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When I was in Korea, trucking around the antiquated countryside and sleeping uneasily in orgy love-palaces, it occurred to me that I haven't really seen much of my own country. I've visited most of the larger cities in Canada, the pockets of unusual density, but as for the rest - the well-advertised vistas of bountiful nature - well, nope. As I am unfortunately mired within a labyrinth of theory and thick books with no dust jackets, opportunities are slim. Still, Hags invited us up to Sudbury for the weekend and I figured I should take what I can get.

After an extended side-view panorama of the Lesser Canadian Wilds, navigated via the decisive highways bored through its heart, Jack, Kyle and I came across Woodcock Road (or a similarly named phallic thoroughfare... someone can correct me later). Kyle gleefully pointed out that this road was on Route 69, exactly 69 clicks away from Sudbury. If you add, to this scene, images of plaid shirted workmen and sad-looking counter girls at Tim Horton's dreaming of escape from tinytown nothingness, then that was our trip in a nutshell. Oh, and highly noxious anal gases brought into our car by poor dietary planning. My God, Kyle smells bad.

Sudbury is oversized for its image, with a population of approximately 200 000. According to our survey data, seven (VII) of these people are black. Only 1 (I) wears a furry pimp coat. Sudbury looks like the scarred aftermath of a bloody battle against Nature. Fierce vertical structures of rock and soil still stand as bastion temples of the earth. Copses of trees wave defiantly from the hilltops. But humanity has largely imposed its will on the landscape: blasting and cutting, deploying strip malls and suburban architecture and places of learning. Bitter and vengeful, Nature has covered her downfall with a sheen of ice and gritty grey snow that eats at the concrete. Guerilla warfare comes easily for abstract notions of resistance; our myths repel the bulldozers. Roland Barthes + self loathing.

The students refer to Sudbury, somewhat lovingly, as SudVegas because there is nothing to do way up there but drink and fuck. Of course, there is nothing to do in any university town but drink and fuck. This is because drinking and fucking are clearly the most fun things to do, anywhere, period. One might think that casinos might fall under the SudVegas umbrella too, but I suppose choosing to live there might be enough of a gamble in itself. What with Nature clearly wanting everybody dead and all.

Until that time, the Sudbury bar scene seems to be going strong with every self-respecting young adult fully aware of what places are good on what nights. A cell phone is a useful implement of indecision. Unnecessarily long line-ups indicate a strong whiskey economy. Girls wear shirts that say things like "Newly Single" and "If you're rich, I'm single" and "Yo, I'm not single but my boyfriend is only a car mechanic" which all point toward strong underlying desires to bang a heart surgeon until money hemorrhages from his eye sockets. I hear that's why people go to university in Sudbury, anyway, to tread water until they have a nice marketable body. Maybe that just came from one of those mass "my-university-is-the-bestest!" WLU emails though.

As a male of personable character, Hags is positioned in Sudbury somewhat like a farmer about to harvest a volumous field of golden wheat. I would like to give him a million dollars and a list of sassy new STDs to collect.

I talked incessantly about the Big Nickel for the whole weekend, not because I thought it would be awesome but because it's Sudbury's big Cultural Identifier. Every place needs something to call its own and Sudbury, in the tradition of Albertan small-town insecurity, has made a Large Statue of Something Unique. In the Nickel's defense, it is intrinsically linked to the city's history: some stupid thing about mining, I think. Mining nickel. And gay space-cowboys.

Hags and co. took me there after I whined a lot. I suppose the Nickel is a lot like the CN Tower for Toronto residents - you see it, you go "huh...", and then over time you begin to resent it for being more representative of the city than you are. The Almighty Nickel is extremely large and, upon closer inspection, hollow. It bears the scratches and pock-marks of having many rocks thrown at its faces over the years. It is sturdily pinioned and cannot be rolled crashing down the hills and escarpments to wreak devastation below. If you managed to steal it with a helicopter, you could probably melt it down in exchange for a mid-level secretarial position in the Liberal party.

For children who are not as intrigued by the Big Nickel as any God-fearing Canadian citizen ought to be, there is an adjacent playground. It has a big slide and it is scary, but with love and compassion it can become a site of grand triumph over gravity. And it struck me that this pleasure tube embodied the true spirit of Sudbury more than the Big Nickel ever could. The slide represented challenge, adversity, and ultimately the human capacity to overcome the obstacles of his or her northern environs.

In Sudbury, honest folk struggle daily against the pitchforks of Nature, boredom, snow, isolation, skateboard kids in Burger King, and mental retardation. The Big Nickel only struggles against oxidation and scraggly birds that crap on its contours. Only when Sudbury constructs a Magnificent Space Slide will it ever fulfil its dreams of becoming a complete and autonomous region, with a symbolic structure it can truly be proud of. Until then, SudVegas will happily hold up its quotia of hushed-up abortions and continue spawning a veritable army of Communications majors.

It's just, you know, so interesting. And you can get a job in PR when you're done!

[Sudbury] [Big Nickel]

Posted by Chris at 02:52 PM >> Commentations (2)