A Shared Politics of Fear and Hate

Posted on October 20, 2016 by Barry Pomeroy

Although Canadians have little actual stake in the American election, there is much shared sentiment on both sides of the border. Following the lead of the American media, many Canadians declare themselves to be supporters of one candidate or another, and expose by their vehemence which candidate they morally, if not actually support.hillary_trump7

Most of this political craving for an entrance into a neighbour’s political travails gets expressed in the perfect venue for such concerns, either Facebook, where the poster’s name is known but can only be seen by a close circle of friends, or as anonymous comments under news articles or YouTube videos. I have been blessed or cursed with having read a number of these attempts at coherence and I’ve noticed the tenor of the repartee indicates much more about the poster than they might wish.

The general plaint about Clinton—who the media and the general public insist on calling Hillary (this may be to distinguish her from her husband, although feminist scholars have long noted the tendency to denigrate women in positions of power by referring to them by their first name while men receive different treatment)—is that she cannot be trusted. Most of their vitriol does not stand up to journalistic or legal scrutiny, in which cases Clinton has been cleared of what her supporters see as spurious charges. For Trump, most complaints against him have to do with his unprofessional, unbecoming, crass, and by times illegal behavior, as well as his dearth of knowledge of geography, international relations, American politics and, some would say, even of the business world that is ostensibly his especial area of concern.

Of course arguments against their candidate of choice have little traction with the supporters. Much like they have embraced the bumper sticker—my country right or wrong—most supporters in either camp heap ill-informed ridicule on their opponent, as they view them, and glowing praise for their candidate. Much of this has been assisted by the tendency of the Republican Party, and its principal poet laureate, Fox news, to tell their viewers that any notion that goes counter to their opinion is likely a lie. The media lies to you, Fox media tells their naïve audience, and that message, combined with the fearmongering about immigrants and terrorism, means that supporters from both parties feel excused from the demand that they expose their opinions to journalistic scrutiny. It doesn’t help that journalism under capitalism means that sales at any cost take precedence over integrity. This leads to an if-it-bleeds-it-leads type of sensationalism and debauch that has further undermined the public’s faith in journalistic integrity.

Disillusioned, the viewer turns to conspiracy blogs and YouTube’s legion of self-diagnosed experts. Thinking of themselves as even-handedly judging differing opinions, of researching carefully each topic or controversy, these Google PhDs peruse articles and rants that algorithms have given them based on past choices. Without knowing they do not have access to random information, they set about planking up the flimsy foundation of their ideology. Their idea of research—a term now so chewed over by the popular mouth that many do not even know the demand for critical thinking that it refers to—is scrolling through comments on Facebook posts. The idea of holding their opinions up to scrutiny—of the peer review process—is literally limited to being scrutinized by similarly minded peers.

You would think that this distant banging of pots and pans would have little to do with Canada, but such is the strength of the American media in Canada—after all we invented cable television in order to access American shows—that we have become infected by the same contagion. Canadians declare themselves supporters of one candidate or another, even though they are largely aware that they would look silly turning up at a voting booth.

This popularity of the election competition even in another country largely has to do with the shared narrative that the media has constructed. In hard economic times we naturally look for scapegoats, and just like the voters in the US, Canadians would like to offload their financial woes on the back of a recent immigrant who is working a job they would refuse, or express their fear and hatred of a group of people they only became aware of recently.syrian-refugees-opener-615

This is the crux of the problem. For many Canadians—if I can use the comment sections as my guide to their mentality—have become increasingly anti-immigrant. This would be comical if it were not so problematic and hypocritical. The notion of a Canadian who is not indigenous claiming that they won’t share their stolen booty can only be embraced by those with serious cognitive dissonance.

What most of the support through behind one candidate or another, especially if we consider the ranting and vitriol of the groups who cry the loudest, has to do with is hate and fear. The immigrants will take our jobs, they confusingly claim, and live on welfare, and destroy our way of life. The numbers do not back them up, and the same people who crow the loudest about this are often the supporters of the temporary foreign worker program, which exists so that foreigners will actually be able to take their jobs.

They say Trump won’t cause wars, although they must have missed the clip where Trump declared he would have given the order to blow the ship out of the water whose Iranian sailors had given the finger to an American ship. Trump will keep America safe, they declare smugly, thinking no doubt of the racial profiling of immigrants and the widely publicized farce of “the wall” and, if that’s not enough, the more ominous wish to deport American citizens depending on their religion or ethnicity.

Unfortunately the campaign of fear and hatred has as much currency north of the forty-ninth parallel as below it. Canadians have their own fears and hates and many do not consider it burdensome to take on the hatred of another. America has long exported its media, and since the first European war, its weapons, but they have largely kept their hates to themselves. To the outsider, the Jim Crow laws, the fight when they attempted to desegregate their schools or to extend the franchise to black voters and women, were seen as incomprehensible noise in the background of a progressive nation.

Using the distrust of the media that they have sown, the present candidates have encouraged their suspicious voters to trust no one, and the voters are too ignorant to realize that this would involve their beloved candidate. With their most recent export of hate, dark clouds hang over the border cable television stations, and even international media, aghast at the embarrassing mockery that is the current political race, use its farce-like nature to sell clicks, to encourage views, and ultimately to generate money for the machine that has failed those who spent the money. Caught in the still spinning gears of that machine is the ignorant Canadian, and the ignorant world viewer.

This is the same person who watched the American show Survivor, which, as Thomas King calls it in his Short History of Indians in Canada, is “a show about people who go to an island to practice their bad manners.” Lest we are completely lost in the bad manners of the current and hopefully short-lived anomaly of American politics, we might want to return to that show, so that we may learn of the root causes of our cynicism about human nature, our distrust of the journalists, and where we began to think of bad manners as appropriate entertainment or political process.

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To Build a Fire

Posted on October 15, 2016 by Barry Pomeroy

In the public imagination, the skill of building build-a-firea fire lies somewhere between the virtuosity of some online people (We can think of the man from the Primitive Technology channel) with their bow and drill, Jack London’s famous story (“To Build a Fire”), and the rather humiliating scene from Survivor where contestants competed to see who could build a fire first—or more properly, in terms of the television show, to see who could even get a flame going. The giant leap forward in computer driven intelligence, a learning algorithm tied to memory recording, can perform simple tasks like find the more efficient path between tube stations in the London Underground. To discern such a path would come easy even to a child, although it takes both the machine and the human prodigious feats of memory and analysis. Building a fire is much more difficult.

Perhaps the most trying aspect to getting enough flame to label it a fire is how many variables enter the equation. three-police-cars-on-fire-during-a-protest-in-frankfurt-564719Not only does the prospective fire builder need combustible material and a source of heat or flame, but each subcategory has an almost infinite variety in its possibilities. The source of the fire is perhaps the easiest. Once I was under a bridge with a friend and we decided we wanted to build a fire to sit near. We had no matches and for my friend that was the end of the matter. We had a motorcycle, however, so to his amazement—for he was more of a linear thinker—I opened the gas tank, soaked a piece of paper in gasoline, and then shorted the battery for a spark. For those of us who cannot get a bow and drill to work—and I have always failed at this—there is also a lighter—even an exhausted lighter can produce fine sparks—and matches. The condition of the matches matters however. For instance, when the Time Traveller from H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine finds, to his utter dismay, that his matches will only light when struck on the box, he is not nearly as complacent about the approaching cannibal Morlocks. Even given ideal conditions, such as dry matches which easily light and hold their flame—you can imagine those fifteen centimetre matches suburban people use to light their fireplace at Christmas—some people still find the task impossible.

Returning to an episode of Survivor might be useful here. When two contestants had a faceoff at the end of a season to see who would win the grand prize, they were

asked to light a fire with a flint and steel. The fire had to burn high enough to cut a string and whoever did that first would win the show. The use of flint and steel is not a modern skill, but since they had lived on tropical islands with fires lit entirely with a flint and steel, the moderators of the show thought they might have learned how. Unfortunately, the two contestants in question had never bothered to learn, and in their idle observation of the skill, they had not even picked up the least amount of knowledge that would allow them to imitate their fellows. They were so incurious about the world around them, that they were content to conspire against their fellows while someone else lit their fires, fed, and likely eliminated for them.

Faced with the flint and steel, the two contestants made a show of trying, and the countdown in the corner of the screen showed the time ticking away. their fellow contestants hung their heads in embarrassment when the truncated segment ended finally with the moderator giving them matches, but even this was to no avail. These were people who could not even light a carefully pre-constructed bed of dry tinder in front of them if they had matches. They spent long minutes trying to get a match lit, and even then, they were uncertain how to approach the tinder with it. The contest ended finally, with one contestant running out of an entire box of matches, and the other using the last of their few matches—like any clever primate having learned by their many mistakes along the way—and getting the tinder alight.

Lest we think that this ineptitude is staged for the benefit for the slack-jawed audience who wants to be feel better about their own lack of skill, I have another story that still haunts me to this day by its exhibition of sheer incompetence. A woman I used to know, we can call her Val, was living in a friend’s forest cabin for a few weeks in the New Brunswick winter. She told me about how beautiful the surroundings were, and how the owners had set up a small hydro power unit and burned wood for fuel. Unfortunately, they had never thought they needed to instruct her on how to build a fire—or if they did, she blissfully ignored them—so when the fire they had built went out several days after they left, Val was stymied completely. She told me with absolute candour how she struggled with the wood and boxes of matches, trying to get a fire alight.

Finally she gave up, and piling up blankets, as well as coats, she crawled into bed and stayed there for three days, 21determined, I guess, to wait until spring. I’m not sure what she was thinking at this point. Was she hoping for rescue? Spontaneous combustion? Perhaps the woodsman from Little Red Riding Hood would come by and instead of saving her from a wolf attack, show her—I imagine a look of utter amazement on his face—how to combust twigs. In any event, after three days she rallied her nerve, and realizing that she had no choice—persistence is another human attribute that has atrophied for those who depend overmuch on others—she determined to try harder. Eventually she succeeded, and lived to tell me with a straight face about her amazing accomplishment, although when she related the story to me she emphasized how she never let the fire go out again.

This story does more than show how the task of fire making needs at least some basic skill or logic, but also how materials matter. Likely Val had kindling and larger pieces of wood, but probably knew little how to combine that combination into flame. The deployment and choice of combustible materials is by far the most challenging component of fire building. Nearly anyone could light a fire from gasoline and a match, fireproviding they had a supply of flammable material, but choosing materials and then assembling them, takes more skill than it might seem.

Of course if such materials are available, then beginning with some especially flammable substance such as paper—or as the man in Jack London’s story does, a candle stub—is best. Then small twigs can be used to coax the initial bright flame into a more sustained fire. As the fire grows, larger twigs can be added, until finally the fire can manage to set alight bigger chunks of wood. None of this will come to a surprise to anyone who has done this or watched this done by another. The selection of twigs is important, however.

When I was a child an advertisement for Boy Scouts used to play on local television, and I was always struck by one of their statements. They showed two boys lighting a fire emma-with-fire-largeand the voiceover—there to encourage their prospective participants and their parents presumably—claimed that one of the skills the boys would learn is how to manage the “challenge of lighting a fire in the snow”. I was surprised by this. The fire on the screen, still in its initial kindling stage, showed they had used fir twigs, and nothing is easier than lighting fir twigs in the winter. They are often extremely dry, easy to access, bundle together nicely, and then with one stomp of the boot, a bed can be laid that the fire can inhabit.

Perhaps they were assuaging the worry of those who think the snow will interfere, but other than the problem Jack London’s unfortunate man experienced (if you remember the story he unwisely chose to light his fire under a spruce tree heavily burdened with snow and it fell upon him once the fire grew large enough to melt the snow), snow typically sublimes when next to the flame, and only when the fire is huge does enough snow melt to be of any concern and then it only affects the coals on the bottom. There is no challenge.

What the commercial neglected to mention is the fact that choice of materials is important. If the novice begins with green branches of an alder, or a birch—and the relative greenness of the branch might be difficult to discern in the winter to the inexperienced—then they will need their jerry can of gasoline to get the wood to cooperate. Small, dry, seasoned twigs can be lit without even using paper, and when adding wood to the pile one should be careful not to jostle the incipient flame. Like a puppy played with too roughly, the flame can go out and leave nothing but horror at what you have done instead of a comforting fire to sit about. Split wood is better than round, since the heart wood is denser and usually dryer. The bark is a kind of shield against flame, so if the bark is removed so much the better.

Humanity has been lighting fires for hundreds of thousands of years. That doesn’t mean that it is an easy task, but it does indicate that even our most modern suburbanite, whose skills run to programing the television to record Survivor rather than learning how to survive themselves, can do it with the application of some logic and attention paid to their surroundings. Prometheus laboured prometheus1-3804on our behalf, and we wouldn’t want him to come back now, his fingers holding the intestines of his sacrifice in place, only to see that we so utterly disdain his gift that we don’t bother to learn even the most basic of human skills.

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Living in Cities and Hiding in a Box

Posted on October 9, 2016 by Barry Pomeroy

Increasingly we gather in cities. All around the globe the movement is toward the urban areas, and here in the west, just outside the principal urban areas, into the suburbs. The glitz and excitement of the city is not experienced nearly as much as the movement would make you think, however. Instead, especially as North American cities become more fear mongering, we are confined to smaller and smaller spaces. We haven’t exactly retreated into the drawers of the Tokyo hotels, where for want of space and money people spend in the night in tiny rectangles, but we have retreated into rooms and tiny apartments. It’s worth remembering that the people in Tokyo staying in such small coffins have the entire quite safe city to explore, while in the west our fear of the urban landscape means we hide from the outside—in the case of inner city apartments—or are confined to the cell of our house and backyard—in the case of suburban living.

I was struck recently, by watching YouTube video representations of people’s lives, by the many thousands of videos of the antics of cats, them jumping into their pool, pranking their friends and family, and making crafts of hand, that we have increasingly moved inside. Few of the videos of society’s most active people—the teenagers who should be outside and exploring the world—show them enjoying the natural world. Instead, they are lounging on couches, lying in the backyard, singing in their bedroom, and teasing their pets. We have increasingly accepted the boxes we fled to in order to hide from the world we are told is frightening.

There are implications to that movement, of course. Over deep time we will likely evolve for this new environment, if the environment itself has any longevity. We will become unable to face the sun—witness the ubiquitous use of sunglasses—and increasingly indolent in our movements, given the confines of our narrow walls. Those were are so disposed as to not be satisfied with this narrow existence will become unhappy and commit suicide, or perhaps break free and become outriders in the system, organic farmers and homeless hippies. Either way, they will likely not contribute their genes to the huge pool of those who are content on a couch, for whom virtual reality is as meaningful as the nightly news, and who ultimately lose touch with what their life could be like.

In the short term, we have children whose soft bodies are undeveloped, whose social circles endlessly recycle electronic friends, whose adventures are limited to shopping trips to preapproved stores or investigative forays into the backyard.

We’ve heard these laments before, that this generation is too digital and not physical enough, too online social and yet unable to address a stranger. Those plaints have merit, but I am more concerned that even our

notion of fun has moved inside. The smack cam videos on YouTube largely take place inside, singing is a bedroom and living room enterprise, and animal videos are almost entirely either those of domestic animals in a home

—working out their boredom by attacking unrealistic enemies or acting goofy—or in a zoo—desperate animals railing against their confinement.

The natural world, which people are increasingly shut away from, is limited to exploration into the nearby park at night, movie-themed for maximum excitement, or stills by those photographers who still venture into the world that most of us in the cities only hear by report. We exclaim over the beauty of the pictures, but refuse to do them one better by traveling outside the endless sprawl that is our cities and see for ourselves what we have chosen to deny.

In Winnipeg, this is also true, perhaps even more so because of the interminable winter. Children play on the school playground at lunchtime for some of the season, are confined inside when the weather turns, and once they are home they have a few rooms for their expansive imaginations. If they are enrolled in clubs, they may have the good fortune to play in larger rooms, but the broader city, the scintillating draw for so many people around the globe, is not for them, their parents tell them. It is too dangerous, too much chance of a child going missing, of being run over, being hurt, talking to someone they shouldn’t, learning about socialization outside the church group, becoming a citizen of the modern urban world. Given that case, they move from one box to another and thus ensure for future generations that such monopoly board movements become the new normal.

Where people rebel, the results are perhaps telling. In Australia, the series from YouTube called Primitive Technology—which features a young man silently going about the business of using what resources exist in his surroundings to show how to modify his environment and thus improve a human life, how to kick-start human technological progress—is wildly popular. His videos, with their deadpan competence, lack of voiceover, splendid and informative editing, complete with bird noises in the background, excite thousands of comments.

Through most of the commentary we can find two general trends. Amazement and enthusiasm that he is engaging in such projects, a kind of nostalgic brooding over what the viewer would like to do, and terrifying ignorance about his true circumstances and mastery over what they would deem obscure technology.

The former group of comments are perhaps the more poignant, for the suburban child—which we may extend in age to at least their thirties—sees in his videos what they have been missing. The barefoot man cracking rocks to make sharp edges and then applying that to trees that fall with such a satisfying crack and crash, awakens our deep need to apply our skills to the world. The viewers find themselves on the outside looking in, far more so than they ever felt when playing Warcraft. They sense their useless hands by their sides and long for mud and sticks and leaves and grasses and rock. Caught by the screen in their hands, they can do little more than dream, however, for their parental and societal obsession with protection has meant they are confined to narrow rooms and a still narrower background, and the hunter gatherer in them must be put away like children’s toys while they get on with the mature business of making a living—pushing paper from one side of the desk to another—and preparing with the bank for retirement before they have ever lived.

Their nostalgia is understandable, given their circumstances, and forgivable, but in the suburban sprawl they have nothing they can exercise their soft hands on if even they retained the ambition and drive. The roads are sealed, like their driveways, with tarmac, the lawns are more industrial artifact than a living thing, the trees are planted by the city and illegal to touch, and the only stones are those imported for decorative purposes. In the house, with its gypsum walls and wpid-suburbbland paints, they can bend pieces of plastic and leftover building supplies, but in the interest of sterility, those materials are typically sent to the landfill. In case that mound of raw materials interests anyone, it is made illegal to procure goods from the piles of trash, although they are ostensibly of use to no one, and the dump hires guards to ensure that the crushing machines can work uninterrupted.

Given their circumstances, their ignorance of what the man in the video is doing is perhaps understandable. Many think he lives in the clay houses he builds, or eats what he finds in the forest. They neglect the fact that he must be editing and uploading videos from some location that resembles theirs, or that he has expressly stated on more than one occasion that he is merely testing ideas that he has researched. Their ignorance of his circumstance notwithstanding, many also leave comments that show not only their lack of understanding of the natural world, but also their unwillingness to inform themselves such as he has done. When he purifies tiny pieces of bog iron from the iron producing bacteria, they merely want to know what was the orange stuff he put in the roll of clay and charcoal. When he fires the clay tiles to make a roof, they wonder why he doesn’t merely dry them instead. He maintains an extensive blog, which should be unnecessary for the careful viewer with a basic educational background since his videos are so meticulous in showing the various steps to his project, but they do not avail themselves of it. Caught physically in the confines of their narrow houses, they also do not venture educationally beyond the walls of their self-imposed ignorance.

Their lack of understanding of the natural world can be seen in the fail videos, in which children jump bicycles in their backyards, make rockets from soda bottles, swing pendulums into themselves, and in other ways show they know little about the natural world. The physics lessons they should have learned by hanging from a tree or from tying a piece of string to a rock and spinning it, have been lost on them. Since they gain their information from heavily manipulated movies, where stunt doubles make the hero look invulnerable, they are unprepared for the broken bones and punctured eyes of reality. If their play would have involved rocks and sticks and weeds and hills and rivers, they would know how to avoid being hurt, instead of walking blithely into the oncoming disaster they should be able to see coming.

This cultural blindness that we inculcate in our children is not an inevitable result of cities, however. The city landscape, concretized as it is, provides many opportunities for its denizens to explore and learn. there are other people, with their plethora of skills, raw materials lying in dumpsters and in the street, buildings against which to test our own Pythagorean theorems and our muscles, and a myriad other ways in which to make our new environment work for us. Unfortunately, we have branded the city dangerous, and are nonetheless drawn to it as a moth to a candle, only there to close our cell with an ominous clang.

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Hostile Architecture

Posted on October 6, 2016 by Barry Pomeroy

I recently read an article about hostile architecture and began to wonder about my own city. I’d noticed the trend before in Winnipeg but foolishly, although I should have known better, I hadn’t viewed it as a movement. As our cities grow more crowded, and our sensibility more corporate, we find our public image increasingly concerned with the presence of the poor. Although Medicine Hat’s Housing First project proved it was cheaper to house people than to deal with the fallout of homelessness and Dauphin, Manitoba’s minimum income project of the Seventies showed poverty to be manageable by policy, few cities have followed suit. Instead, we have chosen to believe that the poor deserve to starve and shiver every bit as much as the wealthy deserve to golf and wolf down caviar.

This way of thinking has extended to our cities. The more recent high profile cases, such as the Olympics in Rio over the summer, snatched back rather than extended the hand that feeds them by ensuring that poverty stricken neighbourhoods are either hidden, or worse, suffer the violent attention of the city authorities when the tourists come to watch people jump and stretch. Likewise, Vancouver landlords took advantage of the 2010 Olympic mania to raise rents beyond what even working people could afford in that already expensive city. In the 2010 Commonwealth games in New Delhi, there was anything but common wealth. Child labour was used in construction of the sites, with some labourers as young as seven, and brothels brought in thousands of sex trade workers and some kidnapped girls in anticipation of the boom in the sex trade. Some brothels even paid for English classes so the prostitutes could communicate with their foreign johns.

When Winnipeg hosted the 1999 PanAm games, the situation was similar; the poor were heartily encouraged by police presence to leave the downtown to their betters, and in architectural terms, crossing Main Street was prevented by decorative fencing. This was the first time I heard of architecture being used against the citizens, or at least against some of them. We have all heard the loud classical music played where young people congregate, and observed pronounced police presence at events and parades, but deforming the construction of public space, using the public purse to make our cities less livable, is an animal of an entirely different kind.

I have by no means exhausted all the options that Winnipeg offers, but I will post occasionally what I discover about this city img_1036img_1057that reels from its poverty, even as it fights back by attacking its most vulnerable.img_1038

We have all seen ledges that might provide public seating barred from skateboarders. This also happens to planters in from of Portage Place mall where many people wait for the bus. There is seating inside for fifteen people out of the dozens who might be waiting, but in case some choose to sit on the concrete planter surround, the city has decorated them. The seating in bus stops is divided in case someone might lie on the seat, or share a seat with someone. These small changes to our urban space are happening around us, ostensibly with our agreement, for as long as we refuse to see the city being walled against its citizens, they will keep blocking us from sitting, lying, and playing in the spaces we have paid for.

 

 

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Returning to an Earlier Moment in Our Life

Posted on September 22, 2016 by Barry Pomeroy

A friend of mine says that if he could return to an earlier time in his life, knowing then what he knows now, his life would be vastly different. That is perhaps true of all of us, but he says it is particularly true of him. “My life is a chaotic series of stupid mistakes,” he has told me often enough, “and I know if I could go back I would change everything.”

Although on the surface of it, such mental exercises seem rather pointless, any thought experiment that would ask us to examine our own lives, and question whether the decisions we made in the long ago, or even yesterday, are decisions that in retrospect we would make again.  The impossibility of returning to the past armed with our present knowledge may make some dismiss out of hand such musings as fantasy, but it is a mental exercise that may fit the hand more easily when we think about our present. How can we use this thought experiment to more rationally interact with others and the world? Stay tuned as we examine this question.

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Getting back to the Cabin

Posted on July 25, 2016 by Barry Pomeroy

I drove down from Montreal today. Although I left late, around eleven-thirty, and was off my path almost immediately, once I was on the freeway I was bumping along on the rough tarmac and peering through the windshield wipers at the diminishing traffic.

I had gassed up in Ontario, near the Quebec border, out of a defensive fear of Quebec gas prices, and that nearly entire tank took me all the way to New Brunswick. An unfortunate side-effect of that was that I didn’t stop once for over six hours. Strangely, on the topic of mileage, the car seems to have better and better mileage as I drive it more. I could go nearly six hundred kilometres on a tank but today I drove well over seven hundred and was shocked to discover my gas gauge was correct: I had almost a quarter of a tank left. I’m not sure what to ascribe that to.

It was great to see my friend and meet her Montreal friends, but it was at least as delightful, albeit in a different way, to leave the highway in New Brunswick and turn onto the potholed and patchy tertiary highway that leads to my cabin. Since I had pressed on so vigorously, I arrived at the land while it was still somewhat light, and I packed in some of my gear without a flashlight.

Strangely there are no lights on in the houses along the road and the cabins here are equally deserted. Some of the houses along the Hartland road are missing windows, showing a toothless appearance of the abandoned house to the road. I feel like I am driving into a deserted province, the lone occupant of a forgotten valley.

The creek is low so we must not have had much rain lately, and the trail is grown up with ferns and littered with fallen branches. The cabin, from what I could tell in the dark, is in good shape, although it must have been a hot day. The main area is twenty-five degrees and I was able to take a shower with the heat that remained in the solar shower.

It’s very quiet here tonight. That’s a difficult thing to describe to my friends who live in the cities and have likely never experienced real silence. The cabin is cozy and I plan to sleep well and for a long time. It’s nice to be back.

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Montreal and Shades of Winnipeg

Posted on July 23, 2016 by Barry Pomeroy

Travel has changed since I drove across the country so frequently many years ago. I used to email in advance, and then just show up. Or, at the most, I would call from the highway to guarantee occupancy, and then come to town to find the person waiting.

In the days of cell phones, people merely say call when you arrive. They rely on me having mobile communication every bit as much as they do, and while I carry a laptop, which on its limited battery could pull in wireless, it is difficult to find wireless along the highway. Emailing in advance has been working on this trip, but if I were to do it again, I think I would get a cell phone just for the ease.

Navigation has changed for me as well. I have misplaced most of my old maps—they are likely somewhere around the cabin and at the house in Winnipeg—so I had to pick up a few maps on the road and use Google Maps on my laptop. I would wait until the streets grew complex, and then I would check the laptop for the turnings I had saved in its memory. If I ventured off the map, it had nothing to offer me, but luckily for the most part, I could use it. Because I am losing some of my near-sightedness because of age, most maps are more than difficult to read and I was introduced to the hassle of driving while peering over the reading glasses I was using to read my map.

I’d been to my friend’s place in Montreal before, so I picked through the torn tarmac of the Montreal freeways to Westmount and was soon knocking on her door. My other good friend, who I rarely see because I am not in Montreal anymore, had a work engagement so I missed seeing her. These trips are difficult to coordinate that way.

Back in Montreal at the end of my trip, we went out to buy food and I began what would turn out to be a fruitless search for vegetarian tourtiere. Vegetarian_Tourtiere_with_Cheddar_001The veggie meat pie can only be bought in Quebec, as far as I know, although it escaped me. The following day we noodled around the apartment and talked, and then went out in the evening to see Phantom of the Paradise, a 1974 Brian de Palma movie I’d seen in the late seventies or early eighties. I’d told my friend about it, and then while we were talking about how maxresdefaultit was hugely popular in Winnipeg and Paris and a flop elsewhere, she found online that it was playing.

We met up with her friends and soon we were all watching in wonder and horror as a grim parade of grotesqueries and nuttiness crossed the screen. The theatre was nearly empty but the few who were there seemed appreciative if their laughter was any indication.

After the film we walked for almost an hour back home in the humid breezes of the summer night. It was perfect walking weather and before long we were asleep and, in my case at least, anticipating the drive to the cabin the next day.

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Back to Ottawa

Posted on July 21, 2016 by Barry Pomeroy

Ottawa is merely a four or five hour drive from Mississauga, and in my case that was lengthy enough. When I arrived, however, and found the kids had been asking after me, it was worth it. We had an evening of catching up on my western trek, and then I rose early to see off my friend on a motorcycle trip and spent a bit more time with the remaining family before it was time for me to go to Perth.

Perth is about an hour from southern Ottawa, and the location of my friend who I hadn’t seen in a few years. I spent the afternoon with her walking around the town, and then drove back to Ottawa to my former boss’ place.

There I was greeted with a huge rock collection and a delicious meal, and after an evening of chat we went to bed. I rose fairly late, compared to my hosts, and found blueberry and chocolate muffins waiting for me. After that filling breakfast I went on to Montreal.

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Winnipeg to Toronto

Posted on July 18, 2016 by Barry Pomeroy

I was on the road by ten in the morning, which was a bit late, and by afternoon I was passing Kenora and Dryden. As the kilometres slowly ticked by I began to doubt my original enthusiasm about getting to Toronto, and especially Hamilton, by the early evening of the second day of driving.

I wasn’t passing Thunder Bay until evening, and to my surprise the gas stations I had passed a month earlier didn’t materialize; instead I had to go off the highway into a loop created when the new highway had been put in. There I found one of the few gas stations that had survived the general decay after the highway had avoided inhabited areas.

I was aiming for at least Rossport, and accordingly, since I knew I’d be pulling over for the night to sleep in the car, I didn’t pick up any hitchhikers. I saw two, and one of them, an old man with a bag and an orange vest, made me regret driving past. But I kept my resolve, for I’m on a tight schedule and I can’t be driving someone way off the highway to where they need to be for the night like the last time I drove through alone.

I was at Rossport earlier in the evening than I thought, so I stopped there for lunch and dinner, and then pressed on past Marathon. By this time it was dark and even though the moon occasionally came from behind dark clouds, it was getting difficult to see. In this area of western Ontario in particular, it is worth paying attention to moose, for they can loom up suddenly in your view and before you know it, your desperate feet are on the brakes.

I stopped in Marathon to wash my wind screen and the lights, and that helped enough for me to get past White River and to the Depew River rest area where at one-thirty I pulled in for the night.

I woke a number of times, as I struggled to get comfortable across the front seats, but by five in the morning I was chilly enough with my one thin blanket that I started the car and drove east. I was nearly the only one on the highway and I saw two moose by the side of the road, surprised at my appearance through the fog, but soon the morning sun burned away the mist and I was winding past Wawa and through Lake Superior national park. The park was as beautiful as I remembered, and I wound through Old Woman Bay and Sand River and Katherine Cove and thought about how many times I had camped along that road.

By the time I was close to the Sault, I was running out of gas again. The car can do, depending on conditions, nearly seven hundred kilometres on a forty litre tank, but I was scraping the bottom as I pulled into northern Sault and then bought enough fuel to keep going to south of Sudbury where I usually gas up at a reserve with people I like.

I stopped for lunch near Espanola but other than a break for reserve gas, I pressed on to Toronto, trying to make it to Hamilton by early evening. The Toronto crush was as my Toronto friends had described it. Traffic was heavy and even though I was traveling in the unpopular direction, it slowed me enough that after my two days of driving I didn’t arrive in Hamilton until seven-thirty. Luckily my sister was home and waiting, so we went right out to a Vietnamese restaurant where she ate little, given that she was sick with a cold, and I merely snacked.

It was dark by the time I left Hamilton for Mississauga, and late when I arrived even though traffic was light. I mistook the exit and went into the edge of the Toronto sprawl, but I was soon turned around and on my way back out there the westbound exit did exist.

I slept like the dead at my friend’s place after my abortive attempt in the car the night before, and once I finally rose, I began to organize the day. I had only a full day, so I met with a couple I’d missed on the last run through, and then came back to Mississauga where we were up late. I was leaving the next day, and although I rose early to say goodbye, I spent less time with my Toronto friends than I would have wished and missing seeing some people I would have liked to see.

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Go Pokémon Go

Posted on July 15, 2016 by Barry Pomeroy

The Pokemon Go craze is relatively recent in 2016-07-13-16-52-32_pokemon go_thumb_634_350_cCanada. In fact, the game is not really available in the country and those who are stumbling around on the city streets chasing ephemeral characters from a game have fudged their country of residence just to play. From that simple example—even ignoring the ubiquitous news articles about the game—we might gain some insight into how compelling it is for its players. I was discussing the popularity of the game recently with my young friend who is an avid player, and she confirmed some of my suspicions.

Other than the many other games available on a phone, Pokémon Go ties the players’ real world location to a virtual com2Fwp-content2Fuploads2F20162F032Fnexus2cee_PokemonGO2-728x573location. In the virtual world Pokémon figures abound, and in the “real” world they are located in strange and perhaps surprising places. The phone’s geolocation function allows those two worlds to align, if not to merge completely. Thus while those who have scarcely stirred from the couch for years totter about on unfamiliar limbs searching for jumping animated figures, they are simultaneously navigating their own world.

This is in part the attraction of the game. The disconcerting flavour that the virtual adds to the mundane livens up the players enough to walk around waving their phones like dowser’s wands, seeking digital characters that only have meaning on the inside of the world. Typically an online game flirts with the “real” by bringing together strangers who can converse in real time about the game before them. These popular role-playing games attract partially because of this connection to the phenomenological world. Pokémon Go carries that interest further and paints the game world onto the player’s lived experience.

I was able to observe a few players before I knew they were playing the game. I was sitting in my car waiting for my friend and I saw two university-aged women walking in circles but seemingly with some obscure purpose. To me it looked as if they were seeking a Wi-Fi signal. The two friends split up and walked around somewhat blindly waving their phones and holding them above their heads and periodically checking them. BN-OW697_POKESA_P_20160712190258The only feature of their aspect that informed me that it was more than bandwidth was their periodic delight.

Although Pokémon Go has proved to be as popular as Twitter, even if it is not available in every country, my friend assures me that its popularity will fade. The younger people will lose interest after the hype for the fad has passed, and the older people are mostly stalking school acquaintances on Facebook and signing into dating sites. My friend tells me that only the diehard fans of the television show, people of her generation, will continue to play after a year has passed and the fickle public mind turns to a new fancy.

The game itself, however, I am assured, will shift the internet slightly. Like a monstrous soap bubble, the internet is ballooning larger with each passing year. Like the bubble it resembles, however, it is as light as it is fragile. A single innovation which adds a note of reality to the fantasy world that people would rather occupy, can make the entire bubble shudder and shimmer. Oculus Rift was supposedimages to be that innovation, but its headset is clumsy and too much of a leap for the purchasing public. Pokémon Go is the baby step that is required for people to realize the virtual world can be traced over their felt reality, and like those readers of the underground map of the London Tube, the lines do not have to match exactly. A linkage which is close enough will provide the initial impetus we see now around us. The people waving their phones in the air to engage in imaginary battles while their fellows are shot in real world conflicts, are the early adopters in a world which too eagerly embraces the fancy and avoids the mud-spattered road beneath their feet.

 

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