Because You Never Know

Earth Day just passed, and for a guy who writes frequently about the environment, even as far as to cast it in a religious light, I didn’t do too bloody much.  I probably spent more time on the computer than usual (a good two hours or more writing ‘Aspirations’ as a matter of fact).  I had my 48 inch flat screen on with playoff hockey happening, although I wasn’t paying much attention to it.  Half my house’s lights were probably on.  Not to mention, I had a fire going, but never checked to see if I had turned the heat down accordingly.  Basically, I failed at being an ambassador of good will to the only deity I would openly claim to worship.  Everybody lapses from their good intentions once in a while, I suppose. 

While I still fill up my van with expensive and polluting petrol, eat fast food wrapped in excessive packaging, and clearly use too much power in my own home, there are still a few things I do for which I can still lay claim as a good environmentally savvy citizen.  I keep things.  I’ve written about this before, but this time I’m making a claim for other reasons to keep stuff/junk.  I don’t automatically throw things away simply because they currently don’t’ work or I don’t need them.  I take a minute to step back and look at whatever the item is and see if there might be a useful item, for either myself or someone I know (or might meet in the near or not so near future, maybe).

Here are some examples of things I have kept, for better or worse.  You can decide if it was wise to do so or not:

·         I have no less than four old VCRs in my cave right now.  One of them works; I bought it at Value Village for $5.99—on purpose—so I could watch my old VHS cassettes of music videos from the 80s and 90s.  I also have Wrestlemania VI, some store-bought music videos, and even some old tapes of the Warner Brothers cartoon Histeria!, which has never been issued on DVD.  I watch them all the time.  I have the VHS tape from when I was a kid that has the televised broadcasts of the original Star Wars trilogy.  I like watching that, because some of the old commercials are still there.  What do I do with the other VCR’s?  I tore two of them apart to use the insides to build dioramas for my Star Wars collection.  Old circuit boards and wires look a lot like the futuristic technology in the Hoth base.  I also have my first VDV player, which no longer works, a couple old phones, and a set of broken walkie-talkies.  I planned to bring those to Dad to look at; he’s good at fixing electronics, so maybe he can get them to work again.  Since I only see him a few times a year, I doubt I’ll ever do it. 

·         I have been saving covers of various sizes for years now.  Pop bottle tops, milk bottle covers, and even coffee tin covers are organized in bags and containers, also in my cave.  I originally started keeping milk bottle covers to use as checkers, since they are about the right size, and in an afternoon’s work, you can build or paint a checkerboard out of plywood or craft board easily enough.  Years ago, I saved the covers from jugs of vegetable oil from KFC because I thought they would make excellent checkers in a large-scale checker board.  I eventually built it, and it looks pretty spiffy if I do say so myself.  I saved enough covers to make a complete set of checkers, and a handful of extras for replacements if need be.  Because you never know.  That’s basically the mantra for this writing piece.  I branched out after this successful endeavor to saving covers of all shapes and colours for more checker boards that I didn’t get around to making.  I made one for Mom for her birthday last year, and had enough covers to give her four colours:  brown, red, blue and white.  I keep the rest because, the teacher that I am, I see value in them as potentially math manipulatives, like for counting or multiplying.  Heck, I can use them whenever my SmartBoard finally dies.

·         I like to think that I am always looking out for things my friends might be interested in keeping.  I held on to a Budweiser bottle with the Carolina Hurricanes NHL team logo on it because a friend of mine supports that particular team, and I immediately thought “Hey, the Hurricanes logo doesn’t appear on merchandise that often, maybe he’ll want it… and say, he loves Budweiser too, this one’s a double-score!”  I gave it to him, and he seemed happy, but maybe it was more that I thought of him rather than that he got said bottle.  I have learned over the years that other people don’t always yearn for things like I do.  It’s hard to get your head around not being a collector when you are a collector.

·         I have no less than five Scrabble boards.  I never play Scrabble.  Again, I’ll play the teacher card on this one; I have run Scrabble in a club before, and multiple sets are really handy in such instances.  I never paid more than three dollars for one, so I’ve not spent much on them.  It’s easier to justify hoarding things when you can say “It was on sale”.  Lately, I’ve had my eyes open to actually pick up a few more, but for a very good reason.  I am thinking about the end of the school year, which is fast approaching, and since I ran Scrabble this year, plus played Scrabble-like games on the SmartBoard, and even Math Scrabble (yes, it exists, and I own it), I thought about a neat craft I could make for my kids.  Since I have only 18 of them, I thought that I could use Scrabble letters to spell out their names, and glue them onto those little shelf-thingies you set the letters on.  They could each have their own name plate, and I would only spend a few dollars, not to mention it would be a hand-made, personalized gift by which they can remember me.  I would like to keep one Scrabble set intact, but the others I can justify sacrificing for what I think is a worthy project.  9-year old Brandon would have loved this.  Will 18 other 9-year olds?

·         If you ever find yourself wanting a copy of Wuthering Heights, Gulliver’s Travels, The Time Machine, Edgar Allen Poe’s works, Bread and Molasses, or the Hardy Boys’ first book (The Tower Treasure), you need look no further.  I have at least two of each of these.  I have King Lear in soft cover, even though I also own a nice hardcover copy of the Complete Shakespeare.  Fact is, I have a pile of books I know I will never read again.  I don’t have time to read much as is, let alone reread.  I have been leaning towards the classics lately, so maybe a Kindle or Kobo is in my future.  If it’s in the public domain, it’s probably free, right?  I won’t part with Bread and Molasses though.  I want a set of five or six of those, because I would love to use them in Literature Circles in a future class I teach.  The future is the best reason of all to keep things, because no one can tell you with certainty you’re wrong about it.

Maybe someday I’ll write a sequel to this entry, with other items I couldn’t bear to part with the subjects of public scrutiny.  There’s no telling what treasures I will come across, or what detritus I’ll rescue from the landfill in the interest of saving the Earth from the scourge that manufactured it.  It saddens me to get rid of things, but if something I have held on to finds a purpose, or makes somebody happy, then I have not only helped the environment just a little bit, but maybe made someone’s day too.  If you like church stuff, then you might appreciate what I’m trying to do here.  Helping people and helping the world in which we live is really what it’s all about.  Compulsively keeping things, of course, has nothing to do with it.

Get Up Off Your Aspirations

This blog was originally posted earlier in the week, but upon reading it, I decided that the contents are fine, but definitely not one cohesive thought.  I want to keep the blog in tact, but clearly divide the entry into the two distinct parts they should be.  I'm not sure I'd add any more to either 'half', so the content remains the same.  However, as I mentioned in the first paragraph, my thoughts sometimes wander, and what comes out often ends up more interesting to me than the original train of thought.  Sooo, I have split it into separate chapters.  At the end, I have also added a post-script, because you know this whole project wasn't pretentious enough.

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When I set out to write a blog entry, I typically have an end goal.  I know where I want the writing to take me, and I usually begin with a rambling preamble before I settle into a rhythm.  I try to stay cohesive, but as in real life, on paper I tend to wander a bit here and there.  Sometimes, I find myself introducing a related but different thread to weave into the piece, and the challenge suddenly becomes finding out how I can tie the damned thing together.  It’s almost like the show ‘Lost’ in a sense, in that the more I write, the deeper I wade into the topic, and the more difficult it becomes to haul my feet out of the suctioning muck.  There, what you’ve just read is an aforementioned preamble.  It's at about this point I have the end-goal mapped out, somewhat.

I

I wanted to take you inside the not very secret world of my alter-ego, Mr. LeBlanc.  I have been teaching for three years, which is not a very long time in the grand scheme of things, but it seems like I have seen so much in my brief career—itself a preamble to what I hope will be a long one.  I’ve taught virtually every subject, either as a supply teacher or in a contract job of my own.  I had a child poop his pants.  One girl cut her own hair.  That same one glued her own backside to the chair for fun.  I had a young man with Downs Syndrome climb a second-story balcony and almost fall.  I saw a girl lose a tooth in a collision on the playground.  I once had a student ask the DARE police officer if all police officers like donuts.  I’ve seen students throw chairs.  I had a student tell me one morning he was super excited because his mom was coming home from jail.  I once sat through a parent-teacher interview with a mother whose daughter was terminally ill.  She cried.  I almost did.  I will never forget it.

Where I’m going with this is that as a relatively young teacher, although my years of service are few, my experiences have been nothing short of remarkable.  Even the rough days leave me with memories for a lifetime, and stories to tell by the bucket load.  Two things need to happen to the young teacher crafting their trade.  They need to lose their fear.  They need to toughen up.  And fast.  If you are new to the profession, you need to toughen up to the kids, because if you come across as too ‘nice’, they will take advantage of you.  They also won’t take you seriously.  Same thing goes with the adults.  Teachers are as different as students, so it’s reasonable to assume that some people will like you, and others will not.  Whether we like to admit it or not, it bothers us when people don’t like us.  That’s where the toughness comes into play.  You don’t need to be abrasive or confrontational, but you need to stand up for yourself without sounding defensive.  Somewhere along the way, hopefully you learned how to socially interact.  There are no courses in university to teach you that.

How do you learn it ? You learn it the way you learn most of the intangibles in life—by living.  Where do students ‘live’?  They spend roughly half their day at school, with teachers as their part-time parents for the duration of their stay.  Their classmates are their roommates, and if you are thinking of that annoying roommate you had that time, imagine having a few hundred.  Expecting to get along with them all is ludicrous; getting along with a small group is usually enough, and if you’re a friendly person, you’ll be respected at very least.  If you don’t learn social skills, or you grow up in an environment where learning social skills is impossible, you are at a severe disadvantage socially.  Those socially maladjusted students inevitably grow up to be socially maladjusted adults.  Some of them even become teachers.  Most teachers have more good qualities than not, but some, like the children they once were, are the reverse.  I dare say you can make that claim in any workplace, anywhere. 

II

I once wrote a story about a guy I met while on a hitch-hiking adventure back in my university days—when I was younger and less afraid of the world around me, in my first degree.  I’ve posted that story on Facebook, so if you are interested, feel free to look it up.  The guy was kind of a jerk, and he swore like you wouldn’t (maybe) believe.  I’ve known some foul-tongued people in my life, but two in particular stand out.  One was a fellow who coached my volleyball team in high school.  He dropped the f-bomb every second word, and was even reprimanded by the school administration for his potty mouth during our practices.  The other was the driver that picked me up just outside Dieppe that day.  He was a little more versatile with his vulgarity though; he was well versed in the George Carlin school of bad language, and at least made things interesting when he swore.  In both cases, I had to ask myself, how did these two become chronic swearers?  I started to think about when I first began to use bad language.  I remember my friends and I secretly giggling about saying bad words out of earshot of teachers as early as Grade 2.  It was an early form of rebellion, and one that didn’t cost anything.  You couldn’t get out of cleaning your room or eating your vegetables, but damn sure you could have your vengeance by (gasp) swearing about it.

Enter Mr. LeBlanc.  At school, we teachers are well-trained via our own self-discipline to use only appropriate language.  We do it because it’s the right thing to do of course, but we also have that constant fear that if we ‘eff’ up, we could jeopardize our careers.  For some teachers, it’s as uncomfortable as wearing dress shoes and ties (I wear neither unless it is absolutely necessary).  But we hold it together because society expects us to.  As they should.  We therefore place those expectations on the students.  We do not tolerate unacceptable language at school, whether in class, in the hall, in the cafeteria, on the playground, or on the bus.  I say ‘unacceptable’ language rather than swearing, because I believe there are far worse words in use that don’t necessarily count as swearing, yet in my opinion are more damaging.  ‘Stupid’ and ‘idiot’ are a few examples.  Racial slurs are obvious; the n-word is probably the most vulgar word in the English language.  Then there are some words that are in a gray area, such as ‘native’ or ‘gay’.  Sometimes it depends how the word is used rather than the actual word itself.  Regardless, the rules of what you can and can’t say are a lot like 4-square rules on the playground:  you start with universal rules, but as you go things change, people add rules, and some recuse themselves from them.  Soon you don’t know what you can say anymore.  I once said the word ‘crap’ in my class, and the students all held their breaths and admonished me.  I told them to grow up.

Lately, students have been substituting ‘friggin’ or more specifically ‘frickin’ for the usual, universally socially-maligned f-bomb.  I can appreciate their efforts, but really, when they say it, it sounds hickish at best and derogatory at worst, depending on the context.  When a student says it, and you prepare to admonish them for it, you need to take a second to look at the big picture.  The student is clearly respecting the code we have set forth for them by making a point not to say the f-word, which is commendable.  As teachers, we often forget that they do listen sometimes.  They are also allowing us to glimpse into the secret life of students, in which they all cuss like sailors when we’re not watching.  By substituting a similar yet different word, they are betraying that little tidbit.  They are also mirroring what others say, and students learn from each other, but someone in the adult world taught some student somewhere the things we try so hard to stop them from doing.  Today it’s swearing.  Tomorrow it could be speeding, stealing, smoking, or watching porn.  All of these things are also ways to rebel against adults.  Maybe we see swearing as a gate-way habit, like marijuana is seen by some as a gate-way to harder drugs.  Except the Liberal Party, of course.  The fact is, teachers need to teach the whole child, which is a concept bigger than curriculum and assessment.  The real assessment comes when you open your mouth to interact with other adults.  I gave the driver when I was hitch-hiking an F, no pun intended.  Still, you can’t help but feel for the poor kid who accidentally slips and says a bad word.  Immediately, we’re ready to hit the sirens and shackle them to a wall for their insolent behavior and make a terrifying example for their peers.  Lately, I’ve been politely reminding them that it isn’t appropriate to swear, or for that matter to even use ‘frickin’.  Not because of any school rule or social code.  It just sounds bad.  It’s beneath us to use base language when we have at our fingertips far better words.  We swear out of fear, and we swear out of ignorance.  As adults, it turns out, even as teachers, the fear is still there.  Sometimes the ignorance is too. 

So what advice do I give in regards to bad language?  Well, adults swear, so children naturally listen and also do it.  I would suggest we read more often, maybe work on those language skills so we don’t automatically default to the f-bomb as much.  Conversely, I don’t think we need to censor with a hair-pin trigger.  As a society we have an unnatural fear that if we let our kids hear a bad word in a movie or song, or read it in a book that we are practically forcing a cigarette in their lips, but that isn’t necessarily the case.  We worry so much about these little transgressions, and forget the big picture or the whole child as it were.  We’re all human, and there is indeed a time and place for almost everything.  Sometimes I wonder what makes any one word ‘bad’ in the first place.  The young student I mentioned earlier who thought all police officers eat donuts all day was unknowingly being more offensive than if he’d said a bad word.  Indeed, I know plenty of adults who never curse, but are often offensive nonetheless.  Of one thing I’m pretty sure though is that a lower vocabulary indicates ignorance. We aspire for our children to succeed, both in school and in life after school, and we want people to think highly of them, so we try our best to stop them from swearing, even though vulgarity manifests itself in many ways all around us, in word and in deed.  The gray area of what to say or do in any given situation is a staggering task for children to learn, from teachers and adults alike.  The ramifications are huge.  It’s hard to land a job if you don’t know what to say in an interview.  Potty mouths need not apply.

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Post-Script

I once had a teacher who, earlier in his career, was delivering an empassioned speech to the students in an assembly.  This teacher was known for his eccentric behaviour, pungent cologne and slicked-back hair, and also for being somewhat clumsy.  Okay, very clumsy.  He once fell through a stage-lights hole on the same stage from which he was delivering this speech.  His voice rose in crescendo as he paced the slightly warped, wooden slats, probably the boarded up light holes, and then issued the students the challenge "... to get up off your assss...perations!!"  I didn't actually attend this of course; it happened years before my time at that school, but I never forgot the story.  As a teacher, I find myself constantly afraid I'll slip in front of my students, and even most of the adults.  Sliding the word 'aspirations' in there at the last second was brilliant, I think.  Let's be honest, what was about to be said was the message he intended, and when you think about it, shouldn't kids get that message regardless?  There's probably a more sophisticated way to say it, I suppose.  I found that, after I read through this post, the title might not make the same connection to the piece that I was thinking when I decided on it, so hopefully this little epilogue enriches the experience a little.  And if not, then, darn it all to heck.

The Great Bleeding Rock

When it occurred to me that the Titanic had sunk in the North Atlantic one hundred years ago, the very first thing I thought about wasn’t the movie.  You know the one.  “I’m the king of the world!!!”  That cursed Celine Dion song.  Of course, Titanic’s modern-day legacy to our generation is the James Cameron film, for better or ill.  I don’t know, it wasn’t the worst movie I have ever seen.  The acting was fine. The effects were top-notch for its time and scope. Kate Winslet was there.  What’s not to like?

As I child, I’ve mentioned before, Mom played music for me all the time.  She used to sing too, and one of the songs I remember was an old folk song about the sinking of the Titanic that was called, give or take, “It Was Sad When That Great Ship Went Down”.  I barely remember the tune, and the lyrics were fragmented in my mind, but I typed what I knew into Google, and what do you know?  It came up!  Apparently, it was written in the years following the disaster, and has been covered by countless artists, most notably country legend Roy Acuff and folk hero Woody Guthrie.  I looked up the lyrics in half a dozen lyric websites, most of which were contributed by ordinary folks interpreting the words from old recordings, or just the way I remembered them from my own mother singing thirty years ago. None of the variations were like the way I remembered it.  All of them were similar, but the same structure and content prevailed through all of them.  Apparently, it’s a common Boy Scouts of America campfire song.  I’ve been in Scouting most of my life, and the most common campfire song I know is “The Grand Old Duke Of York”.  It’s rarely sung differently, yet it’s almost four hundred years old (I looked that song up while I was at it). Maybe the simplicity of “York” made it easier to pass down.  Makes you wonder how First Nations legends have made it after so many generations.  I’ll speak more on this a little later.

I once took a course in university about Maritime History, and the professor, whom I admire for his unique perspective of his material and his frank appraisals, taught us about folk art and culture, particularly in the Maritimes.  He had a real disdain for ‘folk art’, the kind of tossed-off trinkets you buy at farmer’s markets and gift shops.  He felt that folk art in that sense was too contrived, and that it drew culture away from its real essence, which is the whole of a group of people’s lifestyles and traditions that give them a collective identity.  He saw folk art as cookie-cutter craft work designed primarily as a source of income for an otherwise financially drained society.  He once told us that the rocks down at Peggy’s Cove were actually painted white so that from a distance, tourists would see them as more shiny and spectacular than their natural, dull grey.  That notion blew my mind.  Why on earth would anyone feel the need to paint rocks?  There’s a guy who lives near my place who painted a big rock in his yard to look like a giant frog.  It looks awful.

It’s true; folk art can indeed be tedious.  Doomed to be stored in garages, tossed thoughtlessly in landfills, displayed at yard sales with 25₵ stickers tacked on, these hand crafted, often toll-painted little talismans could be wooden, ceramic, with or without slogans or cheesy one-liners, mass-produced or even knitted by someone’s great aunt.  Usually they have some sort of cultural significance, like a 3D postcard that you don’t have to mail to anyone.  It will make a great conversation piece for about ten minutes when you put it on a mantle or window sill at when you get home.  Then you end up cursing it every time you have to dust around it, before you or someone who inherits your house finally gets rid of it.  If it’s wooden, you can at least burn it.  Otherwise, it has been utterly useless, and was just as likely forgotten by the crafts person who made it.

In that sense, folk art doesn’t seem to have much purpose other than to occupy the artist for a while, and to rip off some sentimental tourist of their scant spending money.  We need to ask ourselves something really important.  What is ‘folk’?  Is it music, like Bob Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary, or acoustic guitar music in general sang by knit-cap-wearing hipsters in coffee shops?  Is it tradition?  Is it literature?  Is it crafts?  Folk, in its most literal sense, means ‘the people’.  Folk music, therefore, is music of the people, whoever the ‘people’ in question are.  What the lyrical subject matter is may be irrelevant, since instrumental reels and jigs are still folk in the Celtic traditions.  It’s no less folk whether it’s a song about the Titanic sinking or the tale of a drunken revelry at Finnegan’s wake.  Either way, it’s a tale designed to pass something on.  That ‘something’ can be historical or fictional, but the story is the whole point.  The details fall the wayside like chipped corners of ceramic figures and paint flecks off ‘wish you were here’ wooden lighthouses.  The artifacts themselves might pass down, from generation to generation, and like anything old, might one day prove valuable to someone.  The artifacts slowly deteriorate, fade, and lose their significance when the story of their purchase goes to the grave with the original buyer.

One summer day, when my family was camping at Murray Beach, I was walking along the rocky cliff where kids and adults alike love to hop from rock to rock, wading out into the choppy surf and carve their names into the plateau of shale and sandstone.  Some kids visiting from the United States asked me on this particular day why there was a long, rusty-red trail run down the rock face.  The truth is it is a large clay deposit above that slowly eroded down in a trickling pattern, giving it an eerie bleeding aesthetic.  I told them that the legend says that a young teenager once boasted that he could climb the rock face, only to tragically fall to his untimely demise, and that his blood has stained the rock face ever since.  The kids just stood there in awe.  They ran off to tell their families, and while I wasn’t around to see it, they probably came back and showed them the scene of that fateful incident and its gruesome legacy.  Now, some of you might say that wasn’t a very nice thing to do.  I deliberately made up a story, passed it off as true, and now there’s no telling if more people have heard about the Great Bleeding Rock folk tale.  Who can say how the story has changed as it passes from one pair of lips to another ear, like the old telephone game we all played in preschool?  How could I pass something off as true?

Therein lies the great dilemma in folk tradition.  You could just as easily ask yourself what ‘truth’ is as much as ‘folk’.  What is true?  I often use Wikipedia as a source of information, but people say you can’t trust it.  Why not?  Should I trust a text book instead?  Books once said the Earth was flat, that Columbus discovered America, and homosexuality was a disorder.  We don’t believe any of that now.  The fact is, people write books, and people also write what goes on the internet.  Wikipedia is interesting, because anyone can contribute to it.  I could write up an entry about the Great Bleeding Rock, and many people would take it at face value.  Hold on: before you get too worried, remember that I am an academic at heart, and I value academic integrity very much.  I’m teaching my students how to site their research as of this writing because I think it’s important to acknowledge the academic effort to write what is ‘true’.  Truth, however, is temporary.  It is also the sworn enemy of the imagination, which creates for someone like me--an academic who loves to write fiction—a  great paradox.  Does something become true by default after enough time elapses, or is it the other way around?  The great telephone game doesn’t have to end in a circle; it can keep going indefinitely.  When it finally comes to an end, the message goes to the grave with the last person, unless they start the message again.  That’s why we don’t know if King Arthur ever ruled Camelot, whether Atlantis ever existed, whether Jesus actually rose from the dead, or whether Helen lived and loved at Troy.  Who’s to say someone like me just made it all up?

One final thought about folk and truth.  What does it matter?  Hundreds of years from now, if twentieth century films survive, will people believe that Jack and Rose fell in love on the Titanic as the film story goes?  The real story of Titanic is rather depressing.  A large boat hit an iceberg, sank within hours in the icy North Atlantic Ocean, and people died horrible deaths.  There are no romances to be told here.  Where’s the fun in that?  Traditions survive if they are exciting, personal, intense, or if they provide some moral lesson to be passed on.  Titanic’s story was one of humanity’s arrogance, not unlike the Tower of Babel.  I wonder if people actually built a tower like that?  If the Titanic movie is any indication, most stories are based in a grain of truth somewhere, depending of course on what you hold to be true.  All stories trickle down the blood lines; sometimes the stories bleed clay rather than blood.  For all I know, someone might very well have fallen on the cliffs at Murray Beach.  If nothing else, I entertained some kids, and gave them a neat folk legend to pass on.  No harm has come to anyone.  At least I didn’t paint the rocks white.

Pripyat (or, A Generation of Good Fridays)

When you get older, you often find yourself thinking about your childhood a lot.  It’s natural.  We remember when times were simpler. We bask in the tales of our youth that have grown impossibly out of proportion--like when we could drink like champs, stay up all night, whoop anyone’s ass in pool, or charm the pants off anyone of the opposite sex at will.  Or at least imagine that we could.  But sometimes, we find ourselves doing what we, as kids, would never have done back then.  Reflecting.  That sober second thought not only relegated to the boring stiffs in the Senate, we find ourselves mulling over things we thought we had forgotten, or maybe chose to ignore.  Like when we were cruel to kids in the playground.  Snatched something from the corner store.  Lied and got away with it. 

We also face our fears.  Like any kid, I had my own in spades.  I would never have admitted it, but I was afraid of snakes, heights, water over my head—hell, I was afraid to admit it if I had a crush on someone.  Most of us are afraid of getting embarrassed, and I was no different, except I somehow developed an unusual degree of it.  I’ll tell you what I was most afraid of though, and it may sound silly.  I was afraid of nuclear bombs.  No kidding, the thought of mushroom clouds engulfing the world around me was absolutely terrifying in the eighties when I was in my early elementary grades.  As an astute observer of world events, history and geography, also unusual for my age, I naturally stumbled upon the topic when learning about World War II.  The fact that one single bomb could instantaneously disintegrate whole cities absolutely scared the crap out of me, and why wouldn’t it?  That was a huge concept:  an unknown enemy could fly silently overhead, and with the drop of a button wipe out my whole family, all my friends, and everything I understood and held dear just like that.  Children only have a small scope of personal relevance, and if you don’t understand all the politics, there’s no small wonder how a small child could feel utterly helpless to such an unfathomable terror.  Mom and Dad couldn’t help me in that case.  Hiding under the blankets wouldn’t help much either.

Fast-forward to the ‘me’ of today.  Two university degrees and many more years of world experience and understanding, notwithstanding the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, and my fear of The Bomb has been tempered considerably, but now I find myself very interested in nuclear energy, and the consequences of it in our world today.  I don’t get into the scientific details, interesting as that may be, and I don’t pretend to be pro or con, because there are indeed both sides to the argument.  When accidents happen, such as the scary triple-threat earthquake-meets-tsunami- meets-nuclear-melt-down at Fukushima in Japan last year, we all sit up and take notice.  For me, the shadow of a long dormant childhood fear fell over me again.  I started to do some reading.  I found myself reading about Chernobyl.

I was ten years old when the Chernobyl disaster happened.  At a time when the threat of nuclear war was plausible, an accident of that magnitude sent shivers up everyone’s spines.  The nuclear power plant near Chernobyl, of the then-Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, situated near the border of modern-day Belarus, suffered a series of explosions during what was meant to be routine testing, releasing a massive cloud of radioactive dust and debris into the high atmosphere.  Like a volcanic explosion, the dust carried on wind currents over hundreds of kilometers, but the worst of the fallout naturally settled in the surrounding environs, specifically a small city built nearby in the 1970s as an industrial town for workers of the plant and their families.  It is called Pripyat.

While doing some research for a book I am writing, I decided to look up Pripyat as a modern example of a ghost town.  You usually think of ghost towns in the Wild West, or in the Canadian north around the Gold Rush in the Yukon.  As it turns out, people abandon cities and towns for lots of reasons.  It just happens that few of these evacuations have occurred as the result of a nuclear disaster, until Chernobyl happened in any case.  You can look up the photos for yourself if you like, but I’ll caution you, it’s like picking up the photo album of a family of which no one is alive to guide you through the pages.  On April 26, it will have been 26 years since the explosion and subsequent evacuation.  When they made the people of Pripyat leave, they gave them mere minutes, and commanded them to leave everything behind.  Officials feared that the more people lugged behind them, the more contamination they unwittingly would drag along.  So, what you see in photos of Pripyat after the explosion are snapshots of 50 000 lives on pause, just as they were in the Ukrainian SSR in 1986.  In the school, there are desks with books still open.  Dolls are laying on beds, most with fabric and mattresses still intact, dinner dishes still on the table, shoes and socks laying out of place on the floor.  The streets are empty, with cars parked randomly, asphalt and concrete cracked and split with weeds and shrubs pressing though.  There is a Farris wheel in an amusement park sitting perfectly still, the specters of scores of children only an echo remaining around the slowly decaying, rusty structures.  And in the years since the city was abandoned, adventure-seeking tourists have seeped back in here and there, leaving graffiti, often in the form of people’s shadows along the sides of buildings and walls.  It is truly a haunting sight.  Somehow, I find myself wanting to visit it for myself.  Call it a case of me wanting to confront my fears, like when you feel you need to touch the hand of a loved one at an open-casket funeral.

The other day, I found a really neat video on YouTube about the city of Pripyat, and more specifically the countryside on the outskirts of town.  There were also a number of small villages that had to be evacuated too, and when you see those in the videos, they look much more like the ghost towns in your mind.  If you didn’t know better, the little hamlets of wooden cottage-like structures with brick work and lush pastures surrounding them could just as well have been the remnants of a boom town gone bust, like Dawson City or Murdochville.  The documentary followed some animals that were thriving in what had accidentally become a nature refuge.  Abandoned cats had gone feral, only to have thrived on their own, now masters of the homes in which they once had owners.  Three and four generations later, life appears to be moving on.  They have no idea that their bodies contain alarming levels of radiation, but otherwise, human influence is nowhere to be found.  Birds, fish, insects, and even large mammals like bears, boars and wolves all seem to not only have survived, but thrived.  Slowly, the Earth has begun to swallow the last vestiges of human evidence, and Nature has begun to renew what was once stained.

It isn’t lost on me that this anniversary, 26 years on the 26^th to be exact, happens very close to the Easter weekend.  What does Easter even mean?  Good Friday is observed as the day (roughly anyway) that Jesus was hung on a cross until he died.  He was removed, placed in a tomb, and presumably he woke up and started to walk among the living again on Easter Sunday when his followers found his tomb open and empty.  Talk about your open-casket funeral.  The greater story in all this is that Jesus had performed his latest and greatest miracle, showing us that with the strongest of faith, we can rise up and become one with God, through the example and sacrifice of one person.  When you aren’t dressing it up in flowery church-like metaphor, it sounds a bit contrived.  Then you look at Pripyat.  Here is a city and countryside that was rendered uninhabitable.  The radiation poison will be there for centuries.  Even the Earth itself seemed broken beyond repair.  Yet, there is still life.  For the flora and fauna that have unnervingly thumbed their collective noses at humanity, this Friday isn’t just Good Friday.  It’s a whole generation of them.  We all like to think that God is constant, unwavering, perpetual.  Pripyat proved that it is possible for people to defeat God, but it wouldn’t happen that day.  Sure, he might have been on his knees for a while, but he hung on.  Nature had other plans for that place.  It is doomed to be a repository for the very worst in human technological advancement, but it is overcoming it faster than we could have imagined.  In April, 1986, we ate sumptuously from the tree of knowledge, and as we rushed out, God booting our arses and cuffing us upside the head as we went, we never imagined how the garden would right itself in our absence.