I am going to tell you a simple truth. Those can be the hardest ones to share. I learned this truth years ago, riding the Continental Divide Trail.
My Mother used to joke I was born in the saddle. I was born in a hospital but my Mom was riding when her water broke and my delivery began.
There is a picture somewhere of her carrying me, well I am in a papoose board. I am six months old. We are high in the Rocky Mountain in Northern B.C. There is several feet of snow on the ground. But we are on the back of a very tall horse.
By a year old I was riding in the saddle in front of her. Though I was still put in the papoose if I was fussy, tired, or threw a temper tantrum. By two she started teaching me to use the reins and my tubby little legs to direct the horse. I was four when I started riding on my own. On a pony mind you, but on my own.
This is all by way of explaining that by age twelve I could ride like I really was born in a saddle.
So my parents let me tag along with my Aunt Tessie for what was supposed to be a 21 day trail ride in the mountains North East of Kalispell, Montana. My parents dropped me off with my Aunt in Pablo about a week early. My Aunt who was serving as trail boss was already deep in preparations for the ride and she put me straight to work.
Four of five days later I overheard my Aunt talking with my Mother on the phone about me. I only heard her side of their conversation. My aunt said, “I have concluded he’s useful”. This meant, apparently, I could ride, I could shoot, I could fish, I could cook, and most importantly I could wrangle horses and load a packsaddle properly. My reward was I got to I spend the next 28 days (we took a side trip when the trail ride was over) being everybody’s assistant or perhaps slave was a better word. I had the most amazing time.
We picked up the customers in Kalispell. Kalispell is beautiful. If you haven’t ever gone I recommend it. You could argue it is the gateway to Glacier National Park. Actually, the locals do.
I should pause here and introduce my Aunt ʔa·kuǂa¢, everybody called her Tessie but a literal translation would be testicles sadly there is no phonetic of what it sounds like in Ktunaxa but if you go to www.firstvoices.com/.... and click on Learn our Language you can hear her name and hundreds of other Ktunaxa words spoken. And you should go. Ktunaxa is a language isolate, there is literally no language anything like it anywhere on Earth and it is in serious danger of disappearing. I am trying to learn it but boy is it tricky and that is with my grandchildren learning it.
Aunt Tessie’s parents (my great grandparents, making her my Great Aunt) upon discovering she was a girl named her ʔa·kuǂa¢ as a slap at their shaman who had promised them a boy. In fairness they already had three girls and no boys. Their next child would be my Grandfather.
Aunt Tessie was very much in charge of the trail ride. At 74 she could still ride like a teenager, and as I can personally attest, outwork any boy. Then when everybody else was exhausted she would take out her fiddle and start to play. And it was like magic. People would get up and start to dance. Tessie could play for hours.
She always ended by playing a fiddle version of John Coltrane’s legendary 1961 version of Greensleeves. Now a fiddle doesn’t sound like a soprano saxaphone. But if you scroll down in the attached link you can hear Coltrane playing Greensleeves.
ig.ft.com/…
Aunt Tessie made it clear from Day 1 my primary job was to do whatever I could do keep her guests healthy and happy. They weren’t the easiest bunch to like, they were British and superior and obnoxious but as my Aunt said, they were paying a premium for being assholes. They got drunk every night and became very loud and falsely joyful and then morose as hell. And then Aunt Tessie would start to play and the dancing would begin and then it was impossible not to like them. I would lay awake in the tent I shared with Aunt Tessie and try to imagine them when they were all young rather than in their mid fifties.
The first three days we spent reaching Lake McDonald Lodge. And from the amount of complaining you would have thought we were torturing our guests not keeping them happy. Those that rode were out of practice. Those that didn’t were struggling with simple tasks, like getting on or off and commands like whoa. You also would have thought we had taken them to the middle of nowhere.
And there is a true cultural difference. I grew up in the bush. I feel perfectly at home hundreds of miles from the closest human habitation. The scale of the forest seemed natural to me and really strange and threatening to our guests.
For those of you who don’t know Montana that well we were more or less running parallel to the Going to the Sun Road. If you have never been it is spectacular, worth the trip. If mountain driving freaks you out you can take a free shuttle round trip. Or take a video tour at the bottom of this page.
www.nps.gov/…
The guests stayed at the Lodge for four days and we stayed with the horses. We did day trips. The guests took small tour buses to and from St. Mary’s.
It was on those day trips I realized one of our guests, Mark Jones, was falling behind the group over and over again. He was the only single person on the trip. The rest were all couples. Mark’s wife Wendy had died of cancer just weeks before and he couldn’t ride very well and he wasn’t paying attention which was not making riding easier. He was letting the horse make all the decisions.
Good riding, for those of you who don’t ride, is a partnership. Horses are smart, stubborn, and each has a unique personality. There are horses with a sense of humour and there are horses with a great deal of disrespect for humans. Sometimes these traits combine to give you a horse who is perfectly behaved for days at a time and then when you aren’t paying attention bucks wildly catapulting you into space and then comes up to where you are lying and laughs in your face. So riding is a union of horse and rider. Watch world class show jumping and you’ll see what I mean, just before starting over the obstacles the riders will be bent over talking softly into the horses ear.
Mark had a horse that needed reassurance from his rider. Not having a human making decisions made her nervous and she got skittish as hell. She wasn’t bucking but she was dancing around and sitting on her ass which is a very clever way of dismounting your rider without getting in trouble. I solved the problem by switching horses with Mark. Mine was a follower, happy to plod along behind another horse all day without a complaint but not much for initiative.
I got given the task of staying with Mark and making sure he arrived safely back in camp. I asked Aunt Tessie what if I got lost? She just laughed like I was an idiot. “Are you my flesh or not?” She asked me.
Mark taught me to fly fish. He taught me what a trilobite is and why you don’t take one home with you. I taught him to track and together we watched a mother Grizzly teaching her cubs to fish.
Mark was the only guest I really got to know well. He taught Natural History at a Public School in England (which I gather means a rich private school). He told me he only agreed to come because his wife wanted to do it so badly.
One day as we were walking our horses down a creek, we’d lost a trail but in the mountains trails generally follow water so while we were walking down the creek looking for a sign of the trail we actually had a personal conversation. I asked Mark, given how much he loved fishing, riding, and natural history why they hell he wouldn’t have wanted to come.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “Nobody is being mean to me and we have all been friends since we were at Cambridge together. But they are war heroes. And I am not.
“These guys they fought bravely, won medals, surprised themselves, got drunk a lot, screwed around, fought bravely, won some more medals, got drunk, etc. I sat in an office and wrote procurement documents. I was too vital to the war effort to be allowed to fight. I feel like I don’t deserve to be here.”
The trip devolved once we got on to the Continental Divide itself. Mostly it was the weather. In late July it should have been sunny, warm and dry. It was sopping wet and cold and foggy to the point of forcing us to stop numerous time.. Even the horses were tired of it after 8 days of sliding around. It became clear the further we rode that only two of us were having a good time, Mark and I. We had all this time to look at rocks, search for fossils, use his floral guides to identify plants, and fish. Fish like the rain, or rather they like the flies the rain brings out.
Aunt Tessie consulted and a collective decision was made to ride the Continental Divide as far as the south tip of Waterton Lake where you can take a ferry to Wateron Park and the iconic Empress Lodge. It sounds simple but by this point it was pouring and it took 7 days to go what I would later ride in 2 without stressing me or my horse. Every ford took hours, once we had to go days out of our way to get across a raging torrent that was carrying boulders. Three years ago it was barely a trickle.
We got there finally. Though we nearly ran into the Ranger’s Station in the fog. I was getting ready to get on the ferry when my Aunt Tessie asked if I could stay on and help her and her sons take the horses on to Grasmere where the horse trailers were waiting. I couldn’t believe my Mom had said yes but so my Aunt claimed. I was delighted but astonished.
In the end Mark came along as well. So it was Aunt Tessie, her three boys, Mark and I. We were an hour west of Goat Haunt when the sun came out. The rest of the trip was gorgeous as we rode up the west side of Upper Waterton Lake and then we suddenly went west. Aunt Tessie didn’t offer to explain but I gathered Mark knew where we were going.
I would later learn, that Mark has asked if given the trip was all buggered up, Aunt Tessie could take him somewhere beautiful to scatter Wendy’s ashes. Aunt Tessie knew just the place. That is a picture of it above, and believe me it doesn’t do it justice. The Crown of the Mountains the ktunaxa call it. Where the Mountain Gods live or Akamina Kishinena. It is a truly spectacular British Columbia Provincial Park home to a large population of grizzly bears, even after the 2017 fire.
Akamina Pass is where the Flathead Indians (Ktunaxa and Salish and Pend d'Oreille) crossed the Rockies, at their narrowest point, to reach the Great Plains.
{Want to start rethinking what you now about Native Americans, check out the Flathead website. www.visitmt.com/...}
It is expert hiking in perfect conditions and the current conditions aren’t perfect following the fire. My daughters tell me the conditions are “difficult” with lots of dead-fall and deep ash pits. But regeneration is happening at a spectacular rate and this year they say there was no evidence of mud slides. Next summer I am planning to hike from Grasmere to Banff and my route will take me through Akamina Pass.
We spent a week exploring the park and eventually Mark found a wonderful place, high on Akamina Ridge to scatter Wendy’s ashes. It was a perfect place for a woman who apparently loved the mountains. She was a Canadian girl from Revelstoke.
Then we went on and out to Grasmere where the trailers were waiting for us. As were my parents. Mark and I said goodbye and we shook hands very formally. It was the first time I ever saw Mark smile.
Mark and I remained pen pals for more than 40 years. I am sorry we never saw each other again.
On the way home I told my Dad that Mark felt like he didn’t fit in with his war hero friends anymore.
May Dad drove in silence until we found a nice little park to pull into and have lunch. As we sat there he told me the story of F 36/34 and F 37/34 and the bureaucrat who said no, repeatedly. And saved the world. It turned out he knew Mark in passing, from after the war, when they were part of a team that decommissioned air fields and air bases.
In 1930 the Royal Air Force brass finally gave in to pilot demands and agreed to build a single wing airplane. In what sounds like a bad idea they gave the job of determining the specs for this new plane to a company that was likely to bid to supply them with the plane. That specification is known as F.7/30. The company was Hawker and their lead designer was Sir Sydney Camm. He couldn’t believe it when his design was rejected by the Air Ministry. But he shouldn’t have felt bad the Air Ministry rejected all 18 bidders.
Two companies came back asking for another chance. Hawker, lead by Camm and Supermarine led by designer R.J. Mitchell. The Air Ministry technical specification team (Mark and his team) by all accounts put Hawker and Supermarine through hell. Mark was impossible to please. He said No so often he became known as little Mr. No.
Finally in 1936 the Air Ministry agreed to a first order of F 36/34 (that is the purchase specification number) and F 37/34. To understand why it matters on July 10th, 1940 the air over Britain was invaded by the might of the Luftwaffe. The height of German engineering had come to pound Britain into submissions. The pundits expected, as did the Germans that England would sue for peace in days or at least be bombed out to an extent that it would make a sea invasion possible. After all Britain had no real Air Force, just a bunch a bunch of boys from all over the British Isles and the farthest reaches of the Colonies. And they were stuck flying British junk not magnificent German engineered aeronautic marvels.
That night those brave young men took off to meet the might of the German Luftwaffe they were flying F 36/34 known as the Hawker Hurricane and F 37/34 known as the Supermarine Spitfire. The British say the Battle of Britain lasted a little over a month, the Germans say it lasted a year, the pilots say they knew a few minutes into the night of July 10th, 1940 that they were going to win the Battle of Britain and the war.
War had become about who had the best technology and British aviation technology had leaped past the Germans. It was in recognition of how that technological leap had allowed a group of incredibly brave young men to shatter the myth of the German Superman that was what Winston Churchill referred to when he said “never have so many owed so much to so few”. Of course the Allies margin of technological, engineering and scientific superiority (think of Engima or the Atom Bomb) just grew and grew over the course of the war.
My Dad, who by the way had a chest full of medals including a Distinguished Flying Cross, pointed out to me that day that modern warfare is a team event. It takes the front line troops, the logistical support, the scientists, the engineers, the technicians, the bureaucrats, the manufacturers, the spies, and those that stay behind and kept the home fires burning and the economy running. On Remembrance Day we honour the fallen, those that made the greatest sacrifice of all and that is right and appropriate but we should never forget all the rest who contributed nor those who came back hollowed out.
My Dad spent his post war career working with soldiers who had shell shock or as we call it now PTSD to build new lives.
He concluded our talk by explaining that some members of that team really are too valuable to be allowed to be heroes.
And so we come to the punchline. You knew there would be one. The Brits, the obnoxious Brits on my first trail ride, most of those men had hopped in Hurricanes and Spitfires and taken to the air on the night of July 10th, 1940 to go meet the Luftwaffe. Others had flown Pathfinders deep into the heart of Germany to drop the flares the bombers followed to the target during the long bombardment that softened up the German Army and laid the groundwork for the invasion of Normandy. And they believed to a man that they owed their lives to their long time friend, Mr. No. Because you see Mark didn’t stop with F 36/34 and F 37/34. Nearly every new design the RAF used in WWII passed across his desk. And he kept saying no until they got it right. That was the job.
And here is the simple truth. You can’t judge the book by the cover. Sometimes obnoxious Brits turn out to be legendary heroes and quiet little men who teach high school science turn out to have saved the world.
Wednesday, Nov 13, 2019 · 8:15:55 PM +00:00 · Nonlinear
I am truly overwhelmed by the response to my diary. I wish I could respond to each poster. You have added greatly to my simple story. Unfortunately I am struggling to get over a savage bout with the flu and today is not a good day.
I came back from Cenotaph service on Remembrance Day and sat down at my computer and opened dailykos. There was a lot of talk about Impeachment Hearings beginning. I had no energy and went to bed. But I laid there tossing and turning and wondering if we’d ever have heard of these people who are testifying without impeachment. Yet they have laboured for years doing great work in challenging conditions. I knew I wanted to say something about the role these unknown government workers have and how much we count on their competence, professionalism, and commitment.
I woke up knowing what I wanted to say. I didn’t expect anybody else would be interested. I wrote it in one mad rush and went back to my sick bed. I got up this morning feeling like shit. I came here and went, WOW! Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.