Eighteen Bridges - Winter 2011

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Chris Turner Jan Zwicky Russell Cobb Charlotte Gill Tim Bowling Bruce Grierson Craille Maguire Gillies

Stories That Connect

IN THE PIPELINE WINTER 2011

Fear of Flying

You’ll Get Over It… Maybe

The World’s Greatest Athlete?

Hint: He’s Older Than Dirt

The DrugFriendly House

New short fiction by Greg Hollingshead

Confronting a Turbulent Flow

She is a thing of beauty.

stellaartois.com Must be legal drinking age. TM/MC InBev NV/SA.

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WINTER 2011

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

– E. M. fORSTER, HOWARD’S END

fEATuRES ON THE RECORD

Chris Turner

22 Bearing Witness

What’s really at stake in the Great Bear Rainforest.

THE MEMOIR BANK

Jane Silcott

32 Threshold

The change that ends changes.

THE SCIENCE fIlE

Russell Cobb

38 Up in the Air

There are many cures for the fear of flying.

The trick is finding one that works. fICTION

Greg Hollingshead

52 The Drug-Friendly House

There’s your drug-friendly house, and then there’s your friendly drug house…

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CaMEROn CHEsnEY

span

Craille Maguire Gillies

07 Bringing Home The Bison Have you herd?

Rob Appleford

09 Canada’s Tomorrow That Never Was

Bruce Grierson

12 Running Out of Time

Our shining sci-fi failure.

What keeps Ed Whitlock going?

Eva Kilinska

14 In the Sandhills

Tim Bowling

16 On the Rails

The Keystone XL pipeline decision.

The Great Stone Face in the Great White North. nOTEBOOKs

Josef Skvorecky and Paul Wilson

20 Engineering Human Souls MIsCEllanY

Clive Holden

36 Can•Icons: The Canada Goose 45 Can•Icons: The Tuque GRapHIC nOvEl

Cameron Chesney

47 Daphne: An Excerpt pOETRY

Darren Bifford Jan Zwicky Warren Heiti Sue Sinclair

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There Is No True World Moon Descartes Eclogue sOUnDInGs

Scott Messenger Jennifer Cockrall-King Paul Matwychuk

59 North Star

Who is the Polaris Prize for?

61 Whither The Wheat

Seeking a grain of truth.

63 Malickpsychosis

Beware The Tree of Life.

BRIDGEs

Charlotte Gill 4

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66 Somewhere in Gujarat Passage through India.

EDITORS’ NOTE

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WINTER 2011

EDITOR Curtis Gillespie SENIOR EDITOR Lynn Coady CONSULTING EDITOR Paul Wilson VISUAL ARTS EDITOR Sean Caulfield GUEST POETRY EDITOR Jan Zwicky DEPT. OF FACTUALITY Head: Craille Maguire Gillies Body: Kisha Ferguson, Jessica Lockhart, Christina Palassio, Jay Smith CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Deborah Campbell Marcello Di Cintio Craille Maguire Gillies Lisa Gregoire Bruce Grierson Alex Hutchinson Marni Jackson Lisa Moore Timothy Taylor Chris Turner EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Jessica Kluthe CONSULTING PUBLISHERS Joyce Byrne Ruth Kelly ART DIRECTOR Kim Larson

Fear Not Here we are cracking open EB3, with EB4 already well under way. Who’d have thought? We now have all the thrills, spills and surprises (both good and bad) of three painstakingly-constructed issues of Eighteen Bridges behind us and still we plow ahead, being the optimism junkies that we are. Optimism can be a handy weapon, especially when you find yourself up against the kind of circumstances that would send your more pragmatic, sober-sided types running (the business arm of magazine publishing, let’s say).

And it would seem we’re not the only ones grappling with uncertain conditions these days. As we were putting together stories for EB3, we noticed how, as with previous issues, a distinctive theme began to emerge, courtesy of our writers—that theme being, for lack of a better word, fear. The stories in this issue are about naming fears, facing fears, learning how to approach a fear, and understanding

why fear is sometimes an ally. There are stories that speak to the fear of what we’re doing to our planet, the fear of aging, the fear of flying, the fear of our neighbours, the fear of certain movies, and even the fear of food.

The good news is that you don’t need to be afraid. Feel free to jump right into this (or any) issue of EB. There’s nothing lurking inside but some of the finest writing in Canada. You don’t even have to fear fear itself. Trust us—we’re experts on the subject.

The Editors

GRAPHIC DESIGNER Andrew Forbes WEBSITE Gunnar Blodgett & Duncan Kinney UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA LIAISON Marie Carriere BUSINESS MANAGER Nina Hawkins Eighteen Bridges is a not-for-profit magazine published through the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta.

The production and design of Eighteen Bridges, along with publishing consultation, was provided by Venture Publishing Inc. Subscriptions are one year for $25.95 plus GST. Please visit www.eighteenbridges.com

* put FSC LOGO HERE

A THANK YOU: EB3 could not have happened without the contributions of many people and organizations, and we owe them a great debt of thanks – Ruth Kelly, Joyce Byrne, Lesley Cormack, Kim Larson, Craille Maguire Gillies, Brian McPherson, Bernie Kollman, Cathy Condon, Kathleen Leclair, Stephen Leclair, Timothy Caulfield, Todd Anderson, the University of Alberta Bookstore, Carl Amrhein, Pamela Freeman, Catherine Swindlehurst, Marie Carriere, Erin Berney, Nina Hawkins, Blaine Kulak, Pat Gillespie, John Mahon, the Edmonton Arts Council, Stephen Mandel, Patricia Misutka, Ryan Barber, and Paul Pearson.

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CONTRIBUTORS A few of our contributors…

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pg 52

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CRAIllE mAgUIRE gIllIES is a former editor at enRoute and a National Magazine Award-winning writer who contributes to Canadian Geographic and Reader’s Digest.

She is based in London, where she’s working on a book about modern nomads.

gREg hOllINgShEAd is at work on his fourth novel, about living in the light from the house at the end of the street. A professor emeritus at the University of Alberta and director of the Writing Studio at the Banff Centre, he is currently Chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada.

ChARlOTTE gIll is a former professional tree planter and the author of Ladykiller and Eating Dirt. She lives in Powell River, B.C.

And the rest of them…

ROB ApplEfORd is associate professor in the English and Film Studies Department at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. dARREN BIffORd was born and raised in Summerland.

He currently lives in Montreal, where he teaches at Champlain College. His book, Wedding in Fire Country, is forthcoming.

TIm BOWlINg is the author of The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory and the Death of Wild Culture and In The Suicide’s Library: A Book Lover’s Journey. In 2008, he received a Guggenheim fellowship for his poetry and prose.

He lives in Edmonton.

CAmERON ChESNEy is an actor, playwright, designer, illustrator and cartoonist creator from Edmonton.

RUSSEll COBB is a writer and academic in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. His writing has been featured on National Public Radio, and in Slate, The Nation, The Texas Observer, and This Land Press, among others.

JENNIfER COCkRAll-kINg is a writer from Edmonton who travelled Cuba, Europe, Canada and the US for her forthcoming book Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution.

BRUCE gRIERSON is a Vancouver writer who has written for The New York Times Magazine, Scientific American, Explore, Saturday Night, Vancouver Magazine, Western Living, Popular Science, and many others.

WARREN hEITI lives in Halifax, where he is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Dalhousie University and a teaching fellow at the University of King’s College. He is the author of Hydrologos.

ClIvE hOldEN is best known for two multi-disciplinary art projects: Trains of Winnipeg (2001 to 2006), and the ongoing U Suite (2006 to 2020). Born and raised on Vancouver Island, he splits his time between there and Toronto.

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EvA kIlINSkA is a native of Poland, but now lives in Edmonton. Prior to making Canada her home eleven years ago, she moved every five years to experience different cultures, pursue her education and follow her profession.

A geographer and geologist by training, this is her first published article. pAUl mATWyChUk is the general manager of Newest Press in Edmonton, as well as the film and theatre reviewer for Edmonton AM on CBC Radio. His blog The Moviegoer can be found at mgoer.blogspot.com.

SCOTT mESSENgER lives in Edmonton, where he’s a full-time writer and communications specialist, and part-time musician.

JANE SIlCOTT is a Vancouver writer whose work has appeared in several literary magazines and anthologies, including the recently published Slice Me Some Truth.

SUE SINClAIR is the author of Breaker, which was nominated for the Atlantic Poetry Prize and the Pat Lowther Award. She is currently writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick.

ChRIS TURNER is the author of The Leap: How to Survive and Thrive in the Sustainable Economy, as well as the bestseller and Governor General’s Award finalist The Geography of Hope. His magazine writing has earned seven National Magazine Awards. He lives in Calgary. pAUl WIlSON is a freelance writer and editor. He is the co-author of Fifty-seven Hours: A Survivor’s Account of the Moscow Hostage-taking Drama, and has translated seven novels by Josef Skvorecky into English. A collection of his essays has been translated into Czech and will be published in the Czech Republic in 2012 by Torst.

JAN ZWICky has published seven collections of poetry, most recently Forge, and her books of philosophy include Wisdom & Metaphor, Plato as Artist, and Lyric Philosophy.

A native of Alberta, she now lives on the west coast.

SPAN Reporting back

bRINGING HomE THE bISoN

Eamon Mac Mahon

O

ne day last spring, at the height of calving season, Wes Olson pulled his white Parks Canada Ford F-250 pickup truck off a gravel road that winds through Grasslands National Park, near the Saskatchewan-Montana border. He grabbed his binoculars from the dashboard, and scanned the distance. The plains extended toward the horizon like an inland sea. Both the outside and inside of Olson’s truck were caked in mud—it was the wettest spring on record—but he was immaculate in faded green jeans and a matching Parks Canada shirt.

Olson drives this route often to check on the herd of almost 200 plains bison that are scattered across the park’s West Block. For fun, he likes to wander into the short-grass prairie with a bag of alfalfa, call out, “Hey girls!” and have them come running toward him—a party trick that’s earned him a reputation as something of a bison whisperer. He shrugged off the suggestion. “They would forget pretty quickly if I didn’t have a treat.”

That afternoon all he had were binoculars and intuition. It was a windy day— channelling Wallace Stegner, the weather section of Parks Canada’s online visitor’s guide describes the wind as “part of the landscape”—and he figured the bison had sought shelter. Olson has a hawkish ability to spot wildlife; in the distance he noticed a few black specks. Bison are the biggest land animals in North America and weigh as much as the original Volkswagen Beetle. As they clustered two or three kilometres away near the base of a butte, they looked no bigger than flies.

IN DEcEmbER 2005, SEvENTy-oNE bISoN— thirty male calves, thirty female calves, and eleven female yearlings—were relocated from Elk Island National Park, near Edmonton. They spent the winter in a sixteen-hectare parcel of land and, in late May, after surviving the “death months” of March and April before new vegetation grows, were released into the park’s West Block. They took off like racehorses.

Though nomadic by nature, bison have internal compasses and if it weren’t for the fence surrounding their new home, the yearlings would have run all the way back to Elk Island—600 kilometres in all. “No one has ever successfully relocated an adult herd,” said Olson, who himself moved from Elk Island to Grasslands to work on the reintroduction program. “Bison always find their way home.”

One year, when snow drifts reached the fence-line, an adventuresome male walked up the frozen ramp and headed off across the surrounding ranchland, where it hit another fence. Late last winter, a bull wandered out of the park; wardens found him in early spring.

As the bison settled in to their new home, wardens quietly observed how the herd established itself. Relocating an animal is like dropping a city kid in the far north and making him forage for food.

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pincushion and prickly pear cacti, which are covered with porcupine-like barbs.

But some behaviours were inherent. The yearlings made a distinct lion-like roar before fighting, something they hadn’t yet learned from their elders in Elk Island, and which they usually start when they’re about seven years old. Let loose in Grasslands, they mated almost four years earlier than an established herd would because, as Olson put it, “There was no one bigger around to beat them up.” (Yearling males, Olson wrote in his book Portraits of the Bison, “can be particularly obnoxious.”)

When full-grown, bison are all foreheads and barrel chests, with tiny, black pin-like eyes that give them a clumsy, bullish look of aggression. They have a crooked kind of grace and their insistent forward-leaning gallop has an uneven tempo, as if they are running to the beat of a broken metronome.

The plains bison from Elk Island thrived in their new home down south and each year their numbers increased.

With calving this spring it rose to 250.

In the next year or two, wardens may need to cap the herd—this in an area that hadn’t seen bison since the eighteen-eighties. “At one time,” Olson said, “you could have lined up all the bison in North America and they would have gone around the world three times.”

WhEN I fIRsT mET OlsON, hE Was dEscRIbINg the reintroduction program to a fourthyear biology class at the University of Saskatchewan, in Saskatoon. He wore a button-up shirt and jeans; a cell phone was holstered to his leather belt. He set his grey Stetson on the Arborite counter of the lab and fingered a remote control for the slide machine. Olson is soft-spoken by nature and has a dry, languid monotone that belies his enthusiasm. “I have a whole PowerPoint presentation on manure,” he told the class at one point, clicking through images.

He joined the Parks service at a time when “you only needed to know how to ride a horse—but high-school helped.”

(He dropped out.) He came to Elk Island in 1984 and stayed for twenty-four years, ranching plains bison and Canadian 8

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warmblood horses in his spare time. He claimed to have done “a little undercover law enforcement” somewhere along the way, which he divulged with the briefest twinkle in his eyes so you could not quite tell if he was serious.

It was 8:30 a.m., but the class hung on Olson’s every word. The park is surrounded by ranchland, and some students have ties to the area. When he announced that Grasslands had just made a deal to buy another ranch, a woman near the back of the lab said, “They’re my relatives.”

Grasslands National park was established in principle in 1981, making it a newcomer to these parts—some cattle ranches go back generations. Two decades of bureaucratic wrangling and real estate negotiations followed, and it wasn’t officially declared a national park until 2001. Even still, it lay fallow for years before the bison arrived. “Ranchers in the area viewed the grass as money in the bank,” Olson told me later. Many locals were happy to see the land finally put to use.

Recently, the park held a town hall meeting with local farmers to talk about reintroducing fire to Grasslands, just like they reintroduced bison and black-footed ferrets.

The burn plan would see 7,500 hectares go up in flames each year—a scary prospect for many ranchers. “In the last one hundred years,” Olson said, “the ranching population has been fighting fires to exist on this landscape.” They’re rightly cncerned about the use of fire in Landscape management.

Of course, there’s always been friction between commerce and conservation. Around the time plans for Grasslands National Park were being drawn, American geographer Deborah Popper and her husband Frank, now a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers, wrote a controversial article that suggested the Great Plains of the U.S. be turned into a “buffalo commons.” They predicted that vast parts of the American West and Midwest would depopulate in the coming generation. “At that point,” they wrote, “a new use for the region will emerge, one that is in fact so old that it predates the American presence.” In the nineteenth century people replaced bison; now, the thinking went, bison should replace people. The Great Plains, the Poppers

believed, wouldn’t be able to sustain an agricultural livelihood anyway.

Over the years, Parks Canada has bought up a section here, a quarter-section there, gradually expanding like a prairie sky. Many ranchers see the importance of grasslands conservation and, for its part, the park tries hard to be a good neighbour, working with landowners and even restoring a large sign for the historic Dixon Ranch.

Reintroducing bison to graze these fields was not merely to restore a landscape stripped of bison and other animals such as the Plains grizzly and the Prairie wolf. The cattle that graze this area have not overwintered around here since 1906. Bison, on the other hand, can live outdoors through the cruellest months when the temperature can drop to the minus 80s after wind chill and there are no barns or woods for shelter.

The last balsam poplar died years ago and there is said to be only a handful of trees— black cottonwoods — left in the park.

The return of the bison marks more than a half century of effort to restore the grasslands. Bison are a keystone species, sitting at the top of an arch that would collapse without them. In winter, they blaze trails that other animals follow and use their foreheads to plough through snow to get at vegetation, freeing up food for smaller creatures. Migrating birds nest in tuque-like shells of their hair, which is the second warmest fibre in North America, (Musk-ox is the first), and Sprague’s pipits like to lay their eggs on desiccated bison patties.

The park’s biodiversity has made it one of the most studied conservation areas in Canada. In summer, graduate students who have come here to gather data take up residence in the village of Val Marie (pop: 137). The park is home to rare mixed grass prairie, the country’s only black-tailed Prairie dog colonies, and native black-footed ferrets—adorable cooneyed creatures that were reintroduced in 2010 and are one of the North America’s most endangered mammals. (Their main source of food: Prairie dogs.)

At times, however, there can seem to be no animals in sight—just grass, buttes, and a blue Prairie sky that wraps around the edges of the park. It is “a distance without

limits,” as Wallace Stegner wrote of the Prairies in his classic book Wolf Willow. This is perhaps part of the appeal, and may explain Olson’s favourite place to see the lay of the land: a plateau about forty-five minutes into Grasslands, in a clearing near a branding pen for the Dixon Ranch. The area is along the Continental Divide. Waters to the north, he notes, go to Hudson Bay. Those to the south flow toward the Gulf of Mexico. That day last spring he pulled his truck, like he had many times before, to the empty pen, and got out to scan the horizon.

People from Saskatchewan like to joke that you can watch your dog run away for three days. That windy afternoon there were no stray dogs and only one bison near enough to see—a six-year-old male lolling in the grass, his heft bringing to mind a furry Jabba the Hutt. (The grass here is so rich that some of the herd is becoming obese.) His presence was a totem.

Without the park there would be no bison; without the bison, the park would seem a truly empty place.

– Craille Maguire Gillies

CANADA’S TOMORROW THAT NEVER WAS

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t’s Marshall McLuhan’s centenary this year, and there have been many discussions in the media of his more famous ideas, like the global village, Spaceship Earth, and those irritating conjoined twins, Medium and Message.

I’d like to revisit a less famous McLuhan idea that has always struck me as important. He observed that “art, at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to

happen to it.” One of my favourite illustrations of McLuhan’s idea is what has been called both the most anticipated and pedigreed science fiction TV series of all time, and the worst science fiction TV series of all time. I’m talking about Canada’s very own SF T V show: The Starlost.

In 1973, the controversial SF writer Harlan Ellison was determined to make an SF TV show he could be proud of.

Ellison developed his concept for The

Starlost, an anthology series based around a doomed intergenerational space colony, and it was pitched to the BBC by 20th Century Fox producers. The show’s structure, he felt, would be flexible enough to allow truly talented authors to tell their stories with integrity through the medium of television. He planned to write for and story-edit the series, and would commission original stories from the leading lights of SF at the time: A.E. van Vogt, Frank Herbert, Joanna Russ, Thomas M. Disch, Alexei Panshin, and Philip K. Dick.

Ellison would push these writers to supply their freakiest story ideas to him, and he would then adapt these ideas to fit within the overall story arc of the series.

T he BBC didn’t bite, and so the show’s producers turned to Canada, where they got a deal with CTV. While Ellison’s dream-team of SF writers was A merican, the episodes themselves would, according to Ellison, now be written by “the best Canadian scenarists to be found.” The series was to be shot at the CFTO–Glen Warren studios in Toronto, one of “the best studios, the best facilities,” with, according to an insert in the Toronto Star, “the best techniques in the world.” Two young Canadian actors (Gay Rowan and Robin Ward) were cast as supporting leads alongside the main star, the American actor Keir Dullea, of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame. Ben Bova, the noted science fiction writer, was hired to make sure the series didn’t violate basic rules of physics or biology in its quest to entertain. The stories told in the series were to be unbound by budget considerations because the special effects would be masterminded by Douglas Trumbull, the wizard behind effects on such films as 2001, Silent Running and The Andromeda Strain. His newly-designed Magicam videotaping system would allow live action to be transposed onto miniature sets.In the words of Ellison, Bova’s techniques would make “whatever you envision spring to life.”

If The Starlost sounds like an SF nerd’s dream today, imagine how it sounded then. And it was Canadian! All of which leads to the obvious question: Why have you never heard of it? Well, I didn’t say it was an SF nerd’s dream come true.

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ThE fIRsT sIgN of TRoublE camE bEfoRE ThE show even started production. Ellison, an infamous hothead, was miffed that the show’s funding was tied to its fulfillment of “Canadian content” rules, which meant having to employ a Canadian—and therefore largely inexperienced—production crew. That was bad enough, but he became livid when he realized that the Canadian writers and producers he was forced to work with were inexperienced both in crafting episodic American television and with science fiction as a genre.

“I was not about to spend the rest of my natural life in a motel in Toronto, rewriting other people’s words,” he later wrote in a scathing essay. After several angry exchanges with the show’s executive and associate producers, amidst charges and counter-charges of fraud, calumny, and deceit blasting back and forth like raygun fire, Ellison, the volatile creator and senior story editor, simply walked out of the airlock. Into the vacuum with him went the promised stable of SF writers and the guiding vision of the show. “In the hands of the inept, the untalented, the venal, and the corrupt,” wrote Ellison, “The Starlost became a veritable Mt. Everest of cow flop.”

Adding to the inexperience of the writers, the producers’ battles with Ellison, and Ellison’s premature adieu, was the failure of Doug Trumbull’s Magicam system. It simply didn’t work. And because the entire production budget was based on the phenomenal savings this videotaping system was supposed to deliver, many corners had to be cut thereafter if the series was to make it to the small screen. Many, many corners.

The series was shot “static” on videotape against chroma-key backgrounds, giving it the unfortunate appearance of a local TV weather report. Associate producer Ed Richardson remembers the level of improvisation the production budget required: “The scenes of Keir [Dullea] floating around in space were accomplished by putting Keir in a black chair against a blue screen and moving the chair around with little rods…The meteors were little pieces of Styrofoam that we threw past the camera’s lens.” Actor Robin Ward, who candidly admitted that “as an actor who was doing theatre 10

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in Canada, I would have accepted a series called Pharmacists in Space,” relates a similar story of low-tech mishaps: “We were all wired-up to fly in space. After the other [actors] took off, it was my turn.

Unfortunately, I’m top-heavy. I turned over and flew upside down. They wound up leaving that in.”

Ben Bova, the science consultant, grew increasingly bemused as the red lines he drew under scientific impossibilities or gaffes in the scripts were disregarded. He later admitted that, “I was paid rather handsomely as a consultant, and praised by everybody…and my advice was totally ignored.”

The Starlost was on a collision course with disaster. After sixteen episodes, the series was cancelled. Never one to leave a gloat unrelished, Harlan Ellison wrote what became the epitaph for the unfortunate project. “The shows were so disgracefully inept,” he wrote, “so badly acted, uniformly directed with the plunging breakneck pace of a quadruple amputee crossing a busy intersection, based in confusion and plotted on the level of a McGuffy’s primer, that when the show was cancelled after sixteen weeks, there were viewers who never knew it was missing.”

DEspITE ITs mIxED paTERNITy aND IgNoblE end, the saga of The Starlost is, for me, a quintessentially Canadian story, for better and worse. Our national character is a speculation on the future, and our SF visions tend toward the utopian. One of the first Canadian science fiction novels, Tisab Ting, or, The Electrical Kiss (1896), was set in twentieth century Montreal and featured an interracial couple. Marshall McLuhan, the man whose achievements we celebrate this year, was born on the Prairies. After visiting Edmonton, where he grew up, you can make a day of it and head south to see the giant replica of the starship U.S.S. Enterprise built as a roadside attraction in Vulcan, Alberta. We have even tried to argue that the ideology of Gene Roddenberry’s franchise has a distinctly maple flavor. In the early nineteen-nineties, there was a grassroots campaign for Paramount Studios to name one of the Star Trek: TNG spaceships the “U.S.S.

Pearson” after Lester B. Pearson. His development of “noninterference” as a guiding principle for United Nations peacekeeping forces in 1956 clearly foreshadowed the “Prime Directive” of the United Federation of Planets.

On the darker edge of the future, there is The Last Canadian (1974), a book by newspaperman William Heine. It is a post-apocalyptic tale of a plague wiping out almost the entire North American population except for one man who’d had the foresight to relocate to the far north of Canada. He was an American by birth, but his Canadian citizenship papers arrived in the mail as the plague struck, so he was—say this out loud—“the last Canadian!”

In many ways, Canada was (and still is) a place founded on a belief in the future.

of couRsE, ouR NaTIoNal REach ToWaRDs the future often exceeds our grasp. Tisab Ting, or, The Electrical Kiss is a truly dreadful and racist book. The Last Canadian (no Mrs. Dalloway itself, mind you) was adapted into an appallingly bad direct-to-video movie called The Patriot (1998), relocated from the Canadian north to Montana, and starred— please don’t say this out loud—Steven Seagal. Paramount Studios never listened to the “U.S.S. Pearson” campaigners, and so our very own starship never left spacedock. Some people lament that Marshall McLuhan is now best remembered for a walk-on appearance in the movie Annie Hall rather than for any of his ideas about hot and cool culture.

Yet despite these setbacks and snubs, Canada is still, as far as I’m concerned, a truly science fictional nation. This is where McLuhan’s DEW line analogy comes in handy. While The Starlost project is thought of (when it’s thought of at all) as “the worst science fiction TV show of all time,” it can also be seen as an apt metaphor about Canada and its place in the future. When you consider the story arc of the series, it’s apparent that Harlan Ellison had, quite by accident, come up with a concept that resonated uniquely in a Canadian context. According to the show’s “bible” (a reference manual for scriptwriters) the “Earthship Ark,” built in anticipation of an earthly cataclysm

there is no true world

Muraille play or in a mid-career novel by Margaret Atwood.

There is no true world, wrote Nietzsche,

the significance of The STarloST is greater

unhappily. What you believe to be true

than Ellison’s epitaph may suggest. The series tapped into Canada’s dream of the future, as well as its anxiety about that future. As an SF nerd glued to the TV in the seventies, I felt its promise and mourned its spectacular failure. As I watched and grew, I became used to seeing the ghosts of Canada’s future on the T V screen, what the American-Canadian futurist William Gibson has called “the architecture of broken dreams” reminding us of the “Tomorrow That Never Was.” I once watched an episode of the original Battlestar Galactica series in 1979 which featured the derelict buildings of Montreal’s Expo ’67 I’d visited three years before. Much later, I caught a brief glimpse of what I knew were the Toronto City Hall buildings featured in a montage seen through the Iconian Gate in a Star Trek: TNG episode.

The Starlost has also had a fascinating afterlife, Ellison’s grave-thumping notwithstanding. There have been Starlost character portraits, redesigns and blueprints of the Ark, a comic book version of the original Ellison pilot episode, and even a Toronto sketch comedy troupe doing a Starlost skit in 2010, that, the troupe admitted, “most of the audience didn’t get.” Perhaps most touching is an online campaign set up in 2008, remake the series. The dream of the future that this campaign hopes to renew says much about our Starlost Tomorrow That Never Was: “we’ll rescue The Starlost from its Canadian made catastrophe, and correct the mistakes of the past.”

Yes, our country may be a likeable also-ran in the race to the future. But doesn’t this unfulfilled optimism also tell us something important about Canada as a nation? Idealistic, hopeful, ahead of its time, perhaps, but also compromised in some tragic way? Maybe if those crazy Canadian dreamers ever succeed in re-launching The Starlost franchise, they’ll change the name of the Ark’s Host Computer from Mulander 165 to McLuhan. A nerd can dream, can’t he?

is just what is true. What you believe is what you saw of love before you knew how to speak. And what you say now is what you repeat to yourself about hope or what is repeated by everyone on the news.

Nietzsche went on to say that a new, divine way of thinking might emerge but I think Nietzsche is probably mistaken about this one, a little like a boy playing king of his own castle while the business of the official world carries on around him, carries on in the kitchen down the hall where what you learnt of love is happening in the most haphazard way. Still you might go on to dream in the early hours of a new and divine way of thinking, where what is apparent is exactly all of what is and all that shines.

– Darren Bifford

in 2790 AD, was designed to transport 500,000 people in communities housed in discrete biospheres across space to populate a new planet. But there was a disaster, the piloting crew was killed, and the Ark drifted aimlessly through space for five hundred years. After the accident, one fansite explains, “the airlocks connecting the ship’s domes that housed the last survivors of the dead planet, Earth, were sealed. Cut off from the outside world, many communities simply forgot that they were on a spacecraft. They accepted that their world was fifty miles in diameter and the sky was metal.”

The series was to follow three young protagonists, Garth, Devon, and Rachel, who escape from one of the biospheres, an “almost one-for-one re-creation of an early 1800s Amish or Menonite [sic] community.” These three country bumpkins explore the Ark, discover its looming destruction, and fight to unite the isolated communities to save the ship. Unless control of the ship can be regained, humanity is doomed to die a second time.

As Ellison described the overall concept in the series’ bible, The Starlost “is the long story of three young people discovering their world, and their place in it. It is also a study of many different cultures in conflict with each other… one hundred tiny nations of strangers, no two alike, bound outward toward new life or extinction.” This central idea has, I think, a particular national resonance because as a Canadian kid growing up in the nineteen-seventies, the conceit made complete sense; certainly more so than the “Wagon Train In Space” conceit that made Star Trek seem so American—and by extension, so alien.

But the primary narrative of The Starlost is a story any Canadian nationalist in the sixties and seventies might recognize, with its themes of many solitudes, youthful idealism, multicultural divisions, and the central riddle that Northrop Frye posed as ours, namely, “Where is here?” I can easily imagine The Starlost’s central premise appearing in an early Paul Thompson/Theatre Passe

– Rob Appleford WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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RUNNINg oUT oF TIME

E

d Whitlock, surely one of the greatest athletes of the last thirty years, is not a superhumanly fit long-distance runner in the way these things are traditionally measured—VO2 max and the like. But he is a crazily efficient runner, with a metronomic gait and a crack metabolic mechanism for converting grilled cheese sandwiches into energy for muscles. He is built like a heron—110 pounds on a five-foot-seven frame—and the striations on his quadriceps and hamstrings call to mind the Illustrated Man in children’s science books. He looks as if he could run on a watch battery.

Early one morning this past June, at Hughes Stadium in Sacramento, a criminally small crowd gathered to see all these faculties on display. Into a stiff wind out of the south that messed with his pace but could not touch the consistency of his stride, Whitlock was in the process of shaving more than two full minutes off the best time ever recorded for his age group in the 10,000 metres at the World Masters Athletics Championships. He was barely sweating, but then he almost never does. The only stray joules of energy he expended were from turning his shoulder to blow by the guys he was lapping.

Ed W hitlock is eighty years old.

If you know of him, it may be for one of two reasons, the first being a race he ran 12

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seven years ago, which is widely considered one of the greatest performances in the history of track and field (until he broke through another barrier just recently; but we’ll come to that). Seven years ago, at age seventy-three, he breasted the tape at the Toronto Marathon in 2:54:49. If we “age-grade” that time—adjust it, that is, against the predictable decline in speed as we get older—it was the equivalent of a twenty-five-year-old running 2:04.

Time is a character in the lives of track athletes, in the way that place is often said to be a character in great films.

But when the story of Ed Whitlock is eventually, definitively written, it may be his relationship with time that will be central. Everyone talks about time when they talk about Whitlock, but he hardly ever thinks about time himself. He wears a watch—it dangles on his wrist like a bracelet because the last hole in the strap still isn’t tight enough to secure it around his broomhandle wrist—but he rarely looks at it. He refers to it on long runs only because he likes to know how long he’s been gone from the house, so as to gauge when it’s time to stop running and come home for a meal.

out,” he told me this summer, in soft measured tones still stamped with the Britain of his youth, over sandwiches and coffee at a Sacramento diner. At the starting gun Whitlock doesn’t really think about going fast. He just starts running, and his body, duly prepared, does the rest. “Ed’s take,” says Earl Fee, a middle-distance man who is North America’s best octogenarian runner not named Ed Whitlock, “is you can sort of stay ahead of aging by putting in disproportionately more miles.

You just hit it with volume.” Whitlock cashes in mileage like food stamps. If you get this philosophy right you hit the finish line with pennies left over—as he did in his 2:54 marathon in Toronto. “I could have kept running,” he told me.

For how long? I asked him. He shrugged.

To most modern athletes (for whom short-burst hard training is all the rage), it seems impossible to reconcile—practicing at a pace slow enough to carry a breakfast tray without spilling the cereal, and then suddenly booking it thirty-five per cent faster on race day. But no other way really makes sense to Whitlock, for whom nagging injuries have prevented more high-intensity training. You just have to

he may have an unstoppable engine, but the chassis is wearing.

Whitlock’s chief insight about time is this: To go super-fast, it’s useful to spend many, many hours going super-slow.

His training regime consists of going out every day, rain or shine, and churning laps around the local cemetery in his hometown of Milton, Ontario. He’s out there for hours. The impression to passing motorists is that of a terminally restless white-haired ghost, a Banquo in sneakers. He never counts the laps. And he never tells people he’s going out “for a run.” Whitlock circles the cemetery at a pace of close to ten minutes a mile—at that speed, he maintains, you’re jogging.

All that training is like punching a clock, paying in road-hours, which he will withdraw at a later date with a sterling performance. “It takes people a long time to put in what they expect to get

race frequently enough, he has learned, so that the body remembers what high gear feels like, and likes the feeling.

Nor does Whitlock pay attention to the numbers, which would also probably be hard for most younger athletes to accept. If this seems strange for a retired mining engineer, well, it’s just one of many anomalous things about him.

In a race he knows he’s supposed to go fast. And in training he knows he’s supposed to go slow. That’s it. Very often in distance races, competitors running alongside him will double-take: “Hey, I recognize you! What pace are we doing?”

The response is usually: “I have no idea.”

To bE EIghTy yEaRs old Is To ExpERIENcE the passage of time differently than those younger than you (meaning, just about

everyone). Time really does speed up— subjectively speaking—as we age. There are several theories about why this is. One has to do with ratios: as we age, each passing minute is an ever-smaller percentage of our life—so each minute feels smaller, shorter, more swiftly dispatched. New research suggests, however, that the effect might also have to do with how experience and memories are processed. As the world offers up fewer and fewer surprises, the brain writes less and less down, and time just slides by. Not to mention that perceptual acuity dulls, and minor changes in our environment go undetected. Old folks are on an increasingly lazy ride down a quickening river.

But time rarely seems to “f ly by” for Whitlock. Most of us tweak our own sense of speed relative to the world around us in one way or another. Coffee drinkers speed themselves up. Runners often enjoy the natural cannaboids of the “runner’s high,” which slows them down.

Whitlock is a coffee drinker who runs.

But he drinks coffee solely for the taste; caffeine doesn’t seem to affect him. As for the much-touted runner’s high, Whitlock wouldn’t know: he’s never experienced it.

He does not slow down or speed up relative to the world. He is metronomic.

Where, then, does his mind go on those long, long outings? It’s often assumed that distance runners need a kind of mental strategy or a mantra, if only to distract them from the boredom and the pain. The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, a dogged marathoner, answered the question in a recent memoir. “I run in a void,” he wrote, before correcting himself. “I run in order to acquire a void.”

In other words, he is not mulching plot points for his next novel, at least not consciously. He is just…running, a little bit outside of his body, outside of time. Running has calcified into habit and become something he has to do, as non-negotiable as breathing.

That’s been Whitlock’s experience, too. He doesn’t think of anything transcendental when he runs. His mind is not seeking meaning, not lost in mindless pop culture, not wallowing in quotidian housekeeping. He is occupied by the present as it renews itself, although it would be a

mooN Moon, there you are again, solo in the pale blue sky.

I agree it’s strange, the way I stare.

The snow on the mountains is as white, their dark rock as remote. I, too, said goodbye to the earth long ago.

But, you see, I touch it still.

With my hands, my feet. My eyes.

– Jan Zwicky

mistake to view this as Zen bliss. “I don’t really enjoy the long runs,” he admits.

“They’re a drudge. Mostly, I think that every minute it’s closer to being over.”

IN SacRamENTo, IN ThE lobby of hIS hoTEl, a coach buttonholed Whitlock. She was wearing a hologram bracelet she’d purchased at the Wellness Fair out by the stadium. “It’s actually sending messages into the brain!” she said, offering it up for inspection. Whitlock turned it over a couple of times and handed it back. “My brain can’t handle any more messages,” he deadpanned.

Runners in general, and masters runners in particular, are notorious for tweaking their diet and workout regime and sleep patterns and just about everything else, asniff for a slight edge. Whitlock doesn’t tweak anything. There’s no cross training, no visualization, no weights, no hornet juice, no oxygenating socks. He doesn’t replace his runners every 900 kilometres, as the shoe companies recommend, because, he says, “I don’t even know how far I’ve gone.”

Most touted advancements are fads, and you can’t know in advance if a fad is going to stand the test of time. And if we had the patience to wait it out, well, it wouldn’t be a fad.

Whitlock himself is the test of time.

Unlike Earl Fee, who maintains that his secret consists in “aging more slow-

ly than the other guy”—and indeed Fee does look freakishly Adonis-like from the neck down—time has taken its pound of flesh from Ed Whitlock.

He looks eighty. Delicate veins in his eyelids spider through paper -thin skin, and hounddog bags rest beneath, giving his face a default sadness. He may have an unstoppable engine, but the chassis is wearing. Parts are grinding down: one Achilles tendon and both knees are close to shot. Recently a joint specialist told him his running days were over.

Whitlock sought a second opinion from another doctor who was a runner. He told Whitlock only that his blood pressure was too high, but that he could also start to consider the option of replacing those knees. Whitlock said he didn’t want to be a burden on the medical system. “I think you’ve paid in sufficiently,” the doctor said. They compromised, and Whitlock laid down twenty dollars for a supply of glucosamine. Maybe it would help buy him another year of immortality.

Or one more great race. In October of 2011, Whitlock, at age eighty, completed the Toronto Marathon in a time of 3:15:54, which age-grades out to 2:02:10.

You guessed it—the fastest marathon ever run.

– Bruce Grierson WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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IN THE SANDHILLS

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n the second week of November, as I was writing this article to explore some of the issues surrounding the route of TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline—which will still likely someday carry diluted bitumen from Hardisty, Alberta to the Texas Gulf Coast—the Obama administration announced, somewhat unexpectedly, that, indeed, they were sending TransCanada back to come up with alternative routes. The decision is a sound one, but amidst the 14

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debate, the rhetoric, the back and forth, I could only wonder how many Canadians will understand what I hope is the reasoning behind the decision, namely, to safeguard the unique Sandhills of Nebraska.

Sparcely populated and seldom visited, the Sandhills are just a blank spot on the map to most. Yet it’s a remarkably valuable region, and given that pipeline routing will almost certainly become only more contentious in the future—as both the population density and the demand

for oil increase—it’s worth knowing why the Sandhills matter.

For months now I’ve been conflicted, even torn, about the issue of the Keystone XL pipeline. As an Albertan, I recognize, of course, that oil and gas development is the ultimate source of my good job, comfortable house and (future) college education of my children, yet I can’t ignore the obvious ill effects of fossil fuel exploitation and use. Chief among them, for me, is knowing that we are carving

cycle and climate change are concepts assimilated early on in one’s training as a geologist, along with an understanding of the tremendous complexity and variability of natural conditions. It’s no surprise, then, that many geologists are typically not easily alarmed by environmental change. We need to be prepared to apply our expertise wherever the demand is.

Right now, I’m regulating and overseeing groundwater remediation and monitoring at spill sites and various industrial operations including oil and gas installations. But in the future, I could just as easily be working for industry to secure a groundwater resource for a steam-assisted in-situ bitumen extraction project.

Even with this background I still found the proposed Keystone XL pipeline route, set to pass through the Nebraska Sandhills, distressing. For me, as for many Nebraskans, land disruption and potential contamination of groundwater were the biggest issues, but, in truth, these are typical concerns for pipeline construction anywhere. What is it, then, that made the Sandhills a special case, and why was there so much anxiety (not least in me) around this route?

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

As A pRAcTIcINg hydRogEologIsT WITh A

away virgin land to extract and transport the oil. Having grown up in Eastern Europe, surrounded almost exclusively by human-made landscapes, I treasure the still unspoiled boreal and feel a particular moral burden of benefiting from its destruction.

Working as a geologist doesn’t help alleviate my ambivalence. Our training gives us both the expertise to exploit resources and the expertise to protect the environment. Carbon cycle, hydrologic

degree from the University of Nebraska, I can give you an idea. The Sandhills are a massive stabilized dune field, the largest in the western hemisphere; with an area of 57,000 square kilometres, they cover about a quarter of Nebraska. Underneath the Sandhills and in direct hydraulic connection is the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides water for crop, stock, and human supply across most of the High Plains region. Rain falling on the sandy hills is immediately soaked up and passed down to the groundwater table.

The water table can be deep beneath the tallest dunes, but it comes to the land surface in the low spots between the dunes, resulting in many small lakes and wetlands dotting the Sandhills landscape. It’s hard to imagine a geologic setting more vulnerable to contamination than the Sandhills, with its highly permeable soil, shallow water table, steep gradient, connection to surface water, and America’s most valuable aquifer underneath. A spill

would be nearly impossible to contain in such a setting.

But how likely is a spill, there or anywhere? Pipeline safety has improved, but failures still occur. In fact, there are close to 800 pipeline release incidents a year in Alberta alone; most are small, but some are catastrophic, such as the Plains Midstream pipeline release of 28,000 barrels of crude in April 2011 near Little Buffalo.

The fundamental question for decision makers, and everyone else, is always that of tolerable risk. Here is where arbitrary criteria came to play. And here is where I slipped into non-professional, but unavoidable subjectivity. Make no mistake, I agonized poring over the technical and economic pros and cons of this pipeline. Yet over and over again I fell back on the images of the unique Sandhills landscape and its people.

I spent my early twenties in Nebraska—formative years, when the heart and the mind are still open to the new. And the “new” was what I discovered during my summer internship in 1994, the year after the massive flooding in the Mississippi-Missouri basin. Nebraska was one of the states included in an Environmental Protection Agency study of the effects of flooding on private water wells. The project had the state divided into ten-squaremile grids and my job was to obtain a sample from a water well within each grid block. Equipped with an official state vehicle and county road atlas, I set off crisscrossing the state on its numerous dirt roads in search of residences. The Sandhills was the greatest challenge.

I must have travelled every road in that sparsely populated landscape. I looked for signs of inhabitation: a windmill, a solitary wobbly power line, a turnoff with tire marks. For miles I would find neither and would entertain myself trying to figure out a pattern to this limitless and restless sea of grass-covered dunes. I’d try to guess if upon cresting a tall, smooth, east-west trending dune, I would find on the other side another one like it or a bunch of smaller hills going any which way. As soon as I thought I was beginning to understand the landforms, I’d be proven wrong. But the surprises were not upsetting. Quite the opposite: I WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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remember feeling awe at the sheer size of some dunes, which were often as high as ninety metres. And being shocked at the sight of surreal lakes complete with pelicans. It was in the Sandhills where I ran into my first flock of wild turkeys, saw my first pronghorn, rattlesnake, snapping turtle, and where I witnessed grasshopper blankets so thick I couldn’t tell the colour of the house underneath.

Whenever I occasionally found a promising turnoff onto a side road— which I hoped would lead me to a house— my tranquility vanished as the sandy roads tested my driving skills and the fleet Ford Tempo. I once managed to get buried in the sand and stuck in the mud on the same day. Luckily, help was nearby. A few days later, on a remote road, I felt the sand under the wheels become loose and deep. I floored it, trying to maintain my speed. I tried not to panic when skidding from left to right, overcompensating, because I knew this time there was no help for miles. My cheeks burned, and my adrenaline level ratcheted up with each passing minute. When I finally reached solid ground I burst out of the vehicle crying. Though many years have passed, I remember the raw emotion of that ride as if it was yesterday.

Traveling the Sandhills roads, both the easy and difficult ones, was a bonding experience with the landscape, a bond made even stronger by meeting the people who made their living from it, although getting to know them was not easy. Pulling up unannounced in a government vehicle was not the ideal way to approach them and it precipitated reactions of reserve if not mild hostility. Oddly, I think it was my Polish accent that helped break their initial mistrust. It also didn’t hurt that I was a student at the University of Nebraska, an institution much appreciated by rural Nebraskans for its outreach service. The Sandhills ranchers were often quite guarded but ready to offer help to a stranger. They weren’t talkative, but were deeply knowledgeable, and although I came to them as a groundwater “expert” I was frequently humbled by their understanding of well operation and the local groundwater conditions. They knew exactly how deep the 16

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water table was under different parts of their land and could tell me precisely how it fluctuated from season to season. It was that depth of understanding of the landscape that allowed them to squeeze in a tiny center pivot irrigation system—a kind of giant sprinkler—in the only places where the precious water would not be wasted but would instead produce valuable hay. I realized that it takes that level of knowledge to make a living on such marginal land.

I ENdEd up TAkINg mucH mORE THAN WATER samples from my encounters with the Sandhills ranchers. I came to know them as grounded and self-reliant folk, conservationists by necessity, not trend. That was why when I read of the Sandhills ranchers’ concerns with the installation of the 36-inch pipeline, I knew, simply and absolutely, that they spoke from experience in managing this sensitive

ON THE RAILS

O

n October 4th, 1896, Joseph Frank Keaton entered the world in a clangorous railroad town called Piqua, Kansas. Sixty-eight autumns later, as the legendary silent screen comedian he had become, Buster Keaton crossed Canada on a mechanized railway handcart for the making of The Railrodder, a 1965 National Film Board production promoting the scenic splendour of our country. Less than a year later, the Great Stone Face, as he was nicknamed due to his stoic on-screen expression, was dead.

Rarely is a life so neatly and perfectly framed. That Buster Keaton—whose most celebrated film, The General (1926), involves the theft of a Confederate locomotive during the American Civil War—should enter and exit the world to the clatter of trains is a poignant and artistic structure worthy of the man’s own directorial genius. Ironic, too, given that Keaton’s name—along with those of Chaplin, Lloyd, Fairbanks, Pickford, and so many others—is synonymous with silence, that golden and increasingly rare commodity.

But it is the silencing of that silent culture that intrigues me, the vanishing of one rich world and the emergence of

ecosystem, an ecosystem vulnerable to desertification (as vegetation is stripped for pipeline construction) and contamination (of a life-giving aquifer in the event of a spill).

The Keystone XL pipeline, whatever its final routing, is expected to increase economic development in Alberta, and although logically I know this will benefit Alberta and Canada, and me and my family, it’s also important to know why it would have been wrong to jeopardize the exquisite and fragile Sandhills ecosystem. Such issues are always extraordinarily complex, given all the contradictory technical, economical, and ethical arguments; these are not simple times in which it’s easy to judge right from wrong.

But in such circumstances, perhaps I can only turn to what’s in my heart. Especially since a piece of it is still in Nebraska.

– Eva Kilinska

another that might be less rich, less human, less moving, for this is perhaps what we are experiencing now in our “age of ubiquitous computing,” as Adam Greenfield describes it, an age where the line between the real and virtual worlds becomes increasingly blurred.

I know something about this vanishing myself, having spent the first thirty years of my life actively involved in a vital industry that has all but disappeared (commercial salmon fishing) and the last seventeen years labouring as a writer in a culture with ever-diminishing patience for the apparently complex devices of metaphor, symbolism, and extensive character development, a culture intent on exchanging physical interactions for digitized ones. In fact, it’s my growing sense of frustration with contemporary life’s pace, attention span, and attitude towards reality that has drawn me into Keaton’s dramatic spiral circa the late nineteen-twenties, when sound changed the movies forever, when he lost artistic control over his projects, and when he began a thirty year slide into alcoholism and obsolescence that almost made his story a classic tragedy instead of a classic comedy.

But it is wonder and joy, as much as frustration, that focuses my weary forty-seven-

year-old gaze on Keaton when, in the final scene of The Railrodder, he arrives at the shores of Boundary Bay, in White Rock, British Columbia, climbs off the railway handcar and, hands behind his back, gazes out at the Pacific. Much of the past 115 years since Keaton’s birth have condensed into the figure of that lonely old man at the edge of the sea, and his own mortality. So much of our modern sense of what constitutes entertainment, art, and meaning washes up against those legendary flat shoes and lifts the brim of that iconic porkpie hat. But what haunts me is that a few miles down the highway, in Ladner, British Columbia, that same October in 1964, I lay in my crib, eight months old, pre-language, pre-walking, but already forgetting the mysterious art of the first silences and the first rhythms that we are all destined to forget.

It is, in the grand scheme of “brushes with fame,” a small matter. And yet small matters are the origin of creativity. Would Keaton, for example, even have made The General if he’d not been born in a railroad town? Would I be fascinated with Keaton and silence if I had not, at the age of five, watched with avid delight several of his short films projected onto the side of a neighbour’s house one summer evening as the familiar musk of salmon washed over the town and the larger-than-life black-and-white figures on the clapboard moved with all the rippling, disorienting speed of the sockeye seeking to escape my father’s net?

A small matter. Like silent film, railroads, and poetry.

And already I can see Keaton turning away from the ocean, and the close-up reveals the iconic, unsmiling expression on his face, which is not stone or unchanging, but alive with stoic incredulity at the fate of humans in the hands of the Fates. For Buster Keaton experienced the death of two vibrant cultures: vaudeville and the silent cinema.

In the first case, he was an incredibly gifted young man in his early twenties who realized that the movies were set to replace vaudeville as the dominant form of popular entertainment. In 1917, he took a large pay cut to leave the stage and team up with Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle to begin making two-reel comedies in which bags of flour hit people square in

the face and the logic of the perfect gag ruled the day.

In the second case, a mere decade later, after he had made all of the films on which his reputation is based, the advent of “the talkies” demoted Keaton to a contract player in the Hollywood studio system and effectively wiped out all opportunities for his genius to flourish. By 1933, still famous but now hopelessly drunk and miserable, he was not prepared for change. For the next twenty years, until a widely-read James Agee article celebrating the silent screen comedians appeared in Life magazine, Buster Keaton disappeared from the public consciousness. When he re-emerged, his stoic face much-wrinkled, worn with the decades of heavy drinking and smoking, he took whatever work was offered to him, appearing in hundreds of television shows and a string of “pajama” movies such as Beach Blanket Bingo and How To Stuff A Wild Bikini. Imagine Laurence Olivier making a cameo appearance in an Adam Sandler movie and you’ll have a sense of the sadness involved.

But Keaton, who never considered himself an artist, and who distrusted all intellectual efforts to deem him one, was delighted to have the work; he was old, and he had been neglected a long time. To dress up as a cigar-store Indian and say “How” to teenagers in bikinis was perfectly fine by him; he was not a pretentious man in any way, and often resented high praise for his silent films, dismissing it as all that “genius bullshit.” But still, his work through the fifties and early sixties was sad; he was one of America’s greatest film directors, yet for nearly three decades he directed nothing.

ThEN CaNada CamE CallINg. To bE pRECIsE, a young director working for the National Film Board named Gerald Potterton came calling. He wanted Keaton to cross Canada by mechanized railway handcart and he wanted him to play himself, as in the glory days, with silence and the artistry of expression and physical movement, with gags. And he wouldn’t be dressed as a cigar-store Indian this time. Nor would there be any girls in bikinis. This was Canada in 1964, still a land known for dramatic and even imposing natural grandeur, not a wannabe sophisticated urban playground

seemingly anxious to leave its rural past and hokey history behind. This was a Canada built by the railroad. Under the hum of the steel on the rails you could hear Don Messer’s violin, you could hear Tommy Douglas fighting for Medicare, you could hear people talk about national dreams without sneering or chuckling, but you could also hear the machinery destroying the very land Potterton and the NFB were setting out to celebrate.

At first, Keaton resisted Canada’s call.

In July, 1964, when Potterton visited him in New York and asked if he’d be interested in appearing in the Canada travelogue film, Keaton, according to biographer Marion Meade, experienced a rapid change of heart. Keaton looked at the kid director and rolled his eyes. “Sounds crazy,” he said. Suddenly a racket down on Central Park South sent him clomping to the window. He pulled it up and stuck his head out.

“Quiet!” he bawled at Manhattan. Then he closed the window and turned back to Potterton. “I’ll do it. When do we start?” He never could resist trains.

The Railrodder began shooting in Halifax on September 5th. The weather was already cool, and everyone involved in the film shuddered to think what the conditions would be like once they hit the Rockies. But Keaton was in his element. A documentary on the filming of The Railrodder, made at the same time and narrated by the legendary NFB filmmaker Donald Brittain, revealed Keaton as a moody, shy, sometimes petulant man, but one whose personality exploded into life whenever he discussed the delicious mechanics of a gag. His voice might have been gravelly from decades of chain-smoking, his iconic face flaccid with the ravages of time and alcohol, but the creative spark that took him to the heights of movie stardom in the nineteen-twenties remained.

So did the physical courage and stamina. From the beginning of his screen life, Keaton always performed his own stunts, including the breathtaking 1928 scene in Steamboat Bill Jr. when a whole house-front collapses on him and he escapes because he’s standing exactly where the frame of an open second-storey window passes over him. An inch to either side and he never would have been around to visit Canada at all in the autumn of 1964.

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But there he is, emerging fully-clothed from the cold Atlantic (his character, in London, had read a newspaper headline, “See Canada Now,” jumped off a bridge and swum over); there he is, finding the abandoned railway handcar on the tracks, climbing aboard, and rapidly heading west; and there he is again, on a 200-foot-high trestle bridge with a giant fold-out map wrapped around him, covering his face, as the handcar zips ever onward. That last gag caused some turmoil between the star and his young director. Potterton thought the stunt was far too dangerous and ordered a safer scene. Keaton demurred and shot the scene Potterton’s way, but the documentary records his frustration afterwards. “I generally know what I’m doing,” he says. “That’s not dangerous. It’s child’s play, for the love of Mike.”

The next day, Potterton reshot the scene the way Keaton wanted it. The map on the trestle bridge is one of the comic highlights of The Railrodder, along with the scene of Keaton having a formal tea complete with fine china (all miraculously stored in a box on the handcar). In essence, Keaton co-directed and co-wrote the film; Potterton himself admitted as much. “Let’s face it,” said the man who would go on to be one of the main animators of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, “he was Buster Keaton, and who the hell was I to tell him what to do?”

ACRoSS CANADA ThE CREW TRAvEllED, ovER ThE Prairies and through the Rockies, along the banks of the Fraser, finally arriving at White Rock. The five-week journey had been a comfortable one, accomplished in style on a private railroad car with sleeping compartments and a lounge in which Keaton and his wife—obsessive bridge players—could take rubbers and chainsmoke to their hearts’ content. The travellers even had their own chef and steward. Keaton thoroughly enjoyed the trip.

At one point in the documentary (which itself is a black-and-white tribute to a vanished Canada) the citizens of Rivers, Manitoba gave Keaton the key to their city.

A painfully shy man who loathed public appearances, especially when he was the centre of attention, Keaton was nonetheless moved nearly to tears by the gesture. A kilted band had piped him and his wife into 18

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DESCARTES When a stranger asked to see his library, he pointed to a half-dissected calf: “There are my books,” he said. –Anthony Kenny My mind is tied like a helium balloon to the pommel of the pineal gland.

It dwells like a fountain keeper deep in the grotto of the royal gardens, checking the mechanism and dredging dead leaves from the waterwheel.

A zebra-skin rug, a gallery of antelope skulls. On the screen, cars zip around the circuit; exoskeletons, ghost-controlled.

Inside the watch is a ruby pierced through the pupil by the spindle of a gear.

And this antelope, you know, is merely another automaton, one of indefinitely many earthen machines, swirling, in vortices, in the jam-packed plenum. There’s just one God-sized crack, under the sink, stop-gapped with steel-wool.

Waltham manufactured the first watch with fully interchangeable parts.

A physics in miniature, a cosmology that fits in a pocket.

They cannot speak, and so, contrary to the juvenile Pythagorean superstition, it is no crime to use them as trophies. On my wall, they are what they were: soulless, inert.

Stopped clocks.

My speech distinguishes me: it encodes my soul.

the ceremony (O Canada of the kilts and Manitoba mayors handing out keys!), and even this quaint homage humbled the great comedian. The emotion on his famouslystoic face is deeply moving to witness now.

He had lived large for a long time, and his life, like The Railrodder, was approaching its terminus. The blend of the comic and tragic, the blend that defines our lives, is

writ clearly on the private Keaton’s face as he blinks at the citizens of Rivers, and writ with even greater clarity on the screen Keaton’s back as he stands on the shores of Boundary Bay and gazes westward.

I want to read so much into that old man’s stance. We’re now in the midst of another great technological transition.

The world is being rapidly digitized.

Yes, even you, Elisabeth. I received commands from your naked hand, signals from your lips. These twitches seemed to be evidence of thinking — but who knows? Like the antelopes, like the elephant-foot umbrella-stand, perhaps you are just so much extended stuff, an aggregate of aggregates, half-real, a TV tuned to the séance channel of yourself, prone to fever, pneumonia.

I am the axiom in the system that secures the world.

Even the atom is divisible.

The division of time is done by a clutch of wheels held by the arbour fitted into a frictionless hole.

A leafless tree grows in that golden microcosm, it is the axis mundi, distilling light into the liquor of night, privatizing the I, calculating the if/then algebra of contracts and language and time.

My heart, the dark furnace, churns the finest particles, drives them up the chimney to the lump of fat in my skull, where my soul perches nervously, pinball operator of the pineal gland.

But inside the watch is the transplanted hair-spring of the grasshopper’s heart, gorgeous, almost organic, flexing concentrically with force proportional to what we have offered.

– Warren Heiti

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide spend endless hours playing virtual reality computer games. Google tracks everyone’s private lives for commercial, and no doubt political, purposes. E-books are replacing material books, and the reading culture of the past several centuries is, like vaudeville and wild salmon and the Amazon rainforest, doomed to

extinction, gone the way of nationhood and manners and other quaint rejects from a time when public figures at least paid lip-service to values other than money-making and counting. And here, now, I want to read my own five-decade journey from childhood’s enthusiasm to middle age’s cynicism into Buster Keaton’s lonely figure on a shore only a few miles from my

hometown. I want to see him turn, tears on his face, and tell me that it’s all futile but that I have to make the best of a bad situation. “Get a Facebook page, kid,” he might growl. “For the love of Mike, buy one of them iPhones with apps, or at least a laptop computer. You’re doomed if you don’t.” I want to hear him admit that change is painful and that it defines us.

But I can’t. To do so would be to dishonour the wonderful comedian who never for a moment accepted that any aspect of his life had been tragic. As his biographer Meade puts it, “he dealt with the pain of the past by ignoring it.”

Indeed, he always felt sorry for his fellow stars of the silent screen, those elderly, moaning nostalgics who never heard a Beatles song. When television first appeared, Keaton liked to tease Charlie Chaplin about his elitist disdain for the new medium. Stoic and bravely engaged with the fates to the end, Buster Keaton wanted only one thing: to make people laugh. The Railrodder is a charming coda to a life spent in pursuit of that goal. That it is also a heartbreaking song to the inevitability of change and its consequent losses is entirely my problem. For The Railrodder does not end with Buster Keaton staring at the Pacific. It ends with a fully-clothed oriental man emerging from the bay, a man dressed in a Keatonlike outfit who, on reaching the tracks, finds the railway handcart reversed and who begins his own silent eastward journey across Canada.

And Keaton? When he discovers that his ride is gone, the Great Stone Face simply begins walking the tracks back in the direction he had come. Such an unrelenting adjustment to fate is the reason we continue to love and celebrate the man’s films.

For this reason, I cannot dishonour him. I can do only the opposite. Unwired and unrepentant, I sit in my biological frame and write in longhand the stories and poems that I hope will transcend the limitations of my private self, trust to the old connections between the single imagination and the collective heart, look down the rails at my own and my country’s past, and, like Keaton, walk, stone-faced and off-camera, into the future.

– Tim Bowling WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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NOTEBOOKS

ENgiNEEriNg HumaN SOulS Translating Josef Skvorecky

By Josef skvorecky & paul Wilson

uNTil HE BEgaN uSiNg a cOmpuTEr, Josef Skvorecky always composed the first drafts of his novels in long-hand in high-school scribblers. He wrote quickly, seldom pausing to make changes. One of his quirks was to flip each notebook upside-down and begin writing from the back, leaving the left-hand page blank for amendments and additions. He started doing this with his first novel, The Cowards, written in 1948, when he was in his early twenties. “I began [the practice] because the first few pages of the first notebook I used were already full,” Skvorecky told Paul Wilson last fall. “For consistency, I kept on doing it that way and it became a superstition: I came to believe that if I started writing from the back of the notebook, the novel would turn out well.”

The narrator of The Engineer of Human Souls, Danny Smiricky, is a Czech writer in exile beset by persistent memories from the past.

He teaches modern literature to a multiculturally diverse class at “Edenvale College” in Mississaugua and uses the writers on the course (Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Conrad, and Lovecraft) to convey to his students some of the bittersweet lessons that life under two totalitarian dictatorships—Nazi and Communist—had taught him. Skvorecky’s original title for the novel was “The English Master’s Story,” but as he was typing out the manuscript, revising as he went, he decided that the ironic use of Stalin’s definition of writers as “engineers of human souls” would make a better title.

“Translating The Engineer of Human Souls mirrored Skvorecky’s process, in a way,” writes Wilson. “Using the first Czech edition, from 68 Publishers (the Skvoreckys’ Toronto imprint) i did the first draft fairly quickly, on an old electric typewriter, using newsprint cut to letter-paper size and bought in bulk from The Wiarton Echo. Then Skvorecky read the draft and wrote his comments in the margins.

I retyped the manuscript—which ran to over a thousand pages, triple-spaced—then submitted it to Louise Dennys, Skvorecky’s first English-language editor, who added suggestions of her own. In the end, the translation probably went through as many drafts as the original had.”

The Engineer of Human Souls won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 1984, the first time that award had been granted to a book not originally written in English or French. In 1988 Canadian writer and critic George Woodcock wrote, “If I were to identify the best novel published in Canada in the 1980s, I would pick Josef Skvorecky’s The Engineer of Human Souls, not only for its fine style, its perceptive insight into characters, and its magical use of memory, but also for its complex awareness of the social and political realities of our time.”

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Bearing

The author on Douglas Channel, near Hartley Bay 22

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O N T H E R E C ORD

Witness What’s really at stake in the Great Bear Rainforest?

B Y C H RI S T U R N E R / P H O T O B Y J U L I A N M A C Q U E E N

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Let’s say you’ve never heard of the Great Bear Rainforest. I never had. Let’s say it’s a theory, a conjecture, a proper noun three words long and as real to you as fabled El Dorado or the moons of Jupiter.

There it is in the subject line of a Facebook message: “invite to the great bear rainforest.” A Facebook message, not even capitalized. Incidental. Marginal. A rumour of a place.

What would it take for you to care about it as much as anywhere else on earth? How long would it take to fall forever in love with the Great Bear Rainforest? It took me three days. I’ll tell you how.

My afterthought Facebook message came from Tides Canada, a Vancouver environmental foundation sponsoring a documentary mission to the Great Bear Rainforest involving a handful of National Geographic photographers. The goal was “to raise awareness about this area, and the danger it faces from the tar sands, Enbridge pipeline and oil tanker traffic.”

I knew the name of the oil-and-gas pipeline developer Enbridge—I can see its downtown Calgary headquarters from my bedroom window—but I’d never before encountered the name Great Bear Rainforest. This would soon come to seem absurd, as if I’d reached adulthood without hearing tell of the Rocky Mountains or the Great Lakes or the Grand Banks.

I did some perfunctory research.

The Great Bear Rainforest, I learned, was a protected wilderness on the remote northwest coast of British Columbia, comprising a quarter of the world’s remaining intact coastal temperate rainforest. An organization called the International League of Conservation Photographers (ILCP), a charitable group formed by several of the world’s most highly regarded wildlife photographers, was midway through its annual R AVE (Rapid Assessment VisualExpedition) in the rainforest. Every year, the ILCP chooses an ecosystem in peril to document for a week. In the case of Great Bear, the imminent peril was the arrival of Big Oil. Enbridge had applied to the federal government early in 2010 to build two pipelines from an oil terminal north-east of Edmonton across 1,170 kilometres of wilderness to the industrial town of 24

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Kitimat. One pipeline would flow east with condensate (a petrochemical product that alters the viscosity of bitumen, allowing it to travel down pipelines); the other pipeline would flow west with the bitumen itself—oil, that is—at the rate of 525,000 barrels per day.

Kitimat sits at roughly the midway point of the Great Bear coast. To bring the pipeline’s oil to markets around the Pacific Rim—China, in particular—mammoth supertankers would need to move in and out of a long, narrow passage known as Douglas Channel at the rate of two hundred or more per year. They would pass within a few hundred metres of the First Nations village of Hartley Bay and within a few kilometres of Princess Royal Island, home to the world’s largest known population of kermode bears. The kermode is a rare subspecies of black bear with a recessive gene that renders its coat a ghostly white; locals call them “spirit bears,” and they are the billboard icons of the Great Bear wilderness. The tankers would also pass by dozens of unnamed, barely explored salmon streams, the vital bio-diversifying arteries of an entire ecosystem.

The National Geographic photographers were in the rainforest to sound an international activist alarm against the Enbridge pipeline. If I could get myself to Vancouver International Airport by the morning of 11 September, I could catch a float plane to Hartley Bay and see their work firsthand.

I thought at first it might not be worth the trip. I’d long regarded climate change as the great black trump card in the conservation deck, the overarching crisis bearing down on us with such ferocious transformative power it will erase any act of regional conservation, however noble; keeping one pipeline’s bitumen from reaching Kitimat, after all, would do nothing to keep out the carbon dioxide emissions released by an oil-hungry world. If an awareness campaign isn’t aimed at ending the age of fossil fuels in toto, I tend to see it as an act of deck-chair feng shui on the biospheric Titanic.

Still: this was uncharted territory.

Here there be serpents, at least on the mental map of my own experience. Float planes, coastal First Nations villages, temperate rainforest, spirit bears—this was an irresistible enticement. Thankfully so: there was much to learn about the spirit bear’s iconic place in the global struggle to contain the climate crisis.

ATTAchEd To ThE floAT plANE TERmINAl at the airport is a welcoming bar and grill called the Flying Beaver. It’s got a patio out back, an unassuming oasis jutting out over the placid little bay of Pacific water that serves as the runway for the float planes. It’s a tucked-away corner of a tucked-away corner of a tucked-away corner of the main airport, and I was seated there with the dregs of a coffee when I heard the buzz of propeller engines for the third time that morning and watched an odd, boxy little airplane that looked like something Howard Hughes might’ve owned come down and down into the bay.

There were no floats protruding from its hull. It bellyflopped onto the water and seemed to disappear under the wake it raised, and I had an involuntary adrenal jolt as I waited for it to resurface. It came up the ramp next to the patio and crossed the access road onto the tarmac in front of the float-plane hangar, and a few minutes later its pilot came into the bar and grill and introduced himself to me as Julian MacQueen.

I’d traded emails with MacQueen, but I knew nothing else about him except that he was f lying the 630 kilometres up the coast to Hartley Bay that morning. I’d imagined a plaidjacketed adventurer t ype, maybe a bush pilot who ran supplies into logging camps. Instead, I climbed into the cockpit of a beautifully restored Grumman G-44 Widgeon and sat next to an affable business executive with the soft, elegant accent of Alabama gentry. MacQueen is a born-and-bred Southerner married to a Canadian, and they keep a summer home on Saltspring Island.

The rest of the year, he is a hotelier, the

largest single owner of resort properties on Pensacola Beach in Florida. He’d let his neighbours on Saltspring know he was open to errands of mercy, which is how he’d come to volunteer to ferry journalists and photographers in and out of the Great Bear Rainforest.

Most modern float planes are aircraft on pontoon stilts, but MacQueen’s Grumman G-44 Widgeon is more like a boat with wings. As we taxied out into the bay, the water lapped against the windows at chin level. When MacQueen leaned down on the throttle, the plane’s nose perked up like a motorboat’s. The whole vessel rose up to skim the surface, he pulled back on

Somehow MacQueen got the thing to England, where he had it meticulously restored. It was an exquisite vessel now, a handcrafted airborne sailboat, all teak wood and analog dials and brass-coloured fittings. He called the plane his “time machine”—not because it was a throwback but because of the way it could skip from lake to harbour to welcoming bay across the continent, compressing space to the point where no place seemed far away. The Widgeon was a device to conquer time.

Below us, the landscape had grown wilder in bands, like a graded map of civilization. The sprawling holiday homes of the southern Gulf Islands had given way

altered scale—this tiny plane among giants—and MacQueen and I returned to our small talk. I soon realized he didn’t know anything about the pipeline or the spirit bear or any other aspect of our trip.

As I filled him in, his face came alive with the shock of recognition. He dug through the bag between our seats and produced an iPad. “I’ve got to show you,” he said, “what I’ve been doing the last few months.”

At the start of the summer of 2010 (this was the story he told as he scrolled through photo albums on his iPad) oil from BP’s massive blowout in the Gulf of Mexico began to wash ashore along the

The kermode is a rare subspecies of black bear with a recessive gene that renders its coat a ghostly white. the wheel, and we were airborne. Through mixed cloud and drizzle, we banked north and chugged past the Georgia Strait’s inhabited islands, a patchwork of cabins and grand rural estates that grew more sporadic as it gave way to wilderness. We exchanged small talk that quickly turned meaningful, and I was reminded that dramatic characterization and deep irony were not inventions of literature but reflections of reality, such as the one inhabited just now behind the controls of a Grumman Widgeon by Julian MacQueen of Pensacola, Florida.

MacQueen loved to talk about the Widgeon, which was a smaller version of the more famous Grumman Goose. Only a few hundred Widgeons were ever made, all of them in the nineteen-forties and early nineteenfifties, and MacQueen had hunted for one for years until he found one left chained to a tree in rural Nigeria.

Why, I wondered, would someone abandon a vintage float plane in the backwoods of Nigeria?

Oh, you know, the oil business— this was his response. Some drilling project must’ve finished, and the flight home was more trouble than it was worth.

The world was just full of the oil industry’s junk, wasn’t it?

to knots of more modest settlements, logging towns and native villages, and then the blanket of forest and dark water was broken only by a derelict cannery or the industrial gridwork of a salmon farm.

The landscape below looked wild, but still it was not truly remote. The coarse hand of industry had scrawled its history across the steep forested peaks and blackwater inlets, telling a gruff tale of extraction, exploitation, exhaustion: Clearcuts of varied vintage like patches of diseased flesh, the age of the infection told in the height of the low monocrop trees slowly filling in the poxed land. Fishing boats splitting the water in slow surgical swoops of wake. Barges moving slow under the weight of logs. A shuttered pulp town. Fish, trees, stumps, barges, nets.

It was a map of Canadian history in miniature, a tale told most emphatically in the seizure of its natural resources, the story of a country founded by fishermen and fur trappers.

Beyond the northern tip of Vancouver Island, the clouds closed in and the land became fully wild. Steep black peaks loomed in the mist and spilled down into the darker black of the ocean. A vertiginous sense of departure swallowed the plane, a foreboding born of drastically

Florida panhandle. One of the first places it arrived was the beach in front of MacQueen’s row of resort hotels on Pensacola Beach. Summer is the peak tourist season in Pensacola, the ninety days that sustain the business for the other 275, and the summer of 2010 slid away on an oil slick.

MacQueen showed me pictures of Gulf waves gone deep purple with spilled crude and golden sand covered in inky brown tar. Legally forbidden from disposing of it himself, he’d spent weeks documenting his losses for BP’s lawyers, and then he’d cashed his first compensation cheque and headed to Salt Spring to unwind from the ordeal. He had 700 employees, a vibrant business twenty-five years in the making, a million dollars in insurance paid out every year to guard against potential disasters. “The last thing on anyone’s list was an oil spill,” he told me.

The skies began to clear. A few kilometres south of Hartley Bay, MacQueen spied a couple of black shapes in the water below and banked the Widgeon around and down for a closer look. They were humpback whales, the Great Bear Rainforest’s sentinels, signaling our arrival in a world far away from Pensacola Beach and Vancouver airport, a place that could legitimately claim to be outside that world, WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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perhaps, were it not for the exigencies of overseas oil shipping.

My notes from this point on grew steadily more sporadic, staccato, episodic. I carried a notebook, but chose to keep my digital recorder in my bag. I had to decide whether it was more important to report on Great Bear or absorb it.

HaRTlEy Bay Is a kNoT of modEsT HomEs gathered on the shore of a small bay at the end of a rugged Great Bear promontory, accessible only by boat or float plane.

There are no cars on it’s narrow lanes, and many of the homes are connected to each other only by elevated wooden boardwalks. There’s a community centre, a church, and a small marina. It’s home to a population of 160, all of them members of the Gitga’at First Nation. They are the only permanent inhabitants at the mouth of Douglas Channel, the proposed thoroughfare for the oil supertankers which are to be fed at the rate of nearly one a day

by Enbridge’s planned pipeline.

The Widgeon circled into the bay like a bird of prey, belly flopped, and then chugged toward the pier. A young man trotted out to meet us. Norm Hann is a wilderness guide and part-time teacher at the Hartley Bay school who was assisting with the photo expedition. He was a story himself; in the spring, he’d paddleboarded the 400 kilometres from Kitimat to Bella Bella to bring attention to the threat posed by oil-tanker traffic.

Once MacQueen had docked his plane, Hann led us through the village to a handsome modern house set into the last broad ledge before the face of the hill grew too steep for habitation. He explained that it was the home of Cam and Eva Hill, a Gitga’at couple who’d adopted him as his Hartley Bay family. Inside, two young children were watching Hannah Montana on a flat-screen TV, and we settled into the spacious kitchen for rolls and coffee. MacQueen dug out his air navigation map, and Hann traced the proposed supertanker route. He pointed out the dramatic S-curve around nearby Gil Island, just across the water from Hartley Bay, whose rocky shoals had sunk the British Columbia government ferry Queen of the North in 2006. Hann ran these channels

and bays often on his paddle board, and he knew the local microclimates at the scale of a single paddlestroke. Douglas Channel—the narrow inlet leading from the proposed oil terminal at Kitimat—is a natural wind tunnel, with vicious crosswinds up and down its length. Hecate Strait,the wide passage separating the Great Bear coast from Haida Gwai’i—which oil tankers would traverse once they’d navigated through the tightly clustered islands of the Inland Passage—is even worse, a maelstrom of howling hurricane-force winds and shallow, choppy seas. It is, says Hann, “one of the most teacherous, narrow bodies of water anywhere in the world.”

As we were leaving, I scanned framed photos of the happy Hill family on the walls.

There was Cam Hill struggling proudly under the weight of prized salmon and halibut catches, pictures of orca pods and a Hawaiian vacation. An aquarium stood by the front door, home to a single brilliantly coloured prawn. The ocean, its bounty and mystery, was everywhere. Outside, clouds hung low over the village, the incidental lives of people reduced to a delicate, transient band between sea spray and falling mist so thin it was barely there at all.

kINg PacIfIc lodgE Is a luxuRy REsoRT situated in a cozy bay on Princess Royal Island, just a few kilometres south of Hartley Bay. The main building is a handsome three-storey structure made from local pine, cedar, Sitka spruce and stone, with broad balconies and the faintly Victorian air of a paddlewheel steamer.

Rack rates for a three-night stay in one of its seventeen rooms run from $4,900 for a standard to $12,685 for the Princess Royal Suite; it has been named the best resort in Canada in the Condé Nast Traveler readers’ poll the last four years running.

King Pacific has its own bakery in the basement and a pantry overflowing with house-made condiments and preserves. The water supply is drawn from a local creek, the laundry is phosphate-free, and the greywater in the septic system is scrubbed naturally by bacteria before being expelled back into the ocean. The menu skews hard toward local and fresh, and the lodge employs a number of Gitga’at through a training program in Hartley Bay.

The entire resort is built on top of a salvaged U.S. Army barge, a great slab of floating steel that is towed to Prince Rupert every fall to pass the winter in drydock. Aside from the slumbering diesel generator, King Pacific Lodge leaves no trace of itself behind.

The island behind the lodge is the quintessential Great Bear landscape. It is laced with trickling creeks and rushing salmon streams, providing home and sustenance to the largest permanent population of spirit bears anywhere. In the summer of 2009, a pod of humpbacks settled into the harbour off the front deck for three weeks, often breaching to greet newly arrived guests with a friendly spout of blowhole spray.

The daily life of the lodge revolves around the vaulted central great room.

When I arrived with MacQueen and Hann, the great room’s couches and easy chairs were populated with National Geographic photographers and a documentary film crew waiting on a helicopter ride.

Hann led us into a small reading room off the great room for an introductory slideshow. There were a few details about the lodge itself, but mainly he talked about Great Bear: About the Cetacealab research facility on nearby Gil Island, which has been tracking the extraordinary return of humpback whales to the Great Bear’s waters in recent years—almost 200 of them now, five times the number seen a generation ago, when the memory of whaling boats still haunted these waters. About the more tentative but no less exciting return of the fin whales. About Great Bear’s unique coastal wolves, a subspecies of timberwolf genetically distinct from their inland cousins. About the black bears and grizzlies and beloved spirit bears of Princess Royal and beyond, their numbers swelling as the salmon streams filled each year with thicker runs. About the salmon as keystone species, the extraordinary ecological bounty of the salmon runs—“the miracle of life, really,” is how Hann put it—and how they provide food for more than 200 species in the rainforest, from bears and wolves to trees and ferns.

About the Gitga’at, their traditional fishing camps and smokehouses, the way they tell time by the fishing seasons.

About a world in exquisite balance.

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JULIAN MAcQUEEN ANd I WERE bUNkINg oN A trimaran docked at Hartley Bay, and by the time we made it back it was evening and we were on the slightly dizzy side of hungry. The boat’s owner, Ian McAllister, founder of a conservation group called Pacific Wild, was hunkered over the small galley stove, pan-frying halibut steaks as thick as a Melville novel. The fish had been swimming in a Great Bear channel that morning; you could tell because the meat of the steaks curled just a bit in the pan. The aroma was intoxicating. There was wine already open. We settled around the trimaran’s cozy kitchen and feasted. I knew three bites in that I’d be telling people about the incomparable taste of fresh-caught halibut in Hartley Bay for years to come.

McAllister had been working and exploring in Great Bear for years. He has published two books of photographs of the rainforest and its inhabitants, and his Pacific Wild organization, co-founded with his wife, Karen, had helped organize the ILCP photography blitz. He was serving as its all-in-one project manager, logistics coordinator and communications chief.

After dinner, he took us to a fishing boat that had just returned to Hartley Bay after ferrying photographers through the wildest stretches of Great Bear. A couple of National Geographic photographers were seated around the boat’s small kitchen table alongside the vessel’s husband-and-wife owners, looking through their best shots on a laptop.

They showed us pictures of sea otters, birds of prey, humpback and fin whales, a wolf trotting along a rocky coastline with a fat salmon in its jaws. One picture captured a pink salmon as it flung itself bodily from a steep coastal stream, seemingly suspended in midair perpendicular to the water in a feat of physical strength so implausible it looked photoshopped.

When we returned to the trimaran, McAllister and I stood on the dock chatting. He reckoned Hartley Bay was a last stand. All or nothing. There would be a pipeline or there would be spirit bears.

This, I sensed, was the project his whole working life had been building toward, maybe even a chance to shape the course of

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history. Jane Goodall had her chimpanzees and Cousteau his aquatic adventures, and Ian McAllister would define his career by the security of the rainforest’s spirit bears.

I told him I was beginning to think that this went far beyond one pipeline and one wilderness, however vast and vital. There were two grand narratives of what Canada was and what it wanted to become—two ways forward for the whole overheating, over-exploited world, really—and they were grinding hard against each other in Hartley Bay. Everything Canada had long been was aligned on one side of the battlefield: the forces of resource extraction and global trade, oil money and the insatiable self-interest of corporate profit, exploitation, and colonial domination. On the other side was a more recent vision of Canada, one that saw itself as a responsible steward of the country’s extraordinary ecological wealth, that respected indigenous rights, that sought reconciliation and balance. The Canada of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the Grand Banks collapse, the Indian Act, MacMillan Bloedel and now Enbridge stood against the Canada defined by the national parks, Greenpeace, Nunavut, the Montreal Protocol and the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement.

For almost half a century, environmentalists, natives and loggers had fought pitched battles over their perceived selfinterests among the towering trees of British Columbia, only to realize almost too late that the long-term health of the forests were in everyone’s interest. As we sat there in the cool, clear night, just the two of us leaning on a trimaran, I wondered if the little village of Hartley Bay and some achingly beautiful photos taken by National Geographic photographers could teach the global oil industry the same lesson.

EARLy MoRNINg, ThE cLoUds LoW ANd foggy amid the rainforest trees, and Ian McAllister was at the helm of his trimaran, chugging steadily across the black water of the bay, bound for a salmon stream on Gribbell Island. A few days earlier he’d set up a “camera trap” there—a camera paired with a motion sensor used to

gather images of the Great Bear’s more reluctant celebrities—and he wanted to see if he’d caught anything with it yet.

He’d brought Julian MacQueen and I along to get our first taste of the real Great Bear wilderness.

I was out on deck, watching the cloud cover burn slow and steady off the water. I turned back to watch Hartley Bay recede in the distance. The dark hills had emerged f rom cloud, hunched around the black bay in a semicircle like great ageless sages. The village below was still mostly shrouded, a few square whitewashed facades peaking out, an arrangement of children’s playthings at the feet of the ancient mountains. McAllister joined me on the deck and followed my gaze. “You’ve got every major oil company in the world and the world’s secondlargest oil reserve looking to diversify its markets,” he said, “and the only thing in the way is that little community.”

We crossed a wide channel of open water and came an hour or so later to a small cove on the far shore. The shallow water was lush with fat purple starfish and clams.

McAllister stepped up onto the prow and let loose a long keening howl. He’d been hoping to get some photos of coastal wolves feasting on salmon, and he was checking to see if any were still around.

The only reply came from the stream mouth as coho by the score hurried away from the sound, rippling the water. He dropped anchor and we took a zodiac to shore. He checked his camera—no significant visitors yet—and then led us on a hike upstream.

The banks of the stream were spongy like peat and so thick with foliage they seemed to exhale when you stepped on them. Grasses and underbrush were shoulder-high, taller, a Jurassic landscape of ancient, mammoth plants. And then we were in shadow, lost among the true giants. The forest was towering, majestic, impossibly alive. Moss and lichen hung from every branch and crawled across every stump and rock.

The tops of the cedar and Sitka spruce around us were mere hypotheses somewhere far over our heads. The creek’s

trickle became a steady growl as we moved further inland. The air grew so thick and fragrant it was less like hiking than pressing through a membrane.

The stream’s banks were like an emperor’s dining hall in the aftermath of some frenzied bacchanal. Every few meters, we came upon salmon carcasses. Some were bloody smears of gut and skin—the remains of a bear’s feast—but most were decapitated with almost surgical precision and otherwise fully intact.

The wolves came first to the salmon runs, while the bears were still gorging on berries further inland. For reasons not precisely known—possibly to avoid some parasite or other pathogen in the salmon’s bellies—the coastal wolves mostly eat only the heads of the salmon.

McAllister waded into the stream like he was stepping onto his back deck and then led us tromping and sopping up the far bank. He stopped at a heaping mound of dung just a couple of hues shy of grape Kool-Aid. “One hundred percent berry-fed bear scat,” he explained. Further along, he pointed out a smaller pile of scat, bending down close to study its contents. “Wolves spent some time hanging out here. There’s river otter in their scat.”

He led us back toward the stream’s mouth, pausing as we emerged from the trees to admire the proportions: the band of golden grass giving way to rocky shore, the tidy semicircle of coast, steep black rocky banks and dark water and the hills of other islands on the horizon. “It’s a beautiful scene as it is,” he said, “but imagine a pack of wolves down there, feasting on salmon.” He paused. “It could be pretty powerful.”

He was sizing it up not as a Group of Seven landscape but as a propaganda poster. Look at this—aren’t you awed? He wanted me to wonder whether there could be anything more incongruous than a supertanker the length of thirty school buses chugging past. Could you imagine, he was asking, what this might look like gone thick with black sludge? Black like the surf in front of Julian MacQueen’s Pensacola hotel?

WE WENT To aNoThER sTREam up ThE Gribbell Island coast, one McAllister knew was a favourite bear haunt. A boat carrying a few of the ILCP photographers had met up with us in the cove, and a CBC radio reporter had left them to accompany us to this second creek. My “waterproof” hiking boots started to fail about ten strides into the hike up the stream bed, and now I was hunched behind a log at the water’s edge with McAllister, MacQueen and the CBC reporter, waiting on the predators.

T he river around us was mildly pitched, growing steeper by the yard and so thick with salmon in their final spawning death dance that sometimes

giants. We know not what we do here. It can only end badly.

ThE bEaR EmERgEd fRom ThE foREsT To ouR right maybe ten metres in front of us, a black bear of standard hue, moseying like something in a cartoon. Everyone’s sudden snap to full alert shook me from my reverie. If the bear saw us, he paid us no mind whatsoever. He stopped midstream and rooted for a moment or two among the salmon, but came up empty.

He tried once more, grew bored with it, and sauntered on.

When the bear was gone, McAllister told us they rarely bothered with the salmon while berries were still plentiful. In a

The air grew so thick and fragrant it was less like hiking than pressing through a membrane. they bumped our boots. I would select one swimming in the nearby water and focus on it, watching its body wriggle furiously as it waited beneath the next rocky rise in the stream for some unseen cue. And then suddenly the water would erupt, there would be a sense more than a sight of movement, and the fish I’d been watching was gone further upstream. A trace memory of motion and then nothing. It was like observing a Rapture. And it was here, in the roaring silence of the churning stream, that I experienced the rainforest’s singular satori.

I was outside of time, vanished from the landscape.

The world belonged to the rainforest, to the trees and bears and flailing salmon. I was there only insofar as I was observing it.

Our recorded Western history seems incidental and transient here. Great Bear is ancient beyond our reckoning. The frontier’s final end. I had no business being here, brought by float plane and trimaran, carried on a flood of gasoline, hurtled by oil to this rush of water and fish canopied by dinosaur trees. There was a perfect balance, so rich with emergent life it seemed volcanic, and I could not hope but lessen it.

This is the transcendence of Great Bear, its first and most pointed lesson: We are too small to play among these

few weeks, though, they’d be down here gorging, drunk with fish, so stupified by their feast, he said, that you could step right up to them and practically knock them over and they’d do nothing but fix you with a sleepy stare in return. I couldn’t tell how much he was exaggerating.

Our attention turned again to the water. There were mostly pink salmon in this stream. They were all around us, fighting with all their strength to move another body length upstream, their scales falling away to reveal raw flesh as the struggle exhausted them to death from the outside in. Yet it was strangely tranquil for all the commotion, a ritual whose intent was so singular and selfcontained it felt far away even as you stood in the middle of it.

McAllister explained how little of this we really understand. For a very long time we’d presumed this was a crude endurance match, a survival-of-the-fittest contest, with the salmon that dodged the snouts and claws of bear and wolf and made it the furthest upstream rewarded with safer spots to lay their eggs. Now that we could tag and track individual salmon, though, we’d come to realize that the fish are actually following some guidance system far beyond our reckoning, fighting to lay their eggs and then die not just close by but within mere metres of the spot where they themselves had hatched.

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McAllister bent down and poked the streambed with an extended forefinger, and when he pulled it from the water it was topped with a tiny pink-white sphere the size of a peppercorn. A salmon egg. He was standing in a small eddy of clear water, and you could see the eggs scattered like confetti among the cedar-bark debris at his feet, each of them placed there by a dying fish that had only ever known the place as an infant, and which had then travelled thousands of kilometers across the years and then returned to this exact spot—improbably, presposterously, miraculously—to complete life’s cycle.

These are just words. We talk about the cycle of life as if we invented it by naming it, not as if it were as unknowable as the cosmos or the Judaic god’s true name. Formerly, I knew salmon primarily as a piece of common meat on a plate, a lifeless pink quadrilateral almost impossible to reconcile with the power of the fish racing upstream in cold autumn water in the Great Bear Rainforest, where wild is not a sales pitch but a way of being.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt as irrelevant as I did standing in the middle of that salmon run.

L aTE afTERNooN oN ThE dEck of IaN McAllister’s trimaran under clear skies, the light magical, the landscape ancient and immutable. The mouth of Douglas Channel in particular is a postcard of wild Canadian majesty, a flawless arrangement of flat black sea and low forested hills set against glacier-capped peaks on the horizon.

Now, place a modern supertanker in the foreground, and wonder at what it adds to the scene.

A typical supertanker—specifically a very large crude carrier ( VLCC) or ultra large crude carrier (ULCC) of the sort that would depart the proposed oil terminal in Kitimat almost every day—is at least 300 metres long, maxing out north of 400. A thousand feet long, half or long as Hartley Bay’s coastal hills are tall. At its broadest point, its beam measures more than fifty metres, wider than half a football field’s length. The largest ULCCs can carry more than two million 30

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barrels of oil. A floating colossus, a selfpropelled city block, a mobile reservoir: the scale is at the outside edge of most people’s imaginations.

I tried to picture it, huge and vulnerable, as I sat on the deck of the trimaran, eavesdropping on an interview the CBC reporter was conducting with Julian MacQueen. They were talking about the

down across the bay, about the months afterward waiting in vain for its toxic wreckage to be removed. She recounted a long history of mistreatment and mistrust from the Indian Act to a recent visit from a pair of Enbridge representatives, with their “mumbo-jumbo talk” of consultation and reconciliation. She talked about her own childhood in Prince Rupert, the daughter

hecate Strait, the wide passage separating the great Bear coast from haida gwai’i, is a maelstrom of howling hurricane-force winds and shallow, choppy seas.

BP spill. “I spent 25 years building up a business,” MacQueen was saying, “and overnight it was gone. It was one of those gutwrenching, heartstopping events that you just don’t see coming.” There was a pause, another question I didn’t quite catch, and then he said, “I can’t tell you the feeling of helplessness that I felt.”

Far on the horizon, with a timing that verged on punctuation, a plume of mist rose up out of the dark water, and then another. The water was backlit by the setting sun, the light dancing against the exhalations of a pod of humpback whales. They swam alongside us for a spell, breaching and rolling, their great pale bellies gleaming. I had to wonder how they’d greet a vessel twenty-five times the size of our trimaran, whether they’d still feel welcome in a place that was home to such leviathans.

IN ThE EvENINg, NoRm haNN Took JULIaN MacQueen and I to meet Helen Clifton, a revered village elder. She lived in a tidy home up the hill from the harbour.

In her foyer, a glass case held old-fashioned China dolls of native girls. She was dressed in a smart red sweater, mocassins and pearls. Ceremonial masks hung from the sloped ceiling of her living room above a flatscreen TV. Hann called her Granny (as does everybody in Hartley Bay), and as we sat down to talk a steady stream of grandchildren and great-grandchildren came through to say good night. Clifton is a gifted storyteller, and after the kids were gone, she told us stories. She talked about the night the Queen of the North went

of an English immigrant tailor and a coastal native woman, the kids at school teasing her, calling her “half-breed.”

Clifton worked in a Prince Rupert cannery as a young woman, and then she’d met a Gitga’at man and married him, and the rest of her life had been lived in Hartley Bay. She was interested to hear about new developments in clean energy, to talk about eco-tourism and other new avenues of training for the young people in the village. She wasn’t against change; she was opposed to exploitation. She explained her stance with a sort of parable, a story about her late husband out on a hunt.

“My husband was a hunter, you know, he was trained from a little guy that there’s no way that an animal would suffer, just had to shoot them in the head. And so I guess his father had told him about the white bear on Princess Royal. And because he hadn’t seen it, he thought his father’s just telling him this story about this bear that looks like a ghost that’s in the woods – just to make him be more careful as a hunter. “ W hen he was about in his early fifties, he went out deer hunting, and there was this bear. And it stood up on its hind legs, and my husband said it seemed to just grow and grow until it was seven or eight feet tall. And being a hunter, he just, he brought his gun up and shot at it.

And then it wiped the blood off its shoulder and it just hollered. And he just, you know, he just choked right up, because this was real. ‘What my father told me — it is real. And I didn’t believe my father.’

“And this bear hollered out crying, like a human. He said it was just like a woman had screeched out in hurt. And brushed at its shoulder. ‘ W hat have I done? I wasn’t hunting that animal.

I wasn’t here for that. We have to go follow it, because if I’ve wounded it, then I have to kill it.’ They followed it, and there wasn’t the drops of blood that a badly wounded bear would have.

“And so he comes back home, and he says, ‘Guess what I saw.’ And he said, ‘You’ll find it hard to believe. Because,’ he said, ‘I never believed it all my life.’ And he told me about this experience with a bear. ‘Oh, why didn’t you kill it,’ I said, ‘We would’ve had this white bear fur.’

And he said, ‘You foolish woman, that’s your white blood talking.’ So we both had to laugh. He didn’t say that in an insulting way, just because, he said, ‘It was only meant for me to see that it was real. Now I have to do something about it to protect it.’ And so he told his people they are not to shoot that animal no matter what. ‘It’s there. I saw it. And nobody is to hunt it.

We don’t need it for nothing.’”

The spirit bear, Clifton reckoned, had visited her husband to teach him—to teach all the Gitga’at—that the bears were not there for the taking, that the spirit bear itself was the master of this place.

Her husband did not stop hunting— he never doubted that the Gitga’at and everyone else needed to draw on nature’s bounty to live—but he understood there were limits. You couldn’t take everything.

When she finished the story, MacQueen introduced himself as the pilot of the float plane down at the marina. He told her about his hotels in Pensacola, about the BP spill and the decimated economy left in its wake. He wanted her to know that the Gitga’at would not stand alone in their opposition to the pipeline.

“It’s not just your battle to fight,” he told her. “Here I am fighting it in Pensacola, Florida, and I’m up here. I mean, there’s a momentum that’s building up against this sort of thing. And I think there is hope, that these kind of things can be stopped.”

“I try to be optimistic,” Clifton replied, “and that has to be every day. Every day I have to say to myself, you know, that there’s hope.”

JulIaN MacQuEEN’s TIME MachINE Was crowded for the flight back to Vancouver. There was a press conference about the ILCP event scheduled for that afternoon, and Ian McAllister had brought along Norm Hann and a young Gitga’at wilderness tour operator named Marven Robinson. The three of them were guiding MacQueen across Princess Royal, buzzing low past dozens of streams, marvelling at a place they knew intimately, transformed by the Widgeon into something wondrous and new.

We were all wearing headsets so we could talk over the Widgeon’s growling engines, and the chatter was steady and gripping, a narration of the scene below as skilled as any nature documentary’s soundtrack.

“This lake is larger than I thought,” Robinson said, looking down at the flawless mirrored surface of a lake tucked amid the summit peaks of Princess Royal. The lake reflected back the Great Bear tricolour of deep green forest, golden grass and grey stone, a flag of liberation for the sovereign wilderness below. McAllister pointed out a small waterfall, and Robinson said he’d once seen five spirit bears feeding there.

They traded tales of Great Bear wildlife like they were talking about their neighbours.

Just south of Bella Bella, McAllister directed MacQueen up a long, narrow tidal estuary. It was protected wilderness, the site of Pacific Wild’s first successful campaign. They’d been selling hot dogs to raise the money to buy the land ahead of the logging companies when one of Warren Buffett’s sons kicked in $1.5 million and secured the deal. There were a couple of humpbacks swimming up the estuary as we headed back down toward open water.

As we banked again south, Hann, McAllister and Robinson took turns pointing out the sights. A pod of humpbacks. A pale red cloud of krill in the waves. A clear cut. A salmon farm sprawled across the

mouth of several wild salmon streams. A huge grey whale breaching over and over off the pristine powder-sand beach of an island off the northern tip of Vancouver Island.

MacQueen turned the Widgeon back around for another look at the grey whale, and then another and another.

“You can see wolf tracks down there,” McAllister said, pointing to the beach.

“Oh, man, this is amazing,” Robinson said.

“This is really, amazing,” Hann said.

We all said it or something like it.

Wow. Whoa. Oh man. What else could you say when the land and sea made the limits of language—of the human imagination itself—so clear?

I’d schEdulEd My flIghT hoME To calgaRy too early to make the press conference, so I said my goodbyes on the tarmac at the float plane terminal. In parting, Marven Robinson told me about a conversation he’d overheard between his mother-in-law and Helen Clifton, both of them in the twilight of their lives, both vowing to make the campaign to block Enbridge’s pipeline their “last fight.”

They told one another that they needed to teach us all one final lesson, the one the spirit bear had taught the Gitga’at years ago: You can’t take everything.

Canada is an improbable country in many ways, and sometimes this makes our nation all the more powerful and wondrous. But it can also seem ridiculous, absurd. No: outrageous. It’s outrageous that a legislature on the other end of a vast continent from the Great Bear Rainforest—in another world, really, another age—assumes the authority to decide its fate. What do they know in Ottawa of salmon or spirit bears? I spent three days in the Great Bear Rainforest, and it was long enough to know that we can presume to have no such authority, that it is not for us to decide, ever, what Great Bear is for.

“We have to win this one.” This is what Marven Robinson’s mother-in-law had told Clifton.

It’s what Robinson told me in parting.

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THE M EM O I R B A N K

threshold B y

j A N E

s I l c O T T

the change that ends changes

M

y husbaNd Is a lIaR. When I complain

about the wrinkles on my neck, he says, “What wrinkles?” Then I laugh because I don’t want to press the point. Would it be a good idea to have him examine, truly, the decay that is my neck skin?

Think wattle. Think chicken with pinfeathers that spring out overnight.

I care about these things now, but can imagine a future where I won’t. When the dementia was first catching my mother, there were days when she might open a suitcase and put a hanger in it and then a shoe. A while later, when her mind clicked back again, she’d say, “It’s terrible getting old. I don’t know things anymore, and I get so upset.” It was awful seeing her in that phase. Later when she didn’t know me but would smile when I visited her in the home, it seemed better. But maybe it was just better for me.

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In childbirth, there’s a phase called transition. The cervix isn’t quite fully dilated so it’s not safe to push yet. The experts talk about this as a time when a woman may feel as if the walls are closing in, and then they talk of the pushing that comes after as though it will be a relief, and everyone in prenatal class nods and says, “Oh, good, pushing.” And so begins another of those lies you buy into until you’re in labour and realize that this “pushing” word is just another euphemism for agony.

Everyone yells encouragement at you when you’re in childbirth as if you’re in a race, and so you do the best you can, but you want to scream at them all to shut up so you can concentrate. But you

myself, and sometimes can’t remember where I am in a sentence. People say we forget things in midlife because we have too much information in our brains, and some of it has to be offloaded. I think it may be because I haven’t had eight consecutive hours of sleep since 1991. But the mind is plastic, experts say; not the menopause or birthing experts, the brain experts—usually men. They note how other parts of the brain will step in and take over the job that an injured part can no longer accomplish. Maybe my mind is learning new skills too—like how to make do without the names for things, or my keys. Physically, menopause is the ending of a woman’s periods, and scientists say the word actually only refers to

And because this was minds seeming to spark one against another in a higher, rarer air, I thought it was safe to mention something personal, so I said I was menopausal. It’s not as if he jumped back or anything. He didn’t run. But there was something. A squinching, if you can call it that. A momentary tightening in his pupil (only one, because you can’t look at two at the same time, which seems wrong, but there it is—another limitation of the human body) and I felt suddenly and overwhelmingly ashamed. Why was that? Why be ashamed over a completely common experience? This man is a man’s kind of man, all burly and hearty, but also sensitive and intelligent, and so I admit I felt attracted. Or, more particularly, I

And so begins another of those lies you buy into until you’re in labour and realize that this “pushing” word is just another euphemism for agony. can’t scream, because something in your personality or your upbringing has bred you to be silent when stressed. Besides, you know if you start, you might never stop. You might become the screaming woman, the woman who goes into labour and stays there.

Chaos, disorder, mind-ripping pain.

That was pushing. And that might have been transition. I don’t know if I recognized the borders of either during the labours of my children, but I recognize them now—a feeling that the edges are closing in. Maybe that’s what my mother felt, and the hanger and the shoe in the suitcase and the following around of the cat with the tin of food were all part of her trying to make the walls bigger, trying to make sense of them. I’m not sure. How can I ever know unless I follow her into Alzheimer’s myself, and then what good will that be? None, except to find (as I do, the older I get) how much there was to admire in her, and how little I understood her when she was alive.

“We’re giving birth to the next phase of our lives,” a friend says over coffee— soy lattes, as it happens. The menopause experts would approve. We laugh, and then she tells me she feels like a teenager again, and I say that makes sense.

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the time when a woman’s periods have been gone for a full year. Scientists call points like these “thresholds,” which makes it sound simple (the same way that “transition” initially does). You imagine stepping over this threshold and moving from one state of biological being into another. And this sounds fine. Anyone can step. The body does it of its own accord, whether you want it to or not. Many of us step and then make a big hurrah out of it, as if we’re celebrating. I even had a party, because it happened to coincide with my fiftieth birthday. At this party a friend gave me a book about women in their fifties who accomplish amazing things.

Another friend gave me a paper mâché container shaped like an egg—and a significant look, which I ignored.

It’s time to admit that the reason I started this essay is entirely superficial, which is embarrassing, but there we are.

Some things, I hope, can be confessed and then dismissed. It began with a conversation with a man, an attractive man as it happens, but an academic conversation—the sort that can fire up in a hallway and spin out into the larger air so that everything seems to open up and new ideas rush in. We were talking about aging and then gender, and so for me, the obvious topic of menopause came up.

felt a need to be attractive. But in that moment when his pupil squinched, I understood—perhaps for the first time—what the meaning of menopause really is.

In The Change, Germaine Greer describes menopause as “the beginning of the third age. The age when we are aware (finally) of our mortality, when time becomes precious and moves too quickly, when our looks change and we realize how much we’d relied on them most of our lives, when we lose power and identity (in western cultures particularly), when we grieve for the loss of our fertility, and maybe also for the loss of libido. Our bodies are changing out from under us.

It is the change that ends changes. It is the beginning of the long gradual change from body into soul.”

Safe at my desk, no mirror anywhere near, I imagine this graceful slide towards purity. I think of my father’s skin as he aged, getting smoother and thinner, the folds on his hands like fine silk, under them the ripple of vein, everything coloured: tea-brown age spots, aubergine veins like the rivers on maps. But my middle-aged hands are more like my mother’s, my right index finger an exact replica, the slight bend to the left, as if it’s not sure of the way forward, the folds around my knuckles, which aren’t

EcloguE The finished slag heap yawns over the highway, a man-made sunset aging on the horizon: fading oranges and tarnished pinks, mass of oxides, rich, uninhabitable rust.

The town sinks into oblivion, heavy as organ music. We are not saved.

People walk in a viscous dream of the past, faces crushed under the weight of so much ruined earth.

In our hearts, the stillness of church basements. Of dust.

Overhead, the twin engines of a plane, angels beating their wings as fast as they can, come home, come home, but our arms don’t reach that far.

– Sue Sinclair

thickening yet, but tingle some days in anticipation of future immobility. The top of my back curves forward like hers did. My husband says it’s because I look down all the time. He was following my mother and me in Toronto as we navigated a narrow, snowy sidewalk. “You and your mother, you never look up. What’s with that?” I told him it was because we didn’t want to slip, but I know it’s also a dowager’s hump and don’t want to say those words to him: “dowager,” “hump.”

I know I’m failing on this passage, this journey towards soul. I’m stuck, not just groping for words, but stumbling around in endless circles of thought, and then into grief over looks, which is vain and silly and useless. I take some comfort in thinking that surely in this culture of plumpers and fillers and freezers, I’m not alone, and that some part of me may be excused for clinging to old vanities and habits. But the phrase “aging

gracefully” haunts me, and I think I should hold myself to that higher ideal, forget my small vanities: my chicken neck, my disappearing eyebrows. Aim for a mindlift, instead of a facelift.

On the library shelves there are countless books on menopause, offering guidance and advice: cheering words about the benefits of giving up caffeine and red meat, taking up yoga and meditation. The women on the covers look competent and tidy, their hair neat, their faces remarkably unlined. Inside, they talk of menopause as if it’s something we can manage like a stock portfolio or a new diet. If we eat enough yams, take enough vitamins, begin each day with sun salutations and affirmations.

In theory, I’m all for health and responsible living, but in practice it turns out I’m the same person I was as a teenager: resentful, irresponsible, lazy, easily distracted.

In parts of South America and Africa, women are freed by menopause. In

Botswana, for instance, the older !Kung women join the older !Kung men to tell stories and swear, to make lewd comments and smoke cigars. This sounds like a lot more fun than worrying about whether or not I look good or if I’ve achieved anything worthy in my life. In Western culture, one of the menopause books cheerfully tells me, middle-aged women free themselves from old patterns in their lives. They tell their husbands to do the dishes and they stop buying groceries and feeding the cat. They find new strength, shuck off old, inhibiting habits, and become more fiercely alive and productive than ever. As I passively wipe the counters in our kitchen one more time because it’s easier than haranguing the teenagers into doing it, I think, yet again, I’m doing something wrong. I can’t even get menopause right. I think of my mother on the beach at our family’s summer gathering place with her sisters and cousins, all of them in their upholstered bathing suits, the kind with skirts and lots of pleating. Their hair fluffed out from their heads in clouds of gray or blue, or plastered flat under a fishing hat with hooks stuck into it (my mother). They all had bags of knitting beside them, and they seemed entirely content with themselves, their larger shapes, their wrinkled faces—all of it part of some big joke. Before dinner, they might have a large glass of gin, and after, they might gather again for another. As I head off to exercise class, drinking a glass of soya milk before I go, I think of girdles, cigarettes and gin. Why was I born into this relentlessly earnest time of herbal remedies and yoga classes? Why can’t I take advantage of stimulants and supportive underwear?

My f riends and I sit around my kitchen table lamenting our late starts in maternal life. The hard west light blasts in. None of us looks young in such light.

We’re wrinkling. The flesh is sinking. I have the beginning of jowls, one friend a series of crosshatched lines on her forehead. We talk about surgery, what it would do for us, and then we change the topic. We’re home with teens. Trapped, it seems, by over-sized toddlers who require our minds as punching bags, our WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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spirits as invisible fences. Boundaries, the parenting books remind us. Limits.

You’re there to provide them. But what if I want to leap over those fences myself?

What if I’d rather be running or dancing or singing through fields of flowers, (Oh stop, I tell myself. You’d strain a knee.)

On the internet, I find sad stories by men about their wives suddenly leaving them at fifty, riding off into the sunset on motorcycles, clinging to the leather jackets of unsuitable men, or wearing the jackets themselves—and here I picture them gleefully waving goodbye, leaving responsibilities and the dinner dishes behind them.

On my bicycle one day a fellow cyclist gave me a hot-eyed stare while we were both stopped at an intersection. True I’d been studying his calves, but innocently, I tell myself now—my admiration purely aesthetic. I looked away, but, as I followed him for the next few blocks, imagined a life where I didn’t make dentist appointments and keep them, a life involving men who rode boldly into intersections, light bouncing off their calves.

Maybe the hormones are making small leaps, desperate last gasps at lust and liveliness as I stare down the haunting visions of old age: a friend’s arthritic fingers in my mind’s eye, another friend’s chronic fatigue, another’s brushes with cancer, another’s missing lung, another gone, years gone. A tree she bought us as a sapling full grown in the yard, a photo, her business card in my drawer. Is this all we leave behind? No wonder we leap for men at intersections, small dreams of our former selves.

I know I’m also mentioning this encounter because I want to think there might still be something about me capable of drawing a strange man. How strange? I imagine a Harpo Marx type asking, but never mind. This isn’t meant to be funny. It’s more pathetic really, a woman seeing the end of the road of her desirability. I wonder if the bicycle man was issuing an invitation at all. I could be deluded. My menopausal brain could be making up stories to ease me through.

In Susan Love’s Menopause and Horone Book, she calls menopause “adolescence in reverse” and says that estrogen is the 36

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“domesticating hormone” that turns premenstrual girls—confident, lively, engaged—into weedy romantic idiots.

(The latter is my turn of phrase.) Menopause is actually a recovery stage, says Love, a stage where we return to our true selves. Who is that true self, I wonder, and does she do the dishes and care for her family or does she go running off

in search of fields of flowers—or, in my case, mountain cabins and night skies filled with stars?

Most of the menopause books begin with an explanation of the female reproductive cycle; several include a chart that shows four different coloured lines to represent the four female hormones: estrogen, progesterone, luteinizing hormone

CAN.ICONS ThE CaNada GoosE One of the world’s great migrations, large groups of Canada Geese flying in V-shaped flight formations signal each year’s transitions into Canadian spring and fall. Overhead sightings are often preceded by their distinctive honking calls, which become very loud immediately prior to their landing on water, where they commonly rest.

Seeing a flock of Canada Geese can trigger a conflicting mix of emotions, or even melancholy, in many Canadians. In fall, their flight south signals the loss of summer’s warmth––on the other hand, they pass overhead in the rich heart of the harvest and, more importantly, they mark the beginning of the beloved hockey season. Likewise in spring, surging northward they signal the joyful end of winter––yet they also mark the passing of another hockey season.

Canada geese are often seen leading their goslings in a line, usually with one parent in the lead and the other bringing up the rear. Parents may violently chase away nearby creatures, from small blackbirds to humans.

Usually, a threatened goose will stand erect, spread its wings, and produce a warning, hissing sound. If the threat doesn’t retreat, the righteous bird will charge and attack, biting and slapping with its wings.

Sadly, the species has come to be regarded as a pest in some areas.

Non-migratory flocks have taken up residence in artificial suburban landscapes, in response to shrinking habitats and food sources.

Some retired Canadians choose to mirror the Canada Goose’s habits by wintering in the United States.

– Clive Holden

and follicle stimulating hormone. During the reproductive years, the lines follow a predictable series of ups and downs. In peri-menopause, the lines look like a twoyear-old has gotten hold of the crayons— they shoot sideways across the page and then go straight up and cataclysmically down. At post-menopause everything goes flat. It looks like the heart monitor lines on hospital shows when the music gets loud and the characters go silent.

Maybe that’s why few books publish them. They’re too harsh, too close a reminder of death. They make me think of the vistas of grief that open at unexpected moments: seeing the shape of a man like my father on the street, for instance, or thinking of my teenaged children, their

said something about youth and slenderness, her sigh was full of consciousness.

We laughed a sort of hopeless laugh together, the kind that’s full of grief. Maybe the years and years of hormones have left traces behind, like tattoos. Maybe sometimes they burn.

Some women say just before ovulation they feel a spike of desire, and that even after menopause they have fluctuations in their hormones. Some time after the bike man incident, I sat on a small patio next to the pool where my daughter was having her swimming lessons. A young man entered. I recognized him from the day before; though it was a corner of the eye recognition, and when I studied him more closely, I was a little

Last summer I was sitting in a wicker chair on the screened-in porch of a rented cottage listening to the creek next to me and watching a wasp bump against the glass of the door. Cottonwood seeds drifted from the trees, looking like puffs of dust, slutswool floating through the air. The day before, as the sun was setting and I watched through the small frame of the kitchen window, the light had caught them so they looked like snowflakes against the green lawn and the wood behind it, as if someone had made a snow globe and set it with grass and trees. So that next day I was still fascinated, still thinking of them as floating feathers or fairy dust, something incongruous and magical, something to be

During childbirth, people cheer you on through the transition.

No one cheers you on through menopause. faces turned towards the world, away from me. To let go of people first you have to let go of the part of yourself that needs them.

No one can tell me what happens to the individual cells when the hormones leave them. I’m not sure why I need to understand this, but it seems important to know what’s happening deep inside my brain. What about those neurons that used to be flushed with estrogen at regular times every month? How do they cope? The medical people give me vague answers or strange looks. I search journals, the internet—nothing. Eventually I decide to think of my cells as little homes that have been visited by hormones for the past thirty-five years. Now the hormones don’t come by anymore. They don’t even call. I think of my cells drooping, looking for substitutes, sidling inappropriately up to other cells, or just lying in their little cell beds with the lights off and the blankets drawn up over their nuclei. I wonder how long this phase will last, this pause between infertility and acceptance. How long before I discover something to fill the gap, to spackle over the craters hormones have left behind, with knitting, say, or bird watching? I visited an elderly cousin last summer. She’s sinking into Alzheimer’s, but when she

surprised I hadn’t taken greater note of him earlier. He was deeply tanned and muscled, his skin glistened with droplets of water from the pool. He asked if the chair beside me was taken, then moved it into the sun nearby when I said no. I kept writing, ignoring him, almost. He sat facing the sun, his feet up on the rail, his head resting on one hand, as if he was napping. I didn’t look at him, though I thought he wanted me to. At least that was what I imagined, remembering what I was like at that age, self-conscious in almost everything. A while later when he asked the time, I answered him and walked away thinking that if I were younger I might have woven a fantasy out of that moment, a life, and a story. But I was more intrigued by my lack of interest and how much I was looking forward to taking my daughter and her friend out for ice cream. I wanted to hear their thoughts, glean whatever bits of their minds they’d allow me to see.

“Only when a woman ceases the fretful struggle to be beautiful,” wrote Germaine Greer, “can she turn her gaze outward, find the beautiful and feed upon it. She can at last transcend the body that was what other people principally valued her for and be set free both from their expectations and her own capitulation to them.”

watched—carefully—and as I sat there I felt all the other moments when I’d felt the soft air of summer all around me and had time to look and listen, and so I was happy, really truly at peace with myself and everything around me, and I’d been writing about love and desire, which also made me happy, but the fluff caught my eye and that was more important.

Every day I unlearn. Today I read Germaine Greer again and am inspired.

To let go of beauty is to find beauty. Yes. True beauty is outside us: we find it when we turn our minds away from ourselves.

Yes. And isn’t that a relief, to no longer consider oneself as if on a market shelf?

To age gracefully is to say it doesn’t matter if you become invisible in the world, and it doesn’t matter if no man except your husband (who is bound by habit and good manners) says you are beautiful. It doesn’t matter. During childbirth, people cheer you on through the transition. No one cheers you on through menopause.

You are meant to do it privately in the quiet of your room. I imagine the voices telling me to do so now (You can’t write that! You can’t say that!) But why be quiet about a birth? Besides, our bodies announce themselves. People used to call hot flashes “blooms.” How apt. We flushing, heated women blooming out everywhere. EB WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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T H E SC IENCE FILE

BY RUSSELL COBB

Up

in the Air

There are many cures for the fear of flying. The trick is finding one that works.

IN AUGUST OF 2009, I found myself in the back row of a Delta Connection commuter plane dipping and weaving its way through a line of New Jersey thunderclouds when a full blown panic attack set in. The back row is a paradoxical place for a phobic flyer. It’s the furthest point from a plane’s centre of gravity, and turbulence often feels much worse back there than it does in the front or around the wings.

Yet according to a study in Popular Mechanics, the back row is the place to be. In 2007, the magazine sifted through thousands of unanalyzed data points provided by the National Transportation Safety Board and finally determined that, contrary to conventional wisdom, there was one part of the airplane safer than the rest. The further back you sat, they concluded, the more likely you were to survive a plane crash.

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The odds of surviving a plane crash have risen dramatically in the past few decades and some ninety-five per cent of people involved in a crash with a fatality actually live through it, although who survives depends a lot on timing, location, and how you are dressed (hint: wear tight clothing, preferably tight leather). According to the International Transport Association, the odds of a passenger being involved in an accident of any kind is 1 in 1.2 million. Your odds of dying are significantly less than that already remote figure. All these stats, however, are beside my more pressing point, which is that, on that night in August, 2009, I became convinced that my death in a fiery plane crash was imminent. My cheeks turned hot and my ears were buzzing as the plane shook from side to side and then dropped what felt like a couple hundred feet. I could hear myself struggling to take a deep breath—it must have sounded something like a panting dog—but my inner voice clamored with vindication: I had been right all along; I was going to die in a plane crash.

“Cabin crew, please take your seats immediately,” the Captain said.

A jolt hit the plane and I felt my stomach sink. The woman next to me grasped my hand and started praying quietly, reciting Hail Marys and Our Fathers at a fast clip. She got out her cell phone and called her husband, leaving a voicemail saying that, if she didn’t see him again, well, she loved him. I couldn’t reach for my cell. My one free hand was too tightly clasped to the armrest.

I started to talk myself down from the ledge of insanity. “If this plane makes it down to the ground safely,” I said to myself, “you don’t ever have to fly again.” If the episode were a disaster movie, this would be the part where, just before the climactic event, the protagonist would chat about the vacation he’s going to take when the impossibly difficult mission is over.

But the end was anticlimactic. After the plane dropped, it leveled off into a smooth descent and touched down flawlessly. My seatmate ungrasped my hand and we didn’t exchange a word. Perhaps she was a little embarrassed by her reac40

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tion to the turbulence. I wasn’t. I was giddy to be alive, although a little daunted by the prospect of returning to Edmonton from New York without flying.

Captain Tom Bunn is a retired pilot and therapist based in Connecticut who specializes in treating fearful fliers like me. When I told him about the episode, he wasn’t surprised that my knowledge of statistics had so little effect on my fear.

“Your fear isn’t so much that the plane is going to crash,” he said. “It’s that you’re going to crash psychologically. You can’t keep your mind off the fact that you don’t have control. Even if you’ve practiced relaxation exercises, once turbulence hits and the plane starts shaking, you can’t stop thinking about it.”

Bunn said people like me (an estimated ten to twenty per cent of the population suffer from severe fear of flying at some point in their lives) need the ability “to control or escape” uncomfortable situations. “People often ask me why they can get on their motorcycle but can’t get on an airplane.” Bunn thinks the answer lies in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain in charge of executive function— something he calls “your inner CEO.” When he said this, I cringed, picturing a mini-Donald Trump stomping around in my mind, making the rest of my brain feel small and insignificant. The more he talked, though, the more the analogy made sense. “When you’re driving a motorcycle, you’re making decisions now, and now, and now. Your inner CEO is assessing threats, making commitments, and developing a plan of action.” But once the door of the airplane cockpit shuts, Bunn told me, there’s simply no room or role for that executive function. It’s shut out. In other words, said Bunn, “You have no control over the situation.”

For most people, this is not an issue. Any unusual noise or turbulence is assessed by the prefrontal cortex and dismissed as not relevant. But fearful fliers, for whatever reason, cannot get their CEO to leave the office. Once the amygdala—the part of the brain that senses fear—starts sending stress hormones, “it doesn’t matter how many pills you’ve popped or drinks you’ve had,” Bunn said, “You’ve got problems.”

When my fear of flying first set in ten years ago, I sought solace in facts, statistics, and logic. But even statistics can get murky. “You are more likely to die on your drive to the airport than in an airplane crash,” I read on a fear of flying discussion board. Perhaps, but professional statisticians rarely get behind broad pronouncements such as this. Professor Arnold Barnett of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has pointed out how difficult it is to actually quantify airline safety. Are we to measure the relative safety of different forms of transport in distance traveled or in hours per journey? Hull loss per 100,00 departures?

Maybe the numbers of passengers who arrived versus the number of passengers who died? All of these calculations lead to different pictures of airline safety relative to other modes of transport. Depending on how you measure safety, air travel might look far safer than ground transportation, or slightly more dangerous. If you’re looking for comfort in statistics, in other words, you have to be careful you don’t pick the wrong set.

For example, if you take the number of deaths per one billion passenger journeys—the airline insurance industry standard—you would see that there are more deaths (117 per billion) on airliners than there are by rail (twenty per billion).

The problem with this metric, however, is that one train journey, even if it’s a local subway trip, has the same statistical value as a transatlantic flight to Siberia. Barnett cautions against this measurement and has instead opted for the grim, yet more reassuring, calculation of “death risk per randomly chosen flight.” If you take this as your metric, then, according to U.S. figures for flights between 2003 and 2008, your risk of dying on a flight is about one in twenty-three million. To put that in context, according to Barnett, there’s a greater possibility that a randomly chosen four-year-old will grow up to become a U.S. president than die in a plane crash.

Given those odds, why was I seriously considering taking the Greyhound back to Edmonton in the summer of 2009?

I could blame it on an overactive inner CEO. But that would mean ignoring nearly a decade of history that began with a

global cataclysm and ended with me on a series of flights that would have tested the mettle of the hardiest of fliers.

WhEN ThE sEcoNd plaNE sTRuck ThE WoRld Trade Center at 9:03 a.m. on September 11, 2001, I was directly underneath the buildings, at the WTC subway stop, on my way to work at the World Almanac and Book of Facts. It was a job with few surprises: there are no emergencies in

and I continued on to work a little further uptown. Thinking back on it, it’s amazing how much calm there was during such a full-blown catastrophe. This is now commonplace in 9/11 literature, of course, but it’s often chalked up—mistakenly, I believe—to some sort of innate fortitude on the part of New Yorkers themselves.

Disaster scholars have found the most common reactions to a major catastrophe are altruism and cooperation, not panic.

a pattern of encroaching disasters seemed to be emerging. the almanac business. I always looked forward to this part of the commute because many Brooklynites work in Lower Manhattan and the train would empty out, giving me a few minutes to sit down and read a book. My reading list had recently changed; by 2001, it was clear that the paper-bound almanac was going the way of the fax machine, so I had decided to go to graduate school. I carried around a workbook on analogies, constantly testing myself in preparation for the Graduate Record Exam. Taking one of the nowfree subway seats, as usual, I spread out my workbook, but people came crushing through the doors, not in a panic, but in quiet determination. Someone bumped up against my book and briefly apologized. I felt slightly annoyed but got back to the task at hand. I kept reading. Corpulent is to slim as overweight is to lanky. Diamond is to ring as light bulb is to lamp.

Even though I was a recent arrival to New York, I had developed a technique for shutting out external stimuli. Long before my inner CEO started throwing fits at 30,000 feet, he was quietly managing life in the big city so efficiently that I didn’t register what was going on that day until half an hour later, when I emerged above ground uptown.

When I got to Penn Station it seemed like I had stepped on to the set of a disaster movie. People were stopped on the sidewalks, jaws dropping open as they stared down 8th Avenue to watch the first tower collapse. The lack of panic made me think it was an incredible stunt,

One week later, I was on a plane halfway across the United States, going to visit family in Oklahoma. I don’t recall the slightest bit of fear, but I do recall a bizarre announcement from the cockpit that, in the event of an attack by boxcutter-wielding terrorists, passengers should use the airline’s pillows as shields while overtaking the terrorists.

It was only two months later, after I returned from a wedding in California, that fear of flying began to wreak havoc on my life. I flew into John F. Kennedy Airport shortly before American Airlines Flight 587 crashed on a beach in Queens.

It was a disaster that had nothing to with 9/11, but the two events became connected in my mind. I had flown right after 9/11, and now a plane had crashed near the same airport on the same day I was flying. A pattern of encroaching disasters seemed to be emerging—the proverbial tightening noose—and somehow I became convinced I wouldn’t be so lucky as to avoid the next one. At the same time, I knew this was crazy talk. It was the line of reasoning late-night AM radio callers use when explaining conspiracy theories. Still, when it came time to leave New York for graduate school in Texas, I rented a car, preferring three days on the road to three hours of anxiety in the air.

a yEaR afTER 9/11, I Was sETTlINg INTo lIfE as a graduate student in Austin. When I chose conferences, I picked those I could drive to. I made plans to fly to California to see a friend, but backed out at the last

minute. A premonition of dread turned into the beginnings of a panic attack the night before the trip. I was too busy, I told him on the phone, although he quickly figured out the real reason, and tried to taunt me into getting on the next flight.

“When your plane gets here, and you’re stuck in Texas, you’re going to feel like shit,” he said. “Just man up and get on the next flight.”

Macho Tough Love, Therapy #1, was therapeutically ineffective. I watched planes overhead, almost hoping for one to burst into flames to prove to my friend I wasn’t crazy. But after my scheduled departure and arrival flights made it to their destinations without crashing, I knew it was time to find some help.

I combed through the list of mental health providers whose cost would be picked up by my insurance plan. Psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and alternative medicine practitioners.

Where was a person supposed to even start? There were hundreds of names and a handful of acronyms: Ph.D., M.D., PsyD, M.S.W., LCSW. The modern mental health patient has a therapeutic smorgasbord at his disposal. Do you begin with an appetizer of Freudian talking cure and follow it up with some neurochemistry for the entree? Perhaps you gorge on the most clinical of the bunch—the behaviorists, a terrifying group who will lead you directly to your phobia and expose you to it repeatedly until you are either cured or insane.

Having no context from which to assess the array of choices, I followed a rigorous intellectual process and went with the name with the longest list of titles.

Lisa R. was an M.D. with the added bonus of a Ph.D. in psychiatry, but getting in to see her was no problem. She had no secretary and seemed surprised that a new patient would be calling her. She held late-night office hours in a condo on the fringes of Austin. I rang her bell and could see a slight, pixieish woman with greying hair through a side window, walking gingerly toward the door in a purple jogging suit and cross-trainers. She seemed to have just awoken from a nap.

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made copious notes on a yellow legal pad, but, after about ten minutes, she stopped writing, and gazed a spot on the wall only slightly above my head.

“When are you flying?” she finally said.

“One week,” I said. I was going to Florida for Spring Break.

She wrote out three prescriptions, all with a refill. For the time being, she said, I should medicate. When I got back, I should try Emotional Freedom Technique, hypnotherapy, or even yoga. For now, though, only pills would do.

with something sharp enough to cause a blowout, starting off a chain of events leading to an accident like the one that brought down the Concorde in Paris in 1999. The more I inspected the plane, the more possibilities for a crash came to mind. I wanted to back out of this flight, too, but pride pushed me on to the plane.

I reached in my pocket, and stuck a pill into my gums the way Lisa had shown me, shortly before take off. It was a breeze, a smooth ride the entire way without a hint of turbulence. A week later,

I gripped the hand rests, waiting for the magic of the benzodiazepines to kick in.

“Don’t wait until you’re having a panic attack to take one,” she said. “Be on top of it. If you feel anxiety, take one immediately.” She showed me how to stick the pill in between the lining of the lip and the gums, where it dissolves almost immediately into the blood stream. There was something disturbingly unprofessional about how she pulled out her lower lip and simulated putting a pill into her mouth.

I walked into the pharmacy feeling a slight sense of shame, as if I was doing something on the threshold of lawlessness.

Perhaps I was projecting, but I detected a note of disapproval from the way the pharmacist asked me, almost in a whisper, if I had ever taken these drugs before, examining me from over his eyeglasses.

I told him I hadn’t and he sighed. A few minutes later, he came back with three bottles of drugs: Ambien, Klonopin, and Xanax. He warned me against taking the last two at the same time, since they were essentially the same thing: a class of drugs known as benzodiazepines.

When the day of the flight arrived, I dumped a few pills in my jeans pocket.

Watching the lines for check-in and security, I felt my cheeks get hot and my feet go numb. I made it through and stood at the window inspecting the plane. Inside that aluminum tube were miles of wires ready to short-circuit and start a fire. The vertical stabilizer, what was it made of?

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however, storm clouds had formed and there were delays at the airport in Miami. Standing in line to board the flight home, I reached in my pocket and picked out two pills, one orange and one white.

Take-off was bumpy and I gripped the hand rests, waiting for the magic of the benzodiazepines to kick in, but nothing happened.

The captain came on and said that we were reaching our cruising altitude and that the rest of the ride would be smooth.

Something about the way he urged the passengers to sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight calmed me down. The seatbelt light went off with a ding and then the beverage cart came around. I ordered a Bloody Mary, downed it and rested my head against the window, watching the plane cruise effortlessly across the Gulf of Mexico.

The next day, I got a call from a friend about plans we had made on the way home from the airport. I was confused.

I couldn’t remember the conversation. I couldn’t remember the ride home from the airport. I couldn’t remember anything after gulping down the Bloody Mary and resting my head against the plane. There was a sixteen-hour void in my memory bank, as if I had died for a short period and then come back to life.

The thought of repeating the experience of literally losing a piece of myself was more frightening than flying, which, at least in theory, could be treated. Therapy

#2, Modern Neurochemistry, would have to be a worst-case scenario tool.

My ExpERIENcE WITh ThERapy #3, Emotional Freedom Technique, didn’t last very long.

EFT was developed in the early nineteennineties by a Californian named Gary Craig, who took the basics of acupuncture and turned it into a form of psychobabble.

The idea is that by tapping with your fingers along meridians in your body, you will release negative energy. It seemed like quackery, but it was covered by my insurance policy so I decided to try it.

While you tap, you also repeat an affirmation that deals with the trauma or phobia you are trying to overcome. My EF T trainer, Amy, worked with me on a mantra. Amy’s office was full of beads and crystals. She played a CD of Amazonian wind-pipes. “What are you most afraid of?” she asked.

“Take-off,” I said.

We walked through an imaginary flight while she tapped on my forehead, cheeks, chin, and arms. Finally, she settled on a mantra that I had to repeat over and over: “I will get on the airplane and arrive safely.”

While I repeated this line, the tapping continued down the arms. She started all over again, and I started to get annoyed.

The tapping under the eye socket was particularly bothersome. After round four, the only thing I was able to repeat in my mind was “I need to get the hell out of here.”

When I told Amy I would reschedule after I got back from my next trip, she told me she wasn’t sure I was ready to fly after one EFT session. She thought I might want to delay my travel plans until I was totally confident in my tapping abilities. I decided to suspend my disbelief and work on the mantra and the tapping until my next flight. Plus, I had plenty of Xanax and Klonopin left over from my visit with Lisa. Between Therapy #2 and Therapy #3, I was pretty sure I’d make it through the flights; they were just quick jaunts from Austin to New Orleans.

On the first flight, I popped a Xanax and found my way to a window seat, where I commenced tapping and saying my phrase: “I will get on the plane and ar-

rive safely.” A man two seats over read a newspaper, but he kept looking at me out of the corner of his eye. I know this because I, too, was looking at him from the corner of my eye, worried that he might become worried about my tapping and have me escorted off the plane.

During take-off, my tapping got harder. The temple and chin pressure points got sore and I began to feel ridiculous, especially after the captain came on and said that the flight was so short that we wouldn’t even have time for a drink. I was promised emotional freedom, but what I got was emotional distraction, which was good enough for a forty-minute flight in perfect weather.

My bRush WITh paRaMEdIcal ThERapy MadE me hungry for the exactitude of science.

For Therapy #4, I wanted someone who specialized in phobias, so I sought out the Laboratory for the Study of Anxiety Disorders at the University of Texas at Austin. The lab is run by Michael Telch, an expert in phobias. I seemed like a good fit. I took their online survey, and awaited a phone call or an email. Based on the battery of questions, it seemed that I had phobia-lite, whereas Telch’s lab often deals with people who are completely incapacitated and can’t even bear to leave the house.

Telch is a great believer in exposure therapy. If you’re scared of spiders, Telch gradually brings a spider closer and closer, until it’s crawling on your head. It seemed pretty basic, but I didn’t see how it would translate into therapy for fear of flying.

It was around this time that I called Capt. Bunn for the first time. Apart from designing a fear of flying course on CD, Bunn is available for short—and expensive—one-on-one sessions. If you think you might back out of a flight—as I did a few times—Bunn will talk you through it, and give you enough confidence to get on board. Bunn says he had started out doing exposure therapy in the early nineteen-eighties when he flew for Pan Am. “You just sit there on the ground in an airplane with a bunch of scared fliers,” he said. “It doesn’t really work. After the ‘graduation flight,’ some people were so scared they never flew again.”

As a result, Bunn developed a course called SOAR, a hybrid of many psychological approaches. He tries to get fearful fliers to replace the negative images they associate with flying for positive ones through “strengthening exercises.”

I bought his CDs and listened to them in the car, trying to turn the dark cloud of my fear into happy thoughts. If you’re scared of turbulence, he said, think of your airplane as a little plastic airplane in the middle of a cup of Jell-O. It might shake and wiggle, but it will never crash. He also tried to get me to imagine the flight as a cartoon: the turbulence was some segment of a Looney Tunes strip with Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. I wanted to believe in SOAR, but these analogies seemed forced.

For it to work, you had to truly believe in it.

My inner CEO had always been a bit of a rebel, and it felt like I was being force-fed some childish images instead of dealing with the real problem. But what was the real problem? I didn’t know, and that’s what led me to Therapy #5, The Talking Cure.

FoR ThERapy #5, I FouNd a lIcENsEd socIal Worker at the University of Texas who specialized in post-traumatic stress disorder, and we seemed to hit it off. The social worker, Andrew P., was a slightly overweight guy who smiled a lot. We were about the same age — around thirty—and it seemed like, in another context, we would be buddies. At first, Andrew suspected that I had PTSD and tried some cognitive work to deal with it.

He told me to drive to the airport, park as close as I could to the terminal, and simply watch airplanes take off and land until the sense of dread was gone.

I found a dirt road just beyond a perimeter fence, and managed to get close enough to a landing strip that I would sometimes have to cover my ears from the noise of the departing planes. I did this a few times, but it only provoked a new source of anxiety. In those first few years after 9/11, everyone was paranoid about another terrorist attack, and some of that paranoia started to affect me in a strange way; I thought that my repeated trips to this dirt road would be noticed by security and I would seem suspicious.

This meant I was unable to wholly focus on the planes landing and taking off.

At times, my fear of flying started to provoke awkward questions. As part of Capt. Bunn’s SOAR course, I had a letter of introduction that would permit me to meet the pilot as I boarded the plane.

I told a flight attendant I was a nervous flier and I hoped I could meet the captain.

I waited near the entrance until the entire plane had boarded. Finally, the pilot stepped out and looked at me quizzically.

“How can I help you?” he asked.

“I’m an extremely anxious flier and it was suggested to me that meeting the captain might calm my fears,” I said.

“Right,” he said. “How do you say that in Arabic?”

I must have suddenly looked panicstricken because he slapped me on the shoulder and said everything was going to be just great. Perhaps a few bumps on the way up, but nothing to worry about.

I told Andrew that the trips to the airport didn’t seem to have much of an effect, that I was just as nervous before flying as I had ever been. He threw out his initial diagnosis of PTSD and started asking me about my childhood. I remain unsure if this was Andrew’s attempt at psychoanalysis (he refused to be interviewed for this story) but, before I knew it, we were plumbing the recesses of my earliest memories. When I mentioned that my father had died when I was five years old, at the age of thirty-six, he seemed shocked.

The next week, it was all about my father. Perhaps, Andrew suggested, my phobia of flying was a transference of my fear of dying at a young age like my dad. Perhaps my fear of flying was simply a question of coming to terms with the death of my father. He seemed more enthusiastic about this Freudian turn in the therapy than I did. He even gave me homework: my task was to write a letter to my father, explaining my deepest fears and regrets to him. Like a good student, I completed my task, but catharsis was not forthcoming. And again I wondered if my lack of a breakthrough was the fault of my own skepticism—if my inner CEO had become an overzealous literary critic, deconstructing everything to the point that he could believe in nothing.

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But maybe it wasn’t me at all: perhaps Andrew had fallen prey to some clichéd trope of pyschoanalysis. Why did everything have to boil down to metanarratives like the Oedipal complex? As I saw it, it wasn’t that complicated: I had developed a phobia of flying and, unlike many phobics, I understood that my fear was completely irrational and I wanted to get rid of it. Andrew, however, thought he had tapped into something deeper. I had another, bigger, trip coming up—this one to Europe for an entire year—so I went back, hoping for a breakthrough. This time, though, he dropped a bomb on me.

“If I seemed taken aback about your dad, it’s because my dad died at the same age,” he said.

Suddenly, all manner of therapy seemed like a messy subjective system that said more about the therapist than it did the patient. Had we been working through my psychological problems or Andrew’s? I didn’t want to find out. At this point, after Therapy #5, I just wanted more pills.

I WENT back To DR. LIsa foR aNoThER REfILL of Xanax, Klonopin, and Ambien. I would be in Paris for a year, and if I needed to knock myself out to stay on the flight, I would do it. What choice did I have? This time, the idea of blacking out —of losing part of my life forever—actually seemed appealing. As the date of departure grew closer, the more anxious I became. It seemed impossible that I would be able to spend eight hours on a plane without completely losing my mind.

A week before departure day, I got a rare phone call from my aunt, a reborn fundamentalist Christian who makes the periodic attempts at converting the largely

anthropologist being asked to a pipe-smoking ceremony with a lost tribe in New Guinea. My aunt, somehow, and for reasons I chose not to investigate, had become quite close to the televangelist Richard Roberts, who had presided over my uncle’s funeral.

I expected her church to resemble Roberts himself: gaudy, kitschy, and completely fake. I had expected gold-tinted glass and purple velvet thrones.

But it wasn’t a church at all. The “Worship Center” was more SoHo than Southern Fundamentalist, with its espresso bar and stained concrete floors. An alt-rock Christian band warmed up the crowd and then a preacher named Bill, a guy with the build of a linebacker and closely cropped hair, took the stage and tried out a few jokes. This, I decided on the spot, would be Therapy #6, Conversion.

A f ter working on the crowd for awhile, Bill rolled up his sleeves and got serious. “If there’s anyone here tonight who’s ready to receive the Lord Jesus Christ into their soul, I ask you to come forward,” he said.

A few people came forward.

“If there’s anyone here tonight in need a of prayer, please come forward,” Bill said.

More people came forward. It began to look like a rugby scrum on the dais.

My aunt squeezed my hand, letting me know that this was my turn. “Praise the Lord,” she said.

I couldn’t move. I wanted to flee but felt trapped, a sensation, I noted ironically, that I often felt on an airplane.

Up front, Bill put his hands on the shoulders of the people who had come forward and then closed his eyes. He began to cast out demons and fill people

one of my aunt’s friends asked if she could “pray on me.” apathetic Episcopalians in my family. She had heard that I had refused to get on a flight because I thought it was going to crash. Her first push came in the form of DVDs and CDs that touted a sort of Christian self-help ethos. The next phone call carried an invitation to her church; I accepted with the enthusiasm of an 44

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with Holy Ghost power. “Amen!” people shouted. One of my aunt’s friends asked if she could “pray on me.”

“Sure, why not?” I said. The whole service got very touchy-feely, but who knew, maybe it would work? There is some scholarly evidence to suggest the laying on of hands can actually enact a

kind of healing. Even the tapping of EFT has shown some positive results for those willing to believe it is going to work. And no one believed harder than these charismatic Pentecostals. Next to me, someone started speaking in tongues, his eyelids clenched together in the utmost concentration. I felt a little jealous that a group of people could be so earnest in their beliefs that they would risk appearing so silly.

Looking over this scene, I thought of Pascal’s Wager. “God is, or He is not,” wrote Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century philosopher. In choosing to believe or not to believe, we are making a sort of bet: “But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separates us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.” In the end, you have to believe or not believe. Given that situation, says Pascal, why not bet on the proposition with the biggest up-side: eternal salvation.

It seemed to me that Cognitive-Behaviorists, EFT practitioners, psychoanalysts, and evangelical Christians had all made their wager. They had gone all-in for the belief that the dark forces roiling around in the psyche could be brought to heel through some practice in the human mind.

As a skeptic, I had grown accustomed to looking down my nose at such blind faith.

But Pascal tells us not to judge anyone who has made such a wager: “Do not, then, reprove for error those who have made a choice; for you know nothing about it.”

Was I not to wager at all? That would be impossible. You had to wager, so why not bet on the side with the statistical odds in its favour? Twenty-three million to one—those were pretty good odds.

Statistics, however, also work in strange, paradoxical ways, since anxious fliers become fixated on the one instead of the twenty-three million. “You start to say, ‘well, I will be the one’,” says Bunn.

Although the rate of accidents is at a record low, Arnold Barnett acknowledges that there may be problems in the future with overloaded runway traffic and more terrorism. The safety of air travel, Barnett

says, has created a paradox. “You might say they’ve done all these things to harden aviation since 9/11. Well, that’s true, but paradoxically that can actually increase the risk of aviation terrorism. Because, if they can hit us at the places where we’ve done everything we can to reduce vulnerability, and succeed, you can say that the national demoralization will be greater than it would be if you hit a target that no one believes you can protect.”

Still, “the risk is remarkably low,” he said. “It’s not something we should worry about. There’s no benefit to living in fear.

Basically we have to take certain risks in life if we want lives worth living.”

Last summer, I finally engaged in my own all-in wager with my fear of flying.

It was time. After years of trying every “cure” I could find, it was time. I planned to fly with my wife and two-year-old son from Edmonton to Ecuador, then on to Peru, Argentina, and Brazil. Ten flights in thirty days. Our first South American destination, Quito, has an infamous airport with a landing strip deemed obsolete for modern aviation. If we survived Quito, I thought, we would probably be OK. By the end of the trip in July, we had gone through massive delays due to bad weather and airplane maintenence issues. We were grounded for three days in Lima because of a volcano eruption in Chile. We argued with airlines. We bitched and moaned about extra fees, leg room and crappy food. I tried to get some rest in an aisle seat while a bad Hollywood movie dubbed into Spanish played in the cabin.

Yes, I had a supply of Xanax, but it ran out before the final stretch back to Canada.

Each flight was a little easier than the previous one, and the excitement of a new destination every few days trumped my anxiety—sometimes just—about getting on the plane. By the final leg from Toronto to Edmonton, we had been travelling for twenty hours straight. I was too exhausted for fear. In front of us, a couple of drunk women from Grande Prairie complained when the cabin crew cut them off. I tried to ignore them and found a nook for my head in between seats where I could get a couple hours’ sleep before we got back home.

I had learned, in other words, to fly like everyone else. EB

CAN.ICONS ThE TuquE The Canadian tuque is a warm knitted hat or stocking cap said to have originated with the coureurs de bois, French and Métis fur traders who kept their woolen nightcaps on for warmth during cold winter days. It was also commonly worn by the Canadian lumberjack.

The tuque is usually dome-shaped with a folded brim, but can also be pointed and brimless, and comes with or without a pom-pom.

Although its spelling is sometimes contested, it should not be confused with the similar toque, which is a soft, brimless woman’s hat (think nineteen-twenties haute couture), or the tall hat worn by chefs (also known as a toque blanche).

Historically speaking, the Canadian tuque is reminiscent of the Phrygian cap, or bonnet rouge, which was popular in revolutionary France. In 1837, during the Lower Canada (Patriotes) Rebellion, a red tuque became a symbol of French-Canadian nationalism. This cultural icon was revived briefly in Québec in the nineteen-sixties, but since then the tuque has become a popular form of unisex headwear worn widely across the country.

Tuques were greatly popularized in the early nineteen-eighties by a pair of fictional brothers named Bob and Doug McKenzie, who hosted a regular sketch known as the “Great White North,” on the television show, SCTV. The sketch played upon Canadian stereotypes: the brothers wore heavy winter clothing, drank beer, and frequently used the term “eh,” as in, “Nice tuque, eh.”

Canadian-style tuques are now worn internationally. In popular media they have become common headgear for dockworkers and other iconic figures of working-class culture. They are also popular with snow boarders, and are sometimes worn by rock stars.

Famous tuque wearers include: Michael Nesmith of The Monkees; “Relic” in The Beachcombers TV series; the cartoon character “Loopy de Loop”; Jacques Cousteau; Bill Murray parodying Jacques Cousteau; Alanis Morissette; U2 guitarist The Edge; and the characters in the South Park TV series.

The word’s correct pronunciation lies somewhere between “tooke” (as in “Luke”) and “tuke” (as in “puke”).

– Clive Holden

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supporting and promoting edmonton’s arts community The Edmonton Arts Council is a not-for-profit society and charitable organization that supports and promotes the arts community in Edmonton. The EAC provides grants to Edmonton festivals, arts organizations and individual projects, administers public art projects, and initiates projects and partnerships that increase the profile and involvement of the arts in all aspects of community life.

edmonton arts council Prince of Wales Armoury, 2nd Floor, 10440 108 Avenue, Edmonton, Alberta, T5H 3Z9 780.424.2787 | info@edmontonarts.ca

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FI CTI ON

ThE

dRug-fRIENdly

housE

There’s your drug-friendly house, and then there’s your friendly drug house…

I

By GreG HOllINGsHead

fIRsT hEaRd abouT ThE dRug-fRIENdly housE WhEN JulIE fRom ThREE dooRs down stopped by on her way home from work to check if we were coming to the meeting. When I asked what meeting, she said, Ask Patsy.

Patsy’s on a walking tour of Bhutan, I told her. You’ve caught me in the middle of writing her an email. Maybe she meant to delegate me and forgot. She was pretty frazzled by the time I got her to the airport.

It’s about the drug-friendly house, Julie said.

When I just looked at her, she added, impatiently, The one across the street from you.

She was standing on our front porch. I was holding the screen door open wide as if to let her in, but I didn’t. Now I pretended to search over her head for a drug-friendly house, but all I could see was the Beringers’, which will be a drug-friendly house when the moon falls out of the sky.

So Patsy hasn’t said anything, Julie said.

I know, I said. If you’re like me, it’s always a surprise when you tell one member of a couple something, and later you mention it to the other, and they have no idea what you’re talking about. This isn’t Patsy and me. We tell each other everything. We’re always scraping the bottoms of our respective barrels. And just imagine how much we’ll have to talk about when she gets back from Bhutan, even after the hourly texting and the daily blog-length emails and me following her village by village on Google Earth. I can only say that our failure to communicate in this instance has come as a shock.

Julie wasn’t listening. She was writing something on a small pad she had taken from her purse. Tearing off the top sheet, she said, Here’s the time and place. See you Thursday. Maybe. And she turned and went down the steps.

Thursday! I called. To make sure I wasn’t making a mistake, I texted Patsy.

Patsy texted back, If u dnt wnt a Rx hse a x th st thn by al mns go.

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I goT To ThE CommuNITy CENTRE RIghT oN TImE, but the meeting had already started. Or maybe the dozen or so people sitting around the boardroom-style table under bad fluorescence were just getting to know each other by sharing informal accounts of their experiences pertaining to the drug-friendly house. As I took my seat, Karen, a handsome woman with the sacrificially short hair of a young mother, was saying she lived directly across the street from it—four doors down from us, on the other side of Julie—but her van must have tinted windows. I had never seen her before in my life. She told us how one afternoon last fall she was out on her front lawn with her two kids, three and five, raking leaves and putting them in bags (you can imagine how that was going), when a guy flew out of the drugfriendly house pursued by two others.

They chased him up and down the street, and just when it looked like they’d catch him, he ran over and crouched behind her van, which was parked in her driveway. The other two stopped short and hung back, because she and the kids were standing right there. The guy was down on one knee, breathing hard. What should I do? she asked him. Call me a cab, he said. Karen’s cellphone was in her pocket, so she called him a cab. When the cab came, the other two watched him get into it, and then they went back inside the drug-friendly house.

As Karen told her story, her cheeks glowed like apples. Before she could finish, the chair of the meeting, a man in a quilted vest, recognizable to me from his picture in the community newsletter as the president of the neighbourhood association, said, Listen. Don’t enable these guys. Next time call 911.

Now Karen’s cheeks looked like they’d been slapped. If the chair noticed, he wasn’t bothered. He was telling us how he used to live in B.C., where he’d once attended a series of meetings just like this, called to close down a drugfriendly house. Well, they got the house closed down all right, but it turned out the guy who organized the meetings was running his own drug-friendly house and was just getting rid of the competition.

For a moment all you heard was the 54

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buzzing of the lights. Why was he telling us this? We listened closely as he next addressed what he called the desire expressed by some to meet with the police and with the owner of the drug-friendly house, who was the aunt of its sole tenant, an unmarried female. Next he provided a confusing account of his interactions over the previous year with the aunt and with the sergeant-detective whose job it was to keep an eye on the house. It seemed that the aunt was something of a dragon and the sergeant-detective had too many drug-friendly houses on his plate. There was only so much the police could do.

Now I spoke up. I must have been channeling the general discontent with this guy, because even to my own ear my voice sounded a little harsh. So we’re here, I said, to figure out what to say at a meeting that you want to set up with the aunt and the police.

No! the chair cried. I don’t want to set up a meeting with anybody! I don’t care what we do! It’s completely up to you people where we go next with this! He looked at us, breathing hard. More quietly he added, I’m just saying it’s complicated. The aunt lives in the neighbourhood too. There are hundreds of these houses in the city.

Here Karen spoke for the first time since he had smacked her down for not calling 911. Let’s get one thing clear, she said. You’re just the chair here. My understanding was what he said—And she turned and looked down the table at me, and as if surprised to see me still there she added, Who are you, anyway?

For that second, the second that Karen’s eyes held mine, for the life of me I could not remember.

It didn’t matter. Karen had a larger point to make. This was that even a nonentity like this guy, who has walked in here out of nowhere, can grasp what this meeting needs to be about. To the chair she said, Your position does not give you a right to tell us what we should or should

not do to keep our children safe in our own neighbourhood.

Hey! he cried, showing us his palms.

It sounds to me, Karen said, like you’re afraid of the aunt.

Who does also live in the neighbourhood, the chair reminded her.

And you don’t seem to think, Karen continued, that the police can possibly do more than the piss-little they’ve been doing.

OK, he said, turning grim. Here’s what the police are doing. They’re taking your calls. As you know, they’ve asked you to record the licence numbers of all cars that stop at the house. They get a licence number, they punch it into their computer—he mimed this—seven times out of ten the owner is known to them, five times out of seven he’s got a cellphone, three times out of five—Bingo!—they know the number.

We nodded. This would be the long arm of the law.

So they call him up, the chair continued, and they say, Look, we know where you’ve just been. If you realize what’s good for you, you won’t go back there.

So do they? I asked.

Sometimes, he admitted. My point is, the police are on it. How much manpower do they have? A woman finds herself a few unsavoury friends. The drugs come in, the drugs go out. It’s a tinpot operation.

At this, Julie from three doors down said in a trembling voice, I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Obviously you have no idea what this has been like for us. Last week I was on my front step writing down a licence number, and this character completely covered in tattoos gets out of the car and comes up my walk and asks me what I’m writing. I told him, my laundry list.

Everybody laughed.

It’s not funny! Julie wailed. These guys are scary! On an angrier note, to the chair she said, If you’re telling me it’s the most natural thing in the world when my street turns into a hangout for dopers and criminals, then, mister, you lived in B.C. too long.

At this, Bob Beringer shouted from the far end of the table, The aunt should put the niece on an acreage, where her

druggy pals won’t have law-abiding citizens to terrorize!

—only telling you what Sergeant-Detective Willmott told me, the chair was saying, talking over Bob. He’s spoken to the niece. She’s . . . not young. Very much . . . her own person. Sergeant-Detective Willmott says the licence plate information you people are providing is invaluable— And it hasn’t made one goddam bit of difference, a woman hooked up to oxygen observed in a voice like coarse gravel shifting at the bottom of a copper sink.

He’s talked to the aunt, the chair persisted, who might just come around. Our best hope is, the niece herself will understand the situation can’t continue. She’ll have to close her door to these people or face eviction.

But how long will she be given? a strikingly beautiful woman perhaps seventy-five asked in a voice of polite bewilderment. She wore a charming expression marred only by a look of horror that never left her eyes the entire meeting.

When the chair had no answer for her, I saw my chance. So where are we with this meeting with the aunt and the police?

OK, the chair said, coming out of it, glancing in my general direction, Sergeant-Detective Willmott has requested we hold off on that. He’s asked us to give him a month. He’ll talk to the aunt again, and the niece— What kind of drugs are we talking about here? a man I sometimes see walking a schnauzer suddenly wanted to know.

To this question, in the manner of one familiar with the blandishments of an altered consciousness, the chair replied dismissively, Oh, the usual. Marijuana.

Hashish. Maybe a little Ecstasy. Nothing remotely addictive, really.

When people just looked at him, he leaned back in his chair and, like a dog luxuriating in anticipation of a bellyscratch, outlined another route we could go. We mount a security camera on a streetlamp, he said, trained on the house, motion-sensitive, and—Bingo!—a direct feed to police headquarters.

Would you please stop saying Bingo, Karen said.

After a short silence, we were addressed by the distinguished gentleman

sitting next to the strikingly beautiful old woman, who turned horrified eyes upon him as he spoke. The niece is not an addict, he said. I know the family. She’s one of these people who, for one reason or another, have fallen out of step with the way things are generally done. Too much integrity, perhaps. Too . . . giving. I wouldn’t be too hard on anyone involved.

The narcotics element is a separate issue.

Not if they’re being dealt out of a house the aunt owns and the niece lives in it isn’t, Julie said.

I am pleased to report that in the end we voted eight to five, with two abstentions from people who hadn’t said anything, to give Sergeant-Detective Willmott his month.

A motion was made to adjourn.

Bingo! the chair said.

ThaT EvENINg as I madE mysElf a loNEly chicken-tender stir-fry, it came to me that the woman in the drug-friendly house was the same one who’d appeared in the small hours last summer at our son Cam’s twenty-first birthday party.

Patsy and I had checked into a hotel for the weekend, and so we missed her, but Cam said she just walked in with her little dog at three in the morning and started clearing glasses and doing dishes, saying things like Don’t mind me and You’re only young once. Cam, as drunk as his friends, wasn’t sure what to do about her. In the end, she stayed, and he was able to blame her for every cigarette burn and stain on the carpet.

If I had the right woman, then the drugfriendly house was a vinyl-sided bungalow unremarkable from the street except for a weedy firepit and an apple tree out front.

For days at a time, a sun-corroded Chev Impala was parked on the grass next to the driveway. Sometimes the house pounded like a boom box. Once in the front window I saw what looked like an artificial Christmas tree. Christmas was so long ago that it was possible the tree had gone up early.

Like stepping out of the night with your dog to clear glasses at a party for twenty-yearolds who don’t know who you are, the tree suggested a benign, crackpot domesticity, a willingness to enter into the larger cultural conversation.

It was around this time that I had a dream about a cascade of tectonic events that causes other-dimensional amphibians to leach into materiality and cruise the jet stream in search of unconventional thinkers. Recruiting the homeless is no problem, but when an unconventional thinker has a roof over her head the difficulty for an amphibian is knowing where the unconventional thinking ends and the house begins, and so it takes the whole house. I don’t know if this dream was inspired more by the drug-friendly house or by the information flowing in daily from Patsy in Bhutan, where fishing is illegal because fish are wild creatures; where society is matrilineal, so old women live with young men and nobody bothers to get married; and where signs say things like The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war and THANK YOU HAVE COMPASSION NO TIME TO JOKE WITH AIDS. The dreamer would not have been surprised if the day the amphibians leach back out of materiality one of them departs with the whole of Bhutan under its arm (more accurately, webbed forelimb), but this scenario was perhaps over-indebted to Patsy’s experience as filtered and framed by her enthusiastic reportage.

On a P.D. day for me, with no vehicle parked out front of the drug-friendly house and all seemingly quiet inside, the drapes standing open, I knocked at the door. As I waited, a cab moved slowly along the street behind me, and already I could see the headline: DRUG DEAL GONE W RONG: W ELL -MEA NING HOUSE-CALLER CAUGHT IN FATAL CROSSFIRE. But the cab continued on until it reached the letter-distribution box at the corner. There our mailman got out. He must have been running late. Perhaps he had family money and delivered mail strictly for the exercise and fresh air. But then, why take a cab? Because he could afford to be late? OK, fine, but what about his health?

As he crouched to unlock the box, the door of the drug-friendly house was opened by a lean, wary woman with fine threads of grey along her part. At her feet, an orange Shih Tsu started barking as soon as it saw me.

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Hi, I said. I’m Morris. I live in that house over there. You pitched in last year with the clean-up at my son’s party.

Receiving no response, I added, What’s your name?

Audrey, she said. We shook hands.

Audrey’s grip was narrow and bony. It conveyed a concentrated force.

As for the little dog, it gave one short, sharp yap, spun around twice, shot me a dirty look, and with its rear end in the air and me after it followed its mistress down a brief hallway past a perfectly ordinary living room, Christmas tree notwithstanding, into a kitchen last renovated fifty years ago but clean enough.

Dust motes hung in a ray of morning sun from a window over the sink. As the little dog clicked across the lino to check its bowl, from the fridge Audrey took a bag of spring greens and invited me to look inside. At first I didn’t see anything, and then I did. Blinking up at me from a shallow bed of flat-leafed spinach, the pulse in its throat going but making no sound, was a small, pale green tree frog.

They want me to bring it in, Audrey said.

ThIs Was ThE supERsToRE oN FIFTy-FIRsT. WE didn’t take the dog. Audrey sat in the passenger seat with the bag on her lap, saying little. When I wordlessly indicated a portable hoarding outside a pet store on Twenty-second I thought she might find of interest—BA BY FER R E T S NOW IN—she made no comment. Inside the Superstore it was a quiet Monday morning. The posture of a young produce stocker examining a grapefruit pyramid suggested a kid with a head full of dreams just putting in time. Whoa! he said when he saw the bag in Audrey’s hand. He led us through heavy swing doors with rubber bumpers into a refrigerated cinderblock bunker between stacked boxes of produce on pallets toward a dark corner. He threw a switch—Whhaaah! he said. On a paintstained Rast nightstand, there stood revealed a homemade terrarium. If the four or five tree frogs inside were startled by the sudden brightness, the only sign they gave was one slow, asynchronous blink.

Schwumpff! the kid said. This was hardly the sound of a bag of spring greens 56

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being emptied into a terrarium on top of four or five tree frogs, but Audrey was already untwisting the twist-tie.

The contents of the bag floated down to make a fresh green carpet, but even as we watched, various sectors rustled and heaved, and soon six tree frogs had crawled out to gaze up at us, arranging their tiny thighs, with pulsing throats and not a sound between them.

Ta-da! the kid said.

Back aT audREy’s, ThE suN-coRRodEd chEv Impala was parked on the lawn again, and on a kickstand out front was now a Harley-Davidson. I’ll just drop you off, I said, but an irritated look from Audrey let me know I was coming in for coffee.

The little dog was overjoyed to have its mistress back. Me it lunged at with a demented yip. At the door to the living room Audrey paused to introduce the three individuals who had made themselves at home while we were out. Wayne and Bo were slumped on the chesterfield, doing a convincing impression of two worthless layabouts. More prepossessing was The Organism, a buzz-cut individual in an unbuttoned shortsleeve floral shirt, who sported solid tattooing from his chin to his beltline. Like a speaker reviewing a keynote address, The Organism sat hunched forward on a wing chair, going through a stack of 3x5 file cards.

Hey man, he said when Audrey introduced us. How’s it going.

Good, I said. We just dropped off the tree frog.

I don’t know what that means, he said.

Here I was tempted to offer a droll account of our trip to Superstore, but when I looked to Audrey, she and the dog were already on their way to the kitchen. I can explain, I told The Organism. Instead, in a feint of ironic homage to the disconnectedness of contemporary social interaction, I shrugged and followed Audrey. In the kitchen, the dog was having its topknot fondled while sitting at the table in the lap of a biker, who held my eyes before addressing me by name.

Hey Morrie, long time no see.

We just dropped off the tree frog, I said. I looked to Audrey. She was filling the coffeepot.

The biker extended his hand. Davis Purefoy, he said.

It was a familiar name. As we shook I told him this.

Fucking I’ll say, man! he replied, after a stunned delay of incredulity. You only sat across from me the whole of Grade Two and half Three! Southside Primary, Miss Walser’s class! I can’t believe you don’t remember that. We were best buds!

I do now, I assured him, and I did, except for the last part, but it was too late. Davis was looking at Audrey, and for a moment I thought she must have gone to Southside too. Raising his voice above the tap, Davis said, Sorry, Aud’, I meant to make more fresh, but . . . His gaze drifted back to me.

We had some catching up to do.

While Davis touched on some of the good times we’d shared, I reflected that all I’d ever got from Davis Purefoy was knuckle punches and Indian burns. The noncongruence of our memories set me thinking how the human tendency to pass time in unmoored reverie compromises memory as surely as it impedes attention, and I was hardly taking in what Davis was saying. It was only when he mentioned that he’d just done nine months for bottling a cop that I snapped to awareness.

So what about you, Morrie? he asked me. What’s your game?

Teacher, I said, shortly, dismayed by a note of apology in my voice. How spineless we are! Such chameleons!

Still in class, eh bud? And you’re thinking to yourself Beats jail, loser.

Not at all— Davis’s sad smile as he doubted this suggested that I was not in immediate danger. While the coffee perked and the dog went out of its mind with senseless barking, Davis got me to help him move the table away from the wall. As we fetched more chairs from the living room, he told the others to join us. I said I really needed to be getting along, but Davis couldn’t think why I would want to do that. He was still looking at me, puzzled, as Audrey set out a plate of cookies and mugs of coffee.

When the five of us had taken our seats and got settled and Audrey had sat down herself, with the dog on her lap, panting, Davis opened the meeting.

OK, he said. We have three options: Walk away. Dig in. Revenge.

I would say the reason neither Wayne, Bo, nor The Organism immediately seized upon the only sensible option—Walk away—was a reluctance to be perceived by the others as fearful or cowardly. Revenge, I said. That got their attention. Thinking strategically, I proceeded to make the case for a coordinated friendliness assault.

There’s your drug-friendly house, I said memorably, and then there’s your friendly drug house, and which one will still be around in ten years? This means no loud music after eleven p.m. No flipping the bird at neighbours. All visitors to park discreetly in back. Don’t get me wrong, I said. Nothing you do will win them over one-hundred percent. On the other hand, nothing confuses people like a warm smile. Think of it like living well, only more disturbing.

My point made, I looked around the table. Davis was watching a pencil pass end-to-end through his fingers. Audrey was retying her dog’s topknot. From the look on its face, you could tell it was visualizing the movement of her fingers, and the next time it stopped in front of a mirror it would look at its topknot and vaguely wonder if it could retie it itself, and then it would glance down and notice that it had no fingers, and by that time it would have forgotten this whole sequence of thoughts, if that’s what they could be called. Wayne and Bo were engrossed in some kind of rib-elbowing game and in serious need of a timeout. Only The Organism showed genuine interest in what I was getting at. What the fuck are you talking about? he inquired thoughtfully.

NoW foR ThE sad paRT: ThEy dIdN’T WaNT To know. This became apparent to Patsy and me not a week after she got back.

One morning, as we set out on another walk around the neighbourhood from which I would return with Bhutan dribbling out of my ears, we came down our front steps and were brought up short by the sight of a six-foot chainlink fence with barbed wire along the top, entirely surrounding the drug-friendly house. Sometimes you reconnect with someone from your past, and in no time at all they’ve said or done something that reminds you

why it didn’t work then and won’t now.

Still, it’s sad when all that comes of an unbuttoned exchange of ideas around a kitchen table is a chainlink barricade.

By that time, the aunt had sold the drugfriendly house to what was rumoured to be a numbered company held by a biker gang and Audrey had moved out, to well beyond the outer limits of the west end, far from the tensions that, despite heroic efforts by the neighbourhood association, working hand-in-glove with Sergeant-Detective Willmott and his men, continue to plague us here. I just hope the coyotes don’t get her little dog.

Fortunately, my personal interactions with the residents of the drug-friendly house had been happy ones. So when two officers came to the door recently to ask if my family or I had ever encountered any problems or disturbances from that quarter, I told them uncategorically that we had not. While I can’t speak for my neighbours, I said, in my own experience the residents of that house have been model citizens. As evidence of this, I mentioned Audrey’s helping hand at my son’s birthday party and asked them to picture a free-ranging, sunny-morning kaffeeklatsch in her homey kitchen.

The officers neither affirmed nor refuted my favourable assessment. From their body language I would say they tuned out at model citizens.

On a less sanguine note, after the meeting at Audrey’s, as an expression, I suppose, of his gratitude for my contribution, Davis insisted I accept two ‘hits’ of what I thought he called Ecstasy. Now, drugs are hardly my ‘thing’, but Davis’s intemperate response to my refusal took me back to one or two occasions when I have inadvertently offended my foreign hosts by declining some ugly keepsake or disgusting food item. And then I asked myself, Will Davis be any the wiser when they go straight into the trash as soon as I arrive home? In a quick volte-face, I accepted his gift. But once in the door, I remembered Patsy’s

fond accounts of her hippy days and forgot it on the mantelpiece, and when she got back from Bhutan and came across it dusting, she seemed intrigued and suggested we ‘drop’ it the first Saturday night we had nothing better to do. Even as every atom of my being screamed No!, I readily agreed.

What more romantic way to acknowledge the depth of our love than by ‘dropping’ a modern-day ‘love potion’?

Well, either I misheard Davis or after my initial refusal he gifted me something completely different, perhaps in the spirit of revenge he’d always been known for. While the lasting effects of Patsy’s hippy days seemed to render the poison in her system relatively innocuous, I enjoyed no such advantage. I soon found myself crouched before the refrigerator in a psychic death grip with a lizardlike raptor obscenely impersonating my wife. When it unexpectedly seized the handle and pointed inside, it’s possible it was inviting me to join it in a late-night snack, but I could only assume it wanted me to climb in. When I demurred, it canted sideways to open the vegetable drawer, from which it removed a bag of spinach greens. This it tore open and held out to me, with a significant look.

Just as when Davis Purefoy offered me the poison that was even then coursing through my veins, my first impulse was a polite No thanks. But this time it seemed important to know exactly what I was declining. This must be why I stepped forward and peered into the bag.

And there on the green carpet, in a squat, naked but for long, floating orange hair, with a topknot, was a creature into whose heavy-lidded globes my being swiftly poured, swung round, shifted its thighs, its throat pulsing, and in a voice hoarse with outrage and yet sounding a note of primordial complacence, croaked Bingo!

Aw idney koot the giant face above me rumbled, with a lizard grimace.

Bingo! I reiterated.

Wee urr dyoo! the giant face crowed, a look of depravity creasing its scaly features.

Bingo! . . . Bingo!

It was no use. Next we’d be on our way to Superstore and the kid who spoke exclusively in sound effects. He’d take care of me. EB WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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SOUNDINGS Taking the measure

MUSIC

North Star

Arcade Fire portrait by Anton Corbijn

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// By SCOTT MESSENGER

he talk this summer about the 2011 Polaris Prize can be summed up by the fact that, for the first time, it bent to popular opinion. Since its inception in 2006, this annual award for best Canadian record has been administered with exuberant contrariness by juries of music bloggers, journalists and DJs, each with an ear cupped to the national underground and eager to champion the obscure. In fact, the Polaris highlights the sometimes kindred nature of music and conceptual art, showcasing it at its most unselfconscious and free; and perhaps, for mainstream listeners, its most frustrating.

Yet that’s what the mandate of the not-for-profit Polaris Music Prize organization is meant to protect: “Polaris recognizes and markets albums of the highest artistic integrity, without regard to musical genre, professional affiliation, or sales history.” It’s not about easy listening. It embraces rogue acts shut out of fragile major-label business models and who don’t seem to care about career advancement anyway. When Owen Pallett won the inaugural Polaris, he sank some of the $20,000 prize (now $30,000) into another band’s record before one of his own. In 2009, punk outfit Fucked Up put part of its winnings toward an unlikely recording of Do They Know it’s Christmas? to raise money for charity. These are bands that are content—or at least bound by the creative ethic—to swim beyond pop’s fringes. The Polaris isn’t meant to rescue them from that. It’s meant to shine a light on where they move.

Except in 2011. The September announcement that the prize was going to The Suburbs by Arcade Fire (passed over in 2007 for its sophomore Neon Bible) was an expected anomaly.

The Montreal band was hardly working in the fringes. It owned the 2011 Junos. Nominated for three Grammys, it took Best Album. Adding the Polaris seemed at once inevitable and counter to the prize’s tendency to nurture the underdog, an affection founder and executive director Steve Jordan denies.

The award encompasses a realm of myriad possibilities, apparently, including paths of least resistance.

“Polaris is all about generating discussion,” Jordan said in an interview at Billboard.biz. It’s meant, he said, to plug people into the stunning diversity of music and bands this country produces, that’s all. “You don’t have to like them but you should pay attention to them,” Jordan has insisted.

But other than critics, who does that? As education, the Polaris has always risked undermining itself. Canada’s musical fringe needs support (it’s the only place where music is still actually evolving in this country) and thanks to the prize it now has it. But should a balance be struck? With The Suburbs Polaris judges have finally gone easy on listeners. Imagine if they loosened up just a little more, and recognized the opportunity to open up the vibrant world of the Canadian indie scene by rewarding a few more of its radio-friendly gateway bands. Pop art is for everyone, said Andy Warhol, so why not reflect upon the Polaris’ definition of “artistic integrity,” and pick alternatives, from the same place Arcade Fire has drawn the spotlight? Art doesn’t have to alienate to be great.

2006 probably saw the Polaris at its weirdest and most brilliant in picking He Poos Clouds by Final Fantasy (Owen Pallett’s former musical moniker). Heavily orchestrated, the WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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record’s arrangements are fascinating in their complexity, but require multiple listens to decipher. Admittedly, Emily Haines & the Soft Skeleton also begs patience for Knives Don’t Have Your Back, a slow, contemplative album that can sound standoffish—a quality that also pulls you in like a worried friend.

Recorded after the death of her father, poet Paul Haines, the collection lacks the crunch and energy of Metric, Emily Haines’s main act, but even if it’s better suited to dreary deadof-winter nights (opener Our Hell is the record’s most upbeat), few albums (He Poos Clouds most definitely excluded) will ever invite the empathy of listeners as beautifully as Haines’.

After Final Fantasy, Patrick Watson, 2007 winner for Close to Paradise, sounds like an olive branch proffered by a gentler, almost penitent jury. Songs have a recognizable beat, even if they rarely break from a meandering, somnambulistic amble.

In contrast, Halifax’s Wintersleep cuts to the chase in a way that saw Weighty Ghost, the fourth track from the album Welcome to the Night Sky, score a beer commercial, likely putting Polaris judges off future releases. Still, Night Sky pushes the limits of Canadian guitar rock the way The Hip did with Day for Night thirteen years earlier. The existential, what-does-it-all-mean theme loosely linking tracks isn’t particularly fresh, but it’s mature enough to make these songs stand out as much-needed anthems of nostalgia for a jaded Generation X. From the fist-pumping Laser Beams to the tear-jerking Dead Letter & the Infinite

Call the 2009 Polaris a single-finger salute to mainstream listeners.

Yes, Night Sky doesn’t demand that we Xers get over ourselves as much as it celebrates that we finally have. Records don’t need a point, of course, but the lack of concern for form that makes Close to Paradise interesting also puts it out of easy reach.

2008’s jury should be ashamed of itself for passing over Winnipeg’s Weakerthans, shortlisted that year. The jangly, Sixties-sounding pop of Caribou’s Andorra lacks the intelligence and nuance (not to mention fun) of Reunion Tour. John K. Samson is more poet than any rock ’n’ roll lead in Canada: few better understand the opportunity lyrics present to make music meaningful. Samson can be wistful, but never sentimental, thanks to humour and irony and shockingly good writing. Find all three on Relative Surplus Value, for example, a track that is a model of metaphor Caribou can’t touch: “The CEO takes me aside,” sings Samson, “I’m down 12 points and they’re selling. The graphs in the boardroom show by the time that the market opens in Tokyo, I’ll be worthless. So what I’m trying to say, I mean what I’m asking is, I know we haven’t talked in awhile, but, could you come get me?” At the song’s outset, Samson warns, “You won’t be smiling when you hear how this one ends,” but just try not to.

Call the 2009 Polaris a single-finger salute to mainstream listeners in general, as Fucked Up walked away—even to the band’s surprise—with $20,000 for The Chemistry of Common 60

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Life. It’s raw punk, complete with shouted vocals and power chords, and it’s aggressively, even innovatively, unmelodic.

Folk suggests itself as a natural remedy, with Montreal’s Ben Spencer a frontrunner for his third album, Saboteurs.

Opener Accident Freaks showcases his talent as a guitarist with a knack for balancing intricacy with subtlety. The former Edmontonian also shows a Samsonian aptitude for lyrics on 99, which spins Wayne Gretzky’s 1988 departure to Los Angeles into a touching portrait of personal loss. The one feature Saboteurs shares with Chemistry is inventiveness. Spencer has a revisionist’s affection for the waltz. The three-four closer Telegram From Shucksville (which, incidentally, sounds like Spencer penning his own invitation to return west) incorporates the stop-start of a tapped missive: “Big-city life can be hard STOP Everyone would understand if you’d come home STOP.” Give the 2010 jury credit for recognizing Karkwa’s Les Chemins de Verre, an exceptional record that should make English-speaking Canada wonder what else it’s missing by ignoring Quebec’s francophone rock scene. While the band could stand to distance itself more from the slack, hipster grooves of Broken Social Scene, its parallels with Radiohead circa OK Computer—lots of acoustic guitar with electronic accents, big, frantic beats and layered vocals—give this Montreal band the kind of capaciousness listeners get lost in, regardless of a language barrier. Last year’s closest also-ran represents another largely marginalized genre in Canada: hip hop. But after being shortlisted in 2007 for The Old Prince and again in 2010 for TSOL, the time for Toronto’s Shad, commonly referred to as Canada’s best rapper, will come.

Jaunty and dramatic, Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs, winner for 2011, is an alchemistic wonder that crosses the threshold separating artistic achievement and commercial success.

Tracks Ready to Start and Empty Room are highly danceable.

Springsteen could have written Modern Man or Month of May or even City with no Children. Your mom would probably call the ethereal vocals and string arrangements on Half Light I pretty. In other words, The Suburbs is easy to enjoy, almost annoyingly so, despite its obvious attempts to resist convention. And because of that, even more so than with Karkwa, it’s a choice that shouldn’t be argued against, though Canadian music is rich enough in alternatives to do so.

The Suburbs ought to be a model record going forward for the Polaris. The prize’s early years were marked by choices one could only call inaccessible and esoteric. While their juries congratulated themselves on their coolness, the rest of Canada scratched its head and cranked its Top 40 and classic rock. After Polaris cracked the door on one of the nation’s most active and prolific artistic communities, Arcade Fire has thrown it open like an invitation, welcoming an audience needing a little more coaxing and encouragement, but not education. Whether that door remains open is up to future judges, judges who need to ask themselves whether their choices are meant to showcase their refinement as critics or to highlight the talent that enriches popular culture. EB

CONSUMPTION

Whither the Wheat // BY JENNIFER COCKRALL-KING

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humdrum-looking 150-gram package of penne pasta recently arrived at my door in a padded mailing envelope. These random food drops generally inject a pleasantly absurd respite into my computer-bound days. A two-four of canned cream of broccoli soup here, a raw baking potato there. Such is the glamour of being a food writer.

The pasta, with its rectangular box and little cellophane window, looked just like any other grocery store product, except for the bizarre wording streaking across the broad side of the package. Was I to assume that “high yield potential,” “good straw strength,” and “easy to thresh” were its three best attributes?

Looking for more information, I turned to the attached product information sheet which bellowed the arrival of CDC Verona, a brand new variety of durum wheat promising “improved genetics for efficient [Canadian Western Amber Durum] production,” developed at the University of Saskatchewan’s Crop Development Centre and grown in Alberta and Saskatchewan. A few minutes of research revealed only more claptrap about its threshability and alphanumeric parentage of D95253 and D95212. So what? Was I actually supposed to eat this? Furthermore, what gave them the idea that I would be the slightest bit excited about some new variety of proprietary wheat, created in a lab, recently let loose into fields on the Prairies, while other heritage strains were being lost to us because no one could patent them?

It was as if the box of pasta had sat up on my desk and poked me in the eye. I’d just spent a year researching and writing about how corporate agriculture has seized control of our global food system, selling farmers on the industrial attributes of their new-and-improved varieties, and leaving consumers with the illusion of choice in the grocery aisles. I ran two rooms over and stood by my husband at his desk, rattling the box of pasta above my head. “Just what we need.” I halfshouted. He looked both confused and alarmed. “Yet another scientifically trumped-up food, dreamt up by scientists and wrapped up in public relations hocus-pocus to sell to already desperate debt-riddled farmers and a largely apathetic public whose only connection to food is gliding their shopping carts around to milquetoast easy-listening music under buzzing florescent lights.”

He suggested that perhaps I was over-reacting to a free sample of dry pasta.

Back in my office, I emailed Nature’s Farm™, maker of Nature’s Pasta™, whose address at the Research Park at the University of Manitoba suggested it might be less about nature and farming than its trademarks suggested. “Is CDC Verona Amber Durum a GE wheat?,” I wrote in my best modern farming jargon, choking on the neutrality of my word choice as I typed.

“No, certainly not,” was the very prompt, very specific response. “There are no certified GE varieties of wheat in Canada to date.”

IT WASN’T JUST THE UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA RESEARCH PARK address that arched my eyebrow. On the corner of the penne package, amidst a cluster of tiny logos, I spotted the mark of Syngenta, the world’s largest “crop protection” company (the words they use to describe their agribusiness focus). Crop protection is agribusiness-speak for pesticides, insecticides, herbicides, and patented seeds that have been genetically engineered (GE) to survive regular dousing by a company’s proprietary farming chemicals, among other traits. If farmers want to use these patented biotechnology combos, they pay more upfront for the GE seeds than the non-GE varieties, plus they have to use the specific brand-name chemicals the seeds were developed to withstand. And they must sign a contract to not save seed for replanting from one year to the other, as that would constitute patent-infringement, which companies like Syngenta and Monsanto take rather seriously. Monsanto has famously bragged about its toll-free snitch lines set up so neighbours can report other neighbours suspected of “seed saving.”

Welcome to the brave new world of GE seeds, part of the broader world of genetically modified (GM) foods. Scientists figured out how to tinker with our major food crops at the genetic level in the nineteen-eighties and planted the fi rst commercial GE crops in 1996, and now they’re plowing ahead into uncharted furrows, including inserting non-plant traits into ever y thing f rom oilseeds to cereals to field crops, and genetically engineering animals, too. Today, corn, soybeans, canola, and sugar beets—the only four legal GE crops in Canada—aren’t just robust in the face of indiscriminate herbicides, pesticides, and insecticides, they can produce their own pesticides and insecticides themselves at the cellular level, which we unwittingly eat every day. Canada alone plants 8.8 million hectares of GE crops a year, which are then widely used in most prepared foods we buy at the grocery store.

Worldwide, we’ve already grown a billion hectares of GE crops since 1996. Thought to already be an $8.4 billion global industry, the handful of corporations that dominate the GE seed market are bullish about a GE food-fi lled future. They predict $50 billion in sales by 2025. They should know—they hold the patents to the seeds that produce our food. They’ve also since moved on to developing genetically modified pigs and salmon. Despite platitudes in their promotional materials about their corporate stewardship goals, crop protection is not about food safety. It’s not about feeding the world. It’s not WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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about helping the family farm. It’s about colonizing the global food supply and concentrating it into the hands of a half-dozen corporations.

Which brings us back to the most widely eaten grain in the world: wheat. For years, companies such as Syngenta and Monsanto have been major corporate pushers in trying to get GE wheat approved as a commercial crop in Canada in order to edge into the $3 billion Canadian wheat industry. There have even been “field tests” in Saskatchewan and Alberta. In 2002, at least thirty-three GE wheat test plots were discovered to be growing in open fields in various locations throughout central and southern Saskatchewan alone; a total of fifty-one such sites were found in Canada. So, while there are no certified varieties allowed in Canada as the emailer from Nature’s Farms correctly asserted, he was splitting stalks. GE wheat has already been blowing in the wind across the prairies. And given the constant pressure from Big Ag to officially grant GE wheat commercial registration in Canada, it won’t be long before that box of pasta is made with pesticide-producing, herbicide-withstanding, industrial machine-ready wheat. Which perhaps may not whet your appetite.

Genetic engineering amounts to the fastest adoption of a new technology since the dawn of agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago, and it’s all moving so swiftly that there doesn’t seem to be time to make certain we’re asking the right questions? Do we really need new versions of wheat, canola, salmon and pigs? Are GE foods safe to eat over the course of generations? Why can we not choose between tried-and-true foods and these new-version look-alikes? We’ve entered into the GE food-age without having the GE food-conversation.

As far as Health Canada is concerned, we needn’t worry.

According to its online document, Food and Nutrition: Frequently Asked Questions—Biotechnology and Genetically Modified Foods, “In Canada it is not mandatory to identify the method of production, including genetic modification, that was used to develop a food product. Nevertheless, voluntary method of production labelling is permitted, provided it is truthful and not misleading.” In other words, you don’t have to say anything, but if you choose to say something, please, be polite and don’t lie.

The average consumer can’t begin to understand the science behind genetic engineering. That’s the line that comes down from corporate agriculture, the major funder of post-secondary agricultural research, which not surprisingly is then parroted by government (always happy to offload the costs of university education to the corporate sector). Not only that, says corporate agriculture, tests done by the agribusinesses themselves show GE foods to be just as safe. Consumer confusion, therefore, must be the basis for “unfounded” fears about these new foods. Labelling food would simply cause mass panic in the grocery aisles.

The only thing, it seems, that keeps our government officials from opening the GE floodgates comes from cooler minds beyond our borders. We export seventy per cent of our wheat, and our major export markets don’t want anything to 62

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do with GE wheat. And you can’t just plant some GE wheat in one field and non-GE wheat in another. Genetic contamination can happen as easily as tripping over a box of pasta left at your door: it’ll happen if the wind blows or if a bee pollinates a non-GE plant with patented genetic property. Transportation and grain elevators are also contamination risks. And once these genes are in circulation, they will be impossible to control. Case in point: the Triffid flax disaster.

In the nineteen-nineties, a GE flax was developed at the Crop Development Centre at the University of Saskatchewan.

It was designed to grow in herbicide-contaminated soil and was called CDC Triffid in a dubious reference to the nineteenfifties science fiction novel The Day of the Triffids in which bioengineered plants, widely cultivated for oil production, also hunt, kill, and feed off humans. By 1998, it was licensed as a crop for human consumption in Canada, but Canada’s export markets were not interested in GE flax. All domestic production of Triffid flax was stopped in 2001 for fear that contamination of non-GE flax would render Canadian flax unsellable to all but a few foreign markets. Triffid seed stock was rounded up and destroyed.

In late 2009, the European Union announced that imports of Canadian flax were found to contain GE flax and thirty-five export markets closed their doors. Flax was a $320-million agricultural industry in Canada. This should have been a major news story.

Inspired by the Triffid flax scenario, the NDP Member of Parliament for BC Southern Interior, Alex Atamanenko, put forward a private members bill in 2009, Bill C-474. It was neither pro- nor anti-GE. It simply proposed that, “The Governor in Council shall, within 60 days after this Act comes into force, amend the Seeds Regulations to require that an analysis of potential harm to export markets be conducted before the sale of any new genetically engineered seed is permitted.” It passed its first and second readings.

In June 2011, on the day of the bill’s third and final reading and vote, the members of the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food were invited to Guelph for a special meeting with the president of Monsanto Canada, which is a major funder of post-secondary agricultural research in Canada. Many Committee members missed the vote, and the bill was defeated 178 to 98. The tail wagged the dog, and not even the press managed a token bark.

Without any labelling laws in Canada, in the absence of any conclusive research evaluating long-term safety, without the media asking hard questions about environmental consequences (or even whether it is helping feed the world), we are already marginalized into asking questions to which there are, by design, few answers available. Simple questions, such as wondering whether the foods on my plate or the ones arriving in the mail, festooned with agribusiness logos or not, are genetically engineered. Of one thing we can be sure— there won’t be a press release or a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the local grocery store when the GE section opens. That’s because it’s already there. EB

FILM

Malickpsychosis // BY PAUL MATWYCHUK

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errence Malick’s recent film The Tree of Life does not appear to be a dangerous movie. It’s essentially a long, lyrical evocation of Malick’s nineteen-fifties boyhood in an uppermiddle-class enclave of Waco, with an idealized mother (Jessica Chastain) and a stern, distant father (Brad Pitt)—and what could possibly be mood-altering or soul-shaking about that? The most potent emotional response the film seems likely to evoke is exasperation at Malick’s art-movie pretensions: the opening epigraph from The Book of Job; the excerpts from Mahler, Berlioz, and Brahms’s most thunderous symphonies that propel much of the soundtrack; and, most notoriously, Malick’s decision early in the film to take an extended special-effects detour far away from his main narrative, which takes place in nineteen-fifties Texas, all the way back, beyond recorded time, to the very origins of life on Earth. It’s like a deadly serious version of that dialogue exchange from Airplane II: “Jacobs, I want to know absolutely everything that’s happened up till now.” “Well, let’s see. First the earth cooled. Then the dinosaurs came, but they got too big and fat, so they all died and they turned to oil...”

But I shouldn’t make fun of The Tree of Life, no matter how tempting a target for mockery it presents, because it sent me on a fl ashback detour of my own. Not to the dawn of time, I hasten to add, but to about thirty years ago, when my family went camping near Kingston, Ontario. I was maybe nine. I had always hated long car trips and any kind of boat ride. Travel made me queasy, a tendency that exasperated my father, a tall, Ukrainian steelworker with a shaved head and eyes as pale and blue as ice. I always found him terrifying, not because he was violent (he’s actually kind of a pussycat), but because I had no idea how I’d ever develop my weak body and weak personality into something that would live up to his precedent.

Most of the details of this trip were blurry even at the time—I was nauseous for a few days after drinking some sulfurous water at our campsite’s communal fountain—but I do remember with perfect filmic clarity a small, charged moment that I’ve never quite

gotten over. The family had disembarked from a guided boat tour of the Thousand Islands, and I picked this moment to complain, again, about my stomach, which was apparently one more complaint than my dad was willing to put up with. He gripped me by the back of my head and bent his great body in half to bring his eyes level with mine. He gritted his teeth and told me, “Listen— you are not ruining this goddamned trip for us. Is that clear?”

Part of what makes The Tree of Life so evocative is Malick’s decision to shoot the scenes in question not as an adult’s fading memories but as the immediate, in-the-moment experiences of a child. His camera remains low to the ground, underneath tables and looking up at the ceiling and the sky, the first seeming almost as far out of reach as the second. So uncanny is Malick’s visualization of childhood that in the scenes where Pitt bends down into the frame to berate his son, sometimes even grabbing his head, the sense memory of my own father confronting me during that old family vacation came rushing back so suddenly and acutely that I was almost unable to breathe.

Hours after seeing The Tree of Life, it was that memory (interspersed with flashes of Brad Pitt clenching his jaw in quietly suppressed fury) running through my head in the small of the morning as I scuttled about my apartment on all fours, mumbling to myself about needing to connect with the Oversoul while my terrified girlfriend watched me from across the room, wondering if I would ever come to bed again.

I SENSE MY BOUT OF MALICKPSYCHOSIS IS NOT UNIQUE; WITNESS the revealing interview Sean Penn granted last August to Le Figaro reporter Jean-Paul Chaillet. Penn gets second billing in The Tree of Life, but his role is essentially an extended wordless cameo (Unhappy Man Riding Elevator In Huge Impersonal Glass-And-Steel Office Tower). Much to the amusement of those detractors who found The Tree of Life to be an impenetrable swirl of disconnected images, Penn admitted that the damn thing left him baffled as well.

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“I didn’t at all find on the screen the emotion of the script,” Penn was quoted as saying. “A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing there!”

I wonder how long it took for The Tree of Life’s spell to wear off so that Penn could become his irascible self again. Did it perhaps happen right there in the interview, the fierce Malibu sunlight and the heavily accented questions of an earnest French journalist combining to burn off the magic-hour fog still lingering around his brain? Was the sensation something like the confusion felt when a hypnotist’s volunteer comes out of his trance and uneasily registers the applause of the crowd, not entirely sure what mortifying things he might have done to earn it?

The Tree of Life’s effect upon Penn was temporary, but for other viewers, the condition appears to be permanent. Here’s film critic Matt Zoller Seitz, for instance, writing about The New World, Malick’s historical drama about Pocahontas, which came out in 2005: “Other movies have fans. The New World has disciples. To the disciples of The New World, each

I couldn’t allow myself to go to sleep, not until I’d scrubbed some of the squalor out of my life. viewing is a new experience; a new opportunity to humble oneself in the presence of a great work of popular art....We disciples of The New World consider ourselves lucky to have identified this treasure when it appeared before us and then seized it and made it a part of our lives. We will see it again and again, as often as time and money and New Line Cinema permit. We love this movie more than words can say. Some of us love it so much that at some point during our daily routines, we have to make a conscious decision to quit thinking about it for a while, because there is a chance we may be moved to tears.”

Seitz never emerged from Malick’s hypnotic spell. There were a few hours after The Tree of Life ended when I wasn’t sure I would either.

I saW ThE movIE IN ThE compaNy of my gIRlfRIENd, Who sEEmEd curiously immune to its charms. About thirty minutes into the film, during that peculiar excursion Malick takes back to the dawn of time, there comes a key sequence in which a giant, predatory lizard encounters a dinosaur from a different, weaker-looking species, apparently wounded, lying on the side of a river. The predator puts its foot on the smaller animal’s head, but some impulse—perhaps the planet’s very first manifestation of mercy or empathy?—compels it to suppress its natural instincts and spare the creature’s life.

At this point, my girlfriend excused herself to go to the ladies’ room. She didn’t come back for a very long time. I think I was dimly aware that she was not feeling well, and yet I remained where I was and continued watching the movie.

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In my distracted state of selfishness, I think I was unconsciously following what Jessica Chastain refers to in the film as “the path of nature”—wanting only to please oneself and thinking little of others. But that’s an epiphany I’ve had only upon reflection. What was keeping me in my seat that night were the scenes depicting the fraught relationship between the stern, emotionally distant father, not quite abusive, but formidable and frequently short-tempered all the same, and the restless son, not quite rebellious but increasingly aware of his father’s failings, and alienated from his embittered, dog-eat-dog view of society.

By the time we returned to our apartment, it was nearly midnight and my girlfriend was ready to go to bed. But I didn’t join her; instead, I began obsessively sweeping the floor. It’s a cluttered apartment with many bookshelves crammed into a very small space, and dust and pieces of grit are always accumulating in the corners and underneath my desk and dresser—it’s hard to keep the place clean, even if vigilant. It’s hard even if you spend more than two hours on your knees, which is how long I spent down there with my brush and my dustpan, assuring my girlfriend that I was fine, really, and that she should just go to sleep.

Our apartment is a small loft—the bed occupies the same large room as the kitchen—so it was impossible for her to ignore me. I didn’t give her an explanation for what I was doing, but I’m not sure I could have offered her one if I tried.

What did cleaning the floor (and, later, at around three in the morning, hauling out my ironing board and pressing all my shirts) have to do with my father? Or Brad Pitt? Or dinosaurs?

I sensed she wasn’t even that enthusiastic about the movie, and so how could I explain that I’d just been exposed to too strong a dose of The Tree of Life and that I couldn’t allow myself to go to sleep, not until I’d scrubbed some of the squalor out of my life, removed all the dust and grime that I’d allowed to accumulate around me while I was wasting my nights indulgently watching movies and reading books?

Even at the time, I knew I was reacting incorrectly to the movie. I think Malick wants people who see The Tree of Life to revive their relationship with God (whatever that word means), to follow the thin thread of their lives back into their own past, and to feel a renewed sense of wondrous connection with their younger selves. I don’t think he wanted people to react the way I did, by feeling a grimy wave of shame wash over their lives. To feel small and selfish. To ruin another goddamned trip, this one a night at the movies.

ThE fEElINg passEd. I cRaWlEd INTo bEd aT fIvE IN ThE moRNINg and stumbled through work the next day. My girlfriend was understanding and forgiving, although she’d probably prefer it if I never watched The Tree of Life ever again. But that night at the theatre is one I imagine will always be part of me and which I’ll be regularly returning to and re-examining—especially, perhaps, during long rides in fancy glass elevators. When I do, will I be responding to the power of Malick’s images or the power of the memories they accidentally stirred up? Or both? I can’t say for certain. All I know is, I hope this dinosaur someday lifts its foot off my neck. Eb

The Canadian Literature Centre (CLC) at the University of Alberta is the western hub of the Canadian literary community, bringing together authors, scholars, publishers and the reading public to celebrate the strength and diversity of Canada’s written culture. The CLC serves as a main source of information on Canadian authors and their works, and promotes greater knowledge, reading, appreciation and study of Canadian literature of all genres, languages and regions.

CLC Highlights:

Brown Bag Lunch Reading Series These noon-hour literary readings with guest authors like Will Ferguson and Jocelyn Brown have become an Edmonton favourite.

Author Cabaret & Reception This annual event will once again showcase an evening of stories with popular Canadian authors at the Art Gallery of Alberta on Monday, April 16, 2012.

Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture Now in its 6th year, the lecture will feature acclaimed writer Lawrence Hill on Tuesday, April 17, 2012.

Photo: Lisa Sakulensky

Visit us at 4-115 Humanities Centre, University of Alberta, website: www.arts.ualberta.ca/clc/ phone: (780) 492-9505, email: cdnlit@ualberta.ca

BRIDGES

Somewhere in Gujarat A

dented bus lumbers across the sun-baked plains. Every surface inside is grimed with fine diesel grit and road dust. My hair is powdered with it. I’m travelling with my new friend Sophie. She’s from Holland. Bollywood soundtracks blare from the speakers up front. Everybody knows the lyrics but us. Sometimes grown men board the bus and break openly into song.

India feels like a time machine to me, even a bridge to some other realm that is not of this mundane modern world. From the bus windows, I’ve witnessed men with shaved heads and dhotis, pilgrims of some kind, jogging barefoot along the roadside. Shirtless labourers raking salt into mammoth white piles. Turbaned camel drivers with handlebar moustaches, dressed all in white.

We clatter over the bleached landscape. I hope to reach the medieval city of Bhuj by nightfall. There is a beautiful castle there whose inner walls are lined with mirrors. But as they say, if you want to make God laugh, just tell him your plans.

We stop for a train crossing. The bus grinds down through its gears to a halt. A slow line of rust-coloured rail cars thunders rhythmically over the tracks. The approaching train emerges never-endingly from behind some dry hills in the distance. Our bus driver turns the key in the ignition and the motor cuts. The breeze stops, and searing air begins to penetrate through the windows. The group of ladies seated nearby goes back to their chittering. Traffic accumulates behind us.

A baby at the front starts to cry.

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// By Charlotte Gill

Cars pull around the bus into the vacant oncoming lane.

They, too, idle at the verge of the racks. Cars filled with human biomass, plastic laundry bags and burlap sacks of rice. Everybody going somewhere, laden with their burdens. Before the caboose can trail through, more drivers creep up on the road shoulder to our left and then on the far right.

The train finally passes, revealing the other side of the crossing, where waiting travellers have also rushed the railway barrier. Our two gridlocked lanes sit nose-to-nose with two lines of oncoming traffic. Four lanes across, if I count all the cars on the dusty shoulder. Our driver budges his way out, heckling his fellow drivers, sounding his trusty air horn. It takes perhaps two hours for this traffic showdown to clear, but I can’t be sure. I lost my watch weeks ago and decided not to replace it. Finally we break free. By the time the bus fills with dry road wind again, my t-shirt is soaked with sweat.

After dusk, the bus empties. Sophie and I sprawl over the vacant seats. The driver’s companion sits nearby, talking as if to keep them both awake. In the middle of the night the bus stops inexplicably. I see thorn trees, the desert sand lit up by the brittle light of the moon. The driver and his friend alight.

They gather sticks and build a tiny fire. They squat, warming their hands until the flames burn out. Then they climb back aboard. Who knows why? Every hour of the day seems steeped in holy rituals. Our driver starts the engine, and then we rattle on. EB

The Banff CenTre

Literary Arts Programs Steven Ross Smith, director

Writing With Style Elizabeth Philips, program director A week-long writing workshop that is both inspiring and productive.

Spring Program April 15-21, 2012 Apply by February 15, 2012 Faculty: Ray Hsu, Sarah Selecky, Merilyn Simonds, Joan Thomas

Fall Program September 9-15, 2012 Apply by June 15, 2012 Faculty: David Carpenter, Janet McNaughton, David O’Meara, Dianne Warren

Literary Journalism July 4-30, 2012 Apply by March 15, 2012 Faculty: Ian Brown, chair; Katherine Ashenburg, editor Looking to develop a major non-fiction essay, memoir, or feature piece? This month-long residency provides established non-fiction writers a professional development opportunity in a community of peers.

Writers are provided with a $2,000 commission fee, financial assistance to cover the program fee, and private work space in the Leighton Artists’ Colony.

Self-directed Residencies and other writing programs available.

For more information: 1.800.565.9989 arts_info@banffcentre.ca www.banffcentre.ca/writing

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