It gets dark so early, now that the clocks have fallen back to standard time. Waiting on the sidewalk tonight, feeling the bite of fall in the wind, watching the witches and superheros pass buy, I caught the bus home. Took my seat in the near emptiness and felt the weekend arrive. We rolled through two stops and a few people got on. A young girl in the seat opposite mine wore a hooded sweatshirt with 'Ambiguous' printed across the front, and she held a hardhat like the kind you find worn on construction sites between her feet.
At each stop we waited a few minutes, the driver keeping us on time in the light traffic. At Robson Street the front door opened and a man stumbled on and leaned on the toll box. He had a fine mane of white hair, a white moustache, a tailored suit and coordinated raincoast and shiny briefcase. He was so drunk he could hardly stand. "How comes there's so many stairs?" he asked the driver as he fished in his pocket for change.
The drunk man with the white hair sat sideways two rows in front of me. He did not sit facing forward, but rather, leaned against the window and faced the rest of the bus. I watched the lights of the retail shops pass by. The drunk man was watching me and waiting for any opportunity to start a conversation. Ten second passed, then another ten, and the drunk man swung his fine head of white hair away from me and towards the girl with the hard hat. "You being safe with that?" he asked her and flicked his finger at the hat. She nodded and he was encouraged. He asked her if the hard hat was hers and winked. He told her he used to wear one, underground, after he retired from being a pro athlete and went to work in Revelstoke building the Mica Dam. "When I retired from being an athlete," he repeated and stared at her until she asked him what sport he had played. "Football," he said. "Then I changed the bits on the drills underground."
As soon as I heard the drunk man say that he had been a professional athlete I knew he had been a football player. The meaty, twisted fingers and the heavy, shaggy head on top of the thick neck; I had seen it before in my own football coaches. His body still held some of the strength that had punished opponents on the offensive or defensive line. He still held the cocksure aggressiveness trained into players through drills and camps and practices, a survival instinct for the violence of the game. He still knew he could lick anyone he needed to lick.
The football player rode the bus for three stops, and for the entire time it felt as if all the rest of the passengers held their collective breath. When he stood to get off at Davie Street at the same moment as the bus braked, time seemed to hold still: would he fall?
The football player stumbled and caught himself on the toll box and lifted his briefcase in a wave to the girl with the hard hat. "Jesus, are those steps new?" he said as he stepped down to the curb and left us in silence, save the quiet rumble of the diesel engine. Everyone took a deep breath and looked around at each other in a sheepish way. Sharing the unusual experience both united us and embarassed us. A mixed feeling of disapproval and charity prevailed for the retired football player.
Seeing the football player walk away from the bus and into the night brought to mind an article I had read earlier today about how Halloween has endured through the ages, as it has been modified from a pagan ritual to a campy masquerade to a night of fantasy projections. The writer made the case that the most important ongoing theme of Halloween was community discovery. You head out into your neighbourhood dressed up and everyone wants to see each other and remove the masks and say, "Who is that?"
I remember one Halloween when I would have been around 8, I dressed up as a football player. I idolized football players at the time and my mom borrowed my cousin Grant's football helmet, a bright green shell with a white trojan and white facemask, all of which seemed impossibly heavy to me. I put it on my head and my brother grabbed the facemask and turned the helmet all the way around on my head without twisting my neck. He left it backwards on my head and I ran into the doorframe trying to grab him. That night, I wore the helmet to visit the first few houses and then decided that it had to go. It was too heavy and slowing me down. I ran back home with it bouncing on my head and I left it on the doorstep. When we came home, the helmet had disappeared. I felt panicked. I knew the helmet had been lent to me and I knew that I had said I wanted to wear it. A football player always wore a helmet. I didn't know what to do; my 8 year-old mind tried to remember if I had really brought it back home or left it out somewhere. Fortunately for me, my mom had found it on the front steps and stashed it away inside. But for a terrible moment I thought I had lost the helmet and I would never be able to become a football player because you couldn't play without a helmet.
Who is behind your mask?
It's a strange thing to try and write copy for your own book. You spend n years working on something (in my case, roughly six) and then you're asked to summarize it into a cute 'hanger' for sales reps. "Just give us one sentence that sums it all up. Something that people will remember."
Now, I have nothing against sales reps, since they do a difficult job I don't do and they do it well if they're still employed in the current industry. More than one inkslave has been seduced by the easy target of bashing the publishing industry, and each one who has fallen has been subsequently reduced in public esteem. But it seems to me that the whole process of publishing and selling a book can't help but be reductive, and can't help itself because this is the way it's done, and this is the way it's always been done. But for a sensitive writerly type, that can be a little (how shall we say this), well, offensive. The word vulgar also comes to mind, but it's connotation is too prissy. Luckily, I'm not one of those types. You know, the ones Russell Smith writes about.
To whit, here is my stab at copywriting for my own book for my own website for my own book. Please, read along and help.
Set at Lake of the Woods, in Kenora, Ontario, and in the parklands of Manitoba, Up in Ontario is the story of the Dubois family coming of age.For most people, the Lake of the Woods is a summer-time paradise -- a weekend retreat to cottages. For Wade Dubois, Lake of the Woods exists as an alternate part of himself, a place where he visits his dad once or twice a year. As Wade gets older, he learns to live life in two worlds, his mother's in upscale Winnipeg, and his father's, out of a boat or a tent on Lake of the Woods.
As Wade grows up, he must decide for himself what Lake of the Woods means to him. It is a place that has kept his mother and father apart, a place that has kept him and his father together, and a place caught between Canada's earliest days and the progress of development; it is Up in Ontario.
Through nostalgia, sadness and joy, Up in Ontario covers thirty years in the history of the Dubois family as they carve their lives out of the Canadian shield.
ISBN: 0-88801-286-1
$18.95 Canadian / $16.95 US, quality
paperback 5-1/2 x 8-1/2, 236 pages
This past Sunday, morning broke clear and crisp over the city, the sky above a radiant blue. A day full of possibilities existed right at our fingertips. After days of rain, the sky cracked open and reminded me of a deep breath taken after a long period of concentration. The weight of the rain disappeared.
Autumn had turned the leaves to varied shades of yellows, bronzes, oranges, reds. Leaves crumpled underfoot on sidewalks, pathways, streetcorners. Leaves collect in the corners of fences and under parked cars, the sweet smell of decay cutting through the cool air. Condensation had collected on cars overnight to cloud their windshields. Runners puffed out plumes of mist.
Fog began to collect above the water of English Bay and creeped inland. Eventually the isthmus of downtown was blanketed from False Creek to Burrard Inlet. Only the tallest buildings remained visible. The great green swatch of Stanley Park peeked through the grey.
The Duck and I walked out along Spanish Banks in bright sunshine. We looked back towards the darkness of the city where the fog collected in piled layers of whites and greys like wool, stacked and readied for milling. Sailboats emerged and swung around to regain their foothold in the wind and disappeared again. Freighters at anchor loomed in the thick air, their rusting red hulls fading to vagues outlines and then disappearing entirely.
We walked over a footbridge where salmon had been spawned by Natural Resources officers in the hope they would make the stream their own and begin the annual cycle of return, mating and death that is their compunction in life. A group of eider ducks dove for baitfish in the shallows and overhead a long V of geese winged their way south. The world was right there around us in its vibrancy and urgency and I wondered about autumn, and whether it was a time of renewal or a time of decay.
Latin is like the fading grandparent of our culture. Every so often we hear its echoes. Children no longer study latin in schools. They no longer memorize long tables of subject-verb agreement, and can no longer decipher the mottos ribboned across coats of arms and integrated into logos.
Latin pops up in specialized situations: the taxonomy of biology, medical ailments, contract law. From these glimpses we have some connection to the oral traditions, but the flame of recollection in general usage grows dim.
per se
stet
quid pro quo
carpe diem
a priori
sic
Sigut Miles Christi
ad nauseum
e pluribus unum
quasi
Corpus Christi
status quo
littera manet scripta
A Mari usque ad Mare
This is the latin I know. How about you?
About a year and a half ago, my friend and mentor, Osborne, mentioned that he was thinking about coincidence, but that he preferred to call it Thematic Convergence. He was thinking about coincidence at the time because he was writing an essay on the topic for Geist, where he is the editor. The essay that came of his ruminations ended up being called, The Coincidence Problem, and I recommend it as an important reading to understand ways of seeing the world around us.
Coincidence happens to be very much on my mind these days. The world seems to be trying to tell me something. Or, I am trying to see something in the world. Or, things just seem to be happening in a certain consistent way at the moment. Let me explain.
A few days ago I posted to this blog the synopsis of Elvisology. Right after I posted it, made sure all was tickety-boo, and sent out the email notification to the Loyal Subscribers (praise be), I clicked over to the Geist website. On their homepage appeared the cover of their latest issue. I stared at it in disbelief: there was Elvis on the cover.
I met some friends that night for dinner. One of the friends has been nicknamed, 'Shanno,' ever since someone lopped the 'n' off the end of her name in a book where she had a story published. The nickname suits her well, lyric, musical and fun to say. After dinner I walked home with another of the group of friends and in mid conversation I stopped short. The parked Subaru on the street in front of us had a custom license plate: 'Shanno.' I pointed the name out to my friend and we looked closer and it turned out the license plate actually said 'Shannu,' that the dark letters on the dark border obscured the top of the 'u.' But there seemed meaning in it regardless of our mistake. Then this morning, walking home from the coffee shop, Shannu the Subaru passed me just as I was thinking about happenstance and composing this post in my mind. The woman driving Shannu almost hit me, as if to remind me to keep watch of where I'm going.
To a writer, coincidence appears as thematic convergence. To a physisist, a convergence of probabilities. To a psychologist, a convergence of perceptions. To a linguist, a convergence of interpretations. To a fisherman, just luck. However we have trained ourselves to frame our judgements of the world is how we see coincidence. Certainly we can cross boundaries, and the most interesting stories of the world always cross boundaries. But we all have a fundamental way of experiencing the world.
What's your coincidence?
Event number one in support of the launch of my novel, Up in Ontario, is scheduled for Sunday, November 2nd at the James Bay Inn in Victoria, BC. I will be reading with Beth Ryan and one other writer. The reading is described in the following way by its excellent organizers:
Sundays at the JBI is a weekly reading series that brings spoken word (poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, script) to the relaxed environment of the James Bay Inn Pub in Victoria, BC.Organized within three-week cycles, the series hosts two consecutive Sundays featuring three invited readers, reading 20 minutes each with a short intermission between readings. The third Sunday in the cycle hosts an Open Mic and Poetry Slam.
The series was launched by Roy McFarlane in September of 1999 and quickly became a success with both writers and audiences. The series now boasts a list of over 200 past feature readers.
After the disappearance and accidental death of Roy McFarlane in May 2001 friends and supporters of Sundays at the JBI kept the series going. Jill Margo is now honoured to be producing the series and carrying on with the work that Roy was so truly passionate about.
The event is open and free and everyone is not only welcome, but heartily encouraged, to come. Some individuals will even be conscripted to come. If you know anyone in Victoria, you should tell them to come. If enough people show up, I might tell the cleanest joke in the world, which revolves around a Duck and a grape. If we pack the place, I will tell the chicken joke that Howard Blatt told for 17 consecutive years at the PigFeed in Winnipeg. Sadly, the PigFeed, whose motto was "A moment on the lips, forever on the hips," is no longer an annual event, though the motto can still be seen on faded t-shirts and stained coffee mugs. And the chicken joke lives on in memory.
Full information about the reading and a map to the James Bay Inn can be obtained on the Sundays at the JBI website.
Searching around the Internet today for links to literary websites, I came across this:
International Journal of Elvisology and the Elvisian Era
Howard Denson, Ed.
Florida First Coast Writer's Festival
Florida Community College at Jacksonville - North CampusA journal devoted to writings on Elvis and the phenomenology thereof as a means of cultural expression and investigation. Works by those who met him (before or after his supposed demise), by those whose lives have been affected by him, and by those for whom he is a symbol in their lives. Pays in contributor copies; all rights revert to author after publication; possible paperback anthology ("Alas, Poor Elvis; I Knew Him, Bubba . . .") to come. Short prose 1000-2000 words; poetry to 30 lines.
Florida First Coast Writer's Festival sponsors an annual Elvisology contest in conjunction with the festival (write for details and deadlines), with small cash prizes awarded.
Subscriptions: $2/year.
Let me know if you are interested in subscribing. I have the contact information.
If you missed Part I, see Winter at the Lake: Part I for this to make sense.
Dad and I followed a road along the creek to the locks. We passed over some rail tracks and the road dead ended on a rise looking out over the Winnipeg River. Sometime in the past few years the locks had been closed and filled in. A hand railing slanted down into the snow where the locks used to be, where you used to be able to wait along side your boat as the water level changed. Off to one side a boat launch sloped down to the water, and snowmobile tracks led down it out onto the ice. We parked the truck at the top of the launch and got out to look around. The wind whipped across the ice at us, stinging our faces with particles of snow. There was nothing to see but the frozen river and the cabins and homes on the far shore, trails of smoke rising from their chimneys into the crisp air. The locks were gone.
We climbed back into the truck and returned across the railroad tracks to town. Dad pointed out the house my great grandparents had lived in before they moved into their apartment nearer the end of their lives. Then he turned down some residential streets into a part of Kenora that I had never seen. We went up and over a few stunted hills to where a row of about a dozen identical small houses fronted a street that ended at a rock face. Dad stopped the truck in front of one them and told me that it was the house he grew up in. I looked out and could imagine Pa there in the driveway, a smoker at the time, and my grandmother with her blond hair and my dad, Jimmy, playing on the lawn. It felt as if the past was pressing right up against the window.
We pulled into the driveway and the windows were frosted and no one was home. We backed out and returned to the highway, passed through Kenora and followed Storm Bay Road to Smith Camps, a fishing camp of nine cabins on the east side of Heenan Point.
We ate lunch with Al and Joanie Smith in the restaurant area of their main lodge. After lunch, Al showed us the old wooden gun boat he had put up on the wall, filled with worn out fishing rods and rusted lures. Hanging all around us were the fish and game of hunting and fishing trips of the past: a fisher with a mink in its mouth, a rack of whitetail antlers, a bull moose head, jackfish and pickerel and bass.
Al poured coffee and told us about going down to his butcher shop a few days earlier, opening the door and flipping on the light and seeing a young black bear crawling in the window opposite him. He had left the window open for the night to clear a smell and the scent had proven irresistable to the bear. The bear let out a woof, backed out through the window as quick as it could, fell to the snow and high-tailed in into the bush. It was one lucky bear. Most bears that come around Smith’s and break into the buildings don’t get a chance to learn their lesson.
As my dad and I wheeled out of the Smith Camps yard, Al headed out to clear the snow from the rink at the end of the docks. I remembered skating on that rink when I was still young enough to need help tying my laces tight enough. We used to stay out until we couldn’t feel our toes and then we'd gathered around the fire and drink hot chocolate until the feeling of pins and needles stopped.
Dad and I backtracked along Storm Bay Road to the main junction, and then headed away from the highway toward our cabin. There were no other cars on the road. Just past the dispatch garage of the Storm Bay Volunteer Fire Department we turned down a single-lane track, down a slope and out onto the ice road. Frozen cattails bent under the truck at the shore. We started out onto the ice and there was a funny moment where Dad and I looked at each other and took off our seatbelts. My dad cracked his window open a few inches and we emerged onto the open ice.
The weather had warmed. Only about a foot of snow covered the ice. The truck ran smooth and quiet over the ice and we picked up speed. In front of us stretched a great expanse of snow under brilliant sunshine, bordered in the distance by a thin line of spruce. Then there we were, driving over the water, where last I had travelled in a boat. Ridges ran in straight lines out from the road where the ice buckled under the pressure of the moving water.
It felt as if we were emerging from the past, picking up speed into the future. Everything around us gleamed. We went faster out onto the expanse of whiteness. The truck began to roll on the ice in a porpoising motion, as if we were crossing frozen waves, as if we were bumping along outside of time.
We arrived at a fork in the road and stopped. One branch headed south over Hay Island to residents in Moore Bay and beyond, the other headed east to Blindfold Lake and Rushing River. My dad and I stepped out of the truck onto the ice. I crouched down and cleared off a spot and looked into it, down at the bits of algae and a small branch trapped in its hold, at the dark water below. After a minute we climbed back into the truck and retraced our path to the shore, where we buckled our seatbelts and rolled up the window again.
We checked out the cabin to make sure it was wintering alright. Dad told me about his plans to build a new boathouse in the spring, one with a bunkhouse on top and a sink and table to clean fish at. I had heard about the boathouse before. We climbed up off the ice onto the dock and I listened to Dad tell me again about what he saw in the future.
Last night, at the Big Night II party, my friend Craig Riggs reported to me that he had seen an ad for my book in the Georgia Straight. I grabbed 2 copies of the paper from the box this morning and there it was, page 34.
our West Coast flockUP IN ONTARIO by James Sherrett
Set in the parklands of Manitoba and the lakes of Ontario, Sherrett's debut novel covers thirty years in the live of Gilbert, Christine and Wade Dubois, tracing the impact of divorce and Wade's discovery of place and belonging within his family.
The cover of Up in Ontario appears with 7 other Turnstone Press covers of recent books by BC authors they have published. If you can, pick up a copy and see for yourself.
"Chi mangia bene sta molta vicino a dio."
ZUPPA
Chicken broth with eff, parmesan & parsley
SUPPLI
Fried rice croquettes
INSALATA
Roma tomatoes & bocconcini tossed with basil olive oil
CALAMARO
Squid stuffed with prosciutto & lemon thyme
TERRINA
Grilled eggplant, roasted bell peppers, baked parmesan basil & mozzarella
IL RISOTTA
Pesto
seared chicken with pine nuts & parmesan
Crostaceo
Shrimp, squid & scallop with tarragon white wine
Funghi
Roasted quail with shittake & porcini truffle cream
MANZO
Beef braised in red wine with mint potatoes
ASAPAGO, AGLIO & BARBABIETOLA
Black olive-caper asparagus, roasted garlic & broiled rosemary baby beets
TAGLIATELLE & PENNE
Tagliatelle ragu & penne all'arrabbiata
POLPETTA DI CARNE
Beef meatballs with sage and white wine cream
Pork meatballs with tomato & anchovy
GROSSO PESCE
Lemon & cracked pepper snapper
Here's the weekend summary: the fishing was fine, the weather was lousy, the people were great.
We spent this past Thankgiving weekend on Vancouver Island. On Friday, I walked out of the office at 3:30. Past the surprised looks of co-workers I carried the cases of my fly rods. The ferries ran late and the Duck and I arrived around 8pm in Victoria. We joined my brother, his roommate John Klassen, and my Dad at their local just as they had finished up their meals, right before the serious drinking was set to begin. In a new town at 21 years old, the twinkle in John's eye was not for the scenery. Good times were at hand.
We set off at the crack of nine the next morning for Campbell River, me, the Duck, my Dad and my brother. My Dad ordered a double-double at the Starbucks and I finessed the translation to the barista. We arrived at the Haig-Brown House by late afternoon, having taken the seaside route from Courtney-Comox, past the sweep of breakers rolling over the water, crashing on the rocks and exhausting themselves up on the gravel beaches. All along our route the weather was a presence. The sun became a dim remembrance of summers past. A simple trip from car to shop or house to car became a duck and dash, everyone bundled against the rain and the wind. Brave walkers out with their dogs held their hands to the hoods of their jackets to see straight. Gusts of wind caused trucks to sway and swerve in their lanes, clumps of leaves littered the road along the coastline.
One interesting thing we noticed was that there were pumpkins everywhere: piles of pumpkins and stands of pumpkins and fields of pumpkins flanked the highway at almost every town. The bright orange orbs littered the fields and farmers' markets like scattered lanterns. Surely even Charlie Brown could have found his great pumpkin among these multitudes.
When we arrived at the Haig-Brown House, Mary Lapierre sat silhoutted in the lit kitchen window. With her was a pretty friend, whose name I don't recall, but who my brother immediately took noticed, as a bird dog catches a scent, and engaged in conversation. I can say with certainty that he remembers her name.
Mary showed us where to place our wet shoes and led us to our rooms. After making arrangements for the evening, we split up. The Duck went exploring the town while by brother and my Dad and I made our fishing arrangements. I had the only pair of waders amongst us and didn't want to get into them for the one hour of light left of the day. So we walked along the shore of the Campbell and watched coho spawning in the side channels. I piggybacked my brother across the flooded sections of the trail, since my boots remained waterproof. Grouse lit from the path along Kingfisher Creek and black-tailed deer tracks crisscrossed the trail. We visited the River Sportman outdoors shop and bought the appropriate licenses and tags. We asked about guides and picked some promising business cards from the rack. After a few calls, I made arrangements to meet up with a fishing guide named Ray the next morning on Dock D, Finger 19 of the Campbell River main docks. I took detailed notes on how to locate the place.
By the time we set out for Dock D, Finger 19 the next morning, our party of three had become a party of four. The Duck hated to be left out of anything. Ray was the only person on the docks and his boat was the only one running. The light had just begun to reveal the day in all its greyness. We gassed up Ray's boat, the Duck bought a license, and we set out through the curtain of rain for Plumper Bay.
Over the next 4 hours, we hooked 3 chum and landed 2 of them, a 9 pounder and a 16. At one point, my Dad, impatient with the slowness of the bite, wished aloud for some action. "I could stand a little chaos," he said. The next fish hooked on our lines was my Dad's and he seized the dancing rod from the holder, setting the hook with a full-bodied heave and reeling with vigour. The fish came in fairly easily until it saw the boat. Then it flashed its silver side at us and made a powerful run at the surface, fouling the line in our downriggers. By the time Ray had unravelled the line the fish had thrown the hook. A boat beside us also fouled a fish in our downriggers, though they managed to somehow keep the fish on their line and land it after an elaborate process of untangling and maneuvering. Gale-force winds and driving rain continued at intermittent cycles. We looked up and the clouds were racing past right above our heads.
We arrived back on shore around 2pm and had to be back to Victoria for Thanksgiving dinner that evening. We also had to cook Thanksgiving dinner back in Victoria that evening. A 15-pound turkey waited in the fridge. The math didn't work for us unless we planned on eating at midnight. We called ahead and spoke to John; John, who had just moved out from his mother's house and who ate cereal for dinner so he didn't have to cook. I explained how to cook a turkey to him and could hear the scratching of a pencil in the background as he copied down everything. We reassured John that this was a big step forward for him, that women would be very impressed. We called my stepmother Linda in as reinforcements. She was on her way back to meet us in Victoria from a visit to Port Angeles, Washington. She was still on the ferry when we called and left our plaintive message. We needed help to pull it off and we needed her to calm John. We grabbed some food for the car and rallied back to Victoria as quick as we could.
In the end the meal turned out wonderfully. We arrived to find Linda into a second bottle of wine. She kept telling John about her wonderful niece Becky who just couldn't find any decent guys in Winnipeg. She showed John pictures she had with her. He was a nice boy; why didn't he and Becky get together? John had not used soap to clean out the turkey, as the we feared he might. The stuffing was StoveTop, and the pies were from Safeway, and we didn't eat until 8pm, but by then everyone was so hungry we could have eaten anything. Linda had bought a can of pressurized whip cream and Scott went around the table and gave any who wanted one a hit of it straight in the mouth. All six of us slept in Scott and John's two-bedroom apartment that night with the windows open to cool the place off and the sound of the rain hitting the leaves outside.
Here's a proposition. We've all had those moments when something, say, an idea, has popped into our head. It feels like a surge of recognition, a charged jolt of potential. Perhaps we were in conversation with someone and something they said triggered the idea. Perhaps we were walking along the street, enroute to point x, when a billboard, a bird overhead, a passing car, made us think, what if...
We've all come up with bad ideas. And we all have a Bad-Idea Filter. At certain times the Bad-Idea Filter works, and at other times, to put it nicely, it does not. The porousness of the Bad-Idea Filter can be influenced by many things: emotion, context, rest (or lack thereof), etc. The list goes on. One of the most pronounced influencers of the Bad-Idea Filter is alcohol. When we drink, we don't think. How many times have we woken up the next morning and thought to ourselves, What was I thinking? The Bad-Idea Filter slipped.
That time we did aerobics on the boulevard of the freeway with nothing on save a sock covering our dangling modifier. Another time when we watched a friend fall into a campfire, pick himself up and dust himself off, and we noticed a tongue of flame on his shirttail and we thought to ourselves, Hmm, let's just see where that goes. The stupid things that we tell ourselves we've outgrown until the next time the Bad-Idea Filter slips and we're left explaining actions with nothing more to go with than, It seemed like a good idea at the time.
So what's your story? Comments, please.
Julie Rossignol writes from China, where she is teaching and writing:
Things are good (if only I could breathe) and my students are great. Many of them have strange self-given English names: Wing, Cloud, Beyond, Rain (three of them), Double Red, Windy, Valendon (?), Heathcliff (!), Scarlett, Groggs (?), Javendsin (?), Sunny (four of them), Snow, Echo, Giggles, Potato and one really big husky guy named himself Simone for some reason. I told him there was no way I could call him that without laughing so he changed his name to Simon.
Look for Julie's writing in the upcoming edition of the Lonely Planet Taiwan guidebook.
Last winter, when I was home for my grandfather’s seventy-fifth birthday, my dad and I drove out to Kenora for a day. We planned to visit a few places to research my novel, Up in Ontario. We left Winnipeg early in the morning, before sunup. By the time we reached the treeline just east of the mennonite town of Steinbach, the sun had risen to the horizon. All across the fields, drifts of frozen snow shone in the low light. The day seemed to hold great promise.
We passed into the transitional country, the mingling space between ecological zones which makes up twenty precent of the area and holds eighty percent of the wildlife. Deer tracks crossed the highway where creeks ran off into the bush. The temperature dial on the dash of Dad's truck never went beyond halfway, so you kept your jacket on when you travelled with him in the winter, whether you were going hunting or to hockey practice. He joked with me that it might break something to turn the dial all the way into the red. He had never tried it before; you never knew what might happen. I smiled at him and called him an old farmer and my coffee steamed in front of my face when I took a sip.
We arrived in Kenora about mid-morning. Everything was very quiet. The population of the town doubled or tripled in the summer, and that was when I visited. So I expected a lot more activity. But it was a Thursday and the roads were empty. Many shops had a "Closed for the Season" sign in the window. Snowmobile tracks ran along the shoulder of the highway and then veered off along well-worn trails down to the water or up over the hill into the backcountry.
To prepare for the trip to Kenora, I had made a list of things I wanted to see. We followed the curving backstreets down to where we used to pass through the the locks from Lake of the Woods into the Winnipeg River. Neither Dad or I had been there in over fifteen years, not since we had passed through the locks on a daytrip to Minaki Lodge where we ate brunch before spending the day in the boat, exploring the network of islands and channels of the Winnipeg River. That had been my first time riding in a boat on flowing water and I remember watching the shore blur by at a tremendous speed as we shot downstream, and then crawl by on our return trip upstream and home again. When we stopped and swam I felt the pull of the current and it made me nervous. We snorkelled around the reefs but I never strayed far from the boat for fear of being pulled down the river.
Dad and I followed a road along the creek to the locks. We passed over some rail tracks and the road dead ended on a rise looking out over the Winnipeg River. The locks had been closed and filled in. A hand railing slanted down into the snow and the earth below where the locks used to be.
To be continued...
Big congratulations to John Gould for his nomination as one of five finalists for the Giller Prize, Canada's market-driven and media friendly literary prize. I mention his nomination because John's book, Kilter: 55 Fictions, was published by Turnstone Press, the same fine publisher that is publishing my novel, Up in Ontario.
John: What would you do with $25,000? You've got until November 4th to plan your spree and iron your tuxedo.
The Duck sent me this link from the City of Vancouver website, Community Services Planning division.
The Changing CityVancouver in 1978 and 2003
In 1978 the city was photographed from a variety of viewpoints for a planning study. Today, those photographs are a valuable record of how the city has been transformed by recent planning intiatives.
Juxtaposed against the 1978 photos are recent panoramas, shot from the same locations and at the same angle. The resulting photos give the viewer a literal snapshot of the passing of time. To see Vancouver in 1978, a logging and mining town, a hint of prosperity on the horizon, is to see a part of the story of this place. Yet it is a story few recognize. Almost no one here is from Vancouver. We are all strangers to this past.
I've always thought of Vancouver as a mirage of a city, a city where a city should not be. People gather here, at the bottleneck of the natural pathways: river, rail, air, road. Some stay for good and some linger for a few of their young years. Many only visit.
Having lived in Vancouver for just over 5 years now, I notice that everyone who arrives in Vancouver feels some marvel at this city that should not be. I mostly meet other Canadians arriving from the prairies or Ontario or the maritimes. They notice the cost of houses, the weather, all those asians. I don't know how to tell them that I like it here without sounding smug or too pleased with my present state of affairs. I show them around: the beaches, shops, mountains, clubs, landmarks, parks. I tell them the stories I know about the place. We hear the echo off the mountains when the nine o'clock gun goes off.
Soon we are all on our way again, left to wonder what to make of it all, this city that smells of saltwater but not of the sea, so mild, the seasons just degrees of moderation. What will we remember of this place? What will we find when we return twenty-five years from now?
Today is the birthday of the White Rabbit, Caroline Bradley.
When the Rabbit first moved to Vancouver a few years ago, we went for a walk. The air had thickened and the mist had settled in, just as if a cloud had descended on the city. The rabbit wore her new GoreTex jacket, bought specially for the rains. It was a light purplish-blue colour and she walked around with the hood up. When I saw her in the distance, she reminded me of a kid in a slicker.
We came to our first intersection and stopped. Being the tall one, I craned my neck around the parked cars to check for traffic. I looked left and, before I turned my head to look right, BAM, the rabbit was off. She darted out across the street and I jogged to keep up. We arrived at the far curb and resumed our normal pace. I said nothing about the Rabbit's dash. When we came to the next intersection I stopped to look for traffic, and again, BAM, the Rabbit was off across the street. This pattern continued at every intersection of our walk.
When I returned home I asked the Duck, someone more familiar with the ways of the Rabbit, if she had ever noticed the darting behaviour. The Duck said she had. A week later, I asked the Noodle if he had noticed the darting behaviour, and he said that now that I mentioned it, he had. Eventually, I confronted the Rabbit and questioned her about the darting behaviour and she said, "I never thought about it. I just go."
Luckily, the Rabbit likes to hold hands when she walks. Don't be surprised if she takes your paw in hers as you stroll along.
Favourite Rabbit pronunciations:
Happy birthday to you, Rabbit!
