Before I pull on my warmest toque and toughest boots, I’m quickly scribbling out this note to let you know about an intrepid day of programming that I’m part of today on CJSR: the Homelessness Marathon. From 5 PM Mountain Time until 7 AM tomorrow morning, we’re coordinating a nationwide marathon of radio programming all about homelessness. This is the first year that CJSR has been the host of the event, and other community radio stations around the country will be chipping in with their own hours of programming throughout the evening.
My own contribution is a story about the people who work on, and visit, the Boyle Street Community Services’ outreach van. Once I dash out the door here, I’ll be following them along their route to a couple of the city’s bottle depots, where the van parks to provide a warm meal and essentials like gloves and socks for people living on the streets. I had the pleasure of meeting most of the crew last weekend, and I’m proud to be able to tell a story about something else the van provides: family. Tune in tonight around 11 PM if you’re interested. We broadcast on 88.5 FM in Edmonton, and stream online at cjsr.com.
Ice on Whyte’s iconic ramparts of snow are being melted away by the warm weather, and built back up by Delayne Corbett.
When the January cold dropped off into that warm, wild wind last week, I found myself sprinkling gravel on my sidewalk as quietly as I could in the morning. It was already an inconvenience having to address the fresh ice that had spread out over the walks, and when I saw a woman get out of her truck to move a branch that had blown down from our tree into the road… well, I’m not proud of it, but I slunk away with my bag of gravel, lest she think I threw the branch there or something, and harangue me into arriving even later to work.
All in all though, the warmth was a treat. Which made me wonder who’d be really annoyed by the weather. That’s how I met Delayne Corbett.
Delayne is the Artistic Director of the Ice on Whyte Festival — a fact I discovered when I penguined over to End of Steel Park and shouted across the gates that I had a microphone and I’d love to talk to anyone inside. Ice on Whyte, you see, is the local ice sculpting festival that spreads through Old Strathcona in January. I had a hunch that if anyone resented the temperature hitting 6ºC, it’d be the folk who had a week left to finish building a mini-empire of ice and snow. As an ice carver, Delayne said, 6ºC with full sun was a complete disaster.
Delayne was the only one working on the site at the time, and he let me watch him for a while as he ripped cardboard covers off 150-pound rectangles of ice. He clamped one of them with metal tongs he swore were older than him, and threw it on the snow so he could “walk the dog” and shuffle it into place with the rest of the ice slide he was building. The slide would bring you to the bottom of a mountain of snow his team had stomped into the ground. All things considered, he was in good spirits.
-15ºC, Delayne told me, is the ideal temperature for ice sculptors. The ice doesn’t crackle much when you add water, and the cold wicks away the sweat you’re building up. The warm weather made him want to rip off layers, but he couldn’t because it was so wet and goopy that he had to keep his rainpants on.
Even worse, the wind had blown sheets of cardboard all around the site. That would have been okay, except that the record-setting gusts also tossed an 8-foot tall plywood box into the fences “like a bowling ball,” and he spent most of his morning gathering cardboard that had sailed into nearby streets.
He said something that stuck with me though, about the ice slide and the whole business of working with ice. He was in the process of adjusting the slide to make it a little slower at the bottom, by adding a little more distance. I mused that people building roller-coasters didn’t have that luxury.
“Those are all so planned meticulously,” he agreed. “Basically when I get here, I don’t know how much snow I have… so I kind of have to just go with the flow, rather than pre-plan.”
That, I think, is a skill we could all stand to learn. You’ve got to work with what you’ve got.
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I also told this story for a 3-minute story challenge on CJSR. Have a listen.
In case you want to hear me definitely ace my second-ever live interview on the radio, on Tuesday, January 7th, Terra Informa will be broadcasting live from Edmonton’s City Hall to celebrate the 30th anniversary of our home station: CJSR 88.5 FM. From 5-6 PM, tune in for a special one hour episode of stories about leaving a legacy.
You’ll hear music from across Canada, and stories about artist Richie Velthuis’ delicate carvings in ice and the echoes of Chinese immigrants on Edmonton’s food culture today. I’ll be interviewing Linda Duncan – Alberta’s sole NDP MP, an environmental lawyer, and a recurring guest on Terra Informa over the past few years.
Edmonton listeners can tune into the broadcast live on CJSR 88.5 FM at 5 PM on January 7th, and listeners in other communities will hear both halves of the live show over the next two weeks. There’ll be more celebrations throughout 2014 marking the history of one of Canada’s most outstanding community radio stations. Hope you can join us.
Chris Chang-Yen Phillips: Storyteller and People Weaver 