Beyond road’s end

Preparations are taking shape for my upcoming trip to Québec’s Basse-Côte-Nord (Lower North Shore), a remote section of coast adjoining Labrador. As part of an assignment for Canadian Geographic, I’ll be ski-dooing from Natashquan to Blanc Sablon.

I first became interested in this trip a couple summer ago, when Kathleen and I drove Hwy 138 out of Montréal, along the north shore of the St. Lawrence, as far as the road would take us—about 1,300 kms to Natashquan. Beyond road’s end, there exists a necklace of small, isolated fishing villages hunkered down on rocky shores, outcrops and islets all the way to the Labrador border. It’s a surprising little mosaic of peoples: while most of these villages are predominantly anglophone, there are also Innu and francophone (both Québecois and Acadian) communities. Less than 6,000 people live along this vast stretch of oceanic barrens, connected by supply ships in summer and a snowmobile trail in the winter.

While winter is predictably harsh up there, it is in fact the best time to travel owing to the marked snow trail. My friend Gilles Chagnon calls it “festival time”—it’s the time of year people come out and reconnect with one another. But, as is the case across the country, climate change is having an impact. Over the past ten years the winter weather has become less predictable; the rivers which traverse so much of the land are taking longer to freeze, and fluctuating temperatures mean almost as much rain as snow. This past Christmas locals were stuck in their villages, unable to visit friends and relatives as the trail had yet to open.

It was Gilles who gave me the idea for the trip. When I met him in Havre-St-Pierre, he showed me photographs from one of his solo journeys up the coast. After further research I realized that little had been written about the region. Even the road to Natashquan is relatively new, completed only ten years ago. And now there’s talk of extending the road further, possibly all the way to Blanc Sablon. Hydro Québec would be one of the beneficiaries.

Looking at the map above, one realizes this would be quite the feat of engineering. The coast, along which the villages are clustered, is a veiny network of rivers and hard rock. If such a road can be accomplished it would be the most expensive and complex ever built in Canada. My curiosity has been sharpened by the prospect of what happens when this remote slash of frontier becomes more easily accessible to the rest of the world.

I’ll share more closer to my departure, and will be trying to file reports from along the way, internet connections permitting.

Pashtun Borderlands & History as Rerun

Yesterday, George Bush completed his doughy pretzel of logic: as recently as early fall it was “we’re winning in Iraq”; then, in the wake of compelling election results & the findings of his own Iraq commission he admits it’s time to listen & be open to alternative ideas; now, while confessing he’s ultimately responsible for the war’s dire state, he manages to ignore all the best advice & con’t with precisely the same strategy that’s created this mess, only with a handful of more ground troops—

Whenever the president starts stuttering on about Iraq, my mind can’t help shifting back to that other war zone, much on the minds of Canadians, now absent from American news: Afghanistan. & fortuitously, my friend Adnan Khan just posted on his blog about his recent excursion to the Pashtun tribal lands, travelling both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border. Adnan, who contributes frequently to Macleans, is my go-to-guy when it comes to Afghanistan. Back in August he wrote his prescriptions for what to do in Afghanistan & it still sounds like the most sensible thing I’ve yet heard on how to transcend the region’s historical inevitabilities. Not the kind of things our leaders like to hear, such as the necessity of eventually bringing the Taliban into the political process, but I trust Adnan’s reporting, and thus feel obliged to give his thoughts their due.

Back on the Iraq front, check out the site IraqSlogger, produced by a former news director at CNN. All the news that evidently isn’t fit to print… and all the better for it.

As I’ve written previously in this blog, one wants to avoid making knee-jerk comparisons between the Iraq and Vietnam Wars. But upon catching Errol Morris’s Fog of War again late one night on television recently, I couldn’t help it.

Exhibit A: Bad Information
Just as the attack which didn’t actually happen on U.S. warships in the Gulf of Tonkin (August 1965) was used as a pretext to commence bombing North Vietnam, Saddam’s development of non-existent WMDs and fictional links to al-Qaeda were provided as justification.

Exhibit B: Think Positive!
As the war in Vietnam continued to escalate, President Johnson and Secretary of Defense McNamara both claimed U.S. forces were winning. Privately they knew otherwise, as now declassified audiotapes of conversations have revealed. Only recently has Bush conceded all ain’t going according to plan in Iraq. I can’t help thinking we’ll be hearing a replay of those same conversations twenty years from now.

Exhibit C: Bad Information, Part II
Let’s call this “ignorance of history.” The White House justified the escalation of bombing in Vietnam as part of its domino theory. That fighting the Viet Cong was necessary to containing communist China. In fact, Vietnam and China had been enemies for as long as anyone cared to remember. The Vietnamese believed they were fighting a war of independence against all outside influence. In Iraq, we have seen the same aloof disregard for local animosities. The insistence on seeing historic realities far away through the neo-con’s narrow prism.

Portents & Possibilities

Now that a massive chunk of the Arctic ice shelf has calved itself off like a drifting tundra cracker—due to a variety of factors, all of which could be swept under the header of ‘global warming’—we have our second symbolic event to cast a shadow over the new year. The execution of Saddam Hussein was the first. One is geographic, the other geopolitical. Welcome to 2007. So far we’ve escaped without a natural disaster, although a large part of the ice shelf snapping off could arguably be considered as such.

From the Dare to Dream desk we have this link to essayist Rebecca Solnit’s backward view from the year 2025 in The Nation. In dreams begin responsibilities, and it is such a nice, strange dream…

think BIG in ‘07

so sayeth photographer Russell Monk, as a caption to this pic he sent me to celebrate the new year. now, just how do we go about climbing that thing?

Remembering Lipsett & Willowdale Refugees

Two magazine articles I recently wrote are now out. First, Maisonneuve’s latest has my feature on ’60s experimental filmmaker Arthur Lipsett and the excellent new documentary about his life, Remembering Arthur. Lipsett’s first short for the NFB, Very Nice, Very Nice (1961) helped revolutionize avant-garde and mainstream cinema; its non-linear editing juxtaposed faces and architecture, war machinery and pop ephemera against a cut-and-paste soundtrack to create a mind-bomb of images and sound. This re-contextualizing of largely found materials to create socio-political commentary prefigured the emergence of ironic collage as one of the dominant modes of cultural critique today. As I say in the article, “its startling, hallucinatory frisson perfectly captured the anxieties of the newly christened atomic age.” Very Nice, and subsequent films such as 21-87 and Trip Down Memory Lane, are as relevant and innovative today as there were forty years ago.

Remembering Arthur has been making the rounds of film festivals and a shorter version aired on Bravo this fall. I’ll post a note if I hear of any upcoming screenings.

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The Jan/Feb issue of Canadian Geographic features my column (“Refuge in Willowdale”) on tracking down the grave of my father’s father, who died while fighting for the Germans on the Eastern Front in WWII (or, as the Russians call it, The Great Patriotic War). The first image above is a picture of the cemetery where he is supposedly buried; as it was covered in about three feet of unblemished snow when I was there last March, it was impossible to find any markers confirming his remains were interred there. The second image shows one of the many pillbox bunkers that still line the countryside in the area where he was killed. He died when a Red Army soldier lobbed a grenade into his bunker.

I’ll link to the full text of both articles when they come online.

greetings earthling

& welcome to my virtual woodshed. I’ll be workshopping ideas & stories for my book-in-progress, Broken Atlas, with plenty of serendipitous detours into adjacent terrain. Expect curios & cracked eggs, dispatches from afar & unexpected encounters.

News item of the day: At dawn, Saddam Hussein is escorted to the gallows, which is contained in the same building that his intelligence service used to execute Baath party enemies. He refused to wear a hood. The hanging was followed by bombings in predominantly Shia areas that claimed 75 lives.

By coincidence I watched Emile de Antonio’s Vietnam War doc, In the Year of the Pig, last night. While it may be specious to draw too many direct parallels between the two wars, de Antonio’s film essay makes for timely viewing. An elegantly-constructed examination of the Vietnam War’s logic told as agitprop collage and a brilliant example of how film can successfully compress history. For more info on de Antonio, one of America’s most innovative documentarians, check out this interview.