Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Carbonear, Pt.2: The Sound of Diamonds


Geologists, biologists, and chemists will all tell us that long, long after humans have left this world, the oceans will remember us. But really, that would be obvious to anyone who's ever been on a beach, where alongside the countless rocks and twisted bits of driftwood lay our every fingerprint: rusted steel, broken glass worn smooth by water, and of course, plastic, as ageless and unkillable as the stones themselves. It says something about this place that even with the litter, it's still so beautiful.

Just a tiny piece of beach here in what is basically our back yard, looking out onto what i'm told is Carbonear island. Many of the stones on this beach are too square and regular to be natural, as if they were once shaped into bricks for some stone building, long since crumbled.

For a small place, though, they've got a heck of a lot of young folks. The crowd here was the biggest yet, around 500 students, and they were terrific. We're now five shows in, with something like twenty still to go.

I fear it'll all go by too fast.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Carbonear, Pt. 1: The Sound of Coal

Carbonear is a real place, and on a foggy night it feels like what i imagine being a ghost must feel like.

Everything is far away, hazy. The sound of small waves breaking on rocks could be right at your feet, or a mile away, but even if the water is close enough to get your boots wet, it looks like a blurry photograph, taken a long time ago. There is no horizon, just a flat grey progression from water to sky. You could be standing at the shore of a tiny lake, or the edge of an endless ocean.

I was about to say it was a haunted feeling, but as day turned into night here and i tried to notice, it felt more like i was the one doing the haunting.

Tomorrow is more kids, more driving, another strange place. In the meantime it's time to see what dreams those fog-shaped waters bring.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

obligatory overdue update

Wow, so that was three weeks.

I can't remember if this got mentioned already or not, but our three-week rehearsal period was cut a little short when we left St. John's on Wednesday for a quick jaunt to a place called Churchill Falls, Labrador.

Let me tell you a little about Churchill Falls, population 700. It's only existed since the early 70's, when a massive underground power plant was built there. Virtually everything in the town belongs to the hydro-power corporation that runs the plant, and virtually everyone in the town works there. It is the very definition of a Company town. One school. One hotel. One pub. No streetlights. No cabs (which made getting from the airport to that one hotel kind of a challenge). And one very appreciative graduating class of about 30 making up the first audience of this tour.

Thursday night, after the show, we got a free guided tour of the power plant, which is about 91 stories underground, cut into solid granite. I tried to remember all the details of just how massively big everything in the place was, but after a while all the stats about millions of litres per minute and thousands of megawatts a day and hundreds of tons per what-have-you, started to run together. In layperson's terms: It's really big, and it's really far underground. There's something to do with water, and it makes a big pile of electricity, most of which goes to Québec.


So that was Thursday. Friday we flew back to St. John's, where we spent this weekend making sure everything's ready for when we hit the road. Tomorrow we blow the minds of a few hundred St. John's area teens, and the day after that, we set sail for parts unknown. Well, unknown by me. I rarely pay attention to our travel schedule. I like to be surprised. Hey, is Carbonear a real place? That sounds made-up to me.

Hey, i should really get to bed. We have an early morning (which, by my standards, is any morning that starts, well, before the afternoon), and we've been told that the media and/or the Money People will probably be in attendance for at least one of tomorrow's two shows.

So, here we go.
I'll see you on the road.














On the left: a row of eleven 50' transformers, each weighing about 250 tonnes.
On the right:a wall of solid, 3 billion-year-old granite.
Yeah. Human hands built this place.