Thursday, October 18, 2012
T H E
N A PA N E E
The season of mean As I lay in my beach chair half asleep, the shout of “Come on fatty, get in the boat!” shattered the mid-morning silence on Lake Kashwakamak. I looked up to see the last of four pre-teens slip into the yellow canoe that was destined for Frog Island. With my eyes still adjusting to the sun, I saw four girls in all. Not a single one was fat. Indeed the dawdler was the most skeletal of the group. It seemed as if, in her case at least, “fatty” was meant as an ironic term of endearment rather than a full-blown insult. But in a culture where you can’t be too rich or too thin it’s not a given that she would have taken the comment as praise versus abuse, in spite of its absurdity. I wanted to study her features to see if the remark had registered, but her back was turned to me. I could see only a bony spine clad in a small bikini, as the occupants of the canoe paddled in tandem towards their destination, all giggles and laughter across the clear lake. No harm done right? I’ve never met a ten-yearold girl who was so rock-solidly confident with her body image that some part of her budding ego might not secretly suspect her friends did think she was fat. This phenomenon of selfdoubt and self-loathing — in spite of ample physical evidence to the contrary — is exactly the kind of thing that wreaks havoc on young girls who suffer from anorexia and other eating disorders. Was it a joke perhaps? Teasing maybe? Whatever you want to call it, it still sounded frighteningly mean. The moms on the beach were silent, unaffected. Could it be they had grown accustomed to the ban-
ter of pre-adolescents (acidic or otherwise) in the same way I have gotten used to the sound effects of crashing cars and explosions from five year-old boys? Some would be quick to defend these girls, saying they’re not bullies, not ‘mean girls’ in the Hollywood sense. And in all likelihood, they would be right. But what if meanness is an acquired taste — like a fondness for broccoli or caviar — and what if the process of sampling from the buffet of mean, and learning to enjoy it (possibly crave it), is for these young women (and millions like them) already well underway? The really tough part of course is for parents to be objective enough to see the evolution and escalation of meanness taking place in their own children, particularly if it mirrors their own. In the homes where these girls live, and at family dinner tables across the country, the torment and eventual suicide of Amanda Todd will no doubt be a subject of conversation. But in most cases there will be an externalization of it, a quality of otherness assigned to the extreme of mean this tragic case has once again brought into our public discourse — something akin to, “Isn’t it
awful what they did to her…” Indeed the nationwide murmur is audibly self-righteous — so quick we are to blame things on the ubiquitous ‘they’ — when borderline hate-speech is spread across online news outlets every day, hundreds of thousands of times each day. But what will the flavour of conversation be when it moves, inevitably as it will, to other things, when Amanda Todd is no longer front page news? Will ‘they’ and ‘them’ ever give way to ‘us’ and ‘we’ as we look to ourselves to try to figure out the deeper causes for this mean season in which we find ourselves? Whether it’s Aunt Sally’s enormous thighs, or Uncle Bob’s ugly moles, who among us isn’t guilty of using words to hurt or mock people, spreading meanness from time to time? The question for us as a society in light of Amanda’s tragic suicide is to see that meanness unchecked in the electronic age — even the casual but ugly kitchen table variety that we don’t always think of as ‘mean’ — is a recipe for disaster for our children. In this way, Amanda Todd is the child we all must take responsibility for. Mean words are like weapons of mass destruction in the Internet age, and they are
Michelle Hauser
Train Of Thought
COMMUNITY / 7
B E AV E R
increasingly lethal in the hands of people too young and immature to understand the consequences of their actions. I heard a physicist comment the other day that the bullet is but one piece of the puzzle — the speed at which it is launched is what really clinches the deal. People (including kids) have always been mean to varying degrees, but the Internet — through its scope, speed and anonymity — has done for meanness what gunpowder did for the bullet. Many parents know what is trending on Twitter from one day to the next, everything from celebrity gossip to what videos have gone viral on YouTube. But do they know what’s trending in the minds and hearts of their children? Are kids throwing around words like ‘loser’ and ‘fatty’ with an LOL (laugh out loud) tagged on the end, as if the words themselves have no meaning? Worse still, is their discourse merely a musing on what they hear, see and read from the adults around them? I guess it’s easier to throw stones at those who hurt Amanda Todd, leaving them in the comfortable category of ‘the other’ and waiting for another day to do the hard work of honest, self-reflection. But the place to make a difference for Amanda is not at Queen’s Park or the House of Commons. The truth is there are bigger, more powerful houses where we can try to set things right, namely: yours and mine. Michelle Hauser lives in Napanee with her husband Mark and their son Joseph. She loves to hear from readers, so feel free to email her at mhauser@ontario.anglican.ca.
COMMUNITY PULSE
NOVEMBER 2 LUNCH At the Napanee Legion. Come and enjoy a hot meal including dessert, coffee and tea for $9. From 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. All welcome. NOVEMBER 3 OPEN SHUFFLEBOARD TOURNEY AND MEAT SPIN At Royal Canadian Legion Branch 623 on County Rd. 4 in Millhaven. Meat spin from 1-4 p.m., shuffleboard tournament registration at noon, play starts at 1 p.m. Entry fee $5 each. Bring your own partner. Everyone welcome, win cash prizes. ENTERTAINMENT At the Napanee Legion, featuring A Bit of Nostalgia from 7:30-11:30 p.m. $5 for non-members. All welcome. NOVEMBER 9 FISH AND CHIP DINNER St. Alban’s Anglican Church, Main Street, Odessa is hosting a fish and chip dinner, with salads, baked beans and pie for dessert at 5- 7 p.m. Catered by Mike Mundell. Cost is $15 for adults; $10 for child 12 and under. Call 613386-3500 to reserve your tickets. NOVEMBER 10 QCHS VOLLEYBALL TOURNAMENT Quinte Christian High School is scheduled to have its annual 4 on 4 coed volleyball tournament. There will be a recreational and a competitive division. The teams must have at least one female on the court at all times. The cost to play is $20 per person. If you would like to play, register your team at athletics@qchs.ca or call John VanderWindt at 613-968-7870 x222. All registrations must be in by Nov. 5 and please designate whether you would like to play in the competitive or recreational division. So come on out for lots of fun and community building. NOVEMBER 14 PARKINSON SOCIETY MEETING At 1:30 p.m. at L&A Seniors Outreach Services, 310 Bridge St. W. in Napanee. Guest speakers. Contact Don Ryan at 613-354-5238.
One doesn’t fry eggs in these ‘pannes’ e call it ‘autumnal recrudescence’. That period in the fall when the temperatures, daylight hours, and even length of darkness approximate those of spring. Many animals, especially birds, experience a physiological reaction. Photoperiodism, if you will. Sandhill cranes will spend endless days facing each other and jumping high into the air as they would in the spring, to impress a mate. Many species will sing, and in some extreme cases, weak attempts at nest building may take place. Wildflowers sense seasonal changes too, bravely sending out flowers in October. Perhaps not in grand profusion as they would in spring, but admirable attempts at providing some additional colour to the backdrop of reddening trees. I have seen sprigs of lilacs in bloom on warm, November days in past years, and once, at Point Traverse, a wild apple tree there was covered in delicate blossoms… in late October! I was reminded of this as I leafed through the most recent issue of Between Friends, published by the Friends of Sandbanks. In it was an archived article that I had written back in my days as an interpretive naturalist at the park, in the late 1980s. The article was for a column called Sandscript that several staff members, including myself,
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contributed to during the operating season at the Park and which appeared regularly on the pages of the Picton Gazette. This one was about pannes – low, flat, wetland areas in the park that often host a riot of colour in August, once the water levels have dropped. The plants responsible are hardy species as they must contend with an alkaline environment, one in which water levels can fluctuate dramatically at the whims of rainfalls, drought and changing lake levels. If you happen to own a copy of Sandscapes, published early this summer by the Friends, the subject is covered there. We strolled through these unique wetlands along an established path just a few days ago, and continued deep into the dune system. Along the way, we found a few plants that had responded to recent rains and several balmy days that October so often offers. I brought up the subject of fringed gentian, and one photographer mentioned that he came across one farther back, and had photographed it. Others peeked bravely between browning sedges and sprigs of silverweed. First a single gerardia, then numerous isolated stems of Kalm’s lobelia. Most contained but one miniature flower, as though in defiance of November days around the corner. The most unexpected of all
Terry Sprague
Outdoor Rambles though, was a blossoming hoary puccoon, a wildflower we more closely associate with hot summer days in June. But, here it was, grabbing our attention on a small hummock of sand as we made our way to an enormous dune blowout that I always like taking people to on walks. As winds continue to work the sand, this blowout seems to be getting less dramatic than it was when I used to trail campers over there on my guided interpretive walks 25 years ago. I recall pure sand and towering mountains surrounding this cavernous valley which even kids on our hikes found difficult to ascend to the top. Today, it is becoming more vegetated and stable as the dunes around this blowout con-
tinually become moulded by the forces of nature. We found a couple examples of another type of dune. These are called parabolic dunes and their impressive horseshoe shapes form when strong winds push the unstable leading edge forwards, leaving long, trailing elongated arms on either side. You can see them sometimes as miniature etches on the beach, but the ones we were staring at were several metres high. It can be a wild place out there in the pannes where these strange formations provide variety to an otherwise flat wetland. Years ago, I used to take campers to a wonderful example of a barchan dune — like a parabolic dune but reversed. With these, the wind blows the leading edge forwards, downwind, and the slipfaces are on the concave side of the dune. As barchans migrate, and they do move along
from year to year, smaller ones behind catch up, bumping into the rear of the larger barchans, and appearing on the other side, almost like waves of light or sound that pass through each other. This was a Thanksgiving hike we were on, and the comment was made that the 15 or so of us could be viewed as rejects, with no special plans for a Thanksgiving Sunday. Actually, we felt quite special, being caught up in this extraordinary environment where the forces of nature are at work daily, changing the sandscape and creating new images. For more information on today’s topic, please e-mail tsprague@kos.net or phone 613476-5072. For more information on nature in the Quinte area, be sure to check out www.naturestuff.net .
Please send your Letters to the Editor to 72 Dundas St. E., Napanee, ON, K7R 1H9 or to beaver@bellnet.ca.