Reflections on Victoria

I took hundreds of photos at ASLE but now I notice that very few have people in them.

Sights and sounds

In a UVic classroom building: a sign featuring a wheelchair icon accompanied by the words "Area of Refuge." Is a wheelchair refuge like a wildlife refuge? Are wheelchairs endangered species, and if so, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

In Victoria's busy city buses: everyone says a sprightly "Thank you!" to the bus driver on leaving the bus. Everyone. Even the surly-looking goth girl who looks like she'd rather strangle her grandmother than flash a smile. My experience of commuter buses is not particularly extensive, but I've never seen this level of gratitude anywhere else.

In a restaurant called ReBar: sweet potato (roasted) and avocado (raw) in a salad. Which, by the way, was the best salad I've ever eaten, but still--sweet potato and avocado!

On Beacon Hill: the sound of waves washing the beach, dogs barking, ravens making their metallic meowing sounds--and just over the way, a fellow practicing the bagpipes in the middle of a field.

At the Inner Harbour: a street performer's polished patter, including the incomparable line,
"Of all the audiences I've ever had, you are, without a doubt, the most recent." When two white-haired, stodgily attired ladies strolled through the performance space, the juggler pointed to them and announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, here are Eunice and Ingrid, my dancing girls, who will move off to the left and change before joining me here on the stage!" The audience laughed, but Eunice and Ingrid barely broke a grin between them.

In an early-morning chapel service: the Passing of the Peace followed by the Anointing with the Hand Sanitizer. At the appointed moment in the service, the congregants moved around greeting one another with handshakes and a hearty "Peace be with you!" and then moved off to several corners where bottles of hand sanitizer were stationed. If only peace, too, came in jars with handy dispensers....

Breaking fast

ASLE attendees are a friendly bunch, but you'd never know it at breakfast, where solitary ASLE-ites sit at the end of long cafeteria tables, one person per table, except for those attending with friends. On previous mornings I've made a practice of sitting opposite one of these lone diners and I've had some interesting conversations that way, but today I decided to sit first and let someone else do the seeking.

I sat facing the door so I could see each person come in and look hopefully around for a place to sit. I flashed my best smile and made eye contact as often as possible, and a few people smiled back--but they all moved on to sit elsewhere. How long would it take before some brave soul decided to break the ice and sit opposite me?

Twenty minutes is the answer. I was nearly done with breakfast but still drinking my tea when a fellow sat down, a professor at Sterling College, which has as many students as my college has faculty members. We had an interesting discussion about the challenges of interdisciplinarity on the small college campus before going our separate ways. Score one for friendliness.

Ministry of Silly Quests

I'm sitting on a bench on the wharf in Victoria surrounded by unusual performances. To my right a portly fellow plays traditional tunes on the hammer dulcimer, including that old-timey favorite "Hey Jude," while to my left a scrawny fellow juggles lit torches while riding a tall unicycle, and behind me a mime is taking a smoke break. 

But I'm immune to the excitement because I'm immersed in the opening chapters of Tony Hawks's classic tome Round Ireland with a Fridge, which I purchased today for $5.99 (Canadian) at Munro Books in downtown Victoria. The book was available in paperback for $16.99 or in slightly battered paperback for $5.99, and I wonder what sort of person pays more than twice as much for the same amount of silliness.

The silliness begins in the first chapter when Hawks succumbs to GTDSBS syndrome: Going To Do Something a Bit Silly. Hawks muses about the motivations of people who pursue outrageous acts of derring-do simply because it is there--"But so are your slippers and the TV remote," notes Hawks:

Why subject yourself to untold pain and deprivation when popping to the shops and back followed by a bit of a sit down is an option? Why explore when you can tidy? Why sail singlehandedly when you can read singlehandedly, trek when you can taxi, abseil when you can take the stairs, stand when you can sit, or listen to Neil Sedaka's Greatest Hits when you can take your own life?

Hawks's laissez-faire approach to life is a timely antidote to what I'm hearing at the ASLE conference. Last night's plenary speaker, Karsten Heuer, got a standing ovation (!) for a really marvelous presentation about his experiences following a herd of migrating caribou in the Arctic, hiking from Yellowstone to the Yukon, and canoeing across Canada, presumably without a fridge. Then this morning I heard a paper on the rhetoric of mountaineering, which made me rejoice that I'll never have the $65,000 guide fee necessary to climb Everest (where a fridge would really be redundant). 

I am delighted that many talented and dedicated people are willing to undergo hardship and danger in order to visit and write about some of the world's least habitable places, but Hawks reminds us that epic quests are available closer to home to anyone susceptible to GTDSBS syndrome. I'm no more likely to climb Everest than I am to trundle a fridge on a trolley around the perimeter of Ireland, but if others are willing to pursue these quests, I'm happy to read about the results.

The view from the top

At 10 a.m. I find myself sitting on the summit of Mount Douglas and looking out over the glassy water toward the islets and mountains in the distance. There's no one here but me and the birds and four other people: a jogger who passed me as I trudged sweatily up the steep hill, a fiftyish couple speaking French, and a lean and wiry woman walking a friendly white terrier. A gentle breeze sweeps away the sweat I worked up walking up this hill, and when the French-speakers pause, the silence is intense. 

It took quite an effort to get up here: an hour and a quarter walking from the campus to Mount Doug, all of it downhill--which means I'll walk the same route uphill on the way back, mostly through busy commercial areas. In the middle of a quiet residential neighborhood stands Mount Douglas, a dark crag that looks like a piece of the Jurassic jutting into our era. The lower slopes are covered with thick pine forest, ferns, and rhododendrons, but the terrain becomes less familiar as I move uphill. Near the summit are oak trees with shiny, curly leaves, and the rocks near the summit are studded with brilliant yellow stonecrop blossoms.  Someday I'll figure out what all this stuff is but at the moment my primary goal is to rest up for the trip back to campus and let the breeze blow the cobwebs out of my head. I'll attend a session this evening and more over the next two days, but today I decided to get away and get the view from the top.

Paradise lost

At MLA I got lost in the labyrinthine conference hotel; here, I got lost in a garden. It's not even a particularly big garden, just a small but vibrant haven of greenery on the UVic campus, a quiet place where I escaped the noon sun to sit on a bench and gather my thoughts. 

The flowers there are astounding: rhododendrons in many colors and an amazing davidia that dropped huge white petals like feathers falling from the sky. I saw some Solomon's Seal taller than I've ever seen and still blooming in June, and I heard birds that sounded entirely unfamiliar but turned out on closer inspection to be towhees. 

Then I got up to go back to the conference--no easy task, as I soon learned. The paths in Finnerty Gardens curve and twist, confusing my sense of direction, already numbed because of jet-lag. If I keep walking, I thought, eventually I'll find the way out. I could hear traffic on the far side of a hedge but I couldn't find a way through or even a signpost to point the way, and I felt a little silly about asking directions out of a place no one in her right mind would want to leave. I could stay here forever, I thought, wandering the paths and snacking on the feral bunnies that occasionally find their way through the fences. No one would ever find me and if they did, we'd never find our way back out again.

But eventually I turned a corner and saw that big davidia tree at the entrance and stepped back out of the garden into the workaday world of conference sessions, plenary speakers, and papers. Tomorrow I'll deliver a paper on the rhetoric of isolationism in paradise, so I suppose it's appropriate that yesterday I found myself isolated in paradise with not a hint of rhetoric to help me find my way.

Island time

After hours winging across country in an airplane cold enough to chill an Eskimo, I emerge into the bright Seattle sunshine and start soaking in the warmth. I have two hours to kill before the ferry takes me to Victoria, so I set out for a brisk walk along the waterfront to wake up the muscles that have atrophied during a long day of sedentary travel.  After around 20 minutes I look at my wrist to check the time and notice that my watch is missing--lost somewhere along the busy path where walkers, joggers, and bicyclers zip past in a steady stream. 

So I turn around and start briskly retracing my steps, my eyes glued to the ground just in case all these healthy hordes have overlooked my errant watch. Surely someone has picked it up by now--but no, there it is, glittering in the sunlight.

I take this as a sign that I need to slow down and little, stop and smell the roses (and poppies and lilacs and whatever these unfamiliar flowers are all around me). I am, after all, on vacation. It's a working vacation, true, but it's the only vacation I'm getting this year and after I get back I have to dive into the fray of preparing for my daughter's wedding, moving to my new office, and preparing for my surgery. So if I'm going to relax at all, it's now or never.

So I walk with my watch in my pocket for a while, drifting where the tide may take me. I pause to consider the ampersand. Cincinnati has flying pigs on pedestals along its waterfront; Seattle has a large red ampersand spinning atop a pole in Olympic Sculpture Park. And why not? 

Eventually the tide takes me back to the ferry that takes me to Victoria. I'm on island time now, and who needs a watch for that?

Awaiting ASLE

I've packed my bags, printed out my paper, and painted my nails, so I'm ready to go to the ASLE conference. Unfortunately, my plane doesn't take off until 6:30 tomorrow morning.

ASLE is, I think, my favorite academic conference. There are no job interviews so the stress level is low and you don't see so many self-important scholars dressed in black as you do at MLA. Some of my favorite people will be there this week, at a lovely location (Victoria, British Columbia) where the forecast calls for warm temperatures and sunshine all week long. Last time I presented at ASLE, my session had a large and attentive audience who raised interesting questions at the end. All in all, a positive experience.

I'll arrive in Victoria Tuesday evening and stay until next Monday...but first, I've got to get off the ground. Only 14 hours...