Canada Day in Miramichi

My third Canada Day in the Maritimes was cloudy and misting. Definitely no Ottawa.

But a day off is a day off, so I spent most of the day at home playing videogames, although I braved the shitty weather to head on down to Newcastle for the raising of the Canada Day flag.

Observe how insane huge it was:

That's because this particular specimen once flew atop the Peace Tower! A nice British immigrant couple visited the capital once, liked the big flag and put their names down to get one, as they change it every day.

Waiting list was 25 years. They moved on with their lives, forgot all about it, then one day they got this huge honking great flag in the mail.

They didn't have a flag pole big enough to fly the damn thing (must have been an impulse thing 25 years ago, I guess). So they passed it on to some friends in the Miramichi who, lacking a flag pole, donated it to the city.

So here it is! Our peace tower flag. It was worth it go down and see it raised.

Canada Day in Miramichi is no Ottawa.

But, with the peace tower flag, it's almost like there was still a connection.

The pilgrimage all men must make

Brothers.

I have been there. I have seen it. I have touched it with my own two hands. I still feel the coarse stone beneath my fingers.

Once, long before, the temple was the centre of what binds us all together, Working man and CEO, retiree and underaged fake ID holders, Canadian and Canadian.

No more. That holy function has moved on to other places, and the great blessing with it. But before me, on that sunny morning, with gulls crying and the distant ding of some ship's bell mingling in with lazy Friday morning traffic, the building was as holy as the day its cornerstone was laid. In the pantheon of holy places, it stands tall among the Church of the Nativity in Jerusalem, the Great Mosque in Mecca and any Catholic cathedral you'd care to name.

And as I stood before it, I felt my spirits soar, and my lips dry from a sudden thirst.

Hmm? Oh. Yeah, I was talking about the original fucking Keith's brewery, yo.

Man, I love Halifax. I was there that weekend because the ACNA people bribed me with free booze and gas money to take pictures at their annual conference again this year. I had a free morning, though, so I went out to take in the sights of Halifax.

I was really only just on Lower Water Street or thereabouts. The thing I love about Halifax is how it's got a nice mixture of quaint old colonial and dominion buildings (like the imposing Art Deco stone one above), and some really modern stuff. You walk the downtown, and it feels like a big, thriving city. Which, by Maritime standards, it is. There's about 300,000 people in the 'Fax, and around 2.5 million in all of Atlantic Canada (Maritimes plus Newfoundland). After living for more than a year in a city of 18,000 (and dropping), my sense of scale's a bit warped.

It's a little tough to make out, but that's the Bluenose restaurant (yay, Canadiana!). I stopped in for a steak-and-eggs breakfast, grabbing a copy of the Chronicle Herald first. Over the meal, I got a close-up view of the ongoing election in Nova Scotia, which would eventually lead to an NDP victory, the first in Atlantic Canada.

The day I read the paper, it involved Tory premier Rodney MacDonald calling the NDP leader a car thief. Ahhhh, Tories. No matter the province, no matter the issue, it always comes down to the name calling.

While we're in Halifax, maybe this will mean something to you guys:

They tell me it comes from some kids' show. All I can say is, that must make quite the impression on ships coming from places like China or wherever.

Speaking of which:

Yes. There is a Chinese restaurant in the old Keith's building.

Not that there's anything wrong with that...but that's just the weirdest place I've yet seen one of those things.

Believe it or not, there's a big Chinese presence here in the Maritimes. In Miramichi, we have something like five Chinese restaurants (more than Fredericton, I've heard, tho' I don't believe it).

Which is neat! Yay, multiculturalism!

But...in the Keith's brewery?

Anyways, after my morning walkabout, I went to the ACNA conference, spent the day taking pictures of people I mostly didn't know. Then it was time for the booze cruise! We literally chartered a sailing ship and spent the evening drinking and eating as we sailed up and down the bay.

In between shots of the ACNA prez scoffing down the hors d'oeuvres, I had a glance at the shore. There's tons of old buildings and nice riverfront homes the further you get from the downtown core.

Just down from the Lower Water Street sights, you get a sense of Halifax's position as the great seaport for the east coast.

It was nice. If someone offered me citizenship and a nice job in Halifax, fuck yeah, I'd take it.

I'm not kidding: That city is the jewel of the east.

The float of shame

I think there should be a ritual celebrating the end of winter. I mean, like, a real ritual that people look forward to like Christmas or Easter or Wintereenmas. I heard somewhere around town that someone on the river puts up an old christmas tree in a pot on the river ice and, when the ice cracks and the thing sinks, that's when it's spring.

For me, I marked the end of the bleakest season by standing on Station Wharf in Chatham and watched the river ice break up and move out to sea in big, white, melting chunks.


It was amazing.

See, I'm not gonna lie: This was the worst winter ever.

Seriously, I have friends from Ottawa who would scoff at the Toronto winters, telling tales of ice storms and routine negative 40 temperatures. I'd listen politely, the tropical newcomer, and not pay much attention, as the Toronto/Mississauga winters were enough for me, thank you.

Then ... I moved to the Maritimes.

Here, if you refer to "the time where it was -40 for four days" in January, people remember, with a grimace. Same for the time we got 60 centimentres in 24 hours (see post below). Sweet baby jesus, it was a cold season. Not -40 every day, but -25 or below was definitely not uncommon. I've learned things about car maintenance I should never have had to learn. My baby survived, but I'm dreading taking 'er into the mechanic for a post-winter tune-up.

And then, of course, when the temperature warmed up a touch, it snowed. A lot. Bloody hell, I didn't think it was possible to snow this much and it was still less than last winter.

For the first time in my life, I had to buy a snowshovel.

And, the first time I used it, it snapped in two.

'Course, it was one of those cheap Wal-Mart ones, so that explains it. Still...when you're experiencing the most apocalyptic winter in the history of Dan, snapping show shovels are totally, totally NOT good for morale.

So I had a lot of tension to work out.

And watching the huge chunks of what used to be a kilometre-wide river ice sheet sail placidly by in the Sunday afternoon sun after deadline was just ... wow, gosh, it was just precious.

I remember when I lived in London, how disappointed I was the Thames didn't freeze properly in the winter. Well, I got my frozen river all right, and it was awesome. Seriously, as much as I hated the cold, I loved driving over the river on our big bridge in Chatham. Wish I'd taken more shots of it. Lemme tell ya, the Rideau Canal ain't got nothin' on the mighty Miramichi.

Won't miss the cold, though. Fuck the cold. And the snow, and the ice, and the coming in at 5 am on a deadline day because the previous day's blizzard forced us to leave early.

As I watched the mini-icebergs go out, I'll be honest. My lips curved into a thin smile of maniacal satisfaction.


Melt, motherfucker. Melt.

Nostalgia mania nevermore

The latest column. Nothing else struck me for writing, but a conversation about exotic pets led to a sobering realization about Thundercats. Read on.

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Anybody remember Highlander?

I grew up with that stuff, but when the subject of that most excellent specimen of 80s Sci-Fi came up in the newsroom — part of a conversation on the proper care and feeding of Brazilian piranhas, believe it or not — one of our cohorts confessed himself to be too young to know it.

So I told him.

Highlander is a movie, later a show, about a Scotsman.

He is immortal.

He carries a big sword.

And he uses it to decapitate other immortals, not all of whom are Scottish. Because, you see, there can only be one.

When this happens, lightning bolts flash forth from the ... er ... stump, powering up our hero. Apparently, if this goes on long enough, the last immortal standing will gain a great and mysterious power.

Oh, and said immortal Scot is an antiques dealer, played by a French actor born in the U.S.

Still, he's not the only immortal in the film. There's another one, this one played by a real (and great) Scot, Sean Connery.

He, however, does not play a Scot. He's a Spaniard. Also, he is the chief metallurgist for the King of Spain, or something. And he has a thick Scottish accent.

He dies at one point, but he comes back in the next movie. The whole thing's a bit of a mess, really.

Oooh! Oooh! I almost forgot the show. That was actually pretty cool. Queen did the theme song, and I think the main character (another, totally different Scotsman, this time played by a British actor) had a pony tail, so that's how you know.

I loved the show. I loved the movie. I grew up with that stuff, and it was one of numerous cultural influences that shaped me.

And it wasn't until I had to explain it to my coworker that I finally realized: Good Lord, that stuff was bad.

It was. It was terrible. I loved it, and probably always will, but it was really kind of ridiculous.

I guess it's strange how what you grew up with, shows, cartoons and movies included, looks great in your head as you grow up, but when you look at it again as an adult, the sheer daftness of it comes crashing down.

That goes triple for the 80s cartoons you thought were incredible growing up.

GI Joe, Transformers, He-Man, Thundercats, all of ‘em would get you out of bed at ungodly hours to watch them on TV, or eagerly home from school every day to watch the episodes on tape (Thanks, mum and dad).

But when you're watching them, you're just too young to realize ... most of this stuff isn't very good. The writing is daft and hackneyed a lot of the time. The animation is mass produced and worsens as the shows go on. And at the end of it, one of the main characters usually turned up with a moral lesson shaped like a sledgehammer and beat your young, impressionable mind with it awhile.

Case in point: Thundercats. That 80s gem was about a gang of human-shaped cat people (yes, cat people). Their leader was a 10-year old trapped in a 20-year old's body. He had a sword as well. At the climax of every episode, it would get bigger and give him and the other cat people special powers, which they would use to fight an evil mummy.

And not just any mummy. Sure, he looked like your average, desiccated former Egyptian most of the time, but when it came time to fight his foes the cat-people, he'd mutter some magic words and turn into a big, flying, gray-skinned body-builder with evil powers of destruction.

When I was a kid, that was awesome.

Hell, even as an adult, that's awesome. I'd sit on the balcony with my friends, and we'd laugh and reminisce about the cat people, or the mutant turtles or the big robots.

But the awesome usually stops when you look at the episodes again, which I did not long ago when I scored a copy of season one of Thundercats.

With adult eyes, I watched the old episodes that entertained me as a kid.

Then I put the DVDs away. It wasn't the same, and the same probably goes for all the other shows I watched in the 80s. I wanted to remember the cat people as the dashing heroes of my childhood, a common bond I shared with others of my generation, not the 22-minute toy commercials my parents knew they were.

When I'm savouring the weird locales, large-than-life characters and fantastic tales that fed my young imagination, I'll keep them on the other side of the faulty lense of memory. They'll be safer that way.

The apocalypse

This ran as part of our weekly rotating column. After this, I've made a conscious effort to avoid writing about the weather.

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When my editor called me Monday to tell me not to go into work that morning, a quick glance outside my window told me why.

You know it’s a bit snowy when the giant suspension bridge that normally greets your gaze in the morning is only half there.

So that left a day of working from home (or trying to) with a cup of cocoa in hand.

Unfortunately, working from home when you’re a reporter means eventually having to trudge out to get storm pics for the next paper.

So, happy in the knowledge my colleagues in Newcastle were also braving the storm, it was to this great task I turned when 11 a.m. rolled around, with the storm about as apocalyptic as it was at daybreak.

I donned my toque, thick coat, snow boots and flannel scarf, took a deep breath and plunged into the maelstrom, head high and hooded, ready to face the weather gods’ wrath as I trudged through my unplowed side street.

I came back five minutes later. It was just too damned windy and snowy. Most I managed was a shot of the bridge, still half-swallowed by the white stuff.

Even then, the blowing snow coated my lenses and drove me back up my street to my warm apartment, there to nurse my pride and wait for it to die down a bit.

It did, and so at 4 p.m., I tried again, pushing my way through the drifts in front of my apartment building (the knee-deep footprints left by my previous attempt had been filled in by the blowing snow). I struck out for downtown Chatham.

What a sight greeted me.

The city streets were deserted.

Everywhere was white. Were it not for the occasional cautious car, out for some inexplicable reason, I’d have felt like the only person in the world, sole survivor of some nuclear winter. The main streets were plowed, but still it was eerie.

Choo Choo’s? Buried. That little caboose they have over there was just submerged. Poor O’Donaghue’s’ front door was besieged by a hefty snowdrift, like most of the other stores on old Water Street.

Still, signs of life! A line-up of cars stretched behind one truck, being pushed back and forth by friends and other drivers as they struggled to free it from a snowdrift. The snow in the road was a churned mess.

After taking the obligatory photos (that was the point of my sub-Arctic odyssey, after all), I shouldered the camera and pitched in for a bit, before losing my grip and banging my wrist on the rear bumper. I was almost grateful for the excuse to not have to push anymore.

In a lull between pushing, when one gentleman was having at the road by the truck with a shovel, we all clustered around and commiserated about how the afternoon lull was just that: A lull before a renewed onslaught, according to the all-knowing weatherman.

What better time to talk about the weather than when you’re being brutally savaged by it? I moved on, noting the dark storefronts along the street. The wind had died down a bit by then, but the snow was still falling, and it wasn’t chilly at all. It was actually pleasant, especially since I didn’t have to worry about driving, and would only face the ordeal of digging out early next morning.

One of my assignments was to get close to the river and snag some pics of the storm surge that was expected. Bit tough with all the snow of the season piled up high along the streets running by Waterford Green.

Eventually, I found a patch at the foot of the impromptu mountain range that got me relatively close to Station Wharf, shouldered my camera yet again and scaled the four-metre tall heap.

Once aloft, I tumbled down the other side, and put my foot down into fresh snow, unplowed for the whole season.

I sank in up to my waist. And attempts to get back on the mountain met only with more sinkage, before finally my boots got some purchase and I could clamber my way back to the peak, my quest for the river’s edge a failure.

This time, though, I stopped thinking about where I was going, stopped at the top, lifted my head and looked around.

The bridge was an indistinct line in the distance, a backdrop for a snowcovered boat. I knew the one, and knew it was on a trailer on the wharf. But that day, the land and the river seemed merged, and it seemed adrift in a single white sea.

Never seen anything like it, so I sat there and savoured the moment for a bit. Then I clambered back down to the street, ‘cos I was cold and there’s only so much you can take of a blizzard before you decide to go warm up.

Besides, I figured all the snow building up in the nooks of my camera wasn’t too good for it.

Foreigner vs. U-Haul

Another of ye columns.

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You know what phrase I've learned to hate?

"Free upgrade."

I know it sounds odd. Those two precious words are pretty rare as it is, but when they are spoken down the line, it's usually to do with airline seats, or hotel rooms, or maybe even car rentals.

So free upgrades are supposed to be a good thing. Except the free upgrade I got last weekend was from a nice lady, calling me from U-Haul, to let me know the 14-foot moving van I'd booked a couple of weeks ago had been magically transformed into a 26-foot monstrosity of behemothic proportions.

All at no extra cost, of course. Which was nice.

Still, that left me with a huge honking great truck for the contents of my apartment, out of which I was moving for greener pastures.

I suppose I would have felt less embarrassed had I actually had a lot of stuff. In fact, when I decided to move out of my little apartment, I assumed the hundreds of books I'd accumulated over the past two-and-a-half decades would make a respectable showing as cargo, so I moved it over in one backbreaking marathon session the previous night.

And so it was the next morning, sleep deprived and with aching shoulders, that I and a volunteer mover confronted my nemesis, the 26-foot U-Haul truck that would move the rest of my stuff into my new home.

The beast was huge. Just looking at it was intimidating. And, since I'd been licensed only for about a year in any case, and had never driven anything remotely that big, the thought of actually getting behind the wheel was a touch terrifying.

"Well, let's see if she'll start," said the proprietor nonchalantly after scraping the snow off the windshield. It did, to my dread.

After squaring away the details of the actual rental, he left us with a friendly warning about the tires, which were, shall we say, less than suitable for winter driving.

And so we were left in the shadow of the monster, unsure whether to drive it or caulk the bottom and sail it to the Island for kicks.

My volunteer offered to drive, but I said, actually, I want to try. Game optimism? Sheer foolishness? Probably a little of both.

So, into the cab I clambered, adjusted the seat, put both hands on the wheel and looked around for a bit, puzzled.

"Hey," said I, opening the driver door and addressing my companion. "Where's the thing to make it go in reverse?"

He told me to get out of the truck.

So we finally got on the road, after a few tries since beneath the thin film of old snow on the parking lot was a sheet of ice that made reversing in near-bald tires a little tough.

We sped down the highway at a respectable tilt, because these things are all made in the States and the 80 on the speedometer did not mean kilometres.

"Man, I'm only going 80, but it feels SO much faster," my driver said with a wide grin.

I presume he was joking.

But we made it, to meet with other volunteers lending their strong arms to my exodus.

And it went like clockwork, more or less. Down came the bookshelves, table, chairs, couch, bed, boxspring and desk (which ended the trip in more pieces than it began), all squared away in the cavernous cargo space of the U-Haul.

So, that left us ... the TV.

Lord, the TV.

Even in the weeks leading up to the move, just the thought of having to move the TV filled me with dread.

It's one of those biggish ones with no real handgrips that weigh about as much as the Yukon. I don't even remember how I got it on my TV stand when I first moved in my old place. My brain blotted out what must have been the terrible memory of the effort.

But there it was, nestled menacingly on the unvacuumed floor of the empty apartment while we pondered it.

Then two of us lifted the beast, with difficulty, and started the slow trek down to the truck, fumbling the grip halfway down and coming dangerously close to wrecking my main source of weekday evening entertainment.

But we saved it in the nick of time, struggled to hoist it into the back of the truck and set it down, happy in the knowledge it would be the other two volunteers who'd have to take it into the new apartment.

Prior to setting off, bright sun shining down on us on the chill Saturday morning, we gazed at the cargo space. Every stick of furniture I owned, laid down flat, filled the barest fraction of the behemoth. What an embarrassment.

"Could just live out of this thing," said one of my volunteers. Indeed.

But no. I'll be living out of a spacious river view apartment from now on, which was filled with my furniture in record time, despite another Bald Tires Episode in the crowded parking lot of my new building.

Next time, I'll just get a cube van.

Staff reporters will offer their views in this space on Wednesday and Friday. Daniel Martins covers health and education. His adventures in Miramichi continue.

Not dead...I promise!

Okay, so I went through tons of writer's block over the past few months.

I'm posting a few instances of the times my boss forced me to be creative (i.e. our rotating column), in the hopes looking over them will get me off my ass and writing again.

Adieu.