By Adam Bobbette
to Mr. Nader and W.S. with love

Mid May with W.S. and P.R. riding through the east; we ride through the white suburbs that look like Florida, like I never thought were in Montreal, with trimmed, very square hedges and white brick, and white overhangs, and they border on a huge cemetery, as so many suburbs I’ve been to do. And we take the suburbs to the end of a road onto a dirt path and into a field. Fields in cities always remind me of gangsters. What else happens but dead bodies in the abandoned parts of the city? The forest in the city is where people get buried. Though I probably saw this in a movie.

For mediaeval imaginations the forest outside the city is where the werewolves hang out. That’s where people go to become animals, or where they go when they become animals. The wild is outside the city. Though the werewolf is part of both, the city dweller gone animal, gone lawless, and the animal gone city dweller. When you’re a werewolf you belong to both but, paradoxically, neither. And when you’re a werewolf you are allowed to be killed without punishment by law because you belong nowhere; you have no ties, no affiliations, stateless, you are free and wild. You are a bandit. A wolf-headed bandit.

We ended up at a kind of lookout onto the back side of the Petro Canada Plant, a massive gorge of Martian proportions. Too big for the eyes to take it in, and you feel too much. The earth all dug up, rocks piled very nicely by big machines. They just move rocks around in that pit all day long. And one portion of it a steamy wasteland, like a garbage heap, but melting at the sides. Lost, we decided to get more lost. We went down into the too big and empty with a road covered in trash and puddles. A fox startled took off down the path in front and a seagull circled overhead like we were Aesop’s. Here is where things get heavy. Couldn’t there be dogs on this private property, like the dogs that actually eat you like they do from where I’m from, but they only eat you when your in the parts your not from, like a neighbors property? Don’t they have dogs like that around here? They do up in one of the yards by the train tracks just off Parc Ave and Jean-Talon, and where I ride my bike especially fast because there just might be a hole in the fence. But now we’re inside the fence, or on the other side of the fence you might say, and standing there in the muddy ground we can’t ride our bikes on, we are naked for the dogs. And before us is something like Mars, or like Mars just after life ended, and like Earth just before life began, or just after it ended. As far as the eye can see it is rugged brown and the edges are steaming under the afternoon sun. And there is garbage and dirt, but not enough garbage and too much dirt for this to be a dump.

We have gone down and seen the fox and the bird and now we must go over this what ever it is— some other place; maybe where there are dead gangsters and killing dogs, and we must get to the other side. And on top of it I kick the ground, twice just to see, and there is snow. And here in summer is the left over of winter. Where they drop the snow. That very mysterious destination of all the trucks and all the work they do all winter long, moving the unthinkable amounts of snow around, from one part of the city to another. And with it, broken umbrellas and bike parts and somebody’s beaver slippers—too bad, all the winter bits and pieces. And a cat, split open down the center, being brought out of the deep freeze by the sun and attracting flies. Split open by the snow trucks, but now its belly could receive the warm summer sun. Rather alone.

Getting out I ripped a part of my sleeve on the bottom edge of a fence. And this brings me to Nader, with love.

He told me that he can’t always explain why he returns for an animal. What is it about that bird half frozen in the snow bank that calls you back with a bag to bring it home? Why not all the others? What is this sensitivity? Where most normally have none, passing by how many broken animals, cracking how many with snow trucks? What can we call this communication with the dead. We can use a cliché and maybe call it intuition. But that’s easy and imprecise.

Borax is old, down home, homesteader cleaner. It is hydrated sodium borate. You can find it in the residues of dried up lakes, especially places like Boron, California. And when you sprinkle it on flesh it dries it out and sanitizes it such that you can cut away insides. Lots of Borax. And Alcohol. Nader was working on animals on my porch and there would always be borax scattered around after he left.

And so Nader was taxidermying the animals that called to him. Out of respect and love. Not an art prank. Not really even to show (so I have not included any pictures, but I'll give you a hint).



And of course they are no trophy, no medal for the good hunter. Though they are remnants. Really of violent deaths and of lives we couldn’t really give a shit about.

To give them an after life, unexpectedly so, where they spread their wings and laugh, alongside other bits and pieces culled from peoples’ refuse. A dead dancing pigeon suspended in the air; a cat with its gut open and filled with jewels. To give life to the dead.

And now Mr. Nader and Mr. W.S. have returned to their respective homelands (to which they likely don’t belong) and I am left with the snow and the dead spaces. And I go to the Redpath Museum filled with its bones, nicely numbered and displayed and their taxidermies so very life-like.




And I know what it means to give life to the dead. That is, not to fake their being alive, but add to their death by giving them more life.

And I know where the snow goes.


(poster credit: mr mackenzie)