Canada Trip, 2026
At the end of June, I drove up to see a friend from my undergraduate days.
Donna lives in Queensborough, which has a population of about a hundred, depending on the relatives visiting. A century ago it was a bustling logging village with a railroad stop nearby. Nowadays, it's officially a hamlet. People are moving back in, buying up the old churches and the hotel and turning them into homes. It's keeping the town (okay, hamlet) alive. It is also, undeniably, changing it.
For anything resembling shopping, the residents of Queensborough have to look to Madoc, a thriving metropolis of over a thousand. It boasts two grocery stores, one of which is a package store. The drive takes twenty minutes and it's lovely. But we made the trip in June. I imagine it gets less charming in January.
Officially, Queensborough and Madoc are both unincorporated so they are part of the municipality of Tweed, population six thousand. Tweed has a full-featured downtown with banks, restaurants, and galleries. During our week there, Donna took us to a music festival in Tweed.
More on that later. Because, in truth, we'd come on a vacation with the intent to do chores.
Diane had a plan. Donna had a gazebo kit. Between them, they had worked out how I would help assemble a tasteful outdoor structure, put up a mosquito blanket around it, and sip iced tea while teleworking via my laptop on a sunny day. In reality, the mosquitoes to showed up to the construction site like it was a scheduled event and I was late. They buzzed with impatience. My wife took one look at the situation — me with a half-dozen scout-mosquitoes conducting test raids — and she suggested, not unkindly, that I go be useful somewhere else.
When I popped back indoors covered with the blood of the bloodsuckers, Donna remarked, "They must really like you."
I dressed in layers even though it was summer. Long pants. Long socks. I slathered on an insect repellent lotion. I stepped out to the foyer to spray myself with an odious spray. You would think, by then, I had to be thoroughly repellent. But I was back inside the foyer a minute later, spraying spots I'd missed on my clothes.
“They really, really like you,” said Donna.
Finally, I was safe enough to work on the woodpile. Donna's firewood had arrived two weeks before, about a cord of it. The supplier had dumped it in front of the shed with the confidence of knowing he had not been paid to stack it. Instead, that service was supplied by me. Fortunately, wood does not care about your feelings or your mosquito bites, You just move it, log by log, until the pile in front of the shed becomes a stack inside the shed.
When I had about a third of the woodpile relocated, I went inside to deal with one of the showers. A downstairs shower-bath had developed a problem that can be summarized as "it's in several pieces, but they used to be one piece." Something in the manufacturing had gone sideways and parts of the fixture had popped apart. The threads of them looked like they were never really meant to go together in the first place. But that wouldn't matter because Donna had stocked her house supplies with marine-grade epoxy. It would give us the adhesive, waterproof strength we needed.
The fix didn’t take long, which was a pity. I enjoy the the epoxy-making process. Apparently, I'm one of those people who doesn't get globs of glue or paint where they don't belong. Those types of jobs tend to go smoothly for me - until someone distracts me for a microsecond.
“Let’s go hit a bucket of balls at a golf course," Donna suggested. She knew I had been asked to play in a charity tournament for work. And I had never played.
#
Donna had researched golf courses, including one in Tweed. In the trunk of our car, I'd brought the bag of clubs I got for $40. (Customs agents don't regard pieces of golf equipment as weapons, no matter how bad you are with them.) My first step, aside from learning how the golf bag worked, was figuring out how to rent a bucket of golf balls. The teenager behind the desk thought we were clueless and, because we were, I told him to give me a golf lesson.
"Uh, you need a golf pro," he said.
"Right, I've got a lesson time reserved. That's for two days from now. I'm hitting golf balls today, right now. You just rented me the bucket. Tell me what to do."
"Okay." He took thirty seconds to tell us the main secrets of golf, most of them involving how to stand, which I thought I already knew (but as it turns out, not quite). Basically: take a baseball or karate stance, slightly bent at the knees. Square up your alignment with the ball, parallel to the target. Use a baseball grip, overlapping grip, or interlocking grip. (Overlapping felt right for me.) If you're right handed, bring your left arm back, like in a baseball swing, but keep it straight at the elbow.
Swing and hit the ball. Success! Maybe.
This left out a lot of important pointers but I found the basics to be useful enough. I could hit drives - of a sort - using any of my cheap clubs. Most of the shots went forward, too, which is basically where they should go. Diane and Donna could make shots move forward, too, and they were also beginning golfers.
Special sports note: The three of us originally thought we would go kayaking and take nature hikes between house chores. But I am, as mentioned, a mosquito magnet. The Queensborough area has a lot of biting insects, especially along the hiking trails. In contrast, golf courses take care to eliminate the most annoying insects. So golf ended up being a good answer to the question of how I could spend time outdoors.
At the driving range, I succeeded (if that's the right word) in slicing a ball so far that it cleared the hundred-foot-high shielding net that protected the golfers on the course from idiots on the driving range. Fortunately, there was no one on the course when my ball sailed over. Same with the other three times. Man, I was looking forward to lessons from a golf pro. But first we had to do more house chores. And Donna had arranged for us to play actual golf with a friend of hers, who, we hoped, could be persuaded to give me lessons. Or at least not point and laugh.
No comments:
Post a Comment