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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2013-09-19, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2013. PAGE 5. “I could carry, paddle, walk and sing with any man I ever saw...No portage was ever too long for me, 50 songs I could sing. I have had 12 wives and six running dogs. I spent all my money on pleasure. Were I young again, I would spend my life the same way over. There is no life so happy as a voyageur’s life.” – Old voyageur, circa 1825 Ithink ‘voyageur’ is one of the most galvanic words in Canadian history. Imagine those guys! Fourteen-hour days squatting in birch bark shells, shoulders knotted, sweat popping off their brows, paddling a stroke a second, smashing through rapids, bogs and Great Lakes cloudbursts, sleeping under their canoes when the blackflies and mosquitoes allowed them to. And doing it from the top of the Lachine rapids to the nethermost snout of Lake Superior, and back. Every year between spring break-up and the autumn freeze. The voyageurs’ exploits defined this country for nearly two centuries, and then faded from the scene as the beaver that drew them west grew sparse. In the end they left no more of a mark than a paddle swirl on the water. And even less of a record, being mostly illiterate. Voyageur. In English, ‘voyager’: one who goes on a long and sometimes dangerous journey. There is another voyager – called, in fact, Voyager 2. It is a NASA spacecraft in the 36th year of a profoundly perilous journey. It has travelled through our entire solar system, beyond Mars, Saturn, even Pluto. Voyager 2 doesn’t present anything close to the noble silhouette of a Voyageur canot du nord. It looks like a collision of giant kitchen utensils, an ungainly mashup of antennae and probes attached to a dog’s breakfast of scientific instruments. But it can fly. Voyager 2 has been moving away from Earth for nearly four decades now and is doubtless dented and scarred by its (so far) 16 billion-mile voyage. But get this, in the belly of Voyager 2 there is a golden disc. It is a recording of Earth sounds destined for the ears of...well who knows? Whoever or whatever is out there. Any sentient being that can figure out how to access that disc will hear the sound of: a gust of wind, the patter of rain, human footsteps, the chitter of a chimpanzee, a baby’s heartbeat, a mother’s kiss and a burst of belly laughter. Also, the music of Bach and Mozart. Plus Chuck Berry’s “Johnny Be Good”. It was a galactic leap of faith. When Voyager 2 launched, the planet was knotted in a Cold War, famine and disease stalked huge swathes of Asia and Africa. A spectre called AIDS was just beginning to cast its shadow. The world, as it usually is, was a mess. But out of the chaos, this: a cry to the universe that say, “We’re good. We can do beautiful things. We matter.” Carl Sagan, who helped choose the sound bites on the golden disc, said “The launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.” Indeed it does. It’s a message any Canadian voyageur would understand in his bones. Arthur Black Other Views The song our paddles sing Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense Both my editor Shawn and I recently had a brush with events that made us start to feel the weight of our years on this earth. While I’ll leave him to tell his own stories, it is safe to say that neither of us feels any younger this week than we had recently and a lot of that has to do with some startling revelations. A few weeks back, my youngest sister went away to school. She took my lesson of “Get as far away from home as possible,” and went a few steps further than Brantford, where I went to university, to land herself at Saint Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick. I’m proud of her. It takes a lot of confidence to be that far away from your support system and still make it work but, thus far, she’s doing what I did. She’s making friends, working hard and loving the experience. Upon reflection of how similar our experiences are, I had a realization. My sister is 10 years younger than I. That’s a decade. That’s half a generation and, given all that happened in those 10 years, two completely different childhoods. She is that much younger than I and she is starting university. That made me realize that the fond memories I have of that time are that old as well. It’s been 10 years since I finished high school and 10 years since I started university. I felt old. Earlier that week, I also found a grey hair or two. (And no, that had nothing to do with my current shaved “to the bone” haircut). Just this past weekend, I watched as my eldest (but not elder) sister married her now- husband. I was tasked with taking pictures of everyone who came to the ceremony who would stand in a wooden frame to have their photo taken. Aside from the noticeable red scalp, I took away only one thing from the experience of being that photographer: the years are flying by and I’m definitely getting older. I took photographs of cousins of mine whose birth I remember who are now preparing to head off to high school or university. I see families that have faced adversity smiling and pushing forward and I see people happy to celebrate the day. It all kind of took me back to my first September after graduation. Due to some changes in the editorial department of the newspaper I was working at, I had gone from intern to reporter and officially started a full-time career as a journalist. I wrote a column that month about the desert of the real. The idea of the desert of the real first came to me through the movie The Matrix. It referred to (in my mind anyway, I’ve seen multiple interpretations) the state of the world in the film and it was a bleak one. For me, it wasn’t such a bleak outlook at the time, but it was a stark realization that, for the first time in more than 18 years, it was September and I was not preparing to go to school. (For reference sake, the idea and term originally came from the somewhat-recently deceased Jean Baudrillard, who inspired The Matrix trilogy and been used many times the world over to describe everything from the lack of American culture to the impact of the 9/11 attacks). I was going to get up the next day and go to work just as I had been doing for the past six months. It was an odd feeling to know that, unless I decided to drastically switch my career’s focus outside of journalism and communication, I would never set foot in the classroom again for the sole intent of learning. Sure, I learn something new with everything I do, but the portion of my life, the quarter or third (or hopefully not half) of my life that was spent primarily on learning how to live the rest of it was done. The piece opened my eyes to just how a good chunk of the rest of my life would likely play out. Until I retire (if people can still afford to do that when I hit 55 or 60 or 65), I’ll be writing, taking pictures, shooting video and preparing content for a newspaper. It won’t be like other jobs I had that were a means to an end, this is the end that those means accomplished. Gone was the idea that I could or would be anything I wanted to be because I had hit that mark. All I had wanted to be, for more than half a decade, was a reporter, and it had happened. I felt like I had turned a corner at that point in my life. A scenery change and five years later, I think I have discovered that I maybe had not come as far as I thought or written I had. I still picture myself as a teenager or an early 20-something, not a young man approaching 30. Or at least, up until a few weeks ago, I did picture myself as that early 20-something. Maybe it was the grey hair. Maybe it was taking pictures at my younger sister’s wedding or helping my youngest sister set up her printer in her new dorm room over the phone. Maybe it was a culmination of all these things, but something changed and I suddenly felt older. I’m not going to bemoan my age and say I suddenly recognized the crow’s feet around my eyes or the fact that I don’t recover quite as quickly as I used to from injuries or a night spent celebrating, but I will say it’s a realization that can stop you in your tracks as sure as a speeding bus. I’m not a kid or a guy any longer. Keeping that in mind, I will say there likely won’t be any big changes to my life. I’m still young. I’m still youthful. Don’t mistake the realization as me saying I’m old. I’m not. I still think I represent the oft-overlooked group of youth returning to Huron County. That said, I’m just not as young as I used to be. Denny Scott Denny’s Den Major moments are making me feel old “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou Final Thought Cleaning up the mess It seems like a lifetime ago, but the people of Giglio Island, Italy have had a daily, 300-metre, 104,326-tonne reminder of that fateful night in January, 2012 when the Costa Concordia cruise ship ran aground on the island’s shore. Engineers began the process of pulling the gigantic ship off of the island’s shore on Monday. The salvage operation is said to cost over $800 million and involve a team of over 500 people from 24 different countries. While there have been stories about disaster tourism and people going to the island simply to see the wreckage of the ship, many residents report being sick of seeing a gigantic aquatic landfill every hour of every day. “I would like Giglio to return to what it was before,” said Giglio resident Giovanni Andolfi, as quoted by the CBC, “a beautiful place of uncontaminated nature.” The story was a huge one, of course, all over the world, but it resonated especially well with the people of Huron County as Alan and Laurie Willits, of RR1, Wingham, were aboard the boat on that chilly night in Italy. For me, that is a story, in the Jan. 26, 2012 issue of The Citizen,that I will always remember writing. Interviewing the Willitses provided a harrowing first-person account of a story I had heard told over and over again by mainstream media outlets. From a personal standpoint, I couldn’t believe what Alan and Laurie had been through and how calmly they handled the situation they found themselves in. From hearing the sound of a 70-metre gash being torn in the underbelly of the boat to manoeuvering around on a boat on its side with no power and minimal lighting, Alan and Laurie had gone through an experience that would make most of us squirm, but they, unlike many other travellers on the cruise, not only lived to tell the tale, but salvaged (no pun intended) a decent vacation out of the tragedy. Due to Alan’s mechanical expertise, the pair were ahead of the curve, knowing something was seriously wrong before most other passengers, resulting in their being aboard one of the first rescue boats to leave the ship. There was also a pronounced sadness in the interview. Alan and Laurie were certainly aware that they were lucky to get off the ship in time. However, when it came to the 32 people who were not as lucky, having been there, they knew there was no need for them to die, even in the face of tragedy on such a grand scale. “There were so many bits of information that could have changed everything because they didn’t tell us how bad it actually was,” Laurie is quoted in the story. Even if the ship ran aground as it did, she said there was no reason for people to lose their lives, had the rescue operation been organized and those in charge of the ship been truthful about how dire of a situation they were facing. Like seeing a wrecked car towed away after a collision, Monday’s events no doubt took those who found themselves on the Costa Concordia that night, including the Willits family, on a stroll down Memory Lane that perhaps they didn’t want to take. Finally, however, the people of Giglio Island can look forward to no longer having their beautiful view stolen by the wreckage of a ship that took the lives of 32 people. And while it’s a shame that the incident took 32 lives, and it’s a shame the salvage cost over $800 million, perhaps the island’s residents can begin a new chapter of their lives, putting that horrible night in 2012 behind them for good, just as those on the ship have tried to do.