14 arts & entertainment September 7, 2011 > Over the Edge A WALK IN THE SNOW “As Trudeau Retires from Politics One Man Must Move on with His Life As Well’ PAUL STRICKLAND CONTRIBUTOR Martin’s mom and dad had told him he’d have to leave his childhood home in Palliser Springs, now that he was almost forty, and find his own place to live. He was sorting through papers in his room, hoping to save some. But he was falling behind, and it was clear there wasn’t going to be time to complete this task. “Rents are too high now,” he pleaded with his dad. “Tough,” his dad responded. Martin’s parents had been looking for a room elsewhere in the city to put him into, as they said he was getting to be a burden for them and for society to care for. His mom said he might be able to come back once in a while to housesit when they were on holidays. On the radio, the news was that Prime Minister Trudeau, after taking a long walk in the snow, had come to a decision and announced his intention to resign that summer. Martin wondered what the quality of the falling snow was in Ottawa that time of year — whether it was fluffy, or like falling powder, or like small pellets. He’d heard that some Inuit and Siberian Native tribes have more than sixty different names for different types of snow. In despair, Martin walked down to the Rhodes Hotel pub, across the tracks and not far from the Via Rail depot. The passenger train left for Petropolis at 4:30 every morning and returned at 1:30 a.m. A Palliser Springs resident could spend the whole day in Petropolis shopping and visiting with friends without having to go the expense of a hotel room for an overnight stay. On arriving at The Rhodes, Martin ordered singles and then four or five pints, as he read a newspaper at his terrycloth-covered little table in the seedy hotel. He saw a velvet tapestry featuring a dark-coloured lion on the wall across the pub. He was getting bleary-eyed, but, before he became really intoxicated, In his inebriation he imagined the heads of these meters as small, closed aquariums with tiny goldfish... he saw, a few tables away, a group of five young men. Two had unkempt beards. They were moving about small quantities of a powdered substance over the pages of an open magazine. “Can we call you a cab, sir?” the server asked. Martin took the hint, said, “No, I can walk,” and left. He walked under the Canadian Pacific Railway tracks to the other side of downtown through what was locally called ‘The Subway.’ It was a tunnel about 80 metres long that was painted greyish-blue and led from the Via station to some hotels on the south side of Palliser Springs’ downtown core, such as the Selkirk and the Baronial. It had surprisingly few graffiti: The Palliser Springs Police Service patrolled it frequently, and the small industrial city’s inhabitants were hard-working adherents to conservative religious values whose children were not normally given to defacing public property. Once a visiting Montreal friend, accustomed to his city’s sophisticated metro, laughed when Martin showed him down into Palliser Springs’ ‘Subway’, a mere short tunnel for pedestrians with no tracks or subway cars. Martin decided to skip going into the beverage rooms of the Selkirk and the Baronial to look for friends or colleagues from his former workplace. Instead he went window-shopping, and noted the still winter- oriented display at Eaton’s. Spring fashions evidently hadn’t arrived yet. At the base of the mannequins of slim women wearing fashionable winter coats was lots of fluff -- finely shredded clear plastic that was a reasonable approximation of snow. ONLINE SOURCE He looked at parking meters. In his inebriation he imagined the heads of these meters as small, closed aquariums with tiny goldfish, with an accumulation of fluffy soap flakes at the base. This sediment of soap flakes was easily stirred up into a simulated submarine snowstorm when the fish swam down too close to it or when Martin once tried to shake one of the meters. In one he fancied he saw the head of a smiling Prime Minister Trudeau bobbing up down in the aquarium water amid the soap flakes imitating snowflakes. Trying to focus again, Martin wondered what he was going to do, and where he would eventually stay. He kicked at hard, dirty patches of snow on the sidewalks created by intermittent Chinooks that usually lasted only a short time, but still long enough to melt some snow and create icy hazards for pedestrians. Martin decided to jaywalk across Third Avenue just a little up the hill from Eaton’s to the 24-hour doughnut shop on the other side. Everyone had gone home from work: Only a couple of cars were still parked on the business street. Martin belatedly noticed a dirty white 1960s pickup truck speeding down the hill and bearing down towards him. It hit one curb, and then bounced back into travel lanes and next into the curb on the opposite side of Third Avenue. He noticed an unkempt bearded young man at the wheel and others in the passenger seat. He vaguely remembered them. Now the truck was headed directly towards him. He dove for the sidewalk in front of the doughnut shop, but not fast enough. SLEEP-DEPRIVED SONGWRITING WITH WAX MANNEQUIN Hamilton-Based Singer-Songwriter Chris Adeney Finds Inspiration on the Road DYLAN WILKS NEXUS VICTORIA (CUP) — The best way Hamilton-based indie singer/songwriter Chris Adeney can capture the strange stories of his tours as Wax Mannequin may be through sleep deprivation. “Sleep is really sporadic,” he says from on the road. “I’ve reached the hallucinatory stage of the tour. I find it hard napping when there are big weird people sitting next to me.” Adeney is taking Grey- hound buses for part of his current tour in support of Hear Some Evil, an EP written and performed with Canadian indie band The Burning Hell. Adeney says the bus is actually a great opportunity for him to delve into his stories of be- ing on the road before he forgets them. “My memory is a bit spotty so I want to get a lot of these stories written down,” he says. “It’s been a very productive project so far, and at the very least it’s given me a jumpstart to my songwriting as well. What I’m lacking in sleep I’m making up for in lucid-delu- sional rambling writing.” Time spent alone also al- lows Adeney to reflect on towns he visits and the stories surrounding them. He feels that whenever he returns to a town, he’s continuing a life that he’s spread out through a number of years. “T revisit people that I’ve met and fallen in love with,” he says. “Other musicians and friends of mine, we kind of pick up where we've left off like no time has passed.” But the biggest challenge for Adeney on this tour isn’t the lack of sleep or a spotty memory — it’s spending such a prolonged amount of time away from his 10-month-old son. “Tm having a great time at the shows and with the people but it’s emotionally taxing being away from my little guy for so long,” says Adeney. “I Skype; I see him on the Internet every day and he’s learning new stuff and changing while I’m not there, so I feel I’m missing a bit of it.” Despite the emotional taxation, Adeney is glad to be out on the road with his music and is excited about his life as a father. Wax Mannequin has come a long way since back in his younger years, when Adeney toured across Canada in a 1991 Honda Civic with a wooden window. “Thad to smash it right be- fore a gig to get my drum machine out,” says Adeney. “I had locked it inside with my keys. I constructed a wooden window the next day and drove home with it. It was a terrible blind spot but it stopped the winter cold from freezing me all the way home.”