The heat sat upon everything.

Oppressive and exhausting, it slowly disabled the day’s options. You couldn’t go outside. You couldn’t get comfortable. You couldn’t even think straight, and every time you moved it was as if this thing, this heavy, unseen entity, was wrapping itself just a little more tightly around you.

It was a long weekend and most of the people in Toronto seemed to have vacated the city for cottages. As Rachelle, Jones and I drove through the city to the Ontario Science Centre, we passed empty streetcars on empty roads, and on very rare occasion a person—always appearing slightly dazed, as if they’d just forgotten where they were going. There was a distinctly post-apocalyptic vibe in the still, dirty air, and it all felt as much a dream as not.

The Science Centre was very crowded, though, and it was filled with people just like us, people looking for a place that was open to the public, air-conditioned and entertaining for young children. We were all lucky, all of us there, lucky to have such a place available to us, lucky to be able to use it, and lucky beyond the known margins, too, lucky in ways none of us could even imagine.

But still, it wasn’t easy. It was crowded and loud, even chaotic, and Jones was so excited that he ran in crazed and unpredictable zigzags, and after a few hours we felt like cats chasing the red dot of a laser pointer. And as it approached noon, the children, all exhausted and hungry now, began to throw tantrums. It was like artillery going off, like fireworks.

One child would explode into tears, another one would kick a juice box out of a parent’s hand, and another would just flop face first on the floor and begin kicking his feet, screaming. And so it went, a spreading contagion that was simultaneously hilarious and crushing.

We managed to slither and bounce through it all to find a passage that led to descending escalators. There must have been two or three of them, each one travelling deeper and deeper down and through the wooded ravine the Science Centre was built into.

It was like being submerged in a forest, and the air became cooler and lighter as we descended, and when we stepped off into the refreshing, muted light of a wide open museum space, we were transformed.

About fifty feet in front of us rotating light projections were being cast onto the floor from the ceiling. Ladybugs. Stars. Race Cars. Mysterious fish. Geometric patters. All the children dancing beneath and within this light, and everything was beautiful and quiet and astonishing, like we had just been led to an illuminated cave full of dolphins at play in the purest waters.

It was a small affair, just a little trip to Prince Edward County. The weather was ridiculously beautiful, and like so many other people, we headed to Sandbank’s Provincial Park to meet some friends, friends who had carved time and space out of their lives to drive up from the city to see us. Often, it feels like friendships are circumstantial rather than permanent aspects of a life, little more than rushed appointments to reschedule, but when you’re by the water time moves differently. Nothing is hurried or obstructed, and friendships returns to the effortless state of grace from which they once emerged.

The day slipped away easily, and soon enough we found ourselves having dinner with about a dozen people at a nearby campsite. Sitting around the bonfire everybody was happy, happy like this was the only spot in the world they wanted to be, and these people, strangers and friends alike, were the only people they wanted to be with. Somebody with a strong and steady voice, the sort of voice that could lead the rest of, picked up a guitar and began to play Canadian classics.

Bobcaygeon.
Heart of Gold.
Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Hallelujah.

Songs known in the bones.

And after each one, faint applause rose up from the dark of unknown campsites as other people let us know that they were there, too, a part of our circle even if unseen. After an hour or two, through all all the coincidences, improbabilities, miracles and tragedies that led us to this point in time, Rachelle and I went down to the beach, lay on our backs and looked up at the sky.

I took my glasses off. The stars, they were already so far away, how were my glasses going to make them any more comprehensible? It amazes me that the stars, such a permanent and essential declaration of the beauty and mystery of our existence, are occluded from those of us who live in cities. How could we let that happen? How could we travel so far from what we are?

And within this simple night, the sound of water lapping at the shore. A train in the distance. Disembodied music, rising like ghosts from the lake. Somewhere laughter and wind, a girl splashing and giggling into the water and a boy following her, and all around us infinity stretching out in every direction.

His silence during this time had fueled all sorts of speculation, with some people believing he’d been in Switzerland to attend his girlfriend giving birth, while others thought he was ill, had power seized from him or that he might even have been assassinated.

Well, he appeared hale and hearty on Monday morning, and it turns out that Putin, utilizing the survivalist training he learned as a KGB operative, had spent the last week camping on his own. These are his private journals from that trip:

Day 1:

As spring approaches, the burning comes hard and fast.

I shudder with the unnatural urges and I know that I must, once again, remove myself to the Bialowieza Forest and make peace with the natural world.

My mind, as if fevered, returns again and again to that Sikh cab driver as he stared out his car window on Shkolnaya.

For a moment, our eyes, like magnets, found one another, and we were two beautiful, masculine animals locked to one another, our breathing becoming so urgent and alive, and in such perfect and furious unison as to be inseparable. We would to be just one, all flesh, muscle and luxuriant and mysterious beard. Ah, but this moment lived only in our hearts and minds, for we never met or spoke, just two rugged ships passing in the fading light of a tired Moscow day.

In the Bialowieza Forest there are no seductive cab drivers with strong, Indian features. No, here there are berries. Here there are cold streams in which to cleanse impurities from one’s naked body! Here there are animals to kill! Here there are so many places to unleash the rage and to let the echoes of pain take flight!!!

Day 2.

I am heterosexual.

I am heterosexual.

I am heterosexual.

I am Dear Shirtless Leader.

I am a powerful, heterosexual leader.

I am ruthless and without pity.

I am heterosexual.

Day 4

I use rocks to pound my hands. The pain reminds me of how much I love women and not men. Rocks are my friends. I will incite my people to throw them at the homosexuals when I return from my purification!

Day 5.

I spent the day in penetrating, decontaminating meditation.

The cold of the March forest felt good on my naked body. It was like being caressed and then handled roughly by the indifferent hands of an anonymous man looking to satisfy his own primal needs. I was an empty and willing vessel, a village waiting for to be led by its mayor.

I then ate two birds that I knocked out of the air using my belt. They are part of Father Russia now.

Day 6.

Today a young stag approached my camp while I made weapons from the beaks and talons of the birds I ate. This buck looked at me with both certainty and curiosity, and as a confident as a bear, walked right up to me and licked my bare chest.

I could have torn him apart with my horrible weapons, but I did not. He continued to lick– he must have been starved for nutrients and minerals—and I took his beautiful head in my powerful hands– and then he began to lick me in an intimate spot. The forest was a beautiful canopy above us and the sunlight was falling like gold coins all around, and for a moment there were no other living creatures in all of the universe, and then I twisted his neck and killed him, and there was but one living creature left, and it was then that I knew I had won and was ready to return to society.

It wasn’t the first time I’ve seen a video of this kind, and each time that I do have the same visceral, almost emotional response. Instinctively, like my primal core has suddenly been activated, I know that something’s wrong. I know it in my bones.

The stripped and ruined landscape, stretching endlessly around you, is awesome in the worst sense of the word. It’s a sincere horror, and looking down at it you feel like you’re viewing a crime scene where acts of unspeakable cruelty and evil have taken place. It’s like that lofty view, which grants such scope and perspective, completely alters one’s view, orienting it toward the eternal. I know that I’m coming in at a pretty high pitch here, but it’s truly how it makes me feel.

The oil being extracted from the tar sands, as I’m sure you know, is very costly to process, with the emissions created from developing it being 12% greater than conventional oil. It couldn’t be dirtier, and each barrel of oil requires three barrels of water to produce it. The question of whether oil is more valuable than water is a fundamentally ridiculous one, and that this question was even open to rational inquiry will be seen as a tragedy in 50 years.

The Athabasca Tar Sands are utterly massive. Covering about 140,000 square kilometres of boreal forest, it’s larger than countries like England, Greece and North Korea. The land will be obliterated, as if from a nuclear apocalypse, and the equipment and structures that are used to mine the oil are so large that they command their own weather systems. It’s a dystopian vision, as if a predatory alien culture had descended upon the planet and began to ruthlessly drain it of all resources while maintaining absolute indifference to whether the host organism lived or died. (There are two smaller Tar Sands, Peace River and Cold Lake, each about a fifth of the size of Athabasca.)

The Prime Minister of this country has said that he won’t do anything to address climate change that would cost Canadians any jobs. The Tar Sands, ruinous and retrograde in so many ways, is a job creator, and so in the face of all other reason it goes forward. However, one glance at the razed, apocalyptic world it inhabits, this kind of Mordor, and even a child can cut through all the rhetoric, economics and complex global politics to see that what’s taking place is plainly wrong.