2003-11-15 - 3:51 p.m.
Soon enough we will produce a remake of Planes, Trains and Automobiles once more, but this time it will have an entirely different colour, venturing home instead of far away and so naturally the airports will get progressively colder as I go. I learned a traveler’s lesson on this trip: on the day of your flights, wear clothing appropriate for the climate you’re approaching, not the one you’re leaving behind – that way you offset the aggravation of myriad airports and Godot-ish waiting by at least becoming more rather than less physically comfortable as the day goes on.Odd as it may sound after only two weeks away, and on a business trip no less, I will actually sort of miss this place, and not just for the mercurial weather. It’s a small town, every particular the name implies displayed to full effect (closed mom-and-pop businesses, vacant roads, musical drawls warbling out from under the brims of wide cowboy chapeaux, nothing much happening anywhere at all), but nevertheless the people have been awfully nice to me and, really, let’s not forget that mild 70-degree weather, pleasant as hell for November.
I have been forced to discuss the weather a great deal since arriving here, you must understand, since Americans know nothing about Canada, except for those rare few whose planes once touched down briefly in Vancouver or Toronto or, very occasionally, Montreal. (“moe-ray-AL” to the French, “mun-tree-ALL” to English Canadians, “MAWN-tree-ALL” to every American born of mother). Americans have been offered a grandiose fiction about Canada. And Canadians, for the most part, accept these gross misconceptions, notably because Canadians having plugged all Americans into virtual-reality computers and fed them the seamless fiction of life in Canada helps us collect their bioelectric energy and thus fuel our zambonis. God bless America.
In a nutshell, here is
Canada, As Seen From the South
At the border of Montana stands a terrifyingly high white wall, the sheer southward drop of a vast perennial snowdrift beyond which temperatures never change – the thermometer’s mercury huddles for warmth at the bottom of its graduated well. An ice castle stands proud upon the highest peak, home to Prime Minister Alan Thicke and his hockey cabinet. Here in the ice palace, guarded round the clock by red-serge-clad Mounties atop their noble beaver steeds, Prime Minister Thicke sits upon a burnished throne, his claw-like hand encircling the handle of a black-cloth-taped wooden sceptre, plotting the destruction of the vile French. Servants skate about the palace with great jugs of maple-syrup-flavoured beer, but Thicke does not notice, his jaundiced eye ever fixed upon the hills to the east, where dwells his sworn enemy, General Bonhomme. How he hates his snowy foe! and how he covets the might of the south, the glorious Americans with their temperate climes and the inviolate sanctuary of their government. How he craves their shiny weapons! One day, Thicke imagines, a great insurrection will bring power to his people once more. Abooot this there can be no doubt – one day Thicke’s dreams of an American Canada will be realized and the loathsome French will tremble before its mighty symbol, an eagle with an ice skate on one foot and Wayne Gretzky clutched in the other’s talons, a maple leaf in its beak and the light of freedom emanating from its eyes, eh.
They just don’t get us, and they think we envy the hell out of them. Telling a Texan that it actually reaches 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Saskatchewan now and then is like telling them that sometimes we grow fairy wings and fly around. I was dead right a few posts ago when I said I was in for being treated like something of an alien life form. I might as well be from Neptune for all the bewildered wonder I inspire.
I’ll tell you what’s in the famed Area 51 facility in Nevada. A downed bi-plane and the bodies of two guys from Hamilton, Ontario. Scientists are hard at work deep below the dried bed of Groom Lake trying to back-engineer these mysterious visitors’ arcane technologies, struggling to uncover the hidden secrets of their down-filled coats.
