perhaps this 85 year old man will not have to freeze alone in the cold this long and soon to arrive sub-arctic winter. His son distant and somewhat of an ass I am told, away in the "real world" and business.

It was a great clear sunny day. The sea was beautiful up west along the "lighthouse trail", route 11. We stopped as always to see Fougere's and now my friend Danielle. We need a motor and PTO ( Power Take Off) to run the lobster shell crushing machine. They talked Acadian, which I am starting to get a bit of, thanks little to my long forgotten high school Parisian French.

We then stopped at Manny's place to drop the trailer we will unload tomorrow. Manny is a soulful, sorrowful outwardly cheerful man, an oyster fisherman who built his own solid boat and at 55 could probably pick me up at 180 pounds like a feather. It was a great cold night, the milky way bright along with the planet Jupiter embedded in it like a bright white luminous gem. Manny lives on a neat little farm near his oyster beds in the Northumberland Strait. The farm is very neat and cozy and Manny is one of those people you instantly knew if you had to leave a thousand dollars cash with him to hold, it would be there when you return. He gets a few crates of oysters each day after 10 hours of back breaking work raking the bottom of the sea in churning swells under blistering sun or freezing winds.

Manny gets about 50 dollars a crate for his oysters. The shells are infested with shell worms this year. They cut tiny perfect holes in the shells but don't harm the delicious meat inside. Despite that, only one oyster buyer on the island will buy Manny's "ugly" oysters. Oddly enough its the oyster wholesaler across the way from George and Brenda Henderson's cottage in Freeland. That is where Shel and I stayed long ago when we were first coming here each summer. Long ago, so it seems, when I picked the wild mushrooms in George's little pine forest and steamed them with edible jewels from the sea (to the locals terror and amazement). I had learned, being self-taught, mushroom collecting in the high pine and aspen mountain forests of Arizona. Also dimming into that past.

He grows nice tomatoes and a few other things in a small garden. He shared tomatoes with us-a real luxury this far north when the incredibly short growing season ends. Manny is finalizing a divorce after 10 years with the artist wife who his feelings for are well concealed but to a fellow sufferer glow in that slight moistening of eye with a glance towards her primitive oils hanging on the old wall, or with a little deepening of the fisherman's sun and wind-worn brow. The artist wife. How well I know.

Manny is quite the artist himself. He crafts beautiful decorative items from driftwood and large, ancient white oyster shells. He built a little gift shop near the road that is quite a nice cottage in its own right, matching the perfect yellow Victorian farmhouse. He cries inside. Artist wife gone and the tourists far and few between. Gone now until summer returns-a truly distant and abstract thought. As goes the artist wife.

I know I'll be sore tomorrow-that's OK. No news from Shel, but I got a nice email from my son. Tomorrow we unload the ton of stuff and I hope my back holds out. Then to the beach for seaweed collection to make the fertilizer product.

You really never know whats around the next corner. I just wish it was spring instead of fall, as winter looms and I have decisions to make about my home and life on PEI. Quite a change in paradigm in a couple weeks. Maybe work therapy is what I need. I am really back in the environmental field in a very physical way. I also obtained oyster shell chemistry data for product labelling. Fougere needs my patent and trademark help too, but that comes later as orders are filled and I create an Internet presence. Its pretty exciting.

I have my desk work, legal work, computer, and even outdoor physical labour in one of the most beautiful places on earth. How about that? Retirement? Maybe, but it beats the button-downs and smog and office politics of the big city, in the "real world".