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