Wreckage and Reclamation

Like an unwatered indoor conifer...

2011-06-03T18:20:00.000-07:00

Without love and attention, it dies, just like this blog.
Of course this was always intended to be, and has been, a specific and finite project.
The contents have been sent off to my potential publisher and so this blog can officially said to be archival only.

Does anyone stumble upon this collection of sadness and contemplation? Like the conifer I got from Shannon over Christmas that died in the early spring and was deposited in the backyard of my tiny apartment shortly thereafter.

Maybe. And just in case, in closing,
To answer the question that I wasn't sure was a question: wreckage has trumped reclamation.

Goat Coat

2010-12-27T20:36:00.000-08:00

A gift from the dog gods of Dawson. Delivered before a party at the well-funded Berton House;
Jeramy models the Goat Coat.

Missing Inaction

2010-12-26T21:00:00.000-08:00

After a morning Americano at The Common, a drink that began with me reading a British officer's memoir of his time in The Sangin Valley and ended with some dude shoving past me for my vacated prime seat as I put on my windbreaker and gloves. In need of bars of Ivory and bananas I walked towards Dufferin Mall, up through Dufferin Grove park and across its thin layer of glazed snow/ice. Stewing over pushy hipsterati and his seat grab, wondered:

What happened to the guy who’d pick a fist-fight with a hobo?
(or bunny hop them as the slept on heat grates along Queen st.)
The guy who puked Rye and Coke into an occupied swimming pool and later, out of a car window.
Pissed on a small mountain of puffy Winter jackets at a house party in Esquimalt.

The guy who got angry not sad.
Where’d ya go? Where might I find you?

It was all I could do to keep myself from having a tiny explosive fit under the expanses of yellow isles and walls of No Frills. Coming close to kicking over a pile of no-name pancake mix is the level of lameness I have attained.

buildings

2010-12-26T20:55:00.000-08:00

2 buildings from Dawson: a Generally typical single room dwelling and "The Pit" (open at 9am though only Canadian is on tap. It's better than Blue I suppose).

Again, just a few images (and a whole lotta gnawing)

2010-11-02T19:56:00.000-07:00

There is an end of the year deadline for completing this project. Specifically, completing it as a book. I feel good about such a deadline.

Conversely, I'm having one of those days where my whole life feels like it is loitering at a fork on a country road. What I need is for someone to throw a rusted 10W30 can at me and get me walking again. This is my night tonight. I am, to say the least, anxious about where to go.

Friends have been talked to, beer has been drank, tears have been spilled and many empty days have been droned through... yet still I am incapable of moving forward.

Here's Vassily Grossman etc.

A few little drawings

2010-10-05T04:59:00.000-07:00

The book continues in something like earnest. There isn't much new but here are a few sketches that're filling out pages.

"All endurance athletes are running from something inside themselves"

2010-08-16T17:30:00.000-07:00

Another dusk run through High Park to melt off the day’s malaise in the oppressive, comforting humidity of mid August overgrowth. On a previous outing a fellow runner extolled as we crossed paths, “watch out for the toads!” such was the saturation level.

The air is just as thick this night, the light equally faint – the trails better understood by feel than sight. Approaching a rise, a voice calls out with a sharpness assumed to be the common call for an errant dog. Clearing the rise, ambient yellow light breaks intermittently through the burdened foliage. At first the effect is similar to catching sight of a luminous deep-sea jellyfish, its pulses bobbing into and out of view. Soon though, structured geometric forms begin to take shape and bind onto the growing voices.

Closing on and passing the twilight theatre that sits on the high ground to the south of the trail, actors, congested on an illuminated stage project their personae onto the audience but also out into the surrounding trails.

Sweat falls in oppressive pools down my spine and stomach.
One foot striking in front of the other.
One grizzled knee compressing a battered shin into an ankle,
a noticeable “click” emanating with each foot’s weathered turn pushing me forward at a pace too fast to fully enjoy the world.

Who are these people, presently defined by artifice and luminescence? Who am I to believe my own structured and collapsing existence is any more valid, any less fleeting or any less of a show?

Colour field theory

2010-08-16T17:03:00.000-07:00

Lying on the roof above the patio seems somewhat illicit, up above the sanctioned patio strata. From here I could hop along roofs all the way north to Bloor St. But at this moment, expanding the world is far from what I need.

Lie down eyes closed, feel the tar, tiles, gravel as they offer up the day’s accumulated heat. Opening my eyes and cupping a parenthetical hand to each side of my face creates a zone of exclusion that destroys the city, leaving only a massive solid and shining blue sky all around and above.

Staring upwards becomes gazing down into an infinite pond, a passive, lifeless sea. It is a singular, eternal moment brought to the present by the silent passage of a commuter plane. Passing across this zone of exclusion, from one hand to the other, I feel like I am watching a fish that, having stumbled into this dead sea, is breaking some cardinal rule, is as unaware of the universe as I am.

* * *

The afternoon is dwindling and clouds have returned to punctuate the sky. Above me, grown out of an isolated contrail, a stitch has formed and has taken on the task of holding the sky together.

I do my best to help, willing it to keep all that it surveys intact but all it can possibly keep intact is the person looking back at it.

Dr. Doolittle

2010-08-16T16:46:00.000-07:00

I wake on the sofa with a start, sure I’ve forgotten something, something… something unreachable. Leaning against the bathroom counter with no equilibrium, lop-sided and top heavy in the night’s humidity, the last of the day is peed away before crawling into the too-large bed.

A pink night gown is crumpled on the far side and, it should be said, I’ve been keeping it by my face at night, nuzzling in just a bit. But rolling onto my side, pulling a comforter close, the scent shifts and I real back from something far too reachable. The smell is undeniable and a roll of toilet paper is enlisted to pick out the cluster of cat poo in the bed’s centre. There is also pee I realize.

I love the cats, their neediness, their aloofness – their contradictions – but will admit to a glimmer of relief at soon having to contend with only my messes and desperate emotional deposits. What we have here, on this page, however, is not a discourse on scatology but on domesticity.

My fear is of silence and stasis. In one of my soon-to-be-a-shut-in panics I consider populating my new apartment with a cluster of small, cute and well considered taxidermied animals that might make no sounds but could be used to generate mean-spirited anthropomorphic dialogues within my mind. I need something to remind me of failures recent and ancient.

The silence of my upcoming house equals failure and the cats are the last audible mewlings that might deny such a future. A stuffed badger offers no response to my opening the door and crossing the threshold. There is no leg rub, no pleading outstretched paw, languishing hairball or calling out for wet food. A groomed and stuffed chipmunk or otter though, well they couldn’t offer a salve but might be a sort of mammalian masochism made real – furry reminders or taunts of a family lost.

“Hey dude, yeah, you in the burgundy track pants. [click-click of incisors] We’re dead and so is that idea of family you thought you were worthy of.”

or

“Hey fucker, yeah you with the bowl of soggy Corn flakes, there’s some dust on my coat. You used to empty kitty litter and make a school lunch daily and now [tail slapping on particle board] you can’t even keep a static otter dust-free.”

Settling old scores

2010-08-12T08:11:00.000-07:00

The new content on this blog is probably going to slow for a while as I'm starting to compile, edit, hack and otherwise muck around with what exists in the hope and plan of this project as book underway. With that in mind, there are some writings and artwork done earlier that I'm incorporating into this. Some of those stories are about my being a lame kid. While the writing still needs some editing, here, below is one piece with an illustration done last night. I'll leave the context hanging and just put the piece up as is. For your consideration:

.177

Really, who could blame ‘em? As a typical Canadian response to townhouses, strip-malls and snow banks, my parents began to take annual Caribbean winter vacations. Formerly family affairs, these getaways became parent only furloughs. More to the point, in their absence I became the house’s benevolent dictator, ruling over my sister and our dog Charlie with a gentle but power-hungry hand. Mum also left a freezer stocked with TV dinners for Shell and myself. The Hungry Man entrées an appropriate size to assuage her guilt at leaving us to trudge through dirty snow banks, dreary school days and each other’s company while she topped up on sun burns and pool-side margaritas. Surely though, she knew they wouldn’t be the only ones knocking back the booze.

I couldn’t care less about the basement shin-digs Shell invariably threw. She had her role as ne’er do well libertine and I had mine as curmudgeon in waiting. Still at the Peach Schnapps and sparkling wine stage, the carnage that might have been unleashed seemed minimal, but just to be sure I spent those evenings on the living floor with a machete. Watching horror movies with the crudely fashioned but sufficiently intimidating blade laying across my chest, the young’ns had to step over my display of passive canine territoriality to gain entry.

Dear friends of my sister,

Do not fuck around. I’m in charge of the house, the dog and the fridge full of food. Also, you might have noticed I’m working my way though a stack of boob-munching cannibal flicks, and I’m wearing tiger-striped camouflage pants.

Thanks, her older brother

On this night though, the party stepped up to 80 proof and the Crown Royal pulled the Byron skids in like ants to road-kill raccoon. Whatever the fuck went on below was of negligible interest to me, but Shell at least had the sense to try and kick out some of the more antagonistic skids before holes were punched into unfinished drywall. Muffled yelling rose from the basement and they came upstairs but, emboldened by the hard and sweet rye, wouldn’t leave the house. Pressing pause on Cannibal Ferox, maybe I threatened them with the machete.
“Okay guys, out you go.”
“Says who, you?”
"Me and Mr. Pointy, yeah. C’mon, take it down to the river or somethin’.”
“Dude, we’re not going anywhere. That machete has fucking tassels on it.”
“Oh, Jesusfuckingchrist, just go okay!”

And even though they did leave the house, it was only to gather at the parking lot’s battered dumpster to smoke and nurse their anger. Taking matters in hand, up to my second floor bedroom, Shell and her cohorts were left to stew over teen house-party-disaster yet to be averted. Flicking off the lights and climbing to the top of my bunk bed, I quietly lowered the window facing the parking lot, now with a clear line of sight to the dumpster.
Lying on my belly in the dark and reaching down, I pulled up the Russian air rifle – a memento of Montrose’s expansive landscape.

Tugging the barrel sharply downwards, the rifle revealed the breach and charged its single lung. Opening the ammo tin I plucked out a mushroom shaped .177 pellet. Popped it in the breach, closed the barrel and was ready to go. Clean and simple.

Rolling back to the window, I lined up my target in the iron sights. Partially exhaling and squeezing the trigger mechanism past the spring release, there was a click and a sharp pop as the .177, spiraling across the parking lot, hit one of the kids below the “O” of his DIO t-shirt. He yelled out, and in my darkened room I rolled away from the window feeling fairly pleased with my accuracy and also feeling adrenaline’s twitchy side-effect disrupt my attempts to continue my regulated breathing.

This is the skill and discipline that any trained killer needs to master.

Findings

2010-08-08T06:16:00.000-07:00

Since finishing Patrick Lane's There Is A Season I'd been searching for something equally as rich to sink into. Out of this little quest I found my way to the sort of embarrassing, A Briefer History of Time. The embarrassment comes only from my buying the illustrated and abridged version rather than the full and heavy, serious business version of Hawking's masterpiece. I have to be honest and practical though, I probably wouldn't read the full book and also I'm using it for inspiration rather than actual knowledge, for poetry as much as science.

Also though, Miranda July's No one Belong Here More Than You is what I'm now almost done. This little peach of a book is where I am currently drawing most of my reading joy from. Perhaps I'll write more about the book later, but for now (as I am about to head out the door) a couple of quotes which have stuck with me over the last few days:

"What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real."

and

"There are some great reasons for resisting language and one of them is Love."

* * *

Lastly, and only slightly apropos of today's writing:
My friend Jim and I were walking the alleys of my neighbourhood last night, ambling along for research purposes as well as to enjoy the fading day. In one garage with a door in partial collapse I peered over the top and found Jesus...

This is not to be cynical regarding that overly punned and prodded turn of phrase, but sometimes, well, there he is, amongst the rubble of someone's accumulated life.

Against my better judgement (consider yourself warned)

2010-08-05T14:49:00.000-07:00

Lately, listening to music as I wander around Toronto's stinking hot streets is (sometimes) all that's keeping me from a total emotional meltdown. Often enough I'll sing out loud as I can be pretty sure no one cares if I do and most of the time there's weirder stuff happening all around.

Still though, my gut reaction is to stop singing as someone passes. I was wondering how my poor singing has anything to do with the premise of this blog (if indeed there is a premise). One constant however, is my attempt to come to terms with my limits as a social being. Slowly, I am opening up those limits, and, as I hope the writing in these entries attests, trying to offer up my many failures as something that can make me into the best version of myself.

Blah, blah, blah.

Anyhow, Shannon is currently on a research and reunion roadtrip across the western US coast and as part of her project is recording her own singing. She is, to put it mildly, a far better singer than I but the sadness created by our distance makes it difficult, even impossible, for me to listen to each of her singings more than once.

So instead of listening and getting super sad, here is, unsolicited (and maybe unwanted) a very awkward partial rendition of one of my own favourite sad songs.

******
It's about 3 hours ago that I put this up. I must have been in some sort of heat and sadness induced haze. This post is akin to waking up after a drunk and remembering, with regret, what you got up to the night before. The good thing about blogsslashtheweb is that I can just pull this post off the blog.
"But here this now. Fuck. That. Shit."
Here it stays.

Dogtown

2010-08-03T09:01:00.000-07:00

In Toronto I don't have any friends who own dogs. While there's a large contingent of dog owners around, they're not in my world. I have a friend who walkes dogs for money but that doesn't count.

The Yukon, though, that is the domain of the canine. Sure there are cats, but they have fear in their eyes.

The first dogs on my trip north were my friend Monika's. She and her boyfriend Jonah were gracious enough to put me up on both legs into and out of Whitehorse. For their hospitality I offered a drawing of her youngest dog in trade. Being the procrastinating (and busy) fella that I am, only last night did I get around to doing the damn piece.

I'll ship it NorthWest later today, but here's the pixel version of the ink version of a dog that has been clocked at 50KmH.

This wave is also a particle

2010-08-02T18:24:00.000-07:00

The small brown bats are out this evening and as we sit on our rooftop patio they offer up their carnivorous dance for all who choose to look skyward. Swallows have ceded the stage to their nocturnal counterparts but the dance is the same – small bodies, long wings, jigs and parries – creatures honouring the gift of the day and the onset of night.

Behind and below this dance, the lights of a ball diamond radiate blue-white, an intensity that seems to defy the onset of night and the natural order of the world. Behind this still, the smell from a chocolate factory drifts intermittently towards our vantage point. Sitting on wooden slatted folding chairs and drinking vodka tonics (no ice for you) we take in all these elements as contented, blessed spectators.

As a backdrop to this scene, the sun works a time-lapse alchemy with various types and strata of assembled clouds. July’s humidity adds to the cavalcade of shifting hues but as this processional plays out the sun, on this night, actually seems to be creating clouds, assembling them through light. Somewhere between the physical burning mass of our solar system’s star and the back of my retina, puffs and strands of cumulus luminousity appear through the act of observing and marveling.

As much as I crave it, hope for frozen time, there is no stasis here. The rotation of the earth is destroying these clouds (like a salad spinner tosses water from spinach) faster than the sun is creating them. The peach clouds have rapidly faded out, replaced by a sole grey-blue fair weather cumulus that, inconsolably, drags itself from the waxing spectacle of the night’s promise and dizzy hunting dance of the bats.

What the universe wants makes no sense

2010-08-02T18:10:00.000-07:00

How is it that our bodies maintain any sort of cohesion when the whole universe says spin apart old man?

Electricity consistently fires across grey matter and synapses, allowing us to, for example, successfully lift a flavoured coffee to our lips and (most importantly) collectively agree that it is a mistake to have done so. This unimaginable feat reminds me of airplanes staying in the air only because other humans tell us that this is what airplanes want to do.

It seems a miracle that almost everyone has fingernails and that my face, while occasionally burdened with pimples, doesn’t simply detach from my skull as I brush my teeth which are remarkably similar to yours and the Portuguese woman with the fat Schnauzer down the street.

Today I bought groceries and succeeded in my tasks of coming home with whole grain bread, assorted fruits and frozen pineapple juice. But as I paid for the items I had also wondered how it is that electrons continue to fire, that I don’t simply disintegrate into the wild miracle of the universe.

off the edge of the world

2010-07-23T20:03:00.000-07:00

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.

A Walk into the Apocalypse of the Past (and other hyperboles)

2010-07-07T18:13:00.000-07:00

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.

Stay in touch

2010-07-02T09:20:00.000-07:00

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.

The Last Spike

2010-06-25T01:35:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the end

2010-06-24T18:26:00.000-07:00

What’s more important, the act or the remembering of the act, the writing or the sharing of the writing? It seems that I’m excited by a swallow taking up company with me not because of the small moment of grace it carries but because I’ll be able to write about the bird and its gift.

This is my second to last night in Dawson and the last night I’ll have to myself. Tomorrow there’s a reception at The Odd Gallery followed by some sort of social activity. Booze will be involved and maybe a campfire, and people. The folk I’ve met here are genuine and gregarious and I’m lucky to have joined this community assembled from a widely cast net. Some hail from my neighbourhood in Toronto, others from Germany, or are itinerant, having arrived here from Iceland. Others found there way here from Montreal and Salt Spring Island. I am lucky to have met them but guilty of not knowing them as well as I could. But tonight is mine and is my last chance to sit up late and type over a cup of Earl Grey with the Midnight Sun straddling the rooftop to my west.

Earlier I took my bike out for a slightly muddy ride around town. There’d been heavy rain all day and I was grateful for the lack of distraction that sunshine might have caused. This evening though, the clouds broke and the sun shone and so I pedaled (and manualed) my way down to the jetty where the sternwheeler and catamaran dock. Sitting on the dock, hanging my feet over with just the rubber of my soles catching the brown water, I took in a last chance to feel the river’s mass and the midnight’s quiet. This was also a last chance to watch the Swallows feed from the river and I was more careful in watching their feeding. The pair seemed to be marionettes when they dropped to the water, as if their strings had gone loose and were then jerked up. Thankful for the show and the sound of the ferry echoing off the west bank, I eventually made my way back home.

It had been several days since reading from The Patrick Lane memoir that has provided me with much of my inspiration and context over this last month. I was feeling its absence and so when I returned to MacCaulay House, I sat on the step reading about Lane’s time as a medic at a sawmill in Avola, BC. The life of a mill worker and the regular injuries Lane attended to were often grisly and I was reminded of a serious car crash my friends attended to just outside of that lumber town.

This night has caught me, not surprisingly, in a mood of reminiscence. Soon I’ll be back in my present, where my daily rituals are held dear but often remind me of where I am rather than where I have been. There are exceptions of course. Whenever I eat a date (or even the occasional date square) I think of leaving Kelowna and how Ed, who worked at The Bean Scene (and later did tours in Afghanistan), presented me a paper bag with a corner piece as his parting gesture. Ed knew I loved the corners because it isn’t the dates, but the crumble with its buttery density that matters. Woodchips on the lawns of manicured Portuguese yards take me quickly to the woodchip verge of 870 Tataryn and the stupidity of 10 recently released soldiers defiling a neighbourhood that deserved better. And, to my first mountainbike.

As I write these memories out I think about the importance of connecting the island of my present in Toronto with these places of my past. In its scale and temperament, Toronto is unlike any of my previous worlds, but there are small, wonderous moments that do connect. The loamy earth on the west end of High Park has the same damp, sponginess as the training areas north of Victoria, just as running along the shore of Lake Ontario has the same smell of decaying plant life that evokes hung-over weekend runs with Bernie and Steve along Esquimalt’s boardwalk. My writing life began in Kelowna and it is in Toronto, from Shannon’s commitment to small, sad books that I regained the enthusiasm to put words and pictures to page.

A swallow joined me as I read from Lane’s book. Sitting quietly on the power line above my head, I wondered whether I was happier because it had joined me in my silence or because it seemed to be offering a perfect bookend to what I wanted to write about as Wednesday turns into Thursday and my last full day in Dawson begins.

Mastodon burial ground

2010-06-23T14:56:00.001-07:00

Photos of the Paddle wheeler graveyard:

Mastodons

2010-06-23T14:54:00.000-07:00

Downriver there’s a ferry graveyard. Just the name “ferry graveyard” is enough to get me excited. Elephants washed onto the beachhead from some unknown roaming ground.

* * *

While the village of Montrose had the equivalent population of Dawson it had only 2 stores: Roger and Barb’s Gas & Convenience and Dixie Lee Fried Chicken. A pretty static village there was little construction around town but the odd house did go up, especially in the newer, eastern end; employees of Cominco getting out of Trail’s barren slopes and moving up the more verdant mountainside for a more rural experience.

During the warm months I’d seek out newly framed houses, skeletons of dreams yet to be undone by the slow shuttering of the valley’s economy. Crossing the dry moat between lot and foundation on a springy two by ten, picking my way across the joists and plywood floors, climbing stairs that ascended, seemingly free of supports, to the second and third floor vistas. Leaping from the spaces yet to become windows down onto dirt piled around the foundation, these explorations were also an opportunity to scavenge. Workers often left loot behind and while the booty might be as little as a couple of empty pop cans those could be traded for their deposit and then traded again for 5 cent candies (2 Kraft Caramel squares for a nickel), occasionally the find was more impressive: a ball of twine, blanks from a nail gun or can of spray paint and sometimes actual tools. Claw hammers, robertson screwdrivers or a plumb line would be gathered up and brought home, hidden away and never used lest Dad see them and ask their origin.

Shannon recently asked me if I had a favourite memory from my childhood and to that question there’s no hesitation. Snowbanks were in full melting retreat as I pedaled back from Roger’s with a cluster of caramel squares in my windbreaker and a can of coke in one hand. I was riding a ten-speed, cruising along with the afternoon sun shining down, melting the snow and warming my forearms. The Coke was just opened and super-fizzy as I no-handed, feeling the sun on my flesh and the heat absorbed into my clothes. As much as that scenario sounds like a fake-indie commercial the truth is, I remember it with the clarity of happiness and temporary emancipation. Maybe it’s emancipation that gives me such joy. Letting go, reveling in my occasional luck at something, inexplicably, working out beyond all expectation. Not crashing on a hairy descent, enjoying a leisurely Americano on a park bench in the middle of the day, sprawled out in bed, telling stories and tracing a finger along a hip.

Arriving at the collapsing carcass of the Paddle wheeler I started rooting my way into the structure and those blissful clambers of half-built houses in Montrose came bubbling back. The smell of pine on a sunny day still gives that fleeting thrill of freedom and while this skeleton had no such smell – was a thing from an unknown past – it was also an echo of the future from my own youth. Like a suburban house caught in the gravitational pull of an event horizon, the paddle wheeler was held in a moment drawn out over decades. Slow collapse, splayed-out timbers like ribs, expanding village collapsing village, a kid and a ten-speed, this dialectic of possibility and entropy and, with each carefully placed step, the giddy rush of floating atop this mastodon.

Sound report: June 22

2010-06-23T00:41:00.000-07:00

This evening I was supposed to go Peggy’s to watch Brecken and Jeramy do some slaying at Trivia Night, but right out my door it seemed like a night for something more contemplative. With the sun lighting up the town and heavy brooding clouds threatening to the South East, Trivia Night and tonic water seemed the lesser option. Approaching Peggy's and hearing a question about personal income tax, I peeked in but seeing the joint full, took the opportunity to wheel a quick 45 degrees and amble down to the riverbank.

By the time I found a log end to squat on, the evening light had turned grey-blue from the towering clouds traveling north up the valley. With three days left I’m feeling the pressure to catalogue those things I can’t take with me. Accordingly, here’s my list of sounds from the Confluence of The Klondike and Yukon Rivers at 2245 on June 22.

• The Shallows of the confluence downriver
• Waves lapping on the pebbles
• That previously mentioned songbird
• A squawking gull harassing a Bald Eagle (a coup to watch)
• The distant talk of four teenagers upriver
• An ATV on the edge of town
• The ferry, just barely audible

This is a pretty ideal ratio on the down side of the levee. The town, out of view is almost out of mind. The human noises are tertiary at best and the river’s life takes over. The clouds maintain their quiet drama while the green of the Klondike slices sharply into the muddiness of The Yukon.

Old haunts for new birds

2010-06-22T18:17:00.000-07:00

“I did mange to meet the ghost from the upstairs closet (large bedroom), followed me around for a whole day.” So wrote David Hoffos in the Macaulay House residency journal that I've been perusing this afternoon.

Outside my bedroom window (I'm not in the large, haunted bedroom) there’s a songbird who has been my bedtime companion over the last weeks. If I was more of a birder I’d be able to list its name, and while I love painting birds I’m lazy with my ornithology so I haven’t come to any sort of answer. Laying in bed at 2am his repetitive call is a comforting cadence and a pleasure to nod off to.

With light peeking through the dark plastic blind, the six note refrain also begins to sound like the slow pendulum rhythm of a rusty swing set. For some reason it sits a little spookily with me but that’s because I watched too many horror films as a teenager and people keep asking me if I’ve met the McCauley House ghost. In this gold rush town myths die hard and while I haven’t met the ghost I have a songbird offering me lullabies. If asked, that seems worthy of some small legend.

And the clouds parted

2010-06-22T09:19:00.000-07:00

There is, I was told before coming here, a local tradition of heading up to the top of Dome Mountain on solstice to watch the sun not set. Over dinner the night before Michael informed me that much of the population of the event consisted of Quebecois kids with bongos and quilted cords.

During my 6 years in Kelowna a few things were irrevocably tainted for me: Rollerblades, Spuds McKenzie work-out pants and Bongos. With this caution over local bongo density I was a little reluctant to head up The Dome especially as the day was thoroughly clouded over and intermittently rainy. As with all things celebratory in Dawson, solstice means drinks, so assembling with a cluster of KIAC related folk we sat, sipped and pondered the likelihood of heading up.

After working our way through rounds of vodka-sodas, pints of Yukon Gold, low-grade red wine, G&Ts, Jameson's and Warsteiner shandies we wandered onto the street straight around 1am and into view of the solstice rainbow. After spending a good chunk of my time here in something akin to a bunker mentality, pondering the land and isolation, it was (not ironic but) affirming to stumble upon a Sanford Gifford painting in the middle of a muddy street with a small group of very nice folk.

From this point forward the skies continued to offer truly melodramatic displays of transcendental possibilities. Pretty awesome down in town these moments of radiance would have been something to behold for the top of the mountain. Unfortunately, the chorus of Bongos would have most-likely altered the frequency of the light waves emanating down from the far north and likely ruined the display.

More dogs

2010-06-21T13:50:00.000-07:00

Below: Crodmo of the North's drinking buddy followed by a self-portrait from when I was feeling pretty rough.

wildlife art

2010-06-20T17:49:00.000-07:00

After numerous Warsteiners in numerous other bars I thought it time to make a return to The Pit and see if it might offer more options for the teetotaler. It also seemed like time to part ways with the Hi-def quietude of The Downtown Hotel in favour of the effulgent drunks.

Sheepishly, I asked the bartender what non-alcoholic options they might have. Having a fake beer in The Pit seems like going to a strip club because they have good chicken wings. Surprisingly, not only was there no Warsteiner, there were several options ranging from soft cider and Labatt Nordic to something looking way too similar to Warsteiner. I took the Nordic and sat down to watch Brazil vs. Côte d'Ivoire.

This, however, is just the back drop to an ongoing little quest of mine. While The Pit on a sunny Sunday reinforces my belief that early afternoon is the best time for a tipple (even if it’s a point five Labatt) I was here looking for wildlife. Like a German tourist Grizzly spotting up on The Dempster, I was on the spy for Crodmo of The North.

This aging drunk has an uncanny resemblance to what I believe South Eastern Crodmo might look like after a few decades of hard livin’. Just add age, bad teeth, a ponytail as well as a hockey jersey and a chipper demeanour and you have time travel version of my friend.

While everyone, myself included was glued to the game I snuck a couple of photos of the man in question and spent the afternoon drawing him. Here he is.

Sitting with a fern on a park bench

2010-06-19T21:35:00.000-07:00

[Naval gazing is directly ahead. Consider yourself warned.]

I

I was back riding on the Dome trails today, slogging my way up the roughly paved Dome rd. with my helmet attached to my backpack so as to keep the sweatiness down. Soon though I was helmeted, booting down the dry, rocky south-face singletrack and, unlike my ride down the west slope, this time able to pick up some speed on the more reasonable downward grade.

The first time I rode these trails I had written about wishing my cycling friends could ride them with me. I also wrote that I didn’t miss their cycling companionship and was happy to share the loose, rocky descents with no one. Trail riding is a singular act even when in a group. Focus is key and it is the points in between that are social. So while a post-ride beer or americano is small treasure, the act itself remains suspended and insulated.

Also though these physical pursuits have become my means of allowing the world to lessen its volume, of gaining control through the physical act of controlling the ground moving under my wheels

Since arriving my world has turned on its ear. My working practice is moving along swimmingly and the people I meet are, almost without exception, genuine and welcoming but it’s gotten to the point where I am counting down the days until I fly.

I have been productive, prodigious and a diligent worker but have also asked myself some tough questions about the middle distance. All these qualities are welcomed. My practice as an artist often involves questioning the idea of knowledge gained through tribulation so I’d be hypocritical to not see some positives in my situation. Still, given the option of casually sauntering through my days I might say “Yes please”. As it stands, it is my running and riding, the roots, regulated breathing, drop-offs and burning thighs that allow me to garner my focus and lift myself up.

During the many years that Patrick Lane was lost to the wilderness of addictions he found himself (in retrospect) cutting off those who were attempting to become close. Travelling BC’s back-country he met many loners, some lost like he, others at peace with their chosen place, some bitter and raging, others placid and beatific. Recalling one such meeting, Lane talks about Thoreau and one possible outcome of seclusion. He writes,

“He was a solitary man, but there was nothing about him that spoke to me of loneliness, anger or despair. Like Thoreau, he had three chairs in his house, “one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” From what I saw that day and on the subsequent days I visited him over those years, the old man’s third chair was never occupied.”

This is my dream. This is my nightmare.

When I write about the Columbia River passing through Trail BC I’m also writing about the years that altered me from an average, if awkwardly shy, and friendly kid into the adult I am today. An adult I would describe as friendly but not overtly social. In between, strange machines were devised to defend from possible repeats of the constant harassment, bullying and beatings of those that took place in mountains around Trail. Those machines have long since been dismantled but (and here comes a heavy-handed metaphor again) there is still something left in the dirt.

If I am honest and someone asks why I joined the infantry, one aspect of that murky Q&A (an aspect that I’m reluctant to bring to light because I sound like the self-absorbed teenager that I was) is I didn’t ever want to be the victim again. I know now, however, that if you assemble such machines as I did to keep others out you’ll seldom have the joy that comes from allowing others into the vulnerable parts of one’s self.

The Columbia and The Yukon Rivers are important because they stand in for the points in my life when I turned inward. The rivers’ waters deliberate and quiet movement past these towns is a heavy-handed metaphor that could be used by a kid who out of choice and necessity decides that community is too hard to be part of because at his young age he hasn’t had the experience of being separated from it.

Tourist photos

2010-06-19T16:10:00.000-07:00

For your consideration, a couple of shots of the sky. Sunset photography is an overdone and over-maligned genre that I would like to contribute to. This photo was taken 20 minutes after midnight. I was washing dishes and looked up to see this. I ran upstairs like a first year photo student and started snapping.
Of course calling it sunset isn't exactly true, more like sun-sidle as that's all it does, creep its way north along the western mountains then creep its way south along the eastern mountains.

Cloud photography on the other hand is always worthwhile. The clouds were seen while looking south from The Dome. Another ride down today, but there's more to come on the ride later.

A learning curve for the socially awkward

2010-06-18T21:20:00.000-07:00

Below is a bit of context for the project so far. Written before the 3^rd hangover in 10 days (maybe after the second), before I hopped happily on the wagon, and before I decided – via the explanation below – that this project wouldn’t be about the residents of Dawson, it is a nice glimpse back to where I was in the early days. I'm down to 1 week left and am happy with the project so far. As the Prussian general, Helmuth von Moltke famously said, "No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy."

* * *

When I came here my plan was to consider community. Consider Dawson in relation to those other towns and villages that have carried me to this project, this sentence. But community is about, well, people and I have head-on avoided bringing the people of Dawson into the project. What they might give me, or more precisely, what I might take from them is a question of speculation. From a practical perspective, my conundrum is this: I go to a bar to chat with the more pickled locals but almost exclusively I sit in a corner, making ballpoint sketches of my beer. I am the predictable sketchbook nerd in this regard.

In one of the many ironies at play here, I seldom find moments of epiphany or revelation in the universe of the bar. Production – drawing – is my best option and my best defence.

There are conversations to be had if I will engage them. Instead I continue to hold conversations with the land. But the land offers no conversations. The land tells you something and you respond but that response is rhetorical, unwanted even. I am not telling nature anything it doesn’t already know.

The land doesn't require anything from me. Or what it does require it doesn't negotiate.

It is always telling me about myself because I am always looking at it and it never repeats itself. My head is not down in a book while the thing I seek, the flawed brilliance of the drunk, circulates above my head.

Crossing

2010-06-15T22:13:00.000-07:00

The workers' orange baseball caps look from a distance like glowing orbs hovering just above the deck, weaving in and out of the few vehicles they can fit onto each crossing of the George Black ferry,.

***

Front Street passes through town from south to north, tracing the river and terminating at a gravel verge. In the winter an ice bridge does the duty of allowing travelers access to the Top of The World Highway and further on, Chicken, Alaska. But during the summer the George Black ferry acts as a bridge substitute. Watching these shuttle runs from the gravel dike the process is contemplatively mundane: Wait for vehicles, load the vehicles, cross the river, unload the vehicles. Wait for vehicles, load the vehicles, cross the river, unload the vehicles.

Walking along the 9^th Ave. trail and taking the fork up to the landslide north of town, you can pick your way across the scree and boulders, eventually clearing the debris. The second, older trail now works its way further north until interrupted by a smaller slide. From here the river crossing is laid out below to the South West and its story takes on a completely different tone.

Down at the crossing there seems equality to the dialogue between machine and nature. Perspective and scale make the river seem like a thin strip which the ferry slowly makes its way across as a negotiation. The current is strong with eddies swirling clockwise and counter-clockwise, but as it pulls out from the launch the ferry’s propellers kick up such a dervish of brown water as to give the sense of an even match.

Up here, below the peak of The Dome, looking down into the valley, the mass of water eclipses any question of negotiation. The Yukon River is a behemoth and can be nothing other than singular and irrevocable, doubtless and ruthless.

Pulling out from the Eastern shore the ferry briefly runs northwest with the current as it heads into the river’s centre. Having gained room and space it makes a hard left, turning south southwest – any attempt to go cross-current would land it half a kilometer downriver.

As it pivots, the George Black momentarily becomes still. Save for the sound of its engine echoing up the valley wall it seems to be held in a fleeting moment of stasis, a pocket of both water and time. Acknowledging the power and grace of this moment it pauses and then slowly creeps forward, making its way against the currents. It never regains the speed of its initial departure, but instead comes in slowly, carefully aligning itself with the verge on the western shore.

One can only assume the men working this ferry are aware of the river’s gift to them, its permission given. Maybe they are passive in their understanding; Workers doing a job and recognizing this river requires constant vigilance. Perhaps though, with each crossing from east to west and west to east they feel proud, even blessed, to be held firm by such power.

***

It's evening now. The birds continue to sing, as they will all night long, the wasps buzz at the window though will fall silent as the temperature dips. The town is quiet though there is an occasional howl from the drunks down at The Pit. But behind these noises I can hear the drumming of an engine idling in the water, waiting for late night passengers and another chance to turn upstream.

Keeping it social

2010-06-14T23:12:00.000-07:00

Paraguay and Italy: 1 all.

I had the Sourdough Saloon (home of The Toe) to myself today... No Euros around except for when Paraguay scored and all of a sudden there appeared a German tourist with a point and shoot to take a photo of the goal on replay. And then he was gone. Another game another crappy Warsteiner which, it turns out, is the only non-alcoholic beer in this town. I might give it a pass tomorrow though I have, however, been considering the Warsteiner shandy option.

There was one other German who sidled up to me and asked, "Is this where Jack London drank whiskey?" I didn't know though I will ask tomorrow when North Korea play Brazil.

Today's production: 1 puppy, 1 backpack, 1 headstone. Tomorrow is a writing day but it also a back to the dump day to try and find a Yukon license plate for The Kid. I have some things to say about the ferry but not tonight.

I went out briefly tonight and walked straight into a conversation about the female equivalent of the bromance. I ordered a Warsteiner and did my part for gender specific lexicons but I should have just turned around.
Bromance, ugh. Let us speak of such things no more.

I just finished a tasty bowl of Corn Flakes and Life and am going to curl up in bed and watch an episode of Lost season 1. I do miss home but its markers, like cereal and Lost, as well as this blog, give me some sense of connection, false though they might be.

2 Wrongs Make a Right

2010-06-13T23:51:00.000-07:00

No meat and no alcohol. What kind of Yukon residency am I having? A good friend of mine once spent a year in Japan doing the time honoured ESL gig. She was a strict vegetarian and so spent a year having to work her way around fish. Years later she said that was a mistake and, at least in that case, moral inflexibility (of the kind I am practicing here) was a mistake. The Japanese do some pretty tasty stuff with fish just as I know Elk sausage is something special.

I have a new routine though. It started yesterday morning and I'm already calling it a routine. I Head over to The Downtown Hotel, order a very suspect 0% German beer (Warsteiner I believe) and watch The World Cup with the European tourists. I nurse my beer, work up a ballpoint-pen sketch of the bottle and watch the match. It's pretty alright and though we don't know each other, like the sports propagandists will tell you, football unites the world, or at least the out of town version of the world.

The locals don't seem to care all that much (or maybe they're taking advantage of the miracle of home TV) but as you'd imagine, the old worlders do. As mentioned previously some of 'em went so far as to take photos of the high Def TV mounted high on the wall each time Germany scored... which was often.

My day, as always, begins with breakfast cereal and for the next 11 days (until I leave) I think it'll begin with fake beer and overly enthusiastic Euros. That's the kind of Yukon residency I'm having.

The day's production.

2010-06-13T20:29:00.000-07:00

I started the day with some Germans, watching their country trounce the Aussies. I had a somewhat gross 0.0% beer, but it seemed more appropriate than tonic water.

After that I put my head down and painted. This isn't done most likely but I think it's 95% complete. Putting it here makes me feel more productive.

I give you: Judd Wood

Dump Day

2010-06-12T19:11:00.001-07:00

Today I rode out to the Dump. As a kid in the Kootenays, family dump trips were always an exciting adventure. Once we found a working colour TV and would occasionally see a black bear. Those memories were what compelled me to head out there today. All in all I'm glad I did. No bears and I brought nothing home except for 2 strands of yarn for Shannon. Dump yarn!

It was a tough call to go out today as England were playing the U.S. It's all okay as I'm watching the match as I type. Thanks CBC for on demand web World Cup

Grinding up, floating down

2010-06-11T19:24:00.000-07:00

The intermittent rains of the last few days have left a richness in the air that makes running an intoxicating pleasure. Mary Mcleod Rd. is a steep grade that starts near the back of the residency house and works its way up the side of Dome Mountain cresting at the rambling cemetery grounds. Those first 5 minutes are a grind but suffering up the rutted road trumps any happy hour G&T binge down in the town.

A coyote does its own run along the treeline north of the newest burial plots as the grade slackens and Mary McLeod Meets Dome rd. signaling the start of the downhill reward that will eventually loop back along the riverbank and into town.

As I write this I feel a slight giddiness about these runs. Running on and off for 20 years now, those at the age of nineteen were far and away the toughest of my life. In that liminal year between civilian and soldier, teen and juvenile-adulthood almost all the running was hard, fast and without respite. Just completing a run was often challenge enough. Battle School was no place for the faint of will and the ability to disconnect body from mind was a crucial survival skill.

Like all infantry schools, the physical space of CFB Wainwright has a hard anchoring locus, often built around the imposing indifference of a parade square. From this block of flat blackness platoons head out into the training area, paved roads giving way to oiled hardpack and then dirt roads rippling across the broken grasslands – puffs of dust circling low on the ground as they pass by. The occasional truck or APC passes the platoons and the candidates do their best to not mentally project themselves into the easy living of the passenger seat or crew compartment.

Spittle gather on the edges of their gaping mouths as they suck in as much dust-filled air as possible, focusing their blurring vision on the feet in front of them.

But these long ago sufferfests are just a context. It is the unknown periphery of CFB Wainwright that I am thinking about as I turn past the jutting cliff face to my right and onto the hardpack of Dawson. The small, functional homes I’m passing have qualities kindred to the PMQs of bases across Canada. Those post-war family dwelling are clustered dots on the base’s edge and feel like a mirage when your days are spent humping gear and weapons, living in a crucible of adrenaline and ache.

On our rare day off we might venture a run through these unknown zones feeling like the outsiders we surely were. Children run around in the small fenced yards while lines of laundry are dried by winds heading east across Central Alberta’s expansive grasslands, the nearby Saskatchewan border their next marker. Like most prairie living, domestic life perseveres and almost flourishes in spite of and because of the harshness all around.

Again an outsider, I run along Dawson’s 5^th Ave. wondering, where is the parade square, where are the chin-up bars and the quartermaster stores, where is the hard, defining heart of Dawson? This far north there must be a hardness and the characters wandering the streets affirm my belief. Hardness here is in the hills and rivers around town, in the camps and mines that I’ll likely never see but it is also held in the knuckles and fingertips of the guys downing draft at 10am or happy hour (5-7pm) on their day off, perhaps their last day off for some time to come.

One foot in front of the other. Each running step gives the briefest moment where the body floats above the ground. One shoe hits the ground, both shoe and ground compress and the tiniest portion of heel tread is left behind, embedded in the oiled dirt of this town that continues to offer small and suspect glimpses into the past.

Before the fall (or jump up)

2010-06-11T14:48:00.000-07:00

The boozin' is over. Soon I'll do some sketches of Tonic water bottles (the new beer) but for now an encapsulation of my first ten days. Most of my writing was done while nursing an afternoon bottle or pint so it had its merits.

Just so we are clear

2010-06-09T22:56:00.001-07:00

I miss you S. Gerard.

Some a the works

2010-06-09T15:07:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the painted work that I've been doing up here. Hopefully the desperate humour of the paintings works with the desperate contemplation of the writing. Who knows? Not me, not yet.

I give you: Hobo Hotel, Tree Cave and The Mattress Trailer

Swallows from the past (or maybe the future)

2010-06-08T20:49:00.000-07:00

The edge of the prairie around Wainwright has little in common with the mixed foliage of this Yukon valley. Similarities can be found in the air carrying the scent of an anonymous low, budded plant which is permanently affixed to my memories of Wainwright. The air similarly carries clusters of swallows who I yesterday watched diving into the river low and fast, pulling out of the upstream as soon as they were subsumed by it.

Today I am back by the river seeking them out. I find myself needing reason in a world which has temporarily and suddenly lost almost all such commodity. The Yukon flows as inevitably as ever and today the blue skies are returning. A swallow turns sharply and flies directly at my head followed by another, hot on its tail before they fly off, continuing their dogfight. These actions are likely a warning but I greet them with a grin, travelers acknowledging each other as they pass on a country road.

Years back in Wainwright, with the same smell in the air, I sat on the hull of an Armoured Personnel Carrier eating jam on stale crackers watching the long grass bend in agreement with the wind. The swallows were out flying low and fast, again upstream in the river of prairie grass. I followed one with my eyes, straining to pick it out as its form shrank into the distance and thought to myself, “I remember this feeling, remember being a swallow.” That twenty-year-old version of myself, almost impossible to see in me now, was often filled with rage, booze and frustration. On that day though I was imbued with a joy borne of absolute certainty.

Myself at twenty is now twenty years behind me and as I settle into this new decade I vainly hope the swallows of Dawson, like their Wainwright cousins, might offer a righted view of the world, a world which seems to have slipped of its axis.

Tonight the drunks of these two towns will stumble into the streets, mimicking a slow motion version of the seeming randomness of the swallow. Their worlds will take on the tilted, comforting haze of the immediate.

Don't read too much into this post

2010-06-07T18:42:00.000-07:00

Below the levee with the town out of view, I am down at the river. Such a massive and endless thing making so little noise. It glides by me as a trick, an impossibility. This morning the clouds hung so very low over the valley, submerging the tops of the mountains and appearing as the river’s nemesis or twin.

Yesterday, in my temporary cabin, away from my temporary residency, away from my home, I watched and listened to more TV than I’ve done all year and the subject of death was everywhere for me.

House, True Blood, Lost, something about Haitian Voodoo and Angel (on DVD) were my line-up. This morning Patrick Lane told me about the Red Squirrel in his yard. Three years of arguing between the two and Lane now holds this squirrel, victim of a car’s wheel, in his hand as it fades out.

My own fear of death has something to do with the loss of control, the same way turbulence terrifies me because I have no say in the equation. Surrendering control is not easy for me but the river has such certainty, is so sure of itself that it doesn’t need to say a word. The swallows dive in briefly, flying upstream, gulping in water, bugs, I know not what. They are fearless flyers.

I don’t believe the river but it assures me that one day I’ll come to terms with what it has to offer.

What's that noise?

2010-06-06T17:08:00.000-07:00

This morning I was awoken by an intermittent fading and lamenting electronic whine. At first I assumed it was Kerri’s (the other residency artist) alarm clock as it was coming from a distance and was intermittent. The noise of what could be described as a wounded cyborg wasn’t abating though, so I finally got up to check it out.

As it turns out the noise was the smoke alarm being activated by a burst water pipe in the ceiling, drowning the alarm and flooding the residency house. The good news is neither our work nor possessions was overly affected though there’s damage to the walls, floors and ceilings of the living room, kitchen and Kerri’s studio.

The scenario of waking up to a wounded cyborg and a subsequently raining ceiling is a little confounding at 6am on a Sunday morning but when all was said and done, the outcome could have been much worse.

We’re now out of the building and have been put up at individual cabins at The Triple J Hotel. The cabins are pretty cute with tiny kitchenettes and I have a table with a window at which to paint. The only down side is the lack of internet access, which I can only gain by sitting in the lobby of the hotel.

As I look out the window of my temporary new home I am slightly reminded of a WW2 era army training camp or high-end fruit pickers shacks in Kelowna. For example:

Work continues though as can be almost viewed by my sketch of Shannon in the above photo.

Now though, I’m heading back to the studio to collect my ziplock bag of Earl Grey tea. I have already brought the milk and cereal with me. Stability has almost been achieved.

C'mon, crumble

2010-06-05T20:46:00.000-07:00

It's worth emphasizing that these posts are works in progress, writing that I hope will one day constitute part of a book. But here and now they are attempts for me to understand where, and how, I am.
-----

While I’m in Dawson my partner Shannon is back at home drawing, crocheting, re-watching Lost, spending time with her friends. She is home.

The other night we were talking across these few time zones about the blog so far and what I am calling The Island of Toronto (not to be confused with The Toronto Islands). For myself this island starts as just that, the accumulated physical elements of the land, but land whose make-up has little connection to my previous homes. The smells, the terrain of Toronto – with occasional exceptions – are foreign… but then again the present is always foreign. When my family moved to Trail in 1979 both the land and the people were unrelentingly foreign but now that polluted town on The Columbia is part of my known terrain.

For Shannon though, this island of mine is emotional; a construction built from my lived past, starting with the pain and raw beauty of being a kid in The West Kootenays. It was only when I realized I had turned Toronto into an island that I began to address the many decisions, large and small, that over the years have moved me away from community.

I am here in Dawson, a town of around 2000 souls, in equal parts considering and ignoring the specifics of small town socialization that compelled me to come here in the first place.

I come here from Toronto, a city I love and am happy to be away from. My island of Toronto temporarily resides in the Yukon River. If I look out my window, past these ramshackle houses and down to the riverbank, I can see it looming and slowly, hopefully eroding from the sheer force of the water passing around it.

As goes the water

2010-06-03T11:34:00.000-07:00

A sad fact of my so-called cultural life is a slavish devotion to military non-fiction. When I sit, looking at the Yukon River I am reminded not only of The Columbia River, but also The Volga as it flows through the former Stalingrad. I’ve never been to Russia and my connection to that river is mostly through the writings of Vasily Grossman and Anthony Beevor. Grossman was Russia’s pre-eminent war correspondent during the apocalyptic battle for Stalingrad. Beevor is an outstanding contemporary writer on the same topic. I am surely getting off topic here, but the strength of their writing and, in this case, their descriptions of The Volga almost assure me that I’ve sat on the west bank where the Russians found themselves pushed almost into the river. Where, behind me on the flats of the eastern shore they assembled and fought back from the brink of destruction.

When I packed to come north though I made an effort to bring some divergent reading that has been sitting in the to-do pile for some time now. One of those books is Patrick Lane’s memoir, There is a Season:

Defined by its (overly?) poetic garden musings of the elderly Lane, there are also catalogues of the brutality of his youth in Vernon. Growing up in the BC interior can tend towards harshness and violence. The scale of our experiences differ, but if such violence stains youth – and it surely does – my experiences, like Lane’s are equivalently, brilliantly pinholed by the radiance of the natural.

Walking out our family’s backdoor in Montrose you would initially be greeted by the somewhat feral cherry trees that constituted the garden portion of our yard. The world of man swiftly gives way as the yard, with equal swiftness, tilts up onto a mountainside. There was no actual boundary to the yard and so in the spring I could walk from cherry blossoms and flowering dandelions up through birch and pine trees. Approaching the crest of the mountain, the grade settled to reveal a shallow and microcosmic marshland, and later the receding snowline as it made its last stand at the bases of the conifers.

Down in the village kids would gather at the western edge, where housing ceded to cliff faces and the only road down to The Columbia and the scorched earth of Trail. Here, on the edge of our redneck Shangri-la, we would lean over the road’s crumbling shoulder and fill ourselves on snow-melt as it came through moss and tumbled off rock faces. Those Spring-time satings remain one of my most cherished markers of spring and are the standard by which I judge all water that passes my lips.

On the bike

2010-06-01T16:36:00.000-07:00

In response to the previous post, I offer a small, and impossible to actually demonstrate, example of riding in Dawson. The principal point here: The is only up and down, there is (almost) no coast. For those in the know, a 160mm front disc brake is not enough, no sir. I almost never pick up any appreciable speed as I'm either grinding up a paved road to reach the trails or grinding the brakes on rooty, rock-filled trails that care not a whit for me being on 2 wheels. I ride by myself as I prefer it that way, but also I don't think there any any serious riders here who have grown pubic hair (apologies if you fit into both categories). A couple of times I've walked a section, not because I couldn't conceivably manage it, but the consequences when alone are just not worth the risk (or maybe I'm just lame). Here are th'photos:

Below, I try to take a shot while riding along a cutline. The actual trail is up ahead.

You'll note my name and the Beatrix Potter characters.

Some fancy depth of field action as I take a break from the hairyness.

Looking back up the trail. The seat is that far down for a reason.

Once more, down.

Thanks Monika and Jonah for getting the scoop on Dawson's trails. And thanks to Kale for ordering the many parts and super sweet frame that I'm taking advantage of. The frame is great (as I hope the painting is).

Not long until Happy Hour.

When I ride alone I prefer to be by myself

2010-06-01T16:29:00.000-07:00

The sound of a kid's scooter careening along the long, planked sidewalks of Dawson sounds like distant thunder or a cargo plane echoing off the mountains. I hope I evoke a similarly grand sound as I pedal along.

* * *

I wish my friends – the ones would appreciate the rambling, collapsing bars and their denizens but mostly the landscape (ie hairy-ass downhill rides) – were here to see this place and share in the giddiness of not flying over the bars on trails were you are never not braking.

There is, however, good reason that Chris McCandless is my favourite literary character and failed hero. The truth is I don't need my friends; don't really feel the absence of my attempts at building a community back home. I am happy to ride alone and not share the fear, the cackles of joy as I don't hurtle ass over teakettle down a trail definitely not meant for bikes (or even for hikes).

I am happy to sit by myself all day long, to write and paint (and ride) and think about myself on what constitutes the edge of my known world. I am here to strike it rich and just like the early days of the gold rush, this is something best done alone.

Thankfully my friends already know this about me.

Down to the River

2010-05-31T20:53:00.000-07:00

Those feelings of mutability while sitting on the river bank, they are my present, they are me and as I get older the repetition, the continuity, become ever more dominant. I become my own relationship to the past. This moving present becomes less and less of an unknown.

Little here seems new to me, except the buildings: in collapse or on display,
and the curiosities: Goat Coat, Sour Toe shooters, Hobo Hotel and ample supplies of stable milk.

Everything else is a welcome echo, especially the smells. Pine and scrub grass, smoke in the air, rain on the oil soaked dirt roads; Cornwallis, the Okanagan, the West Kootenays and Wainwright, all are present here. The land echoes the past and all those other rural, removed places.

The Westminster

2010-05-31T14:42:00.000-07:00

For your consideration: A few shots from in and outside the Westminster hotel. The Hobo Hotel seems ideally placed for those nights when the stumble home is just too much to contemplate. As well, a trailer full of mattresses is really just a trailer full of possibilities.

From inside: The Snakepit TV cabinet... the Wooden Cobra.

and birchbark canoe

And though this little fella is found at a gift shop he looks like he could use (or has used) a few pints

The Dead part 2

2010-05-30T17:19:00.000-07:00

This marks my second day in a row of me being hung-over. This ends now I think. Back to my afternoon tipple only. I did get to wear the Goat Coat last night though. Hooves and all, but no photos.

At least it's easy to work off the booze; Mountains are handy for that. This morning I went for a boot around the base of the Dome and found various items of interest that fit nicely into my newly decided upon theme.

Graves, it seems, are all over the place here. Step off the trail and there's a mound with a body several feet under the surface.

Further along the 9th Ave. trail I came across this little gem of an abandoned, collapsed abode. The trail is called 9th ave because decades ago Dawson stretched up the mountainside. With the collapse of the Gold rush, the town shrunk, leaving bodies, houses and roads to fend for themselves.

Treecave!

And, the last vestige of snow in town:

Guys, where are we?

2010-05-30T17:05:00.000-07:00

I find myself struck by the mutability of this northern reach. Instead of arriving to an unknown landscape, of tundra and receding snow lines, my sense is of having experienced this place before.

Sitting on a bench, 500 or so feet past the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers, on the shoreline I feel the most unsure. Part of my reason for coming here was to consider my youth in small town (village actually) West Kootenays and the weight of experience those years gave me. The slow turning of the Yukon River then, deep and deceivingly fast under the surface offers teleportation most effectively. Behemoth, that’s you.

Flowing north seems wrong, like backwards through some very cold time. Backwards to the awesomeness of fishing for Rainbow Trout on The Columbia River and the wretchedness of school bus stop beatings. Of terror and power.

The Columbia always seemed at odds with the dead landscape of Trail, rushing its occupants through to escape the ill will of the slopes poisoned by the massive refinery on the river’s shore. While Dawson and its architecture are rooted in the very specific lineage of gold (Trail was Lead and Zinc), it’s this, the landscape which is a chameleon, changing to accommodate my past, putting me a bit on my heels.

But unsurity is part of the residency experience – a challenge to produce something coherent when coherence comes only from the accumulation of these fractures.

The Dead

2010-05-28T16:14:00.000-07:00

Where to begin?
With a mediocre Americano I suppose.

Actually, in answer to the question of darkness, here's a photo out of my bedroom at 2am, taken after getting back from a ride around town at 1am. It's really quite weird as it feels like daytime but there are so few people around. Perhaps there's a flesh eating plague keeping folk inside. On the other hand, when you see 9 year old kids wandering the streets at midnight, well, that seems kinda weird too.

After the coffee I hopped back on the bike to check out the cabins of the Illuminati/literati. In the case of Dawson, that's Jack London and "a cat named Bobby Service". Both places have grass roofs and even if there are currently no goats manicuring them, they're still pretty sweet little abodes.

First is Robert Service:

And Jack London, who is cooler than Service in the he-man cabin contest because he has a stilt house (used for keeping bears and hobos away from his furs and meat).

This was a pretty filled day for me. After the mad trappers of literature I rode up The Dome, stopping first at the cemetery area. The area has divisions for various faiths and affiliations such as Catholic, Jew and cop. Also YOOP.

Many of the grave markers are seemingly ad-hoc, but like much around Dawson, the necessities of Northern living generate resourceful and unexpected results. The first thing that strikes Big city folk (I suppose) is the wood markers that are completely effaced by time and the weather.

Steel piping is standard fare up here too. Many of the graves use it as a fence.

If you don't like thinking about dead kids, skip ahead.
There are quite a few tiny graves up here, again in various states of repair and making good use of whatever's available.

... 3 days old. sigh.

That's it for now. There's more dead folk to come. For now though, I'm off to The Pit. In my years of drinking there are a few standout (and falldown) joints. Walt's Place in Rainier Washington, The Wainwright Hotel in Wainwright AB, The (late, great) 'Wick in London ON, perhaps The Communist's Daughter in TO and now The Snakepit

Come with me, if you will

2010-05-27T16:17:00.000-07:00

Day 2 and I spent a fitful night's sleep worrying that I hadn't produced any work in my 12 hours here. That would be really lame if it didn't summarize my personality so nicely.

This morning (well, morning, afternoon and evening are more or less the same, differing only in temperate, not light) I wandered around, stewing over project ideas and taking shots of architecture. For your consideration, I offer: a selected number of highlights.
Starting off with a lie, this photo of a local telephone pole wasn't really taken today, but was taken at midnight last night. I guess that's today though, and yeah, day or night, little difference.

I suppose I should do some research on these buildings, but for now, here's a nice abandoned ochre structure down on the riverfront.

How's about some birds? Swallows in fact, nesting in the eaves of another building.

And in closing, a tree house. Pretty sweet.

Here we go

2010-05-26T20:18:00.000-07:00

I've been here in Dawson for about 10 hours and so far I've done one lame drawing, assembled my bike (and stripped the head of my stem bolt), gone for a run, had a Yukon Amber Ale and made dinner from items left here by previous residency artists. Except for the crappy drawing, not a bad day so far.

There's no real night and in about 4 weeks the sun won't actually set at all. The birds seemingly love it as they sing all night long. Last night I was in Whitehorse (somewhere around 600K south of here) and I woke up at 3am to the sound of birds singing in the twilight.

I have no photos of birds singing in the twilight so for now, a shot out the window of my studio. There is one bird, perhaps a Red-Winged Blackbird, singing as I type this period.