Victoria is one enormous seagull

I’m actually, believe it or not, in Thunder Bay. Fringe is over and I’m well on my way home, by a less circuitous route than last year, which took us on a loop through Washington state to visit my Dad’s cousins amongst nearly inexplicable* dry canyons bigger than that at Niagara Falls. This year we’ve been driving actually toward Toronto every day, although our first night-stop might seem frivolous due to the presence of llamas.

* We watched an interpretive film explaining the landscape. It was glacial floods.

We didn’t know they were there when we arrived, after dark, and checked into our caboose. I’m travelling with Alison, by the way, obviously, since she was my co-star in Victoria and Vancouver Fringes, which I realise, by the way, that I’ve written almost nothing about. I have to moosh it all in right here, right now, before I fall asleep and then have to drive and drive and drive and not then write this until I’m all the way back from my tour, and the tour is fully over, and I won’t be writing from within it any more.

So Alison and I checked into our caboose, the real thing, at the Shuswap Lake HI hostel, walking right past the llama pen as we did so, and never knew those that two of those most noble beasts resided there. The two young people who checked us in, who were of course German, asked if we were afraid of dogs or cats. I said I wasn’t so much afraid as allergic. Alison expressed a mild fear of dogs. Llamas never came up. We grabbed our caboose bunks, I made a phone call from the dock on the lake, we slept, and in the morning, walking to the kitchen cabin to grab our all-we-could-eat pancake breakfast (I could eat seven, the record for men was thirteen, I was determined to at least make it halfway), we walked by a pen containing two male LLAMAS. Massey and Ferguson. The two of which had been quiet all night!

The rest of the trans-Canadian drive has been uneventful. In Calgary we stayed with a stage manager friend from Fringe ’06. In Regina, an SM from this year. In Winnipeg, my 2007 Fringe billets. And here in Thunder Bay, a colleague of mine from the U of Alberta. Tomorrow we’re staying near Thessalon ON, Tuesday in Penetanguishine (Ali’s grandparents live there – we’re stalling a bit before Toronto claims us) – we’re still three days from arrival and we’re already in the correct time zone.

But that is all so recent, and there’s a lot more to write about about the time between when Alison took over as my co-star in Old Growth, and the end of the tour and the long drive home.

VICTORIA

Victoria was a bit of a miracle. Alison and I somehow dodged a bullet, inexplicably managing to re-rehearse and partly rewrite the show in two days. I arrived in Victoria on the Monday before Fringe began – we rehearsed Tuesday and Wednesday, figured out how to integrate Aura’s CD recording of the music only on the second of those days, performed together for the first time ever on Wednesday evening at the Fringe preview night (we performed the travel song with extremely high energy and the crowd of 250-ish was unmistakably with us and diggin’ it) – and ran through the show for the first time during our opening performance on the Thursday night. And two reviewers came. We made sure they knew about the cast change, but still, I was nervous. Bizarrely, they both gave us good reviews, one of them even mentioning how well Alison stepped in at the last minute. This was encouraging.

Our theatre in Victoria held 50. Because the venue was so petite, the Fringe gave us eight performances instead of the usual six. And we never *quite* sold out, believe it or not. We were perpetually exhausted.

Friends saw the show – and friends of friends like Josh, who works as a street canvasser for a few organizations, including Greenpeace. He stopped being a stranger to me immediately following the first performance, when he kissed me – on the lips – hard – because parts of the show spoke to/for him and his kind. He came again, refusing my usual offer of a free ticket for repeat viewers, brought all his colleagues, and even bought me a beer afterward.

Andy came to see the show when he returned from the Juan de Fuca trail, and we talked all about it over beers at Swan’s. Performer friends came to see the show, some of them came again, keen it would seem to compare it with the former version. When I think back on Victoria it felt like a wrap-up festival... which is wasn’t quite.

Ali and I got into a groove, the show found a rhythm, albeit one that was often just over the slotted hour (our tech and house manager were patient), my days off were spent clambering on beaches, and my two biggest memories of Victoria are eating far too much good, expensive, vegan food from Green Cuisine and Rebar – and the seagulls. The big, big west coast seagulls whose calls, it turns out, sound more melodious to me than those of our eastern gulls. I think downtown Victoria must be a breeding ground, because the calls are continuous, relentless, 24/7, and I love ‘em. I miss them! The only other person who seems to feel like I do is Elison Zasko, who was touring the show “The Sputniks”. When we ate together, she insisted on sitting out on patios, “with the seagulls”. I complied – others complained.

Look, you know what – this entry is getting really long. How are you going to find what you need when you need it, when you’re compiling that, annotated blog –ography. Or something? Plus, I’m tired. So I think I’ll just post this up there and return to my memories as soon as I can – which may be a few days.

First I may need to re-establish my hierarchy among the smaller breed of ring-billed gulls.

Calgary to Victoria via the longest way possible – (Haida Gwaii trip DAY NINE) - Port Hardy to Victoria

Monday, August 18th, 2008


What is the longest way from Calgary to Victoria? Certainly not this. One could go up through Edmonton over to Whitehorse and down that way, and maybe bounce off Anchorage for a four-day-minimum side trip. One could follow the Idaho Rockies down toward Vegas, make a U-turn in Baja California, skirt up the coast, live at the top of a giant redwood for two years like Julia Butterfly Hill, and then take the Clipper (if it’s still running in that future time) from Seattle to Victoria. One could circumnavigate the entire globe, via Savannah GA and Alice Springs, Australia, and come to rest in Saanich Inlet. With those possibilities in mind, my route wasn't that weird, or all that long. But in the last two weeks, since I found out about the necessity of a cast change for "Old Growth", it feels like I've been to Abu Dhabi (sp?) and back - tied up in a brown paper package like Garfield's cousin Nurmel (sp?).

Yes, I'm writing my entry about Monday the 18th on Thursday the 28th. Jeez. I think that means it's actually been over two weeks since Aura had to drop the show and I decided to continue with both the tour and my trip to Haida Gwaii anyway. Clearly, I got busy when I got to Victoria. Alison and I have performed the show five times (the sixth is tonight, prime time, up against EVERYBODY including a fundraising performance of Charlie Ross's's FAMOUS "One Man Star Wars"), and I've been on a few cool little trips: one to Witty's Lagoon, to walk forest trails and beach (I was visited by a cute and lonely seal, honking out hope that he would find his brethren around somewhere) and to the top of Mt. Douglas, which I climbed without so much as a sherpa or really much of a trail, and then descended to the beach to comb for critters. Tomorrow, my only other day off (we have been given EIGHT performances here, due to our small venue), I'm thinking of driving toward them mountains and seeing what happens.

But back to trees.

On Monday the 18th, Andy and I drove from Port Hardy down to Victoria - which is a long way, really, minimum five hours of driving. We mostly just sort of trucked it down, playing Szymanovsky (sp?) and The Dears on his contabulous iPod fabtraption. The gas prices (high $1.30s) were the SAME as they were, I swear to Gord, in 2005, when I drove from Edmonton to Port Hardy for a hiking trip to Cape Scott, and marvelled at how high gas prices in remote British Columbia can be. In fact, they're more expensive in Victoria now than in Port Hardy. But I keep driving, and so does everyone else, proving in my mind that carbon taxes (as opposed to actual capping systems) are based on MADE UP ideas of human behaviour. And just this morning, comedian/my current roommate Nile Seguin and I agreed that economists are the priests of the 21st century - and that when civilizations go to pot, the religious leaders (those who claim to have the answers) are the first to get scuppered.

But back to trees.

The one real stop we made on the way down the island was to Cathedral Grove. This is Canada's most accessible grove of real old growth forest. The highway to Tofino goes through it. The amazing thing to me, other than the trees, is how few people stop. The narrow parking lot is dangerous, because cars are constantly whipping down the road that separates the two halves of the park. There have been interests in expanding the parking lot - which would mean cutting down some of the big trees. I won't even say "ironically", because that would be redundant. So far there are stronger interests against parking expansion, but if that one tree that is totally going to fall on the highway one day and kill people actually does, I suppose the tree-kickers (an opposing faction to the tree-huggers, less militant than the people-who-give-trees-the-finger league) will get their way.

Cathedral Grove is amazing. I went last year with Alison and her uncle and cousins from Comox, on an incredible (and long) daytrip to Tofino. But it rained all that day - this time we had sun. Andy was very impressed. Many of the trees are 300 years old, having sprouted after a fire in 17th or 18th centuries, but some are much older. Some of the standing giants are dead, with splintered tops. The ground is littered with enormous trunks, many of whom came down in a freak windstorm in 1997 (a bad year for trees, but celebrated by their sworn enemies in their annual ritualistic orgies of tree-kicking, -slapping, -spitting and -insulting). The interpretive signs urge visitors to LEAVE the moment a storm kicks up - but oddly, the highway (which has as much proximity to the giants as the trails do) stays open.

Tourism is pretty heavy there. I was briefly walking behind a bus group from Curmudgeon Tours - we passed a group of 4 downed trunks, all caught between the same two living trees (MAN that would have been fun to watch!) and a man in front of me kept saying "Wastage. Pure wastage..." That depends on who you ask, I suppose. I think the forest might consider nurse logs a reinvestment of capital. And as the be-jacketed tour guide pointed out, "The termites sure like it, though!". Those opportunists! That's right, forest ecology is nothing more than scavenging for lunch.

By then it was five pee emm, so we soared down the rest of the island, stopping at two Timmy's's (the first one lacked vegetarian-friendly soup) so that Andy could have that experience. We got into Victoria about 8:00, I dropped him off at a hostel downtown, checked in at Shiela's house, and collapsed. And the next day, the whirlwind of (re)rehearsals began.

Gotta run and meet my new street canvassing friends for lunch. They can relate to my show...!

Getting further from Haida Gwaii all the time – DAY EIGHT – Prince Rupert to Port Hardy

Sunday August 17th, 2008

The big long ferry! When I first booked this leg of the trip, I was on the waiting list. I was going to have to show up by 4:30am to get in the standby line [images of cars sleeping on enormous stained lobby couches come to mind] and if I didn’t get on the ferry, I was going to have to drive the 3 days the long way around, via Prince George and Whistler, to Victoria. But I got off the waiting list toward the end of Calgary Fringe and sighed a breath of release.

I still had to get up at 4:30 – because I knew I would move slow. My neck was stiff from a pillow incident the night before: when I went to bed, I took an extra pillow from the empty bunk above me, but during the night I convinced my sleepy self that I needed to give it back – and then I crumpled my lone pillow in a weird way, presumably to make it seem thicker. When I woke up, the bed opposite mine – the one that had still been occupied at 2:00pm the day before – was still empty. Now that’s a late night! I got to the ferry check-in line at 5:15 and they started loading almost immediately. Andy got to load later (as a foot passenger) and met me in the enormous lounge. I had had trouble finding just the right window seat. My first choice had a nautical rope slung across the window view, and my second was very near to the air vent. I determined that white noise might be good in case of babies – we stayed there.

The Inside Passage is a famous and peculiar part of the BC coast. Our ferry ferried continuously from 7:30am to 10:30pm, and for about 85% of the day, we were in sheltered waters, protected from the open sea by a long chain of islands. The narrowest passage came first in the day – coinciding with the lifting of the thick fog that we set out into. The engines slowed to a halt for a moment. The captain came on, explaining that the ship had to wait for a deer that was swimming across the channel. Apparently this happens most trips. We looked at the map and, seeing the size of the island that the deer was swimming away from, we wondered what it was they felt they were lacking...

The view for most of the day (in between the intermittent impenetrable fog) was of waterfalls and small patches of mist over rounded mountains, mostly treed except for some craggy tops that inexplicably had snow patches. The altitude up there couldn’t have been more than a thousand feet, and most of the snow was in sun. I have no idea. We passed an abandoned village that I think had been a logging camp, built next to an incredibly fierce waterfall (where did all the water come from?) – one of the old wooden buildings had fallen apart outwards, four walls on the ground. We passed a series of cute lighthouses with cute white red-roofed buildings around them. The channel opened up as the day went on, and we caught glimpses of other channels that dig deep into the heart of coastal BC. I finished my book and actually looked at my script, trying to get my head to consider how Alison and I were going to make the show work. I stumbled into the main lounge just as Canada won the rowing gold on the big screen TV (I have a way of doing this. I flipped on the 198_ World Series just at the moment of the Oakland earthquake). Andy was chuffed that the UK came in second. We celebrated over dinner (fish and chips, one of the few things on the cafe menu I could eat). As a token of goodwill to Andy’s nation’s valiant effort, I ate my chips with horseradish and HP Sauce.

We kept catching glimpses of a pod of killer whales (what an awful name to give a creature, really) – little geysers of steam and black backs. Nobody showed any tail.

The fog came back in the evening, weirdly, but broke just in time to show the tailings of the sunset behind the ship. I stared at our wake for about half an hour, imagining that I was casting off my troubles with this show, until I got too cold and had to go back in.

In Port Hardy, blinded by tiredness, we looped around the streets of the town until we finally found the C+N Backpackers and stumbled bedward.

Swinging toward and then away from Haida Gwaii - DAY SEVEN - stuck in Prince Rupert

Saturday August 16th


As previously reported, I slept on the overnight ferry back from Haida Gwaii and awoke into mist and foghorns and – suddenly – the harbour. The mist didn’t lift until nearly 2:00pm, and I stayed until then at the hostel (which itself just assumed I was already a checked-in guest, left over from the previous night). I realised that I had 23 hours to kill until my ferry to Vancouver Island left the next day. This was inevitable: the ferry from Haida Gwaii gets in 15 minutes after it, on the days that were possible for me. So I sat in the mist and I blogged. Alex from the Queen Charlotte Observer called and we talked for nearly 45 minutes (then she had to go to her other job (I assume) at the Masset library). I wasn’t sure if the mist would ever burn off, and I wasn’t sure what I would do if it didn’t. But it lifted into a bright, hot, *perfect* day in Prince Rupert. And suddenly, I didn't feel so stranded by the BC Ferries schedule.

Andy called (he was staying at a different hostel, as before) and after some very inefficient stuff-rearranging at my car (understandably: I was tired) I walked down to downtown and found him sitting on a picnic table in the park by the glorious harbour. I believe my first words were "I think I can see why people live here now!". Now that the fog and rain were - not gone - but elsewhere, the city was in a gorgeous setting. Across the harbour were endless rolling treed hills, splotched with partial sunlight. Float planes and tugboats puttered around. There was a sign that said "No Tenting" in the park, and a statue of the founder (presumably) of Prince Rupert (the artist formerly known as Rupert), pointing whitherforth like Jebadiah Springfield from The Simpsons.

We were next to the Royal Northern BC Museum (I think that's the name), so we went in to see the exhibits. The artefacts in were terrific - mostly Tsimshian, some actually only a few years old and some ancient - some Haida - and some relics of northern BC history, including what appeared to be the entire stock of a 1940s camera store, and a complete telegraph office. It was interesting to compare this museum to the one in Skidegate on Haida Gwaii. There, the descriptions are in first person: a museum by the Haida about the Haida. This was more traditional: an anthropological catalogue, in fact with very few functions for objects described, or even dates given. Take away the museum carpet and careful air conditioning and it felt a little like a private collection... and I'm sure the collector would have a few stories about how he (always he) found/bought/"acquired" such-and-such. No need for labelling, he can spin you a yarn. But like I say, *that* seems to be the typical way that museums display native objects: like they are mummified. The presence of newer art objects suggests that I'm wrong, though - but I could do with some more alive labelling!

After the museum with trundled down to Cow Bay, the picturesque tourist part of the harbour, and grabbed fish and chips in a place called "Smiles" that has been going since the 1920s. Andy isn't sure about fish and chips in Canada, but has wisely decided not to compare. I keep insisting that there may not be a consistent thing that we could agree is "Canadian-style" fish and chips. And that Canadians are not universally polite. But the evidence he is collecting is skewing his perceptions.

We walked along the harbour and suddenly found ourselves in an industrial zone that made for glorious photographs in the evening light. The employees of a fish cannery, on break, stared back at the semi-cold lens of our two digital cameras. We walked back toward the more harboury part of the harbour and watched the sea bottom at low tide. Star fish! A dogfish - sacred to the Haida - scuttled around the rocks. A family of otters (or two families?) came up onto a dock below us and noisily divvied up the catch of the evening. We watched them for about 20 minutes! On the way back to our two hostels, we stumbled across a tunnel under a road, marked "Sunken Garden". So of course we went in. For some old industrial reason, there was a nearly enclosed area hidden away below the yards of other buildings, and now it is filled with flowers and civic pride. We played checkers/draughts on the provided table: vaguely dark rocks for black, vaguely light rocks for white. The kings would never stack up.

The midges eventually overwhelmed us and we went our separate ways to seperate hostels - myself via Safeway, to pick up a few groceries for the new two days of travel (food is EXPENSIVE on the ferry). Back at the hostel, I donated Aura's bicycle to the hostel (she *found* it, for free of course, and didn't need me to bother to eventually get it to her again) and basically just went to bed, setting my alarm for 4:45.

Teleportation to Haida Gwaii - DAY SIX - 2nd (and last!) full day on Haida Gwaii

Friday, August 15, 2008

Of course, actually, it's Saturday now, and I'm sitting back in my hostel in Prince Rupert, not having officially checked in, but making good use of the free wireless internet and - eventually - the shower. The overnight ferry back from Skidegate on Haida Gwaii arrived this morning at 7:45 am in a thick thick fog - so thick that Andy and I, up on deck, couldn't see anything but a small apron of water around The Queen of Prince Rupert until the enormous cranes at the harbour suddenly loomed out almost directly over top of us. As far as I can tell, the captain (a joyful seagull named "Cap'n Salty", if you trust the on-board colouring books) navigated us in using only the sense of sound - his own (via foghorn) and that of the SONAR [is that an acronym, like RADAR?] equipment on board. And possibly the smell of the barnacles, seaweed and gull guano. And here I am in PR, still fogged in at noon. I'm waiting around today before I can catch my ferry to Port Hardy (at the top of Vancouver Island), which I have to check in for by 5:30 tomorrow morning! So today is a laying-low. If there's much to blog about it later, I'll be surprised. There is a museum. There are walks. I hope the fog burns off.

You may have been wondering what logistical things I was wrangling with before I went to the blisfully Rogers-signal-less archipelago. Well, here goes. It's big. The secret's out: we've had to make a cast change. Due to "circumstances beyond our control", as we say in the biz*, Aura had to drop the tour, and our director, Alison Williams has stepped in to replace her. So when I hit Victoria on Monday night, we will swing into rehearsal mode. It's going to be a different-ish show, but I'm excited. This kind of personnel swap is always bound to be stressful, I think, but Alison has been working on "Old Growth" since the brainstorming stage, over a year ago. I couldn't ask for a better last-minute replacement.

*(the biz of life, and living in it)

---

And now, to yesterday, before today is too far advanced...

I woke up, of course, and still found myself at the Golden Spruce Motel, of course, and after a fierce blog session (my score is gradually improving, despite setbacks) Andy and I met up for another breakfast at the GSM dining room. Of course! This time I had the french toast, with a full side order of rosti, bien sur! Cooked to order. I asked the proprietor about his Golden Spruce-related treasure that he kept in a jar, which turned out to be some golden-needled branch cuttings preserved in gin. The colour was beautiful, and very yellow, and apparently accurate. He keeps the jar covered and out of the light.

When we were checking out, I got up the courage to ask him what room Grant Hadwin stayed in. Room #1, one of the kitchenettes in what I assume is the older yellow motel building out front by the highway. He asked whether I'd read the book. I explained my reason for being on the island and he smiled ambiguously. He said that he hadn't realised what had happened until Grant Hadwin had already returned to Prince Rupert and was checked in to the Moby Dick Inn (which I drove by this morning). Nobody realised it. The Golden Spruce didn't fall until 2 days after it was cut - in the next wind storm. Hadwin had flown. So the proprietor of the Golden Spruce Motel didn't realise until later, when he checked his room records, that the man who destroyed his (and everyone's) totem tree stayed under his own roof before he did so.

Which is why I stayed there - a kind of morbid curiosity. And it turns out it was a nice place to stay!

People were curious about the reasons behind my visit to the island. Andy has been very patient on our excursions, where I have had to soak things in and go through subtle emotional processes that befit a playwright visiting, for the first time, a place that his characters has visited so many times before him. Andy was expecting it. I probably could have stood on my head in the muck and recited Proust and he would have taken it in stride. I did fall in the mud - but I'll get to that in a moment.

Just as we were leaving the Golden Spruce Motel, and were actually already out at the car, the Swiss proprietor rushed out with the telephone. "Alex - you have a call. A girl is calling you," he said, with an ambiguous twinkle in his voice. It was another Alex - and not one known to me - but rather a journalist with the Queen Charlotte Island Observer newspaper, who wanted to talk to me about my visit to Haida Gwaii, and my fairly unique reasons for visiting the islands. She had stumbled across this blog. It has always been my secret hope that a journalist would stumble across my blog and be inspired to interview me. We set up a loose interview for later that day. I was to pop into the Observer office in Queen Charlotte City, once Andy and I made it down the long interior logging road.

Then we went to see the Golden Spruce a second time. It was finally sunny, which was the main reason - and also, I was considering crossing the river to see the GS up close. I recorded more sounds: this time an obnoxious tractor that was chopping out brush along the road - and some ravens. At the river I tried to walk along the bank to get a view *down* the GS instead of just from the side - and ended up slipping on the mud and going down hard on, thankfully, something soft. Also the mud. It's still on my pants now as I write. And I thought long and hard about crossing the river and eventually decided not to. For a few reasons:

1) Rivers are rarely as safe and easy to swim across as they seem. The current looked stronger underneath, the mud would eat my sandals, and the tangles of logs could be dangerous. But I could have done it. Really, it was that

2) Going to see and touch the GS up close would be like a catholic opening St. Peter's tomb and realising that after all, he was a man, who rotted like a man does. And,

3) That side of the river is sacred ground, and not *my* sacred ground. It just seemed like an invasive thing to do, especially to splash over there, and

4) I've had some bad luck on this tour and I didn't want to invite any more.

So, once I'd spent quite a bit of time on the tourist side of the Yakoun, making sure that I was reconciled with my decision, we went back to the car and followed the logging road all the way south. It was a much longer way than I expected, perhaps because we were going 40 km/h max all the way. And sometimes, 10. We met a lovely logging guy in a pickup truck, whom we asked for directions (or more like, asked to confirm that we took the correct fork back at that unexpected and nonsensical junction back there) and he kept glancing at our tires and undercarriage to gauge whether we'd make it over the recently laid patches of loose sharp stones - which he himself had laid! We made it, barely. On the way down we stopped at an abandoned Haida canoe (half tree, half canoe, not so seaworthy by now and not really near the sea either!) and otherwise listened to violin and piano music by Charles Ives (Andy has a fine iPod) and drove the bumpiness through.

By the time we got the Queen Charlotte and pulled up to the Observer, however, Alex had had to go home for the day. Her boss took my number and picture and invited us to an art opening that evening. It turns out Alex and her husband were the artists, and they had to go set up at the gallery - I guess. Andy and I decided to head there later, as our last stop before boarding the night ferry. We went to the brand new Haida Heritage Centre museum, which isn't even officially open (it opens August 23rd I believe) but is in a kind of preview mode. The exhibits were fantastic...and it is the only museum I've ever seen where the exhibits refer to themselves in first person plural. We, the Haida people, do this. These are our customs. Here's what happened to us, and here's what we're doing to reclaim our rights. I learned that the Haida never signed a treaty, and that they have been forced by the Canadian government to *prove* that they inhabited these islands, pre-contact. From the Haida point of view, from what I can tell, the resource extraction occurring here is 100% illegal. Andy and I wondered what would happen if Canada used this as a test case, and gave Haida Gwaii back to its people. What would happen? It might be the best place in the country to try something like that.

So this short visit has got me thinking. About the legalities of colonialism, about what rights I truly ought to have on this land. About how cruel history can be. And about some possible future artistic projects...

When the museum closed, we went for a quick hike up to the two Spirit Lakes above Skidegate. The lakes are very still and probably have an amazing mist over them in the mornings. Dead trees stick up from the water and are reflected in it. We were alone except for a trail runner in full Lululemon regalia.

Along the road, we saw bald eagles sitting by the shore at low tide - about 12 adults and 4 chicks! The chicks were big and speckled like gulls. And I had never noticed before that when a bald eagle throws its head back and squeals, it looks and sounds rather like a gull. We wondered where all the gulls were. It looked like the eagles had eaten their fill of seafood and were chilling out. Some ravens pecked along the shore, ever hungry. Crows played in the trees above us. Next to ravens, crows seem a little bit juvenile. But I love them...!

We went to Queen B's gallery and coffeehouse in Queen Charlotte City for the art opening, which turned out to be art made from firing shotguns and splatterpaint at metal appliance panels. One Sanyo fridge door had splattered yellow image that, from the right angle, looked like the portait of a woman's face. Deliberate or not, we couldn't tell. We ordered tapas for two (including beautiful BC salmon) and ate on the porch overlooking the harbour. I met Alex and we set up a phone interview for tomorrow / today / just now (she called while I was writing this)... and the article will probably be published on thursday. I'll post the link!

Hope all's well, wherever you are...

Pilgrimage to Haida Gwaii - DAY FIVE - full day on Haida Gwaii #1

Thursday, August 14th

That thing is happening. That thing! Where I'm writing when I should be doing. When I get up and write instead of getting up and getting up. That thing!

So, garn dosh it, this is going to be concise. This is going to be dense!

I'm on Haida Gwaii. Still. Obviously! The propriotor of the Golden Spruce Motel is *very*( similar in look, accent, and demeanour to Clemens Merkel, who plays violin with the Bozzini string quartet (I did a workshop with them in April in Montreal). They're both Swiss, I believe. And where are we? Port CLEMENTS. Weird stuff. This is not just a motel, but a terrific breakfast spot. Clemens (I forget his real name) made us terrific food to order. I had salmon eggs benedict with rosti (Swiss-style hashbrowns) where the potato literally lived just for my order.

Then we went to the Golden Spruce trail. It's about 6 km south of Port Clements, along the Yakoun river. The trail is probably only a five-minute walk to the view of the tree, but I took my time. Severely. I recorded the sounds of the forest as they showed up: small birds, ravens, the sound of Andy (my serendipitous) English companion and I walking on gravel, mud, grass, mud, boards, stones. We took pictures of the largest trees. The Informative Sign at the head of the trail used to call this forest "second growth", but it has been re-stenciled to say "old growth". How old is the sign?

It was a very, very odd feeling that I had, walking a path that my fictional characters have walked for 30-odd performances already without me. It certainly looks like forests I've been in in BC before: deep, dark, wide green, moss on reaching branches, mud on the ground - but there it all was, things I've written and read about: the river, 20m wide. The bench where people used to sit to watch the Golden Spruce, slightly taller than the trees immediately around it, glowing, they say, when the right light touched it. And the tree itself: now just a skeleton, hanging out a little over the river. I have been completely wrong about how it touches the river. It's not square on, it's at a 25-degree angle or so. I recorded the sounds of the river. Every two minutes are so, regularly, there was a splashing sound, like a fish, in the same place. What could that have been?

Then we went to the little museum in Port Clements. It's filled with artefacts from the white history of the island: saws and other tools and cash registers and signs... and the White Raven, the other genetical delight mentioned in my show, Port Clements' *other* tourist attraction, who also died tragically in 1997. Ravens are big, when you get close to them. Andy and I wondered how a white raven would keep the blood from showing. If you're going to eat carrion, wear dark clothes.

We spent the afternoon up past Masset, at the very top end of the island, on the beach under Tow Hill. The hill is actually a sheer cliff rising just above the sea - half of a volcanic formation of basalt columns (like Staffa in Scotland, or Giant's Causeway in Ireland). The other half shaved off, and what's left is a cliff sticking up out of the flat part of the island. The whole beach there is volcanic rock, boulders fallen from Tow Hill, and small pebbles of infinite colours. The volanic rock is strange and porous, with perfectly circular potholes around it. The famous Blow Hole there shoots out water under high pressure at fairly random intervals - watching the waves didn't really help us to predict it. Right next to it, a tiny seam in the rock spits out high-pressure air that needs to be released when the water pushes into the Blow Hole. The sounds were amazing - so I recorded them.

On the other side of the river, the beach instantly changes to smooth shell sand, rivulets and ripples, and a line of enormous jellyfish and crabs (all dead of course) at the last tide line. There were people out looking for live crabs, I think - this is where the locals come to catch them.

This - or beneath Tow Hill - is also where Raven discovered the first people in a clamshell, and brought them up to be humans (Haida, to be specific).

On the way back, we stumbled into a fantastic restaurant and bakery call Trout House, and spent much of the evening there, eating and talking to the locals - and visitors working there for the summer - all of whom have the same fantastic demeanour. This is undoubtedly a hippy community, on the north end of the island. The restaurant was beautiful and a rare sight in Canada: not only un-winterized, but un-winterizable. We ate in the greenhouse part. Staff kept reaching in to pick edible flowers with which to garnish salads. Andy and I both had clam fritter burgers made with local razor clams (he also had the clam chowder, but that seemed a bit much to me) and nachos, and we finished up with spontaneous three-fruit pie (the selling point being that it was fresh out of the oven, and served with natural vanilla ice cream). Several people dared me to return to the Golden Spruce and *cross* the river to touch the stump. I'm thinking about it. We trundled home, stuffed, via Old Masset, which really, for this island, is a sprawling metropolis.

Locomotion to Haida Gwaii - DAY FOUR - Prince Rupert to Port Clements

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

I woke up in Prince Rupert in utter darkness. My room at the Black Rooster was in the basement, and even at 8:15, every single person was in a quasi coma. Shouldn't there be some sun-bleached middle-aged German backpacker, up and off and up to pray to the marmot shrine? Wait, these are costal mountains. Lower elevation, so tree-covered, so not so marmots. I guessed that I had missed the early risers.

But when I came upstairs and saw what the weather was doing, I thought I might be the only person in PR that was up and about. The mist, and rain, and low clouds were so enveloping - the sky was so just dark dark trees - and the city itself so tenuous, so obviously flung upon unsympathetic rocky hills - that the only sane choice was to hibernate. But I had a ferry to catch...

And some serious logistical changes to my show to deal with. I'll talk about this later, but I had to spend the morning on phone and email, trying to keep myself rigidly in problem-solving mode.

Most of the day was taken up by ferry travel. I checked in at 10:40am for a 1:00pm sailing. I attempted to stop at Timmy's out of the drizzle, but the line was so long that I didn't even bother to enter the building. (The fact that there was a line long at Timberly's does not, I propose, scuttle my theory that the entire city of Prince Rupert was in a coma.) In the ferry lineup I waited, made some more calls, waited, took some pretty cool pictures of the harbour and train tracks (the ferries and VIA trains come in to the same station. Which is pretty interesting stuff to try to photograph. And logistically...complicated, I'm sure). And waited. And boarded.



And sat next to a nice young English man who turned out to be named Andy, and be a high school history teacher, and to share a lot in common with me including age and ferry schedule. He is backpacking, on a short solo holiday in western Canada. I'm agreed to drive him around Haida Gwaii - and possibly down the length of Vancouver Island when we do that - for the exchange of gas money and the gain of a hiking buddy. No bear's gonna eat BOTH of us! With someone to talk to, the 6.5 hour ferry ride (8.5 on the way back. For some reason.) went quickly. There was little to look at but waves for most of the trip. I experienced seasickness for the first time in my life. I'm great with roller coasters! But I guess I can get off of them. The ferry across Hecate Straight is legendarily retch-inducing. This is even a joke in "Old Growth"! I listed to the starboard gift shop to look for Gravol. I was not alone. All they had was a homeopathic remedy, which I think I took too late. I couldn't entirely keep all of my lunch down (most of it though) and I think I was the only person on the ferry who couldn't. One of the locals on board said this is what the seas are like in the winter. He spent most of the voyage sleeping on an air mattress on the lounge floor. We'll be taking the overnight ferry back. I wish I had an air mattress!

I had to figure out how to open my passenger door to let Andy into my car. Those ferry ramps only have enough room to allow one side to open, and I hadn't thought I would have a passenger. But we figured it out, and made our way north. Within five minutes, we came to a beautiful sight - a large balancing boulder on a rocky beach with tidal pools and seaweed and tiny 6-legged starfish. (whatever happened to the odd-legged rule?) There were tens of tiny dark deer along the highway. We drove up to Port Clements, keeping on saying things like "Uh oh, I already worry that I'm going to want to move here". I cashed in my reservation at the Golden Spruce motel, and Andy decided to splurge and get a room as well. The local pub stops serving food at 8pm, so we had to make do with Andy's stash of cheese buns, and cheese, and fruit. I cracked open one of my last two Bushwakker beers from Regina. And we both wondered whether we were sitting in the room that Grant Hadwin stayed in, when he cut down the Golden Spruce. The rooms are lovingly-maintained retro, cozy as only earlier decades could do it. There is a golden tree-shaped air freshener in my room. And in Port Clements, another golden tree, this time a wooden way-marker: 6. We're going to drive those 6k first thing Thursday.

Voyage to Haida Gwaii – DAY THREE (Prince George to Prince Rupert)

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

So it turns out that while Prince George isn’t all that far from Jasper, Prince Rupert is an awful long way from Prince George. 724 kilometers – as long a day as the coastal Lake Superior road from Sault Ste. Marie to Thunder Bay, and just as winding. The first time I drove along the north shore of Superior, I arrived in T-Bay four hours later than I’d calculated, and wept at the feet of the Terry Fox monument (which is admittedly moving even under less trying circumstances). My driving nerve is stronger now, but the drive to Rupert (who turns out to be some sort of Bavarian monarch’s son) was hard on me.

I left late, to start. I was so enthralled by the free wireless internet at the Economy Inn that I used part of the morning internetting. Partly to type yesterday’s blog entry, and so the paradox continues. So I didn’t get going on the road until nearly 11:00, after I’d found the right Tim Hortons for me (there were five of them in town) and passed out of Prince George’s surprising sprawl.

The day is a bit squished in my memory, but here are some notes in possibly not-so-chronological order:

The pine beetle infestation was obvious along the whole journey – unless there are new varieties of trees being developed that are purple or skeletal. In every infested area, about half of the individuals of a certain species of tree were infected. Why not the others? All the rest stops had signs about the stages of infestation – and how “harvesting” the wood while it still had “value” was the only answer. For those of you who don’t know the details of these wee beetles, they die back only when the winters are below a certain temperature for a certain length of time. So the pine beetle infestation is a massive example of the chaotic effects of global warming.

On a whim, I turned off the highway to visit old historic Hazelton – and once I was there, I realised its significance. Doubly. ONE – Emily Carr painted totem poles on these hills, I swear it. TWO – Cora Grey, Grant Hadwin’s friend (before he cut down the Golden Spruce) was from here. This is a Gitxsan community, and amidst the colonial buildings lies a reconstructed native village that I would have visited if I’d had more time. Between Hazelton (on the highway) and Old Hazelton sprawls a canyon of such depth that I wonder why the two Hazeltons ever considered themselves connected. The bridge is one lane, and the signs basically say “Just, um, kinda wait till it’s clear.”



Smithers was a nice town – with the look of Canmore I’d say. All the way there, I kept reading the “Smithers, ___ km” signs in a Mr. Burns voice. It got me through. Smithers was a nice, clean town – tourist shops, bakeries (I calmed my driver’s nerves with a Dutchish almond cookie in one of these), a bit of that ornate chaletish “Swiss” look to the main street. I felt comfortable there – and if I were really pressed to say why, I might admit that I felt comfortable because it was a White town. Unlike Prince George, where most of the very few people wandering the streets were native. Am I really most comfortable in my own culture? It was also a Middle Class town – and a town of shopping. Everybody’s a little bit racist, on a long driving day.

I ate dinner at Denny’s in Terrace. Terrace is the Glasgow to Smither’s Edinburgh. (I mean, like in the 19th century.) More industrial, rougher, more sprawling. Less Comfortable. Denny’s is an odd, odd place. It’d been a long time since I’d been there, and it may be a while before I am back. But I like the excuse that driving gives me, to eat poorly. I had had lunch at A&W, another of those portabello-based veggie burgers, and now that I’m being tossed on Hecate Straight (I’ll get to that tomorrow) I’m regretting all the rich food I’ve been eating.

By the time I left Terrace it was 7:40 pm, and I still had a 90 minute drive to Prince Rupert. There was still plenty of light left in terms of the sun being up, but the heavy clouds made the drive gloomy, spooky and wonderful. The high rounded tops of mountains with permanent patches of snow looked like orcas. The woods were a deep, deep green out of which I expected Sasquatch to bound. The highway aimed for a while toward one of the sheerest cliffs I've ever seen, a cliff that rose out from a riverbank and loomed over the steel trestle bridge I had to cross. I pulled into Prince Rupert and things were dim and the hilliness never stopped and I checked into the Black Rooster Hostel, whose desk has only a sign for personel: "for check in, please pick up the phone [arrow] - and press the button marked 'manager'". It took a few minutes, but she arrived.

Journey to Haida Gwaii PART TWO - Athabasca Falls to Prince George

This is yesterday I'm talkin' 'bout, now, because I became too tired and too fascinated with gymnasts last night to continue blogging. So already, I am caught in the journaler's paradox: I write to remember, and as I write, life happens, but I'm too busy writing to experience today what I will write about tomorrow. The good news is there isn't much happening in Prince George right now, as far as I can see. There is a single bird uttering the occasional pained cry - and a bit of traffic - and I'm going to assume that the Dairy Queen across 3rd Street is opening for the day (I can't see it from here). Maybe PG is all a-bustle somewhere else, but I can't see it.



DAY TWO (Monday, August 11th, 2008)

ATHABASCA FALLS

I was, after all, staying just across the highway from the falls themselves. I thought I'd pay them a visit, even though I have been several times before, in winter and in summer. This is easy, because they're in Jasper's "neighbourhood". In winter, the falls are muted by enormous blooms of ice. In summer, they are loud! The interpretive signs frame this place as a battle between water and rock. I would say it is a war, with each chasm being a battle - because, while the water is winning in one place, another channel has been abandoned. The rock won. Now, stairs flow down this abandoned mini-canyon. It's amazing to follow the path that gushing water took for thousands of years before it changed routes. Off to the side is a pothole - a cylindrical carving where water spun round and round and round and eventually down and down - one of many here - but this one now has stagnant water at the bottom of it. In another enormous pothole about the existing flow, two long logs are perfectly wedged up into the rock, at a 37 degree angle to each other. Precisely. Something to hang onto, should you need it.

This was my first time visiting the falls with a digital camera in hand, and I went to town. Everyone else takes pictures of their loved- or tolerated-ones in front of a standard vista; I take pictures of tree branches in front of frozen waterflow, or deliberated overexposed white water that looks like an oddly-shaped negative space in the rock.



JASPER

I forgot how soon it comes. Only a few minutes north of Athabasca Falls, Pyramid Mountain comes into view. This is the backdrop for Jasper, the mountain that flanks its rear. In town, I stopped to gas up car and belly. I was craving A&W (they have a veggie option now - as does KFC!) as I do when I am on the road and culinarily crass, but I convinced myself to find a local place to eat. I found a little organic cafe and had the best vegetarian lasagna of my life so far (sorry mom... and Mondragon...).


THE DRIVE

Uneventful, largely due to a low cloud ceiling. Jasper to Prince George is a considerably shorter distance than I'd imagined. (today is the big day) So I thought I'd stop, here and there. I slipped unobtrusively into B.C. I stopped at the Mount Robson viewpoint, but its head was in the clouds (this is usually the case, but I have seen it, once, perfectly clearly, on one of my two trans-canadian rail trips). I stopped at the Mount Terry Fox viewpoint. There is a Mount Terry Fox! I read the commemorative plackqque, but couldn't see more than the base of the mountain. I visited Rearguard Falls - which was very powerful for a small falls - and stopped at a rest stop where the activity of choice seems to simply be dipping hands and feet in a calmer bend of the mighty Fraser River. History rushed by, occasionally sloshing over jammed driftwood. The rocks on that river beach were an amazing variety of colours - rocks of all mountains upstream, I imagined - arranged by size in the muck (wet mountain dust). I remembered "pudding stones" I have seen, where small rocks become trapped in hardened mud and a conglomerate rock is made, and I considered making a smiley face out of stones for some collector to marvel over in thousands of years. But that would be cheating.

The last part of the drive was quite rainy, but in

PRINCE GEORGE

the sun came out. And stayed out! And was enormously bright. That, plus the wide streets and low buildings and subtle traffic (at 6:30pm) and I swore I was in Lethbridge. I walked around the emptied streets, looking for two "vegetarian friendly" restaurants listed online - finding evidence of neither - taking photos of some of the quite subtly funky graffiti and mural art here and there - and fell into the Waddling Duck Restaurant for dinner. How could I *NOT* go to the Waddling Duck!

When I got home I put on the Olympics and checked my email and Aura, after discussions with her family (who came down from Edmonton to see "Old Growth" in Calgary), has some excited ideas for changes we can make to the show. Which is great. But I'd rather not be thinking about scripts right now, when there's life to live...for a few days at least.

I think I might hit the Dairy Queen for breakfast.

Peregrination to Haida Gwaii PART ONE - Calgary to Athabasca Falls

I'm sitting in a hotel room in Prince George, half-watching Olympic high bar gymnastics from Beijing as I type. I'm not much of a gymnastics man, but I'll take whatever CBC will give me (extensive coverage of U.S. and Chinese athletes, apparently) for my first TV viewing of Olympic coverage so far in these games. Nor am I in a place covered by the itinerary of the title of this blog post. I'm writing retroactively. The Athabasca Falls hostel does not have running water, and it certainly does not have wireless, so here I am backtracking so that I can keep with my plan of a-post-a-day during my piligrimage/vacation toward, on, and from Haida Gwaii / the Queen Charlotte Islands.

The story is this: I have 10 days off between our final performance of "Old Growth" in Calgary, and our tech rehearsal in Victoria - so I'm going to go visit the place where our play is set. The island it's set on (Graham Island in the Queen Charlotte archipelago) and the specific site (the site of the formerly vertical, now horizontal, still (they say) deeply moving, Golden Spruce). My plans are to 1) view the Spruce (from across the river - if I actually cross to the far side where the GS lies, I suspect I will be somehow reprimanded), 2) stay at the Golden Spruce motel, and possibly identify which room Grant Hadwin stayed in before he cut down the tree in question, as well as general Haida siteseeing and an incredible ferry daytrip down the famous Inside Passage to the top of Vancouver island. This little 10-day peregrination is costing me near $1,000 - but it's going to be incredible.

So far, so good, with some repeats of things I've previously seen and loved.

Here's the breakdown of Day One (Sunday, August 10):

CALGARY:

This is where I was - for Calgary Fringe. And so, this is where I left from. About an hour and a half later than planned. Poor Laura Harris - the writer and star of the Fringe hit Pitch Blond. Hit where it's played so far (Victoria and Calgary) at least. I was tired - packing my car took far more cognitive power than I had, so I was late picking her up to act as her chauffer, or Greyhound, to Banff.

BANFF:

Laura was going to visit an actor friend there who turns out to the in the same production as *many* friends of mine. Our tour of the Banff Centre buildings produced about 10 people that I know, from some quite different places. We went to the hot springs after lunch and the three of us wore the one-piece, navy, androgynous and vaguely skirted 1920-style swimsuits that you can rent there for a princely $1.90. I rented one back in 2006 when I visited the springs in the month of February (downright surreal) and everyone stared at me like I was some sort of Anachronism Society freak. Even though they could have rented one too. This time, I was in company - and we took pictures!



LAKE LOUISE:

Later in the afternoon, I left Banff with the aim of getting to my hostel sometime before dark. I stopped in at Lake Louise, to wave at the lake and view and overpopulation of tourists for probably about my seventh time. As many times as I've spent full days there hiking the trails to the two teahouses and up to the top of the Beehive (probably three), I've also come just to wave and wash my hands in the cold water and take an obligatory photo of a canoe - or ice castle - in front of the massive stone and ice wall at the back of the valley that makes this one of the most beautiful places on the planet. Usually I would stop at the bakery in Louise's lone (and, really, quite excellent) minimall - and pretend that it's an actual town - but I wanted to get trucking up the Icefields Parkway.

COLUMBIA ICEFIELD:

I've passed this white monster a few times, but this is the first time I walked up to it. I just went up to the foot of the glacier. Several people were walking on it, despite many warnings about instability and crevaces and even an alarming graphic of a small child trapped down a crevace, but I stayed behind the simple rope line. I was wearing my flat-soled Blackspot V2 shoes, after all. (today, the next day, I wised up and wore my serious Raichle hiking boots for the drive/hike). It was windy and sunny and wonderful and a little bit like being on the moon, since the glacier's foot is surrounded by gravel piles that mark where the side- and end-points of the ice used to be. There are also markers showing how quickly this arm of the Columbia Icefield has been receding: 1982, 1976... 1893 was at the Parkway, while the current glacier (in summer, admittedly) is a 15-minute walk from the highway, at least. A rogue path, carefully lined with small boulders, led the way from the main path, in the wrong direction, toward nowhere. Shifting ice indeed. In fact, it led to probably the only place where one can duck out of sight of other glacial explorers, and pee against gravel slopes. There wasn't an outhouse.



ATHABASCA FALLS HOSTEL:

This is about 20 minutes' drive south of Jasper, but not if you come from the south. I'd stayed there before, in 2005 even, and in the winter. It was virtually empty then, but it was hopping now, mostly due to a bus tour of German and English travellers. This hostel has a take-a-book-if-you-want-one policy, but they didn't have what I was looking for: the field guide to Sasquatch (yes!) that was there in 2005. You snooze, you loose. Especially when it comes to Sasquatch.

I've been taking pictures, but it will take a while before I get them off the camera, process and upload...

are you my city?

Yesterday I took a long bike ride down the Elbow river, and a funny thing happened. I'm pretty sure that, somewhere past the Stampede grounds, I slipped through a dimensional rift. Again. Again - Calgary is acting like Vancouver. Or at least, Alberta is taking some cues from its neighbour to the west.

Is this what really happened? Did I slip through space - or have I come unstuck in time and caught glimpses of what September holds for me?

I don't expect you to believe me. But please, consider the evidence:

- I biked along a cold, fast-flowing glacial river.

- my trip took me across two wooden suspension bridges across said river.

- said trip took me through a place called Stanley Park

- Emerging from the valley, I found myself on hilly winding streets of beautiful homes (none older than 75 years) on large, lushly landscaped, private, anally-security-protected properties with sweeping views of city and mountains.

- I considered having sushi for lunch.

- then I bought $75 worth of diverse local organic natural biodegradable honey-based soap products.

It's spooky. the only sound I always hear is trains - I keep looking for the harbour!

But then, there is a grid city - there are the pickup trucks - the cowboy hats. And the sun and the sun and the sun and the sun...

One show left here in Calgary! And then tomorrow, I set off toward Haida Gwaii. I'll be blogging and posting pics here, so do stick around.

Alex

earworms

In spite of myself, I have the opening song of "Eve: the true story", a musical playing here at Calgary Fringe, stuck in my head. Yesterday, it was a very specific snippet from Benjamin Britten's opera "Peter Grimes" - which was with me immediately before our 6:00pm performance of "Old Growth" - *and* immediately after... right up until Eve came into my life. (if you must know, it's from the court room prologue, where Grimes describes how his boy assistant died at sea "among the fish". There's a moment of harmonic, melodic and orchestrational poignancy on "fish" that is apparently freeze-dried goodness to my swimming synapses).

We have two shows left at Calgary Fringe, both prime-time slots. That's all that seems to matter here, when it comes to crowd size: being at 8:00 pm. "Cam and Legs", the apparently astounding 5-star (sayeth the Calgary Herald) puppet show (I will miss it due to the kind of scheduling that sometimes inevitably happens at smaller Fringe festivals), has been having audiences of 25-30. Conversely, my somewhat dismissive reviews in this city (is this what happens when you take a button-pushing show about the troubling intersections of environment/economy to an oil city? Yes.) don't seem to be having any effect. If people are coming, people are coming. And we're getting lovely little audience comments up on the board outside the Lantern Church. (I post audience reviews HERE, FYI, btw)

And some really interesting in-person comments. When people like the show here, they REALLY like it. A lovely woman whom I had met on the grounds came up to me after our first performance and asked me if I consider myself a shaman. I told her my research has only been surface - that I suspect my character also took want he wanted from a few books and ran with it - and she said, I am on the right track. !

In Toronto I was talking to a friend who does clown work about my desire to undertake some clown training myself, and she said that she could see me devloping this trickster-persona that character-Alex puts on as a clown character. I've always suspected that my clown is a musicologist. I wonder what will come out in a workshop?

Speaking of workshops, I'm starting to gear up for my Tarragon Theatre residency in the fall. I visited Calgary Zoo as research for the script I will be writing about zoo elephants, and I already have two sprightly young actors who want to help me workshop the piece. Things are moving ahead. I'm at that point in the tour when I start pondering new projects.

Charmed life, eh? Sometimes. At the Inglewood Bird Sanctuary (in my neighbourhood here in Calgary!) FIVE deer came to visit me.

FYI, btw, and this is very exciting everybody, I'll be travelling to Haida Gwaii / the Queen Charlotte Islands next week, during my gap between Calgary and Victoria Fringes, and I'll be heavily documenting the trip. I will be going as close as I can to the place where "Old Growth" is set: the site of the Golden Spruce. And I'll be posting thoughts and pictures here.

Cowtown by the sea

I'm in Calgary, but I keep thinking I'm in Vancouver. Well, less now. But my billets (Ray and Brian) live in a home in Inglewood that is so stylish, modern (a la mid-90s) and lushly landscaped that I woke up convinced that I was in Vancouver. Their living room vista seems to step down right into the Bow River - the third floor deck/garden just doesn't seem the Alberta way. In Edmonton it was hard to find a lawn that wasn't, well, lawn. And you know what else it is? This lushness abuts sharply onto urban grit. Inglewood is an old community cut off in a sense from the rest of Calgary by the river on one side, and busy railroad tracks on almost three sides! A couple of days ago, Aura and I witnessed the weirdest optical illusion down 13th Street SE as two trains and a truck pulled cargo in different directions at the same rate, in near-but-not-quite parallel.

I'm near the zoo! Apparently sometimes the animals make themselves heard - or a giraffe's head pokes up. I will go visit the elephants in preparation for my Tarragon script.

And a bird sanctuary! Can't wait. Plus on one of my days off I'm going to the Royal Tyrell dinosaur museum in Drumheller AB.

Winnipeg to Calgary is a two-day drive. Did you know that? We stayed with Rod ("Glory Days") and Maureen McDonald in their lovely house right by the Legislature in Regina. And of course we dined and beered at Bushwakker brewpub (and I picked up some bottled brews for the road) - where we randomly met up with about 12 Fringe touring performers to whom we had said goodbye in Winnipeg (they were on their way to Saskatoon Fringe via Regina - I have been trying for YEARS to convince other performers to hit Bushwakker on the way, but only when I stopped trying did anyone show up!)

Rod had just managed to injure his back at the end of Winnipeg Fringe (his play is about boxing - but it is apparently (and perhaps unsurprisingly) the LIFTING of the punching bag that created the problem. His doctor gave him permission to do Calgary Fringe before being tended too, though - for the special reason that Rod and Maureen have decided to make Calgary their last stop in a touring life that goes back to 1992.

We have our opening Calgary show tonight! The festival opened last night, and crowds looked not so bad. So we'll see. Our theatre has a pillar near the middle of the stage. We are treating it as a tree.

I'm always nervous opening in a new city. Nervous nervous! Breathe, breathe...

fours and fives

boy oh boy am I having trouble getting my blog posts to post! If this one posts, I'll be amazed. "If you're reading this, you probably..." The elder of my two unposted posts has been missing from the blog for so long that it's starting to show up on milk cartons.

Oh, wait. I just figured out why this is happening. FTP password stuff ... this is embarassing. c'mon Alex, if your *website* password changes, then so does... geez.

Anyway, here we are together.

I got my first four-star review of the tour! Getting a four-star review at a big festival is sort of like cutting a hole in the glass ceiling and pulling yourself up. In Edmonton, particularly, if you get a four-star, you're likely to sell out. Three-and-a-half? No. Edmontonians are, bless them, obsessed with the star ratings in the Edmonton Journal. I always see crowds of people all doing the same task: checking the day's show schedule against their clipped out star list from the Journal. Four and up, they can fit it in - regardless of weather, regardless of time of day, regardless of what the show IS, even. If it's a five-star, they'll fight each other, and line up for five hours in rain and snow (Edmonton Fringe can have volatile weather) just to buy a ticket, and quit their jobs and leave their families just to see it. No matter what it is. And sometimes, I'm told, the cold stare of a give-me-the-five-star-show-I've-been-promised crowd is a little too much to bear.

Thankfully/unthankfully, we're in Winnipeg, where the star-rating / attendance relationship is a little bit less direct. So, we're the four-star show that is still getting half houses. In an 80-seat house. My understanding is that, in Winnipeg at least, I sell a certain percentage of my house, regardless of total capacity. It's like they *know*. It's the half-house city, for me at least.

But whatever, things might pick up - we have four shows left and we're working hard. And we're in the four-star club! Keir Cutler ("Teaching the Fringe") has been giving me four (like giving five with the thumb folded) everytime he sees me.

There really is something going on with that here. Nile Seguin ("Fear of a Brown Planet") has been trying to resurrect the retro "low five". I'm still getting used to it. I go high, and then I correct down. To make sure I go low enough with my five, I repeat this mantra: "So low that you might miss". The contact and the resultant sound are not nearly as electrifying when the five is low...but it's so much more relaxing. I've been trying to teach Nile my high six - and hand plus a finger. You have to make sure you're mirroring each other, or the solitary fingers can get hurt.

This has been an odd Winnipeg Fringe. Really odd. Ticket sales are down (visibly) despite amazing weather (not hot like the last two years - very little rain). Cell phones are going off during shows all over the place. Two days ago, Keir Cutler had to restart his show three times because the (probably sold-out) audience wouldn't settle down! CBC dropped its Fringe bloggers (I was one for the last two years, so I'm a little sad about this) and Uptown Magazine has hardly reviewed 20% of the shows, as far as I can tell.

Ah well, off to see Bat Boy the Musical. Because, why not?

AAA

Three days in the wilderness

Toronto... was stressful. I didn't think my hometown could do that to me. Suddenly, it seemed like the show wasn't reaching very many people. Reviewers were snarky - crowds were small - reactions were mixed... and whereas in Ottawa a lot of people had constructive things to say about the show (or much-needed kudos), in Toronto, there were a lot of evasions and blank stares and "Well...we'll talk about it"s. It didn't feel like the same show. How could we be sure of something in one city and then suddenly lose our OWN confidence in it in the next?

The good in this is that I looked at the show from a new perspective, and two things happened: I made changes to the script, and Aura and I began to reconfigure how we looked at the story and the characters. By the time Toronto Fringe was done, Old Growth had changed - and was going in a better direction. And then we were going West, and I'm sorry to say it but I was glad to get out of there. Deep breaths, come back in September. That's me talking to myself. We're going to be okay.

And anyway, two things happened toward the end of Toronto fest: 1) we started having great comments float in, from friends who saw the show even on days we were really down about it - and 2) we realised how utterly, totally bad that theatre (the Glen Morris) was for us. Apparently the acoustics swallowed nuance and made our show into a boomy tirade. When Alison came down to Toronto for the final shows, she was insistent that the hall itself was the reason behind some of our problems.

Anyway. Now, after three days of driving, we're in Winnipeg. Actually, we got here on Tuesday evening, and according to tradition we checked in at Fringe central and schmoozed with performers before even going to our THREE billets. Yes, we're billeting separately. And yes, Alison Williams is here, as director and as technician, wrangling the wild flocks of theatre lights at lucky Venue Thirteen (Ragpickers). Alison's staying with the family she was with last year - an elderly matron, a gaggle of pets, and random family members in and out. Aura's staying with my amazing billets from last year, way out Portage Ave. And I'm staying with a fellow Fringe performer down in Corydon - little Italy! I haven't hit the gelato yet, but oh, I will.

Anyway. I guess I feel great about this place. I always do. Winnipeg is the oasis after the wilderness. Or something. I think you have to drive here from Toronto to understand it. It takes THREE DAYS, all but one and a half hours of which are in Ontario. We stayed with my old geography teacher near Iron Bridge, and with a composer colleague (of mine AND Aura's) in Thunder Bay. And then, we're here. We've had three shows. Last night was the best one of the tour (we're still waiting on the pronouncements of whatever reviewers were there). It...sang. And today - today was a matinee. And now, I'm going to go see Steve Larkin the performance poet play in a band. And then?

Lator.

Alright, who here is *for* the continuation of life on earth. Can we have a show of hands, please?

Oh... mah.......Gord......

We're in Toronto - we opened yesterday afternoovening (5pm) and all my effort has been focussed on that, and not getting terribly sick. I've been exhausted, so illness wasn't surprising. Every night in Ottawa was a late one - Ottawa was fun, if not very profitable (Ottawans, bless their hearts, don't seem to Fringe in the rain, whereas Winnipeggers and Edmontonians will see the shows their star critics tell them to see, no matter what - and believe me, I've experienced quite the temperature swing and wacky stormage between those two festivals these past few summers!) Then the next day (Monday) we went to Wakefield Quebec, just for the day, to perform one show in their new little "Piggyback" Fringe festival. Which was very well run! We sold out! Okay, it was 35 seats, but *still*. Wakefield is gorgeous, but of course it rained. Like Ottawa. Every day.

An odd thing happened there - or was said to have happened. Near the end of Old Growth, my character goes a bit (or a lot) over the edge of despair, and gets pretty down and dirty accusatory against the human species (don't worry, he manages to pull back with Aura's help). Well, according to one of the festival organizers, some of the Wakefielders were contemplating voicing their protests during this section. Like "But we *do* agree with what you are saying! Don't accuse us! Which is interesting. I have wondered how self-professed ecophiles would take the show (most realise I'm really speaking to someone larger i.e. all of us and someone smaller i.e. myself). But the question, which only occured to me the next day, is - do I need to poll my audience before every show to determine how to pitch the ending? And the answer of course, is - not so much at all, really.

I already have to get ready for another show in Toronto. 5 days in a row! I'll write more later.

Tchuss!

the head of the chicken

It's day five - or is it six? - of the Ottawa Fringe, and I must say, I feel a little bit like Joe Mal (Rachelle Elie's clown in her Fringe show JOE: The Perfect Man) when he collapses in a middle of a Macbeth audition, cowering from the imagined ghost of a chicken that he once accidentally killed. I believe that I feel a similar mix of adrenaline, fear, anticipation, and confusion about the things that my mind throws at me. And oddly, though I should say I feel also like a chicken with its head cut off - I think I feel like the head, watching my body run around blindly from Fringe show to Fringe show and perhaps just thinking "...chill."

I've seen some farmtastic shows: "Boat Load" (from Jayson McDonald of "Giant Invisible Robot" fame), "Circumference" by Amy Salloway, new shows from TJ Dawe, Keir Cutler and Gemma Wilcox, and a moving monologue about mother-son relationships ("The Girl in the Picture Tries to Hang Up the Phone") from writer-performer Hume Baugh. And I've spent the last bunch of nights chatting with performers in the beer tent - which might sound to an outsider like weird recursive conversations of Fringe talking to Fringe about Fringe - but is really balm for the soul. I've missed these people. The great thing about being a touring Fringe artist is that these people - even the Fringe-famous ones above - are my friends.

But I'm TIRED. I keep talking to Amy Salloway for far too long. We knew this would happen. There is just so much to talk about. Last night I declined to walk her the two blocks home to her billet's house, hoping to avoid the three-hour conversation that neither of us ever plan to have. Alison Williams (my director) walked her instead. And they talked for three hours.

As for "Old Growth" - we've had three shows, we've had some reviews... and now we are in the middle of a four-day-off period. Which is great. We're taking out a few minutes of text so that the show can breathe more - and I suspect this will work very well, and allow the show to reach more people.

Back to publicity for me! And a couple of hours of rehearsal - and going to shows - and talk and talk and talk...

OT and TO

We're four minutes over. No matter what. I shouldn't say that. But look, we were at 69, so we tightened - then we were at 65. Better. So we cut a 4-minute chunk of text. And then we were at 64. So we tightened. And then we were at 64.

Today, we tightened. Where will we be tomorrow? Will you still need me, will you still feed me?

The answer is, I don't care when I'm 64, because we should be 58, because, officially, Old Growth is 60.

These things matter. Oh, they matter! Nick, Aura's quite wonderfully supportive boyfriend who has already attended THREE runs of Old Growth (the last one while absolutely sopping wet), initially wondered whether actors shouldn't just be allowed to "feel it". Why should the Fringe restrain it-feeling?

But they do. Ottawa's probably the best place to start a show with a strange propensity to be slightly overtime. But in Toronto... the first time, it's a warning. The second time - the lights come up at precisely 60 minutes (or whatever your scheduled time is), and that's IT. The third time... oh, you don't want to know. But it's even more graphic than the actual real final four minutes of Old Growth. In Calgary, they feed you to the mountain lions - in Vancouver, to the residents of Port Moody.

And the truth is: Old Growth with the last 4 minutes chopped off is NOT a show you'd want to see. There would be no comedown from the het up. You'd actually die.

So we'd better get it right.

Oh, lots of new stuff up on the www.AlexEddington.com Old Growth pages. CHECK'TOUT!

mired

I'm completely covered in stuff. Little itty bitty props. I have no idea how many. Thousands.

I've been practicing the magic for Old Growth. There's not *that* much, really, the dense parts are only in a few of the "Envirologues", and they last only a couple of minutes each. But it's so dense - and so messy.

That's the aesthetic we want: pollution. By the end of the show, the front of our circular ground cloth (the foundation and bulk of our "set") is completely covered in gum, coins, receipt-confetti, wee yellow sponge balls, and the remains of an exploded box. And almost all of it comes out of ME and my costume!

Whereas last year's The Fugue Code was about Alex-management (where to put the leg when and what-a-ta do with the voice and how to juggle 11 roles) and crazy enough, Old Growth is about pocket management. And fine motor skills. And a constant doublethink. This is what it looks like I'm doing, but this is what I'm doing.

Alison and I blocked out what the "Envirologue" magic should *look* like... and now, with the aid of the largest mirror I have ever been reflected in outside of Versailles, I'm workin' the deets. How to what the what, and when. Whither the gum, whence the coin.

It's a lot of work. But I promise sparkle, when we open in a week-and-a-day-from-tomorrow.

Tomorrow! It's our first preview, for a stately audience of four. Then Sunday is the second one, then Wednesday we tech...and Thursday we open. And, if memory serves me, the weight lifts basically instantly.

No. Not until I know I can set all the wee props in our 15-minute preshow setup!

'till soonish

Alex

gehearsals and gublicity

We have just now come to the end of week FOUR of rehearsals, if you can believe that, and Old Growth opens in just under two weeks at the Ottawa Fringe. And as of yesterday, I feel like we have a show. As of the day before yesterday, we only had a stumble-through where we didn't quite know our lines, nor why we were saying them. Things change quickly. In just two evening sessions (last tonight and tonight), Aura and I sorted out ALL the music for the show.

It's the weirdest thing. By the way, my new hobby is going to be using common colourful expressions out of context. I especially look forward to saying "what are the odds!?", for instance, when someone mentions that they are from North Bay - or Spokane - regardless of whether I or anyone else present is from that place.

It's the weirdest thing. Back in Novemeber I wrote a few very short pieces for flute that fall into a collection called "Branchings". None of them contain more than 99 notes. So the fast ones are over in a flash. It was an exercise, I wanted to see if I could write "music that sounds like a tree". And did so in whatever way seemed appropriate in November, with the aid of some computery randomyness, because randomness sounds "natural" to me. I thought, hey, spruce trees are symmetrical and recursive in structure, so I'll write some music like that. Whatever it is. Like all mappings from the visual to the aural or whatever, it's actually totally arbitrary. It was an arbitrary little experiment.

But it works. It's spooky - it works NOW. I like the pieces on their own, but when we put them with the play... it's spooky. Aura keeps whippin' 'em out. We come to a part of the script where we want music, and I say, hey, I think it should be something that feels a bit like this, and suddenly a "Branching" is up on the stand. We're using all but one of them. And they fit. Like, to the word. It's really quite magnificent.

And I like acting with live music. It feels like wearing a mask - I can really give myself to it, I can really sparkle because I'm safe - I'm not alone up there.

So my life is busy. We rehearse weekdays 10-2, and then I've been doing either magic or music rehearsal in the evenings. Tomorrow is magic all day, Sunday is the day we personalize our costumes and props with the aid of paint and putty and wax and sewing. And on Wednesday, we have our first preview. And every time I come home, I send out publicity emails. Every, every time. The other night I had that nightmare where I wake up and wonder if I even have a show to advertise. There is a pile of five books on my dresser that I haven't even cracked.

I am keeping tabs on the ducklings at Dows Lake, though. They're independent. They know where mama is, but some of them are happy to be even 15 away on the grass. I wish I had that kind of self-confidence at age Three Weeks. I aspire to be a duckling. It's my calling.

Bed, or publicity? ...

wax your cats, folks

And before I forget, there is beginning to be actually important stuff on my website regarding "Old Growth".

Like, a press release.

And a tour schedule, with show deets and ticket info as available.

And don't forget the ACKYFESTO!!

!

kicking the kicker in the shin's shins

It's been over a month! And where have I been? "Young man!" It depends what level of detail you want. I could say I've been to the bagel shop on St. Urbain a whole bunch of times before going to my favourite Korean restaurant near Christie Station, only to end up commuting daily to Elgin and Gladstone... or I could say I've been to the train (which nearly derailed I swear to Gord), followed by the Composer's Kitchen, followed by the train (a smoother ride), followed by the parental basement followed by driving followed by Jack Purcell Community Centre followed by Sir John A's house followed by this computer...or I could say Toronto Montreal Toronto Ottawa Kingston Ottawa (and shortly Toronto) ... or I could simply say I've been alive and kicking, and sometimes being kicked.

This show feels like that, sometimes. I will only say this.

We're two weeks into rehearsals - and of course we've had to change our plans many times. Aura needed more time off after her Master's degree than she expected (which climaxed with a flute recital that was the day before I came up to begin the process)... and there's a lot of material to get through - though less all the time, as I chop and cut and let flutter many beautiful and cloying bits of overwriting to the floor. We need time for, like, a 2-minute piece of music at the end, to bring us and our crowd down from the high-lows to a nice gentle centre. Then we'll all be fine. Yes.

It is an intense show. I will not say otherwise...

And there is a lot of work in front of us. This week, we begin some extra sessions beside the usual 4-hour rehearsal. Line sessions for Aura and I. Music sessions for Aura and I. Magic sessions for Alison and I. And some us time between me and a beagle named Jake.

I am promising myself that if I let my bloggos be brief, that I'll actually write some. Is that a promise? More like a vague supposition.

To coin tricks, and on to bed!

Oh, PS, one of my friends and pairs of eyes pointed out that I'm using the word "recursion" incorrectly in the show. I have decided that I don't care. Faugh upon faugh upon faugh.

Teh beginning of the edn

It's been a long time. It's been a L O N G time! (that looks like "alongtime"). And that after I promised me, you, everyone else that I would blog regularly. Every time I write an entry, it is apparently not often enough to warrant an "every time" kind of memory - because it always seems to be sitting at six entries. Six!

I hope everyone's just waiting to spring on this entry. The strange thing about blogging is that people care, more than I expect them to - sometimes a whole lot. People read lots of blogs. I already spend more time on the internet than I want to, and I don't visit *anything* much of note except Homestarrunner.com. But some people do. They phish for a living or for a hobby. Some of my own friends do this. And the strangest of strangers. When I search for my own name (an enlightening and frequent passtime) I've found pieces of my "The Fugue Code" blog on other people's blogs. Somewhere out there is an unofficial fan page for this blog, I'm sure of it, with candid photos of my blog blogging, and the latest Alex's blog updates. Blog to star in blog! Blog fans all bloggy about The Blog!

So why the delay? I have fans, even if some of them are meta-weird. And I really enjoy the act of blogging - it's good end-of-day therapy, it's a great venue to get my thoughts out without needing to worry about ever being able to control copyright on them. I guess it's because I can't hear. Off and on. I've had a hot-cold with a sinus infection since the first half of March. Six weeks! Nothing much really happens except my ears close up in the evening and I feel adrift, a veil between me and the universe. And it doesn't make me want to do much. The evening is supposed to be my business time: webby work, bloggy blorg, great big jorbs that are supposed to help me unwind from writing mode. Instead, my ears fuzz over, my brain feels fat and insecure, my mind slows to the repetition of a single word, my typing is reduced to msuh, and I watch Strong Bad win "the mile" over and over again...

Also, I'm just not there yet. Not feeling it. Just like, I WILL share the enormous repertoire of walk-around magic that I'm working up for "Old Growth" on-the-Fringe-grounds publicity, it's just, I've gotta write, all I wanna do is write!

And oh, I'm writing! I'm on what I suspect is the draft-of-drafts - the last go-through for structure, tone, character arc, flow, image, consistency etc. before I focus my blorggy eyes on one thing and one thing's one thing only: cutting 60 pages into 35. I've done it before. WOOL was a stately 100 before it became 26. The Fugue Code was sumpin' similar. The Bible is at least a frumptillion pages, but they're pretty thin. Just like that - see- the ears plugging, the brain stares in the mirror, the mind fuzzing, fuzzing, fuzzing, and "Ow, hot soup is on my eye!" Teh fin is meh commencement

Shameless self promotion

Two troubled young musicians travel to the Queen Charlotte Islands to perform for a murdered spruce tree – and to be transformed.

Blending fact and fiction, music, magic, and myth, Acky-Made (The Fugue Code) weaves a unique story about environmental responsibility.

“Brilliantly theatrical...****”
- Eye Weekly

“A must-see...superb...****”
- Edmonton Journal

----------------------------------------

Yes - publicity is already starting to go out. I've got schedules for Ottawa and Calgary festivals and they're quite good! Things are happening.

By the way, that design on the hand is an early attempt at a SHOW LOGO!

One or two

I've got a sinus infection. It's being dealt with. Antibiotics are expensive. I'm sort of half-sick right now: I had a day that was alternately productive and delusional, with bouts of me telling fever-created apparitions to screw off. When I'm feverish I don't want anyone anywhere near me, even if that anyone is imaginary.

It's been a scattered while. I've been writing a bassoon and piano piece for a friend, which has been hard to engage with until recently because so much of my mind is on the Old Growth script. [WARNING, music geek talk ahead:] My musical mind is still fixated on a really simple number series (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 basically) that I keep using to make rhythms and pitch series in *everything*. I started thinking about that stuff when I was writing little flute pieces for Aura in the fall, trying to get a feel for what the Old Growthmusic might sound like. How do I write music that sounds like a tree? I got fixated on how to put the two main principles of spruce tree structure (symmetry and recursion) into music in a way that was audible and sounded good. 20 tiny flute pieces and an orchestral overture, I've still got the same melodic and harmonic material bouncing around my head. Turns out when you start on a note and then go up (or down) by intervals of 1 semitone, then 2, then 3 and so on, the result 1) is bluesy, 2) implies some neat and chord progressions, and 3) has the same bleedin harmonic progression that I've put in every piece I've written since I was 20 (two chords alternating, neapolitan minor to tonic major (or I- to flatI+, if you will) (i.e. C#- to C+)). Love it! So does John Adams.

So the bassoon piece suffered/benefitted from the distraction of a MAJOR script in major development, and the bouncing around of earworms. I was actually going to make the piece abour earworms but when I worked on that idea my earworms got way worse.

I'm putting together a cohesive draft of the script! I'm calling it Draft Two, because that makes me feel better. Draft One was in pieces, Draft Two is a putting together of pieces while editing them. The result is going to be a two-hour show, and then the cutting begins. It has a LOT of sections, which is cool, I like the structure, but man, some of them better overlap or something. But it's going well - writing falls out of me, I feel very confident writing in my characters' voices. Soon I'm going to send it out to a crack team of everypersons and theatre gurus alike, whose pairs of eyes will scan for believability and whose guts will react. One of them will hopefully be T.J. Dawe. He still owes me some noseflutes.