Job Hunting: an allegory

Those who follow my blog have noted, and commented to me privately, on a downward trend in the number of posts over the past four months.

I’ve been academic job hunting.

Picture me with bow in hand, quiver slung over my back. Jobs are elusive and scarce in the humanities. These jobs are skittish and must be approached with stealth, under cover letters of darkness and supported by experienced academic warriors who ‘push bush’ with their words of recommendation. These elder warriors guide to paths less trodden, leading to the elusive lair of the Tenure Track Job – a beast that is a cross between a unicorn and a dragon, in both breathtaking beauty and potential searing fire and impenetrable hide.

Some fellow hunters have been less fortunate than I. They have wandered through the online job forum forests, catching glimpses of potential prey. They prepare their hunting outfit with vigour and keen savvy. But there are a lot of hunters out there, and even the best can get lost in the forest. Or their skills make them better at hunting Tenure Track Jobs that look like manticores, chimeras, and minotaurs instead of unicorn-dragons. Hunters specialize.

My hunting skills, honed through a career path that meandered in and out of academia, have been effective. Fortune favours the odd, I guess, at least up to a certain point. So far, my academic job hunting has led me into the elusive lair with the unicorn-dragon three times this past winter. Hence my absence. I’ve been busy.

In one story, eighty-six hunters sighted one job/prey. The hunting prowess of cover letters, CVs, research statements, teaching philosophies and elder references helped hunters follow the almost invisible trail of the Tenure Track Job’s faint tracks through the academic forest. Three cornered it in its lair (on-campus) and took turns shooting  their arsenal of arrows (words and presentations and teaching and interviews) interspersed with short rests to eat, pee, and sleep. The shooting sessions (on-campus interviews) were grueling, and all three hunters shot all of their arrows, holding nothing back.

But only one arrow took it down. And it wasn’t mine.

You’d think that I’d have learned by now, as any good Tenure Track Job Hunter would, what the other hunters have ‘done’ to aim that fateful arrow past the impenetrable hide. More arrows (publications)? Success comes by volume? Teaching arrows, I’ve noticed, aren’t as sharp as they are vaunted to be. Research and publication arrows are titanium.  Did the successful hunter have a Super Awesome Always Sharp Always Flies True arrow (huge external funding grants)? Or was my aim off? Did my personality, perhaps regrettably somewhat brazen and outspoken, skew my aim just as I let fly? Was I in the glade by nefarious design, as accent and colour to show off more clearly the prowess of another hunter whose arrows were always known to be keener? Or was the other hunter like J.R.R. Tolkien’s character Bard, told about the soft spot in the dragon’s underbelly by Bilbo, the burglar-hobbit who knew this particular dragon through close-up intimacy? Or did my arrow, aimed straight and true and to the best of my hunting ability simply not fit the hole in the Tenure Track Job’s side?

The hunt continues.

Yellowhead Flyway Birding Trail Association annual meeting

Recently, I was invited to attend the annual meeting of the Yellowhead Flyway Birding Trail Association annual meeting. It will be held April 13 at the Churchbridge Town Hall in Churchbridge, Saskatchewan, from 11 am to 7 pm. Registration is open, and more information can be found at:

http://www.yfbta.com/activities/symposiums/2013/symposium2013.htm

As you can see from the list of presentations below, it promises to be a fantastic day.

Lorne Scott Transfer control of Community Pastures and the environmental impact; closure of the Indian Head Tree Nursery

Alan Smith Birding by Ear

Merle Massey The Great Trek North: Depression Resettlement to the forest fringe in the 1930′s.

Anna Leighton  (Author / Ethno-botanist) What the Cree taught John Richardson in the 1800′s

Water Stories

The following is a blog post I wrote for ActiveHistory.ca. It was cross-posted to The Otter, a blog for NiCHE (Network in Canadian History of the Environment).  Links to those posts: http://activehistory.ca/2013/01/water-stories/ and http://niche-canada.org/node/10556.

Water wells up and flows across the landscape of my memory as a cataclysmic force, ebbing and flowing through my earliest life story. Those encounters shift the flotsam of my perceptions as an environmental historian, shaping the way I think about water. And, these stories require sharing, as they differ radically from that of colleagues raised in urban environments where drinkable water flows under, around, into, and out of every home.

My family’s first farm house, purchased in the early 1970s, did not have a bathroom. Our toilets were the classic outhouse, and a metal five gallon pail with a toilet seat lid tucked strategically behind the furnace in the basement, next to a holder for the toilet paper. It was Dad’s job to haul the honey pail up the stairs every day and dump it in the bush. There was a base efficiency to that daily routine, though, that belies its yuckiness. Humans use bathrooms. Every day. What innovations –– in fertilizer, in composting, in sanitation –– would we create if each household was responsible for managing their own eliminations?

The bathtub was a huge galvanized steel contraption placed under the stairs in the hallway when it came time to scrub up four kids and two adults. Bucketed full of water, Dad plugged in a special water heater that looked to me like a metal foot. My job was to move this contraption every few minutes to different spots in the tub, to ensure even heating. As the youngest kid, I often had the privilege of first scrub in the warmest and cleanest water. But with all the work that went into hauling and warming the water, you can be sure that it cleaned more than one body. Efficiency, thy name is sharing.

When I was five or six, we moved in a much larger farm house, one with a bathroom. This necessitated massive renovations, including digging a cistern –– a huge holding tank for water, dug under the new verandah. While water could now gush, flush, and rush out of taps, we still had daily water concerns. Cisterns do not fill themselves. Our water came in summer from the Garden River (which conveniently flowed through our farm land), pumped by Dad via a snake of black pipe. Tadpoles and the odd frog came too, but they never survived the bleach bath: gallons of bleach poured into the water to stabilize it and kill some of the germs. In winter, water became an expensive commodity, brought to our farm and pumped into the cistern by a water hauling truck.

Living off a cistern creates an instant water shortage. Each drop translated into either time or money. Wasting water was not an option. Mom invested in a SudSaver washing machine and a laundry tub, saving wash or rinse water to use over again. We continued to share bath water –– Who’s next? Who wants my water? was the holler from the tub. And there is an old saying enshrined on the walls of many a bathroom in rural Canada: “if it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down.’  On a farm, you knew the provenance of every drop, and you knew where it was all going. Grey and black water mixed in the sewer holding tank, which was pumped out regularly to some far corner of the yard.

Cistern water was for baths and flushes, dishes and clothes –– but not for drinking. As in our pre–bathroom days, drinking water did not come out of the tap. There was a pail of fresh soft clean drinking water, with a dipper, in the kitchen for general use: teapots and coffee pots, thirsty kids, boiling potatoes, and making juice. We hauled that water from generous neighbors lucky enough to own ‘good’ wells, or from the nearest village where water was treated.

On our current farm, the worth of water remains, and responsibility rests squarely on us. The well and its pump are monitored and maintained, the sewer lines checked, the reverse osmosis system (which purifies the well water for drinking) flushed and cleaned and kept in working order. There is always a back up of drinking water stashed away. If something goes wrong, it is our job to fix it, or find a way to live with or without it.

My water stories feed my imagination of our collective Canadian future: a cistern in every house; tap water clean enough for flushing and washing, but a separate system for drinking; innovation in black water reuse; and finally, a new universal maxim: running water, and (even more so), drinkable running water in everyone’s home is not a ‘right,’ or even a given. Access to clean water, yes. But modern city standards of drinking water flowing from every tap have skewed our perception of how water ‘should’ be delivered to all Canadians, and of what quality, no matter where they live. It is an unsustainable, and untrue, perception. If water was part of our everyday chores, responsibility, and routine (instead of an unthinking part of our day managed by someone else, delivered to our taps and whisked away when we’re done with it), water would once again be worth its weight. And its value would be true.

 

Emma Lake Kenderdine Campus closing

Bonfire pit on the shore

[Note: this blog post was published as an opinion piece in the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix Friday 23 November 2012. See http://www.thestarphoenix.com/late+save+Kenderdine/7598518/story.html]

I am sad, angry, and confused that the University of Saskatchewan released news Thursday November 15th 2012 that it is suspending operations at Emma Lake Kenderdine Campus, the U of S-owned campus on the shores of Emma Lake, in Saskatchewan’s northern boreal forest. It is shocking news. The timing is particularly strange: just one day after the U of S hosted a major expo to flaunt its support for experiential learning opportunities for students, it moves to close the one campus that offers exactly that.

Such a move, of course, is a sign of the fiscal restraint facing the University. As a campus community member, U of S grad, and a Canadian environmental historian whose research encompassed the beginnings of the Kenderdine campus, I pause to reflect on the irony of this announcement.

Augustus Kenderdine was a painter, trained in Britain, who taught art from his top-floor studio in what is now the Thorvaldsen building – home of chemists, pharmacists, and old memories of turpentine. By the 1920s, as cars brought mobility and better roads led north of Prince Albert, Kenderdine discovered Saskatchewan’s north, and set out to paint its beauty. He took yearly sojourns at Emma Lake.

When southern Saskatchewan fell to its knees amid the dual prongs of drought and economic devastation, Saskatchewan’s mid-north, all along the forest edge, boomed. It is a little-known story. Thousands of prairie refugees fled north to carve a living off a bush homestead. It was a tough life, but it worked. Northern residents required less than one tenth of the aid of their southern kin – in a time when relief money was a loan for which the government expected payment, a place with fuel, game, fish, berries, and a chance to grow a garden and raise a hay crop seemed a Saskatchewan mecca.

Kenderdine convinced President Walter Murray to purchase land at Emma Lake, and build an art school. It was an art school with a purpose: bring teachers from across the southern wasteland north, to the beauty of the boreal forest. Through art, the teachers would know that not all of Saskatchewan was barren and broken. There, they soaked in a landscape of trees, water, and green and took those visions home with them, to bring a sense of hope and renewal to their students and communities squeezed by drought. It was an extraordinary vision of what Emma Lake meant to the U of S – a critical foothold in a Saskatchewan landscape that was decidedly not the prairie.

It was a stretch for the University. In the province that was hardest-hit by the depression, in the middle of endless years of short budgets and constricting choices, Kenderdine convinced the president that this was a worthwhile endeavor. He won, and Saskatchewan artists, biologists, students, writers, ecologists, and many others have been the thankful beneficiaries.

Fast forward to now. This past September, my colleague and I from the School of Environment and Sustainability took 30 graduate students on a field trip to Emma Lake, the Lakeland, the boreal forest, and Prince Albert National Park. Our students come from all over the world. We had two perfect days and nights at Emma Lake Kenderdine Campus, basking in starlit nights, excellent food, a sense of history, all within an ecological experiential learning laboratory of the highest order. We wished, several times, that we had brought our new U of S president, Ilene Busch-Vishniac, along with us. What a jewel in the campus crown – we wanted to show it off.

Fox walk: knowing the ground beneath your feet

Kenderdine campus has an Achilles heel: it is not operational in the winter. So, the peak time is May to September. When are students most active on campus? September to April. That leaves a scant one month crossover. How much money would it take to winterize it? What could that do to create better connections between the facility and the main campus student body? Solutions, I’m sure, abound.

Yes, I understand fiscal constraint. Yes, I believe you when you say it was a difficult decision. But if Kenderdine and Murray could create it during a time when the province of Saskatchewan, and the U of S, were going through their most difficult fiscal times, could we not do the same now? Please, for the sake of student experiential learning, let’s reconsider.

Lobstick: Canada’s next symbol?

Note: A revised version of this blog was published in The Globe and Mail as an op-ed piece 24 October 2012. See: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/the-lobstick-our-next-national-symbol/article4648053/

Note: This blog post was originally published on ActiveHistory.ca by Merle Massie. See http://activehistory.ca/2012/10/lobstick-canadas-next-symbol/#more-9309

When Senator Nicole Eaton called for Canada to declare a new biopolitical symbol in the fall of 2011, she suggested replacing the ‘dentally defective rat’ –– known as beaver, or castor Canadensis –– with the perhaps more ‘stately’ polar bear. In one simple suggestion, she set off a firestorm of controversy across Canada’s social and public media landscape.

My students in the western Canadian history class at the University of Saskatchewan took a straw poll. By show of hands, who wants the beaver as the national animal symbol? Who wants the polar bear?

The orange–toothed rodent won, by an enormous class mouthful. The polar bear? Too much connection between a certain cola beverage and their commercials, let alone the red and white colours. We do not, they declared, require a rebranding campaign. The beaver has served us long and well. It is, as so many of my environmental students declare, the closest to humans in terms of its ability to reconstruct the world to suit its particular wants and needs. I would like a still pond, nice and deep. I can’t find one. I know! I’ll make one! Here is a lovely brook rimmed with tasty trees; I’ll busy the bicuspids.

As I ponder the continued popularity of that pesky rodent –– for I grew up on a farm where we trapped and hunted beavers, or blew up their land–soaking dam–nifications –– I wonder if the time is now ripe to launch a campaign to change, or at least add to, our Canadian biopolitical symbols.

I hereby launch a petition to add the lobstick tree as a symbol of Canadian identity. What is a lobstick? Haven’t you traveled to Jasper, where Lobstick Lodge welcomes visitors? Or perhaps you are a golfer, and attend the Lobstick golf tournament each year, held at Prince Albert National Park? Lobstick symbols are scattered throughout the Canadian cultural and natural landscape.

Culturally modified trees were once common in Nordic countries, among them the lobstick tree of the Canadian boreal forest. Douglas Durkin, a writer of northern romance novels, used the lobstick tree as a symbol of the north in his 1920 book, The Lobstick Trail. Margaret Atwood wrote poetry about them in 1970. Gwen Hayball wrote of the lobstick in the Canadian Geographical Journal in 1973.

Aboriginal inhabitants of the boreal forest would shape a tall and conspicuous white spruce or pine tree by ‘lopping’ most of its branches off. Branches that strategically pointed in the right direction would remain. The top would bush out in a tuft, making it easy to spot. Nearby trees were cut and hauled away, leaving the lobstick in rather lonely splendour. Lobsticks were used in many ways, both practical and symbolic. They were often signposts, chosen and designed to mark trails, portages, and pathways through the boreal forest, berry patches or hunting grounds. Like the signposts in the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, the limbs would point: “that way to Albuquerque.”

Lobsticks were also cultural markers, used to designate meeting places, burial grounds, ceremonial sites, and even personal totems, or to honour a guest or visitor. Lovers would make them to mark trysting places.

Explorer Alexander Mackenzie was one of the first Europeans to comment on lobstick trees, and in his assessment they “denoted the immediate abode of the natives and probably served for signals to direct each other to their respective winter quarters.” Warburton Pike, an Englishmen who traveled into the far northern tundra in search of big game, also commented on these markers: “many an appointment has been kept at [lobsticks],” suggesting their role as a convenient meeting point that everyone can find.

Caroline Podruchny, in her book Making the Voyageur World, documents the physical creation and the symbolic meaning of the lobstick tree for voyageurs in Canada’s north. In that version, all the branches would be removed (except the very topmost), leaving a tall tree often called a ‘maypole.’ Sometimes the bark would be removed, leaving a smooth surface to cut names, dates, or symbols, or simply to shoot patterns into the tree with gunshots and powder. A particularly gay version was created for Frances Simpson, wife Hudson Bay Company governor George Simpson, with feathers and streamers for decoration. A lobstick, according to Podruchny, was created to honour a new leader, particularly if it was his first trip into the northland. To repay the voyageurs for the honour of making a maypole/lobstick tree, the leader was expected to offer presents, or at least a generous measure of rum. It seems clear that in the voyageur world, the trees were created for their symbolic meaning – and, of course, to have a party.

There was a lobstick tree north of Prince Albert where I grew up, near what is now the village of Paddockwood, Saskatchewan. Pictures and stories from the earliest Euro–Canadian settlers describe a huge evergreen sitting in lonely splendour in a field of grass, at a height that could be seen for miles in every direction. It offered a scenic picnic spot –– until it either died of old age or succumbed to the will and axe of the homesteader that wanted patent to the ground beneath the giant’s roots.

What I like about the lobstick is how it is both natural (a tree) as well as culturally modified (shaped, changed, and adapted; marred or scarred) –– in many ways, a fitting symbol of Canada itself. It is distinctly northern and boreal, evoking the dreaded wilderness of Atwood or the home of Joseph Boyden.

As climate change opens Arctic waters and change stalks the northern air, we could consider once again creating a few lobsticks. They would be there, at the very least, to guide visitors. With the numbers now moving through our sovereign area, directions might not go amiss.

That way to Ottawa.

Vimy Ridge Farm, Albert Kessel, and a historical epiphany

[Note: this post is a reprint from a blog I wrote for The Otter, the blogpost for NiCHE, Network in Canadian History of the Environment. Find the original post here: http://niche-canada.org/node/10456]

I remember my first sight of the old Albert Kessel farm. Nestled on the number Four Saskatchewan highway halfway between Biggar and Rosetown, I loved it from the moment I laid eyes on it — through the window of the truck on my way for my first visit to my then-boyfriend’s parents’ farm. “Wow!” I remember saying. “Look at all those great trees!” A northern Saskatchewan bush girl, I hadn’t yet become attuned to the distinctive and iconic prairie landscape. The spruce and jackpine seemed a dollop of ‘home-as-trees’, stretching to brush the clouds of the prairie sky.

I couldn’t predict, then, that one day I would own that piece of land.

When luck looped through our world and the land came into our ownership and stewardship, I found numerous treasures embedded in the landscape. Stone fences, crumbling. An old road, now leading nowhere. An orchard, the last few hardy trees still birthing fruit. A well, which, when primed, still spills forth fresh water. Another wellhead, furtively tucked under trees and surrounded by growth, littered with empty whiskey jugs – the remains of a still? A steel-wheeled wagon, abandoned so long that its front right wheel is encased by the tree that quietly grew from sapling to spire, anchoring the wagon to the earth, ending its rolling days. A swatch of the Bear Hills, never tilled, native prairie warming the soil like a thick kokum’s quilt.

Wagon at the Kessel farm. Merle Massie collection.

One hill in particular rises to attention, flowing above the farm and the circle of pine and spruce. At its top, a cairn of stones cradles an old, rusted, flagpole.

Flagpole at the Kessel farm, 2006. Merle Massie collection.

Since our purchase, I’ve been trolling the memories of neighbors, local museums, and community history books, gleaning accounts of the farm’s original owner: Albert Kessel, a garlic-chewing, eccentric, WWI bugler, journalist, Czechoslovakian master prize-winning bachelor farmer crossed in love. Fascinating.

Albert Kessel, 1958. “Yielded 45 bushels to acre.” Hills in background. Courtesy Biggar Museum.

I wrote about Albert Kessel and my search for knowledge about him in 2008, published in the June/July issue of The Beaver, now Canada’s History Magazine. I knew that Kessel operated a demonstration farm, which was widely-known and visited every year on field day by as many as 400 researchers from the University of Saskatchewan, federal experimental farms, the Searle Grain Company, neighbors, and busloads of schoolchildren. He called it Vimy Ridge Farm.

Kessel was a bugler during WWI, shot through the thigh at Vimy Ridge. In my article for The Beaver, I wrote: did this hill remind Albert of Vimy Ridge? Is that why he called his farm Vimy Ridge Farm? Did he ever blow his bugle up here? I thought it most likely that the hill, or the series of hills, reminded Albert of his harrowing French experience. In salute, Kessel erected a flagpole and every day, he would stump up the hill and fly a British flag.

At the time, I had never visited the real Vimy Ridge. All I knew of the site was confined to history books and photographs, a landscape of the imagination but never of experience. I thought that Vimy Ridge was like Hill 70 or another strategic marker on a theatre of war where every height of land meant a mile more of sovereignty. That changed in 2009, when I visited Vimy Ridge during a conference tour of Belgium and France.

The experience was overwhelming. The imprint of war on the landscape is still tangible. I visited the tunnels, shuddered at being underground, and felt my jaw drop as my eyes skidded over the craters and hummocks that pock the grass – debris from bombs that exploded on the landscape nearly a century ago. Whether or not you believe that Canada was forged at Vimy Ridge – and I’m not a pinpointer of history – knowing that you stand on Canadian soil in the middle of France redefines your perception of what it means to be Canadian.

But it was at the monument that I had my epiphany. And I wasn’t looking at the monument when it happened. I was looking out, at a flat French landscape that was both foreign and intimately familiar. I was reminded of my own words in that article I wrote for The Beaver: To the north of the yard is a commanding hill, hosting a phenomenal panoramic view of the prairies in a fifty-mile swing from east to southwest.

France, from Vimy Ridge. Merle Massie collection.

I knew, in that instant, why Albert Kessel named our farm Vimy Ridge Farm. It wasn’t about the hill – it was the view. From both Vimy Ridge in France, and Vimy Ridge Farm in Saskatchewan, the two landscapes provide a near mirror-image of space, sky, and panoramic earth. Of course, France is covered in towns, villages, trees, and industry: the pyramids are piles of coal, and that is what both armies wanted. Saskatchewan provides a relatively empty prairie view, studded with a few isolated farmsteads and an expansive agricultural skin regularly grown and shaved by generations of farmers.

When Alan MacEachern issued his lovely summer call for photographs of historical landscapes (http://niche-canada.org/node/10423) I considered where I might go, what I would like to see. But my heart knew that I had already made this trip, even if it did not conform exactly to specs. My story draws together two landscapes separated by an ocean and half a continent, and almost a century of time. The story of Vimy Ridge, and the cascading memories of place, connected a little farm in Saskatchewan with an iconic Canadian symbol.

One day, we’ll raise the flag again. We’ll do it for tenacious Saskatchewan homesteaders; for unlucky romances; for Great War and Vimy Ridge veterans; for excellence in prairie agriculture; and, for garlic-chewing bachelor farmers.

And that’s my story.

Vimy Ridge Farm Flagpole, 2012.

 

Bamboozling youth with ancient technology

First, I’d like to tell you a story about something that happened in our house yesterday.

My ten year old son, a huge J.R.R. Tolkien fan (he has watched all of the Peter Jackson movies — extended version — several times, and has read the books to boot) was rooting around in my office. He unearthed a lovely, boxed BBC radio version of The Lord of the Rings adapted by Brian Sibley and Michael Bakewell.

He was delighted! Some of his favourite stories, in audio format!

The drawback — they are on cassette tape. He was excited, but not quite sure what to do.

“Mom! Do you have a Walkman that I can listen to these?” His eyes were shining in anticipation of crawling into his bed with his stories on a rainy day. Well, that was the first drawback. Once upon a time, I had my brother’s old Walkman, that played cassette tapes. But I lent it, years ago, to my great uncle as he lay dying in hospital, along with a selection of books-on-tape to keep him entertained. It never made it home, for whatever reason.

But I did have, in the back corner of the closet in my office, not one, but TWO ghetto blasters. Riches, indeed!

He hauled out the first one (the larger one, which was older and heavier and I have no idea why he picked it). And promptly disappeared to get things set up and get his story into his ears.

Back again, within five minutes. “Mom, the earphones won’t fit in the hole.” Hmmm. I had forgotten about this small technicality. Remember, back in the 80s, when headphones were huge, earbuds were not invented, and the plug was about two inches long? Yeah, those kind. Well, I may have the ghetto blaster, but I no longer have those headphones, nor do I have an adapter.

So, we switched to the smaller, slightly newer ghetto blaster. It had the proper-sized headphone jack, adaptable to his snazzy earbuds. Excellent. I returned to my own tasks, and left him to it.

Less than three minutes later, he was back. “Mom, how do I get it to go to the beginning?” He was puzzled and clearly stumped. “Press ‘rewind’” I said, equally puzzled. Wasn’t that obvious? “But it makes a terrible noise, Mom! And it takes so long! I think something is wrong! Please come and help.”

Well of course, everything was fine with the boom box. He had the tape in the right way down, so that was fine, but he had it facing the wrong way (side two) so even if he had pressed ‘rewind’ and waited, he still wouldn’t have gotten to where he wanted to be. I patiently explained how tapes work, how they move through the boombox, how they have been recorded on both sides and so you have to flip them over. And yes, it does take time to find the right spot in the tape. And yes, it does make noise when it rewinds or fast forwards. And yes, it’s a lot harder to skip ahead or back. You have to go by feel.

He glared, grumped, and moaned a bit more at the weirdness of it all, but then settled down to listen.

Typically, when a new piece of technology makes its appearance in our house, I am the last to figure out what to do. Or, second last — I might be a shade more up-to-date than my husband. But miles behind our kids, in most instances. When I brought home a new Samsung tablet computer, my son promptly took it in hand to get everything operating well. Remotes, Wii games, and the kids’ ipods are similarly ‘their’ territory.

So this incident made me feel a lot better. As a parent, I had an area of expertise that I could share — related to technology. Of course, they ribbed me for that. ‘Mom, this is from, like, the 1980s!’, as if that was just after the dinosaurs. Yes, I really am that old. And I like old things. I am a historian, after all.

It reminded me, though, of an incident in the archives last year. While rooting through some Saskatchewan Archives Board files on the Royal Commission on Agriculture and Rural Life from 1952, I found a fabulous recording on a blue, small vinyl record of the meetings that were held in my hometown of Paddockwood. I was beside myself. My grandmother was the secretary of those meetings, which I knew from her written records carefully preserved in the archival documents. I was so excited to hear her voice again, and went running for the archivist to see if we could play the recordings. But, unfortunately, the archives no longer has the technology to play those old records. They weren’t the same technology as a simple turntable, I learned. In fact, I had ‘discovered’ an oral record that the archives had lost track of.

They took it away and assured me that they would investigate getting it transferred onto something useful in our ‘modern’ era. I never saw or heard from them again on the issue — I shall have to send a reminder email to see where they are at. But I’m guessing that no news is bad news, in this instance. The technology may no longer exist to hear those recordings.

I know that archivists are acutely aware of the impact of the frighteningly fast changes in technology. Records put on one kind of disk or burned onto a CD Rom seem out of date just a few short years later. Even computers, with their constant upgrades, no longer seem to take into account ‘older’ technology. (For various aspects of this debate and concern, see:http://blogs.cisco.com/government/technology-changes-the-game-for-next-generation-governments/; http://archivists.ca/content/technology-and-archives-special-interest-section. See also various articles inArchivaria.)

I have one computer that I no longer use but am too afraid to throw away, because it has a ZIP drive and a 3.5 inch floppy — neither of which my new computer possesses. I still have old documents, including my MA thesis, on 3.5 floppies and zips. One of the reasons I bought a tablet computer was so that my children would get used to using touch technology — but I also note their frustration when they have to use my ‘old’ computer. It is pretty slow, by comparison. I can’t imagine what they’d think of my stored computer, gathering dust in the bottom of my closet. I think it has Windows, but a really old version.

(Full disclosure: this house has two desktop computers that are hooked up, and one in storage, in addition to two laptops, one tablet, two ipods and two smartphones. There are four people).

So, although I suppose some people may call me a technological hoarder, I can see the benefit: after all, I had a ghetto blaster, that worked, just when my son needed it. That’s something. I just have to make sure I have a house big enough to keep all my old computers and other technology, when the new ones enter our lives.