Feeds:
Posts
Comments

The interviewer between the mirrors

April 18, 2007 by Bruce Byfield

I’m a journalist, so in an interview I’m usually the one asking the questions. Today, I experienced a role reversal when Samartha Vashishtha published an interview with me in Indus, the online magazine for the India Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. I’ve been interviewed several times before, a couple of times for pod casts and a few more for mainstream publications needing some quick expertise about free software, but for some reason, this time I felt queasier than most.

It’s not that Vashishtha misrepresented me, or anything like that. He doesn’t make say anything I wouldn’t have said. He conducted the interview via email, and, so far as I can see without going to the trouble of a detailed comparison,his largest change was to add exclamations marks. I don’t use many exclamation marks myself – nor many initial capitals, being a lower case sort of person – but no great matter if he did.

On the whole, he did a very professional job, The sense is there, and I even got a plug in for free software, explaining how it would help the developing world in general and India in particular to meet the industrialized world on an equal footing.

I also mentioned that free software projects are also a great place for technical writers to gain experience, since most developers have little interest in documentation and generally welcome anyone willing to undertake the task.

Still, I was a little reluctant to do the interview at first. It’s been three years since I last did a technical writing assignment. In fact, it was the monotony of my last major contract that made me desperate enough to take the leap into journalism.

Besides, how could I be sure that anything I was saying was relevant? I occasionally drop by the Techwr-l mailing list to see what old acquaintances are saying, but I can’t pretend to know the trends in the industry anymore.

Even more importantly, I’ve moved a long way down my road since my last technical writing contract. A large part of the time I was a technical writer, I was facing some of the worst times of life, so on the whole it’s an era of my life that I’m not eager to revisit.

Maybe this uncertainty explains why I sound so stuffy and so full of opinions in the interview. I don’t normally sound that way. (or, if I do, my family and friends are polite enough to pretend otherwise) But, even talking in generalities, perhaps I was circling too close to the bad years, and knew it.

Most importantly, the whole time I was writing my responses, I kept feeling distinctly unsettled. Being a journalist yet being the one interviewed was disorienting, like standing between two mirrors and seeing one of the infinite reflections starting to move independently. I don’t feel important or proud to be interviewed — just dazed at the role reversal involved.

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, Free Software, Personal, technical writing, Uncategorized, writing | 2 Comments »

The cherry trees of Vancouver

April 17, 2007 by Bruce Byfield

The Vancouver region has more trees than any other North American city. This fact is never more obvious than in early spring, when thousands of ornamental cherry trees start to blossom.

Younger, white blossoms come first. Some years, they come as early as mid-February, but mid-March to early April is more common. Whenever they come, after the winter’s dark days and constant rain, they are a shock to the eye, an extravagant explosion of life, all so unexpected and so seemingly symmetrical in their thousands that they leave me breathless with admiration and surprise. It’s hard talking about them without sounding trite, but they always seem such a revelation that finding suitable words to describe them is as difficult as it is urgent.

This first wave brings people out by the dozens. One of the most popular spots is the the Burrard Street Skytrain station, where the trees arch over about a walkway of about sixty yards. There, especially on weekends, you can always find a couple of dozen people, often in couples, often Japanese in origin, strolling back and forth and snapping dozens of pictures.

Then, gradually the other trees come out, the west side of the city up to a week ahead of the east: next the younger magenta ones, then, just as the blossom season seems over for the year, the gnarled old trees of both colors. In dozens of streets, the ramshackle houses of the east end are suddenly obscured for a couple of weeks by the trees that line their sidewalks. In Centennial Park on Burnaby Mountain, people amble the tree-lined walkways that line the cliffs overlooking the Deep Cove and Belcarra. For a couple of weeks — maybe a month in good years — everywhere you go in the area, your eyes are ambushed by a profusion of color that has stood dormant and forgotten for most of the year. You’ve need the brain-damaged soul of a hockey enforcer not to notice and feel blessed.

Then, as suddenly as they came, the blossoms are gone, replaced by leaves as the year goes deeper into spring. Sometimes, a high wind sweeps them away in a day, and we are left on with a carpet of blossoms half an inch thick in the streets and gutters, looking around in amazed dismay at a brief display made even briefer by a freak in the weather.

Nobody seems to know why Vancouver and the surrounding cities are so full of cherry trees. I think it’s become the region was settled by three garden-mad cultures: the Chinese, the English, and the Japanese. In the last few years, a Cherry Blossom Festival has started up in minor imitation of the famous Japanese festival. And a few years ago, David Lam, the former lieutenant-governor of the province, was talking of donating another thirty thousand cherry trees to the city of Vancouver.

I don’t know what happened to Lam’s offer, but it met with almost universal approval on the streets. In recent years, the existing cherry trees are part of what makes us locals so smug when we talk to less fortunate friends in the wilds of Calgary and Ottawa.While they’re still trudging through dirty-gray snow and nursing a thousand yard stare that is the first sign of cabin fever, we’re shuffling along kicking up blossoms, having shoved our winter coats to the back of the closet for the next eight months.

Posted in British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, gardening, Personal, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

The shared interests of couples

April 15, 2007 by Bruce Byfield

You can’t know what somebody else’s relationship is like. Lately, though, I am starting to believe you can tell the state of a relationship by how the couple share – or don’t share — interests.

A few months ago, I read an ex-friend’s comment that, when he and his wife went to the cinema, they didn’t always go to the same movie. Admittedly, they worked together, but this comment horrified me. Why get married if you don’t want to spend time with the other person? Because you’re in love with the idea of marriage, rather than a particular person? After such an admission, I wasn’t surprised to hear from another source that this couple had come close to divorce at least once.

An equally unhealthy interaction is common among the weight-lifters in the exercise room half a mile from our townhouse. Every once in a while one of the younger male weight-lifters will bring a girl friend with him. Inevitably, the young woman will do a couple of slow minutes on the treadmill, pedal the cycling machine half-heartedly while reading People, and pull unenthusiastically on a few weights while the young man struts with the other weight-lifters.

Except for one, who has taken up serious training, none of the young women return. However, a couple of the men have brought other women a week or two later. My guess is that the women wouldn’t have come once, except that they felt they should try to share their lovers’ interests. But they did so as a duty, making no effort to get into the spirit of what they were doing. Having one person feeling martyred and the other feeling humored isn’t exactly the best recipe for a relationship, so I’m not surprised at the apparent failure of these relationships, either.

In contrast to these two situations, I interviewed a free software advocate in a local pub a couple of weeks ago. When he sat down, he immediately pulled out a complicated-looking piece of knitting involving three needles and a couple of balls of wool. He explained that he and his wife had made a pact that they would at least try each other’s interests. His wife had learned enough to install FreeBSD for herself, and he had learned enough knitting to design a couple of patterns, and soon hoped to do more.

“How does that work out?” I asked.

“Pretty well,” he said shyly. “We’ve been married fifteen years so far.”

Well, no wonder, I thought. Admittedly, his wife might never learn to enjoy installing a computer operating system, and he might never learn to love knitting. But at the very least, they could both learn something about the other’s passions –and that has to be good for any relationship.

Posted in Bruce Byfield, exercise, friendship, Personal, relationships, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Corporate Don Quixote

April 13, 2007 by Bruce Byfield

Without ever intending to, I’ve been a contractor or consultant for most of my adult life (What’s the difference? About $40 an hour, I like to reply). I’m frequently asked to become a full-timer, but I’ve developed a superstitious dread of accepting; the few times I have, the unsuspecting company has gone bankrupt within a year. Gradually, I’ve taken this karmic hint, and accepted that a Rolex for fifty years of faithful service isn’t in my future.

I might feel differently if I were an entrepreneur. People in business for themselves, I’ve noticed, will put up with boredom and worse. But my parents had the bad taste not to allow me to be born rich, and the few times I’ve contemplated a business more complicated than hiring a subcontractor, I’ve never had the collateral for a loan.

Anyway, quite apart from never being able to take business seriously (in the back of my mind, much of it seems a foolish way to spend your time compared to, say, excavating an ancient Roman villa or brainstorming a thought-experiment in cutting edge physics) I suspect that I don’t have the temperament for the human resources side of business. I mean, I could hardly bring myself to fail a term paper when I was an English instructor. So how could I fire or even reprimand an employee?

No, freelancing suits me better. I arrive as the person who will solve problems, with the promise of bringing order out of chaos. Usually, nobody knows what I do (if they did, they wouldn’t have to hire me), so I’m left alone to get on with my work and can be as friendly or unfriendly as I care to be. I get a chance to satisfy my curiosity about some new aspect of high-tech and, if a particular job threatens to leave my EEG flatlined, I can restrain myself from chewing off my arm to escape by reminding myself that it won’t last forever. And come the boring bits like maintenance and revision, I’ve already galloped off in all directions like a corporate Don Quixote in quest of new adventure and new managers in distress.

One of the major advantanges of consulting is that unfamiliarity breeds respect. When you come in as an consultant, company officers treat you with more respect that if you were on staff. Maybe it’s the hourly rate. But, whatever the reason, the same CEOs who would never learn your name if you were a lackey will respectfully ask your opinion and confide in you if you are brought in as an outside expert. After all, to treat you like you didn’t know what you were doing would be an admission that the contract with you was a mistake. The result is, you’re treated more as an equal — which suits me just fine, I don’t claim superiority over anyone, but I’ve never been one to give others respect because of their job titles, either. For one thing, moving from company to company, I’ve seen too much to defer automatically.

(Politeness, of course, is another matter. Everyone gets that, even the clerical staff. Or maybe I should say, especially the clerical staff. They’re the ones who really run most offices, so even if I didn’t respect them, I’d stay polite to them out of basic self-preservation. As an outsider, I need them on my side. As for executives, they’re not smarter than me, just more single-minded and less adventurous.)

Another satisfying part of consulting is that you get to the good parts sooner. When I was a technical writer, I was managing project and hiring a sub-contractors six months after I started in the business. If I’d hired on as a junior writer in a mega-corporation, after six months I’d have been lucky to be trusted with changing the toner cartridge in the laser printer. In the same way, moving from company to company, I’ve had more hands-on experience of high-tech than anyone staying at a single company could ever hope to get.

All of this explains why my dominant gig these days as a journalist is ideal for me. My interest in any one subject only has to last for the duration of researching a story, and I can question executives without any nervousness. Also, my knowledge of the business has provided dozens of stories, ranging from advice articles that are a summary of my experience to leads brought my way by ex-colleagues. It’s the ultimate work for a freelancer, so much so, that last month, for the first time, I made as much as a journalist as I ever had as a marketing and communications consultant. If I have my way, I won’t be back in an office except as a guest.

That’s not to say that my family hasn’t given up the wistful thought that I might one day settle down to a salaried mid-level position. But that’s not about to happen. When people ask me how I stand the uncertainty of being a consultant, I reply, “The main difference between my position and yours is that I know when my contract ends.” And it’s true — these days, consultants are more secure than a so-called permanent employer, if only because they have a contract and, in the worst scenario, a kill fee.

That’s the secret that all consultants share: the knowledge that all employment is temporary, and that there’s always a next contract. We’ve seen the worst, and it’s not nearly as bad as the full-timers fear. In fact, in every way, it’s more interesting than a 9-5 with unpaid overtime. It’s also a hell of a lot more engaging.

That’s why I’m better off without that Rolex. Why would I need it? My time’s my own already — and if I really wanted one, I could buy one.

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Personal, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

CEOs don’t feed families

April 12, 2007 by Bruce Byfield

“The rich are different from you and me,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote (to which Ernest Hemingway is said to have responded, “Yes, they have more money”). I don’t know about the rich, but as a consultant and a manager, I’ve worked closely with at least twenty Chief Executive Officers, mostly of small to medium sized companies in high-tech. And yes, they are different the rest of us. They have to be, for each of them to solder his or her sense of self to the fortunes of a company instead of just looking to get by or hoping for a pleasurable or meaningful way to survive. But sooner or later, virtually every CEO I’ve known well has said in a self-congratulatory tone to me, “I feed X number of families” — “X” being the number of employees in the CEO’s company.

I’ve heard this phrase over drinks at a bar. I’ve heard it in a board room scrambling to put together a presentation, and several times sitting around with my feet on the desk on a Friday afternoon. But, no matter where I hear it, I never fail to be annoyed by its smug assumptions. Probably, I’ve never left behind my days as Chief Steward of my union at my university — or maybe I’m just an anarchist at heart. But I like to think that it’s my love of logic that always makes me want to denounce this claim.

No, I always think, you do not feed any family except your own. To congratulate yourself on that, you would have to be giving charity, and you’re not. Each of your employees feed his or her families. The fact that they do so by signing a contract with you, exchanging their labor for cash is incidental, and gives you no right to feel self-congratulatory. The exchange of labor and cash cancels any right you have for self-satisfaction. If you and your company didn’t exist, your employees would be making the same exchange with some else. Most of them, chances are, wouldn’t be on the street.

Of course, the subtext to this comment is the CEO’s satisfaction with the size of the company and their own alleged accomplishment. But why they regard the company in this way, I don’t know. Is it something they learn in MBA programs? But, then, anyone who can believe that chairing a meeting or negotiating a deal has any relation to samurais, Henry V or Antarctic explorers can probably believe anything.

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

The secret world of the early morning jogger

April 9, 2007 by Bruce Byfield

When people ask why I run first thing in the morning, I like to say, “So nothing worse can happen to me the rest of the day.” The reply usually gets a smile, but really it’s an effort to avoid a more complicated explanation. Unlike many people, my circadian rhythms are not set to any particular time of day; I adjust easily to functioning whenever I need to. But explaining my pleasure at the hidden world of early morning takes time, especially since my reaction is probably colored by the adrenalin and endorphins pumping through my system.

I admit that in the winter months, when my morning run begins and ends in the dark and often takes place in the rain, I sometimes mutter self-dramatically about “the courage of the early morning,” borrowing the title of the biography of Billy Bishop, the World War One flying ace. For me, the title expresses perfectly the dogged sense of duty with which I drag myself out the door. Yet those days are relatively few, and even that feeling of being active when most people would choose to stay in their beds can feel perversely individualistic.

For most of the year, though, the early morning is a special time regardless of the weather. The relative coolness of the morning is stimulating from the spring to early fall. In the late fall, it stirs the leaves at my feet until I could be running in the middle of a legion of ghosts. In winter, the briskness raises the hairs on my arms, and adds the mild danger of black ice that I have to tiptoe across. And for a few weeks each spring and fall, I can time my runs so I’m at the top of a hill just in time for sunrise.

We live close to the green belt around Burnaby Mountain, and often I share my morning run with the wildlife. Over the years, I’ve seen skunks, eagles, crows mobbing a raven, and who knows what else. Once, I heard what was probably a cougar in a bush nearby (I took good care not to confirm my suspicions, and hastily revised my route). Several times a week, I see coyotes loping along on their business, doing an almost perfect mimicry of domestic dogs. Once, I even saw a coyote sitting waiting at a light – although I’m sure it was watching the traffic flow, not the change of signal. Drivers are on the road by the time I start running, but, half-asleep and sealed in their cars, I doubt they see even the animals who are near the roads – let alone on the trails I sometimes take. At times, I could almost be the only human in an alternate universe.

At other times, it’s the people I notice, stumbling through their morning routines, surrounded by an invisible sphere of privacy, stumbling to the bus stop, or blearily scraping ice off their wind shields. By the coffee shops, I see people staggering in like zombies for their morning fix and emerging with their smiles of relief as they take their first tentative sips. In the light industrial area I sometimes run through, a cloud of pot smoke often lingers here and there, proof (if any was needed) how minimum wage warehouse clerks survive their day. At the Skytrain station, tech-workers march grimly single-file along the side of the road on their way to work.

On weekends, I also see the remnants of the previous night: the road-kill red and raw, the pairs of shoes tied together and flung across a telephone wire, and the smashed bottles of beer at the side of the road. On Sunday mornings, when I’m not sleeping in myself, I see the shift workers and the survivors of one-night stands coming home. Once, I saw a woman in a pink bathrobe and curlers, coffee cup in hand, headed singlemindedly for the nearest coffee shop, careless of the fact that she was on the main commercial street of the neighborhood.

Other times, the appeal of the early morning is the isolation of feeling that nobody else is alive, much less stirring, and I’m the initiate of some private lore denied to everyone else. These days come when the streets are so empty of cars that I could run safely down the middle of the road, and not a light is to be seen in the apartments and houses that I pass. The best day of the year for this feeling is New Years’ Day, when everyone is still sleeping, and these feelings are enhanced by the rosy glow of Puritanical virtue.

For much of last year, I couldn’t run because of reoccurring knee injuries, and I found myself growing restless about mid-morning. Part of the problem was lack of exercise, but an even greater part was the chance to start the day with the time for private reflection that a morning run provides. When I re-started my morning runs about three weeks ago, my main reaction was a sense of relief – as though I had restored pattern and meaning to my daily routine.

Posted in Bruce Byfield, exercise, Personal, running, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Backstage at Imperial Realms

April 5, 2007 by Bruce Byfield

When I was involved with Dungeons and Dragons back in my university days, I always preferred being Dungeon Master to playing. It wasn’t so much that I enjoyed masterminding psycho-drama – although I admit that I cackled at the look on a male player’s face when his female character seduced someone and he found out that I was rolling for pregnancy. But what really interested me was the creative possibilities. That’s probably why I’m so fascinated now with my recent side project of creating the backstory for Imperial Realms, an online strategy game currently in development.

The basic story is already sketched out. It’s standard space opera: thousands of years in the future, in the ruins of a galactic empire, humanity is divided into numerous clans, all of whom compete against each other as well as a cast of alien species. My job is to paint in the details and help the game rise above the standard cliches.

For instance, it would be easy to turn the war-like Spartan clan into a neocon’s delight. Instead, I tried to give them more complexity by dividing them into political factions, each with its own ideas of how war should be carried out. Then, just to shake up the stereotypes, I’ve included mention of a radical team of mercenaries led by a husband and wife who specialize in overthrowing repressive regimes.

Similarly, I made the autistic Inlookers both brilliant and unstable, with a culture dominated by their eugenics program, adding a little detail of how one killed an emperor because he was blocking her sunlight.

For the Clones, I created a half dozen bloodlines and made them victims of persecution until they started a Zionist-like movement to settle their own planet. They are now divided by different traditions of reproduction and by the question of whether they should practice exogamy (breeding outside their bloodlines) or endogamy (breeding inside their bloodlines).

For the Aristocracy, the remnants of the ruling class, I imagined a sub-culture shattered by the disaster that toppled the empire. From the Aristocracy’s formerly exalted position, its members have been reduced to a constant competition for all the titles and offices that no longer have a clear line of inheritance. This competition leads them to displays of extravagant waste, such as destroying their estates in planned meteor showers — excesses that sometimes cause their own deaths.

This week, I’ve been taking notes for alien species. I’ve already written about the Tsihor, pack hunters who cannot meet face to face with humans without instincts taking over and causing an inevitable bloodbath. However, the Tsihor need humans, so both sides have to work around this problem.

Originally, I envisioned the Tsihor as small velocioraptors, but Steve Bougerolle, who master-minds the project, thought they didn’t seem alien enough. They were like fighting cocks, he said. “What does he know?” I asked myself, then, answering, “Enough to sign the cheques,” I redesigned them to make them Lovecraftian horrors.

Other aliens are in the works, and I hope that they will be eeriely strange and, in the cases where they are based on science-fiction standbys, sufficiently original to be interesting in their own right.

In all these cases, part of the challenges is to put as many hooks for plot development as possible into the accounts. These hooks take the form of rumors, which may or may not be true. Freed from the need to be strictly rational, I’ve injected each account with all sorts of gossip and speculation that can be picked up on – or not – once the game is launched.

The game is probably a couple of years from release, and a lot of what I know about it I can’t say. However, my Imperial Encylopedia entries will be posted to the web page soon, so I feel relatively free to talk about them. I’m hugely enjoying the chance to putter around backstage, and I’m looking forward to doing more.

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Fantasy, imperial realms, Personal, science fiction, Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

Love and the uncanny

April 4, 2007 by Bruce Byfield

Formal verse has been out of fashion since before I was born. There are strong reasons for this trend, but I think that anyone with an ear for language has to regret it at times. For all its limitations, there’s no genre like formal verse for teaching you about writing.

The switch to free verse was part of the modernist movement in the arts. However, in English poetry, the switch to modernism was even more urgent than in most of the arts. English is just not a very good language for rhymes. For instance, when you think of it, centuries of English verse have been shaped by the lack of good rhymes for “love.” If you eliminate false rhymes like “cove” and “prove,” and ones of limited use like “gov,” all you are with are “above,” “dove,” “glove” and “of” — hardly a vocabulary to inspire. Yet the same is true of dozens of other common rhymes.

Some early twentieth century poets did their best by using more enjambment (letting the sense spill over the end of the line) and half rhymes like “lave” and “love,” but you can’t blame poets for finally losing their patience and giving up the whole idea of rhyme. It was a reaction like that of the German designers who gave up black letter and upper case alphabets in favor of using entirely lower case letters.

And, just as with the designers, you can’t hold poets responsible for the abuses of their revolutionary ideas in later generations. It’s not the modernists’ fault that anyone who writes in short lines can call themselves a poet today, any more than designers are at fault because trendoids today write their names in lower case without understanding why.

Paul Zimmer, the fantasy writer and Bay Area poet, used to suggest that another reason for the change was that, around the turn of the twentieth century, people stopped listening to poetry. The rhythms and rhyme of formal poetry work best when spoken, and hearing them when you read is a skill that you have to develop. So if most of your audience are going to read your verse, not hear it, why bother with what they aren’t going to notice anyway?

Paul’s answer was to read his work at every opportunity, so that his audience would notice. And I, for one, am grateful that he did, because listening to a expert poetry reader like Paul was not only a pleasure but a a lesson in how powerfully regularly structured language can play on your emotions.

However, I think there’s an even more basic reason: writing thrives on the challenge of technical restrictions. Faced with the problems like the lack of rhymes for “love” poets have two choices. One is to stretch themselves to work with the limitations, by making the standard set of rhymes unobtrusive. The second is to strain to find ways around the narrowness of choice — for instance, by using multi-syllable rhymes like “get rid of” and “mid-love.” Either way, it’s good artistic discipline.

I have nothing against free verse, especially when it becomes a way to explore an alternate rhythm like the alliteration of Old English poems or the structural repetition of the psalms. I’ve written more than my share of it, too. Still, every now and then I like to try my hand at formal verse, just for the discipline.

For instance, here is a sonnet I wrote many years ago, trying to recapture and express the emotions of a crush I had in elementary school. I call it “Love and the Uncanny”:

You trouble me with hints of the uncanny —
Like depths of silence where somebody waits,
Like houses flexing every beam and cranny,
Perturbing me with omens and strange fates.
I sense you now, just at the edge of eyes,
Like scurryings through leaves beneath my feet,
Like hunts that bay above me in the skies,
Like lightning just before it unrolls in a sheet.
Like wolves’ wild wailing, drawing down the moon,
Like presences that walk behind the trees —
Around midnight half-seen, half-guessed by noon,
You trail the hush and grace of mysteries,
And all that thrills with awe, awaking fear,
Must pale and fade when ghosts of you appear.

I’ll leave it as an exercise for the readers to decide whether in the end I am expressing an emotion about a person or talking about the effect of poetry. Really, poetry is an example of the uncanny, although generally a benign one. And that’s an effect that formal verse generally achieves more easily than free verse.

As for my exercise, I admit that some parts of it have a Shakespearean echo, especially the last two lines. But no one in the last four centuries has written a sonnet in English without thinking of Shakespeare in some way.

Anyway, I’m not writing to claim original artistic merit, but to sharpen my writing skills. A sonnet is one of the most challenging forms in English, and if I can write a sonnet that is even borderline respectable, I’m convinced, then all my writing will be better for the practice — even writing in forms as far away from poetry as an online article.

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Personal, poetry, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

From the script for my life: Innocents learn about ethnic tensions

April 3, 2007 by Bruce Byfield

Setting: The Embarcadero station of the BART system in San Francisco, just after the verdict in the Rodney King case. We have just got off the train. You can tell that we’re tourists, because the weather is warm enough for us to be in shorts while everyone else is wearing coats.

An African American WOMAN is standing to one side. She is very tall, and heavyset, and has a new scar on her right cheek held together by some amateur stitches.

ME(nervously): Can you tell us how to get to the Ferry Building?

WOMAN (putting hands on her hips and speaking in a very deep accent): Honey, you ain’t from these parts, is you?

WOMAN takes us aside and explains that, with the tensions surrounding the verdict, it’s currently inadvisable in California for European ethnics and African Americans to talk to each other casually in public unless they know each other. Looking at her scar, we wonder but don’t dare to ask if she is speaking from personal experience. Eventually, we slink off, murmuring nervous thanks.

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Personal, tourism | 1 Comment »

Time-travel by paddlewheeler

April 1, 2007 by Bruce Byfield

On Saturday evening, I went time-travelling. Not through Dungeons and Dragons or the Society for Creative Anachronism, although I’ve done both in my time. Nor did I get a temporal lift, which, despite its name, is not a form of chronic hitchhiking, but a form of cosmetic surgery for those who want to revisit their starry-eyed youth. Instead, this jaunt was up the Fraser River by paddlewheeler to the annual Candlelight Tour of Fort Langley, where historical re-enactors create an illusion of time-travelling to 1858 and the night before the declaration of the Crown Colony of British Columbia through series of vignettes around the fort.

In keeping with the illusion, we took the paddlewheeler The Native upriver from New Westminster. In the days that we were travelling to, paddlewheelers were the main form of transport through the largely roadless interior. These paddlewheelers were not the grandly appointed queens of the Mississippi, but smaller, shallower-draft vessels built for work, with few cabins and a mixture of passengers and livestock as often as not. Originally built as a yacht and just refurbished, The Native is more luxurious than the boats it is modelled on, with amenities that include a kitchen and washroom and comfortable seating for maybe fifty passengers.

Tens of thousands pass over the Fraser River everyday. Thousands more drive along each bank. However, if they haven’t been on the river, they probably don’t know how much of a working river it is. The Fraser is not one of those picturesque rivers surrounded by cobblestoned walks and dockside patios where you can sit under an umbrella and watch recreational boaters zoom by. Recreational boaters do use the Fraser, but they are outnumbered by the tugs and the barges pulling containers. Many channels and shores are floating banks for the forest companies, and the shore is crammed with heavy industry. The canneries that lined its shores for much of the last century are long gone, but in the rotting pylons and shorings that litter the shore, you could still read their history.

Hearing that history, and watching the industry gradually recede as we passed upriver, I could almost believe that we were moving back through time, safely ensonced in a cabin where we could eat and drink the afternoon away while looking for herons and eagles out the window.

Arriving at Fort Langley, we found the gateway to the dock locked, so the paddlewheeler reversed itself for a hundred yards and tied up at the rowing club dock – a flimsy ramshackled built on two logs that was probably much closer to the spirit of 1858 than our original mooring.

In previous years, the tour started at sunset. The conceit was that visitors could go back in time to watch, but could not interact with the inhabitants of 1858 in any way. Both the dark and the conceit added greatly to the atmosphere, but this year both were gone. Daylight saving time came earlier this year, and, to compensate, the tour was more interactive, with the re-enactors talking to the guests and even dragging them into a barn dance led by a half dozen fiddlers.

Yet even these handicaps could not destroy the gentle fantasy of the evening. Travelling in groups of fifteen with a couple of guides, visitors were met at the entrance to the fort by members of the Royal Engineers, the regiment sent out to construct an infrastructure in the new colony. In 1858, they were the only group capable of keeping order as the Barkerville Gold Rush brought a flood of miners and hangers-on – mostly Americans, who were darkly regarded as the forerunners of an attempt by the United States to take over the territory.

Assured that we were neither unregistered gold miners nor Americans, the Royal Engineers let us in. Inside the fort, we passed from building to building, witnessing such vignettes as a cooper’s apprentice arguing with his mother about travelling to the gold fields, and a blacksmith teaching an apprentice to make nails. We heard a boat-builder who doubled as the fort’s schoolmaster talking about tomorrow’s proclamation of the new colony, and, at The Big House, the Chief Factor for the Hudson’s Bay Company – formerly the chief official in the region – announce his resignation and express his appreciation of our work as his underlings. In a warehouse, we heard pre-adolescent girls of the period talking about the men they admired and their prospects for husbands, while nearby in a parlor, whose out-of-tune piano had been carried upriver by canoe, mothers talked about the lack of cultural prospects at the fort. In the center of the fort, newly arrived voyageurs gossiped and grumbled, while, outside the fort, good time girls from San Francisco and a disreputable miner in a slouched hat talked about their plans.

The tour took an hour and a half, but all too soon we were back in the world of flash cameras and cell phones (both had been banned on the tour). We descended the rickety – and railess – gangway to the yacht club dock, and boarded the paddle-wheeler for desert, more wine, and the trip back to New Westminster.

Despite the lights on either side of the river, the return trip was dark. The stark ugliness of the industrial sites was made mysterious, and around us the river swirled like black oil. Inside the main cabin, pop hits of the last forty years were playing, and a few people were dancing.

Most of us were content to watch and talk, but one couple in their sixties danced to almost every tune. They would have been young in the 1960s when the earliest of the tunes first came out, and every now and then you could see from a smile or a dance move how they must have looked forty years ago when they first danced to them. I suppose, in their way, they were time-travelling, too.

Posted in British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, history, Personal, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »