1.
At the nominal limits of Edmonton, refineries wreathed
in their emissions, huge and lit up as headquarters
or the lead planet in a system, as the past
with its machinery exposed —
filters, compressors, conveyors, you name it —
basement upon basement upon basement.
Around them gather opportune spinoffs, low-slung
by-product support outfits named in functional
shorthand. Altec, Softcom, Norcan, Cancore,
subsidiaries crawling onto the farmland.
Employees are legion, transient,
and union, turning what happened before we existed
into something we can use, at capacity
day and night. As we sleep, they build our future.
Which, as the signs say, belongs to all of us, is now.
2.
Worth leaving the highway for. Gorgeous
at sunset, really outstanding,
the potato chip factory at the east end
of Taber, which is a kind of town.
It’s painted a bright and not entirely baffling
turquoise, for who would want
their snacks to issue from a dour scene?
Crowding the parking lot’s acre of slab,
against evening’s mauves, pinks, blues
and tangerines, it looks like a monument
to grad night in the midwest
or a wedding after-party at the Holiday Inn.
There’s a nicotine tinge to the white concoction
frothing from the stack. In the morning
it’s work, an okay wage, metal door
of the employees’ entrance ugly
and dented forever, yesterday’s effluent
still fizzing in the drainage pool.
3.
The global appeal of concrete is not accidental.
Through it, our modern vision is realized. That “cement”
and “concrete” are used interchangeably
is one of the most interesting things about it.
This confusion is rooted deeply in our language.
West of Dead Man’s Flats, at Exshaw, they make
cement. Pre-eminent in the limestone gap, the plant
appears to describe its situation accurately, reflected
in the lake that cools the wastewater.
Scenery north of Heart Mountain goes vague
in kiln dust from the clinkers.
Pity the diatoms, first to go, trout eggs
choked by sediment in gravelly streambeds,
ducks in chloride runoff. Pity us,
we’re all messed up about it. Nearby are the old
company towns. Kananaskis and its lime plant.
Seebe’s power dam has closed. But in concrete
is an ancient technology ushered into
the 21st century: in condos, dude ranches,
four-season resorts, the demand for improved
infrastructure and amenities in the recreational
community of Lac des Arc.
4.
In cold, the blood smell clangs. In heat,
flies observe it. A functional non-
architecture’s slaughter capacity.
We’re coming back to Newfoundland
with our mobile recruiting team!
No experience necessary. High school
not necessary. Must be willing
to work with a razor-sharp knife. Revised
prison recruitment strategies. E. Coli.
Recalls. Must tolerate extreme heat
and cold. Bandidos in town on a recruitment
initiative. raid. Burgeoning drug
trade. Brooks’ Chamber of Commerce
welcomes your input. Delusive, debilitating,
awe-inspiring tedium. I Heart Alberta
Beef. Team members should expect
heavy physical labour and fast-paced
repetitive tasks. Team members
should expect to be called team members.
The killing floor. Caricatures of supervisory
misconduct. Unprecedented growth. Labour
unrest. A crew of managerial thugs
mobilized from Arkansas. The Canadian
Forces steps up its recruitment
campaign. Our industry’s future remains
secure. Additional openings in rendering
and hides. Animals are not our friends. Sign
on the highway, Always, 100 Jobs!
The up-there
shredded, hanging
in flystrip with our nerves
stuck on it. Screw us,
we’re in turnaround
airspace. Down here
fuel costs rise 15
cents overnight.
c-130 Hercules, c-140
Aurora, c-17 Globemaster, c-18
Hornet, f-16 Viper, t-38 Talon
Celebrating Freedom
Through Flight, celebrating
car alarms, panic attacks, canine
episodes, migraines,
childhood hearing loss,
and it’s free, an added bonus
of the CNE. The last word
in military aviation
technology. The last word
in everything
for those paying now,
right now,
for the real show.
I
Cloud, a great skein of it, drawn through the eastern eye
of the Bow Valley by a frontal hook, rolls over
the foothills, purls up thick above the ranchlands. Material
of autumn’s visible ceiling. The river nourished by glaciers
in their last weeks of melt at the tail end of the long
20th century. Perking at the falls, it reconciles south
along the golf course to its downstream designation:
the best trophy trout destination in North America.
Tour buses come and go, everyone suitably amazed,
looking as if they’ve arrived set at the wrong speed.
II
The river is laden with suspended
particles of finely powdered
rockflour. All colours
of the light spectrum are absorbed
but for what these particles
reflect. A frozen mineral green.
Tug at the loose thread under
the heart green, the green that does
nothing of the kind. How dare you.
It teems. It is a measure
of our limits. The green here
and not here at once, that sets
our ears to ringing. Moss, geode,
iris green. Green pins
of cold and cuts of thirst,
relieved. Now do you know where
you are? That green. An orientation
to which the mind returns.
III
The river is older than the mountains folding
in heaves around it. From here, everything follows
eastward in rational or irrational
arrangement. Warmed by ingredients, fibrous,
acquiring odours of its passage, it mingles
with the Oldman and the Red Deer at the feet
of cities, arrives at the muddy basin of the South
Saskatchewan looking inward and browned, its eyes
lowered. By this time, many lives will have changed.
More than a storey high and twice that long,
it looks igneous, the Buhler Versatile 2360,
possessed of the ecology of some hellacious
minor island on which options
are now standard. Cresting the sections
in a corona part dirt, part heat, it appears
risen full-blown from our deeper needs,
aspirating its turbo-cooled air, articulated
and fully compatible. What used to take a week
it does in a day on approximately
a half-mile to the gallon. It cost one hundred
fifty grand. We hope to own it outright by 2017.
Few things wrought by human hands
are more sublime than the Buhler Versatile 2360.
Across the road, a crew erects the floodlit
derricks of a Texan outfit whose presumptions
are consistently vindicated.
The ancient sea bed will be fractured to 1000 feet
by pressuring through a pipe literal tons
of a fluid — the constituents of which
are best left out of this —
to tap the sweet gas where it lies like the side
our bread is buttered on. The earth shakes
terribly then, dear Houston, dear parent
corporation, with its re-broken dead and freshly
killed, the air concussive, cardiac, irregular.
It silences the arguments of every living thing
and our minds in that time are not entirely elsewhere.
But I was speaking of the Buhler Versatile 2360
Phase D! And how well recognized it is
among the classics: Wagner,
Steiger, International Harvester, John Deere, Case,
Minneapolis-Moline, Oliver, White, Allis-Chalmers,
Massey Ferguson, Ford, Rite, Rome.
One could say it manifests fate, forged
like a pearl around the grit of centuries. That,
in a sense, it’s always been with us,
the diesel smell of a foregone conclusion.
In times of doubt, we cast our eyes
upon the Buhler Versatile 2360
and are comforted. And when it breaks down, or thinks
itself in gear and won’t, for our own good, start,
it takes a guy out from the city at 60 bucks an hour
plus travel and parts, to fix it.
Daylight fails crucially along the St. John River
and a focal point of damp sand
dims. Suddenly, like a junked mattress, a tire,
in the flashlight of the immediate future
one is come upon. The forest,
with its long hallways and concealing furnitures,
is not for me.
One hundred yards from the highway
is primeval in its ferns and muck and drowned
hardwoods below the floodline.
Cellular turnover is practically audible.
I’m in the middle of my life. I see it
as through a crowd, from a bad angle,
and the show continues.
My industry fails me. The first person fails me
utterly, again and again, like a landlord.
Even the flakeboard plant rusting vividly
in coastal fog is more than the sum
of its glues and dodgy management.
On the far shore, trees
in inestimable numbers grey as one
toward evening, sleep standing like horses
in thin smoke of the fires up at Minto.
In the world of plants, there is no Airbus 380.
Yet they’re reborn to us selflessly
in fossil fuels! People, we’re at the centre
of a great mystery. Last night saw us
dragging through the clubs, their soggy
double-digit martinis and vocals that reek
of auto-tune, suspecting someone else’s fun
was having us. We snuck back through
the hole in the wall that’s the door
to the part of the house that we rent
and re-entered the good life —
innocence of the new-mown grass blades,
our neighbour who clears his piece of sidewalk
with a hose, endlessly,
while the available portfolio
of non-prescription medication expands softly
as the evening around us. Circling,
a red-tailed hawk pinpoints the moving detail
of his meal in the big picture. We love him
from afar. Soon, we will have to have him.
Our longing hovers like billboards
over the expressway, the same questions,
same answers, throughout each long night.
The lake accumulates what is given it,
until gradually, though it may not appear so,
its constitution is changed. One thing dies,
another takes its place, and an unknown
potential enters the world. Anyone
who spots the alien invader Asian
longhorned beetle in the neighbourhoods
is asked to report this immediately
to the city. Without our efforts, no tree is safe.
It’s as if everybody always wants us to do something.
I’d like to see someone make us. Please,
someone, come on over here and make us.
The longer dead, the more expensive.
Extinction adds value.
Value appreciates.
This may demonstrate a complex cultural mechanism
but in any case, buyers get interested.
And nothing’s worth anything without the buyers.
No one knows that better
than the United Mine Workers of America.
A hired team catalogued the skeleton,
took it from its cave to put on the open market.
Retail bought it, flew it over to reassemble
and sell again. Imagine him
foraging low Croatian mountains in the Pleistocene
and now he’s flying. Now propped at an aggressive posture
in the foyer of a tourist shop in the Canadian Rockies
and going for roughly forty.
The pit extends its undivided attention.
When the gas ignited off the slant at Hillcrest
Old Level One, 93 years ago
June, they were carried out by the hundreds,
alive or dead, the bratticemen, carpenters,
timbermen, rope-riders, hoistmen,
labourers, miners, all but me, Sidney Bainbridge,
the one man never found.
Synchronicity is a theme
science can’t explain. Mutual
appreciation brought us
no closer. More like
we showed each other what we’re
made of. The human brain,
three pounds soaking wet,
its attentions divided.
My attentions were divided.
Nevertheless, I saw what I saw.
Though it appears in the photograph as fog, snow is falling in its fractal specifics straight down onto the city. The day is calm. Light appears as though filtered through a white sheet. The disposable camera is unable to register the snowfall’s particulars, its slight woozy drift as a bird flies through it, and in fact the photographer isn’t very good at taking pictures. It’s difficult to capture falling snow in a photograph. Sometimes, against the headlights of a parked car at night, it can be done.
The calm day is also warm, a break in a long brilliant wire of low pressure along which sound had travelled from great distances, engines and cries rendered proximate. Falling snow dampens resonance. The morning is the body of a different instrument.
The photographer has chosen a disposable camera due to a fear of heights. She must cross the High Level Bridge to get to where she works, and this is easier some days than others. On an afternoon of strong winds, nearing the bridge’s midpoint, handled roughly, simultaneously by updraft and downdraft, she recalls a childhood event: she and her younger sister riding bikes on the dirt road perimeter of a dying hamlet where the family lived in summer while grasshoppers ate paint off the walls. Her sister had offered that if they got tired halfway, they could always turn around and go back.
But in its calm and warm, its falling snow, this day is so beautiful that the photographer’s fear is lessened a little, and she wants a picture of the river to look at later. A document to locate her for people far away. The photograph is shot from the middle of the bridge looking east, though it feels to the photographer, somehow, south. The white shape in the bottom left corner is her hand on the rail. Uneasiness requires that she hold it tightly while lifting the camera to her eye. Because the camera was not expensive she feels that should it fall for some reason the 50-odd metres to the river, she will not have lost something important.
In this way, her fear and where it comes from are also in the photograph. As is the snow melting on her hair and shoulders, falling behind her and farther until it reorganizes as another system. As is traffic’s rumble and clank at her back, groggy spirals of exhaust that don’t do anything for the nerves. Supported on the diagonal by girders, the concrete sidewalk overhangs the bridge’s steel struts, hangs right out there above the valley. The photographer admits that her faith in the long-term success of human ingenuity is limited.
The first train crossed the bridge in 1913, an occasion celebrated by the shrieking of many whistles and sirens. Its 8,000 tons of steel, 500,000 cubic feet of concrete and 1.4 million rivets cost 2 million dollars. The economy was different then, but not so different. Workers earned 35 cents an hour. One man died in a cave-in. Three others fell. The bridge is 13 metres wide and 755, 775, 777, or 877 metres long, depending on who’s measuring and how. In winter it loses a half-metre due to the contraction of metals.
There are animals in the photograph — squirrels, rabbits, deer, foxes — though they are unseen, and fish down there, presumably. She’s heard that immersion in the North Saskatchewan raises welts on human skin. Sour gas ventures are popular in the area and there are various categories of runoff. At the east end of a short stretch of
open water, ice shelves up like wrecked drywall of a huge house. That tiny smudge to the right of it is a bohemian waxwing in flight, is possibly a bohemian waxwing. The water is greener than it appears and moving fast. Crawling over itself and under the ice again. Pressure on the bridge supports is calculable and enormous.
The photographer lives in an apartment hotel housing short- and long-term tenants who have nothing in common except that they live in the building: oil patch and construction workers, hospital outpatients, students, retirees, professional football players, clients of addiction and mental health services, overnighters, and those whose temporary situations have gone long-term. There’s a bar on the ground floor. Once in a while, Deb the bartender turns every one of its seven televisions to a cable channel that seasonally devotes itself to a looped shot of burning logs until Bill, a resident and regular, waves his arms in mock panic and yells at Deb to switch stations. “It feels like my goddamn house is burning down,” he says, and everybody laughs. The photographer learns from Deb that Bill moved into the building after his house burned down. “And now he’s been here five years,” she says fondly. “Wrong again,” says Bill. “Four years, six months, two weeks, and three days.”
What is seen is true, as seen, though may be interpreted falsely. The photographer’s read that the mind fills in dimensions of a viewed object based on the experience of objects of its kind. That, often, we believe in things we see the same way we believe in things we don’t. She looks out over the valley, wondering if it makes any difference. She’s overdressed. Snow falls onto her face, her hands, her neck where she’s loosened her collar and scarf. The air feels carbonated. She slides the plastic camera into her coat pocket and walks the remaining half of the bridge, though there are a few pictures left on the roll, a decision which is in the photograph. It explains why this one instead of, possibly, another.
The camera remains in her pocket for days afterward, the ice, moving water, falling snow, white hand gripping the bridge rail and bird in flight recorded there, the light of their going-on latent in darkness. Like how, in the photograph, incipient leaf buds stir inside stark branches of poplars along the river. An image which does and does not exist. It’s during this week that a university student kills herself by jumping off the bridge. People say bloodstains are visible on the ice, though it’s reported shortly afterward that flowers have been thrown there. The paper issues a warning to stay off the river, as the ice is no longer safe.
Atoms move at an infinite speed. By virtue of their weight, they tend downward. Allowed to behave naturally, they would fall vertically and uniformly and would never meet.
The photographer leaves work, begins the walk home. What was the end of the bridge is now the start. She steps out onto the first part with air underneath, past a yellow sign warning that the deck is slippery during waterfall operations. On special summer days, the city pumps tons of fresh treated water up through pipes and over the east side of the bridge into the river. Then everyone takes photographs. It’s the world’s first man-made waterfall, 7.3 metres higher than Niagara Falls, and called The Great Divide. Once, it was activated on New Year’s Eve. Water blew across the road alongside the river and froze inches thick, causing many crashes and editorials concerning the dumb ideas of paid officials.
It’s colder now, and dark. The photographer walks carefully, flatfooted, with short strides, because the sidewalk has frosted over. Wind throws snow from all directions in a heavy biting mist. Holding her scarf and collar closed at her throat, she remembers standing on the patio of a Niagara tourist facility, soaked in spray, watching slabs of spring ice hang at the green lip of the drop as though, in that moment, something else were possible.
In December, 1874, hotel owners in Niagara Falls purchased an old Great Lakes schooner and advertised a spectacle they called “The Reverse Noah’s Ark” to lure the curious in low season. After loading the boat with a buffalo, three bears, two foxes, a raccoon, a dog, a cat, and four geese, they sent it over the falls for the appreciation of those assembled, who were then further enticed with drink and accommodation. One version has the geese survive. Another claims the cat was found on shore, eyeless, with broken legs, and that for years entrepreneurs maimed cats to sell to tourists. No one seems to know if any of this is true. But neither does there appear to be anyone who believes it could not have happened.
The photographer is less frightened crossing the bridge at night. Imminent threats of proportion are diminished. She feels the immediacy of walking in known conditions and her thoughts radiating through the abstracted landscape. There is no visible dangerous middle ground.
Having achieved the north side, once through the poorly lit legislative grounds with its eternal flame, the photographer uses a scan card to unlock her building and rides the shaky elevator 11 floors to her rooms. She hates the elevator, but has decided it would be stupid to avoid it and encounter a heart attack in the stairwell. It’s dark by 4 p.m. She lies in bed listening to the endless track of traffic around the apartments and condominiums where residents sleep stacked into the sky, and considers how a person can get used to almost anything.
Though the city reflects dimly off the slice of open water, the valley is very dark. It contains the day and what went on in it though now everything has changed. Light of the coming day is also there. Nothing springs from nothing, and nothing is ever destroyed.
At least twice a month, when the fire alarm goes off in the photographer’s building, everyone mills about the lobby uselessly like participants in a cruise disaster. She’s told that, the year before, someone’s homemade bomb exploded, accidentally, on the fourth floor. A woman leapt from her window into the arms of some football players and was saved, but a man on the other side of the building jumped alone and died. “Three storeys and you’ve got terminal velocity,” says a fellow tenant in camouflage pyjamas. “Three storeys and you might as well jump off the top of the World Trade Center.”
In the mid-’90s, the bridge was subject to extensive rehabilitation. Flaking lead paint was removed and 100,000 litres of a friendlier kind applied. Girders for the Pratt and Warren truss spans were welded, fitted, and original rivets replaced by bolts. It was discovered that some segments had lost fifty percent of their mass to corrosion. Of the men who died in the bridge’s initial construction, one remains entombed in the north pier.
What does it mean, Wittgenstein asks, that hair can look blond in a black-and-white photograph? Does it indeed “look” blond, or do we conclude that it is? Because the word “blond” sounds blond, he says, it’s even easier for hair to appear so. It would be very natural for me to describe the photograph in these words: ‘a man with dark hair and a boy with combed-back blond hair are standing by a machine.’
The end of contemplative attention is a purity of heart. Sometimes after work the photographer sits by the window in the bar watching motorists expertly negotiate the icy, snow-covered 105th Street hill. Someone has been murdering women in the city. One is found stuffed under a motel bed, one in a hockey bag, one in a wooded area, and another on the edge of a golf course. On television, a police spokesman delivers a possible profile. The killer likely drives a high-mileage half-ton or SUV with a large toolbox in the back. He may enjoy fishing, hunting, camping, off-roading. He might have to drive long distances for his job. He could have been seen washing his truck at odd hours. Rob, who is staying in the building, says “that pretty much takes care of every guy in here.” Rob left his wife up in Fort McMurray and is deciding whether to go back. “She’s not the woman I married,” he says.
Four days after the golf course victim is found, people walking in the valley see a body on a large piece of ice floating toward the bridge. Police go out in boats to retrieve her. They guess she is between 12 and 20 years old.
What we can know is defined by what we can’t the way a being is clarified by the elements that sustain it. At last measurement, the Columbia Icefield covered 325 square kilometres. The river originates there, 1,800 metres above sea level at the Continental Divide, flows northeast through the foothills, through aspen parkland with its paper birch and river alder where hundreds of bohemian waxwings overwinter, through Kalyna Country riverland, through Saskatchewan, to Lake Winnipeg. It joins the Nelson River, empties into Hudson Bay.
The photograph appears black and white but for the muted green of open water and the brighter painted green of the low bridge to the east although red dogwood and ochre hearts of scrub are in it. In it, everything keeps happening — the snow falls, river flows, the photographer’s hand holds the rail and the bird is flying. The valley bending to the north keeps bending, though snow in the photograph is water now and that water an element of another landscape. A world that is this one too. Moments before the photograph was shot, a person in a bright blue jacket walking with a yellow dog along the trail beside the river disappeared into a knot of trees, moving like someone with a backstory. They can’t have gotten far.
All this is in the photograph. It is and it isn’t.