In lieu of flowers
When John “Jack” William Carew, 82, of Shores Cove on Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula, died Saturday, his family faced the usual quandary of whether to accept flowers or request donations to a favorite charity. Mr. Carew’s obituary in the St. John’s Evening Telegram offered a uniquely Newfoundland solution:
Blueberries and bakeapples will be accepted in lieu of flowers.
A relative of yours, Stan?
Hat tip: JP.
The long-form census in Cape Breton
David Alexander Harley, a.k.a. Gen. J. C. Trail, reports that the Cape Breton version of the Long-Form Census has only two questions:
1. How’s she goin?
and:
2. What’s your father’s name?”
Highway crash survival – ctd.
Contrarian reader JS writes:
Most if not all news accounts of such accidents provide no information about the factors involved. From your account it is clear that a) slowing down during bad conditions; b) having proper approved child safety restraints; and c) operating a vehicle with a good safety rating are the right ingredients for safe driving with a family. This account is far more valuable to the world in general than a news report that simply says a head-on collision sent five to hospital with non life-threatening injuries and the driver of a second vehicle was killed.
I am a motorcyclist, and I read with great attention every account of accidents involving bikes. Rarely if at all are details given as to circumstances. There may be a statement which says the accident is being investigated but the results are never made public. Such dry reportage has no value if circumstances are left to pure speculation. How can I or anyone else learn anything from that?
As an example, the inordinate number of fatal accidents along the Trans Canada near Antigonish in the last few weeks has left a general impression that all have been caused by impatient drivers trying to pass where they shouldn’t. There have been no facts whatsoever presented to support that assumption, yet it persists. Elected officials are now demanding massive public expenditures to twin the highway. On what facts is that assumption based?
I am sure your deeply personal account will be read by many and give cause for serious thought about our own respective situations and hopefully remind us all that there is a story behind the story.
Thank you to the many readers who wrote messages of concern about Silas, Jenn, Maggie, Josh, and Jacob. We are all grateful. They are all on the mend.
How my family survived a highway crash
The five occupants of this 2008 Dodge Grand Caravan — my son, daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren — survived a head-on collision on the TransCanada Highway Thursday evening. I offer the following details in hopes that other families will find it helpful to understand the factors that decisively improved their chances of survival.
Shortly before 5 p.m, August 26, my family was westbound on Route 105 in Lexington, Nova Scotia, just north of the Canso Causeway, when a severe rain squall hit the area. Daughter-in-law Jenn had just slowed down when an eastbound car apparently hydroplaned and spun across the centerline into their path.
Grandson Jacob, age 6, suffered a broken femur. The others — Jenn, my son Silas, Jacob’s twin brother Josh and sister Maggie, 8 — were badly bruised and badly shaken. Surgeons at the IWK-Grace Hospital in Halifax repaired Jacob’s leg Saturday. Doctors expect all to recover fully. We are grateful to them, and to the EMTs and volunteers who responded to the crash.
The driver and lone occupant of the other car, Marlene MacDonald of Port Hawkesbury and Washabuckt, died at the scene.
I offer my sincere sympathy to Ms. MacDonald’s daughters, grandchildren, and siblings. Events like this cause those affected to reflect on counterfactual alternatives; since Thursday, our family and friends have thought constantly of the MacDonald family’s suffering, and how easily it could have been ours. I am sorry for their loss.
Death and injuries in car crashes result not from a vehicle’s collision with another object but from what’s sometimes called the second collision — that of the occupants with the inside surfaces of the car. The second collision occurs a fraction of a second after the first.
Here are some of the factors that made the second collision survivable in my family’s case:
- Jenn reduced speed to reflect driving conditions, lessening the force of the subsequent impact.
- In response to legislation, insurance company pressures, and consumer demand, automobile manufacturers have made tremendous improvements in the crashworthiness of their cars over the last decade. Modern vehicles are better engineered to absorb and dissipate the force of sudden impacts while maintaining the integrity of the passenger compartment.
- Jenn and Silas drove a 2008 Dodge Grand Caravan equipped with front and side airbags. The Insurance Institute of Highway Safety gives this model a “good” rating (its highest) for “frontal offset” and “side impact” test results. You can check the crashworthiness of your car here.
- All the occupants were secured with optimal, industry-recommended safety equipment: the adults with standard lap-and-shoulder belts; the eight-year-old with a child’s safety booster seat held in place by a lap-and-shoulder belt; the six-year-olds by properly secured child safety seats appropriate to their size and weight.
The last point merits emphasis. For many families, child safety seats are expensive to purchase and tedious to install and use. After Thursday, the expense and inconvenience look pretty small to us, the benefits enormous.
Finally, a word of thanks to the numberless, nameless engineers, auto executives, safety advocates, insurance industry risk analysts, and legislators who helped my dear family survive.
Their survival is not a miracle. It is the result of considered steps by real people to improve highway safety.
Land of orange vehicles
What’s up with Queens County, Nova Scotia, and orange vehicles? Top to bottom: Ford Ranger 4×4, Charleston; Harley Davidson, White Point; Custom two-door, Liverpool.
The Negro Motorist Green Book
The New York Times previews a play and a forthcoming children’s book about a nearly forgotten travel guide that helped African Americans (and African Canadians) navigate the segregated accommodations that prevailed into the 1960s.
A Harlem postal employee and civic leader named Victor H. Green conceived the guide in response to one too many accounts of humiliation or violence where discrimination continued to hold strong. These were facts of life not only in the Jim Crow South, but in all parts of the country, where black travelers never knew where they would be welcome….
Historians of travel have recognized that the great American road trip — seen as an ultimate sign of freedom — was not that free for many Americans, including those who had to worry about “sunset laws” in towns where black visitors had to be out by day’s end…
“The ‘Green Book’ tried to provide a tool to deal with those situations. It also allowed families to protect their children, to help them ward off those horrible points at which they might be thrown out or not permitted to sit somewhere. It was both a defensive and a proactive mechanism,” [said Lonnie Bunch, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture].
In the introduction to his guide, which became known familiarly as, “The Green Book,” Victor Green wrote, “There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States.”
It ceased publication in 1964, the year Congress passed the Civil Rights Act.
Post-apocalyptic shopping-cart woman shlep
The Herald’s Pat Lee has a lovely piece about Contrarian’s friend Jane Kansas, currently walking from Montana to Halifax. The layout is also gorgeous, if you can scare up a physical copy of the paper. (Previous Contrarian mentions here and here; Kansas’s own blog here.)
Oracle vs. Microsoft
Oh the drama of it all!
(Click here if the video doesn’t appear.) Hat tip: Doug MacKay
Halorganite
In response to the fuss over Halifax sewage sludge, Contrarian reader S.P. points out that the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, District Sewerage Commission has been selling processed sludge under the brand name Milorganite for more than eight decades. The name, a contraction of Milwaukee organic nitrogen, was the winner of a 1925 naming contest in National Fertilizer Magazine.
A corporate history on the commission’s website explains that product grew out of a pollution control program. Early in the last century, the city formed the commission to clean up organic matter flowing into Milwaukee’s waterways. The commission opened a laboratory to study a British chemist’s scheme for aerating sludge with oxygen and then allowing it to settle in ponds. It decided to incorporate the system into a new treatment plant on the shores of Lake Michigan.
The only question was what to do with the microbial solids that accumulated during the process. The visionary commission established a fellowship at the University Of Wisconsin College Of Agriculture to investigate the use of activated sludge as fertilizer, and by the mid-1930s, it was selling 50,000 tons of Milorganite a year to golf courses and home gardeners. My parents used it when I was a child.
The process is tightly controlled with daily testing that keeps contaminants an order of magnitude below the EPA’s upper limits for “exceptional quality” fertilizer. Further evidence, if more were needed, that the fuss over what we might call Halorganite is ill-informed to the point of silliness, and runs counter to best environmental practices for dealing with human waste. Journalists and city councillors need to start distinguishing between science-based environmentalism and magical belief systems.
