Although I now live in Toronto, I grew up and spent most of my life in Ottawa, and the shootings that took place there on Wednesday felt like they happened in my idealized past, in the nostalgic fuzz of memory, really.
The Ottawa that I remember is a sincerely, and wonderfully decent place. The average person, somebody who might work modestly within a cautious and secure bureaucracy, was friendly, wholesome and responsible– the kind of person you hoped might live beside you.
There’s a lot of planning in Ottawa. Nothing happens without forethought in the city, and sometimes it feels as if life doesn’t happen in real time, exactly, but in a kind of cushioned, protected time. Parliament, in spite of being perched on a cliff and its jagged Gothic flourishes has always felt about as accessible and threatening as a Keg restaurant. There was just nothing menacing or intimidating about the place. It was like the Block Parent on the street, the home of a kindly couple that never had children and would always protect you when the local bully tried to steal your toque.
You felt safe, even welcomed there, like you might even get fed some Kraft Dinner before heading on your way. In fact, Parliament was so homey that a colony of cats actually lived there for years.
And to watch the city experience something as merciless and bloody-minded as the shootings, something that existed at such a terrifying remove from our comprehension and control, was unbearably sad. The rules by which Ottawa lived, that had come to subconsciously frame my psychological landscape, did not apply. The world that I imagined existing when I grew up likely never really did, and now, from the distance of middle age, I can see it receding quickly.
The eruption of violence, in a city that had always seemed frozen in time and almost magically apart from the real world, was a blunt and pitiless assault on the myths that have sheltered and nourished me over the years. It was like watching somebody whom had always protected me and I loved, getting beaten up and being powerless to intercede. A kind of chaos, emerging from a vast and dark pool, had descended on the ordered and good, and the sadness I felt about watching that was deep and heavy in the bones—the echoing gunfire amidst Gothic arches and limestone columns, a sound not soon to be forgotten.
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6 responses to “Ottawa Shooting”
Not sure I agree Michael as I remember the events during the FLQ crisis and soldiers around my neighbourhood with rifles. Just felt like that to me.
I was living in Montreal at the time of the implementing “The War measures Act”‘
even as a young teen I felt the surreal nature of armed guards in the blocked streets and serious curfews on all walking – pedestrian – traffic…
Michael H. of Now mag fame wrote the recent cabaret of Village of small huts –
called ‘Trudeau & the FLQ’ which showed not at The cameron where all the others did but at the new Soul Pepper home in the Distillery district. That was a great piece of theatre.
Ian:
I, of course, was experiencing the shooting through social media, which is kind of like experiencing an explosion of every possibility and emotion all at once. Such a thing can likely both distort and distill one’s response to an event, but mine was a decidedly personal one. At a distance, both physically and through time, I was separate, watching the landscape I knew and loved being cast into terror, and I think, changing. If not the culture of the city, than at least the way I experience the city was changing. It was, in a way writ large, like watching a favourite place being torn down and replaced by something tawdry and horrible, something you would never relate to.
I don’t personally remember the FLQ crisis, and I don’t doubt you, but I guess for me the shooting on Wednesday was kind of like my personal FLQ crisis, maybe even a mid-life crisis,
I agree with you Michael. Many past crimes dented my mythic sense of the city – Robert Poulin’s deranged rampage at St. Pius X 39 years ago tomorrow, for one. And then there was that miscreant who drove a hijacked bus up onto the Parliament Hill lawn in the ’90s. But I always felt notionally ‘safe’ in Ottawa, until this week. I can’t recall how often I’ve stood near or at the War Memorial, gazing north toward the Chateau Laurier and Parliament Hill, swivelling right toward the NAC, gazing left toward Sparks Street, gazing south down Elgin, and feeling (without actually thinking it) that I was smack dab in the centre of Canada, and perforce the Canadian ‘idea.’ That’s gone now for me. Maybe it’ll come back in time, but I doubt it.
Craig:
I had actually forgotten about the St. Pius rampage, but right now remember it quite vividly, the inky yearbook photos of each of the victims printed on the front page of Citizen and/or Journal. Ottawa has always felt like my backyard to me, just the most familiar and understood terrain, and watching things unfold in a way that was simultaneously explosive and uncertain, was really personal and upsetting to me. It really did feel like something had changed, maybe it was just me, though, but maybe not.
I am so glad that I met you. Looking forward to discussing all things literary and journalistic with you.