For me the gathering was mostly a chance to see a lot of people I haven’t seen in a long time, and it has been a long time. Hobbitish greybeards, looming out of the gloom, kept resolving into someone familiar and dear to me from the old days. (Hippie men get more wizened as the years go by. Hippie women get witchier.)

Most of the stories about Jim Campbell mentioned his tireless work out of the spotlight, the letters he wrote to prisoners, and his goofy infectious laugh. My favourite story was the one where he had a job painting the Second Narrows Bridge in Vancouver, which took months, and when he was finished painting it one way he turned around and painted it the other way. Demonstrating his lifelong commitment to infrastructure.

Fall meeting

It was raining when I left on Saturday morning, and it rained off and on most of the day.

It takes me 3 1/2 hours to get there and I didn’t get a very early start. Unfortunately I’m the kind of person who is never late for anything. I stopped once on the highway to take a few pictures, and I stopped for a sandwich at Tim Horton’s in Renfrew, but mostly it was just go go go.

The meeting was at Dallas’s cabin. Here’s Dallas.

My son Jake came to take the minutes for the meeting. He’s thinking of buying a share in the old hippie farm. After all, he was born there. As the wheels keep turning around and around.

Here’s Dallas’s cabin. It’s next to a beautiful bog.

The bog

Patti at Dallas’s

Jacquie. Dallas showing us how big a fish he caught. I think he was lying. ;)

Cabin again. It’s very Walden Pond down there in the bog.

When I wasn’t meeting with people I went around looking at things up close. It’s that kind of place. There used to be long views over the hills, and probably there still are in the wintertime, but now the bush is so thick that you have to look up close.

I waited quite awhile for this leaf to move out of the shade so I could photograph the drops of dew before they evaporated. This was in front of Patti’s house on Sunday morning.

I don’t know what any of this stuff is. It’s kind of creepy, isn’t it? That’s what you get when you go around peering through a camera. I’m working on an explanation for that sharp thing. I think it involves vampires.

Bunch o’ leaves

Scary haunted maple tree. Still scary this year.

I like how Danish modern and Ikea-ish my place up there is. There’s hardly anything there. Just two Ikea rockers, white, and a chess table. It’s very minimalist.

It looks like you could sit in one of those rockers and Ingmar Bergman would sit in the other one and you’d discuss being and nothingness. (I’m all for being, myself, but Ingmar would probably take the opposite point of view.) Then Bibi Anderssen would bring us big bowls of wild strawberries with milk, and after that we’d play a game of chess. I’d be the knight and Ingmar would be Death. Bibi would riddle us a riddle and then we’d dance the dance of the dead. What fun!

Little fungusy things living on the mossy floorboards of my back porch. And a nail.

Here comes a series of pictures of leaves in a rain barrel. You can skip them if you want, but I like them!

Leaves in rain barrel 1

Leaves in rain barrel 2

Leaves in rain barrel 3

Leaves in rain barrel 4

My 911 number. Which I can never remember, even though it’s a very simple number.

My house with red and blue cars

Leaves on gravel road

Leaves in water

This is a Ford Courier truck out in front of my house. Someone has covered it with brush so it won’t look like a wrecked truck. I find this unnecessary. It is what it is, and eventually it will return to the earth it came from. It was a good truck that served me well.

That’s what happens when you let other people live in your house. They have different ways of thinking about things.

Here is some grass

Bright coloured leaves

Old goat shed

(Sigh) Another leaf

After the meeting some of us went to a memorial for Jim Campbell, long-time anarchist and dedicated communitarian, who died of a heart attack while riding his bike in Maynooth. The memorial was in the greenhouse at Dragonfly Farm, and it was attended by people from all over the place. Jim touched a lot of people in his life.

I’m hoping someone will write a guest post about it. I don’t feel qualified to do it justice, since I’m not an anarchist and I didn’t know Jim as well as many others did. Plus I didn’t take any pictures. So stay tuned for that.

This is a picture of Jim and his partner Julie. I got it from a facebook group about Jim and his life, called Dimensions of Jim Campbell.

Then today I came home, and that was the fall meeting for another year. When I was returning my rental car I walked over to see what was going on at the Somerset House. Here’s a picture of the damage. You can see that it’s wide open to the weather. What a mess!

What a demeaning practice! It accuses everybody of shoplifting. I’m not going there anymore either.