Ditch Doc

My good friend GP, one of the three crazy medics of Fort Nelson, happens to be the son of Trapper Ray, the local legend who used to run a trap line near Liard River, and once mounted a vigorous campaign to save the fur spiders, an entirely fictional local species that nonetheless garnered much concerned support from tourists to the Northern Rockies. There were once fur spider crossing signs on the highway, I have myself seen a “Save the Fur Spiders” fridge magnet, and legend has it that a proposed hydro dam was left unbuilt so as not to intrude on their habitat. Anyway, as you might have suspected, GP has a number of excellent stories from his previous life in the North, and I thought this one, flushed out by a discussion of the imminent closing of the Cache Creek landfill, was worth publishing:
“Yeah, there actually used to be a landfill near where I lived, but they closed it because it attracted too many bears. Basically, we’d just back the pickup in, throw out the garbage, and try to leave before the bears figured out we were there. And then sometimes, there would be two in the back of the truck, going through the garbage before we even got out.”

Trying to drive with the driving lights aimed this ridiculously low is like trying to run with a five foot rope tied from your nose to your ankles.

When we got to the scene of the MVA this morning, we saw that the pickup involved had jumped off the road just before a low bridge, flown eighty nearly horizontal feet into the frozen creek bed, and stopped in about four. He hit so hard that his transmission dip stick was launched most of the way out of its holder, with enough momentum left over to bend itself ninety degrees on the inside of the hood.

An exerpt from yesterday’s traffic report for the Northern Rockies:
“…sanding in progress, and watch out for buffalo on the highway from kilometre 800 to the Liard River.”

Yesterday, GP and I were waiting for a helicopter that was late coming out of the bush, lazily drinking coffee and flicking through the many possible flash patterns on our new dash strobe to pass the time.
Ditch: “Nah, I don’t like that one.” [Pushes button]
GP: “That one’s kind of lame.” [Pushes button]
Ditch: “How about this one?”
GP: [Ponders] “I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem to scream ‘GET THE F*** OUT OF MY WAY!’ does it?”
[Thoughtful pause]
Ditch: [Reaches for button]

A few hours later, we were shaken from profound slumber to head 150 km. down the main oil-patch ice road for a car accident. The ice has been thawing for three days, so the road, usually even and grippy, was a buckled disaster of potholes. Road channel radio chatter is often entertaining to listen to, but here’s the best exchange I’ve ever heard:
Trucker #1 [Driving towards me]: “Hey, emergency vehicle, you wanna kill your driving lights?”
Ditch: [Kills brights and mulls over clever rebuttal.]
Trucker #2 [Voice from above]: “Why don’t you have some respect? Just pull over and get out of their f***in’ way, and stop worrying about their driving lights! Those guys might have to save your life some day.”

Yesterday, we flew into the tiny native middle-of-nowhere village of Fort Ware. To get there, you head out over the rockies and straight on til morning, or until this huge green valley appears out of nowhere in the middle of outlandishly snowy mountains. To lose altitude quickly enough to land, you have to dip into the smaller Kwadacha valley and ride it in. The first thing you see when you get out of the plane is the graveyard, where the dead are buried above ground in little houses. We met the snowmobile with the patient at the end of the strip, and got back in the air. On the way to Prince George, I learned a few things about Fort Ware life:

“So what do people do for a living in Fort Ware?”
“Hunting, bingo, camping, going to school, working.”

I asked about food:
“I do not like to eat beaver. I do not like to eat rabbit. But groundhog, moose, elk, deer, I like.”

I asked when a significant family event had happened last summer:
[Shrugging] “Oh I’m not sure. It was when the river was high… so I’m not sure.”

“What lake is that?”
“I forget the name. It’s a manmade lake. There’s a village under it somewhere. My grandparents used to dogsled along it to get supplies.” [Worth mentioning that this lake is about 150 km. long]

I also found out that most of the people in Fort Ware speak at least a little Sikanni, and there are a few elders who don’t speak anything else.

Although you can shoot heroin and cocaine at Vancouver’s “Safe injection site,” there’s a sign on the wall banning smoking. After all, cigarettes are bad for you.

A firefighter taking a break from fighting a blazing fire, taking off his face mask, and lighting up a smoke.

I always think that when one of the warnings on a movie is “adult situations,” the movie should feature scenes of people repairing cars, waking up in the middle of the night to comfort crying babies, and filling out tax returns.

And another thing: the UN, Planned Parenthood and any other child-reducing agency you want to name all defend their actions by saying that if we keep having too many kids, we’ll increase world poverty. Our defense is often “No we won’t. There’s plenty of wealth in the world, it’s just misdistributed.” True, at least for the time being. But here’s another one, perhaps a more fundamental statement of our position: “Maybe someday increased population will make the average human being poorer. Maybe a lot poorer. But human life makes it worthwhile to live in poverty. We’re supposed to lay down our lives for our friends, so we’d better be willing to give up food, shelter, and clothing for the lives of our children.”