Slices of Summer

Troops trek down the river pathway, hauling rucksacks, camouflage uniforms, automatic rifles slung across their backs. Some look like teenagers, but none look like boys.

It had rained unrelentingly since I got home the previous day. The river was busy now, rushing west towards Seoul and the Yellow Sea. I was walking east, against the current, towards work. Among the common debris—branches mostly—something else was floating, bits of black in the muddy water, like stray grounds in a coffee cup. Not just a few, but one every few feet, and all about the same size, shape, and color. I took a closer look. They were eggplants. Thousands of eggplants floating down the river.

Giant white wind turbines turn lazily in the mountain breeze, spread out over hilltops like bleached thorns caught in a moss garden. Pastoral animals graze in the lush green mini-valleys which roll in between. Hikers hike the trail that snakes around this place, couples mostly, but also us, a group of twenty teachers, me the only non-Korean. Many photos are taken. We can see the East Sea from here.

People picnic under bridges.

We walk down a creek, after descending a paint-peeled ladder opposite a temple, her shoes in hand, mine hanging from my shoulder, laces tied together. The water is cool on our bare feet and ankles, stones smooth under our toes. Poorly placed steps send spikes of pain shooting up our legs, but we make it, and climb out of the creek victorious.

Korea is like 1950's America.

Everything in Korea is made in Korea.

Cars, electronics, appliances, furniture, windows, doors, ships, tools, toys, toilets, faucets, heavy construction equipment...pretty much anything you can find in Korea, is made in Korea.

The economy is booming.

Korean electronics are in high demand. Its car industry is growing. In 2011, Korea built more ships than any other country in the world, including China. Bridges, roads and highways are being built on a massive scale, and they're being built fast. People enjoy a vastly improved standard of living from just 30 years ago.

Customer service is great.

Have you ever seen one of those videos from a 1950's gas station, where every car that pulls in gets the full treatment (windows wiped down, oil & tires checked, etc.) by a couple of smiling, clean-cut workers in uniform? Well, Korea isn't quite that good, but it's not far off. Seriously, it's weird.

The ever-present (but not really real) threat of a nuclear war with a non-democratic country that spends way too much on its military, and is obsessed with building rockets.

One key difference being that 1950's Russia was able to build rockets that actually worked.

Wallpaper is in.

Everyone is clean shaven.

Ancient Koreans often grew beards, goatees, and mustaches, but modern day Korean men shave daily. Facial hair is rare; stubble unheard of.

Men wear suits, ties, hats, and slacks--even when they don't have to.

Everybody smokes, and they smoke everywhere.

Not only do people light up everywhere, but it is actually less socially acceptable for women to smoke than men. I've never witnessed it personally, but others who've lived in Korea longer than I swear they've seen grown women publicly scolded for smoking while walking down the street.

All drugs are believed to be equal / evil.

Except for the kind prescribed by a doctor, administered at a hospital, or bought at a pharmacy. Or the ones for sale at the corner store, or at the coffee shop. Or at a restaurant, or a bar. Those ones are OK. Forget what all these so-called “scientists” say with their “studies.” The drugs that have been arbitrarily chosen to be illegal are bad because they say they're bad. Now go get fall-down, throw-up, piss-yourself drunk. That's fine.

Smoky pesticides are sprayed from trucks in public, and children play in the plumes. Everyone is assured they are safe.

Boys are free to play with toy guns wherever they like.

Television is a big deal.

It seems that television is still a pretty novel thing here in Korea. TV's are everywhere, and it's virtually impossible to go anywhere without having several screens there. Every restaurant in Korea has at least 2 TV's on at all times. Soap operas (called “dramas” here) are wildly popular. Some even air during primetime on Saturday night. Another big genre are comedy / variety shows, which are terrible. There's also a disturbing number of shows about people (some vaguely famous) sitting around eating meals together. I'm not saying that American TV was (or is) any better, but it seems that just about anything will pass for entertainment on Korean television.

It's not okay to be openly gay.

That's right, if someone comes out in Korea they will be ruined socially, professionally, and probably disowned by their family. No joke.

SPAM is popular.
 

People have milk delivered to their homes; there's even a special little door for it.

Coca-Cola is served in glass bottles in restaurants.  

Ever see one of those fitness machines that's just a belt that wraps around a person's waist and vibrates? Gyms in Korea have those, & people actually use them.



 

Slices of May

Strange, warbling horns radiate up from the streets. Children's voices, drunken shouts, somehow rise fifteen stories to be heard. A man on a loudspeaker in the intersection below talks from morning till night. Inside, delivery men call out, and electronic locks chime arrogantly, while someone practices piano upstairs. Megaphone trucks overpower them all, blasting incessant messages while they cruise around the apartment complex, their foreign words penetrating two panes of glass to fill every room. A crude digital chime indicates some sort of mandatory message is about to be broadcast into every apartment. Listen up! A cluster of helicopters fly overhead. There is no escape from noise here.

Everything fades away five minutes over the river. In an improbably short distance, all sound is reduced to a chorus of croaking frogs and an intermittent breeze. Freshly planted rice fields extend outwards from a narrow road, raised up from the flooded mud. This is the realm of the amphibian. The frog sounds are all-encompassing, broken only by the odd dog bark, muffled—almost—by so many amphibious throats.

A crane stalks the shallows of the river, easing its reed-like legs into the current, tilting a black knife beak towards some unseen prey.

Hats off to Calvin Bailey

Faith of our fathers ! living still...

We will be true to thee till death.

__________

- an excerpt from a hymn contained in a church pamphlet found pressed between the pages of Calvin Bailey's Hunt Club book, dated 1929.


● ● ●

Calvin Stuart Bailey—my great grandfather—stood 6”2, with a body hewn from Ontario oak, and shoulders as wide as a damn door frame. Born 1905, in the twilight of the cowboy era, Calvin Bailey was of that last generation of hardy men who built buildings with their bare hands, and wouldn't flinch at the prospect of living off the land. In fact, in his 85 years on this Earth, Calvin lived off the land as much as possible: hunting, fishing, felling trees, and selling furs.

Calvin was a classic Canadian. In a 1925 photo, he can be seen mounted on a horse—outfitted in riding gear and a big 10 gallon hat—staring sternly off into the distance. He was only 19 years old at the time, but looks every bit a grown man. Men grew up quick then. None of this live-at-home-till-you're-30 bosh that we see today. Back then, there was no alternative for an upright man.

Calvin married at 20, to a Miss Beatrice Maude Hodge, with whom he had 5 children and stayed married 65 years. Carpentry was his primary means of supporting his large family. Armed with little more than an axe, a jack-knife, and an old-fashioned hand drill, he built heaps of barns and houses from Milton to Stewarttown. Calvin always got up early. He shaved with a straight razor, and had Red River cereal, a soft boiled egg, and toast every morning of his life. He'd be out before the dew dried to check his traplines, and back home by sundown.

Calvin loved hunting. He mainly hunted deer—from which he ate the meat, sold the hide, and used the antlers to fashion tools—but wasn't opposed to hunting bear, when they needed thinning out. He was known to bend an elbow with the boys at the Hunt Club on occasion, though he never drank to excess. A single drink from time to time was all. His only vice was smoking cigarettes, which he rolled himself. But, seeing as he started roughly 40 years before the science was out on smoking, he can hardly be faulted for that.

Yep, life was simple then. Beatrice Maude always kept a garden, and she'd share and exchange the produce it yielded with neighbours, not because it was part of some trendy organic health movement, but because it was the sensible thing to do. Electricity was handy, but coal oil lamps worked just fine, so they used those instead. People made their own fun. Socialized. Talked face-to-face, long before the internet and cell phones came along and balled everything up.

Calvin, I might infer, was a slightly secretive man—though his secrets were of the honest variety. In the 50's, after he'd moved to Haliburton, Calvin bought a snowmobile strictly for trapping. He kept it in the ice-house under lock and key, and nobody ever saw the machine but him. Curiously, the first 250 pages of Calvin's Hunt Club book were left blank, with the writing starting on the last page, and working its way back towards the front. A few pages have also been cut out. Most interestingly, the inside of the back cover contains a warning, written in stylized script:

Steal not this Book

for your Life,

For the owner carries

a Big Dirk Knife!

Calvin, it would seem, was also a poet. However, this is not his only surviving creative work. Apart from his extensive woodworking and construction projects, there is also a placemat-sized piece of metal into which he pounded some maple leaves, a boarder, and the words, “The Emblem of Canada”. I have to wonder what else he might have written, had all those blank pages of his Hunting Log been filled, after the last supply entry was made.

In his later years, Calvin would sit on the back step, with his rifle propped on his knee, and shoot the mice that were raiding his garden. I imagine a great many mice helped to fertilize that garden.Calvin Stuart Bailey died of natural causes on April 29^th, 1990. A contemporary of his—my non-biological great grandfather Pitkanen—died while hauling a deer carcass out of the bush on his back as an octogenarian. Though I don't know whether these two men ever met in life, I think they would have had plenty to talk about in death.

Moving On: a Meditation on Fields and Memories

I still hold a sort of residual fondness for this place—the slice of Southern Ontario roughly triangulated between Rockwood in the West, Terra Cotta in the North, and Norval in the East—but it's mainly nostalgic, where enjoyment of it is dependent on a certain innocence that's all but lost.

When I was five, my family migrated from mountainous British Columbia to rural Ontario in a mid-70's model camper van with all our worldly possessions in tow. I remember virtually nothing of the trip (two weeks though it was) just the vaguest snippets of experience. However, a great deal of it must have been spent driving through the endless fields of the prairie provinces, and it's not too much of a stretch to infer that those wide open spaces made some sort of permanent impression on my young mind. I would, after all, find myself returning to them (for better or worse) over and over again in the years to come. And, while their pull may have faded, they retain the power to draw me back still.

Arriving in Ontario—on the outskirts of a place that could at once be called Georgetown, Acton, or Limehouse—I was greeted by a huge backyard lined with tall trees on either side. At the end of the yard was a one-step stream, beyond which were bulrushes, vine mazes, warring ant mounds, and a marshy forest sprinkled with secret ponds. Beside all of this, just over a rickety old wooden fence, was a massive field, going on, it seemed, forever; its endlessness broken only by a distant barn.

The barn, like all barns, had a character all its own. This one was deadwood gray and rusty-roofed, unused but not dilapidated. Just a proud old barn unafraid of another winter, and comfortable with the fact that it didn't have many left. There were other barns in the area that hadn't aged so well (hollow skeletons of their former selves) and still others that flaunted fresh paint and fancy new materials. But the older barns have always been my favorite, standing like abandoned castles lording over their crops.

When I was nine, I liked to climb trees. I can recall a time when I climbed a tree in my backyard and jumped over to the next one without any fear or hesitation, simply because I could. I remember the leap—the flashing thrill of being in mid-air—and latching onto the opposite trunk. Sure, I got scratched up, but I made it. Though, was I really not afraid? Did I maybe hesitate, but do it anyway? That moment is long gone.There's no way to be sure. The purity of it—the pure daring of the act itself—is lost. The only witness was the forever field.

One particularly nostalgic summer in my early twenties, I hiked back behind my old house with a friend, hoping, I suppose, to glimpse some physical manifestation of my childhood, and bask in the memories. Instead, I found a landscape so violently different as to be completely unrecognizable. Gone was the expanse of grass, the trees (where I had once jumped so bravely) the fence, the yard. All that remained was a narrow patch of dirt. Behind it, nothing but a featureless bog.

Change carries an immediacy that is never really there. My backyard didn't change overnight, it just felt that way because I hadn't seen it in twelve years. Changes in landscape usually occur over a relatively long timescale; continental glaciers retreat over millennia, wilderness is transformed into agricultural land over centuries, and farmland is turned to town in decades. Changes in life, however, usually occur over a matter of months, weeks, or days. Our perception plays tricks on us, but the signs of change are always there. Whether it's the slow encroachment of city sensibilities on small towns, or the worrisome way a girlfriend keeps mentioning that guy she works with—life is full of foreshadowing. Once you learn to spot the clues, there are few surprises. The trade off for this earned insight, is a gradual yet unstoppable dimming of vibrancy, like someone turning a dial in the mind from bright to grayscale. Memory, I think, behaves in much the same way.

The memories that stick are those that we have the greatest investment in emotionally. So it's no wonder that a great deal of our personality—our memory—stems from our childhood, when emotions were flying high and every day was a hyperreal adventure. As we grow older, we try to recapture this magic in different ways. Vicariously through the eyes of children, or through the consumption of media, alcohol, or other drugs. Also, through specialization. Photographers, with enough experience, patience, and luck, can occasionally capture a feeling on film. Dedicated writers may gain an increased ability to spot things (or invent them) and meticulously render them at a later time. Of course, none of these things approach the first-hand natural wonder of a child, but why not try?

This land once held magic, and maybe it still does, it's just more difficult to see it now.

At a glance, this landscape is unspectacular; trees, a few old houses, farmers fields. But for those willing to explore it further, there is surprising variety to be found here: kilns, caves, abandoned buildings, badlands, clayhills, rivers, trails, tree farms, marshland, escarpment, orchards, waterfalls, golf courses, glacial potholes. Even a beach. Yes, there are modest wonders here, private nooks and crannies where a person can disappear for a few hours, where the incredible can happen now and then. Sometimes in a field.

In University, I hiked over 500km of the Bruce Trail from Niagara Falls to Walter's Falls, Ontario. I did this, in part, to escape the drudgery of the city, to reconnect with nature, and to challenge myself physically. As one would expect, I covered an assortment of different terrain in this distance, but soon (re)discovered that fields were my favorite; for their honest simplicity. Forests were too dark, buggy. Walk through a forest an hour before sunset and you'd swear it was already dark, but step into a field before sunset and the sky opens right up, letting you enjoy the last wisps of color as they soak into the clouds.

Hiking had an unexpected effect on my perception of space as well. The further I ventured out, the more my preconceived boundaries broke down. I never knew I could hike 50+km in a day until I tried. Why hadn't I just walked directly to school all those years, instead of taking the roundabout route to wait for a bus? I could have got there in half the time, and it would have been twice as fun. I could have saved dozens of hours. Weeks! What was stopping me from hiking to Kingston, Montreal, or New Brunswick? Across Continents?

Well, I never did hike across any continents. I guess lack of time, money, and other obligations are common enough excuses. But what I got to do was even better. Travel overseas, start a career, meet the woman I would marry, climb a few mountains, see the fields of six different countries; sometimes through a hole in the fog, sometimes from a train, sometimes grazed to the soil by herds of scruffy yak, sometimes populated by a single, wiry farmer bent over his crop, sometimes terraced like liquid glass spilling down a mountainside, sometimes dotted with great overgrown bunkers like concrete turtle shells.

It would be easy, in some ways, to stick around and let the subtleties of my home province reveal themselves to me, over time. But I think, in going away for a while, I'll learn to appreciate the differences between here and elsewhere more fully. To travel is to experience a different perspective, not only on the places travelled, but also of where you came from. I have a lot of fond memories here, but it's time to make new ones. Branch out. See what I can see.

Maybe I'll even find that elusive magic, somewhere in a far off field.