Whitehorse
This is a photograph of a “Hiker’s Highway”, near San Joseph Bay at Cape Scott Provincial park on the northwest end of Vancouver Island. It was shot by a friend of mine, Vancouver theatre designer Ted Roberts.
I’m enthralled by this image, with its invitation to cross into the unknown, the terra incognita that the forest offers. I’m also both oddly comforted by the wooden pathway in the middle of the bush (humankind at work, making the unfamiliar recognizable!) and frustrated by its presence (a sidewalk in the woods? What’s next…a bear crossing sign? Well, I’ve seen stranger things.)
After a week in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, working with artists David Skelton and Joseph Fish Tisiga to begin an Ashley cycle of cyberSite Specific pieces, I find this dichotomy at the heart of all I’m writing these days. Whitehorse, with it’s astonishing landscape, is also *Whitehorse*, where Walmart and shopping malls and parking lots and pavement stamp that landscape with the blight of ashphalt and square, squat buildings.
Ted writes in a recent email, describing a part of the park, “Several miles from the park entrance was one of the early homesteads in that area, where the guy who had cleared the land (1906) had a keen interest in botanical, and brought in plants from around the world. He created a twenty acre garden in the middle of the rainforest with a huge variety of trees and flowers. Lindens from England, Japanese Maple,Monkey Paw tree from Chile, etc. etc. He passed away in 1953, and the indigenous forest spent the years since trying to reclaim the land. Ten years ago someone bought the property, and has since been discovering the huge variety of plants that have been overgrown, seeds lying dormant, and is now bringing them back to life.”
Hmmm…
Unfortunately, I can’t see anyone reclaiming the city of Whitehorse this way, given the ongoing influx and influence of outsiders from the south and the summer visitors from all over the world, heading to and from cruise ships, Tilley hats and video cameras in hand, recording beauty instead of experiencing it. And in the interest of full disclosure, I'll admit to being one of those visitors with camera in hand, as was the project's Dramaturgy Intern, Andrew Cheng, as part of our work on the Ashley cycle was creating photo-documentation and visual context for the text that Joseph and David were creating.
Photo-documenting the downtown area for the Whitehorse Ashley cycle(which launches on the main Common Plants site this coming week), I was drawn to the proliferation of orange and yellow Arctic poppies in full bloom in alleyways, gardens, popping up through the pavement. So unlike the delicate flowers, the tourists from the south, the poppies were a lovely contrast to the painted mountain scene festooning one side of a particularly boxy building.
Was the mural meant to disguise the building and help it blend into the landscape?
As a visitor from the south, I feel privileged to have experienced Whitehorse in winter as well as summer. The beautiful and the ugly, the new and the old. And as with the British Columbia forest that Ted photographed, a garden that is filled with transplanted, hybrid, and indigenous plants, I can only hope that the entwining of the foreign and the local allows both to survive, perhaps even to thrive.
I’m just not sure that’s possible.
I’m enthralled by this image, with its invitation to cross into the unknown, the terra incognita that the forest offers. I’m also both oddly comforted by the wooden pathway in the middle of the bush (humankind at work, making the unfamiliar recognizable!) and frustrated by its presence (a sidewalk in the woods? What’s next…a bear crossing sign? Well, I’ve seen stranger things.)
After a week in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, working with artists David Skelton and Joseph Fish Tisiga to begin an Ashley cycle of cyberSite Specific pieces, I find this dichotomy at the heart of all I’m writing these days. Whitehorse, with it’s astonishing landscape, is also *Whitehorse*, where Walmart and shopping malls and parking lots and pavement stamp that landscape with the blight of ashphalt and square, squat buildings.
Ted writes in a recent email, describing a part of the park, “Several miles from the park entrance was one of the early homesteads in that area, where the guy who had cleared the land (1906) had a keen interest in botanical, and brought in plants from around the world. He created a twenty acre garden in the middle of the rainforest with a huge variety of trees and flowers. Lindens from England, Japanese Maple,Monkey Paw tree from Chile, etc. etc. He passed away in 1953, and the indigenous forest spent the years since trying to reclaim the land. Ten years ago someone bought the property, and has since been discovering the huge variety of plants that have been overgrown, seeds lying dormant, and is now bringing them back to life.”
Hmmm…
Unfortunately, I can’t see anyone reclaiming the city of Whitehorse this way, given the ongoing influx and influence of outsiders from the south and the summer visitors from all over the world, heading to and from cruise ships, Tilley hats and video cameras in hand, recording beauty instead of experiencing it. And in the interest of full disclosure, I'll admit to being one of those visitors with camera in hand, as was the project's Dramaturgy Intern, Andrew Cheng, as part of our work on the Ashley cycle was creating photo-documentation and visual context for the text that Joseph and David were creating.
Photo-documenting the downtown area for the Whitehorse Ashley cycle(which launches on the main Common Plants site this coming week), I was drawn to the proliferation of orange and yellow Arctic poppies in full bloom in alleyways, gardens, popping up through the pavement. So unlike the delicate flowers, the tourists from the south, the poppies were a lovely contrast to the painted mountain scene festooning one side of a particularly boxy building.
Was the mural meant to disguise the building and help it blend into the landscape?
As a visitor from the south, I feel privileged to have experienced Whitehorse in winter as well as summer. The beautiful and the ugly, the new and the old. And as with the British Columbia forest that Ted photographed, a garden that is filled with transplanted, hybrid, and indigenous plants, I can only hope that the entwining of the foreign and the local allows both to survive, perhaps even to thrive.
I’m just not sure that’s possible.