Ben Mitchell-Lewis

Angela and Heather urge us to explore Halifax more thoroughly before we depart.  We listen, but not too closely.  We both want to get home, so we bypass the busy downtown, and instead opt for a quick drive along the coast.  I picked the route by looking at an imprecise map, so we shortly find ourselves rolling past rundown homes and unimpressive tracts of forest.  The brief glimpses of harbors and coves are gorgeous but fleeting.  Thirty minutes later we’re back on the highway, flying westward, heading home. Continue reading →

When I think of worms, I think of a robin yanking a fat night crawler up from the mud in my front yard.  I think of a bowl of stringy spaghetti and how it would look in my small intestine.  I think of that picture in the vet’s office that shows heartworms ravaging a dog’s vital organ.  I give my dog a heartworm pill each month.  I know spaghetti is just noodles.  I don’t eat earthworms.  What on earth would these hookworms be like?  We had no idea. Continue reading →

The forest is uniform and mundane—endless acres owned by paper companies, pine trees in perfect rows, awaiting their demise in some mill farther south.  For a while, we see more ATV’s than cars.  The road slowly unspools, and we pass few homes or buildings of any sort.  A trailer appears here, then a gas station with old pumps and boy on his four-wheeler refueling.  What we’re doing isn’t, in the strictest sense, legal.  The United States has banned distribution of the worms.  In fact, the man who shipped the worms was forced to flee in the night as the FDA was closing in.  He now lives in England, but is hoping to move the business to a tropical climate so that the worms feel more at home.  It took a few months to find someone we knew in Canada that was willing to accept such an unusual package, but finally our mom relented and gave up the name of her old friend Angela.  Malcolm can convince anyone.  It’s a somewhat suspect itinerary though, so as we approach the border, we plan our story.

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A long hiatus deserves a great post. Here is part 1 of a story that I’ve worked and re-worked. I like it quite a bit, hopefully you do too. This one is a tad long; I’ll split it into 6 parts over the next week or so. Happy New Year!

Hooked on Halifax—April 2011

There are plenty of reasons to visit Canada.  Maybe you want to ski in British Columbia, soaring through powdery snow on the slopes of Whistler, blue skies overhead.  Maybe you want a taste of Europe, so you visit Quebec City and sip coffee in a sidewalk café while men in gray woolen scarves saunter past.  Maybe you want to take the ferry to Grand Manan and go for a seaside bike ride—gulls cawing, waves crashing.  I went to Halifax to help my older brother infect himself with hookworms. Continue reading →