Three Things from Edmonton - episode 103: palimpsest, big stand of timbre, long view

And, so, we've made it through another week up here on the northern range…

Looking back, here are three things that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude. Three Things, episode 103: 

                                              

1. Palimpsest  

The years are all starting to run together now, but I think it was late 1987. I was at The Howlin’ Wolf nightclub off 97 Street downtown, on stage were Ian Tyson and the Chinook Arch Riders and the song they were letting loose on was the polka picaresque, the saga of the doomed Carlos Zaragoza and his fighting rooster, Gallo del Cielo. My dancing partner was the pretty Miss Shelagh McAnally. 

The dance floor was a joyful blur. During a break in the action, we said hello to Tyson. He signed Shelagh’s white shirt. He signed the guitar strap I had brought along, just in case. “GOOD LUCK GLENN,” he printed in black-ink block letters. Fast forward a couple of decades: I was working at CTV and a crew was putting together a feature story on Tyson. The years had washed away most of that original signature on the strap. I dug it out and sent it and the Gallo polka story with a cameraman to see if Tyson would sign it again. “LIFE FADES…”, he wrote over the original, signing it and adding his stylized iT logo. The strap was now a manuscript.

Palimpsest is a piece of material, usually written material, on which the original wording or lettering has faded or been made to fade, traces of which remain, even though other writing has been added overtop. Metaphorically, gentrification is a kind of palimpsest. Out there in the city, the Indigenous Art Park in Edmonton is a kind of reconstructed palimpsest, with its Indigenous, settler and urban development layers on display. My Tyson guitar strap is palimpsest, too, and self-conscious at that, with the artist’s observation in Sharpie that time effaces the stuff of the world. That’s how I still read the ellipsis he included after “LIFE FADES…”  Life Fades dot dot dot. Tick tick tick….like a metronome…clop clop clop…

2. Big stand of timbre

In a text from my friend Tim, I heard the news that Ian Tyson had died. Tim, my buddy Fitz and my mother  are the keepers of the names of the dead for me, the three  horse people of the apocalypse. I called my mom to share the sad news. She didn’t even say hello. She simply said, “He’s gone.”

It was like the start of a TV newscast on a dramatic news day when the producer doesn’t go with all usual music and animation and graphics off the top, but, instead, begins with the most dramatic statement, the most emotional soundbite of the day. The way my mom answered my call was the cold open version of a phone call. We traded our favourite Tyson lines, the words that are still branded on us. The ghostly big stands of timber from Summer Wages for her, the alliterative cow camp cold from The Gift for me. Then she told a story I had not heard before.

“The very first time that dad and I saw him was at the Chateau Lacombe, I don’t know if they still call it that or not, anyways, we were there on a New Year’s Eve, I believe, and Ian and Sylvia were playing in the lounge there.” 

“You saw Ian and Sylvia?” I asked. I hadn’t heard a thing about this.

“Yes,” she said, taking her time getting through the word. “So, we went in and sat there and watched the show. I can remember, he was so young, he had these long sideburns, and they were so good right off the start.”

That little yarn has added a family layer of meaning to the old Chateau Lacombe. My mom and I talked of these and other Tyson things until…

“Oh, you’re breaking up, you’re breaking up, Glenn,” she said. “Can’t year ya.”

“Okay, I’ll call you back,” I said.

3. Long view 

Ian Tyson was the poet of the long fade, the chronicler of the I’ll call you back. What he called back was the Old West he had heard of and knew. He was explicit about his mission. Like his Charles M. Russell in The Gift, Tyson had to get it all down, ‘cos she’s bound to go. Gone, in a blink, like the heroic horses in the remuda dispersed in the MC Ranch auction.

Ian Tyson the artist takes us to borders, trails and horizons—the Medicine Line, the customs crossing, the line between buckskin prairie and blue sky, the Goodnight Loving trail, the barbed wire fences that closed the open range, the interstate highways. He calls into being the wind, the rain, the Sacred Mountains and the Horsethief Moon under which Henry and the barrel-racing cowgirl he adores still dance the polka. He introduces us by name to cowboys you’d never heard of, like the Rainbow Rider, Casey Tibbs, and to cowboy storytellers like Will James and Kid Russell. We watch the morning star with that Calgary girl. He sings the praises of coyotes, including one in Malibu—Bob Dylan, I’m thinking. He croons and yodels, he sings blues, he delivers reggae and jazz, he sings from the Songbook. In one song, he takes the point of view of a dun horse in the 16th century. 

I’m not a cowboy. I don’t dress up as one once a year. I don’t think the sky belongs to cowboy politicians below. But there’s this mechanical horse at Andy’s IGA on 142 Street in our subdivision, two bits a ride for the kids, that takes up floor space that could easily be used to sell stuff instead.

Ian Tyson’s music issues from his high and lonesome calling: to find, while they still may be found, traces of what is vanishing around us and in us. Ride on, Mr. Tyson.