Bit Rot Page 2

  Black Goo

  The first time I ever visited a McDonald’s restaurant was on a rainy Saturday afternoon, November 6, 1971. It was Bruce Lemke’s tenth birthday party and the McDonald’s was at the corner of Pemberton Avenue and Marine Drive in North Vancouver, BC. The reason I can pinpoint this date is that it was also the date and time of the Cannikin nuclear test on Amchitka Island—a Spartan missile warhead of between four and five megatons was detonated at the bottom of a 1.5-mile vertical shaft drilled into the Alaskan island. The press had made an enormous to-do over the blast, as it was roughly four times more powerful than any previous underground detonation. According to the fears of the day, the blast was to occur on seismic faults connected to Vancouver, catalyzing chain reactions that in turn would trigger the great granddaddy of all earthquakes. The Park Royal shopping centre would break into two and breathe fire; the Cleveland Dam up the Capilano River would shatter, drowning whoever survived in the mall three miles below. The cantilevered L-shaped modern houses with their “Kitchens of Tomorrow” perched on the slopes overlooking the city would crumble like so much litter—all to be washed away by a tsunami six hours later.

  I wrote the above paragraph in 1992, twenty years after that trip to McDonald’s, and no, the world didn’t end. It never does. Looking back on the nuclear paranoia and fear that defined the emotional texture of the Cold War—not just for me, but for much of the world’s population—I see now that the nuclear threat was a bogeyman constructed largely to terrify citizens into okaying massive defence budgets without debate. Fear sells.

  There’s nothing like the fears you acquire between the ages of, say, ten to fourteen. They seem to go in the deepest and colour your world the most strongly. A common question I ask people whenever film discussions come up is, “What is the movie that scared the shit out of you when you were eleven or twelve—the film that you were probably too young to watch, but you watched it anyway, and it totally screwed you up for the rest of your life?” Everyone’s got one. Mine was Lord of the Flies, but other common answers are The Exorcist and Event Horizon. The point is that we all know that magic window in time when one is most susceptible to fear.

  In the early hours of Tuesday, September 25, 1973, two freighters, the Sun Diamond and Erawan, collided at the entrance to Vancouver’s main harbour area, Burrard Inlet, dumping over fifty thousand gallons of bunker oil into the water. Bunker oil is the nastiest, stickiest, creepiest oil there is. In the oil distillation process, bunker oil is what sticks to the bottom of the tank. It’s like molten tar, brutally foul, jet black and, on a warm day, the consistency of magnetic black diarrhea. It sticks to everything and it doesn’t come off. An oil-soaked bird is a dead bird. They don’t live. They die. There’s no happy ending for any wildlife touched by the stuff. Don’t ever believe the photos experts show you.

  On the afternoon of September 25, 1973, someone thought it would be a great idea for local school kids to come “help,” so a bunch of us went down to help “clean things up.”

  It was a dreadful idea.

  We were dropped off in the same parking lot you normally parked in to get to the beach in summer, except there were dark boot-prints everywhere, and you could see streaks on the lawn where people tried wiping bunker fuel oil from their shoes before getting back into their vehicles; litter and newspapers were used for the same purpose. I remember the bus driver saying they could get someone else to pick us up; he wasn’t getting any of that in his bus, and then he drove away.

  It was confusion. Nobody really had any idea what to do. Well-intentioned people were using bamboo rakes to try to capture bunker fuel globules. You could see the blobs inside the waves as they lobbed in. Undead black zombie jellyfish. Nothing had prepared any of us eleven-year-olds for the foulness of bunker oil, the way it obliterates anything it touches, and its neutron-star black gloss as it smothers a low tide–scape of barnacles and starfish. It felt like a crime scene. It was a crime scene.

  Someone gave us brand new rakes that had price stickers on them from the Woolco store in North Van. The government bought rakes from Woolco? They didn’t have actual proper cleanup tools on hand?

  The government was seemingly no help at all, having no visible plan in place to deal with a spill like that, and its efforts were directly compared to Monty Python’s Flying Circus by The Vancouver Sun.

  Someone shouted, “Go down to where the gravel meets the water and start raking. Try to catch the blobs before they break up,” and so that’s what we did. It was dismal, like trying to capture wheelbarrow-sized chunks of Jell-O with chopsticks. We saw, farther down the beach, that peat moss had been strewn onto gravel and sand to soak up the oil. Logs along the beach, we were told, acted as excellent bunker fuel sponges, and people would be gathering these logs to burn later in the day.

  I remember a hippie with something black in his hands coming up to me and two friends: a cormorant completely covered in oil but still alive, and in heartbreaking death throes. “Look what you did.”

  “Huh?”

  “You people from the suburbs. You made this happen. You killed it with your consuming and pollution.”

  That asshole destroyed any sympathy I might have one day had for hippies, but he made me love all birds and animals in a way I may never have otherwise. So thanks, asshole. And by the way, where did you grow up—in a manger?

  In general, local environmentalists showed no pity for the citizens of North and West Vancouver, whose beaches, rocky coves and bays were blackened for miles once the tides began pushing the oil along. (Forty-two years later one can still clearly see oil stain marks on rocks ten miles up the coast.) The environmentalists argued that residents deserved retribution for all the crap the suburbanites were already putting in the harbour—an attitude as arrogant and useless as that of the government. People talk about the 1970s, but they never talk about how much hate there was back then. Hate and pollution. Everyone was looking for cheap, easy targets. Social ideas were evolving, but technologies to make new ideas fully manifest—as well as laws supporting the changes—were evolving much more slowly. Inside the lag time between the two realms lurked hate; everyone hating everything. Nobody looked clean. People still littered. Cars belched blue smoke that smelled like burning plastics. Don’t get too nostalgic; it wasn’t all plaid bell-bottoms and feathered hair.

  After an hour it was obvious we were wasting our time. Two friends and I took a regular bus back to school, where we got a punitive lecture about bailing on community participation. It was 1973 and the fact that three kids had spent the day unsupervised as easy prey to molesters had never troubled anyone. Had we hitchhiked back to school, we probably would have gotten points for being resourceful.

  That night I didn’t sleep, and I didn’t sleep well for a month, and I still sometimes can’t sleep when I think about the cormorant.

  And don’t forget nuclear war was always one ICBM away.

  And then somewhere in there I saw Lord of the Flies.

  The punchline is that not even a month later, in the early morning of October 24, 1973, a German freighter, the Westfalia, dumped almost nine hundred gallons of bunker oil in Vancouver’s main harbour, and by noon it had washed up on the shore of Vancouver’s crown jewel, Stanley Park. The Westfalia’s spill was a fraction of what had been dumped the previous month, but you have to add the 1970s everything’s-gone-to-shit factor: this smaller spill just reinforced the spirit of the age. Everything was disintegrating back then.

  On April 8, 2015, 15,142 days after the Westfalia spill, a grain ship, the Marathassa, registered in Cyprus, leaked 528 gallons of bunker oil into Vancouver’s outer harbour area, English Bay. It was one-eighty-sixth the volume of what had been dumped on September 25, 1973. One would think oil spill cleanup in 2015 would be quick, forceful and inexpensive. Wrong. Federal and provincial politicians were about as functional and helpful as Peter, Chris, Stewie and Brian Griffin drinking ipecac together on Family Guy. Finger pointing on all sides. Blame. Retaliation. L
ying. Downplaying. Catastrophizing. The one lesson that emerges from what was actually a comparatively small spill is that there still is no effective system in place to handle oil gone wrong, and this is in the centre of a city of 2.4 million people. I shudder to imagine a spill, even a small spill up or down the coast, away from both cleanup protocols and scrutiny.

  In Vancouver right now, a company named Kinder Morgan wants to triple the amount of oil carried by the Trans Mountain pipeline and increase the number of oil tankers in Burrard Inlet from five to thirty-four per month. In preparation for (inevitable) future spills, the company “is committed to a polluter-pay, world-class, land-based and marine-spill response regime.” Who wouldn’t feel better already? I’m stoked!

  Also, the BC government is trying to get liquefied natural gas (LNG) out of BC and down to Malaysia and, to do so, is hoping to get in bed with the Malaysian energy giant Petronas. The BC government has seemingly bet the family farm entirely on LNG going to Malaysia, complete with a fantasy number of 100,000 jobs to be created (in actuality, 4,500 during construction and up to 1,500 permanent jobs afterwards, spread around the province). One plant in particular is slated for the end of Howe Sound, North America’s southernmost fjord and a place of spectacular beauty that has only recently healed from the toxic and visual blight of both copper mining (closed 1971) and a pulp mill (closed 2006). The selling point in the nearby town of Squamish (which lost all those pulp and copper jobs) is, of course, jobs, jobs, jobs—even though the proposed job numbers are pie in the sky, and the facility is setting the region up for truly devastating disaster scenarios. As a bonus, an LNG plant will blight one of the most beautiful and beloved scenic tourism corridors in Canada. It will be a visual nightmare experienced by every single human being who drives from Vancouver up to Squamish, Whistler and beyond.

  Everyone is trying to move energy everywhere—and probably close to where you live. If it’s not tankers and pipelines, then it’s oil by rail. Remember: when something goes horribly wrong (and it will; even they acknowledge that), it will be written off as a one-time-only human error kind of thing, but it will keep happening over and over. Yes, the world will continue to chug along, but it will be a stained and damaged world.

  A wonderful expression comes to mind here, one about trees: “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is right now.” This could equally apply to planning safe energy. Twenty years pass very quickly. Start digging now.

  The Short, Brutal Life of the Channel Three News Team

  Sandra was sitting at her kitchen table looking out at a sunny day when her front doorbell rang. It was the police, come to tell her that her mother had been arrested for murdering the local Channel Three News Team—two anchorpeople and the weather guy and four studio technicians. Her mother, acting alone, had arrived at the TV studio carrying an oversized rattan handbag and pretended to be a sweet old thing interested in meeting the hostess from a cooking show. The moment she was close to the newsroom set, she asked to visit the washroom, slipped away, removed several guns from her handbag and came back firing. She was knocked to the ground by a surviving cameraman. Her pelvis was fractured and she was in hospital in stable condition. A clip of the event was going viral. The police asked Sandra if she would go to the hospital with them and she said of course, and off they drove, cherries flashing.

  The main entryway was cordoned off, but the cruiser was allowed to slip past the security guards and news-crazed media. They elevatored up to the top floor, where a quartet of rifle-toting officers guarded her mother’s room. Sandra had always expected that one day she would visit her mother with a broken hip or something similar in the hospital, just not under the current set of circumstances.

  “Mom?”

  “Hello, dear.”

  “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “I’m more than happy to tell you.”

  “Wait—where’s Dad?”

  “He’s not available right now.”

  “Oh Jesus, he’s not going to go out and shoot somebody too, is he?”

  “Aren’t you quick to jump to conclusions!”

  “Mom, you killed seven people.”

  “Good.”

  Sandra tried to compose herself while her mother serenely smiled. “So, why’d you do it?” she finally managed to ask.

  “Our New Vision church group had an enlightenment fasting up in the mountains last weekend. It was glorious. And during group prayer, I was lifted up above Earth, and when I looked down on this planet, it was black like a charcoal briquette. At that moment I realized that Earth is over, and that New Vision will take me to a new planet.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “No, I’m not kidding you, Sandra. Your father and I want you to join us.”

  “Mom. This is awful. Wake up—wake up!”

  Sandra’s mother looked at her with the same bland face she used when she thanked polite men for holding a door open for her. “You should be thrilled for me, dear. I believe it was you growing up who was fanatical about that escapist comic strip—what was it?—The Battleship Yamato? You of all people must understand what it feels like to want to leave a destroyed planet and roam the universe trying to fight an overwhelming darkness.”

  “It was just a comic, Mom.”

  “For ‘just a comic’ it certainly took hold of your imagination. I think you’re jealous of me, dear.”

  “What?”

  “You’re jealous because right now I’m actually inside your comic book—on the other side of the mirror—and you aren’t. But you can be. Join us.”

  “Mom, just stop it. Why did you kill those people?”

  “I killed them because they were famous.”

  “What?”

  “The only thing our diseased culture believes in is fame. No other form of eternity exists. Kill the famous and you snuff out the core of the diseased culture.”

  “So you killed the Channel Three News Team? They’re barely famous even here in town.”

  “If you watch the news right about now, you’ll see that New Visioneers around the world have shot and killed many people at all levels of fame. To decide who is more famous than anyone else is to buy into the fame creed. So we have been indiscriminate.”

  Sandra’s sense of dread grew stronger. “So who is Dad going to kill?”

  “What time is it?”

  Sandra looked at her cellphone. “Almost five o’clock.”

  “In that case, right about…” Sandra’s mother looked at the ceiling for a second, whereupon Sandra heard small cracking sounds coming from the hospital entranceway. “Right about now he’s just shot the news reporters covering my shootings.”

  “Oh God, oh God, oh God…” Sandra ran to the window: pandemonium. She turned to her mother: “Holy fuck! What is wrong with you?”

  “Is your father dead?”

  “What?” Sandra looked out the window again and saw her father’s body sprawled on a berm covered in Kentucky bluegrass. “Yes. Mother of God, he is!”

  “Good. He’ll be on the other side to greet me with the rest of us who have fulfilled our mission today.”

  Sandra staggered out into the hallway, gasping, but police and hospital staff paid her little attention as they braced for the next wave of wounded, dying and dead. She shouted at them, as if they could understand, “I am so sorry for all of this!” but she was ignored.

  On a nursing station’s TV screen, newscasts were coming in showing the faces of murdered celebrities from around the world.

  Sandra ran back into the room to find her mother glowing. “Mom, you’re crazy. Your cult is crazy.”

  “I want all of your generation to come join me and band together to smash all the shop windows of every boutique in the country, to set fire to every catwalk, to shoot rockets into Beverly Hills. It will be beautiful—like modern art—and people will finally stop believing in the false future promised by celebrity.”

  Sandra wanted to vomit. Gurneys lo
aded with bodies shunted quickly past the room’s door and her mother went on talking: “In the last days of World War II, the Japanese emperor told the Japanese to sacrifice themselves, to die like smashed jewels. And so I say to you, Sandra, die like a smashed jewel. Destroy so that we can rebuild. We can become a furnace within a furnace.”

  Outside it had grown dark—not regular darkness—a chemical darkness that felt linked to profound evil. The moon was full. Sandra and her mother caught each other staring at it at the same time. Her mother said, “I wish the Apollo astronauts had died on the moon.”

  “What?”

  “Then it would be one great big tombstone for planet Earth.” Her mother popped something into her mouth.

  “Mom—what was that?”

  “Cyanide, dear. I’m off on your Battleship Yamato. Why don’t you come too?”

  Sandra ran for help, but the staff were too busy with the wounded, and so she watched her mother die, writhing on her bed, then falling still.

  Stunned, Sandra walked back out into the hallway. There was blood on the floor and blood on the walls. It was smeared, and the whole place smelled of hot, moist coins. She heard gunshots coming from the elevator bank, and screaming staff ran down the hallway past her. She saw an orderly in turquoise surgical scrubs coming toward her holding a sawed-off shotgun, and the look in his eye told Sandra that this was a New Vision follower.

  He was whistling, and as he came nearer, he said, relaxed as can be, “Looks like you’re one pretty darn famous little lady now, aren’t you. Being daughter of a mass murderer and all.”

  Sandra ran into her mother’s room and kissed her mother’s mouth violently, sucking in the remains of the cyanide. She tasted the chemical as it entered her bloodstream and knew death would be quick.