I sometimes compare Kelowna, British Columbia to Bend, Oregon, but that's unfair to Kelowna. Like Bend, Kelowna is in a semi-arid high desert surrounded by mountains and water features. They're both expensive to live in; they're both tourist destinations.
But last week, when I devoured heaping bowls of poutine and tried to immerse myself in the Canadian experience, I realized something. Kelowna represents a transcendent departure from my American routine. It is a wholly unique and magical place, and the vexations of modern life dissolve when I cross the glassy Okanagan Lake and head into town.
People are just more chipper in Kelowna than anywhere else. They have good reason to be: the Okanagan Valley is rich in wineries, ski resorts, and clear lakes. I knew all that, and had traveled to Kelowna before to enjoy some of those things, but this time it was different. My buddies Jeff and Jamie and I were determined to get under the skin of a place, to leave the hotel room and really rub elbows in the community.
I realized last summer that the best way to quickly learn about a place is to see local sports. Milwaukee and Chicago came alive with the Brewers, Cubs, and White Sox--baseball is an affordable and thoroughly entertaining "welcome" to any good city. In Kelowna, of course, we had to check out the junior hockey team, the Kelowna Rockets. This was an apotheosis. A hockey game in Canada is like a soccer game in Mexico or a baseball game in Chicago. It is the perfect intersection of intense athletic endeavor and spectator support. The two games we caught were both high-stakes playoff games, and I was enthralled from the first face-off. Hockey, minute-by-minute, is more violent than American football, and yet the athletes exhibit tremendous grace and skill, changing directions on skates without effort or catching pucks sailing high above the ice. The team moved as a unit, a swelling and contracting organism that simultaneously looked angelic and malevolent, gliding to and fro on the pale rink. The first game went into double-overtime. The second game was decided by a goal. Both times, the home team won. And as we watched, transfixed, the locals around us stomped and yelled and embodied the collective exhultations of a Canadian hockey contest. The thundering arena became part of the entertainment, and us three naive Americans, for a few special hours, joined the fun.
Jeff and Jamie and I all went to a Tim Horton's and bought Timbits (doughnut holes) to celebrate the end of game six, when the boys fended off elimination and won one for the good people of Kelowna.
We skied for a few days and wandered around the lake shore. The wind blew cold off the water: the Okanagan Valley still hadn't shaken winter. We wandered the streets of Kelowna and checked out the cycling scene. We ate french fries smothered in cheese and gravy, and watched Sportcenter about hockey.
The indelible image of Kelowna, for me, was a moment on Friday at the H2O Adventure & Fitness Centre. This enormous add-on to the local YMCA/YWCA is the largest indoor water park I'd ever been to, by far, and was a thrilling diversion. The H2O Centre, filled with local swim teams, teenagers, young families, and the requisite old loners, had it all. Three water slides hung suspended, four stories up, over much of the wave pool. A lazy river wound under the slides, and high dives towered from the next pool over. A false wave, built for surfing and boogie boarding, raged along a far wall. Sunlight peered in from distant windows on the ceiling.
We stayed several hours at that community pool, and the indelible image came near the end of our stay, in the lazy river, when I happily lay on my back and floated around gentle curves. I was surrounded by Kelownans of all ages and foam-noodle flotsam, and I remember the water was warm and the air was very bright as the afternoon sun angled just right at the river. In that golden place, I was an ingredient in a weloming Canadian soup, and everything in life became ideal.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Sojourns: Volume Three--Cibecue
(Not much going on in March for a schoolteacher in Oregon. So I'll write about other times, the quarter of the year when I don't have to show up to work. This will be a multi-part series.)
The Chiricahua Apache escaped the reservation at Cibecue Creek in 1881, vanishing in dust and bullets and blood, commencing the last real skirmishes of the Indian Wars.
I went to Cibecue, after sophomore year at Oregon State, to work in dirty tents and under smoky skies. I traveled to Cibecue, a nineteen-year-old longhaired seeker, to make sense of the West, to try my hand at the terrific promise of an outdoor summer job, and to reinvent the person I was turning into. Cibecue was, to me, the gateway to the Wild West. That impoverished Apache reservation town triggered a shift in the way I viewed myself, and my direction in life.
I'm glad that Ricarda talked me into that job, that she picked me up in a maintenance truck in Eugene and drove me through stark deserts and glittering cities. I'm thankful that the grass-seed farm didn't have work that year, and that I was able to "light out for the territory" like Huck Finn, unencumbered, unattached. The summer of 2002 was hot and dry across the West, and ultimately, I'm grateful for the Indian arsonist that started the Rodeo-Chedeski Fire in those high Arizona hills. These forces combined in a cyclone of luck and calamity, a cyclone that sucked me in.
Compared to life in Oregon, the routine at Cibicue was alien. I'd pull my dreadlocks under a hairnet, put on the company-issue blue work shirt, huff the brown snot out of my nose, and get to work. I weighed hunks of meat. I cut vegetables. I took smoke breaks and shook many hands and stared out into the desert late at night.
In Cibecue, three-legged mangy dogs walked past our generator lights and tarantulas scuttled under our trailers. Forest fires danced up on the hills that encircled our camp. The workers would get nosebleeds and headaches. We'd miss sleep. Some went to the hospital tent for heatstroke. We'd play basketball against Apaches in the high school gym, and get dominated every time. We were part of a town transformed, a ramshackle spattering of desert buildings converted into a government work camp.
I remember working through the night and past dawn, while Led Zeppelin blared through crackly speakers and the sky turned red through the smoke. I remember colored lizards. I remember the truck driver from Riverside with the "K.S." (Killer Side) gang tattoos along his forearms. I remember our boss, sleeves rolled up and high on coffee, recite long lyric poems in the predawn stillness. I can still see vague red ribbons moving along the hillsides under the gray haze, and hear the roar of the planes and helicoptors dumping esoteric chemicals. I recall the big guy next to me in the assembly line that uttered breathy phrases in an ancient language, far older and richer than English or Spanish. I recall the horror, and embarrassment, of a modern Indian reservation: all dirty and poor and sad. There was dust and sage, heat and sweat. In that Arizona furnace, we cooked, grappled, and rallied.
We all wore the badge of OK's Cascade, Mobile Solutions. We made the food that fueled the firefighters.
God bless and keep you, OK's Cascade.
That job, beginning at the squalor of Cibecue, took me across the West over the next two summers. Cibecue was the first chapter in a long novel, a novel filled with triumph, heartbreak, and tedium. The novel would be a western epic, rich with allegory and dirty realism. Though the last chapter ended in 2003, the writer is still searching for material to compose his next epic, another first line to be penned where a dusty desert road threads its way into oblivion.
The Chiricahua Apache escaped the reservation at Cibecue Creek in 1881, vanishing in dust and bullets and blood, commencing the last real skirmishes of the Indian Wars.
I went to Cibecue, after sophomore year at Oregon State, to work in dirty tents and under smoky skies. I traveled to Cibecue, a nineteen-year-old longhaired seeker, to make sense of the West, to try my hand at the terrific promise of an outdoor summer job, and to reinvent the person I was turning into. Cibecue was, to me, the gateway to the Wild West. That impoverished Apache reservation town triggered a shift in the way I viewed myself, and my direction in life.
I'm glad that Ricarda talked me into that job, that she picked me up in a maintenance truck in Eugene and drove me through stark deserts and glittering cities. I'm thankful that the grass-seed farm didn't have work that year, and that I was able to "light out for the territory" like Huck Finn, unencumbered, unattached. The summer of 2002 was hot and dry across the West, and ultimately, I'm grateful for the Indian arsonist that started the Rodeo-Chedeski Fire in those high Arizona hills. These forces combined in a cyclone of luck and calamity, a cyclone that sucked me in.
Compared to life in Oregon, the routine at Cibicue was alien. I'd pull my dreadlocks under a hairnet, put on the company-issue blue work shirt, huff the brown snot out of my nose, and get to work. I weighed hunks of meat. I cut vegetables. I took smoke breaks and shook many hands and stared out into the desert late at night.
In Cibecue, three-legged mangy dogs walked past our generator lights and tarantulas scuttled under our trailers. Forest fires danced up on the hills that encircled our camp. The workers would get nosebleeds and headaches. We'd miss sleep. Some went to the hospital tent for heatstroke. We'd play basketball against Apaches in the high school gym, and get dominated every time. We were part of a town transformed, a ramshackle spattering of desert buildings converted into a government work camp.
I remember working through the night and past dawn, while Led Zeppelin blared through crackly speakers and the sky turned red through the smoke. I remember colored lizards. I remember the truck driver from Riverside with the "K.S." (Killer Side) gang tattoos along his forearms. I remember our boss, sleeves rolled up and high on coffee, recite long lyric poems in the predawn stillness. I can still see vague red ribbons moving along the hillsides under the gray haze, and hear the roar of the planes and helicoptors dumping esoteric chemicals. I recall the big guy next to me in the assembly line that uttered breathy phrases in an ancient language, far older and richer than English or Spanish. I recall the horror, and embarrassment, of a modern Indian reservation: all dirty and poor and sad. There was dust and sage, heat and sweat. In that Arizona furnace, we cooked, grappled, and rallied.
We all wore the badge of OK's Cascade, Mobile Solutions. We made the food that fueled the firefighters.
God bless and keep you, OK's Cascade.
That job, beginning at the squalor of Cibecue, took me across the West over the next two summers. Cibecue was the first chapter in a long novel, a novel filled with triumph, heartbreak, and tedium. The novel would be a western epic, rich with allegory and dirty realism. Though the last chapter ended in 2003, the writer is still searching for material to compose his next epic, another first line to be penned where a dusty desert road threads its way into oblivion.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Reading Rainbow
Three nonfiction books I'm thumbing through now:
The White Album by Joan Didion
For first-timers, this one needs to be read with her other great work, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. These two books are ridiculously good. Didion is an intimidating writer when she writes fiction, and she's on another planet when she writes essays. She's the most honest, incisive, and erudite voice we have in nonfiction American letters, and these two essay collections were written at the high-water mark of her career.
I've read and reread both of these books, and am into The White Album now because it fits so readily into my current teaching curriculum and life's ponderings (the "Sojourns" portion of my blog are a direct rip-off of a section of her book). What amazes me about the book, still, is how easily Didion is able to cut through any crap and immediately land on the truth in all situations. Two of her essays, "On the Morning after the Sixties" and "The Women's Movement" so concisely deconstruct the subject matter that after three pages, as readers, we are simply accepting what Didion tells us. She effectively uses people's words against them, so whenever she quotes something it's a signal of impending doom. Like a literary ninja, she hacks away at pretense and reduces lofty ideas to nothing in a few paragraphs. All the while, she, as a narrator, is quiet and remarkably conservative. It's as though Didion viewed two decades in the American experience with an eyebrow raised, made a few notes in her notebook, then wrote two of the most brilliant books in our history.
Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues by Elijah Wald
This book is uncomfortable to me. Elijah Wald, a blues musician, essentially studies the history of blues music in the Mississippi Delta and explains why the prevailing myths are wrong. Robert Johnson, he argues, was probably a different person than we all think he was. He wanted to be rich, and mainstream. He also was minimally influential in his time. The obsession with "authenticity," with the hardscrabble narrative and legends of blues musicians that the rock-and-roll generation devours greedily, is all a sham.
I like the prevailing myths, and I felt better when I believed that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil to play blues, died at twenty-seven (the first in a series of musicians dying at that infamous age), and became the most influential bluesman in history. Still, I like Wald's book. It's honest, and I am enjoying his meticulous research and rare knowledge of music. This book is revisionist history, sure, but Wald loves music and the truth more than the romantic legends of white college students. Serious music fans should pick up this one.
Buying In: The Secret Dialogue between What We Buy and Who We Are by Rob Walker
I'm not actually reading this text: it's a book-on-CD from the Wilsonville Library. I listen to it on my commute. This book is fantastic, a shorter, less-angry No Logo (by Naomi Klein). Rob Walker, a columnist for the New York Times, studies marketing and consumption, and his book analyzes the shifts in advertising from the 2oth to the 21st Century. Like the other two, his book is refreshingly honest. (Walker admits to feeling miffed when Nike bought-out Converse, then wonders why he felt so tied to the Converse brand to begin with.)
Walker examines the paradoxes in modern life. For example,when surveyed, a number of people (about 77%) think that they are more critical of advertising than "most people." In other words, most people are more critical than most people. Another paradox: people want to be individual and special; people want to fit in with their peers. Walker, in his introduction, explains that we are all consumers, and that we all identify with brand names. His goal (and it's a noble one) is to get us to be honest with ourselves and make consumer choices that are ultimately ethical. This book is well written and well researched, and the hour commute rushes by when the CD is playing. There's a lot of psychology, sociology, and economics in this one. And yet, though I'm a humble English major, I'm getting a lot out of it.
--On a side note, whenever Walker discusses people that revere symbols and brands, or whenever he explores "revisionist" memory in consumers, I think of Oregon Duck football fans. Walker talks about "joining" brands as though they're cults, and consumers being dazzled by things that, while not necessarily better, are "novel" and appeal to consumers' sense of "individuality." I look around the Portland Metro Area, see countless Duck fans that never went to the University of Oregon, and realize that these are the people Walker is studying.
The White Album by Joan Didion
For first-timers, this one needs to be read with her other great work, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. These two books are ridiculously good. Didion is an intimidating writer when she writes fiction, and she's on another planet when she writes essays. She's the most honest, incisive, and erudite voice we have in nonfiction American letters, and these two essay collections were written at the high-water mark of her career.
I've read and reread both of these books, and am into The White Album now because it fits so readily into my current teaching curriculum and life's ponderings (the "Sojourns" portion of my blog are a direct rip-off of a section of her book). What amazes me about the book, still, is how easily Didion is able to cut through any crap and immediately land on the truth in all situations. Two of her essays, "On the Morning after the Sixties" and "The Women's Movement" so concisely deconstruct the subject matter that after three pages, as readers, we are simply accepting what Didion tells us. She effectively uses people's words against them, so whenever she quotes something it's a signal of impending doom. Like a literary ninja, she hacks away at pretense and reduces lofty ideas to nothing in a few paragraphs. All the while, she, as a narrator, is quiet and remarkably conservative. It's as though Didion viewed two decades in the American experience with an eyebrow raised, made a few notes in her notebook, then wrote two of the most brilliant books in our history.
Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues by Elijah Wald
This book is uncomfortable to me. Elijah Wald, a blues musician, essentially studies the history of blues music in the Mississippi Delta and explains why the prevailing myths are wrong. Robert Johnson, he argues, was probably a different person than we all think he was. He wanted to be rich, and mainstream. He also was minimally influential in his time. The obsession with "authenticity," with the hardscrabble narrative and legends of blues musicians that the rock-and-roll generation devours greedily, is all a sham.
I like the prevailing myths, and I felt better when I believed that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil to play blues, died at twenty-seven (the first in a series of musicians dying at that infamous age), and became the most influential bluesman in history. Still, I like Wald's book. It's honest, and I am enjoying his meticulous research and rare knowledge of music. This book is revisionist history, sure, but Wald loves music and the truth more than the romantic legends of white college students. Serious music fans should pick up this one.
Buying In: The Secret Dialogue between What We Buy and Who We Are by Rob Walker
I'm not actually reading this text: it's a book-on-CD from the Wilsonville Library. I listen to it on my commute. This book is fantastic, a shorter, less-angry No Logo (by Naomi Klein). Rob Walker, a columnist for the New York Times, studies marketing and consumption, and his book analyzes the shifts in advertising from the 2oth to the 21st Century. Like the other two, his book is refreshingly honest. (Walker admits to feeling miffed when Nike bought-out Converse, then wonders why he felt so tied to the Converse brand to begin with.)
Walker examines the paradoxes in modern life. For example,when surveyed, a number of people (about 77%) think that they are more critical of advertising than "most people." In other words, most people are more critical than most people. Another paradox: people want to be individual and special; people want to fit in with their peers. Walker, in his introduction, explains that we are all consumers, and that we all identify with brand names. His goal (and it's a noble one) is to get us to be honest with ourselves and make consumer choices that are ultimately ethical. This book is well written and well researched, and the hour commute rushes by when the CD is playing. There's a lot of psychology, sociology, and economics in this one. And yet, though I'm a humble English major, I'm getting a lot out of it.
--On a side note, whenever Walker discusses people that revere symbols and brands, or whenever he explores "revisionist" memory in consumers, I think of Oregon Duck football fans. Walker talks about "joining" brands as though they're cults, and consumers being dazzled by things that, while not necessarily better, are "novel" and appeal to consumers' sense of "individuality." I look around the Portland Metro Area, see countless Duck fans that never went to the University of Oregon, and realize that these are the people Walker is studying.
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