General
FRENCHMAN’S CREEK LINGERS ON the last trace of the prairies, a tendril nudging uncertainly into the Rocky Mountains, postscript rather than herald. Passersby ignore us tucked away as we are behind the gas station and abandoned motel, satellite dish rusting in lonely vigil. At one end of the welcoming strip is a giant wooden teepee, crumbling as its dream of welcoming tourist throngs fades. A street heads modestly into town; at the far side it ends abruptly at the creek facing the remnants of the bridge built to carry campers to the now remote island campground. Weekend nights in our bucolic setting are not as serene as you might expect but are interrupted by drunken arguments; pickups racing up and down the street; and by campers, f rustrated at the inaccessibility of the campground, parking on the edge of town, building bonfires, digging latrines, joining locals in their nighttime pursuits. During one such weekend of rustic revelry, the town leaders resolved to carve a ski hill into the side of Raven Mountain, sacred burial ground for the previous ten thousand years, looming behind. As the night progressed, the scheme became more grandiose, then, in the following weeks, took flight. But our conspiracy to rise from the flats, to be transformed from two dimensions to three, brought us to the attention of the Gods. On the ski hill’s opening day, students from our local school shouldered their wrath. After boarding the chairlift, one student, then thirteen, began to rock the chair. As they pitched ever more violently, the cable first came off its rollers then rebounded upwards. According to local reports, the students were then “slingshot sixty feet into the air.” The ski hill closed, but the trails left their scar, the shape of a pitchfork aimed down our throats pinning us to the ground evermore. Giant teepees, derelict dishes, unwanted campgrounds, ill-advised ski hills, dashed dreams. Perhaps the land is cursed. The Natives who first inhabited the land avoided the Flats, sending here only young men on vision quests or crossing it on their way to leave their dead on the mountainside. The first Europeans to settle were two dairy farmers from France, François and Pierre Joirret. Soon after their arrival, François began hearing voices in his sleep. His dead parents appeared in his dreams ordering him to kill his brother. “He is the spirit of evil!” they shouted. “He is building a machine with which to murder you!” “It was self-defense, ” François claimed in one of his few lucid moments during his trial. He had driven an axe into his brother’s head with such force it had entered even his neck.
The sky is filled with paper clouds like a fax machine erupting; dispensing diaphanous folds of white and Technicolor and faded pink. I imagine, if I blink, the sky will be normal and I will be sane. But I don’t blink. I can’t. And every time I do, it’s moonstruck bats in the belfry; hills brushing down at an artist’s stroke, where they are joined at a delusional lake where flowertrees float on witch-grass and rye. They’re disconnected like during the flood. To see them perfectly is to recognize this: They really drift. Boy, do they ever. This is not the flood which wiped out the ancients but it is a flood of madness, I think, and if not, then what? I see elephants walking on water, like Salvador Dali has procured my mind, taken leverage with great swaths of colourful paint then spattered it on in a fit of rage. / Why me? Why oh why me? This is something I’ve asked as a child; repeatedly over my pillow while pounding a concave into its centre, like I was trying to beat away memories. Harmful memories which wouldn’t depart. I’ve asked it so much now I’m blue in the face. / Why? / I was a boy from Russia, a Montreal child, a lab rat. I was a stringy teenager with a taste for nature. But I had to be the scapegoat. It had to be me. I’ve told myself this to justify the pain, but the pain comes and goes like the passing moon. When the moon is full, the pain is great. I must relinquish myself to be a scared thing. But for now the moon is sleeping. For now, the pain is small. / But the madness is real.
