The United States of Wind ebook: Travels in America

By Daniel Canty and Oana Avasilichioaei

Raise the windsock. Read the compass. Ride where the wind wills it.

Late 2010. From the end of fall to the beginning of winter, Daniel Canty becomes a wind seeker. Aboard the Blue Rider, a venerable midnight-blue Ford Ranger crested with a weathervane and a retractable windsock, he surrenders himself to the fluidity of air currents. The adventure leads him and artist driver Patrick Beaulieu from the plains of the Midwest up to Chicago, the Windy City, into the wind tunnel linking the Great Lakes, through the cities of lost industry of the Rust Belt, only to veer off into Amish pastoralia, and to the forests of Pennsylvania, Civil War land, where fracking is stirring up the ghosts of the first oil rush.

Canty creates a gentle road book, a melancholy blue guide written in an airy, associative prose, where images coalesce and dissipate, carried away through the outer and inner American landscape. The book, mixing the tropes of road narrative, poetic fabulation, and philosophical memoir, reaches towards images on the horizon of memory, to find out where they come from, while coming to the foreordained realization that, wherever memory may lead us, its images will be long gone when we get there and most probably were never even there at all. The book’s through-line is about this emotional reality of images, the ways in which they take hold upon us and carry us back to the deep narrative of self. Clocking in at 160 pages, most readers don’t realize that the adventure spans only ten days, and that The United States of Wind is, in a very real way, a journey through a fold in time.

“I read this book as an essay, a method of thought. Canty doesn’t propose as much a theory of wind as a map of reflections on what emptiness holds, on what the imperceptible space between us occupies … The true object of this book’s love, or quest, is not a weather phenomenon, but rather something more akin to the American soul.”
– Valérie Lefbvre-Faucher, Revue Liberté

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Oct 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9780889229433

Daniel Canty

Daniel Canty is a Montréal-based writer and film director who works in literature, film, theatre and design, and new media. Canty collaborated with the pioneering multimedia studio DNA Media in Vancouver, and directed the inaugural issues of Horizon Zero, the Banff New Media Institute’s website on the digital arts in Canada. Canty’s first book, Êtres Artificiels (Liber, 1997), is a history of automata in American literature. From 2002 to 2005, Canty co-directed the poetry magazine C’est Selon. He has devised three award-winning collaborative books: Cité selon (2006), on the city; La Table des Matières (2007), on eating; and Le Livre de Chevet (2009), on sleeping. He has also translated books of poetry by Stephanie Bolster, Erin Moure, Charles Simic, and Michael Ondaatje. Canty has directed several short films. His latest, Longuay (2012), melds the gaze of an ancient French abbey with that of a tablet computer. His Cinema for the Blind (2010) lets the audience slip into oneiric depths behind the cinema screen. Canty also conceives poetic interfaces for the Web and live interaction. He built Bruire (2013), an architectural poetry-reciting machine, and wrote the libretto for Operator (2012), an alphanumeric automata by Mikko Hynninen presented at Lux Helsinki.

Book preview

Friday, November 26

PROLOGUE TO THE WIND

MONTREAL AND CHICAGO

THE UNITED STATES OF WIND ~ I’m waiting for a sign from the wind seekers. Ten days ago, Patrick and Alexis left Chicago, the windy city. At this precise moment only they know their exact location. The wind doesn’t breathe a word or think. It just welcomes them into its disorder. As for myself, I accepted long ago to abide by the plan. My bags are packed. Tomorrow, I will take over from Alexis at a yet unknown location. Tonight, I will receive an electronic ticket for the United States and, at daybreak, go to the airport. Then surrender myself for nine days to the will of the wind.

A few months ago, I accepted Patrick Beaulieu’s invitation to take part in the project Ventury: A Trans-Frontier Odyssey Trailing American Winds. I had prior experience accompanying Patrick on another odyssey, Vector Monarca, tracking, on the ground, the physical and metaphorical signs of the annual migration of monarch butterflies across America. That is a story of another time, for another time. Now, I will be the second in a trio of authors, the pivot between Alexis Pernet, a French landscape architect, who could think of no better way to get closer to the American landscape than this, and Dominiq Dauphin Vincent, a writer and old friend, who desperately needed a break from his job in hospital administration. Patrick, a visual artist, will drive for the entire continental performance and make images of the winds encountered. Meanwhile, the three of us in turn will share the role of on-board poet and cartographer, each writing a travelogue of our journey, enriching and influencing the day-to-day propulsion with our observations.

The adventure’s vehicle of choice will be the Blue Rider, a venerable Ford Ranger pickup crested with a weathervane and a retractable wind cone. Aboard the truck, we will surrender ourselves to the drifting wind and try as best we can to align the ground configuration of America’s highways with the fluidity of the air currents above. The procedure is crystal clear: every morning, from the end of fall to the beginning of winter, we will hoist the wind cone, consult the compass, and go wherever the wind wills it.

I will become a wind seeker. I will discover The United States of Wind and bring back a winged book.

THE GREEN LANTERN ~ Partir au vent. Surrender myself to forces greater than me. Obey a reasoning that is without reason. Je sais. Je sais. But it’s in my nature to be anxious so I try to stay informed.

November 21, 2010

André Normand,

I hope you are taking good care of my partners in velocity.

Perhaps they will run circles around Chicago and we can meet when I take the relay.

Merci for organizing this!

Daniel

A few hours ago, Andrew Norman, our friend in Chicago who had been the fixer for Ventury’s inauguration, wrote about his last sighting of Alexis and Patrick from the doorstep of the Green Lantern Gallery.

November 22, 2010

Hayy Daniel,

It was great to spend time with them, and we bid them farewell from the Green Lantern Gallery yesterday afternoon. The wind was blowing southwest, so we figured they would probably end up in Indiana. No one really knew what they should see there. Indianapolis? Fort Wayne? I suggested Gary, where Michael Jackson and the rest of the five were born and raised, but my friend Bryce warned them of the urban blight that Gary would present to them. Yes, hoping for wind that takes them around the lake and back to Chicago.

Norm

Bryce, a friend of Andrew, had opened a gallery that dou­bled as a small independent press, in the front half of a former commercial space where he lives. The Green Lantern, a somewhat secret artistic base, is named after an American superhero, the inheritor of a prophetic lantern and a ring that allows him to magically shape matter.

When I first met Andrew Norman—a slender guy with a thick mop of black hair who goes by the interchangeable names of Andrew or Norm—he immediately reminded me of the magician David Copperfield.¹ The spiritual closeness of friendship involves a certain degree of magic. In mentioning Indianapolis and Indiana, Andrew had a premonition: the first team would drift towards Wisconsin, while Chicago and Gary would be part of my wind tour.

¹

Despite the Oriental splendour of his name, David Seth Kotkin, a native of New Jersey, thought it wise to borrow his stage name from one of Charles Dickens’s heroic paupers. He would become a famous millionaire.

Tomorrow, I will land in the States, and Patrick and Alexis will tell me about their night at the Green Lantern. There, they presented Ventury to a handful of curious spectators in an English broken by Patrick’s Quebecois nasal intonation and Alexis’s rounded French inflection. Those in attendance could be counted on ten fingers, which neither lessened the impact of the gesture nor reduced the need to believe in it. The orchestration of their departure was like a sleight of hand. In the guise of a goodbye and impetus, Patrick pulled a white goose feather from his pocket. He held it in his hand the way one wets a finger to feel the wind’s direction, aspire to an intimate knowledge of it. The gentleness of the gesture is ritualistic, almost scientific. Patrick held the feather’s shaft between his fingertips. It fluttered nervously. When he separated index from thumb, all eyes watched its flying whirl. Nothing in the hands. Rien dans les airs. The feather flew away. We no longer thought about it. Only about the image left behind by its disappearance. Patrick, his head in the air, his sights resolutely set on the future, turned his back on the gathering. He was off. Alexis, with the dreamy, faintly amused air that suits him so well, followed close behind. They got into their handsome, twilit truck. Started the engine. Disappeared at the corner of Chicago Avenue and the wind. In the rear-view mirror, the small group standing on the sidewalk began to disperse. A faint smile, as fine as a plume of smoke, hovered on their lips.

WHAT THERE IS THERE ~ Secret bases lurk everywhere. The evening before my departure, in a former stable for the metropolitan police, I watch a screening of a dance film shot by a friend. For several years, Dana and her entrepreneur husband, Justin, have invested in acquiring this building located in a remote area, between the Société de transport depot and rue Beaubien, just to the south of Petite Italie in Montreal. In the summer, perched on one of the balconies or the rooftop terrace, looking out over leafy backyards, we feel like we are in an Italian villa. The ground floor hosts dance rehearsals and two small playful dogs with the Quebec-Italian names of Dante and Ti-Loup. These two furry black balls were adopted as brothers.

Tonight, a packed crowd crouches on the ground floor, their attentive eyes fixed on the black-and-white film projected on the stable wall. In profile, heads bite and bicker, fighting over a lemon. A man with a woman. A woman with a woman. A man with a man. Baring their teeth, acidic juices splashing. What Is Mine Is Yours. I stand close to the projector beside Dana, who tells me that Dante and Ti-Loup, whom nothing excites more than to fight over a small red ball, gave her the idea for the set-up.

Like us, wind has an animal spirit. I’m having a hard time concentrating on the action. The winter and my impending departure weigh on my last night in Montreal like an unconscious motive. I hope that the southern climate will be more forgiving, that the wind will have propelled my companions all the way to Louisiana or Florida’s peninsula. Last I heard, they had drifted towards Tennessee and southern Ohio. Tonight they surely sleep somewhere between the Rust Belt and the Bible Belt. Terres de rouille ou terres de foi. Tout est encore possible.

I leave at midnight, for symbolic reasons. The revelation of my airport destination will be waiting in my inbox at home. The taxi crosses the city. I should count the streetlights. Perhaps that will help me sleep. Snow is expected tomorrow. Why am I so nervous? This night is already the next day. What there is there is mine to know. Today tomorrow, I will reach the United States of Wind. No one knows where. Not even the wind that is there there.

ONE – Saturday, November 27

FLIGHT

MONTREAL, PHILADELPHIA, CINCINNATI

EXCHANGE RATE ~ The first snow has come. The sky is grey, the powder is white, and it’s blue out. I slip my film camera, a small Rollei, into my left pocket. At one time, it was the most compact manual camera in the world. When I feel its metallic mass in my palm, I can convince myself that images, even forgotten ones, have weight. The black and white accentuates the texture of things. Before getting into the taxi, I take two photos of the same thing: beneath the sky’s greyness, the first snow makes the air opaque, seems intent on smothering the city and its light. For the whole trip, I will dread this season, now closing in on us, awaiting my return.

On the dreary strip of Autoroute 20, the taxi cleaves through the rosettes of snowflakes striking the windshield with increasing fervour. I have a claustrophobic streak. From the instant I get into a taxi, I start counting the minutes. I know the route to the airport well, but I’m still afraid of being infinitely detained in the impossibility of departure, if we don’t get there on time. Trapped in this taxi on the snowy highway, or suspended in the halls of Dorval’s airport, contemplat­ing the snow’s silent accumulation outside its windows.

The Haitian driver is kind enough to distract me from these stifling ruminations. He’s getting worked up recounting the abuses of power committed by certain airport customs agents. His voice is shrill, his eyes bulge with outrage.

The customs officer removes a Haitian dollar from the black man’s wallet.

What’s this? Are you a terrorist?

The interview has lasted too long. The man will no longer tolerate these fallacies. With the feverish hand of dictatorial speeches or inspired sermons, he shakes a Yankee dollar.

"What is this?"

I can’t see which of the two characters in this mini-drama is holding the wallet. Do they fight over it, tear it from each other’s hands? Time runs at a different pace for each of us. Others’ thoughts reach us after some delay. As for myself, I recently learned that the Haitian Revolution gave birth to the first Black republic in the world. The American states, home of the brave, land of the free, imposed an embargo on the freed slaves. On his misunderstood dollar, Toussaint Louverture, in his Napoleon uniform, gazes into the distance towards a country that, through ill will and misfortune, could end up considering the possibility of God as a terrorist. In the United States, it takes a Haitian to see the value of the dollar.

FAIR TRADE ~ In the security area at Dorval Airport, U.S. Customs officials sit on swivel stools in a line of glass cubicles. The green glare of computer displays colour their faces. The databases of the federal government shine with the archaic radiance of the first electronic computers. Ever since the gates of Ellis Island, the United States has been practising social cost and control.

The customs officer who greets me appears to be Native American. He has a dark, chiselled face. In another era, he could have confronted John Wayne as an Indian chief, stoic beneath his Technicolor feather headdress. But this customs officer has no patience for these stereotypes. He wears the navy-blue uniform with the pressed collar of his station well. I too am wearing my regulation blue: jeans, sweater, pea jacket. Just before reaching the border, I swallowed a valerian capsule so now everything seems softer. A peace pipe. The man has a melancholic look. He resigned to his occupation without drama.

A laconic Hi.

Bonjour, my name is No One, and I am off to follow the blue roads.²

²

Secondary roads were once marked on road atlases by a blue line. In 1978, following his dismissal and divorce, William Least Heat-Moon, a traveller of mixed blood—English, Irish, Osage—took to the road in search of himself in a truck specially fitted for the trip. His first road book, Blue Highways (1982), can still be found in many bookshops in the American Midwest. The Rand McNally cartographers would soon change their colour palette. Today, we must call them red roads.

Not saying anything, I hand him my documents.

A subtle swivel of the stool. Promptly, he returns to his screen. Tranquilly types. For an insignificant instant, his pupils dilate. A cowboy on the grassy ridge. A bison grazing. A stampeding herd. He takes in the situation in a glance. Has me in his sight.³

³

This gaze is archived at the end of Robert Altman’s western, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976).

In my fog, I wait for the shock of a question, get my alibis ready. I’m going to Cincinnati to see the Indians play the Yanks. My friends are coming up from Louisville, where baseball bats are carved out of Ohio’s black walnut, to pick me up at the airport in Cincinnati. The Reds baseball cap bears a comic-strip character with an exaggerated smile, larger than its face.⁴

⁴

Nervousness induces error: the Cleveland Indian is the one with the wide grin. The Reds cap bears the stylized initial of my family name.

The customs officer knows how to keep his astonishment in check. He doesn’t ask me anything. Absolument rien. Not even where I’m going. Tac. Stamp. He directs me to keep moving by giving back my passport. Men with nerves of steel are rare in his profession. I’m lucky: another time, one of his colleagues ordered me to a line of suspects, composed of a sampling of people of colour, because I had asked for a stamp as a souvenir of the trip.

Our eyes meet through the valerian haze. I think I glimpse the shadow of a smile, an almost imperceptible movement at the corners of his mouth. Taking it in. Taking it all in at a glance.

I am off to follow the winds, officer, my brother. Rien à déclarer. Wherever the wind will take me, I will respect your silence.

TALKING WIND ~ Without a hitch, I have stepped over the invisible dotted line that, on maps, calls us back to order, takes us elsewhere. In the interim, the world has