I bring you good tidings from Canada
If there is one thing I figured out in Canada it’s that I’d much rather wake up everyday to read news items about the arguments between Anglophones and Francophones. At least I like both those sides, something I cannot say about Democrats and Republicans.
I also like the fact that Kit Kat bars and coffee are considered an appropriate snack combination.
The snack thing wasn’t the big news in New Brunswick, though — the tussle of early French immersion in schools was. Count this among the things stupid old me didn’t realize - New Brunswick is the only official bilingual province in Canada.
We happened to be there on New Brunswick Day but except for an all NB gush edition of the St. John newspaper we didn’t see any celebrations. And according to the paper NB’s greatest attribute is niceness. With the exception of one waitress I’ll go with that.
And crazy ocean currents. If you like those then NB is the place for you. Seriously. We saw a couple of the most renowned - Old Sow, a huge whirlpool, and Reversing Falls in St John - and also encounter them routinely as we set our kayaks out into the ocean and found swirls of crazy patterns moving us around. The tides are totally crazy - we pulled onto the shore of an island only to come back an hour later to find thm in the middle of the beach. These are not helped any by the crazy weather patterns that I immediately recalled from our trip to Nova Scotia a decade ago - rain, sun, rain, sun, fog, bright, all over the course of a morning. One trip out to the island and then to the smaller craggy rock islands further out saw a sunburnt afternoon transform itself into a cold rainy one with difficult choppy waters and back again by the time we got to shore. More trips into the ocean followed, more craziness with the weather and the tides walked hand in hand.
Everywhere along the coast - simply the entire damn thing - was a scene of stark alien splendor of browns and grays with giant, curiuosly formed boulders, cut through by the tides, and stone beaches made of colorful and speckled egg-perfect rocks. I don’t think I saw one shoreline that wasn’t striking due to it’s own individual geometry.
As usual I immersed myself in Canadian news. Aside from a couple items now and then, not much is reported on the US, maybe a short weird bit of news or some columnist. It’s entirely possible to stay at arm’s length from the US and that’s a very comfortable position for me.
Aside from bilingual education, the biggest story was a gruesome one. A couple days before we arrived a Chinese immigrant beheaded a young Canadian guy in the back of a bus - not a city one, but a Greyhound type bus. Obviously you have wonder how that could happen and go one noticed, but it also made wonder how differently it would have turned out in our own country where psychos who want to lash out at strangers always seem to get the firearms to do so.
I make note that also in the news, there were two incidences of geocaches being mistaken for bombs. One, in St. Stephen, resulted in the person who hid it being called to deal with it, the other in Toronto, where they blew up the cache, just like we would in America. Heh, big city cops. It did strike me that there were no arrests made, no examples made of the geocachers, no authoritarian finger-wagging ok the part of grim law official, rather a shrug and a “gee guys could you mark these a little better so we don’t freak out with our bond squads anymore” statement. You know, no blustery over-reaction - other than the blowing up thing. Ah, civilization! The reporter for the St. Croix Courier noted that there were other caches in the area.
Of course there was that letter writer who spelled out that all of the USA’s problems over the past few decades have actually been because of the damn pacifists. Seriously, I haven’t seen that term used in ages and it made Canadian conservatism seem so old world and charmingly antiquated instead of the hateful fscism we currently cling to. It also must be very easy to berate us for not wanting to sacrifice lives, resources and money on diversionary militarism when you live in another country.
Even an anti abortion columnist spent his time going on about eugenics - EUGENICS! Who even remembers that word??? It was actually quite clever if misguided, this idea of personal eugenics in direct line to the nastier pre WW2 ancestor. The guy even went so far as to state that the reason secular humanism is so dreadful is that it trusts humans who consistently do awful things - religion reigns them in. I gotta agree with that somewhat only to add that religion being another man made construct is a bound by the same issues. And I echo the letter writer who pointed out that using God in any argument was unworkable since you can’t argue from the point of view of of something that doesn’t exist. In true Canadian form each was so polite as they made their point.
What can you say about a country whose national identity seems largely based in the desire to be pleasant and mostly easygoing?
Anyhow, the St John paper ran an amusing rundown of the weekend police blotter starting with the sentence “The capper on Friday evening’s police scanner items may have been the malfunctioning Spidey-senses of a gentleman who attempted to leap from a roof into the window of his uptown apartment building.” Sgt. Don Cooper of the St. John police department follows it up with “He thought he was Spider-Man, only his Spidey tinglers didn’t help.” The gentleman in question had been locked out of his apartment by his landlord, so he decided to jump through the window of the apartment from a nearby building — he ended up on the pavement instead. Also on the blotter were: a woman relieving herself on the street, duck hunters shooting it up before duck hunting season (didn’t they know it’s rabbit hunting season?), youths jumping up and down on shrubbery, youths attempting to steal a ladder, “ a group of dirt coated young boys throwing clumps of mud at passing cars,” and an 11-year-old kid claiming that his brother hit him and stole his skateboard.
One guy called police claiming he had been beaten in the head with a pipe, but refused to elaborate to the police once they got there. Sgt. Pat Bonner of the St. John police noted “He still had his MP3 player on” while explaining why he felt it was not a robbery.
There was also an article on the brain trust who, while being questioned by the police about one incident, decided to pull out a beer on the street and drink it. When the cop tried to take the beer away, the guy attacked the cop. Stupidity is not something Americans necessarily corner the market on.
In other news, there was the headline “Sixth foot washes up.” It means exactly what it says — the sixth foot separated from its body has washed up on the West Coast. Have you followed this item at all? It’s been going on for a year now and the story provided a convenient map of the foot findings. In this one, a woman in British Columbia saw what she thought was a lost shoe, but was haunted by her knowledge of the news story and went back the next day. She “poured sand out of the shoe to find a sock containing bones and decomposing flesh”
There was an article about Quebec cuisine that pulls from their heritage — you know, barbecued beaver ribs, moose neck stew, and roasted snow goose. It’s just funny that the very fancy people in Montreal eat that stuff.
Among the things we discovered and loved: 45th Parallel Restaurant on Deer Island, Comeau’s Restaurant with their exceptional poutine in Pennfield, CBC Radio - particularly their show The Signal -, that is when it isn’t playing 45 minute epics by experimental jazz composers from Montreal, good lord, but it’s packed with great Canadian content, really interesting music that gives me hope - and McKay’s Blueberry Stand and their amazing pies and jam, a real treasure of a spot.
I also found a Big Turk bar, finally, my first in 10 years. Jana thinks they’re gross, but they’re a total Atlantic Province delicacy to me - I say that because I’ve never seen them in Quebec and I’m not sure if they have them in Ontario. They’re made of some sort of jelly candy - I’m sure either exactly like or at least kinda like Turkish Delight - covered in chocolate. Silly things.
And now, my four favorite food items from the lovely country of Canada
Oh, my, it just gets worse and worse, doesn’t it?
Big Turk bars taste like gum with some sort of crap on them.