works of wanderlust

Month: June 2021

  • Summer

    Where I live, there exists a short and precious span of time between snowfalls. It is when gardens grow strong, trails turn green, and daylight extends well into the night.

    SUHH - murr

    For July and August, this blog is on a summer publication schedule: still posting, but not-daily. Check back for sporadic summer check-ins and stay turned for my regular daily blogging schedule to return this September.

    In the meantime, my summer photo gallery will be updated as often as I can remember to post new pictures.

    Thanks for reading!

    – bardo

  • Local Big

    In merely one week I’m going to be packing up that little black truck in the background of this photo and driving north with a cargo of camping gear to spend some quality time in the Alberta wilderness.

    (No) thanks to the pandemic it’s been two years since I’ve slept in a tent, and coincidentally that same tent will be pitched on about the same weekend in the same vicinity as when this photo was taken… two years ago.

    It’s something of a running joke, or insider gag, that every local road trip through the rural country highways usually involves stopping for at least one photo with something big.

    No… BIG.

    An oversized bird statue. An obscenely large perogy on a fork. A life-sized UFO landing pad. Or the world-famous giant Easter egg, a Ukrainian pysanka, in Vegreville.

    Or, for this example, a few kilometers drive from where we had been camping in the bush, we escaped the rain for a couple hours to meander into Vilna, Alberta for some ice cream and (of course) to pose with the World’s Largest Mushrooms.

    Like so many World’s Largest objects scattered around Western Canada, the World’s Largest Mushrooms are a photogenic bit of roadside art propped up in a small park, tucked into a tiny neighbourhood, hidden behind the main street of a pinprick town in the middle of the Alberta prairie.

    This is as much a kind of local hubris as anything else. For many of these small little towns, despite their small town beauty and unique identity in vast western expanse, the there is little reason besides a fill of the gas tank or a happenstance need for a meal to veer off the highway into their streets. They are lovely little places, but apart from a green highway sign marking their location as one speeds by at a hundred kilometers per hour, few people turn turn gaze from the road… unless as there occasionally may be, there is a World’s Largest… something… anything to be seen.

    With some steel and paint and artistic license, any small town in the middle of nowhere becomes a tourist destination.

    An excuse to visit. A reason to stop. A purpose for a day-long country-side road trip with a camera and a sense of local curiosity.

    And of course, there is usually some ice cream close by, too.

  • Heat Proofed

    While the baker in me is disappointed by the negative impact the heat has had on my sourdough, the science nerd side of my brain has been giddy at watching how this blast of summer temperatures spun the dial on one of the variables in the delicate process.

    My fellow Western-North-Americans know this all too well right now, but if you’re not from around here you may have not heard that we’re in the early half of what is turning into a week-long, record-breaking heat wave.

    Many of us (and our winter-ready homes) are ill-equipped to handle such heat. My house is designed to contain heat, reduce air circulation, and stay warm through eight months of sub-zero temperatures.

    I don’t own either an air conditioner or a personal swimming pool.

    I personally prefer the weather to be about ten degrees Celsius and I am far more comfortable in a wool toque and ski gloves than a sun hat and sandals.

    In other words: It’s hot. I’m uncomfortably warm. And it’s going to be scorching for at least a week more.

    In the midst of this blast of irregular heat, I ran out of bread (a regular occurrence) and went about my regular routine of making dough and getting a couple of loaves of sourdough ready to bake.

    Now let me back up one step: regular readers know that I have been making bread two or three times per week for the last sixteen months of this pandemic. I have a recipe and a process that I follow with rote precision, step-by-step, to produce a consistent loaf.

    For comparison, a pair of loaves that I baked with a blend of local rye flour a few weeks ago turned out great, rising on the counter for about twelve hours pre-bake after an overnight proof in the fridge.

    Great rise. Consistent crumb. Pleasant overall result:

    Compare the successful loaves from the second photo to the less-than-stellar loaves from first photo in this post.

    I cut into one of those squared-off loaves this morning and found a dense, poorly-risen, heavy bread that more resembled a dense bagel then a fluffy sandwich bread.

    For comparison, those first two loaves proofed and rose on my counter for only about eight hours before I had to turn the oven on mid-day (in the hottest part of the afternoon to boot) because they were obviously starting to over-proof, losing cohesion and loosening up.

    To be clear, both pictures are loaves from the exact same flour blend, from the exact same bags of flour, from the exact same process… save for that the average outside temperature is about twenty-five degrees warmer this week than two weeks ago.

    This means also that my kitchen is currently at least five to ten degrees warmer than normal, despite my best efforts to keep it cool.

    The heat has completely revved my yeast into high gear causing what seems to be an accelerated, runaway proofing that I have no great experience (yet) working with. If I bake anymore loaves this week I’m going to need to rely less on watching the clock and more on watching the pans.

    And to sum up…

    Baker me: sad.
    Science-nerd me: neat!

  • Hot Days, Trail Run Nights

    Sunday Runday and technically I finished my weekly long, slow distance very early this morning, even before I went to bed last night.

    The arrival of what the weather forecasters have called “a mass of hot air” over the western half of North America has provided us with a second great excuse to mix up the running training plan.

    The first excuse is that a large contingent of our running crew is off to an overnight mountain race in less than two weeks thanks to the lifting of pandemic restrictions and the resumption of in person racing. They need some serious mileage to help with their training.

    Two great excuses collided into an impromptu plan to start our run just as the sun was setting last night, providing a bit of reprieve from the heat and some local training for trail running by headlamp.

    The first five or six kilometers wedged neatly into a golden hour dusk even after most of the sunlight had faded beyond the horizon. We trod through a more open section of gravel trail still able to mostly see without artificial lights and stumbling through the terrain without much difficulty.

    The next three klicks took us into a winding, twisting, rolling bit of the river valley that swtiched back on itself and sometime between entering and leaving the disorienting maze of trees and roots and flitting insects, the night fully collapsed into darkness and my seven companions and I were little more than spots of light and echo-location-like shouts from the distance.

    Yet, it is remarkable how the dark plays with all your senses on a run like this. Confusing them. Blurring them. At one point, stumbling down a narrow tree-lined path in the dark, I caught myself checking to see if I was maybe dreaming and mentally pinching myself as I felt my mind drift past it’s bedtime fuzziness.

    Our full path crossed with late-night picnickers, a porcupine, a creepy man rollerblading through the trails in pitch black, and the eerie silence once abruptly broken by the echoing boom of a distant blast of noise. For one long stretch of about fifteen minutes where we had nothing but smooth asphalt ahead of us we turned off our headlamps and ran in the pitch blackness under the starry sky and soft glow of the surrounding suburbs.

    It was all at once crazy, serene, painful, and intimidating.

    I crawled into bed shortly after one-thirty am, having crept back into my sleeping house and quietly showered the dust from my calves and sweat from my back, my Sunday run done, and my mind a blur from the mash up of heat and experiences.

  • Toys, Tackle and Fish Stories

    Another story thread I may have seemed to have dropped is that of my slowly simmering plans to do a little fishing this summer.

    Back in my previous Gone Fishin’ post back in March I was revelling in the notion of the snow melting soon so that my brand new fishing permit and soon-to-be-mended rod would see some open water action.

    Alas, things didn’t exactly work out as well as I’d hoped.

    Of Old Equipment

    The last time I’d used my fishing rod was a couple years ago and when I’d pulled it out of storage to evaluate it’s condition I had been quckly reminded that the tip had shattered and snapped off. Back in my last post I’d said that I’d ordered some replacement tips and was planning to fix it.

    Not so quick.

    The tips arrived and were fine, but the problem wasn’t so much the quality of new parts rather that the old rod was just generally brittle.

    That particular rod had been equipment my folks had bought me back when I was just barely a teenager. Best case scenario, I was trying to repair a thirty-year-old fishing rod that was showing it’s age. And it turns out I was right. My attempt to replace the end was all but futile and the rod wasn’t up for even the stress of the repair, let alone some casting and (hopefully) catching.

    Of New Equipment

    Plan B turned into a research effort and eventually a shopping trip.

    I won’t put too many details here because what I finally ended up buying (just this afternoon, in fact) was a compromise between quality and price, in that somewhere around the one hundred and fifty dollar mark I got myself a reasonably middle of the road setup that will let me toss a line out into the water a few times per year but not invest too much into a new rig.

    It seems as though fishing equipment follows a similar rule as my rule for other sporting gear: for every hundred bucks you spend on something, you should spend roughly one hour per week using it. In other words, as I once told my university roomate, if you’re gonna spend two thousand dollars on a new bike, I would hope you spend about twenty hours per week with your feet on the pedals. (He didn’t.) Likewise, now that I’ve spent a hundred and fifty bucks on a new fishing rod, I should try and put it out into the water for an hour or two every week. (I’ll try.)

    Have strung my new rod, I also had a long, hard look at my tackle box. That was deeply lacking as well. The remains of a distant-past spent along the river bank resulted in barely a half-dozen servicable lures and spoons, and at some point before I do any serious casting I’m going to need to refresh my collection of fishing hooks.

    So, I’ll write it one more time before I actually work up the motivation to drive down towards the river and find a bit of sandbar to fish from: get ready summer, I’m going fishing… soon.