Driven by wonder and wanderlust

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/06/2023 (1157 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Let me introduce myself.

I’m Russell.

I’m new at the Free Press, trying to fill big shoes heading the paper’s opinion section.

It is, at least, ground I know well, marshalling wayward opinion and writing editorials and columns.

I’ve written about federal politics for years, and have written about provincial politics in more than half of Canada’s provinces: Ontario, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick and Saskatchewan have all been part of my journalistic stomping grounds. I’ve written magazine pieces and books, and produced non-fiction, novels and collections of short stories.

The truth is, I love words, to the point that, sometimes, I make up my own. (Some editors let me get away with that. It drives others to distraction.)

So, what will I write about?

I don’t bring deep and immediate knowledge about Manitoba’s provincial politics, but I bring new eyes and ears. I pay attention, even when it looks like I’m not. And I learn fast.

So, there will be provincial politics. Just not right away.

Until then — and even after that — you’ll get to see what I see. And hear what I hear. Experience my deep and near-constant sense of wonder.

I ask embarrassing questions, and am constantly embarrassed about asking them, too. But I can’t help myself. I want to understand things and explain them, as much for myself as for readers.

I ask embarrassing questions, and am constantly embarrassed about asking them, too. But I can’t help myself.

Already, I’ve watched a tattooed man with a panhandled $10 order a breakfast in the Exchange District, only to have a tiny ginger kitten named Fireball — still at the stage of every-hair-standing-on-end fluffball — emerge from inside the man’s jacket to devour torn-up scraps of fried eggs out of the palm of his owner’s hand. Fireball’s owner was heading west to east, depending on others’ good graces.

I’ve also driven south on Provincial Road 200 to see the oddly large-named town of Dominion City, heading there just because of its name, and then stopped on the way back at Marsh River.

I wrote about the river in a different piece: “In some of the valleys along the river, yellow warblers fly straight up, wings cocked against the wind, flashing their bright undersides and alighting again in the tops of the new bright-green river willows. Singing single sharp notes. There is no explanation for their behaviour. It is the blind bravado of paper airplanes, flying purposefully into a deliberate stall. Because they can.

“Then I find the Marsh River. Rivière Marsh.”

I stood on the bridge over the river for ages while the barn swallows picked off the mosquitoes forming up together over my head, and I watched thunderheads roll my way from the direction of Ste. Agathe.

I know the side of the highway in Virden in the March-spitting, sleeting dark.

But also in the bright hopeful light of mid-April, stopping at the gas station for the best three-for-five special in existence on the side of the highway — three large chicken fingers, three spice-coated potato wedges, all for $5, the Free Press spread over my lap like a tablecloth as I tried to match writing styles to the faces and names of the people I’d met in the newsroom. My heart palpitates dangerously in my chest with the saline memory.

When I was sitting in that same gas station parking lot in March, I’d watched an RCMP officer walking back to his cruiser, doing that thing police officers often do with their thumbs in their armpits, fingers splayed on their shirtfronts, trying to get their bulletproof vests to sit right, while I wondered idly “what kind of sandwich does a mid-shift RCMP officer choose?”

I know the bridge at the Narrows at the top of Lake Manitoba, and the intriguing Dolly Creek reed marshes. At the Narrows, I watched one ungainly and bright-white ridiculous pelican, poised and bobbing in the water, looking like he’d gotten the dress code wrong at a party.

So there you have it, a hint of what I write about — expect more of the same.

That’s the beauty of newspapers and news websites: if you don’t enjoy it, you can turn the page.

Will everything I write be everyone’s cup of tea?

No. Absolutely not.

But that’s the beauty of newspapers and news websites: if you don’t enjoy it, you can turn the page.

And there will be something new.

I will, at some point, no doubt tell you about my first trip to Winnipeg, almost 20 years ago. (I have family here, and have been a steady visitor ever since.)

About a time when I first met Winnipeg winter cold, and in the process, accidentally froze the tab of the zipper on my winter coat to the end of my nose.

A story for another day.

I have a lot of those. Buckle up.