Final Fire

by Michael Mitchell

  Christmas reindeer

  2002

  The wind has shifted on Barrow Lake out on the tundra behind Kugaaruk in Nunavut. It sends the millions of ice crystals floating on the lake down to the end where Sheila and I camp to make a film about traditional kayak building with a trio of Netsilik Inuit elders. The breeze and moving ice have created the biggest wind chime in the world. The sound is as ethereal and magical for the ear as northern lights are for the eye.

  ***

  Five turkey vultures ride the end of day thermals across the inlet. The light is like butter. Something has died.

  I’ve been slowly climbing the red sandstone cliffs of Badami in southern India since just after dawn. The carved cave temples devoted to Vishnu and Shiva are now far below and the clifftop not 20 feet above. My climbing rule is never look down. Upon glancing up I glimpse a small dark face awaiting my arrival. As I finally pulled myself over the lip a tiny goat stands above me. This kid is so black, and so glossy, it appears to be an absence in the sky. When I lie down on the warming rocks to catch my breath it curls up at my side. Refreshed a half hour later we set off together on a long journey across a barren rocky plain. For many hours its shiny coal hooves make the rocks ring like bells. This is our day music as side by side we explore the vast sandstone plateau. Whenever I stop to rest the kid lies beside me. We drink water from the same spring, we share the same breeze and the heat of the same sun. Come day’s end my descent is secured by the sweet spirit of a very small black goat. I can see his small dark face watch me all the way to the bottom.

  Risk. How do you make that concept, that idea, vivid and fresh again? Walking a tightrope, the apple and arrow, crevasse jumping and knife play are all tired ideas. We are to visually evoke the idea of risk for a software company specializing in financial risk management.

  It’s fun to spin concepts; it’s the execution that’s difficult. Take this idea of risk. How does one make it urgent and real? The agency’s creative team has conceived an elaborate tableau. In the middle ground a pit bull tethered to a metal ring by a leather leash strains to get at a cat sauntering across the background. However, the cat is unknowingly at risk because a small mouse behind the dog is chewing through the leash. I was to cast and execute this idea in my studio. My cat Hero was a master of feline cool so I hired him for a couple of tins of Fancy Feast. A pit bull rescue organization agreed to bring several ferocious dogs in return for a donation. I then rented a couple of mice from a pet store that often supplied animals to the movies. With the casting complete we began to build the simple set.

  I wasn’t worried about the dogs; they’d just do their dog thing and lunge at their mortal enemy, the cat. And I knew Hero was smart enough not to get into trouble. It was the mice I worried about. How was I going to get them to chew on a leash with two of their main predators in the same room?

  When cast and crew assembled there was great excitement and anticipation. Could we pull this off? After blocking out the actors’ positions we all retreated back to the camera.

  What happened? Well, Hero performed repeatedly as anticipated — the essence of cat cool. And the mice unconcernedly chewed away at the leash that had been smeared with peanut butter and cheese. And the ferocious pit bulls? We had a principal and two understudies. We tried all three and each of them broke down completely into cowardly curs. The setup required that they face away from the camera and crew while fixating on the cat. These alpha dogs couldn’t bear putting their backs to the crowd behind the camera. It made them feel vulnerable. They were so upset that they never even noticed the snacking mice behind them or my Siamese tom cocking a snook. They just slobbered and whimpered.

  ***

  Kayaking through a series of small islands along the foreshore of the big Bay I slip through numerous narrow and shallow channels. A scruffy coyote appears over a rise — silhouette against the sky — trots down to the shore and begins to lope along beside me, not a paddle length away. I can’t read it. It’s neither afraid nor aggressive. It doesn’t seem especially curious. It just is. We’re simply being together.

  I’m completing my first summer as an archaeologist. It’s September and the grad student workers have all returned to school. Only I remain on this Cape Breton peninsula, wrapping up my excavation so I can submit a report and return to school myself. Nova Scotia autumns are often heart wrenchingly beautiful and this one is exemplary. Every morning I drive down to the site in the polished brightness of the fall and begin the day’s work — alone. By mid-afternoon the light has warmed and begins to rake across this small barren peninsula that jabs into the North Atlantic, surrounding me on three sides with the sounds and smells of the sea. A scrubby forest of conifers advances on the fourth. The rhythm of these days is pacific and comforting.

  With each day as the first sharp shadows begin to draw my excavations a visitor arrives. He trots out of the woods and paces circles between my works and the declining sun. Backlit, this elegant fox, in full enjoyment of his prime, has a coat that glows like fire. He advances on a secret labyrinth, cautiously cycling closer until finally achieving my excavations. By five each day he’s a fire fox, head on his paws, coat flaming and flickering in the late light and sea breeze, eyes assured but powerfully alert, resting barely two yards from where I work. We are cautious neighbours, provisional friends, a pair of fellow mammals secretly sharing a small private moment in the history of the world.

  In my senescent 70s I’ve become a cat lady. I have two. Long-limbed and fit, Ziggy is white with two black circles on his haunches that from behind look like panda eyes when he sits down. He’s had a long and distinguished career in property management — he operates two entire blocks of downtown Toronto and has imperial ambitions in others. At nine years old he’s approaching our 60 and now faces a rival. He arrives home nightly with new scratches and scars on his face. The real estate business is very competitive.

  Once home he has to deal with Billy Bonkers, a rescue who arrived several years after Ziggy. Billy looks like one of Toronto’s Ford brothers, short limbed and stocky, except that he dresses better. Morning, noon or night, weekday or weekend, summer or winter, Bill is always in a tux. While Ziggy is out visiting the various beds and bowls he has up and down the street, Billy stays home guarding his food dish. Both cats get fed first thing in the morning and then again when CBC Radio’s World Report comes on at six. By nine a.m. every morning Bill is back on duty at his bowl. “Hey Bonks,” I caution, “nine hours to go until supper.” Billy is undeterred, he stays on station like a doorman until the light fails and I get the food out. By the time I fetch his bag of overweight management pellets he is losing consciousness from neglect. Every night is a close call.

  I don’t want to make him sound like a slacker: Ziggy is not the only one with a profession. Billy has a career as a big-box greeter. When either of his human serving staff comes home Billy rushes to the door and begins a series of roll-overs. His roundness helps him be very good at it. I always see this as enthusiastic hello acrobatics, but for Billy the start of a roll is a consequence of malnutrition collapse. It is only the momentum generated by his fall that carries him through the manoeuvre and back onto his feet.

  Billy stays home because the world is just too big for him — not the other way around. He was brought to my doorstep after his owner, an old friend, died in a lonely, midnight car crash on the Tennessee interstate. Bill, Billy’s owner (did he really name his cat after himself?), had family way out west in country too tough for mere house cats. They dumped Billy on me and caught the plane back to Calgary after the funeral. When Billy was let out of the carrier he took one look at Ziggy, who was looking quite buff and Siamese, and bolted up the stairs and into the back bathroom. For weeks he was just a pair of eyes under the claw-foot iron bathtub. That was his first posting.

  To be honest, I probably wrote him off as a sharp-dressing loser but Sheila was more understanding. Everyday she’d find time to sit by the t
ub and talk to him. For days and days he was just a pair of glowing eyes in the sub-tub gloom — remember, tuxes are black. When he finally emerged he staggered downstairs, found his bowl and settled in. He still has little truck with me but he adores Sheila. During the last hour of the day they drink tea together and watch Coronation Street. Sheila is still nostalgic for England where she was born. Billy doesn’t remember.

  Cats are basically solitary animals. These guys don’t need each other. Ziggy’s coping strategy is based on aloofness — he tries to ignore the guy in the headwaiter’s outfit. Billy has developed his own version of Whac-A-Mole to deal with the white senior with the panda spots, ringed tail and a black bat on his head. Since Ziggy appears to be assembled from a box of parts Billy figures the best strategy is to deconstruct him. When Ziggy comes in from outside Billy clobbers him. Ignored, Billy whacks again. Whac-A-Cat, Whac-A-Cat. Ziggy does a flying flip onto his back to present all his electro-razor claws and titanium teeth. Score: 0–0. No giant stuffed mouse-toy in purple plush for either of them.

  What has all this got to do with anything? It’s relevant because I finally stopped calling cat-sitter friends and tricked both cats into carriers and drove them north to the island. Ziggy stepped out of his cage on the dock and immediately went into forest management. At first I worried about him because there are lots of predators in the woods — minks, fishers, coyotes and wolves. However he seems able to survive the backcountry. I suspect that it’s because he looks too weird to be prey. What’s this funny white thing with eyes at both ends?

  The big transformation came with Billy. He finally discovered the out-of-doors. He’d sit for hours near the water’s edge watching butterflies like Ferdinand the bull. As you know, the water’s edge is only a dozen feet from the house. But Billy quickly got braver and has gone at least twice that distance from home base. I’m thinking of getting him a plaid flannel blanket and a black leather collar. I’ll find an old hubcap he can use as a food bowl. He can then move up from being a member of the big downtown elite to good old boy. He’s got the build for it.

  When Ziggy comes back to the cabin after a day’s work in the bush he repairs to his fort in the crawl space above the indoor washroom. I like to watch him planning his assault on his lofty retreat. He easily leaps onto the set of drawers against the washroom wall but from there to the top is a good six feet straight up. Ziggy analyses this distance with his X-ray vision, does his trigonometry and statics as well as ballistic analysis. They say that dogs are two and a half times more intelligent than cats but I’ve never seen a dog that could do this. That IQ stuff is just bullshit. When his computations are complete Ziggy takes an all-mighty leap straight up, grabs a building collar tie with one paw and heaves the rest of his body onto it and casually strides onto the bathroom roof and vanishes. He could easily work out the trajectory of the space shuttle.

  2014

  My oldest friend Macbeth and I head upstream after four days of work opening the cabin. It’s been a brutal winter so we’re more than a month late — on our usual date this year the ice was still a metre thick. This ice had snapped one of the dock’s heavy steel rings I had drilled a half foot into the hard rock of the Shield.

  The sky is largely clear, just a few horse tails, as I swing the skiff on the final turn from the inlet and up into the river’s mouth. The west wind is at our backs but it’s still cold as I accelerate into the current. One can feel the aluminum hull twisting as we cut through eddies and upwellings. A third of the way upriver I spot a large dark shape high in a tree by the south bank. I cut the throttle and we glide up under a large bear some 40 feet up the trunk. He skillfully pulls in small branches and chews on the new buds and young leaves all the while balancing in a tree clearly stressed by so much weight so high up. Large branches snap and fall into the boat. Occasionally he glances down at us without interest and continues lunch.

  I had heard that the tough winter had taken out many animals but this first trip in had given us many visitors. A ruby throated hummingbird had buzzed in through an open door, realized its mistake and spiraled up into the cupola in an escape attempt. There it went into auto flight, endlessly repeated the same escape strategy under the tiny roof, round and round, rattling off the little windows above the main roof line. Finally Macbeth brought in a ladder and climbed into the cupola with a landing net. He quickly caught the exhausted bird. Taking the net outside and opening it on the ground exposed its very small occupant who panted in shock.

  A few minutes later it was off. Then I spotted a half-grown hare crouched immobile between the back of the cabin and a yard-high white pine. It watched me but failed to bolt. After a few hours I offered it half a carrot — I’ve seen the cartoons — which it took and devoured. It then hopped into its new home under my house. Then I looked up and saw a particularly handsome raccoon working my shoreline, scooping up clams. Two geese came in low overhead like fighter jets. Sandhills called from the back bay and a merlin gave me cheek when I got too close to its private tree on my island. Or so I mistakenly think. I return to the front and a beaver swims by. Everyone’s back at work.

  Almost two weeks later I’m back up. The small hare crouches in the same place, nose twitching, eyes darkly alert. It’s early June. Despite a very harsh winter plants are beginning to bloom on my little world. In tiny pockets of soil on the granitic bedrock a new life cycle has begun. Photography can be a meditation. Looking through the viewfinder makes the world go quiet and bright. I twist a macro lens on a new body and set out to discover what flowers sing on my third of an acre. It’s already too late for trilliums and wakerobins; besides, they prefer the sheltered woods back up the river. It’s too harsh down here where the west winds leave the white and jack pine in charge. As I slowly work my way around this tiny island I encounter a total of 10 different flowers, all coexisting with the dandelion, always a brazen trumpeter of spring. The sky is uninflected today, the offshore wind is warm, birds sing, I feel at peace. My body, noisy and demanding for the past several days is finally quiet. I’ve bought a little more time.

  Eight

  Dreaming

  “ . . . an’ me a writer and poet who should be havin’ adventures an’ experiencing all the diversities and paradoxes and ironies of life and passin’ over all the roads of the world and digging all the cities and towns and rivers and oceans and making all the chicks . . . by God!”

  Robert Crumb

  Fritz Bugs Out

  The 1980s were good to picture makers. Corporations spent freely on printers, designers, illustrators, writers and photographers. Hundreds of thousands were lavished on annual reports that were as much vanity projects as financial statements. One insurer that sent me overseas several times had only a handful of shareholders, most of whom had inherited their positions and didn’t bother to even open the document. The rationale for the spending was that the glossy books we produced would serve as ambassadors for the companies and be key marketing tools. In practice people in sales seldom wanted to change the way they did things. The annual reports languished in boxes and drawers.

  As money began to flow freely into the pockets of photographers there were some unanticipated consequences. Several years into the decade a magazine editor got interested in work I was doing with a computer graphics group. We decided to do a men’s fashion spread set in a computer-rendered virtual environment. While this concept is commonplace now, over three decades ago it was uncharted territory. We had no precedents to work with and we’d be pushing the rendering capacities of then current computers to their limits.

  We booked a large studio, as the concept for the double-page spread would involve nearly a dozen models in the picture. We were a good-sized crowd as all the computer people were in attendance as were the publisher, the clothing designers and the usual makeup and hair people. We were trying to make some mini-history. This would be an expensive session that had serious potential to fail. The room was tense.

  I
glued transparent templates onto the ground glass of my viewfinders. They would give me both the perspective and placement of the figures. As soon as I was ready to go the art director arrived. He barked a series of rapid-fire instructions and then disappeared. A few minutes later he was back shouting incomprehensible orders like a Gatling gun before vanishing once again. So the day went.

  As these were early days in the ’80s money party it took me perhaps an hour to understand what was going on. The guy was scooting into the studio washroom every quarter of an hour to do lines of coke. Each time he’d emerge turbo-charged for a quarter of an hour and then collapse into silence and retreat.

  It made for a horrible working environment, one that for the next half-dozen years became all too ubiquitous. Work pressure drove many photographers into the washrooms. They blew much of their inflated fees into their noses. I watched a number of very talented people age a quarter century in a handful of years. Some lost their studios, houses, even their families. Friendships were destroyed and the users looked like death. They became zombies.

  It was in this environment that I learned how to coordinate designers and printers, negotiate endless meetings, even write corporate-speak and do a good president’s letter to shareholders. It was interesting to learn how corporations made their money, what holdings they had and get familiar with the people who ran them. I developed an understanding of business and a respect for what some could achieve. Although many managers were essentially private sector civil servants, a few took risks that were major creative acts. I enjoyed talking with them; they, in return, treated me well. I enjoyed being a fly on the wall.

  As that decade boomed Toronto real estate got very expensive and studios became unaffordable. I had been renting for a couple of decades and as prices got higher I began to look for alternatives. Then I got an idea. I knew that the stock of Great Lakes bulk carriers was aging. There were vessels on the lakes that were a hundred years old. There were still dozens of steamers. I had some knowledge of the fleets and had favourites. As I write this in 2015 one of the handsomest classic lakers, the Montrealais, is being broken. I’ve watched her climb the flight locks on the Welland, I’ve kayaked into her enormous bow thruster and run my hands over her big bronze prop. She was the very last steamer built in Canada. Now she’s gone.