by Ted Binnema, François Lanoë and Heinz W. Pyszczyk
University of Alberta Press
2025/$39.00/232 pP.

When it comes to navigating in unfamiliar terrain, today’s travellers have many options based on GPS systems. I’m a bit of a luddite with my boat anchor of an iPhone, but it does have the county map on it showing every quarter section of land, and landowner’s name, for miles around. If all else fails, I have topo maps for old school route finding, thanks to generations of cartographers who have plotted the entire country in a series of grids based on calculations of latitude and longitude. But in Cartographic Poetry we learn that Indigenous people, the Siksika and Gros Ventre, had a totally different way of navigating, based not on mathematical measurement but on landmarks, particularly rivers, that were, and are, of cultural, historical and spiritual significance. The authors note that “Poetry is language condensed: Siksika cartography is landscape distilled,” that is to say, not only landmarks but the history of a nation was distilled in the minds of the First Nations travellers and guides. Every river, every mountain, every buffalo jump was a living story in the mind of the people.

This was the mental cartography the early fur traders relied on, while exploring the west with Cree and other Indigenous guides. One notable explorer was Peter Fidler, a Hudson’s Bay Company surveyor and map maker. In 1792, guided by Sakatow and his band of Piikani, he made a winter journey from Buckingham House on the North Saskatchewan River south to the Oldman River gap. Nearly a decade later he established the short-lived HBC trading post of Chesterfield House, where he asked the Siksika leader Ac ko mak ki (Old Swan) to draw a map of the land south of the post, an area that at the time was a blank spot on European maps. Fidler, writes author Ted Binnema in one of his chapters, took great care in getting his guides to draw on paper the maps they held in their minds. Among explorers in that era, he “was unique in his systematic efforts to preserve and document Indigenous cartographic conventions.” Indeed, Cartographic Poetry contains a wealth of ethnographic detail on place names thanks to the meticulous care Fidler took with his Siksika and Gros Ventre informants.

The maps drawn for Fidler are very different from the European tradition of mapping. They are minimalist by necessity, since they would have been typically drawn in the snow, in sand or mud, or upon a piece of hide using charcoal or other medium. They show the Rockies, the “Back-Bone of the Earth” to the Piikani people, as a pair of double lines in Alberta bending east to the Musselshell River in Montana and then south again to the Big Horn Mountains. From it, the major rivers are drawn simply as lines leading out to the plains with the Indigenous names attached by Fidler. We are then shown their transition in Fidler’s hands to maps a fur trader might understand. Next, this Indigenous knowledge passes from the HBC to the famous British cartographer, Aaron Arrowsmith, for his 1802 map of North America. The authors point out that Fidler, if allowed, would have made a much better map than Arrowsmith. The latter, to “…make his depiction plausible to a western reader, invented sinuous river courses and confluences even though he had no evidence for them.” His map was relied on by Lewis and Clark for their much-ballyhooed continental transit in 1804 (which had already been done with zero fanfare by Alexander Mackenzie in 1793), but Arrowsmith’s map “…contributed nothing to the success of the Corps of Discovery.”

Today these maps “are priceless treasures,” write the authors. In publishing them they hope others will “become as fascinated by the maps, their authors and the territories they depict as we are.” With this respectful, evocative study, they have succeeded.

Sid Marty’s most recent book is Oldman’s River, which won the Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize in 2024.

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Fast forward to February 28, 2024: the pause was ended—sort of—as premier Danielle Smith and minister of affordability and utilities Nathan Neudorf outlined some of the regulator’s key findings in a report with the windy title “AUC inquiry into the ongoing economic, orderly and efficient development of electricity generation in Alberta, Module A”, dated January 31, 2024.  (Insomniacs can find that on Google; it beats sleeping pills.) A number of conditions would have to be met: for example, protection against losses to the agricultural land base and threats to farming operations would be the number one priority. Rural municipalities were also insisting on being properly consulted on new projects and having a seat at the table when decisions were made by the regulator. And they also wanted assurance that developers would post bonds and agreements to assure reclamation of wind and solar sites when project life was ended. The latter condition is essential in Alberta, where the preferred form of reclamation (think orphan oil and gas wells) is to declare bankruptcy.

As a former talk-show host, premier Smith knows how to give good phone to soothe any rumbling in the belly of the beast, by which I mean her base, which is mainly rural. “Protecting Alberta’s land,” she said sternly, “is also why we will establish buffer zones of 35 kilometres around protected areas and pristine viewscapes as designated by the province.” In a statement that seemed to single out TransAlta’s Riplinger proposal in Cardston County, which would have sited 47 turbines, each 195 metres tall, close to Waterton National Park, she said: “You cannot build wind turbines the size of the Calgary Tower in front of a UNESCO World Heritage site or on Nose Hill or in your neighbour’s backyard. We have a duty to protect the natural beauty and communities of our province.” Now that is some skookum wawa that should thrill the UCP base.

Was Smith not impressed by TransAlta’s claim that Riplinger could produce enough energy in an average wind year to power 138,000 homes or boil 3,960 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water TransAlta’s CEO John Kousinioris responded to the new buffer zone in May of 2024 by cancelling the Riplinger project and (cheekily) putting several other green projects on “pause,” citing the buffer zone and a general lack of clarity coming from the Alberta government in his decision.

I can imagine some readers saying “This is all just batshit crazy,” while others, more sanguine, might opine “It’s about bloody time!” The renewable energy industry, however, has been left in confusion, trying to figure out what qualifies as a pristine viewscape. The map released by our government implies that they mainly consider the viewscapes along the mountain front as pristine. Minister Neudorf mentioned a desire to protect “tourist landscapes” as part of the rationale for his government’s decision, but when pressed by media he admitted “there is no universal definition of a pristine viewscape; however, many use that term to refer to areas that are unobstructed natural landscapes.” The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.

The AUC’s opinion echoes the minister, though it prefers the term “valued” viewscape instead of “pristine.” And yet the commission left the door open for excluding other industries in the buffer zone, maintaining that protection of viewscapes should be “industry agnostic and apply equally to all forms of development.” They didn’t swallow Danielle Smith’s Kool-Aid targeting renewables. The AUC also naughtily pointed out that from 2019 to 2021 the largest driver of land loss in Alberta was the “expansion of pipelines and industrial sites,” not solar or wind development.

Perhaps wind turbines would spoil the view of the coal mine.

Full disclosure: I’m a ratepayer in the MD of Pincher Creek No. 9, a founding member of the Livingstone Landowners Group and no fan of the current political regime. I’m worried about climate change, so I support renewable energy. But I’m also one of many people here who think that nine wind farms in this MD are more than enough for one jurisdiction to deal with. You might expect, given this, that I would welcome a more cautious approach on wind power hereabouts. Not so fast. I’ve found that a steady state of paranoia is the prudent way to deal with the ready-shoot-aim policy shifts of Alberta’s right-wing politicians.

The term “pristine viewscape” trips uneasily from a Tory’s lips. There’s nothing too pristine about their beloved oil sands mines, toxic tailings ponds or clear-cut logging operations. Such things elicit a kind of earth-ravished angst that many Albertans don’t care to contemplate—or even look at. So what has happened to Danielle Smith’s sense of the aesthetic Perhaps some pixie dust from the chemtrails sprayed on her base by the US Department of Defense has expanded her awareness of nature’s grandeur Does she really care about any scenic splendour that has not already felt the caress of a bulldozer blade or the embrace of a feller-buncher?

So many questions, so few answers.

After all, she heads a government that seems hell-bent on resurrecting a zombie coal mine, the Grassy Mountain project just north of Blairmore, that had multiple stakes driven through its heart by the Alberta Energy Regulator, the federal environment minister and the Alberta Court of Appeal. Yet it staggered back to unholy life on November 16, 2023, when energy minister Brian Jean suggested the same AER should take a new gander at Aussie billionaire Gina Rinehart’s favourite dead coal project. By the way, the Grassy Mountain open pit proposal, which includes a “350-tonne load-out bin” and a new railway loading spur next to the Blairmore hospital, is well within Smith’s 35-kilometre buffer zone. Perhaps wind turbines would spoil the view of the mine or fan up too much coal dust in the Crowsnest Pass. Those whirling blades might distract hospital patients from enjoying the lullaby of train whistles and shuttling coal cars being loaded, clang-bang, 24-7.

Further, minister Jean could be feeling nervous about the multi-billion-dollar lawsuit his government is facing from four mining companies after former minister Sonya Savage reinstated the Lougheed coal policy and closed the mountains to new open pit mines in 2022. And worse, Jean’s old political enemy, former premier Jason Kenney, is a senior adviser at Bennett Jones, the firm handling the lawsuit. And lo—that’s the same Jason Kenney who presided over the attempt to overturn the Lougheed coal policy in the first place. “No worries, mate. Just throw Brian Jean on the barbie.”

Good old UCP, still steering Alberta by a broken moral compass. This government suffers from a terminal case of irony deficiency—and from constantly being “hoist by its own petard.”

The new “no-go” zones for renewables include “viewscapes” and “visual impact assessment zones” plus agricultural land. But not all new energy development is banned; the UCP seems to believe coal mines and pipelines are somehow prettier to look at than windmills or solar panels.

Long ago, in a different time and a different world, I wrote: “Each mountain/ its own country/ in the way a country must be/ a state of mind.” I could easily have said there are as many mountain moods as there are mountains. They are that changeable, both welcoming and threatening when you live among nature’s uncompromising cathedrals, these water-towers of the West. When not admiring the constant play of light and cloud-shadow rippling across their ridges, I love to view them from a distance. The Piikani people called them “the backbone of the Earth”; they were known as the “Shining Mountains” to 18th-century fur traders. I can see why their classic profile appears on Alberta’s flag and provincial shield. Something worth protecting, one would assume, and some of us definitely try.

But the shining mountains are no longer the only towering images above southern Alberta’s plains and foothills. White wind turbine towers, some as high as 90 metres from ground to hub, with a rotor diameter of 100+ metres are steadily upstaging the view.

The Municipal District of Pincher Creek was home to Canada’s first commercial wind farm, at Cowley Ridge, in 1993. Its 52 windmills, outlined against the mountain backdrop, predicted how the industry would relate to the “pristine viewscape.” These first latticed towers, some 25 metres high, were replaced in 2017 by a row of 15 turbines measuring 46 metres. According to the US Department of Energy, hub heights of land-based windmills have increased by 83 per cent since 1999. “In 2023,” the department notes, “the average rotor diameter of newly installed wind turbines was over 133.8 meters… longer than a football field, or about as tall as the Great Pyramid of Giza.” The reasons are simple enough: wind shear increases with a gain in height while surface friction (by trees, buildings, grass etc.) is diminished. And the longer the rotor blades, the more energy they capture for the turbine.

In two decades, the mountainous scene west of Fort Macleod and Pincher Creek, from Chief Mountain north to Crowsnest Mountain, and from the Porcupine Hills west to the Livingstone Range, that thrilled many a first-time visitor to this place, has been rapidly transformed by wind turbines as this part of Alberta became the centre of wind farm development. Most locals supported the industry. In Alberta’s free-wheeling energy market, there’s a lot of money to be made by vandalizing the view, both for the developer and for the landowner. I could not obtain information on current leases, but in 2017 Evan Wilson of the former Canadian Wind Energy Association told the Calgary Herald that “every 150 MW of new wind power represents $17-million in lease payments… over a 20-year period and $31-million in property taxes to municipalities.”

Historically, the Alberta Utilities Commission paid little more than lip service to those citizens or local politicians who objected to the pace of development or to turbine placement. The most glaring example of unregulated growth begins a few kilometres west of Brocket, where huge steel transmission towers and a maze of high-tension power lines frame a tangled view of multiple windmills, their huge blades slicing at the sky. Windmills and transmission lines, due to sheer numbers, have become a man-made geographic feature, a creeping industrialization of the signature Alberta landscape that appears on Alberta’s provincial flag. The effect for a long-time resident is a solastalgic assault on the nervous system, a cognitive dissonance where cherished memory meets current realities.

Of course, most of these space-age marvels are well within Danielle Smith’s buffer zone and are grandfathered-in from her newfound pristine obsession.

When it comes to new wind-power development hereabouts, however, the honeymoon phase is probably over. According to the The Western Producer, a survey conducted in 2006 found 90 per cent of MD residents favoured wind-power development. But as development increased, a new survey in 2017 showed only 54 per cent were still in favour of more turbines. The industry is looking farther afield for new sites these days. The local development officer, Laura McKinnon, told me there has not been a new wind-power application here for three years. Right now the biggest windfarm in Alberta so far is the Buffalo Plains facility, and it’s well out on the prairies of Vulcan County. Personally, I think the industry would be more popular here if it had just showed more sensitivity in siting its turbines, sacrificing some height in return for more social acceptance and goodwill.

A “pristine” pumpjack near Longview, in the foothills of the Rockies, on the Cowboy Trail (Highway 22) south of Calgary.

Criticizing wind power during this disastrous era of climate change is like criticizing mom’s pumpkin pie. Calgary politicians have touted the fact that the CTrains run on wind power. But the electrons from wind-powered or gas-powered turbines flow through the same wire. Since urban residences and industry use most of the electricity, why not put the windmills closer to main consumers, thus cleverly reducing material expense and line loss of power over long transmission distances. Why not insist on solar panels on city rooftops, which is becoming the norm in Europe Could it be that city folks might find such installations (especially wind turbines) not to their liking if they were forced to look at them day and night, while watching their electrical bills increase despite all the new infrastructure that comes with new power generation?

While two feuding entities, the Green Genie and Youseepee No-vax, are cudgelling their wits for a social media assault on yours truly, let us slip into a handy thicket of etymology. The word “pristine” derives from the Latin pristinus, meaning “former,” according to the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. Over time the meaning evolved from “ancient, primitive” to “1: in its original condition; 2: fresh and clean, as if new; and 3: unspoiled (pristine wilderness).”

We’re all familiar with current usages, as in “used F-150 in pristine condition,” “pristine bottled water,” “pristine starter-castle for the millionaire handyman”—whatever. None of these meanings apply to either the viewscape of the Rocky Mountains or the condition of its myriad peaks and river valleys. You may hike up to see the untouched marvels of Window Mountain Lake north of Coleman, for example, but don’t drink the water unless you are hankering for a dram of polycyclic aromatic compounds found in the coal dust blown into it from Teck Resources coal mines just across the Great Divide.

You could also argue, based on several factors, that there is no pristine wilderness to be had in these latitudes, let alone a pristine viewscape.

The view west of the windmills, as I write this, may not be pristine, but as the dwarf birch turns crimson and the aspen leaves go to yellow, the foothills and mountainsides are a watercolour artist’s dream, and that includes the battalions of round hay bales, the yellow fields of canola, the still-green grasslands topping high foothills and the distant ranch-houses and barns backed by the blue-grey walls of the mountain backdrop with endless cerulean skies above. There is a word for a view like this that stirs our heartsprings with love for our native place: sublime. Sublimity is what meets the eye when you leave the wind turbines behind.

As a young park warden in Jasper, I once endured a lecture by a Canadian Forest Service officer who liked clear-cut logging and summed it up: “I love to see the hand of man upon the land.” You can see the hand of man at work in the Alberta Forest Reserve just about anywhere you care to look. It’s there in the roads, in thousands of kilometres of seismic lines, in deeply eroded ATV trails, in clogged-up trout streams, logging clear-cuts and abandoned coal mines and slack piles. There are also pipeline rights-of-way, gas flare stacks and transmission lines criss-crossing and scarring the mountains. Even the tree cover today has greatly increased from what it was before European contact, the result of billions of dollars spent on wildfire control to preserve wood fibre for loggers, or in the case of national parks, to protect the scenery. That accounts for the massive fuel loads that feed today’s forest fires.

But in truth, the hand of man cannot be avoided. Even before European contact, the hand of man was at work doing cultural burning to improve the range for deer, elk and bison, to encourage food and medicinal plant growth and to keep some of the trees in check. Historical photos taken by the early surveyors in places like Waterton National Park show a less forested landscape far different from today—at least before the Kenow wildfire of 2017, that is.

Writing in the anthropology magazine Sapiens, Claudia Geib cites the work of geographer William Denevan, who speaks of the “pristine myth”—the belief that all of nature was once a sparsely populated wilderness where humans had little or no influence. She quotes Kawika Winter, an Indigenous biocultural ecologist at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa who says: “I loathe that word pristine. There have been no pristine systems on this planet for thousands of years.” Such scholars are part of a growing consensus against the old tenets of “fortress conservation”—the Eurocentric notion that “pristine wilderness” can only be protected by excluding human beings, particularly Indigenous people, from within its boundaries.

What we describe as a pristine viewscape is a kind of political mirage.

In Canada, First Nations people were pushed outside the boundaries of our national parks when the parks were founded. Recently Parks Canada has been striving to undo some of the harm by reaching out to Indigenous people and involving them in programs such as the reintroduction of bison into Banff National Park. That effort was marked in October 2024 by sponsoring a ceremonial bison hunt by members of the park’s Indigenous Advisory Council in which eight bison were to be “harvested” and used by First Nations members.

The Parks effort is a tentative move towards a conservation approach that includes humans as part of the landscape and biodiversity that ecologists are striving to protect. Danielle Smith, whose former claims to Cherokee ancestry qualify as “pretendian,” should stop pretending that coal mines and pipelines are somehow prettier to look at than windmills and solar panels. I doubt the public will be convinced by this petrostate gaslighting of pristine viewscapes, distorting the term “pristine” as a means of simply slowing the inevitable rise of renewables in favour of the fossil fuel lobby. It’s a fallacy that Alberta can have both unspoiled natural beauty and unchained industrial development at the same time in the same landscape—everybody going everywhere doing everything all the time.

The oil well access roads, gas wells and clear-cuts that scar Alberta’s east slope are not visible at a distance of 35 kilometres. In fact, what we describe as a pristine viewscape is a kind of political mirage. The concept that mountains are pristine landscapes is a myth. Yet the ranges of mountains on Alberta’s western horizon are sublimely beautiful. They still inspire awe, and I hope that someday, for all Albertans, they will inspire respect for the forests, the peaks and the rivers that lie behind that famous skyline.

Sid Marty is the inaugural winner of the Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize for Oldman’s River: New and Collected Poems (NeWest Press, 2023).

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Read more from the archive “Where to Put a Solar Farm” November 2023.

The post Youseepee No-Vax vs. the Green Genie appeared first on Alberta Views.

by Sid Marty
NEWEST PRESS
2023/$44.95/400 pp.

The editors of Sid Marty’s Oldman’s River, Kit Dobson and Owen Percy, have done a remarkable job of producing a volume that is approachable and accessible for the casual or unfamiliar reader while also being exhaustive enough to serve as a scholarly collection. Further, Pamela Banting’s interview with Marty that closes the book provides rich context and allows his poetics to be articulated in an appropriately conversational manner. When Marty wrote his first book, Headwaters, in 1973 he was “much under the influence of the English literary tradition,” he explains in the interview. “When I began writing about the mountains, however, I soon discovered those pastoral tropes and strophes were of little use in writing about the mountain backcountry.” Mountains, it seems, refuse tranquil description but call for a breezy voice with the cadence of speech and for a poet who participates in the landscape and does not just describe it while reposed in meditation.

The language of these poems is not the language of the English garden, pruned, tidy and manicured. This is wild language, natural and untamed, a vernacular language that half reflects and perhaps half creates the environment itself. “What Coyotes Fear” opens with these lines: “In this crazy heat/ there are figures on the far hills/ that could be trees, were trees/ but these things now dance/ above Earth’s stony crest.” These figures, these dancing trees, are revealed to be the lights of the aurora borealis, though in the poem their meaning flickers, never clearly defined, until we learn the human search for meaning is unimportant. It is the coyotes’ response that matters here. Although afraid, the coyotes nevertheless “wait to ambush the moon” and the human becomes once again simply an interested observer.

The majority of the poems offer vignettes of working in nature. But these are not blue-collar poems, they are green-collar poems, the labour described not just intimately connected to the land but indicative of an ethic of stewardship, of love and respect for the land and its creatures. These are poems where word and world meet—and merge. In “Meat in the Snow,” for instance, Marty describes a truck driving through a still, winter wilderness: “Now does this driver/ give some meaning/ to the mute sweep/ of winter bush?” the poem asks baldly. It immediately answers its own question in the negative, dispelling any notion that human meaning has more value here in the natural world. Meaning in these poems is not in the word but in the world: the land gives purpose to the poetry, not the inverse.

Oldman’s River is a book that collects poems rooted in a particular place. Sweetgrass and mountain pine almost waft from the pages. Sid Marty’s poems are southern Alberta.

Jay Gamble teaches in the English department at the U of L.

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by George Melynk
BAYEUX ARTS
2021/$19.95/108 pp.

“For an author examining his own work,” writes essayist and cultural historian George Melnyk, “literary judgment can be messy.” Well, that’s a good reason to leave the judgment to scholars who can view the work through a more objective lens. Unfortunately such reliable critics are few, and they are overburdened, or distracted, by the biannual geysers of new books pumped out by publishers dredging up literary nuggets (and fool’s gold) deposited by rivers of Canada Council grants. It’s not uncommon for an author’s entire oeuvre to get washed away in the sluice box of this deluge.

It is in this climate, then, that DIY litterateur George Melnyk has decided to summarize and critically examine his own published works in this “confession.” But if you are looking for juicy accounts of saucy literary romances, look elsewhere. “By writing this literary confession,” he explains, “I am going back to my printed books, trying to preserve their memory, and fighting to keep them alive in the culture by sticking my finger into an ever-expanding hole in an ever-thinning wall holding back the digital onslaught… but what I am really doing is consoling myself emotionally, trying desperately to somehow validate what I have done in the Age of the Digital Screen.” So with one finger plugging the Google dam, our author sets out to summarize, in only 104 pages, his 45 years of publishing and writing, in case you missed him the first time around. He begins with his forays into “radical regionalism” in his early days, on to his work on behalf of the co-operative movement, with gear changes into philosophy, the cinema, the essay and poetry.

Oddly, Melnyk sheds little light here on the sterling contribution to our literary culture that he made as the founding editor of NeWest Review back in the 1970s, and of NeWest Press which followed, vehicles sorely needed, which gave so many authors a place to publish poems, stories and essays of Alberta. As a young man he was a singular and dynamic essayist and a cultural operative, in mysterious and arcane Ad-monton, known to the poet Andrew Suknaski and myself as “The Melnyk.” The definite article was in deference to his being not so much a literary person as a literary project, or projects. To steal a trope from poet Tom Wayman, The Melnyk was editing in Edmonton, and all we could do was submit. His time at NeWest resulted in the creation of one of his best-known books, Radical Regionalism, which captured the zeitgeist of a resurgent West, eager to take its historical, economic and cultural place in Confederation.

Over the years, Melnyk ventured forth and transformed into a full-scale establishment figure: a treasurer of the Writer’s Union of Canada, executive director of the Alberta Foundation for Literary Arts, on the board of PEN, author of the two-volume Literary History of Alberta, full professor of Film Studies at the University of Calgary, winner of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta Golden Pen award and an esteemed authority on Canadian cinema. He has been described, by playwright Frank Moher, as “probably the most important literary and political thinker in Western Canada since George Woodcock.” Yet in this book he repeatedly presents himself as an “outsider” to the literary establishment. For my money—as a long-time literary outsider in this province—if Alberta Literature was a corporation, George Melnyk would be on the board of directors. The man wears many hats: ideologue, polemicist, film critic, but the greasy bush hat of the outsider Definitely not. From the portrait drawn in this memoir, I picture him “in full harness” (to use his term for when he’s in writing mode) sporting an urbane beret, or a fedora—and a jacket and tie is mandatory.

Sid Marty is the author of five books of poetry and five books of non-fiction. He lives in southwest Alberta.

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I had the same expectation about Abbot Pass Hut, a solid stone building on the pass summit constructed by the Canadian Pacific Railway’s Swiss mountain guides in 1922 for the use of their mountaineering clients. 

Abbot Pass Hut, 1924. The hut’s footing of compacted scree and rock was made stable by permafrost. Photo: Whyte Museum.

At an elevation of 2,925 metres, it was for many years the highest habitable structure in Canada, since edged out by Neil Colgan Hut on the Fay Glacier, at 2,957 metres. Abbot Pass Hut was officially acquired by the Dominion Parks Branch in 1968, then assigned to the control of the Alpine Club of Canada in 1985. In 1992 Parks Canada designated the so-called Abbot Pass Refuge Cabin and its surroundings as a national historic site. But this year, Parks Canada did not announce a centennial celebration for the beloved refuge. Instead, the hut will be removed this summer. Like the Lower Victoria Glacier that it overlooks, the hut is yet another casualty of climate change and glacier recession.

According to an old colleague of mine, Robert Sanford, who is a Global Water Futures fellow at the Institute for Water, Environment and Health, some 300 glaciers disappeared from the Rocky Mountain national parks between 1920 and 2005. Things are getting worse. In the extreme summer heat of 2021, the toe of the Peyto Glacier retreated some 200 metres. This is “10 times faster than the last half century of retreat,” according to hydrologist John Pomeroy of Global Water Futures.

The Abbot Pass Hut’s foundations are sitting on the headwall of the Lower Victoria Glacier. The lip of the ice at one time nearly reached the hut’s east wall. Now the glacier’s edge lies 50 metres downslope. The builders and stonemasons in 1922 may not have realized that the col of compacted scree and fallen rock had been stabilized over time by snow, ice and permafrost. This matrix is melting and eroding. According to Parks Canada, in 2021, “approximately 114 cubic metres of material fell from the slopes under the hut.”

This undermining of the hut foundations threatens to topple the building. Since 2017 Parks Canada has spent some $600,000 on geotechnical studies and the installation of rock anchors to try and save the hut. The anchors have been to no avail. The work was also interrupted by bad weather, lifting limitations of supply helicopters and pandemic health mandates; the hut is now too dangerous to use. 

Zac Robinson, vice-president for mountain culture with the Alpine Club, describes the news as “devastating for our members and for the history of mountaineering in the Rockies.”

A toll booth between heaven and earth, risen from the rocky saddle…

The men who built the hut—without the backing of their employer Canadian Pacific Railway—were two Swiss guides named Edward Feuz Jr. and Rudolf Aemmer, who, as Robinson says, “were homesick for their Swiss mountain culture.” The duo hired local outfitters to haul building materials up the glacier with horses and mules as far as they could go. When the ice got too steep for the equines, the men used sleds and winches to move the material up to the summit. 

Although it looked more Swiss Alps than Rocky Mountains, the little cabin, made of limestone quarried on site, had the organic presence of a temple, or a toll booth between heaven and earth that had risen magically out of the rocky saddle of the Great Divide. “Where else can you climb two 11,000-foot glaciated peaks in one short trip and have such a wonderful place to stay between climbs?” asks Robinson. 

“It was such a special place. There was always a group of people staying there, often a lot of strangers. So after the climbing was over for the day, the cozy little hut made for such warm camaraderie and good cheer. The place was just made for storytelling.” 

I have traversed the Abbot Pass from Lake O’Hara in Yoho National Park and Lake Louise in Banff National Park many times, starting in 1962 when I took a summer job at Lake O’Hara Lodge and began climbing. Patrolling the pass was part of my duties in 1966 as an assistant park warden at Lake O’Hara.

As a warden, I often overnighted at the hut, sometimes accompanied by my supervisor, Bernie Schiesser. The hut will sleep about 20 people, and the attic contained dozens of red Hudson’s Bay point blankets that had been packed up from Lake Louise by the CPR’s Swiss mountain guides back in the 1920s. These made for cozy, if not dusty bedrolls on stormy nights. We kept them draped over a wire clothesline out of reach of the pack rats that sometimes haunted the joint. 

We were responsible for maintaining the hut in those days, and every week found one of us (usually yours truly) backpacking supplies of firewood, kerosene, shingles and hardware from Lake O’Hara at 2,020 metres up to the 2,925-metre pass. The trek involved a gruelling slog up 457 metres of loose scree to reach the hut.

In those days the heavy snowfalls of winter refreshed the world-famous view of the Lefroy and Victoria glaciers, that much diminished selfie-scape that is jpeg-ed a thousand times a day every summer from Chateau Lake Louise. Snow often packed the crevasses of the Lower Victoria Glacier in Abbot Pass with solid bridges that lasted into late summer. It took from two to three hours to reach the hut if conditions were favourable. 

It is an easy hike of less than six kilometres from Lake Louise to the Plain of Six Glaciers Tea House. But from there the trail ends and the route up to the hut threads through the notorious “Death Trap” canyon of the lower glacier. 

This spot is particularly prone to avalanches and ice falls from the upper glacier on Mount Victoria. It was always an eerie place for mountaineers to transit; nowadays the Death Trap is impassable. The worst climbing accident in the history of the pass occurred in 1954, when four climbers fell near the summit ridge of Victoria and rolled in a snarl of ropes and crampons down the ice, then plummeted over a glaciated cliff to smash into this forbidding redoubt.

Even back then, the Abbot Pass route should never have been attempted by people who lacked crevasse rescue training and equipment. But as a 17-year-old ingénu at Lake O’Hara Lodge, I thought nothing of trotting solo over the pass and beetling down the other side among the crevasses on a day off to buy pipe tobacco at the Chateau Lake Louise, then catching the late bus back to O’Hara. I tremble at such blissful ignorance now, even as I long for the speed and stamina that made it possible. 

I once encountered a pilgrim of sorts who had made the journey from Moraine Lake to Lake O’Hara via the Opabin Glacier clad in a saffron-coloured robe and straw hat. His feet looked battered and slightly frostbitten. He did point out to me that his sandals had rubber soles made from old car tires which gripped well on ice. When he left me, he was headed for Abbot Pass, and to this day I don’t know if he made it back. 

In 1999 I was planning a nostalgic trip through the pass and a sentimental climb of Mount Victoria with two old ropemates. I had not climbed in the area for 20-some years. I checked on the route with Fuhrmann and with a former colleague, Tim Auger, who was then in charge of the public safety team for Banff National Park. The pass, I learned, had been trashed by climate change. “Nobody uses the old route anymore,” Auger warned me. “It’s nothing but holes and seracs.” 

“It’s been a no-go zone for at least five years,” Fuhrmann explained at the time. He told me that instead of one bergschrund—the name for mega crevasses that typically form near the top of a glacier—there were now about 20. Fuhrmann has instead revived the old Swiss Guide’s route that follows a yellow rock
band up along the west side of Mount Lefroy to reach the pass. 

Describing the hut in my book Switchbacks, I wrote “the first time I saw it was the first time I really understood the love affair between men and mountains. Abbot’s Hut—a place made to be haunted by their shades. At night, the beacon of a candle flame in its window was like a lighthouse in the clouds.” 

I am one of those who have seen nearly every home they ever lived in fall to the wrecker’s ball, so memory is constantly challenged by a reality that has erased the objective touchstones of my past. I am not alone in this modern form of spatial amnesia. Still, losing a place like Abbot Pass Hut, which was a focal point for so many lovers of mountain wilderness, is somehow worse. 

However this issue is decided, one thing remains clear to me. When the sanctuaries and temples of a culture are gone, the spirits of the past have no place to gather and speak across the ages to the transient souls of today. And we are all lessened, as humans, by that kind of loss.

Sid Marty has published five books of non-fiction and five books of poetry. This article was originally published in The Tyee, Mar 28, 2022. Abbot Pass Hut was dismantled over the last two weeks of June 2022.

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by Paul McKendrick, Harbour Publishing, 2021/$22.95/208 pp.

The estranged (and deranged) loner who takes refuge in the wilds on the fringes of settlement is a familiar trope in North American storytelling. I think of Rudy Wiebe’s mad trapper, Albert Johnson, or Jon Krakauer’s hapless Chris McCandless in his abandoned Alaskan school bus. Earle Birney probed the subject poetically in his brilliant poem “Bushed,” where a deluded protagonist comes to see the mountains as out to get him, so bars himself into his lakeshore shack and waits fearfully for a “great flint to come singing into his heart.”

Canmore author Paul McKendrick has found a fascinating character to add to the genre in the person of John Bjornstrom, a cave-building hermit who haunted the shores of Shuswap Lake at the turn of the millennium. However, Bjornstrom was not really “bushed.” According to McKendrick, this former private detective, hiding from some bad actors, was on a self-directed mission to uncover a child pornography ring said to be active in the Shuswap Lake area. Subsisting on rabbits and squirrels, he augmented his larder by burglarizing lakeside cabins, carrying off not only foodstuffs but firearms, a 200-pound wood stove, an ATV, a Sea-Doo and a dirt bike, to name a few of his purloineries. All this booty he hauled away by canoe! To elude the RCMP, he paddled the lake in the dark of night.

Born Nicholas Korody, the son of Roma refugees who fled Hungary during the 1956 revolution, he wound up with his drug-addicted mother in Vancouver, where he was adopted by the Bjornstrom family. Leaving home as a teenager, Bjornstrom earned his keep as a farrier, cowboy and long-haul truck driver before abruptly switching gears and opening a private detective office in Calgary in the late 1990s. There his life took another dramatic turn, when he was hired by Bre-X CEO David Walsh to travel to Indonesia and investigate the death of company geologist Michael de Guzman.

I won’t reveal much about McKendrick’s startling 32-page detour into the intricacies of that infamous gold-mining scam; I found his account fascinating and riveting, although I would have liked more information on his sources. In fact de Guzman, an affable bigamist who loved to sing “I Did It My Way” to his four wives (one wife at a time, that is) almost steals the show from Bjornstrom. What Bjornstrom discovered in Indonesia would ultimately be the main cause of his flight into the BC outback; he believed his life was in peril, and McKendrick has uncovered some sources that support that belief.

As with Albert Johnson, Bjornstrom’s nemesis proved to be the RCMP, but unlike the mad trapper, the reader will learn, Bjornstrom may have found some peace of mind in the end.

—Sid Marty is working on a book of his new and collected poems.

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Text by Sarah Elmeligi; photographs by John E. Marriott Rocky Mountain Books 2020/$45.00/244 pp

I used to be in the bear police back in the 1960s and 1970s in the mountain national parks, although the actual policing meant ticketing bear botherers rather than the bears themselves. Lots of people were fined, though not nearly enough, and too many bears died as the result of poor garbage management and political pressure to protect the public and avoid lawsuits. Although we definitely had bear jams and photographers to deal with, which is still the case today, we didn’t have today’s bear guardians babysitting bears and tourists. We did not have the bearparazzi, stalking celebrity bruins and recording every twitch and grunt for an eager audience of wealthy hedge fund managers, sipping lattes in their million-dollar second homes in Canmore. We didn’t have bear porn, in other words, or the bear selfie that our author here describes, where aspiring Darwin Award winners pose, smartphones aloft and dumb asses turned on a momma grizzly with cubs.

You will learn all about such things in What Bears Teach Us, by bear biologist Sarah Elmeligi, with ample photographic illustrations by photographer John E. Marriott. Mr. Marriott is a pro who believes in using long lenses and giving his beloved subjects lots of room, which is ethically commendable. If you are a ursinophile, like me, or a mere arctophile (a fond collector of teddy bears), like Sir Winston Churchill, you will swoon over some of Marriott’s shots, especially of the mothers and cubs from Khutzeymateen to the high Arctic of all three species.

What bears teach us; well, the lessons vary, depending on your particular experience, which Elmeligi tells us can be defined by three terms: “positive, neutral or negative.” New Agers (do they still call them that?) raise hands here and ask, “What about the spiritual nature of such encounters?” Being a scientist, Elmeligi loves categories, I suppose. But I can tell you that trapping a 700-pound male grizzly in a culvert trap can best be described by a John Prine verse:

“It’s a mighty mean and a dreadful sorrow/ It’s crossed the evil line today.”

Elmeligi wants to educate the public, and politicians, to avoid such outcomes.  She urges us to treat bears with respect, to “live with them” rather than “live next to them,” which, she explains, are two very different things.

“Every time I encounter a bear,” she writes, “I take time to listen to what the bear wants and then honour his or her request,” but she also wants everyone to carry bear spray, just in case. Vital advice if you are on foot or a mountain bike.

I would add that it’s not great advice if you are on horseback, where horses play as much a role as bears do in deciding what happens next. Bear spray while a-horseback No good, no bueno. But Elmeligi’s advice to mountain bikers should be required reading before any such person is allowed on a mountain trail in bear country. Bears hate bikers even more than horses and yours truly hates them, and for the same reasons: the elements of silence and of surprise, due to the speeds at which they can travel.

Read this book, even if you know much about bears, and give it to some greenhorn set on venturing into the mountains for the first time to escape the COVID-19 horror show. That way they will become a bear respecter, not a bear botherer, and be part of the solution in living at peace with our charismatic ursine friends.

—Poet and writer Sid Marty is a former national park warden and the author of The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek.

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by Charles Noble
Ekstasis Editions
2019/$25.95/272 pp.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line,” according to Allen Ginsberg. “It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.” In his latest book, What Can I Say?, veteran Alberta poet and retired farmer Charles Noble follows Ginsberg’s advice: The reader accompanies the poet to his local sports bar, grocery store and weight gym. Writing about everything from getting his car’s oil changed to getting his hair cut, Noble does indeed make his private world public.

What Can I Say?, however, is quite long for a poetry book, and a little inaccessible. An introduction or critical essay could have provided the reader with necessary context. This book would have also benefited from more intensive editing. Some repetitive elements, for example the repeated criticisms of media mogul Conrad Black and his misguided admiration for American president Donald Trump, could probably have been removed without harming the book.

On the other hand, Noble’s conversational, often rambling writing style (an aesthetic he has described as “digression upon digression”) requires wide open spaces. His poems engage with a broad assortment of philosophers and thinkers, including Plato, Kant, Lacan, Pound, Peirce and Sontag. Noble’s poems converse with various Canadian writers too, some of whom he knows or knew personally: Earle Birney, Andrew Suknaski, Sid Marty.

These poems also betray some degree of self consciousness and perhaps defensiveness as the aging poet critiques and struggles with the younger generation and a changing society. Noble imagines confrontations with youthful rivals in a sports bar, at one point admitting he is “a post jock” and later that “I can’t decide / whether I’m / a horny competitor / or a den mother.” Tourist towns, he claims, are well-oiled contraptions, and he is “the sand / in the machine.”

Noble’s poetry relies heavily on wordplay, mixing puns with political and literary allusions. One of the aforementioned Trump references has the president, “the ego / that walks like a man,” leaping into Joseph Conrad’s “heart of dorkness”; another political commentary ends with the suggestion that we get “down to brass taxes.” Passages like “poetry makes nothing happen / just watch it / an old Trudeau snapped” expect a certain level of literacy from the reader.

If you’re unfamiliar with Noble’s writing, this might be a difficult place to begin. Then again, if you’re looking for a book that combines dry humour with lengthy pontifications and cleverly mixed metaphors, well, What Can I Say?

—Kelly Shepherd is the author of Insomnia Bird (Thistledown).

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AFTER C-19

More bad news started pouring in from Italy and France and Spain. Switzerland, one of the most affected countries, declared a nationwide emergency. This writer’s residency—in a small village in Switzerland on the gentle slopes of the Jura Mountains—was going to shut down indefinitely. I packed my suitcase, not knowing what awaited me. It was near impossible to contact the airline.
The day I packed my bags was followed by a long night when I got my first anxiety attack (of 2020). I recovered, certain I was not going to let it become as bad as it had after 9/11. I was “fine.” Fortunately, the head of the residency made a generous exception for the last two remaining writers, me and a novelist from Germany. We were allowed to continue and self-isolate in our studios—studios designed with solitude in mind.
If I stay here, I thought, I will also make way for someone who needs to return to Canada more urgently than I do. It is lockdown and quarantine more or less all over the world. Here I will be able to walk and reflect and write, I thought. I was fine with the föhn winds (all that is solid melts in the air) and the unnecessary spring. Bees, ladybugs, electric-spark houseflies and small leaves fledged. I was not able to write, but I was fine surveying the dystopian world online and witnessing the collapse of fictions most countries in the world tell about themselves, until a fortnight later a boulder-heavy band gripped around my chest—a near continuous shortness of breath, a sore throat and a nose/eye infection and insatiable thirst for water.
Contagion?
No, said the stoic village doctor, no, he said, no, when he visited me the second time. “What you are going through is extreme levels of anxiety.” The thing was exacerbated by my PTSD (connected to surviving the pogroms in India in 1984). He opened his home-healthcare shoulder bag and took out a benzodiazepine medication. He had lots of Lorazepams in his black bag. There was more than a metre’s distance between us and yet we could not look each other in the eye. What if my negative test result (the nose swab sample analyzed by the lab) was actually a “false negative?” I asked. The doctor readjusted his facemask. So did I, both worried about ourselves and each other, and I knew the first few scenes, the opening chapters of the rest of my life. Both the doctor and I, in strange solidarity, waiting, for now, for afterwardsness, if such a thing remains possible in a world gone logarithmically ambiguous. The only certainty: this catastrophe will be followed by yet another. Perhaps both of us in silent agreement that there was still room for hope in an epoch of unhope, that in the days ahead what “we” (each person on this planet) do, and what we don’t do, and what is done to us, may change our highly interconnected lives and our planet more than a world changed by a virus.

JASMINA ODOR
HARD, SHARP AND DANGEROUS

In those early March days when the epidemic became a pandemic I was home with a newborn, my first baby. He had arrived during that deadly week in January when Edmonton was locked down by unceasing temperatures in the minus forties. We took him home from the hospital in the evening darkness of that cold, on roads completely covered in hard ice—the baby bundled and tiny and squished-looking in the brand new car seat, my husband turning off the main road into our neighbourhood as soon as he could, losing his nerve with the usual traffic. Before the elation of bringing the baby into the warm house, we were tense and terrified of any inadvertent slip—not being able to stop at a light, skidding out on a turn. Once home I thought I never want to leave this house again. In the weeks that followed I paid only peripheral attention to COVID-19. When I met a friend for coffee on my first outing sans baby, and she suggested we plan a visit with both our families “before the pandemic hits,” I was surprised. Of course, she was right—within a few weeks we were all in lockdown.
The pandemic is, in fact, much like first-time parenthood. Few things make us feel as vulnerable as being the sole guardians of tiny helpless beings we want so much to thrive, and thrive in safety. You can no longer, for instance, see anything in your house not in relation to your child’s safety; there’s a quality of terror, as if the light has changed slightly to suddenly reveal innocent objects as hard and sharp and dangerous. And COVID-19 has given us an equivalent of that vulnerability on a social and global scale. The danger seems everywhere, in all the ordinary and until recently harmless things of our daily lives—our grocery cart, our mail, the friendly family passing us on the trail. Our parents and friends. As with a baby, the risk is low but the consequence potentially so terrible that we dare not relax our vigilance.
And of course we can’t anyway, because in the case of this pandemic, one person’s risk is every other person’s risk; we are not staying safe only for ourselves. And that is the other stark thing COVID-19 has highlighted for me—the way the health of one of us is related to the health of all of us, just as a baby’s well-being depends not only on its parents but also, in a foundational way, on the whole social, familial and economic net it finds itself in, something akin to water to a fish, hard to see with any perspective because it is so taken for granted. One wishes we could apply this obvious connection to all our social structures, and that when the next pandemic hits we could really be in it together—equally, not just theoretically.

SID MARTY
THE OLD GEEZER’S SHOPPING HOUR

Our friend Beth phoned and learned that our eldest son, Paul, was staying overnight in our little guest shack. “Give him a hug for me,” she said. Myrna said no. “We have to keep our distance.” “Oh,” said Beth, sadly. “Well, just poke him with a stick, then!”
For a rural freelance writer the COVID-19 crisis is otherwise a bit surreal. There are not enough hours in a day for me to keep up with the maintenance on our small holding. The season is announced by the chorus frogs and the common snipe and confirmed by a sudden charm of goldfinches as we watch the skies anxiously for late arrivals. And social distancing I’ve been doing that since about 1980. If not for my wife, I would turn into a complete hermit. But on our weekly trip into Pincher Creek, for the geezer-only shopping hour, we come face to face with masked strangers (our neighbours) and the peril suddenly gets real.
Still, COVID-19 is mainly an urban stalker; cancer and heart disease thrive everywhere. We’re in the cane and pain demographic, a lonely place of disappearing friends, two of them in the last week alone. In the grocery store lineup, white-haired neighbours eye each other over their outlaw bandanas and wonder who’s next. Like clay pigeons in a shooting arcade, we totter along our predetermined track, then it’s as if a shot rings out because—bing; one of us goes down, never to rise again.
I’m distracted from the pain in the outer world by the terrific pain my wife suffers every day in her joints. They are bone on bone. Meanwhile, Alberta is the only jurisdiction on earth where the doctors are suing the health minister in the middle of the pandemic; they say they will withdraw from the local hospital in July. We support them, but this is an awful worry. My wife is one of thousands of Albertans, some waiting over two years for so called “elective” surgery, who will now face even longer delays while hospitals operate below capacity, waiting for the next wave of COVID. She can no longer “get down and dirty” in her garden, which is the centre of her life at this time of year.
What we needed were some planters, about 31″ high, to allow for stand-up gardening. The local building supply (risky to enter these days) was down to 27 boards. This is where “Thank god I’m a country boy” kicks in. My neighbour has a small sawmill that turns out 1×6 rough stock. “I’ve got a bunch of salvaged 2×4s lying around here also,” he said. “Take ’em all if you want.” And so I found myself happily at work building two eight-foot-long planters with doubled 2×4 legs to take the weight of soil. The red squirrels and chipmunks watched me with interest; they have learned to follow behind Myrna and dig up every seed she plants. So I framed four screens made of wire mesh no cheeky little varmint can penetrate.
We hear about the record numbers of city people pouring into the garden centres. This is something we all have in common: a desire to grow food in uncertain times, to connect ourselves to a nurturing earth, despite all the pain and grief around us; a desire to make ourselves whole again as we weather these desperate days of the plague.

KATHERINE GOVIER
SCRABBLE ADDICT

My name is Katherine and I am a Scrabble addict. I’m nervous to be Zooming with you all but at least I’m here.
I grew up in a Scrabble-playing family. My father wasn’t as good as my mother, so they fought. When she proved her word with the dictionary, he claimed that the dictionary was wrong. Or that the word was not English.
When I had no friends to play with I’d get out the Scrabble board and make words. When I got a bingo I’d run into the kitchen to tell Mum, Hey look! I used all seven of my letters. She would say, Isn’t that wonderful. Then I’d go back out to the living room and select a bunch of great letters that fit onto my previous word, put them down and run into the kitchen again and say, Look, I did it again. The second time she’d appear quizzical, but she never called me on it.
When my first marriage broke up, Scrabble was a factor. My husband did not like to lose. We had our biggest fight about whether you could pluralize the word rice. I was sure you could and he said you couldn’t. I had the s and it led to a triple word score.
After the divorce my sister introduced me to a guy across the street. As a kid he had driven all over the prairies with his mother attending Scrabble tournaments. When he pulled his board out of its own little handmade quilted carry-bag, I knew I was dead. He beat me. No rematch.
The next man I married played Scrabble at first. Then he quit, claiming he never got good letters. My son was more of a chess type so he was out. It got down to where only my daughter would play with me. The games were grim and went on for hours.
But those days it was face to face. The downward spiral started when I got into playing online. On Facebook, on websites, with anyone, strangers, dozens at a time. There was never enough. No matter how many games I had going, the moment came when I’d played all my turns and had to sit there with nothing to do. This is in front of my computer, where I used to actually write books.
I swore it wasn’t affecting my life. But it was an obsession. At night I was always running up to my office. First thing in the morning too. My husband had to stand at the foot of the stairs and shout for me. I’d hear his footsteps and close the screen so he couldn’t see what I was doing.
Before COVID-19 I tried to quit. I swore I would stay away from the computer, work in the garden and read books. Then came the virus. It threw me back more than ever to the tiles. I read about Scrabblers Anonymous online. Your stories have made me see there’s more to life than keeping my ratings up. Maybe if I stick with this program I can get back to writing one day.

SHARON BUTALA
THE UNBEARABLE RETURN

What made it all so strange was that for the first month I didn’t know a single person who was sick, not even anyone who knew anyone who was sick much less had died, while on television I watched videos of hazmat-clad doctors and nurses clustered thickly around beds, working on the tube-riddled, unresponsive bodies of the dying. Starting with videos out of Wuhan, China, where I saw a man neatly attired in a black suit, stretched out on his back on the street, dead—in the night someone must have put him there—on to smuggled cell-phone video of a hospital with bodies lying so thickly on the floor there was no room to walk among them, staff in virtual hysterics and where chaos reigned, to videos of our own calmer, less-congested, if still fiercely alert hospitals with their fast-moving, face-masked, blue-gowned-and-gloved staff. Yet at the same time, when I looked out the windows of my condo, I saw the same playing fields, the two schools, the houses sitting as they always had in quiet rows, no one about other than one or two sauntering by, usually with a leashed dog. No sirens, no ambulances, almost no planes flying over, nothing. Just a silence so great it was eerie.
I couldn’t reconcile the two realities. I kept waiting for them to make sense, even while I obeyed the isolation and distancing rules and didn’t go to the grocery store more than once a week and otherwise pretty much nowhere. I listened to the radio and watched newscast after newscast on television, switching channels, trying to grasp the enormity of the crisis without succumbing to the sneaking fear that it would all end in food riots, lootings and heaps of untended bodies piled in the streets. Or equally, as time passed and the crisis continued to seem distant and unreal, restraining myself from simply saying “To hell with it,” and going to the mall or its equivalent just to break the tension. (Much could be said here about the isolation of the old.)
And yet, my surprising first reaction to the imposed self-isolation had been relief. Good, I said to myself, now I don’t have to pretend I’m normal, meaning, I can stay home without wondering if I’m missing some exciting or interesting happening, while also feeling guilty and inadequate because I truly am an introvert and, mostly, I’d rather stay home alone or with a friend or two for company and that is seen in our culture as abnormal and unhealthy. But by the end of week seven, when the talk of lifting restrictions began, and still I hadn’t personally witnessed any of it and nobody I knew had been seriously ill or died, mixed with relief that the crisis was really ending, what I felt surprised me. It was intense sadness, even a moment of near-despair, that despite everything everyone around the world had endured and seen, things would almost certainly soon go back to the way they had always been, and that now that would be unbearable.

BASHIR MOHAMED
DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT’S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW?

In early May during the pandemic I thought about my father’s death. I remember my sister shaking me awake on the morning of August 13, 2007. I thought it was nothing, so I went back to sleep. She shook me again but I fell asleep once more. Then she shook me harder, with more urgency, and said, “Do you even know what’s happening right now?”
I went downstairs, where the room was filled with paramedics and my dad lay on the floor. He’d had a heart attack. My other memories of that day are scattered but I still recall the shock I felt when I realized he would not be coming back.
I frequently think about that day and try to remember my dad and how he shaped my life. But so much time has passed; I have forgotten the sound of his voice.
My dad was a worker at the meatpacking plant in Brooks. Our family lived in Edmonton and he would often be gone for months. In Somalia he had been an engineer, but Canada did not recognize his program or give him a simple path to recertification. Meatpacking was one of the few places in Alberta that would accept a worker like him, so he jumped at the chance.
The work was precarious and the management was notorious for caring more about the quality and output of the meat than the actual workers. Many in my position—young refugees—understand this reality and have a personal connection to these plants. We know that nobody does this work out of choice—they do it so their children can have a shot at different options in the future.
Perhaps this is why the outbreak at the Cargill and JBS meatpacking plants hits so close to home. Because—to be frank—the outbreak lays bare the position of racialized people in Canada, people
like me.
Some numbers, early May 2020: Alberta meatpacking plant employees make up more COVID-19 cases than the provinces of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, New Brunswick, PEI and Newfoundland combined. The scale of this outbreak is no accident; it speaks directly to a failure in government, healthcare leadership and meatpacking plant management.
Despite this, one plant—as of this writing—remains open. And another is already returning their employees to the danger within the plant after just two weeks being closed. The lack of concern for these workers is disgusting; it’s clear this would never happen if most of the workforce were white.
To me COVID-19 has laid bare the inequalities in our society. That hurts. I am in the military, on notice to move anywhere in Canada during the pandemic. The waiting is stressful but I’m proud to be in a position where I can give back; it’s my duty. I wish Canadians could find their sense of duty to meatpacking plant workers. It’s shocking to see people who look like me—who work where my dad worked—treated in this country as if they are disposable.

TRINA MOYLES
THE USE OF FEAR

The bear emerges from the willows, a startle of black. I stop. Bear. There. A halo of mosquitoes swarms his molting fur. The willows bend, break under his bulky heft. I avoid his beady eyed stare. Hear his lifted snout. Snfff, snfffff, snffff.
I shouldn’t be surprised to see him. I work alone as a lookout observer at a remote fire tower in the Peace Country. Since April I’ve encountered more bears than people.
But the fear of coming within 10 metres of a 300-pound predator is so powerful that it practically yanks me out of my skin. I feel fragile. Incompetent. A twig of a woman clutching a canister of bear spray. Everything I had been worrying about—tasks undone, friends uncalled, life goals unfulfilled, dinner unmade—evaporates on the spot. I’m afraid of what’s going to happen next.
It wasn’t so different with COVID-19. In mid-March, I was supposed to travel to a book event in Switzerland. “I have a bad feeling about this, Trina,” a friend told me. He had been reading extensively about COVID-19 cases spreading into South Korea, Iran and Italy. “I don’t think you should go.” I looked at him skeptically.
A week later Italy’s hospitals were overrun with patients. Death count: rising. The country went on lockdown. I watched a video of Italians singing from their balconies. Another of people warning the world: Please, take this seriously. I cancelled my plane ticket to Switzerland.
Words like “quarantine” and “social distancing” became a regular part of my vocabulary. I obsessed over Dr. Hinshaw’s daily updates: cautionary advice, closures, cancellations. Total cases in Alberta: rising. Total global cases: skyrocketing. Even in a small northern town, where “social distancing” is already something of a norm, the streets emptied of people.
I couldn’t sleep. I’d wake at 3 a.m., my chest tight, the sheets soaked. I googled symptoms repeatedly. Total global death count: rising. Did I have COVID Was I unknowingly infecting people far more vulnerable than my 35-year-old, able-bodied self My freelance writing contracts weren’t impacted by COVID, but I struggled to make sense of my panicked thoughts. Word count: 0.
I was afraid for the well-being of my parents. For friends living in cities across Canada, in New York City and sub-Saharan Africa, where some public health officials worried COVID would tear across the continent like a wildfire. Terrified, I watched the UCP’s ruthless cuts to health, education and environmental regulation. I learned a new phrase: “Disaster capitalism.”
As the snow melted, I packed up my belongings to fly out to the fire tower. “Never been a better time to be a lookout!” my friends joked. But it wasn’t the physical isolation I craved; rather, it was the sense of normalcy I felt desperate for, the knowing that when it’s hot and dry, there’s fire—the familiar chaos in the phenomenon of wildfire.
But beyond the black spruce the indirect chaos of COVID ensues. Horrified, I watch videos of a police SUV running over protesters, a white cop kneeling on the neck of a black man until his last breath. I say his name: “George Floyd.” I am reminded of my white privilege, and that the fear felt by those living in brown and black bodies was infectious long before COVID-19.
HUFF!
The bear stares hard at me. My knees are shaking. I’m afraid because I know I’m not in control of what happens next, not entirely. But fear isn’t a useful survival tool—not without action, anyway. I remember what the experts say: Carry bear spray. Remain six feet apart. Talk to the bear in a low, calm voice. Wash your hands regularly. Back away slowly. Avoid travel outside of Canada.
The bear ambles back into the woods. I catch my breath again. COVID-19 has made me reconsider: Who and what is sacred to me How can I transform my fear into positive action?
I climb my tower and watch for smoke. I try to write again.

The post Life in Upheaval appeared first on Alberta Views.

Boom Time
by Lindsay Bird
Gaspereau Press
2019/$19.95/96 pp.  
Tar Swan
by David Martin
NeWest press
2018/$19.95/96 pp.
Prologue for the Age of Consequence
by Garth Martens
House of Anansi Press
2014/$19.95/120 pp.

Garth Martens’s debut performance, in his 2014 book Prologue for the Age of Consequence, set a poetic template, hammered together with a framer’s hammer and a carpenter’s level, for writing about construction work in general and the Alberta “tar sands” in particular.

In the poem “Leathering,” he writes:

He forgets his reasons, his debts, his wife,

works a ditch or drives a spike.

There is a stone in his wrist.

… If he could reach, he’d pull

every twisted star with a hammer.

The poem sums up both the pride and the anger of tradesmen and labourers forced by necessity to engage with an abysmal human project known simply as “the tower,” a brooding monstrosity whose purpose is never explained to the workers.

The tower is an industrial altar that requires constant sacrifices of tears, sweat and blood. Workers have come from all over Canada, indeed all over the world to carve out a piece of bituminous booty, and Martens introduces a compelling multicultural cast of troubled souls, led by a Bunyanesque character, the foreman Johnny Lightning.

But this is not really docu-poetry about work. Martens is a schooled writer who unleashes a rich Cormac McCarthy-like fusillade of nouns and adjectives arcane enough to make Rex Murphy swoon in admiration, or topple Conrad Black from atop his thesaurus.

Martens creates his own blue-collar mythology, which often springs from the hallucinogenic effects of exhaustion, due to brutal work, tight schedules and the inhalation of numerous industrial toxins. Prologue for the Age of Consequence is truly a tough act to follow.

Martens’s tar sands is very much a male-dominated and male-destroyed landscape. In Boom Time, Lindsay Bird presents the distaff side of the songbook, based on her experience in isolated northern work camps. She is more about the human interactions in the camps, rather than the muscular heroics of the workers, but she is no fan of the corporate ethos either.

Her poem “All I Have to Say About Calgary” dismisses the oil slick HQ in 10 words:

What a good place

to buy a pair of shoes.

In “The Meal Hall” she deals with male misogyny with similar efficiency sans feminist exhortation:

“Hey, sugartits // Sugar/ tits?/ Now/ I’m dessert/ too. Who/ knew?”

But she can break hearts with a prose poem like “Garland,” about a 56-year-old worker, proud and pleased to have “this good job out west” driving a delivery truck for the mine. It’s all over in a flash when he’s asked to read a safety reminder aloud: Garland can’t read, and in a jingle of surrendered keys, he’s out the door. “…I can’t tell you,” writes Bird, “if it was his chest shaking behind the steering wheel, or the heavy haulers moving the earth all around him.”

In Tar Swan, David Martin eschews the realities of labouring and dives straight into mythology, also of his own creating. What he has in common with Martens is a density of word play, but here there is no real hinge to hang the poetry on except a few facts—that one man, Robert C. Fitzsimmons, was the first to build an oil sands separation plant, and another, Frank Badur, a mechanic, is accused of sabotaging the works. Then there is Dr. Brian K. Wolksy, an archaeologist exhuming the colonial and Indigenous histories of the plant. As for the eponymous tar swan, it’s a fictional creation that seems to function as the primal voice of the land itself, although several references to Greek myth are less than convincing in this context.

I say seems, because nothing is really clear in Tar Swan or in any of the four voices the poet employs except the gradual descent into madness of the poisoned protagonists, Fitzsimmons and Badura, under the malevolent influence of the tar swan persona.

This is experimental poetry, language poetry in this case, which depends on the reader to bring her own interpretation to the text. For example, this from page 31:

Gentlemen, Sunday surrender body whims and

shilly-shally Yourselves with a harvest of plate colour.

The text ends, after a seven-line ramble of synecdoches and metonyms, with:

… Set the

watch to tattoo, for tomorrow is tomorrow and tide

is tiding again.

You will have to take my word for it when I say that those of us who love verbal fireworks will be swept along in the Athabascan currents of Tar Swan, albeit to a fraught conclusion.

Writers of experimental verse sometimes fly so high they go right out of sight, or at least out of sense. This book is a wild ride, chilling at times though leavened with dark humour, and the poet has an ominous warning for politicians and taxpayers to come:

…yoU’ll never oUtbreak what we’ve

Unearthed. YoU’ll never be free of my UndertOw.

Sid Marty writes prose, poetry and music at the foot of the Livingstone Range in southwestern Alberta.

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