Category: Travel

How College Students Spend Summers – Then and Now


August 3, 2022

This is not a scientific poll by any stretch of the imagination. But I reflected on how three of my college-age grandchildren spent their summers this year and compared it to what I and my friends did for summers while attending college over sixty years ago.

We had one goal: to get a job to pay for tuition, room, and board for next year at the university. My grandchildren had loftier goals: do something interesting, educational, and even exciting, while making money. Big difference in aspirations! Is this true? You be the judge.

OK. So what did I and my friends do when we were at college? To pay for the cost of attending university the next year, we took the first job we could get. The emphasis was on getting a job, any job. We did not think about fun activities.

Looking for a job in my first year at university, I had a couple of false starts. One was strawberry picking on the lower mainland of British Columbia, where the stench of the accommodation and backbreaking work all day finished my enthusiasm in one week. The other false start was my unsuccessful career selling Collier’s encyclopedia in small towns along the Fraser Valley to poor people. After these attempts, I was successful in getting a sustaining job: I settled into a summer of dish-washing at the Essondale Mental Hospital. Boring as dickens but steady and paid well. The mental patients ribbed me about seeing me doing “women’s jobs”. But I lived at home and could save all my earnings.

Other jobs followed in subsequent years. I was happy to be hired by a survey crew where I did machete work in the wilderness of Vancouver Island’s interior, memorable for the cloud of deer flies and mosquitoes. When I complained, they assigned me to work inside, where I experienced the most boring job of my life: drawing cross-sections for a highway from survey data. Each drawing took a few minutes; plot seven dots on graph paper and connect the dots. I decided never to be a draftsman for a survey crew.

One highlight of this job was that I learned to like and drink beer (in retrospect, this may not have been a positive highlight). We drank beer in the hotel pub at night, having nothing else to do. I learned to gulp down a glass of beer by holding the glass with my teeth and knocking my head backward while opening my throat. Most nights ended with the natives joining us and getting into a rumble that I avoided at all costs.

I left the survey crew in a haste on my last day, after hearing the crew members talking about teaching the “college boy” about real life by stripping me and inserting my private parts into an anthill.

So what do college kids do today? My grandson Cedric showed up at the cottage in Elgin, ON, after a 3000-mile bicycle ride from Portland OR. He is an engineering student at Oregon State University (in Corvallis) and decided to cycle coast to coast before taking on a summer job. What a great physical and educational adventure! And potentially dangerous, too.

Among his many observations he related, he found the prairie people more friendly and curious than west coast people and discovered coffee at Tim Hortons in Canada much hotter than McDonald’s in the US. He avoided places where people looked at him with suspicion, but also met many friendly folks who let him camp overnight in their yard.

He used the “warm showers community” website in his travels, where people offer a welcoming hot shower and a place to bunk down, to cyclists. What first-hand experience learning about your country!

My thoughts circled back to Cedric and his financial situation and how he could afford to spend six weeks cycling and not working. I recalled that last summer he did fire-fighting in Idaho and saved money: accommodation and food were provided in tents in the wilds of Idaho. They were paid for sixteen-hour days and there was no place or time to spend money. They worked in fourteen-day stints, then were off for two days before another fourteen-day session started. For Cedric, it was another amazing educational and well-paying experience as well.

Here is another example of what students do for a summer job today. Not satisfied with repeating a job as a cashier in a grocery store, my granddaughter, MaryKate, created her summer job. With friends from Georgia Tech in Atlanta, where she is a student, they secured accommodation from the friend’s family to stay at their cottage in upstate New York. Then they took training in whitewater rafting and obtained a job with ARO, an adventure class white water outfit in Watertown NY. Another great experience! When MaryKate did not work at the white water center, she worked at the local grocery store. She created her job!

One final example is how another grandson, Alec, parlayed three seasons of fun-filled sailing camp experience in Ottawa, Canada, into teaching sailing to disadvantaged children on Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans. All I heard from Alec during the summer sailing camps was the fun they had turtling (turning the sailing boat upside down), but obviously, they also learned to sail!

Alec negotiated his accommodation in New Orleans by sleeping on a boat belonging to a friend. It had never entered my mind that summer camps can provide skills making you able to get into the workforce.

Yes, three examples do not form a valid sample. Despite that, my cohort, over sixty years ago, had much more pedestrian jobs. Why? I can only speculate that the children today live more in the present and try to maximize their opportunities. As well, they have more confidence. What are your thoughts on this subject?

A Canadian Welcome Called ArriveCan, Driving to Canada


July 11, 2022

“You have been picked randomly to take the covid test,” said the Canadian border agency officer, handing David and his two children covid test boxes. They drove from Durham NC crossing to Canada via the Thousand Islands Bridge into Ontario. That was David’s introduction to Canada, after four years of absence.

He and the children travel with Canadian passports, all had three covid vaccine shots, and filled out the ArriveCan document successfully. So what more does the government want? Do they have Covid? The government just did away with random testing at Pearson and other airports in Canada because of the huge delays. If you have a government mandate based on science, as our PM claims, all Covid mandates are based on science, how come you do not enforce it at airports but enforce it at border crossings by car? This is utter nonsense.

The one good thing was that the entire conversation at the border took five minutes, but the agent left them with an ominous warning to take the supervised tests on the first day upon their arrival and submit them in twenty-four hours, or a fine of $5000 may be levied.

To put it in context, my son David and the two children came to visit us for a few days at the cottage that is on an island accessible by boat. And they were told to take the covid tests with a person supervising via an audio/visual internet connection. On this remote island, the internet is sparse and slow, and sometimes non-existent. Have the government policy wonks considered all the potential circumstances where they may have to administer this wretched Covid test?

So David made appointments for all three of them for the next morning; each appointment was scheduled for twenty minutes by the government.

I listened to the conversation the next day when the government officials, three different ones, instructed David and the children, aged nine and twelve; to take out the info sheet from the Covid testing box; fill it out with their birthdates; addresses, etc. and then swab their mouths on two sides for three seconds each and each nostril for fifteen seconds and the government officials counted the time down.

Then they put the labels on the test tubes; put the swabbed sticks back into the tubes in the right direction; etc. and place the test boxes in the fridge (a weird suggestion since the last time we came back to Canada and FedEx picked up our tests. The driver told us the FedEx truck was unrefrigerated). Like you were in kindergarten. And then they were told how to submit the repacked boxes. Two of them said to get FedEx to pick it up (as if FedEx would send a boat to an island), but the third one said Lifelabs and Shoppers Drugmart are places where you can drop off the boxes. Seemed to me the interviewers needed additional training; the instructions provided by the three people should have been identical.

 A couple of interviewers asked David what time it was as the interview was taking place (Canada has three time zones), a strange question; not knowing where in Canada he was and what difference it made, although the information was available. The border guard asked David where the cottage was for his stay in Canada. The IT people developing this program should have provided location info for the interviewers if they were worth their salt (the question showed the interviewers could have been all across Canada and did not know where David was).

This lack of coordination by the agencies delivering ArriveCan and testing reminded me of a similar situation that happened to me when I came back from the US in May. Although the border guard told me I do not have to quarantine, I received a robot call every day for fourteen days upon my return, asking me about my quarantine location. Assuming the border guard punched in the right information, why had the government follow-up program kept calling me? Does the government contract with the lowest cost IT companies that may not have the best track record? Or, perhaps, government officials never test-drive their creations.

Another ridiculous aspect of the experience David went through is that he never received the result of the tests. He stayed less than a week, but by the time FedEx picked up the packages and the lab developed the results, he left the country. He just told me he never received the results and it is a week after arrival. The entire exercise is a total waste of time and a waste of taxpayers’ money.

Yes, vaccinated travelers to Canada may have Covid. But the effort required for, and the inconvenience caused by, testing far outweighs the benefits of finding out how many people entering Canada. Covid is community-spread today in Canada, far more than by people arriving from outside the country.

If the government wants to test arrivals to Canada, it should test all arrivals, including those by airplanes, via highways, and boats, and should make sure that all the agencies administering this process are well-coordinated. Just my opinion.

A Slice of America, where Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina Meet


June 2, 2022

Sometimes one drives through a small geographic area and discovers its small towns have a rich history. One such area we encountered is where the states of Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina meet. The area experienced the expulsion of the Cherokee Nation from their ancestral lands, the discovery of copper, the development of a company town mining copper, and the destruction of the environment leading to remediation. These have been major historical events. So how did we get there?

My daughter rented a vacation home in Murphy, North Carolina. The area is famous for hiking, walking, rafting, and mountain biking and daughter Megan and family wanted to enjoy these activities. The rental home was so big that we were all invited, though I left rafting and mountain biking for the younger generation. But l discovered other places to visit that interested me: the Cherokee Museum in Murphy, NC, and the Ducktown Copper Museum in Ducktown, TN.

The vacation home we drove to in western North Carolina (on the Tennessee border and a couple of hours from Atlanta, GA), was hugging the hill, almost sliding down, with huge picture windows facing the mountains and trees pruned in front to enhance the view. We took a serpentine road to access the vacation home, which was more like a mansion, with huge rooms and many bathrooms. It was difficult to turn the car around at the entrance to the home. But to go down the driveway, we had to turn around the car: it would have been impossible to back down the steep, curvy, and narrow laneway.

Murphy, NC (population 1600 in 2020), was a few minutes away from our vacation home, and housed the Cherokee County Museum, with panels describing the Trail of Tears, the 800-mile trek the Cherokees took after President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, pushing the Indians out of their ancestral lands onto federal territory (now Oklahoma). Some people called it ethnic cleansing in response to the settlers’ demand to take away the Cherokees’ land for their use. Over 4,000 Cherokees, about a quarter of the Cherokee Nation’s people perished on the trek.

We believe in Canada we were cruel to our native population by taking their children away from their families by force, to educate them in residential schools into our culture. In the US, the government chased them out of their native lands by force and put them into camps until all of them were cleared out of their ancestral territory. 

On leaving the Museum, I asked the receptionist if they employ any Cherokees. I would not have known if she was Cherokee and was simply curious.  She responded obliquely by saying that the Museum sells native crafts made by Cherokees. She may have misunderstood my question. To me, it seemed to make sense that in a museum dedicated to Cherokee history, they would employ people of Cherokee heritage. But then I remembered that the government chased all the natives out of their territory; perhaps there were no Cherokees left in this area. 

Then we saw the Ducktown Copper Museum. Ducktown, TN (population 560 in 2020) was a ten-minute drive from our rent, named after the Cherokee Chief, whose Cherokee name translated to Duck. (called Duck), in their native language. The Ducktown Mining Museum occupies the old headquarters of the Tennessee Copper Company (TCC). Our guide was a white-haired woman, a native of Ducktown – whose husband, brother, and father had all worked in the mines. She said that people started working for TCC as young as thirteen years of age and stayed with the company all their lives. 

TCC had a good reputation for labor relations, and was good to its employees, she said, although I found that there were strikes by the workers demanding higher wages and benefits.  When I asked, she confirmed the strikes but was proud of the company and showed us around explaining how copper was mined at a depth of twenty-five hundred feet. She said that she went down into the tunnels with her husband. I found it surprising to hear from her that the elevator could go down to the bottom of the mine in a couple of minutes; it must have been fast. 

Our guide also described how Ducktown had become the center of mining for copper, after a European American panning for gold in 1943, found copper instead. A copper rush resulted. In a couple of decades, over thirty companies explored and produced copper. Berra Berra Copper Company was the biggest mine at that time headed by a German-born mining engineer, Julius Raht. The company had expanded when roads were built to transport the ore.

During the American Civil War, the Confederates took over the Berra Berra Copper Company, the largest copper mine, and used its production for ninety percent of their needs for copper during the war effort.

But there were environmental impacts. The smelters built to separate the copper from the rock needed fire, and the logging for timber used to fire up the smelters denuded the entire landscape.

The constant burning spewed sulfuric gas into the air which, when mixed with water vapor in the atmosphere, became sulfuric acid and came down as acid rain, ruining all the vegetation and further resulting in topsoil erosion. The acid rain killed aquatic life as well in the Ocoee River. The entire area of sixty square miles had become a moonscape, visible by satellite imagery from the sky. 

But the mines created upwards of 2500 jobs and a booming economy and the environmental degradation had been ignored. To reduce the impact of acid rain, the mining companies erected tall chimneys, hoping for the dispersion of sulfates, only resulting in the dispersion of sulfites in a larger area.

The farmers in close-by Georgia suffered as a consequence of the acid rain and the Government of Georgia, on behalf of the farmers, sued the Tennessee Copper Company (TCC) for damages, in the early twentieth century. The lawsuit ended up with the US Supreme Court, which agreed with the plaintiff and called for an injunction to stop the operation of the mine, which was never enforced because the TCC started collecting the sulfuric acid and selling it as a byproduct of the copper mining process. 

In the early twentieth century, the TCC acquired many of the smaller copper companies and ran a store where the employees purchased all their requirements, and the store deducted the cost of their purchases from their wages. Often, employees developed a large debt that they could not repay and were forced to keep on working for the company. The guide explained that the company provided housing and clothing for the employees as well. I was wondering what life felt like in a company town, where the company ran everything.

With copper prices dropping, all the mines finished operating in 1987. By that time environmental remediation had been going on by the State of Tennessee, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and others. The guide said that although many million trees have already been planted, some moon-like areas were left intact for people to see what the landscape looked like during mining operations. 

I found it interesting to discover that even small places that are drive-throughs for most people, have unique histories, once you scratch the surface. While Murphy was, at one time, the center of the Cherokee Nation, it is now devoid of Cherokee people, except for a Museum dedicated to the Cherokees. And Ducktown, once a booming mining town with thousands of people, has shrunk to a few hundred people, having only a museum commemorating the once huge copper mining operation.