The Boatyards of the Azores and Hawaii

Posted on January 26, 2020 by Barry Pomeroy

He’d heard rumours about the boatyards of the Azores and Hawaii. Some said that retirees who’d spent their working life dreaming of sailing away would sit at their desks gazing a wooden yacht until the fantasy became a certainty and their bank account was emptied into a hole.

Then, these would-be sailors would set out, usually from the western or eastern coast of the United States. They would gladly set to sea, waving to their friends come to see them off from where the boat had sat in dock, and they would sail into the beautiful weather of their imagination.

Once at sea, the drudgery would set in, but they would courageously turn their soft hands to the task of coiling rope and drawing sail. They would crow about their accomplishments online. They’d been correct all along, they were meant to be a sailor and they’d been trapped at an office job while they accumulated enough money to make the dream into reality.

The slap in the face would come suddenly, just like a mugger will approach in the street. A squall, or perhaps a local storm which wasn’t reported by their weather service, would rock the boat of their fantasy until they began to get the queasy feeling that they’d been wrong.

The seasickness would foreshadow what was to come, and they would realize how vast was the featureless desert that was the ocean. Waves would rear impossibly high, and they wouldn’t have the confidence of the true sailor that their boat would bob to the top like a cork. They would dread each wave’s approach, and cringe slightly even as their quavering voice fought to overpower the background howl of the wind in the rigging.

When the storm passed it would leave in its wake a torn sail and a lost line, but the greater impact would be on the mind of the soft-handed sailor. They would suddenly realize how cast on their own they were. If they were to call in desperation because they’d struck a lost shipping container in the night and sunk, days might pass before anyone came. Uneasy, even as they negotiated the deck, they would repeat aloud the sailor’s mantra, One hand for you, one for the boat, and when caught at it, they would grin sheepishly.

They would fancy, especially in their postings online, that they were more than prepared for a larger storm, but that confidence would be shaken from its perch when a squall turned into a gale. Storms are common enough on land, where unshakable houses provide a place to hide, but at sea, where the house pitches up and down the standing rigging whines and creaks in the wind, they are terrifying. The storm warnings from the weather service would fall on deaf ears, for they would already be so frantic that nothing could be said that would assure them of their life’s continuity.

When the squall blew into a full-force gale, or the gale swept upon them without their realization of what it might mean, they would spend their time shaking with nervous energy, shuddering with each pitch of the boat, and tugging fruitlessly at the storm sail they ran to keep the boat pointed into the wind. They would rethink every portion of their fantasy, curse the optimism and confidence that had set them to go to sea in a leaky vessel not worthy of its name.

Their fear would coil lines around their feet, thrash their shoulders into bulkheads, and bruise their knuckles on stubborn blocks which refused to turn once the wind was on them. They would rail at the heavens, curse their gods and demons, but most of all they’d realize that the deadly mistake was their own, and they promised that if they could safely make landfall, they would never set sail again.

The nearest major ports for those who set out to cross the Atlantic or Pacific in their round-the-world tour would be the Azores on the Atlantic and the Hawaii archipelago in the Pacific. Their huge boatyards were crowded with boats that were all but abandoned. Maintained only by their dock fees, they were vessels in name only, for their owners had crept into dock shattered in spirit and by times in body. They would tie up, make some promises of when they’d return, and then take a room in a hotel.

The soft wide beds, the Jacuzzi after a night of drinking, the company in the bar, would remind more of landfall than of a voyage’s end. Without looking in on the boat again, except to carry away a few precious items, the round-the-world sailors would board a flight for home. “There’s untended business I’ve left behind, and family trouble back on dry land,” they would plead, and the dock owners would let them go, the wad of cash for fees pulled from weak fingers proof that they still cared about the boat.

Such boats could often be bought for little more than the outstanding fees, but such a venture is a real commitment to the project, however. The hundreds of abandoned boats showed that others had nursed a similar dream and that it had come to a slow drip of oil and water in a boatyard redolent with the smell of tarp and desperation. Only the most foolhardy of sailors would set out from a graveyard, and only someone whose weather eye was turned to the future would dare to take on the ill-fated slip-holders which were plastic boats abandoned by bankers and social workers, by teachers and software engineers.

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Winnipeg Bus Conversations

Posted on January 12, 2020 by Barry Pomeroy

Conversations on public transit are less frequent with each passing year. Although print media in the form of books and newspapers have always protected the less socialized from interaction, that has been exacerbated by the use of smart phones. Normally any conversation that happens now is between people who are already known to each other and came aboard the bus together, or a one-sided interaction with someone who is slightly off and doesn’t realize that the code of Canadian behaviour prohibits interaction with strangers.

I was that talkative person a few months ago, when my express bus was inching along in traffic due to the construction on campus and the university workers salivating for home at the same time. I was standing at the front of my crowded bus as it swung us forward and back and moved only a metre at a time. I looked at the people near me and said emphatically, “Thank god I got the express.” Their reaction was typical. Even though they weren’t occupied with a phone—for they needed their hands free to hold on—they merely gave a half-smile and looked away. Talking on the bus is tantamount to a diagnosis, they seemed to suggest, and they wanted no part in the straitjacket I was sure to soon require.

An exception to that was another trip around the same time, when I went aboard the bus with one of my international students and we were talking about how the unsocialized Canadians cannot seem to talk to others. We were loud enough in our expostulations, but no one near us responded. Instead, another man standing behind us piped up and exclaimed that he’d noticed the same thing. We brought him into our talk, and before long my friend left the bus and I was avidly chatting with my new friend. I asked him why he refused to follow the rule to ignore all others, and he explained that it might be the result of having been adopted from overseas. Although he was young when he came to Canada, he thought that might have made him stand apart from the bizarre social norms of his new country.

On my bus last week I was able to witness an exception to the golden silence and frigid social norms that govern most interactions with strangers on western public transit. I was standing near the driver and directly in front of me was a woman who was messaging back and forth. Because I am naturally nosey, I looked over her shoulder and I was surprised to see that she was most interested in messages she’d sent. Although I couldn’t read the small printing without my reading glasses—and I wasn’t quite curious enough to make my intentions obvious by taking them out of my bag—I could tell that she was scrolling slowly through long sequences of messages she’d sent to someone else.

There was another couple standing beside her, and the woman leaned on the man, which made me think about how much more difficult it would be aboard the bus if I were as short as the woman. The man was my height and could easily hold the bar over his head while he supported his girlfriend. When he received a phone call, he had to free up his arm and before long he was engaged in a mundane conversation that didn’t attract my attention.

It was only when he had stopped the call and was explaining to his girlfriend that he’d just received a call from a woman who had transitioned from the man he’d known in school. He explained how he knew the woman, how when she transitioned he hadn’t been surprised, and they talked about whether his girlfriend—having attended the same school a few years earlier—knew him or her. He tended to mix up his pronouns, as he talked about the boy he’d known in school, and the woman he’d only recently found on Facebook.

Suddenly, on the strength of her eavesdropping, the woman in front of me asked him if he were talking about ___. Once he confirmed that he was, with a rather surprised look on his face, she said, “That’s my wife.”

This began a short interaction about how Winnipeg was such a big small town in many ways and that such coincidences, although odd in other places, were a commonplace. She yanked hard over on the tiller of that conversation by demanding to know why her wife was calling him. I couldn’t see her face, and tell if her expression matched her tone, but she sounded suddenly jealous and suspicious. To his credit the man handled it well. He said he hadn’t heard from her or him in over a year, she corrected him to “her,” and after that suspicion was settled, he spoke about how they had bonded in high school.

The way he phrased that bonding was awkward, for he said they both excluded because he was bisexual and his friend thought of himself as a woman. The woman accepted that explanation, but couldn’t resist telling him that he shouldn’t be discussing another person’s transitioning so openly on the bus.

I was delighted by the entire interaction. I liked it that the man I wouldn’t have thought to be so open minded was supportive of his transitioned friend, that the woman was so suspicious and judgemental, and that the conversation had taken to many strange tracks. He agreed with her, although I thought he was slightly taken aback that she was describing the parameters of his conversations with his girlfriend on public transit. That mollified her, and then they began a stilted conversation in which he flattered her by asking—since he was having such trouble with pronouns—whether he should call his friend he or she. She told him he should use she, and why she felt that to be the case.

Before long her stop came up, and she exited the bus. The couple exclaimed after that Winnipeg was such a small place and the coincidence of her friend calling after a year while standing next to her wife was strange. I was so thrilled by the conversation that I couldn’t help but jump in. “I thought that conversation was going to go very differently,” I said. “Especially with that whole, ‘Why is my wife calling you?’”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “I thought the whole thing was about to go south.”

We continued the conversation about the woman’s tendency to correct him, and then drifted into how older people have difficulty accepting how notions of gender have expanded more lately. I told him that it is expected that people his age are more accepting, but that I am continually surprised by people my age who make it their business what other people think about their own bodies. We then discussed their study plans at university and college, and when they left the bus the man shook my hand and I said goodbye.

There is hope for the unsocialized people in the Canadian and American transit systems, but such interactions are few and far between. Most people are more than satisfied to read the transit as something to be endured while they wait to get to a place where they will live, rather than a place where they are also living.

In other countries, people use transit as a valuable moment to talk to a stranger. I have had people unburden on me as though they were in front of an unpaid counselor, and I’ve had others pick my brain for advice about their university career once they found out I teach at a university. Still others use the moment to satisfy their curiosity about how people live in other countries. In Winnipeg, few realize that they are shutting down more and more opportunities to converse with a stranger. They demand silence while watching a movie, ignore strangers while walking in the street and taking the bus, and eschew meeting another’s glance when killing time in a waiting room. As they slam more and more doors on possible social opportunities, they are driven to dating apps and social media platforms in order to feel as though they belong to a community.

I don’t want to be the voice of the older person who didn’t grow up with social media and therefore has a gut reaction that it is all wrong, for I scarcely want to return to scratching on the cave wall with charcoal and ochre just because that was good enough for hundreds of generations of my ancestors, but when I search for a model of socialized behaviour, I am drawn to that of other countries. Even in my classrooms, the international students are the ones who talk to those around them. They have spent their lives interacting, from the joint family living arrangements in their home country to the dozens of friends they’ve made and lost on a daily basis. They have a skill set that Canadians would be wise to emulate, if they want to find a friend without an app, and a lover without a credit card.

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Dinosaurs and Asteroids

Posted on November 28, 2019 by Barry Pomeroy

There is much said about the dinosaurs’ lack of information about the asteroid which largely wiped them from the earth.

Ostensibly, they had no idea what happened, although, to be fair, in every visual representation of the scene, the brightly burning ball of the asteroid tearing through the landscape always has a retinue of alert dinosaurs looking into the sky with a foreboding comprehension.

They seem, at least in our attempt to imagine the event, to know what is about to cause their demise.

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The Dream of the Found Object

Posted on November 28, 2019 by Barry Pomeroy

When I told my friend that I have a recurring dream in which I find stuff, she found it endlessly funny. In the dream, I am usually in a rush to go somewhere, and that rush has an extra push because someone is hurrying me along or depending on me to be there at a certain time. Unfortunately, even as I am hurrying, I see a place where someone has long since lost something, something I want, and I only have a few moments to pick it up.

The example I used at the time was a rush to the airport for an international trip and moving very slowly on the road because of the stop-and-go traffic. While looking idly out the window I see someone has lost a toolbox filled with sockets and wrenches from the back of their truck. To be clear, I don’t see them lose it, but rather rusty sockets and wrenches are lying in the grass near the ditch and the crumpled nature of the bent toolbox—which had obviously been run over a few times—tells the story clearly enough.

I clarify this to note that the urgency is the lack of time, not the fear that the rightful owner will return. The former owner is never an issue, and either had discarded the find, or has lost it and does not know where to recover it. I once was walking on a Montreal street with a friend near a gas station and she found twenty dollars. She didn’t miss a trick. She showed it to me, keeping her hands low and her excitement muffled, as she kept walking. The twenty might have blown over from the gas station and she knew it. If she were to ask, likely half a dozen people might claim it, but she was canny enough to not give them a chance.

In the dream, my friend pulls over on the verge, and then I leap for the bent toolbox. I grab handfuls of sockets, not even caring if I get grass and weeds with them, and then reach for more. My friend honks from the road, reminding me that she is sitting in traffic and that we are late. I grab more, some fall out of the crumbled box, and I start calculating how many I can get before we have to leave and they are lost forever.

Some of my ways of living seem overwhelmingly strange to some people, and they would be horrified to discover than I might take something from a dumpster, let alone jump at the chance. They would see my behaviour as a symptom of poverty, and little realize that it is motivated by a parsimonious wish not to waste, as I was taught by my foster parents, a result of my environmental sensibility, but it also a product of my class background.

For some people, only the gutter slime of the world looks through dumpsters, but for me, I have more in common with those people like the man collecting copper from a fridge behind my apartment than with the people in the mall looking through sweatshop clothing. The man in the alley noticed I was looking over the fridge, and he actually apologized that he’d already ruined it by tearing off the copper expansion tube on the back. I assured him that I wasn’t interested in the fridge, but rather was looking for the lightbulb that people very often threw away with fridges and stoves. He was delighted with the intelligence, and exclaimed that he’d never thought about that, and we shared a dumpster moment. I don’t have those moments with the upper-middle-classes, for they tell me about their new house, the flooring they need to hire a contractor to lay, and various travails in their lives, but I have little I can bring to that conversation. With the guy in the alley, however, I could talk about copper prices at the scrap yard, and ask him how much he can carry on his bicycle.

My way of living means that I continue to have few material goods, and those I have are twice-owned and worn, or fairly nice and given to me. Unfortunately, those nicer possessions have always attracted those for whom material possessions are two steps from the rubbish bin. They have always sought to borrow or steal them from me, but I can console myself with the knowledge that they will tire of them before too long, and they will either return it or I will find something just as suitable.

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Racist Rob and Corrupt Politicians

Posted on November 27, 2019 by Barry Pomeroy

I’d only been teaching a few years when I had a student who was so racist that I was forced to confront several of his statements in class. As anyone knows who has dealt with such behaviour, this demands a delicate hand. On more than one occasion, however, Rob helped me deal with his racism himself, albeit inadvertently.

I was teaching a text by an indigenous author and Rob had taken offense to the notion that the Canadian government owed anything at all to the people whose land had been stolen. To express his dismay, he relied on an old standard of homegrown Canadian racism: blame the victim. He told me, and his fellow students, if anyone in class was still listening to him, that “The chiefs get all this money which is meant for their people and they keep it for themselves.”

This tired argument goes the rounds of Canada periodically, and typically it ends with a general call for even more scrutiny over the moneys owed to indigenous people, like the conservative think tank, the Fraser Institute. Although the treaties guaranteed a paltry amount of compensation for the theft of their land, and the indigenous people had signed them under duress, the British government, and later the Canadian government, didn’t even honour those quasi-legal agreements. In fact, we enjoy the distinction that we have broken every treaty that we have signed. For instance, Canada reneged on its promise to cut greenhouse gases after we had signed the Paris Agreement. That might have surprised many Canadians, but likely not Indigenous people. Canada had never followed through on its promise of compensation to the indigenous people which we had taken the trouble to write into the treaties. In fact, even now, many years later, the government is still trying to claw back as much from the original promise as it can.

When Rob made his statement he wasn’t interested in broken treaties, however. Such an argument about the history of Canada, and how the treaties were broken, has little currency with the decidedly racist mindset armed with clichés and conservative talking points. I could have countered with the fact that the chief system was set up by the Indian act, just so the colonial government could deal with a man acting in the role they were accustomed to. The European governments were extremely hierarchal, and the colonizers had brought that unequal system with them. They couldn’t imagine a system of governance based on mutual respect or wisdom, with everyone in the community having a say in their future, so they tried to dismantle the Indigenous systems that they found. They thought of their system of autocratic leaders ruling by divine right—or some feudal version of that—as superior, so they forced that upon the Indigenous communities. The person who occupies this highly artificial role is therefore not beholden to his people, but rather Indian Affairs. In that sense, a corrupt chief could be said to be doing the bidding of his bosses.

Many professors in my position would have simply ignored the situation by moving the discussion onto safer ground, bidding the students to remember to respect all peoples, or in some soft-pedaled way ensuring that Rob felt emboldened to keep making such statements. They might have suggested that Rob meet them outside the class to discuss the matter, or directed his attention back to the text so that the author might shoulder the brunt of his attack. A braver professor could have simply called Rob wrong, and let the chips fall where they may, but I chose a different tactic.

Although I was new to teaching, I was intrigued by the implications of Rob’s claim. I guessed he was mimicking similar sentiments he’d heard around him when he was growing up. He’d belonged to a country club in Vancouver which cost twenty thousand a year to join, he bragged to me on one occasion, and each sport he followed added another similar price tag. For all his wealth, however, he couldn’t attend university in Vancouver. He just wasn’t bright enough to make up for his inherent laziness. That intellectual lethargy was obvious in his racist claim, for instance, for we need look no further than much of our media to see and hear similar unexamined diatribes. Rob had never bothered to think about what he thought, or analyze what he was repeating, but that wasn’t what intrigued me most about his statement.

I was interested in what his words really meant. https://i.cbc.ca/1.4239656.1502234945!/fileImage/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/16x9_780/keith-chief-moon.jpgRob’s choice to read the chief’s role as something more like a caretaker, his wish to tie his statement to an ethnic group, meant he unwittingly ended up holding indigenous people to a higher standard than his own white community.

Although the chief, even if Rob didn’t understand the position’s history as an arm of Indian Affairs, is a politician, Rob seemed to want to give the chief the role of a caretaker. His sentence suggested that he thought the position warranted a generous and altruistic person, and therefore he was dismayed when chiefs didn’t follow his rather high expectations.

I had two questions for Rob. I first suggested that he repeat his statement, and, as I called it, “Strip out the ethnicity.” What does that look like when we make it less racist?

“There are leaders appointed to a community who receive funding which is meant for everyone and they keep it for themselves.” Once Rob’s statement is decluttered, the racism disappears and it is merely a justified criticism of government in general, and particularly targets unscrupulous politicians. Unfortunately for Rob, many people already imagine that politicians are corrupt, and are often surprised when an honest one, such as José Alberto “Pepe” Mujica with the donation of his salary to housing projects and his modest way of living, is found.

Once we have removed Rob’s racism from his statement, it still retains its teeth, but it is directed toward bad behaviour more than a group of people. The implications of his new statement are also worth considering, however, for they bring another aspect of Rob’s racist ideals to light. He obviously agrees that when politicians fleece their people that is a bad thing, but he doesn’t seem to be surprised it happens. The problems with Indigenous politicians, or at least the concern he has in how he expressed it, exposes his way of thinking more clearly than he might have intended. Inadvertently, Rob was highlighting how indigenous politicians were similar to those of other ethnicity.

As I said to him in front of the class, “I think it’s great that you think indigenous people are better than whites. Although you should be careful. Some white people might find that offensive.”

“What?” Rob stammered when he was dumfounded.

“Well that’s what you said. You told me that you thought it was bad that the chiefs, or indigenous politicians, acted worse than whites. Which means that you hold their politicians to a higher standard. You must think that they are more ethical than us, and I think that’s very kind of you, although you should really think of all people as the same. Indigenous people aren’t any better than whites, even if their politicians cheated less.”

Rob was horrified by what his sentence had implied, and without formal training, I doubt he could have found it himself, but the idea was implicit in what he’d said. Although he was certain politicians were in general a corrupt bunch, he was most angry about indigenous politicians. That meant he thought they were automatically better, or else it would have made sense to have lumped them in with other politicians.

Rob was scarcely to blame for the implications of his racist sentiment, for they are always lurking behind the types of media sources which feed people like him their ideas. Every time the news makes a claim about corruption in the Indigenous community, the story is reported with the same Rob-type horror. Any other corruption scandals in the government are seen almost as a matter of course, such as Image result for Brian Mulroney Airbus scandalthe Brian Mulroney Airbus scandal, but rather flatteringly, the media, like Rob, hold the Indigenous politicians to a higher standard. Otherwise, they would act as though any politician would do the same, and spare the populace their strident outrage that an Indigenous politician would be corrupt.

Managing such statements in the classroom can be more than tiresome. They are also a potential minefield of racial-inspired invective, and should be dealt with carefully. Each case is different, but I have found the best strategy is to let the student’s words speak for them. They are often unaware of the implications of their statements, and as an instructor, it behooves us to assist them in realizing that although words have the power to hurt others, they can be much more dangerous to ourselves.

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Found Sentences: The Environmental Movement and Going Back to Green

Posted on November 16, 2019 by Barry Pomeroy

When Cousin Nick wanted to make a documentary about me he wasn’t that impressed when he interviewed my friend Mento Wong. Mento was a biker friend of mine who’d spent his life railing against conformity and worked as an operator supervisor in a pulp mill. In both those ways, he was the antithesis of Cousin Nick. Not only was Mento thoroughly a member of the working classes, he also never subscribed to a rule merely because someone told him he should. He was the exact opposite, in fact, and felt that our actions needed to be rationalized logically. One time he tired of the neighbours telling each other when to mow their lawns so he mowed half his lawn, shut down the mower in the middle of the lawn and left it there for three weeks. Nick said, after the interview, that he didn’t think there would be much footage that was useful, but I suspected, even from the little that I had heard, that Mento would do splendidly.

For instance, when Mento spoke about the nascent environmental movement, his evocative sentences still ring true today. He said, “You should know, today, the more we go, the worst everything gets. Like the forests, and the water, you know. They’re trying to go back to green now, but they’re kind of waiting for the wrong time. They should have done it years ago.”

The most compelling portions of this quote are likely those Cousin Nick found the most troublesome. Mento didn’t have an extensive formal education, and everything he knew he had largely taught himself or learned from others in a more informal setting. The grammatical problems with the adjectives in “the worst everything gets” would rankle Cousin Nick, but provides the jarring word play which makes Mento’s utterance even more accurate and powerful. The comparative adjective of “worse” would not be as effective in his sentence, and on some level, Mento sensed that. The “everything” that is getting worse is not just bad when compared to something else, it is much worse than that. Mento knew for his sentence to be the most damning, he needed the superlative adjective. Everything is not just getting worse than some other thing, it is getting “worst,” which is much more compelling than the grammatically correct option. The list of bad things is not just two—as “worse” implies—with the environment slightly lower, the list is made of numerous elements, and the environment is at the bottom. Mento’s instincts are similarly accurate when he begins to make a list of the environmental disasters, starting with the “forests” and the “water,” but he then ends it abruptly. He knows his audience realizes exactly what he is talking about, and the list is so exhaustive that the “everything” from the previous sentence barely can encapsulate it.

When Cynthia Bissell, my nursing friend and Cousin Nick’s aunt, is interviewed she makes a similar statement about my stance on the environment, and because she is just as honest as Mento, she is quite upfront about our collective, albeit unsaid, environmental realization: “An issue that is big for Bear, that really bothers him, is the fact that the planet is overpopulated. There’s way too many humans and humans just wreck everything, and I don’t think that’s a secret I think we all realize that.”

Such environmental sentiments have been echoing in our society for a number of years now, but where Mento’s statement really shines is in the mixture of tenses used in his last sentences: “They’re trying to go back to green now, but they’re kind of waiting for the wrong time. They should have done it years ago.” Who they are who are “trying to go back to green” is debatable, but presumably Mento was talking about society in general. The “trying,” however, implies the process is ongoing, and the “waiting for the wrong time” tells us that they are not trying at this moment—both overturning what he said earlier and casting doubt about their seriousness. The “wrong time” the environmentalists, or anyone who wants to go back to green is “waiting for” is also doubly problematic. Over and above the comic undercutting of “waiting” for “time,” Mento says that the time will be wrong even when they find it.

The “waiting for the wrong time” also suggests that they are waiting for someone else to fix the problem, even if their commitment to “waiting” wasn’t already undermined by the “kind of.” They are not waiting on a change in their circumstances, or even the environment to improve on its own, Mento warns, they are merely waiting for a certain “time.” Mento makes it clear what he thinks about this time they are waiting for; it’s “wrong,” as far as he is concerned. The action they are “trying” to do, is to “go back to green.” Through this historical placement, Mento claims that there was a greener time to live, a moment in the past which was more environmentally sound. That suggests that we have the skills needed to “go back to green,” and goes even further to ridicule the half-hearted “trying” of the first part of the sentence.

The last part of his utterance is equally interesting, for it suggests that if “they” were going to return to some earlier golden age of environmental consciousness, that should have been done “years ago.” He is not suggesting that it is too late, but rather all of the “trying” and “waiting” has done nothing. We had the skills at our command—we can think of the parsimonious behaviour of our depression-era grandparents—and we never bothered to return to those ways of living before. As the time grows later and later, Mento suggests, this will only become more difficult.

Mento Wong died a few years after the documentary was made (You can view Searching for Bear – a Portrait of a Life on YouTube), but his message about a culture dragging its collective reluctant feet, that the skills we need are ones we possessed historically, and that “going back to green” is urgent, is still as relevant as when Mento said it.

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Superman and Columbus as Heros

Posted on October 16, 2019 by Barry Pomeroy

Stories of origin are where we get our ideas about good and evil, discover how we should conduct themselves in the world,

Diane Douglas Willard, right, demonstrates with her daughter, Gianna Willard, both Haida tribal members from Ketchikan, Alaska, during a Native American protest against Columbus Day, Monday, Oct. 10, 2011, in Seattle.  (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

and find out where we fit into our cultural lineage. That the United States celebrates Columbus Day despite the well-known concerns about Columbus’ part in the genocide on Hispaniola, indicates that to the Americans he is a hero. Once such a person is appointed a hero, then the word hero becomes associated with their behaviour and suddenly his genocide looks heroic.

An example which makes this tendency more explicit is that of the film Superman Two from 1980, in which Superman has momentarily lost his powers and has no more strength than an ordinary man. His debility means that when he confronts a bully in a diner he is beaten up. At the end of the film, this heroic figure—who is universally agreed to be the epitome of the American hero—goes back to the diner and in a bizarre mock-comic confrontation, beats up the bully. Now that he has regained his strength, Superman has become the bully.

If a child were to view that film, and I’m sure that in 1980 many did, then their notion of hero would be expanded to include those who hit people weaker than themselves. To the child who watches their hero beat up a bully, despite the fact that Superman is thousands of times stronger than the bully, suddenly genocide looks heroic.

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Cultural Codes Case Study – Tom Waits’ “Small Change”

Posted on October 9, 2019 by Barry Pomeroy

Much of the interpretative work that the reader is asked to do with this short text is in reference to their knowledge of cultural codes. One of the examples I continually return to when it comes to understanding cultural coding and how difficult it can be to interpret for a cultural outsider, as well as how difficult it can be for us to see that we are bringing what we already know to a text, is from a Tom Waits song. In his song “Small Change,” Waits relates the death of his main character by the line, “Small Change got rained on by his own 38.” Although it is not obvious what the line means, especially without the context of the song, this is not an obscure line for the typical North American student. They can figure out what Waits intends quite quickly, and usually begin by working backward from the recognition of the .38. Most North Americans will know that a .38 is a gun, and a few of them will associate it with the police, since many of them historically carried that gun. The .38 was also a cheap and illegal street gun, the Saturday Night Special, and it could be purchased for as little as twenty dollars. It was correspondingly poorly made, and was famous for exploding in its user’s face. Despite being confined to a single line out of context, we can tell that Waits is referring to the cheap street variety, which is used in petty crimes.

Once the gun has been identified, the reader works backwards to the verb. Someone “got rained on.” Although the verb is more metaphorical than a common idiom, we may guess that whatever happened to the person was negative. Notably, in cultural terms, the reader should recall that rain is not universally understood to be negative. For instance, in southern India, the monsoon season is seen as a time for romance, and in that climate, like many tropical climates, rain is a temporary relief from the unstinting heat. In North America, however, where to be caught in a rainstorm might mean death by hypothermia, to get “rained on” is unlikely to be positive. To get “rained on” by a gun, not only brings to mind a rain of bullets, as the expression would have it, but also that the recipient has likely been killed. Finding out that he “got” rained on further informs the reader that something was done to him, rather than he chose this fate for himself. The .38 belongs to him, according to the use of the possessive in the line, which means that the person who was rained on by his own gun was likely a street hoodlum who is foolish enough to let his gun out of his hands or who has lost a fight.

The grammar of the sentence also gives the reader the name of the man who died by his own gun. The pronoun “his” must refer back to the last proper name it can refer to, or its antecedent. The antecedent of the “his,” in this case, is found in the subject position of the sentence: “Small Change.” Although the name is obviously not a proper name—and this is another feature of the information that a reader unfamiliar with the cultural codes might have difficulty parsing—it occupies the position of a name in the sentence. The North American reader will immediately leap to the conclusion that “Small Change” is a nickname of some sort, and they will combine that notion with the other street reference—the cheap street gun used by small time thugs—and decide that “Small Change” is a street appellation, and likely is meant to be denigrating. This is not a name that would have been chosen by the hoodlum himself, for he would likely pick something a little more forbidding. This would have been applied to the dead punk by his community, which implies that he was considered unimportant. The way in which he died, by his own gun, implies that such an assessment of his abilities was at least shrewd.

Once the reader has parsed the entire sentence—and that would take far less time that it does to show the process—they would conclude that “Small Change,” the small-time street thug, has been killed by his own gun, presumably by another criminal. The verb phrase “got rained on” does more than convey that he has been killed by his own gun. That is the content of the phrase, but the implication of the phrasing is that the narrator of the text is careless about either the manner or the fact of Small Change’s death.

Diminished beyond compare, Small Change has been stripped of his given name, has been denigrated by the diminutive nickname given presumably by those he called his friends, and he has proven the nickname to be true by getting killed by his own rather undependable street gun. His life is of so little importance that the narrator does not even show him the respect due his unfortunate demise, but instead uses another denigrating way to represent that he has been shot.

For those who know the song, this line is a microcosm on the poignant story about the carelessness of the observers when Small Change dies. People steal his belongings while his corpse lies in the street, and the police joke about brothels instead of investigating or solemnly attending to their job. The song would still survive without this line, but it would have lost much of the positioning of the dead man, as well as how the narrator feels about his death.

Without an understanding of the cultural codes, this line becomes very difficult to parse. I asked a friend from Thailand once what he thought it meant, and he was able to identify the .38 as a gun. Other than that small clue, the sentence was opaque to him. This is true to all cultures, of course. Each culture’s understanding either illuminates—for those in the know—or obscures—for those who are outside the system of codes. The conclusion the reader becomes aware of, that of the gun’s background and the implications of that, the giving of street nicknames and what that might mean for the dead man, the use of rain as a negative effect on the dead man, are all due to codes that they understand but likely spend little time thinking about.

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Fiddleheads in the Spring 2019

Posted on May 25, 2019 by Barry Pomeroy

Traditionally, one of the earliest foods of the season for Indigenous people in New Brunswick was fiddleheads. They are the first green which appears and are high in vitamin C. Therefore, they are an excellent supplement to a diet which has been missing greens over the long winter. Fiddleheads have also become a valuable green for me on the land. When nearly everything else is still contemplating whether it wants to come above ground, fiddleheads are ready to push their heads up through the spring flooding along the stream. I picked two litres of them today, and then built a fire so I could cook half of them for dinner.

It’s been raining lately so the fire was reluctant, and the day was slightly chilly, but I am spent most of it either picking fiddleheads along the stream or digging up fresh earth for my greenhouse plants. I was hungry by the time the flames caught, and I was sitting close enough to the fire that I wasn’t cold. While I waited for the pot to boil, I threw small pine branches into the flames to both clean up the area around the fire pit and add to the fuel. By the time the fiddleheads were ready, I was gathering by bowl and fork, and while the fire burned down to coals and a light rain came down, the results of my creeping through the bushes near the creek paid off. Even without seasoning, the fiddleheads were fresh tasting and crisp. I could have easily have picked enough to made an entire meal, and other than the chives growing beside the woodshed, they are the first food my land provides.

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Opening up the Cabin

Posted on May 6, 2019 by Barry Pomeroy

I thought I would have time enough to eat and sleep at the cabin, so I didn’t have any breakfast before I went out to pack up the car. That may have been a mistake, for I noticed my front tire was slack so I fished out my hand pump from the trunk. As I was taking off the dustcap, I saw that the hard thump from the night before had bent my rim. I had more to do than just pump up a slack tire. It was leaking because the rim was bent. I fetched Dennis’ framing hammer from the barn, and hammered the rim back into a kind of shape, and then pumped it up. It seems to be the only rim to have been damaged, but I knew I would have to remove it and hammer the other side in as well. In the long term, the rim is likely ruined, but I was more interested in getting to the cabin before the bright sunny day disappeared.

Once I checked the tires, I slowly drove the torn up road to the dirt road that led into the bush. It was in bad shape, for the frost had been heaving the dirt, and people had rutted it by driving their trucks too fast over the soft dirt. I drove slowly along, thinking all the time about coming out of the bush on the Wednesday, for Ann needs me to help her with a task in her home. Her former tenants had destroyed the place, and we are going to remove carpeting on Wednesday. It’s difficult to come out of the bush early, but I told her I would aim for be there for noon.

Once I found my driveway, the two stumps were where I’d left them blocking the drive, so I parked on the road, rolled them out of the way, and then went for a shovel to get the last pile of snow which was right over my entrance. That would be the remainder from the snow plow, and it should have been a quick matter to remove it.

I keep a shovel, as well as other junk, in what I call the pallet shed near the road, so I unlocked the door only to discover that the building had heaved and the door could not be forced open any more than a few inches. I set the task aside to come back to after shoveling, and reached in one hand to grab the shovel which I luckily keep right by the door. I removed the snow, picked up the small branches which had fallen in the drive, and brought my car closer to the pallet shed where I normally park. I like for the car to be in far enough to keep it invisible to curious eyes.

Then I turned my mind to the door. I used the shovel as a lever, and after a few minutes, I was able to force the door open the rest of the way. Then I took out the hydraulic jack and lifted one of the supports, and then another, until the door was freely swinging. I put a higher support under it, and although the tolerances were close, I could at least lock the door again. I brought out the pallet step for the shed while I was in there, and pulled out the tarp I had taken to parking on to avoid rusting my car. I had parked too far forward to allow placing it, but I threw it near where I wanted it, and figured while the car was warming up, I could place it properly.

I was getting weak from little food the day before, and none so far, but I next contemplated the creek. It wasn’t really high, but I would certainly get wet feet crossing. I took out two pairs of boots and wore one across, while burdened with my pack and shoulder bag. I had removed my pants and socks so that I would have dry clothes for the trek back into the bush, so I dressed again, and put the wet boots upside down to dry while I wore the other pair into the woods.

The trail took a bit of kicking fallen branches out of the way, but it was warm when I stepped into the glade where the cabin looked like it had survived the winter well. The only sign that the snows had been unusually heavy was the woodshed, which had been shoved away from the cabin by the snow coming off the roof. I unlocked the porch door, and although it had moved in its frame, or more properly, its frame had moved around it, I opened it and stepped into the heat of the porch. My key to the main door wouldn’t turn in the lock, so I set down my bag and devoted some attention to it.

The cabin usually shifts on its foundation in the winter and spring, and by times the door is hard to open, but this time it seemed quite stuck. Feeling that I hadn’t eaten or even taken a glass of water, I tried turning the key with a pair of pliers I leave in the porch for that reason, but to no avail. Then I took apart the top hinge and shifted the door by prying on it and lifting it, and then finally, once I turned the key and heaved on it at the same time, it moved.

Once I was inside, I opened the two windows to the porch, for the main cabin was chilly. Then I brought my bags inside, and turned on the main power. I checked the buckets I left in the new part and there were the remains of four mice in them, so I realized that I would be fighting mice again this year. A bucket in the greenhouse had a dead mouse as well, so I added that to my list of things to look into. I plugged in the drill I had modified to run off the twelve volt current in the cabin, and took off the plywood covering the sliding door in the new part, and then went around the cabin unscrewing and opening the shutters. In a few minutes the cabin felt like I had arrived.

A pin cherry tree was down in the yard where it had fallen in the winter, so I opened the workshop for my axe, and moved it out of the way. I fished out the barrel for water, and set it up on its base, and then covered it with screen and hooked up its hoses. Next I set up the step on the tin shed, where I keep building supplies, and the step for the workshop. They merely screw into place, and before long I was bringing out the tin box for the rootcellar—noting the snow behind the cabin I can use to keep it cool—and leaning the ladder against the front of the porch. I set up the steps for the greenhouse, and then took out the parts of the water supply. I took the dirty buckets with mouse remains to a place where spring water collects down the hill, and washed them out so I could install them again in the buildings to collect stubborn mice. I found a dead mouse in the workshop as well, so I will have to look into how the building shifted and allowed it in.

I knew I couldn’t set up the power system yet, and in fact, I was moving slow from the heat and lack of food, so I set up the rest of the water system. That is a half barrel on the greenhouse roof, one on the front of the porch, and the fresh water barrel on the roof with its overflow going into the hot water tank and then hooked that into the inside and shower water system.

I finally took the time to eat, so I made a peanut butter and artichoke and green olive sandwich, and then took it out into the sun. I set up a lawn chair on the grass and ate while I toasted slightly in the bright sun. It was very warm, which made me think—after I finished a few more tasks—that I should use the Fresnel lens to toast my cheese sandwich. I sat in the sun getting more drowsy, but finally I roused myself enough to shovel snow around the icebox or root cellar, and then pad that with feedbags.

I made another trip to the car to bring back my sleeping bags, since I don’t want mice to chew them, and then I set up the frame for the solar panels on the roof. After that, I roasted my vegetarian cheese sandwich with the Fresnel lens. That was a fairly successful experiment, although I set everything up and then realized that I couldn’t remember how to take video with my camera, so there are no photos of the procedure. Next time.

I took a nap after eating, and while I was waiting for the sun to descend enough to make setting up the solar panel system easier—for it is more difficult to keep covering the panels in order not so send too strong a shock through the system.

Once the sun began to slide down in the sky, I unplugged the batteries, and began the lengthy procedure of carrying solar panels to the roof to supplement the two I leave out over the winter. I clipped their connectors together, and before long they were sending the weak charge of twilight to the batteries.

By the time it was almost dark, I was beginning to think about sleeping again. I plugged the obvious hole the mice had made in the wall of the new part, and contemplated waiting until they were running around so I could see if there were new holes. In the end, I just washed up and went to sleep. It had been a brilliant day in the sun, and I had nearly everything in the cabin set up, and so after listening to a podcast, I was soon asleep. I woke a few times in the night due to the cold, but I had overheated the cabin by the sun all day, so it wasn’t too chilly until late morning.

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