Footloose and phoneless
Feeling naked without my cell phone
A picture begs a thousand words.
I guess I’m hooked. I left home the other day without my cell phone and broke into a sweat that lasted the whole run in to Sydney.
“Go back and get it!” I told myself. “No! I don’t need it!” “What if somebody’s trying to call or text you?”
“They’ll just have to wait, I guess.”
“What if a plane falls out of the sky and you can’t take a picture?”
“Just have to remember it in my mind.”
That’s what I told myself. Let the planes fall out of the sky left and right. I’ll just store it away up here. I pointed to my head, alone in the car. In traffic at a light. The big guy ahead glaring in his rearview mirror, tilting his head. I shook mine.
“No, I mean me!” I pointed to myself. The guy’s eyes flared. Then the light changed and I turned right at the first throughway.
I drove on, still feeling like I left home with no wallet, no money, no driver’s license, no clothes...
Okay. #1, I never answer the phone anyway. True, I do text. Big texter. Got me there. But, #2, I’m not a picture taker. I believe in stories, not pictures. I believe in the day when you caught a trout and still showed how big it was with your arms and you told a story about how you landed it while fighting off a pack of ravenous wolverines and two lost guys from Ashby trying to bum a smoke.
Pictures. Phhhh. What can a picture tell? A thousand words? That’s a thousand words in Cape Breton? The beginning, that’s what. I prefer pictures that beg a story rather than tell one. I have this one picture of a seemingly dusty, empty street in a wee village in Alberta in 1987. But if you take a magnifying glass and look closely you’ll see it’s not empty. You’ll see a guy’s head on the horizon, as well his hat, and closer you’ll see that he’s playing a fiddle.
First of all, our railroad gang was bunked down on a siding in this town for a few weeks. And this one day was our day off. It was high noon and we sat on the steps of our bunk cars watching this rodeo parade. It was a small, village rodeo parade, but not to be outdone by any parade anywhere.
I got the guy with the fiddle after an old-timey fire wagon drawn by a spirited young paint horse inspired me to think about getting my camera. Two men on the wagon kept a small controlled hay fire going in the back, pretending to throw buckets of water on it, like old-timey firefighters. But boredom struck and they got to waving and shouting to the parade watchers more and controlling the fire less. A fairly big fire flared up, and the horse, spooked, bolted down the road, leaving the firefighters rolling around frantically in the wagon like two empty pickle barrels. It tore past the sequined rodeo queen on her customary white stallion - which bolted too - and shot around a corner, the wagon on two wheels. The Rodeo Queen, apparently, wound up somewhere near Maple Creek, Saskatchewan. Unscathed. Baton in hand.
Pretty much all the horsedrawn floats bolted, in all directions, like seven parades in one; but the fiddler and his old-time string band just happened to be drawn by an antique truck. The band, abandoned, stopped momentarily to consider its options. That’s when I went for my Kodak Instamatic. The musicians played on soldierly: “Walnut Gap” and “Poor Girl Waltz;” until the float sank as slowly as the evening sun into a distant coulee.
I think I captured the moment, in equal parts memory and film.
Still. I feel naked without my phone.
Oi. There’s an image.
Mike Finigan, from Glace Bay, is a freelance writer and a former teacher, taxi driver, and railroader, now living in Sydney River. His column appears monthly in the Cape Breton Post. He can be contacted at cbloosechange@gmail.com.