Fresh Water Ocean

I just flew into Toronto. I haven’t been to Canada in two years, which leaves me stunned on arrival. Among the many things that feel unnatural and that I used to take for granted, not going to Canada or seeing my beloved Canadian friends has been a very sad reality. I don’t feel myself without Canada. 

When I was a little girl I lived very close to the Canadian border in western Washington on what was and still is unceded Nuxalk land, now also called Whatcom County.  Since I was a little kid before cable TV and the internet, the media I knew was 90% Canadian. Vancouver had much stronger radio and TV transmitting towers than the tiny towns I lived in, and since Canada had the CBC – national radio and TV – we got it all. Canadian music, news, TV shows, etc, etc. I did not know I was not Canadian until second grade or so when the teacher asked what country we lived in and I answered “Canada”. I was shocked to learn I was incorrect. 

Years went by and I ended up going to college in Canada for four years as well. I still play in Canadian bands and am considered Canadian by many people just by association (and I’ve written the word “Canadian” here more times than allowed). I feel more like a “North American” rather than one or the other. 

None of these place names feel longterm, they are just stopgaps in a brief period of colonialism and I look forward to the possibilities of the Landback movements happening everywhere. I want to know the true names of the places I cherish. I feel them as they formed me. I guess that’s how the border feels so unnatural too. 

We rolled into Toronto  in the back of a cab at 8:30 in the morning. It’s been a virtually sleepless, physically punishing week of driving, marathon rehearsals, playing shows, cancelled flights, and I’m feeling very brittle, but I see the familiar highway lights on the QE2 poking up into the low, grey cloud ceiling. Toronto is the only city I know that is exactly this color grey this time of year. I think there is something about the inland position next to its vast fresh water ocean companion that reflects just so. I am so happy to see in real life that the backdrop of Mississauga and Toronto next to the lake still exist. I didn’t worry about it until this very moment, but it broke my heart a little. Toronto still has a shape to it that feels so familiar, like an all-weather version of “Snakes and Ladders” you remember from when you were little, before you knew too much. It has a shape I traced over and over honestly and without preconceived notions of what it was supposed to be or feel like, maybe that’s why it breaks my heart. It wasn’t LA or New York or even Chicago that are described and painted in shorthand cliches all across the television universe. Toronto is personal to me. I have so many loved ones here and have spent some of the best times of my life in Ontario. Those lives and this city are so present and electric to me still. I feel pretty ineffective in this moment thinking how my tiny, one person concern can’t really help anyone, let alone anyone I know,  anywhere in the time of Covid, and I cannot see them though we are so close, even just a street away. I will settle for knowing they are doing OK and that they have healthcare. But my heart feels dull.

Last night after the second show a few of my bandmates in The New Pornographers and I agreed that we felt more like we had performed in a television studio than live and in person in a theatre. It’s very odd. Don’t get me wrong, the connection was still there and the audience were so respectful and lovely (thank you for singing along, it made us all very emotional :). We had a wonderful time and felt even a little more like ourselves, but the lack of outside contact with our familiar people, places, food and touchstones made it more dream-like, or more accurately like we were reading a book about playing music. We ate and shared a big feast but the nutrients were missing? That is a terrible metaphor, but here it seems more appropriate than a well crafted one? It’s awkward and uncomfortable. 

What does this have to do with The Lung you ask? I believe it’s this; every touring musician I know who really loves it and is on the road every year for a decent amount of time has figured out how to extend themselves into relationships with a lot of cities. We have to make bits of “home” everywhere we go with partial routines and expectations. It’s the oxygen you need to sustain you. Without this homemade skill we might feel too lost to summon the nerve to face an audience in a different place every night. We live on snatches of the familiar and the new low level dangers. (There are occasionally high level dangers but that’s a whole other post...) It’s a little like being an air plant except the danger part.  

I think to do it and love it (in a healthy, sustainable way, at least) there has to be equal parts intention, willingness to roll the dice on failure, slightly dysfunctional if not somewhat delusional desire, and simple, physical, craving need. In my mental picture of it, that need looks like a cat stretching. It looks effortless but it takes a cat’s specific body and lazy athleticism. Imagine a cat who was not allowed to stretch. That’s how I have felt during most of the pandemic. I wanted to stretch so much I was stupid enough to risk getting Covid from some assholes (which I did). My bandmates said yes to tour as quickly as I had. We were all lonely for ourselves, and each other, and for you and the cities and unique ecosystems you make. 

You exist in many forms to us and I wish you could see how truly beautiful and integral you are from where we stand; from the stage, from overhead looking out the windows of the airplane; and in the visualizations of our desire to play, written in yearly planner notebooks and highlighted in fluorescent yellow, looking forward to a tour ahead where we will connect with you and your interesting trees and garbage again, and knowing that even beyond that we will keep coming back. You are so worth it.

Bejar backstage watching the incredible Aoife Nessa Frances band.