Final Fire

by Michael Mitchell

  In many ways the country felt the same. I’d done enough travelling and working in Latin America to appreciate cultural differences. You knew you were in Mexico because you could see, hear, smell and taste the country. In fact you could feel and taste each state. And Peru was Peru, not Bolivia. But Nicaragua had been so badly abused — the Americans had been raising hell here since the early 19th century and the Spanish before — that the country didn’t seem to have its own culture. There was little evidence of any national dress or dishes or drink. It was a hollowed-out state trying to reconstruct itself.

  In Granada I met the bird of hope. Slipping through the kitchen to find a washroom I encountered the cook’s parrot. I’ve always enjoyed those birds, even when they’re mischievous. And they often are. One bird that I got to know well on the coast of Oaxaca used to fly into the beach palapa where I ate every day after work. Long beams supported the thatched roof that sheltered a half-dozen rough picnic tables. I’d fetch my plate of rice and fish and sit down. The bird would position himself on the beam above, aim with a beady eye and shit on my lunch. I’d slide down the table and he’d follow and aim. He was fast — and very accurate. Ha ha.

  And there were others with various impressive skills but the Granada parrot topped them all with his ardor and patriotism. With the cook’s encouragement it sang all the many rousing verses of the Sandinista hymn. Perfectly. True revolutionary triumph is a big green parrot staring you hard in the eye while it repeatedly choruses, “We struggle against the Yankee, enemy of humanity.”

  ***

  The forest is very quiet this morning — no wind rustle or sighs, no birdsong, no cries. The command is to walk silently, stepping from moss hummock to bare stone. A few minutes on I hear a whirling, then a metallic clatter as a hundred dark small shapes are thrown toward me. A flock of polished grackles is on the move, streaming through the understorey and parting around me as they rattle by as if I were a rock in a stream. Just as abruptly they are gone and the woods fall back into the silence of the north.

  I’ve been back from Nicaragua for seven weeks now. The first week I’d spent in Ottawa doing a rough picture edit with staff from what used to be known as the Still Photography Division of the National Film Board. A few days into the session I fainted dead away in their offices. An hour later I was on an evening flight to Toronto and feeling like death. I went straight from the airport to emergency at Toronto General where a nurse took my temperature and rushed out of the room. When the doctors discovered where I’d been for weeks they began a frantic series of blood workups. For several hours various hospital staffers rushed in and out of the examining room in a state of excitement that I was feeling too awful to participate in. Then the room went quiet — for hours, for almost four hours. Finally around 3:30 a.m. an intern entered the room with a scrap of paper in his hand. “We thought you had a new strain of malaria that’s just emerged in Central America as you have a temperature of 106. We had lab people come in and got a couple of pathologists out of bed because it was our first case. But everybody went home hours ago as it turns out you just have pneumonia. Here’s a script for an antibiotic. Put your coat on and turn left out the door. The all-night pharmacy is only five blocks away.”

  So there I was, soaked in sweat from the fever, facing a long walk in the dark in minus 25 degree weather, because I was just a disappointing loser with a banal disease. I reeled off to the drugstore and then staggered the 20 blocks home because I couldn’t find a cab.

  When I got over all of this I went to work researching and writing captions for the 50 photographs we’d finally selected. A revolution is an immensely complex social, cultural, economic and strategic political process. I had done all of the work with a trio of Hasselblads because I felt it required the greater descriptive powers of a format larger than newsy 35mm. I made large colour prints full of beautiful detail. They told you that many of the Sandinista soldiers were just scared kids, that the uniforms were cheap and inadequate and much of their equipment just Soviet junk. The prints described the destruction in loving detail — the medium has no morals. Yet the prints remained mute. They needed words to give context and explain what you couldn’t see. This was supposed to be a visual exhibition for display in museums. What I began to create was a book to be screwed to the wall. It was an immense amount of work.

  Spring gradually pushed winter aside while I wrote and researched and revised. Soon it was early May and the leaves snapped out — spring in Toronto lasts 15 minutes. I continued working in my cluttered office at the back of my little Victorian house a block from the university. The deadline was fast approaching.

  One day I heard an explosion, then another one and another. They continued with terrifying regularity like a doomsday drumbeat. My office began spinning and I forgot where I was, who I was and what I was doing. The keyboard I worked turned Greek, the books lining the walls threatened to bury me. I was in a sweaty panic.

  Slowly, gradually, painfully, I pulled myself back together over the course of a couple of hours. Eventually it dawned on me that it was Victoria Day and there’d been the traditional 21-gun salute a few blocks over at Queen’s Park. Everything was going to be fine.

  All those days watching the contras creeping through the bushes, the nights sleeping on the ground with rats scampering over me, the destruction and the deprivations had caught up with me. I’d been surprised at how calmly I’d been able to carry on with photography while shit was erupting all around me. At those times the world became very bright and intense, all my movements slowed, but I never felt afraid. I was to discover later that I’d just buried it.

  This all happened more than a quarter century ago. I’d never heard of post-traumatic stress disorder. The Second World War had receded into Roman times and Canada had yet to go into Afghanistan. There were no glib correspondents chatting on the radio about PTSD: it just didn’t exist.

  A couple of months later it happened again. It was Hiroshima Day and commemorative sirens went off. This time I knew what was happening. I was experienced. I got it all back together in a couple of minutes.

  The Nicaragua show went on the road. Over the course of the next five years it seemed to go everywhere. There were some awful installations of it and some very good ones. The tour of B.C. encapsulated both. I was sent out to Kamloops to talk. Nobody in town knew where Nicaragua was; nobody had ever heard of the Sandinistas. The cruel and paranoid foreign policy of our neighbour was of no interest. It was depressing.

  In those days I was constantly flying across the country executing assignments in disparate western communities. As a photographer I always found that the most curious and alert people in the country seemed to be in Saskatoon. The doziest were in Vernon. They’d trip over your tripod, had zero interest in what you were doing and seemed to be stumbling through life in a terminal mall coma.

  But B.C. redeemed itself. The Vancouver Art Gallery paired my show, After the Triumph: Nicaragua, with Goya’s Disasters of War and gave both a whole floor. It was just brilliant and beautiful.

  The exhibition also went into enemy territory. Part of it went to the New Museum in Manhattan. I took it across the border myself. American customs agents broke open the crate and looked at the photographs.

  “What’s he got there, Bob?”

  “Just a bunch of pichurs of spooks someplace in Africa.”

  And Reagan was spending millions on the counterrevolution.

  ***

  The bald eagles have returned. Last year I discovered them nesting high atop a white pine that towered over a small island in a hidden inland beaver lake. They had three of the biggest, ugliest bird babies I’d ever seen. Benjamin Franklin had thought the bald eagle a bird of such disreputable behaviour — it’s a carrion bird — that it was an inappropriate choice as a national symbol for America. Nevertheless the States went ahead and stole the image of an eagle holding five arrows in his claws from the confederacy of the Iroquoi
s. The colonists’ only creative contribution was to up the number of arrows to 13, the number of colonies. Today it would appear that Ben Franklin was prescient. The large juvenile eagle commandeering a treetop over my harbour is having trouble looking large and in charge. A dozen crows are baiting and shit-bombing it mercilessly. It finally retreats to the beaver bog. May its emblematic country do the same.

  Six

  Filth

  “Each American generation passes the torch of truth, liberty and justice in an unbroken chain all the way down to the present. That torch is now in our hands. And we will use it to light up the world.”

  Donald Trump

  Congressional address 2017

  1979

  I’m on a magazine photo assignment to cover a hobo convention in Iowa. After flying into Mason City at midnight — there’d been a connection delay — I discover that the basic car I’d booked for the drive to Britt has been rented to someone else. Only thing they have left is a full-sized Cadillac Eldorado. We go into the parking lot where several tons of steel iced in white enamel with gold trim are simmering under a lamppost. I take it. The car and I levitate off through cornfields and small towns, windows down, the sweet smells of a country summer pillowing through the interior. Perfect.

  Britt is just a small town but I still can’t locate writer Jim Christy who’s supposed to have come in from Alaska. Without knowing his angle on the story I start shooting to illustrate it. After a couple of days of this I have a bunch of new hobo friends but still no writer. The guys are getting sick of Mulligatawny soup cooked in an oil drum so we decide to crash a big church picnic somebody has heard about. Seven hobos cram into the Caddy and we set off for the Baptist lunch. My passengers demand I roll up the tinted windows and crank up the AC. Soon as I comply I regret it. None of these guys has washed for weeks. The car smells like a plugged toilet. My eyes run.

  When we glide into a churchyard of sunhats and high heels some 30 minutes later all eyes are on the fancy car and its VIPs. I park dead centre in the garden party and release my seven buddies. You could see every church picnicker’s dental work and tonsils. They all vanish into the church leaving us alone to enjoy their Lord’s bounty spread out on the picnic tables.

  Later back in Toronto the staff at Weekend magazine spent days trying to screw Jim’s text to my pictures — we’d missed each other completely. From that point on I always wrote my own text and captions.

  1970

  It’s the start of a new decade and I’m trying to move back north after several years in Mexico. My girl and I have made our way up to San Antonio by bus where I’ve located a drive-away company. They have a big Buick station wagon that needs delivery to the Bay Area. California sounds good so I book it. When I go to the office the next day the boss takes me out back to see the car. It’s an enormous Detroit boat with lithoed wood grain on the quarter panels and a hood large enough to accommodate patio chairs and a barbeque. He drops the tailgate and demonstrates the bouncy suspension. “You just take that girl you had with you yesterday and give her a good pounding in the back here. You’ll love it.”

  I sign the papers, get a map and pull out of the lot to return to the six-dollar-a-night motel and retrieve my girl and our stuff. We head out for the freeway and freedom. As we clear the last overpass the transmission begins to thump and after a mile or two goes into full cardiac arrest. I hike back into town under a blazing sun and phone the car guy. A tow truck picks me up an hour later and by afternoon we’re back where we started in the six-dollar motel.

  Three days later the same car guy calls the motel office with a message — this time he’s got a good car. I catch a bus across town to see it. It’s an immaculate but tiny pale green Ford Falcon that belonged to an old lady who only drove it to church. In fact she died in it on the way to church and she’s left it to her stepdaughter who’s awaiting delivery. The only problem is that the recipient lives in South Carolina, not exactly a shortcut to my new life in San Francisco. We have a conference and decide that the prudent thing would be to retreat to Toronto. I still have some cash in a local North Carolina bank near the university where I’d worked. It could get us home if we got to it. We take the car.

  We have no money but I’ve kept a Texaco credit card that was mailed to me upon first graduating from university several years before. Turns out it still works so it buys the gas for the trip. We also find a motel chain will accept it so we’ve got sleep and one meal a day covered. The world is once again ours.

  We set off eastward across the U.S. It’s a route I already know well — beignets and chicory coffee in New Orleans, Georgia truck stops stocked with Jesus trinkets and weapons where the big rigs pull in with TVs flickering on their dashboards. A half-day from our small town destination I phone in to time our arrival. It’s the poorest white town I’ve ever seen. When we finally locate the street it’s like the second coming. Everybody is out in their front yards to witness the arrival of the neighbourhood’s only car. The family comes out of their ramshackle frame house in tears. We’re heroes.

  I like this job. It’s another one of my cross Canada trudges but this is different and a bit crazy. I’m to photograph explosions. The first one is near home. If you drive west from Toronto on the big Highway 401 there’s a point where the Niagara Escarpment stands proud on the south side near Milton. Until recently this raw reminder of old seas was a somewhat wild place. There are tiny wizened cypresses on the limestone cliff faces that are thousands of years old. The mesa-like plateau above suggests a hidden world.

  When I drive up the escarpment road and crest the top I do encounter the unexpected — much of that enormous promontory is hollow. A huge open pit quarry has removed its belly. From its rim the trucks and trailers below on its bottom look like Tonka Toys. This is no small operation and today it’s about to get bigger. A whole grid of long slender holes has been drilled deep into the west rim. Tanker trucks have come in and pumped millions of ammonium nitrate prills, like little white fertilizer beads, into these tiny tunnels. By themselves the prills are stable and harmless. You could spread them on your garden and eat what they make grow. But mixed with kerosene or diesel fuel and a blasting cap they become deadly. Think the Oklahoma bombing.

  All these drill holes have been linked with little plastic tubes that lead to a single detonator. Once activated the entire grid will go off in a millisecond. We discuss where I should establish my cameras. I set up tripods on the south rim and screw motor drives on several camera bodies. A warning horn will tell me when to hit the button. The long rolls of film will rattle through in seconds. I’ve only got one chance.

  The wait in the summer heat is electric. I feel a slight breeze as heated air rises from the bottom of the quarry. Several tiny figures in safety vests and hard hats move slowly on the far rim. I’m sweating under mine. Waiting, counting, breathing, tensing — what’s taking so long? The horn suddenly barks, I squeeze my remotes, and one whole side of the quarry ripples like a flipped blanket. Then the big boom comes as powdered rock dust rises and a second report as a huge chunk of escarpment lands on a pickup parked on the far side of the quarry bottom. My first shoot on this job is witness to a major miscalculation. Soon a circle of tiny quarrymen are way down below me staring at a one-foot-high truck. It looks like a yellow waffle. This job will be interesting.

  Later I go to western Quebec and the Eastern Townships where I’ll see them make this stuff. It’s the hailstones on a summer day principle. A continuous spray of liquid ammonium nitrate is shot into tall steel cylinders a handful of feet in diameter. Fans at the bottom keep the droplets cycling up and down inside these towers. Like drops of water freezing into hail on updrafts, these droplets coalesce and with each cycle get bigger. As optimum size is reached the air jets die and the prills of AN fall to the bottom. They are sorted and graded. Those of optimum size for explosive use are culled. The irregulars are bagged and sold as fertilizer. Simple.

  Explo
sive plants are interesting. Each step takes place in a different building. The buildings have blow-out walls and are separated from their neighbours in the production process by high earth berms to prevent disaster spread. At one complex in Quebec stands an industrial cluster that looks part refinery, part futuristic city and part spaceship. It’s an abandoned nitroglycerine factory, the process that made Nobel rich. Dynamite is now considered too expensive, too volatile and dangerous for regular use but the prize it funded lives on.

  I go back to recording explosions. Here in the townships they’re testing underwater explosives. There’s a large pond in a field with a sod and concrete bunker on one side. A cable arrangement like a large clothesline stretches from it to the far side of the pond. The explosive package is hung from it like a pair of socks and it’s run out to the middle of the pond where it’s lowered beneath the surface. The testers retreat to the safety of the bunker, the only person left outside is me. Once again my tripods are set up on the rim, I have long rolls and motor drives. They signal, I press; with a big burp the whole landscape rises a few inches before settling comfortably back to its favoured place. This becomes part of the job — being temporarily levitated and then slumped down. I’m always amazed that my shots are sharp when my tripods are so rocked and rolled but they always are. It’s because everything is being uplifted in unison — my tripods and cameras, the explosion, the landscape and me.

  I go into northern Ontario in the fall. Around Timmins the trees have gone gold and the black ruins of old mining headframes advance across the landscape like giant mantises.