Better late than never. This was supposed to be a Christmas posting. It’s been a long time, but I’m back for a moment from the murk.
Since November, this land of ferns and frogs has been beaten down by an endless conveyor belt of raging Pacific storms, keeping electricity and my attention span in rather short supply. When the wind stops howling, the sky hangs over the dripping forest like a grey flannel quilt and sunlight, on the rare occasions that it appears, comes as a shock, like a shard of glass on a dark sidewalk.
But another year has ended and another begun, so some stock-taking is in order and I will try to play a bit of catch-up for my readers in the next couple of postings.
Ruth and I spent the holiday worshipping paper and started to build what will become a bestiary of Japanese papercraft insects There are is a seemingly endless selection of PDF’s available online, enabling you to build anything from a laptop, to a yellow-footed tortoise to fully functioning cog and gear machines and even a V-8 engine. To get us in the mood, we sat down to a multi-day, marathon session of Read or Die-The T.V. that depicts the animated girl-on-girl exploits of a gang of paper masters who use their talents for superhero origami in a battle for global supremacy between a metastasized, technified incarnation of the British Library and a shadowy Chinese publishing conglomerate known as Dokusensha.
Despite my new found appreciation for the spirituality of paper, I haven’t given up on virgin birth or anything. I was delighted by the sensational pre Christmas announcement of parthenogenesis in a Komodo dragon, the largest lizard on earth. The dragoness, named Flora, had been hovering over her self-fertilized eggs since the end of May, at England’s Chester Zoo, and indications were that hatching was imminent. (I am still waiting for an update) Interestingly, due to the arcane Komodo dragon genetics, Flora’s offspring will all be male. Apparently, parthenogenesis is a survival strategy that allowed single female dragons to colonize remote Indonesian islands, where they eventually mated with their parthenogenic sons to further increase the population. The next generation, conceived sexually, would have the usual proportion of daughters, who, if they decided to swim over to the next uncolonized island could then repeat the process. With a trick like that it’s amazing the Komodo dragons haven’t taken over the entire South Pacific. Sadly, they have become quite rare.
Oedipal proclivities notwithstanding, Komodo Dragons are truly worthy of worship— great awe inspiring mounds of amygdala driven reptile flesh, who can take down a pig, a goat or even a human if they want to. Their powerful jaws are lined with backward pointing, serrated teeth, which infect the bites they inflict with a cocktail of lethal bacteria. If the prey isn’t brought down in the initial attack, the dragon continues to stalk it, biding its time until the victim drops dead of septicaemia. Perhaps there is already a cult forming to worship Flora— Virgin Queen of the Lizards. Sign me up!
In the deserts of the American southwest and northern Mexico, Flora has a little cousin, the Desert Whiptail Lizard which has a different approach to parthenogenesis. The whiptail has done away with males altogether, existing as an entirely unisexual population; mothers only giving birth to daughters. Yet there still is a lot of sex going on, or a what the biologists term pseudo sex. The whiptails alternate between male and female sex roles every 10-14 days The lizard temporarily adopting the male role, stimulates ovulation in its partner in an amorous embrace known as “the donut position.” With both parters capable of reproducing, whiptails seem to have a strategy for survival that almost unique among the vertebrates. I guess they haven’t got the word out yet to too many other species. If it catches on, males could be rendered (gulp) obsolete or perhaps relegated entirely to the function of entertainment. . . . .
Our cat brought this beautiful little bat into the house. It was completely motionless but it didn’t seem to have a mark on it. After we put it in a jar for a few minutes, the bat stopped playing dead and came ‘to.’ It looked like a tiny fuzzy devil, complete with a miniscule mouth that emitted a high-pitched stream of screeches, some beyond my range of hearing. After we thought it had fully recuperated, we took it back outside and released it. It scrabbled along the wooden railing of the deck for a few minutes and cocked its little head at us, to utter a few more inaudible vocalizations. Suddenly, it took flight and swooped over our heads, making one last little chattering sound before disappearing into the darkness. Was it cursing us? Was it thanking us? Or was it simply echo-locating its next meal? We’ll never know.
The nightmare bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 61 years ago propagated themselves through post-war Japanese culture in some bizarre ways. The fire-breathing monster Godzilla, was an obvious metaphor for America’s clumsy and destructive atomic power and the original (1954) Godzilla film, (which I saw a couple of years ago at Film Forum), serves as an unambiguous and powerful indictment against nuclear weapons. Before releasing it in the US however, the American distributor, sanitized the film, removing the anti-H bomb sections, to make it more palatable to the haute cold war political climate of the time. Completely new scenes were added, in which Raymond Burr and a cast of American soldiers were spliced in, saving Japan from the runaway atomic monster.
The Godzilla films spawned a whole bestiary of Japanese atomic monsters or ‘kaiju’ and my favourite has always been the giant nuclear turtle, Gamera.
“Look ! Gamera! The children’s friend!” was the trademark cry of the delighted Japanese school children in the films, as they cheer on the monster turtle, spinning across the sky like a top, propelled by atomic fire thundering from its leg sockets.
Until recently Gamera films were just about the only place where the words “turtle invasion” would have made any sense. In the real world, turtles and tortoises have been in increasingly dire straights and many of them are on the fast track to extinction. Imagine my surprise then, when I got my first warning of an invasion by alien turtles from my friend Ian, currently residing in Ehime prefecture Japan.
He reports (sic):
the turtles I’ve been
seeing (in Imabari), the ones with the red and yellow stripes on their heads,
are American turtles, bought at festivals for pets, and, unwanted, later
released…I’ve been observing a colony of 11 turtles, some quite large, that
live in the ‘river’, in actuality a canal, that flows near my house.
They are displacing the Japanese turtles, of course.
The alien turtles Ian describes are likely red eared sliders (Trachemys scripta elegans), which Wikipedia notes are even beginning to colonize England.
But the sliders are benign compared to what the folks over at Pink Tentacle are reporting. They claim that there are now so many stories about giant foreign turtles being found in Japan, that it seems the country is under a full-scale invasion. The most frightening species turning up are the outsized common snapping turtles (Chelydra serpentina) and their larger cousins, the alligator snapping turtle (Macroclemys temminckii). The latter can grow to an imposing 236 lbs. Both species are native to North America, but find their way to Japan as babies, in the pet trade. Once they grow to adult size, they are difficult to accommodate in the average Japanese apartment and so find themselves released into the waterways in droves. The resemblance between snapping turtles and Gamera is uncanny, although anyone mistaking one for “the children’s friend” might easily lose a finger.
Up here in the rainforest, on the coast of British Columbia, I was surprised to come across a (mild-mannered) red eared slider busily excavating her nest in a cow pasture, next to the local lake. Native to the south-eastern U.S. this turtle was clearly a long way from home, yet over the past ten summers, I have glimpsed her, and what I think must be her mate, sunning themselves on half submerged logs. This photo documents the first close- up look of her, that I have ever had, and clearly identifyies her as a slider and not the potentially native Western painted turtle. As climate change continues to heat up our once coolish weather, it might one day even get warm enough for her eggs to hatch. In the meantime, she keeps trying.
In baseball parlance, a “slider” is a type of fast curve ball that confuses the hitter. By bucking the world-wide trend toward global turtle extinction, the red-eared slider might just be throwing us a curve ball of her own.
It’s early summer on the rainforest island where I live and the undergrowth is rustling with intensely kawaii, little black-tailed deer fawns. This one is hiding in one of my bamboo groves.
But I am off to do some work on another island, the *Concrete Island*, which is a ruderal botanical garden on display at the World Urban Festival in Vancouver. People on site can call 1-888-648-0506 with their cellphones to get information about the plants now busy re-colonizing the patch of waste ground that is isolated within the island’s concrete barrier. *Concrete Island* will be the first in a series of cell phone guided botanical tours that I am putting together, to help people navigate through interstitial ecologies of disturbance. It seems no matter how severely we trash the landscape, nature somehow finds a way to reassert itself—in ways that are often surprising.
While I was installing labels on the plants in the *Concrete Island’s* toxic, post-industrial, pit, I was visited by a tiny white-crowned sparrow, which flew down and landed on a Scotch broom branch in front of me.
keep your eye on the sparrow
After that, I started noticing insects in motion all around me: ladybugs, honeybees, bumble bees, parasitic wasps and some tiny thrip-like insect I couldn’t quite identify. They were pollinating and crawling all over the Himalayan blackberry flowers. Since I first visited the *Concrete Island* site back in May, several new plants have arrived, including: tansy, linear-leaf plantain, wild lettuce and fireweed; all brought to the site by wind, or in the droppings of birds. I was amazed at how much the biodiversity has increased in such a short time. In a way, the recolonization process of the *Concrete Island* is similar to what one would see on a newly formed volcanic island, in the middle of the ocean. The only difference is that, instead of water, the *Concrete Island* is surrounded by an ocean of asphalt. I am keeping records of all the new species I see arriving and I will publish a preliminary inventory soon on oliverk.org. Maybe I can get *Concrete Island* designated as Vancouver’s smallest park!
On my most recent foray into New York, I was introduced to the world of the Russian banya. Despite the heat wave outside, I was amazed to discover that communal sweating, (in a hot, dark room, full of boisterous Russians who are beating each other with birch branches), is oddly refreshing. After it was all over and we went back out into the fetid Brooklyn night, I felt as if my pores had been thoroughly cleansed by an army of mop wielding nano-dwarves. The polluted air no longer felt so nauseatingly oppressive and I floated back onto the subway in a blissful, body stoned stupor. Check out a real banya blog to get a sense of the kind of atmosphere to expect. I can’t wait to buy myself one of those rakish white felt hats for my next banya visit.
I was jolted out of my thermally induced euphoria, when, as we walked uptown from Delancey St., we hit a dark patch of sidewalk under a burned out street light. Blithely carrying on, we noticed that the concrete underfoot was a bit sticky and strewn with a great many shiny, button-like objects. Then it hit me. . . We were walking across hundreds of lustrous, skittering cockroach carapaces, some as big as baby turtles, teeming across a rank slick of heat fermented dumpster juice. It seemed we had gotten a little *too* relaxed during our banya outing, otherwise we might have noticed our predicament a bit earlier. E-e-e-e-w!
Now I’m back on the West Coast and living in a landscape that resembles something right off the front of a Celestial Seasonings tea box I’m getting ready to take another poetry course with the inimitable Susan Musgrave In preparation, I thought I’d better write a quick banya poem:
Ninety five degrees
in Alphabet City
and she says we’re going to
a steam bath
a *steam* bath, I say?
Yeah, a steam bath, she says
a *Russian* steam bath, as if
nationality mattered and a
“schvitz” will cool us down
and we’re already traversing the
shimmering, simmering fields of tar toward
the F train’s burping burrow, my face all sputtery like a
lard candle, the seething distance mis-
aligned, de-
interlaced
from the tired atomic
firmament
the magnets focusing the world
have melted off their mounts, we
mince
across hot dumpster juice
lapping
at my ankles even
the ghetto palms
have had
enough
folding feathery leaves
in chlorophytic
beseechment
away
from tormenting sun
I see the hole, the sweet sweet hole
of subway deliverance
of fetid dankitude
of stale metal aircon
relief
in the warm electric bosom
of motors
I flop all nauseous and swirly brained
stick to the vinylette like a freshly licked stamp
commemorative Zen, heat stroke edition, anything
could happen to me now, it no longer
matters, I wish this ride would go on for
ever but the alphabet runs out at
“I”
and down the stairs we clang clang clang from
the rusty platform that straddles
the street
with its overarching Meccano legs, a giant spider
ate a Taiwanese freighter, scuttled, I think they call it, ready
to pounce on the kids with the forelocks and bowler hats
running
under a Carboniferous sky
old as amphibians
beneath the sheets of street
heat lightning over Coney Island ozone
tickle of electrified window
screens and
carack carack kablam
the first fat drops
zisching
on the pavement, outside
the bath house
awning now
and thank God
Marina mayfly
flits toward us
all mouse ears and
kiss kiss kisses
the dioxin sweetness
of freshly laundered terry cloth, where
birch branch beaten
mounds of
man meat
quiver under white felt
hats, lost in a haze
of smoked fish and watermelon steam
we head for the ovens
and emerge
once more as
shining ingots
pure, revirginated
and ready
to be defiled
again.
This nightmare has nothing to do with Hubert Sauper’s brilliant documentary of the same name.
No.
‘Nightmare’ was what came to mind as I was being herded though the dark cattle chute that constitutes the American Museum of Natural History’s new blockbuster Charles Darwin exhibition.
Ruth joked that with the show’s stinging $21 admission fee, it’s no wonder America’s poor don’t believe in evolution. It’s cheaper to go to church.
Such is the power of the religious right in America that, according to a recent New Yorker article, the Darwin exhibition failed to garner a single corporate sponsor.
Yet downstairs in the same museum is the glitzy, permanent Hall of Biodiversity, funded by biotech behemoth Monsanto and open since 1998. One its most noticeable features is the giant Spectrum of Life, a schematic display that shows the diversifying of species from a common ancestor—a central principle in Darwin’s evolution theory. Nuance seems to be everything though—Monsanto can use the word ‘biodiversity’ because it reflects positively on its biotech brand but ‘Darwin,’ eighty years after the Scopes Monkey Trial, is still dirty a dirty word in America. Given this monumental handicap, it is a miracle the Darwin show happened at all. And for that at least I am grateful.
Full of good intentions, we found ourselves queueing outside the exhibit, waiting for the time slot in which we would be allowed to enter. Immediately, I realized that this was going to be one of those shows in which Taylorism triumphed over edification. It seems that almost every so-called ‘special exhibition’ put on by major museums and galleries these days is designed as an exercise in industrial operations management; the primary objective being to quickly process the maximum number of bodies, before ejecting them summarily into the gift shop waiting at the end of the assembly line.
‘Darwin’ proved to be no exception. It’s dark, chute-like architecture brought to mind something slaughterhouse diva Temple Grandin might design.
At our prescribed entry time, we were literally herded through a narrow anteroom toward the first of the glass cases. My claustrophobia kicked in and I imagined that instead of a gift shop, there might be a killing floor waiting for us at the other end, manned perhaps by Christian fundamentalists with bolt guns.
Trying to calm myself, I slipped my trusty little Canon Elph out of my pocket to try and document the mayhem.
Immediately, I was set upon by a burly guard with a shiny shaved head.
“No Pictures !!!,” he barked
OK, OK, I said . . .
We continued to be propelled forward by the human tide until thankfully the hall got a little wider. As we were milling around trying to catch a glimpse of an assemblage of stuffed finches and a disconsolate looking iguana in a terrarium, I heard a high school girl complaining to her teacher that she just ‘didn’t get it!’
The guards continued to wade pugnaciously through the crowd, swooping in on anyone who dared pull out a camera or even a cell phone. It was as if they had been warned that Darwin’s theory was so dangerous, it couldn’t under any circumstances be allowed to leak out beyond the building. Which was surprising, because there really weren’t any artifacts on display that could in any way be construed as controversial. It was all very low key, almost to a fault.
I dislike photography bans in public institutions at the best of times, so I was determined to beat this one, particularly since Darwin’s ideas are so important to our modern intellectual commons. As long as I wasn’t using a flash, what harm could it do?
But it became a moot point. The displays were so woefully under-lit that I abandoned my plan, snagging only one more grainy image. It was however, what I had come to see— a page from one of Darwin’s original notebooks; a tree-like cladogram, in which a number of species evolve from a common ancestor, diversifying in a pattern of adaptive radiation. This simple sketch might well depict the exact moment of Darwin’s great epiphany. He had scrawled the words “I think” above and to the left of the little tree, in a heartbreaking gesture of tentativeness. Oddly, this caption is hidden in the photo I took, obscured by a stray reflection from an overhead light. No matter though, seeing it for real was worth the price of admission.
A half hour after I gave up on any further photography, a female guard confronted me, demanding to know if I had taken any pictures.
No, I lied, reflexively .
What else could I do?
I was after all in a nation that had declared unambiguous war on journalists. Perhaps, while I wasn’t looking, a corporation had bought the rights to the theory of evolution and I was about to get sued for infringement of copyright. She looked at me askance before lumbering away. I knew I would continue to be watched.
Things were a little more genteel in Darwin’s day.
I was touched by the exchange of letters between Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, the theory of evolution’s lesser known co-creator, whose life as an itinerant butterfly collector seemed to consist of an endless morass of tropical fevers and shipwrecks. Both men went to great lengths to give each other credit for their ideas, so much so that in one letter Wallace expresses his “pain and regret” that Darwin withheld his own paper on evolution, so that Wallace could be given the opportunity to co-present his paper with him in front of the Royal Society.
Darwin later wrote to Wallace:
I hope it is a satisfaction to you to reflect—and very few things in my life have been more satisfactory to me— that we have never felt any jealousy toward each other . . .
Interestingly, Darwin had another prodigiously intellectual admirer, by the name of Karl Marx. The latter was so taken with Darwin that he wanted to dedicate the second part of Das Kapital to him; an honour that Darwin alas declined.
Not surprisingly, the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species was hugely controversial, sending the religious establishment of the day into a state of apoplexy. What is harder to understand is why, today, given the unassailable mountain of evidence, is the theory of evolution still controversial? While the Darwin exhibition soft-pedalled the case against evolution’s nay sayers, evolution remains as clearly observable a phenomenon as gravity. It may be difficult to agree on what causes gravity, but most people acknowledge that it exists. Not so with evolution.
The spectacular recent find in the Canadian Arctic of the fossil Tiktaalik is a case in point. This creature is the perfect snapshot of a transition from fish into land animals. If this isn’t an example of evolution served up on a silver platter, I don’t know what is.
Tiktaalik roseae
One need only look to the annual mutations of the flu virus to get an object lesson in evolutionary biology. The practise of modern epidemiology just wouldn’t be possible without evolution being understood, not just as a theory, but as a demonstrable, empirical truth. Viruses mutate and evolve and vaccines need to be constantly adjusted accordingly.
Matthew Chapman, Darwin’s great grandson, wrote a hilarious, yet compassionate article in Harper’s detailing his experiences of the Pennsylvania trial in which a group of parents sued the Dover Area School District to get “intelligent design” taken off the local science curriculum. The proponents of ID promote what is essentially a quasi-scientific re-packaging of Christian fundamentalism, as a theory every bit as scientifically valid as evolution. The ID movement has infiltrated numerous American school boards by framing its overtly religious philosophy as an issue of free speech, in which the teaching of evolution needs to be somehow ‘balanced’ by the teaching of intelligent design. It is the slippery slope to a new kind of Lysenkoism, the triumph of ideology over empirical fact, a trend which has become all too common in contemporary America.
Understandably though, given the technological limitations of his time, Darwin didn’t get it completely right. Recent studies have shown that evolution can be sped up considerably, beyond what is afforded by the glacially slow mechanism of random mutation acted upon by natural selection. Apparently, organisms of different species can actually swap DNA, creating what a recent article in the New Scientist calls interspecies ‘gene flow.’ This speeds up the evolution of new species by rapidly increasing the complexity and variety of available genetic traits. Of course this could be viewed as a kind of ‘intelligence’ but it is intelligent in a beautiful, intrinsic kind of way, akin to the phenomenon of emergence, in which complex functionality and behaviours can arise from the interconnection of simple elements.
A belief in evolution does not of course negate a belief in God. As far back as 1908, American nature writer John Burroughs argued that evolution should not be viewed as an insult to the dignity of humanity but as evidence of the divine in nature. One of his essays has been excerpted in May’s Atlantic Monthly. This passage particularly struck me:
It jars our sensibilities and disturbs our preconceived notions to be told that the spiritual has its roots in the carnal and is as truly its product as the flower is the product of the roots and the stalk of the plant. The conception does not cheapen or degrade the spiritual, it elevates the carnal, the material. To regard the soul and body as one, or to ascribe to consciousness a physiological origin, is not detracting from its divinity, it is rather conferring divinity upon the body. One thing is inevitably linked with the other, the higher forms with the lower forms, the butterfly with the grub, the flower with the root, the food we eat with the thought we think, the poem we right or the picture we paint, with the process of digestion and nutrition.
I wish someone had taught me that in school.
Perhaps the most endearing part of the AMNH’s Darwin show is the provision of a tortoise cam , which streams the ponderous peregrinations of the exhibit’s two resident Galapagos tortoises out onto the internet, for free. For all of the impact they had on Darwin, tortoises are sadly an evolutionary dead end. Unlike the dinosaurs, they never really evolved into anything else, remaining more or less unchanged since the Triassic. Maybe it’s because they are already perfect. Next spring I will celebrate my 40th anniversary with Marmaduke, my male box turtle; not a tortoise really but a kind of terrestrial turtle native to the eastern United States. I bought him at a pet store with my allowance money in the spring of 1967, when I was just eight years old. He has been my stalwart companion ever since, enduring life in motel rooms, being on more than one occasion mailed across the continent and being slept on for a week by mistake when he crawled underneath my futon. These days, he alternates between basking in the pools of sunlight on my office floor and taking long, multi-day naps in the shadows beneath the bookshelf. When I look into the ancient twinkle of his wise reptilian eyes, I see divinity.
On a whim, I started re-reading Phillip K. Dick’s 1969 novel Ubik, a few weeks ago. In it, the characters, who are living some time in the near future, are suddenly confronted with a reality in which time regresses around them. The objects in this environment begin to devolve into more primitive versions of themselves, regressing through their own embedded history, ontology recapitulating phylogeny, in a backward race to the beginning.
To make matters worse, some of the characters are becoming infected with a hyperaccelerated ageing disease that makes their bodies wear out and crumble to dust, in the time it takes for them to traverse a room. The only cure for all of this seems to be the elusive substance ‘Ubik,’ which keeps appearing in mysterious advertisements the characters find in their increasingly regressed environment; ads that emanate from the frozen mind of their cryogenically preserved former boss, Glen Runciter, who was killed in a bomb blast on the moon.
Though the full blown epidemic of atavism Phillip K. Dick imagines still remains in the realm of fantasy, scientists have been having heated discussions lately on the phenomenon of reverse evolution.
The furor centers on accounts of a Kurdish family who allegedly have a mutation causing them to walk on all fours. Is this an example of ataxia, a medical condition caused by an underdevelopment or degeneration of the cerebellum, or is it an example of human evolution going backward? The waters have been further muddied by the claim that the afflicted family has been paid off by a BBC documentary team to stop cooperating with the Turkish scientist, who was originally studying them to give them exclusive access. Given this kind of media manipulation, one has to wonder about the phenomenon’s scientific credibility. Are these poor people simply being co opted into a gratuitous, pseudo scientific TV freak show? Or is there a scientific basis to the theory that their genetic makeup is causing them to revert into a proto-human form? The answer might be obscured forever by scientific infighting and the demand for “info-tainment.”
Buried in all of this brouhaha was an interesting reference to research being done on stimulating the growth of reptilian (or more specifically archosaurian) teeth, in the embryos of chickens. Archosaurian refers to crocodiles, the closest living relatives of dinosaurs next to birds. A recent study, detailed in Current Biology, reveals that dormant developmental programs ‘hiding’ within the genetic code of birds can be turned on to make birds grow teeth.The study hints that under certain conditions, contemporary birds can be made to revert to their earlier form. is essentially saurian. Many primitive birds such as Archaeopteryx and Hesperornis had teeth and the distinction between them and their dinosaur predecessors is vague to nonexistent. In fact the word ‘predecessors’ is incorrect. Bird-like dinosaurs and proto-birds were contemporaneous for eons and more and more fossils are being unearthed, particularly in China, of dinosaurs with feathers.
hesperornis skull showing teeth
Recent discoveries there of the remains of early Tyrannosaur relatives, Dilong paradoxus and Guanlong wucaii, indicate that feathers were in fact a relatively early dinosaur adaptation, which later devolved back into the bare lizardy skin we now commonly associate with them.
I was pleased to read that according to some scientists anyway, chickens might date back to at least the Cretaceous. I keep two small flocks of Chinese silky chickens and am often struck by how dinosaur-like they are. The silkies have some rather odd reptilian features such as a fifth toe, strange, knobby, walnut kernel shaped protuberances on the male foreheads and a coat of hairy feathers, useless for flying; much like those of early feathered dinosaurs. They also make communal nests, as did some of the larger plant eating dinosaurs, particularly the Titanosaurs and the duck-billed Maiasaura. Watching these strange little fuzz balls every morning as they hunt for insects or take their dust bath, I am accorded a view into the distant past. The dinosaurs it seems never left us. They just got tinier. . .
I arrived back in New York to learn that my favourite poet, Ivor Cutler, is dead. I will always remember his multi-episodic Glasgow Dreamer and Egg Meat – heart breakingly bleak, yet completely absurd poems that have etched themselves into my neural chassis. The Guardian has published a beautiful obituary. Metafilter has posted a useful link to some of his recorded material. I moped arount the Met today, taking in the Rauschenberg exhibition but was somehow more drawn to the somber beauty of these ancient Chinese stones. Cutler taught himself Chinese and was in the habit of frequenting London’s Chinatown. I think he might have liked these stones.
During the holidays I was going through some old reels of Super 8mm film, when I came upon a short piece of footage I had shot of the World Trade Center just before Christmas in 1988. It was filmed through the window of a bus, while passing through a vast swath of interconnected cemeteries that runs through the borough of Queens. I had come this way along the Long Island Expressway before and it always struck me how this sprawling necropolis—literally, a city of the dead—served as a kind of sombre counterweight to the manic vitality of Manhattan, rising up like an electrified escarpment on the other side of the river.
But on that day, riding into town from John F. Kennedy Airport, watching the ordered rows of graves as they passed through my little plastic viewfinder, the world felt somehow different—as though my eyes had been reincarnated and that even the most banal detail of what I was seeing was precious and needed to be recorded. The sepulchral landscape outside my window just added to the sensation that I was being delivered back into the land of the living, after an unexpected visit I had made to the border of the kingdom of the dead.
As I continued filming, my thrift store movie camera whirring reassuringly, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center popped into the frame—suddenly looming in the background behind the gravestones like the massive cenotaphs of an extraterrestrial civilization. Even at this distance, the towers exuded an unearthly adamantine quality, a kind of brooding force field, as if the mysterious monolith from Kubrick’s2001 had landed in Lower Manhattan and cloned itself. Yet for all their imposingness, there was something melancholic about them. Their sheer hubristic massiveness made them look somehow out of place—shunned by the lesser architecture around them.
When I look back to the day on which I shot those grainy images of the towers, images that might now be quite unremarkable were it not for the catastrophe of 9/11, I realize that I had myself many times imagined their destruction and that whenever I looked at them, it was with a sense of foreboding. There was something in their very structure, in their brash crystalline supremacism, that hinted at hidden fragility. As every diamond cutter knows, a crystal, though hard, can be brittle and broken easily if struck in the right place. Not surprisingly, this perception was shared by others, including the terrorists. Baudrillard in his November 2001 ”Le Monde” essay L’esprit du terrorisme, suggested that the Twin Towers had become a kind of lightning rod, poised to close a circuit between globalization and terrorism and that their destruction on 9/11 consummated a kind of collective premonition of its inevitability. In that sense, many of us were at least unconsciously complicit in the imagination of their collapse.
And as for me, I had just had my own premonition of their destruction, right before riding that bus, as I flew around the towers inside a disabled aircraft, thinking I might soon die.
The day had started out calmly enough, just past dawn, when my girlfriend and I boarded an American Airlines flight at Toronto’s Pearson Airport, bound for LaGuardia. During the preceding months, we had again grown eager to escape the peculiar claustrophobia life in Toronto often evoked in us. I don’t know what it was exactly—the city, despite its outwardly cosmopolitan nature, could at times feel oppressively parsimonious. It was as if the ghost of Anglo-Saxon propriety always lay in wait for us, scrutinizing and judging with the cold, blue eyes of a baleful headmaster— ready to pounce on the slightest indiscretion. Peter Ustinov may have picked up on this when he famously quipped that, “Toronto is like New York, run by the Swiss.” Blame the Anglo-Saxons or blame the Swiss, fun in Toronto always seemed to come with too many conditions. New York City didn’t have that problem. It was unapologetic, exuberant, beguilingly evil and not afraid to make eye contact.
We had both noticed that occasional trips to New York inevitably improved our melancholic dispositions. The effect though temporary, would last quite a while after our return and so we tried to make the journey at least once a year, whenever our sporadic artists’ incomes would allow. This time we had saved up enough money for a four day get-away and we were feeling quite overdue.
Our plane took off into the gas-flame blue of the frigid Toronto winter morning. We banked over the fractal sprawl of suburban Mississauga and started out across the lake. Still a little bleary-eyed, I became mesmerized by the aircraft’s shadow as it tracked across the water’s preternaturally pristine looking turquoise surface. I was too tired for once to think about the pollutants that roiled and seethed beneath its waves. I sipped some of the orange juice the flight attendant had placed in front of me and started slowly to wake up. It seemed like we’d only been in the air a few minutes when already the snowy fields, gravel pits and little towns of upstate New York started passing beneath us. The view from this altitude in the clarity of the winter light, was making me giddy with a sense of new found perspective. There is something deliciously freeing about being in the unique kind of movement space existing in air travel—that interstice in time and location between having left and having arrived, in which anything seems possible and where one inhabits completely a landscape of anticipation. I felt as if I could finally breathe again, after a long and confining convalescence.
I started thinking about all the fun things we might do after our landing at LaGuardia. We’d start by catching the shuttle bus into Manhattan, drop off our bags at the Washington Square Hotel and then take the subway up to MoMA. My girlfriend was a painter with a particular passion for Monet and she was feeling like she needed to pay homage again to his Water Lilies.
Before long, the captain’s voice came over the PA and announced we had begun our descent. The hour had passed by quickly and I now lurched from my reverie into a more concrete sense of arrival. We dutifully stowed our tray tables, returned the seat backs to their upright, locked positions and fastened our seat-belts. Outside my window, I could see the island of Manhattan spreading out below us— America’s mothership at berth in the mouth of the Hudson, moored to the edge of the teeming continent by the wire and steel of her bridges. We descended further, swooping southwards along the island’s spine. White puffs of steam spiraled up at us from the heat exchangers on the skyscraper roofs, the streets dropping precipitously into the chasms in between. We flew right over the Empire State Building; its cliff-like stone walls glowing the colour of white peaches in the oblique morning sun, and above it, its defiant, art deco needle— a mooring mast for zeppelins, long ago vanished into the air sheds of time. Its evil twin, the Chrysler building, rose up just beyond our right wing-tip; its sinister, triangular windows glinting at us like shark’s teeth from the stylized nested hubcaps of its automotively-themed superstructure.
What a fantastic way to begin our first day in New York, I thought. The magnificent panorama unfolding below us would be ours to explore as soon as we landed, in just a few more minutes.
Moments later, we passed just over the the Twin Towers. Unornamented, brutally mathematical and impossibly enormous; they completely dominated their surroundings like great blocky monuments to a cult of machine hyperbolism. The North Tower’s antenna prong, festooned with communications nacelles and flashing strobe lights, loomed alarmingly close to our trajectory yet I felt somehow confident our pilot knew what he was doing. In fact I was delighted he had taken advantage of this morning’s spectacular weather to give us this impromptu tour.
As we banked out over the topaz water of the winter Atlantic, I realized we were long past LaGuardia. Perhaps the airport was congested and we needed to circle around while traffic cleared up. We began to veer slowly to the left, in a long, languid arc back toward Brooklyn and what I hoped would be our final approach to the airport, a few miles to the north. We descended a little further and I could hear the hydraulic whir of the flaps deploying, but our trajectory seemed a little tentative—lacking in the acuteness and resolve of a plane that was really about to land. By now I could see the runways and terminal buildings of LaGuardia sprawling out ahead. Our descent steepened, then flattened out and we swooped low over the control tower before climbing again; sharply.
What was wrong? I wondered. Where we being turned back at the last minute due to a lack of runway space? We regained some altitude and banked across the East River toward Manhattan and its blocky cordillera of buildings.
The captain’s voice came over the PA:
“As you can see, LaGuardia has come and gone. We’re having a little trouble with one of the indicator lights on the landing gear. We’re just going to circle for a while, until we get it worked out.”
I could see the Twin Towers approach again and as we passed over them, they seemed closer than before, as if their gravity was gradually decaying our orbit around them, like we were a dying comet in the grip of an overpowering sun. As we arced over the sea once more, I looked back, catching a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, green with verdigris and looking somehow sullen, as though she’d been stood up by her date and left standing there to oxidize on her private island, angrily scanning the horizon with her torch. The plane banked right again and we headed back in the direction we had come, in what was shaping up to be a tight oval-shaped holding pattern around the bottom end of Manhattan.
By our third circuit around the World Trade Center, I started idly fantasizing about what it would be like if we suddenly veered into a collision course with one of the towers. It was a strangely familiar feeling because I, like so many others, had rehearsed the gruesome scenario countless times using Microsoft’s Flight Simulator.
Almost as soon as it became available, Flight Simulator become hugely popular with people like me— the first wave of fanatical personal computer users. By the mid 1980’s, its crude wire frame renditions of the Manhattan skyline had already become part of pop culture iconography. I would often spend hours a day, staring at the screen of my vomit beige Macintosh, flying virtual planes, taking off and landing at virtual airports, using the mouse as a simulacrum for the aircraft’s control stick. I was deeply addicted to Flight Simulator and like anything else one does over and over again, the images of it replayed endlessly in my mind, long after leaving the screen.
Vintage MS Flight simulator screenshot
The mock flight around Manhattan was by far the most beguiling and technically resolved choice on Flight Simulator’s menu. I had many times attempted to pilot its virtual 747 through the small gap between the World Trade Center towers and then circled the Statue of Liberty before landing on the pixelated runway of the ersatz JFK. At some point in the game I usually wound up crashing into the Twin Towers, sometimes even deliberately, because the sensation was so morbidly fascinating and of course, being an electronic game, completely without consequence. Even in this blocky, low-fi digital rendering, the towers had a strange magnetism to them, like bug attracting lamps to the inner suicide bomber. Having imagined it so often, when the real catastrophe of 9/11 happened, a quarter century later, it was all the more horrible— because on some instinctive level, I knew it was coming.
By our fifth or six orbit around Lower Manhattan (I was starting to lose track), many of the passengers were beginning to get visibly restless; anxiously shuffling their newspapers and straining to look out the windows to see what was going on.
The PA crackled and the captain’s voice came on again:
“Ladies and gentlemen, just to update you on our status. We’ve received confirmation from the ground that our landing gear is extended, but we’re not yet sure if it is locked. We will be maintaining a holding pattern so that we can burn off enough fuel to attempt a landing. We will keep you posted as to how the situation is developing.”
Attempt a landing? As in we ”might” land? What was the alternative? Wasn’t locked landing gear a prerequisite to not dying in a ball of flames as we hit the runway? My girlfriend and I looked at each other, gulping simultaneously and reflexively squeezed each other’s hand. An anxious murmur rose up from among the passengers; the sound quickly reaching a fever pitch then subsiding into near silence as the gravity of our situation began to sink in. The businessman across the aisle started to furiously scribble what looked like a will on a pad of yellow foolscap. The look of panic was clearly visible on the faces of the flight attendants, eroding my already tentative composure even further. To make matters worse, a baby started shrieking uncontrollably somewhere near the back of the plane, piercing the protective bubble of the apprehension-laden silence.
I still couldn’t really believe it. One minute I’m absorbed in an idle fantasy about a computer game and the next I’m locked into a countdown toward my possible death.
Despite being forced to wince in time to the supersonic shrieks of the baby, the relative physical comfort of the situation made it all the more surreal— I was still sipping my orange juice, the weather outside remained scintillatingly beautiful and the air currents hadn’t even the slightest hint of turbulence. Below us, I could see the people of Manhattan busily coming and going, blithely unaware of our dire predicament.
We circled and we circled for what seemed like an eternity, burning off fuel to make us less flammable should the landing gear fail when we hit the runway. Our endless circuit around Lower Manhattan was giving the Twin Towers a kind of meditative quality; their hulking rectangularity the focal point for our sombre jet age procession around a vast and invisible cloister of the sky.
I’m on a plane, I’m circling the World Trade Center and I may die within the hour. Those were the simple facts to which my previously complicated life had now been reduced. Of course it might all work out, but the moment of truth—that bifurcation point between knowing and not knowing, dying or not dying— would happen in an instant.
My girlfriend, still squeezing my hand, turned to me and muttered “This sucks,” through tightly clenched teeth. “It does,” I replied, somewhat disheartened that this was indeed the most profound thing I could come up with.
The PA crackled and everyone’s heads bolted up to listen:
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We will be going to try to land at JFK instead of LaGuardia because of the longer runways available to us there. We believe we have isolated the problem to our front landing gear. We’ll take an initial pass over JFK and then make our final approach to land. Your flight attendants will be giving you further instructions. Thank-you for your patience.”
Thank-you for your patience? I suddenly had all the time in the world. Given the uncertainty involved, I wasn’t exactly in a rush to hit the runway.
The PA came on again. It was a flight attendant.
“Ladies and gentlemen, If you have not already done so, we require that you return your seat backs into their upright, locked position, stow your tray tables into the seat back in front of you and fasten your seat belts.” Most of us were still strapped in preparation for our aborted first landing, so it was kind of a moot point.
As promised, we veered off from our tight holding pattern around Lower Manhattan and headed southeast toward Jamaica Bay. We were over JFK within minutes and started descending rapidly, the viscosity of the air thundering against our extended wing flaps. It looked as if there were no planes moving anywhere along JFK’s great quadrangle&mash;quite unusual given that I knew it to be one of the busiest airports in the world.
We came in extremely low, just over the longest of the runways, around which I could see a rather disturbing amount of activity, evidently on our behalf.
Both sides were lined with yellow emergency vehicles, flashing their lights, with knots of what appeared to be firefighters or paramedics milling around them. Someone was spraying fire retardant foam onto the runway from a long hose attached to a tanker truck.
We climbed again, this time in a steep vortex along the airport’s ring of terminal buildings, ascending rapidly, then levelling out. I was already eyeing the American Airlines air sickness bag that was sticking out of the seat pocket in front of me, thinking I would be needing it imminently. The piece of hard candy I was sucking on, which the flight attendant had handed out earlier, tasted like a mothball and my stomach was lurching in a kind of energetic Romanian gymnastics routine.
The flight attendant’s voice came over the PA again, clearly nervous beneath her obsequious professionalism.
“Ladies and gentlemen, in a few minutes we will be making our final approach to JFK. In preparation we ask you to remove your eyeglasses, and bend forward, bracing your hands on the seat back in front of you or if you cannot reach it, put your head down as far as possible and wrap your arms around your knees. And while we’re doing that let’s all take a deep breath and think of the holidays.”
The holidays? And here I was thinking about what would happen when we hit the runway and the wheels collapse. Perhaps I was being too negative or maybe I was missing something here but wasn’t it a distinct possibility that we could all fucking die here? The holidays indeed . .
Still circling over JFK, burning off the last iota of lethally flammable fuel, I felt a curious blankness descend over me. I had always expected in such a situation that my life would flash in front of my eyes or that I would have some profound last minute insight into the meaning of my existence— but nothing, absolutely nothing, except for a vague feeling of having been somehow cheated. I turned to my girlfriend and asked her what was going through her mind. “I need a drink,” she said. Although it was just shy of 10 am, I guess I couldn’t blame her.
The cabin warning chime sounded three times and the flight attendants started mincing down the aisle to make sure that we had all correctly prostrated ourselves into the crash position. I could hear someone quietly weeping a few of seats back, although it was mostly masked by the as yet unabated cacophony emanating from the back row baby. By now its shrieking had reach such a skeweringly high pitch that I felt as if someone was performing unanesthetisized brain surgery on me, driving a knitting needle through each of my ear drums. Death would at least liberate me from this, I realized, feeling oddly relieved.
The chime sounded three more times. The cabin crew scurried away, presumably to take up their own impact resistant postures somewhere in the much safer, back part of the plane. I was left to contemplate a close up view of my goat-like knobby, knees, bulging up from beneath my black Levis 501’s. Where my knees the last thing I would ever see in this life? I was hoping I’d at least get to see the Galapagos Islands. It seemed hopeless
I could feel the nose of the aircraft tilt forward sharply. The hydraulics whined as the pilot deployed the spoilers followed by a throbbing white noise rumble as they raked the air to decrease our speed. This was it. We were making our final descent. I took my girlfriend’s hand. Turning her head, she looked at me with an ironic expression and said:
“Well, it’s been nice knowing you!”
“Likewise sweetheart. Um, I didn’t think it would end this way,” I replied in the same nonplussed tone, feeling completely inadequate in the last minute consolation department.
We continued to descend, the roar of the turbines stepping up in pitch as our altitude fell in bursty, vertiginous increments. It was as if we were being rolled down an invisible flight of stairs with our faces on our laps, knowing that the last step would be a doozy or that there might not even ”be” a last step and we would be cast into a flaming pit. It also seemed to be taking an inordinately long amount of time. Not that I was bored exactly. Just anxious.
Then suddenly, just as the whining of engines and the roaring of disturbed air had reached a crescendo, I had the sensation, still staring at my knees, we had levelled out. I popped up from my crash position to look out the window. What the hell, I thought, I really haven’t got anything more to lose here, except my life. I was surprised to see that we were hurtling just a few metres over the runway, like a great pop-riveted metallic swallow delicately skimming across a tranquil morning pond. I could see the emergency vehicles, the fire crews, the mounds of frothy flame retardant almost level with my window and then—
Ka-chunk
The back wheels touched down. We were still moving along at an extremely high speed. The pilot was keeping the aircraft’s nose in the air until the absolute last second, like a kid popping a wheelie on a bicycle, in case the front wheels were to buckle on contact with the ground. The thrust reversers deployed, opening behind each engine like the stiff metal petals of machine age flowers, redirecting the hot blast of our exhaust gases forward into a deafening rumble of tortured air. The airframe shuddered with the rapid deceleration and I could feel my weight pulling forward into the seat back in front of me, as I pushed back hard with my hands.
Thunk
The front wheel hit the runway and within a few metres, we rolled to a full and sudden stop.
Yes there was some applause. The baby even stopped crying for a minute or two as a yellow emergency vehicle raced over with a large metal brace, which was summarily jammed under the front of the plane. But basically, all of us, including the by now dishevelled looking cabin crew, wanted nothing more urgently then to get off that plane. The doors were flung open without any of the usual time-consuming formalities and we all shuffled, shell-shocked out onto the tarmac and into the golden light of the Atlantic winter morning.
We were ferried by bus to a distant terminal building, which when got there proved ethereally empty, giving it the unsettling feeling of being some kind of way station to an afterlife we thought we had temporarily avoided. All the other incoming flights had been held back at JFK, pending the outcome of our uncertain landing and it felt like our plane load of passengers had arrived, like the exhausted protagonist in Chris Marker’s La Jetee, not from another place, but from another time.
We must have gone through some perfunctory immigration and baggage procedures, but my level of delirium was such that I must have completely somnambulated through it.
Somehow we found ourselves on another bus heading toward Manhattan. I remember fumbling at the bottom of my knapsack, looking for my movie camera, thinking that if I filmed the landscape as it went by, it might somehow mechanically corroborate that we were still alive. I was a little sketchy on why this was so, but deeply convinced it was necessary. After filming the expanse of cemeteries on the Long Island Expressway with the Twin Towers looming in the distance, I collapsed into catatonic sleep. I was awoken by my girlfriend tugging at my shoulder, just as our bus pulled up outside Grand Central Station.
It’s nine-thirty on a Thursday night and it’s pissing with rain. I’m sitting here in the Nanaimo Greyhound station staring down onto an expanse of cracked and filthy linoleum, trying to figure out what colour it had been before it succumbed to erosion. I decide on ‘white’, sort of. But that must have been a very long time ago. Behind me, a young Vietnamese woman in a dark blue wind-breaker, pinstriped flares and a white newsboy cap sits among a pile of sodden cartons full of Asian groceries, sucking her teeth so loudly that it reverberates through the waiting room. A not-altogether-unpleasant odour of coriander and peanuts emanates from her beautiful mouth.
A couple of meth heads in black hoodies and multiply articulated plastic moon shoes stand hunched over a cell phone playing a game, twitching and vibrating as they pass the handset back and forth. They giggle in loud bursts as they exhort their blocky 8 bit avatar through the mazescape of the screen’s tiny universe, powering it forward by the sheer maniacal energy of their drumming thumbs. The wall behind them is quite exactly the colour of baby shit and this flu I’ve got is making me nauseous.
The double doors burst open and in with a blast of wind and rain comes a blonde young, short-haired guy in a black nylon wind-breaker and cargo pants. He’s wrestling an enormous khaki duffle bag up onto his shoulders that seems to have developed a sort of writhing lump at each end, as though it was undergoing mitosis or contained a couple of kidnapped children, suffocating and fighting for their lives. The little conical silver horns, pierced into his bland and unlined face, one above each eyebrow and another in the dimple of his chin just above his abbreviated strip of porn-star-pubic-patch beard, make him look like an apprentice devil back from a day’s hunting. As he approaches the counter, the lumps in his bag stop thrashing, as if obeying some silent command, and our young Satan buys his ticket without breaking the trance of the zombified clerk, resplendent in a coffee-vomit beige, short-sleeved, polyester, bus company shirt. Devil boy bursts back out the door, strides across the platform and stuffs his sack of souls into the Greyhound’s cargo hold for the long night ride back to hell.
I don’t know if it’s the flu, the garish fluorescent lighting or the beginning of some psychotic episode but everything in the room is starting to crackle with an aura of electric green corona discharge of the type I usually experience before peaking on acid. But I’m not on acid, although I kind of wish I were. My burning eyes wander over to a broken vending machine, then settle in exhaustion on a wire stand in which a cup of takeout coffee lies spilled over a stack of “New Dawn” papers, turning them into a kind of sodden, brown, stratified, pre-shale sediment, the beginnings perhaps of a new prehistory.
I hear the big diesel turn over. I get up in a fuzzy delirium and shuffle out to the platform and climb aboard the grumbling metal womb, which will take me away from here. I settle into the dark anonymity of my seat and the bus growls and lurches out of the terminal, beginning its long slow drive down the Old Island Highway. I close my eyes and pass out almost immediately into a deep and drooling stupor. I feel opiated. My mind loses its grip on the inside of my fevered eyelids and I start falling backwards into a warm, dark tunnel, the walls of which seem to be made of some sort of palimpsest of layered sediments. Here and there, in what seem like floating fragments of mirror, I catch a glimpse of something monstrous, churning through a limpid ocean that seems somehow to have inundated the glistening, lonely nightscape I am still half-hearing, half-remembering, swishing and droning by, outside the bus window. But that highway seems so far away now. I spiral deeper into the primeval warmth and start to drift. . .
It’s getting hotter and I continue to drop through the void. Perspiration is sheeting on my burning skin and my forehead is glowing like an ember. Seemingly at random, I turn toward one of the passing mirror fragments and it explodes open into a turquoise supernova, sucking me through it like a rupture in an airplane’s fuselage at 30,000 feet. I wince and find myself suddenly suspended in the water column of a warm and scintillating ocean, looking up towards its shifting surface.
I’m just getting my bearings when I glimpse the enormous crocodile-like form of a Mosasaur rising up from far beneath me, surging upwards with great sinusoidal thrusts of its tail. Remarkably, I seem to be invisible to it and it rockets past me, up towards a shoal of rams-horn-shelled ammonites bobbing like pearly Christmas ornaments just below the opaline waves. The monster lunges its needle-toothed maw into their midst and they jet away in nimbuses of purple ink. I pop to the surface, gasping for breath in the fetid air. All around me, the sky is raked with lightning and there is a pervasive smell of sulphur and rotting vegetation. I’m furiously treading water and in the distance I see what I take to be a Plesiosaur bursting through the boiling surf. Its sinuous neck uncoils like a bull whip and it sinks its hideous fanged head into a leathery-winged flying thing that had been gliding like some chthonic pelican just above the surface of the chop. Within seconds, it is dragged shrieking and flapping into the seething sea, leaving only a dark halo of blood foaming on the waves.
The bus shudders and I am shaken back awake into the endless rainy night. My heart is pounding and I am drenched in sweat. I can taste its salt in the corners of my lips as if it was the residual spray from the Mesozoic ocean in which I was just immersed. I open my eyes. We’re in Duncan, a city of strip malls incongruously juxtaposed with beautifully First Nations totem poles. Another palimpsest. We’ve pulled into a shopping mall and it looks completely abandoned. Nobody seems home on Vancouver Island tonight, just miles of dark trees and wet blacktop, interspersed with pools of fluorescent mall aura, the cold light of wasted kilowatts reflected in empty, rain-slick parking lots. Nobody waits for us at the bus stop and nobody gets off our bus. The air brakes hiss, the driver hits the accelerator and we pull back out onto the highway, re-entering the twin beam tunnel of our headlights and our lonely passage through the darkness and rain.
Settling back into my seat, I wonder what could have happened back in those long-ago seas that wiped out all those fearsome dragons in their watery lairs. They must have seemed invincible at the time. Yet they couldn’t escape the wrath of their destiny— even the mightiest reduced to a mute mountain of flesh sinking in abyssal mud, swarmed over by writhing hosts of zombie worms and hagfish. The creek beds of eastern Vancouver Island are littered with their fossilized remains. Almost intact, mineralized skeletons of mosasaurs and elasmosaurs (the most hyperbolic plesiosaur—12 metres in length, half of it neck) have been found near this old highway, along the Puntledge River. I imagine their fearsome teeth, arched ribs and endless vertebral columns sticking out of the ferny banks like the remains of a petrified armada, sunk in a surprise attack at the very apogee of its global supremacy. These mute bones date back to the late Cretaceous, just before the malcontent asteroid Chicxulub, struck the earth in a titanic suicide bombing, precipitating the fifth great dying—the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction. Chicxulub may not have been acting alone, but whatever the geometry of the disaster, at the end of the Cretaceous, life on earth was dealt a sudden and cataclysmic blow.
Vancouver Island’s fabled landscape has always made me feel a bit uneasy. It’s as if the geomorphological rug could be pulled out from under me at any moment. I’ve always put this down to me being a transplanted easterner, a stranger in a strange land, but it turns out that there really *is* some basis for my trepidation. Vancouver Island, Haida Gwaii and a chunk of Alaska are collectively part of an errant raft of the earth’s crust called Wrangellia. This rogue land mass started out somewhere in the proto South Pacific 270 million years ago and headed off on a tectonic joy ride, slamming into the side of what we call North America, 140 million years later, in perhaps the worst parallel parking job ever in the history of the continent.
Wrangellia’s rather tentative relationship with the rest of the continent can be seen in its palaeontology, which has more in common with parts of Asia than it does with the rest of North America. In fact Wrangellia was spawned together with a whole herd of other micro-continents called terranes, which careened hither and thither across the Pacific in a slow-motion tectonic demolition derby, still very much in progress. The incessant lurching and grinding of our bus’s syphilitic gearbox makes me wonder what would happen if Wrangellia started to buck and strain more determinedly at its continental mooring, or worse still, slipped downward into the sea.
For months now, I’ve been obsessing over this idea of rising sea levels. Even without the help of plate tectonics, global sea levels are inching upwards with the relentlessness of a department store escalator. U.S. National Parks officials are reporting that global warming has become the latest spectator sport in Alaska. Tourists are flocking there to see what’s left of the rapidly melting glaciers, “before they’re all gone.” The Greenland ice cap is currently in full bore melt mode and it contains enough water within it to raise the oceans seven metres by the time it’s all gone.
Back in 1962, J.G. Ballard wrote a lurid science fiction novel, Drowned World, in which he portrays a post-apocalyptic civilization rotting under a vast and stagnant ocean. As I look out the window at the pounding, Noachian rain, the question seems to be not “if” we will have a “Drowned World” but “when?” The plesiosaurs and mosasaurs of the Cretaceous may be gone forever but I imagine the shadows of saltwater crocodiles, fattened on our bloated corpses, undulating over strange rectangular reefs that once were the big box stores of Nanaimo. It seems inevitable to me that all this suburban sprawl, these dark forests and fields, will soon become just another page of sediment in Wrangellia’s unfinished paleontological book.
Time seems to be oddly plastic tonight and I feel like I am floating through it like some sort of spectre.
I think of Kim Novak’s character, Madeleine, in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, when she lapses into a state of chronosthesia or time confusion, while looking at the cross section of an ancient redwood tree. Pointing at a space between two growth rings she tells James Stewart’s character Scottie: “Somewhere in here, I was born and there I died. It was only a moment for you. You took no notice.”
Like Madeleine, I often suffer from a kind of temporal confusion, my mind racking focus back and forth across time with seeming impunity and without warning, accompanied by a frequent, complete inability to focus on the present. The fossilized scallops in the flagstones of my suburban Toronto boyhood seem as real to me now as the words I am typing on this page and yet I am constantly plagued by distractlingly tactile visions of the future. For some years now, I’ve had the feeling I am standing at the precipice of a great phase shift, a rip in time, like the one that deposited the thin layer of iridium at the transition between the extinction apocalypse of the late Cretaceous and the rest of history.
