As the World Turns: A fish story*

By Ed Rogers

A couple of weeks ago, our colleague Paul Clark (aka motomynd) brought to my attention a news story out of British Columbia about a fisherman being sentenced to a lifetime fishing ban and prohibited from ever being aboard a fishing vessel again (story by David Strege, MSN). Paul asked whether Vancouver Harbour isn’t on the fringe of my old Northwest haunts.
    Indeed it is. The city of Vancouver is right across the border from Washington. My friend Edda’s brother and sister lived there. Fishing and crabbing are highly controlled in both Canada and Washington. A lot of people up there live off the water, and generations of people know no other way of life. New laws come along telling them not to do things that their family has always done, and that leads to problems like the guy in the news story had.

Adventures in Greece: Part 2 [Final]

Edda Hofer & Ed Rogers
around 1976

Diving and More

By Ed Rogers

Back in Athens, we took a room in a hotel, and I placed the vase on the window ledge along with the clothes that had been close to it. Later we bought a small plastic bag to slide the vase into.
    We called the couple we had met on Hydra and made a date to go out for dinner with them. They said they would take us to a Greek restaurant called a bouzouki. We met them at 10 that night. They explained that Greek people go to work in the morning and close at noon and reopen at four in the afternoon; therefore, they eat late at night. It was a very large restaurant, with a roof that opened. We watched the moon set and the sun rise overhead. Before the war, singers in a bouzouki had been paid by the number of plates that were broken. If the singer moved me to stand and dance, whoever was at the table with me had to break the plates we had eaten off of. At this place, you could buy a stack of plates but were not allowed to break the ones on your table.

Adventures in Greece: Part 1 of 2

Edda Hofer & Ed Rogers
around 1976

From Salzburg to Greece

By Ed Rogers

Around 1976, my soon-to-be-wife (Edda Hofer) and I took a trip to Europe. Edda came from a very old family in Salzburg, Austria, which even has a statue of her great-great-great grandfather in its town square. Her mother, who was a twin, married a doctor who had been a member of the SS [the Schutzstaffel, a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler] during the Second World War.