I’ve spent most of the past month digging and delving in my garden, which is now starting to look a bit more like it should. We had a really dry April and May, but early June has brought some much welcome rain. As a reminder, garden updates can be found on my Facebook page, available here.

For people who connected via my personal account, my apologies if it seems that I’m stalking you. I have accepted your ‘friend request’ messages and I’m interested in the things you post; I just don’t post on that page at all. I only have it because I wasn’t allowed to start a garden page on its own.

In between gardening and watching the news, I finished my fifth novel, which should be published sometime over the summer – updates to follow! Oh, and I’ve been searching YouTube for every clip I can find of that magical concert given by Joni Mitchell at the Gorge Amphitheatre the other week. With Brandi Carlile and Annie Lennox, no less! Just amazing. Thanks for sharing, Joni; you’ve come a long way from Saskatoon.

I also took my car for a drive, to Toronto for a conference. I could have flown, but the airfares were really expensive, and I figured my car hadn’t been much over 90 kms per hour since before the pandemic. So off I went on a journey of just over 1700 kilometres (1050 miles) each way. It took me two days to get there, three days at the conference, and two days to drive back. And it was beautiful.

The car purred along and really enjoyed the higher speed limits of New Brunswick, Quebec, and Ontario. I had the normal putter over the bridge, which normally has an 80 kms limit but there was construction, so the limit was reduced, and a traffic light controlled (i.e., stopped) the traffic. At the Port Elgin roundabout, I took Highway 15, which normally has a 90 kms limit but there was construction, so the limit was reduced, and a traffic light controlled (i.e., stopped) the traffic. Are you noticing a trend here? Welcome to the two seasons in Canada: winter and construction.

Once I reached Shediac, I was on a four-lane highway, with a speed limit of 110 and the chance to meet some very nice Mounties. Luckily, I wasn’t in a rush and the ones I saw just carried on by, although I did get a bit of a frisson when one turned on its lights just after I had passed the little side road where it had hidden. It took off after someone going the other way, though. It’s weird, I knew I’d set the cruise control to 5 kms over the speed limit, which is an acceptable margin of error here, but all the same those flashing blue and red lights made me wonder what I’d done wrong.

It’s a shame that they don’t have underwater police to patrol the oceans, turning on their flashing lights if they see something that appears either illegal or out of sync. I don’t know anybody who would spend a quarter of a million dollars in order to take a trip in a submersible down to see the wreck of the Titanic. That said, I’m sure they were all very nice people, and I’m sorry for their families and friends in having to sustain such a loss. I’m just glad that it seems to have been pretty instantaneous – at least, that’s what a ‘catastrophic implosion’ implies. I did spend some time over the last few days wondering if they were simply drifting, aware but powerless, down to the seabed below. Much better that they weren’t, I think.

The whole affair has raised some serious questions. How could such a vessel operate without any kind of inspection or approval? Why was there no emergency buoy deployed automatically, so that at least there would be some indication that something had happened? How much did the rescue effort cost, and who is going to pay for it? And so on and so forth.

The founder of the company, who ironically was one of those on board, once said something along the lines of “regulation is the enemy of innovation.” Perhaps. But when you are putting people into a sealed container, bolted from the outside with no means of egress, perhaps innovation is the enemy of common sense. As for the emergency buoy, that’s beyond my technical scope, but apparently the radio conduit by which the vessel connected with the surface ship every 15 minutes ceased to communicate after an hour and a half or so. That information was withheld for eight hours.

In all the rush to move ‘surface assets’ to the scene, I did wonder why no mention was made of utilizing any nuclear submarines that might have been in the area. The North Atlantic is a well-known cruising area for these most secret weapons of multiple nations, and indeed the Titanic itself rests about halfway between the wrecks of two American nuclear submarines, the USS Thresher (lost in April 1963) and the USS Scorpion (lost May 1968). After the discovery of the debris field, it has been reported that an analysis of acoustic data collected by U.S. Navy sensors on the day the submersible disappeared had “detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion.” Hmmm. One can’t help but wonder where those sensors were located. And whether the ‘banging noises’ heard by searchers, and reported as being caused by human hands, were just a bored submariner having a bit of a laugh on an otherwise silent vessel.

My last question has an easy answer: taxpayers will pay. The budgets of the coastguard and the air-force come from the government purse, and governments raise money through taxes. I don’t begrudge the search operation; if I was ever in a place of danger, it would be a relief to know that someone was looking for me. But when people who require an ambulance service get a $400 bill, as is the case in much of Canada, one hates to think what it costs to put together a multi-agency search and rescue team. Still, for people who can afford a quarter million just for the trip, perhaps a quarter-billion response bill is just chump change.

It was eye-opening to see the scale of the response for those five people, of whom two were Pakistani and the others American, British, and French. Last week a boat sank in the Mediterranean, killing somewhere in the region of 750 people. Three hundred of those were Pakistani. One Greek coastguard ship attended the scene and searched for survivors.

I think I’m going to turn off the news and go back to my garden. It’s not Woodstock, but it will do for now.