(Howell Creek Radio address for March 31, 2012, by Joel Dueck -- http://jdueck.net/radio) The Smell of the Tea in the Rain ================================ We received two notices in the mail on Monday, straight from city hall. One informed us that our property has violations of certain ordinances pertaining to rubbish and refuse -- in particular, the thicket of bushes on the north side of the lot contain scrap wood and a large pile of cut brush that is considered potential pest habitat. I am to consider myself warned, in bold type, to remove the debris from the bushes within 10 days or face daily fines for failing to remedy a blight on the local landscape. The second notice requests me to consider serving as an election judge this fall. Probably as you listen to this, I'll be out in my backyard removing the debris from the lilacs on the north side. Most of it is just leftovers from the construction and excavation of the last three years, and I was going to want to get rid of it anyway. The yard has been calling, too; Trixie has been looking through seed catalogs and mulling over where exactly we should put in the gardens and flower-beds, and I've been looking up how-tos on building a dry-stacked stone wall, the stone for which I haven't a clue where to procure. I received a third notice from City Hall on Wednesday. It appears the city believes that I am not the one living in my home -- that I am underhandedly renting it out to someone without a rental license. We live in a nice little town but I'm starting to wonder if perhaps the city isn't staffed by a team consisting of Barney Fife and the Eye of Sauron. * * * On the night of my birthday, shortly after dinner, it got very dark. The view outside had that look to it that happens to your vision when you squint your eyes almost but not quite shut. The wind and the rain sprang up, howling and fighting like cougars. Trixie and I scuttled about battening down the hatches and setting toppled flower vases to rights. It was then that the electric lights began to falter "like a gas-lamp in the street, with the wind in the pipe." They "exhibited for a moment an unnatural brilliancy, then sank so low as to be scarcely discernible;" in the blink of an eye they "burst out again, to enlighten for a moment, flickered with an uncertain, staggering sort of light, and then went out altogether."[^1] We are in one respect eternally prepared for power outages: we need never dig in a drawer for a candle. Trixie, whose veins run with the blood of faeries and the licquor of April rains, seems perpetually supplied by an invisible hand with candles of various colours and scents, and soon they are hoisting their small flames about her like the flags of a fleet of little ships sailing in the darkness. I select a volunteer from among them and descend into the hold for my own rather more mechanical specimen of flame, an MSR camping stove for which I still have a full fuel bottle. Soon we are on the porch, heating up the kettle for tea and watching the rain subside. We have these old, predictable lines we trot out for certain occasions, handed down to us from our childhoods; the one we'd ordinarily use during a heavy cloudburst, would be "Good thing we're not camping!" But the act of lighting our little MSR camping stove and the smell of the tea with the rain has sparked the opposite sentiment in me. It's time to go camping. A week suddenly doesn't seem long enough to spend on the north shore of Lake Superior. We need to be careful, though. We may have seen 70° F here already, but that doesn't mean there aren't still 2" of snow cover up in the Arrowhead. A brief image flashes through my mind of hiking trails littered with premature campers who answered the call too early and withered like tomatoes in a frost. * * * Synopsis: ----------- Radio address for March 31, 2012, in which city hall springs to life in a flurry of self-cancelling paperwork, and we listen to the north shore of Lake Superior call us while we brew tea on the porch. The poem is _Fishes' Heaven_ by Rupert Brooke -- read from p. 296 of _An Anthology of Verse_, Toronto Oxford University Press. Music cues are _Fishing Hole_ (theme to the Andy Griffith show) combined with [_Hope Fails_][1] from _The Return of the King_; [_Water Course B_][2] by Richard Harvey; and [_Corinna, Corinna_][3] by Leo Kottke. [1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0018AM1ZS/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=joelsimprpers-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0018AM1ZS [2]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002X31RQI/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=joelsimprpers-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B002X31RQI [3]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001BIJN4E/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=joelsimprpers-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B001BIJN4E [^1]: The quoted prose will be recognized by Dickensians as having been lifted and adapted from ch. 1 of _The Pickwick Papers_.