Walks on the Wild Side

WILD SIDE DAY CAMP: I will be running the day camp for just three days this summer (next week): Wednesday (July 12), Thursday (July 13), Friday (July 14). If you're interested, message me for the details.

Visiting Frederick Law Olmsted’s house in Brookline (MA) today makes clear something Montreal’s Friends of the Mountain seems to have forgotten: man was not made for the park; the park was made for man. Olmsted, who designed Mount Royal Park, along with Central Park in New York City, wanted it to be a public park, a people’s park; but Friends of the Mountain seems to think it’s their park. They regularly harass citizens for trivial infractions of their petty rules; make life miserable for people enjoying a public park their taxes pay for; behave like a police force when they’re really nothing more than a self-appointed morality squad; and impose a draconian version of the invasive species doctrine on the flora and fauna who call the Mountain home. Look, if someone’s picking trilliums or shooting songbirds, by all means, give them s**t; but if a mother is walking two meters off the path to show her daughter a beautiful red mushroom, for God’s sake, leave her alone!

Why I’m Sick of Friends of the Mountain “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”—Mark 2:27 (King James Version) Visiting Frederick Law Olmsted’s house in Brookline (MA) today makes clear something Montreal’s F…

A poem to my resident cat is in order
A cat from up north, not down south, of the border
For reasons beyond me I named him Pablito
A tag far more common in Cali or Quito.

He squanders his days at an indolent pace
And when each is over, he sleeps on my face
Just an inch from the TV when we watch the news
But can’t see the fine line between Arabs and Jews.

But as if there were not enough s**t in this world
What Pablito contributes is rare as a pearl
Though recession and joblessness cripple the nation
The bane of this household is cat constipation.

A beautiful feline by any description
His downside’s his sphincter, a chronic condition
It’s called megacolon and that’s what he’s got
For his bowels expand but his rosebud does not.

The exit’s too small and the hallway too spacious
He squats in his box and the straining’s loquacious
He straddles the floor and the sight’d be funny
Except that to flush him out costs so much money.

He sees us ahead of the rest of his patients
‘Cause we underwrite the vet’s lavish vacations
When he sees us coming, he brings out the tube
Some disposable gloves and the pan and the l**e.

Two hundred bucks later, Pablito’s in heaven
(The cat’s a foot long; his intestines are seven)
He sniffs at the product; he’s proud of his work
It’s a beast of a job but the sniffs are a perk.

He’s a very clean cat, so it’s all the more heinous
His kisses are liable to taste like his a**s
Spread-eagled with tongue planted firmly in ass
It may seem, at first glance, like an absence of class.

But the passion is strong and it’s long, unrelenting,
When cats and their ani are freely consenting
And if, as you watch, they seems overly zealous
Some level pre-oedipal’s secretly jealous.

As for his condition, prognosis is poor
But one thing is for certain: his job is secure
He gets me to write, which curtails the booze
And he knows from an as***le in need of a muse.

—David Lieber

For Pablito A poem to my resident cat is in order A cat from up north, not down south, of the border For reasons beyond me I named him Pablito A tag far more common in Cali or Quito. He squanders his days at a…

In one of those amazing essays that made her famous—the one that made Claude Lévi-Strauss a household name in the English-speaking world—Susan Sontag rightly observed that: “Most serious thought in our time struggles with the feeling of homelessness.” If From Here has an overarching message, it’s that these feelings of homelessness are understandable but not insurmountable. We no longer have to live like royalty in exile. We can take back the Kingdom: fall in love with the earth beneath our feet. We can make any place home if we wish to, if we choose to. But to do so we’re going to have to slow down and get to know, really know, the living things around us. We need to shut up and listen to them. Give them our full attention. Then, like Adam in the Garden, we have to call them by their rightful names. Perhaps it’s then that we’ll realize, at long last, that the world’s still enchanted. And we never really left the Garden.

Homeless No Longer In one of those amazing essays that made her famous—the one that made Claude Lévi-Strauss a household name in the English-speaking world—Susan Sontag rightly observed that: “Most serious thought in…

Tired of the endlessly structured but hopelessly boring day camp? Or the huge, unwieldy and structured but crazy day camp? We’ve tried all sorts and finally gave up. Why? Because we wanted our boys to explore the city at their own pace and directed by their interests in doing so. We didn’t want them to be endlessly managed, corralled and shuttled back and forth on the metro/bus to canned kid experiences. So we decided to create the camp we were looking for: one that involves lots and lots of walking, one that allows us to explore the city unbound by scheduled group tours, and one that fosters an appreciation of nature and adventure.

Here’s our take and our requirements: Though we will do other things from time to time (such as going to LaRonde and the Botanical Gardens), most of our time will be spent exploring every single one of Montreal’s seventeen large parks. Each day, we will choose a destination as well as a departure and return time. However, the path that we follow and the time we spend at each destination will be dictated primarily by the young hominids—that is, structured around their interests, their sense of time, and their approach to play. If they see and want to go to an awesome park that we happen across along the way, so be it. We stop. When they seem ready to move on, we move on. We provide lunch and snacks along the way, with organic produce that is either from our garden or locally grown. We are a husband and wife team with two sons, ages 12 & 13. Our camp is thus decidedly and deliberately small (i.e. up to a dozen total). So, we invite your kids to join in the ride if this sounds like the experience you have been waiting for as well.

Your kid must be between 8 and 13. And your kid must be able to go on very long walks. If this sounds like the day camp you’ve been looking for, send us a message. The camp will be happening for only three weeks in July this year: July 11-July 15; July 18-July 22; July 25-July 29. The price is $270/week (payable in advance, now, via PayPal) and it’s first come first serve.

Wild Side Day Camp Tired of the endlessly structured but hopelessly boring day camp? Or the huge, unwieldy and structured but crazy day camp? We’ve tried all sorts and finally gave up. Why? Because we wanted our boys…

Our conception of Nature has been distorted by British-accented nature shows with zoom lenses, impossible camera angles, and all-seeing eyes. The difference between real Nature and the Nature depicted in a David Attenborough documentary is roughly equivalent to the difference between real s*x and the s*x depicted in Debbie does Dallas (1978). Just as a kid who learns about s*x from p**n is going to have some seriously messed up ideas about s*x, a kid who learns about nature from nature shows is going to have some seriously messed up ideas about nature. Nature p**n reinforces the Romantic conception of Nature as a pristine place you visit: in the summer (e.g., at camp, at the cottage), or on vacation (e.g., on a Costa Rican eco-tour). It’s a pernicious delusion which allows an oilman who works on the Alberta Tar Sands during the week to say that he loves Nature because he goes duck hunting in a national park on the weekends, a delusion which allows a chemical engineer who works for DuPont to say that she loves Nature because she went hiking in the Adirondacks last summer.

Why I'm Sick of British Nature P**n “this is a crisis that is, by its nature, slow moving and intensely place based. In its early stages, and in between the wrenching disasters, climate change is about an early blooming of a particul...

Maybe it’s time to take the “work” out of working out.

Working Out vs. Playing Out “In nature we never repeat the same motion; in captivity (office, gym, commute, sports), life is just repetitive-stress injury. No randomness.” —Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philos...

Like fellow Concordia grad and flâneur Chris Erb, I’m baffled by people who are perfectly able to walk (and whose local environment lacks any major impediments to it – an objection raised in earlier discussions of this piece) but who dislike it, who prefer to minimize it by using their cars or other means. (Chris once described a visit with some Fredericton friends: he wanted to show them some place that was a ways away, and thought nothing of walking there, but as they proceeded and realized that it was going to be more than a couple of blocks, they became anxious and balked.) It makes me wonder whether rigidity of thought goes with a lack of significantly frequent walking – and I don’t just mean the lack of exercise which can also impair blood-flow and thus cognitive function.

Walking, Thinking, and Attention Saw a posting (via Brain Pickings - ) about Rebecca Solnit's 2000 book "Wanderlust, a history of walking" a few weeks back, and just got around to buying the e-book. Walking, as a basic, ...

"What can each of us do? It’s nice outside. Plant a garden; grow some food to get fresh produce that hasn’t traveled halfway around the world. Get rid of your grass lawn entirely or plant clover, which means more green with less watering, less mowing, and more food for bees. Think about walking, cycling, and taking the bus or metro instead of driving. Start a compost for your organic waste. There are a million things each of us can do, every day. And the beautiful thing about planting a garden, getting rid of lawn maintenance, walking, avoiding traffic jams, and taking out less garbage? It might just make us happier as well."—Anna-Liisa Aunio

Think Climate Change Isn’t Your Problem? Think Again. - While extreme weather may have not brought devastation to your door, it may have significantly cost you already.

I am writing from Montreal, Canada. Today, we will reach an unusually hot 28-degree high in temperature (that's Celsius--for friends south of the border, that's 82 degrees Fahrenheit). The average high in Montreal on May 4th, just so you know, is 16 degrees Celsius. In honor of the unusually hot day, I thought I would pay tribute to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, whose records demonstrate clearly that nine out of the 10 hottest years on record globally have occurred in the 21st century and ask: why haven't we gotten anywhere on addressing climate change?

Think Climate Change isn't your problem? Think again. I am writing from Montreal, Canada. Today, we will reach an unusually hot 28-degree high in temperature (that's Celsius--for friends south of the border, that's 82 degrees Fahrenheit). The averag...