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January 14, 2009

Barry Kennedy returns to Discovery Channel for season 2 of OUT IN THE COLD, premiering January 2009

Join host Barry Kennedy as he embraces freezing temperatures on a cross-country ride from the Yukon tundra to iceberg alley in Newfoundland.  With back-to-back half-hour episodes, the six-part series OUT IN THE COLD premieres on Discovery Channel in January 2009.

Go to discoverychannel.ca for TV listings and info on the show

Advice From the Ice

Midnight. Midwinter. Dawson City, Yukon. Advice is flowing freely. . . .

Opinions come thick and furious in the north, relentless tormenting swarms like the summer blackflies that so clog eyes and nostrils caribou are driven in panicky headlong flight to their deaths. But our four-man crew is bearing up, refusing to bolt. The bar is called The Pit, for all obvious reasons, and serious counsel is on tap. (click ‘more’ tab to continue reading)

We’re up here to film, and as a bonus have off-hours to meet the locals—friendly gap- and gold-toothed prospectors and other residents here of a Friday night for a little talk, a little drink, maybe a dance and a cuddle once the insulated coveralls and the parkas are shed. Which is quickly. It’s hellish hot indoors north of sixty, all public places kept blazing as though to soften the underlying permafrost for when the new motherlode is discovered and the staff can abandon their posts to start tearing up the floorboards. Smoking is still allowed most places in Dawson, in fact appears mandatory, and The Pit is as dense with noxious inhalants as the heart of a tire fire; back in the city two of our crew will be diagnosed with cancer of the hair.

I’ll call him Rat, because that’s what he calls himself and I have neither the heart nor the courage to ask for his ID. Actually, he prefers Old Rat, though he doesn’t look all that old to me—a hundred or so, maybe a youthful one-twenty. I feel as though I’ve known him for all of that.

Canada is a friendly place, as anyone from afar will tell you under direct interrogation. Also, Canadians are not normally shy about proffering their take on pretty much anything. But in both regards there seems to be a certain geographical clumping, a concentration of talent in the contradictory arenas of hospitality and telling you What’s What. Or maybe there’s no contradiction at all, perhaps an unsolicited broadside is merely an emotional dialect—a regional version of open arms, a demonstration of trust laid out there for anyone willing to listen. In any event, to my mind these centres are the Prairies, the Atlantic Provinces and the North. Granted, having been reared on the Prairies and being blessed with Newfie blood on my father’s side makes me an offensively biased observer, but there you have it. I feel at home in all three regions, whose similarities so far as I can tell are based on no more than a common heritage of governmental neglect and climatic maltreatment. But back to The Pit. . . .

Willy Nelson’s on the juke, rationing out his own advice to parents pondering whether to let their kids grow up to be cowboys, in the process drowning out Old Rat, who has reached the upper edge of his screaming envelope and is compensating by way of endless repetition. For the locals, the point of the evening’s exercise seems to be to put us at ease, grease the skids to help us fit in, and it’s working. Not that I’m worried in the slightest for the crew.

Cameraman Mike Boland is an old friend and has been decades shooting documentaries around the world, comfortable in any social situation so long as he doesn’t think he’s missing something elsewhere; Soundman Ed Krupa is an affable sort who at the moment is patiently explaining to a small group the purpose of the filters on his cigarettes; and Director Herrie ten Cate is Dutch—stick him up here for any length of time and he’ll have a workforce building dikes and a hundred designers sketching out farms for reclaimed Beaufort seabed. So my friends can handle themselves.

It’s me I’m worried about, the guy wearing Big Red, a gargantuan potbellied parka, a disturbing slash of scarlet in this monument to frozen earth tones. So many critical stares did I reap on entering that despite the supernova temperature I’ve retained the coat lest someone snap at the offence to good taste and reason and I need the sixty kilos of goose down to buy me some time once I go to ground under a swinging axe handle. Because that’s the plan I’ve settled on—duck, cover, and hope somebody can give me a lift to the hotel if the door to the emergency room’s frozen shut again as it was last night.

Abruptly, silence. The music has died, introducing the sink-hole feeling of having to fill dead air with legitimate conversation. Old Rat settles into his normal speaking voice, a baritone filtered through river gravel and Player’s Navy Cut. Finally his advice, which till now has been scattergun and chaotic, is starting to cohere. Best I can remember it’s all about the Move:

“Gotta stay on your toes ready to make the Move,” says he. “Down south you lost all your flexibility, think variation and experimentation are swear words. Up here we still got it. Don’t listen to any talk of northern tradition—no, man, the North is a shapeshifter.”

He continues in this vein awhile, making a fine case for leading an existence alive to serendipity and contingency, then without signalling swerves into another lane: “Takes some time to pick up on the separation of Church and State around here. Thing of it is, Church is what goes on at the bar and at home and the curling rink and anywhere we socialize, which includes actual churches, even though they’ve lost their sense of Church. And State is merely the state you find yourself in, which is another way of describing the way the world works or revolves or whatever it does when you’re not looking.”

As with all of us trying to convey beliefs strongly held but hard to articulate, by way of clarification Old Rat introduces an example:

“That’s why you got to keep two drinks going. To tie the Church and the State together. One drink sitting on the bar here at my elbow—to cover the religious aspects of a night out, like exerting your freedom and independence, arguing with your fellow churchgoers, being open to differences between people, all that. And another drink over there, on one of those tables full of folks by the dance floor—to cover the randomness of the universe that might get you into such a State that you need to dance. Casual as anything, you can walk over, pick up your drink and hold out your arm just like that. And if things work out—okay, the table I pointed at is a bad example, I been married to all them before—you can sit down after and soak in the experience with your dance partner without having to go running back to the bar for your drink, that anyhow has probably already been drunk while you were gone.”

I think I can root out his point, though as with all mining up here, not till after some blasting and clearing: Life is about sifting through, and settling on, options. So act on your selections while keeping to hand backups in case you have to run. Which is a bit of a contradiction to his initial line on letting it all fly—shapeshifters, by general understanding, don’t hedge their bets.

I trust his words nonetheless. Unfortunately, advice is easier to deal with in the abstract than in the concrete. I try mightily to follow Old Rat’s guidance, really I do. Order two drinks, plant one on the plywood bar, battle my way through the scrum of sweating hollering delirious men and women appearing and vanishing like wraiths amid the tobacco cumulus, reach the far side of the room and deposit the second drink on a table occupied by two ladies. Their indifference to my presence is so complete it has a certain regal magnificence, and I can only conclude it’s from shyness. Apparently not a debilitating form of the virus, since one of them summons the courage to clutch and maul Big Red while screaming something in what might be a language, and the other flicks a live cigarette butt that takes me on the ski pants just below the knee. But shy enough.

The load of shame I’m forced to hump makes the return trip endless and painful. There’s also the terrain to deal with—the building is a century joint long neglected and over the years has caved on one side, demanding an uphill hike across a plank floor awash in spilled beer cascading over submerged muddy gloves and toques. I arrive back at the bar stinky, tired, rejected, dejected. On the upside, the flicked butt has melted a hole in the synthetic fabric of my ski pants that tomorrow on camera should add a touch of authenticity to the episode. Or at least make me look more manly.

The juke’s back on and the house has returned to screaming. The din is astonishing, jaw-dropping. Were the roof removed, in no time we’d be up to our eyes in poultry and plumage as overflying birds succumbed to the antiaircraft barrage of sound and spiralled down into the searchlights. I’m uncertain of anything at this juncture, other than the need to ditch Big Red, which has proved much too socially inflammatory to be promenading around in. I stuff it between the bar and the rail, where it’s detectable only to those gentlemen on their hands and knees.

Old Rat blinks a couple times. It’s the first he’s seen me without the parka and the sight has him deeply concerned, as though the piece of gear had been part of my anatomy and I’ve been flayed and flensed on his watch. But he recovers quickly, revitalized by this new opening for advice. Actually, he must be tiring from dishing out guidance, since this fresh batch is so watered down it could be considered obvious by the uncharitable:

“Important to keep warm when you’re out in forty below.”

Sounds fishy to me, but I conceal my scepticism. Nod acknowledgment.

“What you need,” says Old Rat, “is to layer up. Start with the inside, next to your body, put a layer there, then another one on top of that and so on till you got the right insulation going for the conditions.”

It’s difficult to accept advice that’s diametrically opposed to intuition. And practise, for that matter—many years of first donning the outwear then ramming successive interior layers up the armholes and down my pants has left me untutored in the reverse, inside-to-outside method.

“Another thing,” he continues. “You might want to think about getting a parka.”

The comment lies there festering. I will not approach even just to poke it a little.

“Well,” I finally mutter. “I should be able to figure it out. I did grow up in Winnipeg.”

Unanticipated reaction: He starts to laugh.

“Heh. Winnipeg, eh? Heh-heh. Why didn’t you say? Heeheehee, no, no, no, whoowhoowhoo.”

Not here. Please, not here. Not in the Yukon. Over the years I’ve grown completely inured to disparaging comments about the climate in Winnipeg. I even smile and chuckle politely when people relate stories of tongues stuck to metal poles during their childhoods. Smile and chuckle at their innocence. We do not tell these stories in Winnipeg, these feeble lacklustre tales of losing a layer of skin and a few tastebuds. I personally went to school with seven individuals who by the age of nine had lost faces! Look this up in the archives: Winnipeg is the only Canadian city to have had a sitting Mayor succumb to the licking urge and leave behind on a bus stop pole his entire head and vertebrae down to the fourth thoracic. And finished his term!

Old Rat means well, and frankly I’m too disillusioned to get worked up. My head lowers and sweeps back and forth like a bison clearing snow to get at winter grass. “I thought you’d understand, O.R. You can’t laugh at Winnipeg while you’re living here. Not here you can’t.”

Perhaps my tone is stronger than I think, because Director Herrie looks terrified—a dozen men have gathered to listen, I’m on camera tomorrow, and we’re travelling with neither surgeon nor makeup girl. Months back I tried to convey to the Toronto producers the wisdom in travelling with a few spare hosts for emergencies such as this, but they fairly sneered at the idea, even when I tried to save them thousands in casting fees by proposing my brother and six cousins.

Anyhow, Old Rat is taking my point. His laughter is much subdued. He’s still Heeheeing and Whoowhooing, but very softly, and the tears are starting to dry on his cheeks.

“O.R.,” I say, sliding in close. “Gimme a break, brah. You can’t laugh at Winnipeg when you’re living in Dawson City.”

“Why not?” he levers in between his last Hee and Whoo.

“Your car?” I say. “O.R.? Your car?”

“What of it?”

“ Your car is dogs.”

“Eh?”

“Your car is dogs. You showed me last night. Eight canines that pull you around by a rope. Nobody can laugh at Winnipeg when the make and model of his car is dogs. Not Dodge, dogs. O.R., pay attention, man. Does this conversation make any sense to you—

‘Thinking about picking up a new car.’

‘Oh, yeah? What’re you driving these days?’

‘The one I got now is dogs.’

‘Oh yeah, that’s right. The black, white, brown, spotted, hairy car that you used to take to the Drive-In. Good vehicle, as I remember. On it’s last legs, is it?’

‘Got some miles in ’er yet, but with the price of gas these days, I can’t afford to run a vee-eight.’

‘You said the truth there. And I don’t know about you, but every time the wife tries to parallel park ours, all hell breaks loose, biting and snapping and whatnot. Why don’t you do what I do—keep the big one for work, and get one of those little SmartDogs for running around town.’”

The reaction is typically Northern. Just as I’m thinking of dropping flat and pulling Big Red over my tender regions, Old Rat giggles himself into a conniption fit and somebody proposes a toast to Winnipeg and someone else to the rest of Canada and a guy on all fours to the Queen, followed by a spiritual chant that goes on for a good thirty seconds in honour of politicians and the horses they ride in on. After which the ladies from the table arrive and fail to recognize me without Big Red. So it’s all to the good.

Next day, properly layered, we go to work, though it’s hard to keep a straight face using the word Work for spending time with people arse-over-eyes happy with where they live and what they do. And sometime during the day, while the camera turns—or whatever the hell digital cameras do, something about a nuclear fuel cell or whatever—it occurs to me there’s no real inconsistency inherent in O.R.’s philosophy. A little insurance in the form of options fits well with shapeshifting. Altering outlook and selecting a new route just makes sense in the face of fresh knowledge. It is those with no flexibility to altered circumstance we should run from. Perhaps to the North.

Piece of advice: Take a look around up here sometime. And remember to carry treats for the cars.

Barry Kennedy