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.

Every July, for a little over a decade, I packed all my belongings into a green trunk and headed north to the wild’s of Algonquin. My father grew up in the park (literally, but that’s another story,) and felt it was important we learn the basics of wilderness survival, as well as an appreciation for nature.

I was never a popular kid at camp, but I did make friends – best friends. People I still speak with weekly, although we now live miles apart. I excelled at fire building, tree identification, first aid and other random activities most would deem useless in the “real world.”  I spent long days in the bush, covered with bug bites, face black with soot.  I learned to light a fire with only a log that had been soaked in a bucket of water for 24 hours, and a single match.

I think back to last summer, where I wandered alone down the coast of a deserted island in the Mingan Archipelago, torrential rains coming down, completely lost.  While I waited for the coast guard to come and rescue me, and my body slipped further into clinical shock from the cold, I was aware at the back of my mind exactly what was happening, and what I needed to do to stop it.  I knew I would be ok.

At 26, I’ve had a lot of careers.  Treeplanter, Organic Farmer, Media Trainer and now Filmmaker.  Oddly, in every case, my ability to brave the outdoors, diagnose clinical shock, and “survive” while lost have come in handy.

I guess what I mean to say is, sometimes it’s the silly passions, the odd behaviors that other people don’t quite understand, that shape who we become as adults.  I need to relax and keep being silly.

Awareness is certainly a good thing, but at this point I think we’re all aware. Maybe it’s time to move past awareness and on to action? Just a thought…

In other news, I’m heading to Haiti/DR on Monday, to work on a project about sugar. More details to follow. Planning the trip has been a tremendous amount of work, and if I said I wasn’t finding the whole process overwhelming, I would be lying. Still, I’m excited to be in the field again, working on projects that matter. Even if it isn’t the easy thing to do.

Last Train Home director Lixin Fan

Awhile back I wrote a short post about a little documentary called Last Train Home. While the film is still on a successful festival run (winning the top prize at IDFA and screening to critical acclaim at Sundance) it will also open in select cities this weekend (including Toronto.)

GO SEE THIS FILM.
Serious.

Last Train Home is an epic survey of the world’s largest human migration, which happens annually during the Chinese new year, when hundreds of thousands of migrant workers scramble to board trains back to their rural villages. Sixteen years ago, the Zhangs abandoned their young children to find work in the city, consoled by the hope that their wages would lift their children into a better life. But in a bitter irony, the Zhangs’ hopes for the future are undone by their very absence.

The film is visually stunning, emotionally engaging, and has a rhythm that just breathes. It’s a masterpiece that took director Lixin Fan a challenging three years to complete.   Arguably time well spent.

Opening weekends for small independent films matter. They make or break the ability for the film to continue to screen. Independent films matter. This film matters. It shines a light on the impacts of consumerism, and forces you to look at the big picture.

SO, support independent cinema, support independent thought and support my dear friend Lixin.  GO SEE THE FILM.

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.

Due to a looming deadline, I’ve spent the last couple days staring at images of planet earth from space. At first the process was all about details and facts – finding NASA or NOAA maps with simple, clear information. One after another images of earth spinned by, different details highlighted, different facts illustrated. And then they started to blend together in shades of blue and green and white. I zoned out (it’s to be expected after the 500th map.) I saw what has often been described as the ‘pale blue dot,’ for what it really is – a complex but decidedly insignificant part of a much larger picture.

I’ve always been terrified of outer space (to the point where I can not engage in any conversation on the subject.) It’s too large, too ambiguous. It makes me feel small. Starring at earth from above, I realized that I am small, and in some ways, my actions are inconsequential.

Maybe there’s a bit of peace in that. Maybe it makes protecting this little orb more important than ever. Small things should be cherished and protected, because more often than not, they can not protect themselves.

Yes, it’s an animated map, and a decidedly touchy-feely, inconsequential observation. But it makes me sleep better at night. And in the end, isn’t that what it’s all about.