U N I V E R S I T Y O F R E G I N A ■ S C H O O L O F J O U R N A L I S M ■ S P R I N G 2 0 0 6 A MAGAZINE FOR SASKATCHEWAN06 AND BEYOND
To Dance What price beauty? The Window When psychiatry and art collide Canadian, Tired Low-wage world of the megastore Burnin’ Rink O’ Fire A small town rebuilds QUESTION AUTHORITY
PHOTO BY PAMELA CRADOCK
Study journalism at the University of Regina.
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2 THEUniversity CROW ■ SPRING of2006 Regina School of Journalism ■ www.uregina.ca/journal ■ 306.585.4420 University of Regina, School of Journalism, Spring 2006
The Crow is a publication of the School of Contents Journalism, Faculty of Arts. 4 Editorial Editor: Prof. Patricia W. Elliott by Patricia W. Elliott, Editor Editorial board: 6 After the Gulag Prof. Patricia Bell by Carle Steel Tamara Cherry 7I breathe in Jamie Kormarnicki by Nikhat Ahmed Katie Murphy Christopher Zwick 8 Empire, Hotel of Friendliness by Michael Bell Photo editors: Lab Instructor Robin Lawless 15 Valley of Tears Stephane Bonneville by Tamara Cherry Jolie Toews 16 The Prospector Trent Warner by Trent Warner Research: 20 La difference Jason Antonio by Stephane Bonneville Brad Brown 22 Out from the Shadows Design consultants: by Jolie Toews Ken Gousseau 25 To Dance Daniel Jungwirth by Erin Morrison Erin Morrison 30 Burnin’ Rink o’ Fire Distribution: by Brad Brown Kacie Andrews 31 Browsers and Hunters Donna Rae Munroe by Jamie Komarnicki School of Journalism 35 The Window AdHum 105 by Christopher Zwick University of Regina 41 Without Him 3737 Wascana Parkway by Katie Murphy Regina, Saskatchewan S4S 0A2 44 Tanks for Playing Phone: 306.585.4420 by Jason Antonio Fax: 306.585.4867 Web Page: www.uregina.ca/journal 48 Dark Hair … Brown Eyes by Donna-Rae Munroe Vol. 1 Issue 5 52 When Good Fans Go Bad ISSN 1708-1629 by Daniel Jungwirth Design & Layout: LM Publication Services Ltd. 58 Canadian, Tired Printing: PrintWest, Regina by Ken Gousseau Cover Photo: Passers-by shimmer in the heat of 60 Seeking the Light Regina’s Fire and Ice Carnival. Ryan Ellis by Kacie Andrews
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 3 WelcomeWELCOME to The Crow/2006 Patricia W. Elliott, Editor
Facts are scattershot, truth is an arrow
In the 1950s, Sri Lankan journalist Tarzie Vittachi set and transformative power to anything occupying today’s out to practice a kind of journalism that transcended front pages. As Vittachi and so many other great journa- mere reportage. Before committing ink to paper, he first lists have discovered, the stories of greatest impact lie stepped back and considered his universe. His critical close to hand. eye took in the lingering influence of colonial vestiges, as If transformation is the benchmark, this year’s Crow well as the foibles of his own compatriots. line-up should serve you well. You’ll never admire a When he finally hunched over his typewriter, his ballerina’s grace with the same eyes. Nor will you look reports unfurled as more than quotes and facts strung at depression the same way, or art. A news report on a together to fill a specified number of column inches. He missing woman will take on new meaning. A rundown wrote stories that sought the truth of things and hotel will seem less threatening, a small town hockey contributed to social change. He challenged and changed rink more vital to the grand scheme of life. The madness the dominant view of the developing world and sagely of the crowd will gain context. Age and grief will become concluded: “Information without transformation is just more familiar friends. Winning will lose importance, gossip.” and store clerks will annoy you less. You will see land- In today’s information and image-saturated world, scapes through the eyes of others, and appreciate things these words remain a fine benchmark for emerging you missed. And, trust me, you’ll never, ever say “just journalists. We are surrounded by gossip, noise, browsing” again, without pausing first to reflect on your sensation and data devoid of context. More than ever, we aimless, thoughtless ways. need to explore the truth of things. Sounds mysterious? It’s not, really. The storyteller’s At the School of Journalism, we believe the journalist’s task remains the same through the centuries: absorb most essential tool is the long, thoughtful pause. We also human experience and give it voice. Crafting a story to encourage students to turn their gaze toward their imme- reveal its higher meaning is the difference between diate surroundings. Odds are the person standing right scattershot and honed arrows, between gossip and next to them has a story more than equal in relevance journalism. Read on, and prepare to be changed.
4 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 Tattoo
PHOTO BY ANGELA HILL
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 5 After the GulagGULAG Carle Steel hen I worked there in the late Nineties, elegant backdrop to the Board’s display of works from its Regina’s T.C. Douglas building housed an permanent collection of Saskatchewan art. Though we W odd grouping of government and arts insti- had just one plant (which died under my watch) and tutions, including the Department of Health, Commu- only the occasional child visitor, the fauna in our part of nicable Diseases, the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Vital the building was just as strange and irrepressible as the Statistics and the Saskatchewan Arts Board. Except for plants in the lobby. Each spring, hundreds of plump the bronze cows on the lawn, it looked like any other black flies would emerge from beneath the window of government building, hidden from view by trees. Seen the Executive Director’s office and begin their long walk from the back, it sat like an abandoned spaceship in a down the hallway. No one knew where they came from clearing, partly because of its architecture, but also or why they couldn’t fly. Other than the giant moths I because no one ever seemed to use the lawn. used to capture and set free, the only creature I saw Inside, though, the building teemed with life. The actually fly had beautiful striped wings. It perched for a light from the plate glass roof encouraged the growth of moment on my desk like a fairy, looked at me, and flew the giant philodendrons, birds of paradise, calla lillies away. Sow bugs paced the hallways with their many and Norfolk Island pine trees below. Presumably for legs, seemingly unbothered by the brightness of our exercise, women who worked for the Department of office and its lack of water. The colour of the spiders was Health, all decked out in business costumes and running a soft, filing-cabinet gray. shoes, stomped in circles around the lobby, or in com- The basement too had its own life forms. Employees pulsive figure eights through the plants. Herds of in the building, mostly from the Department of Health, school children were bused in to see the exhibits at the huddled in a corner of the parkade to smoke. Their area MacKenzie Art Gallery, or to trace with crayons the was corralled off by discarded cubicle dividers, and fossils embedded in the stone walls, or to play among the furnished with milk crates, broken government-issue concrete human statues in the lobby. Their keepers executive chairs and tomato juice cans for ashtrays. The would gather the children at the mouth of the building. basement people would glance up when newcomers When I went up to my office on the top floor, they would entered their nest, casually, like rats feeding, then turn stand incredulous as I was whisked up to the ceiling in back to their chit-chat and the hand to mouth business of the glass elevators, as if abducted by aliens. smoking and drinking coffee. To many of my friends, I had been. I worked at the I preferred to smoke outside. Saskatchewan Arts Board. When I arrived there in 1998, From the back of the TC Douglas building, the world the Arts Board was nearly fifty years old, and feeling its seemed empty, devoid of human habitation. I sat alone age. All its parts seemed to be ailing. It was exhausted on the steps, smoking, tracing my fingers around the pat- and starving from years of underfunding by an terns of the snails and algae and other strange creatures unsupportive government, and suffered from internal fossilized in the Tyndall stone. I contemplated the ex- blockages like union rules, a complex bureaucracy and a panse of lawn, the moonscape of winter. half-century of unpurged files. Staff members were During these brief escapes from the gulag of my job, I barely on speaking terms, and the arts community was in thought about art and culture, about how if left on their a constant, angry huff. Occasionally the Arts Board own, all human institutions — cities, universities, gov- couldn’t resist snapping at the hand that fed it, which ernments, even art forms and intellectual movements — made everything even worse. evolve into organisms in their own right. They are like The space we worked in was beautiful though, with animals, with their predictable behaviours, their vulner- windows on the northeast side of the building’s can- able bellies and complex internal structures, their mys- tilevered Tyndall stone façade, facing Albert Street and terious ways of propagating themselves. Cities bloom on overlooking the bronze cows. Its walls provided an the edges of land, beautiful as coral as they trail along the
6 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 I breathe in this one moment This very first moment of sweet serenity There has never been a time LIFE such as this ART I open my eyes to greet the beginning of IS another day IS SHORT. And the endless sky above me becomes one LONG. with the crashing tide. I bow before these waters Letting ashes of the past slip through my coastline, then invade the interior by fingers and sink down to an infinite void I didn’t write, of course, that was water, like zebra mussels or blue- My soul engulfs this new stillness just a cover. I took my work in the green algea. As anyone who has and I kneel arts home, where I worked indepen- seen the infection of human habi- tearing the fears from my heart dently towards the creation of a per- tation from an airplane can attest, The breeze is merciful manent endowment for the arts, a however strange the world must Its sympathy carries everything away project abandoned by Arts Board have been in prehistoric times, it Now stripped of the world when the new director took over. didn’t have a patch on the present. Here I am Home is another architectural Inevitably, I would begin to Without any hesitation oddity, a modernist work of art by imagine the earth without us. At the edge of my consciousness the architect and innovator Clifford I fantasized about what the In this one time Wiens, and another building that building would look like after three This very first moment will continue to flourish when our hundred years of abandonment. I — Nikhat Ahmed time has passed. My home, too, is imagined the plants overgrown, on Albert Street, set back from the hitting the ceiling, bursting through the windows. In my street and nearly unnoticeable. Made entirely of steel and mind’s eye, the whole structure became a shelter for concrete, a spine of pipes suspends the rolled culvert of cows, the descendants of those few who were smart the roof. Forty years of city dust have provided nutrients enough to escape the feedlots when the meals stopped for the thistles, foxtails and saplings that have taken root coming. In the spring, they bedded down in the offices of in the upturned curve of its roof. I suppose if our end Vital Statistics, and had their own babies among the came, the roof would last at least until the rust claimed it. records of our passing. The statues and plaques became In the meantime, it gives shelter to pigeons and other rubbing posts, something to lean on as they stood small creatures that nest among its pipes. ruminating beneath the shelter of the remaining roof, I don’t smoke anymore. I think less often about the contemplating the rain. end of the world — maybe it was just the government My smoking time became a kind of worship, a prayer job. Still, I am comforted by the thought that a new world for the earth, for the end of human occupation of the land. is just itching to take over from the one I know we’ll Looking back now on how I imagined things, it strikes someday leave behind. me funny that I thought only of cows, not the rabbits and Some days I stay in bed, staring at the round belly of gophers and deer that I knew would thrive after we were the ceiling, listening to the sound of the tiny feet of the gone. Perhaps the whole thing was born of ancestral guilt animals fooling around on the roof, calling to each other, over the Indians and the buffalo. Or maybe, like any knocking debris off the pipes and down the building’s other dissatisfied government worker, I simply couldn’t slopes. Their sounds are mysterious, playful, amplified see past my own office building. by the metal of the roof. I can’t imagine what they are up Life is short, art is long. to, and have resisted the urge to go up there and look. For me, art was getting very long. The quiet of the I am untroubled by my compulsion to ensure the future office had been broken by new management. For me the of the arts, at the same time that I pray fervently for its only thing the Arts Board had going for it at that point demise: if humans didn’t have that weird capacity to was the feeling that, if the ship were sinking, at least we believe two things at once, there wouldn’t be any art in were all in it together. Even that was gone now. The Arts the first place. At night I sleep knowing that the alley Board decided to move. I applied for a leave of absence behind my building becomes magic with urban hares. to write. Packing up my life there mirrored the packing Above me, the row of poplar trees on my roof has up of the office, the detritus of failure. I knew I wasn’t reached ten feet tall. coming back, everyone did.
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 7 Empire, Hotel You’d think being Regina’s oldest continually operating hotel would garner some respect. Instead, the Queen City treats the Empire like surprises me, as I sit here an open case of Pilsner beer beside in room 126, how quickly him, but wasn’t drinking any of it. an embarrassing I’m getting to know the When I sat down he offered me a It Empire Hotel. When bottle, which I accepted and opened, family secret. others found out about my interest in and we started to chat. Beside the the place, especially folks from entrance, a woman sat shyly on a Michael Bell Regina, they cautioned me to be bench. The two didn’t seem to know careful. That’s a good place to get one another. hurt, they warned. Or beaten. Or In a few minutes, another man takes a closer look. shot. I took these cautions lightly, stumbled around the corner, walked even arrogantly. I’d just come back straight up to me and said: “You’re from two years living in Colombia, flirting with my woman.” I smiled and no wimpy hotel from Regina warmly, surprised at his drunken was going to scare me. So on a cool accusation. I was just sitting, I said. It September evening I decided to walk was true: I hadn’t even said hello to down to Saskatchewan Drive and her. This seemed to satisfy him. So he McIntyre Street, order a beer from tried to sell me some pirated com- the bar, and see if I’d meet anyone pact discs. I looked them over, but with a story to tell. none of them interested me and I The bar, it turns out, was closed, told him so. or so a man sitting on the Empire’s He then very abruptly put his foot steps informed me. I noticed he had up on the step between my feet. I felt
8 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 of Friendliness
He walked straight up to me and said: “You’re flirting with my woman.”
PHOTOS BY MICHAEL BELL
alarmed at this sudden invasion of “Get the fuck out of here, or I’ll About every seven years, some- my personal space. Slowly pulling call the cops on you fuckers!” thing happens in or near the Empire. up his pant leg, he told me I wasn’t It was the night manager of the It usually sounds bad and it usually taking him very seriously, and if I Empire. Later I found out his name sounds like it’s the hotel’s fault. wanted, he would show me how was Ernie, and that he’d worked at In February 1990, Kenneth Piper serious this could get. His hand the Empire for the last nineteen was working as a bouncer at the reached toward his sock cuff. years. But tonight he was just an Empire’s bar when a man pulled My sense of survival took over employee chasing away the riff-raff. a loaded rifle out of his coat and and screamed what I needed to do: He stormed up the steps, cursing us began pointing it around the room. appease the Alpha Male! with practiced ease and disappeared Piper tackled the gunman and no “Whoa!” I said, putting my hands inside, presumably to make good one got hurt. Piper was named a up and waving them submissively. I on his threat. Alpha Male and “his hero and awarded the Saskatchewan was indeed taking him very seriously, woman” got on their bikes and rode Certificate of Commendation. The I was just sitting here drinking a beer, away. Pilsner just sat there, smiling. Empire was named a villain and was and that I wasn’t looking for any And that was it. I finished my awarded a lot of bad press. trouble. The woman tried to shout beer, thanked him and, trembling In February 1997, the following some sense into him too. Case-of- slightly from the adrenaline high, headline appeared: “Empire backs Pilsner-Man just sat, looking on. walked home. down on stripper plan.” The Regina Suddenly, like a scene from a play, That’s why I’m surprised to find Leader-Post reported the Empire’s yet another man burst on to the myself, three months later, staying in owner, Larry Krulak, was consid- already crowded stage, shouting room 126 in the Empire Hotel. ering bringing strippers into the obscenities. bar, after the province eased a law
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 9 banning liquor and exotic dancing in is half true: in the winter of 1997- ever gone in there … to hang out at the same room. Later Krulak had to 1998 he rented a room for a few the Empire.” back-pedal on the plan because the months and used it as a work space, According to Plumb, “It’s more a possibility of violating a Regina city a place to escape the daily distrac- hotel of permanent residents, older bylaw was still too high. Whether or tions of home life and focus on his gentlemen mostly, who get up in the not other city bars considered bring- songwriting. Most times he’d go morning and go down and have ing in strippers, it was the Empire home after a day’s writing, although their beer at noon, and that’s their that wore the public shame. he admits there were a few nights home. It’s kind of an old-age home In July 2004, Moses Alli, a promis- after being in the bar that he stayed for guys that don’t want to go to old- ing Saskatchewan boxer, was beaten the night in his room. age homes. Guys without families, in the parking lot of the Empire’s “I was drawn to the fact that it who have fallen hard on their times.” off-sale beer store. The Leader-Post was a central hotel, and that it was As far as danger goes, he never reported his injuries ended his old, (and) I could come and go and had any trouble. In fact, Plumb boxing career. Then in 2005, Alli sued no one would give a shit.” thinks the Empire’s character is more the Empire, alleging that the owner His friends and family questioned like “an old and weathered street- was negligent and responsible for his decision to work out of the wise person that’s seen a lot.” “If buildings could accumulate all of their experiences into knowledge, I think that that building has a real “I just needed a room with a window wealth of experience in there.” I can to look out of and an ashtray.” hear the respect in his voice as he says this.
The Empire Hotel was con- structed in 1912. One might think this alone would garner respect. Yet if official historical records are any measure, the Queen City has treated the Empire like a shamed relative or an embarrassing family secret. A Regina heritage book, Cornerstones, features beautifully rendered illus- trations of the Wascana, the Clayton, the Alexandra, King’s, Champ’s and of course the high and mighty Hotel Saskatchewan. Yet the Empire does not appear, despite 1940s Empire PHOTO BY MICHAEL BELL letterhead that reveals a hotel of the incident. Once again, the Empire Empire. Plumb says they didn’t equal relevance, beauty and design. suffered a beating. think the idea of writing songs in a It even had a distinctive corner And that’s just the press from the hotel room was strange, but they entrance that none of those other last fifteen years. thought there were “better” places to hotels possessed. Also forgotten is work. the hotel’s distinctive Forties slogan: There’s a rumour: Jason Plumb “But better in what way? I just “Empire: The Hotel of Friendliness.” used to live in the Empire Hotel. needed a room with a window to In the early Eighties, Heritage Plumb, now a solo musician, was the look out of and an ashtray so I could Regina produced walking tour lead singer of the Regina-based band get my work done. That’s all I really pamphlets, with maps showing The Waltons. He wrote the songs on wanted. There is this preconceived where to see historical buildings. The the group’s 1998 album Empire Hotel. notion of what that place is all about. Empire does not appear on the bro- He tells me over the phone the story Yet I don’t know anybody who’s chure’s suggested downtown tour.
10 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 Only a 1995 heritage book austerely reports: “This is the oldest contin- uously operating hotel in Regina. It was built in 1912 for proprietors Samuel and Albert Cook, at an esti- mated cost of $20,000.” In ninety-four years, the Empire’s had just four owners. Albert G. Cook was the first owner until 1935, when he sold it to Stanley Kraft. Kraft sold it to Lloyd Minovitch in 1949. Larry Krulak bought it from Minovitch in 1986. “Well, if you’re thinking of print- ing up a bunch of dirt on us, then you can go find yourself another story,” Krulak tells me over the phone. Given the bad press the hotel has received since Krulak took over, it’s “It’s not the bad-ass place people think.” not surprising he’s defensive. I assure him I’m digging for history, PHOTO BY MICHAEL BELL not dirt, and he agrees to meet. showing me the tavern on a Wednes- hands. The window faces McIntyre Krulak says that back in Mino- day night. I see about six patrons Street. I can see the railway tracks vitch’s time, the bar’s regulars were quietly chatting and sipping beer in a to the north and when a train creeps mainly blue collar workers from the vast tavern that could easily seat up the track, the floor rumbles post office and Silverwood’s Dairy twenty times that. Soothing blues slightly. Once in a while, I hear some- Creamery across the street. Silver- tunes fill the air. one shuffle down the hall, or hear wood’s closed in 1975 and, according “It’s always like this,” he sighs. the murmur of a brief conversation to Krulak, the clientele of the bar through the walls. began to change for the worse. By If Ernie remembers me from the Down the hall I find, literally, a the time he took over in ’86, the bar September night he chased me off bathroom: a room with a big bathtub had been overrun by drug-dealers the Empire’s steps, he doesn’t let on. and a sink. The next two doors down and criminals, and the reputation of I pay twenty five-dollars; he gives are the men and women’s toilets. the hotel was in bad shape. me the key and says sternly: “Up the Everything is clean, just as Krulak Over the years, Krulak has stairs, on the left. Bathrooms at the said. cleaned the place up and tried to re- end of the hall. No parties, and the The hallway is totally quiet as I establish a regular group of patrons. bar is already closed for the night. walk back to my room. But despite his efforts, every once in No visitors after nine. If you go out, The Empire Hotel is to Regina a while something will happen in the you have to leave the key at the what a convicted person is to a com- off-sale parking lot that reinforces desk.” munity: suspicious, despite efforts at the negative view Regina residents Room 126 is simple: one single reform. Since few community mem- have of the Empire, even though bed, a small chair, a radiator, a sink, bers know the convicted person, most people haven’t even been in- a trash can, a dresser, a night stand, most everyone believes the gossip side or know anything about it. They a coat rack, a tiny hotel soap bar, about them. And if something bad see it as dirty and dangerous, yet he a drinking glass, two clean white happens near the convicted person, keeps it clean and well ordered. towels and a window. I lie down on they are guilty by proximity. The “My bar is dead. It’s been like this 126’s aged brown carpet and without Empire has fallen: “The Hotel of for six or seven years. It’s not the stretching I can touch one wall with Friendliness” is today a pariah. bad-ass place people think,” he says, my feet and the other with my
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 11 Flying
Y JEAN
PHOTO BY LINDSA
Aftermath
PHOTO BY JOLIE TOEWS
12 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 Recruit
PHOTO BY RYAN ELLIS PHOTO BY RYAN
Vacation, for some
PHOTO BY DONNA RAE MUNROE
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 13 Emergency Drag King
PHOTO BY JOLIE TOEWS
PHOTO BY ERIN BROWN
Forgetting
Y JEAN
PHOTO BY LINDSA
14 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 Valley of Tears Tamara Cherry TEARS PHOTO BY TAMARA CHERRY
t’s rainy season in Israel. I find myself atop Mt. Bental Noga’s words trail off. The past couple of days have in the northern Golan Heights, four thousand feet seemed so beautiful, so happy until this point. Iabove sea level. My hood is up and I stand in front of In the past forty-eight hours … my sister’s camera, striking a world-is-my-oyster pose, I rediscovered familiarity in my guesthouse by the Sea fist tucked under chin, hand triumphantly on hip. The of Galilee, watching Hebrew-subtitled Sex and the City camera clicks as I gaze over the steep ridge. with my two Ontario roommates. From my perch in northeastern Israel, my eyes drink I’ve taken pictures of children with curly sidelocks in a panoramic view of Lebanon to the left and Syria playing atop their school in the mystical city of Tzfat, straight ahead. There are dozens of tourists around me, only to find out later that their seemingly light-hearted, but the brisk air is calming. I want to sigh; instead, a friendly shouts to us were in fact cries of: “Don’t take my lump forms in my throat. I turn around and am re- picture, stupid!” minded of where I am. I’ve passed a road sign to Nazareth while driving I hop over a shallow dugout and find my group through a village where Israeli flags drape over balconies listening to our tour guide, twenty-six-year-old Noga like drying laundry, and I’ve hiked through the unbeliev- Hoening. One of Israel’s toughest wars was fought here, ably picturesque Golan Heights, where clear streams and she says. I know she’s referring to the Yom Kippur War of waterfalls made it easy to forget the gunshot holes we October 1973 — but could that peaceful-looking gap of saw in old Syrian forts at the beginning of the hike. land between Syria and the Golan border, the view I’d But as my imagination blankets the tranquil, green nearly sighed over moments ago, really be the infamous land around me with bloody remains and twisted shrap- Valley of Tears? nel, the feeling of looking death in the face puts a twist The peace I felt earlier fades as I take another look on my trip to Israel. Can I call this place beautiful? around the historic hilltop, which I now recognize as an Against a backdrop of barbed wire and a Valley of Tears, abandoned Israeli bunker. Layers of barbed wire lie on it seems like an oxymoron. the ground, as if carelessly tossed aside after the battle; Noga finishes speaking and I walk over to the block- teenage tourists laugh as they swivel around in a rusting house with my sister, Sarah, and friend, Ethan. We blockhouse, peering through the gun turret; under- crouch inside, shoulder to shoulder. From outside, our ground, right below my feet, wind a series of claustro- friend Eva can only see our faces through a small square phobic concrete tunnels lined with sandbags. window. As she prepares to take our picture, we make Just thirty-three years ago, Syria and Egypt crossed guns with our fingers in front of our faces and I am the borders in a surprise attack on Israel. It was Octo- overcome with the feeling that I am doing something ber 6, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, the day of I shouldn’t — like a little kid laughing at a funeral. I feel Yom Kippur, 1973. They brought with them three divi- uncomfortable, crawl out of the blockhouse and walk sions of over eight hundred tanks with artillery support; through the trenches with Ethan and Sarah. on the Golan Heights, about 180 Israeli tanks faced an As I think about the bloodshed, the passion and, in onslaught of 1,400 Syrian tanks. Israel put on an impres- turn, the incessant fight-for-the-map that brought war sive defense in the Valley of Tears, home to one of the to where I am standing, I am suddenly reminded of what bloodiest battles of the eighteen-day war. By October 24, a friend told me after visiting Auschwitz in Germany: Israel had lost 2,500 lives, less than a quarter of the they take you on a tour through the empty camp and deaths suffered by their enemies. Years later, this battle it doesn’t seem like much. Then they lead you into a rests proud in the hearts of many Israelis. Yet the lump in room and show you a video of what actually happened my throat only grows. there.
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 15 ProspectorTHE
Each game still gets the adrenalin rushing, like lacing up skates for the first time. Pro hockey has sustained Lorne Davis for sixty years. How could the NHL’s oldest scout ever give it up?
Trent Warner
half hour before a junior Davis meanders to a room below Not likely. hockey battle between the the stands, where a dozen men in Tonight is about business. For A Moose Jaw Warriors and business suits stand in odd contrast every player who leaves the game, Prince Albert Raiders, cars already to the peeling paint and decrepit someone else must replace him. Like litter the Moose Jaw Civic Centre’s benches of the old dressing room. He horse race handicappers, each man parking lot. sits down at a table and says hello to clutches tonight’s lineup sheet. Play- Inside, rusty lights dangle low his friend Peter. Most of the faces in ers are divided first by line combina- over a freshly cleaned ice surface. the room are old, the faces of grand- tion, then by birthday. Those born in Ushers hurry to gather the last bit of pas who swap stories of their fami- 1988 are given special attention. trash from the aisles as the first fans lies, of the travel they’ve done — They’re the youngest eligible for this file in. nothing out of the ordinary. But their year’s NHL entry draft. Each man A fatherly, grey-haired figure hands reveal more: a bulbous flash has his own system. Scratches are moves through the turnstile. Circling of diamonds, the encircling word dealt with first. A slash goes over the the arena, Lorne Davis says hello to ‘Champions’ etched in gold. You name of Raider’s scoring leader Kyle his friends — ushers, concession wonder, with so many rings in the Chipchura, out with a shoulder workers, arena staff — he knows room, if thoughts wander to days injury. It’s a moot point for the men most by name. They ask him how on the ice, holding the Stanley Cup in the room. He’s a 1986 birthday — he’s been and how long he’ll be in overhead in front of thousands of already been drafted. Some make a town. screaming fans. few notes on paper; others stab at
16 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 BlackBerry keys. A man on the end scout from New York shook the hand with the same boyish wonder as the highlights players by order of impor- of a wide-eyed Saskatchewan boy. first day he laced his skates. tance; another circles his targets. It was 1946. Lorne Davis, minor Skating the frozen sloughs of Suddenly, a siren sounds. The hockey prodigy, signed a contract for Lumsden in the Qu’Appelle Valley, men glance at their watches, gather a hundred dollars. It wasn’t a lot of Davis spent long hours playing pick- their papers and head upstairs. It’s money at the time, but it symbolized up games with friends. Organized time to go to work. From a perch in more. The man from New York had hockey came soon after in nearby the corner of the stands, Davis leans bought the young boy’s life. Sixty Regina. The game was primitive forward, a big smile drawn across years later, Davis is still in the game, back then. Outdoor rinks were the his face — he’s home. the oldest scout in the league. At norm and players wore toques and This life began after a junior seventy-five, retirement looms, but mitts under their hockey equipment hockey game in Regina, when a tonight he peers over the boards as protection against the harsh prairie winters. Davis didn’t care. He just loved to play, and seemed to have a knack for the game from the very beginning. At fourteen, the young Regina Pat was already attracting the attention of profes- sional scouts. It was an exciting time, fueled by dreams of skating along- side Doug Harvey and Maurice Richard. Two years later he signed his first professional contract with the New York Rangers. Over the next fifteen years, Davis would play for fifteen different teams across eight different leagues. His career was a series of transac- tions: traded, then traded again. The only certainty was that he was going to be on one of the forward lines. An occasional taste of success was enough to keep him on the ice: a 1953 Stanley Cup with the NHL’s Cana- diens, a 1958 Calder Cup with the American League’s Hershey Bears. With each trade Davis would simply pack his bags and move on. It didn’t matter where. He just wanted to play. There were times when he was moving so often, he didn’t even have time to find a place to live before starting with his new team. In the back of his mind, hope always lingered that he would stick with one of the NHL clubs he frequented. But with only six teams in the league, spaces were tight.
PHOTO BY LEIF ENGBERG Davis in 1966, wearing the captain’s C.
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 17 he covered Canada coast to coast, mulling over the task of ranking watching countless junior games. hundreds of draft-eligible players. “How’d The month-long road trips made him There were times when Davis you like to wonder if he’d made the right deci- broke up fights. In retrospect, the sion. By the end of each trip his mind arguments seemed petty. One scout scout for us?” was numb with names and statistics. would say a player was a great But it got easier. skater and another would say he Bowman Scouting is about careful obser- wasn’t. Sometimes that’s all it took. asked. vation. Fans watch games, scouts Still, there was solidarity among the watch players. group — there had to be. If a major After the game, if a friend asked pick didn’t work out, the whole Davis who’d won, sometimes he scouting staff shared blame. By the late 1950s, Davis had a wife didn’t know — he was too busy The Blues’ entry into the NHL and two school-aged children to care doing his job. He would often see was rocky. After a few losing sea- for. He took a job in Regina as a con- glimpses of himself in the players he sons, a new owner took over the tractor’s superintendent and tried to watched. The way they acted, the team and cleaned house. Davis was make hockey just a hobby. But when- youthful vitality, there was some- out of a job. But, like he had always ever winter rolled around, there was thing about them that reminded him done, he simply moved on, first to always a team out there that needed of the limitless hope and possibility New York and then, in 1980, to an experienced player. Finally in he once possessed. And like a hockey Edmonton. 1966, while playing overseas for the dad, he found himself resting his Led by a prodigy named Wayne Canadian Olympic team, the aging own dreams in the players he Gretzky, the Oilers were a youthful pro was offered a deal that would watched. He wanted them to suc- team new to the NHL. Expectations change his life. The NHL had just ceed. were high. By now Davis had devel- undergone a six-team expansion, Twice a year, all the Blues scouts oped a rhythm. He no longer took including a new team in St. Louis. gathered to create a draft list. In the notes at games. Afterwards, sitting Blues general manager Lynn Patrick stifling confines of a hotel conference down to write his reports, a player’s and head coach Scotty Bowman room, eight men would spend hours every move unfolded in his mind. approached Davis. “How would you like to coach?” Bowman asked. Coach? After spending a year as an International Hockey League player-coach in Muskegon, Michi- gan, Davis knew he was not a coach. “I don’t think so,” he answered. “Then how would you like to scout for us?” This time there was no hesitation: “Yeah, I’d like that” His playing career over, Davis had finally “stuck” in the NHL. In the first season with St. Louis,
VIS
Davis and a young Wayne Gretzky: like any hockey dad,
he wanted the kids to succeed. OF LORNE DA PHOTO COURTESY
18 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 There was a certain formula to find- Coffey. By 1984 the Oilers were a ing a pro hockey player and Davis powerhouse. Davis watched from knew it well. First and foremost, he the stands as Gretzky accepted the He tires must be an excellent skater — both Stanley Cup at centre ice. Four more a little side-to-side and north and south. championships would come in the Skating is often the difference be- 1980s, as the Oilers etched their place faster tween average and great. You can tell as one of the greatest pro sports in his hips what kind of strider he is dynasties. But Davis’ work was far than he — short and choppy or long and from done. remembers. powerful. A player needs a sense of More than twenty years on, he’s the game, too: where to be to find still hanging over the boards, keep- the puck, and where to go when he ing an eye on future prospects for the doesn’t have it. Then there’s char- Oilers. Tonight, there won’t be much panion, Bryan Raymond. Travel acter. You tell a lot about a player by to report. It was a slow game devoid gives a man a lot of time to think and how hard he skates to and from the of draft-quality talent. The fans get to know his colleagues. bench. are happy, though, when the final Turning onto the highway, the Over the next five years Davis buzzer pegs a 4-1 victory for Moose open road awaits as always. Still, would be responsible for drafting Jaw. a new reality is setting in. Truth be key players, including a trio who In his car in the Civic Centre told, he can’t walk quite as quickly as would become Hall-of-Famers: right parking lot, Davis tunes in the post he used to and he tires a little faster winger Glen Anderson, goaltender game show on the radio and chats than he remembers. The travel, too, Grant Fuhr and defenseman Paul with fellow scout and travel com- the travel can be a killer. And yet every time he contemplates stepping away from the game, he’s drawn back in like an addict. For as long as he can remember he’s lived at the rink. His home is in Regina, but not his life. When he wants to see his friends, he goes to the arena. In his darkest times hockey has been there, even in 1992 when he lost his wife to cancer. Davis took several months off to care for her at home until she passed away. Then, to deal with his grief, he did the only thing he knew would make him feel better — he went on a road trip. All it takes is a single step through the turnstile to set it off: a rush of adrenalin that starts at the fingertips and shoots through his body. It never fails; it’s what sustains him. How could he ever give that up?
VIS
Davis, second from left, scouted some solid backup
PHOTO COURTESY OF LORNE DA PHOTO COURTESY for the Oilers’ superstar.
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 19 Stephane La difference Bonneville You might wonder what keeps some of Canada’s best francophone musicians living and playing in Saskatchewan.
nstrument cases rattle against Fransaskois, francophones who have Given that reality, you might each other in the back of a van as been settled in Saskatchewan for wonder what keeps some of Can- I it cruises down a Saskatchewan over a hundred years. The passen- ada’s best francophone musicians highway. Outside, the July air is gers are headed for a show at a small in Saskatchewan — people like thick and oppressive; the wind town community hall, a venue most Regina’s Annette Campagne. Her swirls dust through tangled weeds Fransaskois musicians are familiar career as a singer-songwriter began and fence posts along the roadside. with. The driving distance is long in her hometown of Willowbunch, As the tires skip across the pothole- and the paycheque is likely to be a largely francophone town about scarred road, axles creak and there is small, but no matter — they enjoy it. 150 kilometres southwest of Regina. a persistent crackling sound of grass- At a certain point, however, some Willowbunch sits alone amid hills hoppers bouncing off the van’s musicians find it becomes difficult to and fields that stretch as far as the exterior. Inside the vehicle it feels keep turning off the Trans-Canada eye can see, one of the small islands sweaty and hot despite narrow blasts Highway onto dusty roads leading of francophone culture in Saskatch- of cold air hissing from the air condi- to distant towns. Some just decide to ewan’s anglophone sea. “French is tioner. A singer on the radio keep going and end up in my first language, and English is drifts in and out of the static. places like Winnipeg, just something I learned to speak One of the passengers fid- Vancouver, and Mon- because everyone else did,” Cam- dles with the dial. “C’est treal. Saskatchewan pagne recalls. “As an artist you have pas mieux,” his com- is their home but to express who you are, and I am panions say. “It’s not the big cities are Fransaskois.” any better.” where opportuni- Campagne came from a musical Their French ties for fame and family. In the 1980s she and her carries an accent wider recognition brothers and sisters formed the folk peculiar to les await. group Folle Avoine. It was a modest beginning to her career. After a few Recording artist Annette Campagne. members left, the group re-emerged with a more contemporary rock sound and a new name: Hart Rouge.
20 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006
PHOTO BY STEPHANE BONNEVILLE Although many anglophones might the opportunity to play several things about Saskatchewan. “I not recognize it, Hart Rouge soon shows in la belle province. missed the simplicity of life — things became a household name for French “The head of the record company are less complicated and more Canadians across the country. said that if we really wanted to make open,” she says. “People are open, But as Hart Rouge’s popularity a go of it, we should move over the land is open, and I missed the grew, the reality of being based in there,” she says. The group jumped connection I got with people. In the Saskatchewan set in. “We had done at the opportunity, leaving the wind- big city no one looks you in the eye about as much as you can do in the swept prairie for the skyscrapers and or says ‘hi’.” While some of her Fransaskois community — there’s a boulevards of Montreal. former bandmates chose to stay in limit to how much you can do here,” Hart Rouge was the first Fransas- Quebec, she ultimately decided to Campagne says. She doesn’t mean kois band to truly ‘make it’ in return to Saskatchewan. She saw it as this in a demeaning way. Hart Rouge Quebec, but things weren’t always a welcome change of pace rather simply came up against the fact that easy. Arriving in Montreal, Cam- than a defeat. Saskatchewan isn’t an easy place for pagne and her bandmates joined a Back in Saskatchewan, Campagne musicians to find commercial suc- different kind of minority: franco- has released another solo album and cess. That is true for both English phones from outside Quebec. performed at a variety of places, and Francophone musicians, but Although Hart Rouge had the bene- including the 2005 Canada Summer those who sing only in French face fit of a pre-existing fanbase, they Games opening ceremony in Regina. double the difficulty. learned it can be difficult for Fran- “Ironically, since I’ve come back here The largest Fransaskois commu- saskois to be accepted because of I’ve had more work as an artist than nities in Saskatchewan are in Regina differences in language and culture. I ever could have in Montreal,” she and Saskatoon; the rest are scattered As well, their particular brand of says. Campagne is also enjoying a across the province’s rural southern western folk-rock wasn’t a huge hit position as an artist in residence for and central regions. Driving to small in Montreal, a somewhat fickle the Saskatchewan Arts Board. She towns on a regular basis is costly on music scene tending to gravitate travels around the province giving a musician’s budget, when you have toward glossier fare. But while Hart workshops to young Fransaskois to pay fifty or a hundred dollars for Rouge’s rural sensibilities may have musicians. The residency also allows gas every time you play a show. And, had a lukewarm reception in the big her time to write her own material. as one might expect, there are no city, it helped win over fans in This work is important at a time French record companies in Sas- smaller towns. “We did very well when the community needs leaders katchewan, a province where only outside Montreal, maybe because we in the arts to help Fransaskois cul- about 1.5 per cent of the population were less cosmopolitan and our ture survive tough times. Many of is bilingual. music was more down to earth — the small towns where Francophone Campagne says it was tough to so we did a lot of touring across communities are based are in de- make it when she started, and Quebec,” Campagne says. Because of cline, as is the number of bilingual is probably even tougher today. Hart Rouge’s three-part harmonies, people in the province. The popula- “(Record companies) see the market their music became popular with the tion whose mother tongue is French as limited and they don’t quite know province’s choirs; they did one tour has fallen from 36,815 in 1951 to how to market French bands,” she where the show was split between 19,901 in 1996, and Saskatchewan’s explains. “I think record companies themselves and a choir performing francophone community has shrunk in general only take chances on their songs. by more than 1,800 in the past five proven groups; it’s not like it used Hart Rouge rode their success for years. But, however small, a vibrant to be.” a decade before disbanding in 1998. culture remains. Campagne is help- When Hart Rouge’s members Campagne stayed in Quebec for a ing ensure that, even in these hard decided to give up their day jobs and while afterward, but things just times, there will be a new wave of become full time professional musi- weren’t the same. Her first solo Fransaskois musicians like her, ready cians, they first relocated to Winni- record wasn’t as successful as she’d to express themselves whether they peg. Meanwhile, their Quebec fan hoped, and she felt the music scene stay in Saskatchewan or venture base continued to grow. This led to a in general had stagnated a little. beyond. deal with a Quebec record label and She’d also grown to miss some
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 21 Out from the
Perched like Sometimes I used to hallucinate me whenever he found me crouched when I had a high fever. Sometimes at his bedside in the middle of the a bird at the the walls looked as if they were night. He made me feel so safe. I sure pulsating, and it was only a matter of miss that. kitchen window, time before the room caved in on me How much longer will it be? I would spy on as I lay in my parents’ bed. And sometimes I used to think people Perched like a bird at the kitchen my dad as he were walking too fast, which would window, I would spy on my dad as really irritate me. he worked in his shop. I was curious worked in his shop. Such was the case one Halloween about what could possibly be going night. through his mind at a time like this. I wondered if he Too ill to dress up, I spent the And I wondered if he ever cried out ever cried out there, night lying in bed while Mom took there, all alone. My dad wasn’t the my brother and sisters trick-or- type to get all teary-eyed in front of all alone. He had treating. My room was just off the people. He had to cry sometime, bathroom, so I could see my dad didn’t he? Wouldn’t everybody, if to cry sometime, pass by every time he went to visit it. they knew it was only a matter of didn’t he? I remember yelling at him to stop months before they died? I just walking so fast, but he insisted he wanted to know if he was hurting — Wouldn’t everybody, was walking as slow as he could. any kind of sign that he needed us. Many years would go by before I But he just kept working away on his if they knew it was understood how frustrating it was machinery like any other day, show- only a matter of dealing with someone who saw ing no signs of pain. The four of us things that weren’t there. kids knew better than to bug him too months before Pumped full of morphine, my dad much with such requests as, “Can drifted in and out of consciousness we go swimming in the dug-out?” or they died? in his hospital bed in the spring of “Can we ride the four-wheeler?” 1999, muttering about things he When he was working, he didn’t like thought he saw. So I sat at his bed- to be bothered. “Buzz off. Can’t you side and held his hand while he see I’m busy?” was his usual reply. Jolie Toews dreamed through the night. If he had It’s funny, though, when I think been able to speak well enough, I back to those days. I never realized it would’ve asked him to tell me about at the time, but when he wasn’t busy his dreams, just like he used to ask in the fields or fixing machinery, he
22 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 He used to keep that comb wedged in the back pocket of his Levi jeans, always on hand to tame stubborn flyaways.
was usually making things for us — a merry-go-round, a swing set, go- carts, a floating dock with a diving board. It was his way of showing love. Now, the nights seemed to stretch longer than the days. It was only a matter of time before the cancer would kill him. The hospital became a second home to my family. Visiting hours didn’t apply to us. Whenever I was there, I couldn’t help but feel like a VIP guest. My dad had the nicest-looking room in the entire place, furnished with a bed, night- stand, couch, a few chairs, a TV and a VCR. A big window overlooked a grassy area with a tree and a bird- house, which hung on a budding PHOTO BY JOLIE TOEWS branch and swayed in the warm waiting area. There was a TV in the tan. The name was appropriate, him breeze. waiting room. I remember watching being a farmer and all. But after all I’m thankful it was spring when bits and pieces of the coverage of the those hours the sun had put in to my dad died, that winter had long Columbine High School shootings. I change his skin colour, now it was passed. But I’m not sure how much didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to like someone had come along with a he was able to appreciate the view. the tragedy. I had other things on my pin and poked a hole to drain it all After a while, his eyes glazed over mind. out. and stared blankly at a spot on the As I stared down at my father, I Working on broken-down farm ceiling. couldn’t believe this was the same machinery so many summer days Can you still see me? Or has it man I knew as a little girl. His ap- had turned his hands tough, making already been the last time? pearance had changed so much since them feel like sandpaper. But it had The odd occasion when I wasn’t he got sick. Unlike the rest of his been a while since he had done any in dad’s room, I was either playing body, the skin on his face and fore- repair work, so they’d lost their tex- cards with my cousins in the hallway arms used to be dark brown — what ture. His back was full of screws and or sleeping on the couches in the some people would call a farmer’s pins, put in a few months earlier to
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 23 stabilize his fragile spine — the same eyes. They almost looked possessed. never seen anyone just after they’d back I remember sitting on as we It must have been the morphine. But died before. The sun was shining swam around the pool at the hotel in still, it really frightened me. What a bright that morning, April 25. Grand Forks, North Dakota every thing it is, watching someone die. There are too many nights to November. count I’ve bawled myself to sleep in His skinny arms fell limp to his Before, I’d always found my dad the years following his death. I was sides. Many winters ago, those arms intimidating. His voice boomed, so it able to do it in such a way that no- used to swing me around the town seemed like he was always yelling. body would hear me. I didn’t want skating rink so fast it made me Most of the time, he probably was. them to be scared of me because I scream. Despite his temper, he was usually was sad. I wanted to be the Jolie they The skin sagged off the bones in a funny guy. His sarcastic humour knew — always cracking jokes and his legs. I remember those legs once was a nervous trait, my mom always having fun. So I cried in private, had enough muscle to beat me, his said. Kids seemed to like him. He mostly because I felt sorry for my fastest kid, in a race. could be a real goofball. dad. I was so angry that the disease No, he sure didn’t look the same. forced him to expose his real To keep him as comfortable as I thoughts and emotions. The strong could, I wet his lips with a sponge to … unlike anything and stubborn man I had always keep them from drying out. A small known had turned into this weak ball of pink sponge was attached to I’d heard before. and vulnerable person. When it the end of a stick, making it look like became obvious death was near, he a lollipop. I rolled it back and forth began to turn into someone I’d never across his thick lips. I kept his curly But all I ever saw was an old seen before. His voice grew softer black hair slicked back with his grouch who worried too much about and he no longer lost his temper. favourite little black comb to keep money. “Everybody’s making it big He even apologized for being a the sweat from dripping into his but me,” I often heard him say. I bad father. When it was no longer eyes. He used to keep that comb think he felt sorry for himself but possible for him to show affection wedged in the back pocket of his didn’t want anyone else feeling sorry through building us things, he start- Levi jeans, always on hand to tame for him. ed to speak it. As hard as it must stubborn flyaways. Farming was a stressful job. He have been, he told me he loved me. It became torturous listening to would work so hard putting in his But I couldn’t say the same. Oh, I him breath. Draped over the chair crops, only to sit idly by and watch wanted to. No one knows that more beside his bed, I stared up at the days and days of rain almost than me. But I just couldn’t do it. He ceiling and listened to him barely completely wipe them out. had raised me in his shadow — stub- live. A slow breath in, then a pause I never liked you on those days. You born and guarded. How could he … and finally a long exhale. And it could be really mean, you know? expect anything else of me? would start all over again. It got so If he ever needed help with any- It’s not fair, Dad! That wasn’t you. bad that I had to plug my ears. thing, he was often too proud to ask It feels so nice falling asleep after Just die already! for it. Our neighbours and family a good cry. It wipes me out so I don’t Eventually, he started grabbing at came over anyway to help him in the have to worry about getting scared the oxygen mask to pull it off his fields when he got too weak. of lying there in the dark alone with face. I took the elastic bands off his my thoughts. I just close my eyes and ears and held the mask over his The sound was unlike anything drift off with ease. But it gets hard mouth myself, in case it was making I’d heard before. It was a loud wail- living this way — pissed off at some- him feel trapped. One time, he even ing noise coming from my mom. I thing I can’t change and hiding my tried to get up from the bed. I was knew something had happened so grief. I’ve been thinking lately that standing in the doorway talking with I ran into dad’s room. His eyes didn’t maybe I’ve been feeling sorry for relatives when I saw it happen. He blink and his mouth was gaping myself instead of dad. I mean, is it kept his eyes on me as he tried to open. He looked like a dead fish. I such a terrible thing that my dad had reach for the metal triangle hanging wish I hadn’t seen that, because the to change? Would it be so terrible if above his bed. I’ll never forget those image still burns in my mind. I had I did, too?
24 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 To Dance
PHOTO BY ANGELA HILL
We were so thin, so sick, so screwed up. But every fall, thousands of little girls tiptoe into dance studios wanting to be just like us.
Erin Morrison
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 25 tanding on the carpet in the green room, April Roy and I, dressed like twins, grasp the back of an ornate green velour couch in place of a barre. Our competitors circle us, stretching on the floor or marking their routines with headphones on. We lock stares and she shows me her dazzling toothy smile. She doesn’t blink. In the studio she’d warmed up with her head down, but in the green room, pulling a pointed toe above her head, her jaw is defiant. This is the tiger cage, between the rehearsal hall and the stage, where we all try to stay warm and intimidate each other. My eyes wander to the other duets, but April is all inside her head. Don’t look. Don’t look at them. Oh my goodness, just focus. Just stay warm and focus. On stage we stand back-to-back, our arms stretched out and her palms on top of mine. Her long, thin alien fingers are frozen on mine under the hot lights, and I feel her take a deep breath. She’s thinking about the judges at the back of the audience, she’s thinking about the choreo- graphers in the front row. Oh my goodness. She’s a white stripe on the vast, hot, black stage. “We can do this,” she whispers — to herself, not me. Each of her vertebrae is pushing against her paper- thin skin, pushing into the grooves of my spine. The heavy red velvet curtain separating us from the audience is a threadbare security blanket. Waiting, she second- guesses the placement of her pointed toe, her fingers and her chin. She shifts and contracts her stomach muscles, conscious of how her gaunt profile will look in silhou- ette.
PHOTO BY ANGELA HILL I can’t mess this up. Can’t mess this up. Can’t. If there’s a mistake, she won’t eat for days. She’ll cry herself to sleep. She’ll be in the studio by seven tomor- If there’s a mistake, row morning. She’ll stretch. She’ll lose more weight. Eight years later, she’ll say she was in a weird frame of she won’t eat for days. mind back then. She’ll say she was screwed up, and she She’ll cry herself to sleep. was emotionally fragile. She’ll say she was sick. She and I were sick and we were so thin, and we had our prior- She’ll lose more weight. ities screwed up. She’ll say that she couldn’t do those competitions and performances unless she was com- pletely empty. Eight years later she’ll say she couldn’t believe she ever thought like that. If I mess this up, it’s all over. The hem of velvet heaves from the floor, and a spot- light crawls up our legs and hits the sides of our faces. Then we hear the whisper of the five seconds of empty
26 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 tape before the music cuts in. I’m familiar with it, this five-second free fall, but the moment lasts years for April. She was raised as a rhythmic gymnast, where there are no lights, and no giant theatre house stretching into the black. He sinewy muscles shudder against mine. She knows the audience can’t hear the brief blur of white noise, but she’s sure they see her cheeks turn red under the heavy makeup and she still feels like it’ll break her — that when the music starts, she just might not move.
April took a bite of toast while her sisters scurried around her. One bite of toast, chewed deliberately. She was hungry but by the time she was eighteen she’d grown accustomed to the comfort of an empty stomach. When she swallowed, it was thorns all the way down her raw throat. She faced a two-hour morning bus ride to the other side of town, but didn’t mind. At her old high school she didn’t have any friends. The more her body melted away, the more she melted into the background, the more she avoided everyone. It was a relief to transfer to Winnipeg’s Westwood Collegiate, a school with a per- forming arts diploma programme, a place where people understood her. Every fall, little girls in their first pink ballet slippers tiptoe nervously into dance studios around the world, dreaming of being just like April. Most will take one or two classes a week, no more. But a few will be encour- aged to get serious about their careers and take their exams, beginning at five years old. The Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing reports 250,000 students are examined by judges each year worldwide; the Royal Academy of Dance grades another nearly 191,000 annually. Only the top fraction of gradu- ates will win jobs as professional ballerinas. Anything
short of the highest grade is failure. For the first half of PHOTO BY ANGELA HILL the dance season — before the horrific and elating rush of competing and performing, exams consume a dancer’s mind. She feels like it’ll At Westwood the morning was filled with regular classes. During the lessons, April would float away, break her — that when dreaming about the perfect performance, the perfect the music starts, she just stretch, the perfect body. Afternoons were spent in the school’s dance studio, staring at herself in the mirrors, might not move. trying to make herself look like the Dance Magazine cut- outs she had pasted all over her notebooks. By three o’clock acid was gnawing at her stomach lining, but she couldn’t eat. More classes awaited at the private dance studio where I would see her every day. So after school she dragged herself onto another bus, toes blistered, hamstring strained, a backpack full of tights and tattered
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 27 dance shoes slung over her shoulder. loud gasp; a whooshing crack as air pale peach Bloch Serenade satin Slumping into a seat, her spine sat escaped from between two unnatur- pointe shoes, size 4-E. The box awkwardly on top of her hips, and ally rounded vertebrae. The frac- around the toe was getting soft and she felt bolts of pain with each bump tured bones of my spine had become beginning to melt into the redwood in the road. worn down and spaced out by then, layers that ran along the sole. For kids like April and me, the so the pop, like cracking knuckles, When exam day came, it was just pain made us feel better about our- had become uniquely pronounced. April and I standing before the selves. Twisting the other way, I could examiner they’d flown in from Years later, Dr. Kim Dorsch, a see that outside the picture window, England. We’d been paired for University of Regina kinesiologist, on benches in the gallery, an audi- exams since grade three. Years later, offered an explanation. “It’s the ence had gathered. By now, we were April told me the 1998 exam was the whole notion that you’re tough if the instructors who taught their worst. If she couldn’t score in the you play through the pain,” she daughters. We were the rail-thin highest category, she might just die. told me. Dancers, like athletes, are women their girls wanted to be. Marks were kept private, enveloped constantly reevaluating how much I tugged at the shoulder straps on pain or injury is acceptable. As my bodice, suddenly aware of my success becomes more important, the slumped posture. We were the prod- level of pain they’re willing to accept igies, and everyone wanted to see “It’s the grows. what The Big Girls were preparing Her words rang true. I thought — what sequined-and-tulled master- whole notion back to how a bleeding toe or a piece they would watch in one of the stabbing clamp of hunger made us huge theatres in Winnipeg, while that you’re proud. Eventually, the pain, the leaning over to whisper: I watched control over food, and the drive them rehearse this part. That one on the tough if you for perfection become an obsession. right teaches my daughter on Mondays. “Ultimately what happens with I whipped back towards the mir- play through eating disorders is that it’s not about rored walls and refocused my atten- food anymore, it’s about taking tion on peeling my sweat-soaked the pain. control of one aspect of your life,” tights away from my toes. Beside me, Can that border Dorsch said. “Can that border on I could see April reaching two hesi- pathological? Yes.” tant fingers into the toe of a well- on pathological? worn shoe to pull out what looked A quick tug, like ripping off a like melted cotton candy, crystallized Yes.” bandage, and a purple toenail peeled into a sticky, sinewy clump. Lamb’s off my littlest toe. I flicked at some of wool, saturated with blood. Her toes the caked blood with my fingernail were totally fucked. The baby toe and glanced at the five other girls curled right underneath her foot. away from our jealous best friends, hunched over their own feet, taping I grabbed my white hockey tape our daily competitors. Somehow she over blisters and cramming lamb’s and began to rip off long strips with saw mine that year, and her ‘Com- wool from pastel pink boxes into the my teeth. Wrapping a strip around mended’ was nothing compared to toes of their pointe shoes. my big toe, I jerked from a bullet of my ‘Highly Commended’. We’d been given a brief break to pain. Opaque white puss oozed She locked herself in the bath- change shoes. Sinking to the studio through the tape, begging for the room and collapsed. Outside, she floor in deep exhaustion, you could Baby Anbesol — normally used for could hear packs of young dancers see how pulled apart our muscles teething babies but recommended by shuffling off to class. She banged her had become. Like a rag doll, April’s our choreographer to dull throbbing head against the floor. Hot pain knees fell open and hit the floor on blisters and infected toes. melted into the tears pooling on her either side of her. Julie held one foot The hockey tape bound whatever face. She needed that pain to over- up to her face to examine a raw toe. I was broken, bloodied, raw or weak, power her thoughts. She crawled twisted from my waist until I heard a so I could force the whole mess into over to the sink and threw her skull
28 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 against it until the skin on her fore- my body is all wrong and I completely a commitment not just to dance but head opened up. fell apart in front of everyone. If I go to to be a dancer. The Dancer becomes Until then our parents had been the festival and get anything less than a their identity. Their bodies become concerned but still able to tell them- gold honours I will seriously go insane. equipment to help them succeed, no selves not to worry. Their girls should Either that or kill myself. different from a hockey stick or a be thin. Naturally you’d have no helmet. “There’s a disconnect. Even breasts at eighteen, if you were slight We hadn’t spoken in six years the fact that you’re not going to be of build and working out eight hours when I tracked her down in Toronto. able to walk when you’re forty isn’t a day. We weren’t home for meals, so On the phone, she sounded better. important,” Dorsch said. nobody knew we didn’t eat, and we Happier. She said she always knew Thinking back to the day April all had doctors who understood her knees weren’t perfectly shaped and I performed our duo in the dark- dancers, who would tell our parents enough to be an elite ballerina and, ened performance hall, I understood we were healthy enough, even as one day, she just accepted it. She this even then. Seeing her face, yel- they wrapped the same knee three moved to Texas to dance with a small lowed and bleary, I knew every re- hearsal made her life two hours long, that every time her knees hit the bathroom floor it made her life two minutes long and that, when the music finally began, her life was only as long as that one song. Today April can’t rise up on the ball of one foot. I limp from broken metatarsals in my feet that never set properly. The acid from April’s own stomach eroded her teeth. My twisted spine pinches the blood vessel to my brain. But that’s nothing — we’d heard some professionals needed three hours of pain therapy just to get through a single day. We got away lucky. We can talk about it now. After that first call, April and I sent emails back and forth and talked more on the phone.
PHOTO BY ANGELA HILL In one email, she transcribed some old diary entries and wrote: “Oh, my times in a month and pushed company, then joined a show on a goodness, Erin, wow, when I look syringes of anti-inflammatory corti- cruise ship. Eventually she landed in back, I see how far I have come.” sone into ankle tendons to keep the Toronto, where she stopped dancing April says she still thinks about swelling down. But the wound on for a while. She gained weight. everything she eats but is more easy- April’s head couldn’t be ignored. She lost weight. She got to know a going. She’s taking recreational She was sent for counseling. Her woman who wasn’t just April the dance classes, like the girls who go therapist told her to keep a diary. Skinny Dancer. once a week, for fun. Once in a while Rather than helping, the notebook I thought about what kinesiologist she’ll pass a store that sells ballet became a place for festering fear. Dorsch had told me. Between the shoes, see a little girl inside holding I want to die, she began her entry ages of twelve and thirteen, about her mommy’s hand, and feel a pang on April 21, 1998. I swear I don’t care seventy per cent of young people of loss. But she reminds herself she anymore. All I cared about was dancing drop out of any activity they take didn’t give up. She grew up. Then and it’s gone. I went through my solo seriously. Dancers who make it past she walks on. today. The costume makes me look fat, fourteen do so because they’ve made
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 29 Burnin’ Rink o’ Fire Brad Brown PHOTO BY JOY BROWN BURNIN’
he smell of smoke hadn’t yet traveled the two onlookers couldn’t grasp the inevitable. The fire taunted blocks to my house when, just past five a.m., the us, briefly receding inside the charred walls. This would T phone rang, piercing my sleep with the news that trigger a few gasps of hope — the blaze was finally under our tiny Saskatchewan town’s cornerstone — the Arcola control. Then the inferno would rise up again, higher Memorial Arena — was burning. I quickly dressed and than before. Within two hours the flames were rushing headed out, following clouds of thick black smoke to towards the bathrooms and skating surface. Main Street. It was September 26, 2001, a warm fall Had it been a heap of broken pallets set alight for a morning made warmer by the heat of the fire. When I party in the valley, or a mound of cow chips burning in a arrived, flames were already jumping off a rugged mass field just off the highway, the fire might have been some- of lumber that, like many small thing to admire. It was almost town arenas, looked more like a beautiful the way the red and barn than a shrine for the great- yellow flames flickered against est game on Earth. the still dark sky while black A handful of the town’s five smoke poured from what used hundred denizens had gath- to be the roof. But no one was ered across from the rink, with smiling or admiring as the fire more arriving by the minute. I lurched forward, finally taking spied Gene Hollingshead, for- down the dressing rooms and mer minor hockey coach and south wall. long-serving announcer for our When the wall went down, senior team, the Arcola-Kisbey Singleton knew the place was Combines. Beside him stood gone. “I just remember stand- Bud Askin, who was on the ing there in awe, thinking: rink’s building crew. He helped where do we go from here?
PHOTO BY JULIE FOLK raise the rafters just after the That was the biggest thing, war, in 1947. The arena had a skating rink and curling wondering what the hell do we do now?” sheets, and it sparked Bud’s romance with Marj — one We did what every town does. We rebuilt. We had to. day, after public skating hours ended, he walked her “Who’s going to move to town if we don’t have a rink? home. They’ve been married sixty years. You look at every town and village from here to Regina No one spoke. There was no need. We were all think- and every little place has a rink,” Bud Askin argued in ing the same thing: this couldn’t be for real. We watched the rebuild-or-not debate that followed the fire. as the recently renovated curling rink collapsed and the Four years later, while home for a Christmas visit, I fire spread to the trophy case, then the concession stand. took a turn on the new ice. Maybe I’m rushing to judge- It was like seeing a bad car accident in progress. As the ment, but I felt let down. The old championship banners crowd swelled and more volunteers arrived to fight the were gone, but even if they had survived, there were no blaze, it seemed the entire town was united in the old wooden rafters to hang them from. Despite nearly ridiculous hope that somehow, some way, some portion four seasons of hockey, the boards lacked puck marks of the rink could be saved. But the heat only intensified and the floors were still unscuffed. In a way, it didn’t as the fire leapt across the rink into the main lobby. even look like an arena. It was more like a tin box with Darcy Singleton, one of the volunteer fire fighters, told some ice in the middle. It’s a problem only time can fix. me later it was a losing battle from the start. “In that old But at least, as I discovered after my skate, the dressing wooden building it just spread so fast,” he said. But we rooms were starting to stink again.
30 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 BROWSERSAND HUNTERS
Sarcastic and bombastic, The bookstore’s door is old and weathered, and Wayne Shaw gives it a former football star lurks a good push as he turns the key to open shop for the day. It’s only ten among towering bookshelves, o’clock; he’d promised himself he’d try waiting till eleven on Saturday ready to rile his customers mornings. But he’d been up since six, read the paper and eaten breakfast. into reading. There was no point sitting at home drumming his fingers. Books are piled every which way on his desk, on the floor, encased in bookshelves behind and beside him and blocking most of the sunlight straining to filter through the store- front window. When he first opened the place fifteen years ago, he had a goal to keep it neat and tidy but in this business for every book sold, a Jamie Komarnicki box to sell comes in.
PHOTO BY JAMIE KORMARNICKI
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 31 His glasses sit low on his nose as academically to the top of his class house in downtown Winnipeg, hung he peers at the computer screen and under the guidance of Father Athol out a bookseller’s shingle and over pecks at the keyboard, scanning the Murray. ten years filled it with books from Internet for books; at other times he The Catholic priest introduced the the basement to the third floor. He sorts through the overflowing boxes, Protestant boy to Plato, Socrates, never really made any money but he flips through the Books section of the Aristotle, Aquinas. Shaw grew to didn’t care. Money never brought Globe and Mail, or reads, glancing love the old books. There was always him happiness. When he had money, up at the customers tramping past something new, exciting, thought- he watched his friends get fat and his swivel chair perch by the door. provoking, adventurous to be stupid and die. Selling books, he was All it takes is five seconds for him learned. doing what he loved. to find out if a customer is a fellow After high school, he was He moved to Saskatoon in 1991 to booklover. snatched up by scouts, first with the be nearer his daughter and grand- “Can I help you?” he asks, baring Hilltops, later with the Saskatch- sons. There he set up shop on Main his teeth in a grin, pushing his ewan Roughriders. A chunky 1966 Street, taking in boxes of books, sell- glasses into his silver-grey hair so Grey Cup ring glitters on the fourth ing a few, running the cash register that it sticks up in two little tufts like finger of his right hand, a token of out of his wallet, and occasionally horns. If the customer says “just twelve years with the team. He never chasing away customers with his browsing”, he scoffs. It would take forgot about reading, though. Before sweeping condemnation of reader- three days to browse the books. If every road trip he stashed a couple kind. He was never bored. people would just come up with a of books in his suitcase. He didn’t subject, he thinks, he’d be happy to mind the ribbing from his teammates Even though I’d lived in Saska- point them in the right direction. and spent as much spare time scour- toon eight months, I’d never been He tries to say this out loud as ing the streets for bookstores as he inside the small bookstore. Shopping friendly as he can, but after saying it did in the bars. twenty-nine times in a row it’s hard. Football was glamorous: parties If they can’t at least suggest a topic of and new suits, flashy cars and big interest, he can only conclude they’re houses. But after four Grey Cups, a bored and boring idiots. dozen years and countless concus- And in his book, that’s the worst sions, life outside football beckoned. sin. On the job hunt, he never really found anything he liked. Working a Life was simple back on the farm sales or business job was okay for the between Bladworth and Davidson in first year or two, until he got to know the 1950s. Every meal, Shaw and his everything. Then it was boring. four brothers gathered round the After a failed car rental business table as their father read jokes and (“interest rates went up”) and a failed interesting tidbits from the Reader’s marriage (“a modern yuppie — she Digest. Shaw himself devoured Zane was giving away my good old books Grey westerns; cowboy adventures — though I wasn’t a perfect guy”), didn’t seem so far removed from life he bought a half section of land north on the farm. In Grade Twelve, Shaw of Winnipeg in the early Eighties. He left his country school for Saskatch- wanted to be a hermit on a hobby ewan’s Notre Dame College — and farm with nothing but time to read its football team. He was quickly the thousands of books he’d col- recognized as a sturdy linebacker lected over the years. who could take a hit as well as he He found he missed people, gave one; he played strong and hard though. Books were good com- with an eye for a spot on the Hill- panions to a point, but the real tops, Saskatoon’s junior football satisfaction lay in talking to others team. The young athlete also rose about them. So he bought an old
32 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 in the city’s Broadway area, I was on less readers. And books were every- explanation with a stranger. my way into an antique store when I where. Not in neat, ordered, care- That was my first experience with noticed the sign next door: A Book fully arranged rows, either, but a Wayne Shaw’s verbal barrage. Hunter. I hesitated — there were terrifying clutter, crammed into Ninety-five per cent of university only a few minutes on my parking bulging bookshelves, spilling out of grads never open a book outside meter. Still, the store drew me in. brown cardboard boxes, rising from their expertise, he bellowed; people Except for a fleeting moment in the floor in teetering stacks. just don’t reeeeead. Or worse yet, Grade One when I was terrified of a My hand trailed along the covers, they only want Stephen King novels story called The Satin Shoes (“Satan fingering the bindings as my eyes and Harlequin Romances. His eyes Shoes!” I thought), I’d always loved darted over the titles, looking for an bulged, his face turned red, and his to read. As a child I spent late nights Elizabeth Peters to add to my collec- tufted hair seemed to stand on end. under covers with a flashlight, pour- tion. No luck. With a glance at my Nineteen out of twenty people come ing over Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia watch, I stole towards the door in “just to browse” — heavy disdain Brown, The Prisoner of Zenda, The empty-handed. in his voice — and if you don’t have Scarlet Pimpernel. I’d worn out more “What subject are you looking a subject, well, you’re not going to than one library card since, though for?” find a book. lately with the juggle of university, I gave the owner the brief sheep- Reading culture is in decay, he work, family and friends, I’d found I ish smile of the customer who knows continued; the good stuff, the clas- was taking less time to pick up a she’ll make no purchase. “Just sics, are forgotten. The modern good book. browsing, thanks.” A bit of a fib, but garbage passed off as good literature It was dark inside, and stifling I didn’t have time to excavate that these days, well … with the heavy air of a hundred jumbled store for just one book and I Flustered, I grabbed the nearest thousand pages thumbed by count- didn’t feel like launching into an book at hand — Madame Bovary — dug a few dollars from my pocket and left, closing the door on his righteous howls. Months passed. I moved to Regina. But in the rare moments I had time to read for pleasure, Shaw’s lecture still floated through my mind. Sure I’d grown up accord- ing to the gospel of Sweet Valley High, Books were everywhere, but I’d also put in my time with spilling from boxes, Shakespeare, Steinbeck and the Bronte sisters. If he really wanted rising from the floor people to read, why did he drive them out of his store, I mused, my in teetering stacks. vanity slightly bruised. So early one morning I found myself sucking back caffeine as I drove Highway 11 to Saskatoon under a pale winter sky. He looked different than I’d pic- tured in my fuzzy memory, with healthy red cheeks and a thin, neatly trimmed mustache. He wore cords and blue sneakers, a navy cardigan flecked with little pieces of paper and lint. My eyes caught on the
PHOTO BY JAMIE KORMARNICKI sweater’s open button, second from
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 33 the bottom and I briefly smiled as reading to their grandkids and “Can I help you?” I pictured it popping open during talking to them. He’s disgusted with “Just browsing. I need something one of his vehement speeches. parents who want to ban Harry Pot- where I don’t have to use my brain. When I identified myself as the ter considering the fact that witches That’s what textbooks are for,” she student who’d called, he sprang up and wizards teach children about says with a quick smile before dis- from his chair and wound his way good and evil. appearing into the stores depths. I towards me around a sliding ava- He never really finishes a thought sneak a knowing glance at Shaw. lanche of books on the desk and before he’s hopped to the next. Too Browsers, bah. floor, a dizzying stream of conver- much information in his head, he He knows some people think he’s sation flowing from his mouth as says. nothing more than a grouchy old he opened the secretary desk and man. And why not? He’s sarcastic, ushered me towards a green chair, he’s insulting, and he doesn’t think then pulled a string that turned on “Jack Kerouac? it’s his job to educate empty-headed a bare light bulb, stepped on a stool idiots proud of their ignorance. But to pull on another light, and finally They were crazy, then again, he always asks them if he settled back behind his desk. can help, and when he can’t, he Ah yes, you’re the student. Come those guys.” actually feels sorry for them, he says. in, you can sit down right over here What’s wrong with society, when but watch the chair though, it’s kind people can’t think of books they’d of tippy … what was your name? The day stretches on and Shaw like to read? Jamie, right. At my age I don’t and I settle into a comfortable rou- Every once in a while he thinks, remember everything … tine. I ask him about some authors. ah, that’s it, time to quit. Other than a few affirmative mur- Gertrude Stein? She comes, she goes. But all it takes is a three-day murs, I hadn’t gotten beyond words Jack Kerouac? They were crazy, those weekend. He sits at home, watches of introduction. I took a seat. Yes, the guys. some football or hockey and reads chair was slightly wobbly. Shaw makes soup for lunch, pour- books, and by the time the week- Want some coffee? ing water from a grubby white kettle end’s over, he’s happy to go back to Please. into a powdered mix in a Styrofoam his store, even if to face the empty- I stood up and wandered down cup, which we sip companionably as minded shoppers winding in and the bookstore’s hallway. His voice he tells me the story of how a little out. He doesn’t feel comfortable disappeared behind me. old lady once got locked in, tucked sitting at home all day every day; it’s The store’s façade was decep- away in a quiet nook. If it weren’t for almost like he’s afraid he’ll become tively small; inside it was like Mary a gut feeling that brought him back one of those white haired white guys Poppin’s bottomless bag, one small to check after closing, he’d have he feels sorry for. doorway leading one to another, found her bones the next morning, And the thing is, he’s happy here. rooms upon rooms of towering he says, hooting. Everyone who walks into the shelves. It was … impossible, the I explore the shop’s dark corners, store has the chance to find the book idea of reading all these books, consulting a book list I’d compiled in they think they’re looking for; and if mind-boggling, overwhelming. advance. Scanning yellowed pages, I they don’t find it, Shaw says, his I sat down at the secretary desk, wonder who last saw these words. voice dropping to a conspiratorial pushing Pepys, Sam Johnson, and What did this book mean to them? whisper, quite often they’ll discover Carlos Fuentes out of the way so I Why did they box it up and ship it some other book, an unexpected find had room to write — and listen. off to a second hand bookseller? buried deep in the store. The mayor is illiterate, Chretien There’s a story to the ripped pages, It’s a battle, I think, an entertain- is illiterate, Don Cherry’s an idiot, broken spines and dusty covers. I ing game riling up customers to see the government is the new mafia, I gather up an armful and make my if they truly are interested in books. learned. As for retirement, well, he way back to the front of the store. Sometimes he wins, sometimes he sure as hell doesn’t want to go to A young girl in a bright pink loses. coffee shops and be bored by old peacoat steps inside, a university And he’s never bored. rich white guys. They’d be better off student.
34 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 THE WINDOW
Can the
science of
psychiatry
and the art
of poetry
ever find
common
ground?
Christopher Zwick
PHOTO BY CHRISTOPHER ZWICK
If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection. – Socrates, from Phaedrus
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 35 was the first Monday morning of … your nebulous woman’s ways would make me so mad / i the year and I woke up beside her, would fill arms with wine bottles / retreat to tall pines / choose as I had many mornings in the one / imagine it to be you breaking / among sounds of past. We had so many mornings, shattering glass & slavic gypsy curses … / godammit! / why but not nearly enough. The sun can’t we be more loving? was shining for the first time in — Andrew Suknaski, from “Note 1” five days. She was going home in Suicide Notes, Book One today, and I probably wouldn’t see her for a few weeks. That was It is difficult to articulate exactly how it feels. I have the routine. tried for many years to grasp what it is that distresses I felt her stir, and turned to her. “Good morning, me. Crumpled stacks of horribly depressed poetry date Itbeautiful,” I said as I did every morning I woke beside back to my adolescent years, and similar stacks seem to her. One cup of coffee, two cups of coffee later, she stood appear wherever I settle down. I often wonder if the up. “Oh my god, I’m going to break your heart.” words are a product of the depression, or vice-versa. I have not seen her since. That question has occupied great minds for many That was the trigger, the catalyst that started a chain of thousands of years, but it must be noted depression does events revealing a much larger problem. This story is not not afflict all poets, and anyone can suffer from a mood about the woman I love, but it is about a broken heart, disorder. There are many wonderful poets who would be and why mine is the biggest broken heart ever. My situa- tion is not unique by any means. Clichéd hearts are broken every day. But my situation is complicated by the fact I have a mood disorder: severe depression at best, bipolar disorder at worst. It is further complicated by the suspicion I may be a poet. Health Canada reports eight per cent of adults will be affected by a mood disorder sometime during their lives, but only a percentage of them will be treated. Nobody knows exactly where these disorders come from. Gene- tics are thought to play a large role along with social and personal circumstances. Sufferers are more likely to commit suicide, and many suicides are related to some kind of untreated mood disorder. Symptoms of depression include a growing storm manifesting itself in your psyche, creeping and rumbling slowly up the back of your skull. It’s a storm that is per- sistent, always waiting to pour despair. You can feel the electricity. It disturbs sleep. It disturbs life, all aspects of life. It finds darkness in all things good. It is the burden of Sisyphus, constantly rolling the boulder out of the pit, only to have it roll back down. My mood had been in slow decline for months before that sunny Monday morning. I felt it as a mild numb- ness. But on that day, I collapsed, body, mind, and soul. This time I knew it was bad. I needed help. I couldn’t do
it by myself. So I went to the emergency room. PHOTO BY CHRISTOPHER ZWICK
36 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 quite offended by the insinuation they have a mental illness. However, it speaks to the romantic ideal of what a poet is. It’s a special sensitivity, I think, more than a I was walking very fast. mental illness, but sometimes it manifests itself through I knew they would the illness. Others have described it differently, but there is a general agreement about something indescribable come after me. that compels the poet and all creative people. I asked one Regina poet and journalist to define what a poet was. The hunt was on. “It’s funny,” he said. “No one would ever ask such a question about a brick-layer, say, or a neurosurgeon or a journalist. Those kerchiefs and wheelchairs. I watched muted emergency are all people who work at a certain calling. People don’t room television and read a women’s magazine before a speak about someone having the soul of a brick-layer or nurse baited me to follow her into the labyrinth. By the the smouldering eyes of a neurosurgeon.” It’s true, and time I was actually able to see a head-doctor I had been no one talks about being drunk as a fireman on payday lost in that maze for nearly four hours — a lot of time to either. Some people are just not able to cope. Some regret going to the hospital. people just feel too deeply, and that makes them sus- He poked his half-bald head into the room, intro- ceptible. duced himself and very quickly proceeded to tear away I think about the poets who appealed to me in high the layers. I thought I’d be able to outsmart him. But school. Edgar Allan Poe was a drug-addicted manic- now, I knew I was fucked. Defeated. He said he was depressive who attempted suicide at least once. T.S. Eliot going to certify me under the Mental Health Act, and left spent time in what was then called an “insane asylum,” to arrange for a bed in the Wing. I was grasping for and had a history of mental illness in his family. Charles cogent logic, for any vine that grew too close. I was out of Bukowski was a raging alcoholic. Jim Morrison was options. another drug addict and, yes, a poet, who had a long I’m sure he wasn’t surprised when he came back and history of depression. Then I look at the poets I’ve dis- found I wasn’t there. I was probably two blocks away covered in recent years. Pablo Neruda was a textbook from the hospital by then. I was raving, percolating, but example of bipolar disorder. He survived until he died of was lucid. I was walking very fast. I knew they would cancer. John Berryman spent a relatively large part of his come after me. The hunt was on, but not for long. A life institutionalized. He was an alcoholic who attempted friendly policeman escorted me back to the maze from suicide several times before he jumped from a bridge in which I had come. Minnesota. Vladimir Mayakovsky shot himself in the Two security guards blocked the exits and eventually head after putting on a clean shirt in accordance with accompanied me, one in the back and one in the front, Russian superstition. These are my influences, the people through a long hallway that ended at a secured door. I who have spoken to me through their writing. How entered and became absolutely dependent on the state could I not be depressed? for the first time ever. After the necessary pleasantries that go along with Let us go then, you and I / When the evening is spread out hospital visits, a nurse led me to my room. against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table “The doctor has asked that you wear hospital attire: — T.S. Eliot, from The Love Song the robe, the slippers. So I’m going to have to take your of J. Alfred Prufrock clothes,” she said, as she had a million times before. I’d never had to stay in a hospital before. The smock As I asked to see a psychiatrist that day, my stomach confused me. It was demeaning and disheartening. started to sweat, and then freeze. I could feel the ice “It’s backwards,” the nurse said. “Do you want some forming. The room was empty but for three old ladies in help?”
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 37 I met Forgetful Blanche in the smoking area. She was an old native lady, who had been in and out of the Wing ECT “is always for years. Her twenty-year-old wheel chair creaked every an option for people time she grabbed at her pockets to find a lighter. The nurses got angry with her whenever she brought her who are resistant oxygen tank outside. She said I had a nice aura, and that I reminded her of to medication.” roses. I asked if anyone had ever reminded her of roses before. She said she didn’t think so. Then she said I reminded her of Elvis, and having picked up a little Cree My first night in the Wing was very relaxing, very in my travels, I sang a couple of lines of “All Shook Up” medicated, lots of Ativan. That was the only night I actu- in Cree. She laughed so hard her oxygen tube flew out of ally slept well. her nose. That made me happy. My room was located nearest to the nurse’s night post. Then I did it all again the next day, and that made Doors must be open a crack at all times during the night me sad. so they can shine their flashlights in your eyes. You can I was released from the hospital after only seven days, hear them cackle as they entertain each other during the which I have since learned is a rarity. I managed to long night shift. The phone rings at all hours. Patients far weasel my way out by telling them what they wanted to worse off then myself wander the halls, sometimes with hear. I don’t know what would have happened if I was backwards smocks, or no smocks at all. The Angry Guy forced to stay for three weeks. It has to be the most de- screams and unintentionally pleads to be restrained. pressing place on Earth. Everyone paces like lions in When his voice fills the halls in the night, the security zoos. I wonder if they all know why they are there. Do guards are summoned with a button. Then they expect they question their nature like I do? How do they express you up for breakfast at eight o’clock. themselves? Do they have stacks of bad poetry? Have By the second day, they gave me back my clothes, and they ever created a masterpiece? Have they ever de- that made me hopeful to leave, but after speaking with stroyed it? another psychiatrist, I was sentenced to a minimum of Mood disorders can be hard to diagnose. Manic seventy-two hours. They told me they could hold me for depression, or bipolar disorder, is especially tricky as long as three weeks, but I had an opportunity to because a manic episode can be hard to recognize, and in appeal the decision. It had become a legal matter. I was some cases they don’t happen very often. At this point, imprisoned. It’s not an ordinary prison though; smiles, the psychiatrist is reluctant to say I have bipolar disorder, nice paintings and soothing colours attempt to hide the because he has not seen a manic episode, and I guess underlying principles of concealment and removal from that’s a good thing, but anyone who has known me for a society. They take away your rights “for your own good.” significant period of time would say otherwise. Everyone chats but anonymity is important, and most A manic episode makes you feel invincible; a spell of people don’t know your name. As I start mingling, energy comes over you. An energy that provides clarity everyone gets christened: The Angry Guy, Forgetful and sharpness to the world that wasn’t there before. It’s Blanche, Freemason Frank, the Schizophrenic Demon, like waking up with the sun in your eyes, it’s refreshing Wilf the Wizard, Ill Billy, and Senile Betty. There are also but irritating. Money is no object and no goal is unattain- any number of nameless manics, eccentrics and very old able. Then, everything starts moving too fast, and people that someone forgot. When patients meet in the thoughts start to blend together. Voices start speaking all halls, so to do their afflictions. Ill Billy meets Freemason at once, the agitation becomes unbearable. And then Frank, and they converse. Forgetful Blanche and Senile everything goes awry. Betty pass and have the same conversation every day. It’s Some people are resistant to medications, and are left all poetry. with only one option: electro-convulsive therapy, or
38 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 ECT. I was appalled to learn that ECT is actually quite common. It’s among the safest of anti-depressants, the psychiatrist told me, but somehow I wasn’t comforted. “It is always an option for people who are resistant to medication. Up to this point in time, we don’t know exactly how it works, but all the studies show it works. It corrects the imbalance.” So, after the panoply of prescriptions, and the pos- sibility of future shock therapy, where does that leave me? When my syrup and tonic are balanced and my neurotransmitters have been tweaked, am I going to be a different person? Will I still be able to feel? Will I still be able to write? I sought the advice of doctors, priests, counselors, and friends. They had no satisfactory answers. So I spoke to the poets. There was one name that kept coming up: “The Wood Mountain Poet,” “a geo-poet,” “a lone wolf,” “the real deal,” Andrew Suknaski.
The coyote surrounded / hounded / by too many civiliza- tions / hunted / haunted / snarls and gouges a lair / in the hardened land / none of us has yet to find — Gary Hyland, from Coyote for Suknaski
PHOTO BY CHRISTOPHER ZWICK Suknaski was raised on a homestead near Wood The Wood Mountain poet, Andrew Suknaski, today. Mountain, a small prairie town dense with history on the edge of the Wood Mountain Hills in southern Saskatch- present to capture the people, cultures and turmoil of life ewan. In the early Sixties, he left home to study art at the on the prairies. He lived the life of a poet, and he exper- Kootenay School of Art in Nelson, B.C. and then the ienced the storm. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ School of Art and I found Suknaski, now sixty-four, in a small one- Design. His visual creations have appeared in inter- bedroom apartment in Moose Jaw. It was neat and didn’t national exhibitions. He worked as a night watchman, a look like it had been lived in for long. There was a couch, farmhand, an editor, and a researcher for the National a table and two wooden chairs. The walls were bare Film Board of Canada. Earlier works, including The Zen except for two of his visual creations hung on opposing Pilgrimage, Yth Evolution in Ruenz, Octomi, Suicide Notes walls. One of the chairs was being used as a coffee table; Book One, and Wood Mountain Poems, were all printed in upon it was a tissue, some eyeglasses and an old his- limited edition by small prairie presses in the 1970s. torical novel, opened to save its place. Suknaski was writer-in-residence at the University of He wedged himself in between the table, the refrig- Manitoba when he won the Canadian Authors Associa- erator, and the wall, and sat with his hands on the table, tion Poetry Award in 1979 for The Ghosts Call You Poor. He waiting for my first question. I couldn’t tell if he was traveled the world but always maintained a connection nervous or irritated. I was nervous. I didn’t want to seem to his “spiritual home-base”, Wood Mountain. From pretentious, but I probably did. One of the first things I Saskatchewan’s second-highest hill, Suknaski was able to learned was that he no longer wrote, and rarely spoke of look across the flatlands into the past and his own why. He told me he hadn’t spoken to anyone about
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 39 “That used to be a feeling for me, but it’s no longer there, since I stopped writing.”
writing or himself since he had gone to the psych ward in away … forever. That’s how I feel having had shock the early Nineties. treatments. It’s pretty medieval.” I could feel him begin to withdraw. His voice became There was a longer than comfortable pause. I didn’t barely audible. He was obviously uncomfortable talking know how to respond. I felt bad having asked this sad, about the hospital, so I changed the subject. We talked old man to talk about one of the most traumatic exper- about his interest in aboriginal cultures, his longing for iences of his life. I turned him into some sad-poet-guru as home, influences, journeys around the world and the a way to start my own healing. process behind writing poetry. I only talked to Suknaski for a little more than half an “Where do the words come from?” I asked. hour, but the conversation had impact. He was sad, but “There has to be some kind of initiating experience, was healing or at least accepted that he needed to heal. I something that motivates and moves you, spiritually, or constructed this whole story quest as a way of healing, as emotionally, an energy, a female element, an angel of a way of reaching out, as a way of accepting that I was death, something distinct, an image, or a happening of sick, as a way to stop missing her. It’s part of the depres- some kind,” he told me. sion, reaching out, but so is feeling misunderstood. These I knew exactly what he was talking about: the muse. are two contradictory notions that can’t possibly coexist. The muse never wants to be caged, but Suknaski’s muse It’s lonely. has been caged, and it’s very troubling to him. He is a I asked for help, but that was only the beginning. writer who does not write. Ahead of me lies a highway of failed medications, I had heard that treatments for depression often lead relapses, and missed appointments, second opinions and to permanent writer’s block. I had always half-believed it likely more time in the hospital. As I weigh the pros and was a myth, but knowing how dependent on mood and cons, I wonder if it’s worth it to try. Some days I think it temperament my own writing is, I asked how he deals is, and I hope for sunshine. Other days I think I’m a with it. walking cliché. It’s hard not to be with a broken heart the “I wouldn’t worry about it until it happens. Keep size of mine. writing, keep writing, keep writing. But if it should Thinking back, I can’t remember if I was depressed happen, it’s not the end of the world either, you’ll just the first time I ever wrote a poem, and I can’t remember have to live an ordinary life.” if I started coping before I knew I was depressed. During “But isn’t it nice to feel extraordinary?” I asked. my formative years, I grew accustomed to the peaks and “Yeah, it was nice to be extraordinary and to be a poet. valleys, and with a gross amount of self-medication I was That used to be a feeling for me, but it’s no longer there, able to function quite normally. My youth was a little since I stopped writing.” bit of Poe and Bukowski mixed in with a whole lot of He was talking very slowly. I thought he was pon- Morrison. I was a rugged individual, the tortured poet, dering his words before speaking, but it turned out he and that was just fine. was still thinking about his time in the hospital, and the Now, in my mid-twenties, I’m still rugged and I’m still loss of his muse. tortured. Whether I’m a poet or not is debatable but I do “As far as the psych ward experience goes, electricity have a lot more in common with T.S. Eliot than ever is what put my demons and angels to rest, put my craft before.
40 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 Without Him
Losing a parent just knew I was going to be mis- last-minute preparations we had erable as soon as I stepped asked the North Berry Creek Ladies as you yourself are out of the air-conditioned Club to provide refreshments for the I car. It was August on the reception that would immediately becoming an adult Alberta prairie and although only follow the service. It was reassur- can have serious mid-morning, the wind was hot and ing, somehow. The food would be blowing my hair around, sticking simple, but good. consequences. strands to my already sweaty face. I It was cooler in the hall, at least. I shouldn’t have worn black, if I’d noticed that the guest registry was wanted to be comfortable. Fine dust out already, although no one else had stirred from the bone-dry clay fields arrived yet. Should I sign it? Was I a Katie Murphy around my little hometown, caking guest or an organizer? everything in sight and making me That simple contemplation was feel not only hot but dirty. enough to break my control and I I remember the walk up the steps started to cry. Weep, actually. of the community hall. The green, I turned with tear-blurred eyes wooden stoop was sagging and and walked the rows of empty chairs decrepit, and I wished — not for the to inspect the flower arrangements. first time, nor the last — that another They no doubt smelled sweet, but I site had been chosen for the service. couldn’t tell. My nose was plugged. But it was either the broken-down Among the flowers was a photo of hall or the hockey arena: more than my father, smiling and relaxed in five hundred people were expected front of a cruise ship. The picture and no other place in town was large was taken only nine weeks earlier, enough to hold them all. I checked less than a week before we found out my supply of Kleenex (ample) and we would lose him. The cruise was pushed open the aged, peeled-paint to Alaska, to celebrate a quarter metal door. century of marriage. There was no It occurred to me as I stood and casket. What remained of the man in surveyed the large room that I’d the picture was two hundred kilo- never been in the hall during day- metres away, at the crematorium. light hours. On previous visits, dark- People started to arrive. I’m sure I ness had softened everything, hiding greeted many of them, but I don’t the drab walls and scarred wooden remember. dance floor, the worn carpet of the As the reverend — the same man dining area and the stained, dusty who’d married my parents twenty- ceiling. The smell of coffee brewing, five years ago — took his place at the and the sharp aroma of egg salad front of the room, I took my seat. sandwiches hit me, and I noticed I assume I was in the front row, but a number of middle-aged women I don’t remember that, either. bustling around the kitchen area. I remember my mom, though,
PHOTO BY KATIE MURPHY PHOTO BY KATIE I remembered that in the flurry of sitting beside me, tears flowing,
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 41 black mascara (I told her not to wear any) streaking her cheeks like runny paint. I tried to stop my own tears, tried to listen to the reverend’s words, but couldn’t. As the crum- pled, wet ball of Kleenex in my left hand grew, I stopped caring who saw me, who heard me, crying. I was supposed to be saying goodbye to my father but it was like I wasn’t even there. MURPHY PHOTO BY KATIE I was twenty-one and I felt noth- ing was going to be all right ever “You are given only three days to grieve.” again.
I’ve always been very logical, so his dream of being a broke farmer. grief or sadness, so I avoided talking after the funeral I set out to research He didn’t like the rat race because, to them, too. But it didn’t matter — I grief. The problem was, everything he said, “Even if you win, you’re still hadn’t time to dwell on the subject, I read didn’t quite fit. For example, a rat”. I didn’t want to move away anyway. a lot of the information suggested from my friends, my school, my life My father passed away in early I should be getting closer to my — and I gather mom took some con- August, and I took only five days off mother and more dependent on her vincing as well. In the end, though, from my job at an Edmonton answer- — but that didn’t apply to me. I’d we moved to a cattle ranch. After I ing service. I felt guilty even taking always been “daddy’s little girl”. got over pouting about being up- that much time. Come September I I see this as if I were watching rooted, I spent most of my time with was back at university with a heavy from across the room: a bullish man dad. We spent hours driving around class load (five classes, four labs) in with square thick hands holding a the ranch, looking for wildlife and addition to working thirty-two hours pink and blue book about a badger checking fences. I learned how to tell a week. There wasn’t room in my trying to get a good deal on a new if a cow was close to giving birth day for grief. tea set, a tiny girl nestled in his arms. and how to help her if she ran into This isn’t unusual, says Martha I still have the book. My father lives trouble. I learned how to grease up a Ottenbreit, a social worker in private in my memory like a loose collection tractor and how to operate a drill practice in Regina. Ottenbreit is of snapshots, vivid yet disconnected press. Mostly, I learned to love the known in the counseling community from any sense of the passage of land as much as he did. for her work with grieving patients. I time. There was the bright red car- When I became an obnoxious recently spoke with her, more than penter’s toolbox he made for my teenager, Dad just said: “Don’t do twelve years after my father’s death, fifth birthday, with my name sten- anything stupid. And call if you need to gain some perspective on my ex- ciled on the side in lemon yellow a ride home.” He gave me the space perience. paint. The time we were visiting his I needed. Mom, on the other hand, Ottenbreit believes our culture friend Butch and I decided it would would fuss and fret and push all my rarely allows people the time and be a good idea to “pet the piggie”; teenage buttons. Even after four space they need to grieve naturally, my toddler brain didn’t see a prob- years away from home, to be honest which often forces people to deny — lem with trespassing on a cranky old my relationship with mom was still or at least delay — their feelings in sow that had about 1200 pounds on shaky. We just didn’t see eye to eye, order to keep functioning in their me. Dad hauled me out by my hair and I wasn’t very comfortable talk- many roles. “Especially in the work- and yelled at me like the world was ing to her about personal things. place,” she said, “you are given only coming to an end. That included talking about dad and three days to grieve. One day to When I was nine years old, dad how much we both missed him. travel to the funeral, one day to have decided to quit his well paying job in My friends reacted with clear the funeral, and one day after, that’s the computer industry and follow discomfort when I demonstrated any it. Which is absolutely ludicrous.
42 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 It’s really a denial of who we are as But I didn’t have much else to go torture myself about feeling that human beings. It’s a denial of our on, then or later. My careful research way, she said. humanity.” dug up little about losing a parent at I wish I’d understood all this That certainly meshed with my twenty-one. Instead I found an back then. Instead, I walked around experience. abundance of literature about losing like a zombie, pushing down grief On the day I learned my father a parent in middle age, and the and guilt with every step. Every- was going to die, I was up to my mixture of guilt and relief that comes thing was grey, grey, grey, and elbows in lasagna, making dinner for with the death of someone who is blurred together. twenty. We were having a bunch of very elderly. My situation was so I’m not even sure how old I was neighbours over to help with the different. I was just starting to relate when it all fell apart. I only remem- branding as soon as my parents got to my parents as fellow adults for the ber I was in graduate school, work- back from their anniversary cruise, first time. I felt cheated out of a new ing on my master’s degree. Suddenly and I had come home from Edmon- adult-to-adult connection. At the I was a mess. I couldn’t stop crying, ton to get ready. It was the first time same time, I desperately wanted to couldn’t concentrate, and couldn’t I’d made lasagna, and I was carefully return home and have mom take care sleep. I spent two weeks in bed, lying following Mom’s instructions, lay- awake and numb, getting up only to ering cooked noodles, meat sauce feed my cats (and only when they and cheeses with a precision I rarely got loud about it). Thankfully I rec- applied to any task. “At that age, ognized I wasn’t capable of coping I fancy I had a premonition of there’s a without some help, and I went to a doom when the phone rang, but that doctor. I ended up in therapy and on could just be a construct of memory. double medication, which saved my life. I wiped my hands on a tea towel, Dad was a great giver of gifts, and answered. It was my mom, and separation.” even in death. Today I’m a lot strong- she was crying. Could I come to er emotionally, more centered, and Calgary right away? wiser than I would’ve been without I hung up the phone and turned of me, despite the emotional distance the experience of losing him, and to start putting away the partially between us. At a crucial turning everything that led from that. My constructed lasagnas. I made it all point in my life everything froze in mom and I struggled for a while but the way to the sink before my legs place. I felt I could move neither now we’re very close; she’s one of gave out and I collapsed on the floor, forward not backward. my best friends. I feel fortunate to weeping because I didn’t believe Ottenbreit says that people at have known such a remarkable man, mom when she said everything was different stages of life react to loss even if he didn’t stick around long going to be okay. One year away differently because each stage comes enough to suit me. from graduating with a bachelor’s with unique psychological tasks. In I still feel my dad’s absence every degree in cell biology, I was too the case of someone just entering day. I have a mental checklist of familiar with the ways of cancer for adulthood, as I was, “you are trying things he’s missed: three university comfort. to establish some independence from convocations, five apartments, two It was there, on the floor of our your parents.” cats, one major career change, twelve ranch house kitchen, that I started to “And you are separating,” she Christmases, one love of my life. reject my feelings. I had things to do, said. “So when a parent dies at that Meanwhile, after three years of dogs and cats to feed, food to put age, there’s a double separation … individual therapy and nine months away, clothes to pack. I didn’t have and a person might be affected in the of group therapy, I’ve managed to time to sob on the linoleum. I found way they respond to that.” get a start on undoing the damage of that I could put my fear and grief When I told Ottenbreit I felt guilty denying my grief. It’s a task you away, ignore it, and get on with about not supporting mom more, she never really finish; I’m still working doing what needed to be done. was unsurprised. Because my con- on it. I realize now it’s a task I Unfortunately, using denial as a nection to Dad was so strong, it was shouldn’t have put off. coping strategy didn’t turn out to be normal for me to feel distant from a very good idea. my mother, and equally normal to
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 43 TANKS for
PHOTO BY KEITH BORKOWSKY PLAYING Their long, black snouts shaking in anticipation, the quietly coming from the speakers behind us, Communi- German tanks raced towards Moscow, gears clanking cation Breakdown ending and Stairway to Heaven slowly and grinding, tank treads clattering over the hard- starting up. packed earth, raising a cloud of brown dust that drifted Stretching, I could feel my joints pop. I’d been sitting toward the defenseless city, as if intent on gobbling it up. in the same position for the last few hours, intently peer- Dust-covered infantry followed behind, cleaning up any ing down at the board. In the cramped quarters of a resistance. Soviet tanks burned on the battlefield, flames fifteen by twenty foot basement room, there wasn’t much licking up from the insides of the now dead behemoths. space to move around. We’d set up two couches and a After many months of fighting, the impossible had chair to form a horseshoe around the coffee table, where occurred, the unthinkable was reality: Moscow was the game board sat. The board was just a map of the under the Nazi jackboot. world, each country divided into smaller territories that From somewhere in the distance, a jubilant cry had to be captured if you wanted to amass money, build rang out. troops and win. I raised my arms in victory and leaned back in my Removing my glasses, I rubbed the grit from my eyes armchair, my stiff back complaining in protest, and and looked at my watch: 1:30 a.m. I groaned, feeling the watched as my friend removed his remaining figures onset of a headache, most likely from all the Coke. The from the territory on the game board. It had taken me all bright lights beating down from above didn’t help. Was night to capture this key city. And the game wasn’t over this game ever going to end? Someone should have won yet. Lowering my arms, I looked around my friend’s by now. basement, at the mess we’d created. The area at our feet We were playing Axis & Allies, a strategy game. I’d and on the coffee table looked as if we’d been there for gotten it for Christmas and, after gathering up a couple seven and a half hours. friends, started playing. Our first game took eight hours, Probably because we had been. our second and third games, seven. This was our fourth Empty Cokes were stacked two and three cans high. game and even though we were getting better at it, it was Crumbs of trail mix littered the brown carpet, crunching still taking a while. With five countries to get through and crackling every time we moved our feet. Two empty each round, and decisions to make on what to buy and Old Dutch chip bags were stuffed under the coffee table, where to attack, one person’s turn could potentially last polished off when hunger pains set in two hours into the an hour. Once, one of my friends took twenty minutes game. Under the crumpled bags lay empty chip dip con- just to decide on moving one battleship and two sub- tainers, their insides scooped out. Led Zeppelin was marines into the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
44 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 Chaos and insanity rages on in the Barents Sea. Moscow is under the Nazi jackboot. Strategy, don’t fail us now!
Jason Antonio
PHOTO BY KEITH BORKOWSKY
Like, really, who has that much trouble making such a what with the Internet, X-Box and Playstation. Board small decision? games seemed kind of quaint in comparison. But if you want to win — and who doesn’t? — you do A few days later, the bell chimed as I pushed open the whatever it takes to gain the advantage. If it means door to Tramp’s Books, a downtown Regina geek’s para- staring at a map of the world for an hour thinking hard, dise of books, games and collectables. Climbing the stairs so be it. to the second floor, passing cardboard cutouts of Han I knew the first time I played I was hooked. This game Solo and Boba Fett, I wandered into the board-gaming was like a drug, addictive and desirable. When I went to section and smiled. To explain here would take days: suf- bed, I thought about it. When I was in school, I thought fice to say almost every strategic board game ever made about it. Attempting to do homework, I was still thinking was before me. Exploring the aisles, I realized I’d have to about it. win the lottery before I could buy half the stuff I wanted. Yawning loudly, Jared stood up and grabbed his Satisfied that I’d come to the right place, I walked up to winter coat from the back of the couch. “I gotta go — the counter and waited in line behind a couple of wan- work tomorrow.” nabes dressed like Neo from The Matrix. When it was my “Ah, come on. Stay just a little longer,” I whined, turn, I introduced myself to Brad, the mustachioed man wondering if I had to work tomorrow as well. behind the till. Could he tell me if anyone out there still My friend shook his head and climbed the stairs. plays board games? “Thanks for the game, guys. See ya later.” “There’s this one game called Settlers of Catan, which And then there were four of us. We were still able to has had its popularity double in the past few years,” finish the game, but it wasn’t as much fun. There was one Brad said, running a hand through his shaggy brown less person to socialize with, one less strategy to banter hair. “There’s even a lot more interest in table-top games, over. That got me thinking, after the game had been role playing, that kind of thing.” packed up and I was in the car heading home. Not every- “What about Axis and Allies? There’s gotta be an one likes to spend this much time playing a board game, interest in that, what with four, five different versions out or likes to play board games at all. Sure, some of my there,” I asked expectantly. friends are willing to give up a day to play, but not all Brad nodded. “Oh definitely, definitely. A&A has were. Maybe I would have to go out and find others to increased in popularity and playability, especially since bring along the next time we played. But where would I the miniatures have been created. With the minis, you look for players? The more I thought about it, the more I can now outflank the other guy’s men and have actual wondered if such games were even popular anymore, troop positions.”
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 45 “But the board games themselves are still popular and esting might happen, although obviously this guy hadn’t played a lot, right?” I asked, attempting to get back on played much. topic. Miniatures sounded interesting, but I was still a Boy was I wrong. Two hours later, the game was noob to the strategy board game world. Minis could over and I was sunk. Dejectedly packing the game up, I wait. I was looking for people to play with. looked around the room. One table caught my attention; “They most certainly are,” Brad replied. “A lot are I wandered over and pulled up a seat. Five university played at the Strategy Saturdays we hold every month. students were rolling dice and trading cards. Taking a People get together for a few hours, bring whatever deep breath, I introduced myself and asked what game games they like, play against friends and strangers. they were playing and how it was played. Handing a Would you be interested in coming out?” card to the person on his right, Paul Clark succinctly explained Settlers of Catan, before accepting another The church basement was spacious, with six eight-foot card from a player on the left. Peeking at the card, he diameter tables placed throughout the room. People picked up a tiny house-shaped block and set it down on were starting to arrive for Strategy Saturday, some carry- the game board, enlarging a growing town. ing game boxes. Later, I asked him why he played. Strategy games I managed to pull in a couple of people to play A&A, “give you a rush,” he said. “They make you think. Then including the event organizer, Michael. We decided who there’s the satisfaction in the end where you prove vic- would be what country and started the game. I was the torious.” United States, which meant I was last — a good thing for “So is life a game to you?” the Allies but a bad thing for the Axis. He nodded. “Yes, but you can’t play it like one unfor- The Russian player rubbed his chin, then placed all tunately. It’s kind of complicated, I guess.” the units he’d bought on a couple of territories. I looked “So, you’re saying you can’t employ strategies in at him in confusion. He hadn’t even made any combat life?” I asked in confusion. moves. Was he stupid or did he not know how to play? “Well, yes, you can, but a game is experimenting and “I couldn’t make any moves because I wasn’t in a doing things that would be more of a risk than in real life position to do so,” he explained. “I don’t have enough because there’s not really a consequence to it. Games, units.” generally, you can do things you normally wouldn’t do. My jaw dropped. He wasn’t in a position to do so? He In life, there’s always consequences, but in a game in the didn’t have enough units? He could have taken at least two end, it’s not going to hurt you.” territories away from Germany. I sighed in dismay. Well, “Okay, so what about winning? Does winning mean we had three more hours to play — something inter- anything to you?”
“Winning is just the end of the game, basically, or losing, which is kind of depressing.”
46 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 “Not as much, really, no. No, not at all. I don’t know blew my mind. As for me, it was never easy to accept why. I suppose it’s kind of cool if you do win, but it’s defeat — ever — especially after working my tail off and more about what you do during the game. The decisions wracking my brain to shreds. you make, if your strategies work, how you’re going to prove it, that kind of thing. Winning is just the end of the The deck shook beneath the sailors’ feet as the battle- game, basically, or losing, which is kind of depressing.” ship’s 16-inch guns unleashed another salvo of shells at I raised an eyebrow. “The end is depressing?” the remaining Japanese battleship, almost 1,100 metres “Yeah.” away. Chaos and insanity raged on in the Barents Sea. I tapped my chin, curious. “What makes a good Overhead, Japanese and American warplanes battled for gamer? Their characteristics, I mean.” the skies. Cutting a steep angle, a green bi-plane dove to “As long as they can carry on a good conversation, an attack a yellow Japanese sub, unleashing a red torpedo intelligent conversation very quickly, that’s good. There’s from its belly before pulling up and flying away. no room for pauses. They have to be fast, fast, that’s “NO!” Shawn cried out in disbelief, removing his last essential,” he said, leaning forward, eyes glinting. “They ship from the board and tossing it into the box. “As if! have to be fast in everything they do. Like, employing How did that just happen?!” the strategy, talking during the game, or coming to a con- Shrugging, I smiled sheepishly, almost arrogantly. clusion or reasoning. General logic. Speed is important My friend looked like he was going to cry. because if you don’t catch on, sooner or later you’ll be I chuckled. I had lost only one submarine and a plane. destroyed. If you don’t catch on very quick you’re dead.” In the process, I’d annihilated the entire Japanese fleet, all “And if you’re slow, you’re going to be a pain in the twelve ships. Now nothing could stand in the way of my ass. We don’t want to read the rules to you or explain this invading Japan. Nothing. or that to you. If you don’t know what’s going on on the I had something else to look forward to, beyond board, you’re going to be a hindrance for somebody else. conquering Japan. In a couple of weeks there was going If you’re slow, don’t bother playing.” to be a Strategy Saturday devoted just to Axis & Allies. It’s true: reading instructions and babying a green- That delighted me immensely. I would get to play horn along is no fun. But I was surprised to hear him say against some of the city’s better players. Hopefully I’d be winning didn’t mean much. Having grown up playing able to win while showing off my new strategies. On the sports, winning was the end goal for every game. Hitting other hand, it might turn out to be my chance to learn the triple or home run was sweet, but victory was the first hand that winning doesn’t matter. And when win- ultimate aim. To go into a game with the mind-set of not ning’s hardwired into your being, losing gracefully can wanting to win but just employing different strategies be a challenge on its own.
PHOTO BY KEITH BORKOWSKY
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 47 Dark hair… Sixteen overwhelmed her mother. In the room in the house. Now, Amber’s twisting and jumping young girl, absence fills every moment of every Saskatchewan Gwenda saw a special joy. Others day. saw it, too. Eight years ago, Amber Even as Gwenda relaxes at home, aboriginal women was named Junior Princess of Stand- she wears a t-shirt with Amber’s face have disappeared ing Buffalo. When she was crowned, emblazoned on the front. Honouring her family walked behind her in her daughter has become a mission without a trace. proud procession. but, as strong as she tries to be, she “She just looked so beautiful. can’t help wondering what hap- Gwenda Yuzicappi’s They were singing her honour song pened to her little girl. And that daughter Amber and we were out there dancing. It makes her cry. was very happy.” “I miss her so much. The relation- is one of them. In Gwenda’s house on Standing ship between a mother and a daugh- Buffalo Indian Reserve there’s a ter is so special, the bond is so close, photo on the dining room wall of a and when I know that she’s not Donna-Rae Munroe young girl in a pageant banner. With here, it worries me. Everything goes a toothy grin, she looks happy and through my head. I think about if beautiful, dressed for powwow in she’s being harmed, if she’s cold, if er eyes look black in the bright yellow and red, braids in her she’s being fed.” photograph. Her brown hair. She looks down at a second al- H hair is hastily tied back Years later, in the school gymna- bum, thick and purple. In this album from her face; pieces are falling out. sium, Amber and her classmates Gwenda has saved all the newspaper No makeup, slim in a t-shirt and posed for photos in a swirl of dis- articles published about her daugh- jeans, she leans over the kitchen belief and excitement. Her hair hung ter. They tell the story of a young table, hands buried in a batch of ban- loose and curled, and a powder blue woman who disappeared without a nock. There’s flour on her cheek and gown floated around her ankles. trace. She had long brown hair and the look on her face is strange. Star- When her grandmothers gathered brown eyes and was dressed in blue ing straight ahead, Amber Redman is around the young graduate, Gwenda jeans and a blue jean top on the night expressionless, as if she knows brimmed with pride and love. Seeing she went missing. Everyone wants to strangers will be looking at this pho- that photo now — Amber sur- know what happened to her. tograph months after it was taken. rounded by three grandmothers — Gwenda Yuzicappi was surprised Gwenda can’t help but smile. It was Descending into the Qu’Appelle to find this moment preserved on a such a happy day. Gwenda points Valley on Highway 10, just outside roll of film, four months after the day out each person in the picture, con- the historic town of Fort Qu’Appelle, her nineteen-year-old daughter dis- necting four generations of Dakota the first building you see is the appeared. She vanished July 15, women. Country Squire Inn with its attached 2005. Today the picture is kept safe in Flipping through the album at her bar, Trapper’s. Sitting next to the a small pink album. kitchen table, she can still see Amber highway and backed by a towering When Amber was a young girl, sitting in the dining room, sleeping hill, the lounge’s green neon lights Gwenda wanted to see her dance in her mother’s bed and caring for undulate in the darkness, flooding powwow. The day came, and Amber her younger brother. She filled every the night. From the rear parking lot,
48 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 brown eyes
the entire barroom can be seen er was grateful for a tiny piece of can only wait for new information. through wide windows: bar stools, information, but frightened by what Before her daughter went miss- pool tables, waitresses, everything. it might mean. Gwenda wonders if ing, Gwenda was unaware of the It’s quiet back there; the only move- Amber could have been drugged, pain of other families in Canada ment is from the endless traffic in but doesn’t know because no one has who’ve lost women. Now, tucked and out of the liquor off-sale and the seen her daughter since. inside her purple album is a heavy occasional patron stepping out for a Now the countryside around poster. Written white on glossy dark cigarette. Standing Buffalo and Fort Qu’ paper are the names of five hundred On July 15, 2005 Amber was there. Appelle is covered in the footprints women who have gone missing or She left her purse inside her cousin’s of Amber’s family and friends and been brutally murdered. What they car and walked across the dark the boot prints of RCMP. As the share in common with Amber is their parking lot to the bar. Inside, a wait- searches scoured fields, highways race. They are all aboriginal. ress served her just two beers, but and ditches, Gwenda remained at thought she acted very drunk. She home, comforted by those close to In the bush surrounding Clear- fell down three times. She hit her her as she waited for news of her water Lake, Manitoba, Helen Betty head. When the waitress told this daughter. Osborne’s body was found. She was story to Gwenda, the worried moth- None came and police say they naked, except for her boots, her face
PHOTO BY CHRISTOPHER ZWICK
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 49 Melanie Dawn Geddes Daleen Muskego Alishia Germaine Dark hairHelen Betty Osborne…
viciously beaten. Her skull, cheek- But journalist and author Warren buried from public view. Today, bones and palate were broken. Over Goulding is skeptical. Sitting at his despite increased public awareness, fifty stabbings damaged her lungs. desk in Victoria, B.C., he’s not he remains frustrated by police One kidney was torn. Investigators impressed with words, nor is he forces’ inability to put an end to the believe her killer used a screwdriver surprised to hear about violence attacks. And although he sits far and another blunt instrument to against aboriginal women, especially away in Victoria, the situation in mutilate her. She was murdered on in Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan is on his mind. November 13, 1971. Working as the crime and court He compares the case of alleged Decades later, her name stands reporter for the Saskatoon Star serial killer Robert Pickton, charged among five hundred others compiled Phoenix in the 1990s, Goulding was with the deaths of twenty-seven by the Native Women’s Association assigned to cover the discovery of women from Vancouver’s down- of Canada, as part of the Sisters in three bodies near the outskirts of town eastside. Meanwhile in Ed- Spirit campaign, a movement to stop Saskatoon. When the bodies were monton, police have identified the violence against aboriginal women. identified as three aboriginal possibility of a serial killer following Her murder is also featured in women, Goulding became more the discovery of thirteen female sex Amnesty International’s 2004 report involved in the case. Pen and paper trade workers’ bodies since 1997, Stolen Sisters: A Human Rights Re- in hand, he followed the story and and up to five others dating back to sponse to Discrimination and Violence was dismayed by how little interest 1988. Against Indigenous Women in Canada. Saskatoon residents paid the deaths “The Saskatchewan disappear- The report contains not only Helen’s of three women from their commu- ances are really different, aren’t they? story, but also the story of her nity. He was shocked to discover It’s not like these are girls that are younger cousin, Felicia Solomon, police were investigating John working the street or even living in a also murdered; the murders of Martin Crawford, the man eventu- high risk area or anything,” he says. Roxanna Thiara and Alishia ally convicted of the killings, even as He wonders if this is part of a pattern Germaine in Prince George, B.C.; they denied having a suspect. the police won’t speak about. the murder of Ramona Wilson in During the time the police were Indeed, police are careful not to Smithers, B.C.; the missing and watching him, Crawford reportedly draw links. “We, the police agencies, murdered women of Vancouver’s assaulted another Saskatoon woman, haven’t identified a trend,” says downtown eastside; John Martin who escaped with her life. Jones. “To me, a trend implies that Crawford’s Saskatoon victims; and Goulding was moved to write a there’s a connection between those eighteen murdered women in book about the killings, Just Another (cases). There is a similarity in that Edmonton. Indian: A Serial Killer and Canada’s they are aboriginal and that they are “Missing person cases are very, Indifference. The book candidly de- female.” very challenging for police agencies tails the murders committed by Yet it is undeniable. Something is to work on and try to resolve. Crawford, the investigation, his trial happening to aboriginal women that Throughout the whole thing, the fact and the mistakes made by the media doesn’t affect non-aboriginals in the that there are people patiently and investigators. same way. The numbers make it waiting for answers is what helps When Goulding became involved, clear: although the province’s 66,895 drive the investigators,” says a list of five hundred missing or aboriginal women comprise only Corporal Brian Jones, the RCMP’s murdered aboriginal women didn’t about twelve per cent of Saskatch- media officer in Saskatchewan. exist; the scope of the problem was ewan’s approximately 555,000
50 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 Ramona Wilson
Roxanna Thiara Amber Redman brownFelicia Solomon eyes
women, the number of missing abor- month after Amber. She was gone some friends and never returned. iginal women stands at sixteen, four for five months before her remains Police recovered her vehicle shortly more than non-aboriginal missing were found near the town of after. Everything inside, the floor women, who number twelve. But Southey, fifty-eight kilometres north mats, seat covers, steering wheel race, says Jones, doesn’t affect how of Regina, by a group of horseback cover and contents of the glove box the RCMP or any police agency in- riders enjoying a bright and warm and trunk were missing. vestigates a missing persons report. winter day. “Why does this happen? I don’t Amnesty International disagrees Smokeyday’s voice is quiet and know,” Muskego says in desper- strongly with this approach. In Stolen she speaks slowly, trying to fend off ation. Sisters the group insists that to pre- the pain and emotion. She is firmly In November, as the snow falls for vent racially motivated violence, dedicated to finding her daughter’s the first time since Amber disap- police do need to recognize abori- killer but careful not to reveal too peared, Gwenda is depressed and ginal victims as being aboriginal. much, fearful of harming the police disheartened. Standing out on the investigation. high hill behind her house, she gazes As local newspapers reported on “I’m not giving up until we find on the bison in the valley below. Amber’s disappearance and news out whatever happened to Melanie, Their brown heads stand out against reached Gwenda of the missing and or anybody, as a matter of fact, the winter snow on the hillside dead aboriginal women across because it’s hard. Every day you behind. The sharp air fills their nos- Canada, she began to understand her wake up. Every day you go to bed. trils and their black eyes glisten, daughter’s disappearance in a new Every day that way. Even though we wide and watery, from cold air under way, as part of a greater problem buried her, it’s still hard, not know- a fat sun. One puts a hoof forward affecting aboriginal women. ing how she died and not knowing and then another, her weight leaving In the months following Amber’s who did it.” deep prints in the hard snow. She disappearance, she honoured her Connecting with other mothers of presses her nose against its iciness, daughter at a walk for missing abori- the missing helps, but life is still muzzling it until she finds a piece of ginal women held in Regina. At a painful. “I talk with them, but it’s not grass, dry and crunchy in the chill quiet Regina church service, she any easier. It’s not any easier when and wanders farther forward, mark- spoke to a United Church congrega- you bury your child, you know? ing her path in the snow. tion about the issue. She attended a Especially in this situation, the way Gwenda looks on, her lungs filled retreat for family members of miss- she went.” with air from the valley, dark eyes ing women and held a ceremony to Muskego, who lives in Onion glistening with tears. She steps for- feed Amber’s Indian name, Red Star Lake, fears something terrible has ward in the snow and marks a path Woman. She also reached out to two happened to her daughter as well, that she did not want, but must make other mothers with missing daugh- but will continue to believe Daleen is anyway. Watching the buffalo make ters: Valorie Smokeyday and Pauline alive until she learns otherwise. She its way through the world, she Muskego. insists people speak in the present knows she must put one foot in front Smokeyday’s daughter, Melanie tense when talking about her of the other until her daughter is Dawn Geddes — seen in her missing daughter. found. persons posters as a pretty, vibrant- On May 18, 2004 Daleen, the looking young woman — went miss- mother of a five-year-old daughter, ing on April 13, 2005, less than a left her Saskatoon home to meet
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 51 When Good Fans Go Bad For the young place-kicker from Daniel Jungwirth Vancouver, Regina seemed like a great place to raise a family. Then he missed a crucial field goal.
November 14, 2004, was an ideal day for football. On the prairies, Regina reached a high of seven Celsius, unusually warm for late autumn. But the air still carried a chill. It was a game day — the Saskatchewan Rough- riders were about to face the B.C. Lions in the Canadian Football League western final. The winner would go on to battle for the Grey Cup, Canada’s national football prize. With the game at Vancouver’s B.C. Place stadium, Rider fans back home gathered in their TV dens and local sports bars, eyes glued to the big screens. This would be their year, they told themselves. Already they’d endured so much: missing the big show last season, losing the Grey Cup in ‘97, and living through a long streak of missed playoff bids. Waiting for the Cup had become the
norm — fourteen years of PHOTO BY JERAMI PERGEL ‘maybe next year.’ Patience, they said. It will come. From the opening kick-off, people sat on the edge of their
52 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 seats, clenching their beer glasses. unpredictable journey. Fans file into someone who shows pride in the Cheers and jeers fell upon the deaf the stands with religious fervour. community and history of the team. ears of the television screen. Only a Standing, sitting, call and response, Rider pride wasn’t always green minute and a half into the game, B.C. the game is sacrosanct: good versus and white. The team colours were scored. A collective groan rose across evil, them against us. purple and gold when the Regina Saskatchewan. It would be the first There is a feast of nachos and Rugby Club was born at a meeting at of a series of emotional crests and hamburgers, a heart attack away city hall on September 6, 1910. That valleys as the two teams matched from heaven. Mouths are whetted year, the team lost its first game to points. with guzzled beer. Rider flags on Moose Jaw, 16-6. It would lose the By the time the seconds ticked off hockey sticks are unfurled and two subsequent rematches as well, the clock in the final quarter, though, watermelon helmets — odd head- leaving the club winless in its first quiet triumph glowed on the faces of gear popularized by a marketing year. Thus a tradition began. the watching fans. Saskatchewan campaign — are donned while Ninety-six years later, the Riders was ahead 24-21. That is, until B.C. bugles blow. Fans slop their beer and have won only two Grey Cup cham- place-kicker Duncan O’Mahony begin to stagger. By the time the pionships despite spending many booted a 47-yard field goal through players take the field, the inner beast seasons at the top of the league. The the uprights, sending the game into is stirring. Foul mouths loosen. first Cup was in 1966, the second not overtime. The audience drained their Chants and hexes spill into pro- until 1989. That year, Dave Ridgway beer glasses, victory forestalled. fanities. Opposing fans, opposing won the championship with The On the TV screen, Saskatchewan players and even home team players Kick, a legendary 35-yard field goal kicker Paul McCallum lined up the become targets. at the end of the game. The Riders ‘gimme’, a short can’t-miss kick just And there’s safety in numbers. won 43-40. eighteen yards from the uprights to When you’re a Rider fan, anywhere It was a tough act to follow for a end the game in glory. The fans in the country, you’re never alone. young Paul McCallum. chanted religiously: ‘Go, Riders, Go.’ One person starts something, every- McCallum hadn’t even played Some closed their eyes. When they one joins in. One minute mini- football until he was twenty. Grow- opened them, McCallum was lying footballs and beach balls are flying ing up in Vancouver, his first love desolately on the green turf, hands gaily through stands. The next min- was soccer. But, after returning from covering his face. ute, empty beer cups and snowballs a soccer stint in Europe, he fell into a The mild day turned utterly cold are pelting the backs of the Edmon- new career by chance. The Surrey and bleak. ton Eskimos. It’s okay, though, Rams football team was missing a Another season gone. People left because everyone is doing it. People kicker, and McCallum had the foot to bars in a defeated and hunched are having fun. lead him to all-Canadian status in his death march. Patience, most said. People like Doug Grimstad. He first year. Next year. But others simmered, never wore make-up or costumes In 1994 McCallum moved to patience spent. Trouble brewed. Too when he went to a Rider game. He Regina and became a Rider, kicking many hopes over too many years just had fun. In his late forties, he beside Ridgway, who would retire at had ridden on this moment. enjoyed the game with a few buddies the end of the season. He found the while having a couple of beer. He city’s people friendly and easy- A Roughriders game is a carnival was one of the guys. But on that fate- going. He liked the lifestyle. It of costumes, makeup and props, a ful November evening, he was one seemed like a good place to raise a green and white masquerade un- of the guys who took fandom too far, family. masking the crowd’s creative genius. something he regrets to this day. He and his family made Regina With capes made of Saskatchewan Grimstad says he had no desire to their home year round. From May flags and slogans stenciled on bare watch football before he moved to until November, McCallum was chests and beer bellies, people fall Regina. It wasn’t until 1995, when he fully involved in football. In the off- into a fantasy world where men in bought his first season ticket, that he season he worked at as a commu- coconut bras feel no shame in the was overcome with Rider pride. nications manager at SaskEnergy. anonymity of like-minded patriots. A province hyped on a team is in- He became a prominent spokesper- Every game is an adventure, an fectious. A Rider fan, he says, is son for KidSport, raising money so
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 53 disadvantaged children could play ly neigbourhood had turned into a sports. “bad dream”. McCallum had found his place in “Don’t “I DON’T WANT AN APOLOGY the community. Still, Regina could FROM YOU. I JUST WANT YOU sometimes feel like a fishbowl. go near TO NEVER COME NEAR MY The five-foot-eleven McCallum my family.” CHILDREN OR OUR FAMILY OR had a face easily recognizable in a OUR HOUSE EVER.” modest metropolis of 180,000. People Meanwhile, McCallum under- often approached him to talk football stood he was responsible for the and lend their opinions. “I’d be was a small town and word got missed field goal. After the game he walking with (my dad) when he’d around. His wife Crescent was home waited in the trainer’s room, unable come and visit. People would say ‘Hi with their two daughters on the to face his teammates. Later, at his Paul’ to me, first-name basis. He night of the missed kick. parents’ Vancouver home, he heard said, ‘Do you know that guy?’ and Crescent called the police around about what had happened back I’d say, ‘Nope.’” Sometimes the six o’clock saying there was more home. Until then, McCallum was attention grew tiring, but it was all traffic than usual passing the north- crushed, expecting to be run out of part of the job. Even after twelve west Regina residence. Moments Regina because of the botched kick. years, he didn’t mind. later, eggs began raining on the front But the attacks on the McCallum On game day, McCallum would windows. household turned the tide. He arrive at Taylor Field two and a half Then Doug Grimstad — the man wanted to get home right away. His hours before kickoff, already stocked who’d only been a fan since he’d mom wanted to go with him. up on pasta and chicken from his purchased a season ticket in 1995 — “Be pissed at me. Go ahead. Call favourite local restaurant. There he arrived with a truckload of manure. me a bum. Call me a loser. Call me would stretch out, get a massage He and friend Kelly Garchinski washed up. Do whatever you want. and, finally, dress. In the dressing mistakenly dumped it on the neigh- You’re entitled to your opinion. room, he’d ponder his three pairs bour’s driveway, but the note at- Come tell me. Come to the stadium. of kicking shoes and make a selec- tached was for McCallum. Another Do whatever you want. But don’t go tion. He had a routine, but he wasn’t car drove by. Crescent heard some- near my family,” McCallum said superstitious. He didn’t get all one yelling from the open window, later in an interview with the Regina wound up with the rest of the team, threatening to burn down the house. Leader-Post. either. “I should be more focused Incredibly, it was their neighbour. Crescent didn’t go to work the and relaxed than getting excited and The car pulled to a stop in front of next day and McCallum’s daughters all hyped up and getting my blood the home of Mark Lehmond. didn’t go to school. The incidents pressure going,” he said. Crescent was mad, scared and made headlines across Canada and Standing on the field, he could shocked. But, wanting to see Leh- the United States, including USA feel the electricity of the home mond’s face, she marched up and Today, the Washington Post and the crowd. Ninety percent of the game confronted him. According to Cres- Detroit Free Press. was mental. The fans expected a cent’s victim impact statement, winning performance. “They’re Lehmond repeatedly screamed his Shane Chapman is a Rider fan paying their money to come see us threat, standing two feet from her who admits it was probably a good put a good product on the field and face. In capital letters she wrote: thing he didn’t have a pick-up truck do our jobs properly. It’s a sport — “DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA and manure after the game. “I think sometimes the ball falls in your WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO HAVE every fan who is that diehard about favour, sometimes it doesn’t.” A CRAZED GROWN 31 YEAR OLD their team has a point where they’re He knew there were people who MAN SCREAMING IN YOUR FACE not thinking rationally. It’s just those liked him and people who didn’t — THAT HE IS GOING TO BURN guys who decided to act on it.” it didn’t bother him. Yet. YOUR CHILDREN TO DEATH!” Dr. Ian MacAusland-Berg, a psy- Concerned for their safety, Cres- chology professor at Regina’s Luther McCallum’s address and phone cent hustled her children to another College, says such transgressions number were unlisted — but Regina neighbour’s house. Her quiet, friend- begin with an affiliation with the
54 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 team. But he doubts it’s the actual never have uttered a word. There team that stirs a fan’s emotions of was never any harm intended.” pride, loyalty and passion. Most “They On January 19, 2005 he received a Riders are African-Americans from suspended sentence with eighteen large southern U.S. cities, while their represent months probation for creating an fans are largely white and from rural our hopes.” “atmosphere of terror.” He was also areas or small cities. What’s their ordered to perform one hundred connection? hours of community service. Location. Grimstad and Garchinski were MacAusland-Berg explains sports guys weren’t true Rider fans, people charged with mischief under $5,000 teams come to represent a popula- said. for dumping the manure. Instead tion by geography, which translates The response doesn’t surprise of criminal records, though, the psychologically. “(The Roughriders) MacAusland-Berg. In a social group, two men were referred to the Regina play here, they’re a professional foot- there are expected rules of conduct Alternative Measures Program ball team, we associate with them in policed from within, he explains. (RAMP) for mediation. When ap- terms of they represent us, represent People had to defend their affiliation proached for an interview, Grimstad our hopes, our aspirations. When by stating the small minority didn’t provided a few background com- they succeed, we succeed.” People represent them. ments but said on behalf of himself don’t necessarily see sport as enter- A year and a half later, Rough- and Garchinski they’d like to “leave tainment, he says, but as an exten- rider spokesperson Ryan Whippler a sleeping dog lie.” sion of themselves and their nation- says bad fan behaviour will not be McCallum wants to forget, too. ality. tolerated by the club. The club has “That’s the one thing about play- The attacks on the McCallum already banned the three men from ing here, is people keep talking family took the affiliation too far, attending any Roughrider games at about things that have happened in though. Without knowing the Taylor Field, he points out. “If that’s the past,” says McCallum. “Just keep people, MacAusland-Berg speculates going to be your behaviour, you can going — you’re not going to get any the offenders’ perceptions were dis- stay at home. We don’t want their further ahead if you’re looking back- torted that night. “What I would money, we don’t want anything to wards.” guess is their affiliation with the do with them.” Although McCallum is a little team is so strong that they exper- While Grimstad, Garchinski and more guarded these days, he’s put- ienced the loss as crushing them- Lehmond sit at home, banned, every ting the memory behind him. In selves and took it out on McCallum summer thousands more Rider fans January 2005, he sold his shoes and because they saw McCallum as dis- return to Taylor Field for another helmet from the game on eBay, along appointing them directly.” season. Beer in hand, they chant and with an autographed photo of past It wasn’t the first time. Glen hex, a united, flag-waving horde. Rider greats Roger Aldag and Bob Suitor, who played for the Roug- Going to games is tradition. It’s fun. Poley. The sale raised $3,050 for hriders for eleven seasons ending in Mark Lehmond is no longer KidSport and Asian tsunami relief. 1995, received death threats after he McCallum’s neighbour. After the In the end, it’s a team sport, was called for pass interference on incident, he lost his job at Quality McCallum says. You can’t dwell on September 30, 1989, in another game Tire and moved. The police charged your own mistakes, or the aftermath. against the B.C. Lions. The Rough- him with threatening to damage “If I was to sit there and worry about riders went on to win the Grey Cup property. In a written statement to missing a kick and somebody doing that year, though. the Leader-Post, he expressed deep something, I wouldn’t be playing.” In the wake of the McCallum regret: “What I did do was make a So he will continue to play — incident, the mayor, the media and stupid remark as I passed by the ironically, for the B.C. Lions. He fellow football players all denounced McCallum house on my regular trip signed as free agent February 22, the actions and conveyed their sym- home and said something twice I 2006, after the Riders offered a thirty pathy, and the McCallums received wish I could take back. If I’d known percent pay cut. many cards and a petition of signa- at the time what the McCallum Paul McCallum has left the fish- tures from supportive fans. Those family was experiencing I would bowl.
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 55 Contemplation
WRYSH
PHOTO BY CASSIE HA
56 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 Celebration
PHOTO BY JULIE FOLK
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 57 Canadian, tired.TIRED
t doesn’t take long for the waxed, white tile floor of Rebels without a cause? Hardly. More likely, a sign of Canadian Tire to become filthy. Wandering shoppers inexperience — keeping training apace with staff turn- Itrack mud from an unseasonably warm Regina winter over is tough. Yet such organizational dilemmas are mere through the retail giant’s five departments — Automo- symptoms of a fundamental problem: the employees are tive, Hardware, Housewares, Sporting Goods and being paid next to nothing for work that is spiritually Seasonal — each section offering products designed to numbing. address the domestic woes of the average Canuck. On a I know because I’m one of them. Saturday afternoon, they arrive by the dozen, stuffing After spending a few months in early 2004 working as their loonies and their children into squeaky-wheeled night watchman at a crop chemical plant, I decided to carts. Armed with a weekly store flyer, they are on a apply for a job at Canadian Tire. The store manager said mission. Objective: procure the cheap products that he was impressed by my walking speed; he’d never seen tickled their fancy as they browsed through the anyone approach his office so quickly. Late nights spent aforementioned leaflet over morning coffee. briskly patrolling the chemical plant in sub-zero temper- Customers soon learn, however, that megastore atures had perhaps paid off. It appeared being a Univer- shopping is like an Easter egg hunt — the object of desire sity of Regina student also carried weight in the retail is seldom in sight. industry. I started my warehouse job at the ‘special wage’ Nevertheless, something stands out in the aisles. of seven dollars an hour, rather than the $6.65 minimum Young people, some only sixteen, wear bright red golf wage. shirts, unlucky beacons for time-pressed shopaholics The work was simple, albeit backbreaking and banal. with little patience for the naïve demeanor of pubescent Stock arrived twice weekly on a semi-trailer unit. We un- store-minders. Teenage apathy and middle-aged insis- loaded and sorted products in a monotonous assembly tence can be a volatile mix. line, then put them on dusty shelves in the vast ware- A screaming customer is just one of many annoying house of the store. Each item was shelved using a seven- sounds at the Tire. There’s also the early-Nineties digit product number, with the first two digits designat- country mix that has played on the P.A. system for at ing a product class — for example, lawnmowers — and least five years, interrupted only by booming messages the last four numbers designating the actual product. for shoppers and employees. Mobile store phones carried Once I got to know the place, I realized I, too, was just by employees ring incessently. Each cashier’s till makes a another number. All the employees were given product perky beeping noise whenever a product is scanned and numbers, just like the merchandise, through which they a profit is made. The handles of gallon pails rattle in the were identified in store’s computer system. The paint shaker at the hardware counter. A nearby machine storeowner only knew employees by name if they were squeals as it cuts a fresh key. The store even has the nerve troublemakers, or in upper management. to play its grating TV commercials, right next to the A year later, I was offered a promotion (in position, product being shilled on-screen. not pay, of course) to the hardware department of the High above the sales floor is a black two-way mirror. retail floor. I naively assumed I would be trained to It’s impossible to tell if the owner is ominously watching answer questions about the products I was selling. the employees as they work, hiding like the Wizard of However, just as my name seemed of little importance to Oz. The workers, who frequently chat amongst them- my employer, so too, it seemed, was my actual expertise. selves and sometimes engage in horseplay on the retail Nearly anyone who shops regularly at the store will tell floor, seem unaffected by the scrutiny of managerial eyes, you knowledgeable staffers are few and far between. But whether it’s through the two-way mirror or a hidden why should a corporation care? No matter how much surveillance camera.
58 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 Why do people with jobs live in poverty? Ken Gousseau plunges into the low wage world of the megastore.
PHOTO BY JERAMI PERGEL customers complain, they always come back. This like Luke and I. The provincial government’s response — expertise deficit was of grave concern to me, though, as I a minimum wage increase to $7.55 per hour on March 1, quickly grew tired of being yelled at. 2006 — hasn’t gone far enough to address the problem, The hardware department was where I met Luke. He Gilmer says. didn’t look like he should be working at Canadian Tire I leave with a better grasp of the situation in Regina for a pittance. He spoke eloquently, wore thick-rimmed but I still don’t fully understand why I’m working for glasses and was majoring in political science. I was nothing. At the office of the Saskatchewan Federation of surprised when he told me he’d been working at the Labour, president Larry Hubich says the minimum wage store for six years. He said he appreciated the flexible should be at least eight or nine dollars an hour to boost hours, especially around exam time. However, the me above the poverty line. But, in fairness to provincial miniscule wage was another matter. “It’s tough to get up legislators, the government is facing mounting pressure at eight in the morning when it’s forty below, and go to from the business community to keep wages low, Hubich work for eight dollars an hour. It doesn’t seem worth it tells me. “All you need to do is pick up any newspaper most days,” he said. “If I bust my ass and we sell a when there’s even the slightest hint that the Minimum couple hundred bucks more stuff, it doesn’t affect me at Wage Board is going to examine whether or not the all. I don’t see any of that (profit). I’m still making a minimum wage should be raised, and the chorus of ‘boo’ dollar above minimum wage, so that’s not a lot of incen- comes from all corners of the business crowd,” he says, tive.” Not surprisingly, Luke still lived with his parents; adding it’s no secret Saskatchewan businesses spend he’d had trouble paying off his student loans. He also millions each year lobbying politicians at all levels to owned a car and gas was expensive. “If I had to pay for keep wages down. rent and all the bills every month, I don’t think there’s Still unsatisfied, I phone Canadian Tire’s head office in any way my salary could support me,” he told me. Toronto. Lisa Gibson, media and public relations man- As months passed, my product knowledge increased ager, says I have to talk to the management at my store, much faster than my pay, now a meager $7.50. I imag- as they are the ones who set wage policy — not head ined the owner driving a brand new Yukon Denali to office. At that moment I realize I’ll never know for certain an opulent home where he dined on lobster and caviar. why I make so little money for such hard work. I can’t Meanwhile I could barely afford my rusted-out Honda risk asking my boss that question. I’ve come full circle. Civic, or the tiny one-bedroom apartment where I feasted Now I know the meaning of “vulnerable worker”. on Kraft Dinner. But not for long. Today as I labour through my six hundredth box of Graduating with a journalism degree, I swear I’ll gooey orange noodles in my closet-like abode I stop, never work for near-minimum wage again. I walk slowly mid-chew, and wonder. now as I navigate the aisles, the weight of this place Why am I living like this when I have a job? having crushed my soul long ago, and with it the walk- On a blustery February afternoon I approach the ing speed that impressed my employer. Nevertheless, I downtown Knox-Metropolitan United Church and ring can’t help but smile when I look at the sun shimmering the buzzer marked Regina Anti-Poverty Ministry. Inside, off the large glass exit doors. I have found a way out. The social activist Peter Gilmer tells me the majority of moment of escape will undoubtedly be bittersweet, minimum wage earners are “vulnerable workers” living though, as I’ll be thinking of the thousands of low- in poverty. He estimates there are roughly 18,000 low- income workers in Regina who aren’t so lucky. income workers below the poverty line in Regina, in- cluding people working just above the minimum wage,
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 59 t was an hour after midnight but the full moon lit the south- Iwestern Saskatchewan plains of the Great Sand Hills, making it seem After years of wandering, just before dawn. Overhead, stars displayed elaborate constellations in a late summer sky. On the savannah- Croatian-born photographer like prairie, elusive deer snorted faintly, puzzled by a camera-toting stranger crossing their terrain long and naturalist Branimir Gjetvaj after the sun had called it quits. Three hours past sunset, Branimir Gjetvaj was still seeking the right finally found roots in light, driven by the knowledge that the landscape before him lay under the threat of increased natural gas Saskatchewan’s wide-open development. He needed to show people the area’s natural beauty and convince them it was worth protect- spaces — only to learn ing. He’d taken dozens of pictures already but still needed the perfect one that would say it all. his adopted landscape is Gjetvaj (pronounced jet-vaa-y) developed his love for the outdoors while hiking and playing in the under threat. Can a lone man forests of his childhood. Born in 1960, he grew up in Zagreb, capital of Croatia. His backyard was a gate- with a camera turn the tide? way to the foothills of the nearby Medvednica — or ‘Bear’ — Moun- tain. In forests where bears roamed centuries earlier, Gjetvaj played Tarzan and caught frogs in the Kacie Andrews streams. Photography hadn’t entered his mind yet. That would come later. Back then, the natural world was his singular passion. There was no ques- tion what he would study when it came time for university, despite his mother’s misgivings. “Mom tried to convince me not to go into biology. She was afraid I wouldn’t be able to find a job,” recalls Gjetvaj. It turned out she had some fore- Seeking sight, but for now her worries did little to dissuade him. At the Univer- sity of Zagreb, southeastern Europe’s largest and oldest university, Gjetvaj thrived in the hustle and bustle of the Light campus life. He joined all the out-
60 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 PHOTO BY STEPHANE BONNEVILLE door nature groups on campus, winter. A few days after he arrived, in a new place. This time, though, going on countless fieldtrips to sur- Halifax harbour had to be shut down making friends wasn’t so easy. The vey plants, birds and other animals. because sea-ice had blown in from majority of Queen’s students were Camping out in the wilderness, he the frigid North Atlantic. For a per- locals. Instead of exploring, they was in his element. He discovered he son raised near the balmy Adriatic went home for the weekends. loved being around people, too, Sea, it was shocking that the ocean Lonely, he turned to photography, almost as much as he loved being could get cold enough to freeze. signing up for courses in colour, outside. Gjetvaj missed his family and felt black and white and portraiture. One day, renowned Croatian na- dreadfully out of place. The winter Obtaining a PhD was a long and ture photographer Vladimir Pfeifer seemed to go on forever. But he soon arduous process. Gjetvaj needed visited campus. Gjetvaj went to his discovered he wasn’t alone — Dal- work to pay the bills, but jobs were presentation and admired how housie had many international stu- hard to come by. Short on money, he Pfeifer wove the art of photography dents in the same boat. It wasn’t long moved back to Nova Scotia and with the wonders of nature to create before he started meeting people found employment as a lab techni- beautiful lasting images. It was like a and making new friends. After a cian. It was then that he first started door opening: the young science while, he found himself surrounded thinking seriously of photography as student’s love affair with light and by people who shared his interests. a real job. Before it was just a hobby, landscapes was born. After the pre- When he wasn’t hard at work at uni- a creative outlet to keep busy. Now sentation, Gjetvaj took pictures versity, he went on trips with his new Gjetvaj pored through the books almost every weekend. He brought troupe, exploring Canada’s east coast at the local small business centre, his camera along when trekking and taking pictures of everything. teaching himself the business side of through the mountains with the His original intent was to finish photography. He started selling hiking club, and on nature excur- his degree and return to Croatia, but framed prints and magazine photos. sions with his classmates. the more he saw of North America, At the same time he kept chipping Four years later Gjetvaj completed the more he wanted to stay and away at his PhD, finally finishing it his undergrad degree and enrolled in explore. He calculated he’d need ten in 1993. post-graduate studies, but was soon more years to see every place on his It was time to move on, he real- disappointed: the Zagreb program list. Another reason to stay: it was ized. The sense of community and was small and the classes didn’t easier to get funding and research companionship at Dalhousie wasn’t appeal to him. One day, a professor grants than back home. In 1990, the same as before, when he was a told him about Nova Scotia, Canada. aided by another scholarship, Gjetvaj student. Tired of the isolation and The professor had finished his packed his belongings, mostly cam- poor job prospects, Gjetvaj headed to masters at Dalhousie University in era gear, and moved west to Queen’s the United States. He started out as a Halifax. “It’s a nice place, why don’t University in Kingston, Ontario to technician in West Virginia and from you go?” he asked Gjetvaj. It was begin a PhD in genetics — and to there traveled everywhere: Arizona, exactly the push Gjetvaj needed. He explore a new piece of Canada. New Mexico, Texas, South Dakota. had never been to Canada. It would Once again, Gjetvaj was alone He found new places and kept be someplace new and different. taking pictures — but he never re- There was even a scholarship avail- discovered the kinship he’d enjoyed able — all he had to do was apply. in those first years at Dalhousie. He “What the heck,” he said to him- “What the heck. had visions of ending up alone. self. “I’ll go!” “What if I end up like the photo- In April 1987 Gjetvaj got his first I’ll go!” grapher in Croatia?” he thought to glimpse of Canada. He left behind a Gjetvaj said, himself. Vladimir Pfiefer, the man country that had been bursting with who’d been his inspiration, had greenery and life since the beginning when he heard never married and now lived alone of March. Stepping off the plane in in a home filled with boxes of camera Halifax, he was taken aback to find a about Canada. gear and camping supplies. Gjetvaj’s city still in the depressingly cold own living room was looking more clutches of a snowy Canadian like that every day.
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 61 Gjetvaj drifted back to Nova ewan. Everywhere he turned, there areas. He needed a way to get the Scotia, where he worked odd jobs. was another gorgeous landscape to word out to the public and politi- Then a promising prospect opened photograph. cians. up at the University of Saskatchewan Not only did Gjetvaj fall in love A presentation at the World Wil- in Saskatoon. It wasn’t just another with the province’s natural spaces, derness Congress in 2005 held the lab tech position, but a research he found a community there, too. answer Gjetvaj was looking for: con- opportunity with Agriculture and When he wasn’t working, Gjetvaj servation photography. The example Agri-Food Canada, studying canola. was out getting acquainted with the of Ansel Adams — whose work When Gjetvaj got word at the end of local environmentalist and nature helped American wilderness areas 1997 that the position was his if he groups. The place brimmed with gain national park designation — wanted it, he packed his things again people who shared his ideals and demonstrated how photographic and headed west. passion for nature. Enjoying a good, books could ultimately sway govern- Gjetvaj had never been to the secure job and an active, invigour- ment opinion. Gjetvaj came home Canadian prairies before. He was ating environmental community, with a new sense of purpose. He had struck by how different the land- Gjetvaj found himself in his element, never created a book before — it scape was compared to all the other right in the thick of things, sur- would be a new challenge. He knew places he’d been. There was nothing rounded by people. he didn’t want it to be preachy; like the flat open grasslands of The more he learned about the Gjetvaj was actually in favor of some southern and central Saskatchewan land, the more he learned about the development, as long as it was sus- back home in Croatia. But what changes affecting the people who tainable and left the most sensitive really impressed him was the diver- had lived on it for generations, like areas untouched. The most impor- sity of ecosystems. Gjetvaj dis- increased logging and diminishing tant thing would be to show that covered the hilly ridges of the habitat. His photography became everything on the land’s surface was Qu’Appelle Valley, the northern progressively more about igniting just as valuable, if not more so, than boreal forest and lakes of Prince people’s interest in conservation. the fossil fuel underneath. Albert National Park, the unspoiled Number one on his list was the push After years of drifting, he had prairie of Grasslands National Park, by developers to increase oil and found a home and a mission for his and even sand dunes in the Great natural gas exploration in some of photography. Bent over his camera Sand Hills in southwest Saskatch- Great Sand Hills’ most sensitive in the moonlit landscape of the Great Sand Hills, he hoped he’d have the book finished before the major oil development decisions were made. He’d never seen But even if governments listened more to business than to one lone anything like the prairies. man with a camera, it wouldn’t be in vain. These pictures might be all some people would ever get to see of pristine prairie mixed with desert- like sand dunes. He trained his lens on an old cattle chute that created an interesting shape against the faint-lit rolling hills. The Big Dipper hung in the upper corner of the frame. Not a bad shot, considering it had only taken him three hours to find it. It was the image he needed; now he could pack up for the night. He needed some rest, if he was going to be up at dawn to shoot the sun-
PHOTO BY STEPHANE BONNEVILLE rise.
62 THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 Mother and daughter
PHOTO BY ANGELA HILL
Friends
PHOTO BY JOLIE TOEWS
THE CROW ■ SPRING 2006 63 The city
ARNER
PHOTO BY STEPHANE BONNEVILLE
PHOTO BY TRENT W
PHOTO BY PAMELA CRADOCK PHOTO BY PAMELA
University of Regina School of Journalism ■ www.uregina.ca/journal ■ 306.585.4420