trilingual Canada?

Every month I am overcome by the huge and baffling variety of “feminine hygiene products”, a strange name for menstrual wear of all kinds. What does femininity have to do with getting your period? Personally, I am far less likely to strap on a frock and act the demure shrinking violet at that time of the month than any other. Unless the definition of feminine changed while I was sleeping and it now means something akin to “emotionally raging & cramp infested, possibly tactless to the point of cruelty”, I really don’t see what traditional big-haired femininity has to do with the monthly flow of blood twixt our legs.
But this wasn’t the particular linguistic phenomenon that caught my attention last time I confronted the wall of pads in my local grocery store. In fact, it wasn’t until I had already run the comparative-shopping gauntlet and arrived home that I even noticed it.
Every child in Canada from coast to coast to coast has the opportunity of learning not one but two official languages. The opportunity to actually converse in the two official languages varies with your mileage away from the Bill 101 hotspots rooted in Eastern Canada, but ever and always the back of a shampoo bottle or cereal box will avail some kind of linguistic opportunity. In places where the other official language has never been uttered, it still universally spackles the sides of commercial goods. Whether it will ever be useful to carry on a discussion about proper hair care in the other language or not is debatable, but these small acts of translation are the glue that keep our country assembled, that make us curious and delighted about our cultural and linguistic diversity.
In the States, bilingualism has grown out of necessity rather than legislation. English is the unofficial language of the USA, which means that all their legal documents are written in English. In some states such as New Mexico, laws are written in both English and Spanish, and both languages are found on most goods in stores these days. In fact, driving across the border from western Canada where English predominates into the western States, Spanish is immediately apparent in storefront signage. The United States of America’s unofficial language is indisputably Spanish. Of course, this is more or less apparent depending where in the country you are. The further south you go, the more Spanish there is, and ditto the further west. And, of course, this causes varying degrees of joy and consternation depending on who you talk to.
What, though, was Spanish doing up here in Canada? French, unlike its Latinate cousin, is rarely found in the USA. Imports and foods are an exception, as is New Orleans, but other than that, French is rare in the States. This is evident from the pronunciation of various city names which were once French in origin but now have been thoroughly Americanized into some original unrecognizability.
But there it was on the package: overnight • de nuit • nocturnas. Ah, nocturnas, I thought, that’s pretty. Napkins • serviettes • toallas… Toallas?! Ok, that’s not so pretty. Well, compared to the good old anglo-saxon “napkins” it still sounds good. But “toallas” also sounds huge! Not so comforting to the menstrual woman who already feels like this could be the month she bleeds to death.
So how did this Spanish get on my pads? I was pretty sure that the American packaging wouldn’t contain a word of French. Why does the Canadian one have Spanish? Is this our unofficial third language? to be continued…

Aside: because Canada has two official languages that are both official languages because there is no way we want to designate one as being more official than the other because by so doing we incur either the Separatist wrath of Quebec or the alienation of Western provinces, Newfoundland and all other Anglo strongholds, does that mean that a third language like Spanish would be a first unofficial language, or a third unofficial language, or would it vary from place to place depending on whatever linguistic reality was present, because in many places there is another indigenous language in use that is far more relevant to daily living than Spanish, although the presence of Spanish on household goods could be seen in a providential light by some sectors of the population as being a perfect opportunity to brush up a little before fleeing the Canadian winter in favor of a place where knowing the Spanish equivalent for “towel” and “shampoo” could really come in handy.

no woman is an e-land?

here we were where winter was everywhere wherever was.


snow stood shadow-asunder still shrouded under a sun

heinous amountainous


insert somewhere here

NFL

Newfoundland! Newfinland! Newfundland! Newfunland!

Railing at the Anna Templeton for Textile Arts

Yes, I’m back again on the Rock. A strange choice, perhaps, when fuel prices are soaring and everything salad-like and familiar is on the mainland. But, here I am, and like most people I carry my world with me wherever I go. So, Planet Claire now resides here in the new home of Misty and Rob.

Pitcher plant on Cape Spear

Summer arrived nearly two weeks after I did, and so I got to experience two full seasons of lilac blossoms; one in Vancouver and the other here. They are just about finished, and the local vegetables are now nearly large enough to be eaten. There is a farmers’ market most weekends where local veggies, meat and baking as well as a few crafts can be bought. The sea is also coming to St. John’s, and the capelin will soon be rolling into its nearest shores. The whales are already offshore gorging their gorgeous selves on the wee fish.

Signal Hill in the fog

Humpback Whales

Humpback whales with tourists

The warm weather has enthused locals and nonlocals alike, musical and otherwise. The 14th annual Sound Symposium is now ON, and includes a daily horn symphony that is played in the harbour on the various steamwhistles and horns in the bay. It tends to be a little abstract and a lot loud. I was lucky enough to get a chance to go to the opening night gala for free and see a variety of musical shows that included choral music and a circus. Of course, everyone in St. John’s is born holding some kind of instrument in their fetal fist so seeing musical talent is a near every day event here. Even so, the crowd was enthusiastic about each performance in the varied lineup.
Lupins, lupins everywhere!

I now have a job, another baking job working for two of the best people to work for ever. The bakery itself is called Sweet Relic and is in the oldest building in St. John's. If you are in the area, make sure to come by and taste some of the best baking in the city made by the kitchen boss Patricia. You'll probably be buying it from cafe boss Russell, so that means you will get to see what I mean by good folks.

Mexico in 6 photos or less

We started out to Mexico in half a foot of snow, with the wind blowing and snow falling heavily. At first we—my mom, her boyfriend Dan and myself—weren’t sure if we were heading into worse weather than what we were leaving behind. Kelowna was experiencing its first midwinter blizzard and the streets were no more than two narrow trenches through the snow, all other lines and boundaries buried in white. Which could kind of be said about Kelowna in general: all culture, nature and previous civilizations now buried in white (people).

Anyway, the radio promised better times ahead once we reached Summerland, so we persisted on in faith. The snowflakes were as big as small birds, capable of covering the palm of your hand. These falling small birds made it hard to see much, and we moved forward at a safe and slow pace. Traffic coming in to the city was a mix of the cautious, the foolhardy and those in a ploughtruck-led conga line. Most cars were able to stay on the road.


Once we reached Summerland we saw the promise given by the radio oracle was the truth. The snow thinned, falling in enough air to see through, to see further and drive faster. At the U.S. border they let us through with no thorough vehicle or body cavity search, Allah be praised, and the snow continued on through Washington state. The only noticeable difference south of the border was the periodic presence of symbolic patriotism: the American flag.

I never really know what to think about this flaunting of the flag. Does it mean the people flying it are staunch supporters of the U.S. government even way out here in rural States, or does it mean that they are pureblood survivalists who will defend their right to bear arms even if that means they might have to destroy their own government, or is it just absolute and unwavering allegiance to the idea that is the U.S. of A, or just to the flag itself? I am curious, but I am not curious enough to try knocking on the door of a potentially armed stranger defending their property in order to find out.


Washington was awash in white, and we stayed in snow all through the high mountain passes that led us into the next states of our trip. Each day we had a blustery frozen start that usually progressed into sun and melting. At one point of the day’s thaw, in a straight stretch of road not in the mountains, we saw the remnants of a three-semi pile-up. It looks like they were sniffing each other’s tailpipes a little too closely.

It was near Reno that I felt like my life could be a video game, although it was Danny who was playing it. I don’t think there is a driving game called “Terrified Passenger” yet. But this might give you the wrong impression. Dan is my hero; he drove us safely through the snow and back again, and much more in between. We had become used to winter long before we reached Nevada, but the snowdevils kicked up there by an incoming storm system were a new creature altogether. Driving through the desert toward the horizon we could see white tornadoes blowing up across the ridges and over the highway. We missed being hit by all of them, but unfortunately we didn’t miss the town of Burton Wells.

Our last night in Nevada was in Burton Wells during a full-blown blizzard. Luckily (?), we found a cheap bunker of a motel complete with mildew so there was no chance we were going to be blown away either by the storm or by the quality of our lodgings. Enough said.

The next morning we drove out of the last of that state, through one side of a storm straight into its peaceful eye. Driving toward the thing was like driving into a white wall. Fortunately we were in the desert and the road ahead was dead flat and dead straight. The wind pushed us hard all over the road, and the air was so thick with snow that visibility was zero. When we got through this turbulent wall, we were suddenly in the eye of the storm: a column of clear air that opened up to a blue sky we hadn’t seen for days, with no wind or snow. It was like an oasis of calm that could only be kept by traveling within the storm itself. It wasn’t too many miles before we reached the other side and were buffeted once again back through to winter. The snow and wind continued until we reached the mountains on the far side of the plains, where winter began to magically fade away. Its grip continued to loosen, and by the time we started to see signs telling us how far we were from the modern Babylon, Las Vegas, the roads were dry and the skies were clear.

Another leg of the journey completed, our next gauntlet was the crazy spaghetti bowl surrounding the 24-hour meat ball of Las Vegas. Danny once again showed his quality as with sweaty palms all around, we drove on to the long exit/entrance ramp that surrounds Las Vegas. Traffic merged and exited on both sides of the highway; cars, puffy escalades and semis wove through at 100 kph, crossing three of the five lanes in order to get to their exit: it was a giant and deadly game of Tetris.

If another racing game is ever made, it should be “Home Run: Las Vegas 5:10”. The only possibly good thing about rush hour would be that the cars would have to move a lot slower. Maybe. And I imagine the late night Las Vegas spaghetti bowl is often peppered with fresh corpses ground to bleeding bits in high impact collisions. Maybe I say this because I watch too much TV, or maybe I’ve seen too many car accidents, or maybe that is just about right. With the splatter factor high, why hasn’t the gaming industry gone there yet? And America is the land of highways and guns as well, so there's another winning combination just waiting to be exploited.

Our next but very different hurtle was the Hoover Dam. We had arrived in Las Vegas on December 31st, and while we were on our way out of Sin Central that very night, everyone else and their dog was heading in, determined to break their resolutions before they made them. It took three hours for us to wind our way over the dam and back on to a freeway. From the number of vehicles stuck bumper to bumper, it looked like there were going to be an ocean of folks ringing in the new year in the middle of the Hoover Dam.
Once we were out of Nevada and out of the storm of snow and cars, we had only the not so stinky town of Ajo and the Organ Pipe National Monument to go, and then we were in to Sonoita, Mexico. Felicitously, we had acquired an informative second-hand placemat in Pendleton that mapped out all the cactuses for us.

The border into Mexico was as highly porous as reputed; we had to hunt down a border guard to fill out our visitors’ visas and stamp our passports. After this, we were truly in Mexico, and the bilingualism that had started in Washington state became steadily more Spanish.

Like Nevada, the earth was dry, and dust was plentiful. Every roadside thing was covered with the stuff, the desiccated dead, the skin, eyelashes, and bellybutton lint of Mexico settled and unsettled itself in great gusts of air. The dead were still in motion, animated by the wind and living in among all of life. Here, the living silt looked different, throwing the sun’s light back to us.

The further we drove from the border, the more lustrous the dirt. Along the roads saguaro cactuses sprung straight up from their rocky beds and waved their crooked arms. In the fields, chiles and sandias pulsed at each green extremity. And everywhere the air moved the earth, reflected light spun and shone.

Even in the mountains away from the open plains the stuff was everywhere. It filtered in between the thick trees, bringing down light like tiny microscopic angels. An unnamed class of celestials, we dubbed them the Moteans. The deeper we drove, the thicker the light rained and the larger its grains until sure shapes made from recycled Mexico could be seen swimming in the light. As we reached the end of the forest, the winds grew heavier and blew away all extra travelers that had landed on our car. Only the occasional wing remained, stuck flapping and bodiless on the door, window or roof. Now the entire body of the van sparkled under its veneer of sparkling scales, our mariposa baptism.

New found land for real!!

Ok, so here are the people I'm staying with in Newfoundland that are responsible for me staying longer by finding me a job and are also partially responsible for my recent weight gain. It is a house of hedonists, I tell you. The food is too good to be missed, so I don't.

Here is Misty:
and Rob:

And here are a few pictures from a recent excursion out to Bell Island off the coast of St. John's. There are 20 acres of land for sale, which Misty, Rob and a few others would like to turn into some kind of farm. We are going as a group sometime soon (after the snow clears up a bit, maybe) to see what we think we can do with it, particularly the professional farmer amongst us, Mark.

There are two very rickety attached buildings that will probably need to be torn down. The foundation they are rottenly balancing atop is cracked and eroding, so no renos are worth doing. The building shown here next to the ass-end of our rental car was a little grocery store at one point in the vanishing past.
The tree is nice, but who knows what its roots have gotten into. The septic works probably need to be figured out or reconfigured out again, as it's obviously been a while since anything resembling plumbing was needed here. There are apparently two wells on the land, but we were unable to locate them. They are no longer clearly marked, if they ever were.


The back side of the house.
The field behind the house. It is fairly large, and windy, but would be easy to plant once cleared of the random rusted car parts strewn through it.


More of the field:
Journeying down into the land:

Further down, the trees are definitely thicker, creating more of a break against the wind. There is a track running down the entire length of the property, and frequently to either side are small clearings like this one:
The land further down is definitely wetter, due partially to the shade and water retention that the trees provide and the steady downward slope. A number of mosses and mushrooms grow on the lower part of the property here, as well as a bright orange fungus of some kind.

The property abruptly ends in a cliff that empties into the gap between St. John's and Bell Island. It could be a good site for some extreme rock climbing tourist business, or an experimental commuter system that involved a giant slingshot. The wheels are turning...

New found land too

Here is the Atlantic Ocean, everybody! This is the easternmost point of North America, if you exclude Greenland from the figuring. It even looks cold.


My aquaphilia is definitely less than it was up North, seeing as the water here is harder to get to and far more perilous to boot. But, it's still absolutely gorgeous to watch. Still pictures are really no good reflection of the reality, but uploading tons of footage of crashing waves might just be annoying.

...just one more for the record!

And here I am in an unusually calm moment on the easternmost point of Canada et al.

Cape Spear:
Lighthouses, of course:



An old army barracks, back from before Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949 (!), a sore point still for some:

New found land

Here is what I normally look like in Newfoundland if I don't restrain my hair. That's signal hill we're climbing the back of, and the water is the Atlantic once again.

Here's Misty, at home in the city that was her fate as soon as her parents named her...Misty!


The view from Signal Hill. That's the cliffs of Dover off in the distance, and you can see Big Ben on clear days. This is a panoramic series that moves from the ocean into the harbour.
P.S. that's not really Angleterre over there...




And above is the city of St. John's NL. More later about the city itself.

love eternal for now

Here are the last of the summer flowers. The zinnias are particularly spectacular, as is the chard that follows.
But this is actually all illusion, in many ways. I'm not actually near the flowers, they wilted long before this post. It is actually the 10th of November, the birth date of my beloved mother whom I will be calling before too long.

This post is so long in the making that I am almost certain that they few who took the time to check for new posts have stopped. So much the better for the ranting...

Today's rant is brought to you by the letters B and A and by the number zero. I call it: a rock and a hard place. Increasingly, it seems, the people I know are less and less satisfied and more and more depressed. Maybe the sample of people I know is not representative of the total population, but they are the people that I care about, so that is what I care about.

Most of these people are smart enough to have a healthy distrust of large institutions, although most of them have been or are still engaged in an institution of some sort. Well, who isn't really. Not many individuals can honestly call themselves sovereign entities, and if they can and do, they generally have to promote/demote themselves to nationhood of some kind. Freelandia is an example of the tyranny of internationality.

Anyway, the people who are engaged in work for an institution (school, government, university, hospital, corporation) often have complaints about their institution and its lack of effectiveness in its sphere of influence. Governments are bizarrely inefficient and dominated by power-seeking self-interested infants, schools and hospitals are shackled by their own institutional standards that value formal education (pro-institution) over experience in the labourforce, corporations are attentive only to the bottom line even when ignoring the realworld aspects of their employees' lives begins to erode their bottom line, etc. The monolithic-seeming institution is the rock.

Alternately, an anti-institution position is usually taken as a reasonable reaction to the absurd nature of institutional living. Often the stance is strong and reactionary, which only entrenches the definition of both the institutional and anti-institutional positions. Demonstrations are a show of solidarity, which is good, but only gives the group the definition of existing in opposition to something else, generally a government or corporate policy. This only redefines reality in terms of institution and anti-institution. This is obvious in the recent and ongoing war on terrorism where binarism has redefined previously more heterogenous groups as either "with or against" government, as friendly or terrorist. This is the hard place, the reactionary stance that is the negation of everything institutional.

Of course, there is an entire world between, around and far away from the rock and the hard place. The ideal way to enter this non-binary world is to come up with non-binary ideas. Ideas, and not solutions; solutions are responses to present situations that are framed in a particular way (i.e. as problems) and are therefore reactionary. Are there any original thoughts? Who knows and who cares. It's not really about the historical originality of the idea, rather its appropriateness in a situation. To consider the world in a nonreactionary way is to explore the idea of what constitutes a good life outside of the limited options we are presented with daily. It is the formulation of individual morality, and therefore true morality instead of ascription (if there is such a word) to a culturally inherited morality. This exploration and its results should be exciting and interesting!

End of rant. If you read this far and are interested in or already engaged in figuring out what goodness and a good life is, let me know how it's going, what you've figured out, where you stumble and why. Of course, the caveat here is that I am writing this for my own benefit first and foremost, so these ideas may be old hat to you. If so, let me know what your morality trailblazing looked like. And as for what I've done so far, I guess that will just come in the next post.

Nice chard, eh?