The Road to Black Mountain
Kelowna 2010
We are setting a brisk pace. As you approach the private driveway, you may notice that the fence is new. The old one had been driven over by someone in a four by four. It was old, anyway, and as you walk you will see the remains of it still in the grass: two dilapidated posts with yellow lichen engraved on it, the wire gnarled around them on the ground and hidden by the grass.
This particular walk has a story that develops almost peripherally. You are walking, for example on a road to the university. Simple enough, but if you look to your left, you see the pastures and fields claimed from a primordial, semi-arid pine forest, cleared up to the lake and the two knolls that hide the city dump, sorry, the recycling land-fill, from view. Around you are farms at the edge of the pine forest. Directly between you and your goal is this dry, grey lake bed, which has forced the road builders to go around it. Again, simple enough but look: everywhere that people have pushed away the natural growth, it has immediately pushed back.
And look again, there are the farms and houses, situated for the most part in squares and rectangles, except where forcing the angles on the property became more effort than it was worth. It is as if the stake that the settlers had in feeling more permanent than the land only carried so much weight. The dialogue regarding their mastery of nature was worthwhile, but only up to a point. This part of your brisk walk seems to express that point.
Could the road builders have paved over part of this lake? Certainly, they could have, but it is just a frumpy access road to some farms. The only section that is paved is the section you are coming to now, or will be soon. The pavement is bleached and pitted, falling away from underneath in some places. The cracks span the entire width in many sections, and are inhabited by moss, grass even, from the edge of the road where the ditch-growth has made its bid for mastery. The lone trees coming up on the right are pushing up the asphalt. It appears that someone has mowed the grasses along the roadside, but all it seems to have accomplished is to provide more growth opportunities as the trimmings turn into soil.
Most of the fence posts along this route are being subverted too, by lichen, and weather. They may express the redundant angularity, and shape the feelings that the owners have for their property, but the fences are failing with the encroachment of nature. What can the square-ish, and rectangular-ish features do against real, non abstract, physical threats but symbolize our notions of the effects we have on our surroundings? What else could they do? These fences were not erected so because of any extra functionality of the shape. The properties were divided on paper, and then owners put up the fences. It doesn’t explain the choice of the shape. Perhaps they are rectangles because squares are too small; triangular, and hexagonal land parcels would require more access roads, so they wouldn’t work either; but why would rectangle shapes also be chosen for the homes? The attraction is not in the ease of construction, since builders could produce octagonal houses as simply as square ones. No; the shape has meaning beyond its function, and your peripheral journey demonstrates it.
The shapes people choose for their properties and homes stand for a host of statements we would make about ourselves; it is an entire discourse on our self-image. Placed as they are in spite of the pine forest they contain us against, these boxes make the case that we have risen above the land, and are now in control of it. And these fences are not barriers to you, or any stranger walking by, nor even to the horses that you probably see by now; they are symbols of a containment. They say, this is the extent of this person’s domain. It rests on the land in a position of control and denies any descent from the nature below.
Those horses remind me of the horses in “Gulliver’s Travels” whenever I walk by them. They look at me, like they did to Gulliver in the book, like I’m just some yahoo. Sure, he’s walking off to his institution on two legs like some smelly animal, learning a language that no civilized creature would ever stoop to speaking but; No, you know what, he’s still just a yahoo, and if he had any sense at all, he would turn around, go home and graze. One of these days, the Hwinnims (that’s the horses real names, according to Gulliver) are just gonna eradicate the smelly beasts once and for all, and then we’ll be able to graze in peace without all these pretentious fences.
That’s what the horses are saying about you as you walk by.
Maybe they’re wrong. You should be coming up upon the fence that separates the farm land from the officially contained premises of the University. You’ll see a gate that permits entry to the parking lot via two gravel paths. Notice the extent of the weed growth along the containment structure.
Off to your far left, up the hill, you can see the construction. I’m not sure if it is a new dormitory, or a science center, or what. The end result is not the point anyway. What is important is the act of construction. And you don’t need to take my word for that. You can hear it every week at some point on the evening news when they report, not how many houses have been built, but how many have been started, as an indicator of economic health. The indication of a robust progress is the number of projects on the go. That being the case, you may get the impression that UBCO is very robust indeed.
Look: the parking lot is full. Walk down the main road from the trail as it bisects the two lots. Before long you can look left-ward between the Fine Arts building and the Dorm and see more buildings being constructed. Gravel trucks should be trucking by you as they circle the FA building to deliver their payloads. You will have to walk around the FA building to the right because the left side is blocked by construction.
Stick to the sidewalk as you circle the building. When you get to the lane separating the Arts building from the FA, stop and look across the lane at the “smoking area”. Notice anything? It’s an octagonal building. What’s up with that? The Fine Arts building is rectangular, and even decorated with squares and rectangles. All of the other buildings conform to those basic shapes more or less, but when you want the smokers to go outside, I suppose we better provide a structure more aesthetically pleasing than a merely functional square. Is that what an octagon means: indulgence?
Turn left, however, and head for the grassy knoll where that odd aluminum thing pretends to be artistic. Stick to the edge because you are heading past it to the next big containment structure. Take a minute to look down into the giant, progressive pit where the workers are putting the foundations for the next building in. Take in the progressive noise for a moment; doesn’t it make you feel like you are a part of something bigger than you?
To your right is the Arts building. Cross the lane and go through it to the central court yard. Take in the relative quiet for a moment if you like. Notice the edge of the brick path; in fact, walk around the edge of the arts building to your immediate right, and then go left to the edge of the brick path in front of the grassy hill. Follow the edge of the bricks with your eyes toward the Library and look at how angular they have constructed this little section of nature. It’s nothing. It’s a grass hill, contained within a border of right angles. We have continued our discourse on our achievement over nature even here; or should I say, especially here?
Now look closely at the border, where the futility of the symbolic triumph is clear: down within the cracks the lichen, moss and even grass continue their relentless assault.
Head into the Student Services Building through the main entrance, and make a right turn into the book store. Go past the desk, and past the lounge chairs to the far shelf behind the pillar with the speakers, and the shelf that faces the entrance. On the second shelf up you should see a book called the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology. On page seven is a poem by
John Ashberry called “Token Resistance”.
As one turns to one in a dream
smiling like a bell that has just
stopped tolling, holds out a book,
and speaks: “All the vulgarity
of time, from the Stone Age
to our present, with its noodle parlors
and token resistance, is as a life
to the life that is given to you. Wear it,”
so one must descend from checkered heights
that are our friends, needlessly
rehearsing what we will say
as a common light bathes us,
a common fiction reverberates as we pass
to the celebration. Originally
we weren’t going to leave home. But we made bold
somehow by the rain we put our best foot forward.
Now it’s years after that. It
isn’t possible to be young anymore.
Yet the tree treats me like a brute friend;
my own shoes have been scarred by the walks I’ve taken.
Exit the book store, leave the Student Services Building through the main entrance and then take a right turn toward the Library. Turn right again when you reach the stairs. Notice again on the way down how contained the natural growth is. On your way toward the bus you should see a monument to progress sitting on the grass. It is a wooden replica of a backhoe bucket dedicated to the new buildings on the campus.
Head out toward the road where the busses come by and take the sidewalk to the end of the road past the soccer field.
As you approach the new road which takes you to the overpass, cross to the inside corner. Stand on the corner and look out across the big field at Black Mountain. As you try to see past it, you will notice the smog; a taste of things to come. It is still hazy through that smog, but you can see the scars of the 2003 fire from here. If you have timed it right, about then a transit bus will come by, and you can listen to the sound of progress as the driver looks at you like you’re some yahoo.
