The Vinyl Café Notebooks (23 page)

The two of them, the white cyclist from Whistler, B.C., and the Aboriginal hiker from Ontario, stood on the shoulder and bonded.

“When you drive,” said Noel, “you miss the details.”

“Like the caterpillars,” said the hiker, “and frogs and lupins and brooks and streams.”

Noel told the man that one early morning a deer had bounded through the forest, running beside him for more than a kilometre.

The man said, “Deer are important.”

And then Noel told him that he had passed a dead eagle that very morning, and the man got excited and made him tell
him exactly where the eagle was, so he wouldn’t miss it on his way by.

Many people would think you were crazy to walk from Ontario to Alberta. But for Cal, and Noel, and that walking man, it was the point of their trips. They would tell you the best trips are the ones where you move slowly.

30 July 2006

BRIDGE WALKING

There are many reasons to celebrate bridges. Often just their scale is enough. A grand bridge, stretching across some impossible chasm, like a freight train suspended across a prairie landscape, is worthy of praise; but so, too, are all the little country bridges. The ones that make you want to pull over and climb out of your car and hang on the railing a spell.

Bridges can be beautiful for their largeness or their smallness, but also for their straightness. Or, better, their curves. For when it is a bridge as hard as steel that is swooping and bending and rolling before your eyes, what could be more beautiful than that?

Bridges bring things together that are apart. This bank and that bank. This side and that. And that is a noble aspiration. A bridge is, above all else, a conciliator. Bridges like it when things are joined up. They favour gatherings over solitudes.

So for all these things, and of course, because almost always, there is water involved, I am in favour of bridges.

And with these things in mind, I wanted to tip my hat to the International Bridge that joins Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. For its beautiful curved arch trusses, and for the way it swoops and sags, and for the way
they let you ride your bike from one side to the other right along with the cars. And because it has a steel railing that allows you to see the water, and because it spans the busiest shipping locks in the world—70 percent of the raw material that feeds the North American auto industry, in the form of iron ore, passes below it. This is a serious bridge.

And this June, for the twenty-third year in a row, officials are closing the bridge for an hour so that anyone who wants can walk across it. And the only reason they have for doing that is that it is a beautiful walk. Almost five kilometres long, and high enough so you can see fish in the St. Mary’s River below. And a lot of other things you can’t see when you are behind the wheel of a car.

So here is to the beauty of bridges. And, more to the point, to the wisdom of the bridge operators in Sault Ste. Marie, who believe in beauty and understand the importance of taking the time, from time to time, to pause and appreciate it.

28 June 2009

GETTING TO

SWIFT CURRENT

At midnight, last Tuesday, after we had finished packing up the show in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, we agreed to meet in the hotel lobby at nine o’clock the next morning for the five-hour drive to Swift Current. We, being the touring cast of
The Vinyl Cafe
show: horn player Chris Whiteley, pianist John Sheard, vocalist Lisa Lindo and myself.

We assembled, a little blearily, for our complimentary hotel breakfast, packed the van and headed off—it was Day Three of the Western Tour.

Before we left Yorkton, we stopped so Chris could buy a new cable for his electric guitar. He’d left his old cable on stage in Winnipeg. We had been told McLaren’s on Broadway Street should have one. So that’s where we headed.

Small-town businesspeople are often called upon to use more imagination than their big-city counterparts to stay afloat. McLaren’s turned out to be a monument to small-town ingenuity, a combination music store, trophy outlet and supplier of medical provisions. We could have walked out of McLaren’s with an upright piano, a surgical syringe and a silver-plated bowling trophy. We settled for the amp chord and a handful of guitar picks. And we left town.

We were almost immediately onto the prairie, floating along a highway that was so straight and empty that John, who was driving, could have tied off the steering wheel to the rear-view mirror and done his morning crossword.

We rolled by kilometres of empty fields under a sky so low and grey that it felt like snow. At this time of year, the prairie landscape is drawn from a pallet of beige and browns—a beautiful and contemplative vista.

I was in the back of the van, with my head down, clicking away at my laptop, answering emails, when a train whistle split the air. John whooped.

“I waved at the guy,” he said, “and he blew the whistle.”

He was still beaming a few minutes later.

“He blew the whistle for me,” he repeated.

We were all smiling now. The freight, so elemental to the prairie that it seemed part of the natural world, was still rocking along beside us. What is it about trains that turn us into children?

An hour and three freights later, we passed a field of wheat stubble inundated with black-and-white birds. Thousands and thousands of birds. There were more birds in the field than I had ever seen in one place in my life. They might have been magpies; they were too far away for me to identify.

Maybe I had been in the van too long. Or maybe it was my turn to touch my childhood. Whatever. I barked at John to pull over.

The van was a kilometre and a half down the road before John understood I was serious. When he realized I was, he turned around, and we backtracked that kilometre and a half and parked on the gravel shoulder. The birds were maybe a
half-kilometre from the highway. Unable to get anyone to join me, I slipped alone under the strand of barbed wire that bordered the road, and I began to lope across the prairie like a dog. I wanted to make it into the middle of the flock before the birds took off. I wanted to feel the surge of their wings all around me. I thought the sound would be incredible.

I didn’t even get close before a skittish character squawked into the sky and took everyone else with him. The birds rose into the air like a shook carpet. I returned to the van, disappointed.

Our next stop was at a gas station in the Qu’Appelle River Valley, which like all river valleys in Saskatchewan appears dramatically and, seemingly, out of nowhere. You think it is flat forever when suddenly the land folds, and opens, and there is water, and hills, and stands of trees.

Saskatchewan river valleys make me think of the times before Europeans arrived. I imagine First Nations people moving through the landscape.

We stopped a while later in Enfold, looking for gas and coffee, and realized we weren’t going to find either. We climbed out of the van and saw all the businesses in the small country town had been long abandoned, and that many of the clapboard houses were empty too—another farming community on its way to becoming a ghost town. As the farms get bigger, the towns get smaller. The wind was blowing. We stood there, looking around.

Someone said, “All this is going to blow away one day.”

We climbed back into the van and headed off again onto the highway with Swift Current in our sights.

28 November 1999

PRAIRIE WIND

Art Grenville farms bison about an hour to the north and east of Rosebud, Alberta, in a part of the country where you can feel as if you’re standing close to history just about anywhere you are.

On my way to his place, I pulled over and walked through a roadside graveyard. Standing among the tombstones and dwarfed by the flat-bottomed thunderclouds ranging the edge of the sky, I felt as if I was standing in a painting by William Kurelek. It was good to be back in a part of the country where the view allowed thunderclouds and blue sky to share the same horizon—on the very edge of the prairie, the place where the earth opens and the Canadian Badlands begin. The topography is almost biblical, and brings to mind the cradle of creation.

Before I left, I had checked a book to clear up the difference between a buffalo and a bison. A buffalo is a water buffalo. We don’t have those. We might be used to calling what we do have “buffalo,” but the horned and heavy-humped animals that roamed North America in impossible numbers before Europeans arrived to slaughter them into almost extinction are, correctly, bison.

When I arrived at his bison farm, Art suggested we take the tractor out to the pasture, where he keeps part of his herd.

There is something quite indescribable about finding yourself standing on a prairie hill surrounded by bison. It could be all the movies I’ve seen, or maybe the pictures in the history books, or maybe I’m just a romantic, but a herd of bison seems to fit into the landscape in an organic way that a herd of cattle doesn’t. The bison seem to be
of
the land rather than just on it. Standing amid them made me feel as if I were of the land too.

As we stood there silently, Art Grenville pulled a book out of his coat pocket and asked if it was okay if he read a passage out loud. It was Peter Fidler’s journal. Fidler was a geographer and contemporary of the great, and better known, David Thompson. Fidler travelled with the Piegans to the valley of the Red Deer River in the late 1700s, and it is his account of the bison, or, buffalo, as Fidler calls them, (no wonder we have been confused for centuries) that Art Grenville wanted to read to me.

It wasn’t Fidler’s description, however, that I found remarkable. I’ve heard similar accounts before, about how the plains were so thick with bison that you couldn’t see the ground for ten miles all around you. It was something that Art did when he had finished reading that affected me. He put the book back in his pocket, pointed off to the southwest and said, “I figure Fidler was standing on
that
ridge there when he wrote that.” Grenville was talking about something that was written more than two hundred years ago.

“I figure,” he said, “that the view was pretty much the same.”

Only once before have I felt so close to history. That, too, was on these dry and rolling plains. It was the night, some decades ago, in the Cypress Hills, when I stood alone listening to a songbird swooping and felt the ghost of the great Indian warrior Sitting Bull, who crossed over the Medicine Line into the North West Territories, as they were then called, seeking refuge from the American cavalry who were pursuing him after the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

The dry winds that blow the sage bush over this parched and cracked prairie carry stories you can sometimes almost touch.

The trick is to be there when the wind is blowing. And to listen to the soft whispers of the dry grass when it does.

7 May 2006

PARLIAMENT HILL

The first thing I did on Monday morning, with time on my hands, was what I always do when I have time on my hands in the nation’s capital. I got in a taxi and asked the driver to take me to Parliament Hill. I find the Parliament Buildings, both in their stony reality, and for all that they symbolize, an inspiring place. I am moved by all of it—by the certainty of the stone and the symmetry of the architecture, by the fragility of the eternal flame and the aspirations of the Peace Tower, by the languid lawn at the front door and the rapid river at the back. Even if I don’t have time to stop by, I like to
drive
by and pay my respects.
Take the long way
, I always tell my taxi driver, even if I am hurrying to the airport.

This week I was
not
hurrying. I had time. But that’s not all I had. My friend David McCormick, who is a member of the Ottawa Press Gallery, had arranged to get me a press pass. For the first time in thirty years I was going to be able to wander wherever I wanted.

The pass came with instructions. “There are two hidden gems,” said David, who knows my taste in these things. “I think you should see them.”

He told me to go to the Parliamentary Library. “There is
an inkwell on display,” he explained. “It was used at the Charlottetown Conference of 1864. And then again, eighty-five years later, for the signing of the terms of union under which Newfoundland joined the Canadian federation.”

“I will check the inkwell out,” I promised.

“When you do,” said David, “check out the cake too.”

“The cake?” I replied.

“There is a cake on display. It was baked by the parliamentary kitchen more than thirty years ago, for the library’s one hundredth anniversary You have to see it.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it was baked in the shape of the library,” said David. “It is the oddest thing, but affecting in an odd way.”

An inkwell and a cake. These are the sort of things that I love.
Let the tourists climb the Peace Tower
, I thought as I walked along Wellington Street.
Let the students of politics head for the House of Commons. I will go to the library, and in that most splendid of Parliament’s many splendid rooms, in the woodlined cathedral of books, I will pray at a familiar altar, the altar of the inconsequential
.

I have always believed that the big truths are hidden in the small things. An inkwell struck me as such a nice small thing. The indelible smell of ink, like the smell of blood, or the smell of the sea, recalls elemental things. The alchemy of liquid that, with the stroke of a pen, can become law.

I was touched that someone had had enough respect for history to guard that inkwell for nearly one hundred years so that it could be used during both the first and most recent days of Confederation, and I was pleased that I was going to find it displayed so modestly, on a library desk.

And so I thanked David, and I picked up my pass with great anticipation.

If you have never been to the Parliament Buildings, the best way to walk into the Centre Block is to imagine yourself walking into a cathedral. It is all limestone marble and gothic arches, bathed in the soft light of a setting sun, or as the parliamentarians would have us believe, I am certain, an approaching dawn. You wouldn’t be surprised as you walked around to spot a red-cloaked bishop padding down one of the corridors, or I wouldn’t. Like one of Canada’s grand railway hotels, Parliament is all history and tradition.