As the pandemic grinds on into the fourth quarter, we still have no idea when our Supper Club can safely be reconstituted. The snows have come, and the visiting season is upon us but here we are, more isolated than the first settlers were in 1833.
I once read a letter from the saddleback preacher who ministered to the pioneers of our community in the early years. He complained how difficult it was to give comfort to his isolated parishioners through the long hard winters because he was so depressed himself most of the time, he didn’t want to get out of bed. He helped to organize one of the earliest social clubs in our neighbourhood, the Bowmore Debating Club and Literary Society, founded in 1851, as an attempt to divert the young people’s attention away from alcohol and vandalism. The first debate was held in a log cabin and the question before the house was: “Be it resolved that the cow is superior to the horse.”
The debate ended with a fistfight and the society dissolved. The next year he tried again with an agricultural society and suggested to the young people that they put on a fair. They did and it still runs to this day.
Except that it doesn’t. Wars, depressions, droughts, blizzards, wildfires and ice storms have never stopped the fair board volunteers from organizing their potluck suppers and Barn - Buster fundraisers. But Covid 19 shut the gates on the fairgrounds this fall for the first time in 168 years.
In November, daylight saving added an extra hour to my day. Then Joe Biden won the election and I found I had another free hour because I stopped obsessively Googling American politics. Then my wife took a job in town with the new bakery and our morning coffee ritual was cancelled. Suddenly I was faced with three empty hours in the day and no idea what to do with them.
The most isolated individual I have ever known was a man named Allan Parker who I met while bartending in a small Australian town on the edge of the Simpson Desert in 1969. He was a boundary rider who rode the line fences for several massive sheep stations in Western Queensland. He also shot dingoes for the small bounty paid by the state government. He stayed out on his rides for two and three months at a time, eventually coming back into Cunnamulla for supplies of flour, sugar and tea and staying a few days at the Commercial Hotel. He was chatty enough in the bar and didn’t strike me as a complete recluse. I asked him how he coped with the isolation.
“Isolation?” he said, surprised. “I am not alone out there, mate. No chance of that. I have Adelaide with me all the time and she’s a wonderful listener.” Adelaide was his horse. He also had his lantern, Slushy and his saddle, Audrey. As Allan described it, the repartee around the campfire at night could be very lively.
“Slushy can be a bit stroppy though. We get into some terrible arguments, I’ll tell you. One time I got so mad at Slushy I threw him out of the tent and didn’t light him for a week.”
I asked Allan how he kept track of time and he acknowledged that this was a problem. He had tried and abandoned several systems because each one of them required him to remember to do something each day, something he wasn’t good at.
“I asked myself, ‘What don’t I forget to do?’” And it came to him that he didn’t forget to eat. So, every Sunday night he baked up a big loaf of damper bread and cut six notches in it, one piece for each day of the week. When he got to the last piece, he knew it would be Sunday.
“I guess that’s a good system,” I said.
“I guess it wasn’t. I met a bloke on the trail one Monday and invited him to share a meal with me. I watched the stupid drongo eat Monday, Tuesday and the better part of Wednesday before I snatched it away from him!”
Before I become as odd as Allan was I think we should re-introduce ancient customs that our ancestors knew well, such as the tradition of the farm truck roadblock where farmers visit out of their windows while traffic backs up behind them. The loading dock at the feed mill is another acceptable visiting spot as is the mailbox, the steps of the village store and the dump.
FaceTime actually works pretty well too.