I finally have the internet again at work! My computer is now officially virus free. It's amazing how dependant I am on the internet for everything that I do. Lately, we have been talking about Canada in class, and I have to download all the materials from class off the internet, so you can imagine that the last few days have been kind of a pain without the internet. I wonder why people make viruses?

Anyway, things are back to normal now, and here I am blogging. As I said before, we are talking about Canada in class. I never knew this could be such a difficult topic. I don't know where to begin. How do you teach about an entire country in just three lessons. I have been inspired though. I think I need to write an ESL book just about Canada. But what is Canada? I guess I have been concerned with this question just about all my life. I can still remember when I was six years old, my Dad and his friends standing on the street corner where we lived talking about this same question. The year was 1976, and the Parti Quebecois had just come into power in Quebec. The Parti Quebecois are a separatist party, and they want Quebec to become an independant French speaking nation. We lived in an English suburb of Montreal at the time, and this wall all my parents and their friends talked about. To a six year old, you can imagine this must have seemed all very boring, but for my parents and their friends the future of their country was at stake. In the end, my parents decided to move to Alberta, and so far, Quebec is still part of Canada, but the question still haunts me "What is a Canadian".

Anyway, just prove to your that your teacher is particularly weird, here is something that I wrote after a trip I took across Canada in 1996 that tells you what I was thinking back then:

A Trip Across Canada - 1996

The mountains are always there on the edge of my vision. No matter where
I go, they are the boundary that I cannot pass. I wander through strange
cities filled with bizarre and different modes of life, but still the
mountains are there, fleetingly appearing in the corner of my eye,
constantly beckoning me to return - to return.

The land of my youth haunts me. I escape and still the undulations of the
fields and the straw yellows of the pastures call my name. Sloughs cry
out, using the voices of the ducks and frogs to call across the miles,
reminding me in my sleep, sounding in my ears as I walk that there is
somewhere that demands that it remain in my soul, form part of my body
and not let me escape.

The people filter in and out of my memory. The people - Mennonite stock,
German and Protestant farmers giving their produce to eat, and by
partaking in what they create, by incorporating it with my body it
becomes me - the soil nourishing the grain, the labour harvesting the
wheat, the skill baking the bread. It all comes together in a grand
communion where I eat the body of my land and mingle my life with the
cells of theirs.

But can I only belong to them? Why does my soul ache as I travel through
this land? How does the song about Newfoundland, sung by a barmaid on
holiday cut at my heart while we sit in the pub on the ferry from Sidney?
Where do the tears come from when I see the gnarled trees, stunted
ancient mountains and pools of misty water in Ontario. Que'est ce que le
spasme de vivre que j'ai que j'ai?

Every person belongs to me. In smoky bar cars on the train, biker chicks
with skull rings and silver bracelets are mine as they describe the last
fight they had and how useful it can be to have jewellery that can double
for a knuckle duster. She and her mother are going to West Edmonton Mall
to stay in the Fantasy Land Hotel.

The lady in Ottawa who clarified the difference between an American and
Imperial gallon and the metric standard presently employed is mine. Mine
as she turned around and joined the conversation Fabrice and I were
having on the street in Ottawa.

Chad is mine as he looks for a home moving east and west. Wanting to
leave where he came from and then go back again.

Mike and Karen belong to me. Giving free post cards to the travellers
buying eggs and the margarine Mike suggested because it cost less than
the butter.

Everyone at the Barn Dance we found in the middle of Cape Breton belong to
me. We shared something as we danced to the fiddle player and drank
Pepsi. Them dancing to forget the farms that could no longer produce,
the language that had died and the jobs that were not there. They dance
to forget that the young people were gone, leaving children and people
over 40 to play the music and pass on pieces of their lives to the
children before they couldn't.

The drunk in the pub on George Street is St. John's is mine. Mine as he
asked me and everyone else who would look at him to play pool, connect
with him through his drunken haze. His refuge in his Newfoundland accent
and Black Horse lager.

Jessie was mine as he told me from behind the bar in The Ship how St.
John's had the highest per capita of pubs in North America, 18 year old
drinking age, no more fish or work and the highest rate of alcoholism.

Do the people who mutter and scream to themselves as they walk through a
self defeated city belong to me? They cry out in different languages
hanging onto the lamp poles, wrapped in their own filth. They are mine,
but what am I to do?

Elizabeth has always belonged to me. The wind eating us from across the
Atlantic as we stand looking across to Ireland and Britain. Ancestors’
voices hopeful in the wind as they sweep across the ocean as the rocks,
the trees, the endless wildness, the new cities tenuously sprouting from
the earth ancient and enduring.

History began when Britain took Newfoundland. Elizabeth takes us up to
the top of the lighthouse where no other tourists may go. We look out.
History wells up in her voice, the echoes of her ancestors floating in
her vowels. The ghosts lighting the light. Bright flash 17 seconds,
darkness, two bright flashes 17 seconds, darkness. The fog horn booming
for hundred's of years.

Susan and the college boys playing soldier in the citadel in Halifax are
mine. They are with me as Americans look from the other side of the
glass and we remember the war of 1812.

Canada, Canada, what are you? Are you the chansonnier singing "Mon Pays"
in Les Deux Pierrots? Are you the dead on the Plains of Abraham? Are
you the drug dealer on East Hastings in Vancouver peddling hash to
natives who now speak a foreign tongue?

Where are you? I want you. I need to know what you are. The anomaly of
different coloured pebbles sliding around in a slowly decaying box. The
glimpses I have caught of you tell me only that I love you and I need
you.

The memories swell and crowd each other out inside of my brain.
Remembrances rush forward and others recede back, but they are there and
they are me.

The beer is the blood of my land and the bread is the body. I partake and
we are one.

The trains put it into perspective. A sudden city, then fields, then the
land. A land that stretches forever, populated by memories and escape.

Escape from America and revolution. Escape from poverty and exploitation.
Escape from the white man. Everyone who lives here has run away or has
had their home taken away. Because they came here, we come from broken
families. Because they stayed, we have become orphans.

Does the land cry or sing, or is it silent?


Scott Roy Douglas
1996