It's getting strange up here

A Sketch

On May 9, the power went out in all of the Southern Yu

kon for a good portion of the day, downed, if you can believe it, by a squirrel who infiltrated the . The below news story detailed the event. You can read the whole thing here. It's hard to pick a

favourite quote from the story.

Two of my favourites:

-—"All the power generated by its Whitehorse plants flows through this point.

The substation is enclosed by a chain link fence, and lined with a wooden squirrel guard to keep rodents out.

'But this squirrel was persistent,' said Yukon Energy Corporation spokesperson Janet Patterson. "

—"'As far as I’m concerned our power grid is like that of a Third World country.' [ Gordon Clark, owner of the Whitehorse Boston Pizza, who estimated he lost $1,500 in sales]"

Both of these are good, but the most delicious quote is this:

— "For all those who doubt the official explanation, the News received a photo of the dead animal, but Yukon Energy wouldn’t permit it to be published.

'It’s a pretty charred squirrel,' said Patterson. 'I don’t think it’s something the public wants to see.'"

I am not great at keeping up with the local news, but I was filling blue jugs with water at the laundromat and shower down the hill when I ran into someone while they were reading this article, and as he read he started laughing out loud. I asked him what was so funny and he read the quote to me. My response, given the larger news headlines from the previous week, was something like:

"Maybe they didn't want to inflame sentiment in moderate squirrels who are sympathetic to squirrel jihadists."

And the guys laughed again and said that's exactly what had made him laugh. We then both wondered if the news writer had put this little gem of a 'graf in fully aware of how darkly funny it was. I can't imagine they they weren't.

Anyways, I love this place, third world power grid and all.

"‎"I used to be immune to mosquitoes, I'd been bitten so much, but I've lost it.... The sound of love in the North, a kiss, a slap." —from Surfacing, Margaret Atwood

It's been much longer than I planned since I posted, but I've been something like busy. I'm writing from my home, a trailer on top of one of the last intact tailing piles left behind by the giant gold dredges that flipped the land here upside down the early 20th century. There are miles and miles of tailing piles around, but many have been levelled off or otherwise altered in the years since.

Surrounding much of the pile is a dredge pond (dredges operated by melting the permafrost beneath the ground and sorting through the mix of dirt and water for gold. Gold is heavier than other dirt, so it would sink to the bottom first. Because the dredges here were massive- like, apartment block massive- the melted permafrost underneath them became a small pond on which the dredges would kind of float, moving and sifting through land and spitting out the dirt and rocks which weren't gold behind them. Now, there's a whole network of ponds that remain behind.) There is a beaver living in this pond, though I haven't seen him yet, only heard him chomping away at night. It's sometimes just too thick with mosquitoes to wait for him.

Out my right-side windows, there's the pond and on the far side of that, another pile of rocks-turned-homestead. This one is long and thin, and looks to be abandoned, with a huge chunks of old dredge equipment and an old truck with no engine scattered on the property. Behind that is Bonanza Creek. I am near where the creek joins the Klondike River, about 16 km downstream from where the huge find that triggered the Klondike Gold Rush was discovered.

It's impossible to resist the romance of imagining all the characters that trucked up that creek to make their fortune over 100 years ago.

Out the left windows, there's more pond and a road that leads back into town. There's a campsite at the bottom of my road, where every day there are more tents. There is a second gold rush going on, and young kids from all over the world have been lured here by invitation or adventure to work for larger mining companies that have been combing this area for years, knowing that there's still massive fortunes to be pulled out of the earth here. Ground Truth, a local, husband-and-wife-owned team, have found several huge deposits in recent years, and now the race is on to re-stake and extract gold deposits all over the territory, but around Dawson in particular. The campground is full of their crews, and I can hear them laughing late into the night. In the morning, sometimes the smell of their breakfast prep is too much and my dog runs down to yap at them and beg for scraps. I apologize, but these kids (and yes, they appear to me as kids) are on the adventure of a lifetime, and they aren't bothered. They're from all over, bonding over their wonderment at ending up in a place so strange it seems it ought to exist only in old novels and illustrations from Boy's Life magazine. They are anticipating helicopter rides to the edge of nowhere. They are swapping bear stories and jokes ( I heard one of them doing "If Hannibal Lecter was from Nova Scotia: "How's she goin' there, Clarice? Are the lamb still givin' ye a hard time now?")

They are far away enough that I'm still hidden, and though it's wise to go into town to avoid losing my social skills, there's a lot of time to be alone here. You can sit overlooking the pond and sort through an incredible diversity of rocks—quartz, shale, bits of driftwood in various states of petrification— and wonder if maybe someone else held them and examined them a hundred years ago.

When I first got here, the pond was half-frozen, and the ice looked so thin as to beg the hurling of shotput-weight rocks into them to enjoy the crash of stone through ice. To my surprise, they would land with a thud or bounce and then slide off the edge into the water. I spend several days with a game i "invented", throwing medium-sized rocks onto the ice then trying to knock them into the water by hitting them with small stones. Protean curling of some sort. It was far more engrossing than I could have imagined.

The property was covered in snow when I arrived, but now it's lush and green. The sun is such in the late hours that one evening, while I was inside for dinner, all the barren trees leafed at once, and I opened the door to find myself surrounded by colour.

I find myself living at the speed of my cat and dog, who are clearly delighted to be here. Smells on the wind or channels of sunlight between clouds and hills become like possessions.

I go into town a fair bit, and now it's filling up with tourists, and though it's weird to see the place become like an amusement ride, it's too difficult to begrudge anyone the joy of seeing things here for the first time, things that are no longer personally novel. Giddy summer workers, RV vacationers where the husband does all the driving and is called Dick, because he is old enough to have been called Dick before it became a pejorative. You remember the first time you saw something too — Jack London's cabin, a beaver slapping its tail on the river— and all you can do is be happy for them.

The people that live here year-round are generous in spirit—it feels too cynical to begrudge anyone their little moment of paradise by being cynical or unfriendly. They will tell you how to do what you don't know how to do. They won't laugh (to your face) at your silly ideas. Wait long enough and someone here will encourage you to actualize your most bizarre experiment.

In any event, I started with the quote from Margaret Atwood because I've been re-reading her, or more accurately, reading her for the first time. I always thought I hated her writing, it was so crunchy and staid. Sexlessly Canadian and devoid of romance. I'm starting to think my problem with her was she was slow, deliberate and seemingly indifferent to outcome. Anti-dramatic.

Things I have never prized until now. The story is as much in the inaction as the action. And of course, once you've lived in the North, that mosquito quote is irresistible, because it makes romantic and sardonic one of the most brutal truths of life here—once it's warm enough to be outside, the mosquitoes descend. The more hospitable the climate becomes, the more the mosquitoes swarm. The North protects itself, slowly and deliberately, and is almost certainly indifferent to my outcomes. The antidrama of the moments between the kiss and the slap more than enough to keep turning the pages.

More to come, when it comes. I'm not rereading or proofreading this, so apologies in advance for how rough it is. You're welcome to read, but I think this is just for me, for now...

But you know, like feel free to comment.

This is a poorly-shot video to give you a sense of how fast the water is moving underneath the ice...

No more writing yet, in the meantime, here's some photos

The Yukon River Breakup in Whitehorse

That sheer berg of ice in the bottom right corner got pushed up over the ice ledge somehow, and now it's just kind of hanging there in suspended animation.

My trusty assistant...

Godless Christianity and the Philosophy of Yes.

This is remarkable listen

Mary Hynes of CBC Radio One's Tapestry talks to Richard F. Holloway, the former Bishop of Edinburgh for the Scottish Episcopal Church. Holloway's progressive views caused him to resign from his position in 2000, especially in light of his 1999 book, Godless Morality: Keeping Religion out of Ethics, which makes a very convincing argument that religion often interferes with human impulses towards love and compassion. Holloway now is what most people might call an atheist, but he himself uses the term "after-religionist", which, of you listen to him, you'll understand the difference. He also gets into a the philosophy of "Yes". Anyways, a couple quotes, though really, listen to the whole thing if you have the time. It's beautiful.

If you don't have time to listen to the whole thing, I transcribed some of the best bits below:

Holloway on the problem of rigidity in organized religion:
"One reason I’m glad I’m a former bishop because I no longer have to be defending an 'official truth'. I was getting in that kind of position toward the end of my time of a bishop, realizing more and more that I simply wanted not to have the last word said on any of this—as though it could be said—but to make the church a fellowship of exploration. Which is why I started saying, to me religion is poetry, it’s metaphor, it’s art, it’s imagination. It’s not science, it’s not explanation. Let’s enjoy it—it’s at its best when it’s being like that. Natually that upset a lot of people, and I got denounced, and it upset me because I’m not a cruel person, I don’t think, and I knew that I disappointed people.

But I think some of that’s died down a bit, and in recent years I’ve mellowed a little bit. I feel less anger, because what got to me was not so much the philosophical certainty, as the moral cruelty that was a consequence of some of the philosophically certain positions. Because if you believe you’ve got the final word of God, and God hates faggots and doesn’t much like women the consequence of that is that you promote cruelty to some people, and I’m sorry, I can’t cope with that. And of course a lot of Christians agree with me about that, because they’ve changed their minds about women— took us 2,000 years, but we got there. We changed out minds about gays.... It took us 1,800 years to change our minds about slavery—that apparently was mandated by God. So we know this happens and therefore I think a lot of people are living a much more improvisational version of Christianity. They’re doing kind of ‘theological jazz’ rather than playing from hymns ancient. Isn’t that life? I’m listening to you, you’re listening to me, I might change your mind, you’ll change my mind. If you simply banged your text out and I banged my text out, there’s no meeting, there’s no music."

Hynes: "We interviewed a guy who was a religious writer, and he found that he lost his faith much further down the road than most people. And he said the distressing thing to him, to have come to a place of full atheism, was: no one has my back. He had grown up thinking that there was a divine presence who, in some cosmic sense, had his back. Covered for him. In some way, there was some cosmic protection. And he felt stripped bare…. I guess I come to you as a former bishop on that front, not so much for your own experience, but what your counsel would be to someone in that position. You must have met a lot of people in that position over the course your career.

What do you say to someone who says, “I’m bereft. I used to believe, and now no one has my back?"

Holloway, tenderly: "I know. I know. He’s left home. And we all have to. You could psychologize it into separation anxiety and all of that, and of course you may actually even be able to ease the 'no one' bit, because I do not think you can absolutely demonstrate the 'no one', the ' Nobodaddy', the 'no-God'. And I think that part of the trouble with the debate in our culture right now is that it's too harsh and it's too certain. The atheists are just as unfeeling and unkind as the virulent theists, and the thing is intrinsically much more uncertain than that.

But I would say to the person that if that has become their reality, then they have to say yes to that reality, because the unreal life is impossible, because you can’t live in castles in the air, because there’s not basis to them. And it may well be that one of the things he’s having to go through is ownership of his own autonomy—he’s left home, he’s on his own.

There used to be a phrase in ’50s and ’60s theology: “man come of age”—it was associated with the great Dietrich Bonhoeffer. There was that whole notion that we should no longer have a theology that infantalizes the human, we should have a theology that makes the human adult, and is responsible for decisions, and that there’s no kind of metaphysical insurance. There’s no daddy that’s going to rush into the playground and rescue us—we’re on our own. It can make for a lonely universe, except that we have one another.

We have our astonishing artistic creations, we even have religious longing still. I still get a lot out of religious music. I still think there is something reaching towards something in that kind of music that I can say yes to. But ultimately if you believe in a Godless universe, there’s no one there but us, then, that is the reality. You have to grow up, straighten your shoulders, and deal with it. And sometimes you just have to be tough and brave."

Bonus quote from Holloway's writing:

"Paradoxically, it is scripture itself that calls us to overturn scripture; it is the witness of the living word of Jesus that challenges us to follow the logic that scripture was made for humanity and not humanity for scripture."

Starting In The Middle

Here is a secret: I read the last page of a book first. I know I am ruining an element of surprise for myself, but my preferences tend towards storytelling that justifies itself on every page, not just the last few. That said, I'm always bamboozled by the idea of traditional story arcs when trying to write on my own. The end of the story is where the is resolution, or evolution attained, or growth. The character moves from one place to the other, literally or figuratively, and at the end of this motion there is a peace accord with words.

I've never found that peace. And so I will begin not at the beginning or the end, but rather the middle.

Two and a half years ago, after almost a decade working as a music and pop culture writer in Vancouver, British Columbia, I decided I'd had enough. On my thirtieth birthday, I announced to friends that I was moving to Toronto, after a six-month stay with my mother in Powell River to financially steady myself. Somehow, I instead found myself in the Yukon Territory, some 2,700 km North of Vancouver and more than 4,000 km from Toronto.

For the past 22 months, I've been based in the government town of Whitehorse. With a population of 20,000-odd folks living in a constellation of neighbourhoods sprawled over 416 sq. km, Whitehorse is a bit like a massive suburb of a non-existent larger city. In the darkest days of winter, temperatures hover around -30C to -40C, and the city gets about five and a half hours of sunlight per day, with 10 a.m. sunrises and 3:30 sunsets. In summer, a half-hearted sunset brings on the dusk just before midnight, with the full light of the sun returning just after 4 a.m.

In one month, I will move 600 km north to Dawson City, the place that made me want to move here. I came North with the intention of living there right away, but was obligated to live in Whitehorse for my first two years. I will be giving up the sloping, rickety pink-and-white house I have rented for the past two years to rent a trailer near the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers, which is warm enough to dwell in only until September. I do not know where I will live after that.

This forthcoming venture, I figure, puts me at the natural "middle" of the story—on the last leg to where I think I want to be.

Since moving to the Yukon, I've experienced the highest highs and the lowest lows of my life, with a lot of not knowing where the hell I was throw in for good measure. I have fallen in love a dozen times over—a man, the way the light hit a curving wall of snow sliding off a rooftop, the way a cheap draft beer and warmed over grilled cheese tasted after 12 hours of highway driving; I have thought I lost everything—love, security, countless single mittens— only to realize I had just forgotten where to look. I have crawled under a house at -48 degrees Celsius to wrap a frozen pipes in hot-shots and insulation, and I have thrown a toaster clear across the room when a mouse scurried out from under it, weeping outside my home in jeans and a sweater at -25C, too afraid to go back inside.

I have become far less uptight about peeing outside.

I will attempt with this blog to tell the second half of the story as it unfolds, but also to fill in the first half as I begin to make peace with the words that describe the events. It is not an easy accord.


For now, however: now.

I live on the last block of Black Street, which dovetails at the end: into a staircase up 8 stories of clay cliff straight ahead, a park to the right, and trails leading to downtown and the Yukon River to the left. My block is unpaved, adjoining with the next paved block via combed dirt and gravel. When the slow melts and streams down off the cliffs, puddles ankle-deep form at the bottom of my driveway. The passing of the vernal equinox means there is now more light than dark in the day (today's sunset goes at 8:46 p.m.) and the speed of our winter thaw is accelerating. At today's at solar noon it looked as though the street were an awakening creek. Masses of mud now compete with the mountains of dirty snowpiles for the eye's attention. The snow mounds are revealed for all their ugliness—as much dog piss and dirt as they are anything else. It's a pleasure to watch them shrink, fleeing en masse from Spring, down the street in snakey paths, catching the light and glimmering as they run.


It is a good day for puddle jumping.