Drive-In movie. The only place

July 10, 2002

Drive-In movie. The only place where Dad condoned smuggling and deceit. “Yes just two please..Oh...right... yes all three of them are under five”. This time its in Kingston Ontario. Sitting out under the stars wrapped in blankets and sleeping bags. Crappy sound coming from inside the car. Soundtrack bounces off the screen with two dozen garbled boxy slapback echoes. Smell of Mosquito coils and popcorn upwind. A meteor shower accompanies the double feature. People communicating through an unwritten language of car horn chirps and honks. Three short one long. A sense memory rush kicks in at the instant the crowd of cars starts to honk for their supper. One car starts and the rest fall in at different pitches and volumes. “The sun is down now and we want the show”, shout the rust buckets and freshly washed cruisers. I can’t believe how good it sounds. At the peak of the second feature the projector jams and the film melts. I haven’t seen this in so long. It’s the aurora borealis of movie going. Rare, startling and floral. Orange lava lamp globules expand toward their black edges. The white hot centre burns through and the sound turns to rhythmic low thumping. The honking starts again. “Heh! Projector guy! Are you seeing what we’re seeing? Fix it!”. Hungry cows have their heads yanked back abruptly from the trough. Mooing in protest. Five minutes and the reel lurches back forward and we all relax back into the trance. Starter motors and the first rev of the engine as credits roll. Like all accidental symphonies it contains rhythms too complex to ever be created through conscious composition. The crunching and scraping of a team’s skates on a defensive zone breakout. Neighbourhood shovels on the driveways after the night’s snowfall. A bank of telephones lighting up at the telethon. Goose wings hitting the water as the flock is startled out of the lake by dogs bark. O.K. Maybe not that soothing or beautiful. Driving off in a trail of headlight sweeps and bounces through the dust. Such a treat.

Now I’m on a train to Toronto from Ottawa. Trains come into town through the back door now that everything on this continent is about the car. You seem to cruise over field and stream without the trappings of the road. The train needs no rest stop or convenience store. No billboards and directives to clutter up your concept of the situation. The train cannot be told where to go and does not get lost. If these situations do arise you are as fucked as fucked can be. Rail disasters are the Dagwood sandwich to the tiny hor’s douvre of a burning thirty car pileup on the T.C.H.. The whistle seems to be sounding constantly as a reminder that people forget the deadly power of a speeding train. People know where the closest 7-11 is but they forget where the tracks cross the road. Trains don’t come by enough. They are not open twenty four seven.
You can’t see forward so everything goes by in a flash. Its all a surprise. This must be in the backs of the minds of those who live near the tracks. This makes them able to ignore the intrusion. A rider sees the laundry on the line, the ride-em toys thrown to the side, the long grass around the things that don’t work but are too heavy to move easily, the bar-b-qs, the pools and sun decks, the half finished boats on weathered frames of 2 x 4s. . .in the backyards of the suburbs as it flies into a town. If the train rises with the track it is at eye level to the back bedroom window on the top floor. Titillation for the voyeur in us all. As people increasingly take their lives away to the backyard this is perhaps a flash card for the anthropologist too. It goes by so fast and sometimes you’re not quite sure that you saw what you saw. Was that a mini bike jumping the swimming pool with sis tracking the arc of her sibling with the muzzle of a pellet rifle? After getting the feeling that certain towns are deserted I realize its best to take the train in to check. I get the feeling that the people near the track have decided nobody can see them. If you wriggle from the girdle and somebody glimpses your dark little secret it is probable that they don’t know where you are or where they are when they saw your forbidden flesh. There are no street names or numbers to reference. There is only a split second to process the information. There is no possibility that the witness can stop to confirm their suspicions. The people passing by on the train are just blurs of pink and brown that those standing by the tracks will never see again. Who cares what they see so why figure out the visual angles and place things in order to protect your privacy. Seen from the train nothing but the natural world seems properly composed. Nature can accomplish this from any angle. Forests and mountains make sense from all sides. Civilization cannot do this. Little things and single things can be right. A ball. A thimble. A house. A sunflower Imac? But it all doesn’t hang together just right from all perspectives. Sometimes it is like seeing a good friend’s face beside you in the mirror. It just seems wrong. Familiar but off kilter. Your own face in the mirror is easier to take than the photographs of it the right way around. You have studied it backwards for so long. You are “on the train” when it comes to how you see yourself. Look at somebody’s face backwards to see how they see themselves.
A driver sees the statement the homeowner wants to make. . . out front on the street where the lawn is better trimmed and the address is clearly visible. He sees the photograph framed by the homeowner. The street side, however, is but the hood ornament of family activity. The facade is all that Hollywood needs when it conjures up a town. All they need is the ten percent of the iceberg sitting above dark and broody waters to conjure up the northern ocean. We all know the weight is in the unseen depths. Hanging heavy as a dozen locomotives. Here is where the damage is done. Civilization is just damage control.