Toast to Roads

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Recently, 

at my club one evening, 

I asked my fellows to stand and raise their glass in a a toast: 

“To roads!”

As I told my club, it’s queer: When we go to Washington State or British Columbia, (B.C.) we surely look at the nearby mountains and say to the locals, “Wow. Mountains so close by; I can’t believe you guys don’t go up.” Those folks surely come here and say, “Wow! Flat prairie and lots of roads!” And then be amazed that we don’t all take road trips. Well, I do. Sometimes. 

I especially like the quieter roads. Near my home I have twice seen a pair of big white trumpeter swans, and last month, on a quiet Victoria Day morning, a green headed mallard duck flapped alongside my car going precisely as fast as I was. At last he veered off.

So many roads to choose 

It was in 1926, when my mother was three years old, that the province of Alberta stopped referring to highways by colours and went in for numbering. I guess there weren’t many colours left by then. Today the numbering system is quite rational, for a quite extensive list of roads, too extensive to explain here. 

Of course names can be attached to the numbers, such as the Yellowhead Highway, #5, that emerges from B.C., goes along to Edmonton, and along through the border-straddling city of Loydminster… And the Crowsnest Pass highway, #3, that comes from B.C. through the mountain pass, and on through the city of Lethbridge… while the Icefields Parkway goes north and south along the Rocky Mountains to Jasper… And now the Boom Town Trail goes through some interesting east province tourist areas, including Camrose, the wee city I reported on in May 2019. This latter trail, actually, is not a highway, it’s more of a regional designation.

There’s one exception to the provincial numbering system: Calgary is at the crossroads of the QE II, or highway #2, and THE transCanada highway, or highway #1… and so the ring road, a freeway around the city named Stoney Trail, is… the #201.

It’s easy to find out whether a road is snowed over, or closed by a mudslide, as Alberta has a 511 website and telephone number. Recently I checked and found out the highway was closed north and south of Radium due to wildfires. 

We don’t say “forest fire” anymore, as a “wildfire” can roar through isolated houses or whole towns, such as the wildfire that took out Fort McMurray. (the 6th largest population centre in Alberta) After windows sag and pop, the fire pours right into the house. Incidentally, the government publishes guidelines for how much vegetation to clear to protect your home from fires raging branch to branch up to your door, and big embers flying from far away onto your roof. Alberta ranches have always had their long buildings, amidst vast plains of scrubby grass, separate from each other as a fire precaution. 

Breakdowns

When my car broke down on the Queen Elizabeth the Second highway I pulled across the white line onto the paved shoulder, only a kilometre from the posted turnout. Then others pulled up behind me; I guess they thought we were already at the turnout. In Alberta the turnouts—a short parallel strip— are supplied with garbage cans and very short merge lanes to get back on the highway. Anyway, I was glad people stopped because then I could ask a senior citizen if I could please use his cell phone. He was in a motorhome the size of a tour bus, or so it seemed; I laughed to see his summer home on wheels looming far larger than my own little year-round cabin.

Another time, stuck on a Crowsnest mountain road, I waved with two hands a big stiff white flag and got picked up by a young man and woman who drove me to the next town to phone for a tow truck. I politely ignored the smell of marajuana, what the government is now calling “cannabis,” now that such weed is legal to grow and sell, now that people at parties may show off their weed solariums.

Another time, same flag, I was picked up by a bachelor with a pickup truck and a big dog.

Another time, not from a breakdown, but being stuck within Edmonton city limits on the Yellowhead in a snow bank I could not shovel out of, (because my car bottom was resting on snow) it was a bachelor in a pickup who popped in some chains to the back of his truck to pull me two thirds of a meter forward (two feet)

To avoid such breakdowns, my last cars were bought brand-new. I am currently driving a Toyota Prius, a hybrid, with two motors under the hood—giving me good traction weight for for driving on ice using my front wheel drive. The storage battery, for my “tractor motor,” running under the passenger bench, is charged by my brakes. If you consult Consumer Report (CR) magazine, you will see how my Prius rates “excellent” in every category, earning the coveted CR “checkmark.” 

(Hey, maybe that’s why a “red tag days” letter from a Toyota dealer shows no Prius, and neither do any of the other dealership used-car ads in the newspaper: Maybe nobody wants to sell their Prius!)

My favorite category, of course, is for “ranked at top of the page” fuel efficiency: Because then I can look at the endless Alberta roads, beckoning to me across an entire time zone, and cry, “Road trip!”

Sean Crawford

Alberta

2019

Talk to Stangers Footnote:

As a road trip tourist, are there benefits to talking to strangers? 

(For me there is, as documented in my May essay To Camrose From Gotham) 

How about talking as a commuter, or in your own downtown? Scientists have researched the benefits, here’s (link) what they found

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-48459940

Personal Footnote: 

Did I tell you I value my freedom, even to the point of graduating university without debt? And value buying my cars “all in one payment,” except for my last car? To paid off this Christmas? (And I paid off my wee mortgage on my mini-cabin before the first scheduled renewal) 

Well, thinking of road trips and cellular telephones: Years ago my client offered to buy me a cell phone, but at the time I didn’t want to be “tied down” to a plan. I forgot all about it until my boss was reminded by my old client. We were amused.

Fear in Fiction, with Martians

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

“I think when H.G. Wells wrote War of the Worlds, he knew his Pompeii.”

Sean Crawford

“Roaring and flashing hellish light, the volcano poured forth a weird cloud whose top spread out and out. Birds dropped dead from the sky….

Thousands fled at once. They were wise to flee—and the wisest kept on travelling all that afternoon and night. Nothing else could have put them outside the circle of death that Vesuvius was drawing round itself.”

Donald and Louise Peattie, Reader’s Digest Junior Omnibus, page 66.

Hello Reader,

Got fear?

As a writer, as happens to all artists if they progress, I have reached the point where I don’t learn much from the “how to write” books of other writers. Now I am into uncharted “on my own” waters. For example, I was delighted to grasp something from Robert Heinlein’s young adult novel Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. It was published when a popular cowboy hat and pistol set included business cards showing a chessboard knight that read, “Have gun, will travel.” (I can still sing the theme song for that show about the cowboy Paladin, as the boys sing in the movie Stand By Me) 

The teen hero is abducted into a flying saucer by a scary alien from outer space. Then what? During his first night of imprisonment he has a terrible nightmare. Why? Because things are relative. Because relative to the nightmare, he (and the reader) is calmer, better able to focus on the need to escape… Of course that was the only nightmare he had. I’m so pleased I figured that out on my own.

It’s like when I was an abused child escaping into fairy tales with scary witches. The stories made real life easier, somehow. Perhaps our present day black-and-white comic books about The Walking Dead serve the same purpose, in this fearsome and complex society. A little fear is good for us.

It logically follows: If I were to do a collection of poems about The War of the Worlds in Britain, then maybe my first few poems should be relatively more scary than the rest; Or at least involve fleeing; Maybe I could do a prologue from over in western Canada. 

OK:

When the Martians Stir, Don’t Stop Moving 

I am a scared rabbit.

Wheels roll fast,

my car is hurtling straight down the mountain highway.

The narrow valley has a river, a railway, and mountains rising sheer.

I know how rabbits are caught.

They are channeled into narrow trails.

They put their little heads right through thin wire snares.

I speed as fast as I can.

Behind me the Martians of nightmares are stirring.

Before me, past Hell’s Gate, past Hope,

the valley opens broad and green with room to hide.

Behind me will soon be the blasted wrecks of cars too slow.

The mountains channel the highway as I race for my life.

Thin Martian rays will stab through cars,

asphalt bubbling and sagging.

No breath to scream, no rabbit death-cry.

I drive into the darkening night.

I do nothing but drive.

On a Black Winding Graveyard

Between steep mountains

on the transCanada highway,

the gun emplacements are shockingly bare.

Concrete spools are stripped of their iron mounts,

nothing left to receive 106 mm recoilless rocket guns.

Why? 

I speed along, I grit my teeth.

I imagine the freckled soldier boys on their final day.

“Load!”

“Load.”

“Check back-blast area!”

“Back-blast area checked.” 

Then the warm slap on the shoulder.

Ready.

Soldiers don’t waste words swearing, not during their tight gun drills.

But—

If they see giant Martian machines striding up the road,

Will they swear, helplessly, as the Martians burn them from the world?

I drive past gun emplacements, grimly.

Past another,

and another,

concrete headstones 

on a long black winding graveyard.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

March

2019

Footnote: The guns had been used to trigger avalanches.

Fear and Complexity

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got perspective? 

on a life of quiet desperation?

Let’s start with a metaphor: Everyone knows the usual way to cross the overpass and then enter a freeway is with a small simple semi circle into a merge lane. 

But nevertheless, I travel a long, winding oblong merge road, winding around with the skyscrapers of downtown first on the right, then ahead, later on the left, and still later, now hidden by grassy canyons, astern at six o’clock, as at last, I attempt an all too short merge. I know two drivers who time their trips to avoid that dreaded merge during rush hour. And—get this—at some point, long before the freeway merge, the road narrows into one lane. 

You might think our road engineers would be as practical as old Roman town planners, putting our roads on a classical grid, but no—I think our engineers flunked out of art school. That long spaghetti road to merge is fun for me only because I am used to it, and only because, as I drive with narrowed eyes, seldom does anyone pass me before the road narrows. In fact, unlike nearly everyone else, you are unlikely to see my brake lights before any of the precipitous blind turns—although I will ride with my foot nudging the brake pedal, in case I see a deer: So if I have to panic I won’t STOMP on the wrong pedal, as people have been known to do. It’s been years since I owned a sports car: These days, taking that road so fast, leaving cars behind in my mirrors, is my sole bit of silly male showing off. Hurray for me!

It was writer Larry Niven who pointed out that a driver will take a stretch of road faster and faster until he is at the very limit of his capability, a capability that he finds out the hard way. Perhaps through a harmless flash of fear. To me, Niven’s drivers are a metaphor for our society: We are going ever faster paced, ever more complex, roaring around corners right up to the sidewall of failure… and inevitably, by this model, some people get left behind. Or squashed on the sidewall.

In the merry old days no one was left behind. I am imagining a quaint English village, back in Europe in the time of long bows when only members of the aristocracy would ride a horse. Who would I have been, among the villagers, back then? With my same gender as today, would I have been a broad shouldered fellow, perhaps too nervous for battle, but very good at steering a straight plow? Would I have been a skinny troubadour, good for rousing songs of battle and good cheer, but only average at working the farm? Would I have been the village idiot, happy to contribute to the harvest by copying what others were doing? One thing is sure: The complexity and pace of society would have been slow enough that even as an idiot I felt included as a valued villager. Not left out.

For some people their first “village,” as children, is their school. You might think a school would be scientifically designed so every one would be valued, safe within a section of folks of their own sort of ability. Not so. Of the musically inclined, in band class, some play only “third chair.” For learning arithmetic, according to a teacher on the radio, some kids “feel punished” when others get awards: He was against awards. And many children in school, too many, feel dumb. For a few, without the power from feeling accomplishment, their only way to feel power is to bully others. (On an episode of The Simpsons some bullies smash Bart’s trophy saying, “We hate kids who do things.”)

As new adults, some of those kids, the ones who took algebra, will go on to university, there to quietly crash at midterms, fail at finals, and “graduate at Christmas.” The campus will have resources in place, of course, such as academic helpers and trained psycho-therapists. The problem, though, is partly psychological: Too many students, unaware of how swift and complex society is, think they are unique in their struggles. The counsellors report that they never even see a lot of the students who drop out.

Meanwhile, in the real world, many grown adults don’t have a perspective on how much they should try to “keep up with the Joneses.” The slick magazines are full of articles on what is sexy-normal, what is serene-normal ( ha-ha) and “How I learned to stop worrying and enjoy our frazzled modern style.” OK, I haven’t written that last one yet, but back in the 1950’s someone wrote a business nonfiction, The Organization Man. This was back when the usual thing for an ambitious man of business was to get hired by some “big corporation,” the bigger the better. Other tell-tale books of that time, of the fiction sort, were The Big Company Look and the classic The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson, a book that labeled a generation. In the days of black-and-white TV people knew, but didn’t know what to do.

If our society is overly complicated, then maybe modern life is not a problem to be solved, but a plight to be endured… and to be endured as sanely as possible. To me, sanity is realizing that society’s common sense “knowledge” has not yet caught up to our common “experience.” How many young students, up to their hips in alligators, truly realize that people are more alike than different, and that others, too, are just as sunk in the swamp?

In the Organization Man a businessman is quoted as being frustrated: He is not getting results with the exciting new idea of splitting a big meeting into smaller groups, groups that then report back to the main group. Merely “reporting back” is the usual remnant, today, of that old technique—with one person as recorder, and one as spokesman for, say, a group of six. The problem with this usual method, as practised today, is that it ignores fear. The good news is at least small groups are a chance to interact, in a left brain “just the facts and observations, Ma’am” fashion. And yes, at least there’s a little bit of group bonding. To be sure, the group won’t share honest emotions unless there is work for a clear problem, but… best results come when the chairman can secretly face the concept of “fear” and sneak it into his or her plans.

Hollywood is instructive. Not after the first world war, but only after the second, and then only after a decade had passed, would the war movies finally have a scene where a veteran tells new recruit, fresh into combat,: “Everybody’s scared…” This intelligence, besides being “nice,” is reality based, and results in the new guy feeling more normal, less paralyzed by a sense of personal inadequacy, and then better able to function. Which helps everyone, veterans and newbies alike.

In our modern peacetime culture, despite people commiserating with each other, we still don’t know, not truly, how much fear, anxiety and “everybody is scared” is normally out there. Said Henry Thoreau back in the 19th century (from memory) “The average man lives a life of quiet desperation”—words that still need to be said. 

Today in our business world, or our community halls, as regards those small groups that report back to the larger meeting, the underlying intention, if the chairpersons know their stuff, is to share emotions, discovering that others are anxious too, thereby reducing the flow of energy required for fear and protecting one’s ego, and therefore releasing energy to tackle the problem. Group problems are only solved when energy is available. (Other small groups using this principle of “emotional management through perception-checks” would be hallway conversations during meeting breaks) 

An extreme example may illustrate this principle: Teenagers. On student council. Remember? Jostling and fidgeting, maybe laughing a bit too loud, having nearly all their energy flowing to their self protection, 

(the underlying reason for much “impulsive” behaviour at their meetings) 

a flow hard to redirect… which is why, for example, anything complex, such as organizing to Save the Black Footed Ferret, is better left to college age people. 

We adults are older than we once were, but we still have our inner teenager…

Fear. Inadequacy. How ‘bout those roads? There’s a reason for the cliche of men going on road trips with their wives and then not admitting to problems with going too fast for the map, and with not wanting to ask strangers for directions. Yesterday morning I saw the cliche acted out, yet again, by Daddy Pig on the British children’s show Peppa Pig. 

In a society revved to the max, let’s give ourselves permission to see fear. Let us help each other. Let’s help the new recruit, help the village idiot, and help Albert Einstein too when he faces something new in his everyday life. Gone are the green pastoral villages of yesteryear. Today all of us, in this grey and complex world, can truly say, “I’m a stranger here myself.”

Sean Crawford

Somewhere in society

March

2019

Footnotes: 

~Reducing individual group member’s anxiety is part of the “bag of tricks” a chairman can use to break a group’s gridlock, a trick I learned from the mentor I wrote about in January of 2019. (See archive)

~One antidote to fear is self confidence. But confidence is like shyness: situational, not dispositional. 

At a job site where I was feeling unsafe and unsupported, my I.Q. would plummet as I walked over the threshold. 

Imaginative Travel with H.G. Wells

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got imaginative travel in this mundane realm?

January. Gaining speed on a new year’s road, seeing the crest of a low hill just ahead. Then what? We may drive on past newly dreamed of gymnasiums, past bogs with wispy new year’s resolutions: This month, according to the travel agencies, is when folks make travel plans. How ’bout that jet to the Isle of Wight? If it’s not too dear.

Of course we are careful about our dearly earned money, but I’ll tell what’s always free: imagination. Like travel writer H.V. Morton: Look out to sea, and over to that rocky natural harbour. Can you see them? Pirates, Vikings, and Pilgrims? That’s three different worlds, three visits for the price of just one harbour.

Travel is like a carrying out a new year’s resolution: The hardest part is getting started. I wanted to romantically travel to the land of invasion by evil Martian fighting machines, up high on three stilts. I managed at last to get going, and wrote a poem too.

Three Legs

The hardest thing in my life 

was to leave the old farm, 

where the easiest and proper number of legs 

for a dirt floor milking stool

is three.

Easy to search the big city for a nice flat.

Hard to keep my new digs tidy and clean.

Hard to get out into the neon bustle.

Easy to stay in the yard by starlight

pressing my eye to a telescope

on a tripod.

Easy to have careless cables and cold screens.

Hard to get off that deep couch.

Hard to roll over the bumps for getting a passport.

Easy at last, to get airspeed for flying to Gatwick.

Easy then 

to stand painting romantic colors 

using an easel

on three legs.

I imagined the first cylinder from Mars silent in the sandpit on the common.

On Horsell Common

Heat-Ray periodically sweeps 

past

black sticks on purple heath

Gay ladies, unknowing, stroll out

to view the Thing in the pit.

The coals of their waiting hearth 

fade to cold black.

Have you read The Time Machine? Or The Invisible Man? Both from the mind of H.G. Wells. You may recall that in the 19th century, while living in the town of Woking, Wells wrote his classic about his neighbours being blasted by Martians. I journeyed there, (population now 60,000) to see the sandpit where the first Martian cylinder landed on Earth. Here’s a poem I wrote of my travel.

Into Woking

I flew the strato-jet from Calgary to the airport,

from the airport I rode a passenger train to Woking,

from Woking station I backpacked to the historical society.

I met Duncan who expressed his regrets 

that Occidental College is now Occidental Shopping Centre.

We both remember how the Martian Heat Ray 

blasted the college, 

putting the chimney 

of Mr. Wells’ house 

in line of sight of the Ray.

Crack! went the chimney.

The house of H.G. Wells has a little plaque.

I stood outside his home 

with my back to the raised rail line across the road.

Wells knew the station was close yet too far

so he borrowed a cart and drove his wife to Leatherhead.

The cart was borrowed 

from the owner of the Spotted Dog.

The horse, 

poor brute, 

suffered a broken neck.

The owner, 

poor man, 

was found dead in dark of night.

Wells, 

mercifully, 

was innocent of

what was to become of Leatherhead.

Today there is no Spotted Dog.

Locals raised on Wells tell me with distaste

a few years ago 

a car dealer 

levelled it to make a paved lot.

A bar named Ogilvies has a sign of a telescope.

Inside are many old pictures of telescopes—

etchings, lithographs, engravings,

but no mention of Ogilvie, 

a friendly astronomer

and a good man 

who perished under a flag of truce at the sandpit.

A bar of the Witherspoon chain has a Wells theme.

On the ceiling are two great illuminated glass circles,

a clock face,

and a circle of book pages,

readable from the floor. 

A local eagerly asks, 

“Do you want to see time go backwards?”

“Yes.”

He rushes over to the secret switch 

for the Time Machine.

Someone says George over there 

was the model for the Invisible Man.

George raises his glass to salute

while the Man sits alone 

in the window 

wrapped in his bandages.

I pull out my walking map from the town library.

A drinking buddy tells me the sandpit isn’t marked. 

“Just go there, and turn here,” says the friendly man.

No one wants to drink under the gaze of nasty Martians. 

Far down the hall to the loo is an old steel etching,

a stiff Martian holds a projector to blast a bridge.

Be thankful those times are long ago.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

January

2019