I Went for a Drive

I was going to write about trains and movement and time and perception and a whole bunch of other pseudo-intellectual topics which I’m just not that well versed in, but then I met someone outside of Melville Cafe, and now I’m going to write about that. I should note that I’m writing this at 9 am, December 14th, well beyond my deadline, one hour before crits start, but so it goes.

I’ve seen him before, laptop and coffee at hand, siting around in the cafe from time to time. He’s older, hair gray and thinning but kept long. His stylish but gauche eyeglasses screamed ‘architect’, and so I’ve always assumed he was part-time staff, perhaps a friend who shows up for crits. I noticed him, but that’s all.
    This morning, anxious as ever about yet another deadline unmet, I see him sitting on the floor, back pressed up against the Design at Riverside glass. I look at my watch. It’s 8:30—-Melville is about to open its doors. I say something inane like “‘bout that time, eh?”. He responds with a jovial “Minute or Two, I think. Warmer in here than in my car.”—-a reference to the frankly surprising cold. The weather as conversation starter has so rarely worked out for me that I assume that’s the end of that. “You know, I’m a journalist and photographer, and I was up past Waterloo, you know, way up there, looking for snow owls”. Oh. Let’s go with this, then. The doors open at that moment, a perfect cliff-hanger. Journalist. Photographer. Snow Owls. My kind of guy. I let him go ahead, keeping his place in line, but he insists. I order my coffee, he orders his. I go to the milk-sugar-lid station (is there a name for these things?). He follows. I really don’t know how to pick up where we left off other than a forced “So. Snow Owls.”. 
    “Right, So I was up there, and you know, sometimes, these owls live up in the arctic, but they’ve been spotted as far south as Bermuda. So I went up north of Waterloo with one of these, umm, conservationists from the grand river conservation society. And these lands, way up there, you know the Mennonites? I know this guys and he lets me on to his farm, to look for these owls. And every year they come back, each year around the same time. So I’m with this guy and we spot one, and I get out of the car, and this guy is a pure conservationist and starts to freak out, saying ‘wait should you go there?’, you know, afraid that I was going to disturb this bird’s habitat or something, you know? He later sends me an email asking if I even had permission to go up there.”

I nod and smile. He keeps going.

“Pretty soon, I’m lying on a snow bank, you know, by a stream, watching this one owl for several hours. This bird is looking at me. He must have been maybe...” He looks past me, outside, at the trellis. “... from here to that building there. And these birds are very territorial. I hear something from behind me, and there’s another bird coming! So this one takes off and lands on a telephone poll right by my car. And now I’m just waiting, because I don’t want him on that poll. Eventually I move with my back to the wind, because when they take of they go into the wind, and sure enough, as he takes off, he heads straight for me! And I’m like tedadadada...” He holds up his hands like he’s holding a camera with a telephoto lens. I image a Canon 7D with a 100-400mm L series lens. He makes the sound of a shutter firing wildly. He goes on for another 20 minutes. When I sat down to write this, I imagined I would transcribe the whole monologue from memory (and it truly was a monologue, my contributions being limited to one-word exclamations at appropriate times), but now I realize it might take more time than I can afford, and so here are the highlights: he talks about selling his photos to Grand Magazine, covering the Olympics in Rio, looking for jaguars in northern Brazil, selling those photos to Time magazine, working with a whole spectrum of publications, interviewing musicians, interviewing Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols, being good friends with a famous flamenco guitar player, meeting Bruce Springsteen at a Breaking Benjamin concert, growing up in England, writing about the state of the music industry, funding his son’s band, receiving Spotify checks for 80 or 90 cents, covering marathons in Beirut, covering cycling in Ireland. 

Why am I tell you this? Well, on the one hand, I need some text to fill this part, but on another, though I did not much partake in the conversation, I was fascinated none-the-less. This guy, name given but already forgotten, has found a way to make sense of his various interests. The one question I asked, probably the only question of importance, was “So is wildlife your specialty? Or just a hobby?” This set him off on that 20 minute rant. But in those 20 minutes, I have a nearly fully formed picture of the man—what drives him, what interests him, what he’s been up to. What I realized is that what I’m showing here, today, is my 20 minute rant. I’ve also realized that if this guy was talking to me about being a civil engineer in northern Alberta, I would not be writing this. I would have still nodded, smiled, but I wouldn’t have asked any questions. He interested me because he’s made sense of his life by writing and taking pictures. So whatever it is I end up focusing on, I think I’m settled on format. I’m going to write. I’m going to take pictures. I’m going to tie all of these lose ends into a knot. Whether that knot can be untied and made sense of is the question.

Marco Chimienti
14.12.16