Leaving Directions

Over the past several years I’ve begun writing notes on things around our place. With a permanent marker I’ve been writing words directly onto things – tools, boxes, pails, bins, and buildings. “Outback Homestead Hints,” to make some unknown day in the hazy future proceed a bit better for some future unknown hazy person, i.e., whoever the heck comes along here next. So far I can’t quite see who they might be, despite much squinting and conjuring. Old? Young? Man? Woman? Family? Bureaucrat? (Extended Family of Male and Female Bureaucrats?!)

Will our outback outpost here on the coast of McLeod Bay – alongside Thaidene Nene National Park, half a mile west from the outlet of the Hoarfrost River – morph into some sort of research centre? Or an outfitter’s base camp? Might it become home to a reclusive copy-editor or consultant, who – with nothing more than a high-speed link to the internet – can work from home and make a living at it? Thirty or forty years ago that last bit would have sounded like futuristic navel-gazing, but now (or maybe “for now”), it is well within the realm of reality.

Because for now, the march down the path toward constant and unrelenting connectivity seems to be a juggernaut. Interesting times in the Far North. We were told a while back that Parks Canada intends to install a free-for-all Starlink antenna up on the roof of the former Catling house at Reliance, so that visitors and wayfarers can simply drift past in their boats or canoes or snowmobiles, and oh, you know, download a movie or a book, check e-mail, or get a weather map, before proceeding on their “wilderness” journeys.

And hey, not just the Far North – interesting times everywhere, don’t you think? Are we on a cusp, or are we on the verge? On the brink (of disaster), or the cutting edge (of a new and enlightened era)? Or are we somehow teetering simultaneously on both? Whither these wild, quiet, and empty spaces? Spaces now even wilder, quieter, and emptier than they were 38 years ago when we – all starry-eyed and young and limber – arrived here to start in on what might today be glibly summarized as “our life and times?”

Who knows what the next sixty or eighty years will see, hereabouts? Not I. But I do often wish I could somehow come back to find out. And about all I can say with certainty about that point of history, three-score or four-score years ahead, is that it won’t be a part of my “life and times.”

I am not feeling particularly morose about this. In truth I am feeling fairly jovial and common-sensical about it, most days. The next chapter or two here are the edge of a vast unknown, now heaving into view on the horizon like the odd refracted mirages we get sometimes in late winter, looking south across the bay, when the distant shoreline looms up far higher than it can possibly be. And if there has been one theme in my life, it has been the jolt of energy, fear, and fascination I get as I glimpse the edge of the unknown.

And so, all common-sensical and jovial, I pocket my handy paint-marker. Then, after ten minutes of trial and error fumbling around, I finally hit upon the proper wrench to open the oil-drain plug on the small Champion generator (unpaid endorsement happily given – these little yellow Chinese knockoffs are the cat’s meow and the best bargain around. Sorry, Honda.) I open the plug, drain the oil, replace the plug, pour in 400 millilitres of fresh stuff, and then whip out my red marker and write “10 mm plug, .4 lt oil, change 100 hrs.” on the crankcase.

On the 4-gallon pail of “Boat Soup” home-made stain and weather-proofing, I write:

1: Boiled Linseed 1: Turpentine 1/4: Pine Tar 1/8: Japan Dryer.

On the circular saw, To Change Blade, Find Allen’s Wench! CLOCKWISE TO LOOSEN!

And so on.

It’s kind of fun.

And yeah, you’re welcome.

Whoever you are.