Columbus Burning

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BY SARAH DE LEEUW
PHOTOGRAPHS BY CRYSTAL LIU

The art for this story is by Toronto-born artist Crystal Liu. After moving to the United States in 2003 for an MFA at San Francisco Art Institute, Liu decided to stay. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Toronto and Singapore, as well as in her adoptive city. cliuart.com

I

From the sky are falling ashes the size of opened hands, fingers splayed, palms facing upward. Unsteady.

More precisely, the ashes are the size of the open hands of a big and broken man, toque fallen before him, standing on a grey sidewalk in the bruised orange and grey hue of a fire that is busting the sky wide open. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. Oxygen vanishing. The scream of fire trucks. Soon water will rain down on those flames, those flames the man feels hot on his face.

He is watching his bed burning. He is watching his single-occupancy room vanish in a hotel fire. Painted letters, stencilled across a facade, sizzle. The Columbus Hotel, Built In 1920, is being consumed.

And the water will be too late and the night will have been too long.

The hotel’s namesake landed far away from this fire, in a different lifetime. And, anyway, this man is not interested in histories from books or from people who do nothing but talk. Their words are not the words of people for whom he cares or who care for him. Still, if someone asked him, and if that someone waited patiently for an answer, the man might very quietly recite something that stirs his memory of school days: “In fourteen hundred ninety-two / Columbus sailed the ocean blue / He had three ships and left from Spain / He sailed through sunshine, wind and rain / He sailed by night; he sailed by day / He used the stars to find his way.”

Today there is no way-finding to be had because home has vanished. All orientations to important and intimate things are going up in flames.

So this man knows a different Columbus. A Columbus burning.
 

II

My foot connects with an ash. A flake of charred roofing material drifting down the sidewalk in downtown Prince George. I am walking past the husk of what last week was a building but is now a gaping hole with jagged edges, walls collapsing inward, sky visible through the roof, the corner of a bed’s wrought-iron headboard resting against a window frame. The road is cordoned off, police still moving about. Bright red bags, strips of reflector ribbon, yellow tape, emergency equipment and cameras.

One block away is the local farmers’ market. Today I have a grocery list that includes fresh salsa, bread, basil, honey and eggs. In the distance is a siren, but it is far away.

This is a city that guidebooks warn tourists and travellers away from. Prince George, the guidebooks tell tourists, is not a place to linger. When you go north, say the guidebooks, look for pristine wilderness. When you have witnessed such primitive purity, your metropolises become all the more civilized by comparison. Think of yourself as an early explorer. Look for vast unsullied tracks of ancient rainforest, glaciers and mountain ranges, the lumbering bodies of grizzly bears.

Do not linger amongst the railway yards and boxcars. Do not linger amongst the potholes and rusted-out pickup trucks. Do not linger in parks that lay no claim to manicured beauty or beside riverbanks upon which the carcasses of fish rot, soft flesh red and torn, the high-pitched whistle of eagles touching down as cycles older than time unfold, cycles of decay and hunger, death and flight. Do not linger in a town where, in the middle of winter at minus forty, ice jams up in the veins of rivers, groaning like monstrous mating animals, flooding out residents and confirming a state of unluckiness and disrepair.

Do not linger in Prince George, a city with a worn-out downtown core through which trawl worn-out whores, a city that grabs national media attention only when a Supreme Court judge admits to raping and assaulting young First Nations sex-trade workers, children trying to survive long after Christopher Columbus’ men were serviced by girls they transformed into vectors, veins filled with the blood of Spain.

III

Does the man with open hands, palms facing upward, know anything about the blood of Spain? He has no interest. He does, though, know a thing or two about girls trying to survive on the streets of Prince George.

He knows all he needs to know about Columbus because he lives in The Columbus Hotel.

In downtown Prince George.

Above the bar and strip club.

Before this fire he entered his home, the hotel, through the front of the building, past a small sign reading “Live Girls and Home Cooked Meal.” He entered under green awnings, wilted from the weight of snow fallen over too many winters to count. Then up the staircase leading to the hallway that led to his room. The corridor has flimsy doors on either side, indents in the wood, yellow lighting, sweaty warmth and the soft thudding of music downstairs, the smell of going on one hundred years of old beer sloshed on a long bar counter that decades ago lost any sign of lustre or shine. The door to his room does not have a number, yet he knows his door with all his heart.

If you pressed the man about Christopher Columbus, he might call forth a few more lines from that children’s rhyme: “A compass also helped him know / How to find the way to go / Ninety sailors were on board / Some men worked while others snored / Then the workers went to sleep / And others watched the ocean deep.” He might laugh at this, thinking of the thin walls in The Columbus Hotel. How he can hear men snoring. How commercial fishermen masquerading as sailors are sometimes stranded in the bar downstairs, far away from the coastline, watching the girls, wanting the ocean.
He has passed hundreds of girls in the hallway of the place he calls home. He has watched them fighting men and fighting back tears. He has fought back tears himself, sitting late at night on the edge of his bed, surrounded by the four walls that contain his entire life.

Remember that this man was once a boy and a brother and once, in what feels like another lifetime in a place as far away as the coast upon which Christopher Columbus first set foot, this man was a father.

But now this is his home. He lives here with ten other people who live in ten other single-occupancy rooms. Each room is the home, yes home, of its occupant. It is a place of memory and occasional desire. A place of moments between sleep and awaking, of minutes first thing in the morning when dreams have not yet evaporated and the light is just breaking and we are utterly alone in the world with no one but ourselves.

The fire begins at 6:30 in the morning. No alarms sound. No sprinkler system automatically starts up. A century of dry wood is like kindling, slivers so perfect for burning there is almost no sound, just an instant and quiet inferno.