Nomads

“Nomads” is the second in a series of stories I wrote for Glass Buffalo magazine.

I wanted to write a legend from the future, and I’ve always been interested in cities, so I ended up creating this myth about a city which becomes nomadic and roams across the continent - disassembling and reassembling itself a thousand times.

Nomads

A long time from now, in the last years of our city, we were nomads.

The world had grown terribly old and worn, and newer and shinier things were built up among older and greyer things. For every great catastrophe there was a small advancement. For every newly discovered virtue there was an old vice. Our city was in the eyes of the world for a while, in the endless debate about the end of oil. But then the world changed. The fusion revolution left us behind. Our mineral resources lost their value, and in their obsolescence our city no longer knew itself.

With this great system shock came the inevitable exodus. For so long had we collected new citizens from across the country, around the globe. Now, the fires of dirty industry extinguished by the harnessed power of the sun, we hemorrhaged these people. They left. They were never here to stay, only passing through. We lost them. We boarded up businesses and let houses go to ruin. After so many decades of hasty expansion, we pulled in, ground to a halt. We became the ghost of our former city. And then the few of us who remained resumed our habitual role: perched on the edge of the world, watching, waiting.
We tried to resume our lives with the optimism that had suffused our city in the boom years, when we grew to our highest height - the so-called Diamond of the North, the cosmopolitan gem in Canada's crown. But all of us, this blend of new Canadians and old Canadians and pre­-Canadians all entangled, could not breathe life back into the corpse of the city. And so we became nomads.

A long-neglected need, destined by biology and programmed by society. A rhythm absorbed into our bodies and echoed through the generations, until we stopped moving and let deep roots grow. Wanderlust. Transience. Migration. The story of the new world remembered from the old world. The plot of the future reconstructed from the past. In that time of contradiction - trying so hard to be good among such devastation - the only way forwards was backwards. There was no more progress, only repetition­ the chance, every day, to make amends.

We sensed the departure coming for a long time before we reached the inevitable tipping point and our own pent­ up momentum swept us out of the valley that had been our home for centuries. And so the preparations began ­ quietly, subtly, with any attempt at open acknowledgment mercilessly suppressed. We had to keep pretending that our city would last forever, that we would never change, even though every one of us knew this wasn't true.

But the silent preparations began a decade or so before we up and left - the compulsory city-wide gym training to improve everyone's strength and endurance, the obsessive photographing to document every inch of the city-as-it-lay, the gathering together of all our most precious property. We all knew we were about to embark on a great journey, but we also agreed that nobody should mention it until the day of departure arrived.

In the last year that the city sat static, a Complete and Comprehensive Survey was undertaken to determine its exact anatomy. Every tree, every building, every road and pipe and wire and person and book was considered, and its proper position within the whole was established. It was from this survey that a man was able to lead a team of men to produce a Total and Exhaustive Map of the city. The accuracy of the map was such that every individual component of the city, no matter how far you chose to break it down, could be located instantly within a three­-dimensional, digitally reconstructed model. Even its moving pieces were measured over the course of that year (except the river, which flowed into the city and out the other side and never came back) so that their locations could be specified in terms of their probability for occupying a certain physical space at a given time.

Physical copies of The Map, with increasing size and complexity (all the way up to a 1:100-scale map in an enormous warehouse on the east side of the city), were produced and distributed. At first it seemed that this map would only be a souvenir, a nostalgic reminder of our years living along the river valley. It only took one move for its true purpose to be fully realized.

The day of departure arrived in high summer. Mid­ morning, clear skies, the mounting itch finally broken into action. Equipped with mad joy and the terrified ecstatics of possibility, we tore the city apart. We lifted every building off its foundation, uprooted every tree and excavated all pipes and sewers and tunnels. We packed up our city and picked it up, and by sundown we began our march out of the valley we had known as our home for quite some time.

The satellite communities surrounding the city - those few stalwart towns that had refused to be annexed and amalgamated into the metropolis - were left anchorless by the sudden and traumatic disappearance of their core. Like planets faced with the impossible vanishing of an imploded sun, they waited eight minutes and twenty seconds and then scattered along various rotational tangents, deprived of the gravitational force that held them all in place. Who knows where these orphaned towns ended up? Getting caught in the gravity well of another metropolis and falling into its orbit? Slowly fizzling out without their main point of reference? This story is not about them, so we will never be able to say. Someone else must tell their stories.

Defying this potamological impulse, our dismantled city walked southwest, against the flow of the river. This was an important time, the very first move, and sticking to an environment we knew helped to ensure a smooth transition between our two lifestyles: same river, different valley. We followed the bends and meanders, reassembling and disassembling the city every few weeks. We came to understand that our journey was driving us back to the very beginning, to the source, to the glacial headwaters of the river. Our river.

We arrived and wintered there, in the shadow of the mountains. It was decided that come spring, we would go over them and continue west. But after the great Melting, when we attempted a march through the nearest pass, we quickly changed our minds and veered back toward the East.

And so we came to wander the Great Plains, looping across latitudes and longitudes, circling back on our routes (though never returning to our first location on the banks of our river). We rolled the streets up like carpets and slung them over our shoulders. We herded all the dogs and cats and rabbits and squirrels and magpies and tied little packs to each of them. We rolled houses like boulders and walked trees like marionettes with electrical cables to amuse ourselves, and at night made music around the fire with drained-out sewer pipes like didgeridoos.

It was at this time that we began to revere and worship The Map. It became our sacred text. We found comfort in the belief that it would always be there to guide us in our reconstructions, maintaining the integrity of every iteration of our city. The Chief Cartographer, who had produced our sacred text, became the most important man in the city. He was responsible for educating the people on the correct configuration of every structure and the proper placement of each component of the city. He ensured that The Map was deeply ingrained in our consciousness, so our city would never cease to be itself, no matter where it went.

There were some people who began to fear the power of the Chief Cartographer, fear his potential for tyrannical control. And so it became tradition to name a new Chief Cartographer every year to mind The Map and preserve us through our relocations. Each of these men would embody the spirit of the city, hold its image within himself and communicate it to all others.

Our prairie wanderings never had a specific goal, but we found ourselves inexorably drawn east, marching into the rising sun, reversing the flow of history. We marched past our prairie heartland, through the rough and rocky shield lands. We carried the city into Toronto, and forced that city to pick itself up and march into the lake. But that was okay, because they reassembled all the streets and skyscrapers and continued to live their lives deep beneath the waves. And that was great fun, for a while, having displaced the self­ important megacity.

It was in this time that a new Chief Cartographer was acclaimed, and that's when all the trouble started. This new Chief Cartographer broke with all tradition, announcing that she would no longer continue to pretend that we were the same city we had always been. She would not encourage the delusion that we could ever reassemble the city in its original form.

Hadn't we noticed the slight changes every time? The micrometric deviations from The Map? Hadn't these deviations caused us all unnecessary grief and anxiety, when we wallowed privately in the knowledge of our failure to perfectly reproduce our little plot of the city (never imagining that our neighbours had the same despondency behind the confident faces they projected)? And hadn't we been steadily crumbling apart, losing the stray lamppost and mountain ash and manhole cover and book with every move? Hadn't anyone noticed the trail of debris we had left stretched behind us, marking our path across the continent?

This new Chief Cartographer broke radically with tradition. She dared to defy the Old Lore and proposed that the role of the Chief Cartographer is not to indoctrinate each successive generation of citizens into memorizing The Map, but to draw a totally new map for every new environment that the city occupies. Adaptability, ingenuity, hybridity were to be prized, not some impossible notion of authenticity or perfection.

The old guard cried that this was the disintegration of a noble tradition, and that it would no doubt lead to an ill-constructed, anarchic city that wasn't just corrupted with some grotesque configuration from the upstart hubris of a young cartographer, but that had no map at all.

But the common citizen - greatly unburdened to learn that their shameful and secret inadequacy was universal ­- cautiously permitted this new series of events. (Because, when defining the character of our city, cautiously permitting things to happen is one of our most fundamental attributes.)

And so we picked up the city once again (abandoning some of the unconvinced behind, to wax melancholic about The Map on the edge of that bustling lake) and carried on through the valleys and highlands, testing out all sorts of new arrangements. Skyscrapers were ringed around the perimeter, and suburbs shuffled into Klimt spirals emanating from a centre point, where all the parkland was shoved together. Cookie-cutter houses were scattered about, to make their aesthetic resemblance to a row of prison cells less obvious. McMansions were placed side by side with tiny bungalows and dreaded low-income-housing apartment blocks.

But this Chief Cartographer's crowning accomplishment came when we arrived at Quebec City, and seamlessly threaded ourselves among its structures, integrating the two cities into a single entity. The configuration was so well­ crafted that it became hard to tell where one city ended and the other began. After some time, we wondered at the fact that we had ever thought our cities so irreconcilably different in the first place.

We lived quite happily for a while within this arrangement, but the pull east soon grew too strong to ignore. Some of us no longer felt it, and stayed. Some who had not been among us before did feel it, and came. But eventually we extracted our changed city - many original pieces left behind, many new pieces picked up from our host body - and marched on.

On The Island, we built new structures for our changing city, spires and arches of rust-red earth. In Halifax we floated the city on every available vessel and moored it to Pier 21. After several ferry trips across to The Rock, we made our way to the farthest point, out on a tip of land surrounded by sea, so far from our prairie roots. It was there, at L'Anse aux Meadows, the very beginning, that a decision was reached.

The pull east was growing. There was nowhere else to go but onwards, across the sea, back to our namesake on the outskirts of London. And so we waited for a long time, afraid of what came next, until we knew we could delay no more. And one night, as we watched the glittering lights of the city spread out across the waves, we agreed to merge ourselves with this mirror image. We wedded each light with its reflection. We picked up the city and slipped beneath the surface of the sea.