Talk: White Night

We’re all strangers in the startling light of midnight, but we seat ourselves beside the young woman in the dim booth in the bar, talk about the light, the dark inside. The kilometres she’s driven solo from Vancouver with her dogs, sleeping in her van. She’s fine, she says, she’s safe with the dogs. She just needed something — a flinch in her mouth I catch. To get away.

Talk drifts to the hockey riots ten days ago, when the Canucks lost the big game. Fans segued into mob, began their labours tipping porta-potties, garbage cans, moved on to torching police cars, trashing pizza joints. Then anything. Now, inside the bar’s dull light, we watch ten-day-old footage on someone’s phone, smoke rolling thick as silk on sidewalks the angry men own for a bit. I need a weapon, a sweet-faced boy says, watching another crack his skateboard against a car.

And it’s work to break through the tough glass. When at last they win, watchers cheer, take trophy snapshots, videos: victory Vs, triumphant poses. There have been walls between them and what they want, their team has failed, so now they’ll take walls down, fill their arms with things they don’t have or don’t have enough of.

I was there, the young woman tells us. She’s a paramedic. That night, she was out with the cops. The people she’d come to help hurt her.

She pushes back her bangs to show the bruise.

She’s safe with the dogs. She just needed to get away. Beyond the windows, the sun broods over the horizon, not ready to go.

Whitehorse, Yukon, June 2011