"Cacophony"

Perhaps long but it shows where some of my genes come from as regards poetry and shares a little breath of Canada with you you bjp?????Who ARE you? Yours Ann of Norway PHILIP: Found written on the back of a photograph from his sailing trips on Lake Winnipeg with his good friend Alfred from Germany. “this is a friend Alfred ( a little shorter than I am) at first launching of our boat. Named OOBY sounds sort of Scandinavian but the former owner said that it stood for OUR OWN BLOODY YACHT. Sort of pricks the bubble of Romance? I thought ATE might be a good short name. The Greek Goddess of Infatuation who led men into rash actions. I made table, draws etc. for food and cooking and a hidden toilet for extreme emergencies. We are insured from the Ontario border to Pacific not on West of Vancouver Island. HA! We are mostly armchair sailors.” Another excerpt from his letters “ At my Pelican Lake Anchorage 8 AM Sept 12th/79. Dear Ann, I am enjoying my solitude watching the sun burning the morning mist off the Lake as its shadow recedes to the Eastern shore Line. I came down yesterday leaving at the first sign of a clear sky, with commendable foresight and patience( I’m getting to rather enjoy a new found sense of procrastination) I parked by the roadside while a rainstorm drifted along the Pembina Valley ahead, it proved to be the last of many. I had my old boat with me for old times sake, I had really come down to open up the big boat cabin and air it out, as we were caught mid lake by a sudden storm on Sunday, thunder, lightening and hail, we went below and slept, trusting the anchor with ample line. We had to leave a lot of wet things in the cabin. Joy today clear skies and a brisk wind dropping to gentle airs this PM. I’m afraid I have the basic traits for a lone sailor, but I am really enjoying sharing this time with you without impairing the aforesaid solitude. As it is only 4 or 5 degrees Celsius the sun and wind are in no hurry to dry off the due( yes he wrote that), so I am sitting in my small boat cabin, with a wee gas heater keeping it snug having breakfasted on Grapefruit 2 hard boiled eggs bread butter, jam and tea......The hills are only apparent, they are just the irregular edges of the valley walls, dropping from prairie level. The lakes are puddles left from the last ice age. This puddle has no rocks in it, except along the shore lines.” Philip then does two small drawings of the scene saying “My Artistic Cycle is not at a high at the moment”. “Can’t seem to quite get the idea blame the ball point pen! DUAL HIGHWAY ON THE PRAIRIE. I did not leave enough head room for the sky. The cloud effects are marvellous and some nights in the Summer the whole Southern arc of the horizon will be lit up by innumerable flashes of lightening, too far away to be audible and the storm clouds barely visible at all. I have seen the sky dotted with small round clouds, drifting from NW to SE, lit up continuously by internal flashes, like Chinese lanterns no rain or sound except for the buzzing of mosquitoes and the flashes of fireflies, in the still starlight or in afternoon sunlight. Remember working in the fields watching huge anvil shaped Thunder heads coming up from WNW and being able to predict by their position whether they would slide away to the South or drift North of us leaving us as spectators. (I slid into the plural! but despite grammar how can just I alone watch a storm in all its majesty) spectators in a calm sunlit world, wondering if the next one will hit us. It does and we can look up into a sort of upside down sea of huge long rolling breakers and hear a steadily increasing roar of sounds the trees disappear and in seconds it is upon us, in 15 minutes it is past the sun bright again, the Oats are lying flat, they will never lift up, a lot of work to harvest. 30 acres of barley just beaten into the ground, not lost we never had it yet, and what a grand piece of Summer fallow for next year, too bad maybe but how grand the storm was how insignificant we felt, how exciting, I remember these awesome outbursts they remain with me as happy exciting memories, the destruction somehow forgotten except as reminders of the awesome power of the elements. I think I cried a little as I wrote this but I have a captive audience, I don’t have to say please listen to my tale of the great storm of 47, that threw heavy steel threshing machines on their sides and snapped off big trees, all of them either 4 or 5 ft. above the ground or pulled them out by the roots, leaving all clear for the supple saplings that survived. (Sermons in trees and running brooks?)