18th AIDSiversary

Now my diagnosis is old enough to order a drink in a bar.

It’s a funny thing, remembering that moment that really changed my perception of a lot of things in my life. It was the beginning of the “cautionary tale” that I tell when sharing my life experience with others — don’t wait as long as I did to get tested, it will make your life more difficult.

But there are other elements that stick with me, most of which I have written about before:

• The horrible sensation of suffocating with pneumonia, especially venturing into the cold.
• My doctor sending me to the emergency with a note that I read on the way (kind of took the edge off the news).
• My friend Doug coming to get me and going back into the cold to get my prescription filled.
• The bronchoscopy and the night in a hospital bed with oxygen recovering the strength to go home.
• My friend Maychai taking me home that second time, leaving me with a lovely dinner of holiday leftovers.
• The short call with my parents (I still couldn’t breathe well) with an easy disclosure because of how positively they had reacted to my coming out many years earlier.
• The daily phone calls I got through the holidays from the immune deficiency doctor checking on my pneumonia recovery.
• The easy consent to the HIV test when I already knew what the result would be.
• The secondary shock of the first CD4+ count (it was 4).

Those little snapshots of a crazy time that changed my life. I think about them anew each year at this time. How about some updates?

• Not being able to breathe remains one of the things that scares me the most, so I’m very proactive about protecting myself from respiratory illnesses (vaccines, baby!).
• My doctor has now retired and I am seeing another doctor. I’m left, however, with a lasting appreciation of my doctor’s respecting my stupid decisions along the way to not be tested for HIV, even as he gently pushed me to. That respect gave me the confidence that is so very necessary in a doctor-patient relationship.
• We lost Doug in 2014 and I miss him every day. I do go through cycles of seeing different friends more or less often over time, but I will always appreciate the easy comfort I feel with them, and the sense that I can count on help when I need it. A solid circle of friends is so precious.
• I remember the nurse who found me a bed in the hospital the night after my bronchoscopy when I was too weak and oxygen-deprived to go home and take care of myself. He was doing his job, but doing it well and with compassion, and I will always appreciate that.
• More friends. Maychai was my colleague and continues to be my friend. I don’t see her enough, but I always have a lovely time when I do.
• The unreservedly positive reaction I got from my parents to my coming out as gay was so important to me. After years of anguish and fear of rejection, I got their loving support and I knew 16 years later that my HIV diagnosis was not something I had to hide from them either. I don’t have Mum anymore, but I have Dad and I enjoy talking to him every week and visiting him, though less often than I should.
• So many of our encounters with the medical system can seem devoid of actual human feeling — they are understaffed and overwhelmed — that it is always a refreshing surprise to be on the receiving end of someone going out of his or her way to check up on you. That almost everyone has a story about that one health care provider (or more) who went the extra distance and provided a touch of humanity in a time of distress is so much truer an indication of the humanity that is there every day.
• When you’re ready for something, it’s always easier. I spent quite a number of years resisting taking an HIV test because I feared it would be positive and didn’t know if I could handle it, even with the solid support network I had and continue to have. You can really do anything with support and a crisis like the one I lived 18 years ago really underlines that for me.
• I still have a low CD4+ count. It isn’t 4, but more like 260, still lower than it ought to be and low enough for me to be able to cling to a bit of my personal pessimism. But beyond the odd cold that lasts longer than it should and a couple of bouts of gastro-intestinal problems after travel to exotic places I have been pretty healthy this whole time and never had to stop working.

I know that some in my community will balk at my use of “AIDS” as opposed to HIV, but I have that badge (had my AIDS-defining illness), so choke on it, kids! I use it for the shock value, for the recognition it gets among the less-informed. I also use it knowing that its meaning has changed: AIDS used to be a prognosis, and not a good one; now it is a diagnosis and while that is also not good, it is entirely possible to leave it behind and find your health.

And just to do that thing that drives me crazy when uttered without explanation: getting HIV has had some positive impacts in my life, if you’ll pardon the pun, but impacts that you can also get without the HIV, but with a little introspection and reconsideration of values.

Happy AIDSiversary to me!

Doug McColeman, 1962-2014

“Who’s that?” we asked each other at our first meeting of a Montréal chapter of Queer Nation, too many years ago to count. We both resolved, Peter and I, to know this guy who was being all handsome and articulate in the circle of chairs. Our motivations might have been shallow, even suspect, but our decision to know this guy, to know you, Doug McColeman, was one of the best decisions either of us has made in our lives.

That summer would be the beginning of a long involvement with each other that gave us a whole lot of experiences, most of them very positive, that made you, Doug, an indispensable part of life for us. Demonstrations against the police raid on the Sexgarage party, distributing “Queer is Cool” leaflets outside Montréal high schools, living to the fullest that lifestyle we were so fiercely defending. We did that together and sometimes we did it in parallel, apart. We looked out for each other, we shared the good and the bad.

I remember sitting across a table from you, Doug, in a café late at night when you decided that you could trust me enough to disclose your HIV status to me. I was so honoured, and so afraid when were about to set off for your parents’ summer place that you might catch my awful cold with serious consequences. I needn’t have worried, because you had long before that learned how to keep living with your HIV and to keep living well.

That trust and that excellent example of how to deal led me to reach out to you for help when I found myself in the emergency with my own diagnosis of HIV and pneumonia. You brought me home through the cold in a taxi and rushed right back out to get the antibiotics they had prescribed. Short of breath, I really didn’t think I had the strength to fight and survive, but you were there to offer me that piece of wisdom that I cite without end: we make the efforts to get past the problems we are having today for the pleasure that we will have tomorrow. You saved me from myself there.

And then you gave me opportunities, like thinking of me when you won that trip for two to Australia at your work Christmas party. I would never have had the chance to go there to see my sister and her family if you had not offered me that opportunity. I still haven’t made it back, so all of my images of there are because of your generosity.

And we had some crazy adventures together. Carrying building materials blocks and blocks in the heat to try out our skills with power tools, constructing the world’s flimsiest fence across your back yard to give you privacy from a neighbour who had become undesirable. Good thing we had a bit to drink, or our insistence that we were butch — like lesbians! — handling those power tools would not have survived our little screams when the skill saw caught on something and bucked in our hands.

I can remember going to see you in that same apartment in the depths of winter, only to find that you had decided that you wanted to wear shorts that day, and had cranked the heat up to summery levels. And when I think of antics like that, I see that smile of yours, and I hear that laugh. And somehow I’m no longer shaking my head in disbelief because I am smiling and laughing with you, no matter how outrageous the antics.

You took your place, too, in the HIV/AIDS movement, volunteering, working and volunteering some more, and building more friendships and solidarity along the way. It won’t be a surprise to anyone who knows you to find out that you were involved in yet more organizations with broad or local reach of which we weren’t all aware. Sometimes, when we worked together, you recognized that you had a tendency to be a “loose cannon” (that makes me mirror that smile of yours again), but you also always brought a perspective that needed to be heard and taken into account, as aggravating as that might sometimes be for the primly “responsible” among us (yeah, I know I’m in there).

And two of my favourite lines, classic examples of gallows humour, come from you. The time we were in a café and a scammer came in selling red ribbons. You looked up at her and said “No thanks, I already have AIDS” (she ran for the door). And in the lead-up to the AIDS Walk, when someone mistakenly called it the AIDS Run and you replied “We have AIDS. We don’t run, we walk.” I still giggle at both of those.

And through it all, the antics and the hijinks, the wildness and sometimes the excesses, I can’t think of a single time when I thought you had done something mean or malicious. That just wasn’t your way. You knew how to push people’s buttons, for sure, but you also seemed to know when to stop pushing them. You knew when to reach out and show your love and support, when to protect your friends from themselves and when to leave us alone for a bit.

Over the last days, as your health has deteriorated and we all thought we were losing you imminently, we have all cried. We have all also marvelled at your fight and at your unpredictability in dying as much as in living. I was expecting up until the end that you would bounce back to your old self and mock us for our crying and our gravity. But you didn’t.

You’ve left a hole in our lives — you’ve left a hole in my life. Luckily, I have learned from you to fill that hole with the memories of all of those times that put a smile back on my face, thinking of you, Doug. If I might paraphrase your wisdom, I will cry, I will dry my tears, and I will work to fill the hole you have left with yet more happy memories of you, every day.

Thank you for all of it.

I love you.

Doug's family and his conjoint Jacques have asked for donations in his memory to the Maison d'Hérelle. You can do that online through Québec's AIDS Walk, Ça Marche, here.

Cartooning for Capitalism

It’s a sad state of affairs when the demise of a once-major American city is laid at the feet of the wrong people. If Detroit is seeking bankruptcy protection, why is no finger of blame pointing at the companies which have shipped jobs to places where labour is less protected, fueled calls for lower taxes, and taken big bail-outs from government when their own decisions have driven their businesses downward, all the while compensating their executives at a level that allows them to earn in the first few hours of a new year the equivalent of what they pay their workers for the whole year?

There may be some level of blame to be reserved for politicians who seem to cave so easily to those corporate interests, but the unions trying to establish and protect a reasonable level of income and other essential benefits for those creating the value? I can’t accept that.

That editorial cartoonists, likely working for major corporate interests themselves, should blame those who will most suffer the consequences of a dying city while the company skips off to earn huge returns on investments for its wealthy shareholders by lowering labour standards and evading taxes, is not so much unexpected as it is disappointing. Shame on them.

Fury – comma - Nature’s

I wasn’t sure that I was going to make it to the cinema this week, let alone be able to sit through a film and go out for a bite to eat afterward. Not a health problem, but a weather incident! I had two blocks to walk from the bus I took to get to the cinema, but in that two blocks a storm unleashed the totality of its fury on me (and on others around me, I suppose, but who has time to care about others in a personal disaster?!). I had an umbrella, and I managed to keep it under control for the most part (only one inside-out incident and quickly reversed), but you wouldn’t have known it if you saw me arrive at my destination.

In short, the storm threw rain at me from the front almost horizontally for the first part of my journey and then balanced itself with some frontal horizontal rain for the last bit. Inside, I was able to squeeze excess water from the hem of my lengthening-by-the-minute t-shirt several times, without seeming to have an impact on the amount of water I was carry around with me.

It’s surprising how that much water made me look like Jake Gyllenhaal, no? Could I see a movie in such a state? The account I have written of the film (next post) should provide your answer. Just underlining the great personal sacrifice I went through to share my silly thoughts on current movies with you (#firstworldproblems).

But just a couple more weather notes before I move to the next post focused on the film: one of my friends arrived by car and told us that he watched the temperature drop by almost 15° C on his car’s external thermometer in the space of a few minutes. We also continued to hear the massive claps of thunder throughout the film inside the cinema — yikes!

I see from the weather reports that we only got about 22 mm of rain from the storm, but I can tell you exactly where it seems to have landed. I saw that place in the mirror this morning!

Enough whining…back to our regular programming…

We Had An Election

 

Aislin cartoon from 1976 election

Well, that was interesting. An election that has left us with a new government that is nine seats short of a majority, an old government that lost about a quarter of its share of the vote, but only a fifth of its share of the seats, a new third party that did about two-thirds better than the old one it swallowed, and a fourth party that doubled its representation, albeit from one to two. The Premier lost his own seat, but only four other cabinet ministers lost. 74.6% participation this time, after a scary low of 57.43% in 2008.

The former government went from 42% of the vote last time to 31% this time. The new government also lost in percentage of the vote, from 35% to 32%. This reminds me of an election we had some years back where the leaders of both the major parties (there were really only two in contention then) lost their own seats (one of them may have gained it back by a hair in a recount). A fine comment on the public's appreciation of leadership at the time.

I played with the numbers a bit — because I'm a geek that way — and took a look at what might have happened if we had a strictly proportional system and everyone voted the same way they did yesterday. The flaws in that are obvious (knowing how the system works is a part of what makes us make the decisions we do), but this form of proportionality is practiced elsewhere, sometimes with a "threshold" as low as the vote percentage represented by a single seat. That's how I calculated it. They don't add to 125 because of rounding.

We have our first « Première ministre »! (First woman in this position in Québec.)

And after the vitriolic campaign, some recognition by each of the leaders of the contributions of their adversaries to public life, which was really gracious. Even their crowds of supporters were gracious in acknowledging the opposing parties with their applause.

When Pauline Marois spoke, she said some of the things I wish she had said during the campaign. She talked about setting aside differences and working together to improve our society. She reached out to the English-speaking community with a sentence in the best English I have ever heard her speak, affirming that the English-speaking community is a part of the history of Québec and of its future. She reached out to the first nations communities with a promise to work with them as equals. She has a very tough job to do trying to govern with only 54 of 125 seats. It would be nice to see all of the parties manage to work together and compromise to find solutions to problems: it would be to all their credit.

And then it happened.

Madame Marois was just reaching the end of her speech when two bodyguards appeared beside her and whisked her off stage. The audience, the media, the people like me watching on TV were all dumbstruck. What was happening?

From later reports, we pieced it together (still light on many of the details). A man had entered the back door of the club where the Parti québécois was having their victory rally. Inside, he shot two people who were working as sound technicians backstage (one dead, one in critical condition), then fled, lighting a fire at the back of the club (outside, I believe). He was rather quickly apprehended by the police. I know nothing about this man and the wheels of justice will take their course. So no speculation on my part about his level of sanity or his motivation.

Let me just say that the level of rhetoric in this campaign reached heights of shrillness we haven't seen for a long time. Yes, the Parti québécois was founded 42 years ago to lead Québec to independence, but no one has ever suggested that this would be done without its being an expression of the will of the population. Yes, there are real problems in a lot of people's attitudes about minorities (see my post on secularism), but there are significant actors fighting that xenophobia, too.

We have had a couple of referendums (yes, I know the proper Latin plural is referenda) on different versions of separating from Canada and we have had a whole lot of elections. Since it was founded in 1970, the Parti québécois has been the government several times, and even a majority government most of those times. So I really don't understand the over-the-top rhetoric I am hearing from people about being afraid to come here or planning to move away. Because of an election result?

Whatever the population decided yesterday (and the jury is really out on that one), we still have all of our democratic values. Not perfect, but there are people working on things like limiting even more the amount of money an individual can contribute to the political process, introducing some form of mixed or proportional representation and other issues. But those are the kind of changes that we vote on, or that we ask our duly-elected representatives to vote on.

We don't settle our differences with guns.

Lossiversary

This week marks an anniversary of sorts for me. Ten years since I made the decision to resign from the Bar and let go of that official status that I spent so much time and effort acquiring and maintaining. Not an easy decision, but one probably made more inevitable by my HIV status and my own expectations about my longevity and my immediate future.

Chalk that one up as a loss.

Two things are odd about my having decided to commemorate this milestone today: that it is the tenth anniversary, and that I’m focusing on the loss.

I can hear you saying it: “What’s so odd about marking a tenth anniversary?” This is because you don’t know me as well as you might. I am a tireless warrior against the tyranny of the fives and zeroes, as I like to say. This means that I have made my whole family (except the ornery ones…you know who you are, and, more importantly, I have not forgotten who you are!) put strange times on the timer of the microwave when heating something up. Never a round number, always something with an odd number of seconds. We even had quite a time last summer when I was visiting, ensuring that we set the TV volume to a prime number. I never claimed not to be an odd duck.

The focusing on the loss thing might be less surprising. We in the AIDS movement often talk about (or hear about) losses and coping with them. Here we have something rather significant that I worked for many years to build, with firm intentions for doing something socially useful with my acquired skills, and ten years (yes, ten, *groan*) after having been sworn in as a member of the Bar in Québec, I let it go.

I did gain from my loss, if we must delve deeper into it. I gained a certain ease of my finances as I no longer had to pay those membership fees and compulsory insurance costs that did not differentiate between the guy working for a low salary in the community-based AIDS movement and the one with the wealth clients driving a luxury automobile and taking frequent trips to exotic locales.

And if I am to be completely honest, I didn’t really lose it all. I generally say — much to the chagrin of those who have heard this once too often — that I am a recovering lawyer. I will never really be free of the influence of those years I spend studying law, or explaining the rules as a provider of legal information. It’s a long, long process.

Looking back at this point, how comfortable am I with the decision to resign? I am comfortable with the choice. I took pains at the time to do things in a way that would allow for a potential return to the profession if I should ever reconsider. That possibility gets more remote with each passing year, not only from the decreasing number of years I might have left, or have left to work, but also because the task of updating my knowledge to qualify to practise law becomes more daunting as my experiences grow more remote.

I only have to worry that scientific progress in the treatment of HIV will continue to call into question the wisdom of my perspective, as it continues to push back my expectation of decrepitude and death. I guess that is not such a loss for me.

Treponema Immaculatum

A terrible injustice just took far too long to unfold in my life. Shall we start at the beginning?

A couple of weeks ago, I was feeling quite sick. A little fever and diarrhoea on the Saturday (I never manage to break out the thermometer when I feel feverish, but let's just say that it was hot and yet I felt the need to pull up my down comforter as I napped in midday). Plenty more diarrhoea and gas over the next few days and the rather disturbing change in colour of my – er – stools. By the time I got to the following Friday, I made myself go see my doctor, who ordered some blood tests and asked me to call in for results the next Tuesday.

Over the weekend, things cleared up and went back to normal. On Tuesday I called and got a bit of a surprise: awaiting confirmation on a test for syphilis.

This might not be a big surprise for a sexually active gay man these days as public health panics us with the pronouncements of a large increase in syphilis cases among gay men (shot all the way up to 300 or so, which seems a little small compared to the many thousands of Chlamydia cases among youth these days). It is, however, a rather big surprise for me, as I have not had sex in approximately 5 years. Except with myself, and I had tests every three months during all that time that showed nothing of the sort.

There is something very annoying about being diagnosed with a sexually transmitted infection without having had sex. All of the notoriety, none of the fun. It all just seems unfair somehow.

Add to my frustration the amount of time that it took for the confirming test to come back: three and a half weeks after the drawing of the blood. Good thing it isn't typhoid, or my neighbourhood would have been wiped out!

Now I think that we all believe that medical science is a lot more precise than it actually is. Like they pour the blood on a little test strip which then turns a particular colour or flashes a "+" to indicate a positive test. It just isn't that simple. There is interpretation involved and I suspect that someone has misinterpreted this result. Either that or the 20 previous results. Which of those scenarios sounds more likely? I think we'll find out more certainly when I have my next round of regular blood tests next week.

In the meantime, public health gets notified and will likely contact me (can't wait to see how long that takes) to ascertain my behaviour. I honestly don't know how they will react to my account, but I don't have another one: just the truth of my lack-of-self-esteem-bad-body-image-inspired chastity. The interesting twist is that I go to meetings with these people in the context of my work.

So where did it come from? A mystery, one might even say a Holy Mystery (hence my clever renaming of the responsible bacteria in the title). Call the Vatican! This is surely a miracle, albeit a negative one. I credit (or blame) Brother André. I think he got it from one of those young boys with whom he is rumoured to have chastely shared his bed. With saints like that….

Now lest anyone think that I don't have all the theology straight in my head, let me remind you that my short-lasting conversion to Catholicism occurred when I was a young adult, so I am down with the dogma. The Immaculate Conception refers not to Mary and Jesus, but Anne and Mary, so that Mary could be born without original sin and be in a position to say "Let it be done to me" when accosted by an angel or archangel.

And while I may have uttered those words, or at least thought them, countless times in the past, I have not done so in about five years. And therein lies the injustice.

Oh, the Humanity!

Just back from a one-day trip to Ottawa for a meeting and I thought I would write a brief note about the travel experience, rather than the meeting.

First big surprise: I got to the train station with very little time to spare on Sunday only to discover that the travel agency used to book my travel and/or Via Rail had mistakenly booked me for Monday! Some tense moments on my cell phone to the emergency line of the travel agency got me onto the right train with several minutes to spare.

Second big surprise: there was no Via1 car on this particular train, so no lovely free lunch for me! No complimentary drinks either! :-(

The hotel was lovely, and I'll show you what it looked like in this Bob-esque view of the bed:

It was a sleep number bed, meaning that the remote you see on the bed was there to control the firmness by inflating or deflating each side of the bed. A first experience for me, but I won't be rushing out to buy one.

The real tragedies come with the trip home: brace yourself for bourgeois spoiled-bratness!

No problems with the ticket, but what is with this long, long walk to the Via1 car? I mean I – or someone anyway – has paid much more for this ticket, yet I am forced to walk way further than the economy class passengers to get to my car! The world is surely out to get me!!

And then on the way home, neither of the electrical outlets at my seat worked, so I used up 40% of my laptop battery watching two episodes of Justified. (Timothy Olyphant is pretty, cool, and wears his Stetson well.) And, thanks for asking, I am now completely recharged!

I'm just bracing myself for my Air France experience tomorrow. Can things right themselves? ;-)

Foreseeable

I knew it was coming. That didn't make it any easier to accept, even as it made it easier to plan for.

About a week ago, I casually wiped my glasses with the bottom of my sweater as I have done so often in the past. They came back up seriously twisted, and that was the moment I realized they had entered the fragile zone. They were not long for this world.

I immediately booked an appointment with the optometrist at a nearby optical outlet. For the next day, as it turned out: she is there only two afternoons a week. Another health care professional who didn't bat an eye when I disclosed my HIV status (Did I have any health problems, she asked. I disclosed my status more to explain the potentially vision-impacting treatment I am taking for my psoriatic arthritis, the effects of which she then explained to me more clearly than anyone else has in the past.)

As luck would have it, a promotion at the store: three pairs of glasses with just-discontinued frames, lenses and clip on sunglasses included (well, for 2 of 3) all for less than $900. I might have been more upset by that before my [no longer so] new job and before the impending urgency of the state of my actual glasses. It actually seems like quite a bargain in light of all of those elements.

Ten days to wait for the new ones. Now when would it happen?

I handled them oh so carefully through the entire weekend of the 6th Canadian Skills Building Symposium on HIV/AIDS, where I had some official duties to perform. They held. A day and a half of time to recover from that demanding weekend, including a rare and enjoyable Monday afternoon movie with a friend. They held.

I got the idea that this would be the day as I dashed off to a meeting this morning. When you have progressive lenses, there is something about their being at slightly different angles that becomes disturbingly noticeable. When I had to straighten them several times on the metro en route to my meeting, I got the sense of foreboding. They didn't last through the meeting, snapping about an hour into things.

Luckily, I had been carrying around my flawed but more solid previous glasses since the day after the sweater incident, and the transition was quite smooth for me. I don't feel comfy in these and I'm looking forward to the impending delivery of my new choices.

At Least It Was a Moral…Defeat

Lovely aftermath of our municipal elections, which took place yesterday.

The mayor, whose administration was mired in a few ethical scandals, was returned to power, and with a majority of seats on the city council. At least a few of the big names in his party, including his brother (there's that high school look again — mayor's brother occupies important post in the city) lost their seats.

The progressive provincial politician who unfortunately chose to take a run at municipal politics with the most right wing of the municipal parties came second.

The leader of the new progressive party (the only one that ran mainly on the party's ideas and not on the personality of its leader) came third, but almost tripled his showing from four years ago. In fact, the party — Projet Montréal — has complete control of the Plateau neighbourhood and made some gains in other parts of the city, too, ending with 10 city councillors this time in comparison to the lone one last time out.

Ah, but the real moral defeat was suffered by our democracy. Overall voter turnout was extremely low by Canadian standards — between 30% and 40% — even after all the hot ticket issues that came out during the campaign. The mayor got a whopping 14.2% of voters to turn out and support him. The others did even worse. There were no more than a handful of areas in the city where more than half of the electors turned out to vote, and those were squeakers with just over 50%.

We'll see if there is any impact on the things that really need to be changed.

Epilogue: Karma or Poetic Injustice?

This morning, when it was safe for me to go outside and not get guilt-tripped into helping my neighbour shovel out her car, I ventured forth to remove the snow from my stairs. Oh, I was very ready to leave a little patch of snow in front of the door of the neighbours I have been so annoyed with for not taking their turn at shovelling. My cackles of guilty delight (some penance that turned out to be!) soon dissolved into sobs as my evil plot was undone by physics: something about the configuration of my tiny shared front porch incites the wind to remove snow from in front of my neighbours' door and to deposit it in drifts up against mine.

Foiled!

An Eventful Trip: Countryside

This should be a winner: photos taken from cars speeding along the highway. I'm putting that right out front to explain the blurriness of some of the photos, not to mention the occasional reflection of the side mirror in the window through which these photos were taken. I think I still managed to take some photos that will show what I want to talk about.

The first striking thing is the damage that was done to the countryside just north of Kamloops by forest fires in 2003. At the time, the highway and even the railway were closed for some time, as the fires raged and crisscrossed the valley. My parents, who live about an hour's drive north of the furthest extent of the fires, were affected by losing their telephone and electricity for close to two weeks, which had all of the rest of us quite scared as they barbecued breakfast, lunch and dinner. They remained cut off from the City of Kamloops, which is where the larger hospital and shops and such are located.

Below are three shots of hillsides with the burned skeletons of the trees that used to cover them until four and a half years ago.

The other big impact of the fires was that they were interface fires, meaning that they encroached on the towns dotted through the valley. Many homes were burned and, perhaps more devastatingly, businesses, including a couple of sawmills that have not since been rebuilt, meaning that those jobs are lost and the towns even further devastated. Below is what is left of one of these sawmills. The scene used to include a number of buildings housing machinery for cutting and planning lumber as well as stacks of lumber and of logs over that vast expanse that is now a large empty field.

The next striking thing is the other great destroyer of the forests in the area: the pine beetle (pictured below).

These things are very tiny and have been killing trees in BC for quite a long time. With warmer winters, they are not being killed off by sudden and long periods of cold as they once were, so they are spreading uncontrollably. (Apparently, when the cold arrives slowly, they are able to adapt by producing a kind of anti-freeze that protects them from the cold; a quick cold snap that lasts long enough might actually halt their spread, but this hasn't been happening very much lately. The other scary thing about them is their mode of travel. A cloud of them blew into Kamloops in a storm a couple of years ago and now almost every pine tree in town has been infested and killed.

Here are a couple of pictures of beetle-killed trees (they are the red ones). The other aspect of this is a proliferation of woodpeckers, which love to eat the beetles. The woodpecker action on trees that have already been killed also serves to strip the bark from the trees, as you can see a bit in the second picture.

My Dad and my little sister, who know much more about these things than I do, have told me a little about the various insects attacking the forests. Pine beetles are not the only ones: there are spruce and fir beetles, too, but the difference is that those two kinds can often be 'trapped' by setting up a deck of fallen trees, which can then be taken away and destroyed. The pine beetles only invade upright, living trees.

To end on a more humorous note, let me include this picture of a broken-down looking shed in the Cariboo region. My family has a game we always played when we drove anywhere, looking for falling-down buildings and rusting cars and attributing them to our parents and siblings. In that spirit, here is my sister Brandy's house:

Ha Ha!