There are a lot of tall tales about Paul St. Pierre, who went on his last trip Sunday. Here are some I told at his 80th birthday party 11 years ago: ABOUT PAUL I wondered if I should bring a can of salmon to this event. The reason I say that is that once, in the long-ago past, Paul invited me to go hunting with him. He said “you bring the whisky, I’ve got the food.” Well, I loaded up with some B. C. Distillers, we tried out one of the bottles once we crossed the Chilcotin-- any of Paul’s old friends will know the routine-- you throw the cap out the window and then you have to keep nibbling on the bottle in case the stuff goes bad. We got to the cabin at Big Creek and the food turned out to be a case of canned salmon. I asked if that was all the food he had, and he seemed surprised at the question. He said we could have trout for a change if I could catch some, and that he was also going to shoot some duck. It was a great trip, as far as I can remember. We survived one scrape after another by dint of the indomitable cussedness that makes him unique. He is just what he seems, and you couldn’t ask for a rougher diamond. Paul, you probably can’t remember anything unusual about it. But I remember he insisted I wade out into a bog to retrieve a bird he had shot. It seemed reasonable to him because for some reason I was wearing chest waders. But it didn’t seem reasonable to me after I began to sink in the quagmire. I scrambled out and refused to try a firmer place he pointed out.. Then he decided to try for geese. We chased a flock from one little lake to another. I was ordered to sneak up on them and fire both barrels when they started up. It was foolproof. If I missed (which I did) Paul was waiting at the other end of the lake. But they went the wrong way. It snowed before we got back to Lester Dorsey’s place and we got lost in one of those valleys that all look the same. We trudged for miles before we found the right one. After three or four days of this real good fun, we drove all night back to Vancouver. After a couple of hundred miles I noticed he wasn’t talking and I asked if he was mad at me. “Shut up,” he said. “Can’t you tell I’m writing my column? He also introduced me to the Mexican Overdrive. When the gas gauge is bouncing on empty as you come down out of the hills, you switch off the engine on every long downgrade, and maybe you can coast to the first gas station before the tank goes dry. You can’t do that on modern cars because the steering will lock up when you turn off the engine. They call it a safety feature, but it wouldn’t have been very safe up there. He also taught me about off-road driving in a well-worn Datsun. You follow a barely-discernable trail through the grass, splash through shallow creeks and teeter on side hills. Young Paul will remember a couple of other stories, like the time we were all fishing at the narrows of Lillooet Lake. He had hooked a monster Lake Trout and shouted at me to help land it. I came running down the dike and waded a step or two down the steep shelving bank. The current was swirling past and I realized it was a fight for life between me and the fish. So I took a swipe at it with my pitiful little hand net. All it did was jar the hook loose, and the trout rolled and swam away. When Big Paul heard about it he snorted: “You should have swum after it.” Just one more story. Once when I was living in Victoria we were invited to Thanksgiving Dinner at the St. Pierres in North Vancouver. The rest of my family had the sense to go by ferry, but Paul had just learned to fly and the two of them came over for me in a little Cessna on wheels. He said it was all right to fly across the strait if you climbed until you reached the middle, so you could coast back either way if the engine quit. Actually the plane flew fine, but Paul took so long to line up the runway in Vancouver that as the wheels bounced down the controller was shouting in our ears: “Get off Zero Eight! You have carrier traffic behind you!” So we finished the flight rolling out on the grass beside the runway as the airliner landed and passed us. That’s the best - or the worst - I can remember about Paul. It’s been a slice, old friend. So what are you going to do for an encore? Ron Rose Oct. 12, 2003
Posted on: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 22:40:48 +0000