Pickle Lake Low by Richard Culpeper
Do not visit Pickle Lake. It’s really just a matter of Pickle Lake being a negative energy sink. Once you fall into the vortex, about the only way you can pull yourself out is to transfer your bad karma on the next unsuspecting dupe who passes through town. To make a long story short, I was trapped there at the bottom of the well when along came an unsuspecting American. I unloaded my burden on him to such a degree that his plane went down. For those with nothing better to do with the next few minutes, here is the full story.
Last spring I had a court date in Pickle Lake, which is a small community in northwestern Ontario. I live in Thunder Bay, so normally it is only a short flight. Unfortunately, the Pickle Lake psychic sink struck early, for my staff messed up on the booking. Instead of placing me on the party charter, I was booked for he commercial passenger flight, which involved a transfer and almost twice the flight time.
When I arrived at the airport, there was a delay of over an hour. Unfortunately, the pilot and co pilot both slept in. They came running through the terminal and out onto the tarmac about forty minutes late, but no sooner were they in the plane than an alarm went off in the terminal, sending the gate staff scurrying about and adding another twenty minutes onto the delay. At the transfer station in Red Lake I missed my connecting flight. While waiting in the terminal, a woman sat down with a couple of fellows at the table beside me. She said to them in a loud voice that she had just been promoted the previous week (she was a nurse in Osnaburgh we’ll get to what that entails later). Yesterday she had bought a truck. Later today she was to make a down payment on a house. Then she turned her head, looked directly at me, and said that the next think on her list was to find a man.
Having a keen sense of survival, I retreated to the men’s washroom. Unfortunately, a valve broke when I flushed, which flooded out the entire washroom and a fair bit of the terminal. I spent the next couple of hours in a very nervous state. Eventually the connection to Pickle Lake arrived. Aside from the bobsled run down the Red Lake taxi way (a steep hill with a couple of tight curves), the flight was uneventful. When I arrived at the Pickle Lake terminal (a small steel shed), I was unable to use the telephone because it did not accept money too many thefts, so the gas guy (the fellow who refuels the planes) kindly called in to town for the police to come and pick me up.
It took quite a long time for the officer to arrive. When he finally showed, he explained that the cracked windshield and mud on the sides and roof of the 4x4 were due to a shortcut he had taken when he received the call to pick me up. A delay had been incurred when he had to radio for a friend to pull him out of his ‘stuck’.
I arrived for court just as it broke for lunch, which was just as well, for my client’s circumstances had changed without his notifying me. The deal that had previously been arranged with the Crown was on hold due to my client facing half a dozen new charges. Unfortunately, no one quite knew what the charges were, so my client and I hiked on up the road to the police station (no ride was available, for my driver had to pull out the fellow who earlier had pulled him out of his ‘stuck’). Between the officer at the station, myself and my client, we eventually figured out what all the new charges were about, so we hiked back down to the community hall to face the judge.
Well, things were not too pretty in the hall. The judge was a bit miffed because a busload of defendants from the nearby community of Osnaburgh (where the nursing station is surrounded by barbed wire) failed to show. The bus arrived full of people who wanted to visit the grocery store and the liquor store, rather than full of defendants. It seems that when the folks at Osnaburgh heard that there was a bus going into town (usually there is none), they did not understand why only the criminals should be allowed on it, so they tossed the bad guys off, and took their places for the free ride into town. The shoppers were happy. The bad guys were happy. Only the judge was not happy, but no one really cared too much for him anyway.
The result of this was a further delay while the Osnagurgh mess was straightened out. Eventually the bad guys arrived, but they were pretty drunk by that time of day. The folks who had shanghaied the bus ambled in, but they were also quite drunk following their visit to the liquor store. There were no extra police available to deal with the matter, for they were off dealing with the stuck vehicles. Things eventually settled down, but the delay made me miss the outgoing party charter back to Thunder Bay, and again I had to fly the milk run via Red Lake. To add to my misery, I had to wait at the airport shed for a couple of hours. Just me, the gas guy, and the ticket girl upon whom the gas guy seemed to have a crush.
I was frustrated; I was tired; I was bored. I was also a little disgusted by the gas guy’s behaviour toward the ticket girl. I was not just under a cloud, I was under the Pickle Lake depression. I was trapped in this shed in the middle of nowhere, and I knew that I would remain there until I transferred my cloud to someone else. I reached out, trying to make a psychic connection to my family and friends in hopes that they could find me and rescue me. In particular, I reached out for a friend, Karen Smith of Gaia’s Garden, who is a wicce of the White Goddess with neo Buddhist leanings who has some inside knowledge on navigation (http://www.tbaytel.net/culpeper/NavicularGynoecium.html), and my cousin Nadine’s hubby Ray, who sits at the top of the world with all sorts of electronic equipment.
It worked. No sooner had I psychically reached out than a wee plane flown by an American landed. Then another, and another, and finally an old Stinson biplane. A big smile grew across my face, for I knew that my karma was soon to transfer away from me onto these poor unsuspecting tourists. They were loud and friendly and ridiculously over dressed. They obviously had no idea of the negative vortex into which they had descended. I had a moment of doubt upon learning that their photographer was a Canadian, but all was well when out from under his big fur hat (it was shirt sleeve weather) he said that he had been in California for many years.
While the gas guy filled their tanks, the group chatted with me as I quietly let my bad karma bleed onto them. Their story was that the fellow in the biplane intended to fly to the north pole and back, while the ex Canuck filmed him for National Geographic. I wished them luck as I left the hut for my flight, knowing full well that the only reason my flight had finally arrived was because these poor Americans had now inherited my bad dross and no longer had any chance what so ever of making it to the pole and back. Obviously I did not tell them this. I just smiled, gave a verbal ‘good luck’ to the Americans, and a silent ‘thank you’ to my family and friends whose energy had pulled me out of the hole known as Pickle Lake.
Remember my mentioning my cousin’s hubby Ray? Well, for about four months each year, Ray LeCote runs the Eureka meteorological station. I guess the electromagnetic reception up there must be pretty good, for he sure picked up on my calling out for help from Pickle Lake. When the Americans arrived at his station, they needed some gas, but had not made any previous arrangements. Ray had a drum of aviation gas that was about a decade old, but there was water in it due to condensation. He explained that if they wanted it they could have it, but they would have to filter it before using it, and sign a release to that effect. The release was signed and the National Geographic film crew recorded the final tanking up of the biplane. Note that I make no mention of the film crew recording any filtering. The pilot pumped directly from the barrel into the biplane without filtering, and National Geographic was there to capture every moment on film.
Surprisingly, the biplane made it to the pole, and even made it part way back to Eureka before it went down. When the pilot was eventually returned to Eureka he was pretty miffed at Ray. He hollered and swore and threatened to sue (talk about matching a stereotype) because the bad gas caused him to crash land and abandon his plane. Now Ray is a pretty smart fellow, and certainly not one to get in a flap. He saw that the American was trying to shift the Pickle Lake cloud onto his shoulders, and he was having none of it. While the American was making legal threats, Ray pulled out his ticket book, and proceeded to charge the pilot for polluting by leaving the plane out there in the middle of nowhere rather than bringing it back to Eureka.
Eventually the plane was recovered. Ray figures it cost the fellow an additional $25,000. I figure that crash and the cash are just at the tip of the iceberg for the polar pilot, for until he realizes that the Pickle Lake low is over his head, he is in for some very rough times.
Like I said, avoid Pickle Lake.
about that as well. I’d take it as a compliment, except that it’s just plain nasty whoever’s doing it…