Ditch Doc

Given ten or twelve hours on the Greydog, godlike Achilles himself would look like a washed up halfwit skid.

I’ve always been a bit bemused by people who get slighted in traffic and then make it a priority to cut off the offending driver. I do understand the desire for revenge, I’ve just never felt like cutting the guy off would be satisfactory retribution. For that, you’d have to follow him home, wait for him to go inside, and torch his car. Failing that, I don’t mind giving him the extra car length.

Victor Vincent: “Yeah, that should be one of the corporal works of mercy. Feed the hungry, drive the drunk…”

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.

Ok, so the word “Ambulance” is printed backwards so you can read it in your rear-view mirror. Good idea. But then again, what was the last time you saw a red and white cube van tearing up behind you, lit up like a Christmas tree and leaning on the air horn, and thought “Golly, I wonder what that is? Oh! An ambulance! Good thing it was printed backwards!”

Doctors up here are a different breed. It seems like half of them are South African. “Why do they all come here, though?” I once had the naivete to ask. “Because they get killed there.” Oh. Right. In Fort Nelson, there are usually two doctors in town at a time, one of whom is often a nomadic locum doctor on the latest stop on the small town medical milk run. Between the two of them, they run the walk in clinic and the hospital, from maternity ward to laughingly-so-called ICU. They even do some veterinary duties on occasion, as the nearest vet is 200 miles south. Our current locum, who’s usually a farmer, was telling me some tales of impromptu animal medicine when he came out with this one:
“The only anaesthetic I have on the farm is my gun.”
[Contemplative, farmerlike pause]
“It’s pretty effective though.”

How many things in life are more satisfying than spotting the ghost car as it pulls in behind you, dropping to the limit, waiting patiently for ten minutes, and watching him nab somebody coming the other way?

Dominic Collucci: “You know, why are we always talking about ‘the highest things’? I’m tired of philosophy. I’m gonna be a mysosophist. No wait… a gymnomysosophist!” [Translation: naked hater of wisdom]

One of the truest statements I have ever heard came from Mike Mathie, on the way back from one of those blessed nights at the Pit with Jeanne, Boomer, and Bernadette. We had just capped the night by singing our lungs out to whatever Ferrier hymns we could patch together from our memories, and at four o’clock, we were the last stragglers returning down the short stretch of silent highway to a very sleepy campus. Almost everyone would have been in bed at least two hours ago, and RD shouldn’t wake up for another hour, so we talked easily in the dark. As the lamp post at the gate came into sight, we squinted painfully and there was a pause in the conversation, into which Mike sagely posited:

“It’s at this time of night that you have personal animosity toward light sources.”