Final Fire

by Michael Mitchell

  While searching for toothpaste in the Rankin Inlet co-op store on the west coast of Hudson Bay I overhear a couple of Inuks in the next aisle exchanging local gossip. Although they constantly switch from English to Inuktitut to English I catch a reference to a drum dance scheduled for that evening. As this was the 1970s drum dancing, once banned by the churches, had not yet undergone the revival now current in Nunavut. It had been some years since a real dance had been documented so I was immediately alert for any hints of time and place. None. A couple of hours later when I mentioned this encounter to the southern administrators in the hamlet office I was assured that such dances never happened anymore. They advised sticking to my assignment list.

  It was late February and terrifyingly cold. The days’ highs were in the low minus 30s and the drops at night precipitous. If there was a dance where could it be? The only building large enough for a crowd was the wooden community hall near the centre of town. At six o’clock I hustled over to the dark building and let myself in.

  I found a corner spot in the big empty hall, laid out my gear on a wooden bench and began loading film magazines and wiring my strobe. An hour passed in the cold empty hall. Then the doors opened and several Inuks looked in. They spied me and retreated. A half hour later a couple more peeked in and left. Fifteen minutes later it happened again and then once more. Just before nine a half-dozen faces looked in, stared at me for a very long minute before disappearing. I was clearly an undesirable but I stayed. Another hour passed.

  A little after 10 the doors burst open and every Inuk in the settlement crowded in. Not one carried a drum. A couple of minutes later two more Inuks arrived carrying a 16mm movie projector. They set it up on a chair, threaded the film, turned out the lights and began screening an incredibly bad action film. This plot-free feature was basically just a series of California car chases, shootings, catastrophic fires and explosions. Each time something blew up the whole room would convulse with laughter — people would fall out of their chairs and roll around on the floor. Ninety minutes later when all California buildings had burned down, every car crashed, each yacht sunk and all citizens shot, the lights suddenly came on and the room emptied. Once again I was alone in a cold gray hall.

  A half hour later the doors opened, several Inuit peered in and retreated. In ten minutes a few more looked in briefly. Fifteen minutes later, the same.

  Sometime after midnight the doors flew back and the entire community poured back into the room. With every kabloona save me safely in bed the drum and beater appeared. A half-dozen elders arranged themselves in a row against the middle of one wall. The rest of the crowd formed a higgledy-piggledy circle of parents, grandparents, teens and kids. Gradually the room fell silent and a dancer entered the circle carrying the drum. The elders began chanting as the dancer wove and bobbed around the circle playing the drum. Some minutes later chanters and dancer finished and the drum was placed before the next performer. After four or five dancers the drum was set down before an old lady. As she danced slowly around the big circle several times, I finally got up my nerve and took a photograph by bouncing strobe light off the ceiling. When the flash died I realized that the drum was lying at my feet. This proved to be even more hilarious than the biggest explosions.

  It was payback time. I picked up the drum and the chanting began. It looked easy but it wasn’t. Those drums are basically a one-metre-diameter wooden hoop with a very short handle attached to the rim. They are totally unbalanced and very hard to control. After several painfully inept circuits of the room I began to get competent. As soon as this was apparent to the elders they doubled the speed of the chant. More hilarity. I wrestled the big drum into submission and caught up with the rhythm. They doubled it again. Now the whole room was giggling. I managed a couple more accelerating cycles before quitting, exhausted. The room fell silent. I rapidly scanned the crowd for a clue. Finally I put the drum down in front of the prettiest girl in the room. She jumped to her feet and ran crying out of the building. The travelling assignment photographer is very much in the world but always so alone.

  ***

  The inlet is mirror still. Every rock and tree are perfectly doubled, the ochre-rose sky is both up and down. No clouds, no waves, not a sound. I kayak out into this perfection trailing a small vee punctuated by paddle dip rings. Mid inlet I rest the paddle shaft across the cockpit combing and still. The boat glides to a stop and then slowly begins to drift broadside to the west. There is still a faint river-driven current here. Soon a small riffle flirts in from the big water and weathercocks my boat toward the setting sun. A southwestern puff gently compasses the boat around toward the just visible polestar. It’s a small moment of perfection in a broken world.

  1970

  Mexico was another way of being. My part of Mexico, my time in Mexico — Oaxaca and Chiapas, the late 1960s — was a life lived on another plane in a kind of timeless state where the deep past was always present and the present was an intense, vibrating and shimmering stasis that made any idea of a future impossible and irrelevant. I eventually stopped wearing a watch because there was no advance of time to record. I lived in an eternal present of a crashing sun, coruscating landscapes and tree-feathered mountaintops framing seemingly mystical horizons.

  Our work and residence permits required renewal every six months. We’d drive our little convoy of Jeeps northward up the high central plateau until we reached the Texas border where we’d cross at Nuevo Laredo or Brownsville into the U.S. to renew our supplies, eat American and then reenter the next day and bribe our way into new permits. Sometimes I’d be forced to get a haircut and a shave by the border guards but usually a little bribe, la mordida, would swing any door.

  On one of these trips we pulled into a bleak gas station and hotel somewhere south of Monterrey. Its dismal restaurant had a small newsstand where a few books cohabited with lurid magazines and week-old newspapers. A thick novel caught my eye. I picked it up, read the first page and instantly entered the world that I was returning to. Cien años de soledad seduced me in a way that no novel ever had before or since. However, reading it in Spanish was hard work.

  I’d never studied Spanish. Much of my first year in Mexico was devoted to unlearning French as I kept confusing the two Romance languages. I gradually acquired working Spanish by talking to local farmers — campesinos — that we’d hire to work on our archaeological excavations. These men were either Zapotecs or Mixtecs who spoke Spanish as a second language. We shared a basic vocabulary and functioned in a world of four tenses — simple past, future, conditional and, of course, present. I could certainly do my business fluently in the backcountry but whenever we went to Instituto meetings in Mexico City I could sense the non-Indigenous, educated Ladino Mexicans holding their noses when I spoke. I’m sure I sounded like Don Harron’s guy from Parry Sound, Charlie Farquharson.

  So when I returned to Canada in 1970 and learned that Harper & Row had just published an English translation of Cien años by Gregory Rabassa I immediately sought out a copy. As I was then a broke film and photography student I went to the main branch of the Toronto Public Library. They didn’t have García Márquez’s book and had never heard of it. I somehow persuaded a procurement librarian to order a copy for the system. I heard nothing for many, many weeks. Finally a call came: the book had arrived and was waiting for me at the New City Hall branch. I rode down on my bicycle and handed in the paper I’d been given months previously. The woman on the desk disappeared. I waited. Five minutes, 10 minutes, 15. Finally four desiccated women came out and stood staring at me. I began to shift awkwardly from foot to foot. Eventually one of them spoke. “So you’re the person who’s going to try and read this book.”

  2000

  We’ve been wandering through Seattle’s Pike Street Market for a couple of hours, picking up a few groceries and listening to the fishmongers out-shouting one another. I’m with two good-looking British-Jamaicans, the Murray sisters, Sheila and Claire, and the
y’re hungry. We head for a workingman’s diner on one side of the market. It has basic booths down one side and a long counter on the other. The only free seats are midway down the counter. I sit between the sisters and grab the menu. It’s huge. There are almost 300 numbered lunches listed on its greasy pages. After reading a half-dozen sheets of uninspiring choices somewhere way down in the high 200s I spy something called “The Boss’s Lunch.” When the counterman passes by I collar him and ask what it is. He stops, peers down at the menu and studies the item.

  “I’ve worked here for 20 years and no one has ever asked me that. I have no idea.”

  He hails a fellow server, a 30-year veteran. He doesn’t know either.

  Our neighbours at the counter begin to take an interest.

  “I’ll speak to the cook.”

  The line cook doesn’t know but the head cook has ducked out for a smoke and he’ll be back shortly.

  The head cook returns. He doesn’t know.

  Now there are four staff members staring at the offending item on the menu. All conversation in the restaurant has slowed down. A local matter is becoming of regional interest.

  I’m told that the owner of the diner has driven up to Oregon for a couple of days. A decision is made to try to track him down. In the meantime I’m offered a glass of water.

  The hubbub gradually returns. After some minutes I ask if I can exchange my glass of water for a beer.

  It arrives with the message that they think they’ve found out what town the owner is visiting out of state. They hope to find a phone number.

  Meanwhile Claire and Sheila are enjoying a nice lunch. I have nothing to eat but I can’t back down now. The staff and I are committed. I order a second beer.

  Forty minutes later the waiter informs me that they’ve reached the boss and my dish is being prepared and will arrive shortly. The room once again goes quiet.

  Then the counter man, the line cook and the head cook emerge through the swinging doors of the kitchen. The cook passes my plate to the waiter who marches down the aisle behind the counter and puts it in front of me. The plate is white, the two slices of naked Wonder Bread are white. Between them lie two pickles. No butter or mayonnaise, just two acrid green, intact gherkins sleeping between two sheets of sterile soda bread. This is The Boss’s Lunch.

  2014

  Sheila and I are on a flight from London to Istanbul. Behind us sits a family, Turkish father, English mom, with their bright-eyed four-year-old boy. It must be his first flight — he can’t stop talking. Looking at Sheila’s head of tightly curly Jamaican hair he asks her why it’s white.

  “’Cause I’m old,” she says.

  We’re on this trip as part of her three-continent, three-month long, 60th birthday party.

  “But you can still walk!” the boy declares. “Where are your sticks? You’re not old.”

  His parents laugh with obvious pleasure. They’re enjoying parenthood.

  Sheila beams.

  The plane begins its descent. It lands with a bump and lurch at Istanbul’s Atatürk airport. The boy looks out the window. “Look mummy, we’re finally back to the airport again.”

  He’s right: it’s our one universal architecture.

  2014

  I was lugging my camera bag past Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace when I announced my newest career change. I had just decided to become a Grand Vizier.

  “What?” Sheila scoffed.

  It seemed a reasonable move to me. I didn’t have some loud American ambition to be a Sultan with a harem, eunuchs, a three-courtyard palace and pleasure garden. I just wanted to be the éminence grise in second place — sort of Canadian, I thought.

  Her face was hostile. “Remember your last ambition at which you failed utterly?”

  I’d forgotten.

  “You wanted to be a bra-fitter but you never got farther than occasionally groping me and you certainly never got the clientele with real power and influence. Were you ever on Hillary Clinton’s speed-dial, or Oprah’s, or Sarah Palin’s? Eh? Eh?”

  Sheila and I are struggling through crowds in the Blue Mosque. We keep losing each other. Turning to find her I accidentally bump into a woman in the full black niqab. This dress is always very freighted for Westerners. Bad guys cover their faces — robbers, executioners, evil-doers. Outlaw bikers and riot cops wear black. And Nazis — storm troopers.

  I’m suddenly looking into two dark, liquid eyes. She speaks softly.

  “Look at my husband over there!”

  An arm emerges from her dark presence and points to a guy in bleached jeans and a glitter T-shirt.

  “He tells me I’m beautiful but all he does every day is make selfies, only himself in these famous places!”

  She giggles and I’m suddenly confronted with an individual, a funny woman, rather than the ultimate other. As we laugh together her husband comes over. When I tell him I’m a photographer he shows me the pictures on his phone — Istanbul’s famous cisterns, the Grand Bazaar, the Galata Tower, Hagia Sophia and more mosques. She’s right. He’s in them all — alone.

  ***

  After a late spring and a cool summer it’s suddenly September. Flower stalks turn brittle, the grasses have browned and died: the winter march to monochrome has begun. While sitting on the steps cupping a morning coffee mug I suddenly sense a flash of fire. It flutters through the stiff brush of summer’s death — the last monarch butterfly.

  1998

  Some Toronto Februarys give one a break. This year the last week of the month has been exceptionally warm. Eavestroughs drip, bare branches glisten and mud patches have appeared in the garden. I suddenly get sea restless and phone my friend Epp to convince him to come kayaking with me in Lake Ontario. He shocks me by agreeing.

  We set off early on the last Sunday of the month with two small boats on the roof of my van. The sky is blue, the sun shines, the thermometer flirts with the plus zone. The plan is to paddle along beneath the Scarborough bluffs toward the Pickering nuclear power plant.

  The Scarborough bluffs are a shoreline remnant of the ancient glacial Lake Iroquois that formed after the last ice age. Where they now form part of the shoreline of present Lake Ontario they tower as much as 300 feet above the waters and run from the eastern end of downtown Toronto for almost 10 miles. They may look like the White Cliffs of Dover but instead of being chalky rock they are composed of extremely unstable alluvial deposits of silt, sand and clay. It’s a dynamic landform that is totally dependent on lake water erosion of its base to remain vertical. Without wave action gnawing the bottom, it would gradually become just a long muddy slope.

  I have an intimate familiarity with the dramatics of the Bluffs. In the mid-1970s I moved into a small, winterized cottage on Meadowcliffe Drive in Scarborough. This street of perhaps a dozen houses located on a benchland halfway down the Bluffs was the pioneering creation of painter Doris McCarthy who built her house and studio, Fool’s Paradise, there after buying land in 1939.

  I knew Doris well because my aunt, painter Barbara Greene, taught with Doris at Central Technical’s art school for many years. Barbara and Doris went on several Canadian Arctic painting trips together. My aunt and Doris were probably in one of those relationships that women of their generation did not talk about. Rather than openly sharing a house with Doris my aunt rented a cottage down the street for a number of years. There were plenty of bushes in between. This was the place I took over in the mid-’70s when Barbara, after some sort of falling out with Doris, decided to build a house of her own outside of Perth.

  When I moved onto Meadowcliffe the cottage was about 60 feet from the precipitous 200-foot-drop down to the lake. During early spring thaws I’d lie in bed listening to large chunks of the property disappear over the cliff. One evening when I was standing by the living room picture window a whole row of trees at the edge of the lawn suddenly vanished into Lake Ontario’s great black
hole. On summer nights my next door neighbour would rev up junker cars on his back lawn and let them drive themselves over the brink. These victims of his breakwater building attempts would disappear under the sand and silt in a few days. A few years after actor Billy Van took back the property the little house ended up cantilevered over the cliff edge. This was truly a dynamic landscape.

  So my friend Epp and I launched our boats at Bluffer’s Park and began to paddle eastward. This may seem like a dumb thing to do in February but I was prepared. Some of my paddling friends call me Belt-and-Suspenders Mitchell because, while I’ll do almost anything, like a true photographer, I always have backup. In this instance I had one of the first small cell phones in a waterproof bag along with one of the very earliest portable track-plotting GPS units. I was a high tech Inuk.

  The paddle eastward was uneventful but beautiful. The lake slowly undulated beneath the boats, the cliffs towered authoritatively above us and the sun warmed us despite the freezing waters. Somewhere around Port Union we turned around and headed back in order to reach our put-in while the light was still good. We were about 500 feet offshore when Epp spotted a trio of guys horsing around on trail bikes a couple of hundred feet above us. Suddenly one of them disappeared over the cliff edge into a gully. His buddies took off.

  When we got no response to our shouts we paddled to the narrow beach at the gully exit and beached our boats. It was a hard climb up the muddy slope to the hanging gully bottom about 75 feet above the beach — we were still wearing our heavy cockpit skirts and lifejackets. We waded upstream in the gully creek until we found the biker lying on his back on a pile of rocks midstream. He was conscious but in obvious pain.