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The Last Morning

Mon, 20 Feb 2012, 08:50 PM (-06:00)

1. Leaving for the Airport

We suggested that it made sense for us to take a taxi to the airport in the morning. Our flight was to leave at 6:00am, and (doing the math) that meant leaving for the airport at 3:30am. Why get up and drive us, when we can just call a taxi?

They would hear none of it.

So at 2:45 on our last morning in Ottawa, my father’s alarm clock went off, giving him enough time to dress and heat some water for tea before he promised to knock on our bedroom door.

Trudy had taken a shower the night before, so the only threat to our on-time departure was me. But thanks to a blanket slipping off the bed and a resulting dream about sleeping in a tent with ice falling in thru the ceiling, I was up even earlier and took my shower in a flash.

We left for the airport on time.

2. Waving Goodbye

Not only would they have nothing to do with us calling a taxi that morning, but they also refused to drop us off at the curb. They wanted to walk in with us.

So after a bit of driving around, we found a parking spot in the garage. It was far in the back—perhaps as far from the terminal as you can get in that place. We had plenty of time.

We all got out of the car and walked in. They showed us the way to the international check-in counter, a path they evidently know well.

They worried about the line moving slowly, although we had plenty of time. And they tried to give us some (Canadian) cash for snacks. And they stood by patiently on the far side of the barricades as we filled out paperwork and waited in line.

They stood there watching us, smiling and waving. We smiled and waved back just before we disappeared around the corner.

Goodbye, Dad. Goodbye, Khadija. Thanks for the wonderful time.

Beaver Tails

Mon, 20 Feb 2012, 05:41 PM (-06:00)

Happy to be off the ice with our boots attached firmly to the ground, we walked up the stairs to Confederation Park. We wanted to see the big ice sculptures now that they were finished.

There was a galloping horse. There was a modernistic swirl that looped out at us with a reclining nude sitting foremost. There was a great head with frozen construction workers crawling in and out of it. There was another version of the owl that had tipped over and broken during the two-hour competition. And there was a teddy bear with a short sword fending off a nightmare as a boy slept with his head on his pillow.

But perhaps most significantly, there were the Beaver Tails: a hot, flat tail of dough with liquid maple surgary syrup running off the edges for me, a hot tail with chocolate and hazelnut smeared on top for the fair and industrious Trudy.

Did I say chocolate and hazelnut?

Yes, Trudy’s snack had chocolate and hazelnut dripping off the sides. But lo, there was more. As I finished devouring my maple delight, I looked up at Trudy, and she smiled. She smiled at me as she was chowing down on her chocolate delight, her lips and cheeks decorated in chocolate, her smile radiating sheer undiluted joy.

If only there had been space left on the camera.

Skating Along Rideau Canal

Mon, 20 Feb 2012, 08:55 AM (-06:00)

We had the whole day to kill.

Ok, we got our start around noon, and the sun goes down early in Ottawa in winter. So we didn’t really have the whole day, more like several hours.

So… we had several hours to kill. We planned to spend the time skating on the Rideau Canal, on the world’s longest skating rink.

“Only two hours?” Trudy asked. “Should we rent the skates for four hours, instead?”

“I think that’ll be plenty,” I said.

Skates on, we inched our way along the canal from distance marker to distance marker. As Canadians came whizzing by, we plodded our way like a couple of … Texans on ice skates.

Trudy hung on to my arm. I pulled us along so that we might make it to Fifth Street for beaver tails, hot drinks and a place to sit next to a fire. But our going was slow, and our feet got sore quickly. We stopped for frequent breaks.

“I’ll rest here,” Trudy would say, leaning against the wall of the canal. “You go skate by yourself for a while.”

So I would skate up the canal, always just at the edge of spectacular catastrophe (and once arriving there). And then I’d skate back to where Trudy was still leaning against the wall in her green coat and blue hat with a smile on her face. And then we’d continue upstream.

It went on this way for what seemed a long distance, but after an hour we turned around and could easily see the bridge where we had rented our skates. In that hour, we had not come very far. We certainly didn’t make it to Fifth Street. And now it was time to head back.

So we turned around and headed back. Skate. Rest. Skate. Rest.

When we finally returned to the bridge, it seemed as if we had been at it for a very long time. Our feet were sore. Our shirts were wet with sweat. And it was starting to get cold, because the sun was going down.

We stood in line to return our skates. We put our boots back on. And we walked across the frozen canal to the stairs leading up to Confederation Park.

Trudy turned to me and said, “I feel so stable, now!”

We had the whole day to kill. We spent just over two hours on the ice. And with that, our day was pretty much done.

Where in the World?

Mon, 20 Feb 2012, 08:26 AM (-06:00)

The OC Transpo bus was full from front to back. All the seats were taken, and people were standing in the aisle.

When the bus pulled up to a stop, a short, quiet woman stood up. But it took her so long to weave her way thru the crowd of people that when she got to the door, it was too late. She pushed on the doors, but they wouldn’t open. The bus began to pull back into the street.

A teenager was standing nearby. Although the quiet woman said nothing, he spoke up for her.

“Excuse me! Excuse me, sir,” he shouted to the driver far in the front of the bus.

“Excuse me! Door, sir,” he shouted louder as the bus continued rolling.

On the second shout, the driver stopped the bus. The quiet woman pushed on the door. The light turned green. The door opened. And she stepped out onto the snow-covered sidewalk.

Where in the world would a teenage boy standing in a crowded city bus do this? Where would a kid shout, “Excuse me!” to speak up for a woman who doesn’t speak up for herself and do it politely? And where in the world would that teenager shout out even louder equally politely when he wasn’t heard the first time?

In Canada.

Artists on the Bus

Sun, 19 Feb 2012, 11:37 PM (-06:00)

He walked down the aisle from the front of the OC Transpo bus. He had long, curly grey hair that fell around his shoulders. He had two scarves—a black and yellow one hanging down his front and a white one tied tightly around his neck.

When he got to the middle of the bus, he stopped. The bus started moving, and he grabbed onto the handrails. After a few minutes, he was talking to two teenagers whom he clearly didn’t know.

They were standing near the back exit door, and one of them started talking about art.

Talking about art! This old guy with the long, gray hair was standing there in the middle of a city bus talking to these two kids about art.

They talked about oil paint. They talked about watercolors. They talked about technique, about laying down a base layer of white. They talked about the kinds of canvases they use.

The kid doing most of the talking was particularly interested in talking about canvas.

“I got arrested,” he said. “The police caught me, and so now I do all my painting on canvas.”

Walking Along Rideau Canal

Sun, 19 Feb 2012, 11:08 PM (-06:00)

From the bed races, we decided to walk on the canal.

Skaters zoomed by, hands clasped behind their backs. Or they came by pulling toboggans loaded with boots and backpacks and sleepy kids. A few skated by slowly and tentatively, but the learners were few and the experts were many. Walkers such as us were virtually nowhere to be seen.

There were teenagers and school kids sprinting and horsing around. There were moms with babies and dads with sons chasing them. There were one-person sleighs (yes, sleighs). There were people from the neighborhoods sitting on drifts of snow putting on their skates.

And to our relief, there were places to eat out there on the ice. Places where you could get paninis and pizza and hot chocolate and beaver tails and maple taffy on ice. There was a place where you could taste of wine. And there were fire pits where you could warm your hands, although to Canadians this just-below-freezing day must have hardly qualified as cold.

We stayed to the far right, walking along a kind of ice/snow sidewalk against the edge of the canal. The kilometer markers called out the remaining distance to the Rideau Canal Locks: 7.2, 7.0, 5.4, 2.8, …

When we got to the 0.2 marker, the crowd was thick. There were people patiently standing in a neat line waiting to turn in their rental skates. And there were people crowding the stairs that led up from the canal to Confederation Park.

In the time we had left (for the sun was now going down, and it was beginning to get cold in earnest), we walked up to the park to see the ice sculptors at work. Whereas we had seen the two-hour competition the day before, this was the long-form event. There were 10 hours remaining on the countdown clock as they chiseled and cut and polished and shined their masterpieces.

We were done with the canal for the day, but tomorrow was supposed to be sunny, so we planned to return and to rent skates ourselves.

Bed Races

Sun, 19 Feb 2012, 10:21 PM (-06:00)

When we last spoke, I was talking about a trip we took to Ottawa. It’s been a while now since we returned, but my story is only slowly coming out.

1. Getting Up Late

On the morning of the third day, my father was waiting for us when we finally rolled out of bed. The eggs were scrambled. The spices were queued up. The onions were diced. He was ready to go while we blissfully slept late. And because he didn’t know our intent that morning and probably doesn’t know our propensity for sleep, he was evidently standing at the ready in the kitchen for hours.

2. The Race

The have this tradition of bed races as part of Winterlude in Ottawa. Teams of five people enter the competition with decorated four-poster metal beds mounted on bicycle tires, and they race the beds up and down Dows Lake. Our plan on Saturday was to watch the races.

When we got there, bundled in layers unknown to the common Texan, they were lining up the beds for a parade past the grandstands. And then they raced the beds in six heats of four beds with four people pushing each bed with one lucky team member riding on top.

Four by four they raced down the frozen lake. There was a bed decorated as a fire truck. There was one as a hearse, complete with flowers. There were teams of doctors in lab coats pushing what perhaps was meant to be a hospital bed. And there were even some folks dressed up as Texas cowboys pushing a bed decorated with red, white and blue balloons.

We stood there on the ice behind the barrier along the stretch where the beds raced and watched the first round of heats until we’d seen them all dash across the red finish line painted on the ice.

3. The Surveyor

There was this tall, official looking guy wandering among the crowd at the races. He was walking up and down, holding a tall pole with a ruler on the side and some kind of mirror on top. As the fair and industrious Trudy took pictures of the beds, he walked up behind us.

I turned around and looked at him. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

So I asked about the pole and the ruler painted down the side and about the mirror on the top. And he explained that he was taking measurements of the ice. He and a colleague on the shore with a laser theodolite were recording the deflection of the ice as people showed up during the day.

“Do you prefer inches or centimeters?” he asked me.

“Either,” I lied.

He explained how the ice was floating on about three meters of water. And he said how thick it was that day. (They take core samples, and you have to watch out for the holes when you’re skating.) And he explained that if the ice deflected more than two inches, they would have to tell the crowd to spread out. And finally he explained that their measurements that day showed a deflection of 28 millimeters.

So we were safe. He smiled and turned to walk back towards the starting line.

We’ll Be Home Soon

Sun, 12 Feb 2012, 08:15 PM (-06:00)

Rideau Center is just down the street from Chateau Laurier. There, we could catch the #7 or the #12 back to the condo.

Although it was late on a Friday night, the steets and sidewalks of downtown Ottawa were still busy. There was a crowd at the OC Transpo bus stop when we got there.

I don’t remember which bus we caught. We took the first one. It had been a long evening, and we had been on our feet most of the time. We didn’t particularly feel like standing outside in a Canadian winter (even though to the Canadians standing beside us the weather was undoubtedly mild).

Once on the bus, we sat down.

Trudy’s phone rang. It was Dad.

“Where are you?” he asked.

It is late on a Friday night. The kids are not home. They are taking public transportation in a strange town. They might be lost. Or they might be having trouble.

My father is an impeccable host. He thinks of his guests’ welfare with bottomless, endearing warmth. And he was worried about us. About his 52 year old son. About the fair and industrious Trudy.

“We’re on the bus,” Trudy said. “Don’t worry. We’ll be home soon.”

A Bus Across the River

Sun, 12 Feb 2012, 07:57 PM (-06:00)

The museum was free that evening. After the fireworks, we went inside to warm up, eat some of our snacks and rest our feet. There was an exhibit upstairs about the Canadian Arctic Expedition. We wandered thru and took our time.

At some point, the fair and industrious Trudy looked at me and said, “We probably should take the bus back to Ottawa now.”

There was supposed to be a Snow Bus taking people across the river for free during Winterlude, but the people at the front desk of the museum said that it had stopped running hours before.

“You can catch the 77,” they said, “Right outside. It comes in three minutes.”

We quickly pulled on our coats, mittens and backpacks and dashed out.

At the street, there was no sign of the 77. In fact, there was no sign of any OC Transpo buses, much less the 77. Just two Gatineau buses, and we didn’t know where they were going.

We turned and walked up the hill to where we saw another bus in the distance.

“Excuse me,” I said to a woman who was directing people onto what looked like a tour bus. She had a Winterlude logo on the back of her coat. “Excuse me, do you know where we can catch the 77 bus to Ottawa?”

She said, “I think you catch it down there,” she said, pointing vaguely downhill. “But I’m not sure. Where are you going?”

“Chateau Laurier.”

She stood silently for a moment and then said, “Take this bus,” pointing to the tour bus by the curb.

“Do we need tickets?”

“Just don’t ask,” she said with a smile on her face. “Get on.” And she turned around and walked away.

So we got in line behind a couple of people in black suits and black dresses with black winter coats and fancy black scarfs wrapped around their collars. They must have just come from the Taste of Winterlude wine tasting inside the museum—the gathering with candles and low lighting and a wine bar beside the immense two-story windows that looked out onto the lake. (What a view of the fireworks they must have had.)

We got on with our jeans and our down coats and our puffy mittens and our jeans and waffle-stomping boots. We followed the black-suiters toward the back of the bus. They all knew each other and were talking about business and about school years before in Toronto and about nightlife in Ottawa.

There were plenty of empty seats, so we sat down toward the back. Quietly, not asking questions.

And sure enough, the bus pulled away from the curb and drove along the river up Rue Laurier. It passed a bus stop which was lined with people. The sign said, 77. They were waiting for the bus we were supposed to take. On the other hand, the bus we did take turned onto the Pont Macdonald Cartier and drove across the Ottawa River where in a few minutes it dropped us all off at Chateau Laurier.

Fireworks Spectacle

Sun, 12 Feb 2012, 07:18 PM (-06:00)

On the evening before the Winterlude fireworks, Dad and Khadija took us to eat at Chez Fatima in Gatineau, Quebec, across the river from Ottawa. After the feast, they drove home, and we walked the few blocks to the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

There on sloping, snow-covered lawns leading to the edge of the Ottawa River, people were gathering to watch what what was supposed to be a spectacle.

There were black-hooded walkers on tall stilts draping red flowing flags over the heads of anyone passing by. And there were two fife-and-drum corps marching in the plaza. There were great spotlights shining thru the falling snow, lighting up the low clouds. And in the background across the river stood the many towers of Parliament Hill.

There were some welcoming speeches, and there was some music on a stage. Then (right on time), as the snow fell and the spotlights swept the sky, the show began.

There were greens and blues. There were whites and reds and oranges. There were great explosions that echoed off the shore and lit up the sky. There were fountains spouting upward and glowing tracers drifting downward all the way to the river’s ice. There were purple spikes launched from the bridge and twisting rocket contrails. There were spinning curlicues and jets of fire that flew out over the river.

There were columns of sparkling white light that exploded into mayhem.

And there was something that I’ve never imagined possible—a waterfall of white fire running off the edge of the bridge all the way across the frozen river from Ontario to Quebec.

After a while the crowd fell silent. The show just kept going. The fireworks just kept coming. Rockets kept exploding. Flares kept flying. It was indeed a spectacle, just as they had promised.