Five-Pound Weekend

I am just back from another road trip, this one from Chilliwack, BC, up the Cariboo Highway through the Fraser Canyon, to Prince George, BC, a drive of approximately 7.5 hours each way.

I went with a dear friend of mine—Karen (Rustad) Bergman—so that we could attend the celebration of life for a cousin of hers. The cousin, Jim Rustad, was a pillar of the community of Prince George, a city of 100,000 people, he having run a big sawmill and planer mill busines for many years.

Forestry is Prince George’s main industry.

The celebration, however, seemed to have little to do with his having been a notably successful businessman and donor to many good causes, and much more to do with the way he cared about people—employees, friends and relatives—and the rascally high jinks he and his buddies had engaged in over the years.

The story I liked best was about the time he and two friends went on a hunting trip one October. (Here I must say that I heard two versions of this story, each slightly different from the other, sort of like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, so I will retell it as I now remember and envision it.)

These fellows went on the trip, and on the way home to Prince George from somewhere near 100 Mile House, late at night, they grew tired. They decided to park their camper on the side of the road and catch some shut eye. In the middle of the night, one fellow got up and climbed out of the camper, probably to attend to the call of nature, and decided that, since he was awake, he might as well climb into the truck and start the drive home while the others slept.

Since the truck was parked on some sort of rise, he decided just to release the brake, engage the clutch, touch the accelerator (I imagine—country guys know how to do all this stuff), and let the truck roll until the engine caught, so he wouldn’t awaken the others with the normal truck-starting noises.

In the meantime, the hero of the story—Jim, the good man being celebrated at this celebration of life—also climbed out of the camper to attend to his own call of nature. Dressed only in his undershorts, he noticed in the dark that the truck was beginning to roll. As fast as he could, he searched for a big rock to put in front of a tire to prevent the truck from rolling down the hill.

But the truck just rolled faster and faster, and in a moment was driving away.

There was Jim, out on the highway in the middle of an October night, dressed only in his undershorts. At this point, the highway had virtually no traffic. While he waited in the dark, Jim found some pieces of plastic by the roadside and fastened them around his feet because they were getting very cold.

Eventually, a car came along, and Jim, a tall man, stood in the middle of the highway with his arms outstretched to stop it in its tracks.

The car was being driven by a doctor on his way, as fast as he could make it, to an emergency waiting for him at the hospital in Kamloops. The good doctor picked Jim up, and together they raced to Kamloops. Outside the hospital, the doctor dropped Jim off, and he stood there naked except for his undershorts and plastic footwear, trying to figure out how to get to the police station.

Meantime, the fellow driving the truck thought he should stop and see how the others were doing. (For all I know, maybe he himself was answering a call of nature, because one thing about road trips is that they involve regular stops for coffee, gas, stretching your legs, and attending to such matters.) He opened the camper door and looked in. The third fellow was still inside, both he and the driver having thought Jim was with the other one. Now they knew they had lost Jim, so they started back the way they had come, looking for him by the side of the road—or anywhere.

Back at the hospital in Kamloops, a group of nuns came walking by, and a man driving past, seeing this nearly naked desperado near the nuns, stopped his car to see whether help was needed. Jim convinced the man that he was not as crazy as he looked, and the man drove him to the police station. Walking into the police station, Jim was able to convince the police that he was not crazy, and there he settled in to wait.

Back to the hunters: they drove all the way back to where they had originally parked for the night, looking and looking, but not finding Jim anywhere. At this point, they stopped at a roadside establishment and called the police, through whom they re-connected with Jim.

And so the story ended, with no one the worse for wear, but what a tale to tell.

There was a big feast at the celebration of life, and during that portion of the event I was able to have a most interesting conversation with a young man, husband of one of the granddaughters of the man of the hour, interesting not just because he is a very smart and nice young man, but because of what he is doing for work. He has just started a consultancy to educate institutions on how to teach young people, and eventually all of us, to use AI as a useful tool, rather than letting AI colonize our human brains and compromise our thinking ability in a harmful way.

This was my second celebration of life in a matter of a few months. The thing about funerals, or such celebrations, is that they make you think about your own life, and how you should make sure to love your loved ones as fervently as you can, and to live the precious, unique life that is yours as ambitiously as you can. The second thing you begin to understand is just how short an individual human life really is.

On the drive, we saw abandoned sheds and barns along the way, as you do in farming country. We saw one barn with a big tree growing up through the roof. These old sheds and barns outlast us. When you are a child, life seems long, and old people seem very, very old. When you become an old person yourself, however, you realize that time is whizzing by faster all the time, and it won’t be long until you yourself evaporate.

Oh yes—the five-pound weekend. I brought about five new pounds home, mostly nestled in a friendly way around my waist. That’s because I have a policy of throwing caution to the wind at restaurants when I travel. I had eggs Benedict numerous times and ate every last delicious morsel. And other tasty goodies. Chocolate bars.

This week’s menu, back at home, will feature broccoli, cauliflower, tomatoes, carrots, celery, and possibly a whisper of fish.

We stopped in twice—on the way there and on the way home—at an amazing restaurant in 100 Mile House. It is a one-man operation called Eva Ore, where a man named Nathan cooks gourmet meals for a small clientele attracted entirely by word-of-mouth marketing. Nathan has at the very least the moral support of his wife Eva, a poet and translator. Besides Nathan’s mouth-watering Hollandaise sauce, tender poached eggs and perfectly cooked asparagus spears, the restaurant features a playful and evocative décor complete with foreign black-and-white movies from the 1940s playing silently on a big screen. All the meals are served on charming vintage china. Cloth napkins, of course.

On the road we listened to wonderful music and discussed the men, women, and children we have known and certain unexplainably bad decisions we have made.

Oh yes. We stayed at a fancy hotel, thanks to Karen’s largesse, and burst into whoops of laughter when we saw the toilet in our room. It was all kitted out with electric gizmos and elaborate functions so that you could practically give your bum a manicure by pushing the right buttons. We were too afraid to try anything of the sort, but we did enjoy the wonderfully warm toilet seat.

What next.