Our Young People Are at Ground Zero in This Mess
Photography by Abdallahh, and elPadawan (adapted work).
I said I’d talk more about how an expansion of the island airport would change our lives. Not only would it bring in more passengers (a jump from well over two million to a possible 4.8 million). Our waterfront has been marked as parkland for mixed use by Toronto citizens. The proposed expansion would tip the balance even more to planes. Here’s how a sailor, Ron Jenkins sees the impact of the proposed Porter expansion.
1. How would an island airport expansion affect you?
I’m a member of the National Yacht Club, which is adjacent to the airport. The NYC and Alexandra Yacht Club both contend with significant aircraft noise and exhaust fumes. Our balconies are sometimes unusable and we often move our outdoor activities indoors or to the north of the building to get away from the noise. The NYC has been on the waterfront since 1894, and I think this inappropriate and unnecessary airport expansion would destroy a Toronto waterfront legacy for my children and others.
2. What were your expectations when you started living near the airport?
I’ve never lived near the airport but have sailed from the National Yacht Club all my life.
2. How has the landscape changed?
I started sailing at the National Yacht Club on my grandfather’s 25 foot wooden sailboat boat when I was three months old — in the late 1950s. The area has vastly changed. The area between Stadium Road and Bathurst was an empty dirt field. Now it’s populated with many residences. It’s also the staging point for over two million passengers a year at the airport. Commercial use of the airport has increased one thousand fold.
3. Can you tell me a personal story that demonstrates the impact of the airport?
Back in the 1960s, my grandfather had no motor on his boat, and when there was no wind and we were hurrying to get to races that started off Hanlan’s beach, we’d paddle across the Western Gap. Then, in the style of Volga boatmen, we were able to pull the boat along the seawall and across the end of the airport runway.
In the last ten years the expanse of lake at the end of the runway has changed dramatically. Marks now encircle the so-called “Marine Exclusion Zone” (MEZ) — the area all boats must stay out of to keep a safe separation between boats and aircraft. This makes sense, and yet we boaters have seen the area marked out by the MEZ grow season over season. It’s pretty intimidating to have a Q400 pass overhead when you’re in a sailboat.
My involvement with the summer sailing school also makes me concerned about the health of the young sailors coming from around Toronto to use our water and breathe our air. The recent Board of Health report shows there are health hazards because of the scale of airport operations. Our young people are at ground zero in this mess.
No Brain IS an Island Airport Expansion
Image by James Cridland with text design by Mariel Marshall
Today the Toronto Star published an opinion piece by the man who holds the reins of power over the island airport. His name is Geoffrey A. Wilson and he is the president and CEO of the Toronto Port Authority which is asking Toronto’s city council to expand Billy Bishop airport. He claims that his aim is to “do no harm” and he certainly tries hard to strike a reasoned tone in an article that is mostly unreasonable guff.
He says we need to focus on the facts regarding the airport–a point I agree with him on. But he denies that the proposed Porter expansion will grow Billy Bishop to the size of the Ottawa airport. Of course, Billy Bishop won’t be the physical size of Ottawa. There isn’t room to physically grow a regional airport on a tiny island in our harbour–a fact that our citizen groups have been pointing out for at least twelve years.
But the proposed expansion (if it is approved by Toronto’s city council next month) means that Billy Bishop will have the capacity to have MORE passengers than the Ottawa airport per year. The proposed expansion means that 4.6 to 4.8 million passengers can pass through Billy Bishop each year. The Ottawa International airport currently has 4.6 passengers each year.
Oops! Mr. Wilson conveniently forgot to mention this very basic fact. Nor does he mention that growing Billy Bishop will bring more traffic and jet fuel emissions to an already challenged environment. I am sick and tired of our newspapers running mostly pro-expansion stories about the island airport so I am committing this blog to reporting the facts about what an expanded island airport means for the rest of us.
By the way, I live in the Annex but that doesn’t mean it’s in my interests to ignore a debate that is going to shape our city’s future and the lives of our children and grandchildren.
There are more F-A-C-T-S on this link. www.nojetsto.ca
Mr. Wilson’s opinion piece is at www.thestar.com
More tomorrow.
TAKE ACTION: SIGN THE PETITION
We all cherish the Toronto waterfront as a place to live, work and play. But our waterfront as we know it could soon be scarred by an expanded Toronto Island airport with jet aircraft. An expansion that will bring noise, pollution and more gridlock – paid by our tax dollars.
Toronto’s Board of Health, Waterfront Toronto and high-profile Torontonians and organizations have spoken out against the jet plans, but Porter is pushing City Council to give the green light even before all studies have been done.
It all comes down to how City Council votes in April 2014. By speaking out today you can do your part to save Toronto’s waterfront. Fill out the form and your city councillor will receive an email urging him/her to stop the Pearson-by-the-Lake. Sign the petition here: http://www.nojetsto.ca/take-action/
No Brain is an Island Airport (expansion)
In a short story, I once wrote that a human being grows slower than any creature in the universe … slower than dogs or roses… And our slow evolution is obvious when I see what’s going on with the new plan to expand the island airport. Do we really need to wait until the waterfront is no longer liveable, when people and businesses move out of downtown Toronto because the air is poisoned, and the noise unbearable? In the interest of hurrying our slow, sloth-like tendency to respond too late to choices that are bad for us, I’m starting a new series of interviews with people who live under the planes. They can tell us what it really feels, hears and smells like right now in downtown Toronto. Our daily newspapers aren’t giving us this information; Porter Airlines spends too much money on ads for the newspapers to rock the boat so I’m going to provide some of the missing information on my blog. The following is an interview with Barbara, who lives on Bathurst Quay.
When I moved to Bathurst Quay 28 years ago, the island airport was a sleepy little airport. We thought it would remain little and sleepy because we were told we were protected by the Tripartite Agreement.
Since 2006, everything has changed here. Huge fuel trucks pass daily in front of schoolchildren and other pedestrians. Taxis speed through the intersection to the airport, almost knocking us over. Airport limousines and private cars idle in the no parking area in front of our wheelchair ramp. They also line up idling in the bicycle lane on Queens Quay next to the park. The drivers get mad and refuse to move when we point out that it is a bicycle lane and that idling is illegal. I wake up between 6:30 and 6:45 every morning when the engine run-ups and turboprop takeoffs and landings start. We can no longer eat dinner on our balcony because the noise is unpleasant and fairly constant now, and we often can’t hear others speaking.
I recently had a landmark birthday. I wanted to plan a big party and invite friends from far and wide to celebrate with me. Then I realized–I can’t have a big party. The airport has filled all the parking lots in our area, and there is nowhere for my friends to park.
(Out-of-town Visitors to Harbourfront, who complain of scarce parking, will find it even scarcer this summer, now that Porter Airlines has made a deal for airport parking with the parking garage across the street from Harbourfront Centre.)
I developed a chronic lung condition (a form of COPD) in 2009. I can’t afford to move to a part of Toronto with better air. I understand that even the current level of air pollution, and surely airport expansion will shorten my life.
Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (Day Fourteen)
I have a monkey on my back. The first time I noticed it I was in Grade 2. I remember my six-year-old self going round and round my house in a snow suit while a little voice inside said–you need to work harder. You shouldn’t just be swaggering about in the snow like this. Don’t play. Be serious. Get to work.
I still hear the chiding voice. When I was a reporter, it was even louder. The desk editor Don Grant used to shout at me–don’t think, Susan! Write! I did what he said: I wrote. In those days, there were five editions of a daily newspaper and when I was covering a fast-breaking story I’d have to update the story four times a day. Veteran reporters used to call in their stories, composing it into the phone while they glanced at their notes, and somebody in the office typed up what they said. The ability of these veterans amazed me; then I learned to do it too.
But writing a novel isn’t like phoning in a newspaper story. And the voice in my head isn’t helpful. Oh, it gets me to sit down at my desk every day. But once I’m in my chair, not only do I need to think, I need to play. In fact, a lot of novel writing is about taking your time instead of rushing; it’s about playing with ideas and letting yourself day dream.
So I have a new plan as I start the last section of my book. I am going to play all the way through to the end. I am not going to spend hours and hours revising as I go along, which is what I’ve been doing until now. I’m going to dictate my final chapters, (yes, I know, that’s a link to phoning in the story); get my chapters typed up, and then I’ll spend the rest of the day swimming and wool gathering and generally goofing off.
Until the monkey on my back ruins everything by shrieking, “You really should get back to work!”
Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (Day Thirteen)
Image by Jonathan Moreau
In my last blog, I admitted that I’m moving out of the middle of the novel. What does that mean, really? It means that I’m starting the drive to the finish line and there are a number of plotting details I need to be clear about before I go there. So I’ll be taking time away from the blog to think through different scenarios and see which ones are going to work best for my story. And then I’ll report back here on how it’s going.
Meanwhile, I’ll be reminding myself of Alberto Manguel’s axiom: what the story needs is the first law of fiction. Not which of my favourite passages I want to keep. And not the ending that I had my heart set on but the passages and ending that move my story forward. So I may throw away some of the triggering ideas that started me writing my story–if the story asks for that sacrifice.
But most of all, I’ll be dealing with plot, or the lack of it. The late Hugh Kenner (who borrowed the axiom from another writer) once explained plot to me this way: the king dies, the queen dies–that is not a plot. But the king dies and the queen dies of grief is a plot because there is a causal connection between the first event and the second.
Manguel and Kenner are both critics and neither of them would be foolish enough to utter a rule that’s set in stone. Most axioms about writing are only guidelines because fiction writing is an evolving tradition. Many younger writers are moving away from plot and giving the reader instead the experience of being closer to a self, as the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard put it. And the New Yorker critic James Wood claims plot works like a burdensome and predictable caravan in most contemporary novels. I know what he means. The last thing I want to do is freight my story with a creaking plot line.
So I’m really talking about my story’s trajectory. How will it evolve? There’s something exciting about the last part of the novel writing process. The uneasy, doldrumish feeling of being in the middle of the novel is shifting into a faster, more thrilling sensation. The joy of finishing is like plunging backwards over a fizzing waterfall. Or maybe it’s more like the rush of spring light that starts to brighten our lives. The momentum brings with it the gathering up of confidence as characters and events coalesce.
There will be time enough when I’m revising to start eating anxiety pancakes again.
Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (Day Twelve)
I said I was going to write about Barry Michels and the Shadow, as Jung calls the part of ourselves we hide from the world. Michels is a neo-Jungian therapist who advises Hollywood screen writers to get in touch with their Shadow because it helps them be more creative. When the Shadow is involved, your writing has creative flow, according to Michels. He’s more practical than theoretical, and he offers a number of psychological methods he calls “the tools” that are designed to help anyone, not just writers, get in touch with their creativity.
I’ve tried our a few of Michels methods, like imagining my Shadow is sitting in the room with me when I’m talking to a publisher about a book. His advice helped me to stay focused and confident. Michels has another technique to calm performance fears. It’s called “Dust,” and you literally imagine everyone in your audience covered in two inches of dust. Still another of his techniques, “Cosmic Rage,” consists of silently shouting “Fuck you, fuck you!” to anyone who intimidates you.
A lot of what Michels is saying is really about training your unconscious to be on your side. For instance, before I go to bed, I sometimes ask my unconscious to solve a problem I’m having in my narrative. I know it sounds wonky but the answer often arrives with the daylight.
Anyway, this morning, I thought of Michels when I woke up. I had been dreaming of my character, Dale Paul, who runs a dead pool on aging or frail celebrities. In the dream, I felt submerged in his life and his problems and there was a doleful sense of the world ending. Just before I wrote this blog I realized the dream was telling me Dale Paul’s story is almost finished. That’s right. I’m no longer in the middle of a novel. I am getting closer to the end.
Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (Day Eleven)
Yesterday I mentioned the temptations of a novelist. The phrase was coined by the late Arthur Koestler, the European novelist who wrote Darkness at Noon. In his essay, The Novelist’s Temptations, Koestler said that writing a novel was like sitting in front of an open window with your feet in a hot water bucket. Koestler borrowed the image from the Russian master Turgenev, who actually wrote his novels by an open window with his feet in a bucket because Turgenev felt the hot water stirred his unconscious.
In his essay, Koestler said the novelist’s temptation were threefold: either to stick their head out the window, shut the window, or peer at the world through a small hole in the closed curtain. He said none of these actions helped the novelist write. Instead what he recommended is that the novelist keep their window wide open to the world so they know what is going on around them. But they stay at their task with their feet in the hot water bucket.
The important thing, Koestler claimed, was that the novelist keep up with what is happening outside his study. He believed that these things didn’t necessarily need to be in the pages of the novel, but they needed to be in the novelist’s mind when he or she wrote their story. According to Koestler, knowledge of the world indirectly informs the novelist’s story, taking it to greater depths of understanding.
Well, I agree. But Koestler didn’t say that sticking your head out the open window is always wrong. He said that in some periods, to care about politics is a temptation for the artist. And in other periods, to not care about politics is a temptation. I believe we are in the latter period where not caring is a temptation so my head is going to go out the window when I see a good reason for it. Tomorrow, I promise, my thoughts on Barry Michels, the shrink who talked about why writers need to be in touch with their Shadow, the Jungian aspect of the personality that is the sum of all the unpleasant qualities we like to hide.
Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (day ten)
I know I said I was going to write about a Hollywood shrink called Barry Michels today who has good advice for writers. But I’m moving Barry to tomorrow’s blog because yesterday I ran into one of the temptations of the novelist. What’s that? Simple. It’s called politics.
Last night I went to the meeting at City Hall to discuss the proposal by Porter Airlines to bring bigger jets and more passengers to the island airport. A crowd of about 500 showed up. About forty in the audience were backing Porter. They wore round yellow Porter buttons on their lapels. A sweet, fresh-faced young woman politely offered me a Porter button as I went in. I politely refused it and told her I felt an expanded airport would make Toronto’s air and water even more polluted than it already is. She recoiled in shock.
As the evening ground on, I found myself staring at the Porter contingent, trying to figure them out. It struck me that they really do believe they are doing Toronto a favour by bringing more business to the city through their airlines. So why can’t we make it bigger and better, they reason. A number of my friends fly Porter. They’ve told me it is a friendly and well-run airline without the hassles of Pearson. I believe them. Porter seems to have done a good job building up its clientele.
There’s only one problem: the airport is making a mess of our waterfront. Residents in the buildings by the harbour report a new sticky black residue on their balconies since Porter expanded in 2006. They suffer from window-rattling noise from the planes. In some cases, the planes take off only 200 metres away from their homes–a distance that would never be allowed at Pearson, where the homes around the airport have been built at a required distance. Unfortunately, many of the downtown condos were put up before Porter increased its passenger numbers to well over two million a year.
People are starting to move out from some of the downtown co-ops because they can’t stand the new traffic jams on their streets, along with the noise and the bad air, and likely more will go if the airport expands. Sailors are upset; so are arts organizers like Tamara Bernstein who runs concerts by the harbour. She says the noise of the planes taking off interferes with their public events.
So why doesn’t the Porter crowd understand that their airport has a noxious impact on the environment? Because they claim it doesn’t. Not a “significant” impact anyway. The Toronto Board of Health has recently said no to the expansion because it says the airport is bad for our health. But the Toronto Port Authority who runs the airport says the environmental impact is not “significant.” It’s hard not to think of the backers of the airport expansion as frogs in a slowly boiling pot, frogs that ribbett reassurances that yes, the water is a bit warmer than it was, but not overly warm, and certainly not tropical temperatures, at least not yet.
Last night a man from Transport Canada spoke about its responsibility to certify the new jets that Porter wants to bring in. He never mentioned that it is his job to look at jet emissions or jet noise although it is his job to see if the noise and emissions are bad for the environment. He talked a lot about making sure the construction of the proposed extended runways didn’t interfere with the flights that are on going at the airport. His words weren’t exactly reassuring.
Why can’t our public officials be more honest about what we’re doing to the environment? Is it too scary to face up to what’s happening so it’s easier to close your eyes and rush forward with business plans that make a deteriorating situation worse? Another big problem is the media. These days they don’t do investigative reporting unless it falls into their laps like the Rob Ford crack video. Newspapers can’t spare the money for this kind of reporting because the Internet has taken away much of their advertising revenue. TV news still gets most of their information from the dailies so they aren’t big on investigative reporting either. The result? The public is unable to make informed decisions about issues like the airport expansion.
And that brings me back to the temptations of the novelist. Yes, I am getting politically involved again because our journalists aren’t writing courageously about what’s happening.
Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (day nine)
There’s a term for what I’m feeling, the winter blahs. The blahs have come upon me slowly because I usually love winter. I love the cold air and how it helps my thinking, and I love winter sports like cross country skiing. But yesterday I couldn’t ski for more than half an hour because the ground at High Park was mostly covered with ice. Our high winds last week had blown the snow away. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s been plenty cold this January but we haven’t had a great deal of snow. Until today.
The view from my office window is bleak. I’m looking at my garden through falling snow so fine it could be white dust motes. I have no energy. I am not interested in writing a new section of my novel. I am not even sure if I will be able to finish today’s blog, which I want to be short and comforting. So just to see what happens, I’m going to interview my main character, Dale Paul, and find out what he has to say about my listless mood:
Me: So what’s wrong with me, Dale Paul? Why aren’t I more interested in writing about you?
Dale Paul: I have no idea. You’re lazy is my guess. After all, there are few people as fascinating as me.
Me: That’s true. But even you seem pretty boring today.
Dale Paul: Look, I know what you’re trying to do. You insult me so I’ll beat you up. Well, I’m not going to put you through my word mill just because you’re looking for a little nastiness. Find someone else to punish you. I’m taking off.
Me: Where are you going?
Dale Paul: Wherever you aren’t, you idiotic, craven pusillanimous charade of a writer. Good-bye.
Me: Don’t go.
Dale Paul: I’ve gone. Try and find me. See if I care.
Me: Hey, I didn’t mean what I said. The sun is coming out as we speak.
Dale Paul: Blankety blank blank and then blank you….
(Gurgle, gurgle, hiss–the sound of a character disappearing down the bathtub drain.)
Tomorrow–some good advice to writers from Hollywood shrink Barry Michels.
Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (Day Four)
Yesterday I complained so much I feel almost cheerful today. Like many Canadians, I tend to revel in “a woe is me” attitude. Blame it on our weather. In the days when I did performance art, I once performed a show about self-pity called “Down and In” at the Detroit Institute of Modern Art.” Dressed in scarfs, shorts and toques, my fellow performer, Louise Garfield, and myself lowered ourselves into the gallery’s fountain chanting sad sack phrases. It was funny until we realized we couldn’t touch our microphones on stage. Then we really felt sorry for ourselves. So what did we do? We made our situation part of the show.
This is a good thing for me to remember because the labour of writing a novel, with its long, hard, dry spots and sometimes baffling dead ends, can make you feel sorry for yourself. According to the late teacher and novelist John Gardener, the profession of novel writing gives joy to a certain kind of person. But he warned that no other profession is so fraught with professional and spiritual difficulties. He should know. He died drunk driving his motorcyle.
Gardener wrote two excellent books about writing, The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist. That’s why he has my respect. He didn’t just write powerful novels; he taught fiction for over 20 years before he gave into his demons. (His brother died in a horrible farm accident while he was driving the machine that caused it.)
In other words, writing novels can be a painful way to spend your time. Yet it’s satisfying to live in the world of your imagination. Satisfying and seductive. Who has more freedom than the novelist? (On Monday, the long, dry hard spots of novel writing.)