Friday, June 25, 2010
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Welcome to the end
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.
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.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Mastodons
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.
* * *
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
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.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Old haunts for new birds
“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
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.
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.
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