Liam, the Moose Poop Collector

Posted by Rebecca

Liam is my favorite (coincidentally also my only) brother.  He is a UBC student in Vancouver, Canada, studying English Lit and Biology something-or-other.

He and I are very different in some respects.  He loves the mountains, I love the city.  He loves the cold, I love the heat.  His ideal location is within walking distance of the Arctic Circle, my ideal location is within walking distance of the equator.  He’s a little uptight about privacy, I don’t care who knows what.  He is built mostly for speed, I am built mostly for comfort.

On the other hand, we have some striking similarities.  We share an obsessive love of food.  We both can spend hours wandering the isles of a grocery store, completely content.  We love to travel, listen to music, laugh, camp, hang out in coffee shops, play cribbage.  And, as of this summer, we are both trailer people.

Liam is living precisely in the middle of nowhere.  100 kms north of Revelstoke, BC.  He is a field study assistant for a grad student who is doing a study on why moose travel to high elevations in the summer.  “Basically we just go around picking up their poop and sending it to a lab.”  And while doing that, he is living in a tiny single-wide with the grad student.

My dad recently sent me an email highlighting mine and Liam’s recent similarity:  “Where did I go wrong that both my children are ‘Trailer Trash’?  You should see the trailer Liam’s living in. When I saw it I thought it was an abandoned shed. It makes your fifty footer enormous, and a palace to boot..”

Apparently, Liam’s domicile is pretty rustic – no electricity or running water.  But I’m awfully jealous of that peaked roof.  I bet it never springs a leak!

 

Liam, hard at work.

 

I know Liam’s trailer life is temporary, for now.  But who knows, maybe once he graduates with his degree in Moosepoopology, he’ll find that some of the best times were spent in that tiny single-wide, in the middle of who-knows-where.  And maybe, just maybe, he will decide to be a trailerboy for life.

That’s my dad, the lovely Norwegian Sandra (Liam’s Vancouver roomie, who is also in Revy for the summer), and Liam.

 

Rebecca Knabe

 

P.S.  Here’s a little more from my dad’s email (to be read with a British accent):  “Your place looks super, amazing, fantastic, it’s what you’d see in a glossy magazine. Well done, Rebecca.  Never seen a bathroom sink, or any sink for that matter like yours. But I think I preferred the exercise machine in the kitchen. One of the millionaire Greeks here in town, owns restaurants and all that, has an exercise machine in their living room. So it’s not just trailer trash that has the fix on tackiness.”