I love story telling. Not just mine, all story telling. It is now what it it has always been, a way of passing on our oral histories, valued more perhaps in ancient times than now simply because now we can write down our stories. But I think there is something very different between reading a story and listening to that same story, something that can bring the story to life in a way that the written word can never do. It is the human voice, the instrument of our humanity, the sounds we have used to communicate with one another since before birth. There is nothing more compelling to us as human beings than the sound of a human voice.

Even when I wrote this I was not as mindful as I am now about how wonderful it is to be able to remember Stories from Afar. Even then, and I was 71 at the time, I paid little heed to the inevitable toll getting older takes. Now though after a message or two from the Darkside, I am keenly aware that time is running on my ability to remember and to tell my stories. Of course, they are not important stories, they are just my stories, little nuggets from a lifetime of living. I hope that in the listening they offer some pleasure, some amusement and some insight to my place in time, the path I trod and who I am to you be that as a parent, grandparent, a friend or a stranger.

I wrote this two years ago and I’ve decided to tell this story now. In your busy insatiable world it is quite long but allow yourself these few minutes, shut everything else out and listen to a Stories from Afar.

They were lived in the 1970’s.

In the summers of my second and third years at UVic I worked for the Forest Service surveying BC’s vast timber inventory. By the end of my second summer I was the senior team member so made most of the decisions about campsite and location. Our first order of business would be to set our long copper radio antenna as high up a tree as we could and then find a safe place for our supply of food, usually pulled high up a tree in heavy canvas cases. We had been dropped on the snow line and could see Howe Sound, thousands of feet below. We were as isolated as I have ever been and on our own, no matter what.

And of course ‘what’ happened. On one particular camp it rained from the moment we were dropped off to the moment we were picked up ten days later. I have never been that wet since in my entire life and we were predictably miserable, hiking off into the rain clouds each day following that day’s compass reading to that day’s survey site. I had the compass and my junior had to pull a metal cord called a ‘chain’ up the mountain ahead of me on my reading, crossing over whatever obstacle was in the path. It would take several hours to get to each site, about an hour to do the survey and several hours to return to camp. I’m sure you can imagine our state of mind. On one of those days upon our return we found our camp completely disturbed and the worst of it, our food bags had been pulled down and torn apart by bears. We had pounds of butter in cans but they had been punctured through with their teeth and they’d sucked out the delicious contents. We had been taught to make as much noise as we could hiking in the woods and I think that must have disturbed the creatures because we had enough left to manage the remaining six days of this camp. But I was unnerved and my junior was scared to death.

I tried to assure him that it was a one off and they wouldn’t be back, knowing full well that they would of course be back. I was reading ‘Thirteen Flags’ at the time, a novel about a Russian wolf hunter who had protected his campsites with red ribbons which he would tie all around the camp. Well, if there was one thing I had, it was red ribbon, a whole case of it. That is what we were using to mark the trees we surveyed. So that afternoon before bed, we encircled our campsite with red ribbon and to make doubly certain we would be alerted to any intrusion, I hung metal pots and pans from the tape. We were good.

Actually we were good until we weren’t good. It rained again that night and we crawled into our sleeping bags and fell asleep. Sometime in the wee hours our early warning pans system jolted us awake. Now you need to see the picture. Two young men, bolt upright in a two man pup tent, rain teeming down, pots clanging, the unmistakable grunting of a bear and the even more unmistakable pounding of our hearts. I had never seen a man’s eyes that big before. My poor junior was beside himself but let’s get real here, so was I.

Some teams carried weapons for just this situation but I had always refused to, although I did have a phosphorus gun, a non lethal weapon which I had always thought would scare off any animals, in a pinch. It was shaped like a small long flashlight and you had to load a phosphorus bullet into it by screwing in the round. You try doing that in pitch black, rain teeming down, your heart racing and a bear grunting within feet of you.

Oh and I was naked on account of nothing was dry enough to wear to bed. Now you have the full picture. This is what they would call ‘being in a pinch”.

“Okay, okay, I’m going to fire this phosphorus gun at him. So I need you to unzip the flap and I’ll run out.”. I was hell bent on taking control of the situation, not having a clue on how to do that.

What the hell was I thinking? I gathered myself, got into the launch position, signalled my junior and ran out of the tent into the darkness, as naked as the day I was born, apparently ready to meet my fate and I tripped on the material riser at the entrance to our tent. I flew through the air and landed with a thud. I was wide eyed I’m sure, my eyes as big as saucers, searching for some shape in the darkness, shadows dancing from our flashlights on the trees.

BANG! I fired the gun and a phosphorus bullet put on an incredible display, the bright purple ricocheting off tree trunks like some sort of pinball light show. I caught a glimpse of the bear on his haunches, no doubt wondering, ‘What the hell is this manner of naked nonsense’ or some such thing. Whatever the beast actually thought, he decided this was all a little weird for his liking and took off into the deep forest.

We were plucked off that mountain a few days later and returned to our base camp with yet another great story for the dinner table.

Later that same summer our crew was sent up to Fort Nelson in the northeast of BC, to do some survey work. To survey what, I’ll never understand. That inhospitable part of the country was only good for sixty year old 20’ Black Spruce, and mosquitoes and horse flies big enough to pick a man up and cart him off for dinner. And it was good for oil and gas which is of course why we were really there. If there is a hell on earth, this part of our province is a candidate.

Late in the summer we had been dropped for yet another ten day camp. As usual the first order of business was to set up communication, food security and the latrine, downwind and some distance away, for obvious reasons. Trouble with that part of the province is that it is mostly muskeg. There is no digging a latrine in the conventional sense so we had to make do with what we could find. We dropped a couple of Black Spruce, stripped off the bark and fashioned a seat, all the better to provide basic comfort during our ablutions. My father, the soldier, would have been proud of me.

So inevitably I found myself at our latrine, sitting on the seat we had made. In my hands a novel by Joanne Greenberg “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden” it was about a sixteen year old schizophrenic, a story of adjustment in an upside down world. I had found mine. And of course I had to wait some minutes, unable to conjure up my offerings on demand in that setting. It was a long few minutes.

Now sitting still for anything in that part of our country is a problem at the best of times. The mosquitoes and horse flies are relentless and insatiable and huge! Of course I had my mosquito netting covering my entire body, although it seems abundantly clear in the telling that at least some parts of my body would have to be exposed, given the nature of the business at hand. And of course, clever little beasts such as they are, mosquitoes and horse flies found my exposed parts. I felt a weight alighting on the tip of my (with apologies I go forward, it is simply an essential part of the narrative), on the tip of my penis. Now when it comes to one’s penis as most men will attest, much of our reaction to it is uncomplicated and instinctive. And this moment would prove to be no exception. Without thinking, I used my free hand to SMACK! the offending horsefly before it had a chance to feast on the head of my cowering member.

That concussive action was followed by a loud shriek of the sort that signals some sort of pain. I had missed the horsefly and hit my ‘self’ as hard as I could. It was excruciating. It was metaphorically an unforgettable exclamation mark on one of the most unforgettable summers of my life.

And of course we did return with our most important baggage, a bounty of stories that would last a lifetime and a yarn or two I could spin when the occasion arose. Tell your own stories, write them down, store them away. One day with good fortune you will be seventy-three and have gifted yourself some Stories from Afar. Then they will be yours to tell.

Thank you for listening.