Beaver bus lines

Where the rigs park every weekend--far corner of the hotel parking lot (parkin glot, as I sometimes spell it), the corner closest to me--sits bright and empty in its yellow lines. One rig takes up eleven or twelve spaces. Most of the time the bus or semi is left to idle, as if were the driver to shut it down, six months of deep freeze would descend, or the vehicle's vital fluids would seize.

I've taken to interviewing the drivers, finding out what made them do it--agree to park a bus, and open one door, and walk around, pulling at compartments, smoking.

(Note re what not to wear when interviewing bus drivers: hoodies with the hood up, when they're wearing blazers and ties.)

There comes a time

The other day, a rainy day much like this one, only rainy elsewhere, I was on the phone with D. We're so much alike. Always veering off, trying new things. Somehow the conversation jumped from drums to construction. I told him I'd like to be a track hoe operator. I've been watching one work just outside of town, digging up muck. I love the way it moves. The way it whips around so smoothly. Not sure if I could control the bucket, I said. Looks a bit tricky. But I love heavy equipment. Scrapers, loaders, graders, crawler tractors, excavators. Bring it on. So now, as it rains, I'm looking over the heavy equipment operator course offered by SIAST. It's mighty tempting. Especially for someone who wants to build a new road. Leave a mark. Run a big machine.

Oh yes and windy

"We've got the best air in bluegrass music," Del McCreary on the radio almost said just now. He meant that the near trees whip against the walls of the College I work in. Further out, south edge of the parking lot, others don't know whether to backflip or bow. All that comes between Wascana Lake and the tall poplars across the road is shove after shove from a wind that's pumped for winter.

Once in a while, a visitor to this city comments on the weather. "Cold," usually about does it. Before the decades-long dome of pesticide that floated over the south end, it was always, "Mosquitos are bad." On a personal level, I'm tired of explaining why I don't mind the cold on my bare legs in early April or October. How many ways can I say It's Regina, it's October. What kind of breeze did you expect?

Such wind is my new physician. I'll turn to it for news.

Bad landing

Sometimes you fall hard. As if you were cruelly pushed from behind. Getting back up takes time. Like the time we were playing tennis a few years back. H hit a crosscourt return. Quick-footed on court, I thought I could run it down. I almost did. But, on the dead run, I fell. Fell fist first onto my racket hand. Racket in hand. Fist first onto hardcourt. Bones broke. I remember letting out a quick scream as the rest of my body landed. And then one more. I remember H at my side. The look on his face. I told him not to touch me. I wasn't sure what was wrong. And then I began to laugh. I couldn't stop. Shock turned me into a twisted, giggling heap. Eventually I got up, still giggling. Said I'd be ok. Refused to go to emergency. I spent a sleepless night wondering why I fell. What I did wrong. Some time the next morning I gave in to reality. Saw a doc, then walked home, my bright white cast still drying. I'd refused the prescription the doc offered. No need, I said. Damn thing's broken. It's supposed to hurt.

Then Lucy and I went shopping

Running east along the north side of the creek west of Albert Street, I wondered why no one had a boat on the water. It's the damn climate, that's why. But on a day like today, with the colours and air chippy and fresh as a blown tin can, why not get out there, watch the leaf-play, follow one breath with another.

I stayed on the north side, packed gravel, rather than cross the bridge to a paved path at about Cameron Street. Past several possible exits to the north, I kept going right to the Albert Street bridge. There the path veered left behind some houses. I followed to a dead end, hard up against the bridge on one side, fence ahead and on the left, everything overgrown. After a moment of debate, I climbed a light standard and hoisted myself over the bridge railing onto the west sidewalk of Albert Street, looking as if I'd just climbed out of bed, I think.

I did see a couple of kayaks on the lake, a rushed sky, my own body running.

Attention

I stopped typing the instant I heard the rumble. It was strong. I was scared. It sounded like a blast, but it was already well past 9 p.m. and they never blast that late and the rumbling went on too long. Then I thought, no, please not an accident. But the sound was a bit south of the mining complex. I was confused. Then another rumble. I recognized it then. Thunder. A thunderstorm in mid September. It turned out to be one of the worst storms of the year.

I hadn't checked the weather forecast today and had no idea we were under a severe thunderstorm watch. We'd been out for a walk earlier this evening, on the road west of town. As I walked my mind turned to Dewdney's Acquainted With the Night, which I've been reading, and because of it I was looking southeast, in the same direction from which the rumble would later come, waiting for night-rise and loving the word penumbra, a word I found in his discussion of the dawn of night. I wanted to watch the night rise, the rising of the penumbra, but I was struck by what the sun was doing. How it was throwing giant spruce shadows onto the sand piles. With a wrestling match like that going on, who'd pay any attention to the sky?

Public property

My plan to photograph wherever someone has blocked a Hillsdale easement (a practice--the blocking, not the photographing--allowed over the years by the City) begins behind our old family home. For the last 32 years it's been owned by someone else. Only this summer did they replace the original fence.

If I click enough zoom into digital version of a photograph taken in July, 1961, I can see that house even before the fence was built, when for landscaping Dad tried potatoes. (To prime the gumbo for grass, was the theory.)

The past peeks from most corners here. It's a secret space, what the mind turns to, west between Anderson and Uhrich.

If anyone looking out their kitchen window wonders what I'm doing out there in the easement back of their property line, I'll show them what's in my camera: landscapes, twelve feet wide.

The creeps

Motion-activated sprinklers are downright creepy. There's one near a house along our walking route and when we walk by it spits at us. Even when we walk in the middle of the street it spits and spits. I always make a point of looking the other way. I don't want the occupants to see the expression on my face. As if they're looking. As if there's more than one. Tonight when I looked the other way, just before the sprinkler started spitting, I thought of Stephen King. It felt as if I were walking into a scene he'd written and something really bad was about to happen. A few steps later the spitting stopped, but it took my imagination a while to catch up. A couple blocks later it was still on my mind. I tried to snap out of it by picking up the pace, but the faster I moved the more it spit. By the time I got home I was drenched.

Afternoon one

Lucy said she's never stood so close to a train. This was at the "last spike" site near Craigellachie. I took three snaps of her there in her denim dress she'd bought in Kelowna. Looked like she didn't know what to do at first, the fence between her and the train. She could have stood closer.

She kept us going all that day and most of the next before losing a bit of energy with two or three hours to go, around Swift Current. That's when she hauled open the log I occasionally use on road trips and wrote down the first couple of (locomotive) numbers.

Today's she's out helping a friend film some kind of scene/installation downtown west of Albert Street. I'm not sure of the details other than involves a lot of running.

They're running west of Albert, cutting through alleys to the next street, ragged like flag, in cameras.

Sometimes the train wakes me

Most times I don't hear it, but when the pressure is right and the wind is from the right direction it sounds as if it's right across the street. Like this morning. It's likely not the slag train for it's electric and goes about things more quietly. I have no idea how many times a day it hauls slag to the slag dump, east of the tailings pond. In the past we'd sometimes head down the garbage dump road, crawl up into the rocks and watch the molten waste flow into the pond like lava from four small volcanoes. And I would stand beside H and ask him again what it was like to be so close to something so hot. He had worked as a brakeman on that train. I asked him again this morning and he gave the same smile. The same story.

Regina traffic

The day after I'm home from Vancouver and back, my body starts to react. Someone shut off the lube pumps and went home. Feels like I'm wearing a wooden box.

I drove my lower back through fog, thick rain, frost, night, stale Fresca and 3,500 km first with Tom (who insisted on driving the last 45 km from Chilliwack, which took two hours) then with Lucy, who always finds that last couple of hours from Swift Current to be the toughest. To help, I asked her to start the LocoLog, a listing of locomotives: where they are, which directing they're heading, the date and time. "When you encounter 8809 again in three years, you'll be thrilled," is how I put it to Lucy. "I don't think so," she said, but she got the log going anyway.

In the Main and East 19th Avenue area of Vancouver, stores full of hundred-year-old furniture stacked to the ceiling stand next to the hippest indie record store in the city (judging by its mention that very day in the BC edition of the Globe). Neglected house and yards back onto the newest of renovations, in either case the houses having been owned by the same family for three or more generations.

By comparison the prairie seemed open and alone when we crossed it. And today Regina traffic hardly moves.

Overdone

I'm not a big fan of meat, but you know how it is when you're out for a run and the blood is pumping. You smell every damn steak out there. When my heart is humming along I bet I can tell you exactly how well done each steak is on the fly by. Last night the medium rare rib eye on 3rd Avenue stopped me in my tracks. Time to pull it off, buddy, I thought. But no, the bbq kept smoking, no one in sight. I moved on, knowing how it would end. Tough.