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.

Winter weather

This one is a basic summing up of my first encounter with the winter here. Let's just say it can get a touch apocalyptic at times. Keep in mind it's written for a different audience than most anyone else I write for.

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Even though I've been in Canada for several years now, this whole snow and slush thing never ceases to be fascinating.

Well, mostly fascinating. Really, the proper word for the meteorological chaos that assaulted the city last week is "terrifying," when you don't have any real winter driving experience.

I didn't mind the snow. In fact, I like snow, at least while it's still falling from the sky.

Then the freezing rain started, then the slightly thawed slush on the roads froze solid, with nary a plow to be seen on my little side street. Cue two wonderful days of me somehow navigating that jagged frozen wilderness in my little Toyota, simultaneously cursing the day I got a car and thanking the gods for my studded tires.

Then a bafflingly warm rain began to fall, clearing the streets of the frozen slush snow — for now, at least — and getting me to thinking about how winter was so much simpler back in South Africa.

See, in winter, we didn't have any freezing rain up on the plateau where I used to live. Or snow. Or any kind of precipitation at all, in fact. What we got in winter was four, straight months of bright, crisp sunshine, with the average high somewhere in the mid-teens.

We had so little rainfall in the winter that the government would take to placing water restrictions on households, and there'd the annual "don't waste water" blitz that I doubt we'll be seeing in Canada anytime soon.

With so much sunshine, it didn't mean it wasn't cold, though. I'm not sure what the rest of the country was doing, but in my neighbourhood at least, we never quite grasped the wisdom of insulating our houses ("hey, it's Africa, right?").

So at night, when the temperature plummeted past the freezing point, out would come the dubiously adequate space heaters and electric blankets. Mornings were a shivery wait by the two-metre long hallway heater for the day's clothes that had been draped over it to warm up.

Fire hazard? Probably. But when you're six years old and the house is freezing, you really don't care.

So, yeah. That's my winter memories growing up. No freezing rain, or snow, or slush.

Still, you'd think a few years in Ontario would have prepared me for the weird weather of the past week or so, but no. Maybe in Ottawa, but down in Mississauga, where the weather is gently massaged by the much-touted lake effect, the temperature didn't get too far down past the minus 10 mark most of the time, and we only really had maybe five or six real snowfalls.

Certainly nothing like the past-my-head snowbanks that greeted me when I first rolled into town in March.

And unlike most of the people in Canada, I managed to make it to my mid-twenties before being forced to get a driver's license, about a year ago now (lord, I miss taking the bus) so I'm still learning the ins and outs of winter driving.

In fact, the whole up-and-down nature of last week's weather has given me quite the lovely little crash course in winter driving habits most of you have been developing since your teenage years. I think I recall some weatherman somewhere saying we saw every conceivable Canadian weather system pass through the Maritimes last week.

I don't think I'll ever forget the streak of terror I first felt when I put on the brakes before a stop sign only to find my car refusing to do my bidding, winter studs and all.

Then, during one of last week's thaws, a routine Tim Horton's run turned into a minor crisis as my car slammed into a street-wide puddle that almost came up over the wheels.

The little while it took for me to extricate myself from that flood, eyes fixed grimly ahead as my car inched its way to solid ground with bits of half-melted slush floating past like mini-icebergs, was a bit nerve-wracking.

And, then, also from last week, the wonders of freezing rain and the thin coat of ice covering my car as I come down the steps from my apartment, already late for work. It was late in developing, but the love/hate friendship between me and my snowscraper is coming along quite nicely.

We've had a lot of ups and down weatherwise this past fall, with freezing alternating with balmy like a seesaw. Now, don't get me wrong: I like the balmy parts, and over the years I've come to appreciate the occasional Indian summer.

But now that the temperature seems to be below zero again, I really hope it stays down there for a bit, without rain, until the spring.

Call me crazy, but I prefer it when the weather gods pick one type of precipitation and stick with it.

Coalition blues

This one's about the coalition, waaaaaaaaay back when. Since it had to go in the paper, it's completely different from the one on my Facebook.

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Who says Canadian politics is boring?

Most everyone, I'd imagine ... until last week, when the firestorm over the budget erupted.

While there's a lot of facts, counterfacts, rhetoric and emotion over the possible fall of the Harper government under a sustained opposition assault, I think the main story is the fact that everybody knows, and everybody is talking about it.

People I've never known to be interested in politics are suddenly weighing in on what has rapidly become a full blown, made-in-Canada political crisis.

Everywhere you go, online and in the dailies, news agencies are focussed on the issue, and people are paying attention. Comments on some news websites number in the thousands. Every day on TV, the radio and in the newspapers, a new chapter in the drama, or a new feature ("THIS is how parliamentary government works." "THIS is what the governor general can do.").

In everyday conversation, through Facebook, over drinks at the pub, in offices across the country, people are talking politics.

Not just talking. Reacting. Wasn't long before someone got the pro- and anti-coalition facebook groups up and running, and changed their facebook statuses from the mundane to the political.

There'll be protests and rallies, too, by both sides. Students, unions, political parties, the whole nine yards.

Now, sure, the larger the group of people having an argument, the more likely are the chances some of the comments will be outrageous, or insulting. It's certainly polarized Canadian society, and the invective is flowing like the Reversing Falls.

But in between the charges and counter-charges, people are talking about the system, or the governor general, or the parties' past records and performance, or what should be done and why.

Best of all, aside from talking about the issues, people are educating themselves on the system and how it works.

And a lot of people have been surprised at some of the details that have come out in print or on the air about exactly how parliamentary democracy works. They are surprised it is actually possible (though not guaranteed) for a coalition to come to power without an election.

I would imagine even more have been shocked to find out the governor general actually has the deciding power she apparently has, and how past governor generals have dealt with similar situations.

And the overwhelming charge we've been hearing from either side is "undemocratic," whether it be levelled at the coalition or Harper's supposed behaviour in parliament in the years leading up to this crisis.

That says a lot about how little some people know about our system and its possibilities.

But it also shows Canadians have an idea of how the system ought to work, and are disturbed to find that it doesn't. If enough of those people feel strongly enough about how the system should or shouldn't work, will MPs and parties get the message and make changes down the road? Should they?

For my part, before this crisis blew up in everybody's faces, I apparently only had a partial grasp of how the Canadian party system worked, and I had no idea a coalition was even legally possible. I didn't even know what "prorogue" meant. And I was a poli-sci major.

This is a revived, nation-wide political discourse we badly, badly needed.

The last time we had an election (remember that one? The one that put us pretty much right back where we started?), voter turnout was a record low, at just over 59 per cent, according to Elections Canada.

In the provinces, the highest turnout for the federal election was Quebec, at just over 61 per cent, with Newfoundland and Labrador trailing the pack at around 48 per cent.

Nationally, the total percentage was down from almost 65 per cent in the 2006, or around a million voters less than the 2006 election.

Granted, that's still higher than most European countries, but when almost a million people who voted in 2006 decided it wasn't worth it last time around, that's a bit of a problem.

Whether they're just generally apathetic or genuinely annoyed with the way their politicians are behaving, that kind of voter turnout at a time when people are supposed to be choosing the men and women who are supposed to lead this country doesn't bode well. Can we now expect more people to get on their feet and head to the polls next election? Whether it is called next week or next year?

Parliamentary legalities aside, is the coalition undemocratic, or isn't it? Like everything else in politics, it seems to depend on where you stand. But if this many people are asking that question, and asking it loudly, I think it shows, one way or another, that democracy is alive and well.