What the Heck am I reading? pt. 3

I plowed into The Terror at the beginning of July, after coming across it on a random visit to Indigo. It was in the Horror section. I have this ongoing interest in The Arctic, and I blame it on my reading of The Arctic Grail by Pierre Berton. The book fantasizes about what really happened to the John Franklin expedition, whose ships, The Terror and Erebus vanished in the Arctic and has never been found, despite dozens of searches over the decades, and as recently as last year by a Canadian icebreaker.

All we know is that the crew starved slowly, agonizingly, and attempted to walk overland to the nearest fur-trading outpost in NWT, hundreds and hundreds of miles away. One look at the landscape of NWT on Google Earth will convince you that this is impossible! We also know that they were all being slowly poisoned with lead from their crappy tinned food. What we don't know is where the book begins.... an unknown creature is lurking on the ice and attacking the ships as they overwinter in the ice.

I like the ending of this book, which paints a very realistic view of the Inuit. It is a hopeful book, and an entertaining read.

What the Heck am I reading this summer? pt. 2.

Canadian history always suprises me. Or maybe it's just the way the Pierre Berton tells the story. After reading The National Dream and The Last Spike, I understand why we have a statue of Sir John A. MacDonald in Gore Park, Hamilton. The man almost killed himself healthwise over a period of about 20 years as he rode the political waves of getting the railway built.

The key to this story is that the railway had to be built entirely on Canadian soil, or else the commerce and flow of people to the expanding West would never have been controllable by the Canadian government. Many investors from the US had ideas about connecting the lines through the northern states, such as Minnesota, Wisconsin, N. Dakota, but due to the vision of the MacDonald government, and tons of political wrangling and controversy, the better plan prevailed. It was the plan that built Canada and knitted it together from Ontario to British Columbia.

The biggest earthly obstacle was the area of what is now Northern Ontario. Apparently, muskegs were so deep that they would swallow an entire causeway in a matter of minutes as the soft bottom gave way. What first looked like a rather simple, shallow landfill operation could ultimately consume weeks and months of engineering, resulting in huge cost overruns. (According to Jon Krakauer, muskeg is "the expanse of spongy, poorly drained, peat like organic matter overlaying a permanently frozen bog". A cousin of permafrost, muskeg raised havoc on ... the route. To avoid the loss of vehicles due to sinking, the engineers developed the use of "corduroy". Thousands of logs were scoured from nearby forests and placed crosswise. The highway was built atop the logs. Thus the weight of heavy vehicles was distributed evenly and the problem of sinking into the bogs was solved.)

Then, the whole matter of surveying a passage through the Rockies. Tons of money was spent sending survey crews into the wilderness, only to have an entirely different route chosen a decade later!

Here's the famous Last Spike photograph. Burn this picture in your heads, people. Canada is written all over it.



"The last spike joining the Canadian Pacific Railway was driven at Craigellachie, west of Revelstoke, on November 7, 1885. Sir Donald Smith is driving the spike, and standing just behind him is a lad by the name of Edward Mallandaine. Mallandaine was 17 years old at the time and had been running a pony express service between Sicamous and Revelstoke. He went on to found the town of Creston, B.C." [present day home of Kokanee brewery!]

What the Heck am I reading this summer?

I first read Coyote Horizon, then Coyote, then Coyote Frontier, now I'm working on Coyote Rising. Totally the wrong order but who cares!

I confess. I'm a science fiction/space exploration/interstellar travel nerd.

Everyone seems to equate Steele with Robert Heinlein, author of the Dune series. Sorry, but I haven't read those, but I did see part of the movie which appeared rather lame, but that's probably got nothing to do with the books.

One intriguing story from Coyote is about the guy who woke up from bio-stasis (suspended animation sleep-state) about 215 years earlier than the rest of the crew on the starship. He lived the next 32 years alone on the starship Alabama, trying not to go crazy. After going through almost all of the smuggled booze on board, and consuming about 20% of the food stores, he finally had an accident and fell down a passageway ladder. A bot picked up his body and jettisoned it through the air lock. When the remaining crew woke up years later they had to piece together what happened.

Turns out that what saved the man's sanity was the arts. He decided to start writing a book. Eventually he moved from writing to drawing and painting. In the end, he had covered the ship's interior with colourful illustrations and murals about his story. The thing I like about this is that the arts gave him a means of occupying his mind, and expressing himself, at a level other than human conversation. Art kept him sane like nothing else could.

With no one to talk to, what can a man's mind do? Arts fills the black hole of a man's mind, at least partly.