Apparently Edmonton has a municipal airport a stone’s throw away from the centre of town. It’s called Edmonton City Centre Airport (also known as Blatchford Field), and has been around in some form or another since 1929. Google Maps says it’s 4.4 km from the airport to Edmonton’s City Hall, or seven minutes of driving time.
I gather that the airport is used for regional flights and private air travel. It also gets annually converted into a race track for the Edmonton Indy. Larger aircraft and international flights come through the Edmonton International Airport, which is 26 km southwest of the city centre.
Some of the people who have made submissions to the public hearing want the downtown airport closed and the land developed into a transit-oriented community with housing for thousands of people, along with commercial and retail space.
Other presenters have told city councillors the airport must stay open because it is vital for the business community. They describe it as a hub to the north and argue that it is critical for medevac flights. About 4,000 medevac flights a year go through the facility.
I learned about this whole business from Mack’s site. He’s started NotMyAirport.ca (here’s the associated Facebook group), which argues for replacing the airport with “a new transit-oriented, green community”, as well as an expansion of Edmoton’s NAIT campus. Removal of the airport would also apparently change building height limitations in the city, which is a good thing. A dense city, after all, is a healthy city.
Mack launched his site in response to SaveOurAirport.ca, which argues that the airport “plays a vital role in making Edmonton one of Canada’s leading health centres, as a hub for air ambulance and other essential health services for all of Alberta, the Northwest Territories, British Columbia and Saskatchewan.” This claim is disputed by the CEO of Edmonton Airports in the aforementioned CBC article, who says “”what the City Centre Airport offers is a tremendous amount of convenience for corporate travellers and those people who live in the downtown area and have private aircraft.”
Earlier this week I attended a church service at the Abbey of Gethsemani (great URL, there). This was Compline, the last of the seven ‘hours’ or prayer services which the monks recite daily. Because part of the monastery’s mandate is to “turn no stranger from their gate”, the public may attend any service.
There was a vaguely voyeuristic feeling to the proceedings, however. The public sits in a cordoned section at the back of the church, just past the narthex. We’re separated from the rest of the church by a railing (though those wanting blessings or take communion pass through a gate at the appropriate time). The monks, most of them clad in a kind of cowl (you can see a bunch of them here), amble in and take their places in pews. The ceremony begins–there’s no obvious officiant–and you watch.
Extraordinary Lives
Rituals aside, I was actually fascinated by the life the monks lead. It’s exactly what you’d expect. It’s also nothing like what you’d expect.
Every day (with no exceptions–monasteries apparently know no weekends), the monks rise at about 3:00am. They take their first prayer service at 3:15am–Vigils. Then, I gather, they go to work.
In terms of work, I kind of imagine the Abbey like a big, permanent summer camp. You need cooks, caretakers, gardeners, cleaners and so forth. Monks fill many of these roles, though they’re getting a bit long in the tooth and do hire laypeople for certain work.
The monks also make chesse, fudge (with bourbon–very tasty) and fruitcake on site, and apparently do brisk business through their online store. They also run a retreat centre with 45 beds. It’s very popular, and is booked ahead of time for months.
There are also scholars (many have advanced degrees) writers and artists among the monks. I spoke with a monk–a published photographer–who recently went into Louisville for a Photoshop course. Another was consulting on a movie script with a number of Hollywood names attached to it.
These monks are a cloistered, silent order. So while you might expect them to live in a kind of jovial brotherhood, I guess they actually choose to live solitary lives. I heard of one monk who, in twenty years of shared living, had only had one conversation with a fellow brother.
The Last Generation of Monks
There were 400 of them in the early fifties, but through attrition and departures it’s down to 50 mostly old men. Judging from what I saw in at Compline, I’d say the average age is north of 65. One brother, in his nineties, rolled into church in a motorized wheelchair. The abbey was founded on December 21, 1848. The next morning, forty-four monks said the seven prayer services. They’ve been said every day since. They probably won’t be said in 2048. This is almost certainly the last generation of monks at this abbey.
It’s an extraordinary lifestyle, and I’m glad to have glimpsed it. I feel about the abbey the same way I do about Cuba under Castro. I’m glad I could experience these places when I did. Before they change.
Last Sunday night, as we were packing to come down to Kentucky, I was channel-surfing. I discovered that the movie “Elizabethtown” had just started, so we stopped packing and watched it. I’d seen it before, but I’m a fan of writer-director Cameron Crowe’s work, and, besides, who likes packing?
If you haven’t seen it, the film tells the story of Drew Baylor, played by Orland Bloom. When his father dies suddenly, he must return to his ancestral home of Elizabethtown, Kentucky. He meets and falls in love with a flight attendant, played by Kirsten Dunst, unsullen and doing her best work.
Elizabethtown, as it happens, is only about 40 km from where we were staying.
Taking the movie and the town’s proximity as a bit of a sign, we made a short road trip there. It’s pretty unremarkable, and as far as I could tell the town has resisted the urge to exploit any connection with the movie. We did have a nice dinner at the Back Home Restaurant, which is everything the name promises. I had potato-wrapped cod, and homemade coconut cream pie for dessert.
On our way to Elizabethtown, I was scanning the local radio stations (the radio mix here was much better than in Texas) and happened upon U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love)”. That song is featured on the “Elizabethtown” soundtrack when, in the midst of his own road trip, Drew visits the scene of Martin Luther King’s assasination.
We decided to spend our last night in Kentucky in Louisville. We used Hotwire to pick a hotel. As you may know, Hotwire shows you pricing and details for hotels that match your search without disclosing the actual name of the hotel. You book (often at a robust discount) and then get notified of where you’re staying.
We got a very favourable rate at a downtown historic hotel. It’s turns out to be the Brown Hotel, where Drew stays and where much of the second act of “Elizabethtown” takes place.
Is Cameron Crowe trying to tell us something? I don’t think so, but the coincidences were too numerous not to remark upon.
This week, Julie and I are in rural Kentucky, about an hour south of Louisville. Julie’s mom is Chair of the English Department at Trinity Western University, and a prominent authority on Thomas Merton. Merton was, by apparent consensus, the most significant American spiritual writer of the twentieth century. He was also a monk, and spent the latter half of his life at the Abbey at Gethsemani, a Cistercian monastery here in Kentucky. Julie’s mom spends time down here most summers, and this year we decided to join her.
We’re staying in a house near the Abbey that’s operated as a retreat centre. It’s commonly called ‘the Solar House’, as it was a kind of early green architecture effort. It used to have a translucent roof, to let in the heat. It’s built right into the hillside, on a gravel bed, which I gather helps moderate temperatures throughout the year. It’s got a peculiar, pyramid shape (here’s a photo), though it sits very pleasantly at one end of a huge meadow.
The surrounding countryside brims with life. I’ve seen deer, box turtles, snakes (larger than we grow them back in Canada) and all sorts of birds–blue jays, cardinals, herons, owls, turkey vultures, turtle doves and dozens of other species I don’t recognize.
Of all the places I’ve been, Kentucky reminds me most of Ireland. It’s extraordinarily green–it has rained here every afternoon, like it does in the tropics–and has charming rolling hills. Of course, in Ireland the fences are made of rock, not barbed wire, and there are very few pickup trucks, but there’s a lot of similarity. For no reason other than my own naivete, I expected Kentucky to be more like the country around Austin, Texas. Where Texas was dry and brown, Kentucky is humid and verdant.
I’ve posted a few photos from our trip to Flickr. Tomorrow, time permitting, I’ll tell you about the monks.
It includes a rented movie, three video and audio podcasts, two thousand songs, five Amazon Kindle ebooks, 10 games, 125 unread RSS items in NetNewswire plus dozens of cached articles in Instapaper, the New York Times and WSJ apps. It would literally take me months to go through it all. Plus once I landed my magical pocket computer filled up with even more - emails, tweets, feeds, etc.
Travis, likewise, itemizes what’s on his devices while taking a train to Denali National Park in Alask:
Instead, here’s what I had to content myself with: On my computer: hours of video: movies and TV shows and Web documentaries. Entire books, downloaded from Amazon. Computer games with shifting maps and dozens of levels. Yes, my battery would run out; there was undoubtedly an outlet on the train for me to recharge. But I wouldn’t bother Why would I, when I also had….
My iPhone: thousands of photos, hundreds of songs and a few audiobooks. And of course, offline email, SMS and a phone. Even if you hobble it: no Internet, no phone access, no GPS, there’s still plenty there to amuse and distract and fill your time.
I’ve been on six flights in the past week, and, like Travis and Steve, I’ve got a box of anti-boredom tools. I previously wrote about FORLORM: fear of lack of reading material. I used to carry an armload of books and magazines to combat the tedium of flights. Now my tools are a mix of the analog and the digital.
My usual regimen is, in order from boarding lounge to landing: read newspaper, complete crossword, read half a magazine, watch an hour of TV on my laptop, review notes (as I’m often flying to or from a speaking event), play games on the iPhone (mostly RSoccer09, a remarkably deep soccer game) then read the other half of the magazine. That’s usually more than enough for any domestic flight.
We are witnessing the death of boredom. On the other hand, we’re in an age of distraction. I don’t necessarily want to get all contemplative on an airplane. But we do need to be aware of the habits we’re forming, and how they might discourage healthy introspection.
I flew to Toronto this week. One flight out, two flights (hello, bizarre sculpture in Calgary airport!) on the way back. While checking in at a terminal, uh, in the terminal, I glanced at the seat selection screen. There were plenty of other seats from which to choose. The seat next to me was empty on all three flights.
Julie was down at Granville Island today. It was a gorgeous day, and that place is usually teaming with tourists in the summer months. She was surprised how uncrowded the island was. She easily found parking.
We recently used Hotwire to book a four-star hotel in downtown Seattle for Gnomedex. The conference occurs over a weekend in August, surely a popular time of year for tourists visiting the city. We’re paying US $99 a night.
I know these are all isolated anecdotes, but they confirm what I’ve been reading over the past few months: fewer people are traveling shorter distances. Here’s some empirical evidence. Between March, 2008 and March, 2009, the Canadian Tourism Council reports an 11.5% reduction in the number of trips to and within Canada. That probably represents the entire profit margin for a lot of hotels, travel agencies and related services.
As a matter of curiosity, I checked which countries were showing the greatest decline in trips to Canada. The percentages reflect how many fewer visitors came in March, 2009 compared to March, 2008:
United Kingdom - 24%
Japan - 24%
South Korea - 23%
Mexico - 21%
Of course, most foreign visitors to Canada are from the US, where travel is only off 5.9% between March, 2008 and 2009.
In any case, I guess it’s all good news for the consumer, and pretty bad news for anybody in the travel industry.
Dave Gorman is a writer and comedian whom I admire. His recent blog post about visiting Kilkenny, Ireland for a gig reminded me of the two years we lived in that country:
On that walk I passed three girls in tears with broken heels, three girls being helped out of the gutter by angry men, four men being helped out of the gutter by angry girls, one couple drunkenly helping each other out of the gutter, two people throwing up, two sets of lads squaring up like rutting stags preparing for a you-want-some scrap that probably never transpired and one fella clutching a blood stained hanky to his face because, I assume, he’d found someone who actually did want some.
That could be downtown Dublin on any given Saturday night. We actually spent a weekend in Kilkenny during the Kilkenny Arts Festival in August, had a lovely time and didn’t see any of what Gorman describes. We saw Michael Ondaatje read, and had a nice, brief little chat with him when he signed the unexpectedly Canadian edition of The Cinnamon Peeler. We also saw a bad Stephen Berkoff play, and wandered around the splendid Kilkenny Castle.
We’re spending a couple of nights out in rural Texas–the so-called Hill Country–at the Inn Above Onion Creek. It’s this charming country inn with about eight rooms on 100 acres of rolling country. I went for a really nice walk this morning with the very spry three-legged dog that lives here. Part of it passed through a deciduous forest, which is a rare site for a west coaster like myself.
The Inn itself is comprised of a couple of large buildings and some outlying cabins. To the uneducated eye, they look like they’ve been on the property for at least a hundred years. In fact, it’s fairly new, but uses a tremendous amount of reclaimed materials. The doors, floorboards, fixtures and furniture all appear to date back to the early part of the century or earlier.
Here’s an unflattering photo of our room. It doesn’t convey any of the space’s charms. I find it hard to take good, truthful photos of interior spaces–but you can see that it’s full of period detail:
I wouldn’t claim that it’s a heritage building, but the aesthetic does kind of beg the question ‘what makes a house old?’ How much of a house must be ‘original’ for us to, informally, declare it a heritage building?
I’m reminded of the building that houses the Victoria Art Gallery, which is an odd chimera of a 19th century mansion, a modernist expansion in the fifties and a renovation a few years ago. Is still an old house?
I always feel a little existential when I’m in non-coastal cities and towns in the US. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s just the foreignness of not having an ocean that dominates part of the horizon? Or maybe its the highways which often bisect the towns? I felt the same way in Lake Tahoe years ago. Coincidentally, I quoted Merton there as well.
This is my first visit to Austin. To me, it feels kind of like the Calgary of the south. Or perhaps Calgary is the Austin of the north. Until we found the few boisterous blocks of 6th Street where all the action is, I was struck by how empty downtown Austin seemed. Two nights in a row we dined in half-empty restaurants in the centre of town. What do these establishments do when SXSW isn’t in town?
I haven’t had a lot of time to look around, but local two heritage buildings were highlights. The first is the Driskill Hotel, originally built in 1886. It’s in the Romanesque style, and reminded me a little of the Empress Hotel in Victoria. We had desert there. In what seems like a very southern tradition, the Driskill holds an annual pie bake-off, and the winning pie gets on the desert menu for the subsequent year.
This afternoon I saw the premier of Splinterheads, a charming if run-of-the-mill comedy at the historic Paramount Theater. It’s a gorgeous little theater built in 1915 (here are some photos), with a capacity of about 1300. It’s the prettiest cinema (I gather it’s also a live venue) that I’ve seen in years–it’s really a pity we don’t have more of these left on the west coast.
I don’t really feel like I’ve had the Texas experience yet. I’ve seen very few cowboy boots and hats (aside from those worn ironically by SXSW attendees), and haven’t heard much of that twangy accent which I expected. That, I gather, may be due to Austin’s status as the city that’s unlike the rest of the state. We’re spending a couple of nights outside of the city later in the week, so that experience may seem more genuine.
On an unrelated note, things have been quieter than usual around here because I, uh, broke the back end of this website. I’ll spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say that my reach exceeded my grasp, and chaos ensued. Big thanks to local Vancouver SEO expert Kerry Morrison for digging around under the hood and straightening things out again.
UPDATE: Here are a few photos from our time in Texas:
We’re shortly off to South by Southwest, the big interactive, film and music conference in Austin, Texas. We’re there for eight or nine days, though we’re taking a little side trip into the countryside for a few days. I’ve never been to SXSW or Texas before, so there should be lots to discover.
The scope of the event is a bit daunting–more than 10,000 attendees, 108 film screenings, and hundreds of musical performances, panel discussions and parties. I’ve been paying attention to an unofficial SXSW blog and the Twitter search for ‘SXSWtip’ to try to get a handle on things. I’ve also been using this excellent web app from SCHED to assemble a schedule of what I plan to attend.
Posting may be light over the next week–we’ll see how it goes.
