In between trying to decide whether or not to get the H1N1 vaccine, I took a break to peruse these gorgeous photos on the Guardian site – a gallery of selected images of 19th-century travel from the British Library’s Points of View Exhibition – from the time when the world was still small… Imagine seeing these from your armchair in the 1800s, especially the one of Thebes.
I was a travel writer. I still am, sort of, but a couple years ago I decided to hang up the shoes removed so many times at airport security and switch directions. There were a few reasons for this. One is that flying is so incredibly, amazingly awful for the earth (not that I won’t ever fly again but flying from Toronto to Detroit??? Ouch!!!!) The second is that I wanted to focus on my first loves: poetry and fiction. So, on this year’s Blog Action Day, although I’ve got lots to say about the upcoming meeting in Copenhagen, and in particular the deeply tragic ambivalence of our Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, I thought I’d write a poem… because even in this techno-poppy, distracted day and age, poetry remains the deepest verbalization of our collective conscience.
How Long?
How many years, seasons
cold, day
after day, snow
stuck to sweating windows, sun
spread on the wild
fields, will this
last? Our rambling
conversations, accentuated
by ideas, flashing
mouths
damp with meanings, veiling
the troubled
earth. None of us can
truly see, not
from the windows
of our adventurous
cars, nor even, in our
un-spooling, anxious
dreams. I can’t hear
your voice, each word
a bandage
over reality. Instead, I ask
the birds, balanced
on hot
updrafts, searching
for their nesting
grounds, the white bear
spiraling to dark
bottom, the drifting
hunter, the drowned
fisherman, the dead,
the dead,
how long?
– Lauren Carter
I am a poet and writer working in the small city of Orillia, Ontario, Canada (about 125 kilometres north of Toronto). I write local travel stories for Edible Toronto but am currently focusing most of my creative energies on a novel set on the tipping point of fossil fuel depletion (well, a future tipping point as some would argue that we are already there) and a second collection of poetry dealing with climate change in a personal and historical perspective.
Read other people’s climate change posts at www.blogactionday.org
I am so here. Not only do I love Uxbridge, but now I can eat there easily, too.
In other news, check out the latest issue of Prism International for my poem The Double. On a fine independent book-seller’s shelf near you.
Yes, I’ve fallen off the face of the Internet.
First, there was a canoe trip into a world where the only electricity was the unbridled kind that comes with thunder. And then, in September, I started down a new path. Graduate school. Currently, my sharpened pencils are scribbling out a one-act play for a playwriting course and busy jotting notes in another, all towards a MFA in Creative Writing.
But the best part is that I’m doing what I love to do: making stuff up.
And as I attend more readings than ever before and gaze out over a classroom of people who also appreciate the act of commenting on the world in a creative way, as humans have been doing for millenia, it pains me to hear what our prime minister has to say about the arts. “I think when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see … a bunch of people at a rich gala … all subsidized by the taxpayers, claiming their subsidies aren’t high enough when they know those subsidies have gone up, I’m not sure that’s something that resonates with ordinary people,” Stephen Harper told reporters this week.
That’s funny. Despite my poetic nature, I always thought I was more or less an ordinary person, with a dog, a mortgage, taxes to pay and, oh, yeah, voting to do. And don’t even get me started about WHO gets to go to those “rich galas”. My invitation – and the ones for the thousands of other struggling artists out there – must have gone missing in the mail…
But, as usual, Margaret Atwood says it better than I can.
Please click HERE to read her thoughtful essay about all this seemingly prehistoric clap-trap (enlightenment, anyone?) and then think about the question she poses: what kind of country do you want to live in? Does it involve a few diverse shades of dissenting voices or is it all just a single tone of Conservative blue?
Last year, around this time, Jason and I headed to the Quebec City region to toodle around the nearby island of Ile d’Orleans for a story I wrote for National Geographic Traveler (March 2008).
While in the area, we were also able to attend early August’s New France Festival, a five-day extravaganza that turns the city’s already historic downtown core into a true image of the 17th century, with costumed crowds, acoustic music and booths selling authentic food-stuffs.
Yesterday, my story on the event came out in Toronto’s NOW Magazine – giving me a great excuse to post this picture.
I may look more-or-less like a sophisticated lady-in-waiting, but truth-be-told, I’m still indebted to a stock photographer from Vancouver who lent me his camera bag safety pin to hold the whole contraption together.
I love dressing up, but by the time I got back to Chateau Frontenac and stripped off my itchy, bulky and unflattering petticoats, I was pretty thankful to be a woman of modern times (minus, of course, low-rise jeans and “empowering” pole dancing lessons)!
I have been lazy lately and lulled by the site of green tomatoes slowly growing in my garden. A little sun might be nice, however, to actually ripen them up.
All this percipitation brings to mind the summer of 1992, when it rained 16 weekends in a row, and I walked around Peterborough with an umbrella practically implanted under my arm.
But there were sunny times then too, when my bare feet took to the sidewalk and I sat on the patio at the Only Cafe, sipping honey-coloured pints of ale (not at the same time, mind you. You know the rule: no shirts, no shoes, no service, and even in those post-Gwen Jacobs days, I was still pretty attached to wearing my top). If the patio was even built by then… I might be getting my memories confused but in the interests of creative non-fiction, I reserve the right.
Suffice it to say that I equate the town of Peterborough with easy-going summer-time days and am looking forward to an upcoming journey to those eastern Ontario parts. If you’re in the province and you’re looking for a local-ish getaway, get thee to Peterborough. And if you’ve never been to this artsy-fartsy riverside town, here are ten fun things to do (well, fun from my own experience), in no particular order.
If you’re from Peterborough or, like me, a long-time ex-pat who still misses the magical city, what do you do for fun within its boundaries?
Photo of Gordon Best Theatre (above the Only Cafe) by daniel_photographer
Photo of Ptbo Lift Lock by Derek Purdy
Wow, what a weekend.
This was the one where my brother and sister-in-law drove me out to the kennel to drop off Ollie, Jason came home from class and we drove north for five hours, picked up bug dope and cream for morning coffee at a Giant Tiger in a town smelling of sulpher and crossed over the old wooden single-lane swing bridge (as Jason said, “I’ve never seen pot holes in wood”) to rumble onto the Island, that place of family legend and poetry.
The first night we ate fried fish on the edge of Ice Lake, surrounded by the warm reception of half-second-cousins I’d met only occasionally and sipped Budweiser out of wet bottles and watched the kids become instant friends, playing tag across the large green lawn.
The next day, we gathered at the community hall for my Uncle Clive’s memorial. With his wife, kids, sister (my mom), nieces and nephew (my sister, my brother and I), friends from New Mexico and New York and my great aunt’s kids and once-removed second cousins from Wiarton and Islanders and other family and friends, we read bits and pieces of his writing and told stories about all the antics he’d so often get up to and recited poetry and ate Tim Bits, Scotch mints, smoked fish, butter tarts, potato chips and my Grandmother’s oatmeal cookies (made by me, from her recipe) in his memory. Near the end, I slipped outside and closed my eyes to feel the steady wind running across the wide fields of earth over limestone shale.
Out at Tobacco Lake, where my long-dead grandfather’s initials are carved into a beam into the old camp called Leaning Spruce (so named for the tree pictured above), we piled into three motorboats and two kayaks and traveled across the lake to a place Clive loved.
On shore, my mom picked up his ashes, held in a Japanese paper box, and said “he’s so heavy.” All hail the Chisholm wit: my cousin Caitlin instantly quipped, “he ain’t heavy, he’s your brother.” Single-malt scotch poured on the box and the bottle passed around and our voices singing “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
Back at the cabin, in a half-hour of abandonment and cathartic glee, we sparked up some cigars and waved the setting sun into the darkening pocket of the horizon, an Island tradition he started, fun-loving (and slightly crazy) man that he was. And we said goodbye again, the (first, second) third and final time, to leave him on/in the island he loved, held in the ripple of water, in the long breath of the wind.
Wisconsin isn’t really that far.
And, on a recent trip there, I was surprised to find that it is actually a lot closer than I thought. To my heart, that is.
Driving through lush forests and green farm fields, I’d occasionally spot ribs of white limestone sticking up through the earth’s surface. It seemed a lot like another place I know quite well – the Bruce Peninsula, where my mom was raised and my grandmother lived. In her backyard, there were cherry trees. And cherries are so hot in Wisconsin’s Door County we ate them every day, in various forms, at least once.
Turns out, this bucolic back-to-the-lander’s paradise, edged as it is in historic fishing villages and spotted with a mix of lighthouses and inland art studios, is the western edge of the Niagara Escarpment, a stony arch that stretches from New York State, into Niagara (Niagara Falls is actually water dropping over it), through Ontario, along the Bruce Peninsula, Manitoulin Island, and the southern edge of Michigan’s U.P., before it drops down to create Door County. For all you visual learners (like me), here’s a picture.
Being there was a bit like going home and especially since I got to hang out with some great people, like my new friend Margo, who describes this perfect vacation retreat in a bit more depth.
Every now and then, at dinner parties, over hors d’oeuvres and desserts, I like to raise the question: what’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten? The answers are memorable. One friend snacked on groundhog in Ecuador while another sampled rotten shark, a delicacy in Iceland.
And then there are the bugs.
It seems a lot of people have eaten bugs while traveling. While in South America, I snarfed down a giant maggot sauteed with wild onions before being baked in a banana leaf.
A long-time later, I don’t exactly crave it, but the taste-test wasn’t so bad. And lots of people have tried chocolate ants or crunchy locusts.
Since only some twenty percent of the world doesn’t eat bugs as part of their regular diet, eating creepy-crawlies while on vacation is a common “when in Rome” activity. But some enterprising cooks, biologists, locavores and environmental activitists are starting to point out that a snack of insects is actually a very smart source of plentiful and sustainable protein.
I go into depth in my latest piece for Celsias.com, a story that made me ask myself ‘could I do it?’… What do you think? What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten and could you do that dish on a daily basis?
Today is the last day of school in my neck of the woods. And what that means is that my dear husband will soon be wandering around the house, watching DVD episodes of long-cancelled TV shows in the middle of the afternoon and generally attempting to find something to do. By August, he’ll be hanging around my office – I’m b-o-o-o-red… – as I struggle to maintain my fledgling career.
If he wasn’t a Luddite, I might expect some trouble from those comments, because the truth of it (what can I say? I’m a writer, I make stuff up) is more like this: canoe to be patched in the backyard, sailboat to be painted and polished, summer course to take, solo camping trip to embark on and a whole number of other things that, really, aren’t all that bad at all… I’m sure he’ll still find some time to catch those afternoon naps, closing his eyes against the glare on the TV screen.
And more power to him, I say. After all, who can resist the pull of the season of sun, when a few short months ago the view out our front door looked like this:
Now, instead of snow-shovelling, you might find us plowing through a medium of a different sort. One more watery, more blue, more relaxing, more like this (Lake Simcoe, a couple weekends ago):
HAPPY SUMMER, EVERYONE!
