Twenty-first century hunter-gatherers

Article and photographs by Rick Book
From http://calgarypickers.blogspot.ca/ May 2011

Bang. Rattle. Clink. The metallic jangling seems right outside the living room window. It’s 5:30 as I peer into the dark of a Calgary morning. There’s a man in a parka, hood up, hunched into the slanting snow under a streetlight, ploughing through powdery drifts with a grocery cart half full of bouncing bottles and cans. Even the homeless work hard here in the West.

They call themselves pickers, a hardy subset of the 4,000 men, women and children who are without a roof over their heads on any given day or night in Calgary. Look in any back alley in the downtown core - from where the Bow River winds past downtown to the lower Mount Royal district seventeen blocks to the southwest, look in winter or summer, rain or blinding snow, early morning or late at night, and chances are you will see pickers, 21^st century hunter-gatherers prowling with shopping carts and their punky cargo of bulging garbage bags. If there’s a cart parked beside a dumpster and there’s no one in sight, chances are the picker is inside it, up to her ass in fragrant garbage, ripping through bags filled with lettuce leaves and coffee grounds and rancid scraps of meat, searching for bottles and cans that will earn a few cents at the local recycling depot. You see pickers, too, on the street at any hour, digging through sidewalk garbage cans, their hands black and cracked and full of cuts from jagged edges and broken glass. Sometimes, not often, you see them resting on park benches, coaxing the last drag out of a soggy butt scavenged from the sidewalk. If you try to look pickers in the eye, make human contact, some have the stone cold stare of a gated community, others simply look away, a few will size you up as the bleeding heart you are and ask for money. 

To a newcomer, their presence is jarring, incongruous within sight of the city’s shiny petro towers and the luxurious offices of oil and gas tycoons who run this town. To pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstrap Calgarians, the continued presence of pickers seems either mystifying or a pesky nuisance. It’s not that the homeless here aren’t looked after. I never saw a picker who didn’t have a warm winter parka. At night, many of them bed down on mats at any number of shelters run by the city, charities or religious groups. But there are many homeless men and some women who avoid those places. They sleep “rough,” squirreling themselves away in “camps” - dark doorways, condemned houses, underpasses, in the thickest bushes of city parks, and under dilapidated front porches where there’s an opening big enough for a dog or a person to crawl through.

Calgary introduced a city-wide recycling program for residential areas in 2010, but it doesn’t include the forest of apartment buildings in and around the downtown area. Some of these buildings are served by private waste and recycling companies. Many aren’t, and so the residents toss their recyclables down the chute and into a dumpster with the rest of the garbage. Some people take their bags of recycling to neighbourhood collection depots, a row of green bins often located behind a big name grocery store. Many separate their pop cans, milk cartons and wine bottles and put them into bags for the pickers who station themselves at these collection bins. That’s how you meet the pickers; in some cases, like mine for instance, it’s how conversations – and friendships - begin.     

 Franklin

“Franklin” is the alias he uses. It’s the name on his Safeway Club card: Franklin I. Annoni, a wry, sardonic joke. “It means frankly, I’m anonymous,” he says with a grin. He hangs out by the green recycling collection bins behind Safeway, on the morning shift. The first time we talk, he tells me he’d been a land surveyor for oil and gas companies, marking out new drilling leases in the bush up north. We have something in common. I tell him I’d spent a summer during high school working with my uncle on a survey crew in Saskatchewan. Franklin liked the solitude of the bush, away from people, he says. He is short, stocky, with a cherubic, deeply tanned face, and a warm smile that reveals missing front teeth. Somehow, Franklin manages to keep himself and his clothes quite clean. To see him sitting there, you might not know he was homeless. But his grocery cart gives him away, with its growing assortment of cans and bottles, several bulging garbage bags slung from the side, the large roll of mustard-coloured foam lashed to the front, and curiously, a blue fabric softener jug in the child seat.

One warm spring day we sit in the sun and chat over chicken sandwiches and juice. Franklin had been a boss, had his own survey crew and truck, but in 1967 decided to give up the career, just work as a helper. In between survey jobs, he played pool, going back to the bush when the money ran out, did that off and on for 30 years. “Snooker was my game,” he says proudly, “played for money. That’s all I did.”  When he finally lost the strength in his legs and feet and could no longer thrash his way through the brush, he retired. “I bought myself a gold watch,” he says. I wonder if he still has it. Doubt it.

Franklin says he’s been picking for three months, “the new kid on the block” he calls himself, then contradicts himself saying he’s been picking steadily since April. That would make it almost a year. He’s been homeless since then, he tells me, started picking on his seventieth birthday. Perhaps time is an amorphous, shifting thing when you’re on the street. Perhaps truth is, too. He doesn’t look close to seventy.

Much of Franklin’s life is fenced off. No wife, no kids, he says but he lived with someone once. He’s also been arrested, spent 26 months in the Calgary remand centre, he won’t say why. “They make it very harsh in there, to encourage you to plead guilty and get it over with.” Maybe that’s why he won’t let me take his picture or record our conversation. He watches me scribbling notes and asks to see the article when it’s written. And why should he trust me? Whitebread, middleclass stranger wanting to shoot pictures and tell stories about his life, his decline. I’ve thought about that myself.

Many of the pickers sleep at “the D.I.” - The Calgary Drop In Centre, The Mustard Seed or Salvation Army, but not all. “There’s a whole bunch of unknown people, and I’m one of them,” Franklin says, “we truly live under the sky, don’t want to be connected to any institution. They’re dangerous places, even if you take your shoes off; you have to tie the laces around your legs so they don’t get stolen. You can get lice, all kinds of diseases. The only time I got sick was when I stayed there.”

We talk about money. Pickers get refunds on containers that held anything drinkable. He rhymes off the list: pop, milk, wine, liquor, water, energy drinks -

in cans, plastic, paper or Tetrapaks. They get 10 cents for each, 25 cents for containers a litre or more. “Weekends are the best times for picking when people are housecleaning,” Franklin says. He won’t tell me how much he makes a day.

I ask him what people do with the money. Most buy alcohol and cigarettes, he says; alcohol is number one, as people can usually pick up cigarette butts on the sidewalk. “I might like to have a drink but I only start drinking when I’m back at my camp, often with dinner.” Later, he tells me that he drinks half a bottle of wine a day. What percentage of the pickers have an addiction, I ask. About 95 percent, he answers, then thinks for a moment, maybe 99 percent. ”My personal interest is books, Second World War. But I can’t haul too many in the shopping cart. I really love history.” He regularly visits three used book stores in the area

Franklin gets the old age pension, $530 a month. His rent used to eat that up. Then there was a “mix up” in his income tax, and he was cut off supplements. That extra $516 a month in federal and provincial supplements doubled his income, he tells me. But now it’s gone. “Clifford Olsen is getting $1200 a month,” he says, resentment rising in his voice at the injustice. Someone at a seniors club is trying to clear up the misunderstanding and get Franklin his “back pay.”

I ask him what’s in the green garbage bags tied to his cart. “I have three sleeping bags,” he says, “I put one inside the other in winter, it’s warm and soft.” He bought the foam at Army & Navy to put under him in his camp. He either hides the foam in the morning before he leaves to go picking, or else ties it to his cart, otherwise it might get stolen. He has a bag of winter clothes which he’s not using but still has to carry around. “I’m living out of my cart,” he says.

Franklin won’t tell me where his camp is and what kind of place it is. “I don’t have nine-foot ceilings,” he says with a grin. “My ceilings are infinity.” He does say that he uses scraps of plywood as a windbreak. “I leave my camp while it’s still dark and don’t return till it’s dark again – so no one will see me.” He has gone into Safeway to use the washroom but other pickers will steal the bottles and cans from his cart. “Now I have this jug (the blue bottle) to pee in,” he says, “so I won’t have to leave my cart unattended.” Sometimes he has a friend, another picker, watch it for him. I get the impression that’s risky, too. As we talk, someone sets down an empty wine bottle while they stuff their recycling into slots in the big green bins. Franklin waits till they leave, then scurries over to pick it up.

From time to time, a white Calgary Police Services van or car cruises by the recycling bins. The officers know many of the pickers by name. The police are often a problem for us, Franklin says. “There are so many charges they can lay against us: trespassing, loitering - like what I’m doing now, open liquor, drinking in public, public intoxication.” He hesitates. “There’s another one, too, but I don’t want to give them too many ideas.” He laughs.

Pickers often need a place to rest; it’s hard work pushing those loaded carts around all day. But Franklin says they’re banned from many properties, even church steps. Behind Safeway, it’s okay to sit on benches or on the brick borders around the landscaping. “I was sitting resting in an empty parking lot last week and the manager just came up and kicked me off,” he says.

Franklin talks about a homeless friend, a woman, who was determined to get an apartment. For several years she collected stuff for a home and squirreled it away in a crawl space under a porch: dishes, cutlery, glasses, lamps, vases. Franklin speaks wistfully of her. “She was friendly, very popular among the people on the street. She got her apartment. Now she isn’t in contact with any of us. She made it.”    

I ask Franklin a question, maybe a stupid one: What do you want to do?  “We live from day to day,” is the answer. “We can’t make plans. We need storage lockers for our carts; that would be something if they could do that. They have lockers at Brentwood and Shaunnessey (Calgary’s light rapid transit C-train stations) for bicycles, but they’re too small for carts. If we had lockers, we could lock up our carts and go look for a job, then get an apartment; it would reduce addiction. We can’t go shopping for clothes. We can’t go to Value Village to get bargains. We don’t have the mobility. We’re stuck.”  

Rosie

Rosie, too, parks her cart near the collection bins behind Safeway, against the white fence of the house next door. She usually shows up at around 11:00 a.m., stays till 5:00 or 6:00 p.m. – the afternoon shift. Rosie is thin with jet black hair, wears a light black leather jacket and walks with a severe limp. She’s got a brace on her right leg, and on bad days she uses the black cane she keeps in her cart. Rosie has a sweet smile and an alarming number of scars on her face that map the rough road she’s been on. I’ve been visiting with Rosie once or twice a week for more than a year. More than once she’s had a black eye, bruises, fresh stitches, a split lip.   

Unlike Franklin, Rosie is happy to tell me her story. “Four years ago, I got kicked out of my house where I was paying rent. Why? Because I was drinking too much and not doing the responsibility thing, so the owner of the house said, okay you gotta move now. He didn’t give me 24 hours, didn’t give me anything, just said get out. So I left there, went to Peter Lougheed Park and slept there in my shorts and a jacket. The first night I was out there, this guy came up to me and said, you got a crack pipe? No, I said. No, I don’t do that shit. I’m an alcoholic. And he kicked me in the face just because I didn’t have a crack pipe. I was like, holy shit; this is what the real world is all about.”

“It’s been like this for the last four years. Thirty-four times I’ve been attacked. I’ve been robbed, I’ve been beat up if I don’t give my cart over. And for what?  Money for food, smokes, beer? It’s all the same thing. The bad homeless will fuckin’ do that. Okay, I’m going to roll you, just because you got this and I got nothing.”

“When you’re out on the street, okay, you can go to the cops, but you know what? When you come out, it’s even worse because they (other pickers) consider me a rat. Oh yeah, because I’m hurt. Oh man, the last time I got beat up – September 12^th – two boots in the head, one right here, (points to her cheek below her left eye). I’m very fortunate that I never lost my eye, but I have to go to the doctor because someone’s wrong with this right eye, big time.”

“I’m a soft bottle picker,” Rosie says, “because I got this bum knee. I can’t do anything. I hurt this when I was 13.” She’s on a list for knee replacement surgery. “I’m not using my handicap as a crutch,” Rosie says. “I used to have a bike and run around. I had my own route and I did that every day. Winter is the worst, she says, because of the cold. “But you get this thing in your mind, okay you gotta do this. You’ve got to. You don’t have a choice. It’s either that or you’re going to have no money, no food, no nothing. You have to keep going a step at a time.”

I asked Rosie about Franklin who’s here in the morning. “There’s conflict,” she says. “Cause he knows I been here, and he’s trying to take over the territory. I don’t give a shit.”  But I know she does. It bothers her a lot. On some days, I’ve seen him stay well into the afternoon and get the lion’s share of bottles, while she ends up with very few.

Last fall, Rosie told me she was going to rehab. She was gone for about a month, then one day she was back. I ask her about that. “I went to detox for eight days, then I went down to rehab in Claresholme for 18 days. But the only reason I went there was the last beating that I had. That’s what made me go.” Rosie’s partner convinced a social worker to come talk to her. “She kneeled right in front of me and said. ‘Are you ready?’ I said ‘Yes.’” She begins to cry. “The amount of pain I went through.”  

“I did it, and I was totally focussed when I got out but this is what I came back to.” She points to her cart. “This is my home. This is what I do. And it’s hard to separate and go forward. And I’m still going through that. It’s really, really hard.”

Rosie talks about the number of people she knows, friends, who’ve died on the street. “I can’t tell you how many people died,” she says, and begins to rhyme off their names. “Harold, Benjamin, Thomas, B.J.” She stops. ”The list goes on and on, I don’t even want to mention it.”

After almost four years on the street, Rosie now has a small apartment in the northeast part of the city, provided by an organization that supports the homeless. She takes the C-Train and bus every day to get downtown to her picking spot. She describes her first night in the apartment after being on the street for so long. “The fridge motor turned on while I was sleeping. I woke up. ‘What’s that?’ It freaked me out.”

One day, Rosie shows me a legal-sized pad of foolscap covered in handwritten notes. It’s guidance from her social worker on how to improve her relationships and her ability to manage the ups and downs of her life. She reads the entire page to me as she stands by her cart, her voice full of conviction. It’s an impressive list. I wish I had a copy.  

Later in the spring, I stop by to visit. Rosie is shaking as she lights a cigarette. There’s a fierce look in her eye. She’s angry. Her friend, Willow, who’s been hanging with her lately during the day, has also been sleeping at her place. “She stole money from me while I was sleeping,” Rosie says. “Everything I had.”

Before long, Willow shows up and Rosie confronts her. “Where’s my money?” “What?” says Willow. She denies everything, and claims it must have been someone else who was sleeping there. I wonder how many people there are. Their voices rise, Rosie’s in hurt and accusation, Willow’s in defiance and denial. I walk away as they sort this out. I don’t see Willow with Rosie again.

Willow

Willow is not her real name. Other pickers have warned me that she’s bad news, untrustworthy. I find her friendly, articulate and full of life. I’m told she’s in a relationship with a member of some gang, and that she sometimes sleeps at Rosie’s apartment for a break, for safety. She won’t talk about it. “Too dangerous,” she says. “They would kill me.” I believe her.  

“There are some people that are not here right now that are real monsters,” Willow says. “And they don’t care. She’s (Rosie) seen me hanging around with the worst people.” Rosie nods. “We couldn’t even speak before, I wasn’t allowed to talk to her, wasn’t allowed to be nice.  There are a lot of men who are really trying to intimidate. And it’s called street justice, you know. Rosie’s seen me beat up and bleeding, too. Why don’t you guys go pick and leave the ladies alone?”

“It’s that karma thing,” she says about life on the street. “One day we’ll have lots, we give, give, give. Some days we can’t even find a butt because it’s raining, it’s snowing. Then the next day, some passerby gives us money, but we’re not panners. On the street, it’s panners, and then you got the hard core pickers, you got the lucky people like us that get recycled or donations. Pickers that go up there, trudging those alleys, oh yeah, hat’s off to them. Winter, dragging their carts. Minus 40, I was out here, it took us how long? Over an hour just to get over to 10 and 6 (the address of the downtown recycling depot). Hauling at this. You got to switch arms, right. No need to get a gym membership, seriously.”

We talk about addictions that account for so many people on the street, and about treatment. “Somebody can’t say ‘you have to go to treatment.’ You’ve got to do it for yourself. Otherwise, it will never ever work. If they’d offer me a million dollars, I don’t care, I’d check myself out the next morning. Ten minutes, don’t watch me, I’ll be out the door. I don’t want your money, I just want your respect.”

Some of the homeless eventually get an apartment. I ask her how that happens. “You have an addiction for alcohol, drugs, gambling, whatever. Where there’s addiction there’s street people. I could go away and be perfectly happy but there’d be one thing missing: my family out here, okay? People that’d die for me. Make sure I’m okay. You can live in a million dollar mansion and never really know your neighbours; they think they’re better than that. I said to a cop, would you die for your neighbour? The cop says, no. I said guess what? I’d die for mine, without even thinking about it. So there’s the difference. You got a million dollars? You owe the bank, I don’t owe nothing. It’s true, you’re all running around thinking you’re big because you have a credit card. We don’t owe nothing, so we can sleep at night, peacefully.”

I tell her that I hear more laughter among the pickers than I heard in the company I worked for. “And it’s whole-hearted you know. It really is. We laugh loud and sometimes people call 9-1-1 and say there’s a disturbance. The cops show up. They say, what? There’s a disturbance because they’re laughing?”

But that’s on the good days when the sun is shining. “You have to keep drinking out here just to keep going,” Willow says a few minutes later.

Joseph

Joseph is an old man, in his seventies I guess. He’s tall, with a soft, quiet voice and the gentlemanly demeanour of a grandfather. He’s been on the street for a very long time. “People ask me if the streets are rougher now or in the 70s and I’d say in the 70s. In the 70s, I was shot twice, stabbed three times before I was 20. I’m still here.” Joseph has a home now, an apartment and he’s cut down on the drinking that brought him to the street. “Now I just have a couple of beer, one or two beer a day.” The day I met him, he was going to St. Mary’s church for a Sunday afternoon meal. He seems happy with his life now.  Joseph likes to ask his friends, “What’s good about your day?” Then he’ll tell them what’s good about his. “Well, I woke up and I’m still breathing. Still walking.”

Mister Hapi and Barbi

They arrive like one of those Chinook weather systems, a blast of laughter rolling in on a blue scooter on a sunny afternoon. They call themselves Mr. Hapi and Barbi and pull up by the collection bins to visit Rosie, Willow and Joseph who was just passing by. Their energy is infectious, turning it into an instant party. But just as quickly, the mood evaporates as they talk about their lives.

“I was raped last May,” says Barbi, with astonishing frankness. “I’ve been robbed, jacked, you name it. I’ve been on the street since I got out of the pen in 1998.”

What did you do? It seems an obvious question. “A whole lot of everything, drugs, assault, I used to be pretty nasty:” I like a girl who doesn’t beat around the bush.

Barbi is still picking, this Safeway location used to be her spot. “I gave it to Rosie because she needs it more than me,” Barbi says. The woman isn’t more than a metre and a half tall and tells me about one of the hazards of picking. “When we go into bins, we stand on the garbage bags - you wouldn’t believe the stench. We pull the bags apart to look for cans and bottles and spread them on the floor, so the level of bags drops, which means I can’t climb up on them to reach the top. I was stuck in one for three and a half hours one day. Good thing I took three beers in with me.” Her laugh is deep and hearty.

She and Mr. Hapi now both have apartments thanks to the local Home Base program that helps people get off the street. “It’s subsidized,” Barbi says. Pays $725 a month. “I’ve had cancer, diabetes, arthritis, I’m a recovering drug addict, now I’m just a drunk…Home Base, they pretty much saved my life.”

In spite of his name, Mr. Hapi has nothing but vitriol for agencies like The Mustard Seed and the Calgary Drop In Centre. “You’re just a piece of shit,” he says “They build you up one day and knock you down the next…In any city in Canada, they feed you, they clothe you. Here, they treat people like shit. The bullshit and the money come first, you come last.” Mr. Hapi has volunteered at both agencies. “They get $100 a day from the Alberta government for every homeless person they serve, “he says. “They’re in it for the money. That’s all. They dislike me because I know the truth.”

Barbi backs him up. “I got shit because I fed the homeless,” she adds. “I took food outside and fed them and they gave me shit.”

Harold

Harold is a tall, soft-spoken man whom I walk with one day. He worked in a small manufacturing plant until it closed down. More recently, he washed dishes in a couple of Calgary restaurants. On the way to the recycling depot he tells me that he lost his jobs in both restaurants “due to a misunderstanding.” Like most westerners, Harold looks you directly in the eye. He agrees to have his picture taken, but as I look through the lens at his sad face, I feel like a trespasser.

Harold’s got a big load, after four or five hours work. We line up at the recycling depot with about twenty other pickers. They unload their carts at long metal counters. The depot employees on the other side of that counter are like machines in a noisy factory. Their hands, in thick rubber gloves, fly as they take in, separate and count bottles and cans faster than I can follow. A young depot worker with a Bite Me T-shirt scrawls a number of a piece of paper, gives it to Harold; he takes it to the manager at the cash register who pays him in cash from the till - $42 this trip. Harold leaves his cart in the depot parking lot; there are always carts there. “I’m going to Macdonald’s to get a coffee,” he says as we shake hands. Then he hurries off down the street. I look for him for days but never see him again.            

  

Darren

It was an unlikely conversation in an unlikely place. One cold, grey late winter morning, I see a picker heading away from me far down an alley. He disappears for a moment as I stride to catch up to him, then reappears beside a dumpster. He’s wearing a baseball hat, reflective sunglasses, an orange down vest. I introduce myself, tell him what I’m doing and he agrees to chat. His name is Darren. “I’m a carpenter and a trail guide,” he says. “I’ve been packing mules and guiding for 25 years, all through the Canadian Rockies, up to Jasper, Banff, all over the place there, into some part of Montana. But 12 years ago I caught my arm in a wood splitter and I just kind of let go of everything. It really fucked me up and since I been on the streets for so many years, I’m just kind of forgetting that I’ve been a cowboy all my life.”

Darren reaches for a small backpack in his cart, unzips a pocket and pulls out a digital camera. “I’m an artist, too,” he adds. “A painter.” And, as we stand there in the alley next to his cart, he gives me a show of his paintings on the small digital screen. I’m impressed. I don’t know much about art but they look pretty good to me.    

“Acrylics,” he says. “I keep my art at the Mustard Seed. They have a small studio there.”  He tells me he had an art show at Grace Presbyterian in January. “Sold half of what I painted. I took cotton bed sheets, doubled them, coated them with gesso to glue them together, and as soon as it was wet I put it on a big board and just started painting. I did up a whole bunch of them. I set them on a table, people were buying. I painted 13 and sold six of them. Aside from the one double one I did, none of them were over a hundred dollars. I just made them affordable. Make them big enough, and affordable. Paint ‘em fast, big enough, and they say: ‘Only a hundred bucks! Sure.’ Decent.”

Darren invites me to the Mustard Seed to see more of his work. We agree to meet there the next night. I walk with him for a bit as he heads for the recycling depot to cash in his bottles. On the way, he sees Joseph, an older picker, resting on an empty sidewalk planter. Darren says “Hi,” stops, reaches into his backpack, pulls out a can of beer and gives it to him. Joseph nods and smiles his gratitude as Darren quickly walks on. “We have to take care of each other out here,” he says.

The next night I watch Darren paint in the basement studio of the Mustard Seed’s Creative Centre. He’s standing with his palette and brush looking every inch a painter in front of a large canvas on an easel. There are a half dozen other people working on various art and craft projects at a large table, and a couple of volunteer assistants from “The Seed.”

“I’ve destroyed a bunch of them,” Darren says while I shoot some photos of him painting a bucolic mountain scene. “Sometimes when I don’t have a sale and have a bunch of them, I’ll just get rid of them, bust them up, instead of holding onto them. They’re no good if they’re just sitting there doing nothing, I have no way of packing them around.” I think of how much art the world has lost by disconsolate artists’ own hands.

Darren tells me more about his accident. “It was an auger on a wood splitter, and now I got four pieces of steel in my left arm. So I went and bought every tool known to mankind and built myself a little wood shop. I had an old 18th century railway caboose in my backyard; that was my woodshop and studio. I had a two-bedroom house I was renting, the one back room I used for my painting, taught myself everything, and had four computers running in there. It was my school.”  After teaching himself how to draft, Darren used a computer to design furniture which he’d build out of pine. When he got divorced, his wife went back to Ontario, took their daughter with her. He followed them for a bit, but then came back west.

“I’m going to spend some of my summer in Canmore and Banff this year,” Darren says, “so I’m going to go back out there, take it from there and see what happens.”  I ask him about the chances of picking up work as a trail guide. He shakes his head. “No. The last one, I didn’t appreciate all the stealing that was going on. So I just wound up quitting. Anyways, I don’t have any equipment any more now, I’m just going to study my art, just load up some paints in my backpack and just head out there.”

I ask him what it’s like for him on the street. “I’m used to it,’ he says. “I’m pretty well by myself. I don’t get myself too wound up on too many people. I’m more independent. I hide, so to speak. I just pick my bottles and have a few beer later on, that’s about all. But eventually, I’m hoping work will pick up, and that way I can get back into something affordable where I can live.” What kind of work? Painting? Trail guide? “I’d probably just continue with the construction end. I’m good at it.” 

You’re good at painting, too, I say. “Painting is such a hard issue to keep going with, people fighting me with it. Why? I don’t know. People have a lot of  jealousy about my work, especially, people ask me why’s a guy like you that good doing in a place like this? .Well, that’s what happens I guess. I’m on the streets. What do you expect?”

A few weeks later, Darren sends me a note on Facebook. He’s in Banff and is having a rough time. He writes once in a while. I don’t know how he’s getting by.   

Todd

It’s evening and a heavy snow falls in huge flakes like torn paper. I’m in a back alley with my camera and spot a picker with his cart in the distance, his parka hood pulled up. He is heading south, away from the recycling depot, with half a load still in his cart.

As I get closer he stops to fiddle with something in his cart. I walk up and introduce myself, tell him I’m what I’m doing, mention the names of other people I’ve spoken with. He’s tall, maybe six-three, his face red and raw with wind and cold, his reddish-blond hair and goatee are wild and straggly. I’m a little surprised that he’s willing to talk. “I used to be in management at a pharmaceutical company,” he says. “I’ve been picking for about seven years.” He sleeps rough, not at the DI. “I don’t like those centres. I get sick if I stay inside, like at my brother’s place.” We talk a bit more, and then I ask if he’d mind if I give him some money? “I’m not going to refuse,” he says. We both laugh.  I hand over a few loonies and toonies from my pocket; it feels like a stingy amount.

He tells me his name is Todd, takes off his leather gloves and we shake hands. His hands are rough and ice cold. I feel his gloves, they’re leather, sopping wet. After a while I ask if I can take his picture and he agrees. I pull out a release form but his hands are so cold he can hardly write, his signature a frigid scrawl. At one point, he reaches for a clear glass bottle in his cart. It looks like urine, I wonder for an instant if he’s going to throw it at me, but instead he takes a swig. What’s that? I ask. “Beer,” he says, and takes another. “You need to drink out here.”

I take a few shots as the snow comes down and show him the photos on the digital screen, trying to be as courteous as he is. What does he think seeing himself in that photo? How does he feel? I pull off my dry fleece gloves and offer them to him. “Here, “I said, “You need these. They’re nice and warm and I’ve got more at home.” He takes them gratefully, struggles to pull them on his cold hands. I reach for my wallet, pull out the only bill, a twenty, and give that to him. “For something to eat that will warm you up.”

He thanks me. “I’ll go to the Purple Perk (a local cafe) tomorrow,” he says. “They have fish and chips on Friday.” We shake again and leave. Todd trundles south and east toward wherever it is that he sleeps. I put my hands in my pockets and head for my nice warm home. As the snow sifts down, it is all I can do to keep from crying.        

Joe

One day late in the fall, I’m on my way to Safeway with recycling when I see a half-full cart beside a dumpster just off the sidewalk. I look around. There’s no picker in sight. I walk up and start putting my bottles and cans in the cart. I hear a sound and look up. A man stands up inside the dumpster. “Do you want these bottles?” I ask.

“Yes, yes, thank you,” he says. Of course he does. We get talking. He tells me he’s from Toronto, Italian, left there 30 years ago. He wears a wool toque, is in his sixties, short, very friendly, well-spoken. We end up chatting for 20 minutes about football, Canadian versus American, three downs versus four. We introduce ourselves. His name is Joe. 

I look for Joe after that, see him only fleetingly crossing a street or going down a back alley, never when I have my camera.  A couple of months later, we meet near a Tim Horton’s. His face is haggard and his shoulders slump. He’s in rough shape. “Can you buy me a coffee?” he pleads. “I haven’t eaten today.” I give him money, all the change I’ve got and a five. “Thank you,” he says brightening. “I’ll get you back.” 

A few weeks go by. I’m walking over to Mission Street to buy pasta at a little Italian market when I see Joe walking toward me with his cart on the other side of the street. I call out to him. “Hi,” he says and waves me over. He starts rummaging through a knapsack in his cart. I wonder what’s he’s looking for. He pulls out a can of fruit juice, Five Alive, hands it to me. “Here,” he says, “I owe you one.”

“No, Joe, you keep it.” 

“No, no,” he insists. I accept, thank him and take the can gratefully. “How are you doing?” I ask.

“Oh, fine, fine,” he says and I can tell he wants to get moving. We go our separate ways. I look at the can in my hand. It’s encrusted in crud, probably from the garbage where he found it. I walk a few blocks and then, with a mixture of gratitude and guilt, set it on top of a garbage can where another picker can find it.
                                                                            - 30 -

A report from the President of the Calgary Homeless Foundation:
http://calgaryhomeless.com/assets/Progress/Year5/Five-Year-Update-to-10-Year-Plan.pdf

Dreams in the Dust

By Rick Book

The story of Canada’s most unlikely ship

An article coming in the June-July issue of Canada’s History magazine

There she was, red hull mounted on white keel, facing homeward toward Finland, but going nowhere. Rising above the prairie grass of rural Saskatchewan, not the rolling, grey North Atlantic, she is Canada’s most unlikely ship. The 43-foot Sontianen was part of my dad’s boyhood and later mine, and is one of the strangest reminders of the madness that was this country’s Great Depression.  

The pictures were in our family photograph albums, there in black and white, so my sisters and I knew the story was true. Dad had seen the boat, had met the giant Finlander, Tom Sukanen, who’d built her. On a cool fall Sunday in 1938, a bunch of farm kids put gas in a truck and drove to see this fantastic thing growing on the prairie. Dad, just 14, the youngest of the group, took photographs of the hull and keel with grandpa’s Kodak box camera. It was such an unlikely boat, an ocean-going steamship, built amidst the dust and despair of the Dirty Thirties, thousands of miles from the nearest salt water. And just across the muddy South Saskatchewan River from our family farm. Dad never tired of telling us the story, and we never tired of hearing it. He believed in Tom Sukanen’s dream, believed he could have done it, maybe, if only. Hope dies hard in the West.    

See the rest of this article in the June-July 2013 issue of  Canada’s History magazine:

https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/settlement-immigration/dreams-in-the-dust-the-story-of-tom-sukanen

Two Worlds, One River
 by Rick Book

  An article for Kanawa magazine

            We were in my canoe, Monica, Misty and me, paddling slowly upstream, happy that we had one more day in our long weekend. It was a warm and sunny afternoon and we were gunkholing - quietly poking into marshes and ravines and the places where streams run into rivers, looking for wildlife.  Misty, a border collie/sheltie mix, sat in her middle spot, ears perked, taking in everything. We were on one of those small pretty rivers that wind westward from Ontario's Muskoka country into Georgian Bay. It was still early in the season so the black flies weren't bad and the vegetation hadn't choked all the inlets.

            We came around an elbow in the river and saw a promising marsh to the north. Behind it was a valley where a river once flowed into ours. We decided to explore the marsh and nosed the canoe into the young water lilies and pickerelweed. After a few minutes, the water got shallow, so we poled with the paddles. To either side of us, the new leaves on the aspen and birch shone bright and green in the sunlight. With a gentle swishing sound, our canoe parted the sea of plants.

            We paused and could hear water trickling somewhere ahead. Suddenly, we realized that what we thought was green marsh was, in fact, a beaver dam. The top of the dam was at eye level and we could see a pond behind it. As we got closer, we realized that this was more than a pond; it was a small lake!

            Quietly, we sidled up to the dam. Monica put a leg ashore to steady us. Misty wanted to abandon ship, but we told her to sit and, reluctantly, she did. I held onto the branch of a willow growing out of the dam. We looked around and listened in awe. There were no beaver in sight. A red-winged blackbird broke the silence with a song; its red-and-yellow chevrons flashed in the sun.

            The dam bellied out toward us in a graceful curve as it crossed the entire valley floor. It was a meter wide across the top and perhaps a hundred meters long: a creature mega-project. The beaver had knit aspen, birch and poplar together in the embankment, then packed them solidly in place with mud. The water lapped at the top of the dam; it seeped and trickled through in spots around our canoe. Suddenly, silently, a great blue heron glided in low from our left and landed at the far end of the lake. We spoke in whispers and passed the binoculars back and forth on a paddle.

            The peace and magic of the place enveloped us. We had no intention of leaving soon. We unzipped our snack pack and picnicked on trail mix and juice there in the canoe to celebrate this place.  I dreamed of spending days there, just watching from a blind in the trees near shore. We wanted to absorb the silence, to burn the sight into our memories. Not being able to take it with us, we were already mourning our loss. It was the sun that finally broke the spell; the low, slanting rays told us it was time to leave and find a campsite for the night. Reluctantly, we backed out the canoe and stole away.

            Within 15 minutes of paddling, we spotted a campsite, one we'd passed by three days ago. It was vacant so we put ashore to inspect our home for the night. As our canoe touched the bank, we looked down and saw crumpled beer cans in the water. There were plastic six-pack rings, too, the kind birds' necks get stuck in, and empty plastic bags. The ground near shore was covered with cigarette butts. Clumps of tangled fishing line hung in the bushes.

            We walked up the path to the campsite. A large black tree stump was smouldering in the fire pit. Two forest-green, plastic deck chairs were sitting on the flat rocks around the fire. Their legs had been amputated to bring them closer to the ground: the butt-ends wrapped in duct tape. There was a broken ketchup bottle in the fire. egg shells, more crumpled beer cans, a half-melted plastic mustard jar. The ground was speckled with cigarette butts, beer bottle caps and plastic bread wrap tabs.

            We were in shock. We could not imagine what manner of human animal had fouled this nest so completely. We felt an angry, evil presence there on this otherwise beautiful site.

            There was more. We found a four-litre can of stove fuel, half-full, sitting on a tree stump, a live birch that had just been cut down; and beside it, a broken long-handled axe in two pieces. It looked like the guy had just walked away.  In the latrine area, there were two huge industrial rolls of toilet paper hung on spikes hammered five feet high into the trees. The paper was out in the open, unprotected from the rain. At first glance, from a distance, we thought the forest floor was covered in white trilliums. But it was toilet paper - used - hundreds of pieces. Gingerly, with sticks, we picked up every single piece and gave it a proper burial.

            We slept fitfully. In the middle of the night, we awoke and, by moonlight, talked, and as we talked our anger turned to curiosity and finally dissolved into sympathy for this deeply troubled soul, so alienated even from the woods he sought solace in. We guessed he came here every weekend.

            The next morning we left a note in a Ziploc bag simply asking the person to please have more respect for the bush and for those who also enjoy it. We left with two large garbage bags full.

            Throughout the winter, in front of the fire or when walking Misty in a gale, it was not the campsite but the beaver dam that I remembered most. Now that summer is finally here, people are back on that river canoeing and camping with family and friends.  Fortunately, many bring extra garbage bags and clean up campsites and trails as they go.  They pack their garbage out.  Some have read books on low-impact camping. They live the outdoor credo: "Take only memories; leave only footprints." You will recognize these people only by their anonymity, by the beauty they leave behind.

- 30 -

The Laugh Lady Lives Next Door

 by Rick Book
 An article in The Globe and Mail

In the cool of summer mornings in Toronto, before the humidity turns the city into a sauna, before the chemical blanket of smog descends, here in my leafy Beaches neighbourhood these are the sounds I hear through my open office window: mourning doves, cardinals and robins singing; the hiss of rush-hour traffic; the pneumatic squish of street car brakes; and from next door, a woman laughing. 

I have never met this woman, as far as I know, and have no idea who she is, but she lives in the old Tudor apartment building to the east of me, and her window must be one of a dozen that open onto my backyard. Her laugh is long and boisterous, and suggests to me that she is a woman of a certain age and, perhaps, a certain size. It often starts around 8:30 a.m., a time of day that makes it seem unnatural, as we simply don’t expect people to be so amused so early in the morning. They’re usually rubbing yellow crumbs of sleep out of their eyes, slugging back strong coffee and groping through closets in search of clean, unwrinkled clothes. But not this woman.

I will be deep in concentration at my computer when suddenly she erupts with a full-bellied, crank-back-your-head kind of laugh. It’s a sound that reeks, not of whiskey and cigarettes or a raucous pub at closing, but of open-throated, unbridled delight. The woman holds nothing back and sounds just plain happy, right down to the very core of her. When was the last time you ran into anyone like that?

Of course, I am curious, filled with all the inquisitiveness of a nosy neighbour or perhaps even an aural voyeur, but I want to know what’s going on over there. Why is this woman laughing?  

Naturally, thoughts turn to sex. At first, I conjured up steamy scenarios in which her husband had left for work and her lover dropped by for a rousing morning tussle in the sheets. But I’ve never heard anyone laughing with her and there’s never been a deep male voice spilling out with hers into my backyard.  Something tells me it’s not that kind of delight that’s tickling her fancy.

It occurred to me that she might be listening to a hopped-up morning deejay on a commercial radio station. Could all this laughter be triggered by the antics of some manic morning show personality? I knew immediately that this was wrong as they’re just not that uproariously funny, certainly not in any sustained way.

I found myself imagining a life for this woman that would explain this peculiar morning habit. Maybe she’s an emergency room nurse or 9-1-1 operator who works all night and videotapes her favourite comedy shows, then watches them every morning to unwind and let off steam. Is it Jon Stewart and The Daily Show that turns her into a one-woman laugh track? Is it Leno’s or Letterman’s monologue that rocks her to her socks? Perhaps it’s Just For Laughs gags from Montréal, or The Three Stooges in black and white on the Comedy Network that produces all this hilarity.

I wondered, too, if she might simply be talking on the phone. Perhaps she has a crazy friend who regales her with uproarious stories about an incompetent boss, her dysfunctional family, another date gone terribly wrong. Somehow I don’t think so.

  

It once crossed my mind that she has a terminal illness and, like Norman Cousins, is trying to laugh herself back to health. But that diagnosis was deeply flawed, I could tell, for this woman simply sounds too robust. There’s no hint of despair, no room for it; no pain restricts that woman’s diaphragm from a full-bore belly laugh.      

One evening last fall I thought I’d met my laughing neighbour. A middle-aged woman, roundish and friendly, was locked out of her apartment. I said she could wait at my place until her building superintendent returned. I happened to be watching a movie at the time and invited her to join me. Suddenly, she let out a great big laugh. I hit the Pause button and turned to her: “Is it you?” I asked.  “Are you the woman I hear laughing every morning?” But no, she said, it wasn’t her. And so the laughing woman remained an enigma somewhere inside the building next door.

Winter set in and with our windows shut tight I didn’t hear the woman for a long time. But on a recent January day when it was a balmy six degrees and my windows were flung wide open, there she was again – at 12:55 on a weekday afternoon. She’s had a morning nap, I thought, and is just beginning her day.

It was good to hear that laugh again, if only briefly, and I look forward to it as a harbinger of spring. She makes me smile, this woman, whoever she is; her familiar song is as cheerful as any bird’s. It’s a sound much needed in the world and is made all the sweeter by the mystery of it.

- 30 -

The Summer I Discovered Birds

by Rick Book
 An article for The Nature Conservancy of Canada

I’m sitting on a mossy hummock watching a bird I’ve never seen before. It’s an American golden plover and it’s feeding in the grass beside this shimmering Arctic pond. The crown of its head and back are spattered with flecks of gold that gleam in the spring sun. A white scarf crosses above its eyes and drapes down along its neck and chest, startling against the black of its face and belly, as regal as an Arab sheik. Around us, the tundra stretches away flat as Saskatchewan to the horizon. The dull brown landscape lies awash in blue melt-water ponds and lakes still white with ice. The plover is only five metres away, but my binoculars bring him even closer. I watch him peck into the grass for little black spiders and bugs. He squawks at me from time to time - a high, nasal kwee-ee - and keeps me in his wary sight.  The minutes flow by.  It has taken a trip to the Arctic for me to finally discover birds.

This comes as a bit of a surprise. I grew up on a prairie farm where meadowlarks on telephone poles belted out the signature song of summer, and the liquid notes of red-winged blackbirds always meant water was near. On many canoe and camping trips I’ve been accompanied by the soulful call of loons and the transporting notes of white-throated sparrows. But still, when I think of it, I’ve never actually looked for birds, never really looked at them, never wondered much about them: how they live, where they’d been, the distances they’d travelled. Sitting here, I realize that birds have been little more than a pleasant low-level soundtrack to my life.

Now, as the result of a chance meeting with a biologist at an airport, I’m volunteering with a joint American-Canadian Arctic shorebird monitoring program here on Baffin Island. It’s mid-June. We’re tenting for a month on a gravel esker just shy of the Arctic Circle, 70-kilometres from the ocean. There are three of us in this camp: a retired park ranger from Michigan, a 19-year old Inuit youth from Cape Dorset, and me. We have marked our plots in the boot-sucking tundra of this Arctic plain and our job, simply put, is to watch the shorebirds that come here to breed and nest, and write down everything we see.

  The plot today is strangely quiet; the only sound is the occasional distant croaking of snow geese flying.  “In order to see birds,” said the Irish essayist Robert Lynd, “it is necessary to become part of the silence.”  

The plover seems to accept my presence and keeps on feeding. Slowly, I pull out my bird book and learn that this male has probably just arrived from the grassy pampas of Argentina, perhaps from as far south as Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America. This 26-centimetre long bird weighs just .22 kilograms, yet it makes an annual migration of 33,000 kilometres - the longest of any shorebird. In his thoughtful and enchanting book, Arctic Dreams, (which I’ve brought with me to read again by the light of the midnight sun), the naturalist Barry Lopez describes encountering a horned lark in the Arctic and how he felt compelled to bow low before it, in awe of its migratory accomplishment. Now I finally understand his deep sense of humility.

I look around for the plover’s mate. Perhaps she’s on a grassy scrape of a nest hidden behind a hummock. Maybe she hasn’t arrived yet. Or never will. I wonder what this plover thinks of me sitting here in my rubber boots and green rain gear. Of course he sees a predator. At one time golden plovers blackened the skies, before they were hunted to near extinction in the 1800’s and early 1900’s. The species has never recovered. There are maybe 150,000 left, their bodies laced with toxic chemicals. That’s why we are here.

More than eighty per cent of Arctic nesting shorebird species are in decline, most likely due to pollution and loss of habitat on wintering grounds and along migration routes. Our job is part of a long-term study to get a more accurate population count. What difference will those numbers on paper make? I think depressing thoughts: of the beleaguered Kyoto Accord, the black tide of asphalt smothering farmland and wetland, roaring highways filled with gluttonous SUV’s, the killing smog blanketing the world’s cities, ancient glaciers cracking and melting, and this pale blue dot we call home growing hotter by the minute. If we can’t summon the will to save ourselves, how does this radiant plover stand a chance?

A biologist told me these shorebirds are our canaries in the coalmine, and that their decline is sounding the environmental alarm. That sounds wildly optimistic; I hope I’m wrong. But who is listening? I sure wasn’t. My own small, dutiful earth-friendly acts – reduce, reuse, recycle, and use of public transit and energy efficient light bulbs - seem so puny, perhaps even deluded.

Now that I’ve looked into this plover’s sharp black eyes I ask myself: what will I do? I’m still not sure, other than tell this story. But I make a silent promise to myself and to this beautiful creature. I’ll pay attention to birds from now on. I’ll admire their graceful arcing flight, the sheen of their feathers. I’ll appreciate their courage, their miraculous abilities and, yes, their songs.

But there is something else I need to learn from this plover, and that is hope. “Teach me half the gladness that thy brain must know,” wrote Shelley. “Such harmonious madness from my lips would flow, the world should listen then, as I am listening now.” 

- 30 -

The Mill of Kintail

 by Rick Book
An article for The Globe and Mail

            On a warm summer evening, the forest is glowing as bullfrogs in the river harrumph for mates.  It’s easy to imagine R. Tait McKenzie sitting here in his kilt, deeply contented, as he gazed across the pond at his stone mill. One of Canada’s greatest doctors, educators and artists, McKenzie returned here to his birthplace late in life to make this his summer home and studio. 

He was born just down the road near Almonte in 1867.  The gristmill had already closed when he played here as a boy with his friend, James Naismith, before they left for Montreal and became doctors, before they left for careers in the States. Naismith invented basketball; McKenzie went to the University of Pennsylvania to head the department of physical education.  He and his wife, Ethel, a concert pianist and poet, lived there happily for 31 years.  

During World War I, McKenzie served as a surgeon in the British Royal Army Medical Corps. He revolutionized rehabilitation of the wounded and pioneered treatments that physiotherapists still use today.  But McKenzie was more than a physician and physical educator. He had another calling - as a sculptor. 

He sculpted athletes, sleek young men in their prime, fleet as gazelles, strong and fit. He won art competitions, designed Olympic medals, studied in Paris and met Auguste Rodin. He became world-renowned, successful, and hung out with the rich and famous of his day.  

On a trip back home to Almonte in 1930, McKenzie rediscovered this mill, now derelict.  He bought it, restored it and gave it the name Mill of Kintail.  The three-storey limestone building draws you in through a weathered wooden door with simple wrought iron handles.  McKenzie’s studio was upstairs, a soaring sunny place with huge south windows, stout beams reaching high across the space.  Their living quarters were one floor below, filled with simple rustic furniture – and a piano.  The McKenzies loved to entertain; Prime Minister King was a friend and frequent visitor.

The mill is a museum now.  Seventy of McKenzie’s works are here, some in bronze, some in plaster. In a window, silhouetted against the sun, The Ice Bird sits poised for flight.  A skater on one leg, the other straight out behind, arms stretched, ready to fly. It is grace frozen in bronze.  McKenzie himself was no mere spectator.  He had been a top gymnast at McGill and was Canadian high jump champion; he could run hurdles, fence, box, swim and, no doubt, skate. 

            Another favourite is of eight speed skaters on a frieze, Brothers of the Wind.  I love it for the name alone; companions of the order of sweat, a fraternity of those who know what it means to swoop across the ice like swallows, feel the cold slap of wind in your face, the hot happiness of exhaustion when the race or game is over.  The rink rat in me stands in awe.       

A plaster of The Joy of Effort is here, too. A trio of hurdlers in flight, it’s one of his best-known works.  The original 269 cm bronze medallion is mounted on the wall of the Olympic Stadium in Stockholm, Sweden to commemorate that city’s 1912 Olympics.  In recognition of his support of the Games’ revival and his enthusiastic influence on them, McKenzie was inducted into the Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame.  

It's easy to imagine Rab, as he was known, working here as light and shadows traced their way across the room, Madame Butterfly playing on the Victrola.  He pushes and prods his clay, molds it in his slim, strong doctor's hands, rips it down, tries again and again, until the clay stops being clay and becomes instead a leg, muscles taut under skin, alive in the artist's hands. Only then can he enjoy a sip of tea Ethel has brought up.

            McKenzie, it’s clear, admired not only the beauty of athleticism but its raw passion as well. His Onslaught is a bronze tangle of rugby players that served as the Canadian senior intercollegiate football trophy.  Like a breaking wave of bodies, it captures the rough and tumble of sport in the seemingly endless summer of youth.

This is a quiet place now, a conservation area.  The river, the birds, the sweeping lawns are all part of a serenity broken only by the laughter of school children on a visit, the trickle of tourists, and every spring, by the graduating class of Phys Ed students from McGill paying homage to McKenzie.  A shrine to a virtually unknown Canadian.

Having seen the terrible cost of war, remembering the fallen was important to McKenzie and he received several commissions for war memorials. The plaster version of his Madonna-like Mercy reaches out with tenderness and compassion, a tribute to the Red Cross nurses who died in WW1. It stands in front of Red Cross headquarters in Washington, D.C.  In another corner of the studio is The Young Scot.  The lad sits in his kilt, rifle across his knees, bent slightly forward, eager to answer his country’s call. Commissioned for Edinburgh's Scottish-American War Memorial, it is a picture of innocence doomed and may just be his finest work.  McKenzie gave his all to this project, as if in payment for some enormous debt.  In his will, he asked Ethel to bury his heart by the statue.  And in 1938 she did.  But his heart still surely beats at this beloved mill, his spiritual home and personal monument to the joy of effort, of being human, fully expressed and profoundly alive.

                                                            -30-

Rick Book is the author of several books including the short story collections, Necking with Louise and Christmas in Canada.

IF YOU GO:

Directions from Ottawa:  HWY 417 west to March Road exit. Take HWY 49 west to Almonte, then HWY 29 north toward Pakenham. Turn left onto Clayton Road and follow signs.

Directions from Toronto: Take HWY 7 to near Carleton Place, turn north on HWY 29 (or take HWY 29 north from 401), to Almonte, continue on HWY 29 north toward Pakenham. Turn left onto Clayton Road and follow signs.

Web Site: http://www.mvc.on.ca/conservation-areas/mill-of-kintail

Email: Kintail@trytel.com

Tel: 613-256-3610

Mill of Kintail Conservation Area, R.R. # 1, Almonte, ON  K0A 1A0.