Room with a view

This morning I woke up in Banff to thick smoke, remnants of the fires raging just across the boarder in BC. From what I’m told, the smoke has traveled all the way to Manitoba, meaning it’s now stretching across half the country. Environment Canada says this smoke will only truly impact those with asthma or allergies, but this morning my throat is tight, my eyes a little itchy.

In an hour I will rent a car and drive west, into the smoke, through the Rocky Mountains and Rogers Pass, down into the desert of the Okanagan. It’s a trip I’ve made many times before, though not in recent memory. This time I’ll be guided my memories instead of mountains. That’s alright with me.

Former rocket launchers, Churchill, Manitoba.

It’s been raining for days. Raining too hard to traverse marshy bogland in search of biting flies (pity.) In the distance I can see tin-can structures, pointed skyward. This is all that remains of the Canadian military’s lengthy operations in the region.

I want to go and explore them, but I’m told it’s too dangerous. I can’t be sure if this is because the buildings are old and weathered, or because there are polar bears lurking just beyond the next willow.

Churchill, Manitoba

I spent Canada day on a small plane, flying North. I’ll be here in Churchill for the next week filming a story on biting flies, which is a good, because this town seems to have lots of them.

Initial impressions; Big Sky, smells of summer. The sun never sets, the bugs never sleep, and the men are rugged (which is just how I like them.) I could get used to this place.

Along with the Pine Tree Line and the Distant Early Warning Line, the Defense Research Board is established, with the sole purpose of assessing chemical and biological agents with defense capabilities. The greatest biological threat a northern solider will face – the biting fly.

The Northern Insect Survey, conducted between 1947 and 1962, remains the most extensive insect survey in North American History. By the time it was completed, over 72 sights were sampled, all with the sole intent of assessing how troops would withstand northern climates in the event of a Soviet invasion. In the end little was done with the data, and for years it lay mostly dormant in the Canadian National Collections on Insects in Ottawa. Until Now.

The Biological Survey of Canada, a joint initiative by the Royal Ontario Museum, McGill University and the University of PEI, will recreate the Northern Insect Survey at 12 key locations over a two-year period. The timing of this project is imperative; Today the Arctic is among the most fragile ecosystems on earth. The immense environmental pressures increase annually as the effects of global warming are felt most acutely at northern latitudes. With their diversity and potential for rapid population growth, arthropods can serve as barometers of environmental change. In recent years yellow jacket wasps have been observed on Baffin Island, an unprecedented site, and believed to be only the tip of the iceberg for northern arthropod populations.

In the coming weeks I will travel to Churchill, Manitoba, to document this project. There will be biting flies and midnight sun, and if I’m lucky, the odd polar bear. No word on whether the Russians are planning an appearance yet.

In Praise of Female Athletes Who Were Told No
Brad Cran (care of Geist)

For the fif­teen female ski jumpers peti­tion­ing to be included in the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver

Despite the glory of colour it’s easy to be the butterfly;
It’s hard to be the dog or to remain like the river stone.
For Christ sake little lady, sit down you’ve been told.

Because he thought that a woman short of breath was an affront to good
manners,
Baron Pierre de Coubertin founded the modern Olympics with only the
strength
of men in mind. The heft and depth of sport surely could not be good
for the reproductive organs of a lady—
In 1896 at the first modern Olympics,
Stamata Revithi watched the men’s marathon and the next day started
out
on her own forty-kilometre run. She could not enter the stadium to
finish,
as the men had done the previous day, so with one lap around the entire
stadium
she finished the run that was thought impossible for a woman to
complete.

The most unaesthetic sight the human eye could contemplate, de Coubertin said,
was women’s sport. In 1922 Alice Milliat held a women’s Olympics
in Paris where eighteen women broke world records in sport.
De Coubertin demanded that Milliat drop the Olympic moniker from her
games.
She refused until he agreed to integrate ten women’s events into the
Olympics.
Milliat dropped the Olympic moniker from her games but de Coubertin
only added five female track-and-field events to the 1928 Olympics in
Amsterdam.

For the 1928 games the Canadian women’s Olympic team practiced
for the Olympic relay by passing the baton on the deck of the ship
that sailed them to Europe. At the same time a contingent of Canadian
men
travelled to Amsterdam to petition the ioc to do the right thing
and drop female sport from the Olympics. The media called
the Canadian women’s team the Matchless Six for their athletic ability.

The New York Times called one of them, Ethel Catherwood, “the
prettiest girl
of the games.” She became known as the Saskatoon Lily, for her
“flower-like face.”
Surely, it was said, the Saskatoon Lily would become a movie star,
but Catherwood was an athlete. She said she would rather gulp poison
than try her hand at motion pictures. She won gold in the high jump
and remains the only Canadian woman to win a solo gold in track and
field.

That same year the women ran the 800 metre race so hard that they crossed
the finish line and fell to the ground to catch their breath.
The men of the ioc
found this disquieting. The 800 meter women’s race was not reinstated
until 1968 in Mexico, where Enriqueta Basilio became the first woman
to light the Olympic cauldron.

Eva Dawes was a weak child and her father thought exercise
would strengthen her. He built her a high-jumping pit
at her school. At a track meet in 1926 she won two gold medals
in the under-18 category. The officials then refused to let her jump
with the adults until her father walked onto the pitch,
grabbed the microphone and pleaded with the crowd to intervene.
The officials let Dawes jump again and she won another gold that day.

In 1935 she wanted to see life outside of Ontario
so she accepted an invitation to travel to the Soviet Union.
When she returned she was suspended from amateur sport
for cavorting with communists. The next year she boycotted
the Nazi-hosted Olympic Games and sailed for Barcelona
to compete in the People’s Olympiad, championed
by trade unions, socialists and communists, then cancelled
with the first shots of the Spanish Civil War.

The athlete Fanny Blankers-Koen gave birth to her second child,
immediately started training, and six weeks later competed
in the 1946 European Championships. By 1948 she was back
in shape and held many world records, but still the media thought
she was too old to represent her country and that she should stay home
to take care of her children. She won four gold medals at the 1948
Olympics
They called her The Flying Housewife.

In 1973 the former Wimbledon singles champion Bobby Riggs
claimed that women didn’t have the strength to play tennis properly
and that he would beat any woman alive
by virtue of his manhood.
He beat Margaret Court on Mother’s Day of that year.
He said, “I want Billie Jean King.
I want the women’s lib leader!” He wore a “Men’s Liberation” T-shirt to
practise
for his match with King and said that he wanted to be the number one
chauvinist pig.
The tennis player Rosie Casals called Riggs “an old man who walks like a
duck,
can’t see, can’t hear and besides,” she said, “he’s an idiot.”

A team of football players carried Billie Jean King
into the Astrodome while Bobby Riggs rode in
on a chariot pulled by women. Billie Jean King beat him
three straight sets in a row.

Listen: here they come again, trying to screw things up for the men. In
2005
the president of the International Ski Federation, Gian Franco Kasper,
said
“Ski jumping is just too dangerous for women. It’s not appropriate for
ladies
from a medical point of view.”

The chivalry playbook? For the Continental Cup in Germany the men’s
ski jumping team slept in a hotel while the women were billeted
in a farmhouse and barn, with a pile of manure outside their window,
and awoke to a farm cat eating their food. Or they slept in a post office
in St. Moritz, and under a dining room table in Trondheim.

It is easy to be the butterfly. It is hard to sleep in the barn.

Perhaps your breasts are not aerodynamic.
Perhaps jumpsuits will increase the popularity of your sport.
“Come here little darling, and I’ll teach you how to spread your V-style
wider.”

At the top of the cantilevered tower you envision yourself in flight
and prepare your body to react without thought. You tighten the straps
of your helmet, position your goggles, slide onto the starting bar
to watch the wind work the flags with the possibility of flight
as you slide your feet ahead in the track, fold down
and zip into the inrun—you feel the compression
of the curve. You are over the knoll.
If you bend your knees you lose control.
You master the airfoil and steer with the slightest movement of your
hands.
You look straight ahead and command every turn and nuance of posture.
You are flying. There is no other explanation.
Your body is muscle and memory held up by the wind.

You’ve no doubt heard the news; Harper is planning to do absolutely nothing at Copenhagen.   In fact, our illustrious PM will not attend the conference at all!  And really, why bother.  Mr. Harper is an important man.  He is far too busy jet setting around the world on important diplomatic business, like opening donut shops.  Far too busy to make an appearance at what is certainly the most highly publicized international negotiation of the last decade.  Never mind the fact that the vast majority of us Canucks have demanded action on climate change again and again and again.

Perhaps you’ve noticed a change in the tone of my posts this week.  To be frank, I’m irked. (Perhaps irked is an understatement.)  But I’ve rallied from the last post, and I’m ready for action.  And I’m in enlisting your help.  If you’re as fed up with the Conservative government’s position on climate change as I am, here’s an opportunity to do something.

It seems ol’ Stevie boy needs a friendly reminder on just exactly what his job is (that being, to represent you and me!)  What better way to remind him, than an e-card from our federal government, designed specifically to remind someone you know that the fight against climate change “rests in your hands.”   This Magazine has an excellent post up from their environmental series Stop Everything. Read it.  Then send Mr. Harper a friendly reminder on who he is in office to serve (that’s you; the people!)  Send Stephen Harper an e-card at pm@pm.gc.ca, and tell our Prime Minister to get his donut-lovin-butt on the next plane to Copenhagen!