Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 82: sounding familiar, segments, whales

Happy end of the week, y’all.

This week’s list of three little things from my life that I noticed I noticed made me happy or grateful starts, as they say in TV news, right now.


                             


1. Sounding familiar 


The sounds I heard proved that the Edmonton Folk Music Festival was back. The Folk Fest is about the musicians, but it’s not just their sounds I’m thinking about. There were other notes. Like the question at the top of the hill, "Any glass or alcohol in your bags?" It was actually pretty good to hear that question again and everyone replying no, no, and the good natured volunteers believing them and wishing them a good day on the hill. And the now, where the %^# is my tarp? question. It was good to hear befuddled people standing on the quilted Gallagher Park hill and again asking out loud that fundamental question of place. 



What can I get for you? at the beer pavilion was a transactional query, true, but refreshing just the same.  All weekend the hill popped with little bursts of joy—the sounds of acquaintances re-acquainting themselves with each other. “Look out, the lantern parade is coming through!”—those eight words you will hear only when it’s dark on the Saturday night and the illuminated sculptures are on the move, bobbing up and across the big hill. Even the rhythmic slaps from the row of porta potty doors below stage 3 were kinds of punctuation marks on what people were saying and thinking all weekend: It was good to be back.


On Saturday night, The National was on main stage. At the sight of a natural amphitheatre lit by points of candlelight, one of the musicians said something brilliant. “What is this, normally? A volcano?” Boom, as my friend Fitz would say. Yes, I thought, a volcano. What’s a better description for this mountain bubbling with two years of suppressed emotion now erupting in streams of applause and flashing with sparks of light? Like the sound of spikes being driven in to secure the tarps on the side of the crater that morning, that bit of us sounded back to us hit the nail on the head.




2. Segments 


The way the giant hydraulic limb off the cement truck arced in segments into the construction pit below—as if it were carefully placing the last bean seed in a row—made me stop. I was on 123 Street and 102 Avenue, where a new residential building is taking root, but I was also back in the Chinese Elders Mansion on 102 Avenue up from the old Checker Cafe on 95 Street in the early 1970s. My buddy Ronny’s dad worked construction back in that era (before safety was invented) so, as boys, we got to tramp around buildings as they were being built—in and out of framed walls, up makeshift ladders, along ledges, over rolls of rebar. What an adventure, being among the dimly lit, musty bones of a building as the sun was coming up.



My daydream was broken by sawing and hammering from the real-life construction site, and the sudden sound in my head of the word “articulated.” That’s the word I was looking for. Articulated was the word that described the concrete-pumping truck’s segmented arm. Articulate also describes the person who can use words fluently or coherently. There on the curb, astride my bicycle, I fired up the dictionary on my phone and went all etymological. Articulate from articulare, which means to divide into joints or to utter distinctly. To be articulate means something more specific than being eloquent or rhetorical. Precisely, it means possessing the ability to connect one portion of thought to the next, one sentence to the next. It means information or argument flow like the concrete down the cylinder connected to the segmented arm—the boom, as my friend Fitz would say—off the truck above the pit near 123 Street and 102 Avenue in Edmonton. 


3. Whales

We don’t get many whales in these parts. There used to be a bronze whale in a pool in the main concourse of West Edmonton Mall that children could walk into. The New England Whalers were last here in 1979, a few months before Bob Marley and the Wailers played the Kinsmen Fieldhouse on a road trip. That’s about it. Except for the whale that is Stage 3 at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival. 



“It was pointed out to me that today is August 6, which is the anniversary of the bomb on Hiroshima,” said folk singer Mary Gauthier to the crowd from the whale’s mouth before singing her exquisite song Mercy Now. “I’m gonna sing this next song as a prayer that we never, ever, never, never, never, ever, never, ever, ever, ever do that again.”


Stage 3 looks like the open mouth of a surfacing whale to me. The pennants tied to the jawbone of the stage’s aperture are the teeth of the magnificent cetacean, the troubadour, its lungs and tongue, her guitar, the whale’s echolocation apparatus—the whole instrument waiting for a bounceback message. (Or, at least, that’s how I saw and heard it in the beating sun with a couple of Grasshoppers sloshing around behind my eyes.)  Long live the Folk Fest. Long live Stage 3. Long live the whales who swim among us.


Every living thing could use a little mercy now/

Only the hand of grace can end the race towards another mushroom cloud


As my friend Fitz would say, boom.  




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