Tag

fernie

Apr 15 2011
Love0

March 11. 2011

By Uncategorized

Monday, April 11

Today is the first day beyond winter.

I wake in the half-light of dawn to rain pelting my windows. Clouds cut the mountains half way to the ridges and snow draws a hard line between the clouds and the valley floor. Pulling the pillows up, I lean against them at the head of the bed, watching the weather, I think,

I am done with skiing. Done for the year.

The ski area closed yesterday. Well, not really. The mountain re-opens Wednesday for staff. As always, I plan on skiing staff day. The Elk runs early and then the Bear runs from 11 to 3:30. I’ll swing up once the snow softens and make a few token runs. After, the area hosts a dinner and such at the Griz. That’s far more appealing than the skiing.

Then there’s the RCR Fernie “Bonus Weekend” April 16 and 17th. The old side opens for one last shot at the year. Trooper will play a fee concert in the plaza at the base of the mountain. It’s more a gathering than a weekend of skiing. Take a couple runs. Sit in the sun. Drink a beer and enjoy the music, the day with friends. There will be skiing, but skiing will not be the point of going up.

This year closes in an unusual fashion. No morning pools of half frozen slush at the bottom of the mountain. Just snow. Fourteen and a half feet of compacted base. We close with perhaps twice the deepest base of anytime in last two years. We’re skiing an exceptional combination of mid-winter conditions and spring corn.

Every night the mountain freezes hard. The lows are 7 or 8 C below each night. Starting each morning on east facing slopes that collect the first sun so soften. As the sun warms the snow, I ski aspects and by noon move to the northern facing slopes, slopes the sun never touches and remain soft and unaffected for weeks after a storm.

And then I head down. Once the snow softens beyond an inch or two of corn, I bail.

Mid-day today, the weather turns nasty. A harsh wind sweeps into the valley. Gropple, mixed with real hail, occasionally turning to snow rushes across the streets and hides the mountains completely. Walking down to Mug Shots, the fresh snow drives into my cheeks with needle like intensity.

Yes, I am done with skiing for the year.

Late in the day, as the sun drops toward the ridges on the western edge of the valley, the wind dies, clouds break and the skies clear, leaving only remnants of weather stuck on the sharp peaks. The reflection of the setting sun on the cloud bottoms creates a gold glow the first alpen glow of the season. The peaks are lit and then dark. And cold again.

In the sunset, I start my spring summer habit of evening walks. Ambles, I walk to the river looking for ducks. None. No geese either. And walk back home composing this little epistle.

And I am really done with skiing this year. It’s all good. I’m balanced on my skis. Balanced on my feet. Climbing beckons. It’s time to head into another venue.

Jan 13 2011
Love0

A Place for Writing

By Uncategorized

The Guardian book section publishes a series on “writers’ rooms” augmented by the occasional illustrator and composer tossed in for good measure.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/writersrooms

The series is as informative in detailing the creative manners of the individuals profiled as is about the creative spaces. Creatives tend to function best in certain defined environments—a personal combination of time and space. We nurture our space in the same way we nurture our work.

After reading these personal accounts of rooms, I sit here looking at my writing space. Actually, this is one of two spaces. This first, the primary space, is upstairs in my house. In front of a massive window, I placed an old kitchen table with a plain plank fir top. The window runs across the wall and joins a large single pane French door on the right opening to a small balcony. My desk holds several stacks of seemingly unsorted papers, little talismans that to the casual observer would appear to be more junk than holding any significant meaning. A couple of journals. Actually in counting right now, there are five journals and three small notebooks sitting on the table. A ten-inch tall verdigris cast bronze Thai Buddha sits on the right hand corner. On the left corner sit two used Freshies paper coffee cups waiting to be re-used as road cups. A save-the-date card with two happy faces for a wedding this coming summer. A CD of photos recording the moving of the old press into a final work place. A stapler. A roll of scotch tape. A phone number is taped to the window mullion. Next to the window on the wall, two quotes are taped.

The first is Gary Snyder

“poetry. . .the skilled and inspired use of the voice and language to embody rare and powerful states of mind that are in immediate origin personal to the singer, but at deep levels common to all who listen.”

The second reads, “Poets are the soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.” Eli Khamarov.

The window creates my space in actuality. Sitting at this table, I watch from Mt. Hosmer to the ski hill. The sweep lies, falls across my desk—the Sisters, Mt. Fernie, the Three Bears up in Island Lake, and finally FAR.

On a day like this, I only see the lower forested slopes broken by avalanche chutes and little else. The hill erased by a welcome combination of heavy snow and low clouds. Most of my life, I’ve spent a substantial portion of each day outside. This window brings the outside in while allowing me to write.

The bulk of my work occurs here.

Later today I will ski. I will join the view.

My second place serves as a “change the view” more for polishing pieces. In the final stages of a longer piece, I drag my laptop down to the living room. Curling up on one of the two couches in front of the fireplace, I physically and mentally leave my other projects upstairs and work on the final draft of the piece at hand.

Often at the very end of my editing, I will take a printed draft and head downtown for a cup of coffee. Coffee in front of me and pencil in hand, I run through the piece one final time.

This introspective look at personal space brought me to think of our public spaces and how we define our lives by both the private spaces and the public spaces we inhabit.

In truth, the public spaces we choose define our community. Our community in who we casually meet. With whom we converse. And whom we carry in our lives outside of the home.

Take a few.

FAR is open and with it, the Griz Bar. The Griz defines the classic spirit of skiing with a striking lack of modernity while infusing everyone who walks in the door with an infectious love of the outdoors, of skiing/boarding. Walk in after two or three this afternoon and the Griz will be filling with tired, invigorated skiers. We’ve had days of snow and most of the mountain has been closed as patrol tried to stabilize the never-ending accumulations. Today ropes will be dropping and the Griz will echo with tales of first and second and third tracks down favorite pitches. Of falls and of face shots. Of finding 20 turns of unbroken snow just beyond One Two Three in the trees. Beer and nachos will flow, for that is the character of the Griz. Skiing. Beer. Nachos. All embellished by classic Lange chick posters, skis we can no longer imagine turning and a long wooden slab of a table occasionally supporting a passing naked body.

There are other bars. The Corner Pocket. The Pub. Bull Dogs. The Fernie. The Central. The Brickhouse. The Picnic.

In the end, the bar we seek becomes the “Cheers” of choice. The social grouping creating the most comfortable space. Where Norm sits at the end of the bar answering fully the niggling questions in the back of our head.

Look at the day. The time between breakfast and that end-of-the-day-skiing beer. Look at the coffee shops in town. For a little burg, we offer a plethora of choices. From Timmy’s, A&W, MacDonald’s for the chains, to the homegrown local coffee houses lying scattered like jacks across downtown. There’s Cincott Farms on the highway. A thriving branch of the Hosmer organic farm. Both a coffee shop and a fine restaurant, they will expand over the next few months. In the old downtown, there is Freshies, Mugshots, Sweet Surrender, the Tea House, Big Bang Bagels and another to-be-named rumored chocolate-coffee roaster-coffee shop opening across from the Livery building.

All seem to do well filling a social niche of their own making. There are days I want to read a paper and I head to Freshies. Other days, I want to be left alone and drop into the Tea House curling into one of the overstuffed chairs in the window by the fireplace. Other days, I wander over to Big Bang Bagels or Mugshots for a late lunch.

A flavor of the day. The taste of community.

We choose. Sometimes unconsciously. Sometimes consciously. We choose our community one cup of coffee, one cup of tea, one pint of beer, one glass of wine at a time.

Jan 04 2011
Love0

January 4, 2011. The Morning.

By Uncategorized

I woke this morning early, before light. The streetlight down the block silhouetted my cat sitting on the windowsill. Muted, the image appeared indistinct on the wall. I turn over and sit up. Snow. Fine cold snow drops straight down against the streetlight.

Since moving to Fernie I marvel at the lack of wind accompanying our snows. In Colorado, snow arrives with wind. Snow curls around corners and sifts into every nook and cranny. Drifts build waist high with every chance. Here, snow stacks itself high on every possible horizontal surface. Snow falls at rest

As the sun rises with a diffused light, I watch the day and the block become distinct.

Across the street stands an old branching mountain ash. The snow now sits three or four inches deep on the branches. The last remaining bunches of berries only show hints of the red under piles of flakes. To the left, one house down, the curves of a faded mid-80’s GMC pick-up mimics the berries on a far larger scale. Curves hidden, yet red still pokes from under the new white. The phone line across the street bears a stretched negative image of the line below. Four inches of snows sits stacked on the line.

Hard black against the snow, a raven flies up my street from the south. Immediately in front of my window he abruptly turns left, away, and flies to the next block over. He then turns right, back north and continues. I watch. One block up, he makes the same jog left one block, then right, continuing north. The raven becomes softer, paler moving up the grid of streets.

A flock of small birds fly by. Maybe 50, maybe 75. They fly in a moving ball. Black flittering specks loosely defining a sphere moving through a falling morning snow. They too fly north. Ignoring the grid of development, they angle across the blocks. Free. Swirling, like smoke in flight.

Now a couple hours after starting to write, the snow builds too high to hold to the phone wire. Sections have fallen off, the white strand broken above the wire.

I think I’ll go skiing

k

May 30 2010
Love0

The Barbarians at the Gate

By Uncategorized

“Often overlooked is that though the barbarians of ancient times were not cultivated, in almost every case they had fastened upon one or more technical innovations that enabled them to defeat the superior civilizations they then were able to sack. The Huns and the Scythians had revolutionary tactics, the Parthians their fleeting shots, the Mongols their special bows and their techniques of mobility. Even Hannibal, not quite a barbarian expect perhaps in the Roman view, and ultimately unsuccessful, had his elephants.”

Mark Helprin, Digital Barbarism, A Writer’s Manifesto (Harper, 2009)

A “red plate” prejudice runs rampant around in Fernie. A feeling that the influx of Albertans damages our core values and the lifestyle of Fernie. The Albertans are thought of as the barbarians at the gate. An invasion we must defend against at all costs.

Let’s look at that for a minute. Or rather, let’s take a deeper look at Fernie and the effect of an influx of new blood on the existing civil and social structure.

Take the city council. The make up is divided equally between long-term residents and newbie’s—three and three–with the mayor, Cindy, adding one more vote on the long-term side. The previous six years, the make of the council was similar except the previous mayor, Randal, fell on the newbie side.

Look at new businesses we already take for granted. Start with Big Bang Bagels. Two years ago, Carolyn operated in the morning corners of Just Pizza. Moving into the former Cappuccino Corner on Victoria in the heart of the historic downtown Big Bang ramps into the stratosphere. In nine short months, Big Bang developed a huge following, gathered the three top business awards at the Chamber of Commerce annual dinner and expanded successfully to the mountain. Shortly after the new store opened, the line-ups stretched out the door on Saturdays and Sundays. In the waiting hordes, locals stood only a sprinkling with the vast bulk of customers being visiting red platers. On the hill, the customer base developed into the season pass crowd. A mix of mountain employees, local families, Non-Stoppers and Calgary folks, all skiing with a pass. A mix that values and savors fresh locally baked bagels with flavorful oddball sandwich options.

Look at the current Fernie trend of remodeling rather than building from scratch. It’s a matter of economics—not much is being built to sell and there is added value created in upgrading an existing property. When you look at the families remodeling homes, a large percentage are red platers. Folks from Calgary who appreciate Fernie and decided to make a commitment to live and play here.

When you look at the ‘play’ in Fernie, the influx becomes really interesting. A recent study shows the average second homeowner spends in excess of 60 days in Fernie over the course of a year. That’s just under a fifth of the year. And that’s the average—there are some that spend a week and some that spend months. A substantial percentage of these homeowners plan on moving to Fernie in the future.

People complain that houses cost too much, but look at what we get. Incredible views. A trail system with 10’s of kilometers of trails spreading out from town, most of the close-in trails maintained with no user fee by the city. Unparalleled fishing lies literally at our doorstep. An abiding awareness of the tenuous place we hold in the valley and the needs of the wildlife we might displace leads to programs like Bear Aware dramatically reducing contact between residents and bears and thus almost completely eliminating of the need to kill “problem bears”. (Many would say it was the people that are the problem, not the bears. There are arguments for both sides. Shooting “problem people” is a practice we have moved beyond in modern society.) For the most part, the non-resident second homeowner shares the same values as those that live here. That’s why they chose Fernie to repeatedly visit, to buy into and to bring their friends.

In the early days of snowboarding, only a few resorts allowed boards on the lifts. Boarders were looked at as crass, impolite, and even dangerous on the ski hill. One of the first areas welcoming boards was Mount Baker, just over the US border in Washington State. When you talk to Duncan Howat, the long time manager of Mount Baker about those early days and how they dealt with boarders, he explains it was a matter of culture. Most skiers come to the sport from a skiing family or with skiing friends. Most early boarders came to the sport out of skateboarding, the park rat culture. The two couldn’t be more different. One is understated. The other is overstated.

Duncan recognized this anomaly and created same awareness in his employees. The ski area initiated an employee program to educate the newbie boarders to the ethos and ethics in the culture of skiing. If an employee saw someone doing something contrary to the established way—say jumping off a blind lip—they explained to the boarder the problem and rather than just say “No”, offer an alternative site or place that was safe. The ski area effort was not about stopping behavior, rather the effort channeled the behavior into accepted norms.

On a Friday night late this winter, a friend was driving down from Calgary for a weekend in Fernie. Slowing to 70 in a whiteout driving the winding section of road in Crowsnest Pass, she ambled along in the long line of slow moving cars. Looking behind, she saw a car pull out and start to pass the seemingly endless line of red plate cars aimed at Fernie. There was a double yellow line. Dark. Blowing snow. Minimal visibility. As the Yukon XL passed, she recognized the license plate. The red Alberta plate belonged to her ex-husband. And, at that same moment, she realized her two kids were in the car with him. She was fine ambling along knowing she had Fernie at the end of the line. Who knows what he was thinking, taking that risk with their two kids in the car and a potential nightmare ahead.

These two stories illustrate the answer to the barbarians at tout gate. They have no greater technology. They have no greater society than ours. Rather, what they seek is our society. They seek to share in our life. A life with a different pace, a settled and balanced manner of walking through the day.

What remains is a matter of education. We must educate and eliminate the habits that run counter to our ways. We stop for pedestrians wanting to cross the street—where ever. We don’t pass on blind corners. We take the time to greet and talk to people on the street. It may take half an hour to get to the bank and back, but that’s ok. And we’re willing to wait a little longer for something special, like a Banger on Saturday morning.

So let’s open the gate, but extract a toll for all who desire passage. Let’s require a change of habit from the barbarians. An acceptance of the ethos and ethic of a Fernie life.

They’ll never know what hit them.

May 08 2010
Love0

On Voice

By Uncategorized

In the most recent CV2 (Contemporary Verse 2) looks “At the Root of Voice”. Clarice Foster in her Editorial Notes says voice “like a set of finger prints, is a one-of-a-kind thing.”

This is my take on voice from a bit ago.

The voices we hear.

Driving across the rolling dry wheat plains of eastern Washington an hour after sunset, I found KEWU, “The voice of jazz in the inland Northwest. All jazz all the time.” The public radio station broadcasting from of Eastern Washington University in Cheney. The music moved from a take off on Giant Steps, lifting and falling in separated thirds with sax and trumpet to a couple of Cubano pieces then into a techno jazz with a style similar to St. Germaine and then back again to the more traditional smoky basement bar sax jazz. And on. And on. Segue after segue entering, passing through divergent forms. Each piece strung, drawn from the last, bound together with thought and care. Blended. One into the next. At the hour break, a hesitant woman spoke. Stumbling on some titles, some musicians, she corrected herself and repeated those she mispronounced. She spoke carefully. Softly. Self-correcting as needed. Making no apologies and returning the station to the music, to the jazz.

Again, the seamless string of tunes moved, sliding between jazz genres effortlessly. Dancing on the sawdust floor. Taking me back into smoky basement bars of my youth. Three, maybe four guys crowded onto a corner raised platform. The Chance R with peanut shells on the floor. Swept once a week. Sunday. Fine music. Late nights.
Brick walls. And long battered bar tops.

Her voice? The music.

Driving on, somehow the station remained clear. I remembered late nights driving between races. Days spent on the hill. Afternoons writing. Sending off the dashed stories to papers and wire services. Beating the roll of deadlines, east to west. Posting the stories one after another, then packing up and driving to the next venue. Nights, long nights on the road listening to whatever I could pull in. Country. Rock. Rarely jazz. Always the stations fading in and out as the two lane blacktop, delineated by single stripes, snow banks on either edge and a double yellow down the middle, wove between mountains, rising, twisting up passes and dropping down into valleys.

I remembered one very late night weaving up to Whistler, actually, a very early morning. The Vancouver CBC station introduced a CD recently re-released on Blue Note. Originally recorded in the early sixties at Ferengetti’s San Francisco City Lights Bookstore, Jack Kerouac read and improvised with Dexter Gordon, John Coltrane, maybe Shelley Mann on the drums and a couple of others. It rocked to the curves of the road as l powered up the valley. A few miles from Squamish, as I accelerated out of a turn, CBC stopped like turned off by a switch. Static and nothing more. At the next turnaround, I reversed direction and drove back until I regained the reception. Parking, I listened for half an hour, maybe more, until the recording finished. Turning around, I continued to Whistler.

There was a voice in that music, that spoken word. There was the Beat, the capital “B” beat speaking. This is who we are. We are the sax. We are the beat. We are the trumpet. We are the word. We are. Now. We.

As I drove I thought of the different voices we bring to a table. A community is a collection of voices, each with room to be heard. In Fernie, we are fortunate to be small enough to hear to the voices. To have time to listen to the voices. And to take time to listen to the voices.

In Fernie, we have Mary’s TV show. A window to the community and the events surrounding our valley. We have the occasional Spoken Word at Freshies. We have Pierre’s newly launched fernitv.com with a range of channels and options. We meet at Freshies, at Mug Shots, Big Bang Bagels and the Tea House taking time to sit and talk. To exchange ideas and hassle with differing opinions.

In Fernie there exists a tolerance, a patience, in listening to others. A respect that others deserve to be heard no matter their station and position in town. An artist, a writer, a banker, a carpenter, a checker from Overweightea’s all carry the same value, same impact in the public forum we create for discussion.

Celebrate the voices we have. Respect the voices and listen. For each holds value in the direction we are moving.

Aug 02 2009
Love0

Red Berry Review

By Uncategorized

In any partnership, or endeavor involving more that one person, there are necessary compromises. In creative projects, these become even more frequent and critical. As an individual, you must step back, look at the project as a whole and drop your pre-conceived notion of perfection for the good of the project and let the medium/notion move forward as a group effort.

I am involved with starting a literary press, Red Berry Press. www.redberrypress.ca The press comprises of two distinct components. The first surrounds the acquisition of the letterpress setup originally bought by the Prince Rupert Times in 1901. A 10 by 15 Chandler & Price with 54 fonts of various sizes and styles. With this we plan to hold workshops (the first a couple weeks ago as part of the 2009 Fernie Writers Conference) and print short-run chapbooks.

The second part is the Red Berry Review, an offset printed literary journal appearing twice a year–spring and fall. The underlying idea of the Review is a journal of contemporary western Canadian literature with occasional pieces from the Northwest US. Literature where the land walks as one of the characters. The land becomes a base line in the piece. A beat heard if you listen closely or are intimately aligned to the sound of the base.

Three of us are involved with the Red Berry project. Two avowed writers (myself and Nic) and one avowed non-writer (Randal) with a strong academic background. When it came time to write the introduction, they asked me to write a representative piece.

The first draft was too personal. Kicked back. Fine. I wrote a second piece, which I disliked, but was not personal and talked about (my perception of) how the project moved from talk over beers, wine, and a bit of scotch, to fruition. How after months of saying we ought to do it, the academic developed a timeline to follow bringing about the publication of the first issue. He didn’t quite see it in the same light, so we dropped that piece.

His turn. Randal wrote an intro that was pure academic. No go. Nixed by Nic and I.

At this point, Nic stepped in and produced the perfect piece, a compromise, a compilation of our thoughts.

We missed the final deadline by a couple of months, but it got done. The first issue is out and spectacular.

The look and feel of the Review was inspired by Clemens Stack’s small chapbook Traveling Incognito designed and printed by Paul Hunter at Wood Works Press in Seattle . There is a hand and texture to Paul’s work that is remarkable. While the Review is printed offset, with the help of Vanessa Croome at Claris Media the feel of a letterpress was captured and preserved in the first Red Berry Review. A striking illustration by Nichole Yanota of Crowsnest Pass helped immensely in setting an illustrative tone.

That said, I still like my first attempt at the intro. The words may not fit as an intro to the Red Berry Review, but they speak to what I believe about writing today in the west.

The other issue that needed to be resolved was an introductory quote. We bounced around looking for a selection. An opening speaking of land and people on the land.

Following are the three quotes I pulled.

(quote)

We live where we live for landscape and seasons, for the place of it, but also for the time of it, daily and historical time.

Here at Eagle Pond, Donald Hall (1990)

“He had been eating the whole world for the seventy years of his life; and for the last twenty, he had been trying to eat the valley. It was where he, Old Dudley, sent his young men to look for the oil he told them he was sure was there, but which they had never found.”

In these opening lines of Where the Sea Used to Be (1998) by Rick Bass speaks to the European attitude toward the west. An inexhaustible land to consume. For tens of thousands of years the First People lived off the same land giving as they took. With the European arrival, the mantra became take and send off to be consumed. Take more. Consume more. In the last few years, we realized no longer can we take without giving back. The exception would be the taking of words the return of language to the land.

737

while in Vancouver another plane lands
without me, past the scars of the Rockies
and crooked shadow of blue
herons like lost fishermen
stabbing the shallows where they last saw the sun.

one crow sorrow (2008)
Lisa Martin-DeMoor

My first shot at the intro is posted separately as Writing and the West.

Jul 04 2009
Love0

Saving Place

By Poetry, Uncategorized

Modern city building and planning produces stark anonymity. Dropped blind into any major mall in North America, you’d be hard pressed to determine where you landed once the blindfold was pulled off. The Gap, Smith and Hawkins, the multi-plex playing the top 6 movies of the week, the food court with MacDonald’s, Arby’s, Taco Bell, Orange Julius and whatever, all blend to create a non-singular place. A location without place.

Again this occurred to me as I read a review of a re-published work by Marc Auge, Non-Places: An Introduction to Super-modernity. While Auge focuses on airports, what he says becomes universal.
http://www.worldhum.com/features/travel-books/non-places-and-the-end-of-travel.-20090211

At the same time, people travel seeking ‘new’ experiences shirk from risk. The “all-inclusive” beach resort in Mexico or Cuba provides no local culture beyond the daily commuting staff and a slightly different view, one resort to another. The same resort could be on any number of white sand beaches in any tropical or semi-tropical land—Florida to Brazil.

The Hilton in Singapore clones the Hilton in San Francisco, clones Rio.

There are options. Boutique hotels are sprouting up in the major US cities. Twenty to fifty rooms and a distinctive character derived from the neighborhood or the owner or the region. Often with an international flavor, one of my favorites in Seattle hosts a tremendous sushi restaurant.

The reason I am musing in this manner is a recently arrived white envelope addressed in thick black magic marker mailed form the British Isles. Now sitting on my desk next to my computer, the envelope is visible proof snail mail still operates. The envelope contained three copies of Nigh-No- Place by Jen Hadfield. Jen recently won the T.S. Elliot Prize for Poetry. http://rogueseeds.blogspot.com/ This slim book of poetry written partially while traveling in Canada and partially from her home on the Shetland Islands reeks of place. You can smell the rotten kelp on the beach in her words and feel the constant mist, rain, turning into a howling North Atlantic storm coming ashore on these little rock islands with stone houses

Of Canada she writes in Narnia No More

Alberta’s a miserable monochrome—
a bootcamp of little brown birds,
no moose,
the grey, grey grass of home.

Place. Writing is all about place. The emotional place we occupy in a landscape.

Think of our addresses, now all numeric and flat. 1381 2nd Ave, Fernie BC V0B 1M0

And I look at the envelope the books came in with an address that reads like the land itself.

The name of her house, (the name, yes, the name). Where the house lies—Bridge End. The island’s name, then Shetland, with a last followed by a 6 figure postal code, which seems completely extraneous.

Her address is a place. A home, named. A land feature. An island. A region.

All of us should be so lucky to settle in a place that remains alive in language as well as in our daily life.

May 28 2009
Love0

From mid-May

By Uncategorized

So yesterday it’s full-on nasty November transition fall to winter weather, cold half snow, half rain, all blowing sideways. Today it’s “Where the hell are my shorts weather”.

What’s the deal?

It’s spring. Damn spring.

Fall and spring are the tease seasons. One foot in the old and one foot in the new. Like straddling two canoes, we have to be ready to change our balance. One day it might be warm (today and purportedly the next few) and the next it might be snowing.

Do you have skins?

Skinning up the mountain on a bright spring corn snow day is an the Fernie spring experience. You and a few friends. Sitting at Lost Boys with no lift running. The silence. A few camp robbers and the pop of the cork from the wine bottle. On the deck of Lost Boys with a picnic of a random nature. A picnic that includes wine, hot chili, baguettes, cheese and more wine all by chance. And it works. It fits. Perfectly.

It’s all good

All spring

All good.

May 09 2009
Love0

The Timber of Words

By Uncategorized

The Timber of Words.

Western writing carries a notion of place. Often this sense of place becomes an essential character in the work.

In recognition of this sense of place, the Palouse-Clearwater Environmental Institute is building an artist/writers workshop on their property just outside of Moscow Idaho. In the spirit of Michael Pollen’s A Room of My Own, this will be a room for creating artistic work. The timber frame building gathered materials from a wide range of fallen trees around Moscow and was formed by Nora Creek Timber Framers. The raising of the building will be on Saturday May 9. 2009. This will be a fun day mixing the intellectual with the constructive trades. Toward the end of the day, John Keeble will join the group for a short reading from his newly re-released Yellowfish. One of the founding instructors at the Fernie Writers Conference, John will add his distinct voice to place the frame.

For those not familiar with Moscow Idaho, the city is a little over three hours down the panhandle of Idaho, about 80 miles south of Coeur d’ Alene. The home of University of Idaho, it’s a vibrant, artistically eclectic town.

The two links for the event are

www.pcei.org
http://pceiwriterstudio.blogspot.com

In keeping with the Fernie Writers Conference intent to foster the cross-border creative community, I thought this raising might be on interest to those who have expressed an interest in the Conference.

Mar 16 2009
Love0

Year to Year

By Uncategorized

Year to Year

A couple weeks ago the State of California informed farmers the delivery of irrigation water will cease for three weeks in March. Reservoirs are low from the last two months of literally no rain. Drought grips the state again. Much of California’s water comes from snowmelt. Rain the valleys and snow in the mountains over the winter. Neither occurred to any real extent so fat this year.

In the mountains, this drought leaves hard snow. Almost racer chaser snow. Long looping high speed GS to Super G turns become the norm. The “Legendary Powder” of Fernie takes on the mythic characteristics of King Arthur’s Court. Legendary in precisely the same manner.

Last winter was average in total, but instead of scattered big dumps, we received a steady diet of 10 and 20 cm daily deposits. My routine last February–first light I’d open my curtains and look out at my car parked at the curb. If the Thule kayak racks and their blue pads were covered, I was skiing. I’d bang away on the little white box to finish the imminent deadlines and everything else could wait until later in the day. There were a handful of days over the month of February and the first couple of weeks of March that I didn’t hit the hill early. They were a mix of too imminent a deadline and/or having to demonstrate I really cared enough about a project to show up for a 10 or an 11 o’clock meeting.

It was a great winter.

This winter runs as a contrast to the last. From the end of December to the beginning of March we received little snow. A few skiffs ran through town. The most 10cm over night. In Fernie, that’s a dusting.

Now the pattern has changed again. The clouds hide the peaks and snow falls in quarter sized flakes. The snow of right at 0. It slants across the window backlit by the streetlight.

No matter how deep the racks are buried, tomorrow will not be a morning on the hill. I’ll sit writing, watching the snow and wondering how it is, knowing the next day, Tuesday, I’ll be up when I want.