“I know politicians are going to fuck me. I'd just rather get fucked by a conservative.”
Derek’s father doesn’t view politics as a good thing. He views it as a necessity. For him, it’s a cynical exercise that we all have to participate in, and it could easily be summarized in the cliche of “the devil you know”. Derek described his father’s attitude as problematic.
“Don’t we want politics where we’re not getting fucked at all?” Derek asked. For him, it’s a culture problem.
The previous few days had been a burdensome lot. Not bad, just hard work. We ripped to Cochrane from Lake Louise, 156km non stop, and we did it quickly. We must have started our trip around 11, but we got through the massive trek before 19:30 rolled around. We had taken two days off to work on the magazine and do some writing (the magazine is a unique limited edition print of our trip, using the photojournalism taken by Jay and I, as well as the articles we’re writing plus a bit more from Jay. It’s not expensive. You should get it.)
We rolled up to Dan’s house, exhausted, but happy that we made it so far. Dan is a member of Warm Showers, an app that allows you to camp in people’s yards and potentially take showers and some of them will even feed you. Him and his wife were wonderful, kind people who had toured on their bikes all over the country and the world.
It was a touching evening. We conversed until late.
Dan was a professor at a polytechnic university, but he was recently let go along with 250 of the other staff at the school. His kindness and affinity for pedagogy were immediately apparent, and his kindness mixed with an affectionate desire to help people on the road– he’s a carpenter by trade, but like many tradesmen, he’s someone who can fix and repair nearly anything.
We sat on his front lawn, where I cooked the worst supper of the trip. We eat rice and lentils every evening, a healthy simple meal that doesn’t take much weight in our bag– and I did a horrendous job. Jay and I bit into the rice, which still crunched as though it hadn’t been placed in water. Dan told us about his bosses, and the complications of being part of a team. Despite most of his career focusing on teaching, he had functioned in various roles. At one point he was the department chair, underneath the dean but still the coordinator of many programs in the faculty.
“Who do you work for when you’re a department chair, Isaac?” he asked. The students?
“The faculty. The deans will come and go. The students will come and go. The faculty rarely changes.”
