written + photos by Hardy Friedrich
from Alaska Highway Daily News - 31 May 07

For the first time in 30 years, wildlife rehabilitator Leona Green crossed the yard to feed her bear cubs to find one dead.

“This is grim,” she said, as she took the cub in her tough, wrinkled hands and placed its body on the wooden roof of the pen.

In a dark corner inside the pen, the female cub’s brother huddled in a corner. The two orphaned bears, found in Montney and brought to her over the weekend by a conservation officer, were her first two cubs of the summer.

Green said she knows better than to get attached to the bears, but her disappointment is clear. Having rehabilitated over 100 cubs over the years, including six grizzlies, she’s never had one die.

At six that morning she brought breakfast and they both ate. They weren’t the sickliest cubs she’s ever received, but they were starved and had little energy.

“Most of them come in real thin, but I’ve never lost one,” Green said, back out in the yard of her farm near Dawson Creek as she shielded the Wednesday morning sun from her eyes.

“I’ll put the body in a bag and freeze it so (the Ministry of Environment) can determine the cause of death.”

The 70-year-old Green is one of only four people in the province qualified to rehabilitate bears. Although she has no formal training, she learned how to care for animals from her veterinarian father.

One day 30 years ago, after moving to the Peace region from Saskatchewan, a conservation officer brought her an injured owl.

“He liked the way I handled my animals so he brought me an owl and suggested I look after it. Then he brought me something else, and something else, and finally he said I’d make a good wildlife rehabilitator so he got me a permit and that was that.”

Over the years, Green has taken in deer, moose, birds, coyotes and bears. Moose are the most difficult to rehabilitate, she said, but the bears are pretty easy.

“Bears, they’ll eat anything and they are absolutely wonderful to raise,” she said, adding they get a varied diet of meat, fish, fruits, vegetables and vitamins, and often are released back into the wild at 18-months-old larger and stronger than their counterparts due to the steady diet.

But bears are also easily habituated, so she gives them space – only entering the pen to feed them and clean up. In the winter they hibernate in barrels on the edge of her yard.

“And not one of my bears has ever came back as a nuisance bear after its release,” Green said proudly.

The cause of the cub’s death remains a mystery for the moment. But Green speculated that the cubs could have gotten into something toxic before they were found.

“With all the resource extraction that’s going on out there you never know what they could get into – they will drink anything, like antifreeze or even out of sumps.”

The volunteer rehabilitator will likely see more bears this summer. The most she’s ever had at once was seven, and there was only one year she didn’t receive any.

Much of the food Green uses is donated, and she is always accepting alfalfa hay and meat (wild or beef).

thanks for stopping by

Your empty gin glass is on th floor
dry as a another sunset
still from when you were here
walking around at night while I sleep
it sings a song of antibiotics
& lounges around in a sexless fashion

When I can no longer feel regret
for th lime that was cut for you
sacrificed for your cancerous smile
that eats at love like a broken record
or th biography of a nervous breakdown

Th glass I cannot bring myself to
throw in the sink, which
stares out th window day after day,
even when th flowers are shouting for broken glass
& th couch has reedemd yr poetry

my chemikiller pt 1 [th virgin festival 07]

                                                    punk prostitutes hate
                                                    punk prostitutes hate
                                                    punk prostitutes hate

outside bedrooms on simply hate
grass we thrash th stadium night sky
to songs for our deaths

somewhere is empty tonight. hearts &
oxygen risk. th strum, screaming remains

rain spotlight falling chemicals & mascara streaks
white dreams. black bras under drenchd white tshirts. need
something to do other than run away
to th beaten floor
of summer tongues. fuck
it’s all we have --

so welcome to th beaten floor of summer tongues. of
right & wrong growing
up. december’s cuts are finally healing. this summer
throws. there comes a time in everyone’s body
for an aggressive dance

after th fight

this is after th fight / for jj

it was kinda romantic how we were
outside th door
in the dark
& you were warning me

press release

Rob Hour, minister of time, announced today that

time is stupid!

thank god and for more
information contact:

hardy f
communications officer
Ministry of Time
250-good-night

th flowers that thot

poetry day - dawson creek - 16 may 07

Poetry in the Peace Country came out alive on May 16 during Poetry Day, which centered around readings at the city's art gallery.
Throughout the afternoon, students, the media and Frontenac House authors Dymphny Dronyk and Alexis Kienlen shared work.
The event peaked with a reading by acclaimed Canadian poets Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier.
The day ended in pints at the rural Rolla Pub, and ended under a black prairie sky laughing.
Those are some details, visit www.donnakane.com for more.

*

good work

th way Patrick Lane came to th'old grain elevator
& workd his poems through wind & muscled
those words over hard work. his tongue shaped
but from his stomach still th push of meaning by
deep hits of rhythm. it was then clear that his poems
are not done until he reads them to you.

& in th'art gallery th walkway that climbd round
& behind the glass high school students who
cld not get a seat sat on th floor beneath th bright
paintings, lined up around th'edge like sunglasses
in a gas station listening.

& Lane was reading breaths full of Peace honey
& rusty nails & memories. working w/water
beside him he read from Go Leaving Strange --
"Everyone is quiet / in the stone of thier lives."
(from Match Stick); "His was a long story that came
slowly out of silence / and told without his
eyes looking at me, but staring instead / out
the window at the stubborn apples ripening,
a pale brush of fire / flaring under the hard green."
(from The War); "I learned
when I was young to leave things wrong."
(from Bent).

How he worked on his poems as he read
in th grain elevetor that night was as good
to hear as a man waking up at dawn to go
to work.

*

from the May 18 edition of the Alaska Highway Daily News
by Hardy Friedrich

The hardened media of the Peace revealed a softer side in Dawson Creek on Wednesday – instead of barking questions, we let slip poems.
In the grain-elevator-turned-art-gallery, the Media Poetry Slam brought together 17 unsuspecting poets and admirers of the craft in a day devoted to poetry.
Some read writing of our own, including myself and CJDC’s April Parker. Others brought a favorite piece to the podium (CKNL’s Ogho Ikhalo read Maya Angelou), while Peace FM’s Hugh Headley rapped the lyrics to Kool Moe Dee’s “Go See The Doctor.”
It was interesting to see that people who spend much of their lives in front of cameras, on-air, and in interviews were so nervous when it came time to share something other than the news.
Not everyone was shy – the booming Grizz Michaels, for instance – but there was a fair amount of trembling white pages, soft unsure voices and “I can’t believe how nervous I was” comments afterwards.
For it is, most often, easier to talk and write about other people and events than it is to reveal something personal in front of an audience.
We do it every day – get in people’s faces, get the story, block sentiment to stay impartial – while from everyone else we expect emotions and pry into personal lives.
So the tables were turned on Wednesday, and it was refreshing to see and feel. Humans being human, sifting through the hypertext, reading poems and songs that have a personal significance. It can be a vulnerable feeling to be up there alone at the edge of a risk, like a skydiver about to jump out of a plane.
But, like the skydiver, who has hopefully landed safely on the ground by now, a sense of relief and exhilaration rushes forth.
Having purged emotions and shared a laugh, the readers emerged from the art gallery and into a prairie wind lighter – smiling – and in most cases went back to the daily grind.
One of the featured poets of the day, Governor General Award winner Patrick Lane, told me after his evening reading that poets and journalists share much in common.
They both tell a story; they both sift through the details of daily life to create something for other people to experience. They take the facts and have the power to choose what other people read.
So, as unlikely as Poetry Day organizer Donna Kane’s idea seemed at first, it was a successful experiment that garnered many compliments afterwards. Perhaps every profession should have a Poetry Day, from the oilpatch to the post office. Even Dawson Creek mayor Calvin Kruk joined in later that evening with an uplifting Dr. Seuss poem – “Green Eggs and Ham.”
The events of Poetry Day – which included everyone from high school students to media to two of Canada’s most acclaimed poets Lane and Lorna Crozier – wrapped tightly around an art that is often overlooked. But its power could be felt through the Peace on Wednesday.

th day after last night

I put her & my name together
in a sentence
& publishd it too

th community. I thot
if I kept talking dirty to her
online b/c it seemd like that's what
she wantd -- my dirty mouth

sang country
as I drove down th'alaska highway
really fast

I dipd my feet in a canola field afternoon
& talkd to a big farmer
& thot abt her a lot more

th brazilian wives club

how do I get in? I have this vision
of th poor part of town. favela gun
fights. but when you walk, hand-in-hand
in northern BC in th summer, down suburbia
lane, red dress licking th'air. & yr cousin
th drug mule &
sister th prostitute. in brazil
to save someone. a white man for change

how to save them. every one. or perhaps just
beautiful, on a beach, favela rising, a lonely beach &
on vacation

modo, neglect

neglect is consistent

& therefore need not b

publishd

cool, neglect

another blog. cool -- at th level of th system again. writing until I reach that interactive. through my fingers. stare into space. summer love

“ecomium” is kind of like standing on a riverbank, wondering. it’s practically. it’s like when
all this was inventd how we stopd talking
abt things & things went
inward. like standing on th’edge, inward

*
remember how you felt
when you said youd b there
but you didnt go. well,
really,
it was me that didnt go. I didnt go
for everyone. I was sitting in a bar. I stayd home to drink
& write. I was in
th backcountry. crouchd on a gravel bar swatting
moskeetos. in th’arms of a stripper. thinking
how designs. I spy

thinking abt media, but not of media. flashes. thinking
abt nature but not for nature

[ systems
are okay from behind. that is how a system feels
best

*
it is like cooley said

you dont have to raise your voice in print culture

so let us b quiet on our blogs. let us not
rattle th system. this is summer love. I like th shape of silence
itself. a woman sleeping on a binary
code. covering th main idea