Word of the week

brobdignagian

(brob-dig-nag’-ee-un) adj. (often capitalized) of colossal proportions or extraordinary height; gigantic. n. a giant. [From Brobdignag, a country of giants, in the book Gulliver's Travels.]

Work cited:

http://www.wunderland.com/WTS/Alison/lexophilia/coolwords/index.html. Retrieved Jan 23rd 2011.

The Charlottetown redhead

“One day… you’ll cease to care anymore about whom you please or what anybody says about you. That’s when you’ll do your best work.” – - J.D. Salinger.

I went from Antigonish, past Pictou [oldest Scottish settlement in NS,] and took the the Caribou-Wood Island Ferry to PEI, and from the terminal I made the 60K to Charlottetown in two and a half windless hours. PEI is nice and flat, and very pleasant with good roads and farms. I recognized the route from my trip in 2006, especially the place where the river flows under the road to the ocean at Pinette. It was Friday night and the island was drunk. I rode across the bridge from Strafford and slept that night in the bushes by a Timmy’s near the big Hollywood style Charlottetown letters.
In the morning I rode around for a bit and sent emails from a Starbucks. At an outfitter I found a light one-man tent for a hundred bucks and hit up Wal-Mart for a can of brown spray paint to tone down the yellow highlighting. As I came out from the bike shop where I’d restocked on tubes [I'd done all of Cape Breton to here on no spare tubes] I saw a grey stucko house, slightly run down, that I would recognize later. I’d set up at the campground in Strafford, but the twilight found me at Starbucks again, and it was one of tho se nights when you want to know someone in the town. It was pouring rain, but the town was trembling and waiting for dark, and somewhere violins and guitars were being tuned and people would be at home and pre-drinking with dinner.
Food was a toss-up between fish and chips and Mediteranean, and the Med place was a dark looking, branched-in kind of place with the rain to help remind me of a restaurant in Van, and I went to it.
There was one other customer inside, and old man in a corner, and he left after I came. The waitress was a redhead  – had the kind of thick curls that redheads have – but her hair was dyed brown and we met in the middle of the empty tables and I said the place was empty and she rolled her eyes and said,
“I kinda noticed.”
A middle-aged brown guy in the kitchen looked up with eyebrows curious but disapproving, and his look made it seem that the girl was always this way.
The redhead and I talked, and she didn’t sit but returned often. She was slim, but had the hips of a girl who will pear-out in her late twenty’s or thirties, and I was glad I could see her now, not then. The nachos had lettuce on them, and I said exactly that when she came to take the plate and asked how it was. I was thinking about that quote from The Virginian – “when you call me that, smile” – but I didn’t mention it.
You can talk nachos forever, like beers or hitchhiking, if you can pretend your way around knowing something about it, and the other person pretends as well. Almost as good a conversation starter as the pink glasses pushed up on my head.
“I ate shark nachos in Cyprus,” I lied. It had been sword fish, and not with nachos. I had eaten alone at a sea-side table with linen after walking along the new marina in Paphos. Looking out over the harbor I could see the piled stones from the ancient Geek break-water still sticking above the water. The girl reciprocated with something smart and when she had gone I sat watching the bouncing rain drops and drinking J&B’s in a short glass.  Later I asked about music and we decided she would show me around later. It was time for me to vanish, and I left, amazed that I didn’t do something dumb at the last minute, like pushing against a door with a ‘pull’ sign. There was a liquor store on the next block, and later a shower, and at nine-thirty I was waiting when she came walking. The place had closed at nine, and she had gone for a shower and looked different but the same, the way girls can change themselves. Her hair was the same, but damp.
“I’m Sara,” she said, and we hugged and our arms linked and we walked on the sidewalk, across grass by a church, until we met cobblestones in the shadows on the other side. Charlottetown wends its way and is a place of shortcuts and cross-able grass and old municipal buildings. The streets are straight, but end strangely in some places, and in the summer night the arms that stretch from downtown were crisscrossed by music and bar-light and outdoor patios. We sipped the Palm Breeze, and then the Golden Wedding, and to wait for later we ended up on the roof of a high parking garage, and could see the lights of the town and the black ocean while we talked.

She’d grown up on a goat farm, travelled in India, and had lived with Hare-Krishnas. Once she’d had her Neon T-boned and there was nice little scar on her mouth that I could barely see. There was an ex-boyfriend who still thought she was his, but she wasn’t, she said. It was so damn warm out and we flung the first empty bottle way down to the concrete, then sat on the ledge so it would’ve been easy to push each other off and all we had was trust. I spun some words about dew sizzling on machine gun barrels and she looked quietly at the tags on my neck and asked me things, and then told me about talking to a homeless man in Toronto, and about her little brother who was musical and a wimp. She was someone who understood things, even things she hadn’t seen – she seemed to imagine a place and people very well, and this made me like her.

We had come down from the edge and were standing there.

“Yeah,” she said, in context with the thoughts we didn’t speak of. She spoke in a voice that was coming down after being excited and laughing from joking and talking. A voice that progressed towards sadness and then remembered where it was and bounced back. “Tonight’s tonight and tomorrow’s whatever…” she said, and I leaned against the waist high concrete and looked at Charlottetown, thinking about memories, and then answered quietly.

We went to some different bars and sat in back alleys. At one place the bouncer she knew wouldn’t let us in. Cirque du Soleil was in town, and some quirky-looking dudes and gals with piercings were moving amps and equipment from a truck to the back-doors of a building. I yelled at them in French but they laughed and wouldn’t say who they were. Later we were sitting on a concrete jersey barrier by some empty recycling bins – the kind of place you just end up without knowing how. Sara had scraped up her knees from running and falling. I was probably the same. Tomorrow it would be evidence.

“When do you leave?” she asked, when we were talking about the trip.

“Tomorrow.” I said. “Early.”

We sat quietly looking at each other. “That’s quick.” A breeze came running between brick walls and brushed my t-shirt sleeves. Her hair was done up loosely behind her and in the shadow made murky and yellow from the nearby streetlamp her tiny lip scar was a pencil stroke that some artist forgot about. “Why is that so alluring?” she asked.

And we both knew why, but I looked deeply into her eyes and said I didn’t.

Later we danced.

Word of the week

pettifogging: adjective. Over-concerned with unimportant detail.

Work cited:

Collins Mini Dictionary and Thesaurus. HarperCollins Publishers. Glasgow, Great Britain. 2007.

The hell-eating 4WD – or, the story of a boy’s third romance

Here’ a little blurb I sent to the Wheels section of Our Canada in December 2010. Never heard from it since, so here it is.

 

His name was Red Baron and he was an ’87 Pathfinder. He spent some good years making mush out of carved-up logging roads with a guy named Ray from Vancouver, BC.

One day a young kid showed up at Ray’s house and the Baron smelled trouble. He didn’t have to be told; a baby was on the way and his owner was ready for a soccer-van.

The kid bent down with his brother and looked under his belly.

“Its good,” they said.

The boy was eighteen and didn’t have a clue about driving a manual. Their first time out together Red Baron stalled and the kid swore and hit the clutch all wrong while shoving on the shifter. Cars honked. Finally a man with a beard took the boy for a drive and showed him that smooth is fast.

The boy had a girlfriend and they went in Red Baron to Prince George. This old SUV was in for a nasty surprise – he had no block-heater – and the boy didn’t have the money to get one. It was a cold time and Red Baron had trouble starting. One day the kid was showed how to coerce him into turning on no matter what – a push-start someone called it.

The boy and girl couldn’t find work so they drove over the mountains into Alberta, and since they were poor they slept in Red Baron for a whole month. Sometimes Red Baron woke in the night and heard the kids shivering where they lay on the folded-down seats. The girl cried and the boy muttered and pulled on his frozen pants to go to work at a restaurant before the sun rose.

Spring brought better times. The kids had made it through the rough and were ready to celebrate. For the first time in months Red Baron’s tank was topped up and he drank his fuel happily as the boy and girl laughed and drove the Yellowhead.

That summer they moved to the country and Red Baron met gravel roads again. The girl learned to drive and her laughter erased the memory of winter. The boy would take his rifle and lean out the window of the passenger side and shoot at rocks and fence posts.

The kid was building a house in Niton Junction. In the evening they would drive down to the Mcleod and take Red Baron along the river bank. The kid had mastered the clutch and they would dare the river at its own game, driving along till the water washed above the wheel wells. That was the best time the Red Baron ever had.

He was in rough shape now because the money could not be found to repair him. There was talk about selling and the old truck cringed. One morning the kids got up early like they always did and woke the Baron. The girl worked at a restaurant in town and every day there was a long drive. On the way home the boy sat alone with elbows on the wheel and his eyelids drooped. They swooped across the road and rolled and the beautiful Red Barron was soiled and his smooth metal parts were twisted by a ditch, his roof caved in. The kid went to the hospital and the Baron to the junkyard and later the boy and girl came to get their things and say goodbye. The Red Baron was happy that the kids had loved him the way they did. Satisfied with his life he went to sleep and was later minimized into a metal cube and recycled.

 

 

Word of the week

Abderian: Given to incessant or idiotic laughter.

Work cited:

http://users.tinyonline.co.uk/gswithenbank/unuwords.htm. Retrieved Jan 1st 2011.

Inglorious viking bastards

The boat casts off at noon and in minutes we are far from help on the wide gray waters of the upper St. Lawrence River. We sway back and forth, up and down, playing chicken with the rolling waves that hunger for unsteady vessels. The M/V Nordik Express is a 1,748 ton cargo ship owned and operated by Relais Nordik, a shipping service that ferries essential goods and audacious human spirits up Quebec’s rugged coastline. This is a wild and almost road-less land of welterweight evergreens and a shotgun-spread of irregular, rocky shored islands and serrated inlets. Highway 138 ends at Natashquan and from there to Vieux Fort, to which an access road has been built from Labrador, the villages stand alone, their few sundry items brought painfully in by sea and air.

Natalie and I had started from Quebec City yesterday night after a few days spent in Old Town – we took the latest bus we could find that went to the boat’s primary embarkation point in Rimouski. During the next four days as I go from the shelter of the passenger decks to stand outside, assaulted by the spray of waves and rain, I will think; Here only the stubborn can live.

All my adventures start like the little parasite that gets inside the shell of a living, breathing mollusk: The creature becomes irritated and deposits calcium carbonate to seal off the threat. The irritation grows, more secretion is deposited, a priceless pearl is formed. My new Priceless Pearl is north of practically everything. We are on the way to the place where Europeans, for the first time ever, came into contact with The New World and it’s human hosts.

I don’t know when I first heard of L’Anse Aux Meadows, [the name, for everyone who's ever asked, is an English bastardization of the one bestowed on it long ago by Basque fishermen – originally L'Anse aux 'Meduses' meaning jellyfish] all I know is, once I’d heard of it, the idea of visiting never left me alone. I’d read enough Farley Mowat to have cultivated some romantic ideas about The Rock, or Newfoundland – Canada’s very own prodigal son since it’s official adoption in 1949. The isolation and history of this remote place inside the borders of my own country had raised my eyebrows. The foreign particle had worked its way into the shell. Something valuable was taking shape.

Natalie and I had allotted three weeks total on The Rock before work commitments would have us home again, and we had come to see everything we could see, but the big prize was the UNESCO World Heritage Site at the top of the Northern Peninsula where evidence can still be seen of the earliest European settlement in the Americas: Norse explorers first arrived here about 1000 A.D. having sailed in open boats all the way from colonies in Greenland and Iceland.

For me this trip was personal, a pilgrimage, if I dare – I’m of Swedish routes, proudly speak the language, and my cup overflows with a great yearning for adventure, for perpetual quests, the same which must have been the driving force behind these first Europeans. I read much about the subject in the months leading up to our journey so that I would be well prepared to make the most of the opportunity when I arrived.

At Blanc-Sablon, not five thousand meters from the southern fringe of Labrador we disembark and set up for the night. The chalk-colored houses of the village, neat though they are, lie scattered over the land like smashed-out teeth. It feels like a license to put up our tent wherever we want. The main street through town is an old paved lane, the highway to strategic Happy Valley-Goose Bay [the town and Air Force base], and the aorta artery to Quebec’s unyielding interior.

In the dawn we thumb a ride up to L’anse Aux Claire in Labrador proper and I go for a morning dip, just to say I did it, in the Straight of Belle Isle. This is where the icebergs float down from the arctic and get stranded in the narrows – it’s like swimming in a god-size glass of Scotch-on-the-rocks.

The afternoon ferry from St. Barbe carries us across to the island and over the course of the next few days we hitchhike the rainy road to St. Anthony, Iceberg capital of the world, population of 3000, the largest town in northern NL. Everything here is Viking this and Viking that: A Viking Hotel a Viking Restaurant, Viking Trail, Viking laundromat – you get the idea. From St. Anthony we make our way on eye-pleasing route 436, a back road with promising slices of ocean view, past slumbering specs of communities who’s young people have all disappeared to Alberta. After a well-marked turnoff near the modern fishing village of L’anse Aux Meadows we find our Holy Grail.

The Visitor Center looks like a low concrete bunker built into the side of a hill. The small parking lot is host to an elegant variety of RV’s, motorbikes and regular old cars – clearly we’re not the only people who thought we’d had a really original idea. Inside we meet the Parks Canada staff and see the small museum displaying samples of artifacts found on site, similar to ones found in Iceland and Greenland. A ring pin for fastening a cloak, boat-nails, a stone oil lamp, knitting needles, a spindle whorl, etc. Butternuts have also been found here suggesting that the Norsemen made it as far down as northern New Brunswick and the St. Lawrence River. There is a small movie theater that plays documentaries about the area and history. Much is made of the discovery story.

Helge Ingstad, an ambitious Norwegian explorer came upon the site in 1960. His extensive studying of old texts and exhaustive research had led him to look for Norse landing sites northward from New England. A fisherman named George Decker had led him to the site of man-made mounds dismissed long ago by the local populous as a Native burial site. Ingstad took long pains to examine the site and found the raised ground to be the remnants of dwellings – the type used by colonial Norsemen in Greenland and Iceland. An international team of Archeologists was dispatched, led by Ingstad’s wife Anne Stinne and for the next eight years the area was thoroughly excavated and iron artifacts as well as ancient wood that had been worked with metal tools were found – the strongest evidence to suggest European occupation. Further excavations were undertaken by Parks Canada and in 1978 L’Anse Aux Meadows was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Nordic outpost which many insist was occupied by its makers for no more than three years before abandonment is widely considered to be one of the world’s most significant archeological discoveries.

We take a guided tour of the actual site with about twenty others, a soup of polar opposites strangely assembled in this unlikely place. Yuppie Torontonians stand with dread-locked granola-eaters from interior BC, New york office slaves and a country bumpkin from P.E.I. Most of them have come a different way from the one Natalie and I took. Either they flew into St. John’s or maybe they grabbed a car ferry from North Sydney, Nova Scotia. Once you’re at the southern tip of the island the rest is easy, just a long drive with good look-outs.

I’m quick to notice that there isn’t much left to actually see. The Park’s Guide skillfully weaves in information about the climate and ecosystem to give a greater understanding of the place and, forgive me, elongate our value-for-money. Nonetheless I’m impressed – they’ve done their homework. At one point our guide indicates where the old shore used to be, how the land has risen slightly out of the sea since the time of the Vikings, and where the sheltered beach was where they dragged up their ships. We come to the mounds, first a lump that had been identified as the smithy for the abundance of iron leavings that were found here. A total of eight foundations have been discovered, the largest which is 28.8 by 15.6 m. and consisted of several rooms. All building materials used were indigenous to the area – sod laid up on wood frames: practical and well-insulated with the added advantage of keeping a low, subtle profile against the surrounding landscape. There are multiple workshops and outbuildings since L’Anse Aux Meadows is believed to have been primarily a boat repair center for those reconnoitering further south, and a winter gathering place where the explorers consolidated and awaited the return of milder weather.

Our man from the government tells us that during excavations this topsoil that we see was removed more than once, then replaced just the way it was found. It is a unique example in archeological diggings since in other areas from the same period much ground must usually be removed whereas here all they really had to do was pull the grass up by its roots. This is partly due to the near-arctic climate – the growing season is so slow that a tree from the days of Jacques Cartier wouldn’t be much bigger than a west-coast sapling.

The tour breaks off at the last little hump and visitors are encouraged to go by the replica structures. These are not set up to be just like the settlement, but more to give visitors an idea of how the Norse people lived. Nat and I go through a storage shed, smithy, and long house. I imagine the sour, sweating bodies pressed together for long months inside the smoky dwellings while winter winds ravage the roofs. The walls and ceiling are hung with utilities and supplies. There are still two settlers left from the bad old days, a man and a woman in period attire demonstrating ancient ways of doing things; weaving, carving and tale-spinning, not to mention flute-playing. Curiosity satiated, we walk back to the Visitor Center along the last leg of the loop-trail that brought us through the site.

That night we treat ourselves to a bed and breakfast in the microscopic community of Hay Cove, a few kilometers jaunt down the lane. Natalie is sick from the long days on the move and wet weather. I just got lucky – my body rebelled and then recovered while we were still aboard the Nordik Express. We are fortunate to find a place since this is that small time of year when booking accommodations up here might actually be necessary. A very reasonable forty-eight dollars is all that is swallowed from our finances for the unexpected one-night-inside room and board. That afternoon I walk by myself to find food at a little mom-and-pop store and into the dusk I hike the barren hills that overlook quilts of foam breaking on jagged black rocks. Icebergs large and small dot the ocean-scape, and I can spy that rainbow-blue glow of sea-ice in the flawless curves of the close ones. I’m absorbed by thoughts of the ancient Beothuck Indians now vanished forever by slaughter and disease. My wild blood-ancestors the Vikings, their ragged blonde hair matted with salt-water spray, their lips parched, hands calloused by oars, eyes pinched from squinting into blue distances. On these wild fingers of reaching rock the early people met. Maybe it happened exactly where I’m standing right now. The first contact ever.

Everyone should see this place, I think to myself.

The Viking settlement at L’Anse Aux Meadows was short lived. It was un-sustainable due to the harsh conditions and limited resources, and hard to attain from the closest permanent settlement. Hostilities must have developed quickly between the settlers and the ‘Skraelings’, the Viking term for the local Natives.

The restless wind is eating at my fleece. The sun is descending it’s invisible ladder and pauses on the red shelf of the horizon. We look at each other for a long minute and then the shape of the sun changes as it sinks. It’s last fingers of orange wave, then fade, like the souls of dead people departing Earth. Darkness settles on The Rock and I walk back to the house.

Tomorrow we will thumb our way south.

Word of the week

Soporific: 1. a) causing or tending to cause sleep b) tending to dull awareness or alertness 2. Of, relating to, or marked by sleepiness or lethargy.

Work cited

Websters New Collegiate Dictionary. G&C Merriam Co. Springfield, Mass. 1977.

Meanderings in Canada’s North

Published in The Swedish Press on May 14th 2009.
A bit cheesy maybe, but okay.

In June of 2008 I got a drive to Bellingham from my home in Vancouver BC and boarded the Columbia, of the Alaska Marine Highway. The ferry follows the inside passage to Skagway AK, the first pit-stop of the gold-sick men and women who, a century ago, established this tiny inlet town on the gameboard of history. I’m on my way to hike the Chilkoot Trail, a scar left from turbulent days in the coast mountains of Alaska/Canada.
All winter I’ve been taken in by stories of the Yukon gold-rush. I would sit behind the counter of the little second-hand sports shop where work had found me, and devour Jack London, Robert Service and Pierre Burton. I knew it was that time again, to leave the city and leap at the designs fate had in store for me.
It turns out that I’m not the first Swede to waver for an a-typical desire to go North. On the ferry I sit watching the gray waves and mountains plunging from the sea and think of a man in my readings named Eric A. Hegg. Out of many Swedes who played significant roles among the Klondikers, his was a high calling. Born in Sweden, Mr. Hegg immigrated to the U.S.A. and settled in the region of Puget Sound in 1888. A photographer by vocation, and owner of two studios, Hegg knew exactly what to do in 1897 when news of a gold strike reached Washington. He hoisted his camera and joined the thousands of hopefuls on this same route, his heart not set on riches, but the unfolding of history.
Hegg would become known as an important contributor in the documentation of the gold-rush, the most photographed event in 19th century North America. From the town of Dyea near Skagway, to the Golden Stairs where 30,000 people would cross the mountains into British Columbia, down the Yukon on rafts to Dawson City, the place of the find that had set the human tide in motion. Through this, Hegg lugged his equipment and came away with a different kind of gold.
The hike to Lake Bennett from the townsite of Dyea is 53 km [or 33 miles] and I make a leisurely gait for three nights. Artifacts are everywhere – there are the sundered remains of the cargo tram built in vain at the Golden Stairs – when it was finished everyone had gone over. Wagon wheels, and old food tins, wood stoves and saw blades. The skeleton of a boat… some stoic had dragged it over the pass before leaving it .
At Bennett, the trail’s end, I am swept away by the desolation. A boat builders shanty-town sprang up here and promptly died, a hiccup in time. Nothing is here now except the train station and I sit down with some hikers I’ve aquainted, groups of three and four, and two families, to wait for the great behemoth of the White Pass & Yukon Route that will take me back to the world.
Back in Skagway, I get a ride to Whitehorse with a family of adventurers, whose friendship was found on the trail. Jill, Bruce and their son Caelon, take me in like family and after three days to discover Whitehorse, in the stead of continuing on to Dawson by way of thumb I throw sense to the wind and do something I haven’t planned on. A canoe is rented and I, blissfully inexperienced, set off alone down the mighty Yukon to pursue again the specters of the Rush. Everywhere I stop, and many places where I can’t, I see remnants of last century. Abandoned settlements and RCMP outposts. The hulk of Steamship Evelyn abandoned in her dry-dock at Shipyard Island. Half-way finished I run the gauntlet of standing waves at Five Finger Rapids. After twelve days that would fill a book, I slip around the last bend before Dawson City with 750 km of new-found canoe skills behind my weaving paddle. I had read from Robert Service about the Spell of the Yukon, and now it’s got me. At the end of summer I return to Vancouver with many glances back. Because my spirit remains in the Klondike. As soon as I can, I will go home again.

PEI Popcorn Sister

<In September 2006 [when I was eighteen] I was sent to Kentville NS to do an intensive course in additional machine gun, pistol and mortar skills. We spent time at ranges in Granville [South NS] and Gagetown, NB and after the course I took two weeks off, went to Halifax for a $300 Infinity bike, and continued from there on my first solo bike tour. In one day I got to Amherst and stayed for thanksgiving with some friends, and from there continued to PEI. The following is an excerpt from writing completed in the spring of 2009, regarding that trip.>

I turned right on the 16 out of Sackville and got to the Confederation Bridge that afternoon. A shuttle bus over the 13K bridge and I was on PEI, Anne of Green gables country. I biked past the McCain factory and past old churches set along the quite two lane highway, stopped at a convenience store at the lip of some small town and got apples and candy. Long after dark I got into Charlottetown, locked the bike and climbed a Wal-Mart roof to sleep the night. Someone came up early in the morning, didn’t see me, and I ran between the vents and intakes down to a lower level of roof and jumped down to a loading area at the back of the store. That was a quiet day. It was nice to be alone for a while, to think. I walked up and down some streets, shops labelled Anne’s this and Anne’s that, and stopped in book stores.

That night I was in a coffee shop. Strange towns are great in the day, but at night when it becomes dark they can be very sad if you’re alone and sleeping on roof-tops. I talked to the girl working, glad that her name wasn’t Anne. They were closing up soon.

“Have you heard of couch surfing?” She asked. She was late twenties maybe, dark hair tied back.

No.

“It’s cool, its a club of people that take in backpackers on their way through a place. You post note on the net saying when you’re coming through, someone sees it and maybe tells you to come stay with them for the night. It’ s a good way to meet people, go party for the night. You should try it.”

“It’s a little late tonight.”

“Yeah… Sometime you should try it though, if you’re into this stuff.”

There was no one in the store. She had turned the closed sign. I looked down into the empty mug.

“What about you? Could I just crash on your couch tonight?”. Please, I though to myself

She was cashing out, the change was slamming and clinking in the register trays as she counted. She was quiet.

“I still have to do some stuff here. There’s a bar up the street-” She said the name “-I can meet you if you if you want. Half hour or so.”

Her name was Nisha, and she lived on the whole second-floor of an ancient square-built wooden thing that could have had a typical old corner store, or an art studio on its ground level. There was a long staircase where I put my bike, and mustard-yellow interior walls . We stayed up watching vintage sci-fi, eating popcorn, and after midnight I fell asleep on the couch and she actually threw a blanket on me before going to her room.

In the morning when I woke up she had gone to work already. There was a man in the kitchen. He had a white beard and could have been her dad.

“I’m Glen, I’m Kate’s room-mate. Your were pretty tired last night.” He looked like a professor, and thin beard, glasses. A granola eater, the kind of guy who took LSD in the sixties and now has a PhD and bikes to his research job in a yellow MEC jacket and spandex all year round.

“Help yourself to something. I got to go. She left you a note.”

I chewed milk and Cherios and read the yellow post-it note.

What a cool chick, I thought.

And that day i left Charlottetown, and it has kept a  warm spot in my memory.

Bike This

Works cited have links provided at the bottom of this page.

New bike-only lanes in Vancouver’s already congested city-scape has had citizens up in arms for nearly a year. While budget commuters are riding safer and greener than ever, the city’s motorists are insisting these barrier-separated portions of major streets are causing traffic-movement problems and a higher chance of car accidents due to changes in the infrastructure. And not only motorists may suffer, but small business owners as well, due to loss of parking spaces. Laura Jones, VP of the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses in Western Canada stated in a press release “mayor and council think losing customers is no big deal. It is a big deal when your customers keep your business viable and your business supports your family and your employees.” [See link]. While this is an argument worth considering, Yvonne Bambrick a Toronto activist and avid bicycle commuter in a city that already benefits from existing bike lanes, points out as a guest poster on the Canadian blog Enviro Boys; “more people on bicycles means fewer people taking up precious road space in cars… Bike lanes add a greater level of predictability to our roads by showing more clearly where we can expect each transportation mode to be travelling.” [See link]. Regardless of the controversy, the mayor of Vancouver, Gregor Robertson is still moving ahead with plans to develop the greenest city in the world by 2020. “This plan is not just about having a healthy environment that keeps us all alive, it’s about the economy and the community. It’s about keeping things in balance,” he said during a presentation at the Gaining Ground-Resilient Cities conference at the Vancouver Convention Centre. [See link]. So while small-business owners and motor-commuters may suffer temporarily, a quick enquiry on the internet, or on the street, will go to show that the majority of people support the bike-lanes – and because of these lanes, more people are already cycling. With so many positives and a few temporary negatives, it is clear that bike lanes are the avenue to a greener future and a healthier lifestyle.

Works Cited:

By: ctvbc.ca [author name N/A]. September 8, 2010. Retrieved December 3, 2010. http://www.ctvbc.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20100908/bc_hornby_bike_lane_100908?hub=BritishColumbiaHome

By: Yvonne Bambrick. May 21, 2010. Retrieved December 3, 2010. http://www.enviroboys.com/2010/05/guest-entry-bike-lanes-serve-all.html

By:Gerry Bellett. October 20^th 2009. Retrieved December 3, 2010. http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Mayor+releases+plan+make+Vancouver+world+greenest+city+2020/2124455/story.html