Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
where do i start?
after a 4-day hiatus in the woods, i am sitting down at the machine to try to encapsulate the last few days. honestly, i don’t know what to start with.
from friday to monday i travelled into the back country of manning park with 5 friends (steph, rob, thi, nathan and autumn – hooray for them, good travelling companions all). we did the heather trail which winds 21 km (each way) through alpine meadows and over mountain ridges to inviting lake nicomen which reflects the surrounding mountains as if a mirror. the four days of hiking, sunning, swimming, eating, and general frollicking in the meadows were a much needed break from the days of toil spent here in my government-issued cubicle, and i am loathe to be back in civilization caressed only by the memory of the inner critter freed for a moment.
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tomorrow i leave for a four-day excursion into the back-country of manning park, and not a minute too soon!
ran into a friend from victoria who is over here for a course and we arranged lunch for today – which was fine except she is one of those people from my past who i really don’t what kindof a connection i have with anymore – i can’t even explain why that is, because we get along just fine – but there’s always something underlying that feels a bit disconnected the few times i do see her.
in any case, she told me that steve mitchell has got out of prison this week, he’s in a halfway house in victoria now. i suppose that explains the dream on tuesday night – more prophesy. i think it will be fine – i just need some time to let it absorb and then i’ll file it with all the other weirdness.
eviction
got home tonight to a notice posted on my door.
its’ official – i’m evicted. collect $1100 do not pass go.
huzzah.
poor me
having a day that’s tilted me in the wrong direction – after all these good days of lightness – i guess i need it to balance me back over or something.
i dreamed last night about steve m. getting out of prison – how i went there to see him, and see if he had changed – and when i went to touch his arm, i knew he hadn’t made any progress at all, like an electric shock went through me – later in the dream hunted by him, there was no horror – only fear of being caught. i woke up tired this morning from running all night in my sleep, tension in my limbs as though holding myself away from danger. i realized this morning the need to find out his release date so i can work towards it without the irrational fear that he’s somehow going to show up on my doorstep.
on my way to work, there was a car accident in front of me at the corner where i take the bus – no one was hurt, two minivans collided at a moderate speed, but it sent my nervous system into a frenzy in any case, it being so early in the morning and all.
this was on top of the phone call with my mom last night who is back on anti-depressant medication, and another call from my friend d. (who has been in jail for the past 8 years) who is having trouble dealing with emotional welling and self-forgiveness.
and one of my strike co-ordinators quit yesterday and won’t provide a reason, and work is crazy, and i have to go to a union event tonight after work and lobby mps (which i hate doing).
today i’m feeling a bit of the “poor-me” syndrome, and though i’m not in any real emotional duress, i would like to crawl under my desk and hide from the world at the moment.
someone commented to me recently that i come across as cynical in some of my writing – i don’t think it’s so much that i’m cynical but i just get tired, and to the point where i feel like i’ve really had to deal with enough…..
of course, all this is making me really look forward to my hiking trip this weekend! a remedy is in sight!
photo-real
i have been spending the morning going through the voluminous image-archive belonging to my work unit in the pacific region. lightboard and loupe in hand, i am going through three dozen binders full of slides, photos and negatives that have accumulated over the past hundred years or so, to decide which of them will end up in our digital image archive. i thought this project would take me a day or two max (the photo-selection part), but now i am seeing the vastness of this task. it is easy to get bored and stop looking at the photos critically, and then i have to go back over them and make sure i didn’t miss some gem with historical importance or a species shot misfiled under some other heading.
in communications, we have to access these images frequently. often i am required to locate general photos of a fish species, examples of habitat disturbance, scenic ocean shots or any number of other related areas – a task made tedious with the poor image-management we have had in place for years, and even worse when having to resort to the binders. since technology for archiving, labeling and searching photographs has really improved over the last three years, i proposed to my work unit that we properly archive our images and developed the plan to do it – so this is my big project of the moment (fortunately i don’t have to do the scanning or the initial inputting into the database, i have someone hired to do that for me).
after selecting the images from the archive, my next step is develop the architecture – which is the most interesting part of the job for me. i like organizing data into useable aggregates – as i often am not only the creator, but a user of the end-product.
there is sadness in looking at these decades of photographs – going right back to the time when the people of bc still believed the fish would never leave – trawlers and seiners and gillnetters and even whaling ships – an echo of past policy and the tinge of human arrogance gracing the photo paper in the eyes of men and the full bellies of their vessels. it’s a shame to me to see how the land has been so used here, looking at images of the first clearcuts on slopes reaching the sea, small villages perched on the edge of the world taking as much as they could before it got to be too late.
it’s hard to believe looking from this place in history – that so few people could see the scrabble for resources that would occur, that damage to the earth would not be repaired so quickly as to feed the growing mouths of this land, and we would eventually stand on a precipice of all decisions come before us and weighing on our backs.
Red Cedar 