In the night, something bit me on the knuckle. Why do little biting things always need to bite you places where the bone shifts around under the skin, so even if you're good and don't scratch it, it still get messed with and so makes you want to SCRATCHscratchscratch.

But I guess this is my first bug bite since my vacation and it reminds me of stories I would like to tell. It was a long vacation, so I'll probably string it out into a series of entries.

Much of the trip was spent in the Queen Charlotte Islands, where my old pal Chris lives. The islands are the millennia-old home of the Haida people, so many people now call the archipelago Haida Gwaii, which is the name I prefer. If you are interested, it is a roughly triangular group of islands just south of the Alaska panhandle.

Now Chris is a self-sufficient fellow. He's bought five acres of land, and plans to develop it without being on town power. 'Survivalist', you may say, but you'd be wrong...more like 'stubborn mofo'. But that's another story.

You can live in Haida Gwaii without needing to spend a lot of money. This fact is illustrated by the amount of lazy hippies wandering around. You can grow, gather, catch, or kill much of your food up there. Every time there's a storm you can go down to the beach and pick up edible stuff washed up on the beach, like scallops the size of your spread palm.

I used to live with Chris, and we made beer. I haven't since our cohabitation, but he’s kept up with it, and is pretty good at it by my lights. Since he’s been up in Haida Gwaii, he's been experimenting with other types of homemade boozables, such as last xmas's salal-berry vodka (aka fruit-scented jet fuel).

Devotees of Monty Python might recognize this quote:

"Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries!"

I had my first experience with the elder bush over my holidays in Haida Gwaii. The berries were not yet ripe, so I couldn't tell if they smelt like my father, but when we arrived the flowers were out all over. They grow in numerous clusters, probably 50+ blossoms per cluster, and are ephemeral things, lasting only about a week. They have a confusing odour: a little like honey, a little like meat, and a lot like sweaty armpits...sorta good, mostly gross. Judging by this funk, I guess that the pollinator for this plant is not a pretty butterfly. If I had to guess, I would say blowflies. Needless to say, it is not something that screams "make food out of me!"

Anyway, in his DYI backwoods kind of way, Chris makes elderflower champagne. You pick a bunch of the flower clusters, dunk 'em in water for a day, pour out the stinky results, add sugar and a bit of vinegar, bottle it up, leave it for three weeks, then enjoy. Like grapes, the flowers have their own yeast, and the mix is thus self-carbonating.

Before we left, Chris let me smell some of the not-quite-done stuff, and it smelled not too bad! When we left he gave us a pop bottle full of it, which was exciting. We were heading back to my hometown, and I planned to share it with some old pals of both Chris and myself.

So it's three days after we left, we'd been on one 7-hour ferry ride, another 17-hour ferry ride, and done a whole bunch of driving. We're coming over a mountain pass on a sunny day, and I'm noticing all the semi trucks pulled over to check their brakes ahead of a steep grade down to the coast. I was musing about what I would do if something big and wrong and sudden happened to my car whilst driving. Thus distracted, I got to discover some interesting things about a) my snap reactions, and b) Science.

Remember this formula?

(w²+ sv + a)af = cb

No?

OK, so I made it up.

But I also proved it.

Warm weather plus sustained vibration plus altitude multiplied by active fermentation equals what, you ask?

Equals car bomb is what.

I'm thinking about the truck drivers, and their brakes, and also how you see big chunks of truck tire along the road sometimes, and hmmm...I wonder what I'd do if BA-OOMPF and my ear is ringing and my left side is sticky and there's honey-coloured goop all over the windscreen and side window on the INSIDE and it smells like what the FUCK hot cross buns? and then I remembered the all-but-forgotten pop bottle in the rear passenger-side footwell and how oddly hard it had been when I put it back there.

And then I laughed.

We pulled over to discover that luckily most of the contents had been contained by a dirty towel and an old pillow. And my left rear speaker, but that hadn't been on. I threw away the towel and the pillow, poured out the speaker and mopped up what we could of the ill-fated elderflower champagne. But the memories of the rest of our trip will be forever perfumed.

What happens to yeasty sugar water infused with Eau d'Underarm Funk when it's soaked into your car carpets and left in a hot car, you ask?

Do you know the derivation of the word 'vinegar'? It comes from French. 'Vin aigre' means 'sour wine' and that's what you get when the wrong type of yeast gets in your vat. Alcohol is Good Yeast poop. Bad Yeast poops acetic acid, aka vinegar.

So now I have a vinegary, sickly-sweet, slightly meat-smelling car and I didn't even get to taste the damn stuff, much less get a buzz off'n it.

From this point on, I will have to prove to my passengers that the pong is not a result of my hygiene (or lack thereof) or of any other bodily emanation on my part.

Luckily, I have proof: