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Working with outlines, doing away with time

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on December 19

The other day I said I’d go and meet H at 1230. We arranged this a couple of hours earlier. There was no fixed reason why 1230, other than I thought it would be a good time, and I’d be hungry for lunch.

When the time came around, I was not quite finished what I was working on, or had done the chores I’d wanted to do–reactivate my library card, borrow Tim Birkhead’s Bird Sense–but the 1230 deadline loomed over me to the point where I began to get uptight about it. H was going nowhere. She was in her studio making stuff. There was nothing we had to be at or go to afterwards. 1230 was not precious. And yet I’d made it so–a strict appointment that it would be awful to miss.

For some reason, that day, I began to question why this was. Perhaps because we’d talked earlier in the week about what irked us more, someone being late or someone running an event, giving a talk, etc, overunning at the end into your time. (Note: for me, the latter.) Or perhaps it was because we’d set the time to meet only two hours ahead, and so its complete arbitrariness was more apparent. But essentially it dawned on me, as it has not before, that this was an ingrained pattern, nothing to do with my conscious or rational understanding of what in fact was in front of us. It was something highly emotional, charged, and hidden. That is: something from my childhood.

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Blog, Writing Blog

A word on motivation for writing a novel

Posted by

Alex Lockwood

on August 28

When do you know you’re ready to write a novel? I say novel, rather than book, because although other forms of book (creative non-fiction, journalism, academic work) can take just as long, and have their own difficulties and rigours, for me at least there is something deeply interior about the approach to writing a novel that brings up a blockage that the other forms of writing do not. As for Coleridge, it is my ‘chosen’ form that troubles me most (Coleridge famously complained he could write prose without a problem, but asking him to write poetry was like asking him to cut off a leg. Whatever ‘Kubla Kahn’ is, it is also a statement on the thwarting of the artist.)

I’ve written about this before. How when one integrates a particular form of work too closely into one’s ego boundary container (that keeps us safe; that we ‘show’ to the world) then we won’t risk its failing. And I believe I’ve passed that now. I wrote to a friend, another writer, recently that my trip abroad, my two month travels on a Winston Churchill Fellowship, has given me the perspective to be simply a ‘writer’ and one in service to others (stories, ideas, people, values) rather than having to be a ‘novelist’ in service to my ego (writing for all the wrong reasons, and not ‘succeeding’). It was something I needed to give up. I felt as if I would die giving it up. And yet now I have—the idea that if I never write a novel but follow my energy and heart, that is okay—I am free to actually follow the energy of whatever comes in front of me, or emanates from inside, which is, or could be—no, this time, is—a novel. It’s a love story, at its heart, one set in a collapsed future and one themed around the idea of maintaining one’s values (of being vegan) in a world that no longer, if ever, respected and recognised those values. How does love grow in such a situation? How does one keep one’s compassion?

How do I know I am ready to write this book and not the other books that I have in my ‘unfinished’ projects folder (the book about my father; the book about relationships; the book about the lobotomy). I guess it’s this. That as I am clear that the first half of my life ended a while ago, so went with it the first half of life preoccupations and motivations. Those books started at that time don’t have the same energy now for me to carry on with them. Well, some do, but not while I’m also doing a full-time job. Or maybe. Argh! Constantly this push and pull between projects… And yet this is just an excuse not to commit and get things finished. As my friend, the poet, said, to always feel lukewarm, never cold or hot.

Yes, I guess I’m working this out by writing it down. I have a motivation to change the world for the better, to reduce suffering. Do I truly believe that by entering my own space, descending into the tunnel of writing, and of writing fiction, that I will come out of this with something that will be useful in the world? A novel? Perhaps it has always been the case or is particularly pertinent to this precarious world we live in, that there is no time for fiction any more. That it is entertainment and escapism from the pressing problems of the world. And yet, as Elizabeth Grosz says (PDF) (and I’ve used this quote so many times in the past few weeks) isn’t art about presenting future possibilities? Making of the materials of the present moment a vision or image of what the world could be? And don’t we need art—isn’t art what we save the world for? What she says is that art is the affective energy where “properties and qualities take on the task of representing the future, of preceding and summoning up sensations to come, a people to come, worlds or universes to come.”

What I think I’ve figured out this week is the practical stuff of motivation. I’ve written plenty this week – an article for a running magazine, another one on running and veganism for a Canadian website, a short essay on the film The Ghosts in Our Machine, this post – and they’re all enjoyably short. These essays and articles, as well as the piece on DXE and direct action I’m pitching to a few magazines, are day-long pieces of work (and then of course the re-writing and re-writing follow-ups) but provide something of the instant external gratification that a novel will not provide. So I was moaning last night about the need for some external motivation for the major project, the new book. Hoping that someone would just come along and demand work from me, provide a structure and a deadline. There are mentoring projects, of course. And I just had the PhD. But in the end neither of those appeal because, having learned from the PhD, I really do not want anyone else to read sections or samples of my work until a whole novel is complete.

And so it is back to the intrinsic and internal motivations. The real reasons why we stick with things.

It’s actually good to be thinking of motivation at the beginning of a new project. Do I care enough about this to see it through over a long period of time? It’s much better to be deliberative at the beginning. It’s a long-term commitment. What seems to me a very good indicator of motivation is what comes naturally. I’ve always fought this, being good at things (such as non-fiction, reflective writing, journalism) that I never wanted to be good at. My ego was always so attached, for some reason, to fiction. Perhaps because I loved fantasies and novels so much as a child (and yet I didn’t really begin reading until a little more grown up, maybe 10 or 11). I’m unsure now, now that I come to unpick this. I began writing stories at six or seven. I remember that moment when everyone was invited to write and most of the kids wrote a half-page story in massive handwriting. I was still going 16 pages later. I was so excited I interrupted my teachers’ conversation and got told off. And yet I was still excited, and carried on writing stories. I asked for a typewriter. I wrote whatever I felt like. Poetry, stories, a novel at the age of 15, also journalism, also creative non-fiction (I remember the report about work experience, written about working at, of all places, a women’s magazine, where I wrote an article for them on, of all things, astrology).

I think in terms of motivation I am a little too self-aware now of what comes with writing the novel. Although I have not been through the whole process of the previous one: getting it published, promoting, etc. But I do know what effort it takes, the practical effort but also the psychological drift and step out of this physical plane. What I mean is, you need to properly go and inhabit that other world. I know you do with any book. It’s what Rachel Carson spoke about in the final months of writing Silent Spring. The book becomes your world. You have to want to be in that world. And this wanting has to be natural, not conscious. It’s a bodily longing to be there, I think. It’s what Mario Vargas Llosa writes about in his Letters to a Young Novelist. The single most important factor for being a novelist is the reward of the work itself. Not the product, the process. Sitting and writing fiction is its own reward for those for whom it is the right/only path. (What symbolic lesson is it for me that I cut up Llosa’s book to create a birthday card for a friend? Actually not much. I found the book a little basic and dull.) Oh, okay, that was my ego at work again—being afraid to “be a beginner again every morning”. To be a beginning I mistyped originally, but I quite like that idea (even if it sounds like something out of Apocalypto).

So what new beginning? I think before I wrote for the wrong reasons, and that is putting the fear of god into me for starting something new without figuring out the reasons why I am doing it, or want to stay with it for the next year or two (when also balanced with the rest of my life). But trying to be deliberative runs the risk of being overly-rational. Motivation is perhaps, or should be, more about listening to the body, and taking the peaks and troughs, feeling one’s way into the future, whatever world is to come. Art is an energy and a sensation. Making art is a flow of energy and sensations. And it is about taking materials and shaping them with one’s own energy to create in others the sensation of new possibilities.

It is also about feeling prepared. Feeling capable. As Adele Diamond, the neuroscientist and educator says, the single biggest predictor of educational success is not IQ or even EQ but simply believing that one has the capacity to do the thing. And that comes from confidence and preparedness. Commitment flows from these things. Motivation in essence is then unleashed, whereas before it was bridled, or enclosed. This is where education works at its best sense, as a ‘leading out’ (an e-ducare, in the Latin) from the enclosure, unleashing the motivation through preparedness and knowledge. So maybe one does not simply find the motivation. I know it’s already there to write this novel. The steps I need to take are actually about preparing myself for the journey. And I’ve done that work before.

Activism, Animals, Blog, Churchill 2014, Reviews

The Ghosts in Our Machine

Posted by

Alex Lockwood

on August 27

There is a guy sitting in front of me crying. He looks like the kind of person I’d be friends with—I don’t know why, it’s just a look. I later find out his name is Dan, he’s a schoolteacher, and just a year ago he met the woman sitting next to him, with her hand on his shoulder, at a half-marathon race. She was vegan at the time, active in animal rights; he was vegetarian, sometimes. (Over the next year Dan turned vegan, dropped ten pounds, took ten minutes off his half-marathon time. He speaks of quickened muscle recovery and ‘living aligned’. They both think that each of them has lucked-out in finding the other. He tells me all this the next morning as we run together. Near the end of the run he stops, waits for his girlfriend, and I go on alone.) There is a fresh and loving intimacy between them, as she cares for this man crying in her arms, that I crave. It is perhaps a little of why I’m crying too, because what I’m watching is hurting, and I need support.

It’s the scene in the fur farm. It’s Jo-Anne McArthur’s still pictures, used so affectively as they are woven into the urgency of having to break in to the farm facility, take her pictures, and then leave without being discovered, and without saving a single one of these scared creatures. It is what McArthur says in the foreword to her book We Animals: for all those I could not save. It is why I am crying now (watching the film; writing these words). For every good thing we do, we don’t save these individuals in front of us. They are already dead. The use of the stilled images makes this point strongly, sadly.

Still life. It makes me think of when my grandmother died. I was in Australia on a gap year, travelling. My family told me not to come back, to continue on my journey. My grandmother was ill, cantankerous, gave up on life early, except her sherry and her cigs. The only affection she ever really showed late in life was not towards us, but towards Scruffy and Tigger, their cats. So I did not go back. I send instead to my grandfather a condolence card with the image of a bowl of fruit on the front. On the back, it’s title: Still life. But she was dead. I don’t think my grandfather ever forgave me for not returning, for doing everything I could to get there. This is strangely the same feeling the film leads me to: please, let me go back to this farm, save them, do more. This is perhaps why Dan, I, others, so many others, are crying here as we watch The Ghosts in the People Barn at Farm Sanctuary. Have we done everything we can? For these foxes in the fur farm, death is not still life. Who will forgive us for not doing more?

The Ghosts in Our Machine is an elegy. A plaintive poem, a funeral song and lament for the dead. And because it is this, it knows it needs to hold its nerve. To stay in this tone of the elegiac, edited to perfection in the film, never missing a melancholic beat. To break this tone will be to lessen the story’s power. Even when animal protection workers know that a single story is more powerful than the facts and figures (85 billion animals each year, one cow every 12 seconds…) or a combination of both, they cannot seem to resist drawing us back to the incomprehensible, the overwhelming. I don’t know why this is. It’s like that episode of Friends where Monica wants to make everyone cry at her parents’ wedding anniversary. Perhaps the animal rights campaigners and communicators secretly want to not only stir emotions in others, but overwhelm us, be the one who has the power to do that. Secretly, they all want to be Ross (his first word has everyone crying; Monica flounces off). Ok! I admit it—I want to be like Ross, to write with impact. Comically, Ross has ‘it’. The Ghosts has ‘it’ too, but with a markedly different soul. What makes The Ghosts exquisite is that it holds its nerve all the way through, beyond the credits. The tone never wavers. And so, pure, it will linger on in ways that is, most of all, respectful to the lives lost, of all the lives lost.

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Animals, Blog, Churchill 2014

On Board the Soundwatch Boat

Posted by

Alex Lockwood

on July 13

The Soundwatch Boater Education Progamme has been running for nearly twenty-five years. Eric Eisenhardt, the current director, is into his third season. Before that, the previous incumbent had run the programme for twenty. It feels, though, as if Eric has all the decades’ experience in his eyes and memory. He knows all the boats and most of their captains, can identify the individual orca, knows the waters around San Juan Island, the rips and tears, and small passages, the quadrants split up into hundreds of small squares, the lines of sight and the landmarks. We’re about the same age, perhaps he’s a year or two older or younger, it’s difficult to tell, the thing that swings it for me are his good teeth, a kind smile hidden in his sun-tempered beard. The sun does this to people, it seems: makes you both older and younger than you are.

Soundwatch educates people on the water about the correct whale watching guidelines, the same type of programme as run by CETUS out of Victoria. And indeed later that day we see Leah Thorpe and her crew on the water in their new boat, borrowed from the Canadian DFO. It is a slick black zodiac with brand new CETUS Straitwatch insignia. CETUS are dressed up in orange waterproofs and have an official-looking life jacket. It is much more formal and authoritarian than Soundwatch’s battered old skip, its backup, as its first boat is in the shop for repairs, and us, the four crew, two of us in shorts, Sarah in her running gear, and only John fully crewed like a fisherman in waterproofs, gumboot and hat. Although our faded blue life jackets all have the Soundwatch logo. But authoritarian isn’t always best in these delicate waters, where the work of both projects, to engage the public in what’s best for the whales, can be a nuanced, tactful business. The public, and this genuinely shocks but does not surprise me, isn’t always interested in what’s best for the whales.

This is a wholly different type of programme to what I was invited to take part in the day before, in the belly of the Whale Museum. This is at the sharp end, where the actual welfare of an endangered species is at risk on a daily, often minute-by-minute basis, from boaters. Harassment of the orca in the waters can directly impact on their survival, and is a crime in both US and Canadian waters, but easier to police in US waters, because of the clear regulations. So Soundwatch and Straitwatch, as monitoring and research programmes that deliver just-in-time education, along with the Washington Department of Fisheries and Waters (WDFW) and NOAA, the “big cheese” explains John, the two proper enforcement bodies, police these waters and stop people from harmful boating behaviours.

Around 9am we motor out of Snug Harbour on the west of the island and stop for fuel in Roche Bay. It is a prissy, pretty resort, with at least a billion dollars’ worth of yacht moored along its quays. As we refuel, the waste removal boat The Phecal Freak pulls in to clean away the resort’s effluvia. I think this is genius and want to take a photo, but am slightly embarrassed of what my fellow volunteers for the day, Sarah, an intern from Cal State Channel Islands, and John, a former IBM manager and now a board member of The Whale Museum, might think. (I also think Friday’s Harbour waste removal boat, The Pumpty Dumpty, is even more genius. I’ll get a photo of that instead, later.)

Then we leave Roche Harbour. As soon as we’ve trundled out of the harbour’s limits Eric asks us if we’re ready to go faster, and then throttles the Yamaha engine. A moment later the prow is up in the air and my hat is threatening to fly off and I can’t open my eyes for the wind, but it’s exhilarating, and I love it, especially as the water’s rough and we bounce along with my stomach rising and dropping, every now and then catching air, and once or twice really taking off, landing each time with a thud that jars the backbone.

“It’s a little choppy,” Eric apologises. But it’s fun. The water is more like a river, roiling and rolling around, and throwing us with it. As we head south to find the whales we enter the fog we’d seen earlier that morning, but which cleared up as we went north. Immediately the whole atmosphere changes. It’s mysterious, heavenly, ephemeral. Like being inside a thought and seeing it for what it is. And then out of the fog we begin to see boats. These are whale watching tours out of San Juan, out of Victoria. The international border is a few miles away, cutting the waters down the middle between land masses. And where there are whale watching boats, there are, because of the excellent and connected whale spotting network, whales.

There they are. Their dorsal fins breaking surface as they come up for air. The spumes of water a dozen feet high, wisps of mist, and then their backs curving back into the sea, a sight of their saddle patch, a fluke breaking cover and slapping down. There are about ten or twelve orca, males, females and calves, in three or four groups. Eric and Sarah do their first boat count of the day. EC 6. (Eco Tour boats from Canada). EU 3 (the same, from the States). PM 2 (private motors). Others. MM, such as us, monitoring motors. Much of the work of Soundwatch is the recording of this data, the two pillars of the work of The Whale Museum being education and research.

I’m not sure what I was expecting. But whenever we spot the whales and when the different types of boats, the eco tours and the private boats, also spot the whales, there is a ruckus on the water to get close and to follow the orca as they head north along the west side of San Juan Island. It is a fleet, and I feel, more than fleetingly, sorry for the whales, whose lives are constantly under rowdy surveillance. They are followed all day, every day, but do not leave, because this is their home.

But we’re here to help. Immediately we are in action, approaching a yacht that is half the distance from the whales as the whale watching tour boats, many of whom are part of the Pacific Whale Watching Association and, mostly, follow the Whale Wise Guidelines. We approach and the captain is, if not friendly then at least neutral, and says he knows the guidelines. We don’t ask him why he’s not following them. He says something about trying to back up, but those weren’t his boating actions. We offer him a brochure with the guidelines on it, and he says he doesn’t want them, before a member of his party says she does. My job today is to hand over the brochures on the end of a telescoping fishing pole, and I do this, I’m relieved, without missing or falling in. We spin around and head off, Eric shaking his head a little. John writes down the encounter on the recording sheet. The Whale Museum and the Soundwatch Programme has been recording this type of encounter for more than twenty years. It is this data that was, in part, critical to having the orca population here registered in 2005 as endangered, which led to the regulations being updated and, now, enforced. The whole encounter took less than a minute. That’s all the time that the Soundwatch team have, with the boats moving on the water, with the distance between crews, to get across the basics of the guidelines, and to hand over the materials. It is intense education.

But there’s actually no time to stop. We’re now heading over to a two-tiered power boat that comes at the whales along the coast from the north, directly in their path. When they pull up they are well short of 400 yards, which is unacceptable behaviour. If NOAA were on the scene they could issue a $30,000 fine for this. Soundwatch can only monitor and advise. We’re not there quick enough to intercept their course, but we pull up alongside. There are nuclear two families, two couples and their netball team of teenage girls, all sitting along the back of the boat with their camera-phones out, snapping away.

“Hey there,” shouts Eric. Steely faces. “We’re from The Whale Museum, we’re here to educate boaters about the regulations for good practice around the whales.”

“Yeah I know them,” says one of the guys. “We just came from over there,” he says pointing to the west. It’s a blatant lie, as we watched them steam in from the north and pull up.

“Okay great, you know the guidelines,” says Eric, as our boat, a tenth of the size, manoeuvres around theirs. “But then you’re not doing it right.”

The steely faces continue. We don’t bother offering them a brochure. Eric runs through the guidelines, and then pulls away.

“I get tired of their inventions,” Eric says when we’re out of earshot. But he smiles all the way through the encounter. His job is a diplomatic one. Not for the first time on this trip I come to believe that one of the most important assets a human can offer for the benefit of the animals they are trying to help is a smile. As Mary-chris Staples said, a smile can be an invitation to engage. Without this opening up, change is often impossible.

John is scribbling down on the encounter sheet. He looks up at Eric.

“How would you rate that?” John asks. There is a scale of human interaction for the encounter that needs recording. Eric thinks about it.

“Poor,” he says, after a while. A little while later when we look back, we see the boat has pulled out of the line of the orcas’ progress.

“Well that’s what matters in the end, ay?” says Eric. “They’ve changed their behaviour.”

Later on I keep a check on that boat, and yes, they stay with the fleet after that warning. The intervention made a difference, for now.

The next few hours are filled with boat counts every half hour, the recording of every incident one of us spots, and a number of interactions with private boats and yachts who seem not to know about the guidelines. Some, like the Wind Witch, out of San Francisco, are genuinely unaware of the whales. They leave Mosquito Pass, a notorious point for boats crossing the whales’ path, heading for California.

“Are there whales here?” asks the woman on board. She immediately turns to her partner at the wheel. “We’ll cut the engine to neutral.”

“That’s great,” says Eric, although they’ve essentially already crossed the orcas’ path. We move around to the other side and pass them a leaflet, which they take gladly, smiling, and follow Eric’s guidelines to wait with the fleet.

Others suggest they know the regulations—one guy even waves his brochure at us while barely stopping from his photo-taking—without strictly following them. Each time, Eric instructs John to write down another incident in the shorthand code that makes the job easier. Eric knows each of the codes by heart, of course. “That’s a 3.1 and a 5.3, PM, transiting,” he says. John marks this down, as well as the name and registration of the boat, on his two sheets, incidents and encounters.

Sometimes we have to put our own boat down on the incident sheet because in attempting to get to the private boats before they infringe the regulations and get too close to the whales, we’ve done so as well. Once or twice we’re right in the whales’ path. “MM 3.1” says Eric.

“One of the other drivers says if you’re not infringing once or twice a day, then you’re not doing your job,” says John.

Eric agrees. If you’re too far back then you’re not close enough to get to the private boats before they do harm. It’s a fine balance, but a risk that has to be taken sometimes.

Because it’s a tricky business. The whales are not all in one group, and can change direction at any time. Sometimes the private boats and yachts get genuinely caught up in the swings and sashays of the whales. But then you get some boats that are reckless and arrogant, like this one, as we watch it literally chasing behind the very line of the whales’ path, less than a hundred feet behind. This is cutting right over the whales, and is beyond unacceptable. It’s one of the times we also get too close to the whales. Eric approaches but the captain palms us off and swings away. I watch as a couple on the prow use their high-powered lens to get their photos. They don’t back off, but we do, of course, needing to get out of the way of the whales. But then the WDFW have seen what happened, and approach us, and Eric explains. “That’s what we needed to know,” one of the officers says, and goes after the boat. We watch as the WFDW officers give the boat a $1000 ticket. A wildlife crime has just been committed, and the perpetrator has been punished on the spot. I feel strangely righted.

When the orca need to rest, they line up flipper to flipper. They are voluntary breathers, unlike us, for whom breathing is automatic. So when they are ‘sleeping’ one of the pod stays awake and breathes, and in their almost-unconscious state, the others hear this and come up for air as well. Eric flaps his arms around as he tells me this, imitating a dozy orca, and it makes me laugh, as if we can all understand the state they are in, that relaxed type of napping that we experience on a warm sunny afternoon, or in the morning after not enough sleep.

They are lined up like this for much of the latter part of the day while we are on the water, as they follow the coastline up to Boundary, on their way to the Fraser River. We are in Canadian waters now. This is the most peaceful part of the day, when the whale watching boats simply chug along four or five hundred feet away in a line all heading north and east, and the orca are all together, so it makes it easier to stay away from them. This is the moment when we sit on the water and get a little drowsy ourselves. In twelve minutes Eric and Sarah will do their last boat count of the day. John has no more incidents to report, and Eric is unworried, as all the PMs have disappeared, so we will head back in time for the Whale Museum’s softball game in the Island League. For the rest of their circuit with the flow tide northwards, the orca will remain relatively unbothered, and then return south overnight with the ebb tide, with almost no boats to contend with, with no surveillance of their passing.

“Well what do you think?” asks Eric as we’re almost ready to head back.

“It’s intense,” I say, and all three of them laugh.

“Yep,” he agrees. The work puts you in the present moment, making decisions based on what is happening that minute, as to what to do that’s best. And it is directly beneficial to an incredible wonder, this endangered species with its own social system, its dialects of communication, its greeting rituals, their distinct culture. It is also the accumulation of the data which continues to play a crucial role in the protection of this endangered species.

“One possibility for what was going to happen when they were given protected status,” explains Eric, “is that this whole west side of the island, for half a mile out, would be boat free. But a lot of the tours come out of this side, and so they were vocal, of course, in opposition. So the idea was dropped. But it could still happen.”

It would be comfortable to imagine that. The resident orca having their favoured paths through the water untouched by tour boats or private, not relying on this intense, fast turning monitoring and intervention. The Whale Museum, like many, if not most, organisations of its type, never have enough funding to do all the things they would like. Eric is both Soundwatch Coordinator and Research Curator, and the two jobs are too much for one person. Of course during the summer the whale watching tours run into the evenings, when Soundwatch are not on the water. And private boats can come out any time. One of the most obdurate populations to shift, both physically in their boats and in terms of mindset, are the fishermen. The only thing to move them, usually, are NOAA. But Eric doesn’t give up on them. Conversations can make effective conservation, even with the fishermen who want to be in the same waters as the orca, both, of course, being after the same pink prize: salmon.

Back at Snug Harbour we tie up the boat and stow away our life jackets and head back to the truck. On the way we stop and talk to a guy at the resort, who asks who we are and what we’re doing. Eric explains, talks about the different volunteer roles that Sarah, John and I have been playing that day. The guy looks up at Eric.

“You mean if I have to come out with you I have to work?” he jokes. We all laugh.

“Sure,” says John. “You don’t get to whale watch. I had my nose in a spread sheet all day.

“But you do get to be with the whales for longer,” says Eric. “We’re with them all day. The tours are only there for an hour.”

And it’s true. I didn’t get to whale watch. In fact, for a long while, I was focused more on the boats than the whales. Even though I did get to think a bit longer about the experience, ponder on my questions, take a few photographs. We were never, intentionally, as close as any of the whale watching tour boats. Once or twice we were incredibly close, but moved away as quickly as possible. And yet if my day was not spent watching whales, that was because it was a day of being with them, in their environment, in a way that was respectful, even beneficial, to their needs and their survival. In the evening I feel good. Working for the whales does this to people, it seems: makes you both less and more significant that you really are.

Animals, Blog, Churchill 2014

Beeping Hearts: in the Whale Museum

Posted by

Alex Lockwood

on July 10

A little way into Cindy’s presentation to this group of college biology majors from the local university I suddenly notice the beeping of one of the students’ watches, and realise it has been beeping for quite a while. I look over and the student, a tall young girl with blonde hair and a red dyed fringe is trying to hide the watch in the folds of her t-shirt, with that half-embarrassed and half-pleased smile that says she knows, innocently, she’s the centre of attention, and not what Cindy is presenting.

A few moments later one of the two professors catches her eye and mouths her to take the watch off. The student does so and hands it along the line, where the professor presses a button and the beeping stops. The professor gives the student a smile, and the student smiles back, and then all attention is back on Cindy, who is now telling us all that Eschrichtius robustus, the Gray Whale, has come back from the edge of extinction twice.

The first time was a recovery from whaling, where, as coastal dwellers feeding in shallow waters, the Gray was easy prey to the great whaling traditions of both First Nations and then European settlers. The second great trauma for the whales was the 1999-2000 season, where around a third of the population died, the scientists agreeing due to mass starvation. During the event the Gray Whales photographed looked emaciated—you can tell a whale is starved if you can see its shoulder blade, which should be covered in blubber. (Whales have the same bones in their flippers that we have in our shoulders and arms, right down to the thumb bone, because many millions of years ago, they too lived on land and used their forearms to move about, as we did, when we were apes.) But since then the population has bounced back to around 20-25,000 individuals in the population along the US and Canadian west coast (and another smaller population in Asia). The Atlantic Gray Whale never recovered from whaling, and remains extinct.

It’s probably because they are opportunistic feeders, Cindy explains, that the Gray Whales have done so well, whereas other populations, such as the resident orcas in these waters, which feed exclusively on salmon, and preferably on Chinook salmon, are not doing so well. When the salmon population drops, the orca suffer. Since 1990 the salmon along this stretch of the Salish Sea, the collective name for the waters from Alaska to Puget Sound, have been dying in massive numbers. A new documentary film, Salmon Confidential, by the director Twyla Roscovich, featuring the BC marine biologist Alexandra Morton, lays the blame for this directly at the door of the aquaculture industry—the farmed salmon business—and its protectors in the DFO (Department for Fisheries and Oceans), and its paymasters, politicians in the Canadian Government. The evidence seems almost incontrovertible that farmed salmon fishing has introduced devastating pathogens into the indigenous wild salmon populations. And yet to protect its trade deals with the US and China, the Canadian government is engaged, the film claims, in a massive cover up.

Cindy introduces us to two individual Gray Whales. The first is ‘Little Patch’, with a white patch, obviously, on its side. Patch has been back to the same feeding grounds in Puget Sound for twenty-three years running. The second individual is Stinky Pete, not such a lucky whale, (and not the Frasier-voiced character from Toy Story 2, either) whose one-year-old skeleton fills the room in which we are sitting as Cindy gives her presentation, not nicely lined up but set down in pieces like a jigsaw puzzle, waiting for the college students to put the skeleton together and, doing so, figure out what it was that killed Stinky Pete.

While the students are putting together the skeleton, I chat with the two professors. The main purpose of their daytrip to The Whale Museum, on Friday Harbour, where I am working for a few days to learn about their best practice in education, and about the success and strategies of the museum itself, is for biology class; while the students don’t know that much about whales, they do know about the different bones, the cervical and thoracic, the lumbar and caudal, about the atlas bone at the top of the spinal cord and the axis at its end, the processes of the lumbar and thoracic leading to the ribs, all beautiful words to me, words I recognise from my own limited knowledge of the human body, words that connect this great Gray creature and my own existence, we have the same bones, we both crawled, we both breathed. (Later, however, Cindy will chide the students for beginning the rib cage too high, at the cervical bones. “The ribs come out of your neck, do they?” she laughs.)

However the second reason the students are here, or the benefit of the trip, and one that delights me beyond what it should, is that their biology class is being combined with physical education. Their heart rates are being monitored: hence the student not knowing how to switch off what I thought was her watch. I look around. Yes, they’re all wearing them, some have two watches on, of course, a detail I did not at first notice. Later, they will stop for lunch, and its nutritional value will be calculated. This doubling up of educational experience, the first professor, a tall man with a calm face and a poker hat, explains, will, he hopes, make links between the sustainability of the whales and the sustaining of the students’ own bodies. It is a wonderful experiment, I think, artistic in its composition, if art is or can be about the revealing of what is hidden about our connected living.

The students don’t have much trouble piecing together the skeleton, and from there its quite clear to discover, from the broken bones along one section of the thoracic spine and ribs, that Stinky Pete died from boat strike, a disease of trammeling modernity, glimpses of which I will see the following day when out on the Soundwatch boat patrolling the western side of San Juan Island, when a private yacht practically runs right over the passaging orca (and will be given a $1000 dollar ticket for it by WDFW, Washington’s water police) to get its holiday pictures. The boat was probably a big one, a tanker of some sort, with a huge propeller, and one which Stinky Pete did not hear, perhaps because of the huge amount of noise pollution in the water, or simply because he was a juvenile and had not yet learned how to discern threat and danger.

But in fact Stinky Pete did not die from boat strike. He died from starvation. Some of the broken bones, one student notices, have healed. Which meant Stinky Pete probably lived for another six months from being hit. He starved, because his way of feeding—rolling in the shallows, digging and wriggling right into the mud to reach his prey, crab, crayfish, human rubbish—would have been too painful for him. Stinky Pete died because it was too painful to eat. Stinky Pete felt and responded to pain. And yet people still ride their boats over whales so they can show off their photos to friends and family when they’re finished with the charter.

“So what are the things we can do to help protect the whales?” asks Cindy, near the end of the session. Reduce noise, says one. Protect their migration routes, says another. This has worked for the critically endangered Atlantic Right Whale, whose numbers have started to rebound after boat paths were rerouted to get out of the whales’ passage. To reduce pollution and clean up the oceans: when a necropsy was performed on another dead Gray Whale, half a ton of litter was found in its stomach. Clear up old nettings so that they don’t get entangled: a new disentanglement unit has been put in place in Baja, California, where the Grays mate and give birth. Although not much can be done about predation from other whales: the transient orcas are responsible for about a third of all Gray whale calf mortality. Although perhaps something can still be done about the 140 Gray Whales permitted to be slaughtered each year by Russia as part of its traditional peoples’ rights. Half a percent of a population of families each year.

Cindy then takes the group on a tour of the museum. I went earlier on a private tour and learned much about the resident orca populations, so duck out to get some lunch, let the knowledge settle in, think, and write. A story is filtering through me about the forty-five resident orcas that were captured and taken from the waters, and the dozen or so more who were killed, by the sealife centres such as SeaWorld, which has been struck by so much negative publicity recently since the release of the film Blackfish. Of the forty-five who found their way into the captive system, only one remains alive, Lolita. Considering orca can live up to 103-years old, so far, and counting, in the wild, their premature deaths in captivity is only one indicator of its banal wrongness. The fact that Lolita still uses the same calls as her L-pod family is another. The fact that she swims around in an illegally-sized bathtub is another. There are at least forty more. I go online to try and discover the names of all the other wild orca who were captured. Nowadays, when a new calf is born to the pods in the wild, The Whale Museum runs an adoption programme to raise money and there is a competition to name the new arrival. It seems an intelligent and generative idea to connect the local populations with their water neighbours.

The Whale Museum itself is a successful institution. Established in 1976, it runs education programmes and conducts research into the resident orca, and is one of many marine organisations in the region who have successfully contributed to the identification of the orca as an endangered species, therefore demanding special protection. Such protection was given in 2005, after a long thirty years of data collection and a battle to have them protected. The local volunteers, the NGOs, the organisations, even the government, all work together to protect the orca. No wild captures have taken place for decades. Although sadly some aquariums still take wild caught cetaceans, these orca in the wild are protected from that horrific separation at least.

On the earlier tour we listened to the acoustics of the orca. There are three pods in the Southern Resident Population, J, K and L, and each of them have distinct calls or dialects. “We call the K’s the kittens,” says Cindy, and you can hear why; high pitched mewling, one of the other women on the tour can’t help but “Ah” at the sounds of it. We listen to J and L too, and to the transient orca who pass through but do not live in these waters, whose calls are much deeper. We also listen to what a super-pod sounds like, when J, K and L all come together. Cindy asks us to listen out for what sounds like laughing. We hear it, a kind of cackle, deeper than the usual calls.

“That’s the one universal call,” she says, “it’s done by most orca we know of, here, in the Arctic, in Russia, populations that have never met.” It’s the innate call of the orca species, something they must have genetically, the same way some bird calls are made up of genetic and learned parts. It means, of course, that language is part of the orca genome.

We also learn about what Cindy proudly calls the “culture” of the orca, one of the aspects of their lives that earned them the status as a distinct species, which was necessary for NOAA to give them protected status. This is something only the southern resident orca do. When two pods meet after a while separated, say J and K, what they do is this: they talk and talk and talk under water for a long time, until they come and line up, face to face to each other, and then go completely silent. They face each other in the water in these lines for a few minutes, before they swim together and intermingle, and their calling begins again. They do this each time. What is this if it is not a ritual, memorised and repeated, something essential to their “cultural” life, something that benefits their social experience. Something they value?

As the students disappear I am left with Stinky Pete, who usually resides in his pieces in bins behind educational banners, but who will be left out because there’s another school group coming in, this time third graders, who will be put through the same exercise in a few days. I think about Pete since his death. How he washed up on shore, how his body was saved for educational purposes, how his skeleton was put in a cage in the water to let other ocean creatures pick his flesh bare, how the more fragile bones were transported to the Burke Museum in Seattle to let the beetles in their cases do the final cleansing work, how in this way his dead flesh benefits other creatures in the ecosystem. How his bones are then coated in a solution of Elmer’s glue and water every five years to stop them from falling apart. How his mother may have lamented. How the heart rate of perhaps one young student may have increased on hearing his story. How the beeping of that heart cannot be stopped.

Blog, Running, Writing

Running and academia: the intellectual aspect of pounding the pavements

Posted by

Alex Lockwood

on July 9

This article was originally published on the Guardian running blog

“Running has become socio-cosmic,” anthropologist Allen Abramson announces to his attentive audience, a group of artists, academics, writers and, collectively, runners, gathered at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. What he means by this, I think, is that running is now everywhere. Even – as the first International Festival of Running (Run Run Run, or #r3fest) hosted by University College London last week attests – in the hallowed halls of the academic department, where such highfalutin claims are not, as they might be on the track, out of place.

But outside sports science, what interest does running have for the academic? And is running safe in our hands (or should that be shoes)?

About 50 of us have come for this inaugural conference, which is also the beginnings of a new Running Research Network, exploring the intersections of the scientific with the spiritual, cultural and political sides of the thing we all love to do – and now also to study. What is clear, however, from the footwear as much as the debate, is that we’re runners first and foremost.

“We were worried it was just going to be the two of us,” says Alan Latham, a senior lecturer in the department of geography at UCL, of himself and his co-organiser, the artist Kai Syng Tan. “But the response has been phenomenal.”

They needn’t have worried. As the popularity of running has exploded in parks and on the pavements, an interest in exploring it has grown in academic departments. One of the joys of this interest, keenly felt in the positive atmosphere of the festival, is that it draws people from all walks: the philosophers, the anthropologists, the performance artists, graphic designers, cultural geographers, English departments, music and meditation experts.

Perhaps only at a running conference would you get the choice over lunch of a running film festival; an injury clinic with Dr Courtney Kipps, the medical director of the London Triathlon; or guided breathing with Devashishu Torpy, the UK Peace Run coordinator. I opted for the meditation, attracted by the relation of long-distance running to self-transendence that has grown out of the Sri Chinmoy school of Buddhism, which combines spirituality with marathons.

What, no option of running? That was later, at 2.50pm, with Collectif Totem, a group of geographers and town planners from France and Italy who are mapping cities through running.

The conference’s wide appeal is perhaps due to what “runner geographer” Hayden Lorimer describes as the “mythical and mundane” nature of running. Mythical in its origins and stories, from the Greek goddess Nike to today’s feats of ultra-endurance. Mundane in the earthy and physical nature of planting your feet on to the earth, and the practicalities that requires.

As if to prove his metaphor, we’re treated to a 45-minute exploration in excruciating detail of Lorimer’s feet. While he gives the opening keynote, a webcam is focused on his calloused toes, the missing toenail he lost on the incline up Sentinel Dome in Yosemite national nark, the torn skin across the balls of his feet after coming down a mountain in Tenerife. It is the perfect opening and the ideal riposte to claims that academia does not have its feet on the ground. Here they are in all their grimy, battered glory.

“I’ve not lost a toenail yet,” says Latham as he shows me around his Museum of Running, a collection of some of the first magazines, shoes and memorabilia from the beginnings of the running phenomenon in the 1960s and 70s, including the first ever published weekly training plan from Eugene, Oregon – home of Mo Farah’s Nike Project team. “Perhaps I’m not a real runner until I do.”

Some of the work being produced by artists and academics with and through their running throws a new light on the wider cultural, perhaps even political, implications of running. Véronique Chance’s wonderful Great Orbital Run, a nine-day, 150-mile run around London, is not only an endurance event mapped on to a 10x10ft wall hanging, but also a commentary on the status of negotiating a global city, with its uncharted waste grounds, traffic problems, pollution and hidden beauty. It is every bit as provocative and insightful as Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital.

With Ivo Gormley’s GoodGym project on show, what was really being explored is what another academic, Dr Russell Hitchings, called the phenomenon of “green exercise”, and the implications of how much better for you running in open green spaces can be over time in the gym.

“The idea of the conference was to bring people together and really see what all the difference disciplines could learn from one another,” says Tan – a little like the “motion-controlled collisions” of a thousand footfalls hitting the ground. “There will definitely be a second conference,” she continues. Around her neck are the whistle and stopwatch with which she timed, and then abruptly stopped, the conference papers after a firm eight minutes. Perhaps other conferences could take a leaf out of #r3fest’s book.

Animals, Blog, Churchill 2014

Storying with CETUS, Victoria BC

Posted by

Alex Lockwood

on July 8

It’s nice when someone gets it. Not only get it, but when what you want to do is something the people you’re talking to want as well. That’s what happened with Leah Thorpe from CETUS, the Cetacean Research and Conservation Society based on Vancouver Island, when we met for lunch at the beginning of the month so I could hear what their organisation is achieving with its education programmes to help support the resident orca and cetacean populations.

Leah has been working with CETUS for a while now. She came in originally to run the education programmes and has found herself, with her co-worker Megan, running the organisation at a challenging time, when the Canadian government has slashed its funds for theirs and similar programmes. With some last minute funding, Leah and her staff have been busily getting ready for the summer preparing boats and crew to get out into the water and support the protection of the Salish Sea’s whales.

The waters from the Puget Sound north, around the Islands, and up to Alaska, are home to 33 different cetaceans and marine mammals. There are gray whales, humpbacks, fin and sei whales, as well as harbour and Dall’s porpoises, and minke whales. But the undoubted stars are the orca – the killer whales (actually dolphins, but who’s quibbling?).

There are two resident orca populations – the Southern (PDF) and Northern residents, each made up of a number of families, or pods. Both have declined in numbers over the last few decades, mainly due to difficulty finding their preferred food source, Chinook salmon. The salmon numbers have fallen because of, predictably, overfishing by us, and also, according to the marine biologist and activist Alexandra Morton, because BC’s wild salmon are testing positive for dangerous European salmon viruses associated with salmon farming (the salmon farmed in the US and Canada is Atlantic salmon). Either way, salmon numbers are down 92% on previously recorded populations. And the orca are suffering.

But human activity also threatens the pods. This is where CETUS, and the Soundwatch Programme at the Whale Museum in Friday Harbour, come in. Their main education programme is face-to-face with boaters out on the water, educating the boaters on the Be Whale Wise guidelines for safe engagement with the orca and other cetaceans and marine mammals. CETUS works on a daily basis to monitor boat activity around the orca, and approach boats where there are signs that the guidelines—which are legal regulations in US waters, but only guidelines in Canadian waters—are being transgressed, and the orca are being harassed.

“One of the hardest things is that even if people do know about and understand the guidelines, they don’t understand orca behaviour,” says Leah. “People think that if the orca are coming towards their boats, then that’s okay, the orca are not bothered by their presence. But I try to tell them, well, people do lots of things that aren’t good for them too, and sometimes we need to back away from those people; it’s the same with orca.”

CETUS run a number of programmes such as the Straitwatch and BC marine mammal response network, as well as the Robson Bight Warden Programme, and also the removal of old fishing gear from the water. This last one is a successful programme, and one that is easy to communicate and sell to people about the value of CETUS’s work.

“And that’s because people can see it,” says Leah, “it’s clear to them what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and the potential results. Old stuff that whales get tangled up in gets taken away: clear.”

But with the boater education programme, there are still ways in which CETUS wants to tell its story more clearly, as boaters, often fishermen or visiting tourists—not usually the locals—can respond negatively to what appears, at first, like an official boat approaching across the water. What Leah and her crew try to do is always start by talking about the whales first, and using the anecdotes and stories of the whales, to engage the boaters and watchers.

“We sometimes tell them about the mother orca who lost her son, and the three brothers who lost their mother,” Leah begins. “And then, a few months later, we find the four of them together. The single female was actually their aunt. But to see them come together as a pod was wonderful. People like that story.”

It’s only then that CETUS discusses the whale wise guidelines.

And beyond this, strategically, as with many environmental groups, the ‘selling’ of its value to stakeholders, donors and government funding bodies, either direct or through public pressure, is a critical part of how CETUS manages its future.

And this is where a writer and storyteller can come into the picture. Without getting weighted down with the formalized languages of fundraising or communication, marketing or social media, how can a creative writer come in and work with an organisation such as CETUS to simply tell a story about themselves in a way that is both authentic and that helps them realise their aims? That translates the wealth of research about orcas and their behaviour, and their decline, into something the boaters and public get immediately, and which changes their behaviour. And it’s here where things click.

“We’d love you to come out on the boat with us and help us work out what story it might be that works best,” she says. It’s gratifying that so early on this trip the whole idea of a creative writer working with an environmental organisation to tell the story better to help animals and nature seems to be one that could work. [I’ll be out on the water with the Friday Harbour Soundwatch people on Weds 9th July]

Leah and Megan have been working on this, and in a few weeks they go live with their first youtube.com viral video about the dangers of not properly monitoring and protecting the orca from overzealous or ignorant human interaction. As a mainstream organisation—a registered charity, and not a campaigning or pressure group—Leah is both hesitant and excited about what will happen when the video is launched.

“But with less funds, we may need to take more risks,” she says. And we talk a little more about the aims they hope to achieve through the video. Wider recognition for CETUS’s work; wider public awareness; a clearer story. “Whatever makes it easier for the whales,” she finishes.

It’s obvious with the decline of the orca populations, and their cultural, economic and ecological value to the region – although of course the orca are valuable in and of themselves, not in any metric that can be measured by us – that any and all attempts to protect their habitats and keep human-whale interactions to a safe minimum level is necessary. CETUS’s work, then, is necessary. So how to better tell their story, so their work not only continues, but grows?

The next day I travel out with Five Star Whales on an evening whale watching trip. CETUS work closely with the whale watching industry, and there is a Pacific Whale Watching Organisation with the registration of 33 tour operators who all work together to ensure the safe and sustainable practice of whale watching. Most are part of the Orca Spotting Network, set up by Ron Bates, who comes out on the boat with us, voluntary now in his retirement, to help the boat find the orca. There are two other biologists on the boat, Kaegan, and Sarah, a young marine biologist with a BSc, moving on to do her MSc research on sticklebacks, but with, having grown up on the island, a healthy knowledge of the orca and of the surrounding ecosystem.

Today we’re lucky. One in a hundred lucky, according to Captain Trevor. When we find the orca we find them happily fed, gorged on salmon, and in a playful and sociable mood—both with each other, and with us. We see pretty much the whole of J-Pod, including the oldest orca on record, Granny (pictured above, identifiable from her saddle patch) who is 103-years-old, and who has children’s books written after her. They spyhop, tail strike, and breach, the adults and calves, all around us. It’s a mesmerizing display, everyone on board becoming, for the moment, children again as we stand and watch and take photos and cheer and gasp as we spot one, then another, then closer, then further away.

I count 12 tour boats in the water in a half-mile radius around the whales, although really the whales are around us. They dive and reappear in far places from where they went under, and are always on the move, and when they are done playing (with us), they all dive and swim away, and we don’t see where they go—ready to move on to the next feed, or, having played, ready for other activity.

Being with the orca, and on the best (the oldest, family owned) whale boat, with the man who set up the original spotting network (left, he looks asleep but he was just twiddling with the radio) feels a great privilege. When I told people all about the trip, this was the part they were most jealous of. It certainly made better for the jetlag and lonely intensity of the first few days of this seven-week journey. Stopping to think of the orca, being close to these incredibly sentient, emotional, social animals, thinking of what I learnt by watching Blackfish and by working with ORCA Your Seas in the UK, and what I’m already learning here, the reasons to be here make more sense.

Blog, Churchill 2014, Running

Vancouver Canada Day 10k, race report

Posted by

Alex Lockwood

on July 2

Small world. You travel half way across the top of the globe to take on Vancouver’s finest* in the Run Canada Day 10k, and what’s actually going through your mind on the start line is the need to beat the guy from Wallington in the Great North Run t-shirt.

To be fair, Vancouver’s best weren’t going to be beat (by me, anyway). The eventual winner of the 10k through Pacific Spirit Park was Tony-Carter lookalike Jeremiah Johnson, who won in 33:11, about five minutes ahead of the 2^nd place runner. Second place was a Kenny Mac-lookalike, Adam Morgan, six foot something and lithe, and when the gun went, they both flew off, leaving the rest of us to battle out for the rest of the top ten.

33:11 on this course? This hot day? That was some going. I went out for a quick reconnoitre (as they say in this bilingual city) of the last mile of the course, which was an easy incline, although if I’d feel the same after 9k was debatable. I was already suffering with the humidity and heat – by 10am, when the races (beginning with the kids’ 1k) got underway, it would be in the low-20s, and climbing.

And climbing. And climbing. Although not, the race organiser at Vancouver’s Running Room, warned us, until 5k, as the first half was downhill through the trails of Spirit Park, so to not go out too fast and pace it. We’d also be overtaking the fun runners/walkers on the 5k race before us, so to keep an eye out as we were letting the brakes off down the slopes.

Once the 5k runners were off the first straight road, the 10k runners lined up and waited for the lead bike. I had a funny feeling I might do okay. Despite my chronic hip strain seeming to have moved from the right leg to the left in the past two weeks, apart from the first twenty or so runners, the field didn’t look very fast. And so it turned out – or, my increase in training in the past few weeks, with a firm foundation of Pilates over the last six months laid (Pilates is absolutely the future people. Fill your glutes!) is starting to pay off.

Fortunately most of the race was in the shade of the magnificent Pacific Spirit Park trails. This is a park that sits next to the campus of UBC, but was part of the traditional Musqueam peoples’ territory. During my reccy earlier I’d stopped for what I realise now was a rather sacrilegious pee in the forest, and having stopped running for a few moments I was struck by the absolute silence of the place. It was a good place to find that peace of mind that running in nature, whether it be fells, trails, beach, mountains, can provide. Although there wasn’t going to be much of that after 4.3k.

Because at 4.3k that’s where the climb began. Up to that point I’d gone well. Turning into the first corner in about 12^th, I picked off the two Swedes, and the heavy Wallington boots of my fellow Brit were nowhere to be heard. Then over the next 3k I slowly reeled in a Gateshead Conrad lookalike (what is it with all the lookalikes?) who I’d expected more of, for all the handshakes on the start line, and then also took a guy wearing a Spartathlon headband. But it was downhill and I was making the most of the freedom to breathe in the shade of the tall pines.

Then we turned. It wasn’t a straight uphill but a twisty-turny climb, all the more difficult for not being able to see the crests of the rises. About 5k we left the shelter of the trees and hit the road, where the heat and the climb really hit hard. Luckily we were only off for 500m or so, before we turned back into the park, but then also back up. Even so, I managed to pull in the guy in front of me, until about 7k when the hilly run got the better of me, and he pulled away. I looked behind to see if I could see Conrad/Spartathlon guy, to be surprised to see a runner in yellow.

Over the next kilometre he reeled me in, especially as around 8k the race took a deep incline followed by the related climb. Conditions underfoot were almost perfect. This was a really well looked after trail, solid and dry, and even though I had an ankle-wobble around the corner, that was my only mishap. It was enough to let the guy behind me pull me in, however, and when we next left the trails and got back onto the road, I let him take me, with the plan to sit on his shoulder.

Mentally, here’s where I made my mistake. Because I’d planned my long run back to the other side of town to follow the race, I had an excuse for not giving it everything. It was too easy an excuse, and he pulled away. Only five seconds gap or so, but it was enough. Luckily, when we finished, I discovered he was in the 40-49 category, so it wouldn’t have made a difference to getting a top 3 in the 30-39 category. Even so, it was a mental error in a race, one not to be made again.

The final kilometre was back onto the road and into Wesbrook Village and a twisty, turny path up to the finish line. I ungraciously barged my way past two slow finishers on the 5k (a mother and her six year old; hang your head in shame, young man) for a finishing time of 41:36. That’s a way off the PB, but on this course, in this heat, I was pleased with that, and knew I’d have a top 10 finish. Fourth M30-39, and most importantly for general reputation, first international finisher, all in the TBH vest. See all the results here.

A well organised, enjoyable race and a good way to start the tour of Canadian and US races over the next few weeks. Next up: the Windhorse Half Marathon in Bellingham on Saturday 19^th July. Prizes for all runners are Mongolian khadags. As they say in these parts, “Go Figure, ay.”

* not actually the reason I’m here, boss. It’s work.

Image (c) of the magnificently named Presley Perswain

First published on TyneBridgeHarriers.com

Activism, Animals, Blog, Churchill 2014

Forty-five days

Posted by

Alex Lockwood

on June 28

The chickens are 20 to a crate, and the crates are moved in piles of 2 x 5 by a fast-moving forklift truck driver in dark blue overalls and a thick white mask over his mouth and nose. We’re in the (public) lane between the two buildings of the chicken packing factory at the corner of Hastings and Commercial Drive in East Vancouver. The building on the right as we look up the lane is the warehouse where stacks of crates, some 20 or 30 high, are kept in holding. On the left is the slaughterhouse.

The forklift brings 40 or so crates from the towering columns to the open door of the warehouse, and from here he maintains a steady speed of loading the 2x5s onto the automated conveyor belt on the other side of the lane, into the open end of the slaughterhouse. The chickens are now minutes from death. They are 45 days old.

“Just babies,” said Mary-chris Staples, a maths teacher and organiser of the weekly vigils outside the slaughterhouse. She holds up two fingers to the birds in the crates as they are transported between the two buildings, a victory sign. “Bye babies,” she says as we take their pictures. The thought flashes through my mind that the ultimate sponsor of my trip, Winston Churchill (on this Churchill Fellowship), also used, became famous for, using this V-for-victory sign, long before victory was ever in sight.

A truck loaded with chickens will travel hours from the many broiler farms around Vancouver and beyond to this chicken processing plant. Earlier we watched one turn off Hastings into Frasier, but it looked empty. While we’re in the alley another, presumably full, pulls in, ready to unload. I’m with the 2×5 crates, the 200 chickens, that have just been loaded onto the heavy duty conveyor belt. Taking pictures. Mary-chris points past it.

“In a minute that one will tip up 45 degrees and empty them all out into the processing line,” she explains. A moment later that’s what happens. The 200 birds are unceremoniously dumped out of the crate – and disappear from sight. The floor of the conveyor drops, the crate is rolled back and moved out of the way back to the open side of the space, so the forklift can come pick it up and return it to the warehouse, where it can either be repaired, or loaded back onto an empty truck and taken back to the broiler farms, for repacking. The other crates, still full of birds, move one space along in the line. The chickens I have been taking photos of, the ones I have been watching, slip slowly to the side, slip slowly away on the floating, buzzing machine.

Behind me the forklift driver quickly drives across the lane and loads up another 2×5 in the empty space. The next 200 chickens, to make sure the processing does not stop.

“Be careful,” says Mary-chris. “He won’t slow down for you.”

If this is the input line, round the corner, where a large refrigerated lorry container is fixed to he building, is the output. And the door adjacent to where we’re standing is in effect the garbage chute. The garage-style door is open and we watch as a huge container is loaded with animal slurry, chicken-flesh pink, pouring down funnels and pipes, some into the container, much of it simply onto the floor.

We take videos and photographs until the container is full, the waste products bound for dog food or some other product with standards lower than what is expected for human consumption, and the slaughterhouse worker shuts the roller door, Mary-chris still filming until its fully closed. I wonder why the forklift driver wears a mask but the slurry guy doesn’t. In the lane it smells but not as bad as I’d imagined. The smell is not the worst thing. Even the confusion and fear in the eyes of the chickens is not the worst thing. The worst thing is the mechanisation. The numbers. It’s the first time I’ve seen it up close. I want to cry and I also don’t want to cry. I do not want to seem as if I’m shocked.

Earlier I’d joined Mary-chris on this regular Friday vigil at the corner of Hastings and Commercial Drive, where every week she and others from Liberation BC and the other animal rights groups in the city meet and bear witness so that others also might not forget what happens behind the walls of this nondescript building, hidden on the slope down to the traffic lights by 12 broad-leaved trees. A dozen placards are tied to lampposts and electricity boxes so the commuters on their way to work can see the messages: “Honk to stop the abuse”; a picture of a dog and a chicken with the now well-served slogan “Why love one and not the other?”.

Mary-chris stands with another placard around her neck, smiling and waving at the passing traffic. “It’s an invitation,” she explains. “If you don’t make eye contact with the drivers and passengers, they don’t really respond. But if you smile and wave, it’s an invitation. People can see you’re not here to shout at them. They can see that, ‘look, here’s a happy person doing something for the animals’ and that’s the invitation, to see what we’re saying. There’s a place for all types of activism.”

This one clearly works. While we’re talking Mary-chris keeps smiling and waving and she gets plenty of people smiling and waving back, and a regular orchestra of honking horns. She tells me about one young boy whose car had stopped at the lights, who read the placard and then whose eyes lifted to the building, and she could see something had happened in his mind. “Even if it’s just one person…” she adds.

And then it’s my turn. “Can you hold this while I run to the washroom?” she asks, taking off her placard and handing it to me. Of course, I say. And then she runs up the street, leaving me standing on my own. I’m too self-conscious to wave. But I stand there and I face the traffic. No one honks. I’m not smiling, so no one smiles back. But then a bus driver, who pass by here every day, raises his hand to me, and I think, yes, okay.

When Mary-chris gets back she thanks me for doing my bit. It’s nearly 9am now, and Mary-chris is off to join the striking teachers on the picket line, defending Canada’s free education. She tells me that in fact as of today she’s officially retired. She wanted to retire early so she could spend more time on her animal rights work. We collect in the placards from along the street, and load them in the back of her car. The boot is covered with animal stickers, the back seat already down and the car half-full with other posters and the paraphernalia of an activist’s cause. Some of the pictures are of the abuse uncovered in the Mercy for Animals investigation last week at the Chilliwack Cattle Sales.

Before Mary-chris heads off to her picket line she gives me a hug and tells me that coming out here in the rain, all the way from the UK, has made her day, already an emotional one, even better. As she drives off I change into my running gear. Landed only last night, I don’t know my way around the public transport, so the best way, anyway, to discover a new place is always to run through it. I’ll leave here and do another 11 miles around the beautiful Stanley Park and English Bay.

As I leave I cross the alley again and look up. The forklift is still crossing back and forth, back and forth. The cages empty, full, full, then empty. This is what he will do all day. It is hard labour, and Mary-chris, as with Timothy Pachirat’s book Every 12 Seconds, about his year as a slaughterhouse worker, is at pains to point out, the activists’ vigils and protests are not aimed at the workers, but at the system.

As I’m watching two crows swoop down the lane and one dives and picks up a small morsel of escaped chicken flesh. The other crow bombs its back with its talons, hoping to make the first bird drop its prize. And rather than think how awful this is, I’m thinking why don’t people eat crow instead of chicken, or seagull, or eagle—the eagle I saw a few hours later surrounded by crows out at the very tip of Stanley Park. Why is it the chicken—the hundreds of millions of chickens—are the ones who only get to live to be 45 days old?

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Blog, Writing Blog

Writing in Iowa City

Posted by

Alex Lockwood

on March 29

Saturday 29^th March, 804am, Heirloom Java House, Iowa City

There are a couple of Japanese girls at the table next to mine getting exited about the dresses they’re looking at online. I can’t tell what exactly, they’re talking in Japanese. On the desk there’s a book: Wartime America. The subtle relations between book and laptop, past and present, seem to sit lightly in this place. A place for writers, more than anything, to interrogate connections. Normally, when I get to the café in the morning around 745am, I’m the only person in there with a laptop. Although this morning the Java House is not quite as busy, when I came here Friday at around the same time it was almost impossible to get a table. Each one was already filled by a young student or older writer, laptop up, drinking their coffees and waters and eating their bowls of oatmeal, already hard at work. The same happens in the evenings. When I came here for a vegan salad bowl, there was more writerly activity. One middle-aged and one elderly poet were looking over drafts, while another professor and a younger student were working through her script. This is a place for writers. It’s the café that is the microcosm of this writerly city, the UNESCO City of Literature, home of the Iowa Writers’ Centre, and to Prairie Light Books, a Midwestern city.

It’s been a delight to be here, to discover the city. To discover the Java House with its brewed coffee, its alt-folk music on in the background, its set up for writers. A delight, also, that I can run again, and have run up and down the Iowa River Trail, seeing more of the city than most walkers will, or most other people at the conference I’m here for.

Although to say I’m here for the conference is an ostensible reason. It doesn’t feel like the real reason at all. Why’s that? I don’t know—maybe that will reveal itself only later. The conference itself, although not yet over, has been…okay, with a strange energy that befits an Affect and Inquiry conference, perhaps, but the general consensus is there are a couple of badly behaving academics lobbing grenades to see what explodes. Although the initial senses of exclusion can only be counter-productive to what Jasbir Puar, from the Women & Gender Studies programme at Rutgers University, was calling ‘conviviality’, an attempt to live with the crises points that are being pointed to by the moments where affect is pushing at the edges of different disciplines to bring attention to for-too-long excluded questions, such as ‘what does being a woman of colour in the academy feel like?’.

There was a debate about the ‘sweetness’ of conviviality and the ‘disgust’ of the bleed/edge as two contrasting approaches to these questions of how to do research, how to explore the making of happening. That other sense of conviviality, its companionable enjoyment, was very welcome last night as I went to dinner with three medics from the local hospital who I met at Prairie Lights bookstore following a reading by the essayist David Lazar from his collection Occasional Desire. The three took me to dinner at Devotay, a Spanish tapas restaurant; they went out of their way to make sure everything could be vegan for me, as well as gluten-free for one of the medics. The evening was pleasurably free from academic infighting (“this isn’t a competition to see who is grieving most, is it?” one awkward moment at the memorial session for the critic Jose Munoz, who died awfully young) and full of talk about books, travel, dogs and jobs (not necessarily in that order), things that people should be talking about when they’ve only just met. My dinner and two bottles of Portuguese red was paid for. The finest hospitality from those grounded in workplaces of everyday life and death.

And this morning I’m bunking off the first session so I can come here and spend a little time writing. Just writing. The first session yesterday was from a wonderful presenter, Kerry Ann Rockquemore, from the National Centre for Faculty Development and Diversity, on addressing the pressures and resistances to writing in the academic role. It was very well presented, very generous, and yet if there was anything that I drew from the session it was how very well I have progressed over the last few years in developing my own writing practices. Although it is still always mostly hard work, the problems she was raising (three types of resistance, based on technical errors, psychological obstructions, and external realities) were all problems I had faced and in many ways dealt with, or developed strategies for dealing with, in the past few years. Writing every day. Check. Finding effective ways to motivate via recording and networking. Check. Breaking tasks down into chunks. Yep, etc. In that way, the PhD has been a very useful training ground, giving me the time and focus to learn how to work better as a writer.

Two key words she didn’t mention, and, if there had been time for questions, I would have raised. Identification, and play. She touched upon them, nearly. The presentation remained introductory, if useful for many if not most of the people in the room.

But what I wanted to know were here thoughts on how identification with a particular role (“I am an academic” for example, or rather, putting it into Byron Katie’s terms, the negative impact of beliefs such as “I must be an academic”) can be so strong and forceful, something so critical to one’s sense of self, that it paralyses, or certainly obstructs, fierce productivity and the ability to ensure a healthy work/life balance. Talking with another academic in the room who had been trained as a journalist, we both felt academic work was much easier than many others seemed to feel it to be. Not only perhaps because we had a more thorough understanding and set of tools to tackle the technical errors than many of the other writers in the room—in particular the need to simply let go of stuff on deadline for publication, having done it so many times we’re trained to do so. But also because, at least for me, my identification is not so strongly as an academic, but as a creative writer, and so academic work feels to me much easier. I care less about it, which means I can enjoy it a bit more.

[Talking of which; one of the Japanese girls is a photojournalism major and she’s just asked if she can take my photo for her class project. She’s sending me the photos she took of this place.]

Which leads to the other point. Play. When I write academic work, I don’t struggle with it so much. I play with it. I sit down and think about not just what I want to say, but how to say it. That’s not to say it’s always easy. It can be a challenge. But a good challenge. One of the conference organisers introduced a panel, and the conference, by talking about how we can enter flow in our dialogue as academics, and how really good critical debate can help us reach that high challenge-high skill place that characterises flow (that I’ve written about elsewhere in relation to running). And I’ve worked really hard, through writing every day, through addressing the heavy-laden psychological ‘need’ to be a creative writer/novelist and taking off some of that pressure, to bring more play (back) into my creative writing.

Which is why this morning I’m taking a break from the non-fiction book proposal I’ve been working on. It’s actually been a lot of fun to write. But over the last few days, with the conference, the jet-lag, and dalliance with strong coffee (a day spent sweating, palpitating—how is this stuff not contraband?!), I’ve found it a struggle, and I want to stop, give it some space, come back to it when I feel more creative, more playful with it. It hasn’t reached the hard-ass honing stage yet (I feel I may be adopting the tone of my temporary residence). There’s more to say, to play, before getting there.

And one more thing on writing. Another way of becoming unstuck, and a reason why I put away the book proposal. I was trying to work out how to link together some of the still disparate elements. I couldn’t think how. And now I can again, after five months, I went for a run. On that run, pushing myself enough so that my mind couldn’t really ask itself questions, after a while I found myself writing in my mind the introduction I needed to do for the panel I was chairing later that day. Ah! So the reason I couldn’t find the answers to how to knit together the disparate parts of my book proposal was because my unconscious was already working on/worrying out another thing that needed writing. It was a lovely lesson. Rather than pushing too hard against what was being crafted internally to try to fit an conscious demand, I let the mind rest, and let what was going on inside come out.

It’s very good to be running again, not least for the job it does in my writing.

I’ve just a few more hours in Iowa City, this city of writers, before I have to check out, see the last of the keynotes at the conference, and head to Chicago. And back to that question. Do I know why I needed to come here yet? Was it to experience what a writing city feels like? To meet the doctors, have fun, and make those connections? To have my photo taken by a journalism student? To learn that my writing habits are actually strong, healthy, advanced, developed? (Although not perfect, not that! Still always work to do.) All these things?

When will I find out. Perhaps I won’t. Either way, it’s been an Iowan delight.

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Saturday 29th March, 804am, Heirloom Java House, Iowa City

Saturday 29^th March, 804am, Heirloom Java House, Iowa City