Le lendemain

As you may or may not know, I gave Stéphane Dion a hundred bucks back when he was running for Liberal leader (several of my ND friends gave me hell for this; none of them have since recanted and thanked me, strangely). I'm an admirer of his going back to the Clarity Act. I would very much like to see this election result in a Liberal government (minority, preferably), though the chance of that is pretty well at zero. In light of all this, I thought there was some danger that I might go too easy on Dion in my debate reporting. Turns out I might have gone too hard on him. In the debate aftermath, he's gotten the biggest increase in media coverage, and it's been almost entirely positive.

An Ipsos-Reid poll found that 40% of respondents felt that Dion won the debate, well ahead of Duceppe in second at 24%. More significantly, twenty percent of respondents said that the debate changed their mind about who to vote for. That's a significant number. Also interesting is this (desk pound to Paul Wells for that one), which shows that viewers reacted overwhelmingly positively to most of what Dion (and Duceppe) said, and overwhelmingly negatively to most of what Harper said (though a commenter on Wells' blog points out that these reactions took place almost as soon as the leaders in question opened their mouths, suggesting that participants in the study had made up their minds before they actually listened to what the leaders had to say) (Update: Not so, apparently: this is a pie chart showing the participants' political allegiances going into the debate).

Granted, Dion isn't going to perform as well tonight, and granted it's too late for him to win a plurality of seats. But he might be able to salvage the election, and maybe even his leadership, in sort of the same way that John Turner did in 1988. Turner, recall, lost the 1984 election (in fairness, that bit was probably inevitable), with the most enduring moment of the campaign being his telling Mulroney during the leader's debate that "[he] had no choice" but to make a series of patronage appointments. From 1984 until 1988 he was pretty much a lame duck, being plotted against by forces loyal to Jean Chrétien. During the 1988 election, though, fought on free trade, John Turner belatedly emerged as a leader. He lost then too, of course, but he did it with some measure of self-respect and dignity. I believe that 2008 could be Dion's 1988, and carbon emissions could be his free trade. And I even think that if the gap between the Liberals and the Conservatives is less than, say, twenty seats, he might get another chance. But it's possible that I'm being naive here.

Update: Of course, not all the news is good. Don Martin, inexplicably western Canada's most prominent national pundit, suggests that Dion's performance didn't matter, since only the Conservatives and the Bloc have a chance of winning a majority of Quebec's seats. I'm not sure where he's getting that the Conservatives have a chance at winning a majority of Quebec's seats, but they plainly do not; electionprediction.org currently has the absolute best case scenario for the Conservatives as being 21 Quebec seats. Personally, I suspect they'll wind up with as few or fewer than the Liberals. But this is the same Don Martin who went from touting Stockwell Day as the Great Right Hope (from an Alberta base, recall - he had no excuse for ignorance) to complaining that he was all media-pleasing sizzle and no steak, without apparently considering what this said about his own susceptibility to sizzle.

And now for something completely different

Despite the fact that I follow American legislative politics moderately closely, I'm always surprised by how many prominent people I've never heard of. For example, today I was looking at the Senate roll call on the bailout package, and I thought to myself "Who the fuck is Byron Dorgan?" What's more, he's apparently been in office since 1992. Crazy.

Liveblogging the French leaders' debate

This live bloggery is likely a pointless exercise since a. I don't have any readers, least of all readers who are refreshing my blog every five minutes, and b. I don't think many of my readers (many of the zero, that is) will actually be watching the French debate.  That said, I don't believe I've ever liveblogged anything before, and I might as well cut my teeth while nobody's watching (normally I excuse myself to the washroom to cut my teeth).  Also, in a futile effort to recapture past glories, I'd like to try to put together a faux transcript of the English debate, like I did last time (seriously, (re)read that: I'm pretty awesome).

In any event, here are a few quick predictions about tonight:
1. Dion will win the debate. It won't do him any good.
2. Either tonight or tomorrow, Dion will make an ill-advised policy commitment during the debate, since it worked so well for Martin last time. It will probably be tomorrow, but in case it's tonight I want to be on record as having predicted it.
3. Jack Layton will come across as a grinning, sanctimonious jackass.
4. Elizabeth May will keep things classy.
5. Everybody but Harper will mention Afghanistan at every opportunity, which I will find frustrating because it will remind me that the parties with whom I agree on other issues are completely wrong (flippantly so, too) on Afghanistan.
6. Harper will hold is ground. In strict terms, he'll probably perform worse than Dion and Duceppe, but it won't affect his seat count much.
7. Duceppe will continue the process of saving his essentially anachronistic party for another election. This will cause Dion to breath a sigh of relief.

All times are Atlantic time.

Anyway, let it begin:

8:50 - The stupidity gets started early, as a caller to CPAC's pre-debate coverage asks why immigrants each get $1800 upon arrival in Canada. Also there are kids killing kids in school. Also, somebody (she used the pronoun "they", and I'm not sure who she's referring to) doesn't care about the Canadian people. Quote: "I'm very upset." You don't say, maniac lady.

8:58 - I know I'm about a decade behind on this one, but Bernard Lord would have made a fantastic Conservative leader.

8:59 - Liberal strategist: "People will pay taxes as long as you provide them services." Also, as long as you have the coercive power of the state requiring them to.

9:00 - Okay, debate's about to begin. Switching to the French feed now, as the need for authenticity trumps my need to watch this in a language that I haven't completely lost due to atrophy. Apparently.

9:01 - Harper looks like he's ready to kick some ass, and looking forward to the opportunity. Layton looks like a grinning, sanctimonious jackass. Duceppe looks really uncomfortable. Of course, he always does.

9:02 - "Thank you to all leaders for courageously agreeing to this debate." Also, in one case, threatening a lawsuit if you weren't included.

9:05 - Best line of the night so far to Duceppe: "There are two conflicting visions in this election: Mr. Harper's and Quebec's." Hey, I said "so far" - we're only five minutes in.

9:06 - Layton: "Canadians are very worried about the economy." Grinning smugly.

9:07 - Question: Are the leaders concerned about their family's retirement savings? I'll vote for whichever party's leader says "No, I've got a fat MP's pension lined up."

9:09 - Hmm - the video feed's cut out for me. I still have the sound, but I guess this means the end of my snarky remarks about Layton's facial expression.

9:10 - No, it's back. Just in time to see Layton grinning smugly.

9:12 - Advantage Harper so far. Layton's been the only opposition leader to get himself any speaking time, and Harper's won those exchanges handily.

9:13 - Duceppe accuses Harper of favouring Alberta over Quebec. I'm briefly disgusted with his willingness to fan the flames of regional tension for the sake of political points, but then I remember that that's sort of why he's in politics.

9:14 - Elizabeth May speaks French like the Steve Smith of 2008, and the Steve Smith of 2008 isn't winning any French language debates.

9:17 - I'm not sure precisely what metric I'm using here, but Harper and Dion both look like Prime Ministers. The others, not so much. And I'm willing to bet a fair bit that Dion won't look like a Prime Minister tomorrow night.

9:18 - I missed the explanation of the format, but whatever it is it's working really well. The leaders are the limiting factor on the quality of debate, which is as it should be.

9:23 - Dion's plan is to produce more, consuming fewer resources in doing so, and have the whole thing run by super intelligent flying monkeys.

9:24 - Man, I hope I'm not using up all my good lines before the mock transcript.

9:26 - Layton's beating the low gas prices drum again.

9:27 - Dion: "Oil prices went up forty-five cents per litre while Mr. Harper was in power, but I don't have the demagoguery to pretend that it's his fault. It's because there are a whole bunch of Chinese who are starting to drive cars."

9:29 - To my surprise, the cheapest dig of the night so far comes from May, when she accuses Harper of stealing his environmental platform sales tax policies (thanks Neil!) from John Howard.

9:33 - Dion is on. I suspect he's sugar-coating the price of lowering greenhouse gas emissions (if cutting greenhouse gas emissions increased economic growth in the short run, which is essentially what he's claiming, more governments would be doing it).

9:34 - Are you satisfied with the Canadian food inspection system? My guess is the straw poll comes back 80% no.

9:35 - Duceppe's doing pretty well too.

9:36 - I think I've nailed down the problem with Layton: he's a Ph.D. in political science and a former university professor, but he thinks he's Tommy Douglas. Leaders shouldn't be afraid to be elitist; some of us *want* to be governed by elites.

9:37 - The moderator just actually forgot about Dion. Ouch.

9:38 - Remember what I said about the format working really well? I take it back.

9:40 - Do they not take a break this debate? I have dishes to wash!

9:42 - To judge by facial expression, Layton just couldn't be happier about the Harper government's failure to implement Kyoto.

9:43 - Okay, I promise: no more cracks about Layton's facial expression until at least 10:30.

9:44 - Dion just said "economy of the twenty-first century". No posts for the next few minutes while I dig out a shot glass.

9:45 - When Elizabeth May speaks French, she has basically the same inflection as Asian Reporter Trisha Takinawa.

9:46 - For anybody who was wondering, my immigrant girlfriend has just advised me that nobody gave her $1800 upon her arrival in Canada.

9:48 - Harper hit Dion with the Liberal environmental record, and Dion didn't respond with "You think it's easy to make priorities?" Thank goodness for small miracles.

9:49 - Apparently my girlfriend had to pay $1800 to come here.

9:50 - $250 was to have a seventy year old man hit her on the knee with a hammer, and then yell at her from across the room to test her hearing.

9:51 - Harper seems to be enjoying himself. Dion seems very relaxed for a guy about to become the first Liberal leader since before Laurier to fail to become Prime Minister.

9:52 - Apparently the civil service worked very hard on the government's greenhouse gas plan. We certainly wouldn't want to hurt the civil service's feelings by criticizing it. Harper certainly never did anything like that when he was opposition leader.

9:53 - The guy asking the question about leadership looks a lot like Mr. Bean. Great question, though ("say something nice about the leader to your left"). I hope to hell all of the candidates give legitimate answers. Least likely to is Layton, on Dion, followed by Harper on Layton. Then Dion on Duceppe.

9:55 - Duceppe does well, but he also had it pretty easy. Apparently May is strong on the environment - who knew?

9:56 - Layton starts off strong, calling Dion a smart and honest man, but then he goes off about how he (Layton) will be happy to work with the leaders of all parties when he's Prime Minister.

9:57 - Harper's speaking about Layton with something approaching genuine affection.

9:58 - Dion disappoints - he pulls a Layton, starting with genuine praise for Duceppe's commitment to his cause and willingness to cooperate with his fellow opposition leaders, but then says that he lacks ambition in saying that the Conservatives needed to be held to a minority.

9:59 - Man, May can't think of anything nicer to say about Harper than that he's a good father to his children. And he's committed to his beliefs, but behaves like an autocrat. Wow - worst answer of anybody. I didn't call that one.

10:01 - Tip to the moderator: asking, in essence, whether it's important to treat your opponents with respect isn't a real question, least of all as a follow up to that last one.

10:02 - In answering, Jack Layton quotes Ed Broadbent. May reminisces about Broadbent's last speech. This is sounding increasingly like a eulogy.

10:04 - Harper assures us that he doesn't believe in personal attacks. Either he's completely divorced from his party's ad strategy (which is possible - I don't pretend to know how knee-deep party leaders are in this sort of thing) or he has a very narrow definition of personal attacks.

10:05 - Dion calls him on it (though he nails Harper on a set of personal attacks that weren't against him, which is probably wise).

10:05 - Now Dion and Harper are getting in a shouting match about who's responsible for debasing political discourse in this country.

10:06 - Now Duceppe's calling Harper on having called Bloc MPs a waste of salary. Harper's denying it - no idea who's telling the truth here.

10:07 - Will the parties entertain the possibility of a coalition? Layton assures us that as Prime Minister he will frequently consult all opposition leaders. He's sort of coming across as playing make believe.

10:09 - Did they have to have the gun control question against the backdrop of Dawson College?

10:11 - Dion's kicking ass, but he's coming across too much as the most effective opposition leader, when he needs to come across as the Prime Minister in waiting. Not that Layton's attempts at that are working either, mind you.

10:12 - Recognizing that Duceppe, as the guy with the narrowest constituency, has in many ways the easiest job, he's still easily the least wishy-washy guy up there. Though I've actually been pleasantly surprised at how little equivocating there's been from anybody - not a Paul Martin in the bunch.

10:14 - Duceppe and May are tag-teaming Harper on his ridiculous criminal justice proposals - good on them.

10:16 - Moderator: "Mr. Harper, if you're returned with a minority government will you be prepared to make your criminal justice proposals a confidence motion?"

10:16 - Harper doesn't want to predict the future.

10:17 - Moderator: "Mr. Layton, if a minority government presented this to you as a confidence motion immediately after the election, would you be prepared to defeat the government over it?" Yes.

10:18 - Apparently the worst thing Dion can think of about Harper's proposal is that there's no room in the jails for all those fourteen year olds. Weak.

10:19 - Layton's French is deteriorating over the course of the debate - weird.

10:20 - Duceppe's talking about how, if the Bloc doesn't like a law, it will vote against it. That's a golden opportunity to go after Dion, and he's not. That's not a good sign for the Liberals.

10:21 - Question from the public: "Concretely, what does the recognition of the Québécois mean?"

10:22 - Harper: The recognition was a good thing, and he thanks Québécois for their enthusiasm.

10:23 - Dion: I'm proud to be a member of that nation, and I thank Mr. Harper for involving him in the process of its recognition. Dual identity is a good thing, but my fellow Québécois need to be fully engaged in Canadian affairs.

10:24 - May: I'd like to recognize a whole bunch more nations!

10:25 - You can probably figure out on your own what Duceppe has to say on the subject. Among other things, he's upset that Québec doesn't have a seat at UNESCO. Hey, dinkwallet: section 91 of the Constitution Act, 1867 - read it.

10:26 - Layton: Arts cuts = bad (in my experience, that's how New Democrats talk).

10:27 - Apparently when Harper wanted to move the nation motion, he sent Duceppe an inaccurate copy of the resolution. This is interesting.

10:28 - Harper doesn't deny it, just accuses Duceppe of denouncing him unfairly for trying to recognize Québécois.

10:29 - Dion says Liberals will double the arts budget. In his defense, that's almost the first fistfull of dollar bills he's flung about this debate, but still.

10:30 - Layton's still smiling like a jackass.

10:31 - Moderator: "Mr. Harper, are artists lazy?" No. Moreover, the Conservatives have apparently increased arts funding.

10:32 - The grin momentarily vanishes as he asserts that most Canadian artists live in poverty. This is apparently the most solemn moment of the debate.

10:33 - Dion asserts that artists are also important to the economy of the twenty-first century. Shot!

10:35 - The moderator accuses the candidates of looking at their watches, but Dion's not wearing one! Comedy!

10:39 - Layton's accusing Harper of opting for tax cuts over fixing health care. Somewhat surreally, Harper responds by touting his tax cuts.

10:42 - Dion seizes control of the health care section of the debate, by actually proposing a plan (which is throwing money at it, but throwing money at it in a specific way, rather than the general way that Layton's advocated so far).

10:43 - Harper blames the provinces for not working with him on health care, and emphasizes that health care is a provincial responsibility (there's a guy who's read the Constitution Act, 1867!).

10:44 - May points out that, division of powers notwithstanding, Harper promised a wait times guarantee last election. She must be a Paul Wells reader.

10:45 - Duceppe on health care: the problem "c'est cette attitude de 'Ottawa knows best'".

10:46 - Layton to Duceppe: will you protect public health care, or can only the NDP be counted on to do that? As Duceppe attempts to provide a nuanced answer, chaos reigns.

10:47 - Question from the public on Afghanistan: why withdraw from Afghanistan in 2011, and how will Canada do so without losing face? Afghanistan hasn't been mentioned until now, blowing away my prediction.

10:48 - May: The current mission is ineffective and politically-motivated. A new (and unspecified!) approach is needed.

10:48 - Duceppe: The Afghanistan mission isn't properly balanced - too much money on the military, not enough on development. Also, Harper would have put us in Iraq. Then he gives Layton hell for not supporting a Bloc motion to pull troops out in February 2008 (I'm going to have to look into that).

10:49 - Layton to Deceppe: "The NDP's the only party with a clear position on Afghanistan, and you know it." This belligerence between the NDP and the Bloc is a new thing (I don't think Layton and Duceppe disagreed on *anything* in 2006's debate). I guess this is what happens when the NDP smells Quebec seats.

10:50 - Dion defends the Afghanistan mission pretty eloquently, but says that we need to give our allies notice that it's time for somebody else to put up.

10:51 - Moderator: Karzai has said that he wants to negotiate with the Taliban, which has killed many Canadian troops. How does that make you feel?

10:52 - Dion: This is a decision for the Afghan government to make. Harper says that he'll pull out in 2011. Harper also said that he wouldn't dissolve Parliament early.

10:53 - Based on the Layton grin-o-meter, Canadians dying in Afghanistan is a far more delightful topic than poor artists.

10:54 - May: There are problems with the Afghan government, and the mission has exacerbated these. We need to work for peace, and you can't get peace without talking to your enemies.

10:55 - Duceppe is the first to bring up the 0.7% of GDP figure for foreign aid, and claims that Canada has actually backslid to 0.27%. This breed terrorism. "If the economy's so strong, Mr. Harper, why are we giving less to international aid?"

10:56 - Layton's back to agreeing with Duceppe.

10:57 - Dion: "The reason that Mr. Duceppe will never be Prime Minister is what he just said." It turns out that he means Mr. Layton; there's an entirely different set of reasons that Gilles Duceppe will never be Prime Minister.

10:57 - Layton to Dion: "The difference between you and me is that when we're going in a bad direction, I'll reverse course. You said that 2009 was the latest withdrawal you'd accept, and then you made a deal with Harper."

10:58 - Dion to Layton: "Because Harper hadn't taken the preparations to get us out. I wasn't going to endanger the lives the Canadian troops are protecting before arrangements were made to replace them. That's the difference between you and me."

10:59 - Harper: "I find it ironic to hear Mr. Dion speak about respecting international obligations, given his record on Greenhouse gas emissions as environment minister."

10:59 - Duceppe and May to Harper: "You opposed him every step of the way, going so far to call Kyoto a socialist plot." This is the best exchange of the night.

11:00 - On balance, great debate. Good format. I wouldn't have thought to eliminate opening and closing statements, but I guess there's never really much of substance in there anyway. Dishes now, analysis to follow.

11:01 - No, wait - CPAC's about to do an internet poll on who won. I can't miss that for dishes.

11:02 - For what it's worth, I'd say in terms of actual performance, it went Dion-Duceppe-Harper-Layton-May, but in terms of good they did to their cause, it would be Duceppe-Harper-Dion-Layton-May. We'll see if CPAC viewers agree.

11:03 - This just in: Liberal talking head thinks Dion performed well, and that Harper was on the defensive the whole time. I wonder what the other talking heads will think?

11:04 - New Democrat talking head thinks that it was a good debate, but that it would have been better if Harper hadn't been afraid to respond to Layton's questions.

11:04 - Ooh, here's the Green guy; let's see if he can claim with a straight face that May won.

11:05 - Nope: the environmental focus means that *everybody* won (i.e. not just the leaders). Which is probably fair. But now he's giving May credit for steering the debate towards the environment, which is laughable since i. May didn't steer shit, and ii. the debate was carefully segmented into issue-based sections. He acknowledges that her French was the weakest, though.

11:06 - They replaced Bernard Lord with a different Conservative. Didn't catch his name, but he wouldn't have made an awesome Conservative leader.

11:07 - Duceppe holds a presser. Was he surprised to agree with Dion on so much? "No, I knew there was a fair bit of agreement on issues between the two of us. Between Harper and me too, actually, though there are major policy differences as well - Harper's out of touch with Quebec on a lot of issues, and the Bloc is the only party that can hold him back from a majority." Good debate, though.

11:09 - I can't find the poll on the CPAC site. Can anyone else?

11:11 - Duceppe clearly feels good about his performance, so he, at least, seems to agree with my analysis.

11:16 - Harper's doing his press conference, and seems to be taking aim mostly at the Liberals. Which is odd, because I don't think there's a single mostly French riding in which the Conservatives and the Liberals are competing hard against each other.

11:18 - Dion's turn. He's an entirely different politician in French.

11:21 - Trolling the internet for debate coverage, I stumbled across this Elizabeth May quote: "I'm not going to pretend at the end of the next election I'll be prime minister. I'll let Jack do the pretending." Har.

11:22 - Okay, I'm pretty sure that last comment no longer qualified as part of a live blog, so I'll wrap this up. Thanks for reading everybody Neil.

Update: Shockingly, the Maclean's liveblog of this thing was better than mine. Check it out.

Update: Wells thinks my second prediction came true. Frankly, I don't see it - in Wells's own words, the plan amounts to "hold a lot of meetings", which isn't quite on the order of removing the Notwithstanding Clause from the federal arsenal.

Dept. of controversial statements that I don't bother substantiating

Of the four national parties, there are two that are treating voters and opponents as anything approximating adults.

Dispatches from somewhere in North America II

Day 3: August 12

The highlight of the first part of the day is the shower. I quite enjoy showers at the best of times, when they’re more creature comfort than adventure, but one of the highlights of the Copper King is the weirdest contraption that has ever sprayed water on me. A great skeleton of piping, it has three valves that regulate pressure at various points of the shower. The pipes that surround the showerer are also filled with little pin pricks that spray water (the Copper King’s proprietor warned that if you turned the valves such that all of the water came out of the pin pricks instead of the shower head, it would hurt a great deal and you therefore shouldn’t do it; he was overstating it somewhat). Following the shower and the included breakfast, we took a tour of the Copper King. Our guide was a woman in her twenties who apparently delivered the tour by rote memorization, as evidenced both by her high rate of speech, her total lack of inflection and by her need for cue cards once she forgot the words.

The only sight we specifically wanted to see in Butte was the local brothel, which had been continuously operational until 1982 when the Madam was sent to prison – for tax evasion (the brothel holds some kind of world record on which I’m not quite clear; I believe it’s something like “oldest surviving building originally constructed for use as a brothel”). Entrance to the brothel was free, and we were greeted by a jumble of artifacts including, most notably, an old school and decidedly unerotic-looking vibrator. It’s moderately-interesting, but as long as we’re there we figure we might as well take the tour for a few dollars. We hand our money to the moustached man surveying our move, and ask him when the next tour is. “Right now,” he replies, grabbing a flashlight.

It turns out this man is Rudy, who is the current owner of the brothel, which he bought after co-leading a movement to save it when it was slated for destruction in the early nineties. This got him a fair bit of media coverage, including an appearance on Jay Leno’s Headlines feature, which features unintentionally humourous headlines, advertisements, and the like. Rudy’s appearance was when the Butte paper ran a feature on the efforts to save the brothel, highlighting the efforts of a former prostitute at the brothel. Under the headline, which was something like “Former call-girl fights to save brothel”, was a picture of Rudy lounging on a bed with eyes that, deliberately or not, look like they’re inviting the viewer to come hither.

The tour itself is fascinating. Because Rudy has evidently not yet succeeded in securing serious government or other funding to restore the building to its former glory, it looks basically like it did when he acquired the building, just a little cleaned up. The artifacts in the front room are just things he found in the basement, which hadn’t been used for the last years of the brothel’s operation. He’s opened up a room that had been boarded over in the sixties, with a lipsticked cigarette still sitting in the ash tray. The tour was so good, in fact, that it made me question the benefit of restoring some historical buildings. For the rooms that did have to be cleaned up a bit, the last madam – the one imprisoned for tax evasion – was helpful in advising. She’s still alive, but doesn’t come around much anymore due to a recent stroke. I ask Rudy whether the Pekin was originally used as a brothel, but he responds emphatically in the negative. Pity.

Inexplicably, we decided to eat lunch at another place recommended by the fellow from the Copper King. This one was a mesquite barbecue place and, in contrast to the Pekin, was delicious. I guess the lesson is that you don’t go for Italian food in Bangkok, and you don’t go for Chinese food in Montana.

We want to get to Yellowstone for the night, but we figure that we can afford some more time in Butte, for which we’ve both developed a great affection. The historical district, where we’re staying, is reputed to have some great antique shops, so we decide to check those out. Catrin pays more attention in these stores than I do, but I note with interest a petition in a store run by two delightful old ladies opposing setting more Montana land aside as wilderness (it complains of a plan initiated by environmental groups and out of state logging companies that is now receiving consideration by Congress). What surprises me is that the petition, in its lengthy preamble, does not attempt to explain what harm the bill would do, satisfying itself with asserting that “we don’t need more wilderness”. As with Albertans, I have some trouble with the contrast between Montanans’ great friendliness and their frequently apparently evil political views.

It is regrettably time to leave Butte, which is, I’m happy to report, more beaut than butt. As we drive out, we see what appears to be a giant statue of the Virgin Mary on the surrounding hillside. This town does not cease to surprise.

Not far outside of Butte, we cross the continental divide. I briefly wonder whether a trip from Edmonton to Fredericton should include passage over the continental divide, but the scenery is beautiful and I put the thought out of my mind. On the trip south, we allegedly pass through a number of small Montana towns, but I’m noticing that it’s sort of difficult to evaluate on the basis of population density alone what constitutes a town in Montana, which seems to enjoy an evenly-distributed, if sparse, population. We also get lost for the first time and, despite my assurances that I know exactly where we are (Montana), I eventually agree to pull into the nearest city to orient ourselves and buy lunch. This turns out to be Bozeman, where we pick up some groceries (including an embarrassing attempt by Catrin to buy “a hundred grams” of smoked turkey breast) and eat them for lunch in the supermarket parking lot. I have eaten some of my favourite meals in supermarket parking lots.

The original plan was to camp in Yellowstone, but Catrin’s fear of bears has not abated (especially since, in contrast to Jasper which has never experienced a bear-related human fatality, five people have been killed by bears in Yellowstone). She generously offers to sleep in the car again, but I’m pretty sure taking her up on this would make me somehow unchivalrous, so we drive to West Yellowstone, just outside the park gate, and look for a room. Despite it being midweek, most places are full, but we eventually find a cabin and RV park that advertises vacancy. I hope that these vacancies are for the cabin and not the RV park. I go to the office to check, but it is locked. As I am looking for another entrance, a dreadlocked tornado emerges from the locked door and invites me in.

“Sorry,” apologizes the tornado, who introduces herself as the park’s owner, “I lock the door whenever I’m not in the front part of the office. I really should put a sign up. I use a lot of signs. See?” She presents me with a handful of ballpoint on looseleaf signs proclaiming things like “Still asleep – ring bell” and “Back in five minutes”. It emerges that the advertised vacancy exists in both sections of her park – “If it was only for RVs, I’d have put up this sign,” she explains, holding up one that reads “Cabins full”. She then proceeds to identify me as a Canadian based on my accent, and explain, unsolicited, that she lives in West Yellowstone because of the snowboarding. I am glad to escape her one-sided conversation and get to the cabin, which is essentially a separated motel room (fortunately, it is priced accordingly).

Soundtrack:

Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me, Various (spoken word comedy)
Neil Young Unplugged, Neil Young
Has Been, William Shatner

Day 4: August 13

We know we are underappreciating Yellowstone when we start booing the elk. I feel a little bad about this, since it’s not their fault that they’re elk, but there really comes a point at which you have to put your foot down. We’d be driving through the park and we’d see a grouping of cars pulled over with people with cameras and binoculars looking excitedly at something, and we’d wonder whether it was a grizzly, or even a wolf (which I’ve never seen, though one of the bikers we stayed with at the Copper King said he’d seen one in Yellowstone earlier in the week) and it would just be another damned elk. I really do hate to be a patronizing homer, but visitors to Jasper, even the Japanese tourists, are much more discriminating about what they point excitedly at.

Truth be told, Yellowstone’s a bit of a disappointment. This might be because it couldn’t possibly live up to its advance billing, or it could be because our schedule didn’t allow us to backpack or do any of the other activities that might have allowed us to more fully appreciate the place, but I think that maybe it’s just because Yellowstone is overrated. As noted above, it fell short of its reputation as a hotspot for wildlife viewing (though we did eventually get a good look at a bald eagle, and I also got the closest I’ve ever been to a moose – maybe those of us who grew up near the Rockies have just been spoiled in this regard), and, if we were to rank parks in terms of beauty and majesty, Yellowstone would be well back of both Glacier and Jasper.

What it does have going for it is geothermal activity, and walking amongst the assorted geysers and boiling pools and bubbling mud pits is, in my view, the only reason for anybody with access to other national parks to bother with Yellowstone. One of the interpretive centres we saw included quotes from early explorers about the wonderful nature of the area and about how it needed to be preserved. Somehow, though, I have trouble imagining that this was the early explorers’ dominant reaction. Surely to them the blighted landscape, smell of sulphur, and emerging boiling water must have made the place look like a gate to hell (one child we saw, talking aloud in a world of his own as children sometimes do, offered a pretty nice description of one of the areas as a “crazy alien mud planet”). Towards the end of the day, we also watch an eruption of Old Faithful, which is a pretty powerful display of Earth’s power, even though the eruption we saw was apparently a relatively small one. Sitting around with hundreds of other tourists watching steam emerge from a big hole in the ground until, surprisingly suddenly, water starts spewing out dozens of feet in the air is a surreal experience.

We spend the night at a motel in Gardner, Montana, at the north end of the park. We sleep unmolested by bears.

Soundtrack:

• Mix CD made for Catrin by a friend of hers after she broke up with her last boyfriend, Various
• Real Live, Bob Dylan
• XXX, Alice Cooper
• Victory Day, Tom Cochrane and Red Rider
• XXX, Joan Jett
• Hit Parade, Spirit of the West

Dispatches from somewhere in North America I

As some of you may not know, I'm moving to Fredericton effective September 1, and am taking the scenic route. I intend to chronicle this trip as much as possible on my blog, but time and limited internet access may interfere. Here's the first of what I hope will be quite a few installments.

Day 1: August 10

Arguably August 10 is not day 1, since we left Edmonton on August 9, but we spent our first night at friends’ in Calgary, so it felt more like visiting them than it did like starting out on a three week trip across North America, so I’m going to stand by August 10 being the first real day. We started off with a hearty – in the sense of “swimming in grease” – brunch with a few friends, and then set off to the south. After picking up groceries in High River (“home of the Right Honourable Charles Joseph Clark!” I inform an uninterested Catrin), we make a brief stop at Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump, and then set a course for the border. As we approach Cardston, our right window shows fields of wheat against a backdrop of mountains. “Okay,” says Catrin, “where are the cowboys?” “To hell with the cowboys,” I reply, “where’s the cross of St. George?”

The original plan is to stay in Waterton Lakes National Park and then cross the border to Glacier National Park early the next day. However, we want to drive the Going to the Sun Road in Glacier, and it apparently gets pretty busy, so one of our guidebooks advises us to hit it as early in the morning as we can. Since we have no idea who long crossing the border will take (we’re slightly concerned that the presence of most of our worldly possessions in our car will make it look like we’re planning to stay in the U.S. for good), we decide to get it out of the way tonight. After a mercifully complication-free crossing, we enter Montana, stopping for the night at a campground near St. Mary, just outside the park boundary.

The campground we choose is called Koa Kampground Kabins, though it offers tent sites as well. As I register, I ask the fellow at the desk – a very friendly man, which will fast become a theme in Montana – if the KKK thing raises many eyebrows. “Not that I’m aware of,” he answers, “you’re the first one to mention it, at any rate.” My eyebrows are decidedly raised, but the place seems nice enough, and offers an all you can eat pancake breakfast for four dollars, so we stay. It has a hot tub to, in which I partake despite my reservations that this doesn’t really qualify as camping.

Later that night, as we lie in our tent, Catrin begins to worry about bears again (she and bears have something of a history since she met one twenty minutes into a backpacking trip on to which I lured her by assuring her that I’d never seen a bear while backpacking). She eventually decides that she wants to sleep in the car, to which I assent with something slightly short of good humour, helping her move her sleeping bag. I should mention here that northern Montana, being directly adjacent to southern Alberta, is really freaking windy, so standing outside in my underwear helping her put her sleeping bag into the car (and to rearrange the car’s contents sufficiently to allow her to recline her seat) isn’t my idea of a good time, and I get back into the tent as soon as possible.

Soundtrack:

• Tom Cochrane and Red Rider, Tom Cochrane and Red Rider
• Harvest Moon, Neil Young
• Hearts and Bones, Paul Simon
• Traveling Wilburys Volume 1, The Traveling Wilburys
• The Paul Simon Songbook, Paul Simon
• Bridge Over Troubled Waters, Simon & Garfunkel
• Broken Arrow, Neil Young and Crazy Horse
• Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me, Various (spoken word comedy)

Day 2: August 11

Glacier National Park is beautiful (this will actually also be a recurring theme about Montana). I’m not ready to give it the win over my beloved Jasper, but it’s like a lusher, more deciduous version of Alberta’s mountain parks. Its designers also showed a little more aesthetic sense when it came to laying down roads, so the drive through the park is truly spectacular. And yet, despite the place’s otherworldly beauty, most people there seem, like us, to be only passing through. We camped next to a group of cyclists going from New Hampshire to Vancouver (they’ve been on the road for six weeks, and expect to be for another two), and during the pancake breakfast (Catrin declines to partake, for some reason) I meet a couple of bikers from Minneapolis who are taking their Harley up to Banff. They’ve visited there before; in fact, several years previously they’d taken their kids through most of western Canada, including a pile of national parks. Their eight year old daughter’s favourite part of the trip was West Edmonton Mall; I die a little inside. We meet a lot of (motor) bikers, actually; I’m at loss for hypotheses as to why this may be.

True to Montana’s libertarian bent (we see three Ron Paul signs while we’re in the state, compared to one for Obama and none for McCain), quite a few of these bikers don’t wear helmets, which strikes me as profoundly dumb (though one such biker, himself from Idaho, tells me that wearing a helmet while riding on the highway is nothing more than the difference between an open casket and a closed one). Hang around in Montana for long enough, though, and the libertarianism starts to make some sense; everything’s so perfect there already that it does seem that government couldn’t do anything but screw things up. The highways, though, offer a reminder of the price of this pigheaded independence: there are fatality markers wherever somebody died in a car accident on one of them, and there are a terrifying number. I can’t help but to think that a lot of them were unhelmeted bikers; probably a few more were motorists refusing to wear seatbelts, which are technically mandatory.

Besides the natural beauty and the fatality markers, there are a few more things you notice when driving around Montana. First of all, drivers there have an unnerving (to me, at least) tendency to yield to you when they’re oncoming and you’re trying to make a left turn. That’s the friendliness at work again, I guess, but I’d rather have the certainty of needing to wait for a break in traffic. As well, Montana businesses have a strange habit of replacing the letter C in their business names with either a K or an S, as the situation demands (only a few examples we noticed: Kleaners, Kars, Senter). Could be some kind of bold libertarian thing, I guess.

After a brief picnic stop at the pristine Swan Lake (this lake is not unique: we passed enough of them that Catrin was reminded of the part of Forrest Gump when the title character says “So I went to the White House, again, and met the President of the United States, again”) Catrin needs a bathroom break. Since we’ll probably have to justify it with a purchase of some kind, we hunt for a café where she can get a coffee. In Drummond, we find the Bull’s End, and decide it’s worth a shot. We walk through the doors and into a stereotype. There are three customers, all of them sitting on stools at the counter: one obese woman in her sixties doing a sodoku, and two old guys in white T-shirts and suspenders saying things like “No doubt about it”. It’s around four in the afternoon by this point, and you get the impression that all three of those customers have been in there for most of the day. After looking at the menu (the “Chef salad” consisted of ham, turkey, two kinds of cheese, tomato, and egg), Catrin gets her coffee and I get a bowl of beef noodle soup. Both are about what you’d expect, but cheaper; in keeping with the time warped feel of the place, the coffee costs seventy-five cents (though Catrin had to order a glass of milk too, since they only had cream). As we walk in, Ellen is playing on the TV; despite the state’s conservatism, time and network television wait for no man.

During a commercial break, some sort of an advocacy commercial comes on:
Talk to your children about sex,” is advises. I’m a little surprised that this is a message that is getting play in Montana, until the next line is “tell them you want them to wait until they’re married.” This is more what I was expecting. What I was not expecting was the end of the commercial, when the viewer’s attention was directed to a website for more information. It had a .gov domain name.

The day’s destination is Butte, about which I know very little besides that its name can be mispronounced in a childishly amusing manner (Catrin never grows tired of this). It turns out it’s a charming town, smaller than I expected, with a pretty nice core of nineteenth century buildings, harkening back its history as a prosperous mining town. The mine’s still there, re-opened recently as a result of rising commodity prices, but the prosperity has gone into hiding. The streets are empty – we see two dogs before seeing any people on them – and it only gets more dire from there. High on the list of business items in finding a laundromat (while we’ve only been on the road for two days, we haven’t had a chance to wash the clothes we were wearing in the days before our departure), which we do without too much difficulty. This is a typical sized laundromat, I’d say – probably twenty washing machines, and half as many dryers – but well over half of the machines are out of order. Which isn’t really a problem, since we’re the only customers in the place. The walls are covered with photographic portraits of cowboyish or just plain hickish looking men, which I’m informed are the result of the previous owner’s hobby for amateur photography. The current owner is a reserved older guy named Michael. One gets the sense that he will be the last. Butte’s every bit as much of a time warp as the Bull’s End. Its remaining residents are struggling to avoid becoming a ghost town, but not struggling too hard. It occurs to me that as much as it harkens back to a more glorious era, it could also be seen as a glimpse into the future – Alberta after the oil runs out.

We’re staying in the Copper King Mansion, built by William Andrews Clark in the late nineteenth century and more recently used as a bed and breakfast. Clark was a Butte copper baron (hence the name of the building) and later a U.S. senator. It’s a spectacular building, richly deserving of the title of “mansion” even in an era in which the word is held to a higher standard than it was a hundred years ago, and it’s easy to forget Butte’s apparently grim present while in it. John, who owns the mansion with his sister (they inherited it from their mother, who bought it from the Catholic church, who bought it from Clark’s son) recommends a few dinner places, and we choose the Pekin, a local Chinese restaurant owned by the same Chinese immigrant family for the last eighty years.

On the way there, we stop by the laundromat to put our clothes in one of the three dryers marked as “good”. It turns out to be mislabeled (at least, I’d say so, on the basis that it doesn’t work – Michael disagrees, assuring me that it is a good dryer: “it makes me money”). When we share our dinner plans, Michael frowns. The Pekin is “pretty boring,” he warns us, “nobody in this town has much taste.” We take his suggestion of a 24 hour greasy spoon under advisement, but ultimately opt to stick with the Pekin on the basis of the promised atmosphere.

The Pekin does deliver a unique atmosphere. All the tables seat four, and each is located in its own salmon-coloured, curtained booth (I hypothesize that the restaurant used to serve as a brothel). A glass of the premium wine goes for $2.75, fifty cents more than the house stuff. As for the food, if I had to describe it in three words those words would be “really fucking awful”. Catrin barely touches hers, though I finish mine on principle alone.

Since we still have time and hunger, we decide to check out Michael’s recommended greasy spoon (hey, his recommendation about the Pekin was pretty solid). We sit at the bar, where we enjoy our conversation with the bartender. He’s probably about our age, smaller than me, with more facial hair and fewer teeth. He’s friendly, though, and shares with us a variety of local lore (turns out Even Knievel was from Butte, and there’s an annual festival honouring him). He also shares a bit of his personal history; he’s trying to escape Butte, and worked across the U.S. for a pipeline company for a while. He can’t go back to that kind of work, though. Why not? “I got shot.” Um, any context to that? “It was over a girl.” Right here in Butte? “Yeah. He got me four times, in the arm and the ankle. He was a lousy shot.”

The greasy spoon itself, the M&M, has something of a history – the bartender says it’s been visited by 22 American presidents. I try to calculate how far back this would take it, but only get to thirteen before I forget who preceded Herbert Hoover. In any event, 22 sounds unlikely. “How long has it been around?” I ask. “Since 1819,” he replies. 22 begins to sound less unlikely a figure. Today, the M&M is decked out with a lot of Barack Obama gear. This seems odd to me, since I know Montana’s a red state, and the M&M doesn’t exactly seem like the kind of place that bucks the trend. “Is this a Democratic bar?” I ask, gesturing at the Obama paraphernalia. “No, it’s just that Obama visited us a couple of times during the primary season.” Indeed, there’s a picture on the wall of Obama sitting at this very bar that I’d have noticed if I was more observant. 22 is sounding more plausible all the time. “Do you think Obama has a chance of winning Montana?” I ask. “Oh, he’s got Montana. Butte, Montana – “ Butte’s residents seem to prefer to include the state’s name when mentioning their town, presumably to distinguish it from smaller communities in Alaska and Nebraska “ – isn’t a Democratic town at all, but everyone I talk to is voting Obama.” This strikes me as unlikely, since the polls are showing that this is a close race, and a race in which the Democrat wins Montana is, almost by definition, not a close race. Still, it will be interesting to watch.

Soundtrack:

• Beautiful Freak, The Eels
• Left and Leaving, The weakerthans
• mix CD made for Catrin by a friend, The weakerthans
• Pinkerton, Weezer
• Mirrorball, Neil Young (with Pearl Jam)
• The Millennium Collection, Aerosmith
• Hawks and Doves, Neil Young
• Graceland, Paul Simon
• Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me, Various (spoken word comedy)

In other words, Part II

I received a fortune in a terrible Chinese restaurant - more on that next post - that read "You will inherit money or a small piece of land." In other words, one of my family members is going to die.