Bacon Scrapins – “More Water Under the Bridge”
by Barry S. Wolfe
Bacon Scrapins are the little bits of meat left in the greasy fry pan. They’re tasty, but the ‘nutrition’ needs searching for. This tale is a bacon scrapin.
We were sitting on the large rocks at the top of the slope watching the water race over the dam in a torrent, pushing debris downstream. I’d never met him before. I was watching the flow and he just happened to plunk down on a nearby rock, both mesmerized by the flow. You had to watch closely to track a ‘floater’ go over the dam top, submerge, pop up, submerge, pop-up again further down.
“A lot of water.” he observed.
“Moving pretty quick.” I replied.
“Do you see that orange thing coming? Let’s see how long it takes to get to the bridge after it goes over the top.” suggested my new neighbour.
“This will be easy. It’s a small pumpkin floating down.” I looked downstream. “It looks to be about 250 metres to the bridge.” I said.
He counted out by one-one thousands. “That’s 124 seconds to get from the dam to the bridge. It’s about 250 metres, four of those is a kilometer, so that’s 500 sec./km.”
He mumbled a few numbers as he did some mental calculations. “That’s just over 7 kilometres per hour. That river’s moving at a fairly good clip.” he concluded.
“With that much water going that fast something could get pushed a long way fairly quickly.” I added.
“A long way. Have you heard about that old bridge they’re replacing over on Bridge Street? How far away do you think that is?” he asked.
“Well, there are a lot of river twists, meanderings and turns between there and here.” I pointed out. “I couldn’t take any credit for being accurate on that number. Maybe we could give Google maps some recognition if we used its GPS calculations?” as I opened my cell phone to Google.
“Sort of like politicians’ twisting and meandering statements about who’s paying for stuff, like that bridge.” he mused. “That blue guy from Queen’s Park is taking credit for paying for that bridge, but not recognizing that the feds. who started the Infrastructure Canada idea are paying 50% and we locals are paying almost 20%.”
“Where did you see that?” I asked.
“Oh, he put it in a tax-payer funded flyer in mailboxes. He recognized that his blues paid only a third of a pool in Kitchener, but his wording took credit for all $3.5 million for replacing the bridge we’re thinking about. Nothing about the feds’ or municipal shares in the other projects he listed. You’d think he did it himself.”
Studying the phone screen, I said, “Google maps doesn’t seem to calculate twisty rivers any better than politicians are straight when recognizing funding sources, so I’m guessing it’s about 15 river kilometers from here.”
“So, if someone dropped a small floater off that bridge rail, it would take over two hours to get to the dam here.” he calculated. “Between there and here, all that time, that’s a lot of water over the dam.”
“These days, politicians often taking undue credit for others’ initiatives is just more water under the bridge!” I concluded.
We sat, pondered and stared, back-and-forth, from dam to bridge to dam to bridge, at the unending, murky, flowing waters.