”Tales From The Underbrush” documents, with occasional hyperbole, the experiences of the artist over a lifetime of interaction with what used to be called nature, now reinvented as the environment for reasons apparently best known by just about everyone in the world excepting the artist-writer. These wilderness interactions have come mainly while working as a geologist, briefly as a forester, but sometimes as just a guy whose principal happiness in life has been derived from being outdoors. Not that life in the wilderness, be it at work or at play has been without pain, discomfort, deprivation and even danger. Fortunately, the passage of time more often then not artfully blots out or at least dims the recollections that wound, substituting instead a recall that if perhaps not substantiating the aging athlete’s jest of “the older I get, the better I was”, at least allows tales to unfold that warm the memory and give substance to the life that experienced them.
The artist proposes to post monthly herein a chapter from his book “Tales From The Underbrush” in the hope that his adventures may be shared and enjoyed by those who might stumble onto this blog. This month’s entry continues the tale.
Pass The Salt
“Preach not to others what they should eat, but eat as becomes you, and be silent”
Epictetus
(Roman slave & Stoic philosopher; 55 AD - 135 AD)
In the bush camps of my youth, in an era that might be deemed as BL (Before Luxuries), there were few such of the kind that are now often available to enlighten the after hours of the modern explorationist, be they such amenities as mixed gender camps, satellite radio and TV, computers, iPods and regular spells of respite in civilization. Instead, in BL, after the days’ traverse was done and evenings spent plotting traverses, recording samples and that singular responsibility of junior geologists, colouring maps, what little residual time and energy left could be spent reading, doing laundry, or perhaps canoeing out onto the lake to fish if you had not had enough flies during the day. The one aspect of camp life however that was essential to one’s physical, but particularly mental well-being, was food.
The ritual of food and feeding could vary considerably in a bush camp, from the relative five star facilities of a mine development drill camp with proper kitchen and dining equipment and facilities, to the slightly lesser four star status of a less established exploration drill camp, the three star exploration or development camp working a relatively restricted geographical area with little if any camp movement, the two star exploration camp often on the move, and finally the lowly one star or less fly camp, most often made up of two men, or in the case of one of them being a junior geologist, a man and a boy, and who for perhaps several weeks, had no cooks but themselves to fend off hunger using limited supplies and primitive facilities after a hard day’s traverse in the bush.
There is the widely held, if anecdotal belief that there must be a ritual of silence at the table when eating in a bush camp. While truthful to a degree, it is not a formal thing but one that relates to the king, and nowadays also queen of the bush camp….The Cook. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the practice of expeditious eating is more the rule than is absolute silence at the table. The long hours endured daily by the cook do not encourage idle chat at meals, conversation that might prolong the process of eating and interfere with the ability of the cook to finish with one meal before getting on with the preparation of the next, or, at the end of the day, to enjoy a brief respite before dawn broke and the daily ritual was repeated. As an aside and of lesser consideration, was the fact that normally one was either too tired to talk at the meal table or just too hungry to waste time with words that interfered with the consumption process. Similarly, while table manners were at best perfunctory, it should not be construed that the diners acted like scavengers quarreling over corpses. Normally, the “Boarding House Reach” was the conventional manner in which to secure an item of food on the table, a practice that could be deemed as considerate instead of interrupting one’s meal-focused colleagues with some request to pass the ketchup. On then other hand, should an item of edible interest be seen to be beyond the Boarding House Reach, then it was acceptable to request that said item be passed along to the interested party. In keeping with the spirit of things however, and in the interests of conserving time, energy, and minimizing interruption and the disturbance of one’s fellow diners, the use of such elocutions as “please” and “thank you” were, while grudgingly acceptable, deemed to be unnecessary, wasteful, and indicative of a status that reeked of “rookie.” Occasionally, well, more than occasionally, well if truth be known, almost invariably, while “pleases” and “thank yous” were dispensed with as unnecessary, there were normally, if somewhat contradictorily, a profusion of other, usually profane adjectives thrown in with table requests that unnecessarily but colourfully embellished the item requested.
It is not that we were unschooled, uncouth, ignorant, mealy mouthed, obscenity-ridden, boorish louts…….at least not all the time. It’s that isolation for long periods of time under less than ideal conditions and in the company of other similarly burdened males, more often than not tends to result in a certain loss of the civility of language and behaviour.
And so it was that in late September 1959 I emerged from my rookie summer in the bush, fly-bitten and with a seemingly permanent set of body wrinkles from the incessant rain, but a wiser man for all that. I had challenged nature and survived. As befitted the immaturity of a boy-man, and notwithstanding the painful shin splints that met my first encounter with the pavements of civilization, I carried a certain swagger as well as a more uncivil tongue than five months earlier.
Going to university, I was not living at home, not because my parents did not want me, but as a nineteen year old I had determined to strike out on my own, and indeed, strike-out was often the operative word. As a typically impoverished student, having left the major portion of my summer’s meager recompense at the bursar’s office and the university book store, I was not above caging a good home-cooked meal when it was offered. It was therefore not long after my return that autumn that I found myself at home, wolfing down prodigious quantities of Mom’s cooking. It was early during the course of that meal that I lost my head.
Firstly, you should know my parents. My father was a stern but good-hearted, hard-working Scot with little education but with a great sense of humour and a rigid code of moral values. My mother had had me quite late in life, so that on the brink of age twenty I was the son of a woman who was approaching elderly status. Mom was a gentle woman of limited education but optimum industry, and a lover of music and theatre. She also was quite deeply religious and had a vocabulary to match. Her exclamations were restricted to ”darn” instead of “damn”; “ye gads” instead of “goddamit” and “oh fudge” instead of “oh f- - -“, although I am sure she was only vaguely aware that the latter term existed. If I had not actually wandered off the path of righteousness but merely lost my way and became a geologist and not a minister or at least a doctor, I suspect was a life-long source of bewilderment and heartache for my mother. With near saintly resolve and determined discretion however, broken only by occasional long sighs whose interpretations were no mystery to me, she was never so imprudent to directly express her disappointment to me.
And so it was that not long after the three of us sat down to dinner that evening, and without looking up, I asked no one in particular to “pass the f- - - - - - salt.” Sensing no perceptible response to the request, I looked up to see the uncomprehending face of my mother, ashen and aghast with shock, her eyes wide as dinner plates. Brain dead and uncomprehending, I prepared to redress my request with the suffix “please” when I caught my father’s look and my blood ran cold, my entire life flashing before my eyes. It was too late to retreat and too far gone for explanation. It only remained for me to nearly bite off my tongue while choking back the repeat request with an abruptness that would put modern disk brakes to shame.
Over the next few months of city living, and despite the university environment, I was gradually weaned back to what passed for a civil tongue and a vocabulary, however repressed, that could survive the tests of etiquette, good social grace, and frequent future invitations to dine at home with my parents. But, like a myth, like an illusion that never took place, like a bad smell that passed without comment, no mention was ever made of the request I had made that fateful evening.
And I never did get the salt!
Copyright © 2008 Ian de W. Semple
