Last summer was my first in my new apartment. I’d moved into the building in the fall, several weeks into a cool Vancouver November. The trees were bare, and our famous winter rain had set in for its months-long stay, but I stood on my balcony, looking out over the cityscape and mountains behind it, and thought: This will be heaven in summer.

Buildings in the Pacific Northwest are built for cold, despite our relatively mild winters. They’re made of wood and insulated, or of concrete, which retains heat naturally. Mine, a big block complex in a dense urban area, was concrete, completed only a year prior. When the building manager handed me my apartment keys, she explained the heating system. I asked about air conditioning, and she said the building didn’t have it, but that it wouldn’t be a problem. We were in Canada, after all.

Five months later, I received a notification on my phone’s weather app: An extreme heat alert was in effect for British Columbia. A spring heatwave was headed for the province, with temperatures expected over 30 C (86 F), nearly 20 degrees above the seasonal average. On May 14, I awoke in the morning from a fitful sleep and checked my thermostat: 29 C (84 F). An uncomfortable indoor temperature for a Southern Californian, but hell for a Northwesterner. My concrete home had become a sauna. That afternoon, I encountered neighbors in the elevator carrying box fans and portable air conditioners; the higher the floor they were stopping at, the more their agitation level seemed to rise. It unsettled me, but I still believed my building manager: I could survive the summer heat.

I was born in Vancouver in the late 1980s and have lived in the city most of my life. Vancouverites regularly bemoan our dreary climate, but anyone who’s lived in the Pacific Northwest long enough knows what makes living here worth it. When the rain finally lifts and the trees turn green, our corner of the planet transforms into a northern paradise. Summer’s long, light-filled days—even if they have historically lasted only a couple months—are enough to forgive the rest. When a cool ocean breeze blows in at 10 p.m. on a July evening, the sky still filled with color, anything feels possible.

Summer was always my favorite season here. As a child, I anticipated it with mounting excitement each spring, certain of its transformative potential. Summer meant freedom from school and the confines of a world determined by adults; it meant water parks and beaches, crushes and bike rides late into the night.

Two decades later, I feel differently. Like many in the Northwest, I’ve come to dread summer.

Solastalgia is a word many of us have learned, as the places we grew up in and the seasons we spent there have been irrevocably altered by climate change. It’s a word drawn from the past (the Latin solacium—“comfort” or “solace”—and the Greek algos: “pain”) to describe our present. It holds both our current grief for what has been lost and anticipatory grief for a world that will be even more changed.

Where Vancouver summers were once associated with clear afternoons and gentle temperatures—a calling card that made the Pacific Northwest a promising option for climate apocalypse preppers—they’ve become seasons of extreme heat, fires, and smoke. June, July, August, and increasingly even May and September now often bring long, scorching days and the distinctive orange haze of a smoke-blanketed sun.

For many British Columbians, the summer of 2021 was a psychological turning point. Fifteen years ago, I can’t remember a June day in Vancouver reaching anywhere near 30 C; in fact, between 1976 and 2005, the city averaged just one day over 30 C per year. But in late June 2021, British Columbia experienced a heat dome that saw inland temperatures soar to nearly 50 C (122 F), shattering heat records, killing hundreds of people, and sparking fires across the province, one of which destroyed the entire town of Lytton within hours.

In Vancouver, temperatures hovered at nearly 40 C (104 F) for days, with wildfire smoke adding to the suffocating claustrophobia. Public libraries became cooling centers, and stores across the province sold out of air conditioners. Climate data analysis suggested that the event would have been 150 times less likely without human-induced climate change.

Last year, while I baked in my apartment during the May heatwave, parts of British Columbia and neighboring Alberta again burned—an early start to a Western wildfire season that would be Canada’s worst yet. In June, Canada made international headlines when smoke from wildfires in Quebec traveled south, enveloping New York City and large swaths of the Northeast for days. By the fall, flames had scorched 16.5 million hectares.

I couldn’t afford the expensive air-conditioning units my neighbors had purchased, so I spent June, July, and August in a state of chronic sleep deprivation and mental stress. I didn’t realize how much the summer’s heat had affected me until late August, when the smoke started to roll in from British Columbia’s devastating inland fires, forcing me to keep my windows closed and my air filter running to mitigate it.

Being shut in in 30-degree weather undid me. I caved and purchased an air conditioner—on sale, to mark what would usually be the season’s end. I’m glad I did. September in Vancouver was also hot and smoky. Being able to cool down inside my home provided immeasurable relief.

This year, I’m better equipped psychically as well. As Canada emerges from the warmest winter in the country’s history, and drought fuels fires that have already forced thousands to evacuate in the West, I’m planning for the likelihood of days spent indoors, avoiding the heat and smoke. I know I’m privileged to have an escape. Like many Pacific Northwesterners, I’ve had to accept our new reality: Summer is no longer a time of freedom.

My solastalgia encompasses my grief not just for the climate I knew and how it has changed in my lifetime, but how I have changed in tandem. I mourn the Vancouver summers of my childhood but also the version of me that associated summer with pleasure and joy, instead of anxiety and danger.

I hope there will still be days when the sun sinks late over the Pacific on a cool evening and the future feels expansive, but I’ll experience them differently, knowing they’re a reminder of a fading season. The future they conjure will likely bring a different version of summer with it.

The post An Elegy for Vancouver Summer appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At a children’s summer sleepaway camp in upstate New York in the mid-1920s, two young staffers, Artie and Larry, write a song for the annual camp play. It begins:

I love to lie awake in bed

Right after taps I pull the flaps above my head

And watch the stars upon my pillow

Oh, what a light the moonbeams shed.

Some years later, Artie—composer Arthur Schwartz—is writing numbers for a Broadway revue and gets stuck for a melody. He remembers his camp song, ditches the lyrics (written by Larry—Lorenz Hart—who is by then collaborating on Broadway musicals with Richard Rodgers) and gets wordsmith Howard Dietz to come up with new ones. The result is a hit and quickly becomes a pop standard that will be covered by Crosby, Sinatra, Bennett, Darin, Dylan, and many others:

I guess I’ll have to change my plan

I should have realized there’d be another man

I overlooked that point completely

Before the big affair began

Not all camp songs are written by such illustrious songmakers, nor have such a celebrated destiny awaiting them. But many songs sung at North American summer camps did and do become standards—in the lives of thousands of former campers who can still sing them years later and will remember them fondly all their lives.

What is a camp song—and why do they endure? Unlike “I Love to Lie Awake in Bed,” most of them don’t get composed at camp, nor is camp their subject.

For those of us who spent our summers at camps around Ontario, Canada in the 1950s and 1960s, “camp songs” were the songs we sang, year after year, in the dining hall during “singsongs”; in canoes on three-day trips; hiking in the woods; on bus rides; around campfires after the marshmallows had been toasted; and in the rec hall during rainy day programs. Not to mention the naughty or subversive songs we sang when our counselors weren’t around—mainly seditious parodies and scatological songs that made us laugh.

We learned songs from the staff and from each other; we brought them from home or we made them up for shows and all manner of activities, and to make each other laugh. Favorites included “Little Cabin in the Woods,” “Fire’s Burning,” “Down By the Bay,” and “Boom, Boom, Ain’t It Great to Be Crazy.” What made them camp songs was that we sang them at camp—some, nowhere else—where singing was a natural part of each day.

The children’s summer camp movement was established in North American cities in the 1870s, driven by the growing perception that modern urban society, especially its poorer classes, would benefit physically, morally, and spiritually from a closer relationship with the rapidly disappearing natural environment. Within the next few decades, youth-serving recreational organizations such as the YMCA, the Boy Scouts, and eventually religious and immigrant organizations acquired tracts of rural, wilderness land and organized “wholesome” and active experiences there for urban youth. Besides sports, many favored what were then called “Indian”-themed and -inspired woodland activities, along with programs promoting their own organizational goals.

Author (middle left) playing banjo and singing at Interlochen Arts Camp in 1962. Courtesy of author.

It was an era when group singing was a popular, possibly universal pastime—in homes around a piano, in bars and theaters, and eventually in cinemas. What would be more natural, then, than to include it as an activity at camp, shaped to meet camp’s particular ends, be they recreational, religious, ethno-cultural, nature-centered, or socio-redemptive? Singing offered children self-made entertainment within the self-contained camp environment, and singing led by grown-ups was a superb collective activity for children. Singing could open and close a day, focus energies for rest hour after lunch, entertain in rainy weather, inspire hope or reverence around an evening campfire, promote solidarity, and raise spirits during team games.

From its inception, then, the summer camp was, or was made into, a setting friendly to song. Not all children’s camps may have been singing camps, but my bet is there was singing at every camp in some contexts, regardless.

Camp songs came in many different forms. They included the child-friendly—cumulative songs, make-up-each-verse songs, rounds, action songs with simple lyrics, and funny, silly themes—like “You Push the Damper In,” “There’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea,” and “Junior Birdmen.” Then there were the ones that were, paradoxically, not simple or funny at all, but youth-accessible and inspiring: songs of world peace and civil rights like “Listen Mr. Bilbo” and “We Shall Overcome.”  Most of all, they had to be group-singable—with easy choruses (labor songs like “Union Maid”) and refrains (sea shanties like “Haul Away, Joe”), or call-and-response structures (“The Green Grass Grew All Around”), with harmony-inviting melodies (spirituals and folk songs like “When the Saints Go Marching In” and “On Top of Old Smokey”).

Many of the songs that spring first to my mind as “camp songs” aren’t the usual ones. They are old pop standards from the Great American Songbook that we sang at Camp Katonim, a day camp near our summer cottage just outside Toronto, when I was 7 or 8 years old. At Katonim, singing was the day’s first activity. I walked into the dining hall, took a seat on a bench around the perimeter with 60 other kids and counselors, and joined right in as Joanie led us all from the piano. Occasionally, they were “kid-friendly” songs like “I Went to the Animal Fair” and “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour.” But mostly, they were what I later knew as my parents’ songs: “For Me and My Gal,” “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” “Side by Side.” They were great fun to sing, even if some of the lyrics were over my head. I came to understand them later, but I’ve remembered them ever since, and even just thinking about them takes me back, as camp songs do, to the place I sang them, and the people I sang them with.

Summer camp actually helped me become a musician. It was at camp that I learned to play the ukulele, then the guitar, then the banjo; as a counselor, I honed the song leading lessons I’d learned from Pete Seeger records. At one camp where I also taught swimming, the junior boys I bunked with came up with a chant they yelled after every dining hall singsong: “Well DONE Shel-DON Po-ZUN!” Soon, “Well Done” became my camp moniker, then a family nickname, and then—well, Well Done Music is the name of my recording label.

Like Larry Hart and Arthur Schwartz, I found camp the perfect place to create and perform music where music was welcome. Like them, I went on to other musical arenas, but in my case, camp songs and camp singing remained part of my musical life—whether on stage teaching a chorus to an audience, leading a choir, or making up a silly song with my granddaughter as I bounce her on my knee.

The post What Makes a Song a ‘Camp Song’? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

After all, Canadians already run the place in winter.

Over the past 40 years, snowbirds from the True North have grown into a winter fixture in greater Palm Springs. They get a lot more than an escape from cold winter weather. The California desert is a much shorter flight than Maui, and it offers an array of arts and culture—from the Palm Springs International Film Festival, to the design-focused Modernism Week, to the famous Coachella music festivals in Indio—that Phoenix can’t hope to match.

Over time, the desert has developed a Canadian-friendly infrastructure of restaurants, country clubs, and social organizations. The Desert Sun carries stories about Justin Trudeau and Vancouver Canucks hockey. La Spiga, once a top restaurant in Edmonton, is now open here. In some years, there’s even been a Canada Fest.

Coachella has also developed a Canadian civic life, with leading politicians from western Canada, particularly Alberta, spending stretches of the winter here. The Canadian Club of the Desert, founded in 1982 at the Gene Autry Hotel in Palm Springs, holds monthly breakfast forums “sharing experiences and ideas concerning issues of importance to Canadians.” (Curious Americans are also invited to attend.) The club organizes field trips to Southern California museums, holds tailgate parties before matches at local polo grounds, and hosts both a “Welcome Back Cocktail Party” in early December and “A Wind-Up Dinner and Dance” in late March, at the Canada-friendly Lakes Country Club.

It was the Great Recession that accelerated this Canadianization of the California Desert. In 2008, western Canada’s economy was booming, Canada’s baby-boomers were beginning to retire, and the Canadian dollar was at all-time highs, achieving parity with the U.S. dollar. At the same time, the inland California real estate market was in freefall—allowing Canadians to snap up properties cheaply in a place where your toes don’t freeze in February.

So many thousands did, that, in the first four years of this decade, Canadian buyers accounted for one-quarter of home purchases in the desert. And home sales are just one piece of the crucial stimulus that Canadians provided for a struggling region.

Canada is responsible for an estimated 450,000 visitors to the valley each year; the Canadian government has taken credit for tripling the population of Palm Springs during the heart of winter. The Canadian hordes have provided crucial ballast for faltering businesses; the Palm Desert Country Club and the Tilted-Kilt franchise in Palm Desert were rescued from bankruptcy by Canadian business people. Canadians have also fueled the expansion of Palm Springs International Airport, which boasts direct service to Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Winnipeg.

The Canadian Invasion has stirred only minor resentments. Restaurant servers say they could tip better. Canadians are blamed for—or credited with, if you take a public health perspective—making traffic slower, given their strange national proclivity for obeying posted speed limits.

But the biggest problem with Coachella’s Canadianization is that it isn’t as big and strong as it should be.

The Coachella Valley could get even more of an economic and cultural boost if more Canadians could visit more, buy more homes, and stay longer. But Canadians are welcome here only part-time. That’s because our bullying federal government imposes its complicated tax and immigration systems on you if you spend too much time here.

While the details are complicated, many Canadians in Coachella limit themselves to just 182 days a year, to avoid U.S. taxes and immigration restrictions. Spend 183 days here—more than half the year—and you can be considered a U.S. “resident alien” and be forced to pay U.S. taxes on all your global income.

This hurts California, since our Canadian visitors and part-time residents pay state and local taxes, while using relatively little in services.

A Canadian couple who split their time between Indio and British Columbia (I am not naming them to spare them any federal government hassles) contacted me recently to point out that they have come to the Coachella Valley every year since 1984, and have owned homes here since 2003.

Their California property taxes, they note, are 180 percent higher than those in their home Canadian province. As six-month residents, they spend more time here than they do in Canada, but make no social service demands. They even buy extra travel and health insurance, they said, “to ensure that we can protect ourselves against the bankrupting cost of medical services here.”

So why shouldn’t they be able to stay longer?

“We are welcome here for 182 days, then we become ‘alien,’ and must depart,” they said. “We can own property but not weapons. We can pay every tax but not vote. We can patronize retail merchants but cannot win a prize for responding to surveys …. We commit no crimes. We buy media but seldom appear in it. We are a potential resource, never a threat.”

Recent declines in the Canadian dollar have made them less of a resource; Canadian spending, hotel stays, and vacation home rental all have slipped slightly from their highs earlier in the decade. The California housing shortage, and the soaring home costs that come with it, have made buying here harder for everyone, including our neighbors to the north. (Still, median home prices in the desert are less than half of what it costs to buy in Vancouver or Toronto.)

But this doesn’t mean we should give up on Canadians. To the contrary, California should be making it easier for more of them to come to the Coachella Valley, and to stay longer. Imagine if federal law were changed to make it possible for Canadians to spend nine months a year in California, rather than six months, without triggering U.S. residency rules and taxes. That would be 50 percent more time, and much more spending and sales taxes from Canadians. Building more homes—something California desperately needs to do—would open the door to more Canadian stimulus as well.

Could this happen? Maybe not. The federal government is hostile to policies that benefit California, and the NAFTA agreement that binds together our economy with Canada’s is in jeopardy. But Congressional Republicans are open to tax reform, and President Trump, despite his hostility to immigrants, has indicated he’s more favorably disposed to newcomers from wealthier and whiter countries like Canada.

Perhaps, if the feds won’t make things easier for Canadians in California, the state could step in.

Maybe the desert heat is getting to me, but I can’t help wondering if California might just deed the Coachella Valley to Canada. Not only would we get more Canadians but we’d get a better system of government that has produced an expanding middle class in that country. We’d also get a bit of insurance: If the federal government escalates its ongoing war against California, Californians would only have to drive to Palm Springs to ask for asylum.

A Canadian colony in California might not be paradise. But it sounds pretty good, eh?

The post O Canada, Please Colonize the Coachella Valley appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, is a 64-year-old Canadian repertory theater company known for its productions of Shakespeare and other classic plays, Broadway musicals, and new work. We are, by most measures, pretty far from Suchitoto, El Salvador, an ancient town of 25,000 on a hillside, in a country still struggling with the aftershocks of a 12-year civil war and the fallout from a vicious, ongoing territorial battle among rival drug gangs.

We started the Suchitoto Project in 2009, about three years after meeting with representatives of Canadian University Student Overseas (CUSO), a highly respected aid agency that sends volunteers to help countries around the world. CUSO representatives saw parallels between Stratford and the city of Suchitito, which had begun holding a music festival and had plans to renovate a theater in order to expand its economy, create jobs and offer a better future to its young people through the arts.

As it happens, that’s exactly what the town of Stratford, Ontario, did in 1952. When the divisional rail shop announced its closure here, the local community decided to save the economy by opening a Shakespeare Festival. And, as crazy as the idea sounds, it worked.

After initial meetings with CUSO, we decided to share the Stratford dream and went down to El Salvador with our mayor, developing a tripartite agreement between the city, CUSO, and the Stratford Festival. Since that time we have raised money from corporations and individuals; we have put together a group of volunteers (currently run by festival scenic carpenter Mark Smith); and together with CUSO, we have sent more than 50 people to Suchitoto to work with young people to develop a wide variety of theatrical skills, many of which are transferrable, and to mount a number of productions.

When CUSO came to us about this project, we did not realize all the challenges ahead. We thought, “Oh, we’ll go down there and we’ll put on some plays!”—with a kind of sunny, imbecilic optimism. But there was great power in that, because that’s exactly what we did.

The Festival Theatre at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, Canada. Photo by Richard Bain. Courtesy of the Stratford Festival.

Suchitoto, despite being photogenic and tourist-friendly, has serious problems that Stratford does not. During the bitter 1980-1992 civil war between El Salvador’s right-wing government and the leftist guerrilla opposition, Suchitoto’s population leaned right-of-center, but the surrounding area was left-of-center. So the town was really caught in the middle. The guerrillas surrounded the entire area, and yet there were government troops in the city. It was a time of extreme violence and residents were even afraid to pick up the remains of the dead in the streets, lest they be targeted next.

The civil war is now ancient history and, with the average age in El Salvador quite young, the struggle has changed. Now gangs fight for control and are enlisting young people, funneling drugs and people through the country, and really acting as a government unto themselves.

When our volunteers travel to the area, they continually have to go through gang-held parts of the highways. Shortly before our first group of volunteers arrived, seven teenagers were assassinated. At one point our volunteers got a call from Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino asking: “Are we sure we’re still committed to doing this?”

And we were, because we are optimists. We helped them develop and mount their first project, Voces de Los Cerros or Voices from the Hills, a reimagining of a Mayan folk tale. After the opening night, we had a huge party with hundreds of people celebrating with us. We were surprised to see pockets of people who were just weeping and holding onto one another. We didn’t understand the significance of this until the mayor of Suchitoto told us that those people hadn’t spoken to each other in nearly 20 years because they were on opposite sides of the civil war. But now, because their children were working together, it was leading them to put their differences behind them.

 So far we’ve had 12 full-scale productions. Five of those were classics, including some Shakespeare and Moliere plays and others from the Golden Age of Spanish drama. They did a production of Lope de Vega’s 1619 play Fuente Ovejuna, which is about a town besieged by warlords, and instead we made it about gangs. The local police chief was really taken by it. At first he wondered why the young actors were all dressed up like gang members–but then he came around! The kids also like writing their own work, especially based on their own experiences and observations with such issues as gang violence, poverty, and homelessness.
 
A large number of Festival staff have gone down to Suchitoto, including teaching artist Edward Daranyi who, since the project’s inception, has spent many months each year training and directing the young actors. We have sent propmakers, wardrobe people, electricians, lighting and sound technicians, actors, coaches, designers, administrators—people from every corner of the organization. And we have had people from the program here to North America—to Stratford, Toronto, and Washington, D.C.

Performers involved in the Suchitoto Project. Photo by Tito Hasbun. Courtesy of the Stratford Festival.

Estela Abrego was in our first group. She was a single mother and her family wasn’t happy that she wanted to enroll in the program. Seeing no merit in the arts, they thought her decision showed a lack of responsibility and were threatening to take away her young son, who was eight or nine, if she persisted.

To solve the problem, the artistic director at the time in El Salvador offered to let Estela’s son join the program along with his mother, even though he was younger than the adolescent age group we target. Fast forward, he’s now a budding young star and he came up for the International Festival of Children’s Theatre here in Stratford last year. Estela is one of the leaders in the program now; she writes plays and is the vice president of the governing board.

While tourism is growing in Suchitoto, we haven’t yet developed the infrastructure for consistent performances that would generate revenue among the tourism base. But that’s on the economic front.

For us, the real miracle has been in human-development and youth-engagement—giving them options as they move forward in life. Their advancement doesn’t always have to do with the arts. They have developed reading and writing skills, as well as critical thinking, and the hard skills that are part of what we do, such as carpentry and electrical work. It’s enough to spark interest in these students to imagine their lives differently.

One student is now a recording artist. Another has gone into design and is a student in the University of El Salvador’s new costume design program. She is making all kinds of costumes and wedding dresses in the community.

Some of the youth involved in the project are now writing their own plays and have formed an acting company. They’re being hired by different NGOs in-country to write plays that are socially responsive to things that they face, like anti-violence, gender equality, youth inclusion, and teenage pregnancy.

I think our greatest joy is that we’ve invited the youth in the program to teach us and we’re learning with them. We’ve brought our skills down and they’ve taken us up on the challenge, and now they’re the ones that are dictating the way that we go. We’re always inviting the question, “What do you want to do now?”

The post Staging a Life-Changing Project in El Salvador with Canada’s Stratford Festival appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Taylor’s particular and pervasive influence in Canada is partly the result of his long interest in politics—he ran for parliament several times in the 1960s—but more importantly his academic study of dialogue in all of its permutations. I know this firsthand. For 19 years my office was next to Taylor’s at McGill University, where we both taught, and he was a good friend and a profound influence on me. I have spent many years in dialogues with Canada’s Indigenous people and I have learned an enormous amount about dialogue from them, but I have also learned from Taylor, in both his writings and his practice.

“Dialogue” means “through” (dia) participation in and of “logos” (speech). One of the central themes in Charles Taylor’s philosophical writing and teaching is his view that humans are basically dialogical animals. In essence, what makes us human beings is that we are always talking with each other, always caught in complex webs of interlocution, and at our best we experience a kind of “together-joy,” when we are communicating with each other—Nietzsche called it Mitfreude. It is the theme that has been most important to me. If you have seen Taylor teach or speak publicly you can understand why dialogue is so central to his view of the human condition: He manifestly comes alive in dialogues, enjoys them, and is “at his best” in them. But it runs deeper than this, because Taylor has taken an expansive view of dialogue, explaining four kinds of dialogical relationships that humans have with themselves, each other, and the world around us.

The first is his study of the dialogical relationship one has with oneself. The history of how we talk to and make sense of ourselves as individuals is the topic of his book Sources of the Self, written in 1992. Taylor traces the ideas of the self through history: From Greek ethics based in virtue and character to the Christian turn inward beginning with Augustine, and then the tremendous deepening of self-dialogue through the Romantics, and finally to the explosion of meditation, prayer, yoga, contemplation, and so on in spiritual and secular traditions today.

Secondly, he’s studied and clarified the many kinds of dialogue we have with one another: Discussion, negotiation, bargaining, deliberation, communion, teacher-student, and so on. His philosophical and political writings have been concerned with clarifying the conditions of mutual recognition, deep diversity, fusion of horizons, mutual learning, and coming to agree and act together. And these writings have been developed in the course of his long engagement in bilingual and multilingual political activities in Quebec and Canada.

Some of Taylor’s work takes dialogue out of the realm of merely talking to another level. As Taylor has shown in his expressive philosophy of language, although dialogue is manifest in speech, it is grounded in practices, in the living world, and, in many cases, in the living spirit; and it does not always require speech, as, for example, in dance. “Communion” with all living beings is the most basic form of dialogue. And so his third area of interest is the relationship that humans are capable of having with the living earth (anima mundi). Here dialogue involves all the senses (synaesthesia) as we try to understand how the earth sustains life and how we can interact with it in reciprocally sustaining ways. He traces this dialogue from Goethe and Humboldt to deep ecology, the Gaia hypothesis today and Indigenous peoples’ relation to Mother Earth.

Finally, there is the dialogical relationship with the spiritual realm, whether this is the human spirit of humanist traditions or the spiritual sources of religious traditions. In A Secular Age (2007) and more recent work he explores how different types of secular societies block or diminish the use of religious language in the public sphere or discredit the possibility of the transcendent dimension of spiritual dialogue.

I think there is one particular kind of speech dialogue that has a certain importance for Taylor. This is when people come together not to argue, discuss, deliberate, or negotiate, but to try to suspend their emotional attachment to the deep-seated assumptions or prejudgments that pit them against one another; to put their conflicting assumptions into the intersubjective space of dialogue; and to just share and discuss these prejudgments until they begin to understand and trust one another.

This non-attachment is exceptionally difficult in modern societies, and Taylor has seen many failures. But the idea, and it is a very old one, is that creative, shared meanings might just become the ongoing basis of cooperation, of living together nonviolently. This is the kind of practice of dialogical “transvaluation” (Umwertung) that he said “we can and should struggle for.” This is the great gift he continues to offer us through his remarkable speaking and writing.

Where this has been particularly important for Canadians is that Taylor has modeled for us how to conduct ongoing dialogues that allow both parties to change, and change their sense of self, sometimes over generations as we join in looking at a future together. This perspective has given Canadians a whole new way of thinking about our own association as itself a complex federation that we co-articulate ourselves through dialogues, disputes, negotiations, resolutions, and new negotiations over time. Thus, being Canadian became an awareness of interdependence, or being-with others.

Taylor emphasizes that this sense of the interdependence of humanity is not ethically or morally neutral. It’s actually the same mutual care that all the great spiritual traditions teach. If one wishes to bring about mutual recognition and respect in deeply diverse societies, Taylor shows, then one has to embody mutual recognition and respect in one’s own everyday interactions, in one’s relationships with others, no matter how they initially respond. The change in the larger society one is arguing for has to be the means here and now: One must be the exemplary change if one wishes to move others.

For several generations of scholars, Taylor’s description of dialogic relationships and his manner of engagement have been deeply influential. These scholars have built from his ideas and taken them in new directions out of the elite political sphere to the grassroots, where they are conducting ongoing dialogues with communities to create a more participatory democracy.

The post The Philosopher Who Showed Canadians How to Talk to One Another appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

So I didn’t grow up learning about Daniel Boone and his exploration of the frontier around the time of the American Revolution. If I’d heard of him at all, I probably thought, like many people, he was fictional. But go back to my British Columbia elementary school and there he is, in a 1985 copy of National Geographic on the shelf of improve-yourself reads. That year I was 10, permed and brace-faced and not terribly happy, often sniffing around for something more alluring than modern life. The crusted hull of the newly found Titanic on the cover caught me. But when I parted the magazine with my thumb, it fell open to a pen-and-ink drawing of a man carrying a body, open-eyed and loose-jointed, a spill of blood pouring from its mouth. The caption said it was Boone, who turned out to be an actual person, holding his dead son. Every day at free time I read that article, gawking at the pictures of Kentucky and the westward trails Boone helped open in the 1700s, and at that illustration. I didn’t know why.

Certainly America had a kind of mystique, even in 1985. Crossing the border into Washington state was a palpable change. The landscape was no different, but the licence plates and the slightly elongated vowels were. The unapologetic motel names (The Apple, The Deep Water) and the chatty gas station signs (Come on in! Canadian dollars at par). Baby Ruth chocolate bars and Chuck E. Cheese restaurants, known only from TV commercials on the U.S. stations we got. The gigantic Paul Bunyan statue looming out of the redwoods in Klamath, California, which was cloaked with a kind of glamour in spite of its splintery edges. As we made a pit stop during a childhood road trip to Disneyland, a woman there told me Bunyan was a real person; then my parents said he wasn’t. The U.S. seemed built out of legendary things. It seemed built for travel and for looking.

I didn’t think about Daniel Boone during these childhood trips, or once I moved into the next grade. I can’t remember thinking of him again at all until I was pregnant for the first time, lying on the dusty carpet of my study, which was soon to morph into the baby’s room. My first book, a story collection, was about to come out, and I was trying to figure out what to write next. Maybe it was the horrible dread of losing a child that made it surface, but that National Geographic picture snapped back into my brain. I asked the library to dig up the magazine, and once I saw it again properly, I realized I’d remembered it as a photograph, which of course it wasn’t and couldn’t have been. I knew then what I wanted to write about was Daniel Boone—Dan to me now—and 18th and early 19th century Kentucky, and what happens when legend is mapped onto actual people and places.

My novel, All True Not a Lie In It, is about Dan’s life and family. It tries to get at how it felt to believe in a paradise just beyond the mountains, to be full of an urge to pick up and move on, regardless of the wreckage chained to that desire. The journey is of course the American narrative, from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Lolita to Road Trip. Travel and its aftermath seem to me the root of America’s story about itself—colonial exploration and immigration, slave ships and escapes, Native American seasonal movement and the eventual reservation system.

An 1874 lithograph titled “Daniel Boone Protects His Family.”

Dan grew up an immigrant’s son in a Pennsylvania Quaker community, close to several Delaware and Catawba native communities, and when the family was booted out of the group, they left the area to look for more freedom and land. Dan never really stopped, exploring through North Carolina and the Blue Ridge mountains, and later taking his wife and children into the Kentucky wilderness of his fantasies. Those fantasies and the travel that fulfilled them led to his son’s death, his daughter’s kidnap, and his own capture and adoption by Chief Blackfish of the Shawnee. He was heavily remorseful for the damage to his family, but rarely stopped moving them on in search of something better.

The actual events of his life are dramatic enough to seem invented, as many writers have realized, and embellished, over the years. For instance, many people think he was at the Battle of the Alamo in Texas, which occurred after his death, confusing him for Davy Crockett (unhelped by the fact that actor Fess Parker played both Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone in different 1960s TV shows). This seems an American tendency, too: the capacity to reinvent the self (we see you, Madonna), but also to reinvent someone else in a desired image (JFK as King Arthur). People in the 20th and 21st century want to see Dan in a coonskin cap, though he never wore one and in fact hated them. And white Americans in Dan’s time wanted a recognizable national hero, a man fighting for the newborn country against its royal oppressor, a crack shot, fair but firm in dealings with so-called “Indians.”

This desire to create a legend attempts to paint over any dullness or ugliness in a life, but different shades of ugliness sometimes get painted on. Twenty-five years after Dan’s death, just as westward expansion into native territory exploded, he was re-buried, with a new monument featuring “Indian-fighter” carvings placed on his grave. I think this twisting of his life would have discomfited Dan, who seems to have felt deep closeness to his adoptive Shawnee parents and sisters, avoided fighting as much as possible, and was likely most comfortable with the native way of life in the wilderness. But again, this is a matter of seeming.

I know I call him Dan—and I know Dan is my invention, this figure already imagined again and again and re-created one more time. As a child traveling south, I thought being American meant having a built-in expansiveness, a sense that there is always somewhere else to go. I see that now in Daniel Boone. But after writing this book, I also think it means an ability to see double, to perceive, even dimly, that a person actually lived while overlaying that life with wishes, ideas, the stories one wants. For Americans, the exact details of Boone’s life have always seemed to matter less than his suitability for legendary status. The stories that surround him helped people in his time and for centuries afterwards smooth over the cost of relentless expansion. A gift and a blindness. My version of Dan has both.

The post Daniel Boone’s Legend Defines the American Mystique appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Or you can go for the American history. Those who know of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham—fought September 13, 1759 on a plain named for the early French settler Abraham Martin—often remember it as a fight between a French army commanded by Lieutenant General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm and a British army commanded by Major General James Wolfe. But few know that this battle helped to make the American Revolution possible.

About one-third of Major General Wolfe’s army had been recruited in the American colonies. Two-thirds of the ships that carried his army up the St. Lawrence River to Quebec had been chartered in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. Hundreds of New England sailors had temporarily joined the Royal Navy to take part in the Quebec campaign.

Visit the National Battlefields Park inside the city and you can walk over the ground where American soldiers fought in 1759. Despite its name, the park—Quebec’s equivalent of Central Park—is well known these days as a recreational area, nature preserve, and outdoor concert venue, rather than as a historic site.

James Wolfe, 1727-1759.

But at National Battlefields Park, you can follow in the footsteps of Wolfe’s advance guard that climbed the cliffs lining the St. Lawrence River by walking up the Plains of Abraham Trail. Walk eastward until you reach the Musée National des Beaux-arts du Québec (the Quebec National Fine Arts Museum) and you’re standing at the south end of Wolfe’s line.

Wolfe’s 4,500 British and American soldiers stood there as Montcalm’s army of 3,500 charged across the plains. Wolfe’s disciplined force held their formation and waited for the French to come within range. Montcalm’s army, composed of an uneasy mix of French regulars and Canadian militia, broke apart as a rapid advance over rough ground disrupted its formation and the militia opened fire prematurely, then paused to reload. A series of volleys by Britons and Americans firing flintlock muskets broke the French army and threw Montcalm’s troops into headlong retreat.

By European standards, the battle had been a minor encounter between small bodies of troops. (In the European theatre of the Seven Years’ War, 36,000 Prussians—allied to the British—had defeated 66,000 Austrians—allied to the French—at the Battle of Leuthen in 1757.) Wolfe’s army lost 71 killed, 591 wounded, and three missing; the French had about 600 killed, wounded, and missing. But when the black powder smoke had cleared, a major obstacle to American independence had been eliminated.

That obstacle? The French.

By 1759, the original 13 colonies were potential independent states. They had their own governments, run by local elites and financed by local revenues. And on occasion they organized their own armies and fleets and sent them off to war. New England had sent out expeditions that had besieged Quebec in 1690 and captured Acadia in 1710 and Louisbourg in 1744.

A military plan shows frontline positions of the British and French during the Battle of the Plains of Abraham on Sept. 13, 1759.

But for as long as the French held Canada, independence was out of the question. The British and Americans perceived the French and their Native American allies as a major threat. In wartime, French-Native American war parties raided the American frontier with impunity while privateers from Louisbourg preyed on American shipping. French outposts like Fort Niagara, Detroit, and Louisiana hemmed in the 13 colonies, preventing them from expanding to the west. Americans looked to the Royal Navy and British army to defend the colonies against French aggression.

The Battle of the Plains of Abraham changed all that. A few days after the battle, Quebec surrendered after a brief siege. A year later, following three British-American invasions that converged on Montreal, the rest of Canada capitulated. Now in British hands, Canada no longer posed a threat.

So when the British parliament decided to tax the American colonies, there was nothing to stop British colonials from rising up to fight—first for their rights as Englishmen, then for their freedom as Americans. British soldiers who served at the Plains of Abraham ended up on both sides of the American Revolution. William Howe, who led Wolfe’s advance guard during the landing at Quebec, served as British commander-in-chief from 1775 to 1778. Richard Montgomery, one of Wolfe’s officers, joined the American rebels and returned to Quebec in 1775 as the commander of an American invasion of Canada.

The post The Quebec Battle That Opened the Door to America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The images are gripping. Horizons glow with satanic reds squishing through black and bluish clouds, as though the sky itself were bruised and bleeding. Foregrounds bristle with scorched neighborhoods still drifting with smoke and streams of frightened refugees, a scene more commonly associated with war zones.

But we’ve seen this before. Big fires are big fires, and one pyrocumulus can look pretty much like another. Communities with homes burned to concrete slabs, molten hulks of what once were cars alongside roads, surrounding forests mottled with black and green— these are becoming commonplaces.

What strikes me most about those Fort McMurray images making their way down from western Canada is the mashup of foreground and background, the collision of free-burning flames with a fossil-fuel powered society. The first form of burning dates back to the early Devonian, when life first colonized the continents. The second tracks the Anthropocene, when humanity changed its combustion habits and wrenched the Earth into a new order. At places like Fort McMurray the deep past and the recent present of fire on Earth rush together with almost Shakespearean urgency.
 

***

 
The plot is old, the stage setting and cast of players updated.

Monster fires are no stranger in the boreal forest. It’s a fire-ravenous biota that burns in stand-replacing patches. This is not a landscape where misguided fire suppression has upset the rhythms of surface burning and catapulted flames into the canopy. They’ve always been in the canopy and everything has adapted accordingly. White and black spruce and jack pine and aspen experience exactly the kind of fire they require.

How big those patches get depends on how dry the fuel is, how brisk the winds, and how extensive the forest. In northern Alberta there is not much to break a full-throated wildfire. The Chinchaga fire started on June 1, 1950, and burned across northeastern British Columbia and most of Alberta until October 31, a total of 3 million acres.

Nor is a burning city a novelty. In North America the wave of settlement in the 18th and 19th centuries paralleled a wave of fire. The surrounding lands were disturbed, and frequently alight with both controlled and uncontrolled fires. The towns were built of wood—basically, reconstituted forests. The same conditions that propelled fires through the landscape pushed them through towns.

Only a century ago did those urban conflagrations finally quell as urbanites turned to less combustible materials; fire codes and zoning regulations organized buildings in ways that discouraged spreading flames; fire services acquired the mechanical muscle to halt blazes early; and the wave of settlement flattened. Over the past century it’s taken earthquakes or wars to overcome these reforms in modern cityscapes, and unleash widespread conflagrations.

Meanwhile, a broadly rural scene morphed and polarized into an urban frontier of wildlands and cities that faced one another without intervening buffers. The middle, working landscapes, like the middle, working classes, shriveled at the expense of the favored extremes. In 1986 the term wildland-urban interface appeared. It was a clumsy, dumb phrase, but it referred to a dumb problem. Watching houses, and then communities burn was like watching polio or plague return. This was a problem we had solved, then forgot to—or chose not to—continue the vaccinations and hygiene that had halted their terrors.

Initially, the problem appeared a California pathology. But it soon broke out of quarantine and has spread across western North America. The prevailing narrative held that the problem was stupid Westerners building houses where there were fires. Most of the vulnerable communities, however, are in the Southeastern U.S., and if climate change modelers are correct, we will see the fires moving to where the houses are. That will make it a national narrative. In truth, the problem is international, each country with its own quirky combination of fire-quickening factors. Mediterranean France, Portugal, Greece, South Africa, and Australia are experiencing similar outbreaks. North America has no monopoly over catastrophic conflagrations.

It’s tempting to appeal to climate change as the common cause. Yet the burning bush and scorched town are joined not just by global climate change, but by a global economy, and a global commitment to fossil-fuel firepower. That makes the issue both more pervasive and, paradoxically, more amenable to treatment. It means that, while there is one grand prime mover, there are many levers and gears. Fire is a reaction that takes its character from its context. It’s a driverless car barreling down the road, synthesizing everything around it.

The enduring images of the Fort Mac fire may, in fact, be its cars. Car-propelled flight, cars stranded for lack of gas, cars melted in garages, evacuation convoys halted due to 60 meter flames, relief convoys laden with gasoline. It isn’t only what comes out of the tailpipe that matters, but how those vehicles have organized human life in the boreal. The engagement (or not) with the surrounding bush. The kind of land use that cars encourage. The kind of industry that must develop to support those cars. The kind of city that such an industry needs to sustain it. The oil sand industry that has shaped the contours of modern Fort McMurray is in turn shaped by the internal-combusting society it feeds.

So there are really two fires burning around and into Fort McMurray. One burns living landscapes. The other burns lithic landscapes, which is to say, biomass buried and turned to stone in the geologic past. The two fires compete: one or the other triumphs. At any place the transition may take years, even decades, but where the industrial world persists its closed combustion will substitute for or suppress the open flames of ecosystems. The wholesale transition from the realm of living fire to that of lithic fire may stand as a working definition of the Anthropocene. Once parted they rarely meet.

At Fort McMurray they have collided with unblinking brutality. Wild fire burned away controlled fire. The old fires have forced the power plants behind the new ones to shut down and their labor force to flee. It’s like watching an open pit mine consume the town that excavates it. It’s tempting to regard the incident as a one-off, a freak of a remote landscape and a historical moment. But those collisions are becoming more frequent.

That’s not the deep worry, however. The deep horror is that the two fires may be moving from competition into collusion. They are creating positive feedback of a sort that makes more fire. Those images of fire on fire are the raw footage of a planetary phase change, what might end up as a geologic era we could call the Pyrocene. They will continue until, as Shakespeare put it, they “consume the thing that feeds their fury.”

Disaster is not always tragedy, and Fort McMurray and the industrial complex behind it may well escape lethal consequences. So if Shakespeare seems too elevated, consider Edna St Vincent Millay.

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.

We have in truth been burning both ends of our combustion candle, and if its light seems more lurid than lovely, there are yet texts to be read in the awful splendor of its illumination.

The post Canada’s Fort McMurray Wildfire Highlights the Trouble with Fighting Fire with Fire appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I had Twitter open and noticed something about a shooting and our War Memorial. At first glance, I didn’t think much of it. Lately, in North America, shootings have so often happened that I have become sadly somewhat desensitized to it. But then more tweets came, and it went from a shooting at the War Memorial, to a gunman heading toward the Parliament buildings. Then a pause, and nothing for a few minutes.

I love Ottawa, and it was jarring to imagine what might be happening. I grew up in the West, in Alberta, but moved here three years ago to work for the church. I’ve found that Ottawa is the perfect place for young children–our son is 6 and our daughter is 3. It’s big, with a million people, great schools and a real city’s cultural offerings. But it feels warm (in terms of people, not in winter temperature) and cozy and open, with the beautiful rivers framing the summer and the longest outdoor skating rink in North America in the winter. The government buildings, in our beautiful downtown, project accessibility; it is easy to maneuver among them, and they feel like part of the city.

I had been in Ottawa on September 11, when fear of terrorist attack brought the whole city, our nation’s capital, into lockdown mode. It was the same fear and lockdown that gripped Ottawa again this past Wednesday, with streets closed and no one downtown permitted to move around. I worried. Just a few days prior, in a town just south of Montreal, two soldiers were run over by a radical who had converted to Islam and unfortunately decided to work alongside of the Islamic State. Out of those two soldiers, one died. So with Montreal on my mind, I asked myself if what was taking place on Parliament Hill was going to turn into a full-blown attack on our city.

The Starbucks was far enough away from the government buildings–about 15 minutes– that I could avoid the lockdown. But by midday, it felt like every conversation I had was fear-based, and people speculated about whether this was the start of something bigger and scarier. People on the streets wore looks of disbelief. Then reports of multiple gunmen started to swirl around.

I started to worry about people I know who work directly in those places downtown. I started to think about their families and wondering if they even knew what was happening. I started wondering if I should contact them to make sure they knew what was happening, or try and text those friends who I knew were working downtown that morning. But I didn’t want to add to the confusion and stress of what was slowly overtaking our city.

I couldn’t help but feel so angry and upset that someone had tried to interrupt my peaceful life. It’s selfish, but it was one of the first reactions I had. Canada isn’t that big, so it wouldn’t take something catastrophic to affect our culture. Social media amplified the anxiety and the questions. Once reputable and accurate news started to come in, mainly via CBC, there was some relief: there was only one gunman. But questions remained–and still remain–about the gunman’s intentions.

And the downtown core would remain on lockdown for most of the day some people were forced to stay in their buildings and offices for 10 hours. I have a good friend who works as an unarmed security guard on Parliament Hill (not one of the well-armed Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who also work there). He didn’t carry a gun – which will now change – and he’s wary of going back to work. The first person that gunman encountered inside the doors of Parliament was also an unarmed security guard, who tried to grab the weapon but was shot in the foot.

After the shock of that day, my passion for my church work, triggered by the Holy Spirit, took over. Ours is a church of 1,500 people, many of whom work downtown, and I knew what would happen these last few days: conversations with our members, with pastors throughout the city, and with anyone who needed a sounding board. People need to talk and vent, and some of that is dark stuff, but that’s OK. From the heart, the mouth speaks. In the midst of all the craziest emotions and tragedies, I believe Jesus is stronger than fear.

In the aftermath, I also feel great pride in my country, its freedoms (including the freedom to choose my own faith), and how we believe in peace and tolerance and friendliness. We stand up to bullies; my grandfather fought in the Second World War. There is violence everywhere, and humans are all capable of evil. But I don’t believe this will change Ottawa, or Canada: The incident feels more like a bruise than something more permanent. Even though the prime minister may have called for expanded powers for our national intelligence service, I think it’s in our nature to remain open as we face our challenges and confront the handful of people who try to shatter the peace we’ve worked so hard to establish.

The post How a Single Gunman Interrupted Ottawa’s Peace appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This has become a ritual among those who are leaving Venezuela. That day, my family walked onto an American Airlines flight with four bags of luggage and three things that were exceedingly precious in our home country: airplane tickets, an invitation to stay with my sister in Florida, and hope.

Until the moment the plane took off, we feared we might be in clear and present danger. We had just spent the last month seeking refuge in a makeshift panic room we created in our Caracas apartment. And, even as we navigated the airport’s departure rituals, we didn’t know if we were leaving Venezuela forever and if we’d ever be able to leave the turmoil behind.

During the previous years, we said goodbye to a lot of friends who moved to Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Colombia, and the United States. We wanted to stay, however. We were proud of the job we were doing as journalists, writing about the problems our country was facing and possible ways to solve them. We wanted to help our society to go back to the path to democracy, interrupted in 1998 by the return of army men to power, with the election of Chávez, a career military officer, who had failed to take over the government in a bloody putsch just six years before.

But the majority of our fellow Venezuelans had other plans. In 2009, when Chávez obtained the popular support to reform the constitution in order to rule forever, my wife and I accepted that we wouldn’t be able to live under an elected dictatorship, a government that also would be unable to stop the inflation and crime rates that now are among the highest in the world. As newspapers were being whittled down and journalists feared speaking against the regime, it became virtually impossible to do the work my wife and I were trained to do.

We made a list of places we could go. We put Canada first: we wanted stability and a legal way to immigrate, and that country offered professionals like us a path that was easier and faster than the U.S. We chose Montreal (because Quebec’s list of desired professions included journalists at that time), submitted our application in 2010, and studied French. The arrival of our daughter in July 2013 delayed the process. We sent all the required paperwork, but the months passed with no word from Citizenship and Migration Canada.

In December 2013, we made extra cash from a freelance job and decided to invest it in tickets to Miami. We needed to pick up some savings we had socked away in a U.S. bank and buy some essential things we would need when we finally made the move to Canada. But the meaning of that planned Florida trip changed as a result of a conflict between the government and international airlines—a conflict that made our purchased tickets suddenly seem precious gold.

This was the latest step in the Cuban-inspired Chavista effort to extinguish all private economic activity by asphyxiating the value of all money belonging to anyone but the state. After a decade of currency controls that forbid anyone other than the Central Bank from acquiring U.S. dollars, many foreign companies have stopped doing business in Venezuela. Hence, this year we have in Venezuela, among our long list of wants, no shampoo, no elevator parts, no cancer medicines. We’re in an undeclared state of default that’s cutting ties with the rest of the world. Now, foreign airlines are reducing or canceling their operations to and from Venezuela. They were tired of waiting for the almost $4 billion the government has to give them in exchange for the bolivars (essentially play money for a multinational company unable to exchange them on a free liquid market) they earned. With no dollars, the companies cannot pay services abroad or buy replacement parts.

When violent protests erupted—literally a half-block away from our home—in February against the government of Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s heir, my sister in Weston, Florida, said, “Please, come right now.” We knew by then that our tickets would be the key to an exit door out of all that danger. It could also be a launching platform to the North.

We asked my sister-in-law to move to our house and take care of it and our cats. We hugged our loved ones and told them we didn’t know when we’d be getting together again. We attended the dinners our friends organized to say goodbye.  And then we took the time-honored Latin escape route: the plane to Miami.   

While we were grateful for safe harbor, the city of Weston is a strange place for a Latin American, even if many Venezuelans, Argentinians, and Colombians live there. We’re used to seeing macaw couples rowing over the traffic jams; in Weston there’s no nature—all of that has been obliterated to make room for acres of silent suburbia. There’s no architecture: Each building is a representation of something else, because the place is too recent to have an urban history. There’s no complexity: The streets offer to the eye a narrow palette of master-planned landscape options.

The order is soothing, to be sure, and those weeks in Weston were like a decompression chamber—that temporary holding tank where divers who come from the darker bottom of the ocean can undergo a protected transition before returning to the normal air of the surface.

Even if we were (and still are) terrified about burning through our savings, Weston reminded us that another life, a good life, is possible. The first days there, my wife used to stand in front of the supermarket cases full of brands of yogurt, stressed out by her inability to decide which one to choose. For months, finding any yogurt in Venezuela had been an epic achievement.

“About 80 Venezuelan families arrive every week,” someone in the real estate business told us. Middle-class, of course, or upper: in Venezuela, the poor don’t emigrate. A prominent TV executive I met there told me that famous Venezuelan media personalities, the kind of people we thought would never leave the country where they are—or, were—kings, were begging for jobs in Florida as well.

Almost a month into my Floridian interlude, on April 15, at 3 a.m., I went out of my sister´s condo to see the total lunar eclipse. The moon, passing through the Earth’s shadow, was an astonishing salmon circle, and a red Mars shone very close. I was alone with all that beauty and my own constellation of questions. Had Canada forgotten about us? Could I find a job in Miami, or would I have to return to the battlefield that we still call Venezuela?

The idea of returning made my heart race. In just the short time I had been away, dozens more journalists had been forced to quit or pushed to virtual bankruptcy because they didn’t want to be controlled by the regime. And everyday life was getting worse, too: My mother in Valencia has had to close her eyes when she takes a shower, because the water is so polluted that it’s made her cry.

The eclipse turned out to be a good omen. That very day, in the afternoon, Canada’s immigration agency sent the brief email that changed our lives. Our skilled immigrant visas were ready. On May 8, we landed in Montreal.

As a resident of Canada, I feel like Princess Leia watching her home planet Alderaan explode from a window of the Death Star. I wish I could send some Millennium Falcon to rescue all my people. But I have my own family and future to worry about, too—the challenge of finding a decent job, for starters.  For most of us, exile is an opportunity, not a guarantee.  I am no longer a relatively well-known journalist but an immigrant. I have to reinvent myself; nobody here cares that I was a writer in another country, in another language, in another saga.  It’s up to us to fit into this old, welcoming city, and connect to its narratives, even as we keep an eye out the window, on Alderaan’s remains.

My wife and I take our baby to the parks and streets of Montreal every afternoon. French-speaking grandmas grab her cheeks and applaud when she pays them with a smile. Our daughter is enjoying the gulls of the St. Lawrence River, the summer green on the maple trees, the slow sunsets. She’s learning to walk.

The post A Flight from Caracas to Exile appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.