Final Fire

by Michael Mitchell

  When these ships are retired they are sold for their value as scrap — not much. Knowing this I began searching for vessels suitable for conversion into floating studios. I concentrated on locating the gearless vessels that Great Lakes sailors call flatbacks. I understood that self-unloaders with their enormous above-deck booms and complex conveyor and tunnel systems below were too expensive and time-consuming to convert. But the fates threw me another hand. I found the Grand Rapids and the Madison.

  Sister ships, these 330-foot vessels were railcar ferries that had carried entire trains across the top of Lake Michigan since the 1920s. They had a quadruple attraction for me: they had enormous, completely clear interiors on the main decks; they were cheap; they were historic vessels and they were steamers. Each had a pair of magnificent triple expansion steam engines down in their bellies. As they had been commissioned for year-round service their bottoms were very heavily built so they could ice break. In the non-corrosive waters of the Great Lakes they would float for hundreds of years. They were the perfect ships for the job. I set about assembling a team — money people, a developer, a designer, a real estate professional and so on. It was a solid group. We began having meetings using Captain John’s floating restaurant in what had been Marshall Tito’s personal yacht, the Jadran, as our boardroom. It was exciting — until the bureaucrats got involved.

  The staff at the Toronto Harbour Commission were terrific. They understood the project immediately and loved the idea of assembling a historic ships collection in the harbour and reinvigorating the decaying and underutilized Cherry Street industrial area. I soon had assurances that we could negotiate for a 1,000-foot section of Polson Quay, just above the bottom of Cherry Street. Now I had the ships, the team and a place to moor them. However, all of this was attached to a big city that moved like frozen bunker oil, had little imagination and seemed professionally negative.

  I was told that a project on this scale would have to include parkland. This sounds impossible when you’re dealing with ships but when I offered the top deck as a public lounge area and the wheelhouse and enclosed passenger seating cabin for conversion to a coffee shop, restaurant or, even better, a bar, that objection subsided. When I was asked in one meeting to explain how the engine rooms would be used I, without even thinking, blurted out “gay bar.” That image of sweaty young men partying between five-foot diameter pistons, enormous connecting rods and gigantic propeller shafts was too much for the municipal mind. I was never asked again.

  To make the project viable I needed “live/work” zoning. Our plan was to have the units constructed by a prefab home-builder and trucked to the site. The units would be loaded on the stern of the ships, skidded down the rails on the main deck toward the bows until each vessel was full. Every unit would be two storeys high and run from one side of the ship to the other, a distance of about 65 feet. Openings cut into the topsides of the hull on the quay-side would serve as entrances, the ones on the water-side would give access to individual private docks. Every tenant could have a canoe at their doorstep. Not permissible. Dangerous — like steps with no handrails.

  The generation of urban planners working at City Hall had all gone to school in an era when they were taught that different areas of a city should be devoted to discreet functions. This was partly a reaction to the bad old days of the industrialization when workers lived on grimy streets in the shadow of smokestacks. Toronto had had many examples of this. The Massey works were in the middle of town, as were the Inglis plant, CCM, the CP rail yards and various meat-packing plants — hence Hog Town. The scions of these families, the Masseys, McLeans and Allans, were among my oldest friends.

  So the current dogma was that people couldn’t live and work in the same space. The city had enforcers to make sure that this didn’t happen. A writer was allowed to pound keys at home but otherwise, a separate, appropriately zoned space was required. Even artists had to commute to work. This showed a total lack of understanding of the economics of creative production. It was destructive. It was stupid.

  Why couldn’t I construct live/work studios for photographers, filmmakers, designers, painters and dancers inside ships? Aside from it being slightly unorthodox there were many other objections. I remember some little person from the city triumphantly declaring that my scheme was unworkable because housing could only be built in areas that were served by public transit and there was none on Cherry Street. I never got an answer when I inquired why not dedicate a bus to a Cherry Street route. It could serve not only my project but also the club-goers on Polson Quay, the shoppers at the huge discount food store down there but also, in summer, the beach strollers, swimmers and sailors using the outer harbour. No!

  As these and other issues dragged on month after month something else happened — a recession. As the months, and then years, ground by the price of commercial real estate began to decline and, eventually, collapse. My project, which came in at $14 a square foot, was very cheap when I started but looked insane when the market bottomed out and you could rent downtown warehouse space for four dollars a square foot. I knew that the market would come back but meanwhile I was carrying the costs of a pair of huge ships moored on Lake Erie, plus design fees, etc., etc. As the costs mounted I finally realized that I had to pull the plug. My beautiful ships were towed to breaking yards in India. The losers had won.

  ***

  They believe they’re invisible, the many fishermen who troll back and forth in front of my place staring dully. Despite miles of empty shore to either side they’re convinced that all pike, pickerel and bass are hanging out within 10 feet of my short shoreline. Sometimes these guys will idle several yards off my porch and sit for hours staring slack-mouthed at me as I work on my laptop. They’ll discuss my place, shouting like sports announcers over their motors.

  “He’s got them solar panels.”

  “Had ’em for years.”

  “I figure that’s how he charges up the computer.”

  “Guess so.”

  “I seen him with a power tool last week — one of them battery ones. Must charge ’em on the panels too.”

  “Ya do what ya gotta do.”

  “Just got a nibble.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Strike!”

  “Could be.”

  “Shit, it’s just a rock bass.”

  “Again, eh?”

  “He should get himself a new roof, them shingles are start’n to curl.”

  “Yup.”

  It’s a job this fishing. They start work early, grinding back and forth before my place laying down a two-cycle smokescreen. By noon the morning shift is over, lures are retrieved and the boats race off for lunch. By one or so they’re back at work, coughing their way up and down the inlet, passing and shouting to each other in their battered metal skiffs or glitter bass boats.

  “Ya got any Charlie?”

  “Dick all.”

  “What lure ya using?”

  “Give up on ’em all. On bait. Gone to worms.”

  “Ya should be ashamed!”

  “Couldn’t give a flying fuck. I just want a pike for supper. Otherwise the old lady’ll give me shit for wasting time.”

  Their afternoon shift ends around five. Some do overtime after supper.

  I carry one of my kayaks down to the water. I usually use a wooden one I built myself but today I’m trying out a nifty little number with a clear polycarbonate window between my knees. I paddle across the inlet, cut around a point and slip into a large hidden bay full of lily pads and wild rice. The water is less than a foot deep.

  I feel a bump and the boat humps up slightly. As I look down a large pike squeezes under my boat, briefly rolling so that I can see its glassy eye staring up through the boat bottom. A couple of minutes later another passes under the clear window. As I slip over a small rocky section a crayfish scuttles away. A splash makes me look up in time to see a bear and
two cubs exit the water and retreat into the bush. Another big fish roils the water just ahead. It’s another workday in the woods — rush hour in the wetlands.

  And it’s a secure one because all those outdoors guys perched on pedestal seats in their hundred-horsepower bass boats with stereos, layer-cake tackle boxes and fish finders can’t get in here on account of the muddy shallows and the weeds. They don’t even know about it. While they execute their sub-chaser search patterns on the open waters the fish all hang out here with me, safe from sonar, noisy motors and fuel film on the water. I recall that people once fished from canoes — clean, quiet and fish-friendly. The problem with that is there’s just not enough to buy. Without noise, smoke and fossil fuels the economy suffers. You need 40 grand in gear to catch the free fish.

  That wasn’t the only time that the city defeated me. Another was the legacy of late 19th century deal-making. In return for a transcontinental railway the Macdonald government had handed vast portions of the downtown cores of various major Canadian cities — Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal — to the CPR. My years of photographing and writing for the land division of the hydra-headed Canadian Pacific eventually led to consultancy work on a proposal to convert portions of the Toronto railway lands into a public park. In return for commercial development permits the corporation proposed to create a 13-acre public park on some of the lands. The portion chosen included some switching structures, water and coaling towers and a roundhouse. Nobody told me what to do — just think of something interesting. It was an exciting assignment.

  One of my challenges was to repurpose the huge brick engine roundhouse near the base of the CN Tower. A bizarre aspect of this was that the railyard tracks had been torn up before the roundhouse was emptied. Several big locomotives were left stranded inside the boarded-up, trackless roundhouse.

  However, it was the big bays that remained empty that most got my attention. What could one do with these enormous pie-shaped spaces that were essentially one-car garages for locomotives? Predictably I thought like a photographer: I began to imagine one of those rooms as a giant camera — the Latin word for room, of course. With all their grime and boarded-up windows, each was a very dark room — a camera obscura. This was an ancient device, a room illuminated only by one tiny aperture, like a pinhole. Such an arrangement will produce on the facing wall a large, inverted, very soft and dim image of the view beyond the opening. It’s a well-known and simple optical effect that is both amazing and magical. Whenever I taught photography I always got my students to build one so that they would understand the basic principle behind the modern camera that simply replaced the viewing wall with film or, these days, a light sensitive array. The result always excited them.

  If you add a lens to a pinhole camera the image quality improves by many orders of magnitude. A lens designed for such a large camera was going to be quite a construction. I wanted to put it on the roof of the building in a rotating cupola-like housing with a right-angle mirror or prism. The lens would scan the city, the traffic on the Lakeshore and Gardiner Expressway and the ever-changing lake itself. The image would be projected on the floor of the building. It would be enormous. School kids could walk through it or put large sheets of paper on the floor and trace it. It would be amazing.

  My client thought so too, and so did Eastman Kodak in Rochester as well as the president of Kodak Canada. Rochester agreed to supply the engineering and design talent and their Canadian arm, the money. Initially luck was on my side — my timing was perfect. Eastman Kodak had just lost the bid to design the Hubble telescope to the company that eventually screwed it up. The damn thing got up into space and wouldn’t focus. It was like a bad pinhole. While the contractor and NASA were busy screaming at each other, a bunch of very experienced optical people in Rochester were making paper airplanes. They needed a new project and threw themselves into mine.

  Several engineers came up from head office, toured the site and got excited. The designs began to pour in. My favourite was like a fly’s eye. Its many clustered lenses would be so efficient at transmitting light that the whole contraption would even work at night. The circular image it would throw on the floor would exceed 10 metres in diameter. We even built a working model of it for presentations. It worked.

  But negotiations with the city didn’t go well. The landlord would give the developed park to the city for free in return for permission to develop the balance of the railway lands into a whole new “neighbourhood” of office towers and condominiums. Their proposal was predictable and so was the response. “Saint” Jack Layton, whose positions I would normally support, went after the scheme like a Rottweiler — it didn’t provide enough low-income housing, etc., etc. There were many other objections. People got worked up and eventually my sponsors threw up their hands and my rotating camera spun down the drain of dreams like so many others. It happened very quickly. The president of Kodak Canada was on his way down from Eglinton to University Avenue to sign the final agreement when the whole thing fell apart. I had to call his cell and tell him to turn around. The huge bay I was going to create magic in became, after many more years of negotiations, a discount furniture outlet. O Canada!

  ***

  As I sit under the pines on my little sun-powered, off-the-grid island, my laptop cooks away on radio telescope data from the University of California, Berkeley. I’ve been assigned my own little section of sky and when I’m not working on my computer it searches for unusual signals from the universe. The SETI project harnesses the computing power of over 9 million personal computers like mine to form a volunteer supercomputer that crunches data in search of any sign that in the enormity of space we are not alone.

  1989–90

  During the course of working with various Eastman Kodak engineers and managers on the roundhouse project I got to know one of the senior ones quite well. One day he invited me to his very beautiful early 19th century upstate New York country house for a drink. As we sipped beer on his big veranda he told me that Kodak had been working on a filmless still camera for a number of years. Their first patent on this technology dated back to the early 1970s but after well over a decade of fitful work they finally had a good working prototype. It had been difficult for a company devoted to producing consumables like film, chemistry and photo paper to commit to a product that required none of them. Would I be interested in testing this Nikon camera that Kodak had spent over $2.5 million modifying? I jumped at the chance.

  Some weeks later I was high in Kodak’s Rochester head office building getting a training course in how to use the camera and its user-hostile software. Like all engineers’ working prototypes it was a rather clumsy contraption. The interior pressure plate on the film plane had been replaced by a light sensitive digital array. A thick cable snaked from a blob of black adhesive on the camera body back and led to a long, thick metal box that housed a Winchester disc pack of hard drives on a carrying strap. After a few months working out in a gym a photographer could easily walk around with that monster box dangling from his shoulder.

  The engineers also had an infrared prototype based on the same technology. It was even clumsier. The whole apparatus was enclosed in housing filled with liquid nitrogen — the colder the camera was, the more sensitive the device would be to heat radiation. With the device tethered to a computer and monitor across the room I initially photographed cars far below in Kodak’s parking lot. The images were like x-rays, the engines and exhaust systems of recently driven cars glowed eerily through the autos’ sheet metal. Even spookier were pictures I made of intercity passenger jets approaching the Rochester airport. Fuel stored in their wings showed as a dark shadow and in most there wasn’t very much. Those cost-conscious flights operated with very little margin. Finally I focused on the trees in full fall splendor at the bottom of the Genesee River gorge right beside the building. Guffaws broke out by the monitors across the room. A hidden couple on lunch break were in full flagrante delicto in the bush
es by the river. Truly hot sex.

  Much later I smuggled that first camera into Canada and gradually got familiar with it in my studio. The afternoon that I’d made a date to demonstrate it to the Ryerson photo arts faculty my colleague Dougie appeared at my door. Before leaving I made a head and shoulders portrait of him. Later at Ryerson we hooked the system up to a large screen black-and-white monitor. The assembled faculty sat stiffly with their arms crossed before the monitor. They weren’t going to buy into any weird shit. My much enlarged, razor-sharp portrait of Dougie materialized on the screen. Silence. Then I began to zoom into the file. I got all the way into one of Dougie’s eyes before any pixels became visible. It was only then did former department chair Darryl Williams catch his breath.

  “Wow, that’s pretty good!”

  It was still only black and white but it was amazing.

  The opinion of the rest of the room?

  “It will never replace film.”

  As we all know Kodak repeatedly failed to truly commit to their amazing creation; that was left to the Japanese. However, on my training visit I had also been shown the very large new building in which they planned to manufacture the new technology. When I visited it the production area was confined to a tiny corner of the vast building. While Kodak has never really committed to designing and manufacturing digital cameras, they have remained a premier producer of the light-sensitive arrays used by other digital camera makers.