Three Thing from Edmonton podcast -- Episode 130: Le Tour, sleep, ruins

Hello from Edmonton, where, once a week, I try to discern the tracks left behind after things that made me happy or thankful passed through. This week’s podcast is here for the hearing:

 

                             

And for the reading:

1. The Tour

The Tour de France has the architecture of a pilgrimage, its peloton a collection of the faithful moving together on the winding road to immortality in the Elysian fields of Paris. The gang is a motley group, at turns jovial and gloomy. Some are pure of heart and body. Some are polluted and penitent. Bowed down like supplicants, they move in their own congregations, recognizable by their various robes and badges. They hear voices in their heads. Together, this colourful ribbon flows through towns and villages, by churches and public houses, each pilgrim carrying water and a simple pouch of food. Chains shuttle like holy beads moving through expert fingers. Carried in this group, slightly elevated, is a heroic figure, a framed image, the maillot jaune, the illuminated yellow jersey.

Okay, that’s as far as I can stretch it. In defence of my flight of fancy, I point out that the route of this year’s tour does suggest the pilgrimage theme. Stage 10 from Vulcania to Issoire shares some of the same road as the medeival routes of Santiago de Compostela in France.

You now have a pretty clear picture of what we’re watching and re-watching and talking about and listening to podcasts about and texting each other about and cooking and eating meals to in our house these days. The Tour de France is a tour de force. The machines are gorgeous. The people lining the route are happy. The scenery is dramatic. It is the best of slow TV. It is strangely relaxing to watch the distance-to-go ticker tick down from 167.7 km to 167.6 km to 167.5 km, and so on and slowly on. If that sounds monotonous, if that sounds like nothing happens, that’s not true. Stuff happens. Mark Cavendish crashes. Michael Woods from Ottawa wins the race up the mythical Puy de Dôme volcano.

What really happens is the definition of “happens,” changes. What starts to happen is a hay bale, a chimney, a patch of gravel, a pylon, a woman in a polka dot dress, shadows of trees across the road, festooned power lines, fence posts, asphalt patches soft in the sun, a guardrail, a Renault painted blue and yellow parked in a field, a couple wearing Mario and Luigi coveralls. What starts to happen are the things of the Tour de France. Vive le Tour! 

2. Sleep

My dream of being a surfer has never gotten off the ground. I’ve settled for riding media waves, instead. The Beach Boys harmonies were big in our house. I tortured myself and the rewind button on our cassette player trying to sound out the lyrics to Surfin’ USA. Only with the internet did I figure out that it’s “At Haggerty’s and Swami’s,” not “At Edgar T’s…” Kids at school would come back from family Christmas trips to Honolulu with Hang Ten t-shirts. Hawaii Five-O opened with a monster wave styled on Steve McGarrett’s hair. Wide World of Sports covered surfing. In magazines, skateboarders channelled the surfing vibe and put it within reach of the kids who rode the parking lot asphalt outside the Hudson’s Bay at Londonderry Mall. It was Waimea Bay for us.

My waves break in different places these days. I caught one last week—asleep. It was 3 am Sunday. We were back from pickup duty at the airport. I was starting to routinely wake up as I hit the pillow. Somehow, I stayed under for five hours, but my it felt like five seconds. I opened my eyes, and they hurt. I closed my eyes, and they hurt. Through the window screens, the magpies chattered like hedge clippers. I surrendered to a gust of self-pity. Then, I caught that wave. A blissful, three-hour wave of sleep on crisp linens during which I steered the plot of my dreams this way and that way, staying afloat at one point in the madcap adventure by agreeing to play the lead role in King Lear at the Citadel on the strength of piece of advice from CTV News reporter Bill Fortier, who said all I needed to know was three things about the play and I could ad lib the rest, did I know three things about Lear? Regan, Goneril and Cordelia, I replied, break a leg, he said. I woke up again as the curtain rose. I did not know where I was or who I was or what time it was. But I was rested and strangely awake.

3. Ruins

I was installing a small fence in the container garden to contain the squash, which, left to itself and its sprawling ways, would infiltrate the cucumbers on its way to annexing the tomatoes. The tomatoes stand alone. Next year, I will remember again to not plant squash. It doesn’t play nice. This garden strategizing was interrupted by a clap of afternoon thunder that sounded like a giant recycling cart being pulled across the driveway of the sky.

Larkin has a remarkable poem about thunder. “My mother who hates thunderstorms,” the poem begins. “My mother who hates thunderstorms holds up each summer day and shakes it out suspiciously, lest swarms of grape-dark clouds are lurking there.” That’s as much as I can recall. The poem is a warning against falling for so-called perfection and purity, I think. For me, that’s why the clouds are grape-dark, and not merely purple. Things ferment. The poet is more comfortable in the fall, in the wreckage of the season. The thunder rolled by again. I walked to the back fence to check the sky to the west for the weather to come and I noticed for the first time a rusted clothesline pole standing crooked in a patch of overgrown rhubarb in the neighbour’s backyard. It struck a note of melancholy that I could not put words to. I needed the sheets of rain to do that.

Thanks for being out there, friends.