Despite being on the water for four frustrating days, our time in Duluth was short and to the point. As a result of the extended time on the water, we had less time to turn around and deliver the boat back to Thunder Bay, and so we needed to keep celebrations short, resupply quickly, and get back on the water.
But our first priority was getting ashore; we were thoroughly annoyed with being on the water, and no one hesitated to help dock the boat and tidy up. We celebrated (on shore) for a short bit with our complimentary bottle of rum, but most of the crew quickly disappeared with sorely-missed significant others, leaving Terry and I alone to digest what was left of our four-day agony. We did this with a couple of other sailors – two solo racers who could relate to our pain, one of them being last edition’s winner and this edition’s organizer. We didn’t sleep that night, but rather sat together under a muted but shared sense of satisfaction, growing content with the hand dealt to us.
Breakfast, some work, reprovisioning, and then back on the water mid-afternoon, facing a 30-hour delivery north-east to Thunder Bay.
Here is where the sum of my experiences began to condense. After we cleared the Duluth lift-bridge, I set the boat up for a spinnaker-hoist. Wind was medium strength out of the south – perfect. I set the pole, hoisted, and trimmed – all while driving. I was solo sailing a 33-foot race boat, doing it comfortably, and well.
I hadn’t solo sailed since I was 19, and that was on my Dad’s C&C 29 – it had a furling jib, a tiny main, and didn’t have a spinnaker that I can recall. An X 3/4-ton is a completely – entirely – different sort of creature; and enormous main, certainly no furling gear, a chute, and no autopilot. But while the details are different, more complicated, the principles remain the same.
So, for what ended up being a generally unpleasant (not to mention a gluttonous use of time, and a burden on my wife and family), I had matured as a person in ways that I did not expect. It’s not what I expected, but I should not be surprised. Time at anything makes you better, and not just better at that thing but usually a better person.
Am I suggesting that ‘doing things’ makes you more moral? It’s not what I intended to say, but Aristotle (for one) would agree with it. Part of being ethical is knowing what choices to make in a given situation for the best possible outcome. To do so requires a wisdom that can only be developed by experience of the world and, by extension, experience of yourself. Do things, and you will learn about yourself as well as how the world works. Making the right choice is simply a matter of bringing that experience and knowledge to bear on the problem at hand.
That was an aside, but I think still speaks to what I got out of the trip; it was difficult, often dangerous, lacking in glory or even happy memory, and yet I gained more from it than any previous trip.
The Trans-Superior Race is held every two years. Beginning at Gros Cap light just outside Sault Ste. Marie. Ontario, and ending 338 nautical miles west at the suspension bridge in Duluth, Minnesota, it is the longest fresh-water race in the world. It usually takes about three days to complete; obviously faster if you’re a bigger boat, and slower if you’re smaller. The only rule on the course is to keep Copper Harbour light to port.
But it’s never a simple race. Lake Superior is notoriously tempermental mostly due to its chilly nature (it’s temperature changes only by one degree Fahrenheit between winter and summer), which tends to affect weather patterns in ‘interesting’ ways. The rhum line is, as a matter of course, identical to the inbound and outbound shipping lanes, and those ships are very big and very quiet, and very fast; I’ve been startled on a few occasions even in reasonably clear weather. Three days isn’t particularly long, but it’s certainly long enough for most, and sailors are more often relieved to finish rather than excited. To do well in the race requires some skill, a lot of concentration, and equal parts good luck for you and bad luck for your competitors.
Locking Through.
I’ve done the race three times now, and finished reasonably well the first two. In fact, we won our division in 2007. Going into this edition we had a reputation to defend, but we also had a new competitor with the same rating as ours: True North, a custom C&C 37 built especially for the Canada Cup race quite some time ago, possibly the mid-1970’s. I’m not quite sure. True North is long, stout, and heavy, with a masthead rig – better suited to heavy weather off the wind. Straight Jacket is shorter, much taller, and much lighter, with a fractional rig – better suited to light weather on the beat. Two very different boats with exactly the same rating in a race that could throw every possible condition at you. Our collected forecasts were calling for a mostly light and variable race – our advantage.
Or so we thought. The race began with heavy air on the stern – more wind than forecasted. True North with its masthead hoist and four extra feet of waterline confidently walked away from us. Granted, we were fast, but we simply could not overcome the physical limitations of a shorter waterline and a vastly smaller spinnaker in those conditions. For eight hours those conditions continued, and then it got worse – dense fog and thunderstorms.
We had kept a more northerly course after Whitefish, taking us above rhum line in favor of a slightly faster angle of sail. As a result, when the thunderstorms ran through the fleet, we only caught their fading power. The boats south of us, including True North, were able to benefit from the full force of the wind coming down from those systems, adding even more miles to their lead in addition to being closer to the rhum line.
Thunderstorms and fog are a poisonous mix. Navigating in the fog is difficult at best, forcing you to concentrate on the instruments, robbing you of the usual sensations that assure you of your course. You may be driving straight, but your senses tell you that you’re turning. You check the compass again – it says you’re going straight, but doubt creeps in. You force yourself to trust the instruments. You look up to check your trim, you begin to luff, you look down at the compass to find that you’ve strayed 15 degrees off course. Repeat for four hours. The lightning doesn’t help. The system could be miles away, but the lightning travels farther and envelopes you in the fog, the light being extended among the water molecules all around. Each flash is like someone turning on a 100-watt bulb for a second, leaving you effectively blind in the dark again. And then again, and then again. Throw in the constant threat of tankers running up your stern, and you’ve got the makings for a stressful night.
At around 6am, the wind began to increase again, quickly. When it hit 20 knots and was showing no sign of slowing down, we made the decision to douse the chute, which was the correct decision – by the time we released the halyard, the wind was up to 25 knots. By the time we had the chute on board, it was at 30. Then some mayhem began. All hands came up, and we reefed the main. The wind didn’t abate, and we lost our course a number of times even with the skipper at the helm. This passing system was throwing all manner of havoc at us, but was managed well enough, until the system passed and things calmed down. Then we made our own havoc.
During the cleanup, the spinnaker halyard got loose and flew up, getting tangled in the genoa halyard that was holding up our radar reflector. In trying to separate them, someone gave a little too much tug and tore the reflector apart, but the spinnaker halyard stayed tangled. I then attempted to pull the spinnaker halyard down by gently pulling the genoa halyard down, hoping to bring the tangle down with it where I could separate it. I pulled slowly, bringing genoa halyard down to me, but the tangle did not move. I pulled some more, and then realized that my hand was resting on the mast – on the spinnaker halyard where it goes up, preventing it from coming down. I let go, pulled a little more, and then heard a ‘thwip’ sound on the mast. I immediately realized what I had done – I had pulled the genoa halyard clean through the clutch and turning blocks, right into the mast. I swore, a lot. We were bare-headed, with one halyard stuck up near the second spreader and another inside the mast. We had one halyard left, and we needed it to go up and fix my mistakes. I felt like the biggest fool on the lake.
So, for the next hour-and-a-half, I dangled around, 60 feet in the air, banging around in residual waves, rescuing the spinnaker halyard and then refeeding the genoa halyard. It took several attempts, but eventually we sorted it out and continued on our way.
Three hours later, the same genoa halyard snapped during a head-sail change. Fortunately, it snapped about two feet from the shackle, so were able to re-tie it without loosing much length and refeed it more quickly having learned from our mistakes made a few hours earlier. Then a few hours after that, the other spinnaker halyard snapped, loosing its cover at the clutch. That one we could not repair.
The fog – thick as paint – stayed with us until Tuesday. It would give us some visibility from time to time, sometimes as much as half a mile, but then it would quickly quit its teasing and wrap us back up again, so thick we could barely see the top of the mast. The wind never did get light like the forecast predicted, and our course continued to trend north as the favored tack pushed us farther away from the rhum line.
The forecast began to call for light to medium north winds in western Lake Superior, and our hopes began to rise. We knew that True North had gotten away from us, but we were in terrific position to reap the greatest benefit of those winds, and we began to talk excitedly of a long spinnaker run into Duluth, perhaps even catching True North.
The forecast proved false. But it did get light; too light. By Monday night, it got so light we stopped and lost control of the boat. Our only consolation was the hope that the rest of the fleet was subject to the same conditions.
Good Sailing
Eventually, by early Tuesday morning, the wind returned afresh, and we began to make very good speed on flat water, directly toward the finish. The fog disappeared. For the first time since the start, we saw blue sky and sun. Our ETA into Duluth continually improved. We figured that True North very likely was untouchable at this point, but the other boats were still in play. We could come away with a second-place finish. So we cruised along, feeling better but still unsure, until 5pm.
Three hours from the finish, the wind shut completely off. We stood upright, and as if someone pushed a brake pedal we went from 6.5 knots to zero. Again. We would move a bit here and there, but we could not link puffs or lines, and we watched in horror as boats passed us assuredly to the east. It so happened that these following boats saw us stop, so they tacked back out, stayed in some wind and scooped right by us. It took us nearly ten more hours to finish, at 2:52am, in third place, exactly two hours out of second place, 3 days and 12 hours after starting.
True North had finished 14 hours earlier.
We left Houghton in the early afternoon of August 3rd, the day after finishing the International. The intention was to deliver through the evening and night to Munising, on Lake Superior’s south shore, then overnight again to Whitefish Point for a break, then continuing on to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, arriving Wednesday evening or Thursday morning. And that’s pretty much how it worked out. No surprises, no difficult weather. In fact, the nights were clear, and when there was wind it came from our stern, pushing us along and keeping us rather comfortable.
Coasting.
The point of the over-night deliveries was to allow three of our crew who had never done the Trans-Superior race to acclimatize to night sailing. Night sailing is a different sort of creature in that it requires a lot more ‘feel’ as well as reliance on instruments to keep to your targets, whether course or speed. As a result, you need to be far more careful and attentive if you wish to make the most of night sailing. Like with light wind, long-distance races are often won or lost at night, so anything we could do to prepare our crew for it, the better.
I had brought along my laptop in a waterproof/dustproof/crushproof hardcase (which earned it’s keep during the International), so I managed to tick a number of things off of my work list. The prevalence of internet cafes – even in the veritable ghost town of Munising, where ‘Credit Consultation’ ranks as one the town’s top employments – were extremely helpful, but tethering my phone would have been more useful, I think. Either way, the trip was not just relaxing, but actually productive.
Pictured Rocks, Munising
The delivery up to Whitefish Point was a quiet, quick, and educational run. Building weather on the stern made for some good surfing and respectable speeds under the mainsail only, allowing one of our rookie crew to drive the waves and hopefully develop his sense of their motion, mostly to help him walk on deck without hurting himself or the boat and – ideally – prevent further sickness. Every one gets sick, they say, and the chances worsen if you’re tired, hungry, and cold. But I have a theory that the more you ‘understand’ waves – and therefore are able to anticipate their movement – the less likely you are to get sick. My theory is rooted in the completely unsupported supposition that sea-sickness often results from a person’s often-subconscious attempt to maintain or regain control of a seemingly chaotic and uncontrolled movement. Waves aren’t chaotic, and furthermore a person can’t possibly counteract their movement to regain balance. The only solution is to anticipate and ‘roll with it’, or as I like to say, “Think with your feet, not your head”. I have no way to prove this theory, but I like to think that the crew member’s lack of sickness for the rest of the trip may have been attributable to a night of surfing.
We rounded Whitefish at about 07:00 on the Wednesday, so we docked there and had a quick breakfast before hiking up to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum. Not an encouraging place to visit a few days before racing across the lake along the shipping lanes. Still, it was neat to see, and was a welcome little break. We set off again at around noon, and locked through at Sault Ste. Marie at about 17:00. Another crossing done, and another one to come.
I have just recently returned from something of a self-broadening event: roughly 800 nautical miles of traversing Lake Superior, first one way, then another, then yet one more. It sounds lovely, sailing for two weeks with friends, but ‘lovely’ is not a word that I can honestly apply to this series of trips, of experiences. No, but it was enjoyable in a more substantial way, in a way that has – I think – matured me and improved me. What’s more, I’ve done this trip – this very same track – many times before, but this year was very different.
The first stretch was a race called the International, a 98-mile sprint from Thunder Bay, north of Isle Royale, to Houghton, Michigan. It was the fastest race on record, with the winning boat crossing the line in a mere 11 hours. Our boat, Straight Jacket, crossed in 14. That ‘good’ came with some equally impressive ‘bad’: gale force winds for the duration of the race (some participants recorded higher speeds, in excess of 40 knots), and the 60-mile stretch from Isle Royale to Houghton was a beat upwind in 15-20 foot waves, some of them stacked on each-other. Having been confined in my sailing to the Great Lakes, I personally have never sailed up waves before. Straight Jacket took on some 1.5 feet of water, and the sheer force of water crashing over the boat was enough to lift and move 250lb men with ease – and even knocked our skipper off the helm twice. We broke our vang car, and sheer luck held the boom in place. Three of our six-man crew became sea-sick early on (two violently so), and so the bulk of the race was done by the remaining three, with the skipper and myself trading shifts at the helm. We didn’t eat, drink, or sleep. The main leech developed a hole and the #3 job broke two battens from the incessant flogging. I’ve never seen or felt anything like it – I’ve seen those winds and those waves on Lake Superior a dozen times before, but not so relentlessly and so unfavorable to our course. Some veterans of the lake rank those conditions among the worst they’ve experienced anywhere – lake or ocean – in over 30 years.
Solid Ground.
What is usually a day of raucous celebration partly fueled by free beer from the local brewery, was a day of quiet recovery, of drying out and licking wounds. Nobody said much. Nobody drank much. There was a lot of sleeping and sorting. Straight Jacket – like most of the boats – was drenched. We spent most of our time bailing and mopping, laying our belongings out in the sun to dry (thank God for that), and thinking about the next stage of the trip – a 260-mile delivery to Sault Ste Marie.
Putting the pieces back together.
The race has left its mark on the fleet, on the boat, and on me – but not in a bad way. I was describing the race to some friends later on, and said, “I’ve done nothing but trash the race and it all sounds so horrible, but it’s actually a wonderful thing; this is the kind of experience that binds people together, creates stories, and we can all look at each-other with the knowledge that we pushed through and made it.” What it affirmed for me personally is my comfort on boats, my ability to simply ‘roll with it’ – the worst it got for me were some cold wet feet, due to not having any rubber boots with me. I felt confident, and I would do it again.
'Bowl', c. 1999. Dan McIvor.
I spend a lot of time reading design magazines, books, and blogs; graphic design, industrial design, architecture, interaction design – all manner of producing things and places of style, of expression, and for use by people. It’s a very convenient confluence of professional, academic, and personal interest – I’m a very lucky person because I enjoy it a lot.
But as a complaint (what?), it seems that any designers (but not all, and seemingly less all the time) spend a lot of time creating things without any regard for meaning beyond the object’s significance within the particular design field’s traditions. I know, I know. I talk about ‘meaning’ a lot, but it’s what seems to matter to me these days.
For instance, van der Rohe’s Barcelona Chair is judged not by its ‘physical definitions’ – the various dimensions, ornaments, characteristics, and materials that define it as part of a regionally-specific culture, but rather how it fit within/reacted to the traditions of contemporary, urban furniture design. So, yes, dimensions, ornaments (or lack thereof), characteristics and materials all figure very importantly, but not at all as a function of some larger, deeper regional culture. There is no ‘place’ where this chair makes sense or has any real meaning. It is an object, arguably ‘outside’ any context. (I say ‘arguably’ because the chair was indeed conceived as a part of a larger showcase of early 20th century German design and industrial prowess, but yet its neutral form and function has since made it an ‘international’ object. Does that mean it no longer has any meaning?)
Having written that, I’m immediately struck by/reminded of two things: 1. the chair indeed has a meaningful, nameable context – its ’specific culture’ is that very real culture and society of the particular design field, and then; 2. design cultures have no ‘place’ themselves but rather is a transcendent community of shared ideals, characteristics, and traditions. When I say transcendent, I mean the design cultures exist ‘above’ or ‘outside’ the physical boundaries that have typically defined a society or culture. As such, design culture is a glowing example of McLuhan’s concept of ‘global village’, made immaterial and transcendent by its lack of physical place.
I wonder if there is a danger in removing or ignoring the physical definitions from the objects around us. I find that I’m sensitive to how physical connections to people and places add layers of substance to an object or space (read my previous post), and how those layers can alter how we perceive the ’style’, interpret the ‘expression’, and prefer the ‘use’ of a thing or space.
Consider the bowl up there. I can practically ‘list’ the layers on that thing: 1. made by hand; 2. by my wife’s great-uncle, the late Dan McIvor; 3. who is a Member of the Order of Canada and in Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame for inventing the modern water-bomber by retrofitting retired Martin Mars aircraft (among other things — I consider this to be a separate layer beyond the simple fact of familial relation); 4. made for our wedding, ; 5. made from wood from his backyard (don’t ask me what it is) in Kelowna, British Columbia. Irrespective of these layers and considering it as a ‘transcendent’ object, the bowl is merely okay – it has a sort of pragmatic form to it, which is nice. But considering these layers, the bowl takes on all kinds of depth that attracts me to it and makes it ‘present’ to me – I use it with intention because it was made with intention. I use it knowing where it came from and why. Even if I had a Marc Newson designed bowl, I would still prefer to use McIvor’s bowl.
It seems to me that there is always an opportunity for creating objects that sit somewhere within the threshold between the ‘transcendent’ and the ‘present’, between good style and regional meaning. Not that this doesn’t happen – in fact, it would be accurate to say that most good architecture and some graphic design works within this threshold. But from what I can tell, the same couldn’t be said of industrial design (objects usually designed for univeral function and appeal) and interaction design (interfaces usually designed for universal function and appeal).
I spend my idle moments thinking about this in relation to public objects and spaces here in Thunder Bay. It’s idle thought, so nothing useful has taken root. It usually happens when I’m driving through the intercity area, between Fort William and Port Arthur where the malls and box stores are. These are spaces that are intentionally devoid of any specific character – except as uniform store-fronts, as expendable and forgettable as their contents. I also see the need for this design threshold locally when I look at locally produced graphic design, which defers to some placeless ideal – a set of characteristics developed somewhere else. Technically, the bigger offices do a good job, but that’s where it ends. I think soon I’ll do a post on the City of Thunder Bay’s new online livery, which will nicely illustrate my point. (Don’t get me started on local web design, which doesn’t appeal to or satisfy anything.)
However, the little barrier I constantly bang into when considering this threshold in regional terms is this: how does a regional style emerge? I would like to be able to put it together myself, or at least my ‘interpretation’ of what it should be, but I feel that as soon as I start with such deliberate intention, it is no longer ‘genuine’ or ‘authentic’. That of course reminds me that the idea of ‘genuine’ or ‘authentic’ is something of a lie to begin with, a function of nostalgia and romance. I’m paralyzed, it seems, by this circle of ridiculous analysis.
I guess I’ll just have to design something, sideways.
We live in an old house. It was built in 1928 by my wife’s great-grandfather, a legendary United Church preacher and Member of Parliament who owned most of the block – on most of which he grew apples and roses. He gave the house to his eldest daughter – my wife’s grandmother – a few years later. He then did the same for the rest of his daughters, and all next door to each. And all of them lived in their homes until they died.
An entire family grew in this house. Five kids – two elegant daughters and three rowdy boys – were raised in this house during an era when houses were used – really lived in – and were not sterile display cases for social pretense. Bathtubs overflowed, windows were broken, hundreds of people were entertained… repairs were made, and made poorly. The house bears these scars and other signs of good use.
One one hand, the house is a gem. Its foundation and construction are so solid that only in the past few years has the house begun to shift. The roof contains twice the usual number of beams. All the doors on the second floor close as if they were hung this morning. The basement has never – in 80 years – flooded in a part of town renowned for it. Everything, from the basement concrete and oak flooring to the lathe-and-plaster walls and single-pane windows, is original and, in a blunt and utilitarian way, beautiful.
On the other hand, little concern was given over the years to the aesthetics of the surfaces of the house. A nail served as good a hook as anything else. Strand board was a perfectly reasonable interior finish for the back porch. 3/4″ plywood was a perfectly suitable material for all the cabinetry in the house. Because these were reasonable and suitable options, nothing was ever updated. The concept didn’t enter the mind. Except for maybe the paint, sometimes, but even that was obviously applied with only a mere hint of concern for its appearance (it’s not a family of drinkers, so I’m at a loss).
I’m not sure if I’m complaining or romanticizing. On one hand, I appreciate style (the house has none) and craftsmanship (the paint…and plywood!), but on the other I can appreciate the emphasis on real needs of function over the arguably false needs of aesthetics, particularly in something like a house that was built to raise a family, that was built to be used and not merely maintained for show. Who really ought to care that the hook isn’t wrought iron or brass? Who really should care that the kitchen cupboards aren’t custom cherry? They do what they’re supposed to do, and part of me wants to be content with that. The house serves as an object lesson in practical needs, a lesson that I feel maintains my perspective and keeps me from falling into a mind-set of needless fashion.
But to complicate matters, the marks of use I see everywhere are persistent, almost tyrannical reminders that this is not our house. We legally own it, we live here, but it is not ours. We’re like hermit crabs inhabiting an old shell, a shell that isn’t exactly suited to our needs or wants.
For one thing, there are too many walls; sharply dividing areas of the house 80 years ago was important. Kitchens were small on purpose, and closet space wasn’t a big factor. I guess getting in and out of the basement wasn’t something that needed to be quick and easy. And, of course, energy efficiency wasn’t a consideration of any kind during the age of coal heating when this house was built.
But even beyond these material problems, there is the ever-present fact that the house has had an entire other family live their life here. Part of me likes the idea, especially since it was my wife’s father, aunts and uncles, grandmother and grandfather who all lived here and loved each-other here. But that reality looms. I feel like I am accountable to it, that what ever we do to the house, however we change to make it better suited to our family, it will always have been someone else’s house.
Understandably, I’m on the fence about what to do. I think about the future and where I want to be, what space I want to be in. From this utterly pragmatic perspective, this house doesn’t fit into that future. But the complicated but endearing history of the house carries a weight that holds me here; I think about my children growing and living in the same house that their great-great-grandfather built for his daughter – their great-grandmother – and where she raised her son – their grandfather – and had so many of the same lovely and stupid memories we are having every day.
If one thought could cancel out any of my own selfish needs, that could very well be it.
Excuse me…
It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Life’s been moving quickly these past, ahem, five months.
Let’s see. Well, most of my time has been spent working. Non-stop, it seems, but that’s really not true. Still, my life is dominated by the demands of eleven-seventeen and teaching at Lakehead.
eleven-seventeen is going well. Too well, actually. It seems that we are at that nasty cusp of having too much work for us to do, yet we don’t yet have money to hire someone to lend a hand. Or rent office space in order to house staff, and the various capital requirements that go along with that. The other bad part of being too busy is having client work fall through the spaces between other client work. Not a good situation. I’ve seen a few businesses burn up that way, and it’s never a good thing for your reputation.
Teaching has also been filling up my timetable more than expected. As usual, I overestimated by abilities and memory. The first few months were pretty crappy – poorly prepared, unorganized, unclear, sometimes outright confused… Yet… I managed to maintain more students than the other profs. (Yes, it IS a competition). Anyway, I got my head straightened and followed through. There are four classes left this year, and I’m feeling reasonably settled with how the year has progressed. No teacher-of-the-year, but I’ve still managed to earn the trust of the class, and that’s my biggest concern.
Work, teaching, kids… not much left for anything else. I’m looking forward to the sailing season now winter’s loosening its grip a little, but I’m not really sure how that schedule’s going to play out. It’s a Trans-Superior year, and the captain is keen on the entire Lake Superior Yachting Association offshore calendar. We’ll see. We will see…
There’s a lot more literature around about waste reduction these days. I suppose that’s a good thing. It’s uniformly framed as an environmental ethic, i.e. ‘being good to the earth’. I suppose that has to be made clear as well, that we should treat our surroundings with a little respect. For all of its good sense, it’s not quite hitting the mark, and I’m not sure why.
There’s a poster at Piers’ school that I find to be very funny: it’s a picture of Oscar the Grouch holding a bunch of trash over recycling bins, instructing us to ‘reduce our waste: love the earth.’ I wonder if the designers of this poster took into account that Oscar is a slob. That he loves and hoards garbage. I guess it makes a strong statement when some who is a slob and loves crap is making the effort to reduce how much of that crap ends up in landfills, but how are we to position ourselves in relation to Oscar and his request? Is it a ‘if Oscar can do it, so can you’ thing (likely), or is it a ‘people who recycle are slobs and crap-lovers’ thing (unlikely, but funny to me as an unintended interpretation). I guess I’m being unfair.
I am actually troubled by this poster in one way, and I think it’s an important one. Oscar is asking us to reduce our waste in order to help the earth, suggesting that the source of human-created environmental problems is the volume of our waste.
Now, while waste is certainly a problem in Canada (we’re among those countries that waste the most) and our per capita waste amounts are increasing: residential waste to landfills increased 6% between 2004 and 2006, while ‘diversion’ (composting and recycling) remained the same, waste is only a small part of the problem. It’s the consumption that produces the waste that is the real problem. If you reduce how much you consume – and what you consume – your waste will decrease as a matter of course.
Other things will happen too. You’ll have more disposable income – or, better, you’ll find that you won’t need as much money to ‘live’ so you’ll spend less time working. Suddenly you’ll find that you can spend that extra time relaxing, reading, taking courses, playing with family and friends, napping, meeting your neighbors, making your meals instead of thawing processed ones… really, the life expanding and altering options available when you’re not chasing dollars for false needs are endless.
You’ll be healthier too, since you’ll be eating less processed foods (maybe you’ll have a garden, since you’ll have more time), you’ll be more active (instead of sitting behind a desk or wheel all day long), and you’ll be less stressed (since work and money are the two biggest sources of personal stress and stress in relationships).
Perhaps more to the point, however, is the idea that if we don’t consume as much as we currently do, we’ll go much further in reducing our ‘footprint’ than if we simply reduce our waste. Current statistics indicate that the average American purchases 53 times more than the average Chinese. One American’s consumption of resources is equivalent to about 35 Indians. Or, over a lifetime, an average American will create 13 times as much environmental damage than the average Brazilian. These statistics are targeted at the American audience, but can very easily be transferred to Canadians. And they don’t reference cultures that use even less waste and manage to get by just fine, like many Peruvians, Ecuadorians, and just about all of south-east Asia.
We’re consuming more energy, food, and resources than ever before, and we’re doing and spending more to get that stuff to our appliances, plates, and shelves. We consume many times more water, and we consume many times more space than any other nation or culture. And if we’ve had something for a little while, we get bored and replace it.
This is all old hat, isn’t it? Everyone knows this stuff.
But what I’m suggesting here does not fit well (or, um, at all) with the dominant economic models that require persistent growth. Models of sustainable consumption have been developed, but require substantial modifications to what some researchers call our ‘physical structures’, ‘human structures’, and ‘organizational structures.’ Boy, that’ll have to be another post.
I think the awareness of the need is there. I think people are tired, tired of the ‘thinness’ of what we are doing (like how Bilbo felt “like butter that has been scraped over too much bread”), with all our hurrying and worrying and chasing after shiny, weightless things. Maybe with the current financial ‘uncertainty’, more folks will have the opportunity – the sharp ‘break’ that is required – to assess what’s what, choosing I hope to reduce everything.
Reading that last post in retrospect, it seems pretty damned obvious doesn’t it? Nothing really new down there. However, it should say something about how something so obvious actually isn’t obvious when considered from one’s normal point of view. It’s like combustion engines that run on fossil-fuels; it’s pretty damned obvious that they’re an environmental, political, social, and health hazard… but they’re so convenient and can be a terrific lot of fun.
I kind of chuckle at how silly I must sound, talking like ‘wow, there are real people in those real towns out there… who knew!’. It sound ridiculous, and it is in a way, but it is obviously still something routinely forgotten in socio-cultural centers such as Thunder Bay. So I guess it’s not silly at all… because it shouldn’t be.
At the Hymer’s Fall Fair the other weekend, I got another glimpse into a perphiral culture (actually, an intersection of many, slightly different peripheral cultures) that are withering away, and now are more taken as spectacle rather than something central to a community. Fairs such as this were celebrations of rural culture, culminations of a season’s hard work, expressions of regional cultural dialects in music, food, artifacts, competitions, etc.: all together it was the most important event in the area – a showcase of meaning.
Not really anymore. Some of what I described does remain, but even in the last fifteen years I’ve noticed a shift toward nostalgia and away from substance. Trades and skills that were once critical to the very fabic of rural culture are now quaint, ranking more as a spectacle or novelty. Rural producers are fighting for booth-space against trinket-selling shysters from the city. I suppose (not having the demographic numbers in front of me) that this shift is a result of increasing interest in Hymer’s Fair from urban Thunder Bay residents, and also - perhaps - a result of some urban Thunder Bay-ites’ recognition of their own cultural bankruptcy.
In the last two years, however, another shift has occurred. The fair has attracted a new crowd – the urban, slow-food, local producer crowd – the farmer’s market crowd – and along with it an emphasis on alternative energy supply, local artisans (knife-makers, sculptors, artists), and the like. This shift comes with its own contradictions, but I find it kind of funny; urban types pride themselves on being trend-leaders and progressives, and, yet, here we are at a rural fair – an hour out of town in the heart of our regional farmland - and the rural folks are revealed to be actually leading awareness and change.
And why not? After all, farmers and rural residents tend to have a better grasp on their surroundings – seeing as how they rely on their surroundings and are ‘held accountable’ by it – and subsequently are more attuned to the problems related to consumption and waste. Just one more reason why rural perspectives needs protection in an increasingly urbanized world.
Driving back the four hours back to Thunder Bay from Blue Lake Provincial Park last night, I was slightly taken aback by what, a week ago, would have been utterly normal. It was a news broadcast from CBC’s Thunder Bay station.
That’s all.
But - last night, it seemed so far away. It seemed so completely removed from the reality of the area through which I was driving, and from the reality of the people of the area, with whom I had been hanging out for the past four days – many from Dryden and Red Lake.
I felt a little ashamed; here I am – here we are - in Thunder Bay, feeling so remote and disconnected from the dominating cultural presence of Southern Ontario, perceiving their arrogance and unconcern toward Northern Ontario… and yet the very same could be said about Thunder Bay in relation to the surrounding region of Northwestern Ontario. I had never, ever thought it could be the case. I had always thought that the two of us – Thunder Bay and Northwestern Ontario – were of the same mind, the same angst. It was something of a shock to discover that I should be wrong.
It wasn’t my imagination either, I’m sure of it, or some fantastic identification with the more remote communities of North-western Ontario on account of some mere car-camping among the locals. No, the conversations were laden with indignation toward Thunder Bay and its corporate/service attitudes toward these small towns and, in particular, First Nations communities. It seems residents and businesses of Thunder Bay are as guilty of arrogance and disrespect as any of the worst from Toronto. Go figure.
I had never really considered it before. What Thunder Bay feels when a mill closes or a new box-store opens, these remote communities feel it so much more. Simple reason: they’re smaller. The area-of-effect is so much more condensed. When Abitibi-Bowater closes a kraft machine in Thunder Bay, and 400 jobs are suspended, it hurts a little. But when 400 jobs are suspended in Dryden, it hurts a lot. When 400 jobs are suspended in Ear Falls, well, it kills.
And jobs are being suspended, if not on paper then in looming unpredictability of the resource industry. In Red Lake, for instance, the gold mine has said that there is 5-10 years left in the vein before the mine closes. That’s little comfort for a communitiy – especially when the mine has been saying that for over 30 years.
It would be easy to write it all off as the brutish and short reality of the resource industry. That’s what happens. If only the workers in these industries weren’t people with families, having a desire to set roots down and be happy for a while, comforted by the hope of a secure future.
