It seems like I should mention that I'm neither dead under the wheels of an indifferent cab driver, nor hiding out, living on popsicles and my own sweat.
Instead my energies (though drained by the ongoing blanket of sweltering humidity) are directed towards what has become the exhibition season. Tomorrow I'm taking possession of 2 crates which I'll fill with paintings, wait for shippers to arrive then send off to Brandon MB for my late August show at The Art Gallery of SouthWestern Manitoba. This is on the heals of my current show at LE Gallery here in Toronto. The LE show also garnered 2 pieces of print press. Leah Sandals interviewed me for the National Post while David Balzar reviewed the show for Eye Weekly.
Both pieces are below.
Once these 2 ventures are underway I'm planning on returning to this project. There is still the drawn out promise for CFAP to send me to Kandahar or, as has been recently suggested, Dubai. Regardless of overseas possibilities, I'll be back to this project with vigour come August and September. Until then I will sweat and shower, shower and sweat and eat Popsicles.
I'll also mention that I'm hoping to head out to Fredricton NB in September for the next installment of A Brush With War as it settles into The Beaverbrook. The show then heads to The War Museum in December. Again, I'm planning on making the trek.
North East of my sister’s house in London there’s a marshland of frogs, beer cans and lily pads that constitutes the best semblance of nature within easy walking distance. Return trips to my teenage skulking grounds usually feel like a step into a netherworld of lost time. I often spend time thinking about the Jonathon Lethem book in which its protagonist is a Lack. Similar to this object ingesting, miniature black hole-like entity, London is a city which takes in people’s lives, leaving them only a negative space by which to judge themselves.
What possible worth can be found in those barren teenage years in the city’s west end? With the exception of learning to run, London, in many ways was where I finalized the worst, most insulated version of myself. The raw material of insulation, found in the Kootenays, was crafted here into the type of working machine that no one should choose to operate. Perhaps it’s no surprise that during my brief trip to what is affectionately known as The Forest City, the most joy found was in a solitary walk along train tracks and past power lines reclaimed by the marsh.
Possessing a faint echo of the tracks that traced the valley wall, south of Montrose, The CN tracks intersecting the South East part of London grant instantaneous entry into a world of one’s own. Tempered by similarly niggling concerns for hurtling locomotives and gangs of skids there is actually little other connection between the two rail lines. It was, however, on the rails where my own company was all that felt worthwhile.
The tracks appear through a clearing after winding, mosquito laden single-track reaches an incline. Down-slope the trail opens onto a middle-aged European man with a limp and a makeshift cane eying me with some amount of suspicion. Breaks are taken to examine the rocks and flora around the creosote timbers so as to assuage his fears that I’m about to roll him for his walking stick.
There is little point in arguing with the post-apocalypse genre, especially if you find the world difficult to come to terms with. If you believe something, somewhere has gotten incorrectly shuffled, much hope comes from the purging fires of judgment. The sense of the world having left you behind, having left completely, comes quickly on a set of tracks, no matter the surrounding terrain.
Such a sunny day, such a lovely breeze and, by god, those lily pads are radiant as they cluster around the half submerged phone lines.
Apocalypses’ aren’t supposed to be pretty (with the exception of some of the panoramas of The Quiet Earth) but for reasons known only to the gods of terror and equalization, London shows improvement on an expanding scale along the oil soaked timbers of a rail bed.
And so I walk. After stopping to photograph a bird’s nest solemnly disintegrating in the gravel a pond soon comes into view on the left side of the tracks. It mirrors the right; the beauty of this swamp becomes a reflection of itself – the reflection I’ve been seeking in the city that offered me nothing except my own lameness. More submerged poles peek at each other over the high ground of the tracks, the lily pads can’t see each other but know they are not alone as the frogs call out to each other in a conspiratorial dialogue. The sun shines down.
Pacific and Eastern Time are in a grudge match as the sub-arctic’s perpetual daylight has ceded to the darkness I’d quickly learned to not miss. Stuck in the non-sleep of rolling over and checking the clock in the hours well before the birds begin to herald morning, a memory of vacationing on Vancouver Island sidles into the bedroom. The name of the park is gone forever, lost in the cedars that enveloped a campground on the west side of the island. A small lake with a dock connects to another small lake by way of an arterial creek of clear, luminous green. Overhanging branches crane above the centre of its flow, casting large broken shadows over boulders that create hollows on the creek bed.
The campsite hugged the north lake and a dock stretched outward to lake vines reaching from the muddy floor. If a child lay down on the sun-warmed planks and hung their arm low, wiggling their fingers below the lake’s serene surface, small fish would approach through the vines and nimble at the digits. This is a remarkable experience for a child, an event that gives the false impression of a special and previously unknown connection to the world. A small panic pinches this child each time the fish’s mouth closes on the side of their index finger but they must focus and maintain the gentle rhythm of a pendulum. If instinct takes over – if they jerk and giggle – the bond is broken. To be with the fish they have to keep inside the best part of what childhood offers to the world.
Down past the creek, the other small lake is shallow and pebbly, safe enough for kids whose swimming skills are less than honed. Because of the shallows the July sun warms the green hued water and you can idle along, splashing or submerging a few feet below the surface. It has depth enough for the known world to diminish and the new world of water to become a totality (for as long as little air-filled lungs can hold up their end of the bargain). Taking a shallow dive, the cautious swimmer might decide to open their eyes in this placid environment.
* * *
I awake from this forgotten memory as I concurrently open my eyes below the surface. Staring back is a rock the size of a small, flat gingersnap with the sharp, clear image of a wide-open human eye. There is pure panic as I splash and scramble my way off the lake-bed. Once standing I timidly venture to examine the pebble-strewn lake-bed but am unable to find the rock. It is an object of terror that escapes rationalization. There’s no possibility of picking the stone out and laughing nervously at my folly, of then skipping it across the lake’s surface in a show of skill and superiority.
Father’s Day has just passed and out of a sense of love and duty, as well as a hope of avoiding my Mum’s passive recriminations, I send an email to my Dad at his workplace in China. I expect no reply, as I know him well enough – another email lost in the void of his busy life and distanced personality. Shockingly, he replies promptly, asking how things are in The Yukon, telling me of joking with coworkers that Dawson can be found on a map by looking in the middle of nowhere. The fact that my Dad has responded is a welcome surprise. That he has been discussing me with co-workers is more surprising, but when he writes at the end, “keep in touch”, I wonder what has happened to this tough, traditionally molded Northern English man, the man who hears no conversation that doesn’t involve magnesium or car parts or, ideally, both.
* * *
The creek between the lakes ran parallel to a quiet gravel road so you could walk along and pick out the best fishing spots. The boulders top out at half the creek’s width and offer still recesses in their lee ideal for small brook trout to gather. This is a creek for spinning not casting – worms will not do for these small fighting fish. Spinning is a method much more suited to a child. Not requiring the more dedicated skills of fly-fishing it nonetheless requires the fisher be able to repeatedly and accurately cast the lure past the lee, reeling through without getting hung up on any number of water-borne and creekside obstacles.
The fish are biting but it is dad that catches all the fish save one. He is confident and adept but is also generous and supportive, passing on his skills to his less coordinated and overly introverted son. It is one of those occasional, episodic moments in the life of a boy raised by a hard father when tenderness comes through. It is the same tenderness found in an email closing with “Stay in touch”. And while those moments might not make up for many tasteless jokes, stony silences, violence and disinterest, in the these years that are my middle and my dad’s wane I am hopeful for some manifestation of love that might prove a man to be more than he offers himself to be.
