Eighteen Bridges - Spring 2013

featurinG
Don Gillmor
Lynn Coady
Marcello Di Cintio
Elizabeth Philips
Daniel Baird
Barry Dempster
Paul Matwychuk
Jane Silcott
SPRING 2013
Stories That Connect
$7.95
DOWNHILL
RACERS

THREE
RING
CIRCuS
MAN DOWN!
CHRONICLING THE END Of THE PATRIARCHy
Skiing into
Middle Age
A Palestinian
Juggling Act
Plus
New
fiction
from
Alex
Pugsley
Wherever youre writing from...
Eleven Genres Of Study | On-Campus or Online | Flexible, Comprehensive, Challenging
Write and learn on our breathtaking campus in Vancouver,
Canada, one of the worlds most livable cities. Or participate in a
vibrant online community from wherever you live. UBC, ranked in
the global top forty universities, ofers world-class creative writing
programs at the BFA and MFA level, on-campus and by Distance
Education. Weve been doing it for 50 years now.
Join us.
Faculty
Deborah Campbell
Steven Galloway
Sara Graefe
Wayne Grady
Annabel Lyon
Keith Maillard
Maureen Medved
Susan Musgrave
Andreas Schroeder
Linda Svendsen
Peggy Thompson
Rhea Tregebov
Bryan Wade
www.creativewriting.ubc.ca
Ten I did some of my best writing. A house on
stilts on Maraj island, where the Amazon meets
the sea. Tere was a rubber tree inside the house,
and the waves were red at high tide. Ayahuasca
had something to do with it.
- Samuel Veissiere
I write a lot on the subway using my iPhone,
on the A-train between West 4th and Lincoln
Center, listening to a man in a tinfoil hat
expound on the joys of no longer having to
hear the aliens.
- Chris Tarry
When the weathers polite, I write from a garden
shed in our back yard afectionately known as the
Paperback Shack. Its less than 8 by 10, wired for
light, with the inside painted the blue of a blind
ponys eye.
- Katherin Edwards
UBC Creative Writing
000EB6-UBC-FP.indd 1 2/27/13 2:00:16 PM
WWW. ei GHteenBri DGeS. COM ei GHteen Bri DGeS SPRING 2013
i S S u e 6
S P r i n G 2 0 1 3
HuManKinD
The Descent of Man
Middle age, climate change, and the end of skiing.
On tHe reCOrD
Twilight of the Patriarchs
Dont expect them to go quietly.
tHe MeMOir BanK
In The Chair
Clippings from around the world.
Don Gillmor
Curtis Gillespie 40
featureS
Action Transfers Alex Pugsley 48
fiCtiOn
30 Lynn Coady
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion,
and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.
e. M. fOrSter, Howards End
22
Cover photo BLuefiSH StuDiOS
Marcello Di Cintio
Alexis Kienlen
07
11
SPan
Jane Silcott 14
ei GHteen Bri DGeS SPRING 2013 WWW. ei GHteenBri DGeS. COM
Juggling Act
Its a circus in the Middle East. Literally.
Shut Eye
Now I lay me down to sleepI hope.
Everything Rustles
Taking back the night.
itS tHe LaW
Buyer, Be Warned
What warning labels are really telling you.
Can
Icons: Sasquatch Clive Holden 27

Jam Pearls
Making it new.
Espresso 2.0
Coffee culture and its dregs.
What Art Is for
A dispatch from the galleries of Kyrgyzstan.
The Nightmarish World Of Oz
Why is everything about The Wizard of Oz so terrifying?
Daniel Baird
59
SOunDinGS
57
Scott Messenger 55
A Bridge To The Past
The lost isthmus of Pender Island.
Sarah Shewchuk 66
BriDGeS
Jennifer Cockrall-King
Bottles
Coping
Proof
White Pansy, 1927 Georgia OKeeffe
Jennifer Still
POetrY
Elizabeth Philips
Barry Dempster
Sue Goyette
12
35
52
16
63 Paul Matwychuk
MiSCeLLanY
Can
Icons: Politeness 43
Solo Show: Room 62 Sean Caulfeld 62
S
e
a
n

C
a
u
l
f
e
l
d
Richard Haigh 20
i S S u e 6
S P r i n G 2 0 1 3
EDITOR
Curtis Gillespie
SENIOR EDITOR
Lynn Coady
CONSuLTING EDITOR
Paul Wilson
MANAGING EDITOR
Sarah Shewchuk
ASSISTANT EDITOR
Connie Howard
GuEST POETRy EDITOR
Elizabeth Philips
DEPT. Of fACTuALITy
Head: Craille Maguire Gillies
Body: Michelle Kay
M. Jay Smith
Wajiha Suboor
CONTRIBuTING EDITORS
Deborah Campbell
Marcello Di Cintio
Craille Maguire Gillies
Lisa Gregoire
Bruce Grierson
Alex Hutchinson
Marni Jackson
Lisa Moore
Timothy Taylor
Chris Turner
CONSuLTING PuBLISHERS
Joyce Byrne
Ruth Kelly
ART DIRECTOR
Kim Larson
WEBSITE
Gunnar Blodgett
uNIvERSITy Of ALBERTA LIAISON
Marie Carrire/Daniel Laforest
BuSINESS MANAGER
Tiiu Vuorensola
Eighteen Bridges ISSN 1927-9868 is a
not-for-proft magazine published through the
Canadian Literature Centre at the University
of Alberta, 3-5 Humanities, University of Alberta
Edmonton, AB T6G 2E5 Canada.
The production and design of Eighteen Bridges,
along with publishing consultation, is provided
by Venture Publishing Inc. Occasionally,
Eighteen Bridges makes its subscriber list
available to like-minded magazines for one-time
mailings. Please contact us if you would not like to
receive these mailings. Subscriptions are four issues
for $25.95 plus GST. To inquire about advertising,
subscriptions and back issues, contact
ebmag@ualberta.ca or visit eighteenbridges.ca
All contents copyright 2013 and may not
be reproduced without the permission
of Eighteen Bridges.
PM 40020055
* put FSC LOGO HERE
Featuring
Multidisciplinary Visual Art & Design Exhibits and
Presentations Exploring Human Energy
Stage & Screen presentation opportunities
Contact amber.rooke@theworks.ab.ca
www.theworks.ab.ca
the works art & design festival
june 20th july 2, 2013
churchill square & around downtown
CONTRIBuTORS
DANIEL BAIRD is a Toronto-based writer on art, culture, and
ideas. His last piece for Eighteen Bridges was Photography,
Then and Now in the Winter 2012 issue.
LyNN COADy is a writer and editor whose latest novel, The
Antagonist, has been published this spring in the US by Alfred
A. Knopf. Her collection of short fction called Hellgoing will be
published by House of Anansi in Canada in fall 2013.
JENNIfER COCKRALL-KING is a writer from Edmonton who
travelled Cuba, Europe, Canada, and the US for her new book
Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New
Food Revolution.
BARRy DEMPSTER, twice nominated for the Governor Generals
Award, is the author of fourteen poetry collections. In 2010, he
was a fnalist for the Ontario Premiers Award for Excellence in
the Arts. A new book of poetry and a novel will be published
this coming October.
MARCELLO DI CINTIO has written for numerous magazines,
journals, and newspapers, including the Walrus, EnRoute,
and the Globe and Mail. He is the author of three books,
most recently Walls: Travels Along the Barricades, which
was the 2012 winner of the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for
Political Writing.
CuRTIS GILLESPIE is editor of this magazine.
SuE GOyETTE lives in Halifax. Her fourth book of poems, Ocean,
is forthcoming from Gaspereau Press this spring.
RICHARD HAIGH is a professor at Osgoode Hall law school.
He researches and writes in the area of constitutional law.
A few of our contributors
pg 22
DON GILLMOR is a Toronto-
based journalist and writer.
His most recent novel is Mount
Pleasant.
pg 48
ALEX PuGSLEy is a writer and
flm-maker originally from
Nova Scotia. Recently he won
the Writers Trust McClelland
& Stewart Journey Prize for
fction.
And the rest of them
CLIvE HOLDEN is best known for two multi-disciplinary art
projects: Trains of Winnipeg (2001 to 2006), and the ongoing
U Suite (2006 to 2020). Born and raised on Vancouver Island,
he splits his time between there and Toronto.
ALEXIS KIENLEN is the author of two poetry collections,
She Dreams in Red and 13. She currently works as
an agricultural journalist and lives in Edmonton.
PAuL MATWyCHuK is the general manager of NeWest Press
in Edmonton, as well as the flm and theatre reviewer for
Edmonton AM on CBC Radio. His blog The Moviegoer can
be found at mgoer.blogspot.com.
SCOTT MESSENGER lives in Edmonton, where hes a full-time
writer and communications specialist, and part-time musician.
ELIzABETH PHILIPS is the author of four collections of poetry.
Her most recent collection, Torch River, was released by
Brick Books in 2007. She is working on a novel, and plans to
write a book about dogs called They Dont Call Them Bitches
for Nothing.
SARAH SHEWCHuK recently completed a PhD in Comparative
Literature at the University of Alberta. She is the Managing
Editor at Eighteen Bridges and the Research Coordinator at
the University of Albertas Canadian Literature Centre/Centre
de littrature canadienne.
JENNIfER STILL is the winner of the 2012 Banff Centre Bliss
Carman Poetry Award and the 2012 John Hirsch Award for
Most Promising Manitoba Writer. Her second collection of
poems, Girlwood (Brick Books, 2011), was nominated for
the 2012 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.
pg 14
JANE SILCOTTs frst book, a
collection of personal essays
titled Everything Rustles (after
the essay appearing here),
will be published this spring
with Anvil Press. Jane lives
in Vancouver with her family
and teaches for UBCs Writing
Centre and SFUs Southbank
Writing Program.
SPAN
Reporting back
met Nayef Othman in front of a Mon-
treal Metro station last September.
Othman had been training with the
National Circus School for just over a
month and I asked him how he was enjoy-
ing Canada. It is cold, he said. I told him
to wait until winter came. We wandered
until we found a small bar where we could
talk, and I noticed that even as he shiv-
ered his way through a neighborhood
still mostly unfamiliar to him, Othman
walked with the sort of muscular con-
fidence certain athletes and dancers
possess. I noticed, too, that hed kept
the stubbled buzz-cut he and his fellow
circus performers favoured when Id met
them a few months earlier in Palestine.
Othmans shaved head made him look
even stronger and more streamlined, but
as we walked I suggested he let his hair
grow. What works in a hot Palestinian
summer might not suit ones frst winter
in Montreal.
Othman is the head trainer at the
Palestine Circus School (PCS), and
hes currently spending a year honing
his skills as a teacher of the circus arts
at Montreals National Circus School.
He is also learning to guide students
through the process of creating perfor-
mance, promoting their physical and
psychological development, and using
the circus for social education. Othmans
training in Montreal is intense. By the
time he completes the course, he will
have endured more than 700 hours of
instruction, much of it physically demand-
ing. He plans to return to Palestine in
the fall to teach new circus artists what
hes learned. The circus, he believes,
can arm young Palestinians with new
weapons in their struggle for identity and
dignity. The circus is a kind of fghting, t
h
o
m
a
s
@
o
u
t
o
f
f
o
c
u
s
.
b
e
JuGGLING ACT
Its a circus in the Middle East. Literally.
I
he told me. We are creating an army,
a culture army, non-violent, of open-
minded people.
More than this, though, he hopes the
circus will provide Palestinians with an
alternative language, a language with-
out words, that they can use to tell their
story. For decades, Palestinians have
been ill-served by the scripts written for
them. Negotiations and international
agreements have done little to nudge the
idea of a Palestinian state towards reality.
United Nations resolutions in their favour
have been ignored. Speeches and slogans
come up empty. Palestinians have grown
weary of the illusion that words matter.
Its little wonder, then, that they yearn for
a more trustworthy form of expression.
Which is why some have turned from the
failure of words to the muscle-and-bone
honesty of the circus.
SHADI zMORROD, THE CO-fOuNDER Of THE PCS,
studied theatre as a young man. In
response to the cheapening of written
text, Zmorrod started to examine perfor-
mance based on physical improvisation
rather than on written scripts. I realized
how important it was to forget about the
text and focus on the body, he told me
in a recent interview in Birzeit, a village
not far f rom Ramal l ah. Begi nni ng
i n 2000, Shadi conducted physical
theatre workshops in Jerusalem, Gaza,
and the West Bank, as well as abroad
in Europe and North Africa. In each
workshop, Zmorrod touted the primacy
of the body and the spontaneous emotion
of the performer. What I feel at this mo-
ment, I present.
Zmorrods work attracted the atten-
tion of the Jerusalem Circus Association,
an Israeli circus troupe, who asked him
to join them. Zmorrod hesitated at frst.
It was 2002, during the most violent days
of the Second Intifada, and Zmorrod had
vowed to boycott any work with Israelis.
Still, the offer intrigued him from a theat-
rical perspective. While traditional circus
thrills audiences with animal acts, clown
antics, and feats of daring, contemporary
circus artists tell stories. But instead of
words, they speak the language of jug-
gling and acrobatics, of Chinese poles,
teeter-boards, and aerial silks. And they
express a kind of physical truth. Rather
than a representation, circus artists
exemplify their own individual realities.
They embody their own bodies. The cir-
cus appealed to Zmorrods philosophy of
scriptless physical performance.
Zmorrod thought, too, that working
with the Israel i ci rcus could bri ng
Jewish and Palestinian performers to-
gether and might advance the cause of
peace, at least in a small and symbolic
way. Zmorrod had seen this sort of thing
work elsewhere. Hed held workshops
abroad that used theatre to unite other
traditional enemies. Turks and Greeks.
Iraqis and Iranians. Even warring ethnic
groups i n Sudan.I t hought , Why
wouldnt it work here?
IT DIDNT WORK AT ALL. THE ISRAELIS DIDNT
concern t hemsel ves wi t h peace,
Zmorrod said. In the eighteen months
he spent with the circus, the directors
refused to perform shows in Palestinian
neighborhoods or teach Arab children
in East Jerusalem. Then, without telling
Zmorrod, the ci rcus brought a ten-
year-old Palestinian boy to perform at a
commemoration of the Holocaust in Berlin.
That a boy who lived under Israeli oc-
cupation should be used as a prop to
memorialize a tragedy suffered by his
occupiers, and to suggest a peaceful
coexistence that was inherently false,
proved too much for Zmorrod. The kid
used to sell chewing gum with his broth-
ers at Israeli checkpoints to make money
for the family, he says. Zmorrod left
the company.
I was able to reach Elisheva Yortner,
the former director of the Jerusalem Cir-
cus, and she called Zmorrods accusa-
tions lies and pure invention. She also
added that it was Zmorrods international
funders who encouraged and invited him
to tell a story of struggling in the face of
darkness, meaning, one could presume,
that she felt Zmorrod was engaged in
constructing a narrative for himself and
the circus rooted in Israeli suppression
and betrayal. She labelled it the narra-
tive of his Palestinian Heroism and
the ugly Zionist face of the Jerusalem
Circus. We were communicating by
e-mail, but I could almost see the shoul-
der shrug as Yortner added that she also
understands this sort of storytelling,
calling it the rules of the game in order to
get budget.
Zmorrods brief cooperation with the
Israelis did not, therefore, result in the
sort of small-scale reconciliation hed
hoped for, but the experience neverthe-
less endeared him to the circus arts. He
believed that teaching circus could be-
stow dignity and hope to the children of
Palestine, and so he moved to Ramallah
to gather support and international fund-
ing for a wholly Palestinian circus. In
August 2006, Zmorrod and his partner,
Jessika Devlieghere, opened the Palestin-
ian Circus School. It was a hot summer. Is-
raeli warplanes were bombing Hezbollah
targets in Lebanon, and the war tight-
ened security measures throughout the
West Bank. Most of the European trainers
Zmorrod had invited to the circus open-
ing were too afraid to come. The timing
seemed terrible. Looking back, though,
Zmorrod believes the circus birthing
pains forced the company to be self-reli-
ant from the start. We learned to do ev-
erything by ourselves, he said.
Zmorrods fellow Palestinians were
wary of the project at frst. All they knew
of the circus was what theyd seen on
television. They pictured elephants and
lion tamers and, worst of all, girls clad
in sequined bikinis dangling from a tra-
pezethe sort of thing no Palestinian
Instead of words, they speak the language
of juggling and acrobatics.
family would want for their daughters.
The original challenge was proving that
we could have a circus while respecting
the culture, traditions, and religion in
Palestine, Zmorrod said. Their first
production, Circus Behind the Wall,
reassured the Palestinian audiences. The
show used trapeze, acrobatics, juggling,
aerial silk performance, and other circus
skillsbut no wordsto tell narratives
of two sisters and two lovers separated by
Israels wall around the West Bank. The
show endeared the circus to the wider
Palestinian community. People saw that
circus could tell the Palestinian story,
Zmorrod says.
Soon word of the Palestine Circus
School drifted into the circus tents of
Europe. Clowns and circus artists from
Holland, Denmark, Italy, Australia and
elsewhere visited Palestine to run work-
shops or collaborate with the PCS on
performances. So have the multinational
members of Clowns Without Borders.
The PCS has, in turn, sent members
beyond Palestines disputed borders
to perform and t rai n i n Germany,
Belgium, Denmark, and France. And
Canada. With the support of the inter-
national circus community, and with an
ambition Zmorrod admits is near cra-
zy, the PCS plans on earning recogni-
tion within the next few years as the
worlds twelfth accredited professional
circus school.
For the first few years, the circus
lacked a permanent home. The company
moved between a couple of theatres in
Ramallah, a garage in an industrial zone
of al-Bireh, and a space at a technology
centre run by Christian Evangelicals. In
2011, the PCS finally moved into more
permanent digs, a restored historical
building in Birzeit. The PCS, though,
reaches far beyond their white-stone
headquarters. Trainers run workshops
for children in Jenin, Hebron, Bethlehem
and in refugee camps. Their Mobile
Circus brings performances to audiences
throughout the West Bank. Most other
Palestinian cultural eventsconcerts,
poetry readings, and art exhibitsoccur
only in Ramallah and cater to the citys
upper-middle-class. By bringing circus
to the oft-forgotten hinterlands, and by
offering performances that are almost
always free, Zmorrod has created one of
Palestines truly democratic art forms.
Nayef Othman joined the PCS in
2007. The circus discovered him tending
bar in the lounge above Ramallahs Al-
Kasaba Theatre, which they were using
at the time as a rehearsal space. Othman
used to watch the performers practise
before his bartending shifts. He was born
and raised in the al-Faras refugee camp,
and like many from the camps who grow
up with little access to culture or contact
with wider Palestinian society, Oth-
man was timid and introverted. Before
circus, I wasnt in an open mind, he told
me when I frst met him in Birzeit before
he travelled to Montreal. I was a very
shy person. I was shy with strangers. I
didnt talk with girls.
The circus fascinated him, however,
and Zmorrod invited Othman to join
them. He proved to be a natural and Zmor-
rod offered Othman a position as the
circus frst full-time paid trainer. Othman
excelled at the physical elements of the
circus and quickly evolved into one of
the companys most skilled performers.
But what most impressed Zmorrod was
Othmans gift for inspiring young people.
Othmans infuence on Palestinian chil-
dren, and the infuence of the school as
a whole, has been extraordinary. What-
ever initial misgivings parents might
have harboured about the circus faded in
the face of the gains their children made
in the care of Zmorrod and Devliegh-
ere (Papa and Mama Circus, as they are
known), and trainers like Othman.
When I started in Hebron, the kids
were throwing the juggling balls, Zmor-
rod said. But after two or three months
of circus training, these same children
started to say sorry and please and
thank you. As they learned to juggle
diablos and do handstands, the children
also learned about teamwork, confdence,
and self-esteem. Their grades improved.
They even stopped littering.
And they dont buy Israeli products,
Zmorrod added. Third on a list of eleven
rules taped to a bulletin boardright
after respect and communicate and
listen when somebody speaks and keep
a clean environmentis a mandate to
shun anything produced in Israel. The
confict infltrates every aspect of Pales-
tine life and is impossible to avoid, even
among the bright innocence of the uni-
cycles and coloured juggling clubs. The
PCSs formerly warm relationship with
Montreals Cirque du Soleil soured last
summer when the Cirque disregarded
their calls to boycott Israel and performed
in Tel Aviv. Cirque du Soleil, in a gesture
of consolation, offered Zmorrods stu-
dents and trainers free tickets to their
show in Jordan and accommodation in
Amman. Zmorrod turned them down.
Our dignity comes frst, he says. I do
not want pity for the Palestinians.
In Montreal, Othman told me he
couldnt wait to go home to Palestine.
It had nothing to do with the cold, but
with his yearning to continue his work
with Palestinian children, especially
those who, like him, come from refugee
camps. The circus offers these children
something productive, and protects
them from despair and humiliation.
The Israelis want you to throw stones,
Othman told me. And why do you have
to give them what they want? Instead
of going to the checkpoint and selling
chewing gum, come to the circus and
well teach you how to play with diablos.
Instead of going on the street and throw-
ing stones, well teach you to play with
juggling balls.
Marcello Di Cintio
As they learned to juggle diablos and do handstands, the children
also learned about teamwork, confdence, and self-esteem.
000EB6-TheNub-FP.indd 1 2/27/13 2:09:42 PM
WWW. ei GHteenBri DGeS. COM ei GHteen Bri DGeS SPRING 2013 11
SHuT EyE
Sleep, Dont Fail Me Now
ve always been envious of people who
say they fall asleep easily. The lucky
ones who have never had insomnia, who
sleep on planes, whove never needed
to take a sleeping pill. If you tell such
people about your nights spent staring at
the ceiling, hours spent checking the
clock or pacing the hallways, headaches
from lack of sleep, they will blink, stare
at you, and shake their heads. It all start-
ed early. When I was a child, I would occa-
sionally throw temper tantrums so I could
exhaust myself enough to fall asleep.
At a young age, I remember telling my
mother I wished she would just hit me
over the head to knock me unconscious.
During Girl Guides camp, I sat awake in
the tent, reading by a fashlight, listening
to the sounds of snoring all around me.
Now, Ill go through periods of sleep-
ing well and then my insomnia will resur-
face. I could have a problem sleeping if
someone looks at me the wrong way. Im
affected by disturbing movies or books,
too much caffeine, inadequate exercise,
working after dinner, noise, light in the
room, stress, personal problems, and
temperatures that are too hot or too cold.
Over the years, Ive had to call in sick to
jobs not because I was actually sick, but
because I was exhausted. Guided medita-
tions, warm baths, hot milk, aromathera-
py, and enough sleep-inducing herbal tea
to fll a tea shopIve tried them all.
Not that it helps much, but Im not
alone. Statistics Canada reports that
approximately 3.3 million Canadians
over the age of ffteen have a sleep disor-
der that affects their physical or mental
health. Insomnia is the most common,
but other disorders include sleep apnea,
sleepwalking, sleep paralysis, and rest-
less leg syndrome. Dr. Ruth Benca, the
director of the Wisconsin Sleep Labora-
tory and Clinic, has called insomnia a
serious medical condition linked to
depression, diabetes, hypertension,
drug abuse, and death. My own insomnia
worsened in 2008 when I took a job work-
ing from homethere was no longer any
separation between work life and home
life. As a classic A-type personality, my
head is always filled with ideas for sto-
ries, questions I need to research, to-do
lists. Working from home meant my off
switch was permanently set to on. The
I
12 ei GHteen Bri DGeS SPRING 2013 WWW. ei GHteenBri DGeS. COM
solution seemed to be sleeping pills and,
perhaps predicatably, it wasnt long be-
fore I was dependent.
I clearly remember the first time I
used Zoplicone. I felt a deep, calm relief.
I could knock myself out and avoid the
torment of lying in bed for hours. I didnt
have to worry, or concentrate, or try to do
all the other things I needed to do to get
to sleep. I just took a pill. The writer Nic
Sheff, a meth addict, wrote in his mem-
oir, Tweaked, that the frst time he tried
crystal meth, he felt like he had found
the answer to all his problems. I felt the
same way about sleeping pills. But then
I couldnt stop. If I didnt use the pills, I
couldnt sleep. When I accidentally ran
out one day, the idea of trying to go to
sleep without sleeping pills sent me into a
panic. An addiction to any drug can take
over every moment of a persons life, and
I devoted a lot of time to worrying about
my pills. But after several long months of
addiction, I eventually managed to wean
myself off the pills; now Im an occasional
user on guard against habit.
But I do wonder if sleep dysfunction
isnt a direction too many of us are headed.
Our fast-paced, screen-friendly culture
is affecting many of us in our pursuit of
sleep. The current emphasis on speed,
getting more done, and being constantly
plugged in has disconnected us from one
of our most fundamental biological func-
tions. Sometimes it seems I cant go a day
without talking to someone who is hav-
ing trouble sleeping. Its as if weve for-
gotten how to be in touch with our own
bodies. Have we lost the simple ability to
recognize whats supposed to happen at
the end of our day?
In the summer of 2012, I attended
a journalism conference in Sweden as
part of a group of eleven other young
journalists from around the world. I
was prepared for room sharing but not
bed sharing. My bed-mate (on a queen-
sized bed) turned out to be an Argentin-
ian journalist, who was, luckily, consid-
erate and a daily bather, though it still
remained quite uncomfortable. I took
sleeping pills every night just to knock
myself out. The only person in our group
at ease with the arrangement was a
Slovenian journalist who said this kind
of thing was common in her country. But
for those of us from Germany, Ireland,
South Af rica, Austral ia, the United
Kingdom, and Argentinaand Can-
adasleeping in such close quarters
was awkward.
But it did make me wonder if the
discomfort that comes from sleeping in
close quarters was particular to the west-
ern world and, further, if our problem
with sleeplessness is a North American
or western condition. My experiences
in the developed world have rarely in-
cluded sleeping in close quarters, but
Ive slept in public on ferry benches or in
the homes of people I barely knew when
travelling in developing countries. It
could be weve made sleep too neurotically
private a ritual in North Americaso pri-
vate were unable to discuss it, and need
to see trained specialists to help us fgure
out how to do it properly.
Or perhaps weve made it too much
of a ritual altogether. Many of us now
have an extensive pre-sleep routine. My
bedtime custom is like another persons
yoga practice given the number of props
involved: a mouthguard that prevents me
from grinding my teeth, an eye mask, an
ergonomic pillow.
One thing thats clear, our relation-
ship to sleep has become increasingly
BOTTLES
For so long sleeping
under glass. Ceiling tiles
sagged in stale
breath. Every now and then
a gasp. The fan slicing out
a stutter.
You can hide a bottle
anywhere, you brag to me.
I feed you a mirage, a shattered
swig. Ice chips, one by one, trickling
your lip. You hold onto your shards
in a Styrofoam cup. Melt them
into a shot. You cant take back
the bottles, when they fall,
they fall from so high, for so long
rain stands in the sky
like blades. We hold out our tongues
to the lens of each drop
leavening the silence
while you drymouth
the words.
Jennifer Still
disordered and the lack of sleep impacts
our health, our sanity, our safety, our pro-
ductivity, and our personal relationships.
My sleep doctor has given sleep, anxiety,
and disorder training to the Canadian
Olympic team and the Edmonton Oilers,
which if nothing else at least makes
me feel Im part of an elite roster of
the sleepless. Working with him has
certainly improved my relationship
with sleep, but its also persuaded me
that theres something fundamentally
wrong with how our society approaches
bedtime.
During my initial visits I learned
more about sleep hygiene, which
means (if its good) that you only use your
bedroom for sleep and intimate activities.
You turn off your computer and television
a few hours before bed, keep your phone
and computer out of the bedroom, and
cut down on or eliminate caffeine and
alcohol. Of course, the average North
American does precisely the opposite
in most of these cases. It turns out that
in attempting to sleep well were not ac-
tually supposed to surround ourselves
with devices that beep and emit light,
work odd shifts, keep buzzing phones in
our bedrooms, or try to fall asleep after
watching zombies rip people open on The
Walking Dead. But sleep hygiene also
means getting enough exercise, keeping
the bedroom dark, avoiding naps, and
maintaining regular bedtimes and wake
timesmore things we have trouble
achieving as a frenetic, results-based
society.
We are in possession of lives that
are complex and information-rich, but
we seem to be increasingly failing to
understand something utterly simple:
we need sleep. Instead of listening to our
bodies, we pay heed to the tasks we must
accomplish, to daily demands, to the vast
amounts of information were forced to
absorb. We are supposedly becoming
ever-more efficient in our waking life,
yet we dont seem to have the time to stop
and acknowledge an emerging pattern,
a trend sure to damage us as individuals
and as a society: that more and more of
us seem to be losing our simple ability to
sleep. A rallying cry of attention seems
called for, but Wake Up! is perhaps not
quite right.
Alexis Kienlen
A Memolr about
the 1ang|e oF Mld|lFe
isn: )8--z)8o-q- | )6 pps. | S8 can]usa | avail. April
In this dolut colloction ol oisonal
ossays, Silcott looks at tho tanglo ol
nidlilo, tho long look lack, tho
shoitoi look loiwaid, and tho
nononts iight now that shinnoi
and iustlo aiound hoi: naiiiago,
nonoauso, loai, dosiio, loss, and
that guy on tho lus, tho wonan on
tho stioot, wandoiing loais, naiaud-
ing llanas, light and laundiy ioons.
/ uonderjul book, a book oj uonders."
Sfrvir Osn6vr, Puniisirv, Ge|st
Rrvvrsrfro nv PGC]Rtic6tsf
Her uork |s jearless, bonest, and e|ery
sentence |s edged l|ke a gen."
Cuvfis Giiirsvir, E|gbteen Br|dges
I was prepared for room-sharing but not bed-sharing.

My bed-mate was, luckily, considerate and a daily bather.
ts 5:30 in the morning, a few hours
away from sunrise. Im outside stok-
ing the wood-fred boiler at my brothers
place on Gabriola Island when a sud-
den beam of light pins me to the boiler.
Or so it seems. As if I were a butterfly
on display, stabbed between the shoul-
der blades. Hard white l ight, slam-
ming me against metal. I turn and see
headl ights at about a hundred feet.
Aiming straight at me. I stare at them,
expecting them to swing, back away.
Im thinking the car must be heading
for the ferry, and its people whove just
realized theyve forgotten something
and are turning around to go home and
get it. I move out of the path of the lights
to a shrub near the boiler and watch
the lights. They dont move, and then
they go off.
I hear not hi ngt he crackle of
wood in the boiler, my breathing, the fan
EvERyTHING RuSTLES
I
whirringnothing. For a moment Im still
rational, still in my managing mode, the
mode that got me out of bed that morn-
ingmy last morning herefeeling
happy, thinking of the useful, practical
things I would do before leaving. I consider
walking up the driveway to see whats
going on, but its a long driveway. My
brothers place is on fve acres, and the
small spill of light from the house doesnt
even reach me at the boiler, thirty feet
away. Ive left the fashlight inside. I imag-
ine myself halfway up the driveway and
fully surrounded by dark and emptiness
in the tunnel of trees, with all those black
shapes and the rustle of small animals in
the brush. A thread of fear unfurls inside
of me and makes my breath go shallow,
my heart race.
As I head towards the house I regret
every mystery novel Ive ever read, every
TV thriller, every scary movie. In all of
them, its a woman. Shes alone and shes
doomed. It doesnt matter that by instinct
and luck I have weathered some situa-
tions. I have read In Cold Blood. I know
what happens to people in isolated places
in the dark. I go in the house and close
the door behind me. Its a glass door.
The murderers/rapists will see me at the
same time as Ill see them. Well lock eyes
through the glass, and theyll see that its
all over but for the killing. I turn the dead-
bolt and go to my nephews room where
there are blinds I can peer through, but
his desk is up against the window, and I
need to be close. I go to the laundry room
instead where my brother has installed
machines that look like theyve been de-
signed by NASA, as if laundry is a serious
venture. Maybe it is. Maybe I missed the
memo. The window is long and deep and
looks out on the driveway. I lean against
the wall, the lights off. I can see where
my sister-in-law parks her van, and past
that to the rock at the centre of their turn-
around, the shrubs growing around it,
and beyond them, the empty driveway,
the dark forest.
Its early December, that time of year
when everyone is in a low-level panic, and
the dark seems to go on forever. All week
I have been sitting in front of a different
window on the other side of the house
watching light and trying not to. Why
go to a beautiful place when you want
to concentrate? What was I thinking? In
the late afternoon, the sun would pull its
light back in, and there would be patterns
across the sea and shadows in the seams
between the mountains. In the morning,
light seemed to spread like a melon open-
ing, a slow mystery, an unfolding.
As I stare at the rocks on the drive-
way, hoping to see light growing on
them, I imagine what it will feel like to
hear footsteps approaching. I imagine
my heart scuttling up into my throat for
protection. I imagine myself simply foat-
ing up into the air, the cells inside of me
like dead fsh foating on the surface of
the big bag of water that I am.
The more you feel fear, the more
your brain has the capacity to feel it, I
read somewhere. Its like anything you
exercise: your abdominals, your math
skills. Our minds arent that different
from the rest of us. They get better at
things with use, and they get fabby and
lazy with disuse. I will show you fear in a
handful of dust, T.S. Eliot wrote in The
Waste Land. To him who is in fear ev-
erything rustles, said Sophocles. I fnd
these quotes later, when Im safe and
rational at home. In the laundry room,
Im not thinking of beautiful writing, Im
thinking of the westerns I watched as a
kid where the good guys holed up in the
house while the bad guys gathered out-
side with guns. How could anyone bear
that level of anticipation? I wonder, and
Im serious. If someone gave me a gun, I
think I might just shoot myself to get over
the suspense.
I stare out the window for at least an-
other ten minutes, a part of me aware that
imagining Hoss Cartwright as my sav-
iour is a sign Ive been alone too long. The
driveway remains grey and silent. Fear
needs information to sustain it, Ill read
later on. Its anxiety that can run away
with you. I go into the kitchen and make
oatmeal. Its still dark. The windows are
still black expanses all around me. Ma-
levolence could still be outside, but I push
the thought away and look up sunrise on
the computer to fnd out what time it will
be. The sun will rise at 7:56 a.m., I read
on my computer screen. Actual sunrise
is the time when the leading limb of the
sun frst rises over the horizon. Limb, I
discover, is an offcial term. I think of sci-
entists who get to name things, who give
the sun a limb and are still taken serious-
ly. I imagine a sun with an elbow poking
up over the edge of the horizon, a stretch-
ing sun, a running sun, a dancing sun.
My oatmeal is ready. I place a chair
facing east and sit with the bowl in my
lap. Beyond the verandah, the light is
coming; the sea, from a distance, looks
like a f lat plate. There are dark amor-
phous shadows on it and a boat making
a line in a single pale streak of sea. Be-
yond it the mountains and above them a
tangerine seam opening; then shades of
grey and light. A crow calls. The trees,
slender boles with feathery tops, stand
like sentinels. Between them the dark
clings while the sky and sea fade to the
days ordinariness, and the land around
my brothers house reveals itself in its
broad and innocent emptiness.
On my way out, I pass the neighbours
driveway, see how close its entrance is to
my brothers, and see a car parked half-
way along it. I go home. I tell friends. Im
shocked by how frightened I was. It was a
minor incident, a non-event, and I am con-
scious each time I relay the story of reveal-
ing my own anxiety more than of telling
people something that will titillate their
fear centers. Still, many of the women I tell
nod their heads in recognition. You went
outside in the dark alone? my sister-in-law
says, and I feel a rush of gratitude because
she acknowledged my fear. It never goes
away, does it? my friend Jean says. Its
that awful feeling you get at night when
you hear footsteps behind you.
But some of the people I tell look at me
askance, and I feel a ficker of shame as if
Im revealing something too personal,
or Im showing myself to be nervous,
skittish, flightyqualities Ive always
disdained. I think of all that time I spent
when I was younger dealing with this
very fearI studied Aikido for years.
What happened to all that? Where did
my confdence go?
When I tell my friend Luanne about
the experience, she looks at me with her
intelligence, and I have that feeling again,
not pinned exactly, but exposed. As if Im
being seen without my coverings, the
chimera Ive built over the years. Luanne
is my friend. I know shes not trying to
threaten me. But that doesnt matter. I
feel it anyway. I tell her I think its related
to an experience in a campground years
ago. She shakes her head no. I think
this is something about your brother,
she says.
No, no. Its not about my brother, I
say, though as I do, I think, maybe. Was I
so afraid of wrecking his beautiful house
that I created a fantasy of a bogeyman to
distract me? Or was I afraid of the writing
I was trying to do? When we fear things
I think that we wish for them . . . every
fear hides a wish, said David Mamet.
COPING
She cant tell her bus pass from a bird
so knows the pills have found their way to the microphone
in her brain and shell have to walk. The mating ritual
of the clouds is pornographic and she blushes
wondering why its even allowed. A part of her had sat down
many years ago and refused to get up. This is who she feeds
these pills to in the hopes that shell be trusted and then perhaps
liked. Her therapist has not weathered well and is now
leaking, water getting into his voice so when he says mother
even the word is bloated. Appointments had to be cancelled
and a new fear of drowning introduced to her mirror. She is coping.
She is coping like an explorer cutting into the leather
of resolve and stewing it, convincing herself that this
is all worth it. She is walking because when she put
her hand into her purse she came across a bird that apparently
had died in her care though she doesnt recall how she got it.
This may be the work of the pills. She takes them before she visits.
Her past is a vulture, hunched like a hospital and her mother is in there,
somewhere, waiting for her. Expectant. One cloud
has birthed a whole brood of clouds; this is what they do.
They mate for the day and soon their young are strong enough
to feed themselves and then the whole process begins again.
Sue Goyette
I tell a therapist about the incident,
my over-the-top, outside of all rational
thinking fear. She says: You were afraid
because you went into the house. You
acted scared, so you were scared. I con-
sider the moment when I decided not to
confront the headlights and remember
how that had felt like a minor defeat at
the time, but I still want to argue, what if
there had been a car full of yobs, intent on
some kind of mischief?
A fRIEND SENDS ME A LIST Of HER fEARS.
Its long. Some make me smile: When I
was little I was afraid of the bogey man
under my bed, some unknown devil who
would grab me by the ankles and haul me
down to hell. I was afraid of the bears that
I feared lived in the front little porch area
off my parents bedroom. But its awful
too: Now Im afraid of being attacked by
a manraped and/or murdered. Since I
know it can happen. I didnt really believe
it until it happened to me.
DO ONE THING EvERy DAy THAT SCARES yOu,
Eleanor Roosevelts famous quote ex-
horts me from a poster on the wall at Lu-
lulemon where Im waiting for my daugh-
ter to try on some overpriced shorts.
Im embarrassed, I say to my daugh-
ter, and Im not talking about the shorts.
I think everybody is, she says. You feel
childish when youre scared. After I get
over the shock of her mature response, I
say, I guess we think were always sup-
posed to be in control, at least I do.
And then we fnd out were not.
I think of the wisdom of the young
and then of intersections, those moments
when my view of the world goes skewiff
somehow and I realize I have to readjust
my thinking. Carl Jung said that midlife
is the time when we need to become who
we truly are, rather than who we were
socialized to be. If we do this right, he
saysin much better languagewe
wont be so pissed off when we die. I like
this sort of thinking. Its hard, though, to
look back and not get stuck, and its even
harder to look at where I am, and not
think, how did I end up like this?
A couple of years earlier when Id
been arguing with my son over his cur-
few, foolishly trying to answer his repeat-
ed, But, why? I said something about
the streets being dangerous at night. I
was thinking of a friend whose son had
been beaten up, just because, as he was
standing waiting for the bus one night. I
didnt want to tell him, but I wanted him
to be aware, to be careful, to be safe. I
dont want to be afraid all the time, he
said. I dont want to live my life in fear.
I uSED TO BE BRAvER WHEN I WAS yOuNG
or seemed to be. I hitchhiked, climbed
mountains, skied steep hills, and for a
brief time in the seventies, lived by my-
self in a truck with no lock on the door.
Now Im older, it seems that fear has moved
in. It leers and pulls at me from around
every corner, behind every thought,
reminding me that decisions have conse-
quences. Accidents and bad luck happen.
Evil exists. I think of little old women
cowering alone behind their curtains,
peering out at the world. Is that where
Im headed?
Your amygdala has been damaged,
the therapist tells me. Its overactive. I
wonder how she knows this as I sit across
from her, slumping in my chair, shoulders
hunched as though expecting blows. I
imagine my amygdala all pumped up, too
full of itself, as if it has been going to the
gym all these years while the rest of my
brain has been lying around smoking pot
and watching bad TV.
At home, I read and read. I find out
that people who love risk are more sensi-
tive to dopamine, or is it less? And thats
why they like bigger scares? I find out
that the rush of adrenaline dissipates
fairly quickly after a fright, but the corti-
sol lingers, making us fuzzy headed and
stupid. And I find out that the message
from the amygdala to the prefrontal cor-
tex travels a path as clear as a freeway;
while the return pathway that reason
travels is narrow and twisty, like a coun-
try road with sheep lying on it.
You can have a predisposition to anxi-
ety, apparently. A study done with light
and minor shocks and images shows that
the people who recovered more quickly
from the rude treatment are more likely
to have a larger structure in the brain
near the amygdala. This structure, the
ventromedial prefrontal cortex, inhibits
the activity of the amygdala, but for peo-
ple who suffer from post-traumatic stress
and those of us with more garden-variety
anxiety (i.e. those who fuss over what
they said to their neighbour three days
earlier over the dahlias), the structure is
too thin or too small, and so every time
the amygdala gets even a little excited,
the barrage of messages saying Danger!
Danger! Run! Hide! Do something! Quick!
doesnt stop.
Im looking for excuses, I know. Its
not my fault. Its my brain structure, my
hormones, my over-indulged imagina-
tion. I study a photo of my mother that I
stuck on our fridge a while after she died.
Shes wearing a toque, knit from multiple
neon-bright colours, which sits up high on
her head, her grey hair sticking out un-
derneath. We all made fun of that toque,
but she didnt care. Shes on a ski hill with
a walkie-talkie in her hand. A laugh has
taken her over, and shes inside of it.
Is this a non sequituror an image of
how I want to be?
MONTHS LATER, A fRIEND OffERS ME HER PLACE
for a week when she and her husband
are going away. I hesitate, thinking of my
fear of being alone and isolated and men-
tion it to another friend who says, You
know a woman was murdered near there
in the woods.
I know, I say, wondering if shes tell-
ing me because she wants to warnor
scareme, or if shes giving me more
material for my essay.
My friends place has a large patio
with a big glass door. Light spills through
it. The house is stucco and clematis grows
across the front of it in long sweeping
strands that remind me of a grape vine. I
buy fowers and put them out on the patio,
so it feels like Im somewhere in the Medi-
terranean, and this makes me happy, but
there are a lot of doors in the house, and
every time I lock one a tiny fnger of fear
shows me how old it is, reminds me how
alone I am, how vulnerable.
I call up a friend who survived a bru-
tal rape when she was younger, and then
she survived the trial, which in the seven-
ties was another sort of assault. We talk
about martial arts. Elaine studied karate
for fve years. But Im still scared, she
said. Nothing has changed. Its scary
out there. The threat of violence is there,
even when the actual violence isnt. The
certainty in her voice surprises me. I was
expecting her to sound nervous, like
I am. This is bracing, like a slap or cold
water. I feel something in me waking up.
And wonder if Im two people, one who is
afraid and one who is angry.
Elaine continues: I hate it in movies
where some guy is getting beaten and
the woman stands there screaming help-
lessly with her hands over her mouth.
I think, why dont you help your guy, kick
the attacker or gouge out his eyeballs.
Though, she says, pausing a moment, I
wonder if I could do that, gouge eyeballs
that is.
But if it was your life or his?
The martial arts, though long in the
past, still help us be more aware, we agree.
We look around us; we keep one part of
our minds attuned to the periphery, to be
ready for surprises from anywhere. If she
feels vulnerable now, Elaine says, I try
not to look like a victim. I bring my arms
out from my body as Im walking as if I
have big muscles. I try to look like, dont
mess with me. Its all part of karate. I think
about the reaction, to block, punch, kick . . .
Yes, I have lots of rage. But you know. You
keep your mouth shut.
I hang up, thinking of rage and si-
lence, the veneers we place over our dan-
gerous selves. I look for Aikido videos
on YouTube, where I fnd my old Sensei
from Japan. I smile watching him move
in cyberspace, remember his chuckling
laugh and the grip of his fingers on my
wrist, sharp as a snakebite.
I practice Tai-no-tenkan in the hall-
way, a deceptively simple step and a turn
that we did at the beginning of every
practice to warm up, to centre ourselves.
Its in your hips, Sensei would say.
Your hara. Your power is there, and
hed point to the place where the ties of
his hakama would join in front of his belly
button. I think of my hara and pivot on the
smooth foor, thinking the way I used to,
of holding myself low and powerful and
balanced and ready for anything.
Before I go for a walk, I close the
blinds, even though its still daylight, be-
cause my friend had asked me to, and I
see how my mind wants to inject some-
thing fearful into the momenta strange
car swinging into the driveway, a fgure
on the other side of the glassand I
dismiss them, recognizing how much I
seem to like scaring myself.
I walk a path through the woods out
to the Fraser River. The land on the far
shore is open, the view filled with light
and space. Im happy out there. Maybe
beauty is another kind of awakening.
In time, my body and mind swing into
rhythm, my torso lengthens, and I feel
the health and strength of my body,
everything in concert, everything fow-
ing in a rhythm bigger than I am, as if Ive
clicked into some sort of current thats
always out there, and that as long as Im
walking inside of it, I am invincible.
Jane Silcott
Half these men are boys, like you are, but yell
so loud the cracks in their voices are hard to catch.
The other half, giants, older than the rig itself,
they knew this oil before it was black.
Welcome to The Lease!
Welcome to The Lease!
Distilled from his time in the Saskatchewan and Albertan oilelds,
Mathew Hendersons debut poetry collection The Lease plumbs the
prairie depths to nd human technology and physical labour realigning
our landscape. With acute discipline, Henderson illuminates the
stubborn and often unattering realities of industrial culture and its
cast of hard-living men.
A sneakily brilliant, beautiful work. The Millions
Henderson twists his hands into our collars and yanks us readers
willing or not straight into the prairie oilelds ... When I nished
The Lease, I didnt feel good or comfortable ... I think thats what a
book is supposed to do. Maisonneuve
Coach House Books | chbooks.com Free ebook with print purchase!
000EB6-NWP-FP.indd 1 2/27/13 2:06:53 PM
ITS THE LAW
n January of this year, Australia
introduced the worlds first man-
datory plain packaging laws for ciga-
rettes. All cigarettes sold there must
come in drab green packaging, with
only a small, identically-sized, brand
name identifer. Each carton must also
include warnings and graphic pictures
related to the evils of smoking (for ex-
ample, a close-up of an eye being read-
ied for surgery under the bold heading
SMOKING CAUSES BLINDNESS).
While Australia has taken this
to the extreme, the need to provide
warnings on some of the products we
use is obvious to most of us. It makes
sense that cigarette packages require
an acknowledgment of the harms that
smoking causes. Ditto for guns. More
prosaically, we get used to things like
canisters of Drano telling us to use it
only for cleaning, not drinking. But
what about many of the other products
that we buy regularly, which are also of-
ten littered with similar proscriptions?
THIS WINTER I PuRCHASED A NEW OuTDOOR
extension cord. You know the kind:
rugged black covered plug ends, bright
orange heavy duty ribbed casing, CSA
approved markings on an attached
tag. The model I bought came with an
additional short, sharp directive: Cau-
tion: fully extend before using.
Lawyers love to pick apart the mul-
tiple meanings of words and phrases.
In this case I was paralyzed before I
began. What was I supposed to do? Was
I required to fully extend the cord just
the frst time, after which I was free to
coil it up and use it to my hearts content
unextended? Or did it mean I needed
to extend it before each use? Could I
coil it up while using it, as long as I had
done the extending part first? These
thoughts ran rapidly through my mind.
I even playfully considered whether the
label was referring to me: before I used
it was I supposed to walk erect with my
arms fully raised above my head? The
meaning was not entirely clear. And that
got me pondering the broader meanings
behind warning labels.
There are two main types of product
warnings: those required by government
and those offered voluntarily by a manu-
facturer. Tobacco, gun, and hazardous
product labels, for example, are generally
mandated. These labels are aimed at
protecting the consumer. Clothing, fur-
niture, and extension cord labels, by
contrast, are mainly voluntary. Voluntary
warning labels serve other purposes.
Take cigarettes, drain cleaners, and ex-
tension cords: each falls on a different point
on a continuum that begins with mandato-
ry, extremely restrictive labelling and ends
with mere voluntary warnings. Cigarettes
lie at the harshest end of the spectrum;
Australia leads the way but most western
democracies subject tobacco to stringent
labelling requirements. Thats because cig-
arettes are addictive and harmful. It thus
makes sense that warnings about their det-
rimental health effects and their addictive
properties should be obligatory.
A little further along the spectrum
l ies a common product l i ke Drano.
Labelling requirements for Drano, albeit
mandated, are less onerous than for ciga-
rettes: the labels need only contain a few
suitable symbols and danger warnings.
On one level, this relaxation of stan-
dards for Drano compared to cigarettes
is incongruous. In some ways, Drano is
riskier than tobacco. Its active ingredient,
sodium hydroxide, is terribly harmful
ingesting it could have lethal consequences.
It wouldnt be at all surprising if it was
banned. Yet, rather than do that, weve col-
lectively decided that we are better off hav-
ing chemical drain cleaners available to us,
so long as we are apprised of their hazards.
In other words, a warning label is
thought to help ensure that a product like
Drano will be used carefully, in the approved
manner, without requiring the more draco-
nian standards warranted by tobacco. Our
relationship to drain cleaner has, in effect,
been determined to be positive; it has a net
beneft to our lives. Rather than stringently
regulating its useas we do for cigarettes,
by imposing tough labelling requirements
and limiting their availabilitywe implic-
itly assume individuals will be responsible
enough to prevent harm to themselves
from Drano without much governmental
oversight. Warning labels, hazardous prod-
uct symbols, and childproof caps provide
suffcient protection to allow Drano to be on
supermarket shelves, available to the home
plumber in us all.
At the opposite end of the warning label
spectrum from tobacco are everyday prod-
ucts like extension cords. These warnings,
of the fully extend before using variety,
are not mandated. Instead of acting as an ad-
monishment to act safely, their true purpose
is often to provide a legal waiver of liability.
In the event of an accident, they are intended
to protect the manufacturer from liability.
Thats why they are often so oddly specifc,
and maddeningly obtuse. They usually re-
fect the fact that someone, somewhere, had
an accident in a circumstance akin to what
the warning label warns against, sued the
manufacturer, and probably won. They rep-
resent a manufacturers hope that they wont
be sued, at least not for a repeat performance
of the same bad thing that happened before.
Whats the point, then, of warnings? If
you think about it, many labels, especially
non-mandatory ones, are little more than
a pretense. If we really wanted to protect
people against accidents, should we not
insist that more be done? We could have
laws that ban the sale of any product that
kills, like cigarettes. We could make
manufacturers leave no stone unturned in
ensuring safe products. We could demand
more than perfunctory warnings on little
tags: for example, mandatory licensing
or training classes before using danger-
ous products (imagine going to a govern-
ment-mandated Saturday morning class,
How to Use an Extension Cord: Part I).
BuyER, BE WARNED
I
I
l
l
u
s
t
r
a
t
i
o
n

C
o
l
i
n

S
p
e
n
c
e
But of course we dont do any of this. A
certain number of deaths or accidents is
the price society is willing to pay so the
rest of us can enjoy our conveniences
and habits.
Yet does that explain why cigarette
warnings are more dire than Drano and
both more rigidly controlled than ex-
tension cords? Given that the number
of fatalities directly attributable to one
smoked cigarette must be fewer than
those due to one misused extension
cordand here I mean a clear, direct fa-
tality attributable to a single incident, not
one based on long term aggregation
this is a question worth considering. By
their very nature, cigarettes cause harm
slowly and cumulatively. Extension cord
failure, on the other hand, can be imme-
diate and catastrophic: accident statistics
show that dozens of people each year are
electrocuted by faulty extension cords.
Of course, the comparison is not quite
fair; just because one object can kill in-
stantly while the other harms over time
doesnt tell the whole story. That is where
regulation steps in. Differences between
labelling requirements are pithy remind-
ers of contrasting policy choices govern-
ments make about products and how to
address the associated health and safety
risks of each.
At the heart of the various regulatory
approaches lies a legal choice about pub-
lic policy. Extension cords seem to serve
a useful purpose: sometimes you need
to move electricity further away from
its outlet. The benefts of Drano are also
apparent (although perhaps less so from
the perspective of our sewage systems
and the environment). For cigarettes, the
benefts are less obvious (at least to non-
smokers). So the warning requirements
refect, to some extent, a correlation to
the social utility of the product.
The system probably doesnt work
as well as it could, but this is part of
a larger ideological question. In the
meantime, its still worth considering
what those labels stand for. Only by do-
ing so can we say weve fully extended
ourselves before using.
Richard Haigh
I
l
l
u
s
t
r
a
t
i
o
n

C
o
l
i
n

S
p
e
n
c
e
From Canadas northernmost provincial capital emerges
Canadas hottest new magazine, Eighteen Bridges.
Eighteen Bridges is a magazine of narrative journalism.
Each issue tells stories that engage and delight, while keeping
an eye on issues that matter.
Along with the countrys best narrative journalism, every issue
features essays and opinion, poetry and fction, and more.
All of this in a handsomely designed package featuring photography
and illustration by Canadas best visual artists.
$
2
5
.
9
5
2
0
%

o
f
f

t
h
e

n
e
w
s
s
t
a
n
d

p
r
i
c
e
If youve enjoyed what you read
in this issue, subscribe today!
a four-issue subscription is just $25.95* THATS 20% Off
the newsstand price, and includes convenient home delivery.
*plus GSt or HSt
visit http://www.eighteenbridges.com/page/subscribe
or contact us by mail:
Eighteen Bridges c/o Canadian Literature Centre,
3-5 Humanities Centre, university of Alberta Edmonton, AB T6G 2E5
THE DESCENT Of MAN
By DON GILLMOR
HUMANKI ND
I STOOD uNDER A
CLOuDLESS SKy
near the peak of Mont Fort, at Verbier,
Switzerland, staring at the glaciers of Grand
Combin, which shone like starched sheets.
Mont Fort is one of the steepest ski runs in
Europe. Most of the people who came up on
the tram went back down on it. My friend
Ken and I had come to Europe to ski and
escape ourselves. We were in our ffties, a
shadowy decade. Looking down at the can-
ton of Valais, I felt a combination of exhilara-
tion and fear and simple awe. The world laid
out, endless in its possibilities. Though the
price was a treacherous descent.
It was late in the season and the
moguls were large, rutted from spring
thaws, and shiny with ice. A few people
picked their way down carefully, making
long hesitant traverses across the hill.
We stood in that familiar lacuna,
waiti ng for the right moment to go
down, a moment when the path was
clear, when courage was high. After
several minutes, Ken launched himself
without warning. On the second turn,
he crossed his skis and fell. He slid
quickly on the ice. Both skis blew off,
then he lost both poles. He hurtled
down the steep pitch headfrst, picking
up speed, his helmeted head bouncing
off the moguls. It occurred to me that
he might not stop until the bottom,
more than 300 metres away. There was a
crevasse near the bottom, off to the side.
It was marked with colourful racing poles
to warn skiers away. He was moving at
high speed in that direction.
Speed was part of the attraction of
skiing for us. Beside me, near the tram-
line, there was the residue of a speed
course that had been set up a month
earlier. Speed skiing is simple: you get
into a tuck and go as fast as possible.
The skis are 240 centimetres long, and
specifc aerodynamic helmets and cloth-
ing have been developed for this rarifed
sport. There are only about thirty courses
in the world. Speed skiing requires a
very steep start and a long run out. The
fastest anyone has ever gone on a pair of
skis is 251.4 kilometres an hour, achieved
by an Italian, Simone Origone. What is
remarkable is that he reached that velocity
in ffteen seconds, roughly as fast as the
690 horsepower Lamborghini Aventador
(which gets to 250 km/h in 14.4 seconds).
It was Origone who set the course record
at Verbier with a speed of 219 km/h.
In my youth, speed had been a vis-
ceral affirmation, an extension of my
natural optimism (I wont crash, I will
live forever) and, more, part of my incho-
ate search for limits and meaning. But it
had become something else in middle
age, something I hadnt fully articulated,
though I still sought speed, perhaps
simply as a way to prolong youth. Skiing
has remained a balance between hope
and fear, the hope that it will preserve
me, that it will amplify my existence, and
the fear that it might do the opposite.
Ken had managed to get himself
turned around so that his feet were point-
ing downhill. His boots sent up sprays
of snow and ice as he rocketed down.
The late morning sun was brilliant. Had
we waited another hour or so the hill
would have softened up. People stopped
to watch Ken, a Gore-tex missile now
clearly heading toward the crevasse. I
had a sudden vision of gleaming Swiss
hospitals, the sense that I was witnessing
a cautionary tale.
He skied, he had told me, to take
himself out of his own head, a head that
was flled with screenplays, resentment,
political rants, women, and, more than
anything, himself. A head that struggled
to contain an expansive ego that now
fowed over the moguls 100 metres below.
The act of skiing is visceral, and at
a certain age it provides welcome relief
from our thoughts, our mortgages, and
disappointments. We were both aware
that there wouldnt be many more years
of skiing like this. We could ski into old
age, but it would be a different sport, a
different experience.
Switzerland was having a nervous
year. More than hal f of Verbier was
closed, a brown ring around the bottom
of the resort. While it was late April, this
was unusual. Swiss glaciers, like glaciers
everywhere, were in retreat, and had lost
eighteen percent of their surface area be-
tween 1985 and 2000. Seventy percent of
the Swiss glaciers could be gone in the
next three decades. The glaciers feed
the Swiss river system, and half of the
countrys power is hydro-electric. Low
river levels will affect energy, transport-
ation, and the many ingenious farms scat-
tered through the valleys and crawling
up the mountainside.
Swiss ski resorts have already felt
the effects of glacial retreat. In 2005,
Andermatt wrapped the disappearing
Gurschen glacier in a protective foil made
of polyester and polypropylene designed
to keep the sun off and the cold in. Mont
Fort followed suit.
Standing at the top of Mont Fort in
the perfect spring sun, the snow receding
below me, Ken slowing down, I won-
dered if the sport would die before I did.
Perhaps we would al l go toget her.
Though Ken seemed poised to go frst.
Two hundred and ffty metres below
me, Ken finally came to a stop. He lay
motionless for more than a minute, then
one arm rose and weakly waved, indicat-
ing he was alive, at least. His head wasnt
occupied with the messy details of his life
now. He was mentally gauging the pain,
tracking its source and intensity. Was
anything broken? Had the helmet saved
him from concussion? He had a bad back
that was now much worse. He had knee
issues, a sore wrist, and a lifelong case of
existential angst, and he travelled with a
cache of celebrity-grade painkillers that
would come in handy.
I started down, stopping to pick up
his skis and poles, moving carefully
on the ice, muscles straining, my head
empty of conscious thought, reduced
to a purely physical being, focused on
survival. Speed was no longer a friend; I
was no longer young.
I LEARNED TO SKI ON A SMALL HILL PERCHED
inconveniently on the endless prairie.
Mount Agassiz had a modest vertical of
about 150 metres. It featured one T-bar
and a rope tow that ran off the fywheel of
a tractor, and was operated by a grumpy
farmer who cursed us when we fell off or
slid backward on the ice. The hill was a
three hour drive from Winnipeg and rare-
ly seemed to be warmer than -20 F, and
we had to stop every half hour to warm
up in the modest chalet. From the sum-
mit you could see conifers and low scrub
and hard-scrabble farmland that had been
cultivated a century earlier by hopeful im-
migrants. My Scottish great-grandfather
had tried to farm to the east, but fnally gave
up on that impossible land and moved to the
city to become a minister in a particularly
pessimistic branch of Calvinism called,
paradoxically, the Free Presbyterians.
Mount Agassiz is one of three in
North America named for Jean Louis
Rodolphe Agassiz (1808-1873), a Swiss
geologist who was the frst to suggest that
the Earth had experienced an ice age.
He argued that the ice age replaced
the biblical deluge, that all (sinf ul)
life was wiped out then began anew.
It was a suspension of not just gravity, but time.
Agassi z kept his faith and resisted
Darwins evolutionary theory for his en-
tire life. During the Pleistocene epoch,
glaciers ploughed through Manitoba,
leaving a few upturned hills that were
gradual on the side where the ice was com-
ing from and broken off where the ice had
pulled down huge slabs of rock as it went
by. Geologically, this glacial till plain was
an unlikely spot for a ski resort.
When we were seventeen, a group
of us drove 1500 kilometres across the
frozen plains to ski at Lake Louise in the
Rocky Mountains. Going up the Olympic
chair lift, staring back at the immense
scale of the valley and the Slate Range that
stretches beyond it, the possibilities of not
just the sport were suddenly laid out, but
the possibilities of life. Chief among them
was the concept of freedom. In part, it was
the post-adolescent freedom of being on
the road, of being in another place, unsu-
pervised. But the summit of Lake Louise
invited a larger sense of freedom, a
phenomenological escape that changed
my sense of the physical world. Above it
all was the ecstasy of speed, the harmless
physics of the prairie given way to a thrill-
ing acceleration that was both existential
and visceral.
The search for speed may be a natural
defense against aging. Time does in fact
slow the closer you get to the speed of
light, though you have to get closer than
ffty km/h. It is certainly a useful symbol
for trying to escape the inescapable.
Our Banff trip was a collage of hard
skiing and wasted nights. Our lack of suc-
cess with the few girls we met was epic.
We turned to adolescent stunts: locking
one of our number out of the hotel room,
naked. We drank beer in crowded taverns
and wished we were dancing with girls
and stayed until closing time hoping for
a miracle and woke up at 7 a.m. and ate
pancakes and caught the frst lift up.
No one returned to Mount Agassiz.
It was irretrievably diminished now, a
fondly remembered childhood relic.
The following year I moved to Calgary
and started skiing seriously, getting out
ffty days or more each year. But after six
years even the yawning scale of the Banff
area became too familiar. It seemed as
fnite as Mount Agassiz had. Or perhaps
it was my life that was becoming fnite,
and I needed to get away from ingrained
habits and familiar hills.
After graduating from university,
I went to France to ski. In the Grenoble
train station I saw a man my age wearing
a ski jacket who told me that Val dIsre
was the place to go; thats where he was
heading. He looked like Robert Redford
and introduced himself as Bob. He had
seen the Redford film Downhill Racer
several times and had adopted the stars
mannerisms, and occasionally seemed to
be acting scenes from the movie, without
crediting them.
At the time, Downhill Racer was a
touchstone for a certain kind of skier.
Redfords character, David Chappelet,
was a perfect late-sixties anti-hero, hand-
some and aloof and a bit of a shit. The
movie trailer had a voiceover that asked
the quasi-existential question How far
must a man go to get from where hes at?
That question didnt really parse, but it
sounded deep, and Downhill Racer was a
gritty, European-looking flm, and I want-
ed to be like Redford, though not as badly
as my new friend Bob. I spent the whole
season in Val dIsere, living in the basement
of a massive eighteenth-century stone
house with Bob and a handful of expatri-
ates. The scale of the resort was immense;
we could ski to other villages, to Italy.
Going up a large tram one day, a man
who turned out to be from Brooklyn rec-
ognized me as North American, and said,
Want to take a walk on the wild side?
In an urban setting, this could mean a
number of different, largely uncomfort-
able things. But here it meant he knew of
a secluded powder-flled bowl. I followed.
We climbed and traversed for three
hours from where the lift let us off, sweat-
ing heavily and panting in the thin air.
We fnally arrived at a massive, very
steep, untouched bowl. We hurtled
down, foating in the bottomless powder.
The run took less than two minutes, but
that speed and the ethereal sensation of
the light powder made it feel longer, a
suspension of not just gravity, but time.
It was like a dream of skiing, perfect and
rhythmic, two minutes of uncomplicated
harmony. I was too young to grasp how
few of these moments there would be.
The sense of freedom, the possi-
bilities of life that Id frst sensed at Lake
Louise, were all magnifed in Val dIsre.
Just over the mountain was the world
conjured by my literary imagination:
Paris and Spain and doomed love affairs
with tragic Europeans.
In the spring, my peripatetic Calgary
girlfriend flew over and the tenor of my
expatriate life changed. We skied and
argued, then left for Italy. We ended up in
Greece, admitting fnally that our relation-
ship, which had been largely defned by
break-ups, wasnt working. She decided
to fly home and I stayed. After she got
in the taxi to the airport, I walked to the
harbour and sat on the hard sand of a vast
empty industrial beach at Piraeus. On the
horizon, a fgure approached in the heat
shimmer, a woman carrying something.
It turned out to be a wooden box flled with
cigarettes that she carried with the aid of
a neck strap, the kind that cigarette girls
in nineteen-thirties nightclubs used to
have. She stood over me. Cigarette? she
said in a heavy accent. She was perhaps
forty, and her legs, which were at my eye
level, had small bruises on them. I bought
a package of Marlboros and sat on the
deserted beach smoking, pondering the
end of my relationship with my girlfriend.
It proved to be the effective end of
my relationship with skiing for the next
decade as well. I moved east and ski-
ing withered amid the dwarfsh hills of
Ontario. I was trying to be a writer, and
my world became almost exclusively
urban. On those few occasions that I did
get out skiing, I was reminded of Mount
Agassiz and its limitations and the whole
experience depressed me. Years went by
without skiing.
In my thirties, I inched back, going
to Quebec a few times. By my forties, the
winters seemed increasingly unreliable.
One March I drove to Jay Peak Resort,
in Vermont, where a large thermometer
at the top of the hill informed me it was
61 F. The snow was heavy and wet, and
it was like skiing through peanut butter.
A storm of tropical force that had been
lurking on the other side of the mountain
suddenly released a hard rain. Those of
us who wanted to persevere were issued
green garbage bags with armholes.
By ffty, both winter and myself were
getting unreliable. I couldnt count on
snow, and I couldnt count on my ability
to negotiate some of the runs that had
once thrilled me. Skiing claims to be our
oldest sport (a fve thousand-year-old ski
was found in Sweden) and now it is show-
ing its age. The sport and I appear to be
grappling with similar issues: doubt,
deterioration, financial worries, envi-
ronmental dread. As I lose strength and
stamina, the glaciers retreat in solidarity,
the snow dries up, the resorts dwindle.
The number of US ski resorts dropped
from 727 in 1985 to 481 in 2008. Mount
Agassiz closed in 2000, though I didnt
hear about it for another decade.
The esteemed glaciologist Lonnie
Thompson warned in his 2010 paper Cli-
mate Change: The Evidence and Our
Options that glaciers are disappearing
at an accelerating rate. The glacier atop
Kilimanjaro, that Hemingwayesque
symbol of mortality and loss, could van-
ish entirely within two decades; future
readers may be perplexed as to what
snows Hemingway was referring to.
Ninety-nine percent of the glaciers in
the Alps are in retreat. As a result of our
inaction, Thompson wrote, we have
three options: mitigation, adaptation,
and suffering. Not coincidentally, these
are the three options that late middle
age offers.
Louis Agassiz was the frst glaciolo-
gist, before the word was coined, his rep-
utation made with the publication of his
two-volume tudes sur les glaciers (1840).
He described the landscape transformed
by glacial activity as if it was a womans
body, a breathless and detailed pense
on the striations and valleys, the round-
ing and hollows, the cruel results of time
and friction.
At the time that Agassiz published his
seminal study of glaciers, the Columbia
Icefeld on the northern border of Banff
National Park was roughly twice the size
it is now. In geologic terms, 187 years is a
blink, but the Athabasca Glacier (one of
the thirty that make up the Icefeld) has
retreated 1.5 kilometres since then.
Glaciers dont melt at arithmetic
rates. As they become smaller and their
bulk provides less defense, as the climate
warms, and as more detritus is exposed
and its darker hue attracts more sun, they
melt at something that is closer to a geo-
metric rate. Like certain people, one day
they are suddenly old. You saw them only
a year ago. And now, in the glare of the
supermarket, there they are, the face
subtly collapsing, a blurriness, a weight in
their eyes that hadnt been there before.
Or perhaps it had always been there but
you just hadnt noticed it.
THE yEAR I TuRNED fIfTy, A GROuP Of
old friends from Winnipeg reconnected
via e-mail and decided to return to Banff
to ski. We came from Winnipeg, from
Vancouver, San Francisco, Hong Kong. I
few out from Toronto. I hadnt seen some
of them in thirty years. We caught up,
reminisced. There were missing friends.
Phil, who on our first trip disappeared
with a woman ten years older than him-
self one evening and came back at 5 a.m.
and perched naked on the sink pouring
water over himself in Catholic penance,
was now stricken with a degenerative
disease. There was a suicide, and the
usual complement of tragedy, medical
issues, alcoholism, divorce, and debt.
I was long married, the father of two,
in reasonable shape. I had a touch of
plantar fasciitis, a small arthritic spur on
my hip, and an ongoing bout of existen-
tial angst. Something has happened to

CAN
.
ICONS
SASQuATCH
The Canadian Sasquatch is a fabulous creature rumoured to inhabit the nations for-
ests. It is usually described as a large, hairy, bipedal humanoid. The term Sasquatch
is an anglicized derivative of the Coast Salish Sesquac, meaning wild man.
The Sasquatch is reported to be two to three metres tall. The creatures alternate
name of Bigfoot came about in response to the enormous footprints that have been
found in Canadas wild country, individual tracks measuring up to sixty centimetres long
and twenty centimetres wide. Witnesses have described a pronounced brow ridge,
and a prominent sagittal crest (the ridge of bone running along the top of the skull that
indicates strong jaw muscles). Cryptozoologists assert that the Sasquatch is omnivo-
rous and primarily nocturnal. It is commonly said to have a strong, unpleasant smell.
Wildman mythologies are common throughout the world, especially among
indigenous peoples; these include tales of the Sasquatchs cousin, the Himala-
yan Yeti. In Canada, such legends existed long before the Sasquatch became
known by a single name, and regional details still differ.
Many scientists are skeptical about the existence of the Sasquatch. They
consider it to be a product of folklore and hoax, citing a lack of physical evidence.
Dr. Robert Michael Pyle, lepidopterist and author of Where Bigfoot Walks: Cross-
ing the Dark Divide, argues for a psychosocial origin, claiming that most cultures
have human-like giants in their folk history.
However, during a recent radio interview, world-renowned primatologist
Dr. Jane Goodall made a striking comment about undiscovered primates:
I tell you that Im sure that they exist.
Clive Holden
me, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in Nausea,
It came as an illness does, not like an
ordinary certainty, not like anything ob-
vious. It installed itself cunningly, little
by little; I felt a little strange, a little awk-
wardI was able to persuade myself that
there was nothing wrong with me, that it
was a false alarm. And now it has started
blossoming.
This confronting of existence alights
at some point, a quiet argument that
we carry within us. Where is this all
headed? The answer too obvious to state
out loud.
Skiing was a perfect, if temporary
distraction. Skiing takes you out of your
headthe act of negotiating a steep hill
requires concentration. And unlike many
other sports, it doesnt force you into the
unpalatable head of your opponent. It is
pure experience.
Both Sunshine and Lake Louise had
expanded dramatically since Id last
visited, twenty years earlier. The forty-
fve minute wait at the Olympic chairlift
was no more; the high-speed lifts elimi-
nating line-ups. The frequent break-
downs that left us swaying in bitter cross-
winds for nervous lengths of time were
also mercifully gone. We were still good
skiers, among the better skiers on the
hill, but that was because everyone under
the age of forty was on a snowboard. We
were part of an evolutionary slow fade.
At lunch the next day, my friend Mar-
tin checked his phone constantly for news
of pending interest rate hikes. His nick-
name was Captain Leverage, I was told,
due to his heroic relationship with debt.
He had stayed in Winnipeg and when
his father died hed taken over the family
manufacturing business. I remembered
his taciturn father washing his Cadillac
in the driveway, and his beautiful mother
pouring vodka over Tang crystals in the
kitchen.
Neale was the only one on a snow-
board, though it wasnt a nod to hipness
or progress. He had a leg injury that made
skiing painful, but somehow allowed for
boarding. He had aged very little, and
was living with (and has since married)
his high school sweetheart, the woman
hed been dating when Id left Winnipeg
thirty-three years earlier. His life seemed
miraculously intact, though this was an
illusion. There had been two marriages,
two kids, and two divorces.
I spent time with Paul, my closest
adolescent friend who was now a suc-
cessful developer in Vancouver. In the
mornings, as he drove the rented SUV
up to the mountain, he would phone his
father, who was in a nursing home with
Alzheimers, talking to him in cheerful
repetitive tones.
Paul and I recalled a summer night out
at the lake when he was behind the wheel
of his mothers Thunderbird, an otherwise
responsible boy heading for law school,
racing wildly on Highway 1 in the dead
of night, trying to pass a white Grand
Prix on a blind hill, that reckless teenage
faith. The memory of that hunger for
speed still brought an unsettling frisson
of mortality.
All of our worlds contained secrets
now. Certainly it had been true of an
absent friend who had killed himself by
driving a jet boat into a bridge support
on the Red River. He had managed to
keep his world contained until that
last desperate act. This anarchy lies
in many of us; not necessarily suicidal
ideation, but an anarchy of the mind over-
burdened by disappointment and doubt,
or simply time. The hill had been a test-
ing ground for us when we were young, a
release of pent-up energies. It was more
relief now, the visceral experience of
skiing displacing, at least for a few
moments, other thoughts and worries.
It was another kind of freedom. But
our speed was only a temporary relief;
at the bottom of the hill, our worries
regrouped.
THERE ARE OTHER ACCELERATIONS TO BE
concerned about, of course. In 2004,
the European Project for Ice Coring in
Antarctica drilled to a depth of 3,270
metres, providing a geologic record
that goes back eight hundred thou-
sand years. The methane and CO
2

trapped in bubbles in the ice provides
a record of carbon emissions t hat
stretches back to the mid-Pleistocene
epoch. During glacial periods, CO
2

concentrations varied between 180-190
parts per million per volume (ppmv).
During warmer phases, that fgure rose
to roughly 280 ppmv. After the Industrial
Revolution in the nineteenth century,
CO
2
concentrations spiked. From 1975
to 2005, emissions increased seventy
percent. The current concentration of
CO
2
is 391 ppmv, the highest in eight
hundred millennia.
If this trend continues, the sport
of skiing may erode at a rate faster than
the glaciers; skiing may be entering the
winter of its life. Switzerland noted a six
percent decline in skier visits in 2012.
American resorts have winnowed by
a third in thirty-fve years. At Whistler,
the number of skiers dropped from 2.3
million in 2001 to 1.7 in 2009. The 2011-
2012 skiing season in the United States
st arted wit h t he weakest snowfal l
in twenty years, which prompted a fif-
teen percent decline in skiers from the
previous year.
Snow conditions are increasingly unre-
liable, though partly mitigated by sophis-
ticated snow-making machines. But the
unreliability of snow means that there are
fewer advance bookings, as skiers wait to
see where the snow is. This creates prob-
lems for resort owners. The economic
downturn took a toll as well; uncertainty,
in all its forms, especially plagues the ski
industry, which is an expensive and time-
consuming sport for individuals, let alone
families. The sport needs snow and pros-
perity to survive.
There is a poi nt i n middle age
when you feel that there is still time to
right the ship, that whatever you have
neglectedhealth, teeth (a particularly
sore and expensive point), partners,
finances, childrencan be dealt with
through a concerted push. If we just cut
carbs, buy flowers, start putting mon-
ey aside today, sit down and have that
conversation about drugs with our
teenagers, then all can and will be well.
Climatically, this feels like the moment we
are at; if we install solar panels, buy a Pri-
us, rein back our consumption. But there
are scientists, many scientists, who think
we have passed the point of being able to
right that ship, that it has, in fact, sailed;
regardless of our best efforts, weve already
done too much damage, and it will all
end badly.
IN 2007, THE LEGENDARy NORTHWEST
Passageimpetus for three centuries
of explorationwas free of ice for the
frst time in recorded history. It was an
apocalyptic year for ice, and satellite
photographs showed that twenty-four
percent of arctic ice had disappeared
in the previous twelve months. In the
nineteen- eighties, sea ice covered an
area roughly the size of the U.S.; now it is
half that.
Climate can change on a dime, more
or less. The catastrophic lurks. Exhibit
A for this theory is tzi, the Tyrolean ice
man, whose frozen body was discovered
in the eastern Alps north of Bolzano,
Italy, in 1991 after it was exposed by a
melting glacier. His body had been in the
ice for 5,200 years. Hed been shot in the
back with an arrow, and had managed
to escape his enemies, only to bleed to
death. Within days of his death, there was
a climate event that was large enough
to cover and preserve him for fifty-two
centuries. Otherwise, he would have be-
gun decaying or would have been eaten
by scavengers. Evidence suggests that
the climate event wasnt local. The isotopes
in the water molecules that compose the
remaining ice on Mount Kilimanjaro
also show a decrease at this point, in-
dicating colder temperatures. In the
Middle East, 5,200 years ago seems to be
the start of a very sudden and prolonged
cold snap.
tzi was forty-five, relatively old
in the Copper Age. It is thought that he
might have been a shepherd. Because his
corpse was the best-preserved example
of primitive man, it has become one of
the most minutely studied in history. His
lungs were blackened by campfres. He
showed degeneration of knee and ankle
joints, and had tattoos that may have
been related to pain relief treatments. He
was lactose intolerant, and may have been
suffering from Lyme disease. The arrow-
head that killed him was still lodged in his
back. Perhaps he was a skier. Whatever
else he was, tzi was a middle-aged man
with health issues, trying to survive in a
hostile environment.
As tzi sat on the mountain, bleed-
ing out, what was he thinking? Perhaps
he was thinking about his beautiful mate
and their golden children, or maybe he
was thinking about the cruelty of this
world, the diffculties of fnding food, of
avoiding enemies and predators. Or he
was looking at the stars trying to divine
mans purpose. Maybe all he thought
about was the pain of that arrow in his
back, the coldness in his limbs. Whatever
he was thinking, while he was thinking
it, everything changed. The earth sud-
denly got much colder. It snowed for
days, temperatures plummeted, and he
was buried along with his dreams of love
and survival.
We dream of those things still. As
we age, perhaps more so. We descend,
becoming increasingly conscious of the
speed, the acceleration, of the blur in our
periphery, of those events and possibili-
ties now just out of reach. EB
Is the age-old fgure actually on his last legs?
TWILIGHT
PATRIARCHS
Is the age-old fgure actually on his last legs?
TWILIGHT
ON THE RECORD
PATRIARCHS
By LYNN COADY | PHOTOGRAPHY BLUEFISH STUDIO
was eighteen when I heard Margaret Atwood tell an interviewer that none of the
details of daily life in her patriarchal dystopia The Handmaids Talethe milita-
rized religious state, the religiously-prescribed and ritualized rape, the policed
pregnancy, the enforced prostitution, the absence of basic human autonomy
were made up. These, Atwood asserted in her deadpan, deal-with-it delivery, were
all things that had taken place sometime, somewhere in human history, that in some
cases were taking place as she spoke. I can only report what happened next, clich or
not, because the hair actually did stand up on the back of my neck.
When we talk about feminist awakeningor any political awakening, reallythe
emotion thats often being awakened is panic. Its the feeling of being abruptly and
extremely destabilized, as if a rug is pulled out from underneath you and you realize
there hasnt been a foor this whole time.
I
In early 2012, in the run-up to the
American presidential election, I began
to experience again that same panicked
wheres- the- f loor- gone sensation. The
U.S. culture wars had allowed for many
a self-satisfied Canadian chuckle over
the last decade or so, but now, watching
former moderate turned Stepford Tea-
Partier Mitt Romney closing in on the
presidencyavowing his abrupt desire
to get rid of Planned Parenthood, and
declining to tell a reporter whether or not
he supported equal pay for womenmy
once secure-feeling seat on the sidelines
of Tea Party America was starting to
feel a bit too close to the battlefield for
comfort. It felt as if almost overnight a
real patriarchal madness was hitting top
gear in the nation next door. Every day
seemed to deliver a fresh outrage: rape
apologism, slut- shaming, more rape
apologism, and not just from the neo-con
bullhorns on television, but from sena-
tors and congressmen. New laws based
on medically-illiterate suppositions about
womens bodies were being proposed
and, in some cases, passed. Protestors
took to the streets brandishing signs that
trumpeted not high-blown rhetoric, but
basic, exasperated facts: Women vote!
and This is 2012!
Witnessing the coordinated attacks
on Planned Parenthood, I realized how
mad it was that I was considering sending
money to women fghting for their rights
in the wealthiest, most powerful democ-
racy in the world. In the early 2000s, I
was supporting women in Taliban-ruled
Afghanistan, fueled by precisely the
same female unease: There but for the
grace of God
This realization was followed by the
news that a pro-life, pro-gun rights judge
in Texas had all but declared pre-emptive
civil war if Obama was elected to a sec-
ond term. Im not talking just riots here
and there. Im talking take up arms, get
rid of the dictator. Next came the news
that a militia group arrested in Seattle
had stockpiled hundreds of thousands
of dollars of military-grade weapons to
overthrow the Obama government.
It would be easy to dismiss these as
isolated incidences of lunacy. Except
one was a judge. Except every news day
demonstrated that lunatics can buy guns
as easily as gumballs in the United States.
Except that just over the border there
were men and women with the power to
pass laws saying infammatory, violent,
shockingly anti-democratic things from
sea to shining sea.
Except that it began to feel as if the
better part of the lunacy was directed
at women.
In The Handmaids Tale, Offred, the
narrator, didnt head for the hills when she
should have. One day, whispered a dead-
pan, deal-with-it voice in my head, her
credit cards were all cancelled and her bank
accounts were closed, and the next thing she
knows the tanks are in the streets and shes a
brood mare for God and country.
No rug. No foor. Now, I felt, might be
the time to panic.
BuT WAITIT TuRNED OuT THE fLOOR
was still there. Obama was re-elected,
the Tea Party came out of the election at
an all-time low in the polls and even the
GOP appears to be starting to recog-
nize that extreme social conservatism
is lowering the party into a grave. But
what was that, exactly? Those seismic
tremors down south? Those bellowing,
gnashing noises that reverberated world-
wide, that nearly shook the continent
apart? Something culturally signifcant
happened through, if not because of, the
American election of 2012.
What we witnessed, it seems to me,
were death throesthe kind of violent
spasms to be expected when the (once)
most powerful creatures of the land come
to a tail-thrashing demise. What we saw
was nothing less than the beginning of
the end of the patriarchy in the United
States, an evolution that surely had to
be inevitable for any nation calling itself
a democracy. Of course, the worlds most
powerful democracy also happens to be the
land of fervent evangelical Christianity, the
Koch brothers, and Superpacsa land-
scape where the patriarchys power and
infuence has traditionally been greatest.
Hence the violence of the beasts death.
Sure, roll your eyes: The very idea of
the patriarchy provokes eye-rolls. A pa-
triarch is today an innately cartoonish
fgure, after all, like the Monopoly man
in his top hat and monocle. Caricaturize
as ruthlessly as you like and what do you
come up with? A fat, rich, powerful, loud
buffoon. Oblivious to his privilege, a mor-
al hypocrite. An ex-wife collector, who yet
deplores how the venerable institution of
marriage has been besmirched in these
dark times. A glass of scotch in one hand,
the obligatory phallic symbol cigar in the
other, bloviating from his comfy perch.
But of course its not a caricature; in
fact, its a real person. Rush Limbaugh,
the man who fred the shot heard round
the world in the conflict thats come to
be called The War on Women. And what
a poorly-aimed and anachronistic shot it
was, having wound up in the proverbial
patriarchal foot.
IT WAS IN 2007 THAT THE PANICTHE
patriarchal panic, that iskicked into
high gear, when a woman and an Afri-
can-American emerged as the top two
Rush Limbaugh is a grotesque caricature of the patriarchy come to life
A
P

P
H
O
T
O
S
Democratic presidential contenders.
This historical frst electrifed the race
with the collective thrill that comes from
witnessing a decisive turn of historys
wheel. Barack Obama was chosen as the
Democratic candidate, and then voted
into offce on a wave of exhilaration ex-
perienced across the globe. The two
words that came to be associated with his
campaign were Hope and Change and
everyone seemed to understand instinc-
tively the kind of change Americansand
invested onlookerswere hoping for.
Namely, a country no longer run by and
for the white male elite.
That was 2008. Once a population
has experienced progress on such a vis-
ible, infuential scale, a layer of cynicism
and defeatism gets scrubbed away, or so
we like to hope. Universal suffrage, the
emancipation of the slaves, the fall of the
Berlin Walldoors open in our minds,
light foods in. The political fght at such
points always shifts from the effort it took
to pry those doors open in the frst place,
to the struggle to keep them open and
opening wider. Which brings us back
to 2012, to a struggle that turned out to
be by no means over, and to three social
issues that relate to the patriarchy and
which are in different stages of cultural
evolution: abortion, rape, and the female
presence on the internet.
THE PATRIARCHAL SKIRMISHES Of THE 2012
U.S. election can be traced back to the
abrupt onslaught of legislative attacks on
womens health and reproductive rights
that took place, according to the presi-
dent of Planned Parenthood Cecile Rich-
ards, the day after the Tea Party swept
the mid-term elections. Planned Parent-
hood itself, an organization once lauded
by Barry Goldwater, was suddenly public
enemy number one according to the GOP.
Things steamrolled from there, cumulat-
ing in a much-mocked congressional hear-
ing on the subject of insurance coverage
for birth controla hearing to which no
representatives of the birth-control taking
population were invited. A hearing from
which one such representative, Sandra
Fluke, was rudely turned away.
And this is where we return to Rush
Limbaugh and his ineptly-aimed shot
heard round the world. There was some-
thing about the Georgetown University
student Sandra Fluke and her poised,
articulate testimony that tipped Limbaugh,
and his entire patriarchal club, into a
frenzy. Six days after Fluke spoke at an
alternative hearing, Limbaugh took to
the airwaves in high dudgeon. Fluke, he
insisted, had testifed that she wanted to
be paid to have sex. He then uttered
his now-famous summation: What does
that make her? It makes her a slut, right?
It makes her a prostitute.
Fluke had simply testified about a
friend who lost an ovary as the result of
being denied insurance coverage for con-
traceptive pills.
Despite widespread condemnation
and a looming mass advertising boycott,
Limbaughs ire was not to be restrained.
He ranted for three full days about San-
dra Fluke on his show, exclaiming, Shes
having so much sex its amazing she can
still walk!
In her book, Delirium: The Politics of
Sex in America, Nancy L. Cohen exam-
ines how sexual hysteria has hijacked
American conservative politics in recent
decades. She begins her story with the
arrival of the contraceptive pill in 1965,
demonstrating how the new era of sexual
freedom led directly to the womens and
gay liberation movements. Although it
is easy to grasp why womens lib and
gays coming out of the closet might have
ticked off a lot of people, writes Cohen in
her opening chapter, it is hard to imagine
how it could have sparked the delirium
that has consumed American politics for
four decades.
The sexual counter- revolut ion
started not in response to Roe vs. Wade,
says Cohen, but as a conservative back-
lash against the Pill. The new sexual
f reedoms t he Pi l l represented ran
counter to cherished patriarchal ideals
about the family, exposing it as a petty
tyranny, and setting itself against fun-
damental assumptions about American
culture. Assumptions such as the idea
that women (well-bred women, at least)
were indifferent to sexual pleasure, or
that their natural and preferred domain
was at home with children. More than a
generation later, in his nonsensical leap
from insurance-covered contraception
to sluts and prostitutes, Rush Limbaugh
was merely reframing the original patri-
archal panic attack over womens sexual
freedom.
Late in 2012, after the U.S. election,
I called Cohen at her home. I was feel-
ing suffused with relief and elation at the
decisive Republican defeat, but still shaken
by the woman-hating leading up to it.
In 2012 alone, by way of example, con-
gressional Republicans introduced an
astounding sixty-seven bills that focused
squarely on restricting legal access to
abortion. Matters were even worse at the
state level, with forty-three new restric-
tions enacted in nineteen states, the one
most resonant of The Handmaids Tale
being a Virginia informed consent bill
that conveniently left out the consent.
This bi l l i n part icular warrants
detailed examination. In the online
magazine Slate, Dahlia Lithwick wrote
about the bill, which mandated trans-
vaginal (meaning, internal) ultrasounds
prior to a woman receiving an abortion.
An amendment had been proposed be-
fore the bill was passed, Lithwick noted,
specifying that women would have to
give their written consent to an internal
ultrasound if that was what their doctor
determined was necessary to obtain
images of the fetusessentially allow-
ing them to opt-out of being penetrated
unnecessarilybut this amendment was
voted down. Therefore, wrote Lithwick,
the law provides that women seeking an
A patriarch is today an innately
cartoonish fgure like the Monopoly man
in his top hat and monocle.
abortion in Virginia will be forcibly pene-
trated for no medical reason. I am not the
frst person to note that under any other
set of facts, that would constitute rape un-
der the federal defnition.
Eventually the Virginia law was
amended due to media attention and
public outcry (including counter-amend-
ments tabled by female legislators that
would have done Jonathan Swift proud,
such as one requiring men have rectal
exams before they could get prescriptions
for erectile dysfunction medication).
Women would still have to sit through
unnecessary ultrasounds, but at least
now would not be penetrated. The dysto-
pian irony here is that it meant the man-
dated procedure was not just medically
unnecessary, but pointless; external ul-
trasounds produce no images in the early
stages of pregnancy. These legislated
ultrasounds, then, were pure theatrea
legally-enforced ritual straight out of an
Atwood-inspired nightmare.
This was all icing on the large and un-
appetizing cake being served by the Tea
Party in the lead-up to the 2012 election.
But the Democratic victory in Novem-
ber did stand as a decisive repudiation of
their policy menu. Maureen Dowd wrote
in the New York Times that defeated
Republican candidate Mitt Romney had
resoundingly won the election of the
country he was wooing. . .white male
America, noting, as did others, that the
2012 election featured the largest gender
gap in history. The feminist website Jeze-
bel credited team rape, Todd Akin, and
a cadre of other gaffe-prone Republicans
for making such a mess of the abortion
issue that they actually helped to increase
support for abortion rights across the
United States.
When I called Cohen, she told me
she was still in the process of getting her
thoughts together, post-election. As an
expert on sexual delirium in American
politics she had been much in demand
leading up to perhaps its most delirious
political race to date. Recalling the images
of women protestors holding signs that
read, I cant believe were still protesting
this shit! I asked Cohen how America
could have come so ridiculously close
to turning back the clock to the days
when sex was, in her own words, risky,
dangerous and, in many situations, com-
pletely illegal.
The Tea Party has always operated
under the radar, Cohen told me. For all
its avowed obsession with taxes and the
economy, its telling that the highest-
profile Tea Party candidates tend to be
anti-abortion and anti-gay rights evan-
gelical Christianswhat Cohen calls the
newest generation of sexual counter-
revolutionaries.
Thats their pattern, says Cohen.
When theyre losing, they tend to rebrand
themselves as something other than the
religious right.
Many pundits have expressed baffe-
ment that, despite clear evidence that the
Republican war on women was in large
part responsible for the defeat of the GOP,
Tea Party Republicans have by no means
powered down their war machine. In a
late November editorial, the New York
Times took Republicans to task for stone-
walling the Violence Against Women Act,
patiently explaining how heartless such
indifference to womens suffering was
making the party look, especially in the
wake of Todd Akins legitimate rape
remarks, and asking, Is that really what
Republicans want to stand for? Why, we
might well wonder, isnt the GOP lead-
ership doing an about face on womens
issues now that it has proven to be their
Achilles Heel?
Because, says Cohen, their goal is not
to win the hearts and minds of the Ameri-
can public. Nor has it ever been. These
people are ideologues bordering on theo-
crats. The war on women was never a dis-
tractionit was a main issue for them.
IN OTHER WORDS, ITS NOT SO MuCH ABOuT
winning over public opinion as it is about
achieving an overarching theocratic
agenda. Texas Governor Rick Perrys
vendetta against Planned Parenthood
illustrates Cohens point. He has scrap-
ped the federally-funded Womens Health
Program and created a new program
of the same name, state-f unded, for
no reason other than to keep Planned
Parenthood out, leaving over ffty thou-
sand uninsured women in need of a new
primary care doctor. Perry turned down
federal money and absorbed the costs of
creating this new program. This is not a
politician hoping to win hearts and minds
across a spectrum. This is someone play-
ing to his (largely evangelical) base.
Accordi ngl y, hearts and mi nds
across that broad spectrum have indeed
not been won. Americans have shown
themselves to be in full revolt against
the old-school patriarchal values the Tea
Party represents. A Washington Post/
ABC News poll noted that socialism is
currently pulling more favourable num-
bers than the Tea Party. On the fortieth
anniversary of Roe vs. Wade last January,
an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed
that for the frst time in its history, a ma-
jority of Americans supported legalized
abortion.
ONE Of THE COMMON TROPES Of DISCuSSING
Canadian identity is contrast with the
United States: were like them, but not
like them. Certainly, the abortion is-
suewhich is so central to analyzing
and understanding the path of the patri-
archywas as wrenching for Canadians
as it currently is in the U.S. before abor-
tion was decriminalized here in 1988.
Since then, the procedure has been regu-
lated only by the Canada Health Act and,
following a brief but horrifc spate of anti-
abortion violence between 1994 and 2000
(where, among other incidents, three
doctors in three different provinces came
under sniper fre), Canadians seem to have
decisively lost their taste for the debate.
The legislated ultrasounds
were pure theatre.
Occasional ly, howeverand i n-
creasingly during Stephen Harpers
leadershipa weather balloon gets
sent up in Parliament. In 2012, a balloon
was launched by the Conservative back-
bencher Stephen Woodworth, who tabled
a motion that called for a special commit-
tee to determine when life beginsin
essence, opening the door to Canadian
personhood legislation.
During the run up to the American
election, Planned Parenthood employed
a new slogan meant as a warning to right-
wing politicians: Women are Watching.
Women were watching in Canada, too
clearly the machinations taking place in
the U.S. sent people such as myself into
hypervigilance. Woodworths motion 312
was pounced upon as a none-too-subtle
effort to put the criminalization of abor-
tion back on the table, making headlines
and sparking protests and petitions from
the moment it was put forth.
Prime Minister Harper told the me-
dia he did not support the motionone
of his explicit election vows being that he
would not re-open the abortion debate.
Nonetheless, he allowed a free vote on
the motion, an action NDP opposition
leader Thomas Mulcair called Harpers
backdoor way of signaling to (his) base.
The motion was voted down 203-91, as
predicted, but eight Conservative cabi-
net ministers, and nearly half the partys
caucus, voted in its favour, including
Rona Ambrose, the Minister for the
Status of Women.
The weather balloon def lated and
fell back to earth, but perhaps the true
impact of having launched it in the frst
place was realized a few months later
when the National Post conducted a
poll asking 1,735 randomly selected
Canadians over the age of eighteen when
abortion should be legal. Researchers
were startled when a full sixty percent of
those polled replied, Always. Only a year
previously, that number had been ffty-one
percent. Stephen Woodworth was credited
with having entrenched public opinion
in favour of legalized abortion. Not to
mention that his motion was happening
alongside a U.S. election campaign in
which abortion played a very prominent,
contentious part, as the National Posts
Matt Gurney observed. Canadians
seem to have responded by becoming
even more pro-choice.
Alberta, my home province, is typically
viewed as the Canadian hotbed of U.S.-
style social conservative values, but
the 2012 provincial election threw that
stereotype into question. When the bozo
eruptions of extreme-right Wild Rose
Party candidates began leaking into the
mediaone candidate talked about the
advantage of being Caucasian, another
(an evangelical pastor) blogged about
gays burning in a lake of frethe Wild
Rose landslide predicted in the polls was
reversed, and the Conservative Party,
with its first female leader in history,
cont i nued its fort y- one year power
monopoly, taking sixty-one seats to the
Wild Roses seventeen.
The lesson here, the National Post
quoted strategist Goldy Hyder as saying,
is that the Alberta voter, and certainly
the Canadian voter, has decided that
issues that have already been settled are
best left alone. Canadas conservative
newspaper of record went on to sound
the death knell for social conservatism in
this country, pronouncing it an electorally
toxic Pandoras Box.
PROOf
The black fox is a stream she divines by chance
or geometry, a fash of dark fuidity, the crest
of a night wave, its sharp muzzle and sharper
eyes. Her path and the foxs path, not quite
parallel lines, arrest at confuence
they hover, eye to eye, the shortest distance
between two points.
The fox has encountered a human
before, she can see the calm in its
hesitation, its poised, exact
appraisal. The two of them afoat
on the greenery of their discrete
trails, the foxs less discernible, and low-
slung, hers wide, groomed, almost a road.
One all-encompassing gaze
and the fox dismisses her, she feels herself drop
as the black head swims into the grey
cross-hatching of alderit swallows
the elliptical sweep of tail, white-
tipped, as if the water the fox is
frothed just there. A form drawn
from nothing, as hers is, the water
she is, upright, cylindrical, a standing
well or a stranded waterfall, too far
from the earth and lonely for it. Shes covetous
of every still pool or rill, of the innumerable
lives at home in the planes of light
and dark, moving among the conifers
which do not walk, their slow
green turbulence the fox fows into an intimacy
ground-swellbetween the forest and all other
forms of water.
Elizabeth Philips
RAPE IS HAvING A MOMENT.
When I Googled that exact phrase to look
up a story on Salon.com this past January,
I was surprised, albeit not particularly
shocked, to notice how many other in-
stances of it came up. At the time, it was
undeniable that sexual violence had
become high prof ile. The f irst wave
came as a result of international shock in
response to a gang rape in India. And then,
closer to home in Ohio, a story about high
school football players allegedly toting an
unconscious teenage girl from party to
party and sexually assaulting her.
Prior to this, I had been corre-
sponding with writer Kate Harding a
pioneeri ng femi nist blogger whose
book about rape, Asking for It, will be
published in 2013. She also maintains a
Tumblr called Dont Get Raped, a wry
commentary on the pervasive idea that
its a womans job to prevent her own rape,
as opposed to being the responsibility
of a civil society.
I tried to imagine what it would be
like to be Kate Harding in present-day
western culture, arduously documenting
every instance of not just rape but the
attitudes towards it we encounter every
daya premiere example of this being
the incident that sparked the internation-
al phenomenon of Slutwalk, in which a
Toronto police officer told a group of
female university students, as a part of
a rape prevention talk, that they should
avoid dressing like sluts. It seemed to
me that Harding had given herself per-
haps the most miserable job in the world.
Yes, its really hard to be optimistic
right now, admitted Harding in an e-mail
dialogue. The story of the football players
and the unconscious girl from Steuben-
ville, Ohio had particularly appalled her.
The narrative of sports-playing golden
boys sexually assaulting women with
impunity is one that Harding sees played
out over and over again in her research.
It keeps happening and we keep pre-
tending theres no pattern.
This may be true, but Steubenville
is itself an example of how the pattern
has recently shifted, thanks in large
part to the internet and social media.
The internet has profoundly altered the
conversation about rape, and maybe
even its prosecution and punishment. Its
unlikely the Steubenville case would
have made international news if not for
social media. It began with tweets from
party-going bystanders and the football
players themselves that featured such
insights as, Song of the night is clearly
Rape Me by Nirvana. A photo of two
boys carrying an unconscious girl by her
arms and feet was posted on Instagram.
The tweets and the photo were quick-
ly deleted, but enough were captured
in screenshots and posted by a crusading
blogger that the case exploded online.
Soon it was picked up by the New York
Times, and hit the blogs in earnest, be-
coming impossible to sweep under the
rug, as some prominent members of the
local community had been accused of
attempting to do.
The most notable of these accusers
was the online hacker group Anonymous,
which swept in like avenging superheroes,
launching an online campaign to expose
the putative cover-up and initiating Occupy
Steubenville, a watchdog-cum-protest
movement. Someday someone will write
a story about how Anonymous appears to
have appointed itself Anti-Sexism Sheriff
of Internet Town, stepping in when suicidal
girls are being goaded by Twitter-trolls and
launching an online attack on revenge
porn merchants like Hunter Moore (the
creator of the website Is Anyone Up?
which posted photos and videos of women
who had not consented to having their im-
ages online). Anonymouss crusade marks
the current high point of an increasing on-
line resistance to, and backlash against,
sexism both virtual and IRL (in real life).
Slutwalk is yet another example of
this increasing resistance. While the
mindset exemplifed by the Toronto police
offcers words was telling and depressing,
the movement it sparked in response has
been awe-inspiring, and it is clearly a
movement that would not have, could not
have, spread so quickly and immediately
without the connective power of social
media. In the space of a year, a protest
that started in Queens Park has been
multiplied exponentially from India to
Hong Kong to Australia.
In fact, it now seems clear that social
media has taken over from the conscious-
ness-raising groups of the Sixties as the
new space for women to share thoughts,
validate experiences, and mobilize for
change. Back in 2005, the website Holla
Back was one of the first sites to f lex
the power of collective female outrage,
allowing women to post stories and pho-
tos depicting incidents of everyday street
harassment. One of the most dispiriting
things about sexism in daily life is the
feeling of isolation it impartsthe idea
that the entire culture is mobilized against
you. Holla Back blew apart that isolation,
giving women a graphic document prov-
ing how ubiquitous street harassment is
while providing a sense of solidarity with
other sufferers.
I think a lot of what were seeing
(on the internet) now, says Harding,
is women who have been keeping their
mouth shut for years fnally going IVE
HAD ALL I CAN STANDS AND I CANT
STANDS NO MORE! But I do think the
courage to do that comes from seeing
how bad it is for other women.
Late in 2012, a Twitter meme initiated
by women in the gaming industry called
#1ReasonWhy became a phenomenon
tech and gaming being two bastions
of male brogrammer culture. But tech
is also a young persons industry, mean-
ing an entire generation of female twen-
ty-somethings entering the field are
experiencing good-old fashioned sex-
ism first hand and are, unsurprisingly,
not standing for it. The #1ReasonWhy
hashtag is just one of thousands of such
Social media has taken over from the consciousness-
raising groups of the Sixties as the new space for
women to share thoughts, validate experiences,
and mobilize for change.
memes being used to fght discrimination
worldwide (in Germany recently an anti-
sexism hashtag called #aufschrei (outcry)
sent the popular media into a soul-search-
ing tailspin). #1ReasonWhy arose in
response to a male Kickstarter employee
innocuously asking on Twitter: Why are
there so few lady game creators?
Because Im told designing games
to my POV is nichewhile male ori-
ented design is normal, tweeted one
obviously female responder. Because
every disclosure of harassment feels like
risking never being hired again, posted
another. Within twenty-four hours of
the question being posed, thousands of
women had responded in this vein and
the hashtag made national news.
Another instance of online mobi-
lization came in the early days of 2012
when the largest and best-known breast-
cancer research organization in the
United States, Susan G. Komen for
the Cure, blindsided its supporters by
announcing it would be cutting its fund-
ing to Planned Parenthood. The online
backlash Komen suf fered following
this announcement was so immediate
and scathing that in the space of two
days, Komen reversed its decision. Its
once spotless corporate image has yet
to recover.
For a long time, and for many of its
users, the idea of the web as a safe, affrm-
ing place for women would have elicited
cynical laugher. Women with blogs, high
profile women on Twitter, and women in
business, politics and tech with an active
online presence have long been targeted
and in many cases hounded off the internet
by misogynist online campaigns.
This tendency started to be noticed
around 2007, culminating with the case
of Kathy Sierra, a technology blogger
who eventually felt compelled to shut
down her blog and cancel public appear-
ances in response to an onslaught of
anonymous death and rape threats she
received courtesy of online trollswho
also took care to publish her address
and social security number. It wasnt as
if Sierra had avowed her belief in white
supremacy or pronounced herself a child
pornographer. Her only transgression
was what Kate Harding identifed as the
crime of writing while female. That is,
she was a female writing authoritatively
about the tech industry.
Harding was one of the frst to tackle
this phenomenon on her blog, Shapely
Prose, in a post that she says ended up
being one of the most highly traffcked
things she has ever published. Hard-
ing noted how the conversation about
Sierras harassment seemed dominated
by those who condemned the attacks,
but ultimately thought she should suck it
up. Harding paraphrased the attitude as:
Hey, Welcome to the Internet, Sport!
She was startled by how many of her
male correspondents seemed to have
no idea of the depth and virulence of the
abuse women with online presences have
had to endure.
I didnt realize, she told me, how
much (they) were invested in believing,
A) men and women get exactly the same
volume and nature of f lack online, B)
online harassment and abuse is basically
C
P

I
M
A
G
E
S
Participants in the Slutwalk gather at Queens Park in Toronto May 25, 2012
meaningless, so the right thing to do is
ignore it, and, C) if you dont ignore it,
if you dare to call it out as a real problem,
you j ust don t underst and how the
internet works.
Harding was one of the frst to insist
that online harassment was a womens
issue, and needed to be repudiated con-
tinuously and vociferously. That thinking
has since taken hold online, and its illu-
minating to consider how far weve come
since Kathy Sierra. The 2012 version is
Anita Sarkeesian, a woman who might
as well have had troll bait written all over
her from the moment she appeared on
the web. Sarkeesian, who produced a
video blog about sexism in pop culture
called Feminist Frequency, launched a
Kickstarter campaign in 2012 to raise
funds to make a documentary explor-
ing gender tropes in video games (here
picture that bait being lowered into the
shark tank).
The backlash was immediate and
nasty, reminiscent of that which Kathy
Sierra received. Not only did Sarkees-
ian attract the obligatory death and rape
threats, she also had her YouTube page,
Wikipedia page, and webpage hacked
and defaced in various threatening and
pornographic ways.
But what distinguishes the attack on
Sarkeesian from the one on Sierra is the
pushback in response to the pushback.
Online supporters flocked to Sarkeesi-
ans virtual side. The campaign to threat-
en her into silence was outed everywhere
from Slate to Gamespot.com to the New
York Times, and donations poured into
her Kickstarter account. At the height
of the hostilities, a Canadian named
Ben Spurr created an online game al-
lowing users to virtually punch Anita
Sarkeesian in the face. Spurrs identity
was tracked down by Stephanie Guthrie,
another Canadian, who promptly sic(ed)
the internet on him via Twitter; now
it was Spurr who had to defend himself
against a mob of online adversaries.
Guthrie, naturally, received her share
of death and rape threats, which she
promptly reported to the police. The
internet has become a place where these
views have been able to fester and fower,
Guthrie told me when I spoke to her
recently. Like countless others watching
the Sarkeesian attack, Guthrie had had
enough and acted on it.
In 2007, we were argui ng about
whether or not Kathy Sierra should
have sucked it up. In 2012, the prevailing
wisdom changed from dont feed the
t rol ls to chase down and expose
the trolls. Like Planned Parenthood
reaping publ ic support in the back-
lash against Susan G. Komen for the
Cure, Anita Sarkeesian not only raised
awareness of sexism online and in the
gaming industry, but raised her Kick-
starter fundraising goal of $6,000 within
twenty-four hoursand then went on to
raise $15,297 more.
THERE S A fEELING Of A PATRIARCHAL
endgame in the air. Irelandso long
the Catholic-dominated holdout of west-
ern democraciesis for the first time
since 1992 debating its abortion laws. The
horrifc, lingering death suffered by Sav-
ita Halappanavar last October for want of
an abortion in an Irish hospital led to pub-
lic outrage, mass protests and calls for
action that could no longer be ignored by
those in power. Pope Benedict XVI, that
last old-school patriarch, roused himself
just before announcing his retirement to
utter a condemnation of the potential
new legislation, which pro-choice groups
and Halappanavars parents are pro-
posing should be called Savitas Law.
The patriarchal grip has been so
diffcult to shake off because its had so
many centuries to establish its hold on
us. But real change is evident. Accord-
ing to Hanna Rosins 2012 book The End
of Men (and the Rise of Women), women
are making great inroads into the legal,
medical and business professions and
it is only a matter of time before the
workplace starts to refect this.
Historian Stephanie Coontz, however,
disagrees with Rosins central prem-
ise that all these signs point to the end
of men. What we are seeing, Coontz
recently wrote, is a convergence in
economic fortunes, not female ascen-
dance. What is actually in decline, she
says, is institutionalized patriarchy and
the tolerance for the forcible assertion of
male privilege.
Canada, as we know, has an unprec-
edented six female premiers, one of
whom is openly gay. In his second term
inauguration speech, Barack Obama
evoked the phrase gay rightsanother
historical frst, another door fung open to
let in the light. These are real changes.
Not that the endgame is quite fin-
ished. Take our real-life caricature,
Rush Limbaugh. He has his devotees, as
steadfast as ever. But the hit Limbaugh
took following his remarks about Sandra
Fluke had real repercussions, not just
for his own show but for the entire genre
of right-wing talk radio and, therefore,
right-wing culture. According to Media-
Matters.org, Limbaughs words not only
did incalculable damage to his brand,
but led radio advertisers to reassess
altogether the wisdom of associating
themselves with a f igure capable of
provoking such a powerful consumer
backlash. An internal memo revealed that
141 advertisers had requested their ads
no longer be played during Limbaughs
program. Programs similar to Limbaughs
in tone, content, and philosophywith
hosts such as Mike Savage, Glenn Beck,
and Sean Hannit ywere alluded to
as well.
Could all this mean curtains for
the patriarchy? Perhaps not yet. But
one thing seems certain: societ y is
no longer buyi ng what t hese men
are selling. EB
In 2012, the prevailing wisdom changed
from dont feed the trolls to chase
down and expose the trolls.
Orders 1-877-864-8477 | infO ccrooks@ualber ta.ca | uap.ualberta.ca
2
Canadian Folk Art
to 1950
John A. Fleming & michAel J. RowAn
JAmes A. chAmbeRs, PhotogRAPheR
A daring and beautifully articulated
re-examination of Canadas material
heritage with 425 eye-catching images.
600 pages $45.00 paper
co-published with the canadian museum
of civilization
9780888645562
Disinherited Generations
Our Struggle to Reclaim
Treaty Rights for First Nations
Women and their Descendants
nellie cARlson & KAthleen steinhAueR,
As told to lindA goyette
mARiA cAmPbell, FoRewoRd
Two Cree women fought injustices
regarding the rights of Aboriginal
women and children in Canada.
9780888646422
Healing Histories
Stories from Canadas
Indian Hospitals
lAuRie meiJeR dRees
First collected oral histories
on tuberculosis in Canadas
indigenous communities and
the Indian Hospital System.
9780888646507
Travels and Tales of
Miriam Green Ellis
Pioneer Journalist of the
Canadian West
miRiAm gReen ellis
PAtRiciA demeRs, editoR
Looking at early twentieth-century
westerners through the writings of an
acerbic female agricultural journalist.
9780888646262
Recognition and
Modes of Knowledge
Anagnorisis from Antiquity to
Contemporary Teory
teResA g. Russo, editoR
A comprehensive and comparative
examination of the concept of
recognition across history and
disciplines.
9780888645586
Canadas
Constitutional
Revolution
bARRy l. stRAyeR
Te Honourable Barry L. Strayers
political memoir on Canadian
constitutional reform, 19601982.
9780888646491
000EB6-UAP-FP.indd 1 2/27/13 2:11:12 PM
40 EI GHTEEN BRI DGES SPRING 2013 WWW. EI GHTEENBRI DGES. COM
GRew uP IN a loweR-mIddle-claSS weSteRN caNadIaN home
with a limited haircut budget for male childrenzero, to be
precisewhich meant a tension-flled hour for me and my
four younger brothers whenever our father brought his Sears
Craftsman thirteen-piece barber kit out of the closet, the one that
claimed on the box to contain all the equipment needed for home
hair-cutting. My father ran his own glass and trim business, and was
famously handyhe could repair a television, do home wiring, build a
garage, re-cover a sofabut he was a dreadful barber. I suspect it was
intentional, given his expertise with other tools and with how low the
Clippings From
Around the World
IN THE
CHAIR
THE MEMOI R BANK
By CuRTI s GI llEspI E
I
WWW. EI GHTEENBRI DGES. COM EI GHTEEN BRI DGES SPRING 2013 41
basic competence bar had to be for home-barbering
fve boys in the early seventies in Calgary. Maybe he
thought passable haircuts would sow unrealistically
high expectations for the life ahead, I dont know; I
never got the chance to ask him. Whatever was behind
his ineptitude, the results were always the same: bad
haircuts and worse reactions. There were always tears
of rage and embarrassment, quite often followed by a
terse exchange between my parents.
For heavens sakes, Gerry, my mother would say.
Cant you be just a bit more careful? They care how they
look, even if you dont.
Its hair, hed say. Itll grow back.
That kind of logic usually didnt go over very well.
Conor, the fourth of fve brothers, used to burrow into
the towels and toilet paper under the bathroom sink
when Dad was fnished with him. Hed hunker in
there for hours, a reaction that struck me even then as
illogical, given that he was only hiding from equally
disfgured siblings.
the author receiving
a hair cut from his
father, circa 1968
It wasnt until well after high school
that I convinced a girl to go out on a date
with me, and although it would be unfair
to blame a parent whos no longer around
to defend himself, having a sad haircut
couldnt have helped. Girls might have as-
sumed I was homeless, or that my weird
haircut was the lid on a jar containing
some legitimately disturbing personal
hygiene complications. Still, given that
my father has been dead for over two de-
cades and that the only thing about him
I dont miss is his haircuts, I think Id sit
under my bathroom sink for a month if
it meant having him back for even the
few minutes it would take him to deal
me his signature snaggle-toothed semi-
bowl cut.
The still-visceral longing to see my
father againto witness his grin, to
play cards with him, to watch him fix a
radio at the kitchen tablemust explain
why even now a dodgy haircut makes
me think of him. Comforting isnt quite
the word Id use to describe the buzz of
a barbers clippers but the sound is cer-
tainly transportingI am instantly a boy
on a kitchen chair under a ratty polyester
cape, trapped as my father perpetrates
yet another dismal styling. One of my
favourite pictures from my childhood is
that of me, seven years old, sitting in the
makeshift barbers chair in the kitchen
at home. My father is standing over me
with the clippers in his right hand. His
left hand is gripping the top of my head,
as if hes preventing me making a run for
it. My shoulders are hunched up. I look
more worried than unhappy. Even though
it appears hes only halfway through the
job, you can already tell its not much of
a haircut. The photo seems to perfectly
capture the apprehension I remember
flling the house on haircut day.
Which is why some may find it odd
that these are memories I prize. Some will
find it even more peculiar that not only
have I made no effort to minimize the risk
of a bad haircut in my life, I seem to be in-
creasingly seeking out that risk. None of it
is odd to me, though. Yes, a bad haircut is
always going to be, publicly and inescap-
ably, exactly what it isa bad haircut. But
its also much more than that to me. Its a
way to remember.
Ive come to aPPRecIate oveR the yeaRS
that I left my childhood home with a
freakishly high tolerance for styling risk.
Although my fathers barbering incom-
petence was harrowing for one or two
of my brothers, it never unsettled me at
the requiring-years-of-therapy level. I
suspect this was because my hair was
as unremarkable then as it is now. I also
grew up believing that my hair was sim-
ple to cut. My father never spent more
than ten minutes on it; how tricky could
it be? Quite, apparently; barbers both
domestic and foreign have since pointed
out that I have two cowlicks on the crown
of my head and that at the neckline my
hair is an untamable swirl. Who knew?
In any case, my blithe resistance to
haircut hazard didnt fully manifest itself
until I started travelling. Now, its second
nature. I dont even think about it. Most
travellers, Im given to understand, arrive
in a foreign city and immediately set out
for museums, sights, shows, restaurants,
and art galleries. I have nothing against
such practices, and have even followed
them myself when I dont need a haircut.
But as I grew up, forged my own life, and
moved further into a career as a writer
who travels, I began to notice that Id pull
into Sofa or Guatemala City, Munich or
Key West, and be refexively drawn to lo-
cal barbers and stylists. The buzz, so to
speak, was always greater if they didnt
speak English.
The Paros debacle was my first for-
eign cut. The Greek who barbered me
on that rocky, sunny island some two de-
cades ago had hair like my fathers, multi-
hued and combed back off his forehead.
The hair similarity wasnt why I visited
the Greek, but I noticed it right away.
Though my father had a whitish beard for
most of his last years, which earned him
the nickname Ghost, his hair was five
or six different coloursprimarily white
and grey, but with some black, brown,
and red streaked in, as well as a few yel-
lowing strands that undoubtedly had less
to do with pigmentation than a lifetime of
smoking. From ten paces away, youd have
said my father had grey hair, but the clos-
er you got the wider the color spectrum
became. He kept it tidy but long enough
that he could work in a bead of Brylcreem
and comb it Don Draperishly up across
his forehead from left to right. Hair colour
was not the only similarity between my fa-
ther and the Greek barber: neither talked
much and both liked to keep a cigarette
going while they worked.
In Paros, sitting on a second-f loor
hotel room balcony playing backgam-
mon with my friend Murray, using the
scalding midday sunshine as an excuse
to drink beer, I was surprised to hear the
unmistakable high chatter of a barbers
clippers filling the narrow streetscape
beneath us.
Guzzling the last of my beer, I told
Murray I was stepping out.
Where are you going?
For a haircut, I said.
Murray, then and now a man of good
taste and elegant appearance, grimaced.
A haircut? In Greece?
Greeks have hair. They get it cut.
Whats the big deal?
I left my room and crossed the rough-
hewn rock of the street below. Inside, the
barber with the hair like my fathers ap-
peared to be delivering a lecture to three
hobos sitting on a bench against the wall.
The barbers chair was, mysteriously,
empty. Id heard the clippers whining
away not a minute earlier, yet it was plain
to see that none of these hobos had been
barbered that dayor ever.
I left my childhood home with a freakishly
high tolerance for styling risk.
The barber put his cigarette in an ash-
tray, and slapped the chair half a dozen
times with a white hankie, motioning for
me to sit. As he put me under the cape, I
saw the clippers on the counter in front of
me; grainy rust scabs covered the silver
handle, the cord was badly frayed, the
blade was missing a few teeth. Against
the mirror was a comb jar full of bluish
liquid topped by a hairy scum. No matter,
I thought, if the locals trust this guy, I can,
too. It would occur to me a few days later,
as the nicks and cuts were starting to scab
over, that the locals didnt trust him at all,
given that we didnt see another patron en-
ter his shop for the remainder of our stay.
The barber turned to me and said
something I didnt understand.
Sure, I said, nodding.
He switched on his rusty clippers and
immediately ran them straight down the
middle of my head from front to back at
skull level, stopping afterwards to examine
his work like a carpenter checking a plumb
line. Looking at myself in the mirror I saw a
highway paved through the Amazon. What
he stopped to ponder I have no idea, since
fve seconds into the job the only possible
way forward was to clear-cut my entire
head. On the third pass, closer to the back
of my left ear, one of the broken metal teeth
caught on a hair, which caused the clippers
to stutter and growl. A prickly surge of elec-
tricity shot into the base of my neck and I
jumped in my chair. The barber ignored
my reaction, apparently indifferent to my
electrocution. I stayed quiet except for the
involuntary yips.
On my way out, I turned to look at the
hobos, since I now understood why they
were all so scruffy. They regarded me ex-
pressionlessly, and although I was sure I
would hear roars of laughter when I left
the shop, a scooter zipping by made it too
noisy to tell if theyd erupted.
Boyyou got your moneys worth,
said Murray, deadpan, when I got back
up to the room. But why does the back of
your neck have all those welts on it?
I smiled, not in the least upset. It felt like
being a kid at home.
my fatheR PaSSed away oN JuNe 9, 1992,
three days after suffering a stroke on
the day of my wedding. It was devastat-
ing and, in the words of a friend of mine
about his own fathers early death, my fa-
thers untimely passing is luggage I have
never unpacked, just learned to carry. Its
not the kind of thing you ever really get
over, or, in fact, want to get over. Im not
even sure what that means. To me, its
like losing a leg, or an eye; you dont heal,
you adapt.
In the years following June of 1992, my
travel writing increased in step with my
need to find ways to remember who my
father was, to never forget. I wrote about
him. I sent letters to friends about him.
My siblings and I organized a golf tourna-
ment in his memory. And I kept walking
the haircut high-wire in London, Toronto,
Edinburgh, Paris, Riga, and Rome. The
cuts were often dreadful and the circum-
stances regularly fascinating, but each
episode never failed to act as a memory
chest I was glad to open.
Six years ago I visited Sofia, Bul-
garias vibrant and raw capital, still in a
communist hangover, with its gleaming
commercial avenues opening out onto
civic squares with giant rusting cast-iron
busts of former dictators (all sporting
Stalinist hairstyles, I noted). Strolling
down Boulevard Czar Assen, I found my-
self peering through the window of Salon
Irina. A couple of stylists looked up from
their fashion magazines when I entered.
Both were holding cigarettes. Tendrils
of smoke hung like crepe dangling from
the ceiling.
Hi, I said. Can I get a haircut?
They stared at me. One stylist retreated
CAN
.
ICONS
PolIteNeSS
Everyday examples of Canadian politeness, or niceness, can be broken down
into categories: helpful gestures such as holding doors for people of all genders
and ages; liberal use of please, thank you, and no problem; disarming
greetings like hello or hows it going, especially before business transactions;
and the crucial category of leave-taking language, including take it easy, and
have a good one!
A widespread yet subtle form of non-verbal politeness is the Canadian nod,
commonly observed when two strangers approach each other. This may stem
from traditional working environments where busy hands prohibited the doffng
of hats.
The art of the apology may be said to defne Canadian politesse, sometimes
to the point of clich. For example, Canadians will invariably say sorry when two
people come close to colliding and no ones to blame. This can be humorous to
outsiders, but that signifes a misunderstanding of intentthe word in this usage
is closer to an expression of respect than one of culpability.
British Columbias Ministry of Tourism has run a form of politeness boot-
camp for many years, and they export this expertise worldwide. It teaches
hospitality industry employees the central practices of polite Canadian customer
service, including warm greetings, constructive listening, and learning never to
roll ones eyes.
Readers Digest recently sent undercover reporters to assess levels of polite-
ness in thirty-fve of the worlds largest cities. Toronto did very well, placing third.
Zurich placed second, and New York City won; it would be impolite not to say so.
Clive Holden
behind a curtain. The other took a su-
try pull on her cigarette and continued
to observe me with impressive disdain.
The curtain opened. Four stylists came
at me, all in stilettos, all heavily made up,
all smoking. I felt like an extra in a movie
scene calling for a gathering of assassins
masquerading as high-class escorts (or
vice versa). It was not unpleasant.
Haircut!? said their leader, a kohl-
eyed woman about my age. She sounded
like a Russian spy.
I made what I hoped was an observ-
able visual inventory of the shops chairs,
shampoos, gels, clippers, scissors, and
combs, but as I did it occurred to me that
it may have been a female-only salon, or
that they were closed for lunch, or that
the salon was nothing but a front for a
high-end brothel and Id raised suspicion
by using an incorrect password. Or, even
more worryingly, the correct password.
The leader took a sharp drag on her
smoke before turning away from me to
clarify the situation for her squad, a clari-
fcation that took much longer than the
sentence He wants a haircut should take
in any language.
Yes, she said fnally, turning back to
me. Please. One of her young troika put
a hand on my upper arm and took me to a
shampooing chair. The bored stylist from
the front counter managed to tear herself
away from her magazine in order to move
to the shampooing station, which allowed
me to notice that she was wearing a tight
black miniskirt and a low-cut blouse. She
stubbed out her cigarette, blew the smoke
over my head, and gave me a vigorous
shampoo and head rub, all of which in-
volved considerably more bending over
on her part than seemed strictly neces-
sary. Once the shampoo job was complete
and I was in a chair under a cape, the older
stylist, who I had decided was Irina, began
pulling my hair this way and that while
studying me in the mirror, as if she were
trying to gauge my character.
Thick. She raised an eyebrow.
Long.
Yes, I said, hearing an oddly high
pitch in my voice.
Her eyes bulged slightly. She held
up her right thumb and forefnger, about
three inches apart.
No, no, I said, trying to indicate a
shorter cut. I moved my hands around
under the cape, trying to free them with-
out accidentally groping a stylist.
Ooooh, she said, cutting me off. One
of the other stylistswhos own hair was
a jet-black Medusas head of curlsused
both her hands to suggest a length closer
to eight or nine inches. I was about to shake
my head again when I caught on. I pouted
my bottom lip out a bit and shrugged, as
if to say, You take what youre given, which
made them hoot. Irina set to work, wield-
ing her scissors expertly, stopping occa-
sionally to say, Shorter?
No, Id say, pulling my hands out
and putting them an unseemly distance
apart. One of the younger stylists slapped
me on the shoulder.
When Irina fnished she took a tub of
red goop and put a few ounces of it in my
hair, making it stand up in various places.
The four of them led me out of the chair
and up to the till. I paid the absurdly low
fve lev fee (about three dollars) and then
gave each of them, even the moody hair-
washer, a fve lev tip.
I exited unsure if Irina was training
her staff or whether it was the sort of es-
tablishment that required no training. All
I knew was that I had engaged in firty Bul-
garian banter about my equipment, had
been pawed by numerous sexy women,
and reeked of cigarette smoke and fruity
gel, all of which was agreeable in its own
way, but was, I suppose, more than one
ought to expect from a haircut. I knew
something about the challenges Bulgaria
was facing in its early adjustments to capi-
talism, challenges not entirely benefcial
to the lives of young women. As I walked
down Boulevard Czar Assen and through
Yuzhen Park, I lit a small candle of hope
in my heart that styling hair was the
reason those ladies were gathered at
Salon Irina.
It was the heavy curtain of smoke
inside the Salon that put me back in the
kitchen chair at home with my dad hov-
ering over me. The smell and sight of
cigarette smoke has always been linked
to the haircut for me (a barber shop
combination now non-existent in North
America). I dont smoke and never have,
but the smell of cigarettes is not only not
offensive to me, its achingly nostalgic. I
cannot help but think of my childhood. It
makes me comfortable. It induces sen-
sory recall at every level. When we were
shackled in the barbers chair as kids,
my father usually kept a cigarette go-
ing and often let it dangle from his lips
while he clipped and snipped, the ash
sometimes breaking off and falling into
our laps. The smell and sight of smoke
was everywhere, and was as crucial to
the mise en scne as any other element.
My mother was always present, as well,
anxiously working a cigarette of her own
as she spectated from the kitchen table,
clearly torn, unable to decide who to
root for.
theRe waS ceRtaINly No Smoke befoRe,
during, or after my visit to the Seoul bar-
ber. Ive had just the one haircut in Seoul
and although I wouldnt hesitate to visit a
barber there again, its unlikely Ill sub-
mit to a supplementary treatment with-
out frst getting a reliable translation of
whats involved. My plan had been to visit
one of the famous jimjilbang sauna/spa
combos, most of which feature barber-
shops. I was looking for a haircut, but
was certainly curious about the entire
operation. I found a six-foor jimjilbang
near the bustling Seoul Station, paid
a small fee, and was given a wristband
with a bar code to track how much to pay
upon leaving.
I got off the elevator at the fourth
f loor, the mens f loor. Everyone was
naked, except for the service staff. My
trained eye found the small barbershop
off in the corner. There was a lone barber
and four people in line, so I decided to
explore the hot pools before getting my
hair cut.
After stripping and locking up my
things, I wandered out towards a long,
low hall of showers, saunas, baths, and
pools, and sampled them all more or less
in succession until I was near the deepest
recesses of the chamber. Only then did
I see the low arched passageway at the
back. Beyond, inside a tiled, misty, dimly
lit grotto, two fat naked men were groan-
ing loudly as they received some kind
of vigorous rubdown from wiry fellows
wearing what appeared to be diapers; the
steam and poor light made it hard to fgure
out precisely what was taking place, but it
looked like the kind of scene David Lynch
might fnd himself directing. One of the
masseurs saw me peeking in and barked
something. He pointed at my wristband
the bar codeand then at a hook on the
wall holding other wristbands. I placed
mine in the queue and went to the nearest
hot pool to wait.
Its just a massage, I reminded myself.
This is what Koreans do. Whats the worst
that can happen?
When my turn came, an attendant
took a giant bucket of hot water and
splashed it across my bed. After laying
me out like a corpse on an autopsy table,
he produced a laminated page covered
with Korean characters. He pointed at
it and said, if I was translating correctly,
You are a stupid foreigner. Why are you
here?
I gaped at him.
He worked his lips in preparation.
Rrreggalahh? he said. Ohr V. I. P.?
I smiled, gave him a thumbs up.
V.I.P.!
He put down the page and squirted
lotion over every part of my body. After
a business-like but still rather more in-
timate rubdown than Id wanted or ex-
pected, he doused me with warm water
from the cistern near the wall. Okay, I
reasoned, maybe the massage was too
invasive for my tastes, what with the
exposed privates and all, but it was still
within reason. However, my attendant
then donned what looked like a pair of
oven mitts. He motioned for me to lie on
my stomach. A spurt of panic shot up my
windpipe, and while turning over I real-
ized I was entirely unclear about where
all this was going.
As I was trying to imagine the possibili-
ties, my man leaned into me as if shaving
the side of a door with a hand plane. His
oven mitts werent mitts at all, but gloves
covered with thousands of tiny grainy
shingles. This masseuse with cheese grat-
ers for hands put his entire body weight
into each stroke up and down my back,
my legs, my ass, exfoliating me to within
a millimeter of skinlessness. The scrap-
ing, hair-pulling, nerve-shredding pain of
it was so intense it actually passed through
to a kind of sensory purity, in that way our
lives locate boundaries of extreme physical
sensation to live between.
The dermabrasion stopped. I let out
a breath, and nearly wept with the relief
of it being over. But I felt a touch on my
shoulder. Words were being spoken. I
raised my head. My attendant was mak-
ing a rolling motion.
I blanched. What?
He made the motion again, this time
quite impatiently. There was no resis-
tance. I rolled onto my back. He ran his
handrasps across my chest. The pain
returned in full. He set to work on my
arms, down across my hips and my upper
thighs, my knee caps, then moved to my
inner thighs, moving upwards, closer, re-
lentlessly sandpapering in the direction
of the only part of me hed yet to touch.
No, I thought, hes not going to. Theres just
no way. He cant. He wont.
He did. He got to my equipment,
grabbed it, flicked it around a bit, and
then gave my whole package the kind
of brisk scouring youd give a handful of
baby potatoes before tossing them in the
pot. I was gritting my teeth, clenching
my fsts. When he began to energetically
scrub my perineum I knew it was time to
halt this cultural experiment.
But then the scraping ceased. I was
too scared to open my eyes in case he
was going to ask me to assume some
other unimaginable and even more vul-
nerable position. A glorious cascade of
warm water fell over me, then another,
I realized I was entirely unclear about
where all this was going.
and another. I felt reborn. I was ordered
to roll over, which I did. More water,
more warmth, more relief. And then he
was bidding me to stand up. I was free.
My thigh muscles were wobbly, my knee
joints spasming, my testicles jerking like
yo-yos. I staggered like a crash survivor
to the common area.
There was no lineup at the barber-
shop, and my body went that way without
me sending it conscious instructions. In-
side, a stoic-looking barber was working
on an older gent dozing peacefully under
the cape. The barber was clothed, thank-
fully, although after what Id just been
through, a nude Korean barber wouldnt
have thrown me. He gave me a half nod
to express that I could be next. When
he finished with the man in the chair, I
stepped in.
The only thing I was wearing was my
barcode wristband, and in the mirror I
saw that my entire body was the color of
a red Twizzler. The barber surely knew
what Id just been through, but his face
betrayed nothing. He merely swiped
a reader across my bar code, placed a
clean towel on the chair, and handed me
another towel to cover my public privates.
I sat. He took his scissors and began cut-
ting. For the next ffteen minutes, he did
not once look at me other than to assess
the progress of the cut. He did not utter a
single word or make a sound of any sort.
He did not seek my opinion in any way as
to what I wanted or whether the cut was
proceeding to my satisfaction. There was
no communication of any sort. Once hed
fnished I couldnt help but notice that my
hairstyle looked a lot like his own. Hed
simply taken a road of his choosing and
stopped when he arrived, a process iden-
tical to the one my father employed his
entire barbering career. I dont recall my
father ever asking our opinion as to what
our hair should look like. Hed just turn
the clippers on and when there were no
more scowling kids in the chair hed turn
the clippers off.
My Korean barber put his scissors in
his pocket, but he wasnt done. He moved
to his front table, picked up a straight
razor the length of a carving kni fe,
stropped it laconically, and then went for
the stubble at the back of my neck. Such
a moment would normally have held
a certain frisson, but after the scrotal
assault in the misty grotto, being trapped
naked under the control of a mute Korean
pressing a straight razor to my neck was,
comparatively speaking, a Rockwellian
scene of innocence and bedrock values.
At the end, he snapped off the cape
like a magician pulling a tablecloth out
from under a setting of heirloom china,
then splashed a citrusy tonic in his hands
and rubbed my neck. He made a slight
bow and, now standing, naked again, I
returned it. It was a top-notch haircut,
and if it wasnt the most relaxing cut of
my life it was certainly the quietest. I left
with not a single word or sound uttered
between us.
Dazed, I went into the showers and
must have sat under a warm stream of
water for ffteen minutes before working
up the energy to clean my hair and exam-
ine what was left of my skin. The entire
surface of my body was crackling like a
downed power line. An hour or so later,
riding a high of pure cleanliness now that
my skin was beginning to regenerate, I
passed the barber on the way out. He was
cutting someone elses hair, but paused
to look my way. I smiled broadly for him.
He waited a second to react, but then he
abandoned his poker face and gave me a
full-bore, shiny-eyed grin. I laughed, but
he simply nodded, put his straight face
back on, and returned his attention to the
man in his chair, or at least to the hair of
the man in the chair.
Outside the jimjilbang the smog was
heavy and the traffc frenzied, but I felt
renewed, exhilarated, at peace. Getting
on the subway I thought again of my
Seoul barber, his silence, his smile, and
how it had all made me think of another
undemonstrative person who used to cut
my hair and never really said much him-
self, a person from a past that gets farther
away every day. Not that the ever-widen-
ing gap between now and then lessens
my determination to focus my gaze in
that direction. Lifemy life, anywayis
a lake Im crossing in a rowboat, which
means the only way to go forward is to
face backwards. The departing shore
and the distance covered are receding all
the time, growing ever more indistinct,
but I want to know them and cherish
them by remembering them. I do turn
around every now and then, to make sure
Im still generally headed the right direc-
tion, but mostly Im gazing back at where
Ive been. It seems to me the only proper
way to cross the lake.
Decades after he first spoke them,
I can still hear my father speaking the
words that time and ref lection have
smoothed into metaphor. I know hes nev-
er coming back, and theres nothing I can
do about that; I dont brood on it. Instead,
I wait for those moments when memory
and life conspire to make me grateful for
whats been and for what is. Recently, em-
bracing a whole new sub-genre of styling
risk, I let my thirteen-year-old daughter,
Grace, and her friend, Emily, cut my hair
out on the front porch. They giggled as
they took the scissors to my locks, snip-
ping away in what from the chair seemed
a very unstructured approach.
I cant believe youre letting us do
this, Grace said enthusiastically. But
we ll try to do a good job, Dad. Dont
worry.
Im not worried, I said, meaning
it. My next words came unbidden, and it
made me happy to hear them. Its only
hair, I told them. Itll grow back. eb
I left with not a single word or sound
uttered between us.
Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture
Now in its seventh year, this annual lecture has featured some of Canadas most talented authors,
including Lawrence Hill, Annabel Lyon, Eden Robinson, Dany Laferrire,
Wayne Johnston and Joseph Boyden.
This years lecture:
Dont Turn Back: Observations on Home
Introduction by Marina Endicott. A reception and book signing will follow the lecture.
All are welcome to attend this free event. No RSVP required.
The Canadian Literature Centre/Centre de littrature canadienne presents...
by
Esi Edugyan Esi Edugyan Esi Edugyan
Tuesday, April 16, 2013 at 7:30 pm
Timms Centre for the Arts
87th Ave. & 112th St.
Edmonton, AB
Esi Edugyan's most recent novel, Half Blood Blues, won the 2011 Scotiabank
Giller Prize for Fiction. It was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize,
the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, the Rogers Writers Trust
Fiction Prize, and was longlisted for the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction.
Edugyan has held fellowships in the US, Scotland, Iceland, Germany,
Hungary, Finland, Spain, and Belgium. She lives in Victoria, British
Columbia with her husband and daughter.
For more information, please visit our website, at:
www.arts.ualberta.ca/clc/
000EB6-CLC-FP.indd 1 3/11/13 4:46:02 PM
By ALEX PUGSLEY
A
c
t
i
o
n

T
R
A
N
S
f
E
R
S
ThE SUmmER mY PARENTS dIvoRcEd ThE fIRST TImE,
ThE SUmmER I TURNEd SEvEN,
I wAS No LoNGER ABLE To wALk.
FI CTI ON
Something happened to my super-speed. The fash of quickness I once
relied on to propel me past any other living kid left me and I began to limp
from an ache localized at the top of my left leg. This progressed into a sharp
and steep pain, preventing me from walking, from hobbling, until fnally
I simply hopped everywhere on my right foot. My older sister said it was
because I had an undigested carrot lodged in my hip-bone and explained
I should have listened to her about properly chewing my food, but another
diagnosis pointed to a form of avascular femoral osteonecrosis and a bone
disorder called Legg-Perthes. So I was hospitalized for the months of that
summer and spent my days and nights in orthopedic tractionthat is, with
pulley weights dragging my legs away from my pelvis.
Even though I had brought with me a pencil case of precious effects,
and even though my parents had spoiled me with a number of new Letraset
Super Action Transfersacetate heroes that could be rubbed on to card-
board panoramasmy stay in hospital was a strange time for me. I was so
surprised by my new situation that I mostly pretended it wasnt happening,
that I wasnt in a hospital, that things were the same, and that I would soon be
returned to my familys life, delivered from whatever mythical creatures this
place contained. But morning after morning, I awoke in the Izaak Walton
Killam Hospital for Children, unable to walk away from my mechanized bed,
unable to use my legs, unsure what would happen.
ThE SUmmER mY PARENTS dIvoRcEd ThE fIRST TImE,
ThE SUmmER I TURNEd SEvEN,
I wAS No LoNGER ABLE To wALk.
I remember the smells of the place,
the green reek of the industrial cleanser
used on the tile foor, the blended odours
of a lunch carts undelivered meals
cubes of processed ham congealing into
cheese macaroni, tapioca pudding melt-
ing with humidity, snack-size cartons of
souring skim milk. By the end of the ffth
day, I developed bedsores and chafed el-
bows, my skin a mess of raw cross-hatch-
ings, and I was forced finally to pass a
bowel movement into a metal bed pan.
I buzzed for a nurse to come empty this
pan but nurses were often busy and no
one came right away. So the smell of my
feces, my just-lying-there-on-the-stain-
less-steel poop, spread through the air,
slightly sickening me and very much em-
barrassing me, for I was not alone in the
room. I was in a double room and over the
eight weeks of my stay behind the cur-
tained partition was a succession of other
kidstonsillitis kids, appendix kids, car
accident kids. A new patient might come
in the middle of the night, host a crowd of
visitors that morning, have surgery that
afternoon, and be gone the next day.
Small talk with other families de-
pleted mefake smiles, hopeful waves,
promises to stay in touch. I was happiest
when I was alone and the other bed was
empty, a stack of laundered sheets clean
on the bare mattress. All day I would
occupy myself with my pencil case of
precious effects: a much-loved Batman
figurine sprung from a toy Batboat, a
green terrycloth wrist band, a newly-
received Yellow Submarine. For hours
I played with this Yellow Submarine,
tremendously impressed with the cast-
metal permanence of such an artifact, its
revolving periscope, and the hatches that
opened to reveal a pair of psychedelic
Beatles. At the end of the day I watched
the black-and-white television mounted
on the ceiling, each evening wondering
at Truth or Consequences and the lives
of people who lived outside hospitals. I
awoke sometimes to screams at night
kids wailing, adults sobbingand sad-
der adults you will never see than those
pacing a childrens hospital at three in
the morning. The hallway outside my
room was mostly quiet with moments of
sudden, shrieking calamity.
moRE TERRIfYING foR mE wAS ThE ATTEmPT
at recreation and diversion on week-
day mornings. Day after day I would
be wheeled in my hospital bed toward
the elevators, the hallways perspective
telescoping wildly like the dolly-zoom
in a spooky movie, where I would share
the rising car with a perpetually smiling
hospital porter. Arriving at the top of the
building, I would be steered down the
hallway toward the ffth foor play area.
From inside my bed, I watched the
walls go by, queasy at the sight of the
cheerful posters that featured, say, a
photograph of two kittens dangling from
tree branches beside the jokey caption
Hang In There! or a school of cartoon
minnows happy to be reading from the
same story-book. For this room was full
of extremely ill and not-healthy-at-all
children: cancer kids, burn victim kids,
paralyzed kids in wheelchairs. But my at-
tention that frst morning was drawn to a
purple-faced boy in a hospital bed.
I say purple-faced boy because thats all
he seemed to beI had no idea the world
held such problematics. He was a Thalido-
mide child who, God knows how, had sur-
vived into puberty and adolescence, and
the purpleness of his complexion, which
under the fuorescent ceiling lights looked
positively saurian, was the combined result
of teenage acne and steroid medication.
The purple-faced boy was one of ffty cases
born in the city and he was, like the jokes I
would later hear in the school playground,
a Guy with No Arms and No Legs.
He was mostly just a head and I felt so
humiliated and sorry for this purple-faced
boy, who was living an existence he hadnt
chosen but which he must have known
was about as wretched as a human life
could beand I am ashamed even now
as I write this that on that frst morning I
couldnt look him in the eye and was too
afraid to talk to him. Because he could
speak, of a fashion, making glottal noises
in his throat to indicate a direction or that
he wished returned to his bed a fallen
book. I was embarrassed by this purple-
faced boywondering how on earth he
had happened and could what happened to
him happen to me?and I was sickened to
feel such embarrassment and this frst mo-
ment has stayed with me and stayed with
me and stayed with me, because of all the
kids in the ffth foor play area, the cancer
kid, the burn victim kid, the paralyzed kid
in the wheelchair, or me, a kid in traction,
we all knew we were better off than this
purple-faced boy, who was a horrendous
fuck-up of a human. With his misshapen
head and squiggle fns he seemed a sort of
monster and not a sure bet to be anything
but dead. I had never met a kid so marked
for death. I could sense he knew this, his
eyes were grey and grim and guarded
he probably knew he was not going to get
out of that childrens hospital and that
his possibilities for life were diminished
and diminishing.
We happened to be the only kids in
hospital beds that morning and the Per-
petually Smiling Porter put our beds to-
gether, so that we were side by side, our
bed rails bumping. A nurse assigned to
the ffth foor play area, this was a formi-
dable woman from Herring Cove named
Patty Oickle, suggested I share my Super
Action Transfers with the purple-faced
boy. But in my panic I feigned discom-
fort, as if I were in pain from my traction
weights, and stared instead at the bald
chemo kid who was loose on the floor,
playing with a golden Hot Wheels car I
recognized as Splittin Image.
From the nearby nurses station, an
eight-track played a record from that year,
Bridge Over Troubled Water. Though I
had loved the frst side a few months be-
fore, especially the jubilant Cecilia, the
tapes second song became for me a small
eternity of suffering. This was El Condor
Pasa, an odd, despairing folk tune, full of
faraway sorrow. The singers existential
musingshed rather be a sparrowthan
a nailor a hammerif he could? Who
would want to be either? I didnt under-
stand the guypreyed on my childs sense
of insecurity and looming dread so that
when recreation time was over and I was
fnally free of the ffth foor play area, I was
fantastically grateful to be delivered back
to my room, regardless of its screams and
smells or possible room-mates, content
in my diversion of Letrasets and comic
books and my pencil case of curiosities.
Id rather stay in my room for the entire
two months by myself if I couldif I only
could, I surely would.
BUT EAch wEEkdAY moRNING oN ThE PoLIShEd
foor I would hear the shoe-steps of the
Perpetually Smiling Porter and I would
be wheeled again to the fifth floor play
area. The first day of my second week,
my middle sisters brought a care pack-
age to me (Twizzlers, Pixy Stix, Green
LanternGreen Arrow comic), and, not
fnding me in my room, went searching.
They found me in the ffth foor play area,
next to the bed-ridden purple-faced boy.
They came exploring down the hall,
my sister Faith softly humming See See
My Playmate, and thenand I remem-
ber this next moment so exactlythey
were completely bewildered at the sight
of the purple-faced boy. Both reacted
by staring at him, hardly blinking, gaz-
ing in a sort of simple fascinationnot
because of any prejudice toward him,
but because of a lack of all reference for
what they were seeingwhich in turn
provoked wild curiosity and disbelief.
They were having trouble identifying the
purple-faced boy as a person, as some-
thing more than monstrous, as a crea-
ture recognizably human. I felt in that
moment that completely ignoring him,
was not the sort of example I should
set for my sister Faith, who was four
years old and quite an i mpression-
able young girl, and so I turned to the
purple-faced boy and said hello and
told him my name. He did not have a
lot of motor control over his neck and
his pupils tended to quickly shift and
re-adjust, often straining to the limits of
the eye-socket. He made a sort of smile,
his eyes sympathetic to me, and through
the bars of his hospital bed I touched at
his nearest appendage.
After Bonnie and Faith leftthey
were not allowed to stay as the ffth foor
play area was off-limits to civilians
I showed the purple-faced boy the Letra-
set I was working on, a space adventure
called The Red Planet. Letraset was about
fnding the right place in the landscape
for the action figure as well as cleanly
transferring it to the panorama. Some-
times in my haste the fgure, especially
if it were in a pose I considered hum-
drum, would only partially come off the
acetate, forcing me to line it up again
and to try to match, say, a sentrys hand
with a disembodied ray-gun. The pur-
ple-faced boy examined my handiwork,
noting the split-level choreography I had
achieved around a cliff face, and glanced
at the sheets of acetates.
I passed him the last sheet and the
teaspoon Id been using as a transferring
implement. He accepted the acetate but
made me aware that he didnt need the
spoon, producing from the bed-sheets a
pencil, sharpened at both ends. He held
his double-pencil in pincer fashion, one
of his appendages having opposable dig-
its of a kind, like a swollen crab claw. He
penciled the acetate fgure into the land-
scape with surprising authority and con-
centration. His handiwork was superb
and glitch-free, his effort very genuine,
and, as I nodded to him, the mutual enter-
prise involving us, bonding us, I under-
stood I had a colleague in the ffth foor
play area.
ThE PURPLE-fAcEd BoY wAS STEAdY ANd
studious and resolutehe took nothing
for granted, ever watchful, noting every-
thing for himselfand he had a super-
power. He had an ability to read fast, very
fast, theres-no-way-he-read-it-that-fast
fast. His gurney-bed was home to an im-
provised library and book after book van-
ished into his eyes. I saw him put away
Tintin au Congo, Andr Nortons Witch
World, and The Fellowship of the Ring in
the space of a day. He would use his dou-
ble-pencil to guide his eyes along a line
of text and, when reading a newspaper,
arranged his bed-sheets on either side
of a column so his gaze wouldnt bounce
around. Because he didnt really speak
himself, I guessed his reading was swift
and free of any subvocalization, felds of
text moving clean into his nervous sys-
tem. One quiet Wednesday in the fifth
foor play area, Nurse Patty Oickle rolled
over to our vicinity one of the hospitals
book trolleys. This was an assortment
of sorry-looking childrens books within
which had been stowed some adult hard-
covers like King Rat, The Valley of the
Dolls, and Papillon.
The purple-faced boy was fascinated
by Papillon. I saw him read it three times,
and, though I could be baffed by the te-
dious sameness of the pages of an adult
book, I scanned through it myself, un-
derstanding it was a true-life adventure
about criminals escaping Devils Island.
But I was busy fnishing General Custer,
my next-to-last Super Action Transfer.
The remaining Letraset was some jun-
gle-themed piece I didnt care for called
Animals of the World, all elephants and
peacocks, and I offered it to him. His eyes
spun to their furthest extreme, bloodshot
with strain, indicating I should return to
him the Papillon hard-cover. In the top
right corner of the books frst end-paper,
he placed the image of a bull elephant
and rubbed it perfectly into the book. He
turned the page and positioned a second
elephant on the next recto page, again in
the top corner, so the images would align.
He turned the page and began another,
in this manner flling up the books frst
quire, his double-pencil whittled down
to a nubbin. I said nothing, watching
the acetate animals emerge glistening
in each page corner. Then, in a moment
that revealed to me an intricate genius,
he fuffed these frst pages, making the
animals shape-shift in a shimmer of ani-
mation. He had made a fip-book.
We can do this, I said to him, excited
and raising myself off my hospital bed.
You can do this. We can do the whole
book. Ill help you. You wanna do it? The
purple-faced boy looked at me, his own
eyes shimmering for a moment, their
grimness replaced by insight and curios-
ity. I asked him again and slowly, because
the movement was onerous, he nodded his
heavy head, yes, yes he would do it.
Im NoT SURE whY, EXAcTLY, IT SEEmEd cRUcIALLY
important for two bedridden boys to
transfer an acetate fgure to every other
page of a book called Papillon. The ven-
ture was ours, it was attainable, it was
perfectible, and I liked that we were
re-making a contraption already in the
world, giving it new meaning and vivid-
ness. I suppose the project was our plan,
our jubilation, our method of escape, and
there was for me something so inexpli-
cably right about it. My days in the hos-
pital, which once seemed never-ending,
an infnity of bedsores and decomposing
lunches, became fraught and finite. To
inscribe every other page of the books
pages would require 228 figures
elephants, eagles, lions, gladiators,
wild west cowboys, I didnt care as long
as they were transferred in the mint-
perfect style he had established.
In mid-August, there was a visita-
tion from my mother, distracted in a
foppy hat and peasant skirt. I put in
my request for more Letraset then
asked her about the purple-faced boy.
How long had he been in the hospital?
How long would he stay in the hospi-
tal? He can stay till hes eighteen,
said my mother. And then he l l
have to go to another hospital. Then
wherewhere would he go then? But
my mother, who was suffering from
the lingering effects of a year-long
post partum depression, who had
spent a few weeks that summer in
another hospital herself, who would
shortly leave my father for some
months, was not able or interested in
pursuing an unknown childs possi-
bilities. She shrugged to show there
were contingencies in the world she
neither controlled nor understood. I
didnt push the subject, opting to simply
re-emphasize my requisition order for
Letraset. And to my deepest pleasure,
my oldest sister brought and left me more
Letrasetscopies of Zulu, Carnival, and
Prehistoric Monsters Battleat the
nurses station the next morning.
IN A chILdRENS hoSPITAL, ThERE IS A LULL ThE
week af ter Labour Day, when sport
camps have fnished, when canoe lessons
are done, when families have returned
from vacations and there is lighter traffc
on highways. So the hallway outside my
room was calm, the other bed in my room
unflled. I was not sure where the purple-
faced boy went at night, because in a
few days time I was to be released from
traction, ftted with plaster casts, and dis-
charged from hospitaland we still had
fourteen pages of Papillon to fnalizeso
I asked Nurse Oickle, who had taken an
interest in my partnership with the pur-
ple-faced boy, if he might be moved to my
room. But the purple-faced boy never left
the ffth foor, she told me, and needed to
be kept under observation at night, and
a shift to the second foor was out of the
question. So I asked if my stay in hospital
might be extended. But this, too, was im-
possible because the appointment for my
casts with the orthopedic surgeon was
booked for Friday morning. In this mo-
ment the face of Patty Oickle from Her-
ring Cove was faintly plump, solicitous
but she was baffed that I wanted to stay
longer in hospital when there were, as
she put it, only three more jeezly days
of summer left. So I asked, if the purple-
faced boy couldnt be moved to my room,
could I be moved to his? She wasnt sure
but said she would ask.
The next morning the purple-faced
boy was not present in the fifth f loor
play area. He was somewhere having
testshe was in line for an operation to
repair a congenital heart defectand
there was some concern whether his
system could stand such a procedure.
On my own, I worked on Papillon but ner-
vously and only completed one image, a
Triceratops whose horn-prong I almost
mangled, very nearly twisting it in the f-
nal transfer. I had one last day in hospital
and thirteen more pages to complete so I
asked again if I could visit the purple-
faced boy, wherever he was, and fnally
Nurse Oickle relented. I never knew
if she got higher approval or simply
snuck me on her own.
The Perpetually Smiling Porter
wheeled me after hours to the eleva-
tors and we ascended to the summit,
moving beyond the fifth floor play
area and through a room of odd incu-
bators where inside were cocooned
pinkish, wrinkled creaturesnew-
born infants, I saw, but smaller than
newborns, and some with open
chests, for this was the neonatal
ward. I was mystifed that hidden on
the ffth foor was an entire culture of
other patients, preemies kept alive in
ICU isolation. In the doorway to his
room, on his gurney-bed, was the
purple-faced boy.
He sur veyed t he scene, re-
viewing his fellow- patients with
steady interest. His colour was not
goodhis cheeks seemed desic-
cated, the consistency of tissue
paper, the result, perhaps, of some
augmented medicationand his
thoughts, as ever, seemed far away.
How many kids had he seen come and
go? What did he know?
From six oclock we worked till ten,
working until my eyes were dry, my fn-
gers cramped and trembling. Wanna
leave the rest till tomorrow? I asked,
shaking out my hand. The last two
pages? At that moment an exhausted-
looking anesthetist arrived, confused
to see me with the purple-faced boy. She
told me I would have to return to the sec-
ond foor, that a night nurse would arrive
shortly to take me back my room. I reg-
istered the details around me, the pills
and ointments at his bedside, the varied
prescriptions on his rolling lunch table,
the books piled in the windowsill. All the
books he readwhere did they dwell?
Where did they go in his imagination
where did these meanings reside?
I stared at the purple-faced boy, this
boy whose name I would never know,
contemplating his care and diligence,
the shift and f licker of his grey-green
eyes. He was oblivious to the distractions
of the other roomthe beep-beep of the
electro-cardiograms, the chorus of hap-
hazard breathingand working with a
whITE PANSY, 1927
GEoRGIA okEEffE
Its like those photos of the dead,
disengaged in some essential way,
but beautiful, an innerness
so intent the wall glows. The spot
where soul once came and went, the only
real colour, yolk-gold, though mauve-black
bruises mar the fringe where caress
deepens to a pinch. The rest white,
frosted cheeks and chins. Why didnt
she place it in a vase? Memory
alone isnt enough to keep
anything alive. All thats left
is the levitating smell of oil,
the shush of a hogs hair brush.
A fower long-gone, petals crisp
and cold, puckered at the core
like lips sewn shut.
What is art?
A gasp of dazzle.
An old woman staring you
down with her bone face.
Barry Dempster
single-pointedness of mind I was only
now beginning to appreciate. I was con-
scious of my staring at him, as he mustve
been conscious of my staring at him, as
he mustve grown used to all sorts of
staring years ago, but the example of his
intent was really meaning something to
me and as I was wheeled out of the room,
I reached in kinship to my colleague,
touching at the pincer-fngers that held
the double-pencil.
AT ThE ENd of SUmmER I wAS RELEASEd fRom
traction, encased in hip-to-toe Petrie
casts, and given a wheelchair. After two
months in hospital, I was free to scissor
off my hospital identification bracelet
and return to my familys life. My parents
were busy divorcing that month so no
one in my family was able to meet me. I
was told a cab would be coming. I had no
trousers that could fit over my plaster
casts and so there I was, in T-shirt and
green y-front underwear, waiting in
a wheelchair at the front doors of the
childrens hospital.
I was so bewildered to be outdoors
amid seagulls and f lying beetles and
smells of cut-lawns and thoughts of go-
ing home that I hadnt really registered
the unorthodoxy of my appearance. It
was only when the taxi arrivedand the
driver, who lifted me from my wheelchair
and stowed me in the back seat, kept re-
peating that it was nothing to be embar-
rassed about, being in your underwear,
no, it was exactly like being in a bathing
suit, exactly like it, sure, just like being
in a bathing suitthat I felt ashamed for
I sensed his humiliation for me, a blink-
ing kid in underpants, unable to walk,
waiting alone at the hospital, clutching a
pencil case of knick-knacks. The driver
was packing the collapsed wheelchair
into the trunk when someone knocked
on my window. On this morning, the face
of Patty Oickle was drawn, anguished.
She opened the car door and gave me the
copy of Papillon, saying I should keep it.
I was never told of the purple-faced boys
death, exactly, but I guessed it, I felt it,
from her face I knew it.
Years af terward, my older sister
would talk of him, recalling in contem-
plative moments the person she had seen
for a few minutes one Monday morning.
He was probably better off not being
alive, she said. A boy like thathes
better off.
Life seemed random to me that sum-
mer, death more soI was only a kid,
seven years old, but my sense of fairness
was disturbed. Something seemed off in
the universe. But I had been given the gift
of a book. Coming home that afternoon,
lifted back into my house, I opened the f-
nal pages of Papillon. On the next-to-last
page, in the top corner, was the blended
image of two Super Action Transfers, a
lion with the head-and-wings of an eagle:
a gryphon. It was a work of keen talent
and I was impressed by the rightness of
the proportions, the invisible seam be-
tween creatures, the gleam of assurance
in the eagles eyes. The last page was
blank and I would wonder for years why
it was left this way, deciding at last that it
was simply a sign of things to come. EB
THIS.org
6 |ssues fer en|y $27.99| 0a|| 1-877-999-8447 er e-ma|| us at subscr|begth|smagaz|ne.ca
THIS...
deesn't try te be h|, |t |ust |s.
It never ceases te make me th|nk,
quest|en th|ngs and get angry"
2@Q@G/NKKDX
6anad|an magaz|nes are X QL TX H
$QGVRDUH\RX7KDWVZK\ZHSXEOLVKKXQGUHGVRIWLWOHVVR\RXNQRZWKHUHVRQHMXVWIRU\RX$OO
\RXKDYHWRGRLVKHDGWRWKHQHZVVWDQGVORRNIRUWKH*HQXLQH&DQDGLDQ0DJD]LQHLFRQPDUNLQJ
WUXO\&DQDGLDQSXEOLFDWLRQVDQGVWDUWUHDGLQJ,WVWKDWHDV\

V|s|t magaz|nescanada.ca|ns and newsstands to nd your new favour|te magaz|ne.
000EB6-MagsCanada-FP.indd 1 3/8/13 1:25:26 PM
SoUNdINGS
Taking the measure
SoUNdINGS
Taking the measure
n the fall of 2011 I sat in on a jam Ive since recognized as
part of the future of how we create and consume music.
Whats more, for musicians, it points a way forward for an in-
dustry that often seems like it would rather die than evolve
from a reliance on making and selling records.
It took How Music Works, David Byrnes new book, for me
to fnally understand the impact of what I saw and heard in
a small studio at the University of Alberta, where perhaps a
dozen musicians had gathered for a weekly session. The
lights were low and most people sat cross-legged on the foor
in a wide, loose circle. Apart from a guy with a saxophone and
a girl with a violin, few of the players had traditional instru-
mentsor used them in traditional ways if they did.
Instead, one player swished a whisk, broken and splayed
like an aging tulip, in a metal mixing bowl. Another tapped
bamboo skewers on the lino tile in front of her. Someone
rubbed together rough sheets of paper. The saxophonist
issued mournful, reedless puffs, while the violin lay free on the
foor, bouncing as the bow was dragged tunelessly across its
strings. Play free, no rules, Scott Smallwood, the collectives
leader and assistant professor of composition, had told them.
He joined in, squeaking out discordant notes on a synthesizer.
Despite giving the impression of hippies at kindergarten,
this symphony of found objects was hardly without form. Over
the course of a ffteen to twenty minute piece, Smallwoods
Experimental Improv Music Ensemble, or Xime, cycles
through patterns; it will work itself into a frenzy of sound,
or lull itself into near silence to accommodate, well, a whisk
solo. Structures and patterns emerge organically, providing
enough tension to keep listeners wondering what might come
next and rarely able to guess.
But when its over, its gone. Smallwood will suggest a
new direction to explore, and his band starts over, the sonic
slate wiped clean. Xime might record pieces to discuss them
amongst themselves, but theres no attempt to use them as the
sketches that, in conventional jams, go on to become songs.
There is no intention to make and sell records; ephemerality is
the goal, and its achieved handily. In the time it takes to make
a forty-minute album, for instance, Xime would have created
dozens, if not hundreds, of unique compositions, simply to
explore the mechanics of unfettered composition.
Independent up-and-comersthe most reliable source
of innovation and creativity in modern musiccan learn
from this, because Xime represents an overdue parting with
the past. Making and selling records has been the heart of
both the industrys business model and the musicians ar-
tistic statement for decades. However, fle sharing, iTunes,
even well-intentioned distribution sites like Bandcamp.com,
have rendered the format about as relevant as an 8-track tape.
Musicians make albums at their own, often considerable,
expense and consumers pick them apart for next to nothing,
(or nothing at all, more likely: according to a recent study,
Canadians are amongst the worlds worst offenders for illegal
downloads of music fles).
I
Jam Pearls
MUSI C
// By SCOTT MESSENGER
That means creativity today comes at a cost that may
soon prove unsustainable, even for established acts. Byrnes
booka collection of ten essays covering how spaces, physi-
cal formats, collaborations, and more have shaped western
musicincludes a chapter on business and fnance in the in-
dustry. For what it means to the average musician, it might as
well have been written in red ink. Ive talked to some emerg-
ing musicians who are still watching the industry tank,
Byrne writes, and when I asked them why they even want-
ed to make a record, their feeling was, I want to do it while
they still exist. I may have been operating under the same
impulse. Hows that for a business plan?
For Byrnes 2004 release Grown Backwards, recording
swallowed up nearly ninety-seven percent of his advance
against sales, leaving him with $7,000 for roughly a years
worth of work. Though he admits he could have recorded
more cheaply, you have to sell an awful lot of records to ex-
pect to live off record sales alone, and maybe you shouldnt
count on that happening.
Not to say the album is dead. In 2012, Rush celebrated the
format by releasing Clockwork Angels, the Toronto trios frst
full-length concept record, selling 103,000 copies in its frst
week, their highest number in a decade. Other artists that
year leaned on the album to accommodate unusual bursts of
output. Mark Knopfer went double-long for the frst time in
his thirty-fve year career with the two-disc Privateering. Yel-
low & Green, the double album from Georgia-based metal act
Baroness, gave indie label Relapse its best frst-week seller in
more than two decades. And R&B phenomenon The Weeknds
frst major release (following a series of mixtapes) was a triple
disc. It has since been certifed gold.
But these are outliers. As Byrnes research points out, and
as everyone knows, sales of CDs have plummetedroughly
$15 billion between 2000 and now; at the same time, digital
sales have risen to only about $4 billion. In 2009, only two
percent of the nearly 100,000 records made sold more than
5,000 copies, he adds. Ugly odds for newbies.
Thats part of the reason why he also makes art, works on
flms, and writes booksall of which cost too much money,
time, and energy for most musicians to consider. But Byrnes
diversification makes sense, and thats where an idea like
Xime becomes so important.
Could the spirit and intention of Xime be applied to mod-
ernizing the music industry? Why not create a site devoted to
capturing those moments of inspired creativity of traditional
bands? Ive experienced these in my own projects. You take
chances when you play free. You and your bandmates lead
(or push) each other into unfamiliar territories. Quite often,
the results are so extraordinary that, even if you recorded to
later refne the piece into a song, its like bringing a fre from
inferno to controlled burn. By capturing and posting home-
made video, musicians would be treating listeners to a new
kind of intimacy, giving a glimpse of an artistic point of origin.
Itd be quick and dirty, but the internet doesnt care.
The same site could also host one-off projects, for which
were already seeing an appetite. NPRs music site is grow-
ing its collection of Tiny Desk Concerts, in which artists like
Ben Gibbard, Martha Wainwright, and Lyle Lovett drop by
the offce for short, lo-f sets. Undercover, from the A.V. Club
(The Onions arts and culture property), is a video series fea-
turing bands that pick from a list of songs to cover; its now in
its third season. And, independently, two guitarists launched
the $100 Guitar Project in 2010, shipping their cheap music-
store fnd to sixty-fve accomplished guitar buddies to use it
to make short, novel recordings of compositions to post on
the projects website. It has since spun off a record, a double
album, no less.
That might be one source of revenue for the sites musi-
cians: occasionally compile and sell tracks as cheap digital
downloads, perhaps coupling the release with concerts show-
casing the music those early jams wrought. A little more cash
might come with advertising (no one, after all, is going to pay),
and that might help to bridge the gap to that next record. Few
will be able to do it by touring non-stop.
More than that, this sort of venture would help satisfy con-
sumers in our era of relentless engagement. Social media has
produced a generation of fans that demand not just content
but connection. The internet may have taken the industry out
at the knees, but its also offering unexpected opportunities
for it to try to walk again: for bands to build brands and even
grow as artists.
For me, writes Byrne, diversifcation is about seeking
out ways of stretching creatively. Diversity is not a business
decision: its a way of staying interested, alert.
All artists should all be so lucky. Since theyre not, they
should put the creativity that goes into their work toward
creating sustainable business models, rather than accepting
breaking even as their brass ring.
Were so inundated by the idea of playing by the rules,
Smallwood told his players during the Xime session at the U
of A. A jam had just come to an end and he was both compli-
menting them for breaking those rules and pushing them to
do even more. After all, the task the collective has set for itself
is bigger than it might seem at frst listen. Xime, he told me at
the end of the evening, is ultimately about discovering new
ways to make music. Were trying to invent a new language,
he said. EB
creativity today comes at
a cost that may soon prove
unsustainable, even for
established acts.
riends came to stay with us recently. Among their
suitcases and belongings, they had a cute, quilted shoul-
derbag, which they plunked on the kitchen countertop. Out
came sleeves of aluminum pods, each one a pre-ground
single-portion serving of coffee. Then a milk frother. And
fnally the Pixie, a sleek, pint-sized machine. It turned out this
was a smaller version of what they use at home, the Citiz and
Milk. The Pixie, my friend explained, a tad embarrassed, was
their travel-sized Nespresso machine. It accompanied them
on road trips.
My friend apologized for imposing another appliance on
my cluttered kitchen counter. No messy grounds, she of-
fered by way of explanation. Besides, even he can use it! she
added, glancing over at her uniquely disastrous-at-any-type-
of-cooking husband. Indeed, all you had to do was pop a cap-
sule into the top slot, push a button, and out came an espresso
with a decent-looking crema foating on top. Even the spent
capsule dropped automatically into a holding drawer.
At frst, I chalked The Pixie up to the gadgety eccentricity
of our coffee-crazed friends. But soon after, I couldnt ignore
other clues that this single-serve java culture was breaching
the levees long held by workaday automatic drip machines
and the nerdish luxe of home barista contraptions.
Last year, Nespresso launched its frst big North Ameri-
can television ad campaign just in time for Christmas.
Penelope Cruz seductively lisped over and over again how just
one touch creates the perfect coffee. George Clooneys
face has been splashed all over Europe for years as Nespres-
sos pitchman. More recently, John Malkovich has joined
Clooney in the companys TV ads. You can view their work on
YouTube.
At the same time, other companies were amassing their
lines of single-serve capsules and delivery devicesat
all price levels. Keurig, Tassimo, Bosch, Cuisinart, Krups
(Nescaf), Sears, Black & Decker, and other brands overtook
shelves at Williams-Sonoma, Crate & Barrel, Home Outft-
ters, The Bay, Future Shop, and Canadian Tire.
Everywhere everywhere! kitchen and housewares
stores had pop-up espresso boutiques. Perky sales clerks
were at the ready to demonstrate just how easy it was to brew
a foolproof cup. Not to mention the growing line of must
have accessories, from carousels that arranged your cap-
sules in a twirling, pleasing manner to matching serving
cups. In grocery aisles, those little f ive- gram single-
use capsules were crowding out regular beans and bags of
ground coffee.
As 2012 came to a close, even Tim Hortons and Starbucks
threw their hats into the ring, offering single-serve at-home
versions of their trademark brews for devotees who could no
longer be bothered to wait in the morning lineups.
The skeptic in me assumed that this was a well-orches-
trated campaign where the tail was wagging the dogthat
clever marketers were creating demand out of thin air. But
with a quick look at the research statistics, I soon realized that
Big Coffee was merely trying to keep up with the fckle whims
of the caffeinated masses.
According to the NPD Group, a market research com-
pany that tracks restaurant and consumer food trends, over
F
// By JENNIFER COCKRALL-KING
CONSUMPT I ON
Espresso 2.0
one quarter of us are drinking more cups of joe at home, and
less in restaurants and cafes, partly to save money. And as we
do, were going berserk for the single-serve machines. Even
before 2012 was over, NPD reported that single- serve
machines had become the second most popular coffee makers at
thirty-one percent of the market share and the Canadian mar-
ket for machines alone had reached $113.2 million in sales, a
growth of ffty-eight percent over the previous year.
Josh Hockin, the 2011 Canadian National Barista Cham-
pion, is director of training and quality control at Transcend
Coffee, a craft roastery with two cafs in Edmonton. When I
asked his opinion on these machines and this trend, he used
words like burnt, thin, bitter, and uninteresting to
describe the espresso that a plastic machine could produce.
Without fairly expensive equipment, and without a lot
of training and experience, brewing espresso at home is
actually pretty hard, Hockin said. This is why he thinks
theres been a parallel growth in the business of at-home
specialty coffee and its mass-market contender of single-
serve systems.
Hockin cautions that single-serve contraptions are not a
great choice, though he understands the convenience and the
lack of mess. For what they are, he admits, they produce con-
sistent coffee if nothing else. Of all the brands, he credits Nes-
presso as being the best at what it does. (It is the only brand
that uses actual grinds in the capsule and not an instant.) But
its defnitely a compromise. When was the coffee roasted?
Probably a year ago.
Poul Mark, Transcends founder and owner, added that
the single-serve revolution has been the dominant topic of
North American coffee conferences for the past two years.
Obviously, were not fans, he told me, concerned not only
as a business owner in the specialty bean trade, but as a lover
of quality, hand-roasted coffees. He pointed to the massive
money being made on what are at best mediocre beans,
fuelling the ridiculous growth in this retail segment, and
encouraged me to consider the cost of the product inside those
little capsules.
I did the math. Single-serve capsules cost between fifty
to seventy-two cents each for five-to-seven-grams of coffee.
This means that the cheapest coffee inside a capsule prices
out at about $100 per kilogram or forty-fve dollars per pound.
Transcends most expensive beans sell for forty-three dollars
per pound, while the majority of their single-source fair-trade
beans sell for twenty-five dollars per pound. With relatively
cheap machines, the capsules are the real bonanza for these
companies. Its analogous to the model that printer companies
developed to sell us cheap machines that require expensive ink
cartridges. No wonder companies like Nespresso could afford
George Clooney and Penelope Cruz to pitch their products.
The Bay in Southgate Mall in Edmonton has one of six
Canadian Nespresso Boutiques. The other fve are tucked in
as stores-within-stores at select Bay locations in Toronto, Yor-
kville, Montreal, Quebec City, and Vancouver.
The Edmonton boutique manager toured me through the
various machines, distinguished by their minor differences in
shape, the colour of the exterior molded plastic, whether there
was a milk frother attached or not, and price. It appeared that
you could pay anywhere from $199 to $1599 for essentially the
same appliance. Sleeves of shiny aluminum casings in pal-
ettes of colours like makeup displays were the eye-candy at
the capsule bar. A sleeve of ten servings ranged from $6.80
to $7.20.
Dozens of people were browsing the glossy plastic ma-
chines alongside me, merrily buying indigo blue and scarlet red
capsules. There was a sophisticated feel to the whole affair. You
were part of a club, literally, with membership discounts and
loyalty perks. Nespresso even has its own hip product-place-
ment magazine. Glossy stories on chefs, exotic destinations, ar-
chitecture, and art were layered in between soft-focus close-ups
of machines, capsules, and accessories. There was an article
about the Nespresso-sponsored Team New Zealands twenty-
two metre Catamaran in the most-recent Americas Cup. I lost
count of the full-page ads for watches.
When the moment came for a taste-test, I chose a decaf,
reasoning that if such a machine could extract a superior de-
caf, I would be won over. Sadly, I was not. The coffee was thin
and lacked the fnish that a proper machine can extract from
good, freshly roasted beans, even decaffeinated ones.
I left the boutique asking the obvious question: Was good
marketing and convenience enough to make 2013 the year of
the single-serve revolution? Or would quality carry the day,
and make this years machines next years yard sale items?
Of course, whos to say the coffee war will even be fought
on quality? Its losing ground already to the personal micro-
economic decisions we are making every day in our down-
ward-facing economy. We still love our espresso drinks, but at
four or fve dollars per latte, theyre getting harder and harder
to justify. Single-serve lattes, macchiatos, and cappuccinos
seem to be the new affordable luxury, with the added bonus
of at-home convenience and affliation with Clooney, Cruz,
and Malkovich. The question, in the end, may not be whether
its as good as a top-notch barista-made espresso, because, of
course, it isnt. The point is that, for many, the actual quality
of the coffee might not matter, and the coffee companies have
fgured this out. EB
Nespresso even has its
own hip product-placement
magazinestories on chefs,
exotic destinations, and art
between soft-focus close-ups
of machines and capsules.
ishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, is a small Central Asian
city set under fve thousand metre peaks and sandwiched
between the vast steppes of Kazakhstan and the deserts of
Tajikistan and Western China. As of the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury, Bishkek was little more than a collection of huts, a way
station on what remained of the silk road, dry and dusty, and
bitterly cold in the winter, but thanks to the Soviet Unions
predilection for gigantism, the citys boulevards and plazas
are now vast, its air a haze of sweet coal smoke pumped from
the smokestacks of a generating station.
The State Historical Museum is set in the middle of the
endless and almost always empty Ala-Too Square in the city
centre, in front of which is a glassed-in booth with two perfectly
motionless soldiers in long great coats and jack boots; during
the changing of the guards they exit with high, puppet-like
goose steps. Nearby is a statue of Manas, the furious nomad
warrior of the national epic. The museum itself is a massive
poured concrete cube, columns along its sides, in a style that is
a hybrid of Islamic mausoleum architecture and brutal Soviet
modernism, and inside, above the sparse smattering of relics of
Kyrgyz history, are soaring murals that depict the Russian Revo-
lution and chaotic, bloody tribal raids. Behind the museum is a
statue of Lenin, displaced by Manas from its original place at the
front, donning his signature workers cap and defantly pointing
toward the futureor rather, toward nowhere in particular.
One of the remarkable features of the State Historical Mu-
seum, as well as the grimly monumental Kyrgyz Museum of
Fine Arts, is that there is almost never anyone there. Like the
sprawling boulevards and squares, which by evening in winter
are dark and desolate, the museums seem to represent the idea
of a country that never really existed and has little to do with
the citys rag-tag, multi-ethnic population of Kyrgyz, Russians,
Uyghurs, Uzbeks, Koreans, Kazahks, and Chinese. In this con-
servative, nominally Muslim city, the parks, littered with statues
of shamans and Asiatic warlords and Marx and Engels, largely
serve as private, secretive places for young couples to make out.
cULTURAL INSTITUTIoNS IN oUT-of-ThE-wAY PoST-SovIET coUNTRIES
like Kyrgyzstan with little or no tourism pay no heed to whether
their exhibitions and collections are attractive to the population
or whether anyone actually shows up. There are no market-
ing and publicity departments; there are no education depart-
ments; there are no billboards or television advertisements.
At institutions across North America like the Vancouver Art
Gallery, the Art Gallery of Alberta, and the Art Gallery of On-
tario almost the exact opposite is the case: saddled with debt
from landmark new buildings (or plans for constructing land-
mark new buildings), these museums devote disproportion-
ate amounts of their budgets to figuring out how to bring
great crowds of paying visitors to fashy, fve-star exhibitions
through their revolving glass doors. This is the world of
evidence-based policy, of economic accountability, and of
cultural life as consumption, entertainment, and diversion.
In a twenty-frst century, conservative Canada, with purse
strings for perceived indulgences pulled tight, sexy exhibi-
tions like Van Gogh: Up Close at the National Gallery of Canada
last summer or Frieda & Diego last fall at the Art Gallery of
Ontario or even the biennale at the Art Gallery of Alberta, all
bringing with them to varying degrees signifcant shipping
and insurance costs, not only need to pull in visitors, they
requi re t he f i nanci al par t i ci pat i on of compani es
l i ke Sun Li fe Fi nanci al , Aeropl an, Scot i abank, and
t he Bank of Mont real . The goi ng euphemi sm for
such f undi ng is partnership, but it s about money.
B
// By DANIEL BAIRD
ART
what Art Is for
The press conferences for such exhibitions are always il-
luminating and more or less identical. The director of the
museum will remark on the groundbreaking importance of
the exhibition, and then lavishly praise the various corporate
sponsors. A representative of the sponsor will reinforce the im-
portance of the new or ongoing partnership, and make a few
nervous remarks about the art itself (which often enough was
made by modernists committed to the violent destruction of
capitalism). After sputtering, largely ignored remarks about
methodology by the curator, the director will usually return to
the stage, visibly embarrassed, to pump the products available
in the gift shops. While private philanthropists can and do pro-
vide funding for exhibitions out of generosity, or as a tribute to
the society that has richly beneftted them, we all know, despite
the love-ins between museum directors and sponsors at press
conferences, that companies like Scotiabank and the Bank of
Montreal are involved in these exhibitions because they expect
a return on their investment: they are disseminating a brand,
and such exhibitions are advertisements.
The value of big-money, corporate involvement in the arts,
in North America or anywhere else, might seem not only inevi-
table but something of a no-brainer. Who doesnt want to have
regular programming of major artists in Canada, whether its
Caravaggio or Van Gogh or Picasso or the Chinese conceptual
artist and activist Ai Weiwei, especially for those of us without the
means to hop from show to show in New York, London, Berlin,
or Shanghai? Otherwise, many of us would never get to see such
art, or only on rare occasions, and young people will get to see
it during their formative years. In this context, it would seem to
hardly matter that large companies are ultimately interested in
proliferating their brands or promoting an image of corporate
responsibility; the benefts are simply too big to worry about that.
Few people in the arts are thrilled about the fact that
corporate logos have come to dominate the art world in much
the same way (and for the same reason) as they have come to
dominate professional sports; it is widely regarded as a neces-
sary evil. But this cost-beneft analysisif we want increas-
ingly big, international exhibitions, then we have to partner
with corporationsmay be confused. Maybe there is, in fact,
something wrong with what we want. Maybe, seduced by the
prospect of ever bigger, more elaborate exhibitions, weve
forgotten what the point of art was in the frst place.
Corporate money in the arts has encouraged two insidious
trends regarding the visual arts as a form of wholesome,
educational entertainment (so people can feel good about them-
selves because they didnt stay home watching reality TV) and
art as part of the global celebrity system in which the draw of
an exhibition is less the art than name recognition. Again, such
exhibitions, relentlessly promoted, almost certainly allow more
Canadians to see more historically important art than they
otherwise would, but, ironically, it might lead them to have even
less of a relationship to art than they had before. There is such
a thing as great art (and the difference between great and mi-
nor art is clarifed when one becomes familiar with permanent
collections like those at the Metropolitan Museum in New York,
the Louvre in Paris, the Prado in Madrid, and the National
Gallery of Canada), but the importance of art for the individual
in no way depends upon great art. Having an intimate, ongoing
relationship to works of art whatever their ultimate quality is
more important than seeing major works; it is far better to see a
minor painting often than a great painting once or twice. What
is important about art is the imaginative project it proposes and
the relationship to the world it insists upon. Art isnt about the
moment in which one contemplates it, about the object in and of
itself; its about everything else.
We should try to imagine an art world without the
troubling, and compromising, influx of corporate money.
There would be few if any big-ticket exhibitions that (at least
occasionally) bring in large crowds, so ticket sales would
decline precipitously. The curators and administrators who
oversee such exhibitions would probably lose their jobs.
Marketing and publicity departments would largely disap-
pear. Gift shops would be pointless. Exhibitions would rely
on the creative use of permanent collections and national and
regional artists: in Canada, this would be a far more provincial
and insular world, disconnected from the trends in New York,
London, and Berlin. This downsizing would not exactly compare
with, say, the collapse of the auto industry, but even in Canada, art
is a multi-billion dollar industry, and it should give us pause.
But the question is, would it actually be harmful to art and
our relationship to it? Would this be a bad thing? I think not.
Sustained by tens of millions of dollars in corporate money in
Canada alone, the globalized art world has neither produced
better artists than at any other period of history, nor has it cre-
ated better, more self-conscious viewers, or for that matter
stronger communities: people focking to exhibitions of what
they believe, rightly or wrongly, to be great art leaves them as
they were before, in part because, unlike corporate brands,
they can partition the art off from the rest of their lives.
Think about what our actual, mundane, everyday experi-
ence of art is like. You drift into a museum, gallery, or even
a coffee shop with art on its walls during the course of your
day. You find yourself more or less at random in front of a
work of art by someone whose name you dont recognize and
who may or may not be well known: it might be a painting of a
landscape, a photograph of a riot, a looping web of strings and
objects. You are held there for a moment, sixty seconds, fve
minutes, for reasons you may or may not understand. Then
you leave, pulled back into the rest of your life, and while
Art ultimately dies when it is
a special occasion requiring a trip
downtown and a twenty-fve dollar
ticket; it needs to be indistinguishable
from ordinary life.
R OYAL AL B E R TAMUS E UM. C A
12845 102 Ave. Edmonton, AB | 780.453.9100
Historic sites & MuseuMs, AlbertA culture
Take the whole family on a journey
of discovery at one of Canadas most
popular museums! See all the natural
regions of Alberta, enjoy a breathtaking
gem and mineral gallery, stroll through
a stunning exhibition featuring the story
of the First Peoples, and discover exotic
insects in the Live Bug Room. Billions of
years packed into one amazing day!
you will most likely instantly forget the name of the artist
and might not even be able to describe the work as a whole,
you might well remember fragments of it a gesture, a line,
a swatch of colorand these fragments begin to intertwine
with everything else you look at and think about. Doing this
once might not have much of an impact, but by doing it every
day, unselfconsciously, as a matter of course, the fragments
accumulate and evolve along with you, and suddenly you are
seeing the world in new ways. This process in no way depends
upon great art; it requires intimacy, allowing art to become
part of life, allowing the boundaries between art and life to
slowly dissolve. Art ultimately dies when it is a special occasion
requiring a dedicated trip downtown and a twenty-fve dollar
ticket; it needs to be indistinguishable from ordinary life.
oN ThE oThER SIdE of ThE PARk fRom ThE STATE hISToRIcAL mUSEUm
in Bishkek is the Dubovyi Park Museum (it literally means
Oak Park Museum), a small, well-maintained exhibition
space devoted to contemporary art in Kyrgyzstan. The building
itself has an interesting history. Originally an orthodox church
built in 1870 when Tsarist Russia frst asserted its presence in
the region as part of the diplomatic brinksmanship with west-
ern Europe usually called the great game, the building was in
the process of demolition, its onion-shaped dome already torn
down by the Soviet government, when an urgent message was
sent to Moscow that Kyrgyz artists needed a place to exhibit
their work. Currently its showing an exhibit of photographs tak-
en in nearby western China, home of the Uyghurs, a persecuted
Muslim Turkic people with close ethnic and cultural connec-
tions to the Kyrgyz. In the spring of 2013, there will be a show
of the well-known local painter Sabidjan Babadjanovmostly
depictions of local people and the villages, high meadows, and
mountains one encounters less than an hour from Bishkek.
These artists will never exhibit in the great museums or
galleries of the world; even here, few people here will visit the
show or even know it exists. But those who manage to drift in
and out of the exhibit during the course of the day, when they
wander back into the dusty streets of Bishkekthe market
with its bins of yak meat, the cab drivers pulled up to alley ki-
osks downing water glasses of vodka, the Afghanistan war
veterans begging on street corners, the Korean gangsters in
power suits and hot pink ties, the old women with headscarves
sweeping the gutters with long wicker brooms, the beautiful
young women with hats that look like gutted snow leopards set
on their shining jet black hair, the mountains presiding over
everythingthey will do so in a world completely continuous
with the art. The economy may be global, but art isnt because
we arent. Art exists only in the thoughts and conversations we
have at a particular time and place. We dont need Scotiabank
for that. EB
SOl O ShOw: ROOM 62
SEAN cAULfIELd
Sean Caulfeld is an Edmonton artist whose work explores the impact of technology
on the environment and our bodies. He is interested in creating visual images that
blur boundaries between the biological and the technological, the organic and
the mechanical, and which challenge viewers to consider the implications of this
merging. Caulfeld is a Centennial Professor in the Department of Art and Design at
the University of Alberta. He has exhibited his prints, drawings, and artists books
extensively throughout Canada, the United States, Europe, and Japan.
Diagram for circle of Lights, 2012 contained Body #3 (from the End Point series), 2011
Diagram for the Heaven of the Sun, 2012
he new flm Oz the Great and Powerful arrived proclaim-
ing it as the work of the producer of Alice in Wonder-
land. And so it goes in Hollywood, where L. Frank Baum and
Lewis Carroll can be elbowed aside by the guy who made the
Young Guns movies. That guy in question is Joe Roth, a vet-
eran producer whos had some of the biggest hits of his career
in the last three years with a series of adult takes on classic
childrens stories such as Tim Burtons version of Alice in
Wonderland and Snow White and the Huntsman.
Oz the Great and Powerful, directed by Spider-Mans Sam
Raimi, has all the Roth earmarks: a top-notch cast (James
Franco as the Wizard, and Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, and
Michelle Williams as witches), lavish production design, an
overgenerous effects budget, and a script that adds layers of
backstory to characters and situations whose simplicity and
power satisfed audiences perfectly well for over a century.
What this new Oz isnt, though, is scary. It tries hard to
establish dark-and-edgy bonafdes with images of the Wicked
Witch of the West reaching out from the shadows and clawing
up a marble tabletop with her fngernails, and a fock of bat-
like creatures fying into the camera. But these rote exercises
in computer-generated imagery are pretty weak tea coming
from Raimi, who set the gold standard for giddily energetic
low-budget comedy-horror back in the nineteen-eighties with
the Evil Dead series.
Has Raimi lingered in the Hollywood poppy felds too long
and forgotten all his old gorehound instincts? If he has, thats
a problem. A ruinous one, even. The world of Oz exists for one
reason and one reason only, and thats to give young children
nightmares. Any Oz flm that fails to do so has to be consid-
ered an artistic failure.
L. fRANk BAUm woULd dISAGREE, of coURSE. hE SAYS AS mUch
in his introduction to the frst of his Oz novels, The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz, published in 1900. Baum saw a sea change tak-
ing place in childrens literature, and wanted to draw a line
between traditional fairytales, with all their horrible and
blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a
fearsome moral to each tale, and a newer type of childrens
story which he termed the wonder tale. Wonder tales were
meant for the modern child, who according to Baum seeks
only entertainment... and gladly dispenses with all disagree-
able incidents. Thats the kind of book Baum wanted The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz to be: a modernized fairytale, in
which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-
aches and nightmares are left out.
Baum died of a stroke in 1919, and so was spared the irony
of seeing the universe he created become perhaps the twen-
tieth centurys most fertile spawning ground for childhood
nightmares. As early as 1934, James Thurber noted Baums
knack for thoughtlessly traumatizing his readers: Children
love a lot of nightmare and at least a little heartbreak in their
books, he wrote in an article for The New Republic. And
they get them in the Oz books. I know that I went through
excruciatingly lovely nightmares and heartaches when the
Scarecrow lost his straw, then the Tin Woodman was taken
apart, when the Saw-Horse broke his wooden leg (it hurt for
me, even if it didnt for Mr. Baum).
T
// By PAUL MATWYCHUK
F I l M
The Nightmarish world of oz
T
h
e

W
i
z
a
r
d

o
f

O
Z

-

M
e
t
r
o
-
G
o
l
d
w
y
n
-
M
a
y
e
r
A similar disconnect between stated intention and night-
marish effects is on display in the 1939 MGM musical The
Wizard of Oz, which begins with an introductory text that,
with wonderful hubris, proclaims itself a classic even before
the frst scene is underway. For nearly forty years, we read,
this story has given faithful service to the Young in Heart;
and Time has been powerless to put its kindly philosophy out
of fashion....To the Young in Heart we dedicate this picture.
Maybe infict would have been a better word. Twin, com-
peting narratives have grown up around The Wizard of Oz.
The offcial version declares The Wizard of Oz a timeless clas-
sic, the epitome of Hollywood studio magic-making, one that
continues to enchant new generations of flm fans through its
annual broadcasts on network TV.
In the shadow narrative, however, The Wizard of Oz means
something very different to the children who see it. Its a magi-
cal flm, sure, but its magic is dark and troubling, and it trans-
formed Baums cheerful story of Dorothy Gales adventures
down the Yellow Brick Road into the scariest and most intense
experience of most childrens entire moviegoing lives. This is
not even a matter of one or two isolated upsetting moments;
The Wizard of Oz consists of a steady and unceasing stream of
nightmarish images. The tornado sweeping implacably across
the featureless Kansas horizon. The legs of the Wicked Witch
of the East bonelessly curling up under Dorothys house like
grotesque party favours. Those terrifying fying monkeys. Film
blogger John LaRue once compiled a list of the scariest things
in The Wizard of Oz; he singled out the gigantic disembodied
head that looms over Dorothy and her companions during their
frst encounter with the Wizard, and that eerie, vowelly chant
the guards repeat as they march outside the Wicked Witch of
the Wests castle as being particularly upsetting. For comedian
Julie Klausner, its the Haunted Forest sequence where the
trees come to life and start pelting Dorothy and her friends with
their own apples. Its grotesque! she recently observed on her
podcast How Was Your Week? Theyre throwing something
thats actually a part of them at someone they hate that much!
And I still havent even mentioned the flms main villain, the
Wicked Witch of the West, who is scary when shes alive and
even scarier when shes dying. Is there a more agonizing
demise in all of childrens cinema than the sight of Marga-
ret Hamilton melting into the floor, raging against her own
mortality with her very last breath?
Rewatching The Wizard of Oz as an adult, what strikes me most
is the flms sense of claustrophobia, which is more subtle but just
as intense as anything in Repulsionstrange, since Oz is a flm
that takes place almost entirely outside. Even in the iconic moment
where Dorothy opens a door in her black-and-white world and en-
ters the supposedly wide-open Technicolor realm of Oz, in prac-
tice, clearly all shes doing is walking from a small soundstage into
a bigger one. The hills in the distance are painted on the scenery;
you can see Munchkin shadows playing faintly upon it. The Yellow
Brick Road paves over a foor that was obviously already fat.
I think thats the secret ingredient of The Wizard of Ozs
palpably creepy vibe, even more so than any individual creepy
imageit takes place in a plainly artifcial world that refus-
es to acknowledge its own artifciality. (Its the same thing
that makes clowns so distastefulthe painted face that fails
to disguise the human face beneath.) Even a child can sub-
liminally recognize that the creatures the flm insists are a
magical race of Munchkins are really grown adults forced to
wear humiliating wigs and sing in dubbed voices about lol-
lipops. (The urban legend darkly persists that a particularly
depressed Munchkin actor hanged himself right there on the
set. If you look closely, the story goes, you can see his body in
the background while the stars march past singing Were Off
to See the Wizard. Tra-la!)
ThE oNLY RIvAL To tHe WizArD of oz whEN IT cAmE To coUchING
high-potency nightmare fodder inside anodyne family enter-
tainment was the Walt Disney animation studio, from whose
goblin mind Bambi, Pinocchio, Dumbo, and the Sorcerers
Apprentice sequence from Fantasia all originated. Fittingly,
Walt Disney had been interested in adapting L. Frank Baums
work to the screen since the nineteen-thirties. He acquired
the rights to the Oz books in 1954 and came close to making
a feature flm vehicle for TVs Mouseketeers called The Rain-
bow Road to Oz in 1957 but, for reasons no one seems entirely
sure of, ultimately abandoned the project.
Finally, though, in 1985, Disney Studios released Return
to Oz, an unoffcial sequel to the MGM classic. The poster
for the flm continued the Oz tradition of false advertising:
the tagline called it an all-new live-action fantasy flled with
Disney adventure and magic, a phrase that failed to predict
the flms actual eventual reputation as perhaps the most baf-
fingly bleak and terrifying childrens movie ever released by
a major studio. Astonishingly somber and melancholy, be-
gan the Variety review. Grim and joyless, said the New York
Times. Kids under six are gonna get nightmares from this
picture, predicted Gene Siskel (correctly!) on At the Mov-
ies. The flm was directed and co-written by Walter Murch,
a revered flm editor and sound designer who had previously
worked closely with George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola;
one assumes that Disney had hoped Murch would give them
an all-ages crowd-pleaser like Star Wars, but instead they got a
childrens movie as emotionally grueling as Apocalypse Now.
If the original Wizard is terrifying, it seems to have gotten
that way by accident; the disturbing tone of Return to Oz, howev-
er, seems quite deliberate. How else to explain Murchs decision
to begin the story with a sequence in which Auntie Em and Uncle
Henry commit Dorothy to a mental hospital? (Theyre hoping
that electroshock therapy will cure her delusions of having visit-
ed a kingdom full of witches and talking scarecrows. This scene,
needless to say, does not appear anywhere in Baums books.)
Luckily, a freak rainstorm transports Dorothy back to
Oz moments before the doctor can switch on the electricity.
But once there, Dorothy must contend with a fresh gallery of
horrors: an evil witch named Mombi who keeps a collection
of disembodied heads in her bedroom that she switches out
with her own as the mood strikes her (she has plans to steal
The only site devoted
entirely to Canadian books
)LQG\RXUQH[WJUHDW&DQDGLDQUHDG
&RQQHFWZLWKRWKHUERRNORYHUV
.HHSXSRQWKHODWHVWLQ&DQDGLDQERRNVDXWKRUV
49thShelf.com
Dorothys head, too, and wear it once its ripe); the Wheel-
ers, a race of creatures with wheels instead of hands and feet
who serve Mombi the way the Flying Monkeys served the
Wicked Witch of the West; and the Deadly Desert, a barren
wasteland that turns anyone who comes in contact with it into
sand. AV Club contributor Amelie Gillette has especially vivid
memories of Return to Ozs freaky power: The part that fright-
ened me the most as a child, she writes, was when Jack, the
makeshift scarecrow that pathetically calls Dorothy Mom,
loses his jack-o-lantern head as Dorothy and her friends are
fying away from the witch. Help me, mom! he wails as his head
falls through the foggy sky. The thought of his stick body going
on and living, possibly forever, without a head was profoundly
creepy to me then. In fact, its still really creepy to me now.
IN JANUARY, ThE vANcoUvER movIE ThEATRE ThE cINEmAThEqUE
launched a revival series called Family Frightsa full year
of childrens flms that, as curator Liz Schulze told the Georgia
Straight, have this interesting boundary pushing between
the world of the safe childrens flm and the world of the dark
medieval fairytale, where really anything can happen. The
flm that launched the series? Return to Oz.
Sure enough, Return to Oz does enjoy a small but passion-
ate cult following, and I hope it only grows larger. Watched as
an adult, the strangeness and beauty of Return to Oz become
easier to appreciate, as does Fairuza Balks luminous debut
performance as Dorothy. Murchs sensitive depiction of a
young girl who passes between the gloomy real world and the
often equally gloomy realm of the imagination looks ahead to
flms like Pans Labyrinth or Beasts of the Southern Wild, and
behind to the great Spanish flm Spirit of the Beehive, about a
young girl haunted by the Boris Karloff version of Franken-
stein. People talk about Return to Oz as a betrayal of Baums
vision, but I see it as a flm that brings out the darkness that
was in Baums books all along. (As a child, Baum suffered
from recurring dreams of being chased by a scarecrow that
would collapse into a pile of straw moments before catch-
ing him.) Think of Return to Oz as Baums vision with all the
Glinda drained out of it.
In the stories, Glinda represents all that is pure and good
and safe. Its Glinda who shields Dorothy from the Wicked
Witch, and Glinda who tells Dorothy how she can escape the
alien world of Oz and go back to where everything is familiar
and normal and she can once again go to sleep, untroubled
by thoughts of wicked witches and fying monkeys. What a
killjoyand it doesnt bode well that Sam Raimis new Oz the
Great and Powerful has chosen to make Glinda the heroine.
Come on, Sam: no child who watches The Wizard of Oz for the
frst time, not even the ones still quivering with fright, ever
says their favourite character is Glinda. EB
s a child, I ventured almost every year to British Colum-
bias Southern Gulf Islands and I became fascinated
with the history of the places I visited there. It wasnt so much
the tangible traces that intrigued methe skeleton of a build-
ing or a scrap washed up upon the tide lineas the absences
and spaces that punctuate the islands. I noticed even then that
we referred to the Gulf Islands and their geographies by the
Spanish and English names given to them by European ex-
plorers and settlers, while pre-existing Coast Salish names
for the same places often did not appear on maps. Passing on
a ferry, one cannot see many traces of the Japanese-Canadi-
ans who lived on the islands before the World War Two intern-
ment. And, although I have been told about the abundance
of salmon that used to come through Active Pass, theres not
much evidence of them now.
Today, a small slip of a bridge connects North and South
Pender Islands. Its wide enough for one car to cross. Yet, as
Noreen Hooper explores in the anthology Islands in Trust, and
as other writers have also noted, there was once an isthmus
that joined the Penders, effectively making them one island.
Although the isthmus had historically been used by Aborigi-
nal people, it was destroyed about a century ago so that set-
tlers who wanted to move more easily between Port Browning
and Bedwell Harbour did not have to choose between the dif-
fculty of portaging across the isthmus and the inconvenience
of going around the island by boat. After the rock and soil were
torn away, the islands remained unattached for over ffty years
until the thin bridge, with its low railings and symmetrical
wooden trestles, brought them together once again.
It was from a book that I learned that there had once been
an isthmus between the islands, but Ive carried the story
with me for so long and amassed such a varied collection, that
theres no way for me to know which book it was. In an attempt
to learn more about the islands, I visited the bookstores on
Mayne Island and North Pender, what was then Sabines Fine
Used Books and is now Black Sheep Books in Ganges, and
the Haunted Bookshop and Tanners Books in Sidney, and I
scoured online booksellers across Canada. I tracked down old
maps and guidebooks, transcriptions of oral history, memoirs
and poetry collections, works of non-fction and local history,
and volumes of photographs and drawings in order to account
for and uncover what seemed to have been lost.
Noreen Hooper wrote about the importance of the isth-
mus for Aboriginal populations on the island and the plethora
of artifacts that once could be found there. In BC Studies, Roy
Carlson and Philip Hobler also discussed how archaeologi-
cal excavations in the nineteen-eighties revealed that the area
around the isthmus had been used by Aboriginal people for
centuries, even millennia. But the absence of accounts about
the area by Aboriginal writers is striking, and I dont recall
ever seeing a photograph of what the islands looked like be-
fore the isthmus was destroyed. What has happened to the
history that has not been recorded? Did it disappear with the
bridge? There is now a man-made bridge where there was
once an isthmus connecting the Pender Islands. Imagination
has become the only real bridge to the past. EB
A
A Bridge to the Past // By SARAH SHEWCHUK
BRIdGES
supporting and promoting
edmontons arts community
The Edmonton Arts Council is a not-for-proft society and
charitable organization that supports and promotes the arts
community in Edmonton. The EAC provides grants to Edmonton
festivals, arts organizations and individual projects, administers
public art projects, and initiates projects and partnerships that
increase the profle and involvement of the arts in all aspects of
community life.
edmonton arts council
Prince of Wales Armoury, 2nd Floor,
10440 108 Avenue, Edmonton, Alberta, T5H 3Z9
780.424.2787 | info@edmontonarts.ca
edmontonarts.ca
000EB3.EdmArtsCouncil_FP.indd 1 11/16/11 2:59:32 PM
She is a thing of beauty.
stellaartois.com
Must be legal drinking age. TM/MC InBev NV/SA.
000EB4.StellaLabatts_FP.indd 1 3/14/12 12:51:05 PM

Eighteen Bridges - Spring 2013

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Eighteen Bridges - Spring 2013

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

featurinG

Icons: Sasquatch Clive Holden 27

I was prepared for room-sharing but not bed-sharing.

You might also like