Author: John A. Ross

The kids sometimes became pretty restless as we drove along hour after hour with the hot sun beating down on us. In August it’s mighty hot, even with all the car windows open. When children are confined to crowded quarters, they haven’t much to do except poke or tickle one…

The sun was setting as we drove through the Badlands of South Dakota. Long Midas fingers of light probed into that wilderness of spectacular erosion, turning otherwise dismal tip-tops into golden pinnacles on towers of deep rose grounded in purple. An official roadside information sign hove in sight by the…

If South Dakota’s Badlands is a scene from a devil’s nightmare, Yellowstone’s geyser area must be the kitchen that cooked up whatever gave rise to that weird dream. This enormous steam table has potholes in every direction, seething and boiling over. Occasionally some pressure cooker blows off. A spurt of…

The last day of our journey was a bit of a blur. After the hot, semiarid plateau beyond Spokane, Washington, the lush, irrigated fruit-growing valley around Wenatchee was a welcome relief. Through the coastal mountains all the vegetation was fresh and green. The trees were so tall. Long, long, lacy…

British Columbia is truly unbelievable. As the mass of North America barges imperceptibly westward over the molten core of the earth, great waves of mountains are heaved up along its western rim. Shells long lost under ancient oceans may now be found thousands of feet up in cloud country. Great…

At our Sechelt place we were anxious to avoid making irreversible mistakes. If, for example, we should later wish that we had a tree growing in the exact place we had earlier cut one down, we couldn’t set the fallen one back up again on its stump. We therefore made…

When the big stumps, soil and tumbled rock had been removed to make a “notch” in the hillside—a shelf for our cabin-to-be—the bedrock underneath was exposed. At the south end of this, down below, was our small excavation. If I took out more rock there, we’d gain valuable space under…

Now don’t think that all I did during those summer holiday periods at Sechelt was work with stones. Stonework was only what I did most of the time! I love working with tools. We also went on some long sailing expeditions. In Ontario I had designed and built what was,…

The Sundays we spent at Sechelt were special days for rest and re-creation. I laid aside my tools. My projects remained as they were. The ache in my muscles eased up. No new scrapes and cuts. In the evening we had our own “church service” with Carsons. Collectively we could…

Once young Martin had qualified for his “captain’s papers” he was free to take the outboard-powered cartop boat anywhere in the inlet within sight of home base. He and Karen quickly learned for themselves the marine lore of the area—where dangerous submerged rocks lurked, where the ospreys and eagles nested,…