Features | Craille Maguire Gillies

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Bringing Home the Bison

By Craille Maguire Gillies
Published in the Winter 2011 issue of Eighteen Bridges

One day last spring, at the height of calving season, Wes Olson pulled his white Parks Canada Ford F250 pick-up off a gravel road that winds through Grasslands National Park, near the Saskatchewan-Montana border. He grabbed his binoculars from the dashboard, and scanned the distance. The plains extended toward the horizon like an inland sea. Both the outside and inside of Olson’s truck were caked in mud—it was the wettest spring on record—but he was immaculate in faded green jeans and a matching Parks Canada shirt.

Olson drives this route often to check on the herd of almost 200 plains bison that are scattered across the park’s West Block, an area of 44,000 hectares. For fun, he likes to wander into the short-grass prairie with a bag of alfalfa, call out, “Hey girls!” and have them come running toward him—a party trick that’s earned him a reputation as something of a bison whisperer. He shrugged off the suggestion. “They would forget pretty quickly if I didn’t have a treat.”

That afternoon all he had were binoculars and intuition. It was a windy day—channelling Wallace Stegner, the weather section of Parks Canada’s online visitor’s guide describes the wind as “part of the landscape”—and he figured the bison had sought shelter. Olson has a hawkish ability to spot wildlife; in the distance he noticed a few black specks. Bison are the biggest land animals in North America and weigh as much as the original Volkswagen Beetle. As they clustered two or three kilometres away near the base of a butte, they looked no bigger than flies.

In December 2005, seventy-one bison—30 male calves, 30 female calves, and 11 female yearlings—were relocated from Elk Island National Park, near Edmonton. They spent the winter in a 16-hectare parcel of land and, in late May, after surviving the “death months” of March and April before new vegetation grows, were released into the park’s West Block. They took off like race horses.

Though nomadic by nature, bison have internal compasses and if it weren’t for the fence surrounding their new home, the yearlings would have run all the way back to Elk Island—600 kilometres in all. “No one has ever successfully relocated an adult herd,” said Olson, who himself moved from Elk Island to Grasslands to work on the reintroduction program. “Bison always find their way home.” One year, when snow drifts reached the fence-line, an adventuresome male walked up the frozen ramp and headed off across the surrounding ranchland, where he hit another fence. Late last winter, a bull wandered out of the park; wardens found him in early spring.

As the bison settled in to their new home, wardens quietly observed how the herd established itself. Relocating an animal is like dropping a city kid to the far north and making him forage for food. The bison from Elk Island had never seen a river or a hill. They didn’t know what to eat. That first year, they tried to eat pincushion and prickly pear cacti, which are covered porcupine-like barbs. But some behaviours were inherent. The yearlings made a distinct lion-like roar before fighting, something they hadn’t yet learned from their elders in Elk Island, and which they usually start when they’re at least seven years old. Let loose in Grasslands, they mated almost four years earlier than an established herd would because, as Olson put it, “There was no one bigger around to beat them up.” (Yearling males, Olson wrote in his book Portraits of the Bison, “can be particularly obnoxious.”)

When full-grown, bison are all foreheads and barrel chests, with tiny, black pin-like eyes that give them a clumsy, bullish look of aggression. They have a crooked kind of grace and their insistent forward-leaning gallop has an uneven tempo, as if they are running to the beat of a broken metronome.

The Plains bison from Elk Island thrived in their new home down south and each year their numbers increased. With calving this spring it rose to 250. In the next year or two, wardens may need to cap the herd—this in an area that hadn’t seen bison since the 1880s. “At one time,” Olson said, “you could have lined up all the bison in North America and they would have gone around the world three times.”

When I first met Olson, he was describing the reintroduction program to a fourth-year biology class at the University of Saskatchewan, in Saskatoon. He wore a button-up shirt and jeans; a cell phone was holstered to his leather belt. He set his grey Stetson on the Arborite counter of the lab and fingered a remote control for the slide machine. Olson is soft-spoken by nature and has a dry, languid monotone that belies his enthusiasm. “I have a whole PowerPoint presentation on manure,” he told the class at one point, clicking through images.
He joined the Parks service at a time when “you only needed to know how to ride a horse—but high-school helped.” (He dropped out.) He came to Elk Island in 1984 and stayed for 24 years, ranching Plains bison and Canadian warmblood horses in his spare time. He claimed, to have done “a little undercover law enforcement” somewhere along the way, which he divulged with the briefest twinkle in his eyes so you could not quite tell if he was serious.

It was 8:30 a.m., but the class hung on to Olson’s every word. The park is surrounded by ranchland, and some students have ties to the area. When he announced that Grasslands had just made a deal to buy another ranch, a woman near the back of the lab said, “They’re my relatives.”

Grasslands National Park was established on principle in 1981, making it a newcomer to these parts—some cattle ranches go back generations. Two decades of bureaucratic wrangling and real estate negotiations followed, and it wasn’t officially declared a national park until 2001. Even still, it lay fallow for years before the bison arrived. “Ranchers in the area viewed the grass as money in the bank,” Olson told me later. Many locals were happy to see the land finally put to use.

Recently, the park held a town hall meeting with local farmers to talk about reintroducing fire to Grasslands, just like they reintroduced bison and black-footed ferrets. The burn plan would see 7,500 hectares go up in flames each year—a scary prospect for many ranchers. “In the last one hundred years,” Olson said, “the ranching population has been fighting fires to exist on this landscape. They’re rightly concerned about the use of fire in landscape management.”

Of course, there’s always been friction between commerce and conservation. Around the time plans for Grasslands National Park were being drawn, American geographer Deborah Popper and her husband Frank, now a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers, wrote a controversial article that suggested the Great Plains of the U.S. be turned into a “buffalo commons.” They predicted that vast parts of the American West and Midwest would depopulate in the coming generation. “At that point,” they wrote, “a new use for the region will emerge, one that is in fact so old that it predates the American presence.” In the 19th century people replaced bison; now, the thinking went, bison should replace people. The Great Plains, the Poppers believed, wouldn’t be able to sustain an agricultural livelihood anyway.

Over the years, Parks Canada has bought up a section here, a quarter-section there, gradually expanding like a prairie sky. Many ranchers see the importance of grasslands conservation and, for its part, the park tries hard to be a good neighbour, working with landowners and even restoring a large sign for the historic Dixon Ranch.

Reintroducing bison to graze these fields was not merely to restore a landscape stripped of bison and other animals such as the Plains grizzly and Prairie wolf. The cattle that graze this area have not overwintered around here since 1906. Bison, on the other hand, can live outdoors through the cruellest months when the temperature can drop to the minus 80s after wind chill and there are no barns or woods for shelter. The last balsam poplar died years ago and there is said to be only a handful of trees—black cottonwoods—left in the park.

Their return marks more than a half century of effort to restore the grasslands. Bison are a keystone species, sitting at the top of an arch that would collapse without them. In winter, they blaze trails that other animals follow and use their foreheads to plough through snow to get at vegetation, freeing up food for smaller creatures. Migrating birds nest in toque-like shells of their hair, which is the second warmest fibre in North America. (Musk-ox is the first), and Sprague’s pipits like to lay their eggs on desiccated bison patties. There are more white-tailed deer.

The park’s biodiversity has made it one of the most studied conservation areas in Canada. In summer, graduate students who have come here to gather data take up residence in the village of Val Marie (pop: 137). The park is home to rare mixed grass prairie, the country’s only black-tailed Prairie dog colonies, and native black-footed ferrets—adorable coon-eyed creatures that were reintroduced in 2010 and are one of the North America’s most endangered mammals. (Their main source of food: Prairie dogs.)

At times, however, there can seem to be no animals in sight—just grass, buttes, and a blue Prairie sky that wraps around the edges of the park. It is “a distance without limits,” as Wallace Stegner wrote of the Prairies in his classic book Wolf Willow. This is perhaps part of the appeal, and may explain Olson’s favourite place to see the lay of the land: a plateau about 45 minutes into Grasslands, in a clearing near a branding pen for the Dixon Ranch. The area is along the Continental Divide. Waters to the north, he notes, go to Hudson Bay. Those to the south, flow toward the Gulf of Mexico. That day last spring he pulled his truck, like he had many times before, to the empty pen, and got out to scan the horizon. People from Saskatchewan like to joke that you can watch your dog runaway for three days.

That windy afternoon there were no stray dogs and only one bison near enough to see—a six-year-old male lolling in the grass, his heft bringing to mind a furry Jabba the Hutt. (The grass here is so rich that some of the herd is becoming obese.) His presence was a totem. Without the park there would be no bison; without the bison, the park would be a very different place.

2011: 12/30
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Food for Thought

By Craille Maguire Gillies
Published in the October 2011 issue of The Walrus

Library-quiet, fluorescent lit and immaculate, Mirko Betti’s lab at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, looks like the kind of place a chef — in particular, a molecular gastronomist — would love. Instead of stoves and chopping blocks, a gas chromatography machine (to analyze nutrients in meat protein) occupies one nook. Elsewhere, grad students huddle around various equipment, testing the texture, taste, and nutritional content of animal protein, reducing the saltiness of meat here, increasing levels of omega-3 fatty acids there. “He likes to keep the space as clean as a kitchen,” one assistant says. Still, for the lab of a food scientist, it shows a conspicuous absence of anything edible.

Betti works as a professor in the university’s Department of Agriculture, Food, and Nutritional Science, where he develops new meat products and improves existing ones. Since only about 70 percent of a chicken is typically processed for food, he finds novel applications for the other 30 percent, such as a translucent film made from poultry by-products that brings to mind plastic wrap. By removing fat and myoglobin (a red protein that stores oxygen in muscle cells), he has converted dark meat salvaged from poultry wings, legs, and thighs into more sought-after white meat; and he’s currently trying to improve the taste of meat from animals that have undergone stress before slaughter. Some observers might question the ethics of tinkering with the food we eat, but for Betti it’s a matter of perspective. “I don’t like the word ‘natural,’” he says. “I like to say that nature modifies nature. We are within nature; we are not external observers.” (Such ruminations guide his work, but he considers them too complex to discuss in an interview. “Let’s not talk about nature,” he explains, “because then we’d have to get into Kant.”)

He’s also involved in a more fantastical concoction, as part of an international network of independent researchers working on in vitro meat, an idea once relegated to science fiction novels; think of the vat-grown flesh depicted in William Gibson’s 1984 novel, Neuromancer, or the transgenic ChickieNobs of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. These specialists, including stem cell experts, biologists, and food policy experts, hope to take an embryonic science from the lab to the supermarket. Contributions from food scientists like Betti — the only one doing this work in Canada — will be essential; if the stem cell researchers are the farmers, he is progressive chef Grant Achatz. “What I can do is make it taste as good or even better than what you’d find on the market,” he says.

Rooted in medical research, the science behind lab-grown meat is remarkably advanced. In the early twentieth century, a French biologist kept tissue cultured from an embryonic chicken heart alive for twenty years, and over the decades doctors have experimented with organ regeneration. In 2000, a scientist funded by NASA sliced a fillet from a live goldfish, placed it in a vat of embryonic cow blood, and watched it grow. University of Toronto bioengineer Milica Radisic nurses human heart tissue in her laboratory, and the acclaimed surgeon Anthony Atala generated a kidney on an enormous inkjet printer, laying down cells instead of ink. He also constructed a heart valve around biomaterial scaffolding; soon afterward, it was beating. As he said at the time, “It’s like baking a layer cake.”

Though driven by the quest to design the perfect food, Betti frames his research in ethical terms. “We’re already raising chickens only for their breasts,” he says, paraphrasing a prediction Winston Churchill made in 1932. “Why grow all those feathers?” With annual consumption of animal protein projected to hit sixty-five kilograms per person by 2050 and the world’s population expected to reach nine billion, the ecological and economic implications of satisfying appetites present staggering challenges. Raised in a vat rather than a pasture, in a soupy protein mixture that would make even the hungriest carnivore’s stomach churn, manufactured meat could still become a sustainable and humane solution. So far, though, the science remains largely conceptual. Only grown by a few stem cell researchers, in vitro meat has not advanced sufficiently to even resemble ground round, and is said to have the consistency of undercooked eggs. Betti estimates that he and his colleagues are a decade away from figuring out how to make, say, Swedish meatballs, and even further from perfecting a lab-grown steak.

Inventing a food that has long been imagined but never fully realized is why Betti got into food science, first taking interest in lab-grown meat in 2003. While finishing his Ph.D. at the University of Bologna, he read Futurizzazione, a manifesto by the Italian economist and political scientist Carlo Pelanda on the power of technology to transform society. Betti was intrigued by Pelanda’s passing mention of artificial meat, and dazzled by the notion of technology as salvation. “It gave me a philosophy or a way of thinking about technology and about life,” he says in his heavy accent, over an eggplant sandwich and sweet potato fries at a restaurant near the university. Dressed in a black houndstooth blazer, knit vest, and tie, with dark, shoulder-length hair, he resembles an Italian David Beckham. “Technology has the power to save — I really like the word ‘save’ — the world. It’s a Christian concept, but instead of God we have technology. It’s the language I use.” He glances down at the voice recorder, suddenly self-conscious. “I don’t want to say these things at the moment, because I’m writing a book.” (On another day, when pressed, he grows flustered: “I copyright this conversation.”)

The book will wed his philosophical ideas to his food research, although for Betti the two are already inextricably linked. “Mirko is one of the most creative researchers in the food science sector,” Pelanda says. “His need for philosophy is his driving force. Hope that he will survive a much narrower academic milieu. Help him.” On Betti’s website and his Facebook page, he quotes the Futurist Manifesto by Filippo Marinetti (whose 1932 Futurist Cookbook inspired ironic, avant-garde dinner parties, complete with towering meat skyscrapers and deep-fried roses): “There isno longer beauty except in the struggle. No more masterpieces without an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault against the unknown forces in order to overcome them and prostrate them before men.” In his spare time, Betti reads Amartya Sen and Isaac Asimov; if he weren’t a scientist, he wouldn’t mind writing science fiction: “Science can be boring,” he admits. He posted a copy of his well-received paper about in vitro meat, published in Innovative Food Science and Emerging Technologies, on his website under the heading “Metaphysics of Food.” (He has since changed it to “Cibus Next”; the word cibus means “food for men and animals” in Latin.)

“Without metaphysical old philosophy,” he says, “we wouldn’t have science. Every scientist is a philosopher. Science is an ideology, no different from any other ideology, though it’s much more powerful. I’m probably a heretic saying this in a science community.” He looks apologetic, then adds, “It’s a kind of truth.” His beliefs may be unorthodox — but so is rib-eye grown in a test tube.

2011: 10/13
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The New Phonographers

Urban Sound Ecology is mapping the city one digital recording at a time
By Craille Maguire Gillies
Published April 7, 2011 on Toronto Standard

Leaving behind the whir and din of a JJ Bean coffee shop on a desolate, industrial street in East Vancouver, Max Ritts and I walked to the corner of a quiet, nondescript intersection and made a right. He flipped the switch on his palm-sized Edirol R-09 recorder as we turned away from the traffic and pedestrians of Gastown, with its fashion boutiques, tourist shops and restaurants to the west. The homeless, addicted and down on their luck in the Downtown Eastside were to the east.

With Ritts holding the Edirol in front of him like a dowser, we headed down an alleyway. A chain-link fence separated us from the shipyards on our left. On our right was a warehouse. “I like to go off the grid,” he said, before falling silent so that we captured every sound: the quiet lumbering of a train hauling Hanjin Shipping containers, the hiss of a hydro meter, the clack and scrape of our shoes on the gravelly pavement. When a lone gull gave three shrill staccato cries, like a soloist in avant-garde musical number, Ritts raised the recorder up high.

This has become a hobby of his, wandering alleys, parks, industrial sites and grey spaces to capture the sounds of the city. Ritts moved from Toronto last September to start a PhD in geography at the University of British Columbia. He is tall, lean and has the aspect of a flâneur, wearing a black wool coat and a thin striped wool scarf wrapped neatly around his neck. With the curiosity of a newcomer, Ritts has set about exploring all corners of the city. Instead of a camera, he carries a digital recorder. When he gets home, he uploads the WAV or MP3 tracks to Urban Sound Ecology, a website he co-founded back in Toronto with web designer Greg J. Smith. Listening to a recording is like eavesdropping on someone else’s life, as if they unknowingly called you on their cellphone and you are hearing them go about their day.

Each “soundwalk” recording is geo-referenced on an interactive online street map and annotated with details such as the length of the recording, weather, temperature, time, and what device was used. They have perfunctory but revealing titles: “Wreck Beach,” “Along the tracks in Kerrisdale,” “Kits firecrackers by M. Ritts.” Other titles offer commentary, like “Ends with psychedelic birdsong” and “Slush city.”

Mapping sound makes sense. “These recordings have a cartographic element,” Ritts says. “Sound doesn’t just take place in time, it takes place in space.” Using software such as OpenLayers and OpenStreetMap, the online maps of Toronto and Vancouver turn a few audio recordings into an aural collage of each city: you can hear chatter and traffic outside the Broadway SkyTrain in Vancouver or Islamic and Christian preachers at Yonge and Dundas in Toronto. And anyone can go online to browse a map and listen to unedited field recordings. Or to contribute; Ritts and Smith have recruited a handful of followers in Toronto and Vancouver, and Ritts has students in undergrad communications and geography classes at Simon Fraser University and UBC gathering material for a “sonic geography” show at Western Front Gallery in Vancouver on April 24.

Before they created Urban Sound Ecology in early 2009, neither knew they were joining a long tradition of sound collectives, like NY Soundmap, Montréal Sound Map and Open Sound New Orleans. In Britain, the British Library is collaborating with Noise Futures Network on UK Soundmap. But the field of acoustic ecology has its roots here in Vancouver.

In the late 1960s, composer R. Murray Schafer started the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University to study how sound affects our social and psychological relationship to our environs. Schafer is a prolific scholar who coined the term “soundscape” and became known for his writings on noise pollution (one of his early publications was The Book of Noise). His work spawned a generation of researchers, many of them musicians and sound or radio artists. In 1974, the CBC broadcast a 10-episode series on Ideas called Soundscapes of Canada and members went on to compose music using field recordings from around the country.

The best known is perhaps Barry Truax’s “Dominion,” a composition for 12-piece orchestra that incorporates sounds such as the Noon Day Gun in St. John’s, the chime of the Peace Tower bell in Ottawa and the O Canada horn in Vancouver.

Though grounded in academic rigour, acoustic ecology was based on the idea that we’ve lost a connection to how the world around us sounds. It’s a kind of Venn diagram of sound, person and environment, each affecting the other.

Soundwalks, in turn, are considered by many to be a form of active meditation—one that can’t be captured in an audio recording. Acoustic ecologists sometimes speak about “engaging with the soundscape.”

“It has the strange effect of making the normal seem exotic,” said Ritts. “It spectacularizes the city.”

Not long after we started up the alley, the train with the Hanjin Shipping containers had disappeared and we were out of hearing range of the hydro meter. The sun broke through as we skirted the warehouse and headed toward Gastown. Briefly, the soundscape was quiet. In fact, many recordings – even the ones Smith made last year during the G20 protests in Toronto, with rallying cries, the rumble of water cannons and police advancing in riot gear – have expansive moments of silence, as if the city was enveloped by a calming white noise before the cacophony returned. This is the meditative aspect of such walks, even as the beeping of a crosswalk or the puff of exhaust from a bus or the orchestral blast of birds chirping in a tree intrudes.

When I mentioned that the process feels not just audible, but tactile, Ritts said, “That happens when you record, almost like you’re listening to a composition.” Something else strikes you about listening to recordings of Vancouver: the entire city – whether you’re at Wreck Beach with the ominous sound of an airplane mixed with the cheerful chatter of a couple playing Frisbee, or in Kitsilano, with the rhythmic slosh of feet landing in puddles in 4/4 time – sounds like it is under water. (Ritts notes the location, weather and temperature for each soundwalk. For “Slush City,” the weather is simply listed as “damp.”)

At one point we pass a mysterious sign plastered on a concrete wall that says, “You can’t test the sound.” It’s not a detail Ritts would voice over during a walk. In a manifesto posted on their website, Ritts and Smith discourage people from commenting while recording, which gives the audio a ghostly aspect. “If you leave narration out,” Ritts explained, “you leave more room for interpretation.” Smith, who has D.J.’d for almost a decade and runs the design studio Mission Specialist, put it differently: “Narrative is really boring. A good field recording is kind of like an ephemeral diary entry – it doesn’t have an explicit narrative, but it captures the essence of a particular moment.” Smith recorded the Molson Indy Grand Prix in Toronto. “It was amazing how the massive engines from the race reverberated and bounced around. I felt it in my gut,” he said. “What could I possibly have added to such a visceral, almost otherworldly experience?”

During the G20 meetings, he led soundwalks during a Justice for Our Communities march and the repatriation ceremony of Sergeant James MacNeil, who was killed in Afghanistan. Riot police lined the street as a motorcade arrived at the coroner’s office. “Once the ceremony was over,” Smith recalled, “the officers assembled into a phalanx and marched to intercept the demonstration, rapping their batons on their shields. This was really eerie to hear, and everybody there who was not a law enforcement officer just stood frozen in dumb silence.”

One of his most memorable walks, however, was a stroll west along St. Clair toward Lansdowne. Speakers mounted on lampposts broadcast Muzak outside a string of shops. “This song was playing over the duration of several blocks,” Smith said, “and when the song came to an end I knew my walk had as well.” Recording the walk, he said, only half joking, let him discover the joys of Muzak.

By the time Ritts and I got near Gastown’s famous steam clock in Vancouver, the bleak industrial soundscape had faded, the landscape gentrified. Our voices rose to compete with the traffic until we were almost shouting. (On recordings, Ritts pointed out, cars sound even louder, overpowering the low-fi patter of pedestrians and birds with a hi-fi roar.)

We circled back to Oppenheimer Park and its gulls lounging on the grass. A few minutes later when we parted, Ritts headed toward the terminal to catch a bus home while I walked to the intersection. When the light changed and the crosswalk lets out its measured bleep, I, too, was on my way.
The Roots of Sound Ecology

1961: Experimental composer John Cage publishes Silence: Lectures and Writings.

Late 1960s: R. Murray Schafer founds the World Soundscape Project and coins the term soundscape, setting off four decades of geeky portmanteaus, from soundmark to schizophonia.

1973: WSP members haul briefcase-sized recording devices around Vancouver for its first study. Culminates in a recording, the Vancouver Soundscape Project, featuring water, water and… water.

1974: The CBC Radio program Ideas broadcasts the landmark 10-part series Soundscapes of Canada.

1975: The Vancouver gang heads on a European Tour to document six communities.

1978: Original WSP member, musician and physicist Barry Truax publishes The Handbook for Acoustic Ecology, goes on to create avant-garde compositions using field recordings. Juno winner for best-selling album: Dan Hill for Longer Fuse.

2011: 05/03
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The Deal With the Mountie

If you are from Canada, then you know all about Mounties. If you are not, well, welcome to Canada, where the national police force rides horses and knows how to pull off a red serge suit and always get their man, if not grammar.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or RCMP, is as Canadian as, well, poutine (disgusting as it is, despite what Calvin Trillin writes). Or beaver tails (which are not made of beaver). Mounties are as Canadian as maple syrup (which we do not ingest by IV drip). As Stompin’ Tom Connors. As the Lumberjack Song (ok, that ditty immigrated to Canada, thanks to Monty Python, which is wonderfully Canadian if you think about it). So sing after me: I’m a lumberjack and I’m OK. I sleep all night and I work all day.

Back to the Mounties. The one in the Interactive Advent Calendar story I wrote and edited is a key chain from the collection of an art director-acquaintance with a real-life curiosity cabinet at home. Even rendered in metal, this little fella in red serge is mighty handsome. Maybe not quite as handsome as the one from Due South, but close.

2010: 03/25
CATEGORY: Portfolio
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The Interactive Advent Calendar

When I was editor of the online business magazine Unlimited, we wanted to do a gift guide in our December 2009 issue. The catch: it had to be relevant for our gen Y business audience. The other catch: it couldn’t be your usual list of throwaway products — it had to have advice and ideas, along with cool things like a chocolate pie chart. Then there was the challenge of making the story timely, but evergreen (in other words, no Christmas trees.) Associate publisher Joyce Byrne suggested an advent calendar. One you can click on. One that keeps on giving. The solution was to create a calendar with a new goodie from December 1 to 24, keeping readers coming back to the website every day to open a new box. Then we spent a few weeks figuring out how the heck to do that.

I developed the story, while designer Steph Chan created the corkboard and web technician Gunnar Blodgett figured out how to program it in the digital realm. We knocked on colleagues’ doors for knick-knacks — if you scroll over the objects, whether it’s a Mountie key chain or an old photo, you’ll get the story behind the story — and photographed the image below at our office. On December 25, we archived the entire list so we could keep on giving all year long. Click the image below to try out the interactive result. And click here to read more about Mounties.

2010: 03/24
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He Shoots, He Scores

Director David Cronenberg and composer Howard Shore talk about their friendship, their new film with Viggo Mortensen and more.
By Craille Maguire Gillies
Published in the September 2007 issue of enRoute

Since first meeting in Toronto as teenagers, director David Cronenberg and composer Howard Shore – a three-time Oscar winner for his work on The Lord of the Rings – have formed one of film’s most creative partnerships. They’ve collaborated on 12 movies, including The Fly, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, a Russian mob thriller in theatres this month. enRoute caught up with them to discuss friendship, Saturday Night Fever and how filmmaking is like boxing.

ENROUTE You both grew up in Toronto. When did you meet?

HOWARD SHORE When I was 14, David was 16 or 17, and he had the most beautiful motorcycle and leathers. He was the coolest guy in the neighbourhood. Then I saw some of his short films in the early ’60s. I was about 28 when I did [Cronenberg’s 1979 film] The Brood. It took me 14 years to get up the courage to ask David to do one of his films.

ER Why do you think you work together so well?

DAVID CRONENBERG There’s a kind of bittersweet understanding of human darkness to what Howard does. It’s an interesting combination: never sombre, never solemn, but with an understanding of the tragic nature of human existence, leavened with humour. You can feel that in all of Howard’s work and certainly in mine.

ER What’s the biggest misconception about music in film?

DC There was an ugly, unfortunate era at the end of the ’60s and ’70s, when pop music was a really creative force, when people were always looking for a hit song out of a score. You had movies like Easy Rider whose score was basically pop music. We had some of that pressure on The Fly, weirdly enough. There was a producer or two who felt that a pop song, which was just background music in the bar scene, should play over the end credits so that we could legitimately say that it was music from this film. But we tried and it was so horrible, it completely destroyed the very tragic, emotional ending of the movie.

HS Good films use music as part of the story. Scorsese uses sound pieces in interesting ways that become part of the film.

DC When you think of Saturday Night Fever, you can’t separate it from its music. And that works for a movie like that, which was all about pop culture and dance.

ER How do you know when it’s not working?

DC We’ve all seen movies where the music strains to make you feel something that isn’t warranted by what’s on the screen. But when everything is firing on all cylinders, the music can add a whole emotional subtext. It’s almost like a fourth dimension. We have a couple of spots in Eastern Promises where the music completely alters the scene. Once you hear the music, you think, ‘Oh my God, that’s what’s going on.’

ER Do you know what music you want to hear when you’re writing a script?

DC My decision to write a script is intuitive, and it’s a gradual process. It’s not like I’m suddenly flooded with musical ideas or visual ideas or casting ideas. I wouldn’t have the energy or excitement of making a film if I had the whole movie in my head right from the start.

HS It’s a discovery process. You go on a journey to discover the film.

DC It sounds very arty to say that, but it’s true. And the movie surprises you. You thought it was going to be funnier or more tragic or lighter or darker. It starts to take on a life of its own. If it doesn’t, then you’re in trouble.

ER How is working on the opera adaptation of The Fly – to be staged next year in Paris and Los Angeles – different from doing a film?

HS It’s a different set of tools.

DC Opera is a composer’s medium, and I’m basically a traffic cop. The interesting thing is that the libretto will be based on a script that I wrote, so I have a deeply rooted creative connection. But when it comes to casting, I can’t cast an opera the way I can cast a movie because I don’t have the sophisticated ears for operatic singing.

HS You’re going to have them after this production. [Both laugh.]

DC I hope so. I hope to come out of this with a few more sensory inputs.

ER Have you ever changed a film because of the music?

DC It doesn’t happen a lot, but there are some moments where the music has demanded another beat or two at the end of a shot – probably in Naked Lunch and possibly in Crash. On Eastern Promises, Howard was working on the score with a version of the film that was still in flux, so there’s a real cross-fertilization.

HS He does that on a lot of the films. I’ll go to the set and see some of the assemblage, and a lot of times I just go back to my studio and write music based on that. There’s a lot of trust in doing that.

DC There’s nobody else I would let do that. Certainly not the producers. [Chuckles.] Howard actually saw the cut of Eastern Promises before I did. Basically, I was saying to him, “So how’s the movie?”

ER Do composers need to think visually?

HS A lot of people think that music is what you hear, but composition is entirely visual because it’s about the relationships between the notes that you see on the paper.

DC There’s a condition called synesthesia in which the senses seem to be mixed up, where people see music or hear colours. But for artists, that crossover of the senses happens all the time.

ER What are some of your most successful collaborative experiments?

DC That’s like asking…

ER Who’s your favourite child?

DC Yeah, and no parent wants to voice that. For both of us, the most extreme things are the most exciting. Dead Ringers, Crash and Naked Lunch stand out.

HS The story dictates how you use music. We’ve developed some of our own techniques over the years. With Naked Lunch and with Crash we could do certain things that we might not have tried in, say, M. Butterfly. And The Fly was also pretty experimental at the time.

DC That’s right. The music and feeling in The Fly were very operatic because it’s just three characters in a room despite all the sci-fi trappings, which in a weird way is Samuel Beckett-like: stripping yourself down to the primitive essentials. Maybe it’s because we’re Canadian, but Howard and I try to be invisible. We let the movie tell us what to do rather than wrestle it to the ground and stomp on it.

ER Do you take breaks between projects?

HS I’m essentially a writer, so it’s a very linear process. The recording process happens a little later and usually pretty quickly because it’s so expensive.

DC It’s different for me. A movie goes through the writing process, the trying-to-get-the-movie-together process, shooting, editing and so on. Then you release it, and you’re required to go on the road like Charles Dickens used to do with his novels. By the time you’re finished, you’re ready to go back to the beginning again, writing a script.

ER How has your approach to filmmaking, and collaborating, changed?

DC We’ve found our way creatively in a strange kind of parallel. We have an understanding of what movies can be and what they shouldn’t be.

HS Experience brings with it a stronger sensibility of what a movie should be. You have a more creative way of defining scenes and dramatic moments.

DC When you first start, survival is your priority. To come out of it with some dignity is a challenge, because you’re so overwhelmed. You’re learning on the go. Ernest Hemingway used to compare his writing to boxing, and when I was a kid, I thought that was superficial. Later I began to realize how right he was. It’s like Muhammad Ali doing the rope-a-dope: You can take the hits and blows more easily. You’re an older, more clever boxer.

2010: 03/23
CATEGORY: Portfolio
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Job Training

Unlimited goes west for random conversations with Gen Yers about their work.
Online multimedia series published in September and October on UnlimitedMagazine.com

2009: 11/09
CATEGORY: Portfolio
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Creature Comforts

This is an expanded version of a piece that was originally published in enRoute, October 2007
By Craille Maguire Gillies

Something is staring at me in the warm salty water, its wide-set eyes dumb and blank and yet scrutinizing. He hovers there, this striped brown fish the length of a football, swimming not in a school but alone near the shore. Perhaps, like me, he is assessing the risk: Is she dangerous? Apparently not. After what is only a few seconds but feels longer, in the way that floating underwater seems to stop time, the fish turns glides away. We’ve had a moment, whether he knows it or not. This is what you seek in the Galápagos: Big Important Moments.

I am snorkelling in the Pacific Ocean off Santa Maria (a.k.a. Floreana) Island. It is a thousand kilometres west of Ecuador and many thousands more from my landlocked home. The water is murky from my feet shuffling across the bottom. In truth the water is shallow and the shore is only a few strokes away. The yawning jaws of the Pacific Ocean, which stretches beyond this point to the horizon, seem capable of swallowing a person in one quick gulp. Here, though, the water is tepid and calm.

The 18 Galápagos Islands, with their barren remoteness, are the iconic evolutionary laboratory. But the real action is under the lava-crusted moonscape, beyond the acres of unchecked brush, a wedge of green in the vast blue wilderness and past the knobs of islands that pop out of the sea like little volcanic burps.

The islands sit on the Pacific Ocean’s Ring of Fire, which is responsible for the islands themselves. (British Columbia and the Yukon are also part of this seismic network.) The 100-kilometres-round pillars of molten rock called mantle plumes rise from their submarine base, perhaps deeper than the crust of the Earth, about 2,900 kilometres down. Magma shoots up from a stationary hotspot, creating an underwater island that gets bigger and bigger with every eruption. These submerged mountains eventually become new islands. The Galápagos, as one of the books in the cruise ship’s library puts it, rose from the ocean floor – they were never connected to the continent. The island’s volcano dies, new islands form, the cycle of life is repeated at a yawning pace as the continental shift pushes the islands away from its life source. They’re like Cheerios in a cereal bowl, sailing off into the distance.

I inhale through my nose in a kind of graceless reversed snort to suction the snorkelling mask to my face. The pressure from the mask and from clamping on the bit causes an immediate headache. Peering down in the shallow water, a penguin the size of a large duck dive bombs off the cliff and shoots past me underwater as though it had just jumped out of a Pixar movie. Big Important Moment #2. I spin around to follow the penguin but see only dirty water and other peoples’ flippers. Paddling a few metres, I keep an eye out for the penguin but instead have intimate views of bare legs and bright swimsuits. The irony of the Galápagos is that you travel to the middle of nowhere to come face to face with Nature and you end up swimming in a school of people. Then, I glance down to see a gelatinous mass shifting under me – a stingray. Seconds later, a three-foot reef shark glides by, impervious. Big Important Moment #3. They’re harmless, I’m told, but still I get out of the water and entertain myself by staring at a colossal pelican perched in a tree on the beach.

That so few creatures have managed to populate the islands makes the ones that did all the more remarkable. The origin of species wouldn’t have been possible in this forsaken place without this volcanic rock. As we hear on our nature walks, all wildlife and organisms originally floated, swam or flew from the mainland. Many were lost, many perished –the ones that survived truly are accidental tourists. Still, Galápagos real estate is not bad. The blue-footed boobies, frigates and Sally lightfoot crabs seem to prosper. The fat, blubbery sea lions simply loll around all day. Eventually, “they’ll retire, eat some sardines, get some sun, take it easy,” says Roman, a native Galápagonian. One afternoon, I watched the fast-moving form of a sea lion surfing through a wave and then swimming out to do it again. For him, there was nothing doing. Even the Ecuadorians – mostly men, mostly young – who come to work 12-hour days every day for six weeks straight on the cruise ships, have found an easier life than if they’d struggled to find work on the mainland in Guayaquil, the biggest city at four million.

Others come here searching to for something, and because of the islands’ near mythic status it’s easy to find meaning in everything. Nowhere is the ridiculousness of life, of the human condition, more apparent than when stumbling down a trail to find a bottleneck of about 20 people gathered to watch all of civilization on show. A pair of exhibitionist blue-footed boobies perform their mating ritual in the middle of the path, oblivious to us as they open their wings in a heart shape, fanning and cawing. They peck at each other’s beaks, and not for the first time flirting looks an awful lot like fighting.

After taunting and teasing, the male flies away out into the ocean and is gone.
It’s all a bit of a cattle call. On arriving at Baltra Airport, on the main inhabited island, the Galápagos National Park [Parque Nacional Galápagos] office handed out a questionnaire asking which activities visitors were most interested in. Solitude was one of the options. But on package trips solitude is practically impossible. Our twice-daily nature walks are divided into brief parcels of highly organized tours down a few hundred metres of shoreline. On an hour-long desert walk on Santa Cruz (“It looks like Baja,” someone says), we see the jawbone, perhaps of a land iguana, placed just so on the side of the trail. Our guide picks it up and waves it in front of us. “This was from the last group of tourists,” is his well-rehearsed sound bite.

The landscape is not so much barren as it is minimalist. The islands edges are gritty and messy and smelly. The cliff side of Punta Suarez on Española Island, home to a colony of blue-footed boobies and chick-snatching frigates is coated with feces and feathers and bones and sandy dirt. There are no smooth edges, except perhaps the endless sky or the occasional basin of glittering water. Despite their Edenic reputation, the islands are brown most of the year. Flamingoes, masked boobies and jellyfish with their electric blue whips are bright spots in a mass of muted plants and animals. On San Cristobal, lichen hangs from trees as though it were the film set for a spooky cobwebbed mystery – Galápagos Gothic. The hardened lava moonscape on Santiago Island looks menacing, but underfoot the volcanic rock sounds tinny and light. In a crevice, what looks like ice but is hardened salt forms a pool. Nearby, a miniature rainbow crests in the slipstream of a crashing wave. This gives way to desert on Santa Cruz, punctuated by patches of forest that stolidly marches up hills.

Nothing is midline—the islands are either monochrome and unremarkable or vastly awesome. Even the concept of time seems insanely outsized. The oldest island, Española, is between three and five million years old. The youngest, Fernandina, a mere 700,000. Here, tortoises can live a year without food and their life expectancy is 200 years. A six-year-old blond girl named Agnes is led around under a large black umbrella to protect her from the Ecuadorian sun. At the other end of the scale, slightly bewildered blue-footed boobie chicks wander around the rocks on Suarez Point, their wispy bleach-white feathers not yet slick and smooth. Age hardly seems relevant.
Seeking quiet, the night before we leave I retreat to the empty top deck of the cruise ship. I’m laying on a wooden chaise longue, slowly rocking to sleep. As the boat sways left and right, the entire star-marked sky appears to be sliding back and forward to the tick of a metronome.

The next morning, I have my last Big Important Moment. A colony of sea lions has congregated around the makeshift dock where we wait. An eight-week-old sea lion nudges its mother’s belly for food, but she isn’t serving. The pup flops around, trying another lion, but gets barked out by his mother. The pup, still fuzzy and lean and naïve, furiously inches over the rock as the mother tries to block it like a goaley. The mother barks and groans, but still the pup tries to get to the water. So the mother picks up the pup in its moth and hauls it a couple feet across the rocks. The pup is determined, and crawls again over the rock, making it to the cliff face as the mother follows.

Then the mother inexplicably heads to the water. The pup, now alone, totters on the cliff’s edge like a car in one of those slo-mo scenes in a film when you wait to see if the balance will tip toward safety or catastrophe. If it ends badly I don’t want to know. I cup my hands over my ears and turn away. I watch the waves crash against the rocks. I turn away, already in my mind getting ready for the trip home.

2009: 11/05
CATEGORY: Portfolio
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One Night in Puerto Vallarta

John Huston’s 1964 masterpiece The Night of the Iguana transformed this sleepy part of Mexico into a hot spot.
By Lisa Moore
Published in the September 2008 issue of enRoute

Every inch of the perfect beach is covered with bodies and beach chairs and palm-thatched umbrellas. There are besotted honeymooners, college kids guzzling Coronas and retired couples wearing straw hats and chunky Aztec-style silver jewellery. There is a group of guys, who look like hockey players, with their girlfriends. The lithe girlfriends are full of loud laughter and have great hair and designer bikinis – or what little there is of their bikinis appears to have been designed.

Four men – fiercely buff, pierced, tattooed and tanned – stroll along the beach. One of them holds a tiny Yorkshire Terrier with a pink bow tied so tightly to the top of its head that it’s forced to squint. The men stop abruptly in front of my towel and look up at the sky with their hands over their eyes. The sun is hot but a circle of shade suddenly falls over me – and me alone – and makes me shiver. It’s like a moment in John Huston’s film The Night of the Iguana, based on the Tennessee Williams play, when all the good clean fun turns eerily sinister, when everybody must admit that we desire strange things and that this desire is ungovernable. We don’t want to die or be reminded of death, but it all comes in the same package.

I hear a shrill whistle and see a parasailer hovering about 15 feet over my head. I can see his giant floral-print swimming trunks, the harness straps of his parachute digging into his body and the blue soles of his sneakers, kicking. Four Mexican men race over, catch him in their arms, help set him down and fold up the parachute before it ever touches the sand. They undo the straps and clap him on the back.

This is Puerto Vallarta and the beach is called Playa de los Muertos, a name Tennessee Williams would have enjoyed. My husband and I are off to see the film set of The Night of the Iguana, and we just stopped for a swim. I scan the water for my husband and for a moment can’t find him, but then I see him flick his hair. Drops of water scatter like silver coins.

On the cab ride down the coastal road to Mismaloya, where The Night of the Iguana was shot in 1963, we see people selling sombreros and T-shirts out of huts. The stark white flank of a giant cruise ship is visible through the roadside tropical greenery. When we arrive, we find that the film site is closed and has been for two years. Instead we visit the set of the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger blockbuster Predator, just because it’s there.

I have never watched Predator, but I suspect that, like many blockbusters, it’s fuelled by a portrayal of death so banal that it becomes a parody and does not offend in the slightest. The Predator monster has been preserved here, a string of skulls slung over its shoulder. There is also a zip-line ride. Tourists in helmets and harnesses fly over the rainforest from one peak to the next. The company promises a personalized DVD of your journey, complete with sound effects, delivered to your hotel that very night – filmmaking of a different order.

On the way back to our hotel, our taxi driver says he thinks he can get us into the Night of the Iguana site. He flicks the rear-view mirror so he can see me. “Since you want to see it so much,” he says.

He drives to the entrance, rattles the padlocked gate and stands with his hands behind his back, head bowed, tapping his foot. There’s a guard in a nearby shed and, after the driver speaks to him, he unlocks the gate and we head down the long cobbled brick lane.

Why does this thrill me? Because Tennessee Williams is irreverent and poetic, a brave and vulnerable writer. Because his plays are full of death and a sexuality that is sometimes twisted and morally provocative but utterly human. And because Huston’s Night of the Iguana is a masterpiece.

In it, Richard Burton is astoundingly beautiful and at the height of his powers as an actor. He plays a defrocked priest-cum-tour guide who’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The film, which also stars Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr, is all about pent-up desire, despair, repressed homosexuality, poetry and surf – and an ugly iguana that’s being fattened up on the end of a rope for the kill. Richard Burton’s character walks through broken glass and bloodies the floor of the hotel because he is trying to find lost innocence and because he, too, is at the end of a rope.

Now, though, the hotel is in ruins. There is some graffiti and piles of stones where parts of the roof have collapsed. Dried palm leaves crunch under our feet. A hand-painted sign reads: “John Huston, Director.” The taxi driver looks out over the ocean below us at his hometown. The cruise ship we saw earlier has pulled into the bay. I ask our driver if he has seen the movie.

“Of course,” he says. “Everything changed with this movie.” Richard Burton bought Elizabeth Taylor a house in Puerto Vallarta, and what had been an isolated village burgeoned into the tourist spot it is now.

The taxi driver opens all four doors of the car to let the breeze blow through. It is sweltering inside. He gets in, turns the ignition and the engine chugs briefly and cuts out. He tries again and it chugs hard and squeals and then cuts out. We are trapped on the decaying set in the heat.

On the last night of our trip, a crowd gathers on a street corner to watch a lunar eclipse. An elderly man says, “We won’t be around the next time this happens. This is our last chance.” We all stare up as the giant circle of shade crosses over the moon and blots it out.

2009: 08/31
CATEGORY: Portfolio
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Man of Taste

A conversation with Vancouver chef Vikram Vij on the restaurant biz, why crickets don’t taste so bad and what he’s learned about leadership
By Craille Maguire Gillies
Published in the August 2009 issue of Unlimited

Vancouver chef Vikram Vij

When you opened Vij’s you knew how to cook, of course. How much did you know about business?
Nothing, basically. But my father was a businessman, and through osmosis you learn to become a businessman as well.

My father brought $22,000 cash in a bag from India and I had saved $10,000. If it had gone under, we’d have felt like, “Oh shit, that was a lot of money.”

It was very lean. My break-even point every day was $100. If I did $100 a day, I’d know I would survive. Some days I did $96 or $92. Sometimes I would ring in naan bread or something so that I could feel that I’d done $100 in sales. I cheated myself knowing I was cheating. It was a psychological game that I’d play with myself.

About four months after the restaurant started, a food writer called the Urban Peasant, James Barber, gave me such a raving review that people started coming. Then I was making $130 and $140 a day in sales. And I never looked back.

Was that a turning point?
I was running out of money. I had put the restaurant up for sale. We were all dejected. My father was upset; I was feeling a little bit down. This review came out and people started coming in. Actually, if credit has to be given it’d be to Angela Mills and Robin Mines and all the Vancouver food writers who reviewed the restaurant.

What did you find most challenging about those early days?
People had no idea. The challenge was to show people a more modern style of Indian food – not butter chicken and tikka masala. I made a delicious lamb curry with cinnamon. They still ask for butter chicken, and they’re mad I don’t do it. It’s not their fault; they’re just not educated.

What have you learned about leadership over the years?
I had this old-world way of dealing with the staff by screaming and yelling. I’ve calmed down extremely. But I will still say stuff like, “Don’t you get it? Why don’t you get it?”

The other thing I’ve learned is that we live in North America, and these people are not your servants. They are here to work and help you achieve your goal, so you’d better be nice to them.

If you had to compare your leadership style to one of your dishes, what would it be?
There’s a dish that I’ve just put on the menu called Rajasthan-style goat curry, which is based on my travels to India in April. The meat is slow-cooked for six hours. It’s tender inside, but has very strong flavours. And lots of spices – there’s a conundrum happening with the spices – and a blend of different layers and angles and heat at the back of your palate. I always respect the tradition of a dish, but modernize it by adding blueberries or some acidity. That dish to me is who I am as a human being: Strong, sometimes tender, sometimes spicy, robust and to be enjoyed piping hot.

Today your wife, Meeru Dhalwala, runs the kitchen, while you manage the restaurant. Why did you decide to divide these roles?
Meeru was in Third World development in Washington, D.C., when we met. She didn’t have a working visa. She had no cooking experience. She would just hang out in the kitchen in Vancouver and see what I was doing.

The bigger the restaurant got, the more I was running around. There was payroll to be done, produce to be bought, connections to be made with farmers. And both of us are strong personalities, so we would butt heads on what dishes should taste like. I said, “Look, I can’t work with you and fight with you all day and come home and act like nothing happened.”

She’s the creative force behind the dishes. She will work with me on the menu. She’s also responsible for the emotional well-being of all the women in the kitchen. All these Indian women have some issues at home, family issues and stuff, and they go to Meeru for advice. She’ll say, “This is what you should do: put your foot down; tell your mother-in-law to fuck off.” She’s a force to reckon with.

That’s a very traditional way to develop staff.
Normally when you get accolades and become a big restaurant, you hire executive chefs from outside. But I do it differently: If you stay longer with the company, I will pay you well and you’ll learn how to cook — which builds loyalty, brings consistency to the food and creates harmony within the community. The food shows passion.

You’ve complained that many restaurants are motivated by business concerns instead of passion.
I’m always concerned about restaurants that are driven by concepts. If you don’t love what you do, eventually it will show and you will fail – it doesn’t matter how good a business person you are. I have the passion for food and for wine and for people. I love all these three things.

You make a flatbread from cricket flour. What do crickets taste like?
Exactly like pumpkin seeds. It was my wife who created this dish. She read somewhere that we can eat crickets and bugs, so we made flour and put cricket bread on the menu to see the reaction. The most important thing was the environmental aspect. Crickets are high in protein and low on the food chain.

Do you eat cricket bread at home?
No.

Foodies and critics – of which there are many in Vancouver – consider Vij’s one of the best Indian restaurants not only in Canada, but in the world. If you’re in town, don’t bother making reservations at Vij’s, or its sister restaurant Rangoli. It’s all democratic: show up and wait in line with everyone. Vikram Vij’s newest venture is a series of culinary tours through India. Butter chicken lovers need not apply.

2009: 08/24
CATEGORY: Uncategorized
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