Collected Works ✏️ Canada

Trans-Canada: A Dream of Combustion

7:30 AM

Dazed by eighteen cups of coffees and no sleep, I re-read what I copied from the Voluspá:

There sails from the east a ship      shades from Hel

over the ocean stream      steered by Loki

in the wake of the Wolf      witless hordes rush onward

Sylvia has risen from the waves, like Aphrodite from the foam. She stands like an angel, like a Valkyrie on the prow. High above the chaos of our interlocking legs, and the lust of the thirty-something student mesmerized by her white torso, she scents the pine forests of the north.

Battling the warm currents of the Gulf Stream, we make our way across the Western ocean, past Greenland and the early discoveries of brother Eric, down toward the continent. The ghosts still haunt the waves as we hit the land with a thud.

In our hold are all the noxious chemicals and machinations of Europe — the copper and zinc that fuse to make bronze, the potions of our alchemists to make us live forever ont he cross, the fire-god’s molten iron with which we fashion sword and railway line, to stretch our power from the Danelaw and Grimsby to the ends of the earth. Most precious of all however is the great bin of sulphur we picked up in Iceland, in the dark mines of Mývatn and Krýsuvík. We intend to use this sulphur to burn down anything we can’t control.

Hardly stopping for breath, we continue westward — our smithy quickly fastening sixteen iron wheels beneath the tub — from Vinland to the canyons of the Adirondacks, Westward Ho! along Lake Champlain and through Indian Pass.

Somewhere near Syracuse we’re forced to resize the Matthalaug, because we have visitors now from the Winnebago Company, Ford Motors, and Exxon Mobil. They started off very polite and we offered them maple syrup pies, les belles tartes au sucre, but they tried to take over the helm by installing a dashboard computer system, some sort of Texas instrument which kept defaulting back to their website, where I clicked on a little X to get rid of the webpage but that just brought me to a dialogue box with my name and student number in it and all I had to do was add my Visa number, so I ripped the damned thing up by its roots and threw the intruders into the back seat. 

We steer the behemoth westward, away from the Twin Towers and Washing Town, going west around the Great Lakes, nearly side-swiping Cleveland and Chicago, avoiding Detroit completely, mother of all our woes, wheeling with sixteen wheels beneath us toward the grassland beauty of the prairies.

Loki, Hel and I splash in our sulphurous tub, ignoring toxicity and acid rain, maidens choking in the Rhine, ice-caps melting and George Bush and Donald Trump and polar bears eating from garbage cans on the outskirts of Milwaukee. Hel looks suspiciously like a girl I once knew, winking at me from the suds.

And who is this, slithering toward land from the watery depths? The ancient Snake? Or is it more specifically Jormungand, the wolf-serpent, looking very much like the lascivious Alberich?

It’s 7:47, and I can’t stop my mind from falling into sleep. Our boat is speeding along an aqueduct, some ancient roman contraption that crisscrosses Europe with technology so wonderful that it can bridge entire continents. Sylvia, Juniper, and Mädchen are climbing the gunwhales now, transforming themselves into the Rhein maidens Woglinde, Wellgunde and Flosshilde. They’re winking at me, yet also wagging their fingers, their slim white fingers at me, as if to warn me about the dangers of Alberich’s lust for gold and beauty, which will only force me into the depths.

Yet I keep my eyes on the prize, the holy grail, the 8:30 AM test paper, my pen in hand, my mind sharp as a pin. What good are golden rings at this hour? I saw what happened to Gollum. I’ll follow instead the wisdom of the Greeks, just as Old Rex has commanded all year long. And according to Homer the sea may be dangerous ((changing as the mods of Neptune), but what lies beautiful and seductive beneath the waves is more dangerous by far!

First you will come to the Sirens who enchant all who come near them. If any one unwarily draws in too close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and children will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song. … There is a great heap of dead men's bones lying all around, with the flesh still rotting off them.

They may have beautiful white bodies, they may have the land of honey and milk streaming down their slippery loins, but down below they’re witches, sometimes three sometimes one, like the one who looks like Sylvia and seems to give such good advice. Yet when the old king’s sleeping peacefully she’ll call on all the powers of darkness to unsex herself and to change her mother’s milk for gall.

From a distance they may look like Rhine maidens or the three muses, but they aren’t to be trusted.

I refuse to even look in their direction. Sticking bee’s wax in my ears, I scream at the oarsman to break on through.

The three hellish maidens fuse back into one and Sylvia becomes human again. She’s shaking my head and sticking one of her nipples in my mouth. She scolds, “Wake up, you idiot! We’ve got exactly 21 minutes to get dressed and across the quad.”

It was all a dream. Sylvia’s back on the prow, thank God, no longer threatening me with the charge of hubris and of trying to tell Old Rex what Homer means.

We fly over lake and forest in our bathtub full of fire and brimstone, skirting Lake Winnebago where Nanabush the Trickster gives Loki a run for his money. Nanabush shouts at him to go to Hell but Loki tells him he already has, for beside him sits Hel, grave Mistress of the Deep. She winks back at him with her fiery eyes as they ramble northward across the fictitious border which the Indians don’t recognize.

The travellers in the tub don’t care much for borders either, rub-a-dub-dub, as they cross from the newly-spangled bannertown called the USA into the red leafy town called Canada in the province of Manitoba. Come 8:30 I’ll regurgitate my notes, and tell the old goat that Manitoba is “a Cree word meaning, the strait of the spirit or manitobau, which refers to the roaring sound produced by pebbles on a beach on Manitoba Island. The noise gave rise to the superstition among the Indians that a manito or spirit beats a drum.”

We come we come, we beat our drum, all five cylinders pounding out the name of ecological disaster, brought to you by the furnaces of Glasgow and Birmingham and Dunsinane.

In the land of the Great Spirit we haul our rig into the town of Gimli on the west coast of Lake Winnipeg. “Fill her up,” I say in my least provocative accent, though hellfire and brimstone bubble beneath my ears, and the old geezer says “Sure thing, laddy” and proceeds to tell us about the orgins of the place, repeating information he probably stole from some website: Gimli is now the largest settlement of Icelanders outside of Iceland. The town of about 3000 people was settled in 1875 after a series of natural disasters drove them from Iceland. The old geezer adds with a Charonesque gleam in his eye, it’s all kept on high boil by the Seagram’s whiskey plant which employs 135 people.

Fire water, ah… and Charon adds that one day the Icelanders will rise up and — tanked up, we drive off and leave the old-timer in our wake to tell his stories of the odin days to his kids who couldn’t care less because Beyoncé’s atwitter and she’s even on the radio as we rev up for the big climb, as we gear up for the cosmic battle which begins at 8 AM in the infernal morning and will take the shape of the fiery Manitou guzzling gallons and gallons of liquid fire, hot cappuccinos that taste like whiskey that we’ll sell along the way to any Indian left standing, pure distilled or mixed, 100 proof, guzzling like an ancient Leviathan who is, like Loki, at once a physical threat to the order of Odin and the gods and a symbol of the psychological dimension of the id.

From the rumbling furnaces of history, black and grimy in the plunging soul with lime and hydrocarbons we take a long running start across the prairies of Saskatchewan and Alberta, gathering steam to ascend the steep slope of Hroðgar’s Pass, a monster rising from the deep dark heartlands of Michigan and Ontario, from the thermal pools of our northern subconscious, the realms of sleep and Grimm fantasy, of brothers battling in the skaldic mode over the waves and over the hills and far away, we come we come, we beat our drum from Albany to Detroit, from Ann Arbour to Dunsinane and Deadwood, where the heavy engines roar and the furnaces of coke lift acid to the skies we ride in our mammoth ship of steel and chromium and sulphurous molybdenite, polished in Detroit and in the branch plants of Oakville and Brampton.

Together with our southern brothers we set off in combustible wrath, the drum will shake the castle wall / the ring-wraiths ride in black across the heavy skies of North Dakota to Swift Current and Medicine Hat, Lethbridge and Drumheller, up the foothills to the Crow’s Nest Pass, Cowley and Coleman, Greenwood and Cawston, along the road winding west from Copper Mountain, chalug, chalug, like a sixty-year old smoker up the hot asphalt, past the last mountain town: “Hope” they call it, like pilgrims heading to the last resort and down into the Valley, towards the primeval forests and clear-cut wastelands of the West Coast, descending like a fire-breathing dragon dragged by Loki and Hel whose writhing in the waves is one of the tokens to herald Ragnarök.

From the paradise of Gimle to Hell’s Gate, going down on the Fraser, that deep romantic chasm, scorching the earth with each fuel-combusted breath and turning the skies yellow I start to babble in my 7:48 delirium about exams and footnotes and The Marvels of War my jaws yakking that we’re all just criminals here of our own resort and that we’ll consume whatever the hell we want to consume, and that tuna by the cargo hold is on offer in Lahaina, as the pop tarts fly up from the dashboard toaster and the on-board GPS lies to us like Ophelia in her cock-mad delirium telling us only where we are and what we are, but not what we might be.

All we can make out is a slight smell of singed sugar on the dark flooded highway now floodlit with a thousand lights, like the 776 Norman ships that crossed the English Channel, or the neon spikes beneath the gaping maw of the alien ships of the Martians and Romulans, or like Loki who is an agent of doom whose children will swallow the sun as the world revolves and the mountain peaks are left far behind us, along with the slim chance of Hope, we enter the steady stream of traffic down the 125 kilometre dragstrip of the Trans-Canada roaring to the sea, where Jörmungandr, the Giant-Snake, will rise from the sea where he lies curled round the world, to slay and be slain by Thor.

Thor thunders above us with the eagles as we blast now down the double highway racing with the SUVs and Hummers and hockey moms heading for the monster truck rally in Abbotsford, paving the way to rack and ruin, toward Room 666 at the edge of the Western world and the Osborne Gymnasium, The University of British Columbia, on the road to Ragnarök, B.C.

8:30 AM

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