Red Klister Era

Sunday, February 12, 2017  Williams Lake, Canada

     Is ours a red klister era?
     Red klister is a ski wax for warm temperatures.  I rarely used it when I skied in adolescence in the late-1970s.  From warmest to coldest, the waxes were red, blue, green, and white; green I used the most often; not much call for cold-weather wax in this warming climate

HAROLD AND PINE TAR
   
      I have my brother Harold to thank for starting me cross-country skiing.
      When I was 14 and he worked in social services and recreation in Wildwood, he brought several pairs of skis, his spouse Joanna, my younger sister Maryanne, and I to the Edson golf course one cold winter day.  We donned ski boots, mine too small, attached them to the three-point toe bindings on skis, and learned to ski.  After skiing around on the golf course for awhile, we packed into his and Joanna's station wagon, turned the heat on full, and held one another's cold feet and hands.
     Harold got me and Maryanne boots, poles,m and wooden skis.  My Finnish Splitkein skis covered many kilometres that winter and the next, until I skied off the edge of the bank of Millar Lake and snapped the top two feet off one ski.  Those skis had cost $20.  He got me a new pair,  Norwegian like our mom's dad's ethnicity, and I used them constantly during high school, and later in the Northwest Territories.  As I type this, I listen to a compact disc of Edvard Grieg piano music by Knut Erik Jensen, who performed here a few years ago:  good Scandinavian soundtrack for this story.
     After a day of high school, or during a weekend, I, and sometimes Maryanne, would go out back door of our Edson-area acreage house, put on our skis, and ski off into the nearby boreal forest, toward the gravel pit past the dump.  The gravel pit's hills were endless enjoyment, and regular wipe-outs.
     Those wooden skis required pine tar, heated and rubbed in with a rag, and wax, rubbed in with cork.  Harold had shown us how to do this.  We would go to gas stove in the Little House, the house my dad had hauled from Spike Island to the acreage in the early-1950s for his mother, our Irish-born granny (1879-1960).  Spike Island was the Edson neighborhood of railway workers.  A few old houses stood there the last time I passed through Edson, in 2016.
     Using a 3 cm paintbrush, we would paint tar from the 250 mL can onto half the length of the ski.  A stove burner lit, its iron cover removed using the iron lifter with the heat-resistant coiled handle, we would put the tarred ski over the flame, careful not to start the tar burning.  Remove the ski, rub the tar in with a rag, and tar the other end.
     The skis tarred, wax each with wax for that day's air temperature.  Sometimes put a different color wax under the part of the ski under the boot, for grip climbing hills.  This helped even if one encountered a steep hill, requiring fish tracks, that is, splaying the toes of the skis outward to walk up duck-style, or setting the skis parallel to the hill and climbing it by walking sideways.

"PFFF."

      In the Northwest Territories in 1986-87, I had those wooden skis, after Dad sent them by bus in early winter.  I did not tar them but I might have waxed them once or twice.  I skied mostly along trails beside the Mackenzie River in Fort Providence, where I lived from September-July to work in the Hudson's Bay Northern Store.  As I recall in Michael Wynne:  My Youth, some days the bush was so quiet that I could hear snow from trees hit the ground snow as it fell from tree branches:  "Pfff. Pfff."
     I also skied in Fort Resolution, in the Slave River Delta, when I ran that Bay for one week in late March, 1987, while the manager was in Edmonton for meetings.  The local priest had fixed wooden runners between the skis on a sled his snowmobile pulled.  He used this contraption to make ski trails, "Seven trails, numbered 1 to 7, like the seven highways in the Northwest Territories," he told me.

BOITANIO PARK

     Skiing for the first time this winter, finally, in Boitanio Park today, I remembered those days, so long ago.  My skis are fibreglass, a mid-1990s gift from my dear spouse Carla.  My old boots, which came with the wooden skis, were cracked and worn.  I skied using them and the wooden skis once or twice near Alexis Creek in 1991-92, and to teach children to ski at Alkali Lake a couple years later, using the shed full of skis and boots and poles the school had.
     I miss skiing more than I miss teaching.
     Boitanio Park, named after an Italian who settled in Williams Lake decades ago, is a  kilometre long and about a half kilometre wide, a hundred  metres down a walking path from our apartment building.  It's not skiing out the back door into the boreal, but it's what's available here, unless I want to drive 20 km north to Bull  Mountain, the local ski club's trail network, and pay to ski.
     Pay to ski?  That'll be the day, although I have downhill skied, the last time having been near Quebec City during the 1990 Christmas break from my McGill University teacher training program.  I also downhill skied at Silver Summit, near Edson, and Mount Timothy, near Williams Lake, where I cross-country skied the same day, our daughter's elementary school field trip day there.

CANADIAN COLONIALISM

     Making a wee trail network on the park today, and skiing over it a few times, I thought about colonialism and the upcoming 150th anniversary of the July 1, 1867 founding of Canada as a nation, on Indigenous land.  I had planned a trip to Ottawa for the anniversary, but knowing what I know about Canada's ongoing colonial legacy, I decided against the trip.  Once one has learned the truth, how can one revert to living the lie?
     "This land called Canada" is how the teacher of a University of Northern British Columbia First Nations history and culture course describes this land.  She's Metis and I'm her teaching assistant for this all-day Friday-Saturday course taught this month at Tl'esqox, a Tsilhqot'in community 50 km west of where I type today.
     The Tsilhqot'in never surrendered their land in battle or by treaty, although most do not go as far as many Mohawks, and deny they are Canadians.  Still, one elder said during a recent Tl'esqox meeting attended by the federal minister who oversees Indigenous people, there's little to celebrate on July 1.  He seems not to call himself Canadian.  His statement decided me against going to Ottawa, although I am not Indigenous.  Yet, once one knows Canada's sorry colonial history, continuing today via its Indian Act, among other unjust laws and practices, can one celebrate in good conscience?  I cannot.  Today's skiing made me wonder if I should help organize a critical celebration here on July 1.  Perhaps this elder has some ideas.
     Confederation in s 1867 was a deal made by white men of property to better exploit other settlers on stolen land.  Perhaps it helped prevent the United States from annexing Canada, a worry then, and still; but that was more scare tactic than real threat:  the U.S. could have annexed a British colony or a British dominion with equal ease.  See how much Canada has fallen under U.S. sway since 1867.

RED KLISTER RESISTANCE

     Resistance rises against colonialism, against capitalism around the world, including on Indigenous and, which the Americas, Australia, Africa, and much of Asia are.  These were rich places when European colonizers stole them; Europeans had battled for land for centuries before they left Europe. These places were not paradises; they had inequality and the wars is spawns.  Under colonialism, the descendants of the pre-contact people became poorer, many died, many collaborated, many resisted.  That history, the true history of Canada, is worth noting, and some of it is even worth celebrating.
     Resistance to colonialism sticks around, like red klister wax sticks to skis.
     To those who say, "It's over.  Get over it," I say that it continues, learn it, and  join the resistance, which begins inside each person.  You need not block pipelines or mines or retrieve Indigenous children stolen by the foster care system, or help prevent more Indigenous women disappearing while bringing to account those who made many disappear in the past and others who make many disappear today.  You need not inveigh against the systemic racism underlies all these injustices, and others.  
Instead, you need to learn the real history of this land called Canada.  This will help you understand why residential school survivors drink, why young people kill themselves, why a lack of trust and respect exists between Indigenous and settler people, and why some on each side strive to make a better land for us all. Join this red klister resistance to lies, and stick to the truth.

LAND, BEAUTIFUL LAND

     It's about land, at bottom.  It always has been about land.  I skied over settler-colonial land today, and decades ago, before knowledge of settler colonialism liberated me, as honesty and truth always liberate.  This ongoing liberation is joyful, as surely as skiing was joyful on this beautiful day, on this beautiful land.