Brotherly love

Monday, July 21, 2008

ESQUIMALT — Our resting spot for tonight and tomorrow night is the West Bay Marine RV Park, right on the harbour across from Victoria, with yachts and sailboats all around us and seagulls drifting overhead. It’s a perfect spot that we learned about from some campers we were chatting with in Sooke. There’s a boardwalk around the harbour that starts here and will take us right to the Empress Hotel and the heart of the city!
Our route from Sooke took us along the Kangaroo Road — named possibly from the way it hopped up and down and curved from side to side — and along the coast past Royal Roads University and through quite a few built up areas. We saw less of the water than we thought we might, and we guessed that it must have been because the coastline was too much of a challenge to build roads on.
We wanted to get to Victoria in time for a noon-hour outdoor concert at City Hall, starring my brother Al Maybee and his two cohorts, Angie and Ron. Our GPS guidance system was a godsend, telling us every turn and street to take! We even found a parking spot big enough for a large camper truck just around the corner from our destination — not an easy feat right downtown!
We hopped in to the camper and threw together a couple of sandwiches to take with us. By the time we found the large shelter where Al and his fellow performers were, they were playing tunes already — but it was just for a sound check before the concert actually began. There were benches and chairs arranged in front of the bandshell, so we grabbed a seat and were soon joined by Al’s girlfriend Peggy.
The show began, and they did a great job. Angie is a wizard on the keyboards, of which she had two, and her fingers flew through the opening number of the Flight of the Bumblebee! Wow! The trio — they call themselves Three of a Kind — were great, doing foot-stomping renditions of lots of favourites. Al managed a terrific rendition of Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World, with a gravelly voice and a trumpet solo. The audience was enjoying every number. One fellow was grooving and dancing to the music with great abandon.
After the group performed I Feel Good, with its exuberant shouts of "Ow!", someone behind the bandshell starting shouting "Ow! Ow! Ow!" and at first we thought he was just in the spirit of things, or high on drugs, or heckling or something. Then we realized something was amiss. Al turned around and spoke to the guy who was really hollering by now — and the mikes were picking up everything he was saying. He had just been stabbed! Al was on his cellphone calling an ambulance, and offered his jacket to pillow the young man’s head while another fellow stripped off his T-shirt to mop up the blood.
Angie, who was the spokesperson for the musical trio, was amazingly calm, and said "fortunately we have a social worker with us", referring to Al. In no time the police arrived and Angie got us back to the performance with some more upbeat numbers. The concert continued while just behind them paramedics and police attended to the crime victim.
Aside from the distraction of paramedics wheeling the fellow off and police mingling amongst the audience asking for witness statements, and after that, news photographers filming the aftermath of the mishap, the concert was a delightful interlude. When the hour was up we trotted off to feed the parking meter and came back to congratulate Al and his fellow musicians, both for their wonderful performance, and for their grace under pressure! Al said the victim had suffered a superficial wound and would probably be OK. He was a bit upset that his jacket had been scooped up by the paramedics. The police officer said he would probably not want the jacket back anyway.
While Peggy and Alan and the others stowed all their gear, we headed off to register at the campground and get settled in. A bit later, Al and Peggy came to get us in Peggy’s nicely air-conditioned truck, and we left our camper truck behind for the first time this trip!
We stopped at a couple of shopping malls, in search of some wine and ingredients for dinner, a radio for our camper and a new jacket for Alan. We succeeded on two out of three items (no jacket, unfortunately). Then we went to Al’s place, where our hosts prepared a lovely meal of bison steaks, scallops wrapped in bacon and a couscous salad, garnished with edible flowers. It was a delicious meal!
While we waited, Val cranked up our new radio — it doesn’t need batteries — and found a newscast telling the story of the stabbing at City Hall. The victim and two culprits were known to police and drugs were involved. His injuries were not life-threatening.
Al took us for a walk around Thetis Lake, just a short distance from his house, after dinner. It was getting dark, so we didn’t do the complete circuit, but we got to the beach where, despite the dipping temperature, four young people decided to go for a swim. A flock of Canada geese on the shore were staring at the two couples as if to say "we were here first!" By the time we headed back to Al’s place, we needed the flashlight to guide us along the path.