Three Things from Edmonton podcast, episode 80: big world, tracking shot, transfers


Happy end of the week, y’all. Here are three things from my life up on latitude 53 that made for some happiness and gratitude this week. 

Three Things podcast, episode 80:

                     

1. Big world 

Sitting at an airport, looking at the different planes from their different places, re-lights the longing that would come over me as a kid, watching freight trains go over the Fort Road. Most of the cars were CN, but some had different names. Santa Fe. Burlington Northern. If I was lucky, I’d spot a boxcar from the Illinois Central, like the sublime train in the Steve Goodman song. My first sense that it was a big world came from the livery on those cars. Like sentences being read, the trains and their fonts shuttled by. My horizon was a receding train. 

Air travel doesn’t have the romance of the rails for me, but seeing planes from Southwest Airlines or KLM or El Al or Aeroflot on our various travels takes me away, too. Last week, I watched an ITA Airways A330, with Pope Francis on board, taxi into the Edmonton International Airport. It took 10 hours and 20 minutes to fly from Roma—amor spelled backwards. Blue fuselage, white wings, the Italian tricolour painted on the end of tail. It was like seeing an airmail letter with a foreign stamp in the mailbox.  And then the real surprise. Below the aircraft door, printed in big, bold black letters was the name Marco Pantani. This plane was the Marco Pantani. 


Pantani was a complex, controversial, superb and revered professional bicycle racer from Italy.  Pantani was a great climber, perhaps the greatest ever. He shaved his head, wore a bandana and an earring, was called Il Pirata, the pirate. His name on the plane made the pontiff’s Airbus a kind ot papal encyclical—sort of, well, not really, but kind of. 


All of which is to say that as I watched the plane arrive from the ocean of sky, drank in the Italian colours and read Pantani’s name out loud, I had again for a passing second that sweet, sad feeling that the world is not just what it is here. Travellers, and the containers they travel in, bring that message home.



2.  Tracking shot 

It was good to listen to Shelagh and Aleasha swap stories about Anne Shirley last week. Anne came up when Aleasha and Michael dropped by to share pics from their trip down east. I can’t say or think or type eastern Canada without hearing the voice of Shelagh’s late mother insist that when I use those words I am referring not to Ontario and Quebec but to the Maritimes and Newfoundland.  Phyllis was from Charlottetown. It was good to have her nearby as we looked at the kids’ adventures at Green Gables in Prince Edward Island. 


And that was them in a pub in Halifax and over lobster sandwiches by the beach, and, look, wildflowers in New Brunswick and now they’re on the Cabot Trail, and the Confederation Bridge in an Audi is pretty cool, oh, and look, here’s Shelagh back with a photo album of the time she was on the island as a girl. 


One of the inexpensive thrills of travelling is the feeling of being not just a crosser of borders but a kind of border agent inspecting the papers of tourists in line. Okay, not tourists as much as their cars in parking lots and not their papers as much as their licence plates. But you look at each of these documents and, like Michael did at Green Gables, say them out loud: New York, Québec, Massachusetts, Georgia. Then like a border official, you might document these plates, using a tracking shot to record them for review back in the basement of the home office. 



3. Transfers 

I ask for a bus transfer even if I am not transferring buses. I like to get the piece of paper. I like to have it on me, like a boarding pass. I liked to study the little jagged shape made by the hole punch in the old transfers. The Greek word for transfer gives us the English word metaphor.  Literally, it means to carry over or to carry across. There is nothing more mundane than a bus ride and little that’s more mysterious than a metaphor. In what depth lies hidden the truth that explains how human beings can use words to describe things that are not those things? The sky was one of my first teachers about metaphors, or the particular sky with its castles and canyons that Joni Mitchell sang about from the kitchen radio before the walks to school in the morning. Indeed, metaphors carry us across from here to there—from one side of meaning to another.

Thanks for being out and up there, friends. Travel safely. See you next time.

Three Things, episode 80, features sound of Shelagh, Aleasha, Michael, Phyllis, the Pope’s plane and more:  https://podcasts.apple.com/.../three.../id1550538856...   
[5:36]

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