“Light travels faster than sound. That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.” Murphy’s lesser known laws

A few years ago, Harv decided he’d walk across Canada in order to raise money and, for a while, he was quite adamant about the whole concept. He had dreamed of making it around the world but the idea of cheating and taking rides across various oceans sounded unethical to him at the time. He also had a tendency to get thoroughly sick, even on the Kootenay ferry.

So he made up his mind to start in Vancouver and then walk to Halifax, thus omitting the nasty bits over to Vancouver Island and to Newfoundland. He reckoned he could raise quite a bit on money that way.

His wife, the ever patient Louisa, thought he was nuts but then, ever since he’d planned their honeymoon — without consulting her — in the Tuktoyaktuk Beach Hotel because, he’d explained, he never been there and it sounded cool, she’d had her suspicions.

Harv’s son, Young Harvey, back from a stint in the armed forces overseas, listened to his father’s plans to tramp across Canada and suggested quite bluntly that someone in the family might be a couple of cans short of a six-pack. “You can’t even walk eighteen holes on the golf course, Pops,” he said unnecessarily cruelly, “You tear around on a cart, swinging, missing and swearing.”

Pamela, Harv and Louisa’s daughter, was more sympathetic, even pragmatic. She endeavoured to point out to her father that people did not do stuff like walk, ride or even hop across Canada in order to raise money for themselves. They did it for charity. “Besides, Daddy,” she explained calmly, ”You’ll need sponsors for back up, the way Terry Fox and Rick Hansen did.”

Louisa had already stated quite sharply that she, for one, didn’t intend to drive the family pick-up plus camper across this great land. “You want someone to follow your sad ass across thousands of miles, buddy, think again.” Louisa, the family grown up and mostly out of the house, had a tight schedule of curling and golf to look after, as well as the ladies choir.

“Supposing you could manage five klicks an hour, Pops,” said Young Harvey, hinting that he didn’t believe that concept at all, “and you walked say ten hours a day, it’d take you two days to get to Fernie, for a start.”

But Harv wasn’t listening to reason. He was picturing himself wetting his feet in the Pacific before a cheering crowd then setting off towards the rising sun in the east

Harv was in hospital in Calgary recovering from a hip replacement operation and feeling sorry for himself when he first announced his intention to hike across Canada. Louisa, visiting him at the time, suggested that he might have waited until the anesthetic had worn off before he started in with his lame-brained ideas, but Harv’s pea-sized grey matter was made up.

Meanwhile Harv’s long-time drinking and ice-hockey-fan best buddy, Bill, conceived the idea that Harv should cross-country by way of the North-west Passage, in winter, on skates. “Faster,” he said, then wondered if he might borrow Harv’s snow-mobile while he was gone. There was no suggestion of back-up implied.

Probably the best suggestion about his planned expedition that Harv heard was from his own G.P. She, no doubt exhausted after a long session of talking as if to a brick wall, opined that Harvey Baynes might get some support for his idea if he could contact S.A.S, the Society for the Aleviation of Senility. Harv, oblivious to sarcasm, said he’d try them.

Eventually, when Harv’s hip had healed enough for him to hobble from cart to tee on the golf course and not dislocate anything when he swung his driver, he got the cross-country walk bee into his bonnet again but the family – and a few sympathetic friends of Louisa – pitched in and purchased a bunch of coupons so that Harv might get to see a psychiatrist, soon. They’d given up arguing with the idiot; sometimes it’s difficult to spot who’s who.