Dream states and delusions

Last night I was awakened from a deep sleep by the calls of coyotes. During the day they are remarkably discreet; I have hardly ever laid eyes on one, and we have never had problems with them coming close to the house to take goats or chickens – knock wood. But lately we have been finding their tracks each morning in the dry, crystalline snow. (Conditions are so arid, the kitchen chairs are falling to pieces, and I have been asking complete strangers to scratch me between the shoulder blades.) Their nocturnal calls are nothing like the coyote howls you hear in Western movies. The high-pitched whining caused me to sit bolt upright because it sounded exactly like a child crying in another part of the house. For a few seconds, I was back in that early stage of parenthood – ready to stumble out of bed and provide comfort for a nightmare, a belly ache, or a Charley horse. Then I remembered that those days are gone, and I lay down to enjoy the insane canine chorus.

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I find my 14-year-old son in the unheated shed wearing swim goggles. He is hitting the pulse button on the electric food processor, which makes a great clattering racket. “Smell this,” he offers.

“Nice try,” I say. He’s pulverizing horseradish that we dug up before the ground froze. The plant is invasive as heck, readily propagated from root fragments. One of our good raised beds is fairly polluted with it, but we weed out most of the shoots all through summer, and herd a couple clumps into a corner, where they are allowed to bulk up.

When grated, those roots release a vapour that sets off fireworks in your sinuses. Could be used for crowd control, or just a culinary out-of-body experience. It’s not the same plant as real Japanese wasabi, though apparently it is frequently passed off as such in commercial preparations. We cook it up with diced beets, along with some sugar and vinegar, and process it in Mason jars. It’s great with any kind of meat or eggs or potatoes, or in a cheese sandwich. Although we have progressively increased the proportion of horseradish, its volatility is much diminished by processing, so the relish is pretty mild – more like a distant memory of an out-of-body experience.

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Driving across the county at night, in deepest winter, I can completely lose track of where I am, and even who I am. On these secondary highways there are long stretches with no landmarks. This is not wilderness – far from it. (The land all around has been cut over, fragmented, riddled with “access roads,” as they are called – roads to nowhere, intended not for travel but for extraction.) Yet for miles and miles there are no lights, no signs, no human habitation visible in the weak band of whiteness cast ahead by my headlights, with blackness all around.

If there are flakes coming down, the effect can be dangerously hypnotic. But sometimes it brings on a calm lucidity. The drone of our tires is muted on the packed snow. The kids are warm and silent in the back seat, and I am under the pleasant delusion that I can keep them safe forever. They have one of their handheld devices cabled to the stereo, playing the eerie, echoing harmonies of Fleet Foxes (somewhere between Steeleye Span and The Beach Boys). I forget where we have been and where we are going. Did we miss the turnoff? Has an hour passed? I could be 18, or I might be 82. I feel I could go on and never stop.

But we must stop, eventually. I gas up, and attempt to squeegee crusted salt off the windshield with the filthy blue fluid in a reservoir beside the pump. I step up to the till, and the clerk asks, “Do you need some lottery with that?” – as though long-odds gambling were a side dish to complement a serving of hydrocarbons.

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I have been having a protracted, intermittent debate about oil with a friend of mine who works in the industry, in Alberta. He’s not one of the many interprovincial migrants who go west temporarily to earn wages. An engineer by training, he started his career out there, and rose through the ranks of one of the big energy companies. Now he’s an independent consultant. By all appearances, the oil business has been very good to him.

Why would a Calgary petrochemical wonk be rubbing shoulders with a granola-munching, kale-cultivating, goat-milking farm journalist living in the wilds of Nova Scotia? Well, we’re old friends (which actually seems to be the only kind I have, these days). I’ve known him since we were toddlers – our respective houses just a stone’s throw away. He was the smart kid, a whiz at maths and sciences, with the rock-solid work ethic frequently ingrained in the children of first-generation Canadians who risked everything in hopes of finding security and opportunity in this country. We remained good buddies right through until graduation, and it’s a relationship I value highly – even though we see each other only occasionally, and our lives have diverged quite dramatically.

A quarter century ago, when I expressed some optimism about a general shift toward renewable energy, he just thought I was naive. “We’re always going to need oil,” he said, back then. Now he’s a bit ornerier about it, because he believes I and others of my ilk are hypocritical in our criticism of Alberta’s oil industry. After all, we’re still using oil daily. Every aspect of our lives depends upon it. Would we prefer to support producers in the Middle East?

My friend is a rational guy. He acknowledges that we need to cut way back on global carbon emissions. “But it’s a demand-side problem,” he says. “You can’t fix it by cutting off supply.”

Economists love to say that oil is “fungible,” meaning it’s a commodity that can readily be substituted with a supply of virtually identical stuff from a different source. The pro-tar-sands argument, as I understand it, is that the world is awash in oil, and lots of people want to buy it, so we would accomplish nothing by excluding ourselves from the market. I have heard a similar argument from the Canadian forest industry, because wood products are also considered fungible – so if we were to scale back our timber harvest, the supply gap would almost immediately be filled by production from jurisdictions where sustainability standards are lower or non-existent, such as illegal logging operations in Siberia.

But here’s the thing: when you attempt to stake out a little piece of moral high ground by comparing yourself to the House of Saud or the Russian mob, you sound kind of like the guy who feels the need to tell everyone that he does not beat his wife. Shouldn’t we aim a little higher?

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If we accept these market-based arguments, is there anything we should not produce for export? When Canada finally stopped mining asbestos in 2012 (after shameful delays based on political expediency), it was not due to lack of demand. Quebec producers could have continued selling it to Asia for decades – scrupulously advising the end users to avoid breathing the dust, if possible. Same with tobacco, right? Just don’t inhale! Actually, some Ontario tobacco is still exported, even though it’s not cost-competitive on the global market. In that respect it resembles Alberta oil, which is relatively expensive to produce and refine.

Addiction experts would agree that while supply-side restrictions alone won’t work, they are part of the solution. Along with whatever steps you may take to curb cravings, you should probably avoid hanging out with purveyors of the substance you’re trying to quit. You should distance yourself from that milieu, and perhaps even try switching to a less harmful substance.

For Canada, oil is as much a revenue addiction as an energy addiction – which explains why government policies in this realm are so muddled. Part of the problem with building new pipeline capacity is that it keeps oil revenue flowing long into the future, delaying the necessary economic adjustments. Alberta has been living off the liquidation of its natural capital, instead of investing those royalties for future generations (whereas Norway has famously socked away about $1 trillion in oil money). People out there really like living in the only province that has no provincial sales tax. Even my Albertan friend agrees this is nuts.

I don’t see how we can play a role in tapering off demand for fossil fuels while we continue to invest in infrastructure to maintain our status as a significant supplier. We are in an internal conflict of interest, and will have no credibility on the world stage. We will be like the guy who swears he’s trying to drink less, but in the meantime he’s installing a keg in the garage, just to keep costs down. “It’s not a supply-side problem,” he insists.

In our household we used to be avid homebrewers. We made zippy gingered lager, pungent spruce-tip ales, and rich blackstrap molasses stout. Fabulous stuff, always on hand, for a few nickels per glass. We eventually gave it up because we were drinking too much damn beer. DL