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Touch of Strange: Amazing Tales of the Coast |
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Written by Cherie Thiessen
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/Touch-of-Strange---Amazing-.gif "A Touch of Strange: Amazing Tales of the Coast")
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A Touch of Strange: Amazing Tales of the Coast by Dick Hammond, published by Harbour Publishing, 2002 (246 pp., PB, $24.95). Hal Hammond was a logger, a farmer, a tracker and a hunting guide. Most of all, perhaps, he was a story teller, and his son Dick remembers vividly the many tales he heard from his father, told around the dinner table to entertain friends and guests, or related to him alone in the last years of Hal’s life.
He had so many stories, in fact, that they couldn’t be contained in one volume. This is the third book to chronicle
his Sunshine Coast life and adventures in the first half of the 20th century.
Hal has been dead for more than a quarter-century but he continues to live through these tales, tales of
skeletons found laced with snakes in an old well, or sitting in creek beds, or hidden beneath boulders; tales of fools who got what they deserved, of revenge taken on camp bosses, of unusual characters like the hermit who made wine with old socks. Some though are, indeed, strange (don’t read “The Serpent’s Lair” before bedtime!)
Hammond’s stories are written in straightforward, unembellished prose, allowing them to retain their sense of immediacy and their oral storytelling style.
A note of caution, however: Hammond is writing of the days before most people were concerned about the
devastation of our natural resources. Readers sensitive to today’s environmental concerns and issues such as grizzly bear, cougar and mountain goat “trophy” hunting, trap lines, and the random killing of wild creatures, should keep this in mind.
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