Some 19 yr old from a suburb of Edmonton wants to join my friendster network. I have no friends, or like 3, ’cause I was well after the curve of actual friendster use (most folks I know are completely dormant on the beast). And I never posted my name: just ‘tough girl’ with a photo of me in -48 where you can barely see my frosted over eyelids ….

If the Yukon were always like this evening I would stay here for a good long time. After work, I peeled out quick as I could to join the bike ride celebrating the beginning of the commuter challenge. All 30 or 20 of us or however many we were toodled down the main street then went up Black Street and up the gulch/gully and then the 13 leg stairway up the clay cliffs which we all eagerly thrust out bikes onto. Then we pedalled along the path behind the airport and finally down the new bike path on the other side of two mile hill (you long time readers may reference my february rants about the two mile hill bike route) and along 4th ave. The highly ironic edge to our lovely group ride was that on monday, after the new bike routes had been up all of a few days, (yesterday they were still finishing grading and removing the gravel from the new route), city council reversed its decision on the routes. Although they had been years and a huge lobby effort and a lot of $ in the making, a few complaints from drivers that the bike routes slowed down traffic were enough. The crews are working through the night to remove the multi thousand dollar project, which had a trial run of all of two weeks. See cbc north

So it was all kind of ironic — here we were celebrating the lovely new bike lanes and as we were out there riding them crews were out replacing them with 4 lanes of car traffic. This is why YTG (the Yukon Territorial Government) needs a climate change action plan — while the Yukon is experiencing a faster rate of global warming than any other place in the world, with the exception of our equals in certain sections of Antarctica, the Yukon government has no plan for facing climate change. NONE. NADA. ZIP.

Vancouver has a plan. Hence, in official city doctrine, planners must support pedestrians and cyclists above motorists, and when faced with a traffic choice, must defer to the needs of sustainable transportation modes. It doesn’t always work, but the basis in policy gives us all a place to work from.

Despite the demise of our bike paths, I had a smashing good time. Us bikers all got 2 for 1 drink tixs at the High Country. I chatted with some lovely folks, and by coincidence sat beside someone who was the appropriate contact to answer a bunch of my work-related questions about how the government manages lands. And he was a likeable fellow.

Then I rotated down the road a few blocks to attend the opening of a new artist’s centre/gallery space/arts programs area underneath the Hougen Centre Mall. The new gallery is by far the largest display space I’ve seen for art in Whitehorse, and I even saw a couple of reasonably priced art pieces that I will flirt with the idea of buying all summer.

And it was a great mixer.

Brief philosophical notes–observations from another drive with Jim Pojar. Although I’ve been far too busy to write about it, I went on a 2 1/2 day moving water (ie. river and whitewater) canoe course this weekend. It was great, but niggling in the back of my mind was how hard it is to maintain the separation, even in this blog where I do not write about work, between work and metaphor and the rest of my life. The river itself –watching it move, moving with it, learning and sweeping between and among and through its swells — demanded thought, and I just didn’t have the time or ability or thinking room to grasp it. On our drive today, Jim said a couple of things that were really interesting:

work flows to the competent person until she is submerged

a river is an excellent metaphor for balancing the excesses of postmodernism in environmental thought

A river braids, goes through wetlands and meadows, sometimes moves quickly and sometimes slowly. But despite it all, it is always bounded by gravity (flowing downhill) and by the valley that it is in. For all its unpredictability and changes, it will keep to these limits, which are natural laws. There are boundaries, and only within these do the prisms and swirls and avalanches of relativism make sense.