It Begins

The Poop Neareth the Fan
or
Let the Games Begin

Dateline: St. John’s, Newfoundland (that’s in Canada). I went to Signal Hill today, desperately to avoid the MUN campus and its attendant crowds of undergrads and families carrying furniture and musical instruments into the dorms.

Signal Hill is a notably famous site among many such historical structures and localities in St. John’s – known as North America’s oldest city, the first North American city to see the sun rise, the easternmost community in North America, or occasionally sin city (from rural Newfoundlanders). Like many of these historical places, one cannot really talk about Signal Hill without starting at the beginning, which ‘round here usually takes one back to the 1600s if not earlier. I’m way too tired for that. Google ‘Parks Canada’ and ‘Signal Hill’ if ya want a tour.

Suffice it to say that I left Florida, where I lived among long-silenced coastal defense batteries, to live in the Officer’s Quarters of Fort Yellowstone, only find myself once again standing among coastal defense canons with a strategic view of my community. And yet I’ve never been a soldier.

Anyway, walking the hiking trails around the hill gives the observer great views of St. John’s Harbor, the city, the Narrows, the endless horizon of the North Atlantic and more gulls than I thought possible. A walker is also exposed to gale-force blasts of salt-laden air, which are locally termed ‘breezes’.

Being the tail end of the Labor Day holiday (excuse me, Labour Day), I was surrounded by tourists. Still, better that than the activity on campus, resembling as it does a disturbed anthill where the ants wear really big sunglasses and spotless white baseball caps.

Classes start on Wednesday, and it was only with some digging that I was able to determine when one of my classes meets, and where. I had to query students who’d already taken the class, as no such information is posted anywhere, online or otherwise. Sort of an academic oral tradition, I guess.

I don’t know which classes I’m TAing either. Makes it kind of hard to prep, as I see it, but I’m told not to worry. Teaching assistants fall in line after a Lead Lab Instructor and an Assistant Lab Instructor, both of which are professional, union positions. I’m sure you can imagine how important the contributions of grad students are under such circumstances.

Despite the promise of meaningless TAships, it was explained to me that, starting at sunrise on Wednesday, my future is best understood as ‘feeling like you’re running around with your hair on fire’. I’ve precious little hair to burn, but I have been a graduate student for eight months now and it’s probably about time that I actually spend some time in school. Minitab, here I come, ready or not.

Hurricanes? Again?

Given my tenure aboard a precariously thin barrier island situated along Florida’s northern gulf coast, I can honestly say that I’ve weathered my fair share of hurricanes. In those years, I somewhat grudgingly learned that despite the dangers and the inconveniences hurricanes bring, like most things in life, they have their upsides as well.

I recall those powerful tropical storms as the only force which could disturb the Floridian high-pressure Shangri-La – blue, cloudless skies, highs in the 90s (35 C), lows in the 70s (23 C). Indeed, a hurricane rolling in was one of the only things that could thin the crowds of tourists, so adamantly were they determined to be On Vacation. The winds created exciting surf from the usually flat, placid coastal waters of the gulf. Given the endlessly repetitive, admittedly perfect Florida summer days, storms provided some relief from the innocuous, mundane weather sought with fervor by vacationers, beach bums and sun worshipers.

The highly-organized weather systems which so often damaged and sometimes completely obliterated the frail human toeholds on the coast were in fact an ecological process with generally beneficial results for the rest of the gulf’s denizens. True, some sea turtle nests drown, and some nesting shorebirds colonies are flooded when the storm arrives, but the following season those turtles, terns and skimmers return to newly-created habitat, wrested from the grip of coastal plant succession and high-rise condos. Psychological escape from fair-weather boredom and the maintenance of ecological diversity: these things, at least to me, represented the benefits of hurricanes and tropical storms.

The less enjoyable aspects of hurricanes are well documented and innately understood by those who choose to live near the coast. The economic costs of the damage and the invariable post-storm cleanup, the disruption – and tragically – the loss of human lives, the days or weeks without power or roads, the flooding, the fear and worry.

I will likely be spared such serious consequences in my current location, situated on a hunk of ancient rock jutting out into a remote section of cold water in the north Atlantic. However, I have been horrified to find that I won’t be spared one of the more, well, as Lisa might be temped to say, annoying aspects of a hurricane season: incessant media coverage.

The current storm of interest to eastern Canada is named, sadly, Earl. I guess Edwin and Ernie were unavailable. I’ve already been through a hurricane named Earl, which I referred to as ‘the lame storm with the goofy name’.

This new storm called Earl is the subject of hourly updates by the local news agencies. Much like along the US coasts, the objective of the Canadian media is evidently to accurately pinpoint Earl every time he moves more than 12 miles. What is more, they too display every projected track (called ‘spaghetti diagrams’ on CBC; I don’t recall hearing that in the US), overlaid with the general track, various windspeed zones, and satellite photos. The importance of this intense effort is somewhat dampened by what folks like to call the Cone of Uncertainty.

Referring the large swath, at times stretching from the eastern coast of Newfoundland to Jacksonville, Florida, and often colored red to freak everyone out, forecasters admit – every freakin’ hour – that a hurricane may choose to make landfall anywhere in the Cone, contrary to any early predictions.

“Here’s what we know right now, ladies and gentleman, but this projection is 100 hours out and will likely change as time goes on.”

“Folks, you can see the storm right here on the map, and the projected landfall in five days is looking like here, although that will probably change.”

The size and force of the hurricane is always another source of nebulous information:

“Earl’s winds have increased 7 KPH and he is now a Category 4 storm!”

“Windspeeds have fallen by 4 KPH so Earl is now a Category 3.”

“Wait, we’re just received an update and Earl is now a Category 4 . . no, he’s back down to a 3 . . oh, just a moment, he may be a 4 again. Yes!”

I actually heard this morning that he's a '4 and a half'. I have to wonder if there is an albatross out there somewhere laughing about the human preoccupation with difference between 204 and 211 KPH winds.

And so, with a deep, calming, breath, I listen to update after update – and qualifying statements about how uncertain those prediction are – on TV each day. As an experienced storm watcher, though, I know that this is only the pre-game show: as the storm nears landfall, the media can only wait and make repeated guesses bolstered by reports from the Canadian Hurricane Center (I didn’t even know there was such a thing until a few days ago).

But once the hurricane begins battering its way onshore, however, the next phase begins. I can’t be sure about Canada’s media, but in the US it is customary to find the youngest or otherwise lowest-ranked member of the news staff, give them a North Face jacket, a mike, and a similarly undervalued cameraman, and then send them out into the storm. Anyone living in US hurricane country is familiar with the images of soaked, wind- and rain-pelted reporters, a species born in the proverbial shadows of towering eyewalls and swirling stormclouds, which for a brief time become a more frequent sight than disoriented frigate birds and floating cars (by the way, if you’re curious – Gore-Tex doesn’t breath in Florida).

I suppose I’ll just have to wait for landfall to see how the Canadian media handles the sea-land transition of violent low-pressure weather systems, although I don’t suspect it will be that different from the US. I’ll get hell for saying that, but there it is.

The concluding, and often most painful, stage of this process occurs once the storm has pushed inland. After the hurricane loses integrity and organization, the massive amount of moisture present in the storm falls as rain determined to make its way back to the sea as floodwater. The reporters then descend on ruined communities, seeking returning residents and the shock-numbed dumbasses who decided to ‘ride out the storm’. To get the scoop as to how they feel about the destruction of their homes and neighborhoods, you see. Particularly, it seems, they seek out the most thickly-accented, dentally-challenged people for such interviews. Well, Canada ain’t exactly lacking in rednecks, though their health care system promotes better tooth and gum care, so I’ll have to wait and see.

“Well, that’s a &^%*ing game changer,” I said, looking down at the broken trap in my hand.

For her part, Teresa kept her own counsel and remained uncharacteristically quiet as I ranted at the bug-filled darkness outside the cabin. The disgust finally subsided and I sat down at the indoor picnic table that serves as our desk, kitchen and map-reading locale.

“I’ll have to talk to Yolanda (my major professor) about this,” I growled to no one in particular as I scribbled this simple little phrase in my field notebook: ‘situation is worrisome’.

Worrisome, indeed. On the first night of one particular trap set, it was raided by a black bear sow and her widdle COY. That was not unexpected; as most of my friends and everyone else should know, hang some some meat in the woods and bears will eventually show up. I should say that when you’re trying to trap bears, they sometimes refuse to cooperate. Because I was after coyotes, I’m sure this particular ursid felt no compunctions about stomping all around my 6-trap set.

Her arrival, then, was not a big surprise at that point. I was mostly disappointed to lose bait (a tiny little moose calf quarter) in a place where dead animal parts are ridiculously hard to come by. To wit: 700 moose struck by vehicles a year and I can’t even frikking buy dead meat. I got lucky with a sympathetic Parks Canada biologist and a young Conservation Officer – thanks, guys – who took pity on me, allowing me to create a grand total of about 10 hunks of meat (little moose, big moose, and one bear) for the entire summer. Not much to work with, especially with bears stealing it.

Back to the trapping. Given the structure of a bear’s foot, I thought the most that my 3.0 soft-catch foothold traps would do to an adult bear is grab a few toes. The dexterity and strength of an irritated bear would quickly take care of the rest: they’d growl, bite the trap and generally throw a fit, in the process quickly pulling their toes free – they still have three other hands, mind you. This is, in fact, exactly what happened. The toe-catch did so little to bother her that she thoroughly explored the area and found the rest of the satellite baits I’d spread around the site.

I should mention that the possibility of catching a cub was also there, for which I had already arranged a release plan involving two very watchful people, two cans of bear spray and hopefully no more than a bluff charge. Luckily I didn’t mention this to anyone, being later assured that such a plan would have apparently caused a meltdown in university Risk Management circles.

If some yummy critter had stumbled into these traps, I would have reset them. A trap site smelling of hare, rabbit, or some such would have been a gift from heaven. A trap site stinking of angry bear does not promote visits by a wary canid. So I dug the traps out, annoyed and a little amused. Bears 1, TD 0. As big game hunter Robert Muldoon famously said of that lethal and oversized species of Velociraptor in Jurassic Park, she was a clever girl.

I threw the traps in the truck and moved on. It was not until later that I picked up that particular trap, only have the 'butterfly' (a kind of anchor so named for its shape) fall free from the chain. The butterfly and the chain are, of course, what keeps the trap anchored to stakes. These are driven into the ground, the combined effect of this arrangement being that the theoretical trapped coyote is unable to leave. Ideally.

I stared at the trap for a long time. One of the chain links had been broken – instead of forming an O, it now looked more like a C. The stakes and anchor had held while she pulled, but the chain came within a hair’s breadth of completely failing. If luck had not intervened, that sow would have walked away with a trap on her foot.

I remain fairly confident that an adult bear would still get a trap off fairly soon, yanking on the trap until his or her toes popped out. However, any number of other things could happen in the interim: this bear could get shot raiding a cabin, or hit by a car, or just run out in front of some guy on an ATV. In each case, the image presented to the pubic is a bear walking around with a trap on its foot. My trap. That’s not cool.

Upon presenting these ugly scenarios to my major professor, I indicated that I would fall on my dull sword – pack my bags and leave today – rather than have a critter loose out there with one of my traps on it.

To be uncomfortably and abrasively honest, I’ve had more than few dark thoughts about how I sacrificed my career, not a few belongings, all of my savings and much of my life to end up as a foreigner at the edge of the continent, while so many friends seem to have found projects that allow them to work, retain their house, and keep their significant other, the aforementioned boy- or girlfriend feeding the dogs and visiting every few months. That was not meant to be my path; so be it. Things are not any easier for those folks than for me and I suspect that Newfoundland has things to teach me yet. But even with all the sacrifices I’ve made, including those yet to come, a degree just isn’t worth putting an animal through that.

Being much wiser than I and less pre-disposed to self-sacrifice, Yolanda agreed that – with me leading the way – we’ve collectively reached The End of Trapping. The coyotes of the Newfoundland boreal forest have ignored scent lures, visual lures and dug up trail sets. And though I still maintain we could catch ‘em on carcasses, a) I can’t find a carcass to save my life and b) all the meat is moot if the bears get there first.

So with her blessing and guidance, I’ll just have to come up with a new project, that’s all. As a favor, please don’t ask me what that will be, for I have absolutely no ___________________________ ing clue.

Well, there it is. I’ve been here six months. And in less than a month of actual fieldwork, I officially ended our lab’s multi-year and multi-student attempt to catch Newfoundland coyotes in the boreal forest. I'm off to the woods for the next two weeks, but when I get back I think I'll hang up one of those ‘Mission Accomplished’ banners.

Aboot Town

I combined two activities today, sightseeing and geocaching. I’ve done very little touring (unless you count driving around lost in this $%*ing town) since I left Yellowstone; I’ve never tried geocaching at all before.

I broke out the GPS, a street map, and a Google map (generally, experience has shown that if I consult all three I reduce the odds of getting completely lost) and navigated to a geocache which was located at a small monument to the Newfoundland Ranger Force. Before they were assimilated into the RCMP, the NL Rangers served as the law, EMS, wildlife enforcement, firefighters, SAR, relief agents, and truant officers. To the 80% of the island too far away from a comfortable bed to be served by the RNC, rangers were the representatives of a far-away national government (the Republic of Newfoundland). Modeled after the Irish Constabulary, they served the island’s outports and small communities for almost twenty years before confederation. There wasn’t much at the site, except a plaque to the Ranger’s training house, which burned down years ago, and a little geocache next to a running/biking trail.


Geocaching is a niche sport, combining outdoor treasure hunting with GPS technology, because Heaven Forbid (!) anyone should go outside without an electronic device in their hand. Likewise, who would think to look at a tree or examine the ground if there’s no promise of a container full of notes and trinkets? Ever heard of tracks? Hmph.

Despite my old-school grumbles, geocaching has its place – and it does get nerds out of the house; I’ve seen proof. I myself spent at least 30 minutes outside of my truck/campus lab/bedroom. I also should admit that since sources of information about anything other than (a) guided bird-watching tours, (b) snowmobiling trails, (c) snowmobiling trails, (d) guided whale-watching tours or (e) snowmobiling trails are few and far between in Newfoundland, geocaching was how some of my CFA (Come From Away) brethren have discovered little areas of parkland or decent hikes ‘round these parts. Break out the beat-up eTrex and the spare batteries, I guess.

I must be lucky

Probability is a funny thing. We who are not statisticians tend to create perceptions of risk based on our own personal experiences, which is understandable and just as obviously out of whack with reality (‘I’ve never had a car accident, so the likelihood of my having one is low’). Many people drive their cars through frighteningly heavy traffic every day, yet find the risk of bear attack so intimidating that they hike in abject fear during their once-a-year visit to a national park.

I carried a ‘major injury’ health policy during the Montana winters, supposing that the risk of breaking my leg while trying to ski was a moderate to high probability. I was completely oblivious to the probability of contracting a rare disease. Low and behold, I didn’t break my leg (a fact which is probably explained by my flexibility, not my downhill skill), but I did end up with multiple sclerosis.

The odds of being diagnosed are relatively modest, 1 in 1000 by most estimates. I was much more likely to be in a car wreck or contract any number of common cancers. I guess that makes me pretty lucky. In this particular case, my luck was bad, but lucky nonetheless.

I’ve spent the last month carrying my medical records around St. John's in my pack and communicating with people on both sides of the border (neurochem corporations, schools, insurance companies, nurses, doctors, and bureaucrats of all stripe), endlessly explaining my unique case. I’m a non-Canadian temporarily residing in Canada for school. No job, no family, not planning to stay.

I further explain to these folks that I, like everyone here in the Dominion of Canada, have free access to a doctor, hospitalization and surgery. Then comes the tedious discussion of (my) MS: a medical condition which costs thousands of dollars a year but requires no hospitalization or surgery. Being a non-citizen makes me ineligible for the federal and provincial programs which cover medication.

I don't need a doc but I have one; I need medication but I can't get it. By the time I get done explaining this circuitous situation, the other end of the line was often silent for a moment. More than once I’ve had people sputter on for a bit before finally offering to call me back after they’ve consulted with a supervisor.

“This is, well . . . somewhat . . . unusual . . .”

I guess it’s the price I pay to be so lucky. The poor souls in customer assistance who deal with the masses day in and day out were just unprepared for lucky bastards like me.

While I do consider my luck contracting MS to be bad, I have to admit that my luck in terms of condition and progression is pretty good. It’s my theorem that this is what’s confusing people in the medical establishment so much: if I were lying in a hospital, or in a wheelchair, requiring thousands of dollars in care, everyone would understand. If I were a healthy, active person who runs and pumps weights and hikes and bikes, who needs to go to a GP once in a while and get a ‘script for a headache or sinus infection, that would make sense.

The source of confusion for everyone is that I’m a healthy person doing all those healthy things, yet I’m also sick and cost lots of money. So, like I said, I’m pretty lucky: some of it is good, some bad.

Today, I got the word that Teva Neuroscience Inc. approved my request for financial assistance. They will subsidize some of the $10,000+ cost of my medication, putting it within reach of my student insurance. So I can now complete the great circle of modern western medicine: go see a doctor AND afford the meds.

For the last month, I have lost a good bit of sleep and operated every day under the looming possibility that, after all I’ve done to get here, I would have to leave Canada; my post-bacc adventure was over before it even started. Now, even a cynical statistician would say that the probability of that outcome is pretty low.

And the sun in shining in March in St. John's! It seems like my luck is holding.

I hate Facebook

I cannot abide FB. In response to inquires from my friends, Facebook refused to let me write more than three FRIKKING COMPLETE SENTENCES (I was 'using too many words', it complained). So unless folks want updates like 'I'm fine', you'll have to come here. Sorry, but don't blame me - my ever-so-slightly verbose nature is not the problem.

After taking the time to point that out, I'll go on to say that the only news from the Canadian side is that I'm leaving town tomorrow for a week in the sopping wet dog-hair timber referred to as 'the woods' by townies. Tony told me not to bring trekking poles because I'd lose them in the post-logging regrowth and I'll need both hands to push through it. It reminds me of some of those burned areas on the west side/Madison, sections of which hold the distinction as the only terrain ever to bring me to tears. We'll be venturing out from a Parks Canada government cabin to count snowshoe hare tracks, in exchange for laughable compensation (why does this scenario seem oddly familiar . . ?).

Anyhew, don't look for any verbage from me for a spell. I secretly hope I’ll be able to report a soggy lynx sighting upon my return.

I made it

Grant me, O Sacred Heart, a steady hand and watchful eye, that none shall be hurt as I pass by . . .

I officially, profusely and wholeheartedly thank Saint Christopher (the patron saint of travelers) and the dude in Bozeman who steered me to the best set of windshield wipers I’ve ever used. Without those two personages, along with the influence of some of the oddest weather since white people started keeping records, I doubt I could have succeeded in my cross-continent journey. Indeed, if I had known beforehand what kind of country my route was to take me through, particularly the jig through the mountains of New Brunswick which was necessary to skirt the practically roadless region of northern Maine, I would have probably not attempted it.

Despite that promise of snowy and ice, I was instead greeted exclusively with two other elements during the trip: water and mud. I was going to take a picture of my truck at one point because so spattered in mud and slush was it that the vehicle no longer appeared white; I carried a roll of paper towels and a bottle of window cleaner.

Alas, the last two days have been characterized by 100kph drives through spitting cold rain, and so the truck appears clean again.

While my friends in Atlanta and my sister in Dallas had to deal with more snow than has ever been recorded thereabouts, and I arrived in the snowiest, cloudiest, windiest city in the Dominion of Canada without having shifted in 4WD once. Now that I’m here, though, I’m sure I’ll be slipping around town tomorrow.

It has been almost a decade since I packed up my life and drove from Florida to Wyoming. Before that, it was Texas, Oregon and California. I have to admit that the whole frikkin’ process seemed a lot easier back then. But there is no denying that this day marks the widest distribution of my life to date. And that ain’t too bad for a guy who didn’t have a passport until 2007.

On The Road

“Where ya goin’ na, eh?”

“Whoa! You’re a long way, na?”

Loose translation: ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

Polite to a fault but less conscious of personal boundaries, more than a few Canadians have done a double-take at my Montana plates and followed up with questions. When I tell ‘em Newfoundland, I might as well say I’m driving to Mongolia.

Leaving the ol’ GMGM, I plowed through eastern Montana, North Dakota and a confusing amalgam of Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin, slowing only as I approached the world’s friendliest border at Sault Ste. Marie. Trying to get information about the Sault was an experience that I’ll have to parody more in the future. More than half a dozen people in the UP, some within 150 miles of the place, proclaimed that they’d ‘never been that way’ or proclaimed no knowledge of the town. I was waiting for a grizzled old man with an eye patch to step out of the shadows and growl, ‘Aye, fair traveler, there be dragons to the east.’

Given the whispers and wide-eyed gasps, I was prepared to drop off the edge of the earth. Instead, I arrived at a border station staffed by bored CBSA agents (the place was almost completely empty). I successfully convinced a uniformed CBSA kid that, yes, I am actually a 39 year-old American going to school in a region of Canada about which he’s probably heard only vague rumors. I then spent a few shamelessly relaxed days in the care of a friend from days past. Tina and her husband Paul fed me, showed me the local sights in the Sault and generally helped me ignore the huge, overwhelming risk that I’m engaged in.

I headed out from the Sault through Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City. Ottawa and Montreal were, to this small-town rube, intimidatingly large cities while Quebec City was about the same size as Austin (500,000) when I lived there back in the day. It also probably didn’t help that my only familiarity with Ottawa was seeing Mac Hudson fly over its skyline in the Guardian suit (if you’ve never heard of John Byrne or Alpha Flight, just skip that reference). By Monday the 7th, I was out of Quebec and I could once again read highway signage.

I’ll pass through New Brunswick and Nova Scotia on Tuesday. Once I get to Sydney, NS, I’ll leave terra firma for the rock (via a 6-hour ride aboard a superferry). After a few additional days of driving, totaling 8 or 9 days, I should arrive in St. John’s. Not bad time for covering a distance measuring 45% of the planet’s diameter.

In conclusion, then, I have traveled through some of the least populated areas in the United Sates and some of the most populated areas in the Dominion of Canada. And it wasn’t all that easy to tell the difference.

Farewell 2010

And so we arrive once again at the point where I bid farewell to the NPS and Yellowstone. Travis has referred to this as my second annual going away. While there were some great experiences this summer, many things in the GYE have not changed for me (see my Farewell 2008 entry if you’re so inclined).

The summer of 2009 was . . . complicated. Given the impossibility of coherent explanation, I’ll simply say that I learned a lot about unexpected topics and surprisingly little about the subjects in which I‘d planned to immerse myself.

I was able to do things which, had I done them regularly in these past nine years, might have given me a different perspective on Yellowstone. Working for the affable Gunther, I squeezed out a few adventures and visited a few places in this park that not many people see. That ain’t bad for the last summer of my 30s.

The summer of 2009 was hard on my friends; much harder on some than I realized at the time. The winter has been hard on my family: deaths, Alzheimer’s, cancer. My friends and family have one big, fat, ugly thing in common this year: I wasn’t there for them.

I was considering my upcoming move, thinking that I would be so far away from everyone as to become irrelevant. As I passed for the last time (for a while at least) under the watchful, objective gaze of the Beartooths, I wonder if that’s already happened.

To say that I regret that possibility would be a colossal understatement. I’ve though a lot about the reasons, and come to the conclusion that the ‘why’ doesn’t really matter. I will either be forgiven or I won’t. I find that I have nothing in my heart but fervent hope that all those people who I care about will flourish in the days to come. I’d even go so far as to direct them to live long and prosper – but Jenny Jones would never let me live that one down.

Now then. Rumors are rampant, as if I would expect anything else from the YCR. Allow me to lay it down for those interested in the facts.

Yes, I did get into graduate school. No, I did not get into UM (Missoula) because I’m not smart enough. Well, really, I’m not the right kind of smart. I blow the top off the standardized testing charts in terms of verbal skills, something I was honestly surprised to learn is freakishly rare. It’s also spectacularly useless, especially in science. A mild, frustrating learning disability in the quantitative realm led many to doubt my fitness for higher education.

Despite all that, I’m headed off to school in Canada. And not just any whitebread school in British Columbia or Alberta, either – I’ll be attending Memorial University. MUN is located on the island of Newfoundland and is billed as the largest university in Atlantic Canada. Because of the absurd cost of a) Uhauling to Canada, b) shipping to Canada, and c) generally reaching Newfoundland, I’ve given away or sold everything that won’t fit in my truck and/or in the spiffy new huge-ass Rocketbox™ which I’ve bolted to the roof rack.

I’m praying for moderate weather through the Dakotas. It’s a straight shot to Minneapolis/St. Paul, where I will proceed to plunge through the dark forests of the UP (eh!) in Michigan to cross the world’s friendliest border at Sault Ste. Marie. An NPS friend from way back married a Canuck and lives there now. Once I’m done declaring all of my personal property, getting a permit for my bear spray and .22 rifle, and successfully convincing a border guard that I’ll leave when they tell me to, I can then proceed to apply for my student visa. After that wringer, I will head to Tina’s house where I plan to recover for a day or two before the ~1200 miles on the Trans-Canadian Highway to Nova Scotia.

Upon arriving in North Sydney, NS, I have to catch an apparently heroic ‘superferry’ for the six-hour ride which forms the penultimate leg of the trip, from NS to the western coast of Newfoundland. Then it’s 500 miles on winding roads to the island’s eastern coast and my final frikkin’ destination.

Memorial University is located in St. John's, the provincial capital of the single province with two names, Newfoundland and Labrador. St. John’s is the easternmost community in North America. It looks out over the North Atlantic to Greenland.

How did this come about? Well, I looked around and said, 'Where can I go to school that would make Gardiner look cosmopolitan?' Newfoundland came to mind. Seriously, I applied to a Masters’s project in NL, along with many others, some months ago. Every US project found a reason to decline my application, and just as I was poised to begin a career at WalMart, I got the call from Canada.

Gettin’ all lerned in Canada has advantages: I will have healthcare for a few years, something which my own country seems determined to deny to the outliers like me. As for Newfoundland, the entire island has about as many people as Wyoming (a hair over 500,000). St John's is a huge place that accounts for almost half of the economic activity of the entire province, and that single municipal area holds 25% of the province’s population.

Newfoundland has been historically isolated by distance, weather, and choice. Newfoundlanders consider themselves more European than Canadian - there are daily 2500-mile flights from NL to the UK; so NL is closer to London than to Wyoming. It's basically like Texas – a big nation-state where people who often talk funny have reluctantly joined a greater union but essentially want to be left the hell alone.

I'm supposed to trap and collar coyotes for this project, which others have failed to do, despite heroic efforts. If I also fail, then I have to start over with a Plan B for graduation. That nightmare is another posting entirely.

So there ya go. After 10 years in the intermountain west at 6300+ feet, I'm moving as far east as I go in North America, to live on a flat Canadian island which is only marginally Canadian in order to take on a graduate project with a major professor who is younger than I am and who has described the study as having 'a high probability of failure'.

Any questions?