some of this is true

I have nothing to say today. Look and some pretty pictures instead . . .

Prince George

When I say I had never spent Christmas in a small town before, that’s not exactly true — not at all, in fact. When I was a child, I had a grandgfather in the community of Creston in southwestern British Columbia, not far from the U.S. border and — a fact I did not know at the time — a short drive away from the polygamous community of Bountiful, which you may have heard of in the news. And we would drive there, most summers and every couple of years at Christmas, through the Crowsnest Pass on winding mountain roads. You also may have seen Creston on those old television ads for Kokanee beer, the guy with the blue house next to the brew house, the rhyming and always someone in the commercial who didn’t quite get the back-and-forth, and it was true, there was that house, and it was blue, sitting inside the brewery’s fence. We went and checked one day.

But since entering my adult years, Christmas has for the most part been in Calgary,
except for two years in a row working through the holidays in Halifax, which is small enough but it’s no Creston (pop. 5,000), where there was a bird sanctuary but no MacDonald’s, and a bakery with the best butterhorns you’ve ever tasted.

This year, after a few days in Calgary at home with family and friends and beers and snow, Christa, her brother and I drove up on HIghway 22 more than five hours on mostly straight roads, our route taking us west enough from Edmonton that the provincial capital might not have existed at all, through Mayerthorpe, which you also might have heard about on the news, and we arrived in Whitecourt sometime in the late afternoon on Christmas Eve.

Whitecourt has a population of 10,000 people but driving through the downtown it somehow feels like less. The Wal-Mart and Canadian Tire near the row of gas stations and hotels along the main highway might have stolen some of the life out of the town centre, black holes sucking the community away from itself, which is what happens when they talk about progress. Or perhaps I’m reading into things. It’s a mill town, and there is steam rising above factory-sized buildings sprinkled through town, and like any mill town, there have been layoffs, even a few in the past year, but these are the times we’re in.

And it’s in Whitecourt that I found myself holding a long piece of black piping with a potato stuffed in one end, and at the other, where the pipe widens out to form a chamber of sorts, the fumes of fragarent hairspray curling around themselves in the cold darkness.

It was cold, but not cold enough that you couldn’t take your mits off for a second to put your thumb and middle finger on either side of a small metal switch, and then you snap like you would to music, which rubs a flint inside the chamber. The flint lights a spark and the spark ignites the hairspray, and if only to prove true all of those urban legends about hairspray lighting people’s hair on fire (Michael Jackson notwithstanding), a deafening crack sends the potato flying into the distance.

That was after the ATVs and the tobogganing and before the buffet-style dinner on the side of a hill on the outskirts of town, parents of in-laws of in-laws, and it was a few days after the turkey and the presents and the gingerbread cookies, and another day still after the swiss cheese fondu, and it was Whitecourt, Christmas in a small town, and it was good.

I am in the private oral surgery just a few blocks away from my house, watching the large blue and yellow fish swim in the large tank in the wall, around in circles.

A nurse in that aqua-marine uniform calls my name and shows me into the operating room. She makes small talk, about the weather, about it still being summer this late in September, about no rain, and I joke that I’ll be too out of it today to enjoy it, and she laughs in a way that tells me she completely agrees.

The surgeon comes in, Dr. Reichman, who looks more like a school guidance counselor or a kindergarten teacher than someone capable of ripping my mouth apart, not to mention, from what I can gather from the brochures in the waiting room, liposuction and chin augmentation.

After the hellos, everyone gets to work. A pad around my arm to monitor my blood pressure and pluse. An IV into my arm, starting with saline (a little bit of breakfast, he calls it), an oxygen tube around my nose so it will be easier to breath. And then the sedative.

“How fast does this work?”

-You’ll start to feel a little strange after about 30 seconds or so.

After about 10, my heads starts to feel like it’s falling inside of itself, drifting backwards away from the room, and I’m about to agree that I am, indeed, feeling a little strange, but there’s no time for that.

-James, wake up, the doctor says.

-Wake up, the nurse repeats.

It feels like I’ve been asleep for just a few seconds, but also for hours, a deep sleep without any dreams, so how could I tell, anyways. My eyes flutter open, and everything feels very blurry and slow, and while I can’t feel my mouth at the same time it feels like it’s the size of my entire head.

“Is it over? Already?”

The nurse takes my arm into a small room with a bed, lies me down, and straps ice packs against my cheeks.

“I’m so tired, I could go back to sleep,” I mumble out of a mouth full of gauze through lips that won’t move.

“What time is it?”

- 10:30-

“How did it go?”

-Everything went great.

“What about the nerve?” I say, even in this state worried about the one complication I was told about months ago.

- It’s just fine.

“What time is it?”

-10:35

There are detailed instructions, which I mostly forget, and a booklet and two out of four teeth in a paper cup and gauze and prescriptions, and then the nurse and Christa walk me out through a side door (I’m guessing to avoid scaring the other waiting patients with my battered face) and out to the car, and after a short drive to the pharmacy, which I also mostly forget, it’s into the apartment and onto the futon and almost immediately back to sleep.

A day later, and things are mostly fine, thanks to the codeine and ice packs and a diet that’s been mostly jell-o and pudding and juice and pureed soup. A little puffy, a little bruised, but I’m mostly no worse for wear, but four teeth lighter, and perhaps a little less wise.

I am in the Safeway exactly five blocks away from my second-floor apartment, just home from work, and in my black plastic shopping basket I have the following, which is few enough for the express lane:

1 jar reduced-fat smooth peanut butter
1 can corn niblets
2 salmon steaks
1 can frozen orange concentrate
1 carton strawberries

I am standing in a short line with my headphones on when an old man with grey hair and a beard that was perfectly shaped as if moulded out of clay hurries past me and places a large green watermelon on the conveyor belt.

He must be in a hurry, I think, and what does it matter anyway on this pleasant nearly-fall evening, so I let him past without saying anything.

He then turns towards me with the wrinkles on his face swirling about in confusion, and in a thick Greek accent says, “Go ahead! You were first, I just didn’t want to carry it,” while motioning with crude sign language, which, if I couldn’t hear him, I’d think meant he was pregnant.

“Well, either way . . .” I say, trailing off.

“No, no,” he says, “you can’t let everyone past, because then another goes past, and then another and another,” and now his hands are flicking up and down like he’s trying to shake off a bee, “and then people think you’re a loser.”

“Well, I’m in no hurry,” is all I can think to say, and then out of obedience more than to assert myself, I take back my place in line and empty out the basket, keeping the cans together because I’ll want those double bagged.

“You should always be in a hurry, life is a hurry,” he says. “It’s all a hurry.”

And then the cashier interrupts and rings up my total and I hand her my credit card and my frequent shopper card, and the old man is now talking to the woman behind him, giving her another piece of wisdom no doubt, so I pick up my bags and carry them on my bike to my apartment to broil the salmon until it’s too dry and the rice is undercooked and I think about all that I’ve learned today.

We are in a small wooden building, Christa and I, that smells of sawdust on the rolling farmland in western Idaho, where they grow wheat and canola and barley and hay, but not potatoes, which I know is what you were thinking. It is hot, nearly 40 degrees, and that’s what it’s been like since we left Canada. That was a week ago.

That’s when we hear it: “Real America.” It’s how the woman here describes this place we’re standing in, a chainsaw carving studio and giftshop on the side of a highway next to the world’s largest beagle, which doubles as a bed and breakfast and you can sleep in the dog’s head. The small black wooden dog carving outside the front door — they’re going to put that in the Lewis and Clark exhibit in some museum. Apparently they took a dog.

Real America. The woman who runs this place with her husband — he’s the one that carved the world’s largest beagle, and I imagine the smaller dog next to it, and the fire hydrant, which of course is a washroom — is telling us about a British comedian who came through a while back making a documentary about non-corporate America. He visited places like this, and that’s what he called it: The Real America. And here we are.

She seemed to agree that the places we were seeing qualified as The Real America as we travelled along the Washington-Oregon border, with a small taste of Idaho, although I’m not sure exactly what that would look like.

On the first night, we ended up drinking at the Oasis Tavern in a town called Castle Rock, where the churches work out to about one for every 200 people. The bar is decorated in a Caribbean theme, which might be for Jake’s 21st birthday party (for which we are each handed a Jell-O shot), or it might just be the way it is here every night. There is a wall of knives on one end of the bar. You can pay a quarter to try winning one of them. In a bar. While drinking beer.

We went to Portland and saw burlesque and fire dancers and bought late-night donuts from a guy with death-metal hair who seemed genuinely sad we didn’t know that you can’t fill a cake donut with cream.

In Pendleton there was a tour of the underground, which are effectively dark basements built by Chinese workers who were forced to live in them next to a few businesses and speakeasies, and they have mannequins because they wanted it to look authentic, and then we stayed in a hotel converted from a brothel that closed down 50 years ago.

In 1929, someone decided to build a war memorial in Maryhill, and building a replica of Stonehenge sounded like a good idea, except not the falling apart version of Stonehenge but what the original might have looked like.

There were the wineries of Walla Walla, and a museum filled with a retiree’s own surreal and dadaist art. An actual piece of the Oregon trail, and probably a fake wagon sitting in the worn-down lines in the grass. A collection of old highway memorabilia in Pomeroy, which actually turned out to be in this guy’s house, but he invited us in for a look anyway.

In Pullman there was the one-room anthropology museum and, oddly enough, sushi that would give a lot of Vancouver’s restaurants a run for their money, and the old printing presses and Linotype machines at the newspaper museum in nearby Palouse.

In Garfield we had dinner with a real American family, who operated the bed and breakfast we were staying in (sharing a bathroom with her 95-year-old father, Willard) because the only restaurant in Garfield is closed on Mondays. The next day we looked at the hundreds of cars rotting on Willard’s property just outside of town.

There was the petrified forest in Ellensburg, which is effectively a desert where there were rattlesnakes and lizards and at least one cactus.

A few decades ago, the lumber town of Leavenworth, Wash., was dying as the forestry industry collapsed, so someone decided to turn it into a Bavarian-style tourist trap with a nutcracker museum and many terrible tourists shops, but the food was some of the best we had, even in a town so bizarre.

And there were other things, too. Exploring volcanoes and waterfalls, small-town museums that compared Obama to Lincoln, drunk Americans looking for a fight, a wool mill, a working monastery, the pub where the waitress “could tell by looking at you that you’re not from here,” a bacon donut, lots of swimming in rivers and streams.

I don’t know if it was The Real America, or how we’d know even if it was, but the woman at the Dog Bark Park seemed to think we were on the right track as we saw this small slice of just three states, just a sliver of the country, and I suppose that’s as good a gauge as any.