Glenn Kubish

This is a presentation on the language of winter I shared at the Winter Bike Congress in Minneapolis earlier this month. The theme of language was developed further in talks by Bill Lindeke and Dan Patterson. I am very thankful for the chance to again share the thoughts first developed for the Winter Cities Shakeup in my winter city hometown, Edmonton. For most of my working life, I worked in a television newsroom. TV newsrooms are unique places. Full of, how shall we say?... unique people. People driven by wanting to get to the truth, people wanting to afflict the powerful, folks driven by the joy of telling a good story, people seduced, like Narcissus of old but updated for HD, by the reflection of their images. And some just have very good hair, and they know it. TV newsrooms, I think, are a little more time-stressed now, but when I worked there there was still time for huge debates. And one of the hugest was whether the first snowfall of the year was, properly, news...

The silent snowflakes spun to the earth like paratroopers. Pekka Tahkola was the first to notice the invasion. He jumped from his chair in the hotel room we were in, some fifty or so of us in one room, and he ran to the window and the world beyond. Decades of his life seemed to melt away, so that by the time he reached the window he was again a boy, or, what's more accurate, he was again the boy we chase on the other side of the man. "Look!" he said. "The snow is here!" We clapped and cheered. Not for long, but for long enough to make a mark. I had never before in my life clapped for snow. I have admired its beauty. I have photographed it. I have marvelled at it. But cheering for it? Never. Now, there I was sitting in Minneapolis at the World Winter Bike Congress breakout session on Finland's preeminent position in the pantheon of winter cycling and I was cheering as the snowflakes twisted and turned down down down. Down. They were big, fluffy, beau...

Here is a Pecha Kucha I delivered at the Winter Cycling Congress in Minneapolis. It was called Let There Be (Just a Little More) Light. I'm Glenn. From Edmonton, Canada. And this is the landmark High Level Bridge in my hometown. Take a good look. It's 2400 feet long. And something to see. Especially in the winter. Especially in the daylight hours in the winter, that is. When you can especially see anything at all this time of year. Okay, that's not the whole picture about the bridge in winter. Because this is more the way it looks on some nights now after a big community crowdfunding campaign raised the money to put LED lights on the bridge. Citizens bought and dedicated individual "bulbs." In a real way, inside each "bulb" is a real story. The bridge goes red and white for Canada Day. It can go the colours of the French flag after the Paris Attacks, which it did. It went red, white and blue for the Fourth of July. That caught your amb...

Quick note off the top: I hope to attend the Winter Cycling Congress in Minneapolis next February, where the theme is equity. To get my thoughts started, I put together a draft Pecha Kucha-style storyboard on the question of winter cycling and ownership—even though it's May and there is no snow in the forecast. It's not exactly what in cycling circles is meant by equity, or maybe in a way it is. In Happy City ( read it, btw), Charles Montgomery writes: "Despite the obvious effort  [my emphasis] involved, self-propelled commuters report feeling that their trips are easier  [his] than the trips of people who sit still for most of the journey." I wanted to explore that idea, and see if something in addition to good feeling isn't being lost in our thinking about winter and bicycling. I wanted to think about work and ownership. This draft starts with John Locke and ends with Bob Mould, with some David Byrne and Abe Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and John Hiatt sprinkled ...