Wordsworth Burnaby Norway Salvation

That blog entry title raises reader expectations.  If you want to know what's at the root of this tale, then come with me back to an elementary school writing assignment.  I was nine or ten.  The teacher had us each invent an event, then write an advertisement for it.  Then he had us remove words from it, to teach precision, until we had to choose one word to advertise our event.   I think my word was the event's location.  I reasoned that people interested enough would merely go to the site and wait for the event.

As I pondered a title for this tale, I remembered that assignment.  "Norway Salvation" came easily, but "Burnaby" came later, and "Wordsworth" last.  The early-1800s English poet Wordsworth called poetry "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling, recollected in tranquility."  Oil links the Canadian west coast city of Burnaby and Norway.  The setting, the where, was the local Salvation Army thrift store.  Where, with dashes of when and whom, made this event described below.   

As I walked back to tranquility, ah would tranquility always reachable merely by walking, to compose this little tale, I thought about Henry Miller.  This mid-1900s United States writer, whose prose was too obscene for there but fine for France, produced entertaining prose from routine events.  Here is my humble, similar effort, minus the sex, sexism, and swear words.  Perhaps those deletions are deleting some readers.

Quantum theory about being in two places at once, which would have undermined my elementary school writing assignment, aside; the physics of multiple simultaneous universes which would produce readers elsewhere for those lost here, aside; Mark Twain's mockery of German as a language with verbs at the end of sentences, hence a reader is mystified until the last page of the work, where he finds all the verbs, aside; Twain a hint that you've swum many words so far and reached no storied shore; all that aside, read on about a thrift shop sale, three men, and a 45 rpm record.

The Salvation Army had a sign on the sidewalk today advertising 50% off furniture and Easter items, and books for $4.00 per bag.  There was no advertised bag size, I would later think, as I looked at the books and pondered the weight of a big black plastic bag full of books.  Perhaps Easter furniture got a double discount; I didn't notice any life-sized, or other sizes of crucifixes in stock.  Perhaps an Easter or furniture book, or coffee table book big enough to be a coffee table, got a double discount.   A big coffee table book about Easter?  As well as many religious books, I noticed Frank McCourt's autobiography Angela's Ashes in stock.  In it, he says he and his Irish brethren, and sistern, spent much time in the church in rainy Limerick, more to get dry than to get religion.  I don't know what the discount would be on a book about building furniture, or on a chair shaped like an Easter basket.

Around a corner, where life often gets more interesting, I found two men discussing pipelines.  Neither wanted the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline, planned to stretch from the petro-province of Alberta, to tidewater on the rainforest coast of British Columbia, 1500 kilometres west.  I don't think Enbridge asked for these men's opinions, but neither did the two men ask for mine after one said the pipeline should go south, through the United States, to tidewater on the Gulf of Mexico.


"Nebraska stopped that pipeline," I interjected cryptically, as Henry Miller would in a Parisian brothel, to interrupt a different sort of flow.   "There'll be no Northern Gateway Pipeline," I continued definitively.  "The people up North won't have it.  Also, the mayor of Burnaby is against more pipelines through his city," I finished.

One of the men then crowded this thrift store conversation by raising an oil refinery, although one wouldn't fit in the store.  "What about that guy who wants to build a refinery on the coast?  He owns The Tribune."

Invoking imitation journalism, such as that paper practices, didn't help the man's case.  "The problem is the pipeline," I continued.  "Enbridge couldn't even clean up a leak in Michigan, which is flat with lots of road access.  They wouldn't have a chance in the mountains around Terrace."

Wise nods all round.

"They should refine it where they dig it," the other man said.  Before I came upon them, they lamented that pipelines bring few jobs.  "More jobs that way." 

Norway is imminent, readers.  Be patient.

"Or scale down the tarsands," I added.  "Look at Norway," I dragged into this refinery-crowded thrift store conversation.  "They have almost a trillion dollars in a trust fund from their oil."

"I was in Norway," the second man said.

Who expects a customer in a Canadian Salvation Army thrift store to have been to Norway?  That statement made me want to write about this encounter.  There is a Sons of Norway club in this city, and there have been Norwegian language classes here, and the coast to the west of here boasts Norwegian settlers because its fjords resemble those of Norway,and the Lutheran church is the biggest building in the coastal community of Hagensborg; but I was surprised that this thrift shopper had been in Norway.  Of course, Norway is a thrifty country, banking oil money, moving its fish farms to Canada's west coast, spreading disease among local fish.

As English Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden said when Iranians elected a socialist government and threatened to stop English theft of Iranian oil, "Socialism is fine in England, but not in Iran." 

The Norway traveler had my attention.  Now I have yours.

"I was there," he said.  "They have a whole underground city set up, with special roads and rail lines.  There's enough room for lots of people."

English writer HG Wells' story "The Time Traveler" and German film maker Fritz Lang's film "Metropolis" swirled in my mind, like Norwegians in a bunker.

"The Norwegians are ready for the future," I offered, lamenting that Canadians aren't, and are instead going into the past, this time as hewers of tarsands, drawers of water.

"They're ready for disaster," he amended.

"We have disaster already, in government," I added.

Laughs all round.

Then the first man said goodbye and headed toward the furniture.  The second man went the other way, toward the clothes.  I stayed there and found a 45 rpm record of "One Tin Soldier" by the Original Caste.  I didn't buy it, but I did think of adding something of it to this story's title.  The song played in my head as I looked at the books and pondered big black plastic garbage bags.  Nor did I buy Frank McCourt's autobiography, nor anything else.

On my way out, I looked at an old, heavy, sturdy table and chair set, too heavy for Jesus to overturn in the temple, but probably not gopher wood and therefore not optimal for a crucifix.           
      
 An old comic strip, "Hagar the Horrible", has a monk lament to Hagar the viking that more understanding among people would bring more peace in the world.  Hagar replies, "True, true.  How are we going to get everyone to speak Norwegian?"

Happy Easter, everyone. 


       

Great Blue Heron

I saw many birds during today's early-morning walk to the lake in my small Canadian city, but one bird stood out, then flew away.

During the who walk to the lake, crows croaked, on the ground, on treetops, on buildings.  Chilcotins  here call them ravens, but a Shuswap once told me they are mostly crows, which have black legs and feet, which she said raven's don't have.  Both Chilcotins and Shuswaps venerate ravens.  Many who venerate ravens know a dance called the Crow Hop, originally from Prairie indigenous people.    

Dozens of gulls milled in the parking lot between the curling rink and the rodeo grounds, too late to curl, to early to ride.  I don't know anyone who venerates gulls.

Redwing blackbirds are another story, and bird, rare enough to attract bird experts from far away.  One expert spoke at the lakeside nature centre a couple years ago.  A couple trees by the lake were a-chirp with these robin-sized birds.  Crows croaked in the same trees.  Two weeks ago, I saw my first robin of the year.

Geese honked on the ice and overhead.  Ducks paddled about.  A couple geese would waddle ahead of me on the road back from the lake, which the city surrounds.  Some would be on the rodeo grounds.

I interrupt this bird saga to mention three deer I saw yesterday in the field by my apartment building.  I now return to today and birds.

I walked the trail that goes to the tip of the peninsula in the lake, the woods and sky alive with the rustle and song of birds, geese milling and honking on the lake, ducks swimming in the few patches of open water.  I looked down the lake, the risen sun orange on the water, then turned around and looked over the city and the three kilometres I had walked.  I stood there long, thinking, happy to see another spring.

Then I started walking back on the peninsula trail.  I took a detour along a narrower trail that boasts some wooden walkways.  I stopped to look over an expanse of last year's cattails, dry and akimbo.

Then I saw it, across the cattails, at water's edge:  a great blue heron.  It was the first time I saw this long-beaked, tall, skinny, blue bird.  Stately.  Pretty.  Strong.  Within three seconds it launched itself quietly into flight.  I stood watching it fly out over the lake, which is a kilometre wide, five long, and very deep, like most lakes in the Western Cordillera.  Neighboring Quesnel Lake is 600 metres deep.     

The Boreal Forest around where I grew up had different birds, but never this bird.  It had chickadees, and I heard some as I walked this morning.  It had blue jays, sparrows, robins, starlings, grouse with their noisy flutter.  Where I live now, south of the Boreal Forest, I have seen eagles, hawks, owls, bluebirds.  A couple weeks ago I saw an eagle launch from a ditch:  six-foot wingspan, it seemed.

Today I saw a great blue heron for the first time in my life.  This shouldn't surprise me because I live along a major migration route for birds.  The local nature centre organizes a yearly bird-count day in which people recognize dozens of birds.  Today's heron counted for me.